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 With the police defeated and withdrawn, neighborhood patrols spontaneously emerged to protect neighborhoods, while Tahrir was transformed into an autonomous zone and tent city.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

• Designed to Kill: Border Policy and How to Change It
• Four Stories from the Border

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.

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.

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.

The Revolution in Egypt: The End of the New Pharaohs?

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What is happening—first in Tunisia and now in Egypt—is the beginning of the wave of full-scale revolutions that will inevitably follow the global financial crisis of 2008. Taking place in the wake of the failed “War on Terror,” these revolutions combine the latent force of massive numbers of unemployed youth with the dynamism of modern communication networks. They signal the conclusion of the decade of counter-revolution that followed September 11, 2001. Although they continue the exploration of new technologies and decentralized forms of organization initiated by the anti-globalization movement, the form and scale of these new revolutions is unprecedented. Largely anonymous groups are using the ubiquitous World Wide Web to spark leaderless rebellions against the pharaohs of the global empire of capital.

The self-styled rulers of the world are truly at a loss as to how to understand the new social and technological forces at play; the aging dictator Mubarak is a perfect example of this, but he is hardly the only one of his kind. One can almost smell the fear, not only amongst the despots of China and Saudi Arabia but also the supposed leaders of representative democracies. The contortions the US government has been going through are the most grotesque of all; it isn’t lost on the Egyptian people that the bullets striking down their comrades came from the USA. Egypt receives $1.3 billion dollars of military aid from the US every year. The suppression of “democracy” in the Middle East has been a deliberate policy of the US government: they know popular sentiment would never support their agenda as the military enforcement of global capitalism.

The best efforts of Mubarak’s dying regime to put its fingers in the ears of the world have not silenced the people on the streets of Cairo. Even blocking cell phones and trying to turn off the entire Internet have proved futile. For generations, Arabs and Africans have been silenced, represented by various colonial governments and portrayed as “primitive” and “terrorist” in Europe and the US. Now the people of Egypt are speaking in thunderous unison for freedom—not for political Islam, as demagogues from Iran to Israel would have the world believe. In doing so, they are realizing the ideals to which the US government pays only hypocritical lip service.

Today, the common condition from Egypt to Tunisia is approaching universal unemployment—especially among the younger generations, which comprise the vast majority of population. This is increasingly the case in the United States and Europe as well. Unemployment is no accident, but the inevitable result of the last thirty years of capitalism. Capitalism reached its internal limits at the end of the 1970s; now the factories of every industry produce ever more commodities, while increasing automation renders workers less and less necessary. The only way to make profits off these commodities is to eliminate workers or pay them next to nothing. To discipline the skyrocketing unemployed population and prevent revolt, the police wage a never-ending war on the population. We live in a world overflowing with cheap shit, in which human life is the cheapest of all.

In these conditions, people have nothing to left to lose. Nothing, that is, but their dignity—and it turns out they will not surrender that. It was precisely this innermost core of dignity that led Mohammed Bouazizi to light himself on fire rather than face humiliation at the hands of the police, who in seizing his fruit-selling cart took away the only way he could feed his family. The blaze lit by Mohammed Bouazizi has spread, carried by other unemployed people who thereby transform themselves from abject beggars into world-historical heroes. The people of Egypt are not only burning police cars, they are organizing popular committees to clean the police and other trash off the street, and the streets of Cairo have never felt safer.

It is not surprising that a wave of revolutions should begin now. Not since the days of pharaohs and monarchs has the world been controlled by as senseless a force as the global financial market. As capitalists became less and less able to produce profit from industrial production over the past decades, they had to invent means of profiting based on expected future returns. But in a world of increasingly cheap commodities and poor consumers, how could capitalists keep people buying stuff and still make a profit? They had to invent a way for consumers to continue buying even when they weren’t paid living wages: thus the invention of mass debt. When the sale of real goods can no longer produce profit, profits must be made on increasingly fantastic expected future returns—in other words, on finance.

Yet like any house of cards, debt cannot be built up forever. Eventually, someone wants to be paid back—and so the entire house of cards collapsed under its own weight in 2008. The financial crisis signals a deeper metaphysical crisis of our present order: capitalism is unable to provide for the real material needs of the global population. The high poverty rates in Egypt are not simply the result of mismanagement by Mubarak, but the inevitable consequence of the contradictions of our era.

Their eyes hopelessly clouded by their own ideology and lack of vision, heads of state can only stand dumb and surprised as the crisis goes on and on. They lamely hope to re-start the financial markets through “austerity” or “green” capitalism, refusing to consider systemic change despite the fact that the system cannot even deliver jobs and affordable commodities to people—much less a good life. Just as it took an era of revolution to overthrow the divine right of kings, it will take new revolutions to overthrow the divine right of things: the power of financial capital and its puppet dictators.

Revolutions are never brought about by technology, but rather by the collective action of human beings who radically transform their relationships with each other and the world they share. However, one cannot deny what an important role the World Wide Web has played in Egypt and Tunisia. Especially among cybernetically skilled and predominantly unemployed youth, it enabled people to call for and participate in mass mobilizations without any need of leaders. The demonstrations in Egypt on January 25 were called for by a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said,” named for a victim of police brutality much like Alexis Grigoropoulos in Greece. The page itself was set up by the anonymous “El-Shaheed”—that is, “martyr” in Arabic. Meanwhile, youth throughout the world are mobilizing as Anonymous; in the battle over Wikileaks and more recently in actions against the Tunisian government, Anonymous has showed itself to be a potent new international with an awakening political maturity beyond the message boards of 4chan. Demonstrators’ ability to communicate with large numbers of people and react immediately to events via mobile phones, Twitter, and Facebook is swiftly making previous forms of Leftist and industrial-based political organization obsolete, along with other hierarchical formations such as political Islam.

This revolutionary use of social media should come as no surprise. In the hands of an elite few, expensive communications technology will naturally be used for self-aggrandizement and consumerism. In the hands of unemployed youth and other excluded classes, this technology can be re-purposed to organize revolution. The Internet is the new global factory floor, and we are seeing its first workers’ councils form—a new kind of collective intelligence that enables people to organize themselves directly without representation.

The blank confusion of global capitalists as to who is “really behind” the mysterious resistance in Egypt and Tunisia is revealing. It’s obvious how desperately US politicians wish they had anyone, such as Mohamad ElBaradei, with whom to negotiate. These revolts are anarchist in form if not content—and even the content is becoming increasingly radical. The absence of any organized group or leader in the early days of the protests speaks volumes: increased information technology has not only destabilized the old Leftist forms of organizing, but also the justifications for having hierarchical government in the first place. When people can communicate, they can organize their own lives. Expanding such horizontal structures to a global scale no longer seems impossible, even if it is not yet well thought out.

To make things even worse for capitalists and nation-states, the massive secret apparatus of the state has been revealed in all its incompetence by sites such as Wikileaks. While Wikileaks had nothing to do with the Egyptian revolution, the cables describing Ben Ali’s pet tiger being fed a luxurious diet while Tunisians starved further stoked the flames in that country. Wikileaks has produced paranoia in the global state apparatus itself, as the state cannot function without the subjugated population believing that it is necessary and according it the right to exercise violent force. Now the empire has no clothes—and its naked corrupt power is disgusting to behold. There is a growing consensus that the state apparatus is an archaic holdover no longer worthy of respect.

The Mubarak regime made the classic mistake of conflating technological structures with the people using them, an error typical of Silicon Valley and certain theorists as well. In a poorly thought-out move, the regime shut down all four ISPs in the country, effectively turning off the Internet. In addition, cell phones have been intermittently blocked before major demonstrations. If anything this only enraged the Egyptian people more. It may even have interrupted their spectatorship—it is easier to watch a demonstration over the Net than to participate—and driven more and more people into the street.

The lesson here is clear: the supposedly decentralized Internet is quite centralized, and while it may be useful, it is a mistake to depend on it as long as it remains in capitalist hands. Yet rulers such as Mubarak face a no-win situation. If they keep communications technologies up and running, these will be used to organize against them—but if they take them down, it will provoke worldwide outrage.

How do you organize without the Net? You might start with existing social institutions; in Egypt, this meant the mosques. The “Days of Wrath,” characterized by street-fighting with the police far more intense than the Greek insurrection of 2008, culminated in the torching of the headquarters of Mubarak’s party. Afterwards, in a brilliant move, the protesters called for people to gather after prayer at mosques—where most Egyptians would be gathered anyway. In this regard, the mosques served the same purpose that social centers and squats did during the Greek insurrection, only for a much greater part of the population.

So while communications technology may be advantageous in the early stages of organizing, a movement must become powerful enough not to need the Internet once it takes to the streets. In Egypt, the revolt actually grew in intensity after the Internet was shut off.

If there is one regard in which the Internet is indispensable, it is in spreading the news of disorder elsewhere. As the Empire’s power has become increasingly spectacular, it has become more vulnerable to being damaged on the terrain of the spectacular. Obama’s first response to the uprising was to call for the “violence” to cease—even though his government routinely administers violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and inflicts it on US citizens through the world’s largest prison system. He and Mubarak are not against violence, but they appear to be afraid of images of violence. If these images escape, they undermine the state’s cover story about maintaining order.

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At the same time, the state desperately needs people to distrust and fear each other. This explains why Mubarak released undercover police in civilian uniforms to pose as looters in order to justify his crackdown. When that failed, he turned off the Internet and denied media access in order to prepare the conditions for the kind of massacre it would take to restore his control. Yet now it seems doubtful that the army is willing to carry out such a massacre.

The insurrection that began by burning down police stations then shifted to massive peaceful demonstrations intended to win over the army. Pamphlets that have circulated indicate that Egyptian organizers planned from the beginning to pit the army against the police. Insurrectionists in Europe and the USA should take note of this clever strategic move. After the front line of the party of order was effectively defeated, the Egyptians clearly understood that the only force capable of stopping them was the army. Instead of attacking it directly, which would surely have resulted in a massacre, they undertook to win over the hearts and minds of the soldiers. Thus far they have been successful in this, demonstrating that they can self-organize and maintain a leaderless yet disciplined rebellion that makes the streets of Cairo safe and clean for the first time in years.

This leaves the army without a reason for existence, let alone any excuse for a massacre. Once an insurrection has reached a certain phase, as a friend has said, weapons are unnecessary. For a revolution to succeed in overthrowing the state, the army must refuse to shoot its own people and instead join them in revolt. In Egypt, the army is at least paralyzed enough right now not to start shooting; it may yet join the people, or more likely attempt to broker a transition to representative democracy.

All this shows that billions of dollars of military equipment can’t stop a revolution. Once things reach a certain point, military force is no longer the determinant factor. If the Egyptian people persist in revolt, the military can hardly bomb its own cities.

Yet even if a military defeat is avoided, the insurrectionary process begun on the “Days of Wrath” is more likely to be side-tracked into representative democracy than to end in a genuine communization of society—that is, in the immediate sharing of all production for the survival of the people. This is not to be pessimistic—already the neighborhood assemblies and defense committees resemble nothing more than the Paris Commune. But Mubarak is a dictator, and the youth of Egypt have not yet tasted the bitter fruits of representative democracy. They may have to learn about them the hard way. Even if a representative democracy is established, it will not be the end of the story—witness the continuing protests in Tunisia. There would inevitably be another insurrection sooner or later, although that could take years or decades.

In this context, it is promising that many young Egyptians seem aware that representative democracy will only limit their movement and redirect into yet another form of enslavement. This is visible in many ways—for example, in the message sent to self-appointed leaders like ElBaradei, “Shall we just call your mobile when we have finished the revolution for you?” The insurrection has also seen unparalleled action and power of the Egyptian women, who will not go back to being subservient under the Muslim Brotherhood after these upheavals.

