Fed up with your job, or stressed because you can’t find one? Daydreaming of a world off the clock? Tune in to the second episode of the Ex-Worker, our twice-monthly podcast of anarchist ideas and action.

Why is this podcast called “the Ex-Worker”? In this episode, hosts Alanis and Clara join a friend in a café to discuss work and how it works, in the first installment of our series exploring anarchist critiques of capitalism. Other features include a special report on 2013 May Day actions around the world, a review of Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch,” and an interview and reportback from a Canadian anarcha-feminist conference, as well as news and upcoming events, with music from Underground Reverie.

Interested? Download the episode or stream it online or read the full transcript. You can also subscribe in iTunes here or just add the feed URL to your podcast player of choice. We’ll be releasing a new episode on the first and third Sunday of every month, so stay tuned!

To celebrate May Day, we present the debut episode of the Ex-Worker, a twice-monthly anarchist podcast.

Each episode of the Ex-Worker offers an in-depth look at a different field of anarchist thinking and practice, rounding it off with news, reviews, profiles of current anarchist projects, upcoming events, and more. This episode focuses on the anarchist roots of May Day as a radical workers’ holiday, starting with the Haymarket affair of 1886. It also includes a profile of the Lucy Parsons Center in Boston, a review of the journal Modern Slavery: The Libertarian Critique of Civilization, brand new music from Underground Reverie, and a great deal more.

If you’re curious about anarchist ideas, history, and current practices—tune in! You can also subscribe in iTunes here or just add the feed URL to your podcast player of choice.

Sexual assault and abuse continue to plague anarchist circles and spaces. In response, we’ve developed processes to hold each other accountable outside of the state. But why can’t we seem to get them right? Our newest feature, Accounting for Ourselves, examines the context in which these community accountability models emerged, analyzes the pitfalls we’ve encountered in trying to apply them, and proposes new directions for our resistance.

Accounting for Ourselves: Breaking the Impasse Around Assault and Abuse in Anarchist Scenes

Printable ’zine (PDF; 750 KB)

Online reading ’zine version (PDF; 450 KB)

This is not intended to serve as an accessible introduction to community accountability processes; it assumes that you have some knowledge of what they are and how they work. If you don’t, here is a reading list offering thorough background.

To celebrate this year’s Steal Something from Work Day, we present a critical essay on the possibilities and limitations of stealing time at work as a revolutionary practice. Our contributor is one of the countless grad students who have better odds of participating in an anarchist revolution than landing a tenure track position. Like anything stolen from work, this text bears the imprint of the context in which it was created—yet hints at what it will take to abolish that context. Thieves of time, one more effort to steal back the world!

Meanwhile: Steal Something from Work Day auf Deutsch.

A Theft or Work?

Why Steal Something from Work Day Means Burn Down the Internet

La Perruque, “the Wig”

It is impossible to steal from work. If you are at work, you are either an employee or a boss, or else both. A boss cannot steal from work because he or she already owns the apparatus of production; an employee cannot steal from work because working means being part of that apparatus. If I get away with it, the staplers and printer cartridges my bag are just a category mistake, a peculiar misgrouping of my little hands with other company property. If I don’t, they are a trail of evidence proving that I was never really an employee.

The labor of workplace theft is a ruse, but the ruse rouses. The soul is an engine calibrated for pursuing the impossible: as long as capitalism makes equipment out of people, people will make off with equipment. This is a sign of life. The question is how the ruse relates to capitalism, how capitalism absorbs and reverses it, and whether the ruse can help us to abolish capitalism.

Let’s begin with the labor of stealing back your time, if only because that may be your primary workplace activity. Michel de Certeau, a hybrid Marxist/Jesuit philosopher of language whose specialties included May ’68 and late-medieval demon possession, discusses this in The Practice of Everyday Life:

Take, for example, what in France is called la perruque, “the wig.” La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on “company time” or as complex as a cabinet maker’s “borrowing” a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room.

Trickery and Domination

For de Certeau, la perruque is exemplary of “tactics,” as opposed to “strategy.” The difference between the two is central to his analysis of how power functions everywhere from the factory and the kitchen to language itself:

Strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces… whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces.

His basic insight will be as familiar to dishwashers lolling in the locker room as to conspirators planning revolutions:

The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection: it is a maneuver “within the enemy’s field of vision,” … and within enemy territory. It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a distinct, visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow.

