The People Rebel

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

May Day 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Myfest Is Not Your Fest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Putting Down Roots, Escaping Plateaus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, April 28, Oakland

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

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

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

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

Sunday, April 29, Albany

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, April 30, San Francisco

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, May 1, Oakland

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

We hope that this series will help to clear up lingering confusion about the differences between democracy (a form of government) and anarchy (i.e., freedom). Democracy, even direct democracy, is not the same as self-determination. Democracy is premised on the idea that only one decision-making body should have legitimate authority, while anarchism proposes the decentralization of power: not just horizontality, but also autonomy.

Just as anticapitalism has entered public consciousness in the US since we published last year’s line of anti-capitalist posters, the coming year may see people looking for alternatives to democracy as well. It’s up to us to offer liberating possibilities, since the other alternatives to democracy are even more oppressive than it is.

What Does Democracy Mean?

Our forebears overthrew kings and dictators, but they didn’t abolish the institutions by which kings and dictators ruled: they democratized them. Yet whoever operates these institutions—whether it’s a king, a president, or an electorate—the experience on the receiving end is roughly the same. Laws, bureaucracy, and police came before democracy; they function the same way in a democracy as in a dictatorship. The only difference is that, because we can cast ballots about how they should be applied, we’re supposed to regard them as ours even when they’re used against us.

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Democracy means police. Democracy doesn’t just mean public participation in making decisions. It presumes that all power and legitimacy is vested in one decision-making structure, and it requires a way to impose those decisions.  As long as anyone might defy them, there have to be armed personnel to regulate, to discipline, to control.

Without police, there would be anarchy: people would act on their own initiative, only implementing decisions they felt to be in their best interest. Conflicts would have to be resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all parties involved, not suppressed by a gang with a monopoly on force.

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Democracy means borders. Democracy presumes a line between participants and outsiders, between legitimate and illegitimate. Only a fraction of the men could vote in ancient Athens; the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Citizenship still imposes a barrier between included and excluded, shutting over 10 million undocumented residents out of the decisions that shape their lives.

The liberal answer is to expand the lines of inclusion, extending rights and privileges until everyone is integrated into one vast democratic project. But as long as all power must flow through one bottleneck, there are bound to be imbalances and outsiders. The alternative would be anarchy: abolishing centralized power structures and all the borders they impose. Without borders, people would only live and work together of their own free will, flowing freely between communities without top-down control.

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Democracy means prisons. Those who don’t accept the authority of the state must be isolated, lest their disobedience spread to the rest of the population. We’re told that prisons protect us, but the only constant since their invention has been that they protect the state from those who might threaten it. In practice, by breaking up communities and fostering antisocial tendencies, they only endanger us—even those of us who aren’t behind bars.

Without prisons, there would be anarchy: people would have to work out conflicts directly rather than calling in the authorities, and it would no longer be possible to sweep the inequalities of this society under the rug.

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Democracy means surveillance. Democracy presumes transparency: a marketplace of ideas, in which decisions are made in the open. Of course, in an unequal society, transparency puts some people at risk—the employee who could be fired for expressing the wrong opinion, the immigrant who fears deportation—while the powerful can feign transparency as they make back-room deals. In practice, political transparency simply equips intelligence agencies to monitor the populace, preparing reprisals for when dissidents get out of hand—and what government could maintain its authority without intelligence agencies?

Without surveillance, there would be anarchy: people would say and do what they really believe in. Those who defend centralized power fear nothing more than privacy—the keeping of secrets—which they call conspiracy.

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Democracy means war. Democracy means constant competition. Just as corporations contend for resources in the marketplace, politicians and governments vie for power. When power is centralized, people have to attain domination over others in order to determine their own destinies. Those in power can only hold onto it by waging war perpetually against their own populations as well as foreign peoples: hence the National Guard troops brought back from Iraq to suppress domestic protests.

As long as we remain at a distance from our own potential, being governed rather than acting freely, being represented rather than acting on our own interests, people will seek power over each other as a substitute for self-determination. The alternative is anarchy: a world in which people fight only for themselves—not for empires, flags, or gods—and conflicts cannot produce hierarchy and oppression.

We have to be tireless in our critique of democracy, as the alternative people in this society intuitively fall back on against the excesses of capitalism. The more unpopular this is, the more important it is that we do it. Private property and government are the two great sacred cows of our age—the ones for which our lives and the earth itself are being sacrificed—and challenging the ways they monopolize legitimacy is one project, not two. They are two heads of the same beast; they cannot be beaten separately.

–Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy

For more ammunition: www.crimethinc.com/vote

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

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

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

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

We’d love to expand our photo gallery depicting these in action. If you see these stickers in use anywhere clever, please take a picture and email it to us, or better yet tweet it with the hashtag #votehere.

