Our dear old friend Pat Wright passed away in November, 2020 — his final months spending time with his people, even having a zoom birthday party where his circle of friends could express our appreciation and love for him while he was still alive. What a blessing. We are lucky that Pat, who grew up in New York, came out West in his crazy big truck/wagon around 1965 and settled here in the Bay.
When I got into the Local #510 Sign and Display Union, setting up trade shows in San Francisco, Pat was the President, facilitating the sometimes unruly meetings, letting the discussions roll in the spirit of democracy. Always having an archivist’s eye for history, he had a scrapbook of old articles, including the murder of painter’s Unionist Dow Wilson in San Francisco, killed for his powerful organizing. Back then, our newsletter was called “The Wingnut”, meaningful on many levels since some tradeshow displays we install are held together with wingnuts. Pat got the punks in the Union, many of whom are running it today with the same ethics. Seeing me struggle with being a single mom while working long hours, Pat would say “You need a wife at home”. Coming from him it wasn’t sexist at all. He had a way of seeing you, supporting you, with deep solidarity and a sense of equality.
Pat was a fixture at the 924 Gilman Street all-ages punk venue in Berkeley, helping hold things down in the nuts and bolts sort of way. Who’s sweeping and mopping the floor at the end of the night after the show? What needs repair? What is the work that needs to be done to hold the project together, people wise and the physical space? Always an eye towards what holds a project together. The real shitwork and a sense of fair sharing of the work, not the glamorous stuff. And the love and appreciation for the people. He was the tall lanky punk elder with his flight jacket and beanie cap, always there looking out for the community he loved, a sort of glue in the scene and a mentor to the youth, exemplified in a song called “Wright Kids” written by Robert in the band Shit Coffins: “…all you’ve done is open doors for us all…take a deep breath and see the lives you have changed.” His role in Gilman and everything in general seems to have been about having meaning and connection.
Before Gilman, Pat volunteered with KALX, Berkeley’s student and community radio station. When he showed up to help out in 1982, he choose Facilities. Pat’s DJ name was Insect Chickenboy, and he was a community bridge between different eras: bohemian, hippies and hardcore punk. KALX Last Will wrote, “If there had been no Pat Wright I would not have survived feeling out of place in my first crucial days as a KALX Berkeley underground volunteer fresh from East Oakland… [H]e went out of his way every time he saw me to take aggressively generous action to see to it that I belonged with the misfits… Pat being resolutely clique free, I would not have learned that healthy rebellion lives in the grooves of every genre of the human condition.”
Pat had a way of being present with love and solidarity. While making his rounds in his big van he would swing through the Long Haul/Infoshop saying “What needs fixing?” with a hand on his tool pouch on his black jeans, with more tools and supplies available in the intricate custom shelves of his van. He’d come over saying “time for a dump run” and make a date with you to do an Urban Ore run. That was another special place on Pat’s rounds: a church of life’s debris where decluttering your life can be a sacred act of getting stuff to move on to the next person’s hands. He would give you a CD of music with your name on a ziploc bag. Pat’s presence made everyone feel welcome and a part of something, which is what all us humans need most.
I’m sitting on what used to be a car seat, torn-out and tanned by the Arizona sun. It rests against a school bus, perhaps its past home, that is half engulfed by the earth with cob walls guarding its entrances. Around me, makeshift abodes — some on wheels, tiny homes, tents, cob houses bedazzled with bottles and other odds and ends — giant water collecting towers, attempted hydroponic greenhouses, a composting toilet, and solar panels decorate the landscape. This is what I call home, or as the owner calls it: The island of misfit toys. A collection of characters color in between the lines; everyone here comes from their own pasts, all around the world, with different beliefs and passions, yet we’ve found ourselves in what seems to be the middle of nowhere, this homestead and ecological sanctuary.
About two months ago, I set off on my first solo cross-country trek. The mission: To mess up. What I mean by mess up isn’t terribly clear: I wanted to push the boundaries of what it means to live in the United States; I didn’t want the next cookie cutter step — graduate college, get a job, get a house, work until you can’t — and I certainly didn’t want to stay complacent, stagnant, during the burgeoning ecological crisis. So, I decided to WWOOF. WWOOFing stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms and is a worldwide initiative to connect people to organic farms, provide an educational platform for more earth-focused agricultural practices, and to build community.
More than anything, I wanted to rid myself of this ongoing sense of disempowerment, devastation, and dread. Nowadays, these are normal responses to our institutionally-dominated sphere where nature is cast aside, along with human wellness. Sustainability, beyond its denotation, its buzz-wordiness for green-washing corporation’s intentions and profit, is inherently an intersectional outlook: the well-being of the natural world is inexplicably linked to the well-being of humanity.
WWOOFing is a radical style of life. Radical meaning root. When it comes to getting to the root of climate change, it is essential that we look at agriculture and our modern-day practices: tillage, chemical exposure from pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, water run-off, desertification, monocultures, pollution, habitat destruction, and more. Unfortunately, the USA’s agriculture field is more focused on subsidizing crops for cattle, such as corn, rather than maintaining fertile soil that can sequester carbon and continue to grow food for people. So, small-scale, organic farmers may be the underdogs, but they are the keystone to a sustainable future in farming.
One thing I’d like to express is that WWOOFing is a personal journey — no one experience can replicate another. There are a plethora of farms, skills, people, and other factors that can change the course of events; also, goals, desires, and intentions can heavily influence what is taken from any given situation. Additionally, it is important to be cautious and aware if/when traveling alone. Although the WWOOF.org organization does a wonderful job at regulating feedback, entering into any situation, especially intimate situations where you may live in a shared space with other people, can be somewhat unsafe. That being said, make sure that you have points of contact, consider traveling with a friend, thoroughly check reviews, and be on guard. Overall, WWOOF attracts good people, but safety always comes first.
My personal journey started in Concrete, Washington at a homestead nestled beside the Skagit river and underneath the North Cascades. This land, before westward bound colonialism, was home to numerous indigenous tribes and is still sacred land to numerous people. My host made this incredibly clear, which transformed the nature of my stay. The land where the homestead was located was not only full of thriving microbes and critters living under the earth, blooming flowers, hearty vegetables, and fruiting trees, but also held a wealth of indigenous history, traditions, and sovereignty.
