Submission
In the context of the Moms for Liberty conference the Museum of the American Revolution was vandalized. It hosted a reception event for the conference, despite complaints from staff. I wanted to make sure that people knew the museum was attacked. Hats off to the anonymous vandals! I’d love to read your communique; I can’t read the graffiti from the pictures.
Museum Hosting Moms For Liberty Attacked
Announcing Unravel.noblogs.org
from Act For Freedom Now!
Unravel is a counter-information project with an insurrectional perspective that aims to connect acts of negation and attack in the so-called USA. Those in power want our acts to remain disparate and disconnected, the spark that drives each of us shielded from the other’s view. By weaving together the threads of action, this project hopes to draw throughlines in the struggles that anarchists engage in, in order to broaden and amplify shared projectualities.
Domination and authority cross us in a tangled and knotted web of ever more interconnected systems; unraveling this network at one point has the potential to create a cascade that throws everything into disarray, opening spaces for freedom. This website is explicitly anarchist, and accepts/reposts communiques, reportbacks, analysis, calls to action, events, and mass media articles about unclaimed acts of vandalism, sabotage, arson, or destruction.
Report from Anti-Gentrification Action At Bartram’s Garden
Submission
A couple weeks ago, a friend sent me a flyer for a “work” party at Bartram’s Garden. Anarchists have been agitating around stopping gentrification of that area for a while after that zine came out…I forgot the name. Generally, one of the cooler things about anarchists in Philly is that we have a pretty long history of actually fighting gentrification through sabotage as opposed to just complaining about it on a megaphone. The flyer advised us to mask up, bring tools, that phones were bad and to bring trusted friends. It also advised for folks to keep off the internet and big threads. I was excited to have been sent a flyer for an action that seemed a bit more devious especially since all the leftist stuff going on in the city is very uninteresting to me. Yelling at buildings is very boring and doesn’t seem like a good way to adequately address gentrification in my view. As a Black radical, it is pretty disappointing that most of the Black organizations in the city are uninterested in attacking in ways that actually combat gentrification, materially.
Anyway, I sent the flyer to a few homies. Some were able to make it. Some weren’t. Anyway, myself and a comrade rolled down there a lil after the time it was supposed to start. We scoped it out. We weren’t sure exactly where everyone was meeting but after hearing cutting sounds, we went over. The action was pretty cool. People were just cutting this big ass fence that the developers had set up in Bartrams. Everyone was kinda just doing their own thing. My homie and I didn’t bring adequate tools to cut so we ended up just carring the fencing and throwing some of it into the river along with other attendees. The action was very chill and it was good to see a few familiar faces. We both had some shit to do early the next day so we peaced out a bit early after leaving a few tags. There wasn’t really much else to do though other than cut the fence…and I wish the action maybe had another goal or something. Despite this, it was pretty cool.
Either way, actions like this are cool because they are pretty low level and a good entry point for people that are interested in learning how to be more confident in doing attack with their own hands as opposed to asking some politician for help. I hope that this energy can continue into the summer. I’d love to get invited to more night demos or work parties. And I’d definitely bring my friends.
I guess I’m sorta a movement oriented person (which puts me at odds with a lot of insurrectos in the city) so I just wonder how a more aboveground anti-gentrification movement could interface with these more underground attacks in Philly. Is that something worth pursuing? What would it materially look like? I’d like to see attacks grow and I wonder how much of that means trying to interface and impose our will on the more leftist anti-gentrification forces in the city. Despite this, most of them are pretty liberal and against violence but maybe there are some openings. Who knows? It was refreshing though to take part in something that wasn’t liberal. I’ve love to get more invitations in the future.
More anarchy
More destruction
Fuck the Gentry
-a new afrikan anarchist in Philly
Earth Destroying Machine Sabotaged At Bartrams
Submission
On June 1, under the moonlight, some feral gnomes poured grit into the lubrication system of an earth destroying machine – paralyzing it before it kills more of the post-industrial wild habitat in Bartram’s. The goal of this earth destroyer, and the developers in power of it, is to raze the land, killing and displacing all of the wild and free life from the area in order to make way for a Biotec Campus who markets a sanitized version of life. That life includes the torture of nonhumans and displacement of humans and nonhumans alike for it’s concrete pathways and steel buildings.