Since de Certeau was writing in the 1980s, computers have rapidly replaced both letters and lathes in our workplaces. Digital spaces may operate differently than the ones he was examining. Yet the problem is not just that de Certeau was writing thirty years ago, but that he presumed an eternal present. The space of tactics, he says,

takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment.

The subject of de Certeau’s analysis turns the ”actual order of things” to his or her “own ends, without any illusion that it will change any time soon.” And de Certeau seems to agree: tactics can evade, subvert, and defy structures, but not destroy them. De Certeau sounds like King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 2:18-26, presenting a work/play dialectic in a closed and unchangeable universe. As far as de Certeau can see, free moments are free, but they are doomed to remain forever transitory: born to lose. Vanity of vanity, nothing is new under the sun.

For worker/theorists who both enjoy the ruse of workplace theft and refuse a “realism” that cannot envision the abolition of the workplace, is there any way to retain de Certeau’s insights without his assumption of a static universe? He is, after all, a fine theorist of secret games like ours.

Or, to use de Certeau’s metaphor, though our tactic is inevitably immersed in and permeated by its surroundings, can we insinuate ourselves like worms into a place from which la perruque could constitute revolutionary sabotage?

Can the Master’s Degree Dismantle the Master’s House?

A good Jesuit, de Certeau flourishes a mind like a filigree of silver: he is refined toward ornate visionary practice and ordered instruction. To be crude, he’s a fancy poststructuralist academic, and he concisely presents the ethos of the well-meaning academic leftist:

If one does not expect a revolution to transform the laws of history, how is it possible to foil here and now the social hierarchization which organizes scientific work on popular cultures and repeats itself in that work? The resurgence of “popular” practices within industrial and scientific modernity indicates the paths that might be taken by a transformation of the object of our study and the place from which we study it.

He presents the academy as a place where la perruque can have different effects, precisely because, in a regime grounded in science, the university is the factory that produces the systems of control:

Let us try to make a perruque in the economic system whose rules and hierarchies are repeated, as always, in scientific institutions. In the area of scientific research (which defines the current order of knowledge), working with its machines and making use of its scraps, we can divert the time owed to the institution.

So here we have the Poststructuralist Battle Plan:

1) Gain access to the means of academic production;
2) Escape the space of strategy by situating oneself as a thief;
3) ????
4) Prophet.

De Certeau claims that as (social) scientists, academics can make clandestine use of science, the means by which everyday life is produced, and thus undermine the structural difference between the theoretical remove of strategy and the immersed immediacy of tactics. It sounds so tantalizingly like sabotage that even those who dream of “a revolution to transform the laws of history” could see the value of pursuing an MA in Poststructural Theory.

If shops have lathes, what could we use at a university? Funding, projectors, libraries, food, photocopiers, scanners, USB voice recorders, staplers… bricks and ivy! The academy is an armory waiting to be raided.

But we should be suspicious of this plan because the most expensive piece of academic machinery is the well-exercised brain. A stapler can be removed from its post, but prying your brain loose from the system in which you have immersed it is something else entirely. You never actually arrive at the moment when you have just stolen a graduate-student brain. The moment, instead, is always either the discovery that this was not in fact a graduate student brain, but the brain of an unemployed writer with an unpalatably narrow range of expertise, or the expansion of the academy to incorporate a range of once-threatening ideas. 

Ethnographically, de Certeau’s plan is unconvincing for other reasons. The college town in which I write has a healthy infoshop, still selling shirts announcing the now departed presence of the 99% movement, and continuing to engineer tactics against ecocide, homophobia, and other contemporary faces of hierarchy. But neither that shop, nor that fleeting movement, nor the tactics that flow through it are significantly enhanced by the thousands of college students a few blocks away. The marks of la perruque are all over the classroom—professors and students working to use the academic machinery against itself and other hierarchical structures. Personally, I have both taught and attended courses that teach potent radical texts. Students who get high marks for understanding Marx, Bakunin, Fanon, Debord, and Solanas are no more likely than anyone else to engage in the struggles those texts endorse.

The university seems to be a machine that provokes people to commit a perruque in which they redirect their attention to structural inequalities, then neutralizes this by means of a flood of relativizing information. The now-harmless critique is administered to classrooms as a sort of vaccine against outbreaks of mobilizing rage, while technologies of cathartic distraction (beer, usually, with or without basketball) expel the remainder safely from the system.

