Underground Reverie
“Out of Isolation and into the Fray”
Four-Song Debut [27MB]

The release is free, of course—but if you can, please show your appreciation by making a donation to the legal fund of those arrested in last month’s building occupation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. To do so, go to the defendant support site and donate to the arrestees’ legal fund; further inquiries can be addressed to ‘defendoccupychapelhillarrestees@riseup.net’.

One of these songs appeared in our video coverage of the aforementioned building occupation. Since this is the digital age, we can already offer a review of the release, courtesy of Seattle’s excellent Tides of Flame [PDF]:

“Underground Reverie’s debut album is throbbing, haunting, and completely amazing. Samples from helicopters, owlish flutes, various films (including Network), and eerie old songs flesh out a skeleton of delicate electronic beats. The music is as much about the horrors of civilization as it is about the raw beauty of struggle. In the liner notes, UR reflects on anarchist praxis and encourages us to keep fighting.”

Contact Underground Reverie: undergroundreverie@riseup.net

These are available practically at cost; please order a pile of them to distribute in your neighborhood, school, or occupation or to decorate the walls of your city! Note that they have been added to the Poster Mix Kit as well.

In addition, we’ve prepared a new text for the back of the poster, Seven Myths about the Police. A full pdf of the print version is available here.

We’ve also yet again reprinted our Civilian’s Guide to Direct Action, which remains available in bulk as well. This paper offers a step-by-step overview of how to act directly to transform society, rather than bogging down in fruitless efforts to exert influence through bureaucratic channels.

Gent Sept. 28
Leuven Sept. 29
Amsterdam Sept. 30
Leiden Oct. 4
Utrecht Oct. 5
Berlin Oct. 6
Hamburg Oct. 7
Gottingen Oct. 8
Milton Keynes Oct. 11
Basingstoke Oct. 12
Exeter Oct. 13
Bristol Oct. 14
Brighton Oct. 15
London Oct. 16
Nottingham Oct. 17
Leamington Oct. 18
Chesterfield Oct. 19
Leeds Oct. 20
Liverpool Oct. 21
London Anarchist Bookfair Oct. 22
Calais Oct. 24
Paris Oct. 25 (need help)
Dijon Oct. 26 (need help)
St. Etienne Oct. 27
Millau Oct. 28
Barcelona Oct. 29
Marseilles Oct. 31 (need help)
G20 at Cannes Nov. 1-5
9 November / Reggio calabria – Csoa Cartella
10 November / Palermo – Facoltà Lettere e Filosofia
11 November / Barcellona P.G – C.P:P. Il Pane e le Rose
12 November / Milan – C.O.A. T28 via dei Transiti 28

(help us fill this gap!)

22 November / Austria – EKH
23 November / Koper (TBC)
24 November / Ljubljana
25 November / Zagreb – Attack
26 November / Zadar – Studentski Klub
27 November / Belgrade
28 November / Zrenjanin
29 November / Kraljevo
30 November / Nis
01 December / Thessaloniki (TBC)
02 December / Volos
03 December / Athens Nosotros social center Exarchia sq.

After Athens, Testament plans to continue on to Egypt.

Contact testtheirlogik@gmail.com to offer assistance booking shows, and also for media requests or to propose collaborations.

Dear Occupiers [online viewing version]

Dear Occupiers [print version]: A two-sided flier intended to be folded down the middle, longways.

Dear Occupiers

A letter from anarchists

Support and solidarity! We’re inspired by the occupations on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country. Finally, people are taking to the streets again! The momentum around these actions has the potential to reinvigorate protest and resistance in this country. We hope these occupations will increase both in numbers and in substance, and we’ll do our best to contribute to that.

Why should you listen to us? In short, because we’ve been at this a long time already. We’ve spent decades struggling against capitalism, organizing occupations, and making decisions by consensus. If this new movement doesn’t learn from the mistakes of previous ones, we run the risk of repeating them. We’ve summarized some of our hard-won lessons here.

