Reflections on Time and Monuments: 14 Photographs and and Essay

  • February 26, 2018 8:55 pm

From Radical Education Department

You can find another RED article by the author on monuments here.

Cetin-Monument-4

“What time is it?” asks artist Tyree Guyton in his mural installation at Kensington, Philadelphia. A question I take to asks more than what the clocks show at the present moment. As if the name of the installation, The Times –in plural, not the singular time of the one accurate clock– asks how many times are there that order this monumental space, how many temporalities cross-cut each other at the walls of that old Kensington factory, now being a special installation within the city wide temporary public art and history project: Monument Lab.

Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project was a temporary installation of monuments across 10 sites of Philadelphia, produced by a curatorial team and Mural Arts Philadelphia. It centered on an overarching question: “What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?” which is posed initially to 20 artists. It exhibits artists’ responses in the form of temporary monuments at 10 different publics sites between September 16th and November 19th, 2017. Installations accompany with research laboratories where visitors participate through proposing their appropriate monuments for the current city of Philadelphia, and shared with public on a mapped here. I think it is fair to say that Monument Lab was a majestic collective inquiry and experimentation on the ordering of public spaces of the city with art installations and citizen participations.

The project was topical as well. It opened within the heated national debate around the politics of the monuments, primarily of the confederate monuments in the Southern states and protests for the removal of Frank Rizzo monument at Philadelphia’s Thomas Paine Plaza. It provided a local venue to carry out the debate on a proper monument in a positive form of proposing new monuments that would tell the story of Philadelphia. Monument Lab Research Director Laurie Allen’s call in the project’s newspaper summarizes the historical-political starting point of the project: “Our monuments have meaning. They are city’s way of telling its story, of picking out moments in history for elevation, and for making a statement about who and what deserves to be honored and remembered. In 2017, we must recognize that the story told by our monuments is not our city’s full history. Help us elevate a richer reading of our history and move creatively toward a better future” (3).

Some of Lab monuments, such as Sharon Hayes’ “If They Should Ask” at Rittenhouse Square, marks precisely this selective historiography of the existing monuments in Philadelphia. Hayes problematizes that in the entire city there are only two monuments that are dedicated to women: French heroine Joan of Arc and Bostonian Quaker Mary Dyer. By half-scaling nine pedestals of the existing monuments in Philadelphia and writing dozens of names of public women figures from the Philadelphia-area on the pedestals, Hayes monumentalizes the absence of women’s monuments and powerfully makes the case for the exclusion of women in the public memory.

Rittenhouse Square

“A monument” writes Jane Golden, the executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia, is what “commemorates something or someone, in order to uplift and keep it in public memory –an enduring symbol.“[1] Monuments are mostly[2] deliberate symbols engrained in the build environment of the city/town that encapsulates a particular past to carry it to the future. Most monuments are symbols of the state and commemorate the founding acts and heroes of the nation to remind whose heritage that land is loyal to. For critics such as Kim Dovey, “Public monuments often use the memory of a past use of force by the state to signify such future possibility.”[3] Others uplift political principles such as the human rights monuments, cultural figures or commemorate past tragedies such as genocide memorials. Each monument’s commemoration of the past has a particular purpose in the present to frame future social and political relations. Monuments’ symbolic universe dictate a certain code of conduct, a way of thinking and acting in the public, and depend on the material they are made and the surrounding social-political relations, they usually do so for long durations.

Art historian William J.T. Mitchell, in his lecture “What do Monuments Want?” observes that the desire of the monument is “to live forever, to defeat death and history.” He says that they express power and desire to immortality while at the same time; almost all of the monuments eventually scum to the blows of history and crumble. Monuments are temporal, in both sense of the term. They are made to remain intact over time, defeat death and history, but they are also products of history and the social-political relations that erect or remove them. In that sense, the time of the monument is not less frail than human time in the longue durée.  Nevertheless, when it is intact and granted its demand of honor, monuments’ time poses a contrast to human temporality. Our mobility and short life span stand out against the background of monuments’ claim to stability and immortality.

Lab’s exhibit of monuments, installed for a short period of time, defeats this conventional logic of monument-time from the outset. It occupies what art critic Krauss Rosalind calls a “negative condition of the monument” where monument becomes nomadic by resigning its usual position of established place and entering into a field of “sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place.”[4] With temporary monuments, Lab not only experiments with various monumental contents fitting for Philadelphia, but also questions the temporal logic of monumentality.

The purpose of this photography project is to contemplate on the contrast between the time of monuments and that of human beings against the background of the questions Monument Lab opens up. It can be considered as a visual dialogue with, or maybe rather an ocular ode to, the artists, curators and participants of the Monument Lab. Maybe it is even a photographic attempt to immortalize the passing of multiple times at each monumental site before they migrate to their next location. Each photograph in the series is taken with the same long exposure technique using an ND filter in daylight, which allows the photographic moment to be as long as 25 seconds. I am grateful to people who kindly accepted to be in the frames even though their faces are not really recognizable.

You can view all the images here:

Anathema Volume 4 Issue 2

  • February 22, 2018 9:09 pm

from Anathema

Volume 4 Issue 2 (PDF for printing 11 x 17)

Volume 4 Issue 2 (PDF for reading 8.5 x 11)

In this issue:

  • Gun Control
  • Of Iron Fists and Velvet Gloves
  • What Went Down
  • Letter to the Editor
  • War of the Words: Antifa
  • Fly Eagles Fly
  • Class War on Broad Street
  • Against Amazon
  • Joseph “Joe Joe” Bowen
  • Ozymandia

Stand Up, Fight Back: a Charlottesville torch rally Report Back

  • February 11, 2018 1:04 am

Submission

The following report back was written days after the Unite The Right rally that took place in Charlottesville during August 11th and 12th of 2017. We have chosen to release our collective accounts on the 6th month anniversary of the torch rally because we believe that as anarchists and anti-fascists, it’s critical for us to remember our history and to learn from it.

