The People Rebel

According to Fire and Flames, a book recounting the history of the German Autonomen, the first May Day riots in the Kruezberg area—on May 1, 1987—came as a surprise to everyone. A simple street party became a major conflict involving many sectors of the population, forcing police to abandon the district for hours. From that night of freedom sprang a tradition of mass confrontation, a yearly day of rioting in downtown Berlin.

May Day 2012

May Day 2012 occurred in a context of resurgent revolutionary movements seeking to project their strength. There were many signs that it would be exciting and combative: unexpectedly confrontational actions during the previous year, a call for insurrection days the weekend before, new attempts to squat housing, and efforts to expand the conflict zone to other areas of the city—not to mention, this was the 25th anniversary of the first Kreuzberg May Day riots.

Walpurgisnacht, the traditional anti-capitalist gathering the night before May Day, was moved to Wedding, a residential area seeing gentrification for the first time. This attempt to extend the conflict zone met a suffocating police presence that tightly controlled the actions of the 5000 participants and prevented almost any action outside the route previously registered with the police.

On May 1, for the first time, the traditional revolutionary May Day march attempted to march to the center of the city. Perhaps expectedly, the police surrounded the gathering of 20,000 after some small incidents, declared the march illegal, and steadily broke down the crowd.

Special semi-autonomous snatch squads charged violently into the gathering to extract individuals, making the majority of arrests during the march. Here’s how these work: one cop selects the target and runs forward full speed with the rest of the squad in a compressed line behind. The group flows around the arrest site to form a circle, picking the target up and running, the entire operation usually accomplished in under 20 seconds. People were targeted for wearing masks and showing some sign of fight towards the police.

The suffocating numbers of police caused people to leave so as to avoid being trapped. Later that night, most people had returned to Kreuzberg but were unwilling or unable to precipitate further clashes.

The protests have been received within the radical scene as a bit of a letdown, while the state and establishment view this as a victory. Papers were splashed with headlines such as “May Day Passes Relatively Smoothly” and “May 1st Demonstrations Largely Free of Riots and Violence.”

The reduction of confrontation on May Day is not a result of decreased social momentum. To understand what’s happening, we have to look at the state’s strategy for undermining successful mobilization.

A large movement with thousands of militants can’t be ignored. Millions of euros are spent on the security operation to ensure that the events of May Day do not call the power of the state into question. Officials’ careers can be advanced or ended by the perception of how May Day goes. Media coverage is extensive. The language around the necessity of using force, and against whom, mirrors the US government’s description of “surgical” drone strikes and bombing campaigns against those with whom negotiation is impossible.

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Myfest Is Not Your Fest

In 2003, Myfest was created by an alliance of do-gooder liberal types, small capitalists, and neighborhood-watch-style initiatives. The festival, now attended by tens of thousands, was designed specifically to occupy traditional gathering sites of overt political action in Heinrichplatz, Kottbusser Tor, and Mariannenplatz, remaking them as depoliticized zones of cultural activity, commerce, and partying. Through the joint public-private efforts of Myfest and the state, this scheme is intended to achieve complete spatial occupation and psychological control of the population of Kreuzberg.

The control extends from the big picture—about 10,000 police and private security—to minutia: the smallest aesthetic detail of your presentation can determine whether you are allowed to pass dozens of arbitrary entrance and exit controls.

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Massive security operations in the US, such as those seen at political conventions and international summits, have carved out artificial spaces in cities for the elite to gather. This security model is designed to shut down all aspects of normal life in a particular zone by establishing an impermeable demarcation between the normal and the special. This is the use of crisis.

Berlin’s May Day, on the other hand, is the mapping of total state control onto the everyday lives and experiences in a specific geographic area. In the festival zone, control is about the creation of fixed continuity and normality where nothing besides a festival can occur above all because everyone knows that nothing besides a festival can occur. The crisis model at least acknowledges a state of exception and increased violence.

To neutralize Berlin’s history of active resistance, Myfest imposes its own convergence on the area. This starts with the branding of the event as a safe space for families, immigrant business people, and anyone wishing to participate in a political May Day event without conflict. “Protest leaders” play an essential role in legitimizing and enforcing the idea that this is not a space for confrontation.

Two dozen stages physically occupy gathering sites; music monopolizes the aural space. Artifacts of resistance are offered for consumption, wielded as weapons against any potential for resistance. You can watch bands under anti-Nazi banners railing against police and fascists. At night, there is a movie showing on the history of the protests.

Heading towards the festival zone, the police presence becomes visible a full mile away, increasingly steadily until you reach the actual checkpoints where bags are searched for bottles and weapons. The police officers who serve as bouncers courteously move aside to let in the right people, but sternly grip their weapons as they tell other individuals to fuck off. At one line, you may not be allowed to leave due to a pierced ear or a political t-shirt, while at another you have no issues. It’s the kind of arbitrary repression that says, “We do what the fuck we want.”

The zone itself is closed to all vehicular traffic, ceded to pedestrian commerce in order to avoid the possibility of people trying to occupy the roads for anything else. Groups of 30-60 plainclothes police with earpieces monitor the crowds; additional groups of “Anti-Konflikt-Team” police work to “reduce tension.”

As the night progresses, the proportion of radicals begins to rise and police visibility becomes more suffocating. Small autonomous groups of riot police snake through the crowd seemingly at random, looking at individuals or standing near smaller groups they wish to intimidate. Sometimes they deliberately shoulder people to emphasize that there is nothing anyone can do in response. It’s a difficult tactical environment, a fact recognized by those who want to continue contesting space and by those who believe it’s better to stay out of the way.

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Putting Down Roots, Escaping Plateaus

All this is not to say there is no future for May Day confrontations in Berlin. Many avenues for experimentation suggest themselves: shifting to decentralized actions around the periphery, attacking the checkpoints themselves, precipitating conflicts at new flashpoints via squatting or occupations. This is not the venue for a complete evaluation of the options. Rather, we should focus on what May Day in Berlin can teach US anarchists.

Many US cities have been known as anarchist hotbeds over the last decade, and at least one seems in the running for a repeat championship. Yet successful outbursts of activity have often been followed by escalating police repression and movement fragmentation, locking anarchists in cycles of confrontation with the state (and each other) that have been difficult to disengage from.

What’s astounding about Berlin’s May Day is not just that the authorities have been successful at limiting people’s ability to riot; it’s also that each year thousands of people keeping trying despite the odds. The ability to regularly manifest a collective desire to publicly attack our oppressors is missing throughout the United States. This failure speaks to the problems anarchists have had at rooting themselves anywhere from which they can consistently struggle—be it workplace, school, neighborhood, or margin. We’ve gotten better at gathering for occasional storms, but haven’t yet broken through to creating permanent sites or traditions of confrontation—Oakland’s admirable recent attempts notwithstanding.

Throughout the year, rioting and acts of sabotage occur regularly in Berlin—click here to see a partial map of car burnings between 2008 and 2011—but they exist in the context of a movement that still holds significant space from which it can continually gather, regenerate, and attack. Social spaces and housing and the intimacy and support such spaces generate go hand in hand with the ability to weather repression. The constant flurry of activity at social spaces and their function as default social gathering points enable them to bring new people into the movement on an ongoing basis.

Yet movements rich in numbers and space and steeped in the history of specific tactics often have a hard time adapting and experimenting with new approaches. Owing to the sheer weight of resources being directed within them and against them, shifting strategy often requires a large movement buy-in that is difficult to achieve. If US anarchists are to consolidate recent gains, we’ll need to sink the deep roots our German comrades have, while retaining the unpredictability and dynamism necessary to push beyond plateaus and impasses.

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It’s also important to strategize ahead of our immediate problems, so we will be prepared for the subsequent challenges when we succeed. The cooption of Berlin’s traditional May Day rioting via Myfest is an important cautionary tale, showing how the commodification of revolt, the influence of accommodating movement leaders, and the rhetoric of creating safe spaces can be used offensively to suppress outright resistance. On May Day 2012 in Seattle, a few dozen anarchists may have accomplished as much damage and unexpected disruption as occurred in all Berlin. If this kind of combative activity continues, we can expect to see some of the strategies exemplified by Myfest employed in the US alongside straightforward policing. Let’s be ready to identify and counteract them immediately.

As the momentum that originated with Occupy Wall Street tapers off, May Day 2012 saw anarchists on the West Coast consolidate their gains in the street with actions from Los Angeles to Vancouver. In a series of first-person vignettes from the Bay Area, supplemented by a photoessay from Seattle set to a song by Underground Reverie, we evoke the atmosphere of May Day 2012 and plumb the questions it poses.

