Experiments Beyond the Brutality

Washing the pepper spray from my clothes and waking up regularly to startling dreams of riot cops, ex-lovers, and frenzied television production, I can't help but feel a bit depressed.

While the DNC was happening, significantly fewer cops plagued the neighborhood I live in, an impoverished community on the North East side of Denver. Now that protest has stopped, the neighborhood has filled up with cops again. Virtually no sustainable links between organizing against the police brutality against protesters and organizing against the regular violence in this neighborhood was created. While white subcultures flourished in both Denver and St. Paul, strong links were not made between anti-convention activism and the ongoing, life-or-death struggles faced by people of color. While these struggles were addressed rhetorically, and organizations such as Recreate 68 did attempt to make connections, the protests remained largely white.

I wonder if the enormous infrastructure set up by white subcultures to facilitate protest will ever have a real impact on the daily lives of poor people. I fear it will be used to simply facilitate cathartic protests that release the pressure in this steam-cooker of late capitalism; protests that create demonstrations of antagonism; protesters that fail to build sustainable alternatives; protests that falsely excuse people of privilege from their complicity in the violence of oppression.

Perhaps to scream out in the streets, to smash windows, to destroy cop cars, to fight the police, and directly, physically confront the perpetrators of violence is not enough. After 9/11, a broken window hardly garners media attention. After millions have been assaulted, falsely imprisoned, brutalized, and degraded by the police, a few blows at a line of riot cops hardly challenges the system. Perhaps the level of sophistication, military strategy, and organization needed to militantly confront global capitalism and the state in the streets exceeds our current capacity.

The old question I would like to re-pose is what forms of creation and destruction will most effectively eliminate relationships of oppression and most directly lead to global liberation, conditions for joy and possibility. If the answer to this is found in the shattering of Macy's windows, hand me a rock. If the answer to this is found in tactics of greater aggression, let's arm ourselves. If the answer to this is found in building strong community ties, networking diverse localities, and creating alternative economies, let's get to work. Sadly, we don't know which of these solutions will work outside of practice. Armed struggle may be a death trap. Window-breaking may be futile. Community organizing may never work. Unless we try, informed by history, we will never find out.

Kudos to those who struggled in Denver and St. Paul. Kudos to all who work regularly for liberation at home, while traveling, at convergences, and in isolation. Kudos to those who risk it all and dare to experiment.

So much to be done. So many experiments to be had!

Once again, Gramsci's dictum comes to mind: Pessimism of the intellect. Optimism of the will.

"I'm a Lover Not a Fighter."

Yes. I actually uttered this cliche in an interview for Colorado Matters about the work of Unconventional Denver.

Unions: Queer Them or Let Them Die

I just read on an anarchist newswire a reportback from the Class Struggle Anarchist Conference.

From the report-back:
Organizers from the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC), Workers Solidarity Alliance, Industrial Workers of the World, Solidarity & Defense, Capital Terminus Collective, Amanecer, Class Action Alliance, Michigan-Minnesota Group, Anti-Racist Action, the (now defunct) Love and Rage Anarchist Federation, and even a former member of the Mujeres Libres of the Spanish CNT attended. We discussed organizing experiences in the community, workplace, and various social movements with a focus on the role of race and gender within the movement.

This sounds like it was probably an incredible event with great organizations represented. Outside of Love and Rage, which the writer mentions is defunct, the other anarcho-communist organizations sound so caught up in the burdensome jargon of white, male labor organizing that I wonder where the possibility lies.

Don't get me wrong. I can get as teary-eyed as the next Wob when I hear a searing rendition of Solidarity Forever. Sab the cat makes me chuckle too. That being said, there is something unbearably tiresome, white, patriarchal, and heterocentric about the rhetoric of the labor movement. Perhaps this is why, according to The Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 12.1% of the U.S. workforce belongs to a union.

Of those 12%, dare I speculate most are reform minded and content with the Capitalist system? In that case, there are likely more LGBTQ people in the United States than there are revolutionary minded trade-unionists.

Perhaps the time for queering the union movement is now. Since queerish icons like Prince, Michael Jackson and Madonna took over the popular imaginary in the 80s, the fact of the matter is If its not queer, its not here, so get over it.



So perhaps the time has come for Sab and Felix the cat to start doin'-it, for Solidarity Forever to be sung from the bubbling tubs of bathhouses, for queer organizers like Emma Goldman and Baynard Ruskin to be celebrated far and wide for the queerness, and for the trade union movement to stop acting so gosh-darned butch.