 

Friday, arriving in Charlottesville our crew knew what to expect. For weeks we had been aware of the Alt-right’s plans to have a torch march the night before the Unite the Right Rally. Having known about the torch march, we had no choice but to oppose it. We feel that as anti-fascists, we don’t “save our energy for the big fight,” we must oppose fascism whenever and wherever it chooses to rear its ugly head. Other traveling counter protesters we networked with for the weekend events were made aware of the size of the demo we were expecting Friday night, and we consider it a tactical failure that so few fellow anti-fascists came to oppose the torch rally with us. To those who did, we hope we’ll you see on the barricades.
 We were aware of the level of danger of the situation, and decided it was best to try to plug into the area and see if the locals were planning anything, as well as figure out the most tactically logical way to oppose the march with so few numbers. We found out about a gathering at St. Paul’s Church for local radicals and progressives. In order to learn more and connect with the locals, two of our crew went to the church to find out more. The following is an account from that encounter in the words of our crew members who attended:

The church was conducting a non violent direct action training, and later hosting an interfaith sermon featuring Cornell West calling for 1000 faith leaders to oppose the hate driven Unite the Right Rally. We were able to meet with a local radical minister deeply involved with the struggle in C’ville, and discuss the churches worries, plans, and needs for the upcoming troubles. The good Reverend shared with us that he had personally been doxed, the church had received multiple threats, and white nationalists were attempting infiltration. There was a lot of concern about the Neo Nazi torchlight display of force that was in the works very, very, very nearby the doors of the church. We offered to assist with the physical security of the church. The Reverends response to paraphrase was,” Sure, we can use an extra set of hands. But we recognize and appreciate a diversity of tactics. Perhaps what is just as important is that the Nazi torchlight march is opposed and disrupted.” From there we were introduced to other radical actors on the ground. 
 This was something that struck our delegation, some of us who have been involved in Anti-Fascist politics for a number of years thought,”Wow- this is the first time we’ve ever basically received a Reverends blessing for doing this kind of work.” 
A small number of us returned to the church in the evening to see where we could fit in and support the local community and the larger community of faith. Redneck Revolt and a number of other groups and individuals had set up a layered security perimeter to ensure the physical security of the church. The people and the church were at serious risk as it was standing room only, packed to full capacity with a fascist paramilitary force wielding fire as weapons across the street.

While members of our crew were in the church, the bulk of our group was scoping out the scene. As the nazi’s started to amass in Nameless Field, we quickly realized our numbers were nowhere near as high as we had hoped. We decided the best course of action would be to meet them at the statue of Thomas Jefferson, their end point, and disrupt their photograph. In total the number of people opposing the group of nazis was under 40. Around 15-20 anti-fascists circling the scene as well as 15-20 peaceful student demonstrators. As the march commenced, we got word that there were around 250-300 nazis on the field lighting their torches. The students linked arms and circled the statue, chanting and singing in protest. The small group of anti-fascists floated around them ready to fight and defend the protesters from the oncoming group of nazis snaking their way over and down the steps towards us. The nazis encircled us, chanting “Jews will not replace us, you will not replace us.” They came ready to kill any protesters, bearing not only torches, but also bottles of kerosene, cans of mace, and other miscellaneous weapons. Then they attacked, And we fought like hell.

That evening, we had noticed police lurking around, even having walked by a group of officers who greeted us, suspecting nothing wrong. While we were waiting for the nazis to arrive, A police vehicle was parked at the bottom of the steps across the street as well as one not more than 100 yards further. During the battle at least 4 officers stood less than 10 feet away and watched while unmasked student protesters were attacked by a violent, angry, torch wielding, mob. We are not in the least bit surprised. The entire concept of “police” supports the agenda of white supremacy, and with it the systematic murder of the oppressed.
 The battle was madness. Every member of our crew was pepper sprayed and beaten, with multiple people doused in kerosene. Nearly every protester was injured during the altercation, and a team of medics did their best to aid them during and immediately after the battle. 
 However, even though we were heavily outnumbered we were successful in stopping them from taking the boastful picture they had planned. When the nazis began to lose momentum, and the police finally told everyone to disperse, about 50 of the nazis took a picture without torches that hasn’t since made it onto any social media because of how defeated they were. 
 Around the same time, a group of between 35-40 racists dressed in the American Vanguard uniforms approached the steps of the church chanting “You will not replace us, Jews will not replace us” again. There was a call from Redneck Revolt and the Socialist Rifle Association to defend the church using the high ground and our smaller numbers managed to keep the marchers from reaching the church. 
 The entire evening was a terrifying reminder of the level of growing seriousness in the alt-right movement. What was even more powerful, however, was what we managed to accomplish when a small number of people stood their ground and fought back.

 

Charlottsville revisited: moving forward in the antifascist struggle

 

We’ve come a long way since Charlottsville. In the days following these events, it felt like most of the world was flooded with a storm of media coverage, interviews, report backs, and solidarity actions. For a brief moment, one could almost feel like we had beaten the nazis back into their caves and we could once again focus on combating our real enemy, the State. However, as Charlottesville fades further into history, we are aware that this is not the case. Fascist activity around the so called United States is slowly picking back up, with a myriad of gatherings and speeches being coordinated to happen over the next few months. We feel that it is critical to analyze the tactical choices made in August, and how we can learn from them.

For us, one of the most glaring tactical missteps was that the general consensus from counter protestors that the torchlit march held by the nazis would be significantly smaller than it was, even when we had reliable intel regarding the numbers who planned to be present. As antifascists, we believe that we should never underestimate our opponents, especially in situations such as these. Solidarity is our most powerful weapon against the rising fascist creep and we need to make sure we use it. Moving forward, with the Alt-right conference (Detroit, MI March 4th-5th), the TPUSA regional conference (April 14-15th Chicago IL), The NSM meeting in Temple, Georgia (April 20th-21st) and the American Renaissance conference (Burns, TN April 27th-28th) on the horizon, we recognize that we must grow our networks of solidarity both within more clandestine circles and local communities. We’ve beaten them before and we’ll beat them again.

The solidarity actions that took place after Charlottesville were incredibly powerful. With these, antifascists around the world were able to not only support comrades fighting in Virginia, but to send a message to those in power and the paramilitary far right organizations that defend them: We will never stand down. We are everywhere. Once again, we want to analyze this level of solidarity and how it can be used to further support each other in the future. From our perspective, anarchists and antifascists in North America could do a better job of supporting both local and international struggles through solidarity actions. The fight against fascism goes far beyond street battles and we recognize that any struggle against domination anywhere, is our own. We want to send our love and support to every crew, friend, and stranger who supported the struggle in Charlottesville.

6 months later, we still feel the pain of Heather Heyer’s murder and with it, the burning rage we hold towards each and every fascist scumbag that’s infected our communities. With every action we take, we carry the memory of everyone who’s lost their lives in the struggle against fascism and in the fight for a better world. We have a long battle and a long road of healing ahead of us.

In Love and Struggle,
-LCA

Class war on broad street: a report back from the 52nd Super Bowl riots in Philly

  • February 6, 2018 9:14 pm

Submission

On February 4th, 2018, the Philadelphia Eagles stomped out the New England patriots in a classic expression of proletarian violence versus the statist symbol of a modern day “patriot.” Such highlights as known trump supporter and nerd Tom Brady getting dunked on will continue to inspire us. With this event in mind, our affinity group coordinated with other anarchists and anti-authoritarians in the weeks leading up to it to make sure that we all agreed to violently attack institutions and pigs using the sports celebration as cover. Fliers were posted all throughout the city calling for a loose “bird bloc” aka wear eagles gear and fuck shit up. We set the meeting point as city hall, leaving it vague and open to interpretation with the intention of autonomous groups coming together to perform their own actions. We felt this type of action would be more productive for this situation than an organized bloc. From everything we’ve seen so far, this is exactly what happened.

