From Outside the Circle

Day 8

Seems like some really bad, bad people called me a terrorist on Twitter today, to try to destroy Occupy Philly by creating a straw person (“the anarchist”), and of the many words of solidarity, I have say that Kotu Bajaj put it best, “Cindy’s the kinda of terrorist that kills with kittens and hugs”–although I’d substitute “convinces” for “kills.”

And just when I thought it couldn’t get better, the occupation in Philly amazes me yet again. After a day of vicious attacks on anarchists, often including me by name, as a divide-and-conquer strategy to destroy this beautiful movement/space, the outpouring of people showing solidarity was incredible; but much more incredible was the fact that people knew this was meant as an attack on all of us, on our occupation, on how well it’s actually making & taking its own collective power. The sign that we’re doing well is that we not only are targets of such tactics but that we can also withstand them; that they bring us closer. So many people hugged me tonight, from all political persuasions and of many colors, genders, ages, backgrounds–all to say, we have each other’s backs. So many people asked me how I was. I kept answering: “Great! Just great!” And I meant it. I mean it. We’re only being attacked–so far, primarily people of color and anarchists–because we seem easy targets to stir up hatred around in order to subdue and dismantle this uprising; but we’re only being attacked because we’re winning, because we have power together, not power over, and increasingly, achingly hard as it is sometimes, we’re doing the hard work of undoing ourselves and our socialization to become, faster than I ever imagined, new people who can be trusted to begin to stand with and for each other.

From Outside the Circle

Day 1

First autonomous action at occupied city hall in Philly: we brought a couch, chatting “occupy the couch” and “there’s going to furniture working group!” Some folks replied, “our home!”

And now, an hour into Philly occupation, there are probably about 1,000 to 1,5000 people already. I never thought I’d be able to say this, at a space that instantly become a do-it-ourselves community: it’s working; we’re working; this us really what direct, confederated democracy looks like, in actuality. Or as one sign declared, “This is real!”

As the occupation began, a bunch of us anarchists hung banners, painted the night before: “Commons Not Capitalism,” read one; and another (my favorite, because it’s true today) proclaimed, “We’re Occupied with Direct Democracy.” Our occupation engaged in two general assemblies on this first day of occupation—where thousands worked though proposals and made decisions together—and implemented the “CoCo”—the coordinating council for all the working groups, which daily will send delegates (rotating regularly) before each general assembly to work out issues and send proposals to the general assembly, for decision making by the GA. Confederation works! Direct democracy works! And among so many folks who have never, ever done it.

Despair has come over me in the last few years. Normally this manifests itself as exhaustion and frustration. To understand it this time, though, you’d have to understand that the last few years haven’t been so good to my family.

My dad lost his job a few years ago, and from there, we lost our house on Christmas of 2009. We had an emotional conversation about what it means to lose a home, the place where we played soccer in the hallways, and the windows, the ones we snuck into after staying out too late before mom could catch us. This loss of home and income, class, and most importantly to some, status, all led to some pretty serious depressive symptoms that have lasting impacts on a family. Some would de-politicize the moment and say ‘life is about more than politics,’ or some vague sentence about how this is ‘real life not politics.’ But that can’t be further from the truth. These moments are the key reminder that capitalism exists in our daily lives and isn’t just beyond the walls of our homes or in our theory texts. It’s in our workplaces, our schools, and unfortunately, our social relationships. That is to say, capitalism has a way of not just stealing your labor as Marx taught us, but also stealing your spirit and meaning, and teaching us to treat each other in these ways as well; as my good friend and fellow anarchist Cindy Milstein reminds me.

From Counterpunch

Late September. It's just another day in the community of Juana Millahual. Jose Llanquileo is driving a team of oxen pulling a heavy iron plow, clearing furrows in the hillside for a spring crop of potatoes, barley, and onions. Nearby, Angelica is starting a fire to burn away the last traces of pine and eucalyptus planted by timber companies on stolen Mapuche land. Today, the sun shines and the wind blows softly through the tepa trees on the banks of Lleu Lleu, one of the cleanest lakes in South America. On another day, it wouldn't be at all out of place to see a hundred heavily armed police backed up by jeeps, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers, knocking down the doors of one of the small houses to conduct a raid or search for a fugitive. The rural indigenous communities on the banks of the lake, peaceful as they seem on any day when the police don't come around, are a source of fierce resistance to capitalist investment and neoliberal development.