Occupation is nothing new. The land we stand on is already occupied territory. The United States was founded upon the extermination of indigenous peoples and the colonization of their land, not to mention centuries of slavery and exploitation. For a counter-occupation to be meaningful, it has to begin from this history. Better yet, it should embrace the history of resistance extending from indigenous self-defense and slave revolts through the various workers’ and anti-war movements right up to the recent anti-globalization movement.

The “99%” is not one social body, but many. Some occupiers have presented a narrative in which the “99%” is characterized as a homogenous mass. The faces intended to represent “ordinary people” often look suspiciously like the predominantly white, law-abiding middle-class citizens we’re used to seeing on television programs, even though such people make up a minority of the general population.

It’s a mistake to whitewash over our diversity. Not everyone is waking up to the injustices of capitalism for the first time now; some populations have been targeted by the power structure for years or generations. Middle-class workers who are just now losing their social standing can learn a lot from those who have been on the receiving end of injustice for much longer.

The problem isn’t just a few “bad apples.” The crisis is not the result of the selfishness of a few investment bankers; it is the inevitable consequence of an economic system that rewards cutthroat competition at every level of society. Capitalism is not a static way of life but a dynamic process that consumes everything, transforming the world into profit and wreckage. Now that everything has been fed into the fire, the system is collapsing, leaving even its former beneficiaries out in the cold. The answer is not to revert to some earlier stage of capitalism—to go back to the gold standard, for example; not only is that impossible, those earlier stages didn’t benefit the “99%” either. To get out of this mess, we’ll have to rediscover other ways of relating to each other and the world around us.

Police can’t be trusted. They may be “ordinary workers,” but their job is to protect the interests of the ruling class. As long as they remain employed as police, we can’t count on them, however friendly they might act. Occupiers who don’t know this already will learn it firsthand as soon as they threaten the imbalances of wealth and power our society is based on. Anyone who insists that the police exist to protect and serve the common people has probably lived a privileged life, and an obedient one.

Don’t fetishize obedience to the law. Laws serve to protect the privileges of the wealthy and powerful; obeying them is not necessarily morally right—it may even be immoral. Slavery was legal. The Nazis had laws too. We have to develop the strength of conscience to do what we know is best, regardless of the laws.

To have a diversity of participants, a movement must make space for a diversity of tactics. It’s controlling and self-important to think you know how everyone should act in pursuit of a better world. Denouncing others only equips the authorities to delegitimize, divide, and destroy the movement as a whole. Criticism and debate propel a movement forward, but power grabs cripple it. The goal should not be to compel everyone to adopt one set of tactics, but to discover how different approaches can be mutually beneficial.

Don’t assume those who break the law or confront police are agents provocateurs. A lot of people have good reason to be angry. Not everyone is resigned to legalistic pacifism; some people still remember how to stand up for themselves. Police violence isn’t just meant to provoke us, it’s meant to hurt and scare us into inaction. In this context, self-defense is essential.

Assuming that those at the front of clashes with the authorities are somehow in league with the authorities is not only illogical—it delegitimizes the spirit it takes to challenge the status quo, and dismisses the courage of those who are prepared to do so. This allegation is typical of privileged people who have been taught to trust the authorities and fear everyone who disobeys them.

No government—that is to say, no centralized power—will ever willingly put the needs of common people before the needs of the powerful. It’s naïve to hope for this. The center of gravity in this movement has to be our freedom and autonomy, and the mutual aid that can sustain those—not the desire for an “accountable” centralized power. No such thing has ever existed; even in 1789, the revolutionaries presided over a “democracy” with slaves, not to mention rich and poor.

That means the important thing is not just to make demands upon our rulers, but to build up the power to realize our demands ourselves. If we do this effectively, the powerful will have to take our demands seriously, if only in order to try to keep our attention and allegiance. We attain leverage by developing our own strength.

Likewise, countless past movements learned the hard way that establishing their own bureaucracy, however “democratic,” only undermined their original goals. We shouldn’t invest new leaders with authority, nor even new decision-making structures; we should find ways to defend and extend our freedom, while abolishing the inequalities that have been forced on us.