Decked out in Eagles gear, our crew used the cover of this celebration as an opportunity to attack what we view as the structures of domination that continue to keep us in chains. Instead of choosing specific targets, we recognize that with the oppressive structure of civilization, everything in the major business districts of a city, is a valid target. Hidden amongst thousands of eagles fans, we joyfully wandered the streets smashing, painting, and torching whatever we pleased. We also used this opportunity to violently assault police officers with a scattered volley of projectiles. For some of us, this was our first opportunity to physically strike back against the police with the aid of more experienced anti-cop militants. It was wonderful to see the way our friends eyes lit up with joy when they realized that they had all the tools they needed to fight back in ways they felt most comfortable.

We reached out other east coast anarchist crews to assure that we all got the opportunity to experience the fun of this attack, and as an opportunity to reconnect with friends we’ve made while traveling to actions in other cities. It was extremely refreshing both physically and mentally to share these moments of insurrection with people we don’t have the chance to revolt with in our everyday lives. We urge other insurrectionaries and revolutionaries to call upon friends in other places more often. Borders aren’t real and we shouldn’t let imaginary lines define our friendships.

We feel that it’s critical for anti-authoritarians to look for events such as this to plan attacks but also not to wait for them. This sports riot was perfect cover to carry out actions to temporarily liberate ourselves but these events are rare and we strongly believe that we must create our own spaces to act in however ways we see fit. It is worth noting that the NFL is an extremely fucked up hyper-masculine, sexist, racist, oppressive, capitalist institution that profits off the bodily harm of people who, for the most part, grew up in working class neighborhoods. We are also disgusted by the way the state uses the super bowl as an opportunity to further occupy and militarize cities. We stand in full support of the folks in Minnesota holding it down with protest and direct action. Philly loves y’all. Keep up the good work.

We took these actions with the memories of the murders of David Jones, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Scout Shultz, Laquan Mcdonald, Alexis Grigoropoulos, our Russian comrades being tortured, and everyone else who has been murdered, tortured, assaulted, or imprisoned by the state. We one day hope to see the structures of domination that keep us unfree as piles of ashes and distant memories.

 

Free Meek, The Move 9, Mumia, the remaining J20 defendants, and all political prisoners
Fuck the Patriots, fuck the pigs, fuck 12
To Amazon: Fuck you, theres plenty more where this came from. STAY OUT
To all our friends who couldn’t be with us today: We love y’all
Last of all “GO BIRDS”
With Love, rage, and solidarity
-Philly anarchists and 161s

“The Koch Brothers at Villanova” (Flynn and Dave in Forum)

  • January 29, 2018 3:24 pm

from Radical Education Department

(Flynn and Dave’s article was originally published in Forum.)

RED’s Introduction to “The Koch Brothers at Villanova”

The article that follows was recently published in the Villanova student magazine Forum. It uncovers the hidden influence exerted by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers on Villanova University’s campus.  The Matthew J Ryan Center, Flynn and Dave show, receives large sums of money from the Kochs precisely in order to serve as their puppet in peddling neoliberal indoctrination under the disguise of the academic pursuit of
knowledge.

RED has a particular interest in the Koch’s secret influence at Villanova, since our group first banded together–under the name “Nova Resistance”–to disrupt a Ryan Center event. In early 2017, the center hosted a talk by the widely disgraced pseudo-intellectual Charles Murray, who became infamous in the 1990s for openly embracing the eugenicist view that workers, women, and people of color are genetically inferior to rich, white men. The event was billed as an expression of Villanova’s deep commitment to academic “free speech”–a ridiculous claim, given that the talk was secretly purchased by billionaires spreading an agenda that does not stand up to academic scrutiny, on a campus that refused to allow the “free speech” of an openly gay performance artist on campus.  Moreover, it came to light that the university paid between $10,000 and $15,000 for additional “security” from the local police department out of fear that activists would exercise their purportedly constitutional right to protest the Charles Murray event. For more on our disruption of this corporate bank-rolled, over-securitized, pseudo-intellectual spiel, see this official statement.

Dave and Flynn’s article highlights a problem that goes far beyond Villanova University, however. Corporate and military interests regularly shape academic life on college campuses, in what some aptly call the military-industrial-academic complex. See, for instance, this article and this piece. The university system is not set apart from the forces of social domination that structure our society. It is neither a pure “ivory tower,” nor simply a harmless public service aimed at helping students find jobs. It is a site of social struggle.  In it, reactionaries seek to advance, by any means necessary, an agenda of social domination.  But history repeatedly shows the university can also be a means to infect society with radical, liberating social change.

The aim of the Left should not just be to protest corporate and military interests on university campuses. Such a reaction is defensive; it fails to make a lasting change, leaving the university at the mercy of reactionaries. Instead, the goal must be nothing short of a radical offensive: transforming universities into spaces from which to spread radical social change. This is precisely one of the reasons why we founded RED in the wake of our disruption of the smooth functioning of the military-industrial-academic complex at Villanova University.

– RED

2017:Year in Review

  • January 25, 2018 1:19 am

from Anathema

The following piece offers some thoughts on anarchist activity in Philly in 2017. Like any reflection worth its salt, this one is meant to inspire thought, conversation, and ultimately action.

Changes

The most noticeable change in the anarchist space has been its increase in size, alongside a deepening and broadening of anarchist activity in Philly. An ever-changing place, the anarchist space has seen an influx of new people and ideas. More punks, more overlapping with the left, and definitely more anti-fascism. Many of the struggles anarchists engaged in prior to 2017 have escalated, and anarchists have also opened new fronts on which to fight the social war. The anarchist space itself is constantly in flux; with people dropping in and out, relations between people changing, organizations forming and collapsing, new alliances and hostilities emerge. Each change affects our capacity, growing it, limiting it, moving it in different directions. Like all changes, these present both new opportunities and new challenges. How can we move beyond increasing our numbers to seeing our activity flourish? What would it mean to qualitatively assess the growth we’re experiencing?

Other aspects of the anarchist space have remained the same. We have yet to open large public conflictual spaces within big marches and protests. Theoretical conversation and deepening stays confined within one-on-one conversations and small groups. Assemblies and larger discussions continue to feel like spaces where many people show up with the expectation of being told what to do, of finding a group to join, of coming to a decision all together about what should be done, instead of being spaces where people arrive with their own initiative. As always, there is room to improve; this is not something we should shy away from.