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Yet the popular occupation of Tahir Square cannot last forever; there must come a moment when food will be produced, train lines reactivated, and the Internet turned back on. These are the real keys to the success of the insurrection and to preventing the return to capitalism, even under the mantle of representative democracy. It seems that the steps in this direction have not yet begun.

Let’s step back now and ask larger questions. If Egypt is not fundamentally different from Europe and the US, why haven’t such insurrections happened there as well? First, let us not be too hasty—the dominos are already falling, with massive protests in the streets of Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, and Mauritania. One reason the insurrection has such popular power in Egypt is that, as many Arabic-speaking countries, the Egyptian form of life has not yet been fully subsumed into capitalism. For example, in many cases one only pays as much as “one feels” one should pay for goods. Haggling is not so much a way to maximize micro-profits as to ascertain an affordable and ethical price for an exchange. The commodity exchange itself is often less important than the social relationships that the commodity symbolizes. The collective responsibility and power of the family knits people together over generations, in contrast to the alienated individuals of the United States and most of Europe. The vibrant and public street life of the Middle East is a natural fomenting ground for insurrection.

Yet are there not dark forces waiting in the wings? This seems unlikely, as the protest is clearly focused on “freedom” rather than Islam, with those wanting to lead religious chants being shouted down on occasion. This is not to say that Egyptians are not Islamic—indeed they are—yet there are subtle distinctions. Political Islam is effectively the Tea Party of Egypt, a hierarchical religious movement mostly of the older and conservative generation; but Islam exists in other variants, binding social relationships and promoting a collective ethics. One can even interpret the giving of alms in Islam as a ritual to avoid excessive centralization of wealth. “Allah” does not necessarily denote a commanding deity; the notion may also point to the ineffable, the invisible excess of life that denies reduction and resists the catastrophic harnessing of all to the imperatives of profit.

Of course, currents far older than Islam hold sway in Egypt as well. Unlike many in Europe and America, many Egyptians are profoundly aware of their history from antiquity onwards, and feel deep shame at their present state of impoverishment. The dignity and respect they show each other in the streets in midst of the insurrection attests that this revolution is not abstract, but rooted in everyday lives; it is the deep metaphysics of these forms of life that provide the subjective conditions for transformation.

Communism is older than Marx, just as anarchy is older than Proudhon. The age of revolutions did not begin with the Paris Commune, nor did it end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As capitalism now encircles the earth, the one thing that could unite the world would be a common rejection of it and the police that defend it. The communism of Marx was trapped in the abstract metaphysics of economics and poisoned by a misunderstanding of the danger posed by the state; this sabotaged the revolutions of the early 20th century, bringing about the catastrophe of Soviet-era state capitalism.

But the age of revolutions is not over; on the contrary. In a song of the Tuareg—“the desert is our mother, and we will not sell her”—we can glimpse a form of communism far more alien and hostile to capital than anything imagined by Lenin. Many of the calls for “freedom” in Egypt have little to do with the freedom to elect a president or choose among commodities on the market, but resonate with a common desire to live with their heads high and not cowed to any ruler. For this they are ready to die, whether by self-immolation or in the streets together.

Yet one can sense a profound need at this time for a common international revolutionary purpose that resonates outside of the Middle East, for something truly universal to fill the void left by capitalism. The nationalist flags of the protesters were tactically effective at confusing the army, but they also reflect a lack of critique of the conceptual apparatus of capital and the state. While the conditions are right for revolution, over the last thirty years revolutionaries have largely failed to create and spread the organization and analysis necessary for insurrections to become genuine anti-capitalist revolutions. What does it take for people to realize that the true potential of their neighborhood defense committees is not as a means of temporarily replacing the police, but of prefiguring the abolition of all police, in every country?

No event occurs in a vacuum; events originate in concrete conditions, and consequently they tend to come in waves. The events in Egypt show that the center of revolutionary impetus is no longer “the West”; this new age of revolution will culminate first in areas where the living conditions are becoming unbearable and the ways of life are not yet completely colonized by capital. However, it would be a mistake to see this as merely the conclusion of an unfinished anti-colonial revolt. It is something much bigger and deeper. The financial crisis is a sign that capitalism is on a declining trajectory. The conditions that precipitated the events in Egypt are rapidly becoming universal across the globe, spelling another cycle of revolution and possibly war. Eventually these same forces will hit Saudi Arabia, Europe, China, and finally even the United States with the strength of a tidal wave.

Make no mistake about it, we are entering an era of revolt. These revolts will reject and attack capitalism in their concrete practice, even if the systematic destruction of earlier revolutionary currents has left a vacuum. Hopefully the participants will realize that freedom is impossible without the destruction of capitalism and the state, and a new generation of revolutionary thought will update the concept of revolution for the dawning era. We are at a point now where it should become clear to all that we can direct our own lives—that the state is a historical fossil holding us back. As shown in Egypt, the stranglehold of the state and capitalism must be broken in the streets; over the coming decades the results of this ultimate struggle will likely decide the fate of humanity itself.

All Power to the People!

-A dissident exiled in North Africa
with assistance from the CrimethInc. Workers’ Collective

Further Reading
Occupied Cairo: An excellent blog from comrades on the ground
Photos from Egypt
More Photos from Egypt

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.

“The Insurrection Has Begun”

On November 10, 2010, 52,000 people participated in a protest in London organized by the National Union of Students. As the main demonstration moved by Millbank Tower, a splinter group of hundreds, headed by no more than 30 black bloc anarchists, broke into the Tory Headquarters there.

Carrying red and black flags with their faces concealed, the small group of anarchists formed a bloc at a doorway to Millbank tower within eyesight of the main demonstration. The intention was clear but at first the crowd seemed reluctant to join them and passed on by. Then more people started to join the back of the bloc. This gave others confidence and the group soon grew to several hundred, at which point the front of the bloc entered the building. Then another entrance was taken as many more people left the proposed rout and the crowed filled the courtyard.

Protesters broke windows, flooded hallways, and scrawled anti-government graffiti across any available surface. The small number of police at the scene moved in to prevent anyone else from entering or exiting the building. An estimated 200 people were trapped inside Millbank tower as thousands waited outside.

Soon those inside the building attempted to break out by throwing furniture through the large lobby windows, while others smashed CCTV cameras. Some ran further into the building, even reaching the roof. People outside fought police with sticks and fists, trying to open a passage in and out of the building.

The corporate media immediately attempted to blame the invasion on a small group of troublemakers, focusing on an incident in which a fire extinguisher was dropped from the rooftop. However, these claims held little legitimacy juxtaposed against images of thousands of protesters gathered outside the building. Sky News reported a fringe group were taking part in violent protest, but their feed had to be suddenly cut when students and members of the public berated the reporter live on air, one shouting “the insurrection has begun!”

Others who had proceeded to the end of the march appeared to become bored of the National Student Union speeches and returned to Millbank tower, swelling the numbers there already. Students who had been dancing to Rage Against The Machine earlier in the day were now fighting side by side with others dressed in traditional black bloc attire.

This was one of the most militant protests the UK had seen in recent years. It concluded with approximately 50 arrests. In an attempt to play down student involvement, corporate media ran “exposés” on long-running anarchist institutions such as the Anarchist Federation and Class War. While it might be true that individual anarchists where among the first into the building and some even made it to the roof, not one of the few organized anarchist groups in the UK were out in any great numbers. The images of suspects circulated by the police and media didn’t show the faces of shady bomb-throwers but those of the countries’ youth.

These events ignited a wave of protests, occupations, and action across the UK involving more than 100,000 students over the months of November and December.

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Timeline

This is a summary of some of the more notable moments leading up to and during the months of November and December 2010. Many other actions, protests, and occupations occurred across the United Kingdom during this time, and each one was integral to maintaining momentum.
A more detailed list is available here.

May 2010 – General Election results in a hung parliament, the first in the UK since 1974. Liberal Democrats form a coalition government with the center-right Tory (Conservative) Party.

October 12, 2010 – The controversial Browne Review is published, an independent report on education funding. The government paper recommends the removal of caps on the upper limit to university fees.

October 20, 2010 – The coalition government announces the largest spending cuts since the second World War, including huge cuts to public services.

November 10, 2010 – An estimated 52,000 people attend a National Union of Students demonstration against raising tuition fees and scrapping EMA (Educational Maintenance Allowance). Hundreds of students follow a small group of anarchists into Millbank Tower, the Tory Government headquarters. Windows are smashed and the building is shut down for several hours.

November 15, 2010 – A wave of university occupations and sit-ins begins, starting with Sussex University in Brighton. Over the next few weeks at least 25 universities and colleges are occupied across the UK, some of them multiple times.

November 24, 2010 – A national day of action is called for by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts. Students use social networking websites to organise in cities and towns across the UK. In London a police riot van is destroyed when cops try to kettle the majority of the protest. Small groups of students run through central London starting fires and breaking windows. Italy sees similar protests, with an occupation of the Coliseum in Rome.

November 28, 2010 – A council meeting in Lewisham, South London is attended by several hundred protesters; 16 police officers are injured when scuffles break out.

November 30, 2010 – In London, 139 people are arrested for “breach of the peace” during a second national day of action. The word “Revolution” is sprayed across Nelson’s Column. Protests are held in 14 other cities across the UK; these are fast-paced, as students adopt new tactics to avoid kettling.

December 9, 2010 – The government votes on the raise in tuition fees while a national protest is attended by thousands. In London, 2800 police are deployed to protect Parliament. Protesters break into splinter groups to avoid being kettled. Thousands make it to Parliament and fight police; 43 protesters are injured. One protester is hospitalized, requiring surgery to treat “bleeding to the brain.” Several breakaway groups head into the city shopping district where windows are smashed and a car occupied by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall is attacked. The windows of the Treasury are smashed. The government votes in favor of the rise.

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“We’re from the slums of London”

As with any mass movement, it’s impossible to identify every brush stroke that contributes to the bigger picture without making assumptions about individual motivations or simplifying the complexity of human behavior within a struggle. It would be improper to proclaim that a single series of events or conditions led to this outburst of protest, but we should identify factors that can aid our future manifestations of resistance. In particular, we can look at how momentum is created, maintained, and finally lost.

One feature of the protests was the wide range of social classes on the street. The United Kingdom has a rich history of class-based struggle, from the Diggers’ land occupations of the 1600s to the Miners’ Strikes of the 1980s. Many considered the latter the beginning of the end for organized working-class struggle in the UK when the previous Tory government, lead by Margaret Thatcher, brutally dismantled the trade union movement and paved the way for modern free-market capitalism. Up until 2010, celebratory proletarian culture had been notably absent from the wider public for the preceding 20 years. Consequently, the visible anarchist presence of recent years had lost some of its historic emphasis on class, instead playing a secondary presence in larger campaigns such as anti-war and anti-fascist movements. Many younger anarchists had become engaged through single-issue activism and later adopted an anti-authoritarian perspective.

Over a few weeks at the end of 2010, however, a new form of class struggle appeared. It manifested itself less in the conventional workplace struggles associated with unions and the traditional Left and more as an angry reaction against the alienation experienced by those outside the ruling class under 21st century capitalism. Debt, fewer education opportunities, fewer job opportunities, a stagnant political system, police violence, and general social ennui are all contributing factors.

After the protest on December 9, a video appeared in which masked individuals proclaimed “We’re from the slums of London, how do they expect us to pay £9,000 for uni fees?” “What’s stopping us from doing drug deals on the streets anymore? Nothing!” This video contrasted starkly with corporate media interviews with white middle-class teenagers condemning protester use of violence. This gives a good insight into the tension on the street, but also the growing class divisions within the UK and the tools used by state apparatus to delegitimize protests.