We will oppose every destroyer, every tool of power and development that seeks to capture, kill, torture, and displace all our lives. The feral land, trees, nonhuman and human animals will not be bulldozed with ease.
Direct Actions At Philly Pride
Submission
Amidst the huge crowds at Pride our affinity group had a lot of fun dancing and spitting on cops yelling at them to get the fuck out of pride. Several of their cop cars were spray painted “FTP” and “ACAB” and “Pride is a Riot!” There was some anti-gay hecklers that were attacked by various queer people throwing drinks and heavy objects at them. We also burned American some flags in the street. Goods were redistributed from various stores.
Some homophobic bigots were chased out of the Gayborhood and we are sure that many more Queer Revolutionary actions and general mischief happened as the night continued. Let’s keep the fight against the corporations, cops, bigots, and capitalism strong all year. Fuck Assimilation! Liberation Now! Bash Back!
May Day Action
Submission
May Day graffiti was done on a settler colonial monument on Lenape Land. It says “May Day means Land Back!” – “Solidarity Means Attack” – “Smash colonialism!” – “Kill cops!” “ACAB” and more!
STRUGGLE, SOLIDARITY AND RAGE ¡VIVA TORTUGUITA!
from Unoffensive Animal
[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]On January 18th police murdered a forest defender, Tortuguita. Immediately, a call was put out for a “night of rage”. The rage was instead was not limited to one night, nor only retaliation.These actions have been claimed in honor, memory, vengeance, revenge, for, or in solidarity with Tortuguita.
From January 18th onward across the USA people held vigils, built barricades, attacked a realty office, attacked banks, smashed the windows of the skyscraper housing the Atlanta Police Foundation, torched a police cruiser, vandalized cars in a Porsche dealership, attacked UPS shipping center, set construction equipment on fire, and attacked the offices of those responsible for cop city. Across turtle island we felt it from California, Illinois, North Carolina, Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, Atlanta, Georgia, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Michigan, New York, Colorado, Indiana, and Minnesota.
In February across the USA, banks were attacked, excavators in Weelaunee forest were set on fire, Amazon delivery vehicles vandalized, Atlas offices targeted, a Norfolk Southern rail line sabotaged, the home addresses of employees of Atlas were published, in France a transmission pylon was set on fire. Rage was had from California, Brooklyn, New York, Georgia, South Carolina, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, to Bure France and back.
In March during the week of action in Atlanta, GA USA, a demonstration of 300 people stormed and destroyed a construction site and police staging area, and later that week machinery in Weelaunee was destroyed. More construction equipment was sabotaged and, offices vandalized. In late March the home addresses were published of several Judges, a Police Investigator, an Assistant Chief of police, and a GBI Special Agent.
By carrying our friends in our hearts and actions they live on in spirit and in memory. With Love and Rage, we carry on those who have been taken from us.
Night Owls #4: Winter’s Embers
from It’s Going Down
[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]
Download pamphlet: Print – Tabloid
Download action poster: Print – Tabloid [For a Risograph]
A banner dropped in Eugene, OR this past February read “Against Cop City and Its World.” These words have come to echo throughout Atlanta and across Turtle Island, indicating that the struggle extends far beyond the construction of this particular police facility. But what exactly is “the world” of Cop City?
One interpretation has to do with the strategy of secondary and tertiary targeting. This past winter, night owls across the country have set their sights beyond the state officials behind the Cop City project, focusing instead on the contractors hired to build it and the banks and corporations funding it. This is a practical approach to stopping this specific project — sabotaging the offices of contractors like Atlas and Brasfield & Gorrie is intended to put pressure on them to drop their contract with Atlanta, which would make it harder for the city to move forward with its plans.