Simplistically stated, homesteading is the practice of creating a self-sufficient system. However, in a culture where most people are dependent on creature comforts such as grocery stores, heating, cooling, water, and plumbing, this act takes a significant amount of planning and upkeep. At this homestead, my host centered her homestead around permaculture principles. Permaculture is the act and art of looking towards nature’s natural systems for solutions to human systems. Now, I’d like to personally add that the separation between “nature” and “humanity” is a social construct; people live within nature and are a part of it. While this distinction may be helpful for describing ideas such as permaculture, it can be harmful to our understanding as living beings that share this world with numerous other living beings. However, when we blur the line between nature and humanity, permaculture actually makes a lot more sense — of course we should be looking at the “natural” world for solutions, we are a part of the world and they are our solutions as well. Permaculture is more of a mindset than a rigid system of rules and regulations: A permaculture mindset provides tools and is an open field of innovation where exploration takes place.
The first rule of permaculture is to observe and then interact. Observation can last as long as it is needed and is ongoing. In order to interact with the land, it is important to observe it for at least a year to fully understand how the seasons interact with it, especially if you intend on building structures, collecting water, and growing food. I also learned the importance of zones. At this homestead, there were different zones which determined the layout of the land: The garden and kitchen were closest to living structures as they are frequently visited; in the middle of the property there are berry bushes, a composting toilet, and the shower; then the property is guarded by a guild (collection of plants that provide support for one another), a chicken coop, and larger trees. This design organically unfolded to adhere to the needs of the people living there and mitigate their energy expenditure.
When I first arrived at the homestead, I was overwhelmed by every detail, every bit of intention, that went into the land. When WWOOFing, the general deal is: work four-five hours a day for housing and food. By only working up to five hours, which is often full of conversation, education, and friendship-building, there is a ton of time to learn, and time to create, relax, cook good food, and create community.
During this time, I lived in a wooden hut, somewhat like a glorified bed frame with a roof above my head and wooden pillars elevating the mattress off the ground, which opened its door to Sauk Mountain. Every day, I watched the raspberry sky fade behind the mountain’s face. Admittedly, the living situation was rustic, but the lack of space pushed me outside and gave me a greater appreciation for what I did have. This hut became somewhat sacred to me: the beginning and ending of my days all coiled under one roof.
Although each day began and ended the same way, with a reflection period, everything in-between wildly ranged from canning parties, where four pots of boiling water were going and hundreds of cans of food were preserved, to harvesting medicinal herbs and making tinctures, to visiting nearby farms and assisting in their harvest. Every day was full of diversity. Every day was full of intention. I think that may be one of my favorite parts of my WWOOFing experience: without the distractions, or the business, of everyday life, time blossoms and becomes plentiful. Instead of rushing from once place to another through a general medium of anxious thought, I was present in every task. And, at the end of the day, everyone living on the homestead would gather around a communal meal and give thanks. Despite having the least amount of material goods, I have never heard so many people sing praise to the ongoing abundance festooned around our little community.
I continued to WWOOF down the west coast and ended up working on an organic winery where I’d wake up in the morning and squish grapes under my feet. Then, I found myself in Big Sur living on the top of a mountain in a small artists’ homestead. Now I’m in Arizona, sitting in a sun-dried chair thinking about earth ships and what kind of kingdom I’d like to build from clay, sand, and straw. Along the way, I have met characters and some of the most inspirational people I’ve ever known.
Whenever people call and ask what I’ve learned, I feel this sense of fear: How could I ever encapsulate all of the lessons I’ve learned, all of the stories, people I’ve met? While that may be a futile effort, I do believe that one of my biggest revelations from this ongoing journey is that there is a myriad of beautiful ways to live life outside of the heteronormative, capitalistic, consumeristic society that seems to be hanging over the United States like a cold, wet blanket. Likewise, some of our greatest solutions are working in hidden corners, and although it may be hard to see, gears are turning. Lastly, the health of our soil really does correlate to the health of our nation — not to mention ourselves.
“If you dare to struggle you dare to win. If you dare not to struggle, goddamnit you don’t deserve to win. Let me say this: all power to the people.” -Fred Hampton
When Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline crossed the Mississippi, we knew we couldn’t let them take the Willow River without a fight. On July 3, protestors in black and green bloc constructed a barricade on a road leading to a pipeline easement and flooded past security. The pipeline workers cleared out and sat in their trucks, smoking cigarettes, scrolling through twitter, expecting another—now typical—three to four hour machine lockdown. On the outside of the construction site, we built barricades out of tires, car doors, rebar, barbed wire, and wood debris at two choke-points. At a third barricade, two people locked into a painted car at the entrance blocking workers from getting in.
The element of surprise delayed the cop response time. Before police were able to arrive, the Horizontal Directional Drill’s control box was ripped out and its electrical power cords sliced. For a week or so after the action, the sound of metal cutting into the earth didn’t pierce the air. For a while, they were set back.
What happened at the Willow River demonstrated how much damage was and could be done to ecocidal infrastructure by a few dozen autonomous actors. Guerrilla warfare — as a model for nonviolent civil-disobedience — never seeks to overcome the enemy by strength or numbers. With any future resistance to this pipeline and others like it, organized resistance can pick targets, concentrate a large enough number of people at a weak point, hit hard, and then disperse under the cover of their surroundings. Mao sums up the principles of asymmetrical warfare against an occupying force: “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.”
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The July action came a few hours before the Line 3 “Four Necessity Valve Turners” would appear before a judge for the very last time. Valve Turning is a direct action tactic that involves safely and forcibly turning the emergency shutdown valves of pipelines. As they carried out their action, the four Catholic workers prayed and sang. The Catholic Worker movement ranges from monastic types who are content sowing pea seeds in their rural enclaves to the type that light excavators on fire with coffee bin molotovs and chopped up the Black Snake DAPL with welding torches — as Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya did in their “rolling ploughshares.” Ploughshares actions usually involve an attempt to do maximum damage to devices of genocide and imperial domination (warheads, submarines, pipelines). The people who take these actions are almost always incarcerated, and continue to care for the downtrodden within the carceral system. Reznicek, whose arson charge of two years was supplemented with a six year terrorism enhancement, wrote from prison that she’s begun teaching creative writing classes to other folx in genpop.