We surmise that struggles in which the participants aim to address their own conditions directly offer greater likelihood of sustained resistance and continued momentum than campaigns based on moral objection, which are easier for the state to neutralize. This is a common line of thought among many anarchists, but it’s worth reiterating as we choose how to focus our own energies.

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Anarchy in the UK

There are many signs that, in the UK, modern anarchist culture has put down roots within current youth culture; among young people, it may be on the way to becoming the prevailing stance outside of the conventional conservative-liberal spectrum. Anarchist flags, class war placards, and banners with anarchist symbols peppered the protests and occupations in towns that previously had no visible anarchist presence at all.

Anarchism remerged in the UK as a cultural mainstay in 1980s, then gained momentum during the 1990s with the rise of the anti-roads movement. That movement largely transformed into the anti-globalization movement, an often celebrated phase in anarchist history worldwide. There have been peaks and troughs since then, but campaigns and projects such as Smash EDO (see Rolling Thunder #7), the Camp for Climate Action, Earth First!, and a network of anarchist-run social centers have all contributed to an ongoing visible anarchist presence. In the last few years, a string of new book fairs and small press events has sprung up across the country, most with varying degrees of anarchist involvement. Since 2000 there has also been two summit protests against the G8 and G20, both a successful insofar as they created effective anti-authoritarian infrastructure and mobilized large numbers of people.

However, many recent protest campaigns had been largely organized and attended by “full-time” activists and dedicated anarchists, and most anarchist actions had been an appendices to campaigns that were not explicitly anti-statist or anti-authoritarian in nature. Consequently, an activist subculture has emerged. Though this subculture plays an important roll in fostering radical activity, creating infrastructure and providing protest experiences, in many ways it has been separated from broader forms of class struggle. Meanwhile, creating a movement based on political affinity rather than longstanding community also provides opportunities for police infiltration.

The student protests represent a re-emergence of a popular movement based largely in class issues, the likes of which have not been seen since the anti-poll tax movement that peaked at the beginning of the 1990s (see Rolling Thunder #6).

It would be disingenuous to suggest that anarchists represent more than a fraction of those involved in these protests and occupations. Yet it’s important to note that the actions of even small groups of anarchists such as the initial invasion of Millbank Tower can create huge waves of momentum and spark whole movements. Even in small numbers, well-planned or even spontaneous actions can catalyze momentum we couldn’t otherwise create ourselves.

Existing anarchist groups and networks have provided important infrastructure in the form of legal advice, communications, and independent media; they’ve also shared street knowledge such as how to remain anonymous and how to handle police violence. In one case, the police targeted FITwatch, a group set up by anarchists to encourage anti-surveillance tactics at protests, prompting their web host to close down their blog for “attempting to pervert the course of justice.” The group had simply distributed information on avoiding arrest after the invasion of Millbank Tower; the suggestions included tips on getting rid of the clothes you were wearing, seeking legal counsel, and so on. The actions of the police backfired as the information was quickly spread via social networks; the liberal press eventually picked up the story, spreading the information far wider than FITwatch could have ever managed.

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Anarchy in Action

A revolutionary movement may not be explicitly anarchist but nonetheless embody many of the values expressed through anarchist theory such as mutual aid, autonomy, solidarity, and distrust of authority. From the protests in towns with smaller populations to the largest in London, the rejection of traditional power structures was a running theme. The leadership of National Union of Students (NUS) was increasingly marginalized. To some extent, this was their own doing: for example, it didn’t help that Union President Aaron Porter condemned actions taken in the NUS’ own protest. This may have helped foster a distrust of leadership; when attempts where made to organize speeches from opposition politicians and the usual “movement leaders,” many moved off before the speeches even began.

Within the school and university occupations, the occupiers organised non-hierarchically, examining their own processes, structures, and effectiveness. One individual statement from the Goldsmith Occupation even expressed a sentiment common in modern insurrectionary texts, criticizing the “connivance of pseudo-radical academics, anxious union reps, obnoxious sub-Trotskyists and pedantic anarchist hangers on.” The text goes on to describe the frustrations of dealing with “a more academic faction of occupiers” and calls for action similar to that of the “Human Strike” discussed in the text “Preoccupied” produced after the New School occupation in New York City.

On the other hand, despite being the most explicitly horizontally organized element of the struggle, the occupations themselves created points of authority for the movement. The time, resources, and public attention granted to students involved in the occupations offered them a louder public voice than some of those on the street.

In addition to the occupations and protests, thousands of schoolchildren walked out of lessons or locked themselves in classrooms as an act of rebellion or mischief. The spontaneous and self-organized nature of these protests no doubt greatly contributed to maintaining momentum. Instead of carrying mass-produced “official” placards, most people made their own with varying degrees of comedy or political poignancy. Instead of being told where to go and at what speed, people chose to run and splinter from the proposed routes when it suited them. Sometimes this led to protests taking seemingly illogical paths, such as marching from one side of a city center, turning round, marching back, and then repeating the same pattern; but this atmosphere of autonomy and spontaneity gave the protests an energetic air and communal spirit. No one knew where we where going, but we were all going there together. When the front of the march took a bad turn, the middle would branch off and take the lead.

The protests were not self-conscious attempts to organize horizontally so much as they reflected the organic process of consensus seen in most friendship circles. This makes sense in that the largely youthful crowd on the street has more experience with this form of relationship than with bureaucratic and hierarchical structures. Disputes were dealt with by those involved rather than any authority stepping in. The only people asking “who shall lead us?” were those with longer experiences of being led.

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Smoke from the Prairie Fire

The events that took place during November and December 2010 are called “student protests” because so many students participated and because of the focus on education issues. But this shouldn’t suggest that it was only students involved. Corporate media demonized the non-students that attended the protests, labelling them professional protesters or outside agitators. This was intended to prevent the spread of popular protest, encouraging division and marginalization and implying a hegemony of self-serving individualism at the protest.

In fact, the protests were attended by many non-students acting out of solidarity, concern for their children’s education, or simply class anger. Many students expressed the importance of this solidarity. The most interesting event in relation to this occurred November 28, when a local council meeting to discuss general austerity measures was attended by 100 students and other members of the public. A mini-riot broke out and 16 police officers where injured when the crowd tried to force its way into the building. This was one of the first moments that the student protests could be seen outside of the context of protest for educational reform.

Further attempts were made to draw parallels between the student protests and other anti-cuts struggles; but as of this writing, most anti-cuts organizing has been small and directed at engaging the bureaucracies of local government. It is too early to tell how influential these protests may be when austerity measures begin to bite in full force; however, the bar has been set, and escalation may be inevitable.


After the Storm

The first stage of the struggle is now over. Groups like the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) that once played a purely logistical role have begun to take conventional positions of power. As occurred during the anti-war movement against the invasion of Iraq, these groups are adopting the stance of “legitimate” protest.

As in the Greek riots of December 2008, the end of the year served as the closing of parentheses around a period of gained momentum. What can be done to ensure that moments of visible social upheaval are not for nothing? How can we ensure this momentum is not wasted?

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The 2008 Greek riots set the tone for further struggles. The efforts of Greek anarchists to build a culture of ongoing resistance have heavily influenced not only the current Greek strikes against austerity measures but many other acts of resistance around the world. The student protests can do the same. Where years of inaction had created a reputation of apathy, the UK now has a refreshed history of student organizing. Future struggles will begin from this new context. A new generation has its own personal experiences of resistance in addition to those inherited from previous generations.

The term “anarchist” has entered public usage once more with both negative and positive connotations. It’s impossible to gauge the effect this has had; while some have been introduced to an interesting set of ideas, others have probably adopted corporate media definitions and the prejudices that come with them. At this point anarchist book fairs, social centers, infoshops, and other explicitly anarchist projects have an important role to play.

We can also confront the discourses aimed at delegitimize our struggles. Government and corporate media propagate the ideology that the capitalist economy is directly linked to our very survival. If they succeed in this, the public will accept the necessity of additional neoliberal policies, further attacks on the lower classes. Resistance can polarize society, but we need strong alternative proposals for this to be a good thing.

Many legal battles are about to begin that will decide the fates of those arrested over the last few months. Once again this highlights the importance of long-term infrastructure; between periods of state repression, we can concentrate on building up skills and passing on lessons. Although the initial momentum of last year seems to have dissipated, it’s possible that this energy will adopt other forms. If people remain engaged in the struggle, they may find themselves back in the street soon.

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Interview with Participants in the Occupations

Collectively answered in December 2010 by some students involved in the protests

Q: What factors have contributed to maintain momentum over the last few weeks?

A: I think there have been numerous reasons for the continued momentum, many of them being entirely beyond the reach of any “organizer” or “agitator.” To an extent, it feels as if Millbank awoke something in the student movement which has not faded yet. The kind of events that took place on 10/11/10 had not been experienced by most, and say what you like about its tactical significance or the political consciousness of those smashing the place apart, Millbank’s most significant outcome seems to be a huge sense of empowerment that has been built upon and refined in consequent protests rather than allowed to fade. It is a sense of empowerment which many students seem to have come to these demos to recreate simultaneously to expressing their anger.

On the other hand, there are some things which have actively been done by those involved in the movement—I’m reluctant to call them organizers because from my experience, it has not been the same bureaucratic organizations and individuals who have been calling for the demonstrations—which have helped build momentum. For example, attempting to engage college and school students on a wider scale was extremely important after Millbank, and it was an idea which succeeded, judging from the mass walkouts on November 24. I also think that switching the focus to local struggle after 10/11/10 has served the movement well also.

However, I feel that one of the major reasons for the continued momentum has been the fact that in people’s minds everything was building towards the day of the vote in parliament. Now that the vote has passed, it is unclear whether the movement will continue with similar levels of strength. Usually I would expect a movement not to, but the energy, atmosphere and sense that people have been radicalised by this struggle that I witnessed after the demo on Thursday [December 9] are keeping me optimistic.

Q: Do you feel students have rejected conventional protest institutions such as unions and even “professional” anarchist groups like the Anarchist Federation or Solfed? If so, why do you think this has occurred? How has this affected the struggle?

A: One of the most simultaneously disheartening and exciting things about the last few weeks has been the role that the NUS has played. After Millbank, the NUS clearly showed themselves to be unaccountable to the student movement, reformist at best and ultimately self-serving—a fact that some of us have known for a while. However, the backlash against Aaron Porter’s denouncement of the violence at Millbank has snowballed into a widespread disinterest in the views and actions of the NUS for many students. Rather than spend time and energy encouraging the NUS to back the movement, the movement itself has made the NUS largely irrelevant, which seems to be the best tactic when facing an organization that wishes to impose itself on others. Having said that, it is short-sighted to write off the NUS as useless. The union has the resources to contact almost every student in the country, making them particularly invaluable in universities in which there are no other political groups to publicize and engage in building for national demonstrations and such. The NUS could be a useful tool if they eventually decide to or are forced to represent the views of the students fighting these cuts, but they are not necessary and have been largely bypassed by the movement. Their plan for the day of the vote was to hold a vigil with 9000 candles on the bank of the Thames, a spectacle which seemed to be perfectly constructed to highlight their ineffectiveness and unaccountability while simultaneously celebrating the fact that the movement failed to stop the vote being passed. In the end, though, they chose to cancel the event in order to distance themselves even further from the “violence” that took place earlier in the day. This perfectly sums up the NUS’s role in the current struggles.

As for anarchist groups, I do not feel they have been rejected by the movement, primarily because they haven’t put themselves in a position to be rejected. From my experience working with these groups a little over the last few weeks, they have usually avoided putting their name to anything and instead focused on issues and activities that may be more related to anarchist ideas than others, but in no way conflict with the general feeling of the movement. For example, encouraging direct action, the use of face masks, engaging and networking with college and school students as well as worker movements, and occasionally offering up an alternative analysis of the cuts and the struggle so far. All extremely important, but none which involve attempting to alter the general direction of the movement.

