Happy Birthday Tortuguita

Submission

Lots of goods were liberated from various places today including Home Depot in memory of Tortuguita! They are with us in every action. Lets crew up with our affinities and redistribute goods to those who need in and out style. Viva Tortuguita!

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

West Philadelphia Vigil Remembers Tortuguita

from Twitter

West #Philadelphia earlier tonight: A vigil at a turtle sculpture in Clark Park to remember #Tortuguita, the forest defender killed near #Atlanta. About 70 people joined a vigil and talked about local struggles. One shared a memory of meeting Tort in the forest last year.

In West #Philly tonight, a small breakaway march from the vigil at Clark Park looped thru the streets and someone tagged “RIP TORT” on a Jersey barrier. #CopCity #Tortuguita

Killing time as high art during quarantine

Submission

In times like these, no work to be found even if we want it, not enuf weed and acid in the world to make time pass fast enuf, we must dig deep and remember play as a method of killing time. You could fill your night with such activities as: 1. Walking around your neighborhood til you find a nice banner
2. Cut it down and bring it to your sacred spot
3. Smoke weed until you come up with a cool thing to say on it
4. Remember There’s a bridge over the trader joe’s That’s good for dropping stuff
5. Make a banner encouraging looting of said trader joe’s
6. Bike over and drop that banner

7. Make your way over to the property Joel Freedman owns on 21 and locust.

8. Add your words to those of the crew who got there the night you originally wanted to
9. Steal some snacks to keep you sustained
10. Spray over a security camera at a Wells Fargo
 11. Engage in a low effort cat and mouse type game with a police car

12 haviing come to a spiritual awakening

As a result of these actions , become resolutely committed to sharing the stories of them as well as the tactics involved
 in solidarity with every laid off restaurant worker, and with everyone who’s ever turned a trick,
the anticapitalist contingent of the philly mural arts program


Friendly Fire Collective’s Dissolution Reflections

from Friendly Fire

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Collective Statement

Friendly Fire Collective was always an experiment – always changing, re-forming. As a national collective, we formed around a potential zine for anarchist Quakers, and after that fell through, a potential retreat for Quaker anarchists. Over time, that retreat vision changed, hoping to connect revolutionary leftist Christians or, more generally, “mystics”. 30 or so of us gathered in May 2018 in Philadelphia. As a local group in Philadelphia, we formed after the Friendly Fire retreat among friends and comrades as a prayer group. We met weekly to eat, pray, and sing. It was a way to support and encourage one another. We endeavored to be in solidarity (both materially and spiritually) with the revolutionary left, leading us to participate in and support Occupy ICE and the National Prison Strike, as well as create propaganda to push people of faith to realize the need for revolution.

Over time, though, our expectations and visions came into conflict, as we continually failed to have a clear understanding of our mission, or a sense of our structure. In the space of indecision, unspoken disagreements and interpersonal conflict led to the end of our affinity group. A way forward together as a community feels not only impossible, but unnecessary. Instead of spiritual community, it is more important in these times to orient our lives around the work of liberation. For some of us, what we sought in Friendly Fire was what we wanted in a political formation, or a party. But that was not what we were, or were intended to be.

There are several things to be owned and learned. The church abolitionist rhetoric, grounded in “Quaker” apocalyptic idealism, was ultimately ultra-leftist. Though we did not officially take this stance, the majority of us supported it to some degree, despite knowing that this was a stance that the masses would not be able to adopt any time soon. Church abolitionism combats an institution that can often play an antagonistic role on these stolen lands, but also plays a vital, unharmful role, especially in the lives of many colonized people, even at times serving the people and inspiring class consciousness. Christians have played roles in revolutions throughout the world, even communities of Christians, such as with the community of peasants in Solentiname led by Father Ernesto Cardenal in revolutionary Nicaragua. There is value to finding the revolutionary potentiality in the Christian narrative, as it is a fair analysis that Jesus was a revolutionary leader.

We also found our orientation becoming church-like, despite our church abolitionism. Our stressing of discipleship and fellowship led us away from the work of building revolution. Within a few months of forming, we fell out of coalition work around Abolish ICE and ceased to plan and collaborate with other orgs on actions. At our best, as an affinity group, we were a presence of care and faith in the revolutionary left. At our worst, we were an insular intentional community.