Many of the communiques accompanying the actions we’ve seen this season state this as their goal. A claim for an action against an Atlas office in Detroit included the warning, “Atlas, until you stop supporting Cop City, there will be no safe corner for you on Turtle Island.” A communique out of Indiana writes that all executives and property of Atlas should be considered legitimate targets “until Atlas publicly announces that it will no longer work on the project.”
Additional communiques from this winter’s solidarity actions with Atlanta — to our knowledge, only a handful of claimed actions took place that were not Atlanta-related — clarify their opposition not just to Cop City but to the world that needs it. In many cases, they do this by drawing connections in writing to additional struggles that the authors see as interconnected. In other cases, this projectuality that aims to destroy both Cop City and the world that makes it possible is embodied in the choice of target. Many of this winter’s actions expanded from the more “precise” choice of targets like Atlas offices and into the wider world of exploitation and domination, which, after all, would likely just find a replacement for Atlas elsewhere if the contract was dropped. This is not to minimize the significance of actions against contractors, but rather to consider some critical questions being raised and experimented with through action, a powerful and beautiful dynamic that we were happy to see growing this winter.
Night owls in the Ozarks sabotaged “four forest-killing machines,” writing that their action was taken in solidarity with “forests under siege everywhere” as well as with the Atlanta forest. This thought was echoed later by Portland anarchists, who similarly took up a solidarity action that burned a machine unrelated to the specific contractors of Cop City. Other actions, like ones in Durham and Oakland, were dedicated to Tortiguita, who was murdered in the Atlanta forest in January, as well as to Tyre Nichols and others recently executed by the police.
Anarchists in Denver remind us that that the violence of US-based private extraction companies extends beyond US colonial borders, acknowledging “the murder of three land defenders in Honduras since the beginning of the year.” In another communique, Brooklyn anarchists included shoutouts to “the struggles in Latin America, the Palestinian struggle and the struggles against exploitation the world over” alongside their solidarity with Atlanta.
But there are also ways in which these struggles, regions, and systems of oppression are materially and logistically interconnected. A handful of actions in solidarity with Stop Cop City have turned their focus to this aspect of Cop City’s world. In a communique about an action against Norfolk Southern, three weeks after the catastrophic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, anarchists in Philly wrote that they chose this target not only because NS is itself a funder of Cop City, but because “large shipping companies like NS are the circulatory system of industrial colonialism.” The authors illustrate this by discussing how rail and other logistics provide the means through which industrial agriculturists move their soy and corn, loggers get lumber to and from mills, and Amazon gets shipping containers from ships to distribution centers. “Perhaps NS funds cop city because they understand both how crucial they are in building a dead world and exactly how vulnerable they are.”
There’s been a lot of talk of winning with regard to the fight in the forest, but in a world whose brutal domination and exploitation extends so much further than one police facility in one city, what exactly constitutes a victory? If Brasfield & Gorrie drop the contract, is it still a win if a new company then gets hired to do the same thing? If this police training facility is never built in Atlanta, but is built somewhere else instead, should we call that winning? What exactly are actions accomplishing if their perspective is confined to winning a campaign goal?
Any particular struggle against a specific manifestation of domination will have its ebbs and flows — triumphant moments, waves of repression, and responses to that repression. Moments of success and failure happen throughout a particular struggle, not merely at the end of it. Memories of past struggles can be used as a weapon, too, whether to avenge our fallen comrades or to send a kind of smoke signal that the will to rebel endures.
Projectuality is a word the insurrectionary anarchist tradition uses to describe the longterm and contextual dimensions of the projects that rebels take up, and how we make sure these projects take us to, and help us create, the places we want to go. This often includes fighting against a particular project the state is proposing, but is not confined to responding to the initiatives of those in power.
Our conception of victory and defeat must similarly extend beyond the immediate goal. For one thing, to say that nothing is truly a victory while capitalism is still intact is not just an ideological flourish, but quite literal. It is a commitment to continue fighting against all forms of domination and to resist recuperation at any cost. From resource extraction projects to new prison construction, in the rare cases in which we do succeed in stopping a particular thing from happening, the state and capital tend to simply shuffle things around until they get what they needed from that project through other means. When the state is just giving us the stick, it can be difficult to remember that the carrot is just as dangerous.