The shift toward anti-fascism, fighting the right, and opposing Trump has affected local social conflict in interesting ways. Longtime anti-fascists expressed both bitterness and pleasure to see large sections of the population finally take seriously the dangers the far-right poses, a danger they have been fighting for years. One unfortunate effect of this shift towards anti-fascism has been a shift away from black revolts against policing and from anti-colonial struggles, as well as a shift away from insurrectionary interventions among anarchists. The rise of anti-fascism has birthed a curious and misguided belief among the mainstream that anarchists and anti-fascists are the same thing. What would it mean to understand the fight against fascism as part of a holistic struggle against all domination? How can we use this supportive climate to move forward without playing down our radical politics for the masses? How can we reimagine anti-fascism as proactive and offensive rather than reactive and defensive?

Strengths

Small and large autonomous actions proliferated! Last year saw consistent anarchist propaganda in the forms of graffiti, posters, and stickers in multiple neighborhoods, mostly in West and South Philly. A practice of attacks and sabotage against symbols and mechanisms of authority have become normal. The attack against a Philly police substation and several cop cars outside it was a notable escalation; Philly police property has not been successfully attacked in such a way, to our knowledge, for many years. The struggle against gentrification has continued without devolving into liberal activism, appearing mostly as targeted vandalism both in and out of demonstrations. How can this practice of attack be sharpened and expanded? What experiments in coordination, escalation, and diffusion can we try in 2018?

The May Day demo and the J20 march on South St were a dramatic escalation of anarchist street presence, creating short-lived spaces where people could freely express their rage against capital and the state without the threat of immediate arrest. This model of demonstrations, planned and promoted out of sight, have the potential to continue creating inviting space to experiment with attack on a scale impossible for a single affinity group to pull off alone. How can we keep creating space to collectively build our confidence and capacity to attack together in the year to come? How can we break out of the anarchist calendar and create moments of collective rage outside of a few anarchist holidays every year?

Support for local and national J20 defendants took many forms. The punk scene began to take political action in a way that hadn’t been seen in years. Lots of benefit shows and an all-day barbecue were organized. Meals, a rally, and benefit shows created a number of opportunities for the punk scene and the anarchist space to intermingle and draw new lines of solidarity.

Speaking of punk, at least twice in 2017 fascists were fought in or around punk shows. This return to the anti-authoritarian roots of the subculture is an example that can be carried over to other scenes and subcultures. How can we intensify the subversive potential of diy music, graffiti scenes, drug culture, or other alternative spaces? What would it look to begin transforming scenes and subcultures into rebellious countercultures?

The murder of anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, VA and nationwide debates around public monuments this summer led to a renewed interest in removing the monuments to former police chief and mayor Frank Rizzo. Public rallies and petitions pressured the city government to remove the Rizzo statue in Center City. At the same time, people vandalized the statue and mural, hung an anti-Rizzo banner, and put up posters depicting the statue being torn down. These actions worked to immediately discredit and attack the symbols of racism, and to pressure politicians to take action. This instance of national anti-confederate momentum being directed at symbols of racism and homophobia locally is an interesting example of adapting trends to fit our own contexts and desires. We might do well to learn from this and imagine ways to funnel popular sentiment in anti-authoritarian directions in the new year.

These practices, and the consistent rhythm they have created in the city and the anarchist space, are an accomplishment in themselves. What are ways to further spread and deepen these rebellious activities? What new ones can we imagine and experiment with?

Critiques

Anarchists have not yet been able to create large confrontational demonstrations. We have had little success with this here since at least before the Occupy movement, and this was also notable in 2017. In March, the MAGA march was confronted by the largest black bloc seen on the east coast in years, yet the opposition was mostly symbolic; the cops ultimately shut down the MAGA march. The Black Resistance march in February, which did clash with the police and vandalized a bank, led to arrests and injuries. Reports and many discussions of the march framed the protesters as passive victims, and the number of arrests and injuries left many feeling less empowered than they started. Attempts to create participatory confrontations were made during the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in October, but fell flat. The history of vicious police repression and Quaker pacifism in Philly have certainly contributed to this failure, yet it is up to us to create the activity we want to see.

Anti-fascist organizing has faced some challenges despite its sudden increase in popularity, as new methods are now needed. The wave of new people means that security and communication practices must be reviewed and tightened up.

When police killed David Jones in June, the response by anarchists was remarkably tame. The possibility of expressing an explicitly anti-cop position in solidarity with those who knew David never became a reality. David’s name was painted around the city, but it was the activists who made the most noise around David Jones’ death, asking for truth, justice, and at times community control of the police. This is not a call to dismiss the grief and suffering of those close to David whose ideas we disagree with, rather a suggestion to be honest about our politics and to act on them when police killings happen.

Our networks outside of the city seem to be lacking. Our location along the east coast means we could communicate and coordinate with anarchists in Baltimore, NYC, DC, Delaware and New Jersey. These types of connections could have made responding to the Vaughn prison revolt in February feel more possible. Additionally, international solidarity has not seemed like a priority for anarchists here this past year.

Lastly, and most straightforwardly, anarchists could have done a better job of presenting anarchy as a viable and desirable alternative to Trump and democracy. Despite a spike in activity by anarchists, many people still do not understand why anarchy is so appealing to us. We cannot look to the media to tell our potential accomplices and comrades why we do what we do. Only we can explain ourselves and what we fight for.

Reportback from the Eagles riots: A chance for solidarity, but more importantly, a chance for Joy.

  • January 25, 2018 1:03 am

Submission

On January 21st, we took the opportunity to take part in the temporary autonomous spaces created by the post victory fervor of thousands of football fans. Realizing that the soon to be victory of the Eagles was an ample time for us to strike back against the domination of civilization, the police, and the prison walls built by our own deteriorating mental, we met up with friends outside of Lincoln Financial field with the intention of freeing ourselves, albeit temporarily. We joined up with fellow members of the continuous class war in their celebration, singing, chanting, lighting fires, and using this opportunity to attack ATMs and throw a little bit of art on the dismal walls of south Philadelphia. We moved down broad street with a roving party that the Philly PD just couldn’t seem to shut down.

After the pigs threatened an individual with noise violations for playing music to the crowd, the atmosphere took a more exciting turn. South Philly sports fans who normally shrieked about the thin blue line became agitated at who they viewed as their protectors. We took this opportunity to begin chants such as “Fuck the Patriots” and “Fuck Tom Brady” which many didn’t notice quickly became abbreviated to “FTP” and “Fuck 12” (Brady’s number). The crowd began to swell, with people leaving and even more left their homes to join the party and follow what soon became an autonomous, spontaneous anti police demonstration.

We made our way to city hall where our moving party joined up with an even larger group, the smell of smoke and alcohol filled the air and the distinct sounds of chanting bellowed in our ears, drowning out the orders of the Philly PD. With growing anger, the police attempted to clear the street. We used this opportunity to use the hundreds of bottles littering the streets as projectiles, with many others soon following our lead. The riots moved slowly, untamed by the police as people continued to share their joy and release their rage against the city through attack. More and more riot cops materialized from the side streets as someone with a speaker played NWA’s “fuck the police” to the excitement of many within the crowd. We continued to throw projectiles, light things on fire, and paint the walls with many other folks, most of whom we had never struggled against domination with, but whom we certainly hope to have at the barricades with us in the future. The crowd moved towards 15th and JFK and eventually dispersed. At this time, we are unsure of anyone arrested for taking part in this spontaneous riot.