Q: What role do you feel the occupations have played? Are there different dynamics than on the street?

A: I can only speak of the occupations I have experienced directly, these being the Sussex and Brighton University occupations. Each of these were very different, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I feel that the Sussex occupation, which began 5 days after 10/11/10, was badly timed and implemented, but nonetheless allowed for a space in which to discuss Millbank and plan for the day of action on the 24th. The Brighton occupation however began on the day of action and continued for over two weeks acting as a productive and consistent space in which to organize. In part I feel that it was because the Brighton occupation more successfully captured the dynamics from the streets. It was the university’s first occupation in 18 years and began off the back of a demo. This excitement persisted through some organizational challenges, enabling the occupation to become an active hub of discussion and organization in the center of Brighton.

Overall, however, I feel that the effectiveness of occupations has diminished since last year when most local student movements were fighting the cuts being implemented on their own campuses. This year the issue has become much more national, and it could be argued that occupations serve less of a purpose. Despite this, many have been invaluable in organizing on a local level.

Q: What do you think are the paradoxes of being an anarchist involved with protests against cuts to state-funded education?

A: I don’t necessarily see any paradoxes as I do not see revolution and reform as polar opposites. While many local anti-cuts movements are protesting the cuts, they are also setting up or at least considering alternatives to the current system, such as the Really Open University at Leeds and the teach-ins which have been popping up at university occupations.

Further Reading

Geographies of the Kettle: Containment, Spectacle & Counter-Strategy: A critical appraisal of the police tactic of “kettling” demonstrations, and how to resist it

Movement beyond “Actions”: An insightful critique of the limitations of “activism” as the default setting for resistance movements in the UK, especially as we enter an era of widespread discontent

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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.

If You Build It . . .

Early on, the plan was to put a space in our home. Our friends and colleagues have known about our wild dreams for the last two years — that we’d be able to have a social space independent from the rest of our house. Now that we’ve finished most of the work, a community is waiting for us.

We knew from the start that making good on our promise would mean a lot of work and time. It would mean learning how to do things we’d never done before. Perhaps most importantly, it would mean we would have to care enough about the outcome to do things well.

The process was long, though. Visitors passed through to see the space in wholly different stages and shades. Before any work was done the wallpaper was sagging, the plaster dripping, like some paper street soap company.

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The walls were first to go. We had to tear down the old walls, swinging hammers and crowbars. Carpenters call this doing “demo” and it is similar, in many ways, to the anarchist sense of the word. Of course, it wasn’t all smash. We shoveled plaster and lath. We scooped armloads of asbestos vermiculite. It was dusty, disgusting, probably deadly, and it had to be done.

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With the inside of the walls exposed, we had lots of work to do. The framing of the walls had to be restructured. A wall and staircase were moved and supports were installed to brace the buckling structure of the house. We insulated the outside walls to protect the space from our frigid winters. We established a subfloor and a new ceiling to accommodate for a century of sagging and settling. Somehow, we found time between phases to host gatherings like this Really Really Free Market spokescouncil.

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New drywall meant new paint. We argued many nights over the exact colors to be sure that everything would be just so.

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We found used flooring at an extreme discount, and taught ourselves how to properly install it. It took about 45 hours to place all of the pieces and fasten them. Afterwards, we sanded the entire space with a very powerful expandable drum sander that a friend loaned us. Tragedy struck when we botched the seal job, on account of the frigid autumn temperature. And even though most people can’t tell, we will have to buff it down and apply a fourth coat of polyurethane.

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A member of our community happens to be a professional cabinet builder, so we called upon him to build the cabinetry for the infoshop’s kitchen. Amazingly, he manufactured a countertop out of wood pulled from a dumpster.

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Finally, we built the shelves for the infoshop’s library. This was a considerable undertaking, and another task we had never attempted before.

• 20x 8′ pine 1″x12″ boards = $260
• 5 lbs Tan Deckscrews = $18
• Jug of Woodglue = $8
• 5x 8′ pine 2″x2″ boards = $9
• 3x 8′ pine 1″x3″ boards = $10

At just over $300, our shelves store over 1000 books, a collection of anarchist magazines, and a display for anarchist primers and other critical material. Without the made-over interior, a sizable anarchist library can be a public resource for a third the cost of a month’s storefront rent. If you sacrifice your personal living room to it, there are no additional mandatory expenses. This does away with the tiresome obligation to fundraise month-to-month, and allows donations to go directly towards more features and services.

The construction work isn’t over — we still have to build shelves for our free food pantry, make other kitchen installations, trim the space, and build a projector mount and screen. Although, the space is open, welcoming, and usable, however incomplete. Building things from scratch complements the theories in our books — the sense of lasting commitment to anarchist resistance and transformation is embodied in the very process of creating long-term anarchist spaces. This is our propaganda by the deed.

. . . They Will Come

From the beginning, we wanted an explicitly anarchist space, even if we wanted to make it available to a community that was largely outside of the anarchist subculture. By waving this flag, we not only introduce and elaborate anarchist critiques and perspectives, we also can feel safe knowing that a thriving small-town community values and has affinity with anarchists who would otherwise be defined by the misdirected representations — or, and especially, those directed misrepresentaions — made in the newspapers and on the occasional newscast across the country. By flying the black flag, we put a face on the shadowy anarchists so that others can befriend or become them.

To these ends, we drafted the first version of a thorough Owners’ Manual, which details the policies of the space and articulates common anarchist intentions and tendencies. Additionally, this document spells out how to use the space, from the operating the audio system to borrowing books from the library.

It had been said before that it would be difficult to create a completely open space in a home. Although the duplex creates the illusion of separation, this obstacle is not completely overcome by architecture alone. To create neutral space in our home, we have committed ourselves to social communities larger than the anarchist subculture, and to sharing the reins with whomever will take them. In a small midwestern town with a modest anarchist population, this is a necessity. Wherever there are public anarchist spaces, they must connect with larger communities, or the anarchist scene will remain forever in adolescence. In this sense, we’ve created neutral territory on anarchist ground — a victory against subsumption and for communities of resistance.

Communities of Resistance

Today, mainstream society presumes that everyone who disagrees with its logic or authority will plead their grievances through established channels. This tendency is flawed in at least two ways: the first is that it presumes that anyone who doesn’t utilize those channels (write their elected representative, vote, peacefully demonstrate, etc.) has no wide-reaching grievances of their own; second, the established channels form a closed-loop circuit of speech-with-no-action.

For over than one hundred years, anarchists in this country have struggled against the narrow walls of these established channels—sometimes controversially—and because of that society has conceded ideas like the eight-hour workday and the term “birth control.”

If anarchists reject capitalism, hierarchy, gender and sexuality norms, the subordination of other species, eco-devastation, imperialism, and other forms of authoritarianism, what then is the purpose of demonstrating through the established channels? And what exactly would we be demonstrating? It is in this spirit that communities of resistance can inform expressions of our dissent. Each member of such a community is free to act upon their grievances with society in whatever ways they need to.

Communities of resistance are creative places, full of invention, performance, freedom of identity, consensual relationships, and gift-giving. But they can be a destructive force, too; as each member confronts their domination by modern society on their own terms, little pieces of that world crumble away.

A community of resistance is a demonstration of the lives we want—individually, we may be stuck in the real world, but collectively, we inhabit another real world.

— From the Burrow Owners’ Manual.

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The Grand Opening

The night before our grand opening, anarchist comrades arrived from the region to celebrate the beginning of a new anarchist space. After a feast at our grand banquet table, we cleared space and dimmed the lights for music and dancing. One by one, our local friends arrived, too. Electro dance music sounded where only power tools had for a full year prior. It was lively and lovely; but it was solemn, too, when the oscillating rhythm of Test Their Logik’s No World Order filled the Burrow with fury and longing.

Saturday began with an open house. Carload after carload of supporters arrived with trays of treats and boxes of books. People were able to browse the Owners’ Manual, inspect the shelves, and admire the signage for the first time after months of waiting. Approximately 40 people visited the space in this first event of the day.

Later in the evening we threw a potlock. Dozens of dishes from different households, accumulated in the kitchen. Afterwards, some kitchenware was even donated to the space!

The Burrow collective presented a slideshow with before and after photos, and welcomed the crowded room officially to the first evening of the new community library and social center. One of the out-of-town guests courageously stood, and delicately opened a little blue book to recite a passage.

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It was then that famed author and filmmaker Bill Brown took the stage to present a short film on the subject of demolishing old spaces and read adorably idiosyncratic tales of the adventures in daily life. The evening’s events ended with the latest from Froseph, and the jar went around to cover Bill’s bus ticket.

Coming Soon to Living Rooms Everywhere

Now that the long stretch of labor is past us, we are left pondering how many other living rooms could transform this way. How many new types of long-term social spaces can emerge from the anarchist community? In the days following the grand opening, participants returned to their households with Owners’ Manuals. A woman walking a dog through the neighborhood brought us 30 books and kind words, because her friend’s mother had given the space such a warm review. A homeless man had found a copy of the Owners’ Manual at the Catholic Worker and came to share some anti-police poems he had written. In our first week of open hours, we’ve received over 300 book donations: from Žižek and woodworking manuals to The Red Tent and The Monkey Wrench Gang. What dangerous ideas lie on the shelves of your friends and neighbors? More importantly, what must be built for them to synthesize?

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To visit the Burrow with a touring anarchist presentation or on some other adventure, email burrow.booking@gmail.com. Send books, zines, or anarchist outreach materials for distribution to: The Burrow Library, PO Box 765, Winona, MN 55987

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.

Prelude: A Spiking We Will Go

We learned of Moscow city authorities’ plans to destroy the Khimki forest in summer of 2008, when local environmentalists started an outreach campaign to drum up support for their cause. Even then it was already late, since the forest—one of the three major forests surrounding Moscow—had already been extensively logged and was pockmarked with tumors: cottages for the nouveau-riche, warehouses, parking lots, and malls.

So without a minute to lose, we grabbed some spikes and rushed in. The logging site was patrolled by guards, but their attention was distracted by the official “eco-camp” in front of their cabin so it was easy to sneak in and spike every tree we could get our nails into. This was our first experience of eco-action and it was exciting and inspiring: we didn’t get caught and we accomplished what we had come to do. We were sure that between our action, the constant pressure liberal ecologists were putting on the authorities, and the popular movement gaining momentum in the local suburbs, the tree-killers would retreat and leave the forest for good. Soon we learned better.

The trees were being felled to prepare the way for a massive new road plan authorized by the federal government. High-ranking officials—as high-ranking as Putin himself, we later learned—had a stake in lobbying for the new toll highway to be built right through the forest. The construction was financed by the international syndicate Vinci, headquartered in France, and several European banks working in partnership with the Russian national bank, Sberbank. With such powerful enemies arrayed against the forest and its defenders, the situation turned ugly.

Foreword: The Russian Context

“Those numbers are murdered antifascists only. We don’t know exactly how many immigrants are killed by Nazis every year.”
-Anarchist spokesperson at an international Antifa conference

In fall 2008, Khimki journalist Mikhail Beketov, who played a major role in news coverage of the corrupt road plans of local and government officials, was brutally attacked by thugs. The attack left him in a coma and he later had to have his legs amputated. That same month, elsewhere in Moscow, several well-known activists were attacked or threatened with violence. That’s not to say that cops haven’t beaten ecologists before. But it was the first time such blatant attempts were made on the lives of our comrades.