If trade-union anarchists want to play Joe Worker, they should save it for play parties. Oversized, white, straight male workers are anachronisms. The oppressed work force is radically diverse in gender, race, and documentation status. As the icons of immigrant labor have been swept under the rug for the domination of white men in the labor movement, Joe Worker's image must be swept away if Class Struggle is to mean anything more than a postmodern nod of the head to the late 19th early 20th century.

Lunch and Anarchist Studies

I just got away from the office for a bit for a delicious lunch with my friend Jared, a young punk, dedicated anarchist, and absolute romantic. Struggling with the loss of my cousin has been difficult and spending a bit of time with a young, dreamy, struggling intellectual with heart felt good. Jared talked of his struggles but also spoke of his quest for community. As a young intellectual, part train hopper part aspirant academic, I thought he'd be interested in going to Renewing the Anarchist Tradition put on by The Institute for Anarchist Studies. His eyes lit up when he found out about the event and the IAS and he said he'd go. For those who've never been, RAT is an incredibly supportive event for anti-authoritarians and anarchists who are interested in developing anarchist theory, history, and academic work.

Gangs: Please Get out of the Capitalists' Bed

Eager to find reasons to police poor people and people of color, city officials, most often in bed with or inseparable from developers, have many reasons to love gang violence. Its neither their run of the mill perverse love of structural oppression nor their glee that poor people are focusing their rage on each other rather than the ruling class that wets their whistle.

No, developers LOVE cops.

They love reasons to escalate police presence and justify it in the name of "crime," a codeword for poverty and color. Now, whether cops or developers intentionally escalate gang violence is debatable. Certainly, if cops and feds are snooping around and trying on the panties of Quakers and other non-violent anti-war activists, chances are they've also infiltrated and influence the habits of street gangs. As such, it would not be unthinkable that agent provocateurs actually spur rivalries between street gangs in order to justify an escalation of militarized policing.

In Denver, as we've seen the beginnings of Guiliani style "broken-windows policing" we have also seen the media focus on the rise of gang activity. As millions of dollars are being funneled into the city to bolster police presence in time for the Democratic National Convention, reports of high incidence of crime pave the way for the bullies in blue to enter our neighborhoods. Police arresting poor people is great for developers--they win contracts for building prisons in rural communities and condos in urban communities. As people of color and poor people suffer, the rich get richer.

This scam, of course, is called capitalism. It is what we want to destroy.

In destroying capitalism, we have to determine what our relationship with gangs will be. I choose to avoid relationships with the gangs in power: the police, the corporations, and most politicians; however, street gangs may be a different matter. Building power from below requires working with all of those who are being oppressed by the contemporary society. The anti-police attitude of many gang members and gang associates should be a natural bonding point as we engage in self-defense against the perpetual environmental, military, and economic attacks on our communities from the capitalist elite and their armed brutes.

Gangs destroying each other will only aid capitalist development and justifications of militaristic presence in our neighborhoods. Gangs attacking developers, police, and agents of gentrification might be an early sign of class resistance akin to militant attacks on coal companies, developers, and gentrifying tourists that occurred in the Appalachian mountains during the seventies.

Attacking developers, state terrorists (police), and agents of gentrification will only be useful if communities take as seriously, rather more seriously, the importance of creating local economies, vibrant cultural and educational institutions, and spaces for joy and liberation that are local and connected globally to other localisms.

To sum up: gangs should stop fighting each other and pick more ethical targets. Rather than picking on gangs, we should find some targets too. In the meantime, working with all members of our community, both within and out of prison, gangs, or even more dangerously the 9-5 workday, we should create an autonomous, effective, and uncompromising culture of liberation hellbent on replacing capitalism with an autonomous, egalitarian, just, and pleasurable form of existence.

Center for Tactical Magic

Everybody should check out all the amazing projects The Center for Tactical Magic has been engaged in for the past few years. The TCM merges showmanship, interventionist art practice, creative disruption, energy channeling, and a whole host of performances from The Tactical Ice Cream Unit seen to the right to free occult services where people can curse their least favorite institutions and "learn simple magical tactics for combating the abuse of power."

The Center for Tactical Magic engages in extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic. A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the purpose of actively addressing Power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts. At the CTM we are committed to achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation. From the Center for Tactical Magic website.