For examples of how to move through these peaks and valleys, we can look to those who have kept fighting long after a particular phase of the struggle has ended. In a recent communique in solidarity with Tortiguita, comrades resisting a nuclear waste storage project in Bure (France) wrote:
“We have taken the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the evacuation of the forest [in Bure] to show that we have neither forgotten nor forgiven what they did. And that they are mistaken if they think they have hunted us and defeated us forever.”
In torching an ANDRA transmission pylon near Bure, the writers aimed not specifically at the corporation (CIGEO) that drove the police to evict the forest occupation, but rather “deliberately place[d] our action in the context of a series of attacks carried out last year against measuring stations intended to collect geological, hydrological and meteorological data.” This choice of target comes from observing that “these structures are of paramount strategic importance in the current development phase of the project given that the data collected, for example for environmental impact studies, alone constitute a necessary basis in the creation authorization procedures. Thus, destroying them, putting them out of service, are and will inevitably be a thorn in the side of the ‘smooth running of the CIGEO project.’”
“And its world” is adopted from the slogan accompanying the struggle to halt the airport slated for development in Notre-des-Landes, France, this past decade. Proponents of the ZAD (“zone to defend”) saw the horizon of victory squashed there after a long, brutal, and dedicated fight. After the state announced that they were no longer planning to build the airport, the fixation among certain participants in the struggle on securing their hold on this particular piece of land led them to effectively recuperate their own struggle. The long and violently repressed fight against another airport in Atenco, Mexico State ended when the current progressive president AMLO was elected. He was able to claim the victory of cancelling the contentious project in the name of the popular struggle, carrying out mediatized “consultations” with the affected communities, and then proceeded to build the airport elsewhere. His government has proceeded to use the support garnered from this strategic concession to pave the way for further industrialization and militarization across the country.
Both of these struggles cost the state and the corporations behind the projects dearly, and both live on in the multitudes of actions that took place against the world that made the proposed airports possible. The claims of “victory” are attempts to rewrite these stories of struggle, and the heavy costs suffered by the rebels, as part of the necessary democratic process of checks and balances within the power structure. From unions to politicians to social movement leaders, opportunists everywhere seek to pacify our intransigent struggles with “winning strategies”.
Specific struggles are part of the fight against domination, but the whole cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts — this fight is also long, intergenerational, and cyclical. Out of the endless daily miseries of this world, choosing where to draw lines in the sand enables rebellious energy to coalesce and build on itself. The most significant struggles are ones that are approached not with an expectation of “winning,” but rather with an eye towards how to spread practices of lived anarchy and struggle, how to build capacity as individuals and networks, and what can be taken from this struggle into the next. The words “Cop City will never be built” evokes a powerful and transformative commitment to fight to the end, to refuse surrender. The fact that there is no end, that the fight against domination cannot be reduced to a single target, but is a tension that must be created and maintained, doesn’t make this specific fight any less important.
The only way to really do away with the world of Cop City is through profound revolutionary upheaval, an insurrectional process that goes so far that normalcy can’t return. The fight to defend the Atlanta forest has disrupted the social peace that those in power reimposed following the 2020 uprisings for Black lives and against the police. The combative struggle against Cop City lays the social groundwork for insurrection, spreads indomitable practices and ideas, and provides anarchists with the experiences of autonomous self-organization that will be needed to decisively intervene when widespread social revolt comes knocking.
Along these lines, the epic mass action on March 5th during the Week of Action in Atlanta was in itself a major milestone. That a combative crowd was able to force police out of their own outpost and then burn it down in front of them in broad daylight — unprecedented in the US as far as we know — potentially opens up vast new fields of action for those with the courage and ability to pursue them.