And if you leave, it only gets worse: I have spent full years of what I occasionally pass off as an academic life diverting my energy and resources into sneakery and tactics. The university cannot be drained in this way.

Elsewhere, de Certeau seemed to understand this tendency of the university to reabsorb subversion quite well. He understands, for instance, that the historian “has recieved from society an exorcist’s task. He is asked to eliminate the danger of the other… ejecting those dangerous individuals from the social body, and keeping them temporarily or permanently isolated.” In observing how the student riots of 1968 were neutralized, de Certeau indicts the academy, and notes how the students in revolt were later decried for their limited vocabulary of “two dozen words” like “consumer society,” “repression,” and “contestation.” Good words, but the University will demand that you use so many words that they cannot be used for anything in particular. 

There was a graduate student from the anthropology department, a self-described Marxist, who came frequently to our Occupy encampment. He would tell us that if we really wanted to change things we would go home and read more theory.

This is not a diploma

100% Time

So la perruque of writing about la perruque doesn’t constitute sabotage. Yet the problem is not the academy. De Certeau is right in asserting that nearly everyone sneaks time from work to do their own projects, even if they are being watched. But somehow millions of people running errands in company cars, making snacks from spare ingredients, and sexting while “on the clock” have failed to abolish capitalism.

Every workplace has two reflexes that work to prevent la perruque from damaging the functioning of the system. Let’s call these reflexes release and recapture.

Release is a simple reflex. In the academy, it takes the form of scheduled forgetting, and in most non-academic jobs it is described poetically as “the blind eye.” La perruque is simply forgotten so the system can continue as it was before. Jobs that can be done by machines already are, so the remaining jobs must accommodate the fact that humans require play. Play: that is, a space of free movement so the system can adjust to inevitable tiny changes without shattering. A gear also requires play; humans just require more play than gears, and tend to fracture more dramatically when they are not provided with it. This should not be mistaken for freedom any more than the fact that skyscrapers sway from side to side in the wind should be mistaken for a “small victory” for the forces of horizontal movement. 

Recapture is a more complex reflex, and while it is ancient, it seems to be becoming more important these days. We can see historical traces of recapture, for instance, where certain pre-existing facets of slave religions have been nurtured by masters in order to promote docility. Let’s consider how recapture relates to la perruque.

In 1948, the corporation 3M began encouraging employees to use 15% of work time to do any project they want, so long as it ultimately benefited 3M. It was in this creative space that a 3M employee invented the Post-it note, making the corporation countless millions. Today, Google encourages its employees to spend 20% of their time thus; that recapture of free time created gmail.

The nightmare capitalism of the future will consist only of “100% Time,” constant freedom under total capture.

Or maybe that future is already here. Consider your own recent moments of la perruque. What were you doing? Think hard, because some of your favorite activities may have been designed to leave no harsh mnemonic trace. Were you fiddling around online?

Workers who engage in tactics of la perruque, but use the reclaimed hours to participate in a digital capitalism that commodifies user attention, merely sneak from one job to do another. In 2013, we call it “social media”—in thirty years, it will have no name. Would that we had more lathes. Because we cannot build with computers, we ply games like Farmville or World of Warcraft, becoming background objects for other players; we add stars and comments to Amazon products improving their sales; we self-surveil with Facebook; and we help search engines anticipate human desires by performing as a human test audience for them.

Tactics are immanent, whereas strategy is transcendent, so la perruque is always a movement down and in. With ”social media,” we have learned to enjoy the practice of fleeing from a larger job into a smaller one nested within it. Facebook’s interface is surprisingly honest: a sort of matryoshka doll that recedes deeper and deeper toward the ends of attention. Only on the middle level, where one gathers and becomes a sort of currency counted in “friends,” does this work comprise what Julian Assange has called the “most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” The smaller jobs of glancing at ads, which finances the appalling and pleasurable spy machine, are too small to remember. Imagine a book stamping on a human face forever.