We must own the role whiteness played in our collective. As we had articulated a number of times in our analysis of liberal unprogrammed Quakerism – whiteness has a tendency of becoming the authority in horizontal, white-majority organizations – the same could be said about our organization, even as we sought to be accomplices and race traitors. What started out as a POC-majority organization became a majority white within months, and the difference was felt. Several attendees noted that our meetings began to feel uncomfortable for a number of reasons, including our conversations becoming inaccessible and our members unfriendly. These issues were discussed between members, but never addressed or properly dealt with. We consistently catered and accommodated to the needs and comfort of our petit-bourgeois white members over the needs of colonized and working class people attending, making our space uninhabitable to many and our vision incoherent. We heed to the wisdom of Loreno Kom’boa Ervin:

“Even so, it is important for anti-racist/anti-colonial activists to continue trying to dismantle racism inside these movements or organizations, and failing that, to dismantle the groups themselves entirely. If allowed to continue, they do more harm than good. Activists must recognize the damage of internal racism, the politics which support it, and how to deal with it, and then act swiftly and forcefully, sometimes even ruthlessly.”

As we formally dissolve our collective, we all encourage those seeking to be faithful to God’s liberatory Spirit to join a revolutionary organization. The u.$.a. cannot be reformed into justice, but rather must be abolished. We will not wage revolution through Marxist happy hours or electing a “socialist” war criminal. Do not give into electoralism and reformism. Revolution is the only solution!

Guard yourselves against liberalism, which Comrade Mao defines as stemming from petty-bourgeois selfishness, placing “personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, [giving rise to] ideological, political and organizational liberalism.” Orient your life around the work of liberation.

Guard yourselves against white chauvinism. Make your organization accountable to colonized communities. If your organization refuses, seek its destruction. Support colonized revolutionaries and their organizations. There are many good reasons why there are formations of colonized people that refuse to work with white communists. Humbly reflect on that, continually. Read Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s The Progressive Plantation and J. Sakai’s Settlers.

Be disciplined. Read and discuss revolutionary texts with comrades. Study revolution to build revolution. Learn to self-crit. Exercise. Get comfortable with a gun. We only have each other, so we must be prepared to care for and defend our communities.

Serve the people. Live with the people. Learn from the people. Remember Comrade Mao’s words: “The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.”

Listen to the people’s concerns and needs. Organize around them. See what works. Own your mistakes, and do better. Love the people, and care for their well being. Be humble and kind. With the people, communists seek to build new power, and build towards completely overthrowing imperial power. This is an overwhelming but necessary task – and we must love and support one another to do it. Take care of your comrades.

As we look back on the last couple years we feel a mix of deep sadness, but at the same time we feel an excitement and creative energy burning within us. This spirit, we know, is the spirit of Liberation which burns down in order to build up and breaks in order to bind. Friendly Fire may be coming to its end, but we know that this same Holy Spirit is working within the masses to make a way in the desert for the true kindom of G-d which will tear down every wall, burn down every prison, and break every chain. The work of revolution is only beginning. Amen.

Occult Features of Anarchism w/ author Erica Lagalisse

from Facebook

In the nineteenth century anarchists were accused of conspiracy by governments afraid of revolution, but in the current century various “conspiracy theories” suggest that anarchists are controlled by government itself. The Illuminati were a network of intellectuals who argued for self-government and against private property, yet the public is now often told that they were (and are) the very group that controls governments and defends private property around the world. Intervening in such misinformation, Lagalisse works with primary and secondary sources in multiple languages to set straight the history of the Left and illustrate the actual relationship between revolutionism, pantheistic occult philosophy, and the clandestine fraternity.

Exploring hidden correspondences between anarchism, Renaissance magic, and New Age movements, Lagalisse also advances critical scholarship regarding leftist attachments to secular politics. Inspired by anthropological fieldwork within today’s anarchist movements, her essay challenges anarchist atheism insofar as it poses practical challenges for coalition politics in today’s world.

Studying anarchism as a historical object, Occult Features of Anarchism also shows how the development of leftist theory and practice within clandestine masculine public spheres continues to inform contemporary anarchist understandings of the “political,” in which men’s oppression by the state becomes the prototype for power in general. Readers behold how gender and religion become privatized in radical counterculture, a historical process intimately linked to the privatization of gender and religion by the modern nation-state.