Saturday, April 28, Oakland

I’m back in the Bay for May Day, loitering outside the top-secret anarchist hideout. The streets of Oakland record sedimentary layers of resistance and defeat: “OCCUPY EVERYTHING” is painted across a canvas of faded tags, the slogan itself obscured beneath syringes and garbage. Deeper beneath that concrete canvas lies the pavement that the Black Panthers once patrolled, and below that the streets blockaded in 1946, during the last General Strike in the US. We stand above, upon the syringes and garbage, aspiring protagonists of the next chapter of the story.

Two by two, my friends are showing up from all around the country. We thought we’d finally superseded the summit model of anarchist action, taking up the diffuse model of social unrest already spreading around the rest of the world. But here we are again, converging.

This converging confirms that the window of possibility that opened with last fall’s surge of activity has closed; momentum has plateaued in the small towns, leaving the diehards to flow into the metropolises. Like Vietnam, Oakland is the site of a proxy war, patrolled by police who live in other towns and thronged by anarchists who move here from other states. This is where rulers and ruled contend to produce different visions of the future, which will presumably filter out through news stories and youtube videos to the periphery. Yet what happens here is determined elsewhere; Oakland wouldn’t be an anarchist hub without a steady flow of recruits from the Midwestern suburbs, nor could the Oakland Police keep the upper hand without funding and arms from outside. Both sides ignore the hinterlands at their peril.

Across the street, a half dozen rough characters pass lugging massive improvised shields, irregulars in a revolutionary army yet to exist. They look haggard; none of us recognize them. This could be Muenster in 1534, vagabonds trickling in from failed peasant wars for another showdown with the powers that be.

Sunday, April 29, Albany

North of Berkeley, hundreds of people have occupied a wide tract of prime farmland owned by UC Berkeley. The University is considering selling the land to Whole Foods, among others; why not use it to produce the food locals need, rather than destroying it so a corporation can cash in on their consequent dependence? Back in my hometown, we’re doing the same on a site proposed for an unpopular drugstore, cultivating a guerrilla garden of medicinal herbs. Compared to this vast expanse, the scale of our little plot—a few plants at the foot of a fence—emphasizes the relationship between hinterland and epicenter.

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The police circulate freely, filming us. Were it not for public support, they’d clear us out immediately; but the conditional nature of liberal backing ties our hands so we can’t force the cops out, either—and their filming puts us all at risk, amassing evidence for databases and court cases.

While everyone else is juggling, playing with fabric at the art station, and listening to poorly amplified speeches—the rituals of liberal California—I join a Rastafarian my age shoveling soil and breaking ground. It feels good to wield a shovel in the hot sun, to do something with my body. I want to create commons, but I want to do it for keeps, not for show.

On the way out, I meet one of the organizers. We talk about the importance of secrecy in planning this occupation, and about the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, which does this on a scale in Brazil that makes Berkeley look like my hometown. I never saw brighter stars than the night I stayed on several miles of occupied farmland outside Belo Horizonte.

-I also pass some comrades not yet wearing their black sweatshirts. It’s not just community support and public legitimacy that make the authorities hesitate to evict this place; if that were all, they would go ahead, knowing the consequences would be limited to the field of civil discussion. It’s also the threat posed by people like us.

Monday, April 30, San Francisco

We’ve been in the street for two minutes, hoods up and flags out, when the first police car rolls up. Even the most hardened of us flinch: here we are, caught red-handed. This moment is inscribed on each of us in shame and fear: the siren behind us on the highway, the loss prevention agent blocking our path at the grocery store, the officers evicting us from our encampment or home. The moment when it becomes clear that we are weaker, that we have to give in regardless of our needs or ideals.

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A masked figure coolly steps to the car and spray-paints a circle A on the passenger-side window. The officer halts the car and jumps out; his body says, I’m going to assert order. Without breaking stride, the masked figure pitches the empty spray-paint can directly at the officer’s face; it bounces off with an audible smack. The officer gets back in the car. Its windows are bashed in with a garbage can as he retreats.

One more block and the police station looms into view ahead. Normally this would mean we’d made a costly wrong turn, but tonight we march right to it. The police run for cover beneath a hail of paint bombs and projectiles; more masked figures spring forward to drive their flagpoles into its doors and windows. The sound of shattering glass and hissing tires fills the night continuously for fifteen minutes.

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Here it is, finally, the power to defend a space beyond their control; inside it, all the rage suppressed beneath the veneer of imposed order erupts to the surface. Activists and poor people humiliated by police exact vengeance; renters gentrified out of their homes wreck a neighborhood they could never afford; service workers taunted all their lives with luxury goods give the rich a taste of fear. The calculations—the debts and payments—of capitalist “justice” give way to the excess of rebellion. It’s chaotic, terrifying, exhilarating.

Walking around the Mission district afterwards, there’s a lot of confusion and anger, and not only from the fabulously wealthy. Indeed, it’s stupid that ordinary cars have been damaged alongside expensive restaurants; the lines should be drawn between the ruling class and everyone else, not each against all. But after so many years of bottling up the consequences of injustice and inequality, things are bound to be messy when the floodgates open. This is the flip side of the docility of career activists, the shadow of the self-congratulatory moralism of non-profit employees: what is shut out returns tenfold. And how many riots like this would it take for San Francisco rent to drop within my price range?

Tuesday, May 1, Oakland

The sweet scent of distant tear gas greets us as we arrive in downtown Oakland for the noon rally at Oscar Grant Plaza; concussion grenades are already exploding ahead. The bullies in blue are making snatch-and-grab arrests to intimidate the crowd. But the crowd doesn’t fall back; everyone rushes forward, yelling and shoving. The police issue a dispersal order through a megaphone. There’s some back and forth—everything is confusing—but then they’ve retreated and we hold not only the plaza but the streets around it.

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The crew around the sound system rolls their cart into the middle of the intersection and a raucous dance party ensues. Another hard-won space outside the logic of control and profit: dancing without a cover charge, lunch without a checkout line, politics without politicians. There are hundreds of people here, maybe thousands, and contrary to the allegations that Occupy Oakland is a bunch of outside agitators, many are longtime locals of color. It’s a mistake to credit recent arrivals with Oakland’s street militance—if anything, they’ve learned it here.

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Originally, the plan for May Day had been to shut down the Golden Gate bridge, but that collapsed in acrimony as the unions that had originally sought social movement participation backed out. This has happened over and over all around the country: formal and longstanding organizations have only coopted and obstructed popular outrage, even when their own existence is at stake. It has been challenging to find new forms of organization that enable people to coordinate confrontational action. During the summit era, groups like the RNC Welcoming Committee and the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project offered a provisional solution, although they also gave the state a target for conspiracy charges. The general assemblies of the Occupy movement offered another model, often supplemented behind the scenes by informal networks; it remains to be seen how secure these are against state repression—the full force of which will not be felt until this wave of momentum has passed entirely.

After a couple hours circling Oscar Grant plaza, we begin marching to meet the permitted march for immigrants’ rights. The police are still nowhere to be seen. We cross the city, confident in our strength; participants drag the occasional barricade into the street, but for the most part our uncontested presence is enough. Still, when we pass a McDonald’s, somebody can’t resist lobbing a paint bomb at it, and a masked figure smashes one of its windows; when someone chases the vandal, the pursuer is immediately surrounded and neutralized by the crowd, the way white blood cells respond to bacteria.

Rumors are pouring in from other corners of the country: police have raided and arrested comrades in New York City, LAX has been shut down, a state of emergency has been declared in Seattle after anarchists wrecked Niketown for the first time since 1999. It’s not clear how seriously we should take these, but it’s easy to believe just about anything in this environment; the fantasy persists that unrest will spread from the epicenter to the periphery, that riots will break out everywhere this coming autumn the way occupations did last fall.

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After dark, when our numbers finally drop, the police swoop in en masse. We see lines of their vans zipping up the side streets to cut us off from the rear, so we fall back, orange columns of flame rising from the trashcans into the colossal night. Explosions echo in the distance behind us, screams and sirens mingle around us, and no one knows what to expect ahead. Maybe this is just the final act of the play, when all but the extremists have withdrawn from the field, leaving the impression of escalation; or maybe this really is a harbinger of things to come. It’s probably both.

Further Reading

—Unexpectedly supportive coverage of black bloc actions in
Los Angeles, Seattle, and the Bay Area; even Adbusters announced that the black bloc “stole the show” on May Day

—Extensive analysis of the failures of privilege discourse in criticism of Occupy Oakland

—And for those who came in late, please review how to dress for a black bloc, what a black bloc is, and why we don’t endorse the conceptual framework of “nonviolence”

Does consent discourse offer a useful framework with which to evaluate direct action tactics and strategy? Can we challenge consensus reality effectively while respecting everyone’s wishes? What’s the relationship between desire and social transformation? Breaking with Consensus Reality grapples with these questions, exploring the limits of the politics of consent and proposing an alternative.

