from Instagram
A group of young boys in a boarding school dare to challenge the authorities that control them. “If…” rises to the question, what happens when the oppressed are given the tools to liberate themselves?
from Crimethinc
In the following report-back, participants in a march against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Philadelphia reflect on how to move from symbolic protests and top-down organizational models to effective autonomous action. As the conflict between federal mercenaries and the people of the Twin Cities intensifies, others around the country are looking for concrete ways to act in solidarity in order to divide the attention and resources of federal forces. We encourage everyone who participates in demonstrations to show up in affinity groups with concrete plans as to what they hope to accomplish and bold proposals to share with others.
The more agency and initiative each of us brings to our collective activity, the more powerful our movements will be.
On the night of January 23, the day of the general strike in the Twin Cities, a rowdy march against ICE took place in downtown Philadelphia, involving about 300 people. At the conclusion of the march, a couple dozen militants decided to break off and head in the direction of the nearby ICE office. The march organizers—Socialist Alternative—had told the entire crowd at the beginning of the march that they planned to circle City Hall once and then march together to the ICE building.
We had heard about the march just the day before. A small group of us quickly prepared a banner reading “FUCK ICE.” During the march, we carved out a spot for ourselves at the front, despite commands from self-appointed protest marshals to “move to the side” and make more space for their party-branded content.
The march proceeded down a major thoroughfare of the city, the simple “Fuck ICE” banner attracting enthusiastic support from onlookers. Then, strangely, when the crowd was just one block away from the ICE headquarters, the marshals directed everyone to the Federal Detention Center two blocks away. There, the organizers set up a weak sound system and began making speeches to the confused crowd.
At the same time, a member of a competing state socialist faction, the Revolutionary Communists of America, pulled out their own megaphone and started soapboxing to the people around them about the working class in a bid to one-up their competitors. The energy, which had been lively throughout the march, dissipated rapidly.
Someone asked one of the protest marshals why we weren’t converging on the ICE building. “There’s no shortage of targets,” they answered.
This rally was was explicitly organized in solidarity with the general strike in Minneapolis, which itself was a response to the invasion of the city by ICE and the recent murder of Renee Nicole Good. On January 24, the day following the general strike, ICE agents murdered another person in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti.
The usual alphabet soup of state socialists were there. Aside from Socialist Alternative (the main organizers), there were also the Revolutionary Communists of America, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and others, each faction vying for their spot in the limelight with recruitment tables, proselytizing overtures, and promotional literature. They made many speeches about how we need to go beyond symbolic protest and take the next step into direct action against ICE.
But when protesters broke away to engage the nearby ICE office, most of the crowd simply looked on or away. Some jeered, made snide comments, or expressed disdain. Nonetheless, a few were curious or supportive. It is worth noting that, in a march that was probably 95% white, many of those who joined the breakaway march were not white, and specifically young and Black.
As we marched towards the throng of police outside the ICE office, encouraged by one enthusiastic snare drummer’s beats, some in the crowd began to chant “Migra, policia, la misma porqueria!” Someone made some quick remarks about how the Philadelphia Parking Authority and the Philadelphia police were protecting ICE. When someone in the crowd yelled “Fuck 12” in response, we all began chanting “Fuck ICE! Fuck 12!”
It was clear that there were too many police and too few people in the crowd to breach the office, which had been barricaded in anticipation with metal crowd barriers. So after a short while, the group took their exit, flipping off the bike cops.
If nothing else, some of those who were confused about the location of the ICE headquarters now know exactly where it is. Experimenting with the breakaway march as a protest tactic was also a useful exercise in that it demonstrated what a small number of frontliners can do as part of a larger crowd, showing the potential of autonomous direct action within a broader ecology of tactics.
Not all of the state socialists took a paternalistic attitude toward the militants who engaged the ICE headquarters. One of the protest marshals joined us at the end and made a genuine effort to show support and have our backs as we approached the building and the police stationed outside of it. The problem is not the intentions of specific individuals, but rather that the organizational structures of these groups are not oriented towards practical direct action. They remain stuck in the mire of representational, spectacle-based politics.
The class struggle, which necessarily involves a dynamic ecology of different kinds of action, is not the driving motor of organizational development and innovation for these groups. Instead, they filter class struggle through the sieve of each group’s particular brand of state-directed revolution, which the movement managers and wanna-be politicians of each respective faction are trying to sell us. When organizational fetishism is the driving force of a struggle, revolutionists appear as nothing but snake-oil sellers.