The publication Storm Warnings‘ 2018 essay “Without Victory, Nor Defeat” argues that the logic of victory and defeat comes from politics, i.e. activities that distribute power relations and status among individuals. Anarchy, the beautiful idea, abjures the realm of politics and proposes instead to live and fight in a state of tension towards freedom and the destruction of power relations. The only defeat is submission, resigning ourselves to the world of policing, Cop City or no; and as all those who put their freedom on the line showed us this winter, that seems unlikely to ever happen.
“Contrary to cats, we indeed only have one life, and we dare to say that it is during this life – the only one we have – what matters is to fight, to live that tension towards the destruction of authority. It’s by moving, moving on the path we have chosen, that we live up to ourselves, that we become what we are. It is the quality that bursts into our life, the quality of actions and ideas that go hand in hand. Victory or defeat have no place here, only persisting or abandoning, perseverance or resignation, passionate love and hate or obliteration to politics.”
Action Briefs
1/21: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A small group broke off from a vigil for Tortuguita and threw up barricades and graffiti before smashing a realty office. “Neither innocent nor guilty, neither terrorists nor protesters, simply anarchists!”
2/12: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A vandalized Comcast fiber optic cable provoked a major outage during the Super Bowl.
2/28: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The railway mainline belonging to the Norfolk Southern company was sabotaged with copper wire, which trips the signal and potentially stops traffic until the wire is located. “With love for Tort, and infinite hostility for cops who killed them.”
3/18: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Bleach was poured into the tank of a “monster of steel and rubber” by Tortuguita Revenge Gang.
Hit Us Up
If you come across existing articles from mainstream media you’d like to see included in our next action briefs, or have feedback on the column, we’d love to hear from you at nightowls [at] riseup [dot] net. Please do not send us your communiques or any actions you are personally taking responsibility for — send these instead to one of the counter-info projects that publish claims, some of which are listed here.
Distribution of Night Owls is decentralized—don’t forget to print the column, bring it to infoshops, drop it in newspaper boxes, or just pass it to your friends.
Fascist’s Car Attacked
Submission
Paul Minton (aka Misk) is a neo-nazi and a snitch living in South Philly. He organizes with White Lives Matter and the Rise Above Movement.
Last week we drank John Zerzan’s cum, we dissolved our sense of symbolic thought and lost all restraint. We took a stroll in South Philly and went apeshit on Paulie’s car. Fuck that ugly White Lives Matter sticker. White lives Shatter! Oops…
Solidarity with Alfredo Cospito
Sabotage at Bartrams North
Submission
On a warm late winter night we went on a walk to one of our favorite post industrial wildernesses and discovered that it was being assaulted by monsters of steel and rubber. Disgusted, we returned with bleach, poured it into the tanks of a machine, stole a box of tools, and vanished into the night.
We send solidarity and complicity to the forest defenders in Atlanta behind bars and among the trees
RIP to Tortuguita
Fuck a Cellicon Valley
-Tortuguita Revenge Gang
Cities Across the US Take Part in ‘Week of Action’ Against Cop City
from It’s Going Down
[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]
Over the past week, dozens of cities across the so-called US took part in the recent week of action in solidarity with Tortuguita and the ongoing struggle to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest. This out-pouring of solidarity has been amazing to see, both from the wider autonomous movement and even mainstream environmental and Left groups.
Many towns organized small events, including nights of writing letters to those facing charges, benefit shows, and informational teach-ins and film showings on the struggle itself. Other cities organized mass marches and protests, bringing attention to the various corporations and banks that are currently funding the Cop City project and demanding that they drop their contracts.
If you’re looking for more background on the Cop City project, check out the recent deep dive from CrimethInc. here and here. There is also currently a call for a week of action in Atlanta, that kicks off on March 4th. Check out a full week of events planned here.
Now, let’s dive into our roundup of actions against Cop City!
Northeast
In Pennsylvania, people in Philadelphia put up graffiti messages and held a mass march through the city center. Protests were also organized outside of the offices of Cop City’s major funders and a law firm supporting the project. A communique posted to Scenes from the Atlanta Forest also took credit for causing train delays on a mainline owned by Norfolk Southern, a Cop City investor and the company responsible for the recent chemical disaster in East Palestine.