Appropriate Ressurections: An Easter Manifesto

Jesus has been killed so many times: first by the Roman State, then by the various Christian states, Empires, monarchies who killed, tortured, pillaged, and raped in his name, and finally today by the mulitnational capitalists who take advantage of poor people, spread war, and hatred while espousing so called "Christianity." Christianity is the final thorn in his crown, stab in his side, nail in his wrist. Jesus taught messages of love, resistance, and equality. The church kills him when they ignore the poor, support genocidal wars in Iraq, enable the suffering of the Palestinians abroad and communities of color at home. The same people who killed Jesus run the church today. Everyday they crucify him in a million ways.

So when a preacher with strong language and analysis enters the American imaginary, the media, churches, and parties crucify him like they crucified Jesus. Reverend Jeremiah Wright has suffered the gauntlet of the ideological state apparatus as Barack Obama has struggled to get into a seat of power. For acknowledging racism and genocidal foreign policy, he has been denigrated by Obama and the public alike.

To be Christlike, or Christian, a person must follow in the footsteps of Jesus and confront the horrors of the contemporary world, bare witness to the suffering of others. This is the Jesus and the Christianity that should be resurrected this year. The self-help megachurches and their capitalist empires should fall like Babylon, turn to salt like Sodom and Gomorrah and those who bare witness, multiply food and wine, comfort and love should rejoice. They are the true Christians and in each witness of human suffering, each act of selfless kindness and humility, each confrontation of the state, Jesus is resurrected.

What Happened to the Anti-War Movement?

After watching a number of the Winter Soldier Hearings, I found myself, once again, standing outside the Colorado State Capital at a lackluster peace rally wondering, "why this, again?" According to The Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 3988 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Over one-hundred have died from suicide, tens of thousands have been wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been murdered, countless injured, the soil irrevocably contaminated by depleted uranium, and the people traumatized. Over a third of the U.S. homeless population are veterans and rates of post-traumatic stress disorder have sky rocketed leaving hundreds of thousands of young people forever scarred by Iraq. No need to review the senselessness of this war, the lies that provoked it, the wealthy who send poor Americans to die for oil.

We need to bring the war home. People in the United States need to feel it. Peace vigils fail to bring attention to the horror of the situation. We need the rage and trauma of war to ring through the streets shattering the illusion that "everything's ok." We need politicians and businessmen, the catalysts of destruction, to quiver in fear of the people. Too many corpses, too much violence, too many victims. We need to demand joy, peace, and tranquility, but not without justice. The fight is on. Which side will we be on?

Anarchists Plan Direct Action Against the DNC/RNC

As the country gets invested in the electoral politics and is forced by corporate rule to choose between 2 sell-out parties representing the ruling class, some Anarchists are planning to use this as an opportunity to protest capitalist globalism and demonstrate that another world is possible. Current debates include violence vs. non-violence, appropriate targets, and appropriate actions. I am personally sick of some of these conversations when neither advocates for property destruction nor non-violence are engaging in the consistent long-term strategies of protest that are necessary for real victories. It is not enough to engage a few days a year--we need the streets every day. But not only do we need the streets--we need strategies to help people in great need--we need systems networked together to replace the state and bring power back to the people. How to do it? That's what those of us who care have to figure out.

Unconventional Action Prints Paper

For those anarchists out there looking to get organized around the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, Unconventional Action has just printed their paper outlining Anti-Authoritarian strategy from now till the upcoming elections! Whether you want to plant some trees or vomit on the coattails of the ruling class, Unconventional Action is a great resource and their paper, Unconventional Strategies looks awsome!

2 Great Tigers: Radical Nostalgia

I wanted to do a quick hat-tip (well, I don't wear hats but who gives a damn) to two of the great tigers: Paper Tiger Television and La Tigre!

Paper Tiger Television is celebrating some big-time anniversary (25 ass-kicking years)! They've just put out the documentary Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger -- a critical and celebratory documentary about all the incredible projects they've done from mainstream media critiques to slams on military recruiting! Congratulations to these tigerrrrrific media pioneers!

Le Tigre, who is apparently going out of style, is another quality tiger, a post-riotgrrrl, queer-ass, punk-electronica band with fabulous songs about everyone from the likes of Marlon Riggs to that finicky freak who put the bang in the chitty chitty bang bang. Check em out and find a revolutionary beat to dance to--even if they're already old hat!

What this movement needs are a few more tigers and a few less bores! Get dancin' and romancin'! Start making media. And for a quick change, growl like a beast!

couch potato revolution