As a consequence, the burning need for decisive action is put off indefinitely. Rather than presenting opportunities to disrupt the operation of ruling class infrastructure, militant demonstrations instead become opportunities for selling newspapers, photo-ops, recruitment drives, and ideological competition between various bullhorn-wielding aspiring leaders.
It was heartening to see the federal inmates waving at us and flickering their lights from the inside. It was good to pay them a visit. But there is something very wrong with a march against ICE in which protest marshals direct the crowd away from a building ICE uses as its headquarters. At a certain point, revolutionaries need to make a choice: are you organizing for revolution, or building a political clique?
For those who want to make a revolution against class society, the spectacle of symbolic protest and organizational fetishism is a dead end. The 2020 George Floyd uprising, the Eddie Irizarry rebellion in 2023, and the anti-ICE rebellion in Los Angeles last year show us that there is another way: the path of militant solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous self-activity and self-organization. The revolt against ICE that is unfolding in Minneapolis is currently the most advanced iteration of this mass historical dynamic within the United States. Rather than looking to the fantasies of the past, we should take our cue from the frontline in Minneapolis and follow their example. We have to fight with strategy, organization, and vision—but nonetheless, we have to make the leap.
Now is the time to get together with those you trust, to call more demonstrations, to organize rapid response networks with your neighbors, to facilitate assemblies, devise plans, experiment with bold tactics, take the initiative, build momentum, stretch the limits of whats possible, and most importantly, embrace every strategy at our disposal for tearing this motherfucker down and building a new, better world, including direct intervention against ICE and all agents of state repression.
See you in the streets!
– Your autonomous comrades across the partisan divide
Submission
this is by no means a complete picture of the aftermath of a mid summer call for a Philadelphia game of CAMOVER. This is only what I can verify from seeing and from hearing firsthand from those I trust.
Disabled by paint: 20
Disabled by smash: 8
Pulled down by rope: 6
Etch bath mop: 2
Disabled by climbing up with an impact driver, socket set, and orange vest: 1
Let’s hear it for the rowdies, the rebels, creatives, party kids, criminals, insurrectos, and faggots!! Men aren’t allowed to look at us bitch! Especially not thru a lens fuck that !
Separate from results, we are taking the opportunity to formalize a call for a Winter Games 2026!!!! Starting as the first snow falls on Sunday, and ending mid April, we are inviting anyone reading to renew and sharpen an anti-tech, anti surveillance tendency thru attack, study and experimentation. Camover is the main event, but what else can be done in the resultant terrain of weakened surveillance? We invite you to think long, to eat well, and to do good works this winter.
from Anathema
This compilation is coming together in a moment when it feels that many anarchist ideas are losing their meanings. Dragged out of anarchy into leftism or activism, drained of their radical content. Mutual aid is giving away supplies, direct action is a more aggressive form of begging, anti-fascism is reduced to publishing personal details about our enemies, attack is left to gather dust or spectacularized as a social media aesthetic.
Lining up anarchist ideas and practices is not always easy, which is no reason to lower the bar. It’s with this in mind that it felt useful to compile these articles, to clarify just how radical anarchist ideas really are, to encourage people to keep imagining and moving toward absolute hostility with authority and anarchic relations with everyone else.
from Anarchist News
From Fifth Estate # 417, Winter 2025
by Carl Craft
Wooden Shoe, as a publicly facing anarchist infoshop, was established in 1976 and, using capitalist projections, shouldn’t exist. Amazingly, it still does. Many visitors share stories about their parents as youthful hippies or punks hanging out on South Street in Philadelphia and coming to the Shoe to learn about the system.
As a current volunteer described: “Wow, I was in my twenties coming out of the early New Left, SDS-gone-vanguard, mass mobilization against the Vietnam War, anarcho-curious, and searching for an anarchist project and practice or at least an attempt. The early Wooden Shoe gave me such a project in collaboration with others. Now, in my seventies, I’ve returned to Wooden Shoe as a volunteer.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average lifespan of a new business is about eight and a half years. So, how has the Wooden Shoe remained active for almost 50? There are several explanations.
The all-volunteer shop, which takes its name from the sabot, literally a wooden shoe worn by French peasants that would be thrown into the gears of a machine as sabotage, is located in a tourist area of Philadelphia, so the store gets a steady stream of curious visitors. It stocks a wide array of book titles, including a section on anarchism as well as LGBTQA, feminism, poetry, graphic novels, children’s and more. Monthly events also create interest.