The occupations will thrive on the actions we take. We’re not just here to “speak truth to power”—when we only speak, the powerful turn a deaf ear to us. Let’s make space for autonomous initiatives and organize direct action that confronts the source of social inequalities and injustices.

Thanks for reading and scheming and acting. May your every dream come true.

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Get updates and information about specific shows here. Contact the puppeteers here.

July 6th- Richmond VA- The Wingnut

July 7th- Charlottesville VA-Random Row Books

July 8th- Washington DC- Dream City

July 9th- Baltimore- 2640

July 10th-Philadelphia PA-TBA

July 11th- Day Off

July 12th- NYC- (still need help booking)

July 13th-New Haven CT-TBA

July 14th-Providence RI-Libertalia

July 15th-Day Off

July 16th-Boston MA-(Still Need Help)

July 17th-Amherst MA-Food For Thought Books

July 18th-Ithaca NY- Green Star Food Cooperative

July 19th-Buffalo NY-TBA

July 20th-Day Off

July 21st-Pittsburgh-(Still Need Help)

July 22nd-Morgantown WV-(Still Need Help)

July 23rd-Cleveland OH-Whitman House Drop-In Center

July 24th-Chicago IL-TBA

July 25th-Milwaukee WI-Cream City Collectives

July 26th-Madison WI-Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative

July 27th-WinonaMN-The Burrow

July 28th-Day Off

July 29th-Minneapolis MN-Boneshaker Books

July 30th-Des Moines-TBA

July 31st-Champaign IL-Independent Media Center

August 1st-Day Off

August 2nd-Bloomington IN-Boxcar Books

August 3rd-Louisville KY-TBA

August 4th-Asheville NC-Firestorm Cafe

August 5th-Greensboro NC-Green Bean Cafe

August 6th-Chapel Hill NC-Internationalist Books

This ludicrous saga of faulty production has taken years from our lives, but sitting here, paging through a copy, makes it all worth it—we really love this book, and hope you do too. All backordered copies have been mailed out as of Saturday, to arrive in hands shortly. New orders will be shipped out immediately. Thanks to everyone for their patience and understanding.

For those who have defective copies from the initial run . . .

1) If you ordered your copy from our online store, you have two options, and have to choose one or the other:

Credit: Keep your copy of the book, and fix it permanently in about five minutes by following the instructions at the end of this post. If you choose to do this, you will receive a $5 credit off any future order from our online store. The credit never expires and can be used on any item, any time. To redeem the credit, simply put “$5 WORK CREDIT” in the order notes and be sure to use the same email address with your new order as you did with the initial order.

Exchange: If you would like to simply exchange your book with defective binding for one never touched by human hands, with pristine binding, throw your old copy in an envelope, send it via Medial Mail ($2.60 in postage) to CrimethInc. Work Exchange / PO Box 13998 / Salem OR 97309. We’ll send you back a new copy along with $3 cash to reimburse your shipping and packaging costs. Simple as pie.

2) If you received your copy from any other source, then you can exchange your book for a new, proper copy by following the Exchange instructions above.

A note on how to permanently fix your original copy of Work.

The below photo is all too familiar for those unlucky ones who received a defective copy. Luckily the fault is fairly easy to fix and will result in a permanent solution to the binding problem. Once the cover has become detached, simply apply some glue directly on top of, and right next to, the previous glue line, indicated in the below photo by the red arrow. Then, carefully aline the spine and fold the front cover back into its proper position clamping down long enough to ensure the glue adheres solidly to both surfaces. Voila! Perhaps the most difficult part is finding a suitable glue that is strong and flexible but not bulky. These folks have some advice on that front.

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Work is now being reprinted, and we expect to have copies to mail out mid-June. For the hundreds of you who have back-ordered the book—anticipating, as did we, that they would be available by now—we offer our most sincere apologies. Never did we imagine this fiasco would be extended for so long. You have three options: 1) Do nothing and your book will be among the first ones sent out a month from now, 2) Cancel your order by emailing us, or 3) E-mail us to remove Work from your order, and we’ll ship out the rest immediately (send emails to house@crimethinc.com). Details of the exchange/credit program for people who received defective copies will be announced once we have the new copies in hand. Thanks everyone for your patience during what has been a genuine nightmare for us!