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We gathered around fires in the winter to stay warm, and in spring we gathered in the smoke to keep the bugs away. We talked and passed along rumors. Rumors of wiretapping and police drones with thermal optics. Rumors about the horizontal directional drill (HDD), the machine that utilizes pilot drones with drills attached, followed by thousands of gallons of clay and chemical sludge mixed with extracted river water, to drill a tunnel for the pipeline underneath water bodies like the Mississippi River. We wondered how many drills there’d be, where they’d be positioned first, and the possibility of disrupting the pullback process, speculating on how bad the cops would try and hurt us for non-violent civil disobedience. One rumor that floated around was that there were only three of these machines in North America, which proved to be utterly false. Rumors of pipeline workers clearing out any wildlife along the line, including wolves and bears, by shooting them from their ATVs. Some of the ecocide could be documented with water samples during frac-outs when, amidst the drilling process, an aquifer is breached, causing the drilling fluid, made mostly of clay and xanthan gum, to gush into the surface water. This geyser of industrial waste suffocates plant and animal life, from algae to wild rice to minnow.
As we talked, the cops dislodged and arrested tree sitters, police liaisons and medics all while Border Security helicopters kicked up debris to disperse crowds. Police told arrestees in riot vans, “If you act good, I’ll turn the heat on to make sure you don’t freeze.” Sheriffs would threaten Protectors who locked-down that if they didn’t disengage (unhook themselves from pipeline construction equipment) they’d be subject to pain compliance — officers grinding knuckles on pressure points at the nose, behind the ears, and in the jaw, torturing non-violent protestors causing permanent nerve damage to some.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, the police murdered Daunte Wright, and Mayor Frey deployed the National Guard. Agape Project removed the barricades around George Floyd square. Winston Smith was assassinated by a federally deputized task force. Deonna Marie was hit and killed by a white nationalist car attack. And through all this, the sound of machines continued to pound by the rivers, in the woods up north. As Enbridge sucked water out of the rivers and lakes for drilling in the middle of a drought, entire rivers disappeared virtually overnight.
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The lifeline of a movement is fairly predictable, and there were points where we fundamentally failed. There was an occupation that successfully blocked the entry of an HDD drill site for a week, with people camped out on the easement leading into the river crossing. But after a week of waiting on the company’s water permits, they were all upheld, and leadership decided to do a coordinated march out of the site to take formal arrest. At the end of it, the Sheriff said to the crowd, “Come to my car if you want to be cited.” And a few days later the drills rolled in unhindered.
In the weeks leading up to the river crossings, thousands materialized for a mass civil disobedience that targeted one of the pipeline pumping stations. But the action was swept into the news void.
An entire camp formed at the beginning of the fight, positioned next to the Mississippi river crossing. The coordinators expected to house thousands of campers and be for the Line 3 fight what Sacred Stone was to Standing Rock.
However, the numbers barely materialized, and there were points where the camp was a skeleton crew. The infrastructure and openness of this camp led to a tendency towards liberal tourism, where many people congregated to learn about the struggle for a weekend, but few actions ever materialized. The week of a scheduled Indigo Girls concert put on by the camp, Enbridge ploughed beneath the Mississippi River.
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We began to wonder if we could disrupt work well enough to escape the cycle of symbolic arrest, and to avoid seeing our friends brutalized, subjected to the dehumanization of the carceral system, and bogged down for months in lengthy and expensive court proceedings. With some success, autonomous actors were able to infiltrate worksites and evade arrest by running out through heavy brush. We wondered if this tactic (practiced by the Mississippi Stand camp and detailed succinctly in the Swarm Manifesto on antidotezines) could be proliferated, so that we’d have a way to fight back beyond machine lockdowns.
We all knew the monster we were going up against, and we knew pipeline owner Enbridge had the cops and courts incentivized to come down on us as hard as possible. There is a whole network of Task Forces, private security, infrastructure-specific citations, suits, informants, surveillance software, grand juries, and solitary cells for anyone who challenges the system in a way it cannot tolerate.
Letter writing campaigns, bank actions, marches, and even lockdowns are situations the corporations can adapt to and control. When their investments are hit in a way that is multi-pronged and out of nowhere, it reveals that their security apparatus is not all-powerful, but rather fragile. A paper tiger can turn to ash with a single spark.
Asking people to mobilize in a way the system can’t tolerate requires a lot of trust, and a lot of faith that you’ll have each other’s backs when the state retaliates. It even requires faith in history. The reactionary will say of any revolutionary act, from a march, to a hunger strike, to sabotage like that of Reznicek, “Well, what did that do? They lost in the end anyway.”
Our ‘victory’ may never be clear-cut but every revolutionary act inspires another. (So we have to also believe in the butterfly effect.)
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A lot of the people out in Northern Minnesota fought because they were fighting for their home. Oil executives made the age-old decision of disregarding indigenous sovereignty again. Some people fighting Line 3 had been at Standing Rock or had watched a livestream of that camp being burned as it was cleared by black-helmeted police.
People power, when used responsibly, has a clarifying effect on all participants. Despite the cops, mace & guns, & legal legitimacy to capture and kill, there are moments when you feel your feet on the ground, the relief of rain on your face after weeks of drought, and none of the violence matters yet, because the cops aren’t there yet, and everyone’s charging one way: forward.
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A red dress hangs and sways in the wind and in the daylight, surrounded by abundant green, the frame of a body in the fabric looks less like a ghost and more like a guardian. Outside my window, Lake Superior is indistinguishable from the night sky.
Still, tar sands are flowing under the Mississippi River. As the non-profit resistance camps close down for the winter, there is a sense of disbelief and mourning in this moment. A lot of people who risked their lives in this struggle are wondering if they could have done more. I’m sure many people are wondering if we could have gotten greater numbers or gotten the right media coverage or made a strategic shift that would have delayed this day from coming. We have to remind ourselves the fight does not end with this pipeline because the people in its path are surviving more than just this project.
I believe that one day the emergency shutdown valves will be turned. The pipe will be excavated, cleaned, and sold for scrap.
Hundreds of young people came out and acquired essential skills for fighting white supremacy & extractive industry, supported by radical, resilient communities forged in the fire of this fight. Now, Enbridge seeks to vertically integrate production and distribution, buying several ports in Texas for the international sale of crude. What if, on a given day, railroads were blocked in Calgary and Clearbrook with a simultaneous blockade of the ports in Texas? What if someone in another country could turn the valves with malware and lock the companies out of their own system (as the Colonial Pipeline hackers successfully did, kept it shutdown for months, and apolitically ransomed it for a few million.)