This action was super great for us and hopefully for the hundreds of others who took to the streets at our sides. It was a beautiful change of pace to strike back in such a low stress environment on such a large scale without the traditional cover of the black block. As insurrectionary anti-authoritarians, we’re far too aware of how damaging to our mental health the institution that is the state is, and how little we get to exercise our rage to the capacity we would like to. This battle in the on going class war was extremely refreshing, and most importantly it was fun. By striking back, we were reminded of the level of joy only experienced when we make our executioners fear us, to watch the uncertainty and terror that manifests in their eyes when they realize that they’ve lost control. We are reminded that within the chaos, we can be free. Most importantly, we are reminded of our own power and that class war and insurrection will never be a few small groups taking actions, but a writhing unstoppable horde of love and rage.

 

We took these actions in memory of all our comrades across this dying world who are no longer with us and those who are slowly slipping from our embrace, whether it be from toxic institutions pushed onto them, or ones they’ve summoned for themselves. A riot will always carry the ghosts of our losses, and our hopes for a world we hope to see one day. For this reason, we view every attack as a eulogy, and a chance for inspiration. We hope to see y’all in the streets February 4th.

Fuck Cops, Go Birds

Anathema Volume 4 Issue 1

  • January 21, 2018 8:05 pm

from Anathema

Volume 4 Issue 1 (PDF for printing 11 x 17)

Volume 4 Issue 1 (PDF for reading 8.5 x 11)

In this issue:

  • New Year, New Attitude
  • 2017: Year in Review
  • Guilt
  • DOW Reaches 26,000
  • Against Fearlessness
  • Poem: “About Me: In English”
  • What Went Down
  • World News

The Cinema Committee Reflects on 2017 from Belarus to Philadelphia

  • January 20, 2018 10:52 am

from It’s Going Down

[Video Here]

We’ve all heard the story before. People still tell it from the moldering dankness of their mom’s basement. It goes like this: George Soros contacts The Anarchist Antifa Supersoldiers and hands over bulging bags thick with gold in exchange for doing his bidding. Interesting story, right? Well, turns out plenty of shitholes on the internet tell it nearly every week. Since we can’t seem to convince anyone that we’re broke a a joke, and since everyone is calling everyone else a Russian spy, we thought it appropriate to celebrate our current predicament by weaving it all together in a simple and clear narrative. Contrary to popular reports, the international anarchist movement is beholden to neither George Soros or Vladimir Putin. All flags look the same to us. Every country is our homeland.

While the techno-overlords continued to blast the San Francisco Bay Area with their continuously stoked housing crisis, several individuals found it wise to begin burning down luxury housing developments in the city of Oakland. These fires began in 2016 and continued into 2017, each of them completely destroying their targets and costing ten of millions of dollars. The latest was in July when a luxury apartment block caught fire in the heart of Downtown Oakland. These arsons have been wisely left unclaimed by their authors. With the housing and homeless crisis plainly visible for all to see, the sight of burning luxury apartments is a simple message difficult to misinterpret.

Across the continent in Philadelphia, the local anarchist movement has grown quite strong in the past years and become popular for organizing and marching against Trump. Since the fall of 2012, local anarchists have printed their paper Anathema and chronicled events in their city and beyond. With housing costs rising and homelessness increasing, some individuals found it wise to sneak into some luxury developments and torch them to the ground. This arson took place in the Point Breeze neighborhood in 2017 and garnered wide attention in the local media. In another act of rebellion, a group of fifty people rampaged through a series of new developments and trashed everything that reeked of luxury. These two events happened within weeks of each other and sent a clear message against this new luxury development most liberals view as normal. Because of the fluid and toxic news cycle of our current era, few people remember these important activities outside of Philadelphia.

Philly’s War on Papi Stores and the Limits of Liberalism

  • January 13, 2018 11:54 am

from Tubman-Brown Organization

By Tubman-Brown

On November 2nd, Philadelphia Councilwoman Cindy Bass introduced legislation to further regulate corner stores and restaurants — specifically to introduce new restrictions and reinforce existing restrictions on these stores. The bill has passed through City Council and has now been signed by Mayor Jim Kenney as of December 20th. The contents of the bill can be viewed on the city’s website, here.

News about this bill has been circulating around the internet. The articles are generally condemning the Councilwoman’s bill as an unfair imposition on business owner’s rights to operate as they please. The Conservative Tribune claims, in an article called “Big City Dem Wants Bulletproof Glass Banned for Being Racist“, that the bill is evidence that: “We now live in a world where almost anyone and everything can and will be labelled ‘racist.’ Some store owners in Philadelphia are the latest victims of the PC police.” But the liberal majority in the city government agrees that the bill would improve quality of life in the city and passed it unanimously. We would like to criticize both of these positions and provide our own view from the perspective of poor Philadelphia, and use this example to draw attention to larger problems in American politics, particularly how the interests of the poor and working class are never represented. A better source for this story is Philadelphia’s The Inquirer, who published a more balanced article called “Barrier windows in Philly beer delis: Symbols of safety or distrust?” that tries to present both arguments and provides good testimony from some stores owners, but as a piece of reporting it does not look at the wider situation.

Councilwoman Bass is a liberal and a Democratic Party politician, and a black woman from North Philadelphia. She told Fox29 News: “We want to make sure that there isn’t this sort of indignity, in my opinion, to serving food through a Plexiglas only in certain neighborhoods.” This is in reference to the statements of Yale sociology professor, Dr. Elijah Anderson, who describes the presence of bulletproof plexiglass as a “symbol of distrust”, a suggestion that the customers are not “…civil, honest people.”

Bass’s statement is strange. Why would the plexiglass barrier make us indignant? Is it because it shows that we live “…only in certain neighborhoods”? Well, those “certain neighborhoods” are poor neighborhoods. If you live in a poor neighborhood you know it, and your problems definitely have a lot more to do with affording your groceries than whether or not the cashier selling you them is behind glass and wire. What Dr. Anderson of Yale fails to recognize, or does not say clearly enough, is that if the glass and wire is ugly it’s ugly because it reminds us of our own desperation and the desperation we are surrounded by. If it were not a symbol of the reality of poverty and violence it would not be troublesome. The trendy coffee shops and restaurants of University City and the recently deceased neighborhood of Fishtown are often decorated like warehouses and factories, with exposed piping, steel, and gritty lighting to create an urban atmosphere — the people eating there are not reminded of the reality of hard labor and poverty because it is not a reality to them, it is an aesthetic choice. Dr. Anderson and Councilwoman Bass equate the presence of bulletproof plexiglass with an aesthetic choice meant only to impart a message and ignore the circumstances that created it. The most important factor, regardless of whether the plexiglass is necessary or not, is finding out why it is there in the first place.