The 76 minute film examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations. Based in part on Endgame, the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

Backed by Jensen’s narrative, the film calls on us to act as if we truly love this land, moving along at a brisk pace, using music, archival footage, motion graphics, animation, slapstick and satire to deconstruct the global economic system, even as it implodes around us. Featuring interviews with Paul Watson, Waziyatawin, Gord Hill, Michael Becker, Peter Gelderloos, Lierre Keith, James Howard Kunstler, Stephanie McMillan, Qwatsinas, Rod Coronado, John Zerzan and more.

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What We Know So Far About the Problem

For books that contain the defect, it manifests itself thusly: Initially the book seems fine and by all tests and measures appears to be in good health; the cover is solidly attached, and nothing indicates trouble. However after spending some time actually reading the book and putting stress on the cover, it will simply pop off. The adhesive meant to attach it will be exposed and there will be no tears in the paper or any trauma—it is simply detached as seen in the above photo. At the moment, we still don’t know exactly what happened for this to occur on some books and not all of them, and are waiting to hear back from the printers as to what precisely can cause this to occur. The trickiest part of this defect is that it can’t be detected until the book has been handled for several hours, making book-by-book quality control impossible. Fortunately, because we have a fancy Otabind binding on this book, a cover failure isn’t catastrophic, and the actual book binding remains 100% intact.

Not all copies are affected, in fact, we believe that most are not—we’ve found more books that are rock-solid than those that aren’t, so if you’ve spent some time reading yours and it still is in great shape, then you have nothing to worry about.

What Happens If You Already Bought the Book

We’re particularly sad that this problem will affect our most enthusiastic supporters and early adopters of the new text—it seems incredibly unfair to all involved. You can be assured that if you are affected by this problem, at the very least you will receive a free replacement copy as soon as they are available, at no cost at all to you. We will post an update as soon as we have a system set up to deal with exchanges and credits. Thanks so much for understanding, for your patience, and for supporting us at the first opportunity.

In the meantime, there appears to be a simple solution that at least temporarily solves the problem: simply close the book and align the cover properly with the edges of the book, place it on a hard, flat surface and press down firmly on the spine-edge of the cover, running your fingers from the top of the book to the bottom; somehow this appears to bind the cover to the book more solidly than they initially came, and should last through an entire reading of the book, and beyond, judging by our experiences here.

Moving Forward

We are still accepting orders for the book, but they now become backorders. If your order contains a Work book, the entire order will be held until the corrected printing of the book is available, which we expect to be approximately 3 weeks from now. Your card will not be charged until the order is shipped. All paper mail orders we receive for the Work book, starting today, will be held also, even if the order was mailed prior to this announcement.

UPDATE: New info here.

As foreshadowed in our “State of the Union Address,” we’re also increasing the prices of our books slightly. This will help us stay solvent so we can take on other printing projects rather than simply retreating to the obscurity of virtual publishing. A quick glance at our colleagues’ prices will confirm that our books are still more affordable than almost anyone else’s.

The flip side of the price increases is that later in 2011 we plan to debut free electronic versions of all our books, refined, adjusted, and enhanced to make the most of various digital formats. These will take us some time to prepare, however, so please be patient.

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Letterpress geeky note: Because we were printing on non-white paper, we chose to create our baby blue ink by mixing the blue ink not with the usual translucent white ink, but instead with an opaque white ink, not intended for mixing. This helped keep the ink from being darkened by the paper, and resulted in a delightful visual pop. Using that success as a guide, we mixed the orange with a smidge of metallic silver ink to help give it some brilliance as well. You can judge the results when you get one of these in hand.

The first three of these are also available on our Guerilla Film Series DVD, along with five other video shorts; The Chicago Conspiracy is also available on DVD from the directors. We urge viewers to support the filmmakers who are sharing their work by buying their DVDs or donating to them: filmmaking is one of the most expensive mediums, and without financial support we can expect fewer and lower quality radical movies in the future, at precisely the time that more are needed.