This community, similar to many of its neighbors, is in a process of forcefully recovering hundreds of hectares of their traditional lands which have been usurped by timber companies. Forestal Mininco, which is controlled by one of the richest families in Chile and partners with the IFC, the private arm of the World Bank, operates thousands of hectares of pine and eucalyptus plantations just around Lleu Lleu. Where there used to be farmland or native forests, the timber companies have planted genetically modified pine and eucalyptus in homogenous rows, at great detriment to the health of local soil, watersheds, and biodiversity. The exotic tree plantations, which produce mostly for export, drain the water table and steal food directly from the mouths of indigenous communities.

From Counterpunch

Santiago.

At a September 14th symposium on the Chilean anti-terrorism law, the lawyer Julio Cortes pointed out that the frequent use of the law despite the absence of any real terrorism in Chile illuminates its fundamentally political, persecutorial character. Historically, terrorism was first used by the new bourgeois state against the old order. Only later did the phenomenon of terrorism from below emerge.

September 11th in Chile is an interesting day. While much of the rest of the world follows the US-driven discourse of the War on Terror, Chileans remember the state terrorism at work in the 1973 military coup by General Pinochet against the socialist president, Salvador Allende. Ultimately thousands of political opponents of the new regime would be tortured, disappeared, or executed. Once the dictatorship transferred seamlessly into democracy, with many of the same people remaining in power, and without revoking any of the neoliberal economic changes violently forced through by the dictatorship and under the direction of economists trained at the University of Chicago, people began commemorating September 11th with massive protest marches. The marches typically go from the city center to the General Cemetery, where there is a memorial to the victims of the regime, and where the day usually ends in heavy rioting against the police. At night, in the poorer neighborhoods, which received the brunt of state terrorism under Pinochet and continue to be the prime targets for pólice violence under democracy, people traditionally set up burning barricades and fight the carabineros and military special forces that come to antagonize them.

From Revolution by the Book

As we’ve mentioned on this blog before, AK Press was one of ten collectives that sponsored an anarchist workshop track at the US Social Forum (A New World from Below). This also included a convergence space where NWFB held a shindig celebrating anarchist authors, editors, and publishers. The lovely folks at the defenestrator recorded it (well, they recorded the talks, not the drinking and partying and such). Go here and scroll to the bottom of the page (though you might want to stop along the way and listen to one of their many interviews) .

The event featured:

Benjamin Holtzman, editor of SICK: A Collaborative Zine on Physical Illness (Microcosm Publishing, 2010)
Cindy Milstein, author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010)
Jeff Conant, author of A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency (AK Press, 2010)
Jordan Flaherty, author of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena 6 (Haymarket, 2010)
Josh MacPhee, editor of Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today (PM Press, 2009)
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, authors of Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas (Microcosm Publishing, 2010)
Seth Tobocman, author and artist of Understanding the Crash (Soft Skull, 2010)
Team Colors Collective, editors of and contributors to Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010)
Turbulence Collective, authors of What Would It Mean to Win? (PM Press, 2010)

From Revolution by the Book

The ever-fascinating David Graeber made an appearance on the Authority Smashing Hour’s show. He was supposed to share the bill with Uri Gordon, but Uri had technical difficulties, so it’s a full hour of David talking about two of his AK Press books (Possibilities and Direct Action), his forthcoming book on Melville House Press, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and lots more. The ASH site seems to be under renovation, but you can find the interview here (it’s the one that happened on July 15, 2010).

From AnarchistNews.org

In an article in the recent book, We Are an Image from the Future: the Greek Revolt of December 2008, I briefly made a point that a friend convinced me needs to be elaborated. The idea is that of “signals of disorder,” and their importance in spreading rebellion.