Poverty is violent. Most of the danger comes from the lack of jobs, healthcare, and education, but those threats sometimes spill over into robberies and shootings. Bulletproof glass is a sad reality in poor neighborhoods, a reminder of the interaction between one person robbing a store because they’re struggling and another person trying to run a little store. And these people running the stores are treated as the primary opposition to Councilwoman Bass’s bill. Bass claims that “…the bill has been mischaracterized by the people who run those stores – people who are exploiting a loophole in state law and hurting the neediest neighborhoods in Philadelphia.” The stores she is referring to are corner stores in poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia. These are redlined neighborhoods (Philadelphia is such a good example of redlining that a map of our extensive racial segregation is used for the Wikipedia picture describing redlining). In short, these are neighborhoods where there are none or fewer of the Wawas and Acmes and stores of similar reputation as are available in places like the Far Northeast, Chestnut Hill, or Center City. That’s because opening them in Strawberry Mansion, East Germantown, Kensington, and similar neighborhoods is considered a bad investment due to the high poverty and the crime that comes with that poverty. The owners of Acme and Wawa can afford higher rent in wealthier neighborhoods, or can place their stores strategically on the edges of poor areas.

Whose Land Are We Fighting For? A Critique of Leftist Attempts to Engage the “White Working Class”

  • January 12, 2018 11:49 am

from Tubman-Brown Organization

By Bonny Wells

Right wing militias have been part of the US political landscape since at least the 1980s. The ideology that guides them, a combination of patriotism, capitalism, religious fervor, and white supremacy, has also been attributed to “lone wolf” attacks like the Oklahoma City bombing and the massacre in Waco, Texas (Kimmel and Ferber, 2000). There are more recent examples as well: In 2013, the town of Gilbertson, Pennsylvania was effectively seized by the police chief Mark Kessler, who also headed the Constitution Security Force[1]. In 2014, the armed standoff at the Bureau of Land Management by Cliven Bundy and his family put militias on the national stage again, as he was connected to the sovereign citizen movement and, by extension, the Oath Keepers Militia. Most recently, a standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge from January 2nd-February 11th, 2016 returned the Bundy family to the public eye (Ammon Bundy was present at the Oregon Standoff). These movements are based on a particular narrative about control of land, which contributes to associated beliefs about the intrusiveness of the federal government and movements toward state sovereignty. While only one of the above incidents was directly carried out by a militia, the sentiments that inform right-wing militia activity undergird all of the conflicts: white settlers using any means necessary to control territory. At the same time, organizations on the political left have renewed their efforts to engage with right wing militias and find a common cause against the state. This paper will examine these efforts, as well as theoretical analyses of the position of white settlers, in order to assess these organizing efforts.

Understanding these narratives is useful at this moment in U.S. politics. In the months leading up to and following the election of Donald Trump, numerous articles[2] were written attempting to understand the mentality of the so-called “white working class”-rural, low income white people in areas that are economically depressed and have been neglected by politicians and institutions. Writers attributed Trump’s success to several factors, but racism and economic depression consistently topped the list[3]. In many cases, “economic anxiety” arguments were used to refute or complicate the notion that white rural voters were motivated by Trump’s racist, xenophobic and misogynistic platform. While responses to Trump’s election ranged from sympathetic to vindictive, they all pointed to the failure of existing institutions to redress economic exploitation and vulnerability. Neither major political party has the will nor the capacity to provide basic economic support for these people.

The framing of Trump voters as uniquely racist shifts the responsibility for white supremacy from white progressives, who prefer to see themselves as “good” or “antiracist” white people, to people comfortable with the most vulgar display of a set of values that is for the most part shared by white people across the political spectrum. This is further complicated by even more deeply assured white communists, socialists, and anarchists, who frequently deride white liberals for evading their role in white supremacy while insisting that the violent racial resentment of a prototypical Trump supporter would be best addressed by a combination of radical economic redistribution and stringent social conditioning (by which I refer to the militant “no platform”, direct physical confrontation approach favored by antifascist organizations).

A program of radical wealth redistribution is a significant improvement over liberals’ approach to racism as an individual attitude problem to be repaired through endless discussion and recognition, without any effort to address systematic racism or violent capitalist exploitation. However, anarchist and communist responses often fall short of directly confronting the white relationship to land and wealth in the United States. These tendencies argue that working class white people have been conditioned by wealthy white people to fight with working class people of color to fight for the scraps of unequally distributed wealth. In its less sophisticated forms, this argument states that poor white people have been manipulated by their wealthy counterparts to “work against their own class interests”-wealth redistribution that would benefit working people of all races equally.

Communists and anarchists have identified this political moment as an opportunity to radicalize poor white people and engage them in anti-capitalist and anti-racist activism. One such group is Redneck Revolt, a nationwide group formed specifically to bring poor white people to the radical left. Some chapters also form armed self-defense groups under the banner of the “John Brown Gun Club”. The objectives of Redneck Revolt are multifaceted[4], but a key component is the effort to converse with and educate poor white people and to offer an alternative to white nationalist groups, who have also consciously incorporated anti-capitalist rhetoric in their platform[5]. While they are one of the most notable examples, Redneck Revolt is part of a broader radical fascination with the aesthetics and popular culture of poor white people.

This type of organizing leads to strange bedfellows, or at least attempted alliances that other groups on the left might not consider. Recently, Redneck Revolt has been encouraged by the testimony of Peter, a former member of the III% militia who wrote a powerful reflective essay about a car ride that forced him to rethink some of his deeply held racist and Islamophobic prejudices. While Peter stated on no uncertain terms that he would not compromise his former militia members, his essay signaled that it is possible to encourage anti-racist and anti-capitalist consciousness in people who have been considered longtime enemies of the radical left[6].

Pennsylvania Halts Construction of Mariner East 2 Pipeline

  • January 12, 2018 4:11 am

from Unicorn Riot

Harrisburg, PA – On January 3, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued an Administrative Order halting all construction of the Mariner East 2 Pipeline. The natural gas liquids pipeline is being constructed by Sunoco Logistics, who in 2017 completed their corporate merger with Energy Transfer Partners. The pipeline begins at fracking fields in Scio, Ohio and crosses southern Pennsylvania to reach its terminus at refineries in Marcus Hook near Philadelphia, where the natural gas liquids will be exported by ship for use in the European plastics industry.

The decision by the DEP, which has historically sided overwhelmingly with oil and gas interests, comes after over 100 spills of drilling slurry have plagued construction along the pipeline route. Bentonite clay leaked from Mariner East 2 drill sites has damaged numerous streams and natural areas and tainted drinking water in private homes and public schools.

