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Just in time for the anniversary of the beginning of the Egyptian uprising, we’ve received this report from a comrade who participated in the most recent clashes in Cairo. It offers an overview of the current context in Egypt, along with photos and video footage from the front lines.
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To follow up Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy, we present The Empire Has No Clothes, an overview of the factors we expect to shape the context of struggle in 2012. These include intensifying repression, the struggle for the internet, the crisis of legitimacy facing representative democracy, and the fault lines within our resistance movements themselves. We anticipate a new round of confrontations, more pitched than the last, and the stakes are only getting higher.
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To ring in the new year, we’ve composed a review of the upheavals of 2010 and 2011, reprising the highlights of our earlier coverage to outline why some efforts have taken off while others have hit walls. “Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy” serves as a prehistory of the Occupy movement, offering context for the form it has taken and the challenges ahead for all who sincerely desire social transformation. It’s the first in a series of strategic analyses with which we are kicking off the new year. We have high hopes for 2012: let’s take stock of how we got here, survey the terrain, and get ready to go for it.
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It is December 17, 2011. One year ago today, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in response to his mistreatment by the Tunisian police, setting off a chain reaction worldwide. Let no one forget that the wave of uprisings still sweeping the globe did not simply spring from the hard work of activists, however long some labored to pave the way. It did not begin with people setting out to better themselves or the world. It began with the ultimate gesture of despair and self-destruction.
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On November 22, 2011, six of the defendants in the main conspiracy case stemming from the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto pled guilty, while the other eleven had their charges dropped. The defendants just issued a collective statement emphasizing that they emerge from the court case “united and in solidarity.”
Now that the case is closed, it’s possible to speak freely about the campaign of infiltration and repression that produced it. We’ve received this analysis from comrades in Canada who are eager to pass on the lessons from this experience; the document offers valuable insight into how infiltrators managed to penetrate anarchist communities and which vulnerabilities they exploited. This concludes our comprehensive coverage of the 2010 G20 protests, which has also included an overview of the events and issues, an eyewitness account from the riots, a review of the legal fallout, and even a benefit album.
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On May 20-21, anarchists and fellow travelers gathered in Milwaukee for a small conference about the ongoing crisis of capitalism. In the final discussion, people from around the US compared notes on recent anti-austerity protests, focusing chiefly on the student movement in California and the recent protests in Wisconsin. We’ve summarized some of the conclusions here in hopes they can be useful in the next phase of anarchist organizing.
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In May, a new movement spread across Spain and elsewhere around the world, with crowds occupying public spaces in an attempt to formulate a new resistance to the effects of capitalist crisis and austerity measures. We are excited to present Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the #Spanish Revolution, a full report from a comrade on the ground in Barcelona. This report chronicles the trajectory of the movement and offers a critical analysis of the potential and limitations of the forms it assumed.
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As a preview of the forthcoming tenth issue of Rolling Thunder, we present two texts about US border policy and policing:
The former, Designed to Kill, analyzes US border control policy, exploring how its actual effects and objectives differ from its ostensible purpose. The conclusions are based on several years of firsthand observation of both sides of the border by a participant in No More Deaths. For additional context, Four Stories from the Border offers glimpses into the lives of those who risk death to cross the border.
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To mark the coming of May Day, we’re delighted to take part in the online debut of the subMedia film END:CIV, now available in it’s entirety—for free, of course—at our movie sub-site, the CrimethInc. Emergency Broadcast System.
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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North Africa is in revolt. As usual, the most striking thing is how familiar everything is: the young man with the prestigious degree working at a coffee shop, the unemployment and bitterness, the protests set off by police brutality—for police are to the unemployed what bosses are to workers. These details cue us in that what is happening in Egypt is not part of another world, but very much part of our own. There are no exotic overseas revolutions in the 21st century. Make no mistake—though these events dwarf the riots in Greece and the student movement in England, they spring from the same source.
To keep up with events, we urge you to read our comrades’ dispatches from Egypt and anti-authoritarian perspectives from the Middle East in general. But for these uprisings to offer any hope, we have to understand ourselves as part of them, and think and act accordingly. To that end, we’ve solicited this analysis from a comrade in North Africa.
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November and December 2010 saw an unprecedented wave of student protest in the UK, touched off by an attack on the right-wing Tory party headquarters during a demonstration against tuition increases. With the assistance of members of the Last Hours collective, we’ve completed a belated overview of the causes and highlights of the UK student movement.
The events in the UK are significant in that they come on the heels of labor unrest in Spain and France, and coincided with fierce student protests in Italy as well. To the south, the government of Tunisia has just been toppled, sending shockwaves to Egypt. Broadly speaking, these are all reactions to the effects of the ongoing financial crisis that came into public consciousness in 2008; we will probably see more of these as disaffected youth take stock of the world they will be inheriting.