Breaking with Consensus Reality
(PDF [1.8 MB] Imposed Zine Version)
(PDF [1.7 MB] Online Reading Zine Version)

This text is drawn from the publication TERROR INCOGNITA, which will soon be available online in full.

In this new feature, “The Rose of Fire Has Returned!” our Barcelona correspondent provides extensive background on the riots of March 29, tracing the trajectory from the plaza occupations to the general strike, and explores the questions that have arisen in this context as anarchists face new opportunities and challenges.

In response to the recent backlash against diversity of tactics, we’ve prepared a new feature—The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy—explaining why we consider this an important principle for anyone invested in the pursuit of liberation.

A print-ready pdf of this text is available here.

What is taking place here is a kind of silencing. Defining people as “violent” is fundamentally a way to delegitimize them; Solnit and Hedges feel entitled to spread falsehoods about their political adversaries because their goal is to shut them out of the discussion entirely. That’s why Hedges acknowledges he never spoke to anyone involved in a black bloc in the course of composing his diatribe. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect better from journalists with their own wikipedia pages and glamor shots, who have much to lose should popular movements cease to be managed from the top down.

To counteract this silencing, we sought out our comrades from the heart of the black bloc and asked them to tell their side of the story: where they come from, why they participate, how they see the world. We do not accept the terms set by the mudslingers: our intent is not to compete for ideological legitimacy on a battlefield of abstractions, but to foster mutual understanding grounded in personal experience. As the expression goes, God only knows what devils we are: He can’t know anything else.

A ’zine version is available as a pdf; a reading version is available here.

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God Only Knows What Devils We Are

an apologia for the black bloc from the community that has no community

courtesy of the Institute for Experimental Freedom

Have you ever worn the mask one-two one-two,

(M) to the (A) to the (S) to the (K)

Put the mask upon the face just to make the next day,
Feds be hawkin me 
Jokers be stalking me,
I walk the streets and camouflage my identity,

My posse in the Brooklyn wear the mask.

My crew in the Jersey wear the mask.

Stick up kids doing boogie woogie wear the mask.
Yeah everybody wear da mask but how long will it last.
-The Fugees

That’s why I live illegal
All my life I live illegal
Don’t give a fuck bout the law

When my pockets reaching zero

I’m fresh out the ghost town similar to your town

I’m probably where it goes down

Keepin’ ten toes down

-Ski Beatz & Freddie Gibbs

For thirteen years, for over a decade, I have donned the black mask. “Seattle”—that word still means “the days the world stood still” to me. “Genoa” still holds more terror and perversity than the North American September 11. In experiencing anonymous collective force, I have gained far more than a diversity of tactics in my tool box. The black bloc is not merely a tactic, as so many anarchist apologists claim; it’s more of an aesthetic development in the art of street confrontation. The black bloc is a methodology of struggle; it goes beyond a single color, and its intelligence reaches beyond the terrain of protests. The black bloc is irreducibly contemporary because only in its opacity can a ray of light from the heavens finally reach us. Allow me to explain.

I.

It’s the summer of 2000. Many of us have given up on both Democrats and Republicans. The sense is that “anti-globalization” poses the only alternative to advanced capitalism. The Democratic National Convention: I am marching, drenched in sweat, through the catacombs that hosted the Rodney King riots. Sadly, the only remnant of those fateful days is a militarized police force that anticipates our every move.

We walk into an enormous play pen—the “free speech zone”—surrounded on all sides by a sea of navy blue wielding pepper balls and batons. Amid the most dreadful speeches and rebellious rock music, we find each other: the stupid, isolated, alienated, and utterly lost children of capital, just beginning our downward spiral—just beginning a precarious life, without promise and without hope.

We organize ourselves at the center and proceed to the margin, where things are unpredictable. Someone climbs the tall fence, reaching the limit of free speech; and then another, and another. A black flag is unfurled, and a figure waves it with pride, claiming this as a site of freedom with that stupid gesture. The pepper balls crash against your skin; they collide against your frail bones, exploding on impact and releasing a furious burning that traps itself in your oily clothes and sweat. The crowd collectively gains intelligence and transforms the signs bearing socialist slogans into shields for cover. We brace each other and press the signs against the fence. Shot with pepper balls, a figure falls from the apex of the fence; arms and femur bones snap against the concrete.

That putrid smell, the eyes glossed over in tears, the stomach churns and nausea overwhelms you. Vinegar-soaked rags help to soak up the poisonous clouds, but you can hear screaming everywhere as the blue tide comes rushing in, and your nerves twist and vibrate as the CS gas and police mutate into a single hostile terrain.

Suddenly, I am with six or ten people. I don’t know who. We’ve found a large road sign and we’re lifting it slowly. Plastic bottles soar impotently overhead. A small rock or two hits an officer. We press with what was once our labor power, straining to hurl the worthless product of our grandparents’ toil back at our overseers. The object tilts over the fence and falls to other side: clong. We cheer and revel in our functionless gesture. “Fuck the police” resounds throughout the night, however foolishly. A few bank windows collapse in glittery confetti. Spray paint decorates a wall. We journey to the end of the night; at its perimeter, we share drinks and laughs over our absurd gestures. Finally, back at the union hall, we crash in our sleeping bags, exhausted and dehydrated, to dream of the abolition of capitalism.

I am irreparably transformed.

II.

Lets rewind. Sixteen years ago, I am an adolescent teenager. I have entered Alcoholics Anonymous—somewhat earlier than most of my family. There, I witness one friend’s overdose, another friend’s relapse and subsequent incarceration for manslaughter, and the spread of methamphetamines throughout my neighborhood. I watch Requiem for a Dream some years later, horrified by the cinematic juxtposition of “normal” and “marginal” addiction—it feels so familiar.

I am watching 20/20, an episode exposing Nike sweatshops. Through some extended leaps of logic, I recognize a link between those exploited by sweatshops and my own condition. With this heightened sensitivity, I conclude that

1) addiction has an economic function

2) the economy includes industries that tend to harm people—through exploitation, alienation, and immiseration, the reproduction of addiction being a subset of the last of these

3) the economy tends to hurt people generally.

My initial moral indignation passes; my sensitivity shifts from a moral compass faulting individuals for their choices to something more like class consciousness. The broke-ass cars in the yard appear starker. The drive-by shootings in our neighborhood gain a new meaning. The empty refrigerators’ sad grumble reverberating in our empty stomachs, my many stepbrothers’ sweet mullet haircuts—these bring me a certain revelation: I am white trash.

Seattle: the anti-globalization summits and corresponding riots. The beautiful rhythm: work, misery, chaos. They kill Carlo and we meet at the intersection of Colfax and Broadway to block traffic, frantically trying to show our tears and rage. The war. My sister is deployed to Iraq. We wear helmets and anachronistically chant “Bring the war home!” We spray slogans and burn effigies. We block the flows of the metropolis. As if to baptize our newfound agency, we are showered in pepper spray. Tear gas spreads across entire continents. We go from basement hardcore shows to warehouse parties. Our friends learn to DJ. Cocaine comes back into style and claims two victims; heroin gets a few more. The boredom and stupidity is suffocating. We attempt to wrest the noose from our necks. Democracy sweeps Bush back into office. We’re trashing a gentrified district of Adams Morgan. My friend records an MP3 of her heartbeat, shouts and heavy breathing accentuated by shattering glass and anxiety.

In the US, we hit a lull. Everywhere else the world burns.

As we get older, we find new ways to survive. A small meeting of coworkers transforms into an ambitious conspiracy. Without making any demands of the boss, we increase our pay and our quality of life. We eat well, we can afford cigarettes, we travel where we want to: Scotland and France, Italy and Germany. Can’t stop the chaos.

In Europe, the black bloc means “no media!” I watch a snitch in a tie go down among the kicks and punches of the hooded ones. A car burns. As the police battle two thousand rock throwers, a couple hundred advance through the marketplace, smashing everything. “Tremble Bourgeoisie!” is scrawled across a temp agency service.

Back home, our own temporary involvement in the economy—our precarious life—is reflected in the windows of the temp agency, the retail shop, and the café. The image of our desire is captured in the commodities to which we have no access. Our needs are displayed in advertisements that sell us happiness and grocery store aisles that mutate our tastes and relations to other living beings. Smashing, burning, and looting make sense to us in this context like nothing else could.

III.