Horizontal directional drilling by Sunoco has also led to the “development of an expanding sinkhole that currently threatens at least two private homes and is within 100 feet of Amtrak’s Keystone Line”, according to PA State Senator Andy Dinniman.  

State regulators cited a long series of “egregious and willful violations” committed by the pipeline operator while constructing Mariner East 2. The DEP website’s Compliance and Enforcement section for Mariner East 2 shows 33 Notices of Violation sent between May 9, 2017 and January 8, 2018 regarding drilling incidents in over 12 counties.

The order from the Pennsylvania DEP essentially freezes all construction along the pipeline route, with specific exceptions allowing anti-erosion measures at pipeline dig sites as well as maintenance of horizontal directional drill (HDD) equipment.

Last summer, Unicorn Riot visited Camp White Pine, a direct action encampment using tree-sits and other tactics to obstruct the pipeline route. After they were served with notice, Sunoco had seized a portion of their forest land under eminent domain, Ellen Gerhart and her daughter Elise decided to invite supporters to live on the easement and have erected several complex aerial blockades.

In summer 2017, we also traveled to Chester County, outside Philadelphia, where drilling by Sunoco contractors for Mariner East 2 had damaged local water tables, destroying and polluting local aquifers and private wells. We heard from affected residents, as well as members of neighborhood-based Safety Coalitions working to address safety concerns posed by Mariner East 2.

While driving through Chester County, we also discovered Sunoco was conducting horizontal directional drilling within feet of dozens of homes in an apartment complex, exposing residents to extreme drilling noise and toxic fumes from an open waste pit.

Open pit for storing Mariner East 2 drilling waste at Whiteland Apartments

While the legal shutdown of virtually all construction along the pipeline route has been hailed as a victory by many activists, others have also pointed out that the order does not stop the pipeline entirely, and merely points out issues Sunoco must address in order to proceed.

Anathema Volume 3 Issue 10

  • December 20, 2017 12:04 pm

from Anathema

Volume 3 Issue 10 (PDF for printing 11 x 17)

Volume 3 Issue 10 (PDF for reading 8.5 x 11)

In this issue:

  • What Went Down
  • Flash Mobs
  • Portrait of a Neo-Nazi
  • Rail and Energy Infrastructure in Philly
  • Gas Plant Greenlit in Nicetown
  • Updates on Local Repression
  • Black December
  • John Raines
  • Signals of Disorder
  • Against Morality
  • World News
  • Poem by Eric King

The Insurrectionary Campus: A Strategy Proposal

  • December 15, 2017 7:35 pm

from It’s Going Down

Someone stands on a table and yells, “This is now occupied.” And that’s how it begins.

– Q. Libet, Pre-Occupied: The Logic of Occupation.

Introduction

We know by now that fascists are targeting universities as recruiting sites and as places to make ideologies of racial, gender, and economic domination respectable (see this and this). Both liberals and conservatives are rushing to ensure that universities give fascists protected, well-funded platforms. What is the task of Antifa on college campuses? How can we be effective in combating the “fascist creep”?

Antifa’s powerful disruptions of fascist speakers help point the way. But that essential tactic has limits. It is often defensive, which leaves the university waiting for its next fascist cooption. What if the university could be more than a site to be defended? Can the struggle for campuses be not just reactive but transformative – wrenching universities out of the hands of fascists and liberals to make them sites of revolutionary power? We’ve seen glimpses of this possibility in the insurrections at the New School in 2008, at NYU in 2009, and throughout the wave of campus occupations in California in 2009 and 2010 -themselves reminders of the earthquake of student and worker struggle in May 68.

As a member of the Radical Education Department, part of the on-campus Antifa struggle, I offer the following: a strategy proposal for the experimental, insurrectionary seizing of campuses away from fascists and liberals. This insurrectionary approach could not only help create campuses entirely hostile to resurgent fascism; they could also help put powerful tools in the hands of radical left movements as they coordinate, expand, and develop, especially during key moments of social upheaval.

To make this proposal, I first frame it in the context of current American antiauthoritarian organizing.  Then I analyze the crises shaking the university system, which reveal powerful possibilities and resources for radical action in and against that system.  Finally, I chart some potential tactics by which to seize the means of intellectual production.

1. The University Struggle in Context

The horizontal, directly democratic struggles that surged after 2007 achieved important gains like reviving large-scale radical politics and producing a new generation of militant, antiauthoritarian organizers. The collapse of Occupy in the US, 15-M in Spain, and beyond in 2011 and 2012, however, reveals an important limit within the radical left today.

The kind of prefigurative organizing that stood at the heart of Occupy and related uprisings has been a crucial way of coping with the collapse of the revolutionary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In the absence of those larger, more powerful, and more coordinated struggles, prefigurative politics played an experimental role. Occupy’s emphasis on consensus, for example, made it possible to tentatively construct mass movements by not forcing any group to commit itself to a particular program, thus bringing together a wide range of groups and interests.

Despite its important role, larger prefigurative struggles are often unstable. Within Occupy’s coalitions, revolution-minded anarchists were constantly hounded by pious liberals wringing their hands in terror over the possibility of a broken window. After the state swept Occupy clear of the squares they were squatting, it was no surprise that the coalitions often scattered.

Movements like Occupy, then, highlight a central question for the antiauthoritarian left.  How are we to create revolutionary, mass, and durable movements capable of eventually overthrowing capitalism and social domination?

In this context, the question of the university becomes: how can campus struggles add to the construction of those kinds of movements? In particular, how can we help lay the infrastructure for mass, federated action during the next wave of revolutionary struggle?

2. Crisis and Possibility in the University

The university is undergoing a series of fundamental crises within which we can spot possibilities for revolutionary struggle. What follows is only a brief sketch of those crises and possibilities.

A. Crisis of “Expert Knowledge”

Because it is the place where society’s experts and managers are trained, the university plays an important role in determining what counts as “real” knowledge – which is why the media often turn to professors to comment on current events. Strangely, the university is rejecting this role. Professors and administrators are not only refusing to judge the fascist ideology of racial and gender inferiority as right or wrong; they are also asserting that fascists have a right to free university endorsement, massive funds for protection and promotion, and highly publicized platforms to spread their ideologies.

But Antifa’s challenge to fascists on campus reveals an important opportunity. The struggle over university platforms suggests that they could increasingly become the conscious target of seizure and control by radicals. Those platforms are ready-made bullhorns by which to cultivate revolutionary theory and culture able to reach far greater numbers than many other outlets. One can imagine, for example, anarchists increasingly and actively (rather than reactively) seizing podiums at high-profile university events – hijacking and subverting media coverage with minimal effort.

B. Crisis of the Disillusioned Student

Traditionally, the university has been seen as a basic tool for social mobility – and so a justification for capital’s brutal inequalities. But the possibility of social climbing now looks increasingly ridiculous in light of ballooning of student debt and an economy geared towards “flexible,” part-time labor.

