Category: Articles

Edited by Fern’s Dad

The Prison Ecology Project (PEP) addresses the intersection between the environment and incarceration. Initiated by Paul Wright of Prison Legal News and the Human Rights Defense Center, PEP seeks to bring environmental activists and the skill sets of the ecology movement to the struggle against the prison industry, prisoner’s rights, criminal justice reform and prison abolition. PEP builds on the experience some radical environmental activists gained when we were either thrown in prison for eco-actions, or organized support for imprisoned activists. These experiences gave us an inside look at the prison epidemic in the US. With the steady stream of urban uprisings against the police state, there has never been a better time to organize at this intersection of ecology and incarceration.

One way to accomplish this is to expose the stream of environmental and health violations flowing from overcrowded prisons around the country as a weak point in the system of mass incarceration. A prime example is the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) plans to build a massive maximum-security prison on top of a former mountaintop removal coal mine in Letcher County, Eastern Kentucky, an area surrounded by sludge ponds and coal processing and transport operations. This produces an environmental justice nightmare, where prisoners, who are disproportionately low-income and people of color, face toxic conditions behind bars. The prison site is a mile from a rare and biodiverse pocket of Eastern old-growth called the Lilley Cornett Woods.

As of December 2015, the BOP got $400 million approved for the prison’s construction. The newly formed Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) is organizing to stop the Letcher county prison and looking to grow a coalition of opposition.

Stopping one prison is not a magic bullet to ending the US police state, the one that gave way to world’s largest prison nation and in turn serves as the apparatus of repression that keeps the planet shackled to industrial capitalism, but it’s a pretty good place to build from. In particular, it is a powerful place that the environmental movement can express solidarity with the growing rage over the racist criminal justice system.

PEP is helping to organize a convergence in support of eco-prisoners & against toxic prisons June 11-13 in Washington DC. For over a decade, June 11 has been a day of international solidarity events with environmentalists and anarchists imprisoned for their actions in defense of the Earth. The gathering will have networking, strategizing and organizing June 11/12, culminating with a mass action on Monday the 13th. The gathering will put dual pressure on both the BOP and the EPA regarding the Kentucky prison, and environmental justice issues related to prisoners in general, while continuing to fight for the release of eco-prisoners in the spirit of June 11th. We also hope to see this effort build stronger bonds between the eco-defense movement and the movements against police and mass incarceration.

For those interested, but can’t make it to D.C., the BOP has 5 regional offices or you can organize your own June 11 event anywhere. For more info, email FightToxicPrisons@gmail.com

 

Reviewed by A. Iwasa

The City is Ours begins with a preface by George Katsiaficas, who I consider to be the next Noam Chomsky. Though he is an academic, I feel like he has long overcome that world’s tendency towards dry writing.

The foreword was written by Geronimo, the author of Fire and Flames, a history of the German Autonomist Movement,.  Though he is as passionate as he is in his earlier writings, a diatribe against anti-sexism almost completely derailed my train of thought as I read his foreword.

That written, this book starts off strong before calming down to a more nuanced, academic feeling with the introduction.

I was reading the book with a real sense of urgency, having recently become involved with the squatters’ and squat supporters’ collective, East Bay Homes Not Jails.  After living in two squats that had been evicted in Oakland the previous year, I was ready to look just about anywhere for advice.  The subtitle of the book should be stressed, this isn’t just about squatting, it’s also very much about European Autonomist Movements.

But it was well worth working through all the historical context to get to the actual material about squatting.

The chapter on Brighton was one of the major highlights, written by two groups, one explicitly of squatters, the Needle Collective.  It’s exactly the sort of writing I was hoping for when I got the book.  Though the post-World War II emergence of squatting in Britain and general historical context is touched on, this is mostly a fiery account of squatting in Brighton from 1969-2012.

An interesting side note to the mostly academic writing style of the book was the amount of documentary film footage referenced, much of which I was able to find on the youtube!  Taking breaks from reading to watch some of these videos reminded me of history classes in high school big time, but far more interesting.  This could make a fun Squatting 101 textbook and study guide!  Possibly the best of these films was 69, about a Youth House, Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen.

The chapter on London was written by a Lecturer in Law, Lucy Finchett-Maddock.  Though the emphasis on her specialty comes off as dry at first, the flip of it is she also focuses on the political organizations of the squatters, even going back to the Ex-Servicemen’s Secret Committee, who were one of the many groups helping homeless families get into squats in the post-World War II wave.

As a participant in East Bay Homes Not Jails, these sort of organizational forms were some of the specific things I was hoping to learn more about.

The next chapter is about the Rozbrat squatted social center in Poznan, Poland.  Being the only chapter about what I consider to be Eastern Europe, I particularly enjoyed it on several levels.  How the emergence of the Polish squatting movement fit into the post-State Communist era, and how Rozbrat in particular also fit into the Anti-Globalization Movement was fun and exciting to read.

As a participant in the Infoshop Movement with many white relatives of Slovak descent, there was something homey feeling about this chapter for me.  There was even a reference to Anarchist Soccer!