What Chris Hedges fails to understand about black bloc activity is that it arises from a real need. The “cancer” that Chris finds so disturbing—the contagion of an anonymous collective force—is precisely why and how it continues to outlive every social movement from which it emerges. These generations—we who fantasized about Columbine and now only know metal detectors at school; we who expected September 11 and now only know the politics of terror; we who grew up as the world crumbled all around us and now only know the desert—we need to fight, and not just in the ways our rulers deem justified and legitimate.

As workers, we’re excluded from unions, from collective arrangements of any kind. When we manage to find employment at all, it is meaningless labor that corresponds to our own superfluousness in the economy. We were raised by a generation so thoroughly defeated that it feared to pass on its history. We are the inheritors of every unpaid bill, of every failed struggle, the products of the insanely selfish individualism of advanced capitalism in North America.

Our entire environment feels hostile. Hence our hostility.

Chris Hedges cannot understand this because he misses the real historical conflict expressed in contemporary struggles. As David Graeber points out, his exhumation of the decrepit journal Green Anarchy shows how out of touch he is. The black bloc spreads because of a real need to take back force, which has been monopolized by the police. The black bloc spreads because it is a living practice of collective intelligence, redistribution of wealth, and improvisation; it spreads because it interrupts the ways we are confined in our identities as subjects within capitalism. The black bloc is tuned to the uneasy pulse of our time.

A paradigm of life is coming to an end. The black bloc is irrevocably contemporary because our age of unrest is reflected in this gesture. Populations everywhere are becoming ungovernable and doing so by casting off the fundamental assumptions of government, the techniques of policing, and laws of the economy. The paradigm of sovereignty is collapsing.

To see what is changing, we have to understand the nature of sovereignty. The modern state is founded upon an anthropological fiction of human nature and the surgical extraction of violence from living beings. Thomas Hobbes argued that the establishment of the civil state conveyed the human being from the state of nature—a war of each against all—to the loving arms of the sovereign, rendering him a citizen-subject on the condition that he leave “nature” at the door. But this discourse separates each being from collectivity: the subject of sovereignty is always already an isolated individual. And the arrangement keeps war at the center of the state, as the sole dominion of the sovereign. Ironically, what the subject lays down in return for security—the capacity to use force—is precisely what the sovereign must wield in order to ensure it: and this is wielded above all against subjects.

The form of sovereign power shifted as democratic governments replaced autocracies, but the content of state sovereignty remains. The modern state has shifted from techniques governing territory to techniques governing populations.

It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between totalitarian and democratic governments, as policing is identical under both. The police have the power to let live or take life—biopower—and the distinction between democratic and totalitarian becomes even more muddled as management and medicine also gain this power, determining who can access fundamental human needs. The mediation of capital creates a hellish environment in which practically everyone is integrated into a single hostile terrain, subject to its violence and its justice. If the cause du jour is enunciated as “fuck the police,” this is because the police are the living embodiment of Hobbe’s Leviathan, the state that keeps us at arm’s length from our own potential.

“The police” includes all who police; policing is an array of techniques, not all of which demand uniforms. Hedges’ cancer metaphor exposes his penchant for order, translating it explicitly into the language of biopower. Remember how Oakland’s Mayor, Jean Quan, and other authority figures used the discourse of health and risk to justify the repression of occupations around the US? Hedges continues this work of policing with his metaphor of an unhealthy social body in need of surgery. Whenever the basic assumptions of sovereignty and capitalism are called into question by those who defy state violence and the sanctity of property, the police are mobilized to discipline them. This disciplining is carried out by both the armed wing and the necktied wing of the police. It’s not a coincidence that Hedges invokes biopolitical language just as a portion of the population is beginning to discover the power of their bodies.

Less than seven years ago, in New Orleans an entire population was forced into a concentration camp by militarized police forces acting on a juridical state of emergency. The ones who did not obey this order could be gratuitously shot down. The justification given during Katrina was the health and well-being of the population. One can’t help but notice this same paradigm at work, albeit with less racialized brutality, in the violent evictions of the occupations. Safety, Health, Security: Necessity knows no law. These police actions only deviate slightly from the norm in terms of intensity, frequency, and grammar of “protection.” The deaths of Oscar Grant and Sean Bell attest to the murderous day-to-day operations of the police. The other casualties, the forgotten, continue to haunt every city block, where the police function to eliminate useless surplus—either out of economic utility or biopolitical necessity.

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin spells out in Theses on the Philosophy of History. It is terrifying to face the wreckage of history that constitutes the present. One loses count of the tragedies. Despair, recoded as “happiness,” runs through every aspect of social life, increasingly reflected by Hollywood and ironic television sitcoms as if to anesthetize us.

The arguments for orderly, passive demonstrations by Hedges and other liberal pundits miss all this. One doesn’t sweep the floor in a house falling off a cliff. In a world that feels absolutely hostile and alien, every element of social life acquires a sinister glow. In this light, the black bloc appears as a ray of optimism because it creates an opening that leads through to the other side of despair.

The new struggles increasingly take place outside of legitimate and traditional venues. When the factory was the contested site, the workers’ movement was the most vibrant and decisive space of contestation. During the shift from a factory-centered economy to an economy integrating social life, we saw the emergence of social movements contesting social spaces. Now that social life has been fully subsumed within capitalism, the mutant offspring of the proletariat and the counterculture is appearing outside the legitimate parameters of the old movements. This explains the spread of anti-social violence, anomic play, self-destructive revolt, irony. Chris Hedges may wish to turn away his gaze, but society is imploding.

We accept our conditions and get organized accordingly. Compared to the fatal and fatalistic strategy employed by school shooters, terrorists, and isolated individuals marked as insane, the black bloc, rioting, and flashmobs are collective and vital forms of struggle. The Left is obsolete—rightfully so, as it still clings to this collapsing society at war with its population. Society is decomposing and nothing will or should bring back the the good ol’ days—the days of slavery, hyper-exploitation of women, apartheid, homophobic violence, Jim Crow. We wager that organizing our antagonisms collectively and attacking this society where we are positioned, without anything mediating our force, is our best chance for a life worth living.

Remarking on how the black bloc assaults the sanctity of property, Chris says “there’s a word for that: criminal.” Even here he is behind the times. Once, it seemed that crime designated specific transgressions of the law, such as breaking a window. Today, this fiction is evaporating as crime is openly integrated into the economy. The black market, the gray market, the war on drugs, the war on terror. Branding criminal is not simply a maneuver in a public relations war—though it is that too; crime is the excess of law. Security cameras and Loss Prevention are not there to stop shoplifting and workplace theft any more than borders exist to stop illegal immigration. The designation of criminal is simply one more tool for managing populations, another line along which to divide and exploit.

The cynicism of the justice system is surpassed only by capitalism itself. There’s not enough money circulating any more for us to be fully integrated, so entire economies of ultra-flexible, superfluous, and precarious work have arisen. We don’t do anything that appears to matter, but somehow we have to do it all the time. Just to count as people, we have to gain all sorts of stupid commodities—a cellphone, a laptop, a specific knowledge of culture. Because our wages are so low and we work so much, our only options are illicit. Petty drug dealing, sex work, and pirating movies and music have become at once a normal practice for us and a constant opportunity for the police to rein us into the justice industry. The black bloc makes sense to us because it offers an intelligent way to do what we always have to be doing without getting caught.

If Chris Hedges is really concerned about crime, perhaps he shouldn’t praise anything in the movement of occupations. What attracts us to the black bloc is exactly what draws us to the occupation of a public square: all the different people with different experiences coming together to steal back the time stolen from us by work and the spaces stolen from us by ownership and policing, the collective crime of revolt. Hum the national anthem all you want and sing “dissent is patriotic” to the media, but the reality is that anything that breaks with the way things are is categorized in the same sphere of crime as “violence” and treated accordingly. So why not do it together and with intelligence?

IV.

Above all, the black bloc is contemporary because it is a site of self-transformation. Even the abused corpse of Gandhi is in accord: if we want to change the world we must change ourselves. To take this further, we might say we have to abolish ourselves.

Capitalism has only managed to stave off revolution by constantly reordering and diffusing social antagonism. At the center of the economy, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between citizens and police, yet at the same time they appear to be at war with each other. At the margins, everything that once made antagonistic groups into “revolutionary subjects” is extracted—think of the fate of the Black Panthers—and the remaining husk works to gain entrance to the center or manage the disorder of the margins. Only an immediate break with the process by which we become subjects can open a window of potential. This self-transformative gesture is where tactics and ethics meet. If liberal commentators can’t handle the implications of this, this just shows the widening abyss between those who would defend citizenship and those who refuse to be governed.