Norfolk Southern Rail Sabotage – Philadelphia
from Scenes From The Atlanta Forest
In solidarity with the struggle against the police, entertainment and real estate industry in the Welanuee forest, the mainline belonging to the Norfolk Southern company in Lenape territory north of so called Philadelphia was sabotaged. Copper wire was used to connect the tracks, tripping the signal and potentially stopping train traffic until the wire is located. This action is incredible easy and simple to repeat.
NS funds the Atlanta police foundation, and is also responsible for the large spill of toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. The spill of vinyl chloride is toxic when it leaks into the ground and air, but don’t forget that this chemical is being used in large scale production of everyday industrial products. Large shipping companies like NS are the circulatory system of industrial colonialism. NS is responsible for massive ecological and social devastation through disasters like the recent derailment but they do even more damage when they function with out derailments. So many destructive companies can not function with out NS and other shipping and logistics companies. How would the massive mono cultures of industrial agriculture move their soy and corn to processing plants and slaughter houses? How would Loggers transport lumber to and from mills? How would oil and other chemicals move from extraction to the industry that so readily consume them? How would Amazon get shipping containers from cargo ships to distribution centers with out NS, and the other rail roads?
Perhaps NS funds cop city because they understand both how crucial they are in building a dead world and exactly how vulnerable they are.
With love for Tort, and infinite hostility for cops who killed them.
ISO Fence4Fence
Submission
with valentine’s approaching, i need a date – will you show your interest? i always make the first move – so take the broken fences at bartrams north as your cue. half is done – now do your part and we can kiss under the FUCK CELLICON VALLEY graffitti down the road. NO BORDERS. NO FENCES.
our desire fuels an end to all development.
your secret admirer-
Vigil and Stroll for Tortuguita
Submission
On Saturday 1/21 there was a vigil for Tortuguita Manuel Teran. A group of about 40 adults and children placed candles and homemade signs by the turtle in Clark Park.
People spontaneously made speeches about Tortuguita’s death. The speeches touched on people’s experience of them, grief, martyrdom, and continuing to struggle. People called on each other to target cop city’s sponsors and the contractors responsible for building.
After people had been speaking for a while a small group broke off from the vigil. They took the street with banners. Barricades from a nearby construction site were pulled into the street to block cops and traffic. As the march moved graffiti memorializing Tortuguita and against police was tagged. A realty office had its windows smashed.
The rowdy vigil is the first time things have popped off from Clark Park in a while. A few years ago Cark Park was a regular spot for mid sized black bloc demos to start from. We think that this is worthwhile to revisit because it’s a traditionally anarchist neighborhood and there are lots of alleys nearby to easily change in. It’s exciting to see this kind of energy re-emerge in Philly.
Even though Philly is far from Atlanta, Tortuguita’s death has been deeply felt here. We are angry. We are watching. We are acting. Cop city will never be built.
RIP Tortuguita
Neither innocent nor guilty
Neither terrorists nor protesters
Simply anarchists!
A warm embrace to those arrested in Atlanta, Seattle and everywhere else
Death to civilization
Night Owls #3: Autumn Offensive
from It’s Going Down
[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]
Diversity of tactics is a concept that has been used to break the hegemony of non-violence in social movements. The term can be understood as a shared principle that advocates respect and solidarity across different approaches with the aim of breaking down moralistic and ideological divisions. Tactics, however, are often confused with methods, leading to a dangerous misuse of the idea of diversity of tactics to advocate for tolerance of or collaboration with authoritarian, populist, or democratic initiatives.
Since Night Owls focuses on sabotage, which is a tactic, and direct action, which is a method, we want to dive into these ideas and how they might relate to anarchist struggle more broadly. Tactics can be understood as what you do and methods as how you do it. Tactics change according to the moment and the needs of the struggle, whereas methods are stable and well-defined, remaining consistent across contexts, though how methods are understood and developed will vary.