Check out the Frequently Asked Questions page for more information, and enjoy these four finely-crafted documentary films.

Five years have passed since our last report. Since then, we’ve distributed another 50,000 books, published seven more issues of Rolling Thunder, and done our part to support uprisings from Pittsburgh and Toronto to Athens and Moscow.

All this is well and good, but we live in a constantly changing world, and what worked well yesterday is bound to deliver diminishing returns tomorrow.

On one hand, our insistence on selling almost everything at cost means that—like our foes—we’re always on the verge of complete economic collapse. At the same time, and more importantly, the channels through which information circulates have shifted a lot over the past decade—and it’s important for us to keep up with these changes. For a long time, we’ve resisted the pressure to shift to digital formats, convinced that offline media have more power to move people than online ephemera. But as revolutionary anarchists, our task is not to fight a rearguard battle against technological progress; it is to engage capitalism and the state in a struggle to the death, utilizing every opportunity to spread subversion.

The initial funds for our projects came from us pooling the money we’d made working minimum-wage jobs in the service industry. Back in the 1990s, it was also possible to obtain resources by hook or by crook, as they say; however, after one attracts a certain amount of the wrong kind of attention, this becomes a bad idea. As a result, for the past decade, CrimethInc. Far East has operated according to a very simple program. We sell some of our books at a slight profit, counting on the high volume of sales to generate enough money to pay all our overhead costs and fund our other projects. Some of the other projects are priced to break even, such as the posters and stickers, while others are priced below cost, such as Fighting for Our Lives and Rolling Thunder.

It’s actually a miracle that we have been able to make this work. Unlike most other major anarchist publishing projects, we’ve almost never had to beg for money. We find it distasteful to seek resources from those who don’t share our political commitments, and we don’t trust those who depend on such funding; at the same time, we don’t want to drain the resources of the anarchist community, which should go to projects like prisoner support that cannot pay for themselves. Because we’ve been willing to work full time for free and plenty of people want our books, it’s been possible for us to accomplish things few organizations could.

Over the past few years, however, the proportions of what we sell have shifted significantly. We sold more posters and stickers in 2010 than ever before, and traffic to crimethinc.com continues to increase dramatically; yet book sales have declined from their previous levels. This isn’t surprising: book publishers and periodicals are going out of business by the dozen as the shift to free digital media takes its toll on both the publishing world and the attention spans of readers. We’ve also noticed that ever more people are downloading sub-par versions of the books on torrent websites—the same number by which book sales would probably have increased, in a world without internet or recession.

Consequently, the costs of keeping everything in print, maintaining the website, and distributing free material have begun to exceed the funds brought in by book sales. This means that, at the very moment we should be taking advantage of new attention and new opportunities to up the ante, we’re hamstrung by a lack of resources.

We could probably plateau at this point and coast forward a few more years, but that’s not what we’re here to do. We need to work out a new model that will enable us to be even more effective in the coming decade than we were in the last one. This will involve changes and new risks, and we’re hoping you’ll support us through these.

The internet has fostered a culture in which people take free access to information for granted, while the economic recession has made it difficult for poor people to buy any more than they absolutely need. At the same time, the global spread of the World Wide Web offers new opportunities to cross-pollinate with resistance movements in parts of the world where no one can afford to order books internationally. While we’ve long resisted the pressure to digitize our books, hoping instead to emphasize the value of real printed matter, we are now considering ways to go about this tastefully and effectively. Nonetheless, we remain convinced that one physical copy of a book has more power to change the world than a hundred digital downloads, and we will to continue to give real-world projects priority over virtual ones.

In the future, we expect to derive less revenue from projects that have downloadable equivalents; therefore we’ll have to raise money from materials that can’t be downloaded. We’re still brainstorming what that might look like. For now, we’re simply raising the prices of our posters and stickers slightly (guides will remain as currently priced); we’re also about to introduce larger posters as a fundraiser to pay for our other projects. Soon we’ll be announcing new book printings and minor price increases for those as well. If this is successful, we hope to initiate a new round of free projects; but first we have to stabilize ourselves financially.