Allow me to elaborate from our side of the barricades.

The black bloc is an anonymous way of being together. Anonymity allows me to shed the mask I have to wear at school, at work, in your parents’ house, in casual conversations at the bar. The black bloc enables us to interrupt the processes that make us into subjects according to race, gender, mental health, physiological health. Here, we can cease worrying about how power will extract the truth from us, and we can reveal truth to each other.

The black bloc assumes an intense ethics of care. Hedges alleges that it is “hypermasculine.” Not everyone who dons the black mask reads feminist and queer theory—Bell Hooks, Judith Butler, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Guy Hocquenghem—but these are extremely influential on our discourse. Had Hedges taken the time to research his subject, he would have found multiple discussions about the gender of anonymity.

Via the black bloc, we open the space to play with power. We radically reverse its operations on our bodies. Casting off the assumption that our bodies need to be protected, that we should give them over to the care of the state, we collectively re-inscribe them as as source of power. We also reverse the notion that freedom ends at the boundaries of individuals. I want you to put me at risk: in this axiom, we find the basis of love, friendship, and death, the three irreducible risks of life.

The black bloc is the site for a new sentimental education: a political reordering of our sentiments. We learn new sensations of love, friendship, and death through the matrix of collective confrontation. In the obscurity of the black mask, I am most present in the world. This unfamiliar way of being compels me to focus and intensify my senses, to be radically present in my body and my environment.

In the black bloc, I have to reconceptualize geographies. The event of the riot gives us a new mobility and space, a laboratory in which to experiment with public space and the relations of property and commodities. Moving through a one-way street backwards, I note how a slight displacement causes the flows of capital to malfunction. The metropolitan environment ceases to appear as a neutral terrain: suddenly I can identify all the ways it functions to channel all activity into a very narrow range of possibilities.

Drifting thus through urban centers, I become attuned to all the apparatuses at work and to how they can be caused to break down. Newspaper boxes and dumpsters can be moved into the street, blocking police from entering the space we are creating. Cars—the individualizing apparatus par excellence—can be put to collective use. All the pretty commodities in the window, usually the breadth of an entire social class away from me, are now a mere hammer’s distance from my proletarian hands. I can move through these spaces in which I am not authorized to be, transforming them. I can dance with mannequins or use them to smash out the windows of a storefront. I can trade the insanity of everyday misery for a collective madness that devastates the avenues of wealth.

For those of us who were excluded from the community of good workers, there is the black bloc. Like the myth of the historical proletarian community, it has no single organization, no membership, no written constitution. Through the black bloc, we find collective power, a sense of camaraderie, a historical tradition of living and fighting. It offers the possibility of immediately changing our conditions and immediately changing ourselves. Those who say it doesn’t act in the workplace misunderstand the forms work takes today and where it takes place. The black bloc has been instrumental in the recent port blockades on the West Coast and in the occupations of universities through Europe, the UK, the US, and Chile; the method is constantly being appropriated and adapted. When coworkers outsmart the cameras to take money from the register to share—when the hungry pocket goodies from an expensive health food store—when Anonymous strikes the credit card companies—wherever we use anonymity offensively, there is black bloc.

As I write this, Greece burns yet again, and more of the flexible, unemployed, and immigrant populations appropriate the tactics of the hooded ones—and vice versa. The black bloc can’t be cut out of the movement of occupations: there is no surgery that can extract the need for redemption from history, and there is no method better tuned to that task than this vital opacity. On the contrary, the so-called cancer will grow, spread, and mutate—and the movement of occupations, like other movements, will increasingly be indistinguishable from the black bloc.

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Once again, please forward this and print out copies to distribute in your community!

• Eight Simple Steps [online viewing version, 195 KB]

• Eight Simple Steps [print version, 496 KB]
A two-sided flier to be folded down the middle, longways.

Cast a spell. People in North America are already under a spell: the spell of private property, of the legitimacy of government, of hopelessness. None of these are inherently real; they derive their reality from our collective belief and activity. You have to be hypnotized indeed to believe that property is more sacred than the needs of human beings—that the decisions of the government are more legitimate than your own judgment.

To break this spell, cast another. When a few people invest themselves entirely in another vision of reality, they open up space for others to invest in it as well. It doesn’t have to be realistic at first—it just has to spread until it creates the conditions of its possibility. The original call to occupy Wall Street on September 17 was an example of such a spell. What could take us further?

Find each other. Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding, we’re more isolated today than ever. There is a fundamental difference between merely circulating information and making connections that enable people to act together. In an era when social networks are effectively mapped and contained, it’s subversive to make these connections beyond your usual social milieu; some of your friends may not have much fight in them after all, while others with goals complementary to yours might be very different from you. You can’t expect other people to leave their comfort zones unless you’re prepared to leave your own.

Together we can do anything. Preparing a revolution isn’t a matter of a radical minority building up the skills and resources to change the world; when enough of us get together, we have access to the knowledge and resources of our whole society. It’s not our job to orchestrate every aspect of the struggle, nor could we; we just have to create conduits through which subversive practices and momentum can flow. Preparation could go on endlessly, as the world goes on changing—circulation is what counts.

The secret is to really begin. Until there’s something new happening, something that interrupts the status quo, there’s no reason for anyone to pay attention. It’s not enough to try to start a dialogue in a vacuum; for people to take the dialogue seriously, there has to be something to talk about. Don’t just chant that another world is possible; manifest it, so everyone who might believe in it can. Don’t just talk about abolishing capitalism; pick a pressure point, have a go at it, and see who joins in.

Build the will. Nowadays most of us don’t know our own strength. We’re not used to relying on our own capabilities; we assume we can always be defeated. Most of the strength of those who hold power is founded on this defeatism. But a little courage can be infectious, and once people get used to wielding power together they won’t quickly give it up.

The first compromise is the last one. Over and over, our occupations and movements are undermined one compromise at a time. Whenever we concede anything, we set a precedent that will be repeated again and again, emboldening those for whom it is more convenient for us to remain passive. If police don’t arrest us when we stand up for ourselves, it isn’t because they support us, or because we’re within our legal rights—it’s because we’ve mobilized enough social power to make them back down. Timidity, placation, and obedience only detract from this leverage.

Address the 99%, not the 1%. Demands oriented towards those in power direct the focus away from what we can do ourselves; joint action, on the other hand, empowers us and creates a space where we can weave our differences into collective strength. To put this in the language of the Occupy movement, why address demands to the 1% at the top of the capitalist pyramid, who will never share our priorities? Why not instead address proposals to the rest of the 99%, whose combined power could render the authority of the 1% meaningless?

We’ve been taught by a thousand classes, newspapers, and job interviews to present everything in the language and logic of our superiors. We must finally learn to speak each other’s languages, to make proposals that are relevant to our own needs rather than “realistic” in the framework of our rulers. This means dispensing with every conception of legitimacy we inherited from the prevailing order—not just the authority of the politicians and the courts, but also academic prestige and middle-class “common sense” and activist credentials—in favor of value systems that legitimize our voices and our resistance on our own terms.

Aim beyond the target. Often, to accomplish small concrete objectives, we have to set our sights much higher. Conversely, it sometimes happens that we accomplish what we set out to easily enough, but have no idea what to do with the new opportunities that open up next. Every time we act, let’s act in a way that points towards the world we want and equips us to go on moving towards it. The most important thing is not whether we achieve our immediate goals, but how each engagement positions us for the next round.

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Think big and you just might get your wish

Live from the Streets of Cairo

When we heard gunshots coming from the cabinet building, we were certain they were blanks. Despite having seen the military use live rounds earlier that day, we had a naïve sense of security amongst the thousands in the streets.

When the screams and panic erupted as one of the people standing next to me was shot in the neck and rushed to the ambulances at the back of the crowd, we stayed put, along with most of the crowd. The calm we felt was a testament to a feeling of strength in numbers we had never experienced before.

The scene was surreal: a few hundred people at any given time exchanging projectiles with Egypt’s military, while over a thousand more stood only a few meters away as the protest buffer zone. Among them, street vendors sold everything from snacks and tea to helmets and keffiyehs.

We’d been there since we woke up to the news that the army had burnt down the occupation at the Cabinet building. We knew that as night fell, things would get harder for us. Dodging the military projectiles from the roof would be tricky in the dark, and without media there, the military would fight even dirtier. But the determination of the crowd was contagious, and we couldn’t pull ourselves away.