As an aside, the video game industry is a phenomenally successful experiment in recapture by the military-industrial complex. Some argue that the first game was Tennis for Two (1958), created on a computer properly used to calculate missile trajectories, but most claim it was Spacewar! (1962), created by MIT’s military-funded computer labs and spread widely through the networked “ARPA community.” This military organization, famous for creating the Internet, spread Spacewar! as part of their general endorsement of “blue sky mode research”: they gave their employees nearly total freedom and funding, and fired them if they failed to produce lethal results. Perhaps in 1963, someone thought the proliferation of video games was too wasteful a perruque. But twenty years later, Ronald Regan revealed that the Air Force regarded Atari as military training for the masses: “Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The Air Force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.”

It is has been a long recapture, but a successful one: 40 years after the release of Spacewar!, America’s Army became the name of both a murderous force of empire and the video game it uses as an official training and recruitment device.
      

The Potlatch: Destructive Gifts

What, then, can we do? Can any perruque oppose the regime of 100% Time? 

De Certeau offers a hint. La perruque is 

no doubt related to the potlatch described by Mauss, an interplay of voluntary allowances that counts on reciprocity and organizes a social network articulated by the “obligation to give.” … It survives in our economy, though on its margins or in its interstices. It is even developing, although held to be illegitimate, within modern market economy… the loss that was voluntary in a gift economy is transformed into a transgression in a profit economy: it appears as an excess (a waste), a challenge (a rejection of profit), or a crime (an attack on property).

Waste, challenge, and crime! This sounds quite like how we reclaim our time “on the clock,” but where does de Certeau find the “obligation to give” in la perruque? The love letter and the family furniture he mentioned in his first example sound generous, but certainly many forms of la perruque are like masturbation in employee bathrooms—unlike anything we would call “generosity.” Taking a closer look, we see that de Certeau is directing our attention to Marcel Mauss’s ethnographic conception of “the gift.”

Mauss hoped to use ethnography to show that capitalism is neither natural nor complete, that “Apparently there has never existed… anything that might resemble what is called a ‘natural economy,’” no matter how much capitalism asserts itself as a system of natural (that is, rational, or at least non-magical) exchange. One of his most powerful tools for this purpose was his analysis of the potlatch, a cycle of ritual gifting among the indigenous Kwakiutl people of the American Northwest. The principle was simple (more so in Mauss’s academic reduction, certainly, than in Kwakiutl reality): to receive a gift is to take on an obligation that must be paid with interest. So gifting spirals. We are weighed down by generosity, and collective efforts to relieve ourselves produce spirals of accelerating gifting. A madness of generosity.

It is not clear why de Certeau, writing in the 1980s, saw this in la perruque, but it should be familiar to anyone mired in Facebook. The gift of “friendship” is an obligation, as is Farmville manure, or mentions by friends. Social media is already a potlatch. We have created 100% Time by trying to rid ourselves of the curse of free time.

But Mauss’s description of the potlatch gives us one more hint:

In a certain number of cases, it is not even a question of giving and returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gift to be reciprocated. Whole boxes of olachen (candlefish) oil or whale oil are burnt, as are houses and thousands of blankets. The most valuable copper objects are broken and thrown in to the water, in order to put down and to ‘flatten’ one’s rival.

Recent historians have suggested that the potlatch only reached this immolative form when the Kwakiutl were confronted with the crisis of colonization. Previously, the spirals of gifting had been acquisitive rather than destructive. Perhaps this is true. And perhaps there is a kind of gift spiral that can only emerge in 100% Time, in which it will not be enough to waste the hours we reclaim, nor to share them, but within which a new relation to time must emerge. Perhaps in the furtive laboratories where tactics are invented, we are only now discovering a mode of laziness that manifests as revolutionary sabotage. Perhaps here can we finally put on la perruque to end all perruque.

“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”

“Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating.”

Resources

De Certeau, The Practice of Every Day Life
 
Mauss, The Gift

Bataille, The Accursed Share

This morning, environmental activist Daniel McGowan was taken back to jail despite his exemplary parole record, presumably in retaliation for his recent article on the secretive Communications Management Units the US prison system uses to silence political prisoners.

Daniel’s article cites court documents confirming that, during his incarceration for environmentally motivated direct action, Daniel was moved to a CMU to punish him for expressing his political views. Despite first facing the threat of a life sentence, and then serving years in the CMU with very little contact with the outside world, Daniel has never cooperated with efforts to incriminate other activists, nor ceased to speak his mind. The US government is determined to make an example of Daniel for this. We too might hold him up as an example, showing that no amount of threats and coercion can break the spirit of a person determined to stand up to oppression.