Our core values remain the same; we’re still committed to the same types of outreach we have always been. We just reprinted Fighting for Our Lives for the fifth time and will continue to distribute them for free, all 50,000 of them. Ideally, we will come out of this able to make all of our materials more widely and freely available, while increasing our capacity to take on new projects. If you aren’t on the verge of bankruptcy and you want to help us with this, feel free to order one of the benefit posters that will appear on this site next week.

Thank you all for everything you’ve done to enable us to do what we do. May it someday be enough.

For the abolition of business and business plans, by any means necessary—
A few overworked underlings at CrimethInc. Far East

During last June’s G20 protests, the Canadian government brought trumped up conspiracy charges against our friends Test Their Logik, accusing the hip hop duo of causing the riot that destroyed downtown with their hit video “Crash the Meeting.” The two were imprisoned, then forbidden contact upon release, as part of a massive campaign of repression that ultimately targeted over 1000 people.

In response, we released a collection of their material as a benefit for G20 defendants. Now that the prosecutors have admitted that their charges were groundless and dropped their no-contact injunction, Test Their Logik are back in action and coming harder than ever. Featuring a cameo by fan Glenn Beck of Fox News, their new video “Conspiracy Rap” sends a big fuck you to the ones who tried to stop them and offers a preview of their first official album, which we’ll be helping them release this May. Like “Crash The Meeting,” this video was produced by Anarkid, a self-taught multi-media warrior and VJ from Montreal bent on radicalizing the rave scene.

Test Their Logik will be touring extensively this spring to support the release of their new album, showing that resistance cannot be stopped by any amount of repression. Meanwhile, over a dozen people still face serious charges as part of the same conspiracy rap the Canadian government tried to pin on Test Their Logik; the Guelph Anarchist Black Cross has released this zine to publicize their situation, which we strongly encourage you to print out and distribute.

London
March 11th 8:30PM @ EVAC (757 Dundas St.)

Hamilton
March 12th 9PM @ Casbah (306 King St. west)

Brantford
March 13th 1PM @ Kanata (440 Mohawk Rd.)

Six Nations
March 14th 6PM @ Old Council House (4th line & Chiefswood)

Sudbury
March 17th 6PM @ Myths and Mirrors (corner of Frood & Shevchenko)

Sault Ste Marie
March 18th 8PM @ Foggy Notions (Corner of Queen & East)

Grassy Narrows
March 20th 5PM @ Multi-Purpose Complex

Winnipeg
March 21st (TBA)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Winnipeg
March 22nd 8PM sharp @ Mondragon (91 Albert St.)

Brandon
March 23rd (TBA)

Regina
March 24th 8PM @ (The Club 2431 8th Avenue)

Calgary
March 26th 8PM @ The Soda (211 12 Ave SW)

Calgary
March 27th (TBA)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Nelson
March 29th (310 Observatory st.)

Vancouver
March 31st (TBA/open)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Nanaimo
April 1st (open)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Denman Island
April 2nd

Victoria
April 3rd 6:30PM @ (Solstice Cafe, 529 Pandora)

Vancouver
april 4th 5PM @ (UBC) (night-time TBA)

Kamloops
April 6th (open)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Prince George
April 7th, 5PM @ Northern Undergraduate Student Centre, UNBC

Edmonton
April 8th, 8PM @The ARTery (9535 Jasper Ave.)
for more info email Jess at outreach@apirg.org

Saskatoon
April 9th (TBA)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Saskatoon
April 10th 8PM @ Lydia’s Pub, 650 Broadway Avenue

Saskatoon
April 11th (TBA)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Winnipeg region
April 12 (open)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Thunder Bay region
April 13 (open)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

North Bay region
April 14 (open)
holler@testtheirlogik.com

Toronto
April 16th 9PM @ (Anarchist Bookfair after-party! Venue TBA)

On March 9, while Senate Democrats were absent in protest, Wisconsin’s Republican Senators passed a bill stripping public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights. In response, thousands returned to the capitol building, forcing open windows and pushing past state patrolmen to reenter and occupy it. Police eventually gave up attempting to control the crowds, and the announcement went out that they would not remove demonstrators from the building despite the court order that had forced the end of the previous occupation. At the high point on Wednesday evening, several thousand people filled the first three floors of the building entirely; after midnight, a few hundred still remained, despite the usual pleas from authoritarian organizers for people to leave.