[April 25 at 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM at Wooden Shoe Books and Records 704 South St]

Spring issue of Friendly Fire

from Friendly Fire

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s p r i n g    2 0 1 9    i s s u e 

Militant discipleship, revolutionary eschatology, tarot, info on our upcoming retreat what’s there not to love about the newest issue of Friendly Fire? Check it out here ❤ 

Also, you can still apply to the retreat in Minnesota (June 17-20)! You can do that here. Applications are due 4/15.

And if you have any spare cash to help comrades make it out to the retreat, you can donate here on our Chuffed.

Aries Blessings!

Friendly Fire Winter newsletter!

from Friendly Fire Collective

OUR WINTER NEWSLETTER IS OUT!

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~For more info on the upcoming retreat in this issue~

The emerging vision of Friendly Fire

from Friendly Fire Collective

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Power has a way of co-opting the subversive for its own stability. The teachings of Jesus, an anti-imperialist prophet, included. Within a few centuries, Christ’s communities of holy fools and prophets ossified into a vehicle of imperial power, playing a vital role in historical and contemporary colonialism. Today, Christian institutions are globally advocating for right-wing reactionary ideologies. Christianity has materially and historically proven itself to have a devastatingly synergistic relationship with imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy. For those of us who are Christians with revolutionary anti-capitalist convictions, we are responsible for working through these contradictions for the sake of reparations. U.S. and White Christians are especially called to take responsibility for the sins of their tradition and institutions, working out their salvation in fear and trembling with the knowledge that the sins of the Church are insurmountable.

The Friendly Fire Collective has a number of Christian members currently working through these contradictions. We have been asking ourselves what discipleship in Christ looks like in the context of the US, where Christendom is losing its grip but Christian hegemony remains.

For those not acquainted with our community, Friendly Fire is a network of individuals, cells, and communities who seek to accompany revolutionary and liberatory currents as people of faith. Originally a collective of far left Quakers, we re-oriented our mission early on to include mystics of all faith traditions, including outside Christianity. Though our network is national, our “base” is in Philadelphia, where we have a community focused on anti-imperialist discipleship.

As a community with an apocalyptic vision, we believe that today’s global political  crises are connected and reveal the imperialist order collapsing on us. The last days are here—the world as we know it is coming to an end—and we must build a new world in the ashes of the old. The masses are being called to enact God’s transformative judgment in this world, tearing the mighty off their thrones and lifting up the oppressed. We believe this is essential to the gospel of Jesus.

Though the institutional Church widely dismisses and even combats the political convictions of our community, we look to the witnesses of the Taborites, Beguines and Beghards, early Quakers, militant Anabaptists, Liberation Theology-inspired Christian base communities, the Christians for National Liberation in the Philippines, and other communities and prophets on the outskirts of Christendom that found subversive power in Christ’s gospel. Prophetic communities have periodically popped up throughout history to reveal the sins of the State Church, and to proclaim and demonstrate a different way of following Christ that is egalitarian, communal, Spirit-driven, and against the cruelty and nonsense of the status quo. Many of them tended to retreat from the world, creating isolated communities of mutual aid, spiritual presence, and committed agape love. Other communities, like those who followed the early radical reformer Thomas Müntzer, were grounded in the experience of God and a profoundly political narrative of the apocalypse, feeling that Christ himself invited them to be disciples through the class struggle. This form of political discipleship laid ground for the German Peasants’ War.

As Christians who seek the death of empire, we take comfort that we are not alone, and millions of others who followed Jesus sought the same thing.

We especially look to the example of Christians like Camilo Torres Restrepo, who famously remarked, “If Jesus were alive today, He would be a guerrillero.” He followed Jesus out of the priesthood and academia, and into the revolutionary struggle, joining the National Liberation Army in Colombia. He was shamelessly a Christian Marxist, and provided spiritual support to his comrades. He was martyred in his first experience of combat. His life embodies the gospel our Christian members believe.

In the context of the US, we understand that essential to our discipleship in Christ is combating Christian hegemony. We see an emerging strategy in the Christian/Religious Left forming, which we tend to call “religion for the commune,” that expounds on this mission. This strategy calls us to orient our spiritual lives, as individuals and as spiritual communities, around accompanying liberatory currents. As people of faith, we feel called to be present to the revolutionary process, seeing the political struggle as a spiritual struggle. The love of God dares us to follow empathy into its most radical leadings, including to revolt against a world built on the exploitation of the masses. We hope to corporately participate in the revolutionary struggle, as well as be present to the spiritual needs of the growing revolutionary movement, creating spaces of prayer, contemplation and pastoral care. Through this work of accompaniment, we intend on modeling a new way of being a spiritual community. We can form a theology and practice built from and for the people.