Smashing something or lighting something on fire does not necessarily contribute to the struggle against domination if it is carried out using authoritarian or reformist methods. Pushing forward confrontational tactics while failing to be critical of the methods employed can lead anarchists to enact a sort of “leftism with teeth:” when conflictual efforts are subsumed by dominant political forces and used to grease the wheels of the democratic process. Among other reasons, many anarchists focus on developing autonomous methods of struggle to avoid becoming foot soldiers of the left—diverting a liberatory project into voting with bricks.
On the other hand, reducing the anarchist project to militant tactics can create hierarchies where some tactics are valued above others, instead of understanding how different tactics work together in an ecosystem of actions and ideas. This can lead to the uncritical valorization of militancy for militancy’s sake, fertile ground for the creep of militarism into radical struggles, risking the transformation of a dynamic social conflict into a conflict between isolated militant actors and the state.
Central to anarchism is the method of direct action, which is self-organized by definition. Direct action and sabotage are often used interchangeably, but this is a mistake—many tactics, including sabotage but also those considered “peaceful” such as wheatpasting posters around your neighborhood, can be approached through the method of direct action. The word ‘direct’ here means without mediation; without any intermediary, representative, central committee, union, or other leaders—formal or informal—between you and action. It is a refusal of the logic of democracy; of engaging in dialogue with power, of waiting, of compromise. Tactics such as collaborating with political parties or mass media are incompatible with an anarchist understanding of diversity of tactics: they violate the principle of self-organization, instead reproducing alienation and centralization. By using reformist methods, these tactics foment divisions between actors and spectators, representatives and represented, snuffing out self-organization and the potential for social contagion. Reformist mentalities can often even find their way into action claims, as Let’s Talk About Attack aptly proposes to do away with:
It’s not about bringing a mean company to better intentions, of forcing it to change its bad habits via punitive measures, nor of pressuring an institution to change its mind. […] when we’re talking about, for example, companies that build prisons, high speed train lines, airports, let’s refuse all forms of communication (even the radical ones) with the enemy; let’s refuse all forms of reformism. Better still: we don’t want to spread the logic of reformism, we want to destroy it. The goal is, then, not to convince (by way of damage, material or monetary); the goal is to sabotage and attack the entirety of the project on all terrains. Attack – not to convince, but because we are convinced we don’t want this project. Attacking, not to punish, but to make life harder for the enemy. From the construction companies to the security coordinators and engineers; from the civilian participants to the banks who finance the project.
This column is especially interested in actions that inspire new conceptions of anarchists’ role and potential impact, in which tactics are innovated through creativity and experimentation. In a recent action against a police shooting range in Atlanta’s Weelaunee forest, some “chainsaw-wielding militants’” knocked out the power line feeding the range before going on to destroy the cameras. This action showed creativity both in its choice of target and the tactics used, in an intelligent and effective blow to the facility’s ability to operate. It demonstrates a shift in focus from the mere symbolic facades of power and reminds us that we are not just against Cop City, but the entire institution of policing.
Privileging tactical preferences over shared ethics, goals, and methods can be flimsy ground for collaboration. For example, people who use high-risk tactics but are motivated by a desire to impact public opinion can make unreliable and even dangerous co-conspirators. Many of those who snitched in the Green Scare “revered public opinion about an environmental movement rather than aiming to destroy anti-environmental forces.” More recently, two individuals confessed to having attacked pipelines in a statement to the media, demonstrating a similar desire to impact public opinion—one later became a cooperating witness, while the other, who stayed solid, regretted publishing her identity. People driven by such motivations are liable to change their minds as the tides of “public opinion” inevitably change. Understanding one’s goals and motivations for acting is indispensable, not only for deciding who to take risks with, but also for deciding what to target and how.
This does not mean that you have to be an anarchist to use direct action or to be trustworthy. We are less invested in more people calling themselves anarchists than in the spreading of practices of self-organization and conflict with authority, which were around long before anarchism was named. Our understanding of anarchist methods can grow and deepen by learning from other self-organized struggles and individuals who sabotage domination.