A Year of Revolt

One year ago, millions of Egyptians took to the streets and occupied public squares as part of the wave of revolts popularly referred to as the Arab Spring. Inspired by the uprising in Tunisia, Egyptians overcame the paralysis of fear and met their oppressors head-on, clashing with the police on National Police Day. The people were dispersed, but confrontations continued in neighborhoods and streets across Egypt, spreading police numbers thin while systematically destroying police infrastructure and readying the masses for the Day of Rage. On January 28, the people of Cairo retook Tahrir square, breaking through police barricades with decentralized marches originating from neighborhoods throughout the city. With the police defeated and withdrawn, neighborhood patrols spontaneously emerged to protect neighborhoods, while Tahrir was transformed into an autonomous zone and tent city. Two weeks later, the streets erupt in joyful celebration as Mubarak surrendered power.

One year later, the third round of elections has just concluded, while the military still holds political power. They also hold over 12,000 political prisoners, who are being hastily sentenced in military trials. The streets of Cairo are filled with graffiti and the residue of political protests that became street fights. Walls made of huge concrete slabs block roads where the military and police faced off with protesters only months earlier; the marble sidewalks remain torn up where street militants recently improvised ammunition. Some neighborhood assemblies have transformed into “popular committees in the defense of the revolution,” working on issues ranging from basic services to local governance. Meanwhile, over 100 independent trade unions were formed, breaking the state’s former monopoly on organized labor.

From the Circle As spray painted on the sides of government buildings to the explosion of independent and federated trade unions, anarchist currents can be seen throughout Egypt as its people scramble to win revolutionary change following their great revolutionary moment. But this isn’t the first time that anarchist currents, both implicit and explicit, have been part of Egypt’s political landscape.

Greek anarchists based in Cairo and Alexandria were instrumental in establishing Egypt’s first trade union, the cigarette rollers’ union, in 1899. Italian anarchists were also involved in Egypt’s union movement until the 1950s, but the independent union movement was crushed following the military coup of 1952. The independent trade union movement re-emerged in late 2006, but only really materialized in late 2008. 

Unions played a key role in the success of the uprising of January 25. Starting on February 7, a public transport strike across Greater Cairo, coupled with labor protests along the Suez Canal—along with other industrial actions across the country—helped bring down Mubarak on February 11.

The revolution also led to the birth of the first independent trade union federation in Egypt’s history. Since its founding on the fifth day of the revolution, over 100 independent trade unions, syndicates, and professional associations have been formed, including one for public transport. It has also spurred authorities into dissolving the board of the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), which had monopolized the union movement—by law—since 1957. 

But revolutions aren’t just confined to the workplace. While strikes and other industrial actions put economic pressure on the regime, the success Egyptians had in liberating the streets from police control is largely due to another organized group. The “Ultras,” Egypt’s extreme football fans, were some of the most well-prepared and coordinated groups in the marches toward Tahrir. They became the front line in the battle with police to regain access to the square. Organizing via online message boards after one of their own was killed at Tahrir, they came out in force on the Day of Rage. They maintained a strong presence within the square during the occupation, especially at times when the occupiers were most threatened by state and para-state violence. 

Before last January, “Ultras” were regarded as apolitical football hooligans who liked to cause trouble. However, they were one of the only social groups in Egypt with experience fighting police, and their central role in winning the streets has made their popularity skyrocket. Ultras groups have tens of thousands of members across the Egypt, many of whom identify as anarchists. Although Ultras organizations refuse to be officially placed on the political spectrum, their tactics and modes of organizing are extremely anti-authoritarian. They organize without leaders or hierarchies, refuse financial sponsorships, fight against the commercialization of sport, and live their lives in conflict with state security forces. “All Cops Are Bastards” is a central tenet of the Ultras, and through graffiti and chants they have popularized this slogan in Egyptian society. 

The Ultras were the first to use graffiti to discuss police brutality and freedom of expression, and this attracted supporters and members in the years before the revolution. Today, ACAB is the most common graffiti tag in Cairo and is scrawled on walls in other cities across Egypt as well. The Ultras continue to be a powerful social force giving teeth to the movement, showing up to protests with fireworks, Molotov cocktails, flares, and songs of defiance that have been widely adopted.

The revolutionary movement born out of Tahrir also attracted many who were traditionally excluded from formal political organizing: the millions who survive through direct action and subsist on as little as a dollar a day. The street kids and slum-dwellers that made Tahrir their home stayed there once the party was over. The conditions that led them to revolt had not changed with the fall of a politician, so their occupation continued. Street youth as young as six continue to be some of the bravest and dedicated fighters in this revolution, ripping out the paving stones and running to the front with makeshift shields, keffiyehs, and slings. Egyptian state media dismisses them as thrill-seekers without political motivations, or claim they’ve been paid or forced to fight. But seen dodging live rounds through clouds of tear gas, these young Egyptians bear a striking resemblance to the iconic rock-throwing Palestinian youth that many say inspire them.

In the sprawling expanse of informal neighborhoods surrounding Cairo, self-organization is a means of daily survival. Those without homes build on squatted land or occupy vacant structures. They seize water and electricity when the authorities turn them off, and clash with police when they raid neighborhoods to evict or shut off essential services. Pockets of gated communities inhabited by Cairo’s upper-class fence out the growing excluded class and make visible the intense stratification of wealth in Egyptian society today.

But some of Egypt’s growing underclass, emboldened by the revolution, are going on the offensive. They have begun highly orchestrated waves of occupations targeting empty apartment buildings in more affluent areas. A coordinated takeover of over 2000 housing units in 6th of October City only a few months ago forced a major confrontation with the thousands of soldiers deployed to evict them. The squatters defended their new homes with firearms and Molotov cocktails. Others stormed apartment buildings in Sheikh Zeyad City, occupying flats and demanding permanent housing. These high profile actions are a testament to the growing strength of different communities that organize horizontally and act collectively. 

And it’s not only in the slums. Examining the construction of much of contemporary Cairo, you can tell that informal development has occurred with minimal intervention or assistance from the state, mostly through either the organization of neighboring plot owners or just spontaneous development checked by the intervention and negotiations of neighbors. This has lead to a fairly high functioning system of neighborhoods, albeit with some common problems having to do with planning issues around green space, street widths, and building heights. Still, the outcomes have met a serious set of needs without any real action by government, and definitely display evidence of some planning and cooperation at the local level. 

During the original occupation of Tahrir, neighborhood self-governance again became a necessity. The already minimal functioning of government infrastructure ceased, and plainclothes police even took part in organized looting in attempts to terrify people. Popular neighborhood committees appeared throughout the entire country within the matter of a night. People came down from their apartments to the streets in the midst of a mobile phone and internet blackout and set up checkpoints and communications systems to defend their neighborhoods from police and other anti-social elements. 

Within Tahrir, an autonomous community also emerged. Clinics and logistics tents met the needs of the protesters, while discussion groups, lectures, concerts, a library, a school, and even a regular “Cinema Tahrir” ensured that the square became a space for political education and the forging of deep relationships. Like the Occupy protests it inspired, these initiatives were supported by donations and self-organized by volunteers. Mutual aid and voluntary association became the norm, and the logic of capitalism and power relations faded. But the occupation didn’t come without issues. Thieves and thugs were a persistent problem throughout Tahrir, one that led to the creation of jails and vigilante security and justice systems with varying degrees of respect for human rights. Still, many Egyptian anarchists rightly point out that the occupation of Tahrir and the subsequent Cabinet occupation were successful experiments in anarchy.

A year ago, the exploits of revolutionaries in Egypt turned Tahrir square into a household name. But a few blocks away another occupation shook the foundations of power more recently. People fed up with military rule and disenchanted with elections occupied the entrance to the cabinet building in order to prevent meetings from taking place there and to protest military rule. In the early hours of December 16, this occupation became the latest flashpoint of social war in Egypt. The military kidnapped and seriously beat an occupier, then burnt the entire occupation to the ground, kicking off five straight days of intense street battles. Unlike all the clashes that came before, the people were no longer facing off with the universally despised police forces, but with the army.

People woke up to the news that protesters were under attack and rushed to the scene where a once lively and blossoming tent city had been reduced to fires and rubble in the streets. Rocks were flying through the windows of the cabinet building at the soldiers who had retreated inside, and the numbers in the street continued to grow into the thousands. For the next five days, Tahrir became the convergence point and staging ground for a 24-hour-a-day battle with the military. First-aid clinics opened up and banks closed. Youth could be seen breaking ATMs and ripping marble off the walls and paving stones out of the ground to use as projectiles. The cabinet building was set on fire repeatedly with Molotov cocktails, while soldiers dropped huge chunks of concrete off the rooftop indiscriminately into the crowds, injuring dozens. At some points, the people seemed to be winning, at others the army looked as if it had the upper hand, but there was no mistaking this for a mere protest; this was full-scale conflict.