At its start, some people involved with Wooden Shoe funded the proposed project. However, as anarchists, left libertarians and new left individuals, many with experiences in top-down leftist organizations and parties, acting as a capitalist and expecting a return on their investment was not their expectation. Rather, it is voluntary, collaborative participation that runs the Shoe and makes it a place where people want to be.
The pleasure of involvement is clearly expressed by two volunteers.
“I love the community that the Shoe cultivates. Between the volunteer collective, event organizers, and our patrons, staffing the store ensures you will meet new, like-minded people,” says one.
The other echoed that feeling, saying, “I like that being part of the Shoe allows me to make a difference in ways I wouldn’t be able to on my own. If I have a project idea that betters the communities around us, I can propose it to the collective and have their support in pursuing it.”
From the start, a fundamental aspect of anarchist relationships—consent, free of coercion, among equals—was tried. But the conundrums and contradictions were and are many. The ugh factor can be large and a sense of humor and even sarcasm is needed. Wooden Shoe exists within retail capitalism among all the other hierarchies associated with racism, patriarchy, class and other forms of systemic oppression. The store puts prices on peoples’ creative efforts and thus turns use value into price points (commodification) for books, pamphlets, patches, t-shirts, zines. It needs a legal identity to sign a commercial retail lease, and more.
The shop currently has a nonprofit status with governments, its landlord and the world at large. All this requires designated officers, bylaws, and the filing of yearly financial statements with the Pennsylvania Department of State and the IRS. So, at times participants ask themselves, is the store an authentic anarchist-oriented project or just another small retail business?
What makes Wooden Shoe an anarchist project, in addition to the store’s content, is the volunteers’ ongoing attempts within the project to relate and interact with each other based on a wide array of anarchist constructs—non-hierarchical interactions, consensus among equals, including in decision-making, inclusivity, and transparency with sharing on procedures, finances, history. They also strive for ongoing self-awareness and self-evaluation of our identities and personal histories and their impact on involvement and relationships in the Shoe. Many view the project in the context of the long-standing anarchist tradition of prefigurative politics, trying to embody the visions of a collective anarchist future. Often this is a difficult effort and participants fall short.
Those involved with the Wooden Shoe describe themselves as a volunteer collective. Since inception, people volunteering their time and energy have operated the project and this is a wondrous reality. Bringing in new volunteers is an ongoing process. People interested in volunteering are asked to be in general agreement with the store’s written mission statement and statement of values and to complete three training orientations. Staffing volunteers determine to what extent they will staff and/or participate in working groups as well as decision-making.
All this sounds pretty straightforward. However, every volunteer has an ongoing life—which may involve employment, relationships/family, childcare/parenting, schooling, other volunteer activities, and their own physical and mental health needs.
Thus, there are significant differences among volunteers related to how much time and energy they can give the Shoe project. This leads to an unequal distribution of in-house knowledge of projects and procedures. Sharing information and knowledge about these is an ongoing necessity for volunteers on a daily basis and at collective meetings. The arrival and exit of volunteers is continuous and is to be expected. This creates an unequal hierarchy of know-how.
Given these realities, there are practical aspects of sustaining the project. Volunteer collective meetings are currently twice a month and the bylaws state that those volunteers attending a meeting make decisions as needed. No quorum required. The notes from a collective meeting are sent to all volunteers. Anyone who cannot attend a collective meeting, after reading the notes, is welcome to question and even block a reported decision by sharing their opinion/ objections and any proposed alternate ideas within three days of receiving them. Once they do that, then the decision is not implemented and the expectation is that whoever objects will participate in the next collective meeting to attempt to reach a consensus.
Then there’s the money thing. Leading up to the Trump election in 2016 and since then, revenue beyond expenses at the Wooden Shoe has increased. What to do with this money has been an ongoing decision for the collective. Funds have been set aside as a safety margin. The preference of the collective is to give away most of this additional money. At monthly collective meetings, funding proposals to organizations, including other nonprofits, are considered. Some groups request funding—from local Philadelphia-based organizations to ones around the world. This past year, the collective has donated funds or printed materials to thirty organizations and groups. (Fifth Estate note: Including to this publication. Thank you, comrades!)
In addition, Wooden Shoe is a supporter of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA). Through PACA Wooden Shoe offers no interest loans to Philadelphia based cooperatives. We expect to soon provide loan funds to an immigrant craft outlet and a BIPOC herbalist collective.