There are two and a half million people in prison in the US, more than there were in the gulags at the height of Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union. As in the Soviet Union, the authorities do everything they can to keep this population invisible: to prevent them from communicating with the rest of society so most people never learn how much violence and coercion are necessary to maintain this social order.

We should respond to attempts to silence Daniel and others like him by listening to what they have to say about what is going on in America’s prisons–and by doing our part to make it impossible for the authorities to silence anyone.

Background

Daniel’s original article from within the CMU, “Tales from Inside the US Gitmo”

Our overview of Operation Backfire, in which Daniel was arrested, “Green Scared?”

Update

Daniel’s attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights just released this statement:

Daniel McGowan has been released from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was taken into custody yesterday and is back at the halfway house where he has been residing since his release from prison in December. Yesterday, Daniel was given an “incident report” indicating that his Huffington Post blog post, “Court Documents Prove I Was Sent to Communication Management Units (CMU) for My Political Speech,” violated a BOP regulation prohibiting inmates from “publishing under a byline.” The BOP regulation in question was declared unconstitutional by a federal court in 2007, and eliminated by the BOP in 2010. After we brought this to the BOP’s attention, the incident report was expunged.

At long last, we’re finally out of Rolling Thunder #6, and accordingly, a free, complete PDF of the issue is now available. This issue is one of my personal favorites, filled with spectacular photography and a diverse selection of writings based around the theme of experimentation. From Swedish anarchists literally building a social center to a detailed look at anarchist organizing in NYC, this issue has many hours of good reading between its covers.

And as the print edition of RT #6 sails off into the sunset, the newest issue from this past summer, RT #10, has now been added to the Rolling Thunder Bundle, where you can now get the last four issues for just $10. Happy reading!

Let no one accuse us of fiddling while Rome doesn’t burn! We’ve been hard at work on a new book that picks up where our others leave off, continuing our offensive against the status quo on the terrain of language itself.

In the tradition of The Devil’s Dictionary, our Contradictionary assembles a wide range of wit and whimsy. This is no mere miscellany, but a lighthearted work of serious literature, concentrating a wealth of ideas and history into aphorisms and anecdotes.

Whence do Stockholm Syndrome and Broken Window Theory derive their names? What is the common root of aristocracy and democracy? Who gets diagnosed with Anarchia and Drapetomania? How did voting kill Edgar Allen Poe, and why is a crater on the dark side of the moon named for the man who blew up the Tsar? Alternately scathing and sublime, Contradictionary pulls back the curtain from the war within every word, revealing the conflict behind the façade of the commonplace.

We’re supplementing this book online with a series of Contradictionary entries. The first ones are Prefiguration, Drapetomania, and Concessions.

 

The first thousand orders come with a free bookmark and pencil to celebrate the book’s release. If you are reading this, they are still available.

For months now, three courageous individuals—Matt Duran, Katherine Olejnik, and Maddy Pfeiffer—have been held captive in the Federal Detention Center in Seatac, Washington for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury currently underway in Washington state. Another person, Kerry Cunneen, has been subpoenaed but declines to appear. Convened in March of 2012, the grand jury is clearly intended to discourage anarchist activity, which has proliferated on the West Coast over the past few years.

In the following statement, we emphasize the urgency of offensive as well as defensive strategies, and present new support materials to draw attention to the grand jury resisters. This situation has been going on for many months now, but it’s important to renew public awareness on a regular basis.

Support Material

Corina Dross has created a postcard to raise funds for the Committee Against Political Repression’s fund for material and legal support for Grand Jury resisters. We are offering pdfs of a handbill and of a color version of the poster, in order that supporters around the world might print them out and distribute them.

11×17 Color poster [754kb]   :   Half-size Handbill [748kb]

Postcard text:

Grand juries are used as a tool to coerce people to provide testimony to the authorities about their friends or acquaintances, whether or not they are involved in illegal activity. Those who refuse to testify may be held in jail for the duration of the grand jury—often a year or more—for choosing to protect their privacy and the privacy of others.

Recently, a grand jury has been convened in the northwest to investigate anarchist organizing. Three courageous young people are imprisoned for refusing to cooperate, while more subpoenas are forthcoming.

Let’s show the investigators that our lives and friendships are none of their business. Support the grand jury resisters!

Why Solidarity Means Attack

Until someone takes a step to oppose them, the tragedies that are heaped upon us daily cannot even be recognized as tragedies—they remain invisible, merging with a sea of other misfortunes, a few more threads in the grey fabric of existence. That’s life. 