We were sucked into “the wormhole of violence” in the dead of winter 2009, when Stanislav Markelov, who provided legal support for Beketov, and Anastasya Baburova, an eco-anarchist and journalist, were shot dead in the center of Moscow. By the time some of us returned to the surface—fortunately, almost unscathed—the whole activist landscape had changed.

Since winter 2009 the streets of Russian cities have been rife with Nazi/Antifa violence, as the conflict has steadily shifted from the social-political context towards a scenario of gang warfare. This context is crucial for understanding how the struggle for Khimki forest developed.

For almost six years now, the anti-authoritarian movement in Russia has consisted primarily of two wings, one ecological and the other antifascist; the former is primarily anarchist, but the antifascist movement also includes significant participation from patriots and Stalinist parties. These groups meet infrequently at convergences, eco-camps, and other events such as the numerous in memoriam actions dedicated to murdered comrades. But with machismo increasing in the antifascist scene because of the perceived necessity to maim and kill more Nazis in retaliation for Nazi attacks, and paranoia spreading in the eco-defense movement because of the need to constantly attack construction sites and engines in the absence of popular opposition to deforestation, the rift widened. By the time of the Khimki defense, the movement was already straining to maintain coherence. Some people suspect that if it weren’t for the selective murders of the few anarchists and antifascists wise and widely respected enough to hold the various schisms in check, the movement would have been more prepared for this crisis.

Interlude: We Don’t Need No Water

Two years after our first adventure, we experienced a touching reunion with our dear forest. It was the first night of the resumed logging operation when we disembarked from our special eco-defense vehicle and ran for the cover of the nearby tree line. In several minutes we changed clothes and double-checked our comms, camouflage, and the presents we had brought along for the construction vehicles. Soon several shadows glided silently over the nocturnal plain under the pale moonlight towards the faraway forest, which was still alive and foreboding.

When we arrived at the logging encampment, we split up. Some of us lay in the romantic cover of some bushes, enjoying the stars and the sound of each other’s breath; our friends who were more eager to do reconnaissance bounded off toward the black shapes of tractors and excavators. Then all hell broke loose. Suddenly we could hear the all-too-familiar sound of a vehicle going up in flames, which sometimes reminds one of a jet plane flying overhead. The entire forest was bathed in dancing red and orange light, and the comms scouts were yelling in surprise. We tried to figure out what had happened. Luckily we evaded the guards’ attention and made it back to our transport on the remote and empty road. Red lights, comm talk—and we were sound and safe, spirited away to another town.

As it turned out, ours was not the only group sneaking around the site that busy night. Needless to say, the inhabitants of the eco-camp were blamed for the arson. In fact, the presence of the camp actually prevented eco-defenders from damaging everything they wanted to—that is why only one vehicle was torched at the site. But this didn’t occur to the logging manager, who immediately requested a police investigation of the arson and the ecologists’ suspected part in it; soon enough, he got his revenge on them in a perverse but typically Russian manner.

Over the following days our scouts reported increased guard and cop nighttime activity around the logging site, including roadblocks and patrols in the vicinity, so eco-defenders had to cancel their initial plans and shift focus a bit. Khimki is a big forest, and the logging and despoiling of wildlife in the name of profit took place almost everywhere. The incident did raise serious questions regarding overall security though: because ELF groups do not share their plans with each other, such accidental encounters are bound to happen again and again as these methods are propagated.

Enter the Nazis

As we found out later, one early morning we barely missed a mob of hired Nazi thugs who were marching towards the eco-camp at about the same time we were escaping yet again into the mist after another scouting mission. Upon arriving, they started verbally and physically abusing every eco-protestor present, but settled for guarding the logging equipment once the police made their appearance. A top manager of the logging company later admitted that he had hired the Nazis “for security reasons.”

This episode showed every doubting critic how easily capitalists fall back upon fascist support—a truism not yet obvious even to most activists in Russia—and sparked a fire in the hearts of the previously dormant antifascist wing of our movement. The confrontation that morning did more to popularize and escalate the conflict than any eco-camp, internet PR campaign, or eco-defense action ever could have. Some of our comrades reflected that what we had witnessed was a fine example of how an unforeseen, unplanned, chaotic event—even one deemed negative—can push the movement and its supporters in the right direction.

That is to say, in a revolutionary direction.

The Khimki Battle

The loggers had made a major mistake. Employing Nazis in what was perceived by almost every citizen as an anti-human project broke the ranks of the extreme right; most fascist groups tried to capitalize on the situation by posing as opponents of the destruction of the forest. More importantly, now every antifascist in the vicinity had enemies in sight and rushed to the battle.

The next day the announcement went out that a huge unpermitted show would take place in the center of Moscow. Hundreds of anti-authoritarian activists, antifascists, and party-goers gathered in anticipation of a street-party with a long-disbanded famous antifascist band as the headliner. Instead, as everybody arrived at the meeting place a guy in sunglasses announced that there would be no show, no street-party, and that the plan all along had been to go to the suburbs and attack the logging camp and the Nazis gathered there. Some people left, but the majority set out for Khimki.

While most of protesters were traveling via railway, scouts reported multiple riot police squads at the logging site. It was then decided to head for the Khimki municipal building—Khimki formally being a town in its own right—which was defenseless while every available police unit was on guard in the forest. Dressed for a party, people gathered in a bright and colorful bloc at the railway station and started marching towards the target. The bloc was accompanied by two scooters that acted as lookouts and rear guard during the action. At first local residents reacted with fear or suspicion, but after hearing the slogans and reading the banner or talking to protestors many expressed approval and support. Cars continued honking throughout the march and assault on the building.

So it came to pass that on July 28 in broad daylight, with the approval of hundreds of onlookers, several hundred anarchists and antifascists gathered in the center of Moscow, traveled to the railway station, hopped on the train, rode to the suburban district Khimki, disembarked, blocked up, and marched up to the municipal office chanting and lighting flares. Participants immediately commenced breaking windows, painting anti-logging and pro-forest graffiti, opening fire on the building with handguns, and even chopping the front door with an axe. Throughout this action no police officer showed up to protect state property.

Satisfied with the damage done and having received word from lookouts that riot police were loading up into busses at the logging camp, anarchists and antifascists started back towards the railway station. At this moment, two encounters with police took place. The first to face the angry mob were several cops on foot, who were strolling down the street when it suddenly flooded with anarchists. The cops retreated to the sound of breaking bottles and crashing stones. Then a police patrol made the mistake of trying to intervene in the protest; they quickly realized their mistake and retreated. Unfortunately, antifascists on foot couldn’t catch up with the swiftly retreating police car. It should be pointed out that, although the local populace supported the action verbally and symbolically via honking horns, the action failed to entice onlookers into any sort of participation.

Nevertheless, protestors managed to reach the railway station and crowd into the train, where they waited patiently for the doors to close. The doors, however, did not close. As it turned out, the locomotive driver was at that moment involved in a tense conversation with the police commander. A group of antifascists with handguns was quickly dispatched to explain to him the negative consequences of siding with our class enemies, and finally the engine started moving, pulling the train towards the safety of the big city with no trees.

Criticism has been raised in the aftermath of this event about the distribution of information, the lack of advance organizing, and on-site video recording. Most of the people who took part had initially expected to attend a street party and arrived unprepared for direct action, without matching clothes, masks, or gloves and with working cell phones. Many young participants used social transport cards with ID tags in them to gain entrance to subway. The few organizers who did know the whole plan from the beginning hadn’t prepared accordingly and failed to provide even the most minor riot gear such as face masks. This led to a huge number of protestors being videotaped with their facial features clearly distinguishable.

The Russian anti-authoritarian movement has yet to learn from its own mistakes when it comes to video recording during street protests. Protesters and “media-activists,” most of whom turned out to be journalists invited from the liberal press, failed to recognize what a fatal mistake it was to videotape the unmasked faces of activists. Some of these reporters continued shooting even after people had gotten into the train and started pulling their masks off, so even participants who had provided for their own security failed to remain anonymous in the end because of this media-activism fetish. Later, people interrogated by the police reported that they were presented with a frame-by-frame breakdown of the video that circulated on the internet. Some comrades have been forced to leave the country because of this evidence.

The Fallout: Repression and Solidarity

Alexei Gaskarov and Maxim Solopov, public spokespersons for the Russian antifascist movement, were arrested on July 30. This was followed by attempts to capture several other suspected organizers; because of their frustrating failure to turn themselves in, they were placed on a wanted list.

Facing intense pressure from government officials, unable to catch the elusive anarchists and receiving little cooperation from anyone, the police opted for massive sweeps of “prophylactic arrests.” Throughout August and September more than 500 antifascists, activists, and anarchists were detained, put in custody, tortured, and bullied into providing information on the movement—not only in Moscow, but in Nizhni Novgorod, Vladimir, and other cities as well. Police harassed people at public Antifa and animal rights events, football matches, and gatherings. Following this sweep, the sheer volume of data on the movement has swelled tenfold. As of this writing it seems that our enemies have moved on to the next phase, probing further into the network in what appears to be a third wave of interrogations of a select few activists who have been apprehended and deemed “interesting.”

It is still too early to draw conclusions, but some ideas about this repression can be explored, if only as a basis for future discussions. It is now obvious that the FSB, the Russian secret service, didn’t have any aces up their sleeves; their investigators have been joining in and ganging up on detainees from the start without a particular plan. Only two people are in jail awaiting trial, the main reason for their apprehension being their public profiles. The choice to rely on sweeping arrests and the total failure of the authorities to round up any direct action group despite all their attempts to convert detained activists into informants indicate that the Russian police approached 2010 unprepared in terms of provocateurs and informants within the Russian anti-authoritarian movement. This situation, of course, may yet change.

With all this said, it seems that the repression succeeded soundly in several ways. First, the movement seems to be isolated in a cocoon of fear. Support from outside is meager at best; social activists are second-guessing their cooperation with known antifascists. Second, almost every known “leader” or “organizer” has either been jailed or driven into hiding. Third, the authorities have managed to gather an ever-increasing amount of information since, as often happens, those who read about security practices and try to implement them in their daily lives are frequently not the ones who end up being arrested and answering questions.

Finally, and most importantly, almost everyone has forgotten about the original problem. Just as the capitalist leviathan has overextended itself, our movement has thinned its resources by betting everything on an ill-conceived riot and now all we can do is try to stem the rising tide of repression. This has happened before: in 2008 an anti-police campaign turned into a prisoner support campaign after police started hitting back with arrests and trials. Now we are watching the original environmental campaign fade into the background while prisoner support actions demand more and more attention.

There may be ways for anarchists to use the situation to our advantage, both in anti-Nazi outreach efforts and narratives and as an opportunity to reach out to the ecological movement and grassroots collectives. But the way the movement perceives itself has changed dramatically and we may need some reflection and self-assessment if we are to outmaneuver our enemies at this stage.

This is not to say that prisoner support is unimportant. Solidarity campaigns are crucial not only for the people in jail facing trial, but for the sake of those who may end up there yet. However, we should not forget the reason our comrades were arrested in the first place.

Most importantly, almost everybody has forgotten about the original problem. Our movement has thinned resources by betting everything on an ill-conceived riot, and now all we can do is try to stem the rising tide of repression.

Two Cocktail Parties

On September 2, the Russian embassy in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, was firebombed by anarchists. One of the Molotov cocktails hit a car parked in the yard. The car burned up. Evidently, this was the only damage inflicted by the attackers. Soon a communiqué was published on Belarusian anarchist websites, stating that the attack had taken place in solidarity with the Russian anarchists fighting for the Khimki forest and that Belarusian anarchists held the Russian government responsible both for the continuing deforestation and the repression of the movement.