People were pushed back to Tahrir, but even though the military began using live ammunition and lethal force, their first attempt to clear the square failed. As rocks rained on them from every direction, they retreated back to the ruins of the cabinet building. To formalize the stalemate, a huge wall made of concrete slabs was erected, completely blocking the road between Tahrir square and the cabinet. But the fighting simply continued down a different street. The next day, the military succeeded in clearing Tahrir and burning occupation infrastructure to the ground. But new groups arrived to fight them and they were pushed back once again. While the State television was creating conspiracy theories about the protesters and showing child-protesters claiming that they were paid to fight in the streets, the independent media was documenting the abuses, the casualties, and the real reasons behind the conflict. The image of a woman being dragged and beaten by police as they lifted off her niqab to reveal her blue bra eventually led to the end of the street battle. In response to that image and reports of sexual abuse in detention, a women’s march of thousands gathered and decisively pushed back a humiliated army, ending the military confrontation in victory on its fifth day.

As has been the case for the last century, women have been on the front lines of this revolution leading marches and chants, writing and distributing leaflets, fighting police, doing independent media work, and serving in popular committees. Defying the culture of patriarchy that still exists in much of Egyptian society, women shattered sexist stereotypes with their actions and empowered themselves to push the revolution forward in all spheres of daily life.

Some women are now running for the highest levels of government. But like their male counterparts that abandoned the streets for the political process, they are about to realize the bitter truth about “democracy.” As the elections wrap up, it is clear that the winners of Egypt’s so-called “democratization” will be the once-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. This isn’t exclusively because so many revolutionaries decided to boycott the elections. The Muslim Brotherhood’s “Freedom and Justice” party had the financial capacity to pay for the big campaign that bought them the votes of many Egyptians. In Egypt as in other capitalist democracies, the axiom one dollar = one vote rings truer than ever. Although economic conditions were a major spark for the uprising a year ago, the MB have the exact same economic policies as their predecessors. So many Egyptians who simply voted for the party with the deepest and longest-running conflict with their previous rulers will have to take it to the streets to topple their government yet again in the near future.

Alongside the widespread implicitly anti-authoritarian currents, explicitly anarchist organizing has also been growing throughout Egypt’s ongoing revolutionary process. Individual anarchists have played key roles in the revolution from organizing protests and occupation logistics to doing independent media work. Meanwhile, anarchist conferences and assemblies are also being organized by a growing anarcho-syndicalist organization called the Libertarian Socialist Movement. With members in Cairo and Alexandria and connections to international anarchist networks, the LSM is starting to also attract enemies, entering into conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood and others.

As empowered protesters build organizations, coordinate direct actions, and become increasingly bold in demanding revolutionary change, institutionalized repression continues to rise. People drafted their own trade union law, while the military made laws criminalizing strikes; independent media has risen to new heights of popularity, while the state media has become more blatant in their lies against the protest movement; and people continue to fight authority in the streets, while 12,000 are locked up and denied due process in military tribunals. Egyptian society is experiencing diverging realities. On one hand, people are determined to finish the revolution that sparked a year ago; on the other, elections mask the continuation of state dominance and co-opt the potential of an emerging social order.

Breathless Conclusion: To Be Continued…

The revolution was alive in every moment. The determination of people in the streets to finish what they started last year was matched by the urgency we felt from our comrades to actualize the revolution within broader society. Every moment was an opportunity to seize the future, and everybody knew it.

Before the clashes broke out, we spent every night talking about revolution, analyzing the present and strategizing for the future. I could only imagine that there were thousands more conversations like these happening throughout Egypt. When we said our goodbyes—which we hoped would only be “see you laters”—there was a gravity to the moment. While my new friends may be celebrating victories in the streets and might even win this battle in the long run, some could be killed, injured, or taken prisoner by the military in the days and months to come. The same risks will apply to all of us once we each begin to “fight like an Egyptian.” The pyramids of power weren’t built in a day, and the epic task of dismantling them may take a little while yet, but it is well underway in Egypt.

Further Reading

• Coverage of the December Clashes

• Life in Tahrir

• Ultras in the revolution and at Tahrir

• Revolutionary graffiti in Egypt

Ongoing Coverage

• Occupied Cairo blog

• Egypt Independent

• Tahrir & Beyond blog

• Mosireen.org, Cairo’s independent media center

• Blog of Egyptian anarchist and independent journalist Jano Charbel

Bouazizi was not enacting a strategy. He was alone, as alone as a person can be. By drawing back the curtain from injustice so we could come together to fight it, he gave us a precious gift, but a costlier gift than we have any right to receive. The European Parliament awarded him the Sakharov Prize posthumously, but he died knowing only that he had acted on his humiliation and rage, to no end other than to express them. His death hangs in eternity as an irreparable tragedy. We might say the same of so many others who have thrown away their lives in the history of revolutionary struggle.

What can we learn, then, from this man who gave free vegetables to poor families, who had to buy his wares on credit the way many of us must, who reacted against the same policing that imposes inequalities in the US? First, that misery is the same the world over today, even if it assumes different forms. But we can go further: in Bouazizi’s example, we see what it takes to get out of here, even if we do not wish to ignite a worldwide conflagration but simply to change our own lives.

What would life be like after a revolution? The dishwasher pictures a dishroom without a boss. The renter imagines herself in the same little hovel, rent-free. The shopper looks forward to stores without checkout counters. We can hardly imagine beyond this horizon—yet surely it would be easier to change everything entirely than to build a version of this world in which the same institutions and habits magically cease to be oppressive. When what we are is intrinsically determined by capitalism, it’s not enough to try to better ourselves; we have to cease to be ourselves.

In the era of precarity, this is clearer than ever. Globalization has swept the entire population of the planet into one labor pool that competes for the same jobs; mechanization is replacing those jobs, rendering us more and more disposable. In this context, those who set out merely to defend their positions in the economy are doomed. Look at the student movement of 2009-2010, or the protests in Wisconsin last spring: these rearguard struggles to preserve the privileges of a particular demographic could only fail. Today we can neither found our strategy on incremental victories—we are in no more of a position to win them than our rulers are to grant them—nor on the fixed roles that once gave the general strike its force. We have to fight from our shared vulnerability: not on the basis of what we are, but of what we will not be.

The only thing that can bind us in this is our willingness to renounce, to defect, to fight—to abolish the system that created us. This means altering our lives beyond recognition. There are no guarantees in this undertaking; it takes self-destructive abandon. We must not celebrate this, but there is no getting around it.

Nothing is more terrifying than departing from what we know. It may take more courage to do this without killing oneself than it does to light oneself on fire. Such courage is easier to find in company; there is so much we can do together that we cannot do as individuals. If he had been able to participate in a powerful social movement, perhaps Bouazizi would never have committed suicide; but paradoxically, for such a thing to be possible, each of us has to take a step analogous to the one he took into the void.

We cannot imagine what Bouazizi went through, nor the hundreds upon hundreds of others who have lost their lives in the struggles throughout North Africa since—only a minute fraction of the casualties of capitalism this past year. Yet in embracing destruction on his own terms, he at least opened a path to something else. When a youngster hoods up for a black bloc or a middle-aged secretary moves into an encampment, departing from all they know, all they have been, they can hope to do the same.

Let’s make our despair into a transformative force. Perhaps we can give a positive meaning to the saying that is so chilling in reference to the gift Mohamed Bouazizi gave us: you have to be ready to die to be ready to live.

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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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G20 Conspiracy Coverage on Hold

On November 24, we put up a text entitled “The Toronto G20 Main Conspiracy Case: The Charges and How They Came to Be.” Our intention was to share insight into how infiltrators managed to penetrate anarchist communities and what vulnerabilities they exploited. We’ve since learned from comrades in Canada that some of the claims in the text are extremely controversial. In response, we are withdrawing it until we can produce a version that draws on more perspectives. We’re no strangers to controversy–as a general rule, we cultivate it—but it’s important to us to be sure we can stand behind everything that appears on this site.

Covering the G20 conspiracy case has presented special challenges. Because of a publication ban and widespread government harassment and intimidation, we had to rely on anonymous contributors for reports such as the one we put up two days ago. Though we were careful to run it by trusted comrades first to check its authenticity, we were not warned of how divisive some would consider it. This has been a headache for everyone involved, but we remain convinced that it is imperative to formulate lessons from infiltration, and we hope to have a revised version available swiftly. If you can contribute to this process, feel free to get in touch.

The primary goal of repression is not to capture and imprison everyone who resists—there’s hardly room for all of us in their prisons—but rather to create fault lines within insurgent communities. In this regard, the struggle to resolve internal conflicts is identical to the struggle against the state. We hope that our handling of this controversy will aid our comrades in addressing and resolving their differences, making our communities stronger and more resilient.