As far as Greece is concerned, the argument is that by carrying out attacks—primarily smashings and molotov attacks against banks and police stations, which constitute the most obvious symbols of capitalist exploitation and State violence for Greek society—insurrectionary anarchists created signals of disorder that acted as subversive seeds. Even though most people did not agree with these attacks at the time, they lodged in their consciousness, and at a moment of social rupture, people adopted these forms as their own tools, to express their rage when all the traditionally valid forms of political activity were inadequate.

An interesting feature of these signals is that they will be met with fear and disapproval by the same people who may later participate in creating them. This is no surprise. In the news polls of democracy, the majority always cast their vote against the mob. In the day to day of normality, people have to betray themselves to survive. They have to follow those they disbelieve, and support what they cannot abide. From the safety of their couch they cheer for Bonny and Clyde, and on the roadside they say “Thank you, officer” to the policeman who writes them a speeding ticket. This well managed schizophrenia is the rational response to life under capitalism. The fact that our means of survival make living impossible necessitates a permanent cognitive dissonance.

Recently at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, the Friendly Fire Collective distributed a short collection of writings from selected authors on the subject of capitalist crisis and anti-authoritarian response(s). It is also available for download!

The collection, Cascades: Conversations in Crisis, features original works from Peter Gelderloos, Erik Forman, Isaac Hawkins, and Ian Paul. This is part of ongoing project Friendly Fire is involved in that will soon produce two larger written works by Ian Paul and David Zlutnick around this same theme for the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

To view the aforementioned works please click on the links below:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF FOR PRINTING

The articles in the journal include:

1 – On Crisis by the Friendly Fire Collective
2 – Crisis as Pacification by Peter Gelderloos
3 – Economies and Ecologies in Crisis by Isaac Hawkins
4 – A Flowering of Subjectivities: Rethinking Antagonism in the Desert of Crisis by Ian Paul
5 – The New Workerism: Capitalist Crisis, Proletarianization, and the Future of the Left by Erik Forman

From JeffShantz.ca

In the days following the mass police assaults on organizers, demonstrators, and bystanders during the G8/G20 events, even as comrades linger in squalid detention centres and jails, a troubling notion is taking shape, seemingly gaining traction, among activist circles as well as some sectors of the general public more broadly. This notion suggests that the police in Toronto acted in a way that was somehow atypical or out of the ordinary. Even more there is a sense that the police could have “kept order.” Some public discussion suggests that policing during the G8/G20 reflects a breakdown, a failure to carry out their duties “properly.” Incredibly, during a rally in support of people in detention, Naomi Klein suggested that the police “Do your goddamned job!” In response many in the crowd chanted “Do your job! Do your job!” Elsewhere, and even more incredibly, Judy Rebick has suggested that the were police failed to do their jobs properly in not arresting perceived black block participants: “What they could have done is arrest the Black Bloc at the beginning before they had a chance to be part of the bigger crowd and that's what they didn't do.” Some seem to believe that the police were supposed to be there to protect them or that the police provide the means for “protest” to take place.

[Image by Eric Drooker]

The concern here is that the discussion is being framed in a rather liberal framework that presents a proper, even desirable, form of state policing, a good way of policing against a bad, that police in Toronto presumably strayed from.

While it is certain that the police job is a goddamned one, should activists really be calling on the police to do it? Think about what that would actually mean. More than this, though, the police during the G8/G20 (as during APEC in 1997 and Quebec City in 2001) WERE doing their job. They were doing what they were and are instituted and structured to do. This is not a case of the system going awry, breaking down, going off the rails or being over the top. This is a case of the system doing precisely what it is organized to do (and in a rather limited way).

The related argument is that the task ahead is then to get the police back to doing it right, to doing their job, to act properly as police. Thus calls for public inquiries that will supposedly shame the police or find them to have acted inappropriately or hold them accountable (to whom?/ to themselves?/to Harper?). Historically the more brutal the police, the less the allegiance of the citizenry. They know this.