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A lot of people will throw around their political affiliations in action spaces. Anarchist, communist, socialist – or some vague fusion of the three. All that politics, especially away from the frontlines, is just talk. Now that the pipe’s done and the cameras are gone, the longterm work begins. Community care-based programs like free lunch, people’s clinics and childcare, wilderness survival and self-defense courses, patrols for missing and murdered Indigenous relatives and eviction defense teams will be set up to do what the state will never do: care for the people trapped in its borders. We will be on standby ready to take back the land from fascist and corporatist forces when the time comes.
As we move beyond the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, Minnesota’s position as a climate refuge will invite conflict in the region, rather than de-escalate it. As people arrive, displaced by our resource wars and trade policies, and displaced within the nation by poverty and ecological disaster, there may be a virulent tide of eco-fascism, unless we can lay the groundwork to stop it. It is already deeply entrenched in the logic of white nationalism. “This is our land” and “You’re trespassing” is uttered by the typical Line 3 sellout as they swerve their trucks or four-wheelers at us. “They [migrants] are a strain on our resources” is a rhetorical point that echoes through the Fox News broadcasts they all watch, a point that was also braided into the manifesto of the El Paso shooter who committed a genocidal terror attack against Chicano people shopping at Walmart. Out of a need to play soldier, lone wolf attackers like Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha or organized groups like the Proud Boys in the Pacific Northwest kill and physically dominate anyone they perceive as a threat to the American empire and private property.
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There were moments in the winter when there were a few hundred people marching down a country road, flanked by snowdrifts. The man camps, essentially Enbridge-built trailer parks that operated with the same opacity as fraternities or precincts, were hotbeds of Covid-19 transmission and, more pressingly, sexual assault & trafficking. As the march concluded with prayer and song, I wondered what would have happened if we’d stormed the man camp. The workers, despite the fact that they too are exploited under capitalism and completely disposable to their employers, deserved to be driven out.
Misogyny, Covid-19 denialism, anti-Semitism, Christian Creationism, neo-confederacy, and utter contempt for Indigenous people is endemic to the culture in their line of work. What if we’d banged down the doors and occupied their ‘homes’, made them, for a portion of time, displaced? But of course, it would’ve led to mass arrest and riot charges for the leadership of the march…
As the imperial core continues to collapse, the next wave of fascists will continue to collaborate with law enforcement and increasingly fringe local government, trying to create sovereign ethno-states, to exert control over farmland, freshwater, and hunting grounds as the climate crisis becomes a game for resource-ownership.
In the resistance fight, the communal fires, dinners, and conversations of about ‘what could be’ were all little parts of a bigger picture. The crisis of the Line 3 pipeline created, in the woods around border townsfe wells of grassroots democracy akin to international revolutionary projects like the Zapatista resistance that gained autonomy over Chiapas or the eco-socialist Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava. Expanding autonomous regions may become a more common sight within the next decade as the people begin to take their power back.
All in all, what we’re asking is for us to think a little outside the box, considering the batshit sci-fi movie that already is our reality. We should imagine cyberpunk outlaws to hack Amazon’s self-driving semis. Imagine non-lethal drone swarms to delay commercial air traffic. Imagine flotillas of buccaneers overtaking oil tankers in the middle of the ocean. All of this so we can have drinkable water and breathable air, so that our daughters and nieces may grow strong and storm the jails and camps, decades from now, as liberators.
In the meantime, though, we can only know that at some points in the fight, we landed a blow that made them bleed. From Fairy Creek to Thacker Pass, from the forests of Humboldt County to South Atlanta, we’re fighting a war for the dawn, and we have a duty to win.
What do we do when our planet is under attack? STAND UP, FIGHT BACK
Further readings:
For America to Live Europe Must Die- Russel Means (pdf on Indigenous Action)
Accomplices Not Allies (Warrior Zine)
Defend the Territory (Warrior Publications)
Anarkata (the anarchist library)
The struggle is not for martyrdom but for life: on the revolution in Rojava (Crimethinc)
Swarm Manifesto (antidote zines)
ELF Black Cat sabotage manual (downloadable on the earth first website)
Slingshotis an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.
The Occupy movement introduced the “human microphone” — when a speaker has their words repeated and thereby amplified by a crowd without the need for a PA. This is a slow way of communicating, but the advantages can be pretty inspired. The speaker has this explosive sensation of a large crowd not only hearing what they’re saying, but have their own words given back to them with emotion and energy. This is a useful metaphor of the condition we are in. There are entrenched systems and people holding back things from changing. Climate chaos, racism, stolen lives at the service of capitalism is seemingly never going to recede. Using force and violence to intervene has its limitations. The older, slower way of working is to inform and inspire more people to go in the directions that are needed.
A newspaper is in this tradition – relaying the speeches, ideas and urgency of those on the front line. Microphone. This paper is made by regular people who are not professional journalists or activists or even hardcore revolutionaries. This issue and recent issues testify to how Slingshot puts out a call for submissions and is often met with something worse than silence. Many of the articles we consider are lacking. We do our best considering what’s given to us. As with those dramatic days of Occupy sometimes we are amplifying something that is awkward or we don’t entirely agree with. We appreciate the authors who worked hard on what you hold in your hands.
To get this issue out, we extended the article deadline twice for two months to finally get enough material for a paper. Even though we made an issue, it was just a skeleton crew making the decisions and attending meetings. Like so much else in the world, it doesn’t feel sustainable to work like this. The pandemic cut the collective off from its typical process of gradually incorporating new members who drift in. The Long Haul was closed and the lockdown caused the whole society to turn inward — sticking with a tiny pod of people you already knew. Worse yet was only seeing people on a computer screen. The pandemic isn’t exactly over — it is unknown how we can heal this damage and reinvigorate our grassroots communities. But we gotta try — write it in your organizer.
While we were making the issue up in the loft, the meeting room downstairs filled to capacity with an 8 hour long anarchist conference — the biggest public gathering at Long Haul in two years. While the endless lectures made it hard to concentrate, it was so nourishing to be amidst the rabble.
Slingshot’s normal practice is to publish an article deadline a few months out and then wait and hope. We’re doing so again — but with reservations and some anxiety. Another attractive option is to take a break and try different things for a while. Perhaps exciting articles and folks wanting to join the collective will accumulate over time — and perhaps patience is the best way forward? If you don’t see another issue of Slingshot for a while, that may be why. And if we end up taking a longer break than usual and you miss Slingshot,feel free to start your own zine. When the time is right, Slingshot hopes to sprout like the mushrooms after a heavy rain.