This is why it doesn’t make sense to premise the right to act on victimhood: today’s outrages will be taken for granted tomorrow. All it takes to cease being recognized as a victim is to suffer the same offense long enough that everyone gets used to it. Think of all the atrocities everyone is resigned to today! Justifying our actions as responses grounds them on an ever-receding foundation.

So it is always the right time to act out, to revolt against age-old tragedies as well as brand new ones—even if the news of the day offers no rationale for our actions. If we want evictions, incarceration, deforestation, and genocide to be recognized as tragic, we have to attack their perpetrators ceaselessly. It is too easy to become accustomed to our cramped conditions, the tiny bubbles of freedom that remain to the obedient. Only in straining against the walls of our cages can we rediscover in our bodies that we were made for forests and open fields.

Likewise, when new tragedies are forced on us, if we do not wish to be alone in our outrage, we have to act immediately: to show to others that these are not just reprehensible but intolerable. If we do this, others may feel entitled to do the same—and together, we will be able to feel something that would have been impossible otherwise: that we deserve better. We remember Alexis Grigoropoulos, but not the thousands of people shot by police since his murder. Tragically, a tragedy is not a tragedy unless we respond appropriately.

For these reasons, we applaud the anti-capitalist march that took place in Seattle on May Day 2012, during which hundreds of people cheered as a black bloc destroyed government and corporate property. Capitalism and the state are responsible for most of the needless suffering taking place on this earth, but this will remain invisible unless we strike against them openly. It is all too rare for people to take the offensive and give shape to the discontent seething below the surface of this society.

The empire always strikes back, and a large number of people have been subpoenaed to a Washington State grand jury intended to map anarchist activity and relationships. Six of these subpoenas have been served; several more subpoenas are known to exist, but have not been successfully served. The government has very little to show for this effort, as all but one of the subpoenaed have refused to cooperate in any way and the entire operation is proving to be a media debacle.

In addition to commending the resisters, we extend our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has acted out in solidarity with the people being held captive in Washington. This kidnapping might otherwise have passed unnoticed, like the imprisonments of nearly two and a half million more people in the United States—yet another blow to isolate and demoralize those who desire another world. Instead, it has become a rallying point for new acts of revolt. When we take practical steps against the injustices around us, we recognize ourselves in others’ attempts to do the same, and the state’s assault on them becomes an assault on us. Some of the most inspiring actions have been the ones that open space for revolt to spread, like the marches in Portland, Olympia, Atlanta, and Bloomington.

If you have not done anything yet to support the grand jury resisters, there is unfortunately still time. The more opposition this witch hunt generates, the more hesitant the state will be to use this tactic against others.

What You Can Do

-Write to the prisoners
-Donate to their legal support
-Organize solidarity actions
-Learn more about Matt Duran, Katherine Olejnik, and Maddy Pfeiffer
-Read the text of Kerry Cunneen’s powerful and defiant radio interview

…and strike against the system that kidnapped them!

Appendix: Solidarity Actions

As reported via saynothing.info, these are some of the actions to date that have been claimed in solidarity with the grand jury resisters.

I refuse to appear because I despise the state. They are working to undo
 everything that Anarchists stand for. I refuse to help them on the principle 
that prisons should be abolished. I refuse them because I am in complete
support of the crimes they are investigating. I refuse them with a visceral
 hatred for the law and all of the lives they ruin. I am glad for the little bit of
 resistance I can provide in denying them information. I respect and admire
 Matt, Kteeo and Maddy for making the sacrifice that is involved in sitting for 
an undetermined jail sentence. I just am not personally willing to take a
 step in the direction of my own jail cell.

-Kerry Cunneen

We present here, in Arabic and in English, an open letter from participants in black bloc actions in the United States to participants in the Egyptian black bloc, aimed at initiating a dialogue beyond the exchange of youtube videos. This is of interest to everyone around the world struggling for liberation, so please print and distribute widely:

        Printable PDF in English [3.5 MB]                     Printable PDF in Arabic [3.7 MB]

The emergence of the black bloc in Egypt at this time should not surprise us as much as it surprises pacifists and authoritarians. The struggles of the 21st century will not be limited to nonviolent civil disobedience, nor to reformism; they are bound to involve open conflict with the state. Moreover, they will be increasingly international in scope and character. Whenever anyone anywhere around the world stands up for herself or himself—however awkwardly, however humbly—it sets a precedent for the next generation of resistance. Let’s rise to the occasion.