Unions are legally prohibited from calling for a general strike, but there has been much talk of striking. In any case, a series of protests are planned for the next several days. In addition to this list of demonstrations Thursday morning, Thursday evening a flash mob is planned for the university library in Madison at 10 pm, Saturday farmers will drive their tractors into Madison in protest, and it’s rumored that teaching assistants will go on strike on Monday when the state contract with the Teaching Assistants’ Association expires.

Events are still unfolding in Wisconsin, and may yet escalate further. But we can already draw some conclusions from them, which can guide us in the months ahead–for Wisconsin is surely only the first of many states that will see public outrage over austerity measures.

The role that the capitol building has played in Wisconsin’s protest movement shows the importance of establishing a public relationship to physical sites that can serve as social centers during upheavals. Just as university occupations served as nerve centers during the December 2008 uprising in Greece, the capitol building offered a focal point for demonstrators to build up momentum over a period of weeks, and a space to congregate in response to new developments.

There are several other important points to make here. First, however devious the Republican Senators’ machinations, the bill was passed by democratic process, the same way countless other bills are passed. Those who protest against it are essentially proclaiming that representative democracy has failed them: they are asserting that there is more legitimacy in angry people occupying the capitol building than there is in Senators doing what they were elected to do. As anarchists, we wholeheartedly agree–workers deserve access to the resources currently being hoarded by capitalists regardless of what goes on in voting booths or politicians’ offices. The question is whether the movement will adopt this position outright, or remain mired in the contradictions of claiming to pose a democratic opposition to the democratic process.

Second, this is not simply a question of politicians being mean: from the capitalist perspective, these austerity measures really are unavoidable. The state budget director claims that Wisconsin faces a two-year budget shortfall of $3.6 billion—for comparison, that’s more than three times what the Canadian government spent for security at last summer’s fully militarized G20 summit. As far as the politicians are concerned, that money really does have to come from somewhere, whether from higher taxes or government cuts. Indeed, elsewhere in the US Democrats are proposing similar measures for their own states. This may legitimately break their hearts, but they see no other way.

From our perspective, of course, all this is despicable nonsense. Corporate magnates are sitting on the biggest fortunes in the history of the world. The net worth of just one of the planet’s 1210 billionaires—let’s say Bill Gates—could pay off a budget shortfall over fifteen times the size of the one in Wisconsin; distributed among Wisconsin’s 5.6 million residents, that would be $10,000 each. The problem is not that there’s no money—at this point money is simply created by the Federal Reserve whenever they choose—but that the vast majority of it is held hostage by a few rich people who don’t give a damn what happens to anyone else. If this is even causing trouble for governments, which work hand in glove with capitalists, that just shows the magnitude of the crisis.

In this context, it’s a mistake to expect a little protesting to achieve immediate results. Even if we manage to stop one wave of cutbacks and rollbacks, a thousand more assaults will follow. The state literally can’t back down—the politicians have nowhere to go. So rather than focusing on achieving “realistic” goals, such as blocking a particular budget or bill, we have to think bigger. How do we build a long-term movement that can fight against capitalism itself? How do we approach these protests as the starting point for the savage, years-long struggle that undoubtedly awaits?

Those considerations make it particularly dispiriting to come across attitudes like the one expressed by Wisconsin teacher Peggy Kruse, quoted as saying, “Most teachers are more than happy to take the 18% pay cut, to do anything that will help get the state back and running. We’re most concerned about the loss of collective bargaining rights.”