One collective member asked her middle school students what they want to learn and discuss in school? We would like to invite more responses from students beyond the Bay Area and may publish some responses in the future. Another collective member suggested we start a People’s Park vision quest so we can publish ideas for parks and commons in a future issue. On the back cover, Slingshot for years published a calendar of upcoming events. But with the pandemic there’s hardly any events. So we’re experimenting and hope to get the calendar BACK soon.
Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers and distributors. Even if you feel you are not an essayist, illustrator, or whistleblower, you may know someone who is. If you send an article, please be open to editing. We’re a collective, but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.
Thanks to the people who made this: Alex, Andrei, Daisy, Darby, eggplant, elke, Emily, Fern, Gina, Heval, Jacob, Jack, Jesse, Jax, Josette, Juan-Carlos, Luis, rachelle, Robin,Salmon, Seandunn, Sylvia, Will & all the authors and artists!
Slingshot New Volunteer Meeting
Volunteers interested in getting involved with Slingshot can come to the new volunteer meeting on February 6, 2022 at 7 pm at the Long Haul in Berkeley (see below.)
Article Deadline & Next Issue Date
Submit your articles for issue 135 by March 4, 2022 at 11 pm.
Volume 1, Number 134, Circulation 22,000
Printed November 19, 2021
Slingshot Newspaper
A publication of Long Haul
Office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley CA 94705
Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703
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Circulation information
Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income, or anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or $1 per issue. International $3 per issue. Outside the Bay Area we’ll mail you a free stack of copies if you give them out for free. Say how many copies and how long you’ll be at your address. In the Bay Area pick up copies at Long Haul and Bound Together books, SF.
Slingshot free stuff
We’ll send you a random assortment of back issues for the cost of postage. Send $4 for 2 lbs. Free if you’re an infoshop or library. slingshotcollective.org
If you want to draw for the 2022 Slingshot Organizer, contact us now. Slingshot includes art from dozens of people from all over the world — please be one of us. Email by April 20 — pages are due May 28.
Anyone can suggest, help edit, verify and proofread historical dates in March and April. (You can do so remotely.) We also need corrections and suggestions of new radical contact list spaces by May 29.
Slingshot volunteers will put the organizer together by hand May 29/30 and June 5/6 in Berkeley. Please drop by and join us if you’re in town.
There are still copies of the pocket size 2021 Slingshot organizer available; the spiral size are all gone. Selling the organizer enables Slingshot to print and distribute this newspaper for free. So if you like what you’re reading, please buy the organizer for yourself and as gifts. If you know of a store in your area that might be able to carry the organizer let us know.
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Over the last several years, a number of members of the Slingshot Collective have explored the importance of consent across a range of human activities, including sexual consent, and consent within the context of labor. These explorations have led many of us to begin to ask, “What would a consent-based economy look like?”
Right now, the basic unit of the economy is this thing called capital, which is a way of gamifying human social relations so that people who win at largely inaccessible institutionalized gambling are given the power to direct human labor towards creating more capital. This system has only one goal: to replicate capital at any cost. The logic of capital is supported by local and international laws, laws that force corporations into structures of demonstrating growth to investors and that likewise allow individuals who work for corporations to not be held personally accountable for actions committed on behalf of a company (this is called “limited liability” and it is one of the legal loopholes that led to the birth of capitalism in the 16th Century). Empowered by laws that prioritize capital, CEOs of capitalist entities direct labor towards replicating capital, often committing egregious violations of consent.
One of the most deplorable consent violations currently underway is a regime of environmental racism in which communities of color disproportionately find themselves subjected to poisonous and toxic chemicals that are byproducts of capital replication tactics. Latinx communities in Los Angeles are experiencing disproportionate rates of cancer and disease because of oil drilling in their neighborhoods, the Standing Rock Sioux and the Wet’suwet’en and many other Indigenous groups are having to fight dangerous pipelines from being built over their ancestral land, while the Mohawk people are dealing with a regime of racist toxic waste dumping on tribally held land that has greatly increased mortality rates among their people. There are just so many cases of environmental racism that emerge in a system that prioritizes capital’s replication rather than consent.
Likewise, consent is violated for everyone through the destruction of ecological wealth and climate stability brought on by the concerted actions of the for-profit petroleum industry. If the people of Paradise, CA, or Malden, WA, or Phoenix, OR had known that their entire towns would burn to the ground because of escalating carbon emissions, they likely would have not consented to the escalation of carbon emissions. The same might be said for everyone under the age of 30 at this point, a group rapidly losing any hope of a future without horrific social and ecological disasters each day greenhouse gas emissions are not cut to zero.
Imagine a consent-based economy
Imagine what would happen if consent, rather than capital, was at the center of our economy? Imagine if the courts no longer prioritized capital, but prioritized consent?
Dr. Grace Delmolino at UC Davis is currently teaching an undergraduate class on consent, and here is a diagram of consent that has been used in her class:
One of the main focuses of her class is the question, “What makes consent valid?” As we move towards a consent-based economy, this is an important question to ask.
Consent cannot be valid if it is coerced or forced. Additionally, to be able to consent, a person needs to be adequately informed about what they are consenting to. This means they need access to all of the information, and it needs to be represented in a way that is truly accessible and easy to understand. Sometimes things are called “informed consent” that don’t meet this criteria, for example, the “Terms of Service” that we often sign online that allow companies to gather and sell our personal data — if the typical internet user were to personally read all of these, it would take a full month of their time each year, 8 hours a day. No one has time for that, so this clearly isn’t valid consent.
Likewise, consent becomes less valid when asymmetrical power relations are at play. For example, because women — in particular women of color — are asymmetrically disempowered through the wage gap (i.e., women make 79 cents to the white man’s dollar, Black women make 63 cents to the white man’s dollar, Indigenous women make 58 cents to the white man’s dollar, and if a woman is trans, these numbers are virtually cut in half). The wage gap is one of a number of factors that systemically disempower women, and because women are more likely to find themselves with less access to money, it disproportionately puts women in the precarious position of feeling pressured to sometimes consent to things they don’t want to do. In this way, the legitimacy of consent between romantic partners of different genders is thrown into question, and the need to remove these forms of systemic oppression is thrown into focus.
Consent economics allows us to think through a number of systemic issues within our society that are oppressive to whole groups and to center these groups’ consent, rather than treating it as an afterthought.