“Black Anger” by MC Sayed appeared on the two-year anniversary of the Egyptian uprising. These clumsy subtitles are part of our effort to facilitate intercontinental communication.

The criticisms of the black bloc in Egypt are all too familiar. Those who have more privilege and power than you accuse you of being spoiled rich kids. Those who are not willing to run the same risks accuse you of cowardice. Those who have different goals than you complain that you are not strategic. Those for whom democracy means the amplification of their own voices insist that you should submit to majority rule in order to silence you. Those who depend on foreign military aid, who bow to foreign political pressure in selling out the people of Egypt, accuse you of importing foreign tactics. You are blamed for the violence of the police, when the police are always precisely as violent as they have to be to maintain their supremacy, and their ongoing violence is only visible because you resist it. Above all, authorities of all kinds do everything they can to isolate you from others who might resist.

To the Egyptian Black Bloc

from “black bloc anarchists” in the US

You strike the note—it sounds in us.

It is an honor to address you on account of your courage in the struggle still unfolding in Egypt.

For a decade and a half, we have participated in black bloc actions in the US and elsewhere around the world. Of course, we do not represent anyone or anything; the black bloc is a tactic, not a group—that is what makes it so frightening to our rulers. But on the basis of our experience with this tactic, we would like to share some of our perspectives in hopes of establishing a more explicit intercontinental dialogue.

We have already been in a kind of dialogue with you, exchanging signals of revolt across the ocean. We’ve circulated reports of your struggle here, and now we are seeing photos and videos of our actions appear in youtube collages from Egypt. But we want more dialogue than youtube collages allow. We want to be able to discuss strategy as well as tactics, and goals as well as strategy.

First and foremost: you are not alone. You are part of a struggle against oppressive power that is taking place all over the world. The same economy that is plundering Egypt wrecks our lives and land here in the US; the same networks of armed force that tear-gas you in Cairo maintain “order” in New York City. If we are to win anything in this struggle, we can only do so internationally.

It is embarrassing that it took us so long to address you in Arabic—that shows how unprepared we are for the opportunities history is offering. But that may change quickly in the coming years. It will have to.

We have gained our experience with black bloc tactics under what you might call adverse conditions—as a small minority acting against a stable power structure, without much support from the rest of society. The black bloc evolved in that context, and it is interesting to see it appear in a situation of more generalized revolt.

Indeed, the longevity of the black bloc surprises everyone; over and over it has been pronounced dead, yet it keeps coming back. This is because, like Anonymous, it expresses the spirit of our times. In an era when tremendous disparities are maintained by surveillance and policing, any meaningful movement is bound to involve anonymity and clashes with the authorities.

The black bloc is important because it gives that anonymity and antagonism a political content: it ties specific struggles against oppression to the possibility of a generalized struggle against all oppressive power. It is a coup to “brand” anonymous collective confrontation with the authorities as anarchist—this means that everyone who stands up for himself against the authorities must ask, sooner or later, what his relationship to others’ struggles is.

It is fitting that the black bloc emerged in Egypt on the two-year anniversary of an uprising that only replaced one tyranny with another. The problems caused by capitalism and government cannot be solved by a mere change of regimes. It will take a struggle from the ground up—the emergence of social formations that can defend themselves against government and capitalism. This is not a matter of addressing demands to those in power, and it is not something that can be won simply by attacking presidential palaces. It requires us to oppose the structures of domination everywhere they appear, shifting our strategy from mere protest to the assertion of another way of life.

The criticisms of the black bloc in Egypt are all too familiar to us—we have watched reactionaries read from this same script since 1999. You are blamed for the violence of the police, when the police are always precisely as violent as they have to be to maintain their supremacy, and their ongoing violence is only visible because you resist it. Those who have more privilege and power than you accuse you of being spoiled rich kids. Those who are not willing to run the same risks accuse you of cowardice. Those who have different goals than you complain that you are not strategic. Those for whom democracy means the amplification of their own voices insist that you should submit to majority rule in order to silence you. Those who depend on foreign military aid, who bow to foreign political pressure in selling out the people of Egypt, accuse you of importing foreign tactics. Above all, authorities of all kinds do everything they can to isolate you from others who might resist.