We gave away 1000 of these in a single day at last week’s Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair and we anticipate them going quickly. We’ll follow these up with a poster series in time for May Day.

Order the stickers here!

This year, April 15 falls on a Sunday, but that won’t stop people from participating—thanks to the shift from production to service sector employment, more people than ever find themselves working every day of the week. And in the wake of the financial recession, with millions struggling to get by, can you imagine how much worse off working folks would be if they didn’t steal from work? Here are some resources with which to help your community celebrate Steal Something from Work Day:

Steal Something from Work Day website
Steal Something from Work Day video and follow-up video
Frequently asked questions about stealing from work
Steal Something from Work Day theme song by Test Their Logik
Steal Something from Work Day journal: color reading PDF (4.3MB) and imposed B&W printing PDF (2.3MB)

We also send a shout out to the Steal from Work tumblr and to the book, Steal Stuff from Work. In addition, let’s take a moment to remember the 25 people killed in the chicken processing plant fire in Hamlet, North Carolina in 1991, as a result of the owners keeping the fire doors locked for fear that employees might pilfer a little of the food they were packaging. We observe Steal Something from Work Day because human life is more precious than capitalist profit.

To mark the occasion, we present this narrative of resistance from an insurgent service worker, Out Of Stock: Confessions Of A Grocery Store Guerrilla.

Out Of Stock:
Confessions Of A Grocery Store Guerrilla

This narrative is dedicated to the courageous individuals who attacked the Whole Foods during the general strike in Oakland on November 2011; whatever the papers say, many of us employees would be overjoyed if you paid a visit to our workplaces.

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My Name Is Carlos

I am twenty-eight years old. I am wearing a black apron in the canned food aisle of the well-known corporate natural foods grocery store at which I work. I’m staring into nothingness, reflecting on the decisions that have put me here. I am beyond depressed; I’ve reached that juncture where depression meets anger. I am hostile, reactionary, and dangerous.

I’m so lost in thought that I’m honestly unaware of the shoppers scuffling around me—until a customer interrupts to ask a question I had already heard many times since I had clocked in. I turn my blank stare upon her: “What?” She repeats the question and I cut her off, pointing to the empty space where the product should be; below it is a sign that announces, in very large decipherable letters, “Out Of Stock.” She commands me to go check in the back, obviously annoyed at my poor social skills.

I’ve been asked this question about a dozen times already; I let out a sigh through my clenched teeth. This customer isn’t happy with my reaction and asks for my name, since I’m not wearing a name badge like all the other employees. This is a threat. “My name?” I answer, drawing on all my resentment. “My name is Carlos. I work in the Bakery Department.” Two falsehoods.

Confused by my response, she heads straight to the customer service booth to submit a complaint. This is not the first time this has happened; I disappear to my hiding spot. Thus begins the career of Carlos, grocery store guerrilla and ghost in the machine, the shadow employee known throughout the store for disobedience, obstruction, and customer service performance art.

Death to Loss Prevention

I had been living in the same city for almost five years already and hadn’t yet made contact with other anarchists. It was an incredibly isolated phase of my life. Between the hours I spent working and recovering from work, I schemed plan after spectacular plan to break free from my loneliness, only to have them crushed when I stepped back through those sliding doors.

I often saw customers shoplifting; a shoplifter myself, I’d try to give them space, but I wasn’t the only one watching. The Loss Prevention Agent (LP) stalked the isles, attempting to blend in among the shoppers, though not much good at it. LPs are the scum of the retail industry, the vilest of would-be cops. I saw many taken into custody by these bounty hunters and eventually couldn’t stand passively by anymore; I began competing with the LP to get to the shoplifters first. This was incredibly risky: not only was I risking getting fired for preventing their apprehension, but I had to be secretive enough not to attract attention to any of the shoplifters I was attempting to make contact with.

One distinctive group that shopped infrequently at the store wore all black and weren’t particularly subtle about stealing. Often they were lucky enough to come in when the LP wasn’t working, but one evening the LP began creeping behind them from a distance. Somehow the middle-aged rent-a-cop did not attract their attention. I was desperate to approach the would-be shoplifters in black, but I knew that could mean getting caught myself, so I decided to start with the LP instead.

I walked to the back of the store and used the intercom to call for the LP by his first name, asking that he call me back at that number. Then while the LP attempted to return the call I headed to a different phone at another location in the store, from which I called for the LP over the intercom again. Miraculously, this little stunt bought just enough time for the shoplifters to leave untouched by the confused loss prevention agent.