A consent economy would also prioritize staying within what scientists have called The Planetary Carbon Budget (NOAA 2018), so to ensure future generations are not trapped with awful conditions they did not consent to. If the courts prioritized consent before capital, so much could be solved quickly. But this must start with a narrative shift from the ground up.
The overly simplified idea is: Replace the logic of capital with the logic of consent, like this:
Sure, in the case of Indiana Jones, the temple collapses around him the moment the golden idol is removed, nearly crushing him. But also: the temple collapses!
Likewise, in a consent economy, each sector of the economy would need to be evaluated, sector by sector, to ensure that its operations did not impede upon the consent of others. The energy sector and the transportation sector for example have been found to fail to achieve consent while operating under the logic of capital. Other sectors whose operations impede upon consent when they are organized by the logic of capital include housing, prisons, military, education, and medicine. To transition to a consent economy, the logic of capital needs to be removed from these sectors and they need to be de-privatized. Some economic sectors, however, might be able to continue to operate under the logic of capital, with a few modifications. For example, the entertainment sectors (film, video games, magazines, etc) might be able to remain operating under a mostly capitalist logic, but factors that violate different kinds of consent would need to be removed.
In a consent economy, workplaces themselves would also need to be evaluated and organized around principles of consent. Many workplaces are presently dominated by a coercive logic in which workers are robbed of decision-making power, of ownership over what they produce, and ownership of the tools to produce it. In a consent economy, models of consensual and democratic decision-making would be used by worker-owners to self-manage their own workplaces, with workers having full control over how and when they work, what they produce, and how they co-create the models of production within a given workplace. Work in such an economy would radically shift towards being an occasion to create meaningful experiences for workers, with automation valued for its ability to alleviate meaningless toil, while environmental consent would need to be weighed in all aspects of the decision-making process.
For such workplaces to truly be consensual, the logic of compulsory labor would need to be removed from the economy. This will ensure that workers work because they want to, not because they are being forced by pervasive artificial conditions that compel unnecessary labor. This places importance upon the cultivation of commonly held and publicly accessible spaces for things like food production, sharing computer code, etc. Creative engagement will be necessary to develop, strategize, and maintain commonly held infrastructure that removes artificial scarcity that is presently used to compel labor by removing the conditions for consent.
Within a consent economy, consent would also be centered in workplaces, community spaces, and relationships, with community members being ready to actively intervene and mitigate harm when survivors come forward to report non-consensual abusive behaviors. This means communities must do the work (before abuse happens) of proactively implementing adjudication processes that center survivors. Such processes remove those accused of engaging in abusive behavior from the spaces that survivors interact with, a move that allows survivors to heal while also preventing abusive behaviors from becoming a means to achieve hegemony with a given space.
What happens when we better center consent within our institutions? What happens when we prioritize consent in our media and storytelling? What happens when we teach consent as a value to the next generation? There is definitely a time limit at play — there are less than 10 years left before we need to reduce humanity’s net carbon emissions to 50% — and the push for a consent economy is just one of many tactics that may help us rapidly put an end to environmental racism, mitigate climate chaos, and put an end to many other forms of social and ecological harm that currently wreak havoc on our communities and ecosystems.
The effort to center consent within our economy will surely be an adventure, one that will take care, cleverness, courage, humor, the ability to collaborate and also rest.
SH Steele is a member of the California Economists Collective, cec.ucdavis.edu.Many ideas in this article were influenced by Dr. Grace Delmolino.
Supplemental Reading:
—Indigenous scholar Kyle White has written about consent from a variety of angles that pertain to law and scientific practice. His work may be read for free here: https://umich.academia.edu/KyleWhyte
—The book Sexual Consent by Milena Popova (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, 2019) breaks down sexual consent from a social, legal, historical, and mutual aid standpoint. Everyone should read this book by the time they finish high school, and it offers a framework that might be used to think through other types of consent.
—South African scholar Lesley Green has just released a book that thinks through an alternative approach to removing the logic of capital from our relations. The book is called Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa (Duke University Press, 2020). While focusing on South Africa, this work models a relationship-based approach to non-capitalist economics any region might work to foster.
Edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder. 525 pages. (c) 2020 by The New Yorker.
Reviewed by T. Frank
I was largely unaware of the climate change findings of the 1980s, as someone who grew up a decade later. The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change reveals that scientists and inventors have documented rising temperatures one hundred years prior, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. “Man was evaporating our coal mines into the air,” wrote Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, in 1884.
The concept of time, of past, present and future, becomes murky halfway through the 1989 essay Reflections: The End of Nature,by Bill McKibben. This volume repeats data and information about our warming planet like the feedback loops of climate change. Reminders of continuous, growing sources of carbon emissions are sprinkled throughout. Our daily dependence on oil and gas, agriculture and water, affects multiple generations that experience rapid destruction from exploitative industries. McKibben suggests that our responsibility is not to end climate change — the events are unavoidable — but “to slow down the warming so that we can adapt to it. Our impulse will be to…figure out a new way to continue our accustomed life styles…and press ahead into a new world” (p. 45).
Slingshot readers should be familiar by now with our coverage of climate change. The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change might help us balance the totality of this crisis with frank, fluid text, a narrative that reviews and analyzes the causes and effects of global warming. You can pick it up at your local library — I borrowed this volume during the Covid-19 pandemic, and our library system allows for multiple renewals. What better way to be informed?
Last summer’s catastrophic forest fires were just a taste of what’s in store if we don’t drastically reduce and eliminate emissions from our infrastructure. But how do we make sense of climate science? How do we direct our energy towards the changes that need to happen most urgently?
EarthGamesUW is a game development laboratory at the University of Washington run by climate scientists and their students, and they have created a number of apps and games based on real climate data that can be downloaded or played online for free here at: earthgames.org.
The climate data used in these games comes from the C-MIP6, or the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Version 6, which is considered the best predictive climate data available. At EarthGamesUW, climate scientists sit down with computer programmers to translate the C-MIP data into the Python programming language, allowing game designers to use it as the backend for their games.
Some of these games may seem a bit hokey and DIY when compared to games produced by big teams for profit, but they offer a number of creative ways to visualize processes that contribute to and result from the greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling climate change.
My favorite game that EarthGamesUW has created so far is Infrared Escape, in which you play a tiny beam of infrared energy attempting to escape the atmosphere to cool the planet. Rather than setting the game to “easy” or “hard” at the start of the game, there is a scale that you can use to adjust the PPM (parts per million) of carbon in the atmosphere. The more PPM of carbon in the atmosphere, the harder it is to escape.