Indeed, in our experience, this is the greatest risk in using the black bloc tactic: in giving an identity to anonymity and struggle, it offers the authorities an opportunity to make an “other” out of us, to quarantine our revolt and our ideas. It is a mistake to view ourselves as separate from the rest of society. The black bloc is powerful and dangerous only so long as it remains a space of revolt that anyone can flow into—the tip of the iceberg of something much broader. Our rulers do not fear anarchists—they fear that anarchist values and practices will spread.

It is important not to impose a dichotomy between being honest about our goals and participating in movements larger than us. On one hand, we must be clear that we reject all forms of domination; if we do not, everyone will have to learn again and again how little police and the poverty they impose change from one government to the next. This is why we should not hide our values under the same vague banner of “democracy” that disguises others’ hunger for power: doing so only legitimizes the structures that will be used against us later. But at the same time, we have to maintain the openness that enables tactics and ideas to circulate. Anarchism is not an identity, it has no meaning in isolation; it is a relationship that must spread.

In the United States, anarchists have erred on both sides of this dichotomy. Often, we have served as shock troops and free labor for liberal causes, taking great risks to advance their agendas while failing to act on our own analysis. We hoped this would connect us to the rest of society, but connections that depend on us hiding our values are meaningless.

Other times, anarchists have acted as though we could accomplish our goals on our own, winding up in a private grudge match with the state that everyone else assumed had nothing to do with them. Certainly, we can’t wait for mass consensus to begin our project of revolt; we can only find others in revolt by rising up ourselves—but the point is to find others. Over and over, we’ve thought our own dreams too wild to propose, only to see other people enacting them spontaneously. In fact, the time is ripe for us to advance our proposals: capitalism is in crisis around the world, and soon billions will have to choose between totalitarianism and the kind of freedom no government can provide.

If it is true that the state cannot solve our problems, all who wish to wield its authority will discredit themselves once they assume power. The sooner all the Muslim Brotherhoods of the world associate themselves with the state the better: this will clarify things for those who do not yet understand why anyone would be an anarchist. When the opposition parties join the rulers in telling everyone to get out of the street and the streets remain full, this suggests that people are catching on. In this situation, anarchists could help turn regime change into social revolution, a full-scale transformation of everyday life.

The US government needs Egypt to have a government with whom to coordinate the resource extraction necessary for global capitalism. The black bloc scares them because it is not legible in their conception of politics—it offers no one to negotiate with. They want to bring all the political parties into “dialogue” in order to map everything in their structures of power; we want to take the struggle out of the hands of political parties entirely, establishing dialogue among people rather than with parties or governments. We seek to spread struggles in which we communicate with and inspire others directly, as you have inspired us.

We will continue this dialogue in the most meaningful way we can—by continuing to challenge the power structures here in the United States, which underpin those in Egypt and elsewhere around the world. But if any of you can send us reports from your struggles, or translate materials between English and Arabic, we would be glad to hear from you. May we meet in the streets of a stateless world.

rollingthunder @ crimethinc.com

Further Reading

10 Points on the Black Bloc [Video]
Introduction to the Black Bloc
Black Bloc Safety and Fashion Guide
Debate about Black Bloc Tactics

The digital version of the complete Catharsis discography, Light from a Dead Star, is now available online for downloading for just $10.

We have gone to great lengths to produce a definitive, comprehensive collection. The discography includes their debut 7”, the “Samsara” and “Passion” LPs, the split LPs with Gehenna and Newborn, and the final Catharsis song, “Absolution, ” recorded alongside “Arsonist’s Prayer” in their last session but never released–altogether totaling well over two hours of music. All the lyrics, manifestos and artwork for all the releases are also included, along with zine interviews, video footage, and posters, fliers, and handouts from various eras of the band’s existence.

Music files are available in both 256kpbs VBR AAC [289MB] & 192kbs MP3 [219MB]. All songs were remastered with a very light touch, encoded from the original files, and have complete metadata including album art and the song’s lyrics. Supplemental materials [493MB] are high-resolution PDFs and JPEGs and the video is a 688×512 H.264 MP4 file.

The 4-LP discography sets have sold out; we will send them out as soon as the vinyl arrives.

Catharsis in Baltimore, January 18, 2013

Catharsis in Brooklyn, January 19, 2013