Carl Craft is a Wooden Shoe volunteer. The collective would like to thank the founders and early volunteers—Frank, Ben, Louise, Adrian, Steve, Barbara, and Albo. woodenshoebooks.org or sabot@woodenshoebooks.com for more information.
from In Contempt
[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]
Though with a delay, we return with the monthly news roundup of analysis on prison rebellions and imprisoned freedom fighters that is IN CONTEMPT! Once again, the US has seen unprecedented authoritarian repression confronting determined community resistance. As we enter another insurrectionary moment, we are reinvigorated by the relentless struggles of political prisoners worldwide who continue to inspire collective action through words and deeds.
Following the closing of It’s Going Down, a new collective will continue publishing monthly “In Contempt” updates on this noblogs. We hope this publication helps develop networks of inside-outside solidarity – over 100 copies are mailed to people behind bars each month! Please submit any updates and calls to action to the new email in_contempt at autistici dot org.
“Escalation means that you trade your banner for a sledgehammer, you lock on and get in the way of business as usual.” – Sean Middlebrough, escaped Palestine Action UK prisoner
In December 2025, Philly ABC announced that the judge overseeing the case against the Northumberland 2––Cara and Celeste, accused of freeing hundreds of minks from a fur farm in PA––dismissed ELEVEN charges total between defendants Cara and Celeste—including one count of ecoterrorism and several misdemeanors.
The next step is a pretrial conference in February. After that will come trial.
While this is big and exciting news, the case isn’t over yet. Cara and Celeste still have many charges to fight. Trial will come with extra costs on top of the other legal fees.
Thank you for all your support!
To donate: Venmo @phillyantirepression (note “for cc”)
For more updates: tinyurl.com/we-support-cc
As far as we know, these are the current addresses of political prisoners from the George Floyd Uprising:
David Elmakayes #77782-066
USP Lee
U.S. Penitentiary
P.O. Box 305
Jonesville, VA 24263
Smart Communications / PA DOC
Khalif Miller / #QQ9287
SCI Forest
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Visit https://uprisingsupport.org/ for more ways to support.
And print the January 2026 Uprising Support zine:
The year started off with a sharp rise in deaths in federal custody as the feds expand network of immigrant detention centers, seeking to repurpose industrial warehouses, a new “Panhandle Pokey” in Florida, and re-opening the scandalous FCI Dublin. A new report shows Homeland Security is incarcerating people than ever before; there are 70,000 people in DHS custody, expected to increase as their detention budget exceeds even that of the Bureau of Prisons.
Birthday: Jan 15
“Joe-Joe” Bowen is a Black Liberation Army (BLA) Prisoner of War, serving two life sentences for the assassination of a prison warden and deputy warden, as well as an attempted prison break which resulted in a five-day standoff after his initial arrest.
Joseph Bowen #AM-4272
Smart Communications/PADOC
SCI Fayette
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
As PADOC is a digital mail scanning state, please use single sided letters; books must be sent to Joseph Bowen #AM4272 / 268 Bricker Road / Bellefonte, PA 16823-1667
Submission
In honor of our fallen comrades Renee Nicole Good, Tortuguita Teran, and all others murdered by the police state, we dropped several banners along the vine street expressway on the morning of Jan 18th, on the third anniversary of the Day of the the Forest Defender.
from Instagram
from Philly Fash Watch
Philly has a new entry in the right wing rage bait streamer category, 23 year old Frank Scales. This is a very brief introduction to Frank; something more comprehensive will come soon from this blog. For now we’ll just expose Frank Scales lying about a recent incident. On Saturday January 10th Frank posted a video from his Surge Philly accounts spread across social media platforms of himself in an ambulance. Doing his best Andy Ngo impersonation, Frank Scales states “we don’t know if there’s bleach in it. We don’t know what they put in the solution that they sprayed at me”.
After Franks video was posted an anonymous source sent us a recording of police scanner communications regarding the incident. The scene commander from the Philadelphia Police Department is acknowledging that Frank was sprayed by his own side!
We can go even further and state that it wasn’t just random assholes from Franks side using pepperspray in the peaceful crowd, it was Franks cameraman who sprayed his face. More to come on that individual.
Francis J. Scales, 23, of South Philly on Front Street is a Temu version of people like Jack Posobiec and Nick Shirley. There is nothing good that can come from Frank being in protest spaces. Remove him immediately so you don’t become content for his social media rage bait. We protect us