The next morning repression hit the Belarusian scene. It took the Belarusian KGB several days to round up and arrest almost every known or suspected anarchist in Minsk, Gomel, Soligorsk, and other Belarusian cities. Our comrades were pressed for confessions of having cooperated with the Russian secret services in an attempt to discredit the Belarusian government and bring down Lukashenko’s regime. Most were formally questioned, then locked away and “forgotten” in cells for several days.

Some of our friends were not so lucky. One girl was hospitalized after she cut her veins during interrogation; another person, with previously existing serious health issues, developed major health problems as a result of the prison conditions and the severe beatings he received. Some lucky few fled the country; others stayed, taking it upon themselves to organize prisoner support campaigns. Among those who stayed were the comrades brave enough to carry out a follow-up attack on the Minsk detention center three days after the KGB started mass-arresting anarchists. A group calling itself “Friends of Liberty” firebombed a guard post in the detention center perimeter and claimed responsibility for both firebombing attacks—the Russian embassy and the police guard post—on the internet. In their second communiqué, “Friends of Liberty” stated that the KGB reacted by arresting innocent people simply because the latter had already been on the KGB’s radar. The aim of their second attack was evidently noble and brave: to demonstrate that the KGB got the wrong suspects. But the KGB was acting on Lukashenko’s direct order to “pacify the opposition,” a common practice in both Russia and Belarus shortly before presidential elections; so arrests, disappearances, and tortures continued unabated.

The Wings of a Butterfly

“Anarchy is all about order, not chaos.”
-popular Russian anarchist saying

Two notable events marked the fall of 2010: a deepening crisis in Belarusian-Russian relations, and the removal of Luzhkov from his position as the mayor of Moscow. Anarchists did their best to bring about both events.

Luzhkov, a petty Moscow tyrant who’d been abusing his position as mayor for more than 10 years, was relieved of his duties by presidential decree “for incompetence and failure to stand up to expectations.” This occurred immediately after he returned from vacation, a month after the Khimki riots. Among the reasons cited by experts and analysts was Luzhkov’s failure to cope with the Khimki crisis, as well as the part he played in the corrupt city development program.

Lukashenko, the Belarusian national-socialist dictator, gave in to fits of rage and anti-Russian rhetoric after the anarchist attacks on the Russian embassy and the police detention center where most of the anarchists arrested in Minsk were being held. An exchange of notes at the highest levels of diplomacy failed to avert the crisis, which had already been brewing before the Molotovs hit their targets. A series of bad political and economic decisions, the conspiracy-theory worldview every dictator seems inclined to, and a minor anarchist action led to the deepest political crisis Russia and Belarus have yet experienced.

This is not to imply that the departure of the mayor of Moscow and the collapse of relations with Lukashenko happened as a result of an anarchist plot or anything else along those lines. But it is important not to lose sight of the political perspective. We should consider the ways our actions can sometimes contribute to significant social changes and political upheavals—or at least scare the shit out of rich bastards!—however minor (like the Minsk firebombing) or major (like the Khimki battle) these actions may seem to participants and experts. It may be impossible to plan such things ahead of time, but we—boisterous chaos-loving anarchists—should take heart from these developments nevertheless. Hope for change and be the change.

Calls for solidarity

Freedom for the working class can be won only by the working class itself.
-Nestor Makhno

Repression hit both the Belarusian and Russian anarchist scenes hard, and we are in dire need of support from around the world. A call circulated for solidarity actions in support of the Belarusian anarchists (in jail for suspected firebombing attempt) on October 14-20; solidarity actions are called for the Khimki arrestees this coming November 12-15.

Also, as much as we need solidarity and support for our friends in prison and in hiding, let us not forget about the forest that’s still being threatened with destruction. We ask for international support for the eco-defense campaign against the deforestation planned by the Russian government backed by Vinci Group and other international financial institutions.

You can read more about the repression in Belarus and planned solidarity actions on Belarus indymedia.

Information about the solidarity campaign in support of arrestees after “the Khimki battle” is available at www.khimkibattle.org.

You can contact the Moscow Anarchist Black Cross via this site to learn more about supporting anarchist prisoners in Russia.

You can send letters to the prisoners in Moscow care of this address:

     P/B 13 109028 Moscow, Russia.

Letters should be sent in an envelope without any name on it. Letters can also be sent to the prisoners digitally via the email address helphimki@gmail.com.

Finally, support stencil PDFs are available here.

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.

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In fact, organizers at the center of Otpor were directed by organizations affiliated with the US government, from whom they received millions of dollars. By ostensibly limiting itself to attacking the established order, Otpor drew participants of all ideological persuasions, while preparing the way for the implementation of capitalist democracy. The entire event was carefully choreographed to smooth Serbia’s transition into the neoliberal market. Afterwards, the same model was exported almost anywhere a regime was not cooperating with the US agenda; Otpor was followed by Kmara in Georgia, Pora in Ukraine, Zubr in Belarus, MJAFT! in Albania, Oborona in Russia, KelKel in Kyrgyzstan, Bolga in Uzbekistan, and Nabad-al-Horriye in Lebanon. In each of these cases genuine local unrest was channeled into a proxy war serving the interests of powerful outsiders. Yet most of the participants must have felt that they were genuinely fighting for liberation.

Ljubisav Đokić, the man who drove his bulldozer into the state television headquarters, declared shortly afterwards that the uprising had made no difference. Today Serbia is no closer to meaningful social change. Nationalism and fascism are still rampant, the population is more discouraged and apathetic than ever, and local anarchists are still struggling to gain traction in an unfavorable social terrain.

All this suggests that anarchists in the US need to develop a more nuanced understanding of social upheaval. Fixating on burning cars and fighting police can obscure the important dynamics at the root of events. The insurrectionist conviction that confrontations are intrinsically desirable offers little insight into what counts as a confrontation. Over and over throughout history, anarchists and other rebels who mistook violent clashes for real transformation have served as an expendable front line in essentially conservative revolutions. We need to refine our analyses so that when we fight, our efforts cannot serve our enemies.

Is it possible that, as the police were disappearing activists and the nation was teetering on the brink of revolution, the most worthwhile thing Serbian anarchists could have hoped to accomplish was to involve a few more people in their long-term networks? Bear in mind how difficult it must have been to stay focused on such a seemingly trivial goal under the circumstances. Or could anarchists have somehow taken the initiative in the struggle against Milosevic, miraculously outflanking an organization with millions of dollars of foreign backing in a nation consumed with nationalist fervor?

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In hopes of shedding more light on these issues, we’ve conducted this interview with a former member of Otpor currently active in the Serbian anarchist movement.

More on Proxy War.

Interview with Relja from the group Antifa Zrenjanin in Zrenjanin, Serbia.

For more historical background on anarchism in Serbia, skip to the appendix.

How did anarchists respond to the wars of that ripped Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s? Did this early activity have any influence on the context in which Otpor appeared?

Unfortunately, during the wars I was young and not involved in the anarchist movement, so I can only tell you what I’ve heard and read from older anarchists. Anarchists were involved in opposing the war practically from the start of Yugoslav crisis. For many of them, then very young and coming from the punk scene, this was the time to “get serious.” Communication between anarchists across former Yugoslavia continued throughout the conflicts.

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One of the first projects, in the first half of the 1990s, was the fanzine Over the Walls of Nationalism and War, started in Croatia. Anarchists were involved in the wider antiwar movement, often cooperating with antiwar groups like Women in Black (based in Belgrade). During the NATO bombing of Serbia, one of the main sources of information for people outside Serbia was the English-language anarchist newsletter Zaginflatch (Zagreb Information Potlatch) providing firsthand information from the Serbian anarchists and antiwar activists . Later, lots of anarchists were also involved in campaigns against the draft. At the end of the 1990s, meetings of anarchists from all over former Yugoslavia were held in the Bosnian village of Zelenkovac. But as the anarchist movement was very small in Serbia, their activities didn’t influence, as far as I am aware, the context in which Otpor appeared.

How did you participate in Otpor or in other forms of resistance to Milosevic?

I was very young when I started to be interested in politics and also to do some practical political stuff. And although this was “anti-government” politics it wasn’t radical in any way. Basically, along with the majority of my friends, I was a kind of nationalist, considering Milosevic to be a traitor and a “dirty Commie.” My first practical involvement in anti-Milosevic politics started when I was thirteen years old; it consisted of distributing leaflets and propaganda and participating in local protests and demonstrations organized by various opposition parties and student groups. I particularly remember one leaflet my friends made in form of a WANTED poster to the effect that Milosevic was wanted “dead and only dead” and that his crime was “treason to the Serbian people.”

Then Otpor appeared and I was involved in the local group in my home town of Zrenjanin. I was 16 years old and my friends and I were among the youngest people there. Our activities mainly consisted of putting posters and stickers on walls, graffiting the town with various slogans and with the famous Otpor clenched fist symbol, and of course participating in demonstrations. That was when police started to routinely stop me in the street, search me, ask me idiotic questions… it happened almost on a daily basis.

What were you doing on October 5, 2000? At the time, did you think that a positive revolutionary change was occurring? What happened afterwards?

On October 5, 2000, I was in Belgrade, with my friends and my dad, in front of the Parliament building among several hundred thousand people in a cloud of tear gas, watching football hooligans storm the building and people beating very, very scared cops who were trying to surrender. I remember thinking that the worst was still to come as army helicopters were flying over our heads. But then it was all over, and people started partying with no police on the streets… a strange day.

Of course, with my political beliefs then, I joined the majority of people in Serbia in believing that this was a positive change… and of course it wasn’t. Two years later I moved to Belgrade to study, met some anarchists, and soon my perspective on the world started to change dramatically. I recently heard a British journalist speaking about his political transformation, and although his change was completely different from mine—he changed from a Trotskyist to a conservative—I think that his metaphor is quite good. He said something about this kind of radical change of perspective being like falling through a floor which suddenly gives way beneath your feet, and falling so fast that when you hit the floor below it gives way beneath you as well, and that a huge number of things that you believed were not questionable suddenly become questionable.

But my personal change coincided with the growing of apathy and pessimism in the Serbian society and people, now twice betrayed, first by Milosevic and then by the new government.

How was Otpor organized?

Otpor had a quasi-non-hierarchical and egalitarian image. This was a clever political decision in a period when the opposition political scene was full of leaders who were considered to be incompetent in their struggle against Milosevic. So, this group (and later organization) of young people, primarily students, appeared with a seemingly new approach to politics. Members of Otpor didn’t have any formal ranks in the organization; they were only called “activists of Otpor.” But the truth was that this was a highly hierarchical organization with a small minority making all the decisions. For example, I don’t remember any discussions with older members of Otpor in Zrenjanin. They just gave us propaganda material and told us what to do with it, and we considered this to be normal in a way. And of course Otpor was financed with CIA money. All major decisions and all the proclamations were made by this small minority as well.

Should we be suspicious of resistance groups that claim not to have formal structures or hierarchies? Do groups have to be transparent to the public, in order to deserve trust? How does this affect the security of those who participate?

I do not think that we should be automatically suspicious of groups that claim not to have formal hierarchies, because this is an anarchist way of organizing, and I think that it is proven that this kind of organizing is possible and can be very effective. The Otpor case, which didn’t have anything to do with anarchism or any kind of radical politics or anti-authoritarian organizing, doesn’t disprove this at all.

As far as transparency to the public (and therefore the state) is concerned, I think that every case needs to be judged individually. In my opinion, the most important variables are the local political context, the type of political group, and what kind of activities you engage in. Different regimes have different ways of dealing with radical political groups; it is not the same to organize in Turkey or in Greece as it is in Serbia.

How much were anarchists or radicals involved in Otpor? Were there other resistance efforts going on at the time, or did it absorb all of them?

I am not aware if any anarchists were involved in Otpor, but I know former members of Otpor who are now anarchists or close to anti-authoritarian politics.