In other words, Kruse is willing to concede anything, so long as she retains her right to concede. Let Bill Gates keep his $56 billion while we get pay cuts or pink slips—just don’t touch the illusion that we choose this state of affairs!

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Accepting defeat in advance in this way goes along with a blind faith in “peaceful protest.” Signs in Wisconsin read “FIGHT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN,” but Egyptian protesters burned down police stations. Neither “peaceful” protests nor more assertive ones are likely to bring about the immediate repeal of the bill passed March 9–so questions about how disobedience plays to the media or affects the prospects of the Democrats are beside the point. The question, once more, is what will catalyze a fierce new movement that can go beyond single-issue defensive measures to push for a fundamental shift in the social order.

Anything the movement accomplishes, it will accomplish in defiance of the authorities, in defiance of would-be leaders who would tame and direct it, in defiance of union bureaucrats who don’t dare call for a general strike even as they are stripped of all power.

Thus far, everything that has given vitality to the movement in Wisconsin has come out of a spirit of rebellion. Those who broke into the capitol building the evening of March 9 did so in defiance of the court order that had concluded the previous occupation. In this light, it is particularly embarrassing that certain authoritarian organizers would enter the building illegally just to tell people to leave it politely. If police did not arrest or remove demonstrators, it was not because the demonstrators had the right to be in the building—police beat and murder people with no justification on a regular basis—but because the demonstrators have mobilized enough power to force the authorities to back down; politeness and obedience can only detract from this leverage. Anything the movement accomplishes, it will accomplish in defiance of the authorities, in defiance of would-be leaders who would tame and direct it, in defiance of union bureaucrats who don’t dare call for a general strike even as they are stripped of all power.

Some of the protesters understand this already. The chants of “OCCUPY!” and “GENERAL STRIKE!” that echoed in the capitol building Wednesday night recall the chants of more militant and deeply rooted overseas anti-austerity movements. As the conflicts generated by capitalist crises intensify, anarchists can expect to be outdone by other working and unemployed people.

What can you do to take a side in this struggle? If a general strike really does take off, that means—in the words of our comrades—NOBODY AND NOTHING WORKS. If you are in or near Wisconsin, you can support a strike by interrupting business as usual: calling in sick to work, occupying buildings, blocking streets. Look for ways you can connect with others in the process—what you can do on your own is not nearly as important as how your efforts become infectious.

The most important question of all is how to spread the action beyond the capitol. The capitol symbolizes “democracy,” which is to say top-down control. But capitalism is not simply maintained in government buildings. Initiatives like the university occupation in Milwaukee are important in that they offer a model for how to expand the terrain of conflict. Rather than everyone descending upon the capitol to be mere faces in a mass, people should go wherever they will be most effective proportionate to their numbers. An occupation of 50 people in La Crosse could have ten times the impact of 50 more people joining an existing occupation in Madison.

It’s also crucial to expand the issues beyond legislation affecting unions and state employees. Spontaneous high school walkouts already set a precedent for this in February, connecting the proposed cutbacks to the alienation of young people who have not yet even been thrown at the mercy of the job market. This isn’t just about government cutbacks or union rights—it is above all about self-determination. If you don’t have a union job or a state salary, if you’re unemployed or precariously employed, you’re already affected by the same conditions the Republicans in the Wisconsin government hope to intensify.

To say this once more, we shouldn’t evaluate efforts according to how effective they are in immediately achieving changes in legislation, or for that matter how many people they draw to rallies. The real question is their content: do they create new relationships between people, new ways of relating to material goods? Do they demonstrate values that point beyond capitalism? Do they produce new momentum, new ways of fighting, new unruliness?

If you live far outside Wisconsin, take this as a warning shot; don’t be caught off guard when the same things occur where you live. Think about how you can prepare so you’ll be ready to push things further when the window of opportunity opens up. This is not a fluke, but the first signs of a long war finally beginning in the United States.

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Further Resources

Video from the capitol building on the evening of March 9

General Strike pamphlet courtesy of the Industrial Workers of the World

Poster: General Strike Means Nobody and Nothing Works

Poster urging protesters to go all the way