Other EarthGames projects include Climate Quest, which is made to look like a 90s-style RPG game, in which you direct a team of specialists in addressing escalating ecological and social disasters that come up due to climate change, and Life of Pika, in which players direct a pika (a real animal that is threatened by climate change) to collect food while dodging predators as the rising temperature threatens your survival in a number of ways. These and a number of other climate games are free to download for your phone, tablet, or computer.
These games are especially handy if you’re homeschooling and want to include a unit on climate change (every little kid alive right now is going to have to contend with this, so better to be honest and prepare them as much as possible while fighting like hell to mitigate the damage while we still have time).
My one criticism is the website doesn’t have any widgets to help you visualize climate data in a more straightforward way. For that, you have to go to a different website (climateinteractive.org/tools/climate-pathways/) to download an interactive graphing tool that shows you how temperature change will be affected by different levels of greenhouse gas emissions over the new few years.
The future trajectory of global warming over the 21st century will be determined by the speed with which humans eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases. According to the IPCC, in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-Industrial average, emissions must be reduced by 50% by 2030, and drop to net zero by 2050 (IPCC 2018). We now have less than 10 years to reduce emissions by 50% to prevent catastrophic climate change within our lifetimes. Rather than panicking, it is a good time to slow down and work to understand the factors that are contributing to climate change so we can make smart collective choices fast.
Finding the Ground – Reorienting Ourselves in the Age of COVID
By Crow
It has been a dizzying whirlwind of a year. It’s hard to know what to think these days. I find myself questioning if the political analysis that I had pre-pandemic is still relevant. Clearly, when times change, it is necessary to adapt. But how?
We must re-affirm our core values. Anarchism is the philosophy of freedom. It is predicated upon voluntary association, mutual aid, and the belief that there is a symbiosis between the freedom of the individual and the health of the collective.
And here we must get into a question that has been gnawing away at me for months. Why have anarchists been so silent in the face of government lockdown orders and related arbitrary rules approaching martial law across the world? Even though lockdowns are ebbing now, they could come back. Aren’t radicals defenders of civil liberties such as the freedom of assembly and privacy? Yet until recently, there seemed to be a taboo against radicals criticizing measures justified in the name of Public Health — almost the only people protesting lockdowns were right wingers.
Thankfully, that is now changing. In Quebec, home to a fierce anarchist tradition, it took the imposition of a curfew before anarchists reached the point of mobilizing, but I am happy to report that radicals in Quebec are now taking to the streets. There have now been two anti-curfew demonstrations organized by anarchists. I hope that it will lead to further dialogue about the path forward for a resistance movement in the age of COVID, for the old world is behind us.
Social media platforms are scrubbing their platforms of information deemed to be contrary to the recommendations of Public Health. This type of censorship works to create a type of groupthink by making criticism of lockdown measures seem like an extremist ideology, by placing it outside the bounds of what it is acceptable to say.
We need to question authority. We need to ask ourselves: What is Public Health? What is justifiable in the name of Public Health and what isn’t? And who gets to decide?
What is really implied by the term “Public Health”? Often, it seems that the term is used to suggest that individual wishes, needs and desires must be subordinated in the interests of a greater good. Who determines this greater good? The state, of course.
I believe that human beings want to be free. However, there is one thing that most people value over freedom. That is safety. That is why, when a regime wishes to gain the compliance of a population for nefarious purposes, such as war, they focus on making people afraid. This is basic. The War on Terror was accompanied by a massive effort in fear-mongering propaganda. The U.S. government issued daily color-coded “Terror Level Alerts” as part of the mobilization of support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This fear was accompanied by propaganda promoting patriotism, justifying an invasion of another country in the name of freedom. Is it such a stretch that a modern-day propaganda machine could have people believing in and supporting equally untrue things? Whenever the media is clearly pumping fear into the public, the natural question to ask should be: “For what purpose are they spreading fear? What do they want the public to believe?” When we ask ourselves those two questions, we can operate with another assumption — that the thing that they want the public to go along with is not something that the public would normally support.
Every day, we are told over and over again how dire the situation is. We are essentially being told that we are under attack. The only difference is that the enemy is not a foreign power but a force of nature, a virus, an invisible enemy.
It is clear that some people are more at risk than others, and of course we should respect the boundaries of those who have a different level of risk assessment than we do, always basing our ethics in these matters on principles of consent, self-determination, and respect of the bodily autonomy of each person. We need to talk about these things and decide our own ethics around them, rather than reflexively reproducing the dominant narrative being promoted through mainstream media.
We need to reject the logic that we need to be protected from ourselves. To accept this logic is to accept defeat. If we accept the logic that the information that we have access to must be controlled, we are accepting the logic that we must be controlled. The state would have us believe that it has our best interests at heart, and that it is manipulating us for our own good, in the name of Public Health.
This pandemic points towards some very big questions for society in general. Society is being radically transformed. Who are the winners and losers? Which corporate interests and which political parties are gaining wealth and power, and which segments of society are most adversely affected? Some of the questions are not just political, but spiritual. For example, is Western society pathologically death-phobic? Throughout human history, societies have dealt with the natural human fear of death through spirituality practices, philosophy, and theatre such as funerary rituals. Do we need a grand narrative within which we can understand our mortality? Is our lack of such a narrative making us behave irrationally? Today, it seems likely that the constant stimulation of electronic media is distracting people from understanding the meaning of life, which is the natural antidote to the fear of death. Some from the tech world, drunk on the power of their privilege, dream of overcoming death through biohacking and nano-technology, but this search for immortality is an ancient folly.
So I would propose that the conversation around COVID needs to go beyond its current obsession with “saving lives” and focus on the larger question of how to live and to die well in a world where death is an inevitability. I hope that we will all agree that there is more to life than just being alive. This is not just an individual question, but a question for society, because if we don’t want our elders dying terrible deaths in nursing homes, we’ve got to do some soul-searching… because if our ideal society doesn’t involve the state, it means that people like you and I will have to provide for people who have gotten too old to live independently. And this is a topic about which anarchists over the past few decades have been mostly silent, an oversight that we now must address. Are we including elders in our imagination when we think about the autonomous communities and neighbourhoods that we desire to bring into being? Because if we aren’t, we are part of the problem.
In the end, though, I think that the crisis is a spiritual crisis. We will all die and until we make peace with that fact, we will desire a freedom that will remain out of our grasp.