We have already seen some of the effects of this disillusionment: the underemployed recent graduate is often the engine driving movements like the Global Justice Movement, 15-M, and Occupy.  The question was already asked by Research and Destroy in 2009: what is the point of college, other than disciplining us to manage a failing society?

The university, then, contains a highly disillusioned group – precisely what lures fascists on campus – and yet one that clearly can be radicalized for antiauthoritarian struggle. In this university crisis, the left could accelerate disillusionment and radicalization.

C. Crisis of the Disillusioned Worker

The vast majority of classes are now taught by contingent faculty – teachers without job security who often also lack benefits and receive poverty wages. Drives to unionize contingent faculty have begun, but a more radical possibility can be found here.

The precarious teacher is facing plummeting job prospects; the hope for tenure is now almost completely gone for most. But their precarity organically connects these teachers to the other disillusioned workers at the heart of so many recent uprisings, positioning it to bridge on-campus and off-campus struggles.

The college campus, then, is home to extremely volatile ingredients – disillusioned teachers students, alongside also exploited cooks, servers, and janitors. And those ingredients are combined in a place that also offers the potential for a platform through which to spread radical political organizations and ideas. If these could be properly combined, they could make the campus a thoroughly radical, even explosive, center.

3. Further Possibilities

But a college campus also has particular kinds of resources that, even beyond its volatile elements, make it an important target for radical seizure.

Communication

If a central job for radicals is assembling mass, revolutionary struggles, then one key element will be access to technological hubs for coordination and federation. We saw the importance of these kinds of hubs in N30. The radical overtaking of Seattle in 1999 was coordinated via Independent Media Centers – websites that communicated tactics and ideas. But in Seattle, activists managed those sites through physical IMCs – rooms full of computers and other resources (food, water, shelter) that made coordination and communication much easier and faster and that strengthened the sense of community and solidarity. We saw the importance of these centers in Seattle from the fact that police targeted them to choke off the uprising.

College campuses offer massive, free access to computers and the internet that could be communication hubs for radical struggles on and off campus. One valid ID and password could given an entire movement that access. More than this, some grad students and faculty are given unlimited free printing privileges – and again, only one person with that privilege could print an entire movement’s flyers, posters, zines, and papers for distribution.

But colleges also have libraries – and within them, mountains of information on past movements’ tactics, strategies, and ideas. College libraries are waiting to become part of a radical research center for ideas and histories that could feed directly into movements.

Spatial infrastructure

At the same time, radicals need centralized, reliable spaces for meeting, relaxing, sharing ideas, planning actions, and so on. This often means renting or squatting spaces across an entire city-scape, and those spaces are often available only on a temporary or unpredictable basis.

A college campus has a glut of unoccupied spaces ready to be used: halls, dorm lounges, library rooms or floors, theaters, and so on. On urban campuses, those spaces are not only relatively concentrated within one (often fairly central) part of a city, but also can be available more predictably.

4. Seize the Means: A Tactical Sketch

So what does it mean to seize the university through insurrection – to take hold of these possibilities and resources?

First, seizing the university means building radical, antiauthoritarian campus “cultures.” On the one hand, this entails what RED calls “guerilla education” – radical forms of education outside, beyond, and against the classroom that spread militancy and push a campus’s “common sense” far left.  On the other hand, this means creating, multiplying, and federating radical groups on campus that are intolerant to fascism and willing to act in solidarity with radical struggles on and off campus.  The Filler Collective, the Radical Education Department, anti-racist organizing, the Campus Antifascist Network, and radical struggles in solidarity with Palestine are examples of this work.  The aim is to become a kind of disease, infecting other groups with leftist ideas while recruiting their most radical members.  This is to “solidify” the radical left, as a pamphlet from the 2008 New School occupation puts it, creating zones of radical antiauthoritarianism on campus that spread and connect.

But it is not enough to aim for a radical leftist culture. Those cultures can become simply alternative spaces that leave the college basically untouched. What’s needed, I suggest, is an emphasis on direct, radical action. The Filler Collective, discussing a Pitt occupation, writes:

I sure as hell wasn’t radicalized after hitting up some student group’s meeting. I’m here because I’m still chasing the high from that first punk show in a squat house basement, that first queer potluck, that first renegade warehouse party, that first unpermitted protest, that first smashed Starbucks window. […]

Last November, a student-led march ended with a brief occupation of the Litchfield Towers dormitory lobby […]  That night ended with radical questions circulating beyond our countercultural bubble for the first time in recent memory: Do the Pitt Police really have the right to beat the students they’re supposed to protect? Wait, don’t we pay to use that building? Well shit, do the police even have the right to dictate how students use our campus in the first place?

Insurrectionary actions reveal undreamt-of revolutionary possibilities. Without them, potential radicals remain stuck in a world with no alternatives.

In this way, overt tactics should be rooted in central, covert, insurrectionary tactics that take Antifa as a model.  What I have in mind here, however, is not defensive but offensive, essentially devoid of protest: experimental seizures of resources and of symbolic spaces that show that the university can–and must–be in the autonomous control of radical leftist movements.

Occupations are a key example. In 2008 New School students overtook the cafeteria and study center; in 2013, students seized the president’s office at Cooper Union; at the National Autonomous University in Mexico, a building has been occupied by radicals for 17 years; and in the recent past, “in hundreds of universities across central and eastern Europe–students gather in the auditoriums of occupied buildings, holding general assemblies, discussing modalities of self-determination.”  Such occupations are often reactions–to tuition hikes, e.g. – but they could become powerful offensive weapons.

Occupations should not be the limit of our imagination. Reclaim the Streets was genius in its guerilla actions, temporarily but radically overtaking and transforming roads, highways, and intersections. The same tactic could apply in a president’s office or at a campus event–perhaps making them unpredictable places to issue revolutionary communiques.

By creating offensive, radical campuses, we could create schools where no one would dream of inviting a fascist ideologue. More than this, campus insurrections are practice for the next revolutionary moments, when we’ll be ready to take hold of the university’s and society’s resources in order to put them at the service of broader struggles. In the words of Research and Destroy, “We seek to push the university struggle to its limits. […] [W]e seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.”

The insurrectionary campus: not just defending against fascism, but making the university a tool of social revolution.

Anathema Volume 3 Issue 9

  • November 20, 2017 7:44 pm

from Anathema

Volume 3 Issue 9 (PDF for printing 11 x 17)

Volume 3 Issue 9 (PDF for reading 8.5 x 11)

In this issue:

  • What Went Down
  • Letter From Michael Kimble
  • 5 Points Against Waiting For The Next Big Demo
  • Price Of Amazon
  • J20 Updates
  • Vaughn Prison Rebels Indicted
  • World News
  • Panopticon Consumes Bike Trail
  • Philly Vegan Awards
  • Raccoon Obituary