As I said, there was an antiwar and anti-nationalist movement in Serbia long before Otpor appeared—but this antiwar and anti-nationalist trend was a minority inside the anti-Milosevic movement in Serbia. And the anarchists and radicals involved in the anti-nationalist part of the movement were a tiny minority inside a minority. When Otpor appeared, most of the resistance efforts carried out by young people were absorbed by Otpor. The thing that is very important here is Otpor’s ideological relation to the nationalist and conservative majority of the anti-Milosevic movement.

In the ideological field, Otpor was also very far away from any kind of anti-authoritarian politics. Basically, the ideology that Otpor propagated was a form of anti-communism quite typical for that period in Serbia (and today to a degree), which combined a conservative world outlook, neoliberal free market ideology, cultural racism, elitism, Eurocentrism, and nationalism. One of the typical ideological points of Otpor’s program was that a war was taking place between two Serbias. One was a backward, Asian Serbia—Turkish, communist, collectivist, and pro-Milosevic—and the other was the forward-looking, modern, European, pro-free market Serbia that would build a new elite to guide a united nation.

How did the legacy of Otpor and the downfall of Milosevic frame the context for radical organizing after 2000? How did it make it easier for anarchists to organize, and how did it make it harder?

What is the legacy of Milosevic and his downfall and the ascension to power of his supposed enemies, including elite participants in Otpor? As I said earlier, it is a depressed and apathetic population. This is caused by the continuation and intensification of economic poverty and deprivation, the privatization of communal property, and state repression and terror, but it also reflects the frustration of the dominant ideological centers (nationalist, conservative, and fascist) with the fact that the Serbian imperialist project has failed miserably. So unfortunately this situation not only contributes to the development of mass cynicism but also fosters new forms of fascism and right-wing extremism.

The Otpor experience doesn’t help us much in anarchist and anti-authoritarian organizing in Serbia today. We operate in different circumstances and are in need of completely different strategies of resistance; in my opinion, this means constructing of networks of solidarity not only between radicals, but more importantly, between ordinary people who are fighting their “small” local fights in their factories, neighborhoods, and elsewhere. And based on this, creating an anti-authoritarian movement in the future that is centered around solidarity and mutual aid as its core values and principals.

When the Milosevic regime attempted to repress youthful opposition in 2000, this provoked a popular backlash. Did this delegitimize government repression of radicals after the change of the government, as well?

Milosevic’s repression of his opposition did not delegitimize repression of radicals or any other kind of dissent for that matter. Just recently we had a case in which six anarchists from Belgrade spent six months in jail for supposedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at the Greek embassy—the damage was 20 Euro—for which they were charged for international terrorism. After some public pressure, they are free now and the charges are dropped, but the repression of Roma people and striking or protesting workers is practically a daily event, with new laws making it more difficult to organize strikes and protests.

The rationale is that Milosevic’s regime was illegitimate, dictatorial, and communist, and that therefore the “revolution” of October 5th was legitimate, but that dissent against this government is not legitimate because the new regime is “democratic, pro-European, and accepted by the western democracies.”

Compare and contrast the Serbian anarchist movement today to anarchist organizing elsewhere in the Balkans, such as Croatia.

In both countries we speak the same language and share quite a lot of the recent and not-so-recent history. So there are many similarities, and anarchists from Serbia and Croatia have a long history of friendship and cooperation. In both countries recent anarchism mostly originated from the anarcho-punk scene. And as that scene was more developed in Croatia, today anarchism is more present there then in Serbia.

This “punk thing” has always been an issue here. Personally, I find this question boring and unnecessary. A lot of anarchists spend a lot of time attacking the punk scene as “lifestylist,” not serious, and so on; in my opinion this is senseless, because none of the anarchists coming from the anarcho-punk scene claims that “punk” is their politics. Also, some of the ex-punks are now “anti-punks”. I find this whole thing very silly.

So the movement in Croatia is more decentralized, with more active groups, better organization, and a few infoshops across Croatia while there are currently none in Serbia. In my mind the reason for this is a more developed anarcho-punk scene as a basis for the development of anarchism. I am not implying that an anarcho-punk scene is necessary for the development of anarchist politics, or that it is a necessarily a good thing. Of course, we have many problems in this case, the classic one being how to overcome subcultural isolation and connect to the wider society. But I don’t think this problem is inherent to the punk subculture alone. In a way, the old-fashioned “serious” leftists with their own rituals are also a very closed group that has a lot of trouble connecting with the rest of society as well. Maybe even more trouble!

In both Serbia and Croatia, we have one trend of anarchists organizing in small affinity groups and another trend of anarchists trying to develop anarcho-syndicalist unions but effectively being organized in small affinity groups as well, at least for the time being.

In Greece, the anarchist movement didn’t develop from the anarcho-punk scene, but from the radical leftist movement. Recently I spoke with two anarchist friends involved in the so-called “social anarchist” part of the movement in Greece, close to the Anti-Authoritarian Movement; they told me that they consider it a good thing for an anarchist movement to develop from a punk scene, like in Serbia and Croatia, because in their opinion that makes a movement more open to new ideas. I’m not sure if this is true.

What is the influence of the Greek anarchist movement in Serbia?

We maintain friendly relations with the anti-authoritarians from Greece. Some of them participated in our annual Zrenjanin Antifascist Festival, and they also organized a benefit event for ZAF in Greece. They invited us to participate in an event they are organizing in Thessaloníki. We are also discussing organizing some regional anarchist events together.

The situation in which the anarchist movement developed in Greece was quite different from the situation in ex-Yugoslavia. Greece was ruled by a right-wing dictatorship, while Yugoslavia had a “communist” regime, and then later a former communist as dictator. These situations led to very different outcomes: today in Greece they have probably the biggest anarchist movement in the world, while in Serbia a lot of right-wing, fascist (youth) groups have appeared, caused by the re-traditionalization and fascization of our society that happened in the 1990s. You can see this as a reaction to the “communist” and “socialist” authoritarian regime.

Nevertheless, the experience of the movement in Greece is very important to us. As is the building of wider Balkan networks of solidarity.

In a context of rampant nationalism, how can anarchists connect with “the” people without tacitly approving nationalist politics?

We should not perceive “the people” as an abstract entity like “the Nation,” but as ordinary people with their own local, everyday, “small” but very important issues and problems. In that sense, a group of radicals active in their local community is not something separate from “the people.” When you have an approach like this you will always deal with people who are not anarchists or radicals, and also with some who espouse even nationalist or conservative views. But when you meet them individually and personally, you can understand where they are coming from better and they can also understand how your politics are different from the politics of the politicians—and although maybe they won’t agree with all your positions, they will understand them better. This doesn’t mean we should be tolerant of nationalism—just the opposite!—but it means that in order to build a social movement based on solidarity we must engage with the local community and “face towards it.” Maybe this sounds simplistic, but this is the way I see it now.

What relationships do different nationalist groups through former Yugoslavia have to each other? Do nationalist groups in former Yugoslavia focus more on fighting against each other, or against radicals and immigrants? What can we learn from this?

Well, they hate each other, of course—not only because of the recent wars but also because their nationalist identities are very much based on hating each other. And the absurd but logical thing is that besides their mutual hate, their world views are identical.

Croatia is not a less nationalist society then Serbia, but in a way Croatian nationalists and fascists are currently less frustrated (although I believe fascists are “frustrated” by definition) than their Serbian counterparts, because the Croatian nationalist project was quite successful: they succeeded in creating an ethnically cleansed nation-state. On the other hand, Serbian nationalists and fascists are intensely frustrated by the total collapse of their nationalist project. So they turn their attention more to the “internal enemy”: LGBT people, Roma people, antifascists, anarchists, and other “traitors.” Of course, fascists always concentrate on the internal enemies, but less successful fascists do this more then others, in my opinion.

For example, it’s relatively safe for anarchists in Croatia to stage public events, but in Serbia you always need to think about potential assaults by the Nazis. Also, Zagreb Pride is a successful annual event despite fascists regularly organizing against it, but Belgrade Pride hasn’t happened yet. On the first attempt to organize it we had real lynching scenes in the streets of Belgrade, and last year it was banned by the authorities because “they didn’t feel that they could protect the participants.”

What strategies have worked in Serbia for building antifascist resistance? Which strategies have failed?

After a lot of discussions with my friends, I came to the following provisional conclusions.

One of the usual mistakes is to confuse “militancy” with radical politics, that is to believe that mere use of violence against the fascists means that your approach is politically radical. I already said that I think engaging the local community is crucial: thus the “fascist problem” must not be dealt with separately. If we connect the problem of fascism with the wider problems of capitalism and exploitation, which is not hard to do from an anarchist perspective because this is exactly the point of radical anti-fascism, and especially if we connect it to local manifestations of these wider problems, we create the conditions to re-establish anti-fascism as an important part of people’s struggles against oppression in general.

This does not exclude militancy, which is a necessity in combating fascism. But if we put mere violence in the center of our antifascist “politics” without a wider radical critique of capitalism and its concrete consequences, we risk being perceived as one hooligan or subcultural group fighting another—or even worse, as one group of extremists fighting another—and thus, becoming alienated from the rest of the society. And despite the use of violence being a necessity in combating fascism, it is also good to remember that the use of nonviolent radical methods is also essential in creating social movements.

Of course, I think it is equally bad to try to present your anti-fascism as “respectable” by refraining from violence and cleansing it of radical elements to build an alliance with liberal anti-fascism. In Serbia, this will produce the same results as I described above: alienation from the wider society.

Appendix A:

What are the origins of contemporary anarchism in Serbia?

The first Serbian socialist, Zivojin Zujovic (1838-1870), was a follower of Proudhon. Zujovic influenced the first Serbian socialist theoretician Svetozar Marković (1846-1875), a central figure of the early Serbian revolutionary movement. Marković was not an anarchist, but was significantly influenced by anarchism, and his ideas contain libertarian concepts. In the 1870s there was a large contingent of Serbian students with socialist leanings based in Zürich, Switzerland. Among them there were anarchists such as Jovan Zujovic, Manojlo Hrvacanin, and Kosta Ugrinic who were in close cooperation with Bakunin. Bakunin took part at the 1872 conference of Serbian socialists, and almost single-handedly wrote the draft of the program of the “Serbian socialist party.” Alongside Russian, Italian, and other anarchists, some of these anarchists, including Hrvacanin and Ugrinic, participated in the Bosnian insurrection against the Turkish occupiers in 1875. The leader of this revolutionary contingent of insurrectionists was the Serbian socialist Vasa Pelagic.

Later, followers of Svetozar Marković divided into a reformist Radical party including some former anarchists like Jovan Zujovic (who became minister of education in the Serbian government in 1905) and the revolutionary wing led by Mita Cenic (1851-1888), another non-anarchist influenced by anarchism. He was in fact a Nechayevist Blanqist: he knew Nechayev personally, and thought that true socialist ideal lies in the synthesis of Blanqui‘s and Proudhon’s ideas.

By the beginning of the 20th century the Radical party had completely transformed from a revolutionary group into a reformist party and finally into a conservative party, as Cenic had predicted. Between 1905 and the beginning of the First World War, thanks to the influence of Kropotkin’s ideas and anarcho-syndicalist efforts elsewhere in Europe, new anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist groups and papers appeared. A group of anarcho-syndicalists was also active inside the Serbian social democratic party.

The most prominent figures among the non-party anarcho-syndicalists were Krsta Cicvaric and Petar Munjic. Munjic was also the Serbian delegate at the 1907 anarchist conference in Amsterdam. Sima Markovic, one of the prominent members of the “party” anarcho-syndicalists (the “direktasi”), later became general secretary of the Communist Party. The anarcho-communist group was called Komuna.