Afterward, the LP and the store manager questioned me as to why I had called twice and never picked up. My answer was simple and easy enough to believe: I was trying to contact him about the group of shoplifters I had seen. When he didn’t answer in time, I decided to follow them and called from a phone in another location. This put the blame back on the LP. A few months later, I met those same shoplifters in black outside my workplace and told them about what had transpired. They are my friends now and although I no longer work at that store, I do what I can to keep them safe when we are together.

Sabotage on the Dairy Floor

Anyone who’s worked in a grocery store knows how miserable the dairy department can be. You’re stuck in a claustrophobic freezer room for eight hours, terrified you’ll be accidentally locked inside. No matter how many layers you wear, the cold creeps in and reminds you of all the things you’d rather be doing. On top of that, you’re forced to listen to terrible muzak blaring from the speakers, occasionally interrupted by a shrill voice to add to your aural torture.

Everyone was expected to work at least one dairy shift a week; although I did my best to evade it, I was often stuck stalking the dairy floor. On one of these shifts, I broke one of the large metal sliding doors by slamming it too hard in a fit of rage. I quickly found out that if one of these dairy doors stopped functioning correctly, I didn’t have to stock that particular door.

I wasn’t content reserving my anger for the dairy doors. My second target was those deafening speakers. On one of my closing shifts, after my bosses had left for the day, I took the opportunity to paint the connecting wires with clear nail polish I had pocketed from the beauty section. I chose this method instead of just cutting the wires because I was already under suspicion for the dairy doors. After that, to my great relief, I didn’t have to hear 80s music anymore, as none of my coworkers could figure out what was wrong with the dairy speaker system.

Following several broken doors, a new speaker system, and a long list of health code violations, I was taken off dairy duty.

The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer

In the course of my final days as an employee, I took it upon myself to leave messages throughout the store. Armed with a permanent marker, I wrote anti-capitalist slogans under items, on items, on the bathroom stall doors, on baby diaper boxes, and on all the self-help customer computers, being careful never to get caught on the security cameras. The most notorious of these slogans was “the falcon cannot hear the falconer,” which I heard repeatedly discussed by both customers and employees. It’s a line from a William Butler Yeats poem describing Europe after the Second World War; I used to say it to my boss at a different job many years earlier when he asked me to do things I didn’t feel like doing.

Despite all the amusing things I wrote, this was the only one shoppers seemed to notice. Customers would simply ignore graffiti cursing work or capitalism as if it were just another tag on a shelf; but wherever I put up “the falcon cannot hear the falconer,” I’d witness customers staring at it, trying to decipher its meaning. Of course, any item that was written on became “damaged,” and employees were allowed to take home damaged items—so not only was I detracting from corporate profits, I was also improving conditions for us workers. And walking around the store with my permanent marker was one of my many ways of looking busy while doing as little work as possible.

The Damage Done

Aside from breaking the dairy doors, writing graffiti, and carrying out psychological warfare against my employers, most of my antics consisted of petty vandalism and general bad behavior. My acts of indignation would probably have gotten me fired on the spot or arrested if it hadn’t been the affinity I had developed with my coworkers around our hatred for work. Most of the grocery team would mark off items to bring home or just blatantly put groceries in their bags as they were leaving for the night. Only a few of my coworkers were “good” employees, and those were widely loathed; after my first week working at the store, I was informed of who they were and warned to avoid them.

All good things come to an end, however. Cameras were installed throughout the store, most of them in the back stock area where my team usually worked. Though we were able to find a few spots outside the camera’s view to continue our pilfering, the store managers initiated mandatory bag searches at the end of our shifts. My reign of terror came to a close soon after when upper management ordered my boss to get rid of me. In a generous gesture, my boss instead informed me of the decision and offered me the option to turn in my two-week notice. I put in my two weeks just in time for summer and took the opportunity to spend my free time making connections with other anarchists, fostering friendships that were only possible because I was no longer giving my time to that terrible job.

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Appendix

How to quit your job at Whole Foods
How to quit your job at Taco Bell

Lest we lose our edge, THE EXPERIMENTATION COMMITTEE has been hard at work on a new publication, VORTEXT, the contents of which HAVE NOTHING TO DO with the recent surge of social movements. Vortext explores speculative philosophy, nihilist performance art, black magic, and MAXIMUM FUCKING ULTRAISM, celebrating the nonfunctional, non-productive, and irrational. OUTLIERS TO THE FRONT!

Each copy features a lovingly letter-pressed cover and further printing STOLEN FROM OUR FUCKING ENEMIES. Proceeds from Vortext, HOWEVER SCANTY, will offset the legal expenses of the various contributing FELONY DEFENDANTS. We encourage readers to support the Asheville 11, surely among the most NONFUNCTIONAL, NON-PRODUCTIVE, AND IRRATIONAL anarchist defendants of recent years.