Spiritual practices are a gift to disciples, transforming affinity groups into disciplined revolutionaries, and they can be a gift to the forming Commune. But we should offer these spaces for healing, contemplation, and spiritual practice with the Commune in mind, never centering our spiritual affinity groups or in any way replicating the dynamics of imperialist Christianity. When we join our faith to the Commune, we can discover with the people how to love and serve God, and even how to be disciples of Christ.

Freindly Fire November Newsletter

from Friendly Fire Collective

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You may have missed it, but we put out a newsletter a week ago! You can check it out here.

Topics included: Repentance for missions, God’s wrath, Comrade Alyssa, early Quakers – and more!

Report-back on the Ordination

from Friendly Fire Collective

This past weekend our Friendly Fire community celebrated our comrade and friend Matti, as well as their gifts and ministry.

As one of the initial members of the collective, Matti was one of the main organizers of the May Day retreat. They cooked, cleaned, led workshops and prayer meetings, provided pastoral and spiritual care, and went about it all with bliss. When things kept falling apart during our retreat, Matti fearlessly transformed every moment of chaos into grace. Their profound faith has grounded our community in an outrageous sense of love and magic.

Though situated across the so-called US, they have continually offered their anointing and spiritual gifts to the Philly base and the wider Friendly Fire community through tarot readings, intercession, prophecy, and more practical, material support, such as writing for our newsletter.

This weekend, our community surrounded Matti to recognize the Spirit’s ordination of Matti as a seer, prophet, and minister of insurrection. We shared silence and out of that stillness we prayed and prophesied for over an hour, speaking blessings over our community and Matti.

Some friends of our community traveled from out of state in order to celebrate, so as soon as the ordination was done we feasted and celebrated.

Thanks to all our friends who showed up, especially those who traveled quite a distance! Your presence was felt and appreciated.

Thanks, also, to the friends who were willing to endure the marathon of TLC’s finest reality TV show 90 Day Fiancé. We did that, and we did it together.

October’s issue of Friendly Fire

from Friendly Fire

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Our October issue is out. We’re on time-ish.

O C T O B E R   F R I E N D L Y   F I R E 

SEVERAL INCORRECT THINGS IN THE NEWSLETTER, INCLUDING:
-we’ll continue to meeting at 7 PM (not 7 AM) on Tuesdays
-wrong link for the ordination’s event page! here ya go

Friendly Fire’s September Newsletter Is (Finally) Out!

from Friendly Fire

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The September issue of Friendly Fire is out!

S E P T E M BE R   2 0 1 8 

It’s a bit late, and we apologize for that, but perhaps we can use this as a chance to convince you to submit some writing to our blog and/or newsletter?

If you have any piece of writing you’d like to share – whether it be a report-back of a Christian leftist demo, a devotional or theological reflection, or anything related to the vision of Friendly Fire and the Christian Left – feel free to send it in. We want our blog and newsletter to amplify and connect the work of comrades in Christ.

All submissions can be sent to friendlyfireinfo@protonmail.com, as well as any others questions/inquiries.

Friendly Fire August newsletter is out

From Friendly Fire

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The newest edition of the Friendly Fire newsletter is out with some updates on #OccupyICEPHL, what the Philly chapter is up to, and a devotional about doing crimes with Jesus.

Read here

And subscribe!

May Day 2018 Retreat

from Friendly Fire Collective

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Vision statement: In the spirit of International Workers’ Day, the May Day retreat will be a worship gathering for Christians and mystics with revolutionary leftist convictions. Our hope is that this space will be a time of collaboration and fellowship intended to foster the emergence of a Christian/Religious Left.

We are currently taking applications for the May Day retreat! Apply here!

The retreat fee will be a sliding scale of $45-95

We will be meeting in Philadelphia on May 1st for various direct actions, but we have reserved cabins outside of Philly for lodging and our time of fellowship. People are welcome to come a day or two before and we are definitely willing to help arrange housing situations.

For more information: friendlyfireinfo@protonmail.com

If you want to join the ever-growing Planning Committee, let us know!