All these groups worked and communicated with anarchists in the Vojvodina region (then part of Austro-Hungary, now of Serbia), where the Serbian anarchist Krsta Iskruljev operated, and also with anarchist members of Young Bosnia, the organization that assassinated Franz Ferdinand in 1914, as well as with Slovenian, Croatian, and Bulgarian anarchists. After the First World War, many of these anarchists became communists in the newly formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia; others became reformist socialists or even nationalists, like Cicvaric. Those who remained anarchists—such as the painter Sava Popovic, killed in 1942 by the Gestapo in Belgrade—were quite isolated.

After the Second World War and as a result of the largest antifascist insurrection in Europe, a socialist Yugoslavia was formed and soon broke its ties with the Soviet Union. In the 1960s there was some renewed interest in anarchist ideas, especially after the 1968 events in Belgrade and Zagreb. The Praxis group of Marxist humanist dissidents also appeared during the 1960s. Some of the theoreticians of the group had written quite positively about anarchism, and some anarchist books were published. One of the younger people from Praxis, Trivo Indjic, was an anarchist, and later Zoran Djindic, a younger person close to the Praxis group, also considered himself to be an anarchist. Filmmakers connected to the Yugoslav “black wave” cinema at the time, such as Makavejev, Stojanovic, and Zilnik, also espoused anarchist views. In that period, Left dissidents—Marxist humanists and some Trotskyists and anarchists—mostly moved inside closed discussion groups without any kind of contact with social movements. As in the Eastern Bloc, “social movements” were practically nonexistent.

When the Yugoslav crisis broke out in the 1990s many of these people converted to other ideologies such as nationalism or liberalism. In 1990, the former anarchist Djindjic joined some other Praxis members in founding the pro-capitalist Democratic party; within a couple of years he became the leader of the party. After October 5, 2000, he became the prime minister of Serbia, until he was killed by organized crime/secret police/nationalist elements in 2003.

Meanwhile, Indjic and a few other people from his generation joined some younger people in the Belgrade Libertarian Group. They were one of a few small anarchist groups that appeared in the 1990s; others included Torpedo in Smederevo, Kontrapunkt in Kraljevo, Crni Gavran (Black Raven) in Smederevska Palanka, and GLIB in Belgrade.

After 2000, Indjic became the Serbian ambassador to Spain; both the Belgrade Libertarian Group and GLIB disbanded. Kontrapunkt also disbanded and reassembled again in Belgrade; it still exists today as a completely different group, maintaining an alternative media website. Torpedo also disappeared. Some people from Torpedo and the GLIB later joined the Maoist Partija Rada (Party of Labor).

In 2002, the ASI (Anarcho-Syndicalist Initiative) was formed, and later the DSM (Another World is Possible) collective. The ASI is the Serbian section of the International Workers’ Association, and DSM was close to People’s Global Action; they organized a PGA conference in 2004 in Belgrade before eventually ceasing to exist.

Anarchists from Novi Sad are mainly active inside AFANS (Antifascist Action of Novi Sad). For a while the group Freedom Fight, which works closely with some Serbian workers groups, was close to anarchist politics and published the Balkan edition of Z Magazine. After 2000, Anarhija/blok 45 publishing initiative also appeared; they publish books that are not sold but distributed based on the principles of gift economics. Some of the newer groups include Antifa BGD, Queer Belgrade, Antifa Zrenjanin, and Zluradi Paradi, which has already translated and published about fifty anarchist pamphlets.

For more information about anarchist activity in Serbia:

You can contact us at a.zrenjanin@gmail.com.

Also, the 5th Balkan Anarchist Bookfair will take place in Zrenjanin October 29 to 31. Antifa Zrenjanin is organizing this with ZAF. Previous Balkan bookfairs occurred in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sofia, and last year in Athens and Thessaloniki. Send inquiries about the bookfair to balkanbookfair2010@gmail.com.

Further Reading

Appendix B:

Proxy War

from Rolling Thunder

In a civil war, rival factions often seek assistance from foreign governments; the latter, of course, have agendas of their own, and what might have appeared a simple local conflict becomes a tangled international intrigue.

Once upon a time, when the governments of different nations generally perceived themselves to have distinct interests, open warfare was relatively common. As individual nations consolidated themselves into blocs held in check by other blocs (see Mutually Assured Destruction), proxy war increasingly replaced open conflict. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, was largely fought by proxy on battlefields such as Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, and Nicaragua. Afghanistan was one of the last of these, and subsequent hostilities between the mujahideen and their one-time sponsors illustrate the hazards of proxy warfare.

One cannot understand the history of resistance without taking into account how many movements and organizations have received foreign aid. For example, after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, it came out that the Red Army Faction, West Germany’s longest-running armed resistance group, had been funded, equipped, and sheltered by the notoriously repressive East German Stasi, despite the ostensibly conflicting agendas of the RAF and DDR. Likewise, the Serbian group Otpor, known for mobilizing grass-roots resistance to the regime of Slobodan Milošević that culminated in the storming of the capital building and the offices of state television, received millions of dollars from organizations affiliated with the US government. The countless copycat groups that appeared afterwards across Eastern Europe—Georgia’s Kmara, Russia’s Oborona, Zubr in Belarus, Pora in the Ukraine—could be seen as youth movements struggling against repressive governments or as front groups for foreign powers, depending on one’s vantage point. Even when they did represent genuine local movements, it was easy for their enemies to portray them as pawns of Western corporate interests.

Since the end of the Cold War, international conflicts are no longer framed in binary terms; instead, they manifest themselves as a global majority attempting to rein in a “rogue state” such as Iraq or North Korea. Rather than openly contending for ascendancy, governments are working together more and more to deepen and fortify the dominion of hierarchical power. Statist and state-sponsored revolutionary struggles are less common than they were forty years ago—in a globalized market, they’re too messy and unpredictable to be worth the trouble. It follows that the revolutionaries of the future will probably have to do without government backing.

This is not necessarily for the worse. State sponsorship is at best a mixed blessing, even for those who don’t oppose state power on principle. In the Spanish Civil War, a classic example of proxy war, the Soviet Union backed the communist elements of the Republican forces, while Hitler and Mussolini backed Franco; when Stalin had to appease Hitler to serve Soviet interests, he forced the Spanish communists to sabotage their own revolution, taking down the anarchists and the rest of the Republicans with them. Lacking sponsorship of their own, Spanish anarchists were at a tremendous disadvantage—not so much against the fascists as against their own supposed allies. When the lure of foreign funding no longer exists and all the governments of the world band together to put down uprisings, anarchists will come into our own as the only ones capable of revolutionary struggle.

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.

We knew that Steve would never stand in the way of a benefit for Scott and Carrie no matter how personally humiliating it was. So we sent out a top secret email soliciting pledges to their legal fund on the condition that Steve record a folk punk album. We hoped to reach $1000 worth of pledges, but within a week we had more than $2000—everybody wanted in on this prank! We broke the news at the last show of a From the Depths tour: picture a wild crowd waving fistfulls of dollar bills, holding signs reading “Don’t let us down!” and chanting “STEVE! STEVE!” A dumbfounded Steve was ceremoniously presented with a banjo and eventually stuttered that the album would be recorded, to the glee of all.

Performing under the nom de shame “Spook Rat,” Steve has now completed the recording. Hearing Steve’s anguished voice belting out these tuneless anthems warms our wicked hearts—Steve is a highly trained musician and a perfectionist who never dared sing a note until now. And the album does not disappoint: it’s at least as funny as the prank itself! Borrowing from Umlaut, plagiarizing Manowar, and covering Kool Keith, Spook Rat mercilessly satirizes folk punk, anarchist subculture, and everything else within reach. “Drunk Dialing Legal Support” and “You Say Oogle like It’s a Bad Thing” are destined to become timeless classics, while “Deth 2 Folk Punk” is more introspective, capturing Steve’s meditations on life’s inescapable tragedies.

So, to Steve’s eternal misery and mortification, we present “The Shape of Bagels to Come,” Spook Rat’s magnum opus:

Spook Rat: “The Shape of Bagels to Come” 10-track album, complete with PDF liner notes [30 MB].

To quote the insert, “SHAME on anyone who listens to this without donating their life savings to prisoners!” Click here to make a donation to Scott and Carrie’s support campaign via Paypal.

The beauty of this tactic is that it can draw money from outside politicized circles; we raised money from people who would not otherwise have donated a cent to Scott or Carrie. Traditional fundraising tactics usually require political sympathies on the part of those at whom the appeal is directed. This one requires only two people who give a damn about anything: the organizer of the prank and the victim. We call on all anarchists who find our story entertaining to commence testing this method out in their own social groups immediately.

When we say that we are prepared to go to any length to support our prisoners and overthrow capitalism, we don’t just mean we’re willing to break things or go to jail or get killed. We also mean we’re ready to invent brand new tactics and even have fun if that’s what it takes—we mean that nothing is sacred, including our friends and our pious notions about anarchist organizing. When it comes to maintaining long-term defendant and prisoner support, a little fun might not hurt.

-
The unfortunate Steve attending a Renaissance-themed wedding

The Original Top Secret Fundraising Plea

Famed bassist of From the Depths and Requiem and guitarist of Network of Terror, Steve is an amazing musician and can play almost every instrument there is.

For some reason, Steve hates folk punk. It drives Steve crazy! Steve is a funny person who loves to hate things. Sometimes we speculate that Steve loves the same things Steve hates, because it makes Steve so happy not to like things.

But Steve cares a lot about Scott DeMuth and Carrie Feldman, the two young people alleged by the FBI to have something to do with an Animal Liberation Front action in Iowa in 2004. Scott and Carrie languish in jail, even though the event in question happened when they were barely in high school.

We have a crazy idea. We’re soliciting pledges for people to promise to donate a certain amount of money to the support fund for Scott and Carrie, on the condition that Steve records a folk punk album. When we’ve got $1000 pledged, we’ll break the news to Steve, who will have no choice except to record the album. We’ve already raised hundreds of dollars—we’re close and just need a little help!

If you like folk punk

Steve is a great musician and is bound to record an album that will shoot to the top of the folk punk charts, knocking Ryan Harvey out of #1.

If you don’t like folk punk

Life gives you lemons, make lemonade! Even folk punk can serve a purpose when it comes to offering legal support to political prisoners—and playing practical jokes on our friends.

If you like Steve

Show you care by helping out Steve’s friends, and playing this teasing trick!

If you don’t like Steve

This prank will mortify Steve! Just imagine Steve’s reaction when Steve finds out that Steve has to record a folk punk album or deny friends $1000+ of funds they desperately need.

If you like defending targets of state repression

This is an opportunity to break exciting new ground in prisoner support! If pranks like this can be tied to prisoner support projects, it will open up broad new horizons for fundraising and spreading awareness. This isn’t just about Scott and Carrie—it’s about the future of prisoner support!

If you don’t care about defending targets of state repression

Then fuck off!

To participate, just email rollingthunder@crimethinc.com and tell how much you can pledge. We’ll contact you when we’ve reached $1000 and can break the news to Steve. Everyone is invited to the surprise party at which we will make the announcement.

Feel free to forward this email to others you trust. Thanks so much, everyone!

Testimonials

“Thank you all so much! We are so thrilled and honored that Steve is doing this for Carrie and Scott. It’s a huge help. And we can’t wait to hear the album!”
-Support Committee for Carrie Feldman

“This is a significant contribution to Scott’s struggle for justice, and for justice for all peoples.”
-Family and Friends of Scott DeMuth [apocryphal]

“I hate folk too, but I like making people suffer, especially my friends!”
-Bryan Funck of Thou

“This is the best idea ever. No really, EVARRRR.”
-Anonymous supporter