Vortext is to anarchist literature what ÜMLAÜT was to hardcore and the MARQUIS DE SADE was to political prisoners. Vortext is the perfect gift for every fugitive trying to figure out what Wittgenstein can tell her about FACING CONSPIRACY CHARGES. Vortext is NOT FOR EVERYONE and it’s probably NOT FOR YOU.

This first and possibly last issue includes, inter alia,

A Prelude • Midnight on September 11/In Praise of the Jumper
A Manifesto • Beware the Experimentation Committee
A Demand • Join the Experimentation Committee
A Libretto • Passionism, Consonance, TERRIBLE FREEDOM
A Communiqué + Recipe • “Wiccans” Claim Attack on the APD
A Play • The Anarchist Panel Discussion
A Lecture • All the Terrible Things We Do to Each Other
A Cenotaph • Self-Destruction
A Fable • The Magician and the Needle

A very limited number of copies are were available for order online. Paper copies have now sold out, watch for PDFs in coming weeks. Each comes with a copy of TERROR INCOGNITA—for a total of 148 pages of reading.

Why do liberals label nearly any form of direct action as violence? What do queer black blocs have in common in with Christian hardcore? Why are anarchists so hung up on breaking windows and fucking?

In three interlocking movements, TERROR INCOGNITA answers all of these questions and more, while overturning some of our deepest assumptions about desire, identity, strategy, and freedom.

“Consent, Seduction, Violence” asks if we can build our politics as well as our sexuality around a discourse of consent. Offering a new analysis of violence and nonviolence in the context of consensus reality, it recasts anarchist resistance as a form of seduction, rooted in invitation, transformation, and contagion.

“W(h)ither Queer?” provokes us to examine how anarchists use the term “queer,” and why this is significant. Assessing queer identity as a post-feminist signifier and an eroticizer of insurrection from the dance party to the black bloc, it challenges us to move beyond the safe spaces of identity into the terror of the unknown.

“Terror Incognita” concludes the triptych with a journey beyond the boundaries of civilization into terrorism, secrecy, and terrible freedom. Along paths as disparate as Islamic theology, surveillance technologies, and medieval mapmaking, it charts an anarchist cartography of subversive peripheries and unknown directions, illuminated by the erotic force of terror.

TERROR INCOGNITA abounds with sexy and shocking vignettes, articulate but controversial claims, strategic insights, and a steamy undercurrent of sex and violence. Incisive, fresh, provocative, with classy design by the Troletariat, Terror Incognita invites you to the edge of a cliff—it’s up to you to step off.

against consensus reality – for unreasoning rebellion
against fixed identity – for desertion and disruption
against every map – for every terrortory

A very limited number of copies are were available for order online. Paper copies have now sold out, watch for PDFs in coming weeks. Each comes with a copy of Vortext—for a total of 148 pages of reading.

We will also debut a new sticker and a brand new experimental publication, Vortext, a journal of philosophy, nihilist performance art, and MAXIMUM ULTRAISM. Vortext will be available for online orders afterwards if we have any left, and the stickers will be available here in bulk next week. We’ll have our new, free postcard, as well.

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

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

Sunday, March 11, 6 pm: Columbus, OH
Sporeprint Infoshop
172 E 5th Avenue
Columbus, Ohio 43201
www.sporeprint.info
614 299 INFO
info@sporeprint.info

Monday, March 12, 7pm: Champaigne-Urbana, IL
Gregory Hall, Room 319
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois

Tuesday, March 13, 7 pm: Chicago, IL
Columbia College
623 S. Wabash Ave – Hokin Lecture Hall (Room 109)
Chicago, IL 60605

Wednesday, March 14, 6 pm: Indianapolis
1051 East 54th Street
Indianapolis, IN 46220

[Thanks to Ben for sending us this photo of his eighteen-month-old son, capturing perfectly the exact moment he finished reading Work in one marathon sitting.]

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

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

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

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God Only Knows What Devils We Are

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

courtesy of the Institute for Experimental Freedom

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

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

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

My posse in the Brooklyn wear the mask.

My crew in the Jersey wear the mask.

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

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

When my pockets reaching zero

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

I’m probably where it goes down

Keepin’ ten toes down

-Ski Beatz & Freddie Gibbs

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

I.

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

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

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

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

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

I am irreparably transformed.

II.

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

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

1) addiction has an economic function

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

3) the economy tends to hurt people generally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

Our entire environment feels hostile. Hence our hostility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

Allow me to elaborate from our side of the barricades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Think big and you just might get your wish