Sooner or later, this outrage is bound to erupt in the US as well. Last year’s student movement is surely only a preview, though we can’t tell what form it will take next. What we can do is study upheavals elsewhere in the world, reflect on how we can best contribute to oppositional momentum, and keep up our experiments in catalyzing resistance.
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On Saturday, November 13, a new and experimental infoshop in Winona, MN, opened it’s doors to the public. The Burrow is one of the first new infoshops to open since the controversial essay “5 Steps to Reviving Your Failing Anarchist Bookstore“, and at a time when long-standing infoshops are throwing in their towels, this account offers insight into the new models still unseen.
This story begins where our coverage of small-town organizing left off in Rolling Thunder #7. What follows is not only an account and recipe for a new type of space, but a possible intermediate step in anarchist organizing in long-term communities.
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We just received this inspiring and instructive report from anonymous comrades in Russia, describing two years of struggle against logging operations in one of the major forests near Moscow. The struggle culminated this summer in the “Khimki battle,” in which several hundred armed antifascists and anarchists attacked a government building in suburban Moscow; the authorities responded in kind, and subsequent solidarity efforts in Belarus provoked further repression.
Most of the links in this text lead to Russian-language pages; those too busy to teach themselves Russian can at least plug the website addresses into Google translate and struggle through computer-generated translations.
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A tremendous amount of attention has focused on Greece lately. Looking at the successful anarchist movement there, we can nurture utopian visions to strengthen our resolve; but if we only consider apparent success stories, we will not be prepared for the challenges ahead.
The entire Balkan peninsula is a sort of laboratory of crisis. Studying it, we can discern some of the possible futures that may await us now that North America seems to be entering an era of crisis as well. The vibrant anarchist movement in Greece represents one possible future, in which a powerful social movement establishes hubs of resistance. But only a few hundred kilometers north Serbia shows another: a nightmare of ethnic conflict, nationalist war, and false resistance movements in which the anarchist alternative has sunk almost as deep as Atlantis.
The roots of the differences between these countries are hundreds of years old, but we can identify some recent factors. Only a generation ago, both were ruled by dictatorships: Greece by a US-based fascist dictatorship that collapsed under pressure from rebellious students, winning youth revolt the respect of the general population to this day; Yugoslavia by a socialist dictatorship, in which Tito maintained power by playing various groups off against each other. When the Berlin Wall came down and the socialist government collapsed, the country was torn apart by ethnic strife. By the end of the 1990s, Serbia was reduced to a much smaller nation ruled by a nationalistic communist, Slobodan Milošević.
On paper, what happened next reads like an anarchist fairy tale. An ostensibly decentralized and nonhierarchical underground youth group named Otpor (“Resistance”) carried out a propaganda campaign aimed at rousing popular revolt, despite aggressive repression from the authorities. After a rigged election, hundreds of thousands of people converged on the capital and intense streetfighting ensued. An unemployed vehicle operator, nicknamed “Joe” by his colleagues, drove his bulldozer through a hail of bullets into the headquarters of the state television station at the head of a furious crowd. Other protesters set the Parliament on fire and violently wrested control of the streets from police. The authorities surrendered, the government toppled, and soon a former anarchist was prime minister.
More history, commentary, an in-depth interview and appendices after the jump.
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Or, How We Raised $2000 for Scott DeMuth and Carrie Feldman
It is with great rejoicing that we announce our latest triumph, the successful development of an effective new means of fundraising to support targets of state repression.
All you need to try this yourself is 1) a person or cause that deserves fundraising support, 2) another person who cares about that person or cause, and 3) a bunch of people who want to play a practical joke on the caring person.
In our case, the targets of state repression are Scott DeMuth and Carrie Feldman, two young anarchists the FBI is struggling to tie to an Animal Liberation Front action that occurred at the University of Iowa in 2004 when the two were barely in high school. Scott is charged with conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act; he goes to trial September 13. After serving four months in prison for refusing to speak to a grand jury, Carrie has been subpoenaed again, this time to testify at Scott’s trial. The two face tremendous legal expenses and are in dire need of support.
Last November, we were fruitlessly trying to brainstorm new ways to raise funds for Scott and Carrie. At the same time, we were teasing our friend Steve for hating folk punk, an obscure musical genre. Have you ever had a friend who loved to hate things and be miserable in a way that was positively adorable? Steve is that kind of person, as hundreds of admirers can attest. Somebody had spread a rumor that Steve was in a folk punk band, Steve was incensed, it was hysterical—and suddenly we had a brilliant money-making scheme.
The scheme and resulting free MP3 album download after the break.