In compiling this column’s list of actions across the so-called United States, we include actions that were claimed with a communique as well as those that were not, with the assumption that there are lessons to be learned from both. The advantages and disadvantages of writing communiques have often been the subject of heated debate among anarchists. Many actions speak for themselves and do not have to be claimed to be understood or to significantly disrupt systems of domination. On the other hand, actions that are not claimed may be harder to find on the internet and so feature less prominently in counter-information projects (including this one), though such websites are rarely engaged with by anyone who’s not themselves an anarchist. In putting together this column, we try to consider the challenge of communicating outside of the anarchist space—which depends on our newspapers, posters, zines, social centers, and physical places of encounter within the struggle.
The torching of three police cars in Pittsburgh this fall was not accompanied by a communique, but the burnt-out shells of the cruisers spoke for themselves and the message could not have been clearer: Fuck the police. We feel it’s important not to speculate about whether this or other actions were carried out by anarchists or not, since that has the potential to aid the police in their investigations. Whatever the motivations of the anonymous one(s) who burned the cars, this action can resonate with anyone who has their own reason to hate and take action against the police.
On the other hand, communiques can also have their own very important place, and all the better when that place is not just the Internet! Although we chose this medium for our column in the interest of reaching a wider audience, we also include a zine version and posters so as to take these ideas and actions off the screen, with its inherent alienation, and spread them through our real world encounters.
This season’s posters feature a communique from occupied Anishinabewaki and Odawa territory (northern Michigan) which claims the arson of heavy machinery at an Enbridge facility. The fight against pipelines and the extractive economy is not restricted to occupations against their construction and is not defeated after they go into the ground. The communique reminds us that the extractive economy, along with the devastation it causes, is all around us, and that it’s possible to fight back.
Earth- and animal-liberation focused struggles continued to take major risks to defend land and life over the course of the fall season. Decentralized supporters of the Defend the Atlanta Forest campaign carried out at least ten known direct actions altogether against Cop City, all of them daring and impressive. Meanwhile, we saw a return of Animal Liberation Front fur farm raids, which according to reports released 15,800 mink in total, destroyed vehicles and machinery at one farm, and ultimately forced the closure of Lion Farms, the largest mink exploiter in the U.S. and the target of one of the actions.
As the recent commentary “On Mink Liberation” notes, “Whilst [mink liberation actions] behave like any other animal liberation action—freeing animals from their place of abuse—they are understood easier as a sabotage action.” It’s heartwarming enough to see these individual lives freed from captivity and given a second chance, yet these actors also took care to aim at the mechanisms of the fur industry itself—an industry that’s entirely intertwined with and made possible by the domination of this territory by capitalism and colonization. The most recent mink raid’s communique makes this connection as well, ending: “free all prisoners and give the land back.”
Our last column centered on the significance of our settler colonial context, not only for forest defense and other ecological struggles, but also with regard to how we position ourselves in relation to land, life, and collective survival—with the ultimate objective of destroying the settler colony and returning its territory to the continent’s original inhabitants. This autumn saw a heartening expansion of anti-colonial solidarity actions, from Washington and Oregon to Michigan and Philadelphia. Some of these actions happened in response to solidarity calls, one took place on the colonial holiday Columbus Day, one on Thanksgiving, and another responded in part to the brutal consequences of climate collapse in the Global South. In discussing the need to take apart elements of colonial industry and infrastructure, the communiques attest to the ways in which destructive acts, when paired with anti-colonial methods, can help empower people to move towards self-organization and action, nurture non-hierarchical relationships, and cultivate “communities of collective resistance and joyful militancy.”
Distribution of Night Owls is decentralized—don’t forget to print the column, bring it to infoshops, drop it in newspaper boxes, or just pass it to your friends.
Action Briefs
10/12: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A colonizer statue was vandalized on Columbus day. “Fighting colonization is a way to nurture a less hierarchical relation with the land and those that live on it.”
11/5: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Lenapehoking)
On the Wet’suwet’en day of action, “a small group of Anti-colonial Anarchist settlers in Lenapehoking blockaded a chokepoint of a high frequency railway.”