There are many important questions raised by the current crisis, which we cannot afford to leave to the domain of governments and corporations.
Don’t believe the hype. Governments lie, politicians lie, the media lies, and corporate executives lie. If we want to know what constitutes appropriate action in the context of a pandemic, then we need to understand what the risks are and how to mitigate them. To do that, we should seek out the best available information. There are tons of medical studies regarding lockdowns and related subjects that you can check out online. A year ago, we didn’t have a lot of information about COVID. Now we do, and the picture that has emerged is clearer than the media would have you believe. Lockdowns are not justifiable in the name of public health, and we should oppose them as fundamental violations of our autonomy.
Insofar as we know, It’s Going Down is one of best platforms presenting news from an antifascist perspective. Has the federal classification of antifa as domestic terrorists caused any repression of your website?
There is no federal classification of antifa as domestic terrorists as the US lacks the legal infrastructure to designate domestic groups as such….
Before leaving office, Trump did issue an executive order that stated antifascists would be added to the list of groups banned under the so-called ‘Muslim Ban’ or Travel Ban, however no one was clear how this would be implemented or if this was legally possible, and Biden has already thrown out those executive orders regardless.
The push by the Trump administration to label antifascists as domestic terrorists has however been picked up as a rallying cry by sections of the GOP and the far-Right….
At the same time, repressive State organs such as the FBI, DHS, and Joint Terrorism Task Forces operating out of Fusion Centers routinely place heavy emphasis on anarchist, Black Lives Matter, and antifascist groups. For instance, thanks to Freedom of Information Act Requests, we know that police in Berkeley referred to “Black Lives Matter” and “ANTIFA” as “hate groups” in the lead up to counter-protests to far-Right rallies. Homeland Security even pushed the line that antifascists were a bigger threat than the far-Right in the lead up to Charlottesville.
The FBI has also ramped up surveillance of Black Lives Matter, creating a designation of “Black Identity Extremists” and also creating a so-called “Iron Fist” program to disrupt the current Black liberation movement; all of which echos back to COINTELPRO [from the 1960s.]
In the wake of the far-Right storming of the capitol on January 6th, it is incumbent upon autonomous social movements and the Left in general to remind the public that for years the State allowed the fascist Right to grow, while focusing on coming down against the Left. Giving the State more powers to repress even the far-Right, will ultimately be used even harder against movements from below.
What are your primary critiques of the mainstream liberal media’s approach to fascist and white supremacist activity?
The neoliberal press treated the ascension of the Alt-Right in 2016 as an oddity; an upper-middle class fascist movement that embraced white identity politics was something that they did not know how to cover. The fact that they believe racism and white supremacy to only be the station of poor and working-class whites speaks volumes to the ‘class gaze’ of many journalists. This reality was shattered however in Charlottesville, where the press was confronted, and in some cases attacked, by the very people they had been platforming for the past year….
The stance by the press overall towards antifascists and anarchists more broadly has been one largely of contempt. Before Charlottesville, there were literally more editorials written attacking antifascists in mainstream newspapers than there were attacking the Alt-Right. And while the red carpet was rolled out for the far-Right and volumes of explainer pieces were written about the movement, when it came to autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements and struggles, the press was afraid to dive deep and give a platform to those with radical anti-capitalist views — and for good reason. While news of Nazis sells, it does also not upset the owners of corporate media. This dynamic resulted in a reality where the media gave the far-Right a large platform to talk about their ideas, where antifascists, when they were interviewed at all, were forced to defend their tactics.
In short, if working people understood that they could self-organize and take on the far-Right without looking to the State or the police — and what other conclusion could one make under Trump — then what was stopping them from blocking ICE vans, stopping evictions, launching strikes and engaging in other forms of actions that put our own interests ahead of those in power?
As a guest on our show put it: the media exists to divorce social movement from their potential base of support within the wider population. While we are not opposed to talking to the media at times, we do so knowing that they are owned and controlled by forces that don’t have our best interests at heart.
What role do anarchist media projects, including It’s Going Down, play in challenging fascism?
IGD and other platforms have been able to massively shift the conversation around the far-Right while vindicating social movements pushing back against them. We’ve also been able to at times break stories — for instance exposing an Alt-Right member of Turning Point USA screaming racial slurs on video, thus causing a crisis within the organization and his removal. Just today, we learned that a member of the Proud Boys who has wormed his way into the local GOP was removed due to a video of them calling for the murder of migrants going around on the internet. Moreover, journalists for a lot of reasons also lack the fortitude to ‘break stories’ and challenge existing narratives. The fact that Unicorn Riot, IGD, and many others have pushed things so hard, allows journalists in the mainstream to report on what we’re already covering. The downside of this is that at times our work is stolen and not attributed back to us by larger outlets.
What antifascists are currently behind bars who were convicted for their political activities?
First we should mention, Gage Halupowski, currently serving a six year sentence for defending other protesters from a group of fascists armed with hammers. There is currently an outbreak at his prison, so please step up and support! Also anarchist prisoner Eric King faces constant attacks and harassment for being an outspoken antifascist and is currently fighting trumped up charges from the guards. Finally, hundreds of people are facing heavy charges following the rebellion that kicked off this summer following the police murder of George Floyd. We must all play a role in prisoner defense, so get in where you fit in and do what you can.
Anything else you want to say on these topics is welcome!
There’s a lot more we can say but the energy that exploded last summer needs to continue, albeit in new trajectories and projects. The neoliberal center is going to attempt to placate liberals and progressives and push for social peace; it’s our job to point out the contradictions and how similar both parties really are. We need to keep building up the mass networks and programs of mutual aid, tenant unions, and prison organizing which has been taking place across the US the past year and expand these projects. There’s a lot of new people around radical circles now that need to be caught up to speed on everything from security culture to community organizing — let’s not lose our momentum but keep growing. Already since Biden has been elected we’ve seen strikes in New York and riots against the police in Tacoma; things may have calmed down a bit, but nothing is going back to whatever ‘normal’ is in an age of catastrophic climate change and rising fascism. Get organized. Expand the capacity of your projects. Work on strengthening existing movement infrastructure and growing it. Solidify and build regional networks. Deepen relationships with the broader proletariat in every way possible.
Follow It’s Going Down online at itsgoingdown.org, on Twitter @IGD_News on IG: its.going.down. and check us out in the bay area on the radio, every Friday at 12PM NOON at 94.1 on KPFA.