So far, anarchists have not been very successful in contributing to anti-austerity protests in the US. Starting in December 2008, anarchist participation in school occupations was instrumental in kick-starting a student movement, but by March 4, 2010 this movement was dominated by liberal and authoritarian organizing; it subsequently ran out of steam. More recently, anarchists participated in the occupation of the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin in protest against anti-union legislation and occupied a university building in Milwaukee, without substantial impact on the course of events.

It’s troubling that we’ve had such limited success in a context that should be conducive to our efforts. Eleven years ago, during the high point of the anti-globalization movement, anarchist participants were essentially the militant edge of an activist movement addressing issues that were distant from many people’s day-to-day needs. Today, the livelihoods of millions like us are on the line; people should be much more likely to join in revolt now than they were a decade ago. If this isn’t happening, it indicates that we’re failing to organize effectively, or that the models we’re offering aren’t useful.

European anarchists have had more success, but they benefit from a richer and more continuous lineage of social movements. In the US, the birthplace of the generation gap, our task is not just to intensify ongoing struggles, but to generate new fighting formations—a much greater challenge. We seem to go through one generation of anarchists after another without any gains. Although our predecessors rightly caution us against measuring our efforts in purely quantitative terms, we can’t hope to overthrow capitalism by our own isolated heroics, turning the world upside down one newspaper box at a time.

A small fire demands constant tending.
A bonfire can be let alone.
A conflagration spreads.

We have to figure out how to connect with everyone else who is suffering and angry. To that end, here are some observations and proposals derived from the conversations in Milwaukee.

—The anti-austerity protests in Wisconsin are not the last of their kind; on the contrary, they herald the arrival of a new era. It is paramount that we learn from our early failures to develop a more effective strategy for engaging in these conflicts.

—In Madison, anarchists largely focused on establishing infrastructure for the occupation. This is not the first time anarchists have contributed their organizational skills to an essentially liberal protest. At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, about 100,000 people participated in demonstrations; this included thousands of anarchists, many of whom limited themselves to logistical roles. Afterwards, this was recognized as a tremendous missed opportunity—hence the efforts to take the lead in planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Our task is not just to facilitate protests of whatever kind, but to ensure that they threaten the flows of capital—that they create a situation in which people abandon their roles in maintaining the current order. To this end, we have to seize the initiative to organize actions as well as infrastructure. Clashes with the state will be more controversial than free meals and childcare, but this controversy has to play out if we are ever to get anywhere.

—A wide range of sources concur that the occupation of the capitol building in Madison was undermined one tiny compromise at a time. First the police politely asked people not to be in one room—and they were being so nice about everything that no one could say no. Then they gently asked people to vacate another, and so on until the dumbfounded former occupiers found themselves out on the pavement. This underlines an important lesson: the first compromise might as well be the last one. Whenever we concede anything, we set a precedent that will be repeated again and again; we also embolden our enemies. We have to be absolutely uncompromising from the beginning to the end.

In popular struggles, anarchists can be the force that refuses to yield. We can also pass on our hard-won analyses to less experienced protesters—for example, emphasizing that however friendly individual police officers might be, they cannot be trusted as long as they are police. To do these things, however, we have to be in the thick of things, not looking on from the margins.

—A common complaint from the more combative participants in the Madison occupation was that leftist organizations had already gained the initiative and determined the character of the protest. Anarchists were afraid to act, taking the leftist control of the narrative as an indication that there was nothing they could do. Indeed, after the end of the occupation, liberal organizers channeled the remaining momentum into a recall campaign confined to the electoral sphere.

In fact, in circumstances like the capitol occupation, there’s nothing to lose. The solutions promoted by authoritarian leftists and liberals don’t point beyond the horizon of capitalism; even when they aren’t utterly naïve, they’re no better than the right-wing agenda, in that they serve to distract and neutralize those who desire real change. Where the field is split between left-wing and right-wing, we may as well disrupt this dichotomy by acting outside of it. Even if we fail, at least we show that something else is possible.

—One Wisconsin anarchist proposed that we should distinguish between two strategic terrains for action. Some events, such as the occupation of the capitol building in Madison, function as tremendous spectacles; the most we can hope to accomplish is to interrupt them, forcing a more challenging narrative into the public discourse. Other spaces that are under less pressure, like the occupation of the theater building in Milwaukee, offer an opportunity to develop new social connections and critiques.

In the latter, we can create new channels for discussion and decision-making that will serve us well in subsequent confrontations. We can measure our effectiveness by how well we accomplish this, not just by the material damage inflicted on targets or the numbers of people who show up to demonstrations.

In upheavals such as the one in Wisconsin, we can unmask authoritarian domination of resistance movements and debunk the idea that the democratic system can solve the problems created by capitalism.

—At no point during the buildup to the protests of March 4, 2010 or the occupations in Wisconsin did anarchists establish an autonomous, public organizing body to play a role such as the RNC Welcoming Committee played at the 2008 RNC or the PGRP played at the 2009 G20. This was a strategic error that enabled liberal and authoritarian organizers to monopolize the public discourse around the protests and determine their character and conditions in advance. In the Bay Area, the word on the street was that anarchists had established some sort of back-room deal with public organizers that the latter reneged on. This betrayal should come as no surprise: without the leverage afforded by public organizing of our own, we can always expect to be hoodwinked and betrayed by those who don’t share our opposition to hierarchical power.

We need public, participatory calls and organizing structures, both to offer points of entry to everyone who might want to fight alongside us and to make it impossible for authoritarians to stifle revolt by arranging the battlefield to be unfavorable for it. Public organizing can complement other less public approaches; often, it’s necessary to render them possible in the first place. Compare the 2008 RNC and 2009 G20 to March 4, 2010.

—As capitalism renders more and more people precarious or redundant, it will be harder and harder to fight from recognized positions of legitimacy within the system such as “workers” or “students.” Last year’s students fighting tuition hikes are this year’s dropouts; last year’s workers fighting job cuts are this year’s unemployed. We have to legitimize fighting from outside, establishing a new narrative of struggle. Who is more entitled to occupy a school than those who cannot afford to attend it? Who is more entitled to occupy a workplace than those who have already lost their jobs?

If we can accomplish this, we will neutralize the allegations of being “outside agitators” that are always raised against those who revolt. Better, we will transform every austerity conflict into an opportunity to connect with everyone else that has been thrown away by capitalism. Our goal should not be to protect the privileges of those who retain their jobs and enrollment, but to channel outrage about everything that capitalism has taken from all of us.

—Anti-austerity protests may offer a new opportunity to resume the practice of convergence so important in the anti-globalization era. Anarchists could respond to upheavals like the one in Wisconsin by converging on these “hotspots” to force things to a head. But this would require local communities to be ready to host visitors—to have the necessary resources prepared in advance. These resources include food and housing, but also a relationship with the general public and leverage on the authorities, such as the Pittsburgh Organizing Group built up in the years leading up to the successful demonstrations against the 2009 G20.

—Between peaks of protest, we can attempt to connect with social circles that could be politicized. Punks entered the anti-globalization movement with a preexisting anticapitalist critique and antagonism towards authority, thanks to two decades of countercultural development. This enabled them to escalate the situation immediately, shifting the discourse from reform to revolution. The more people enter anti-austerity struggles thus equipped, the less time will be wasted relearning old lessons.

—In addition to exacerbating the contradictions inherent in the financial crisis, we should undertake to make life in upheavals more pleasurable and robust than workaday life. Those who participate in wildcat strikes and occupations should experience these as more exciting and fulfilling than their usual routines, to such an extent that it becomes possible to imagine life after capitalism. As many anarchists live in a permanent state of exclusion, making the best of it despite everything, we should be especially well-equipped to assist here.

In this regard, there is a real need for infrastructures that can provide for the practical needs of those who wrest themselves out of the functioning of the economy. But these infrastructures should not be simply ad hoc protest logistics; they must demonstrate the feasibility of radically different systems of production and distribution.

There is probably some new way of engaging, some “new intelligence” appropriate to this era that we haven’t discovered yet; the formats we retain from the past may not serve us now. There is much experimenting to be done. Dear friends, may you succeed where others have failed.

Further Reading

Early Spring for the Badger, a collection of communiqués and reflections related to the demonstrations in Wisconsin

Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the #Spanish Revolution, an analysis of recent anti-austerity protests in Barcelona

• Barcelona, Spring 2011: Chronology of an Unexpected Event
• Reflections on the Occupation
• Appendix: Translations of Materials in Catalan and Spanish