The final chapter, Squatting and Autonomous Action in Vienna, 1976-2012, is solid. The whole book, for the most part, should probably be called Autonomous Action and Squatting.  In some ways, this book is more like what I had hoped Fire and Flames and The Subversion of Politics would have been like:  an exciting, well written and researched history of Autonomists.  But it wasn’t as full of helpful advice on squatting as I hoped it would be.  Still well worth reading and discussing for what it is.

 

PM Press, PO Box 23912, Oakland, CA 94623

By A. Iwasa

One of the little things that I think has improved my life over the last eight or so months has been making my own deodorant.  I’ve experimented with a few different recipes, but am currently doing this:

1 tablespoon of baking soda to 1 table spoon of organic coconut oil, smooshing them together and adding about 8 drops of tea tree oil per ½ cup or so.

Not exactly science; since fall I’ve only been places where the coconut oil is solid at room temperatures, and I refuse to heat it to work with it more easily.  And I keep having to abandon supplies, and just trying to make sure my jar is full before I leave, so I’m half assing it like I always do.

By Daddy LongShanks

By the time Nosebleed squat started, I’d been houseless for almost two years and considered myself something of a pro-squatter. The upside of squatting is zero dollars rent and total freedom to spend your days as you please, free of indentured servitude to the corporate ogre; the downside is zero stability, frequent unplanned moves and occasional loss of possessions up to and including all of them. The average life-span of a squat in San Francisco, according to my Homes Not Jails cohorts, is three weeks; my own experience more or less confirms that statistic. Moving more than once a month adds up to plenty of stress on its own, but squatters have more to deal with: periodic confrontations with angry property owners, and police, who invariably take the gentry’s side against their ragtag, would-be disseisors.

The first night I stayed there, we agreed to set the roster at five, not to accept any more members (other than overnight guests), and set some loose house rules. (They can only be loose in a household of anarchist cat people.) After lone-wolfing it for so long, I was happy to be part of a group again, building a house with others outside the capitalism box. Safety in numbers, the synergy of human interactions, personality dynamics I’d missed (a little). We all had our failings and foibles and eccentricities, but no one was judging, or hiding in shame. We were all fuck-ups of one kind or another and that was okay. It was some kind of wonderful.

We discussed intelligence gathered so far on the property, over dinner and drinks in the kitchen. From the street, Nosebleed wasn’t much to look at, but inside the house was full of retro charm. What it lacked in size it made up with a cozy, finished basement and a fenced backyard with garden. It was an inheritance property. The owners appeared to live in the East Bay. They had major renovations planned that would involve extensive construction, as evidenced by blueprints and other Department of Building Inspection documents we’d intercepted. This dampened any hopes for a long-term tenancy, though not completely: we’d all seen enough construction projects stall for long periods, sometimes indefinitely, for reasons one could only guess: owner moves or sells the property, dies, runs out of money; plans delayed or derailed by permits, Planning Department bureaucracy, complaints from other homeowners, etc. Though hope was further eroded by the fact that The Great Recession was itself receding by this point (early 2013), and construction was starting to pick up again all over the place.

Water and power, at minimum, are considered necessary by self-respecting squatters for decent indoor living. In this respect, Nosebleed was a peach, boasting not only these baseline amenities but also a gas stove and furnace, working washer and dryer, and even hot running water — a rare luxury indeed! That first night, I washed a load of clothes and went to bed earlier than the others, setting up my tent in the basement. Indoor camping! I would have camped outside, but we wanted to maintain a low profile.

To access the basement, one had to go outside. When I did so, I noticed that our clamoring voices were clearly audible to the next-door neighbors, who struck me as the sort of married couple who wake up early and pack their kids off to school before leaving for work themselves. At that very moment, I could hear talking, loud as day, about strategies for dealing with cops if they showed up, and how we should fabricate and memorize a story so as not to be taken off guard or caught in a lie if owners or others came calling.

I brought this up the next night, my second in the house. Again we stood in the kitchen eating dinner, by dint of no furniture so far. “You guys, we’ve gotta talk quieter,” I exhorted them. The response seemed to be a collective shrug. Not wanting to come off as a fussbudget, I didn’t press the issue. After dinner, I took a hot shower, something I’d anticipated with relish all day. When I emerged a half hour later, steamy and well-scrubbed, I was in congenial spirits, starting to really look forward to this little house adventure and already feeling fondness for my surrogate squatter family. Wicked sugarplums were dancing in my head, of how cool and fun this house could be. Maybe we would make it so cool that the owners, when they got wind of our unauthorized tenancy, wouldn’t even mind! The permission squat of my dreams come true!

But the next day the squat blew up. The owner showed up, found one of us and threatened to call the police. He ran off with a few of his belongings and the rest of us lost everything we had left in the house. We understood. I think we’d all been through our share of squat busts by that point. Nonetheless, I was disappointed. It was a nice house, and we were a fun group. It was too bad the experiment never got to play out. That night, I walked by the house and saw it boarded up, and looked over the fence into the dark, desolate garden we’d hoped to cultivate. That squat, lasting only two days, came to symbolize for me the wasted potential and brusquely shattered daydreams of those attempting to build a better world at this early and subliminal stage of human enlightenment.

When I became homeless and hit the street for the first time in my adult life in San Francisco in mid-2011, I had no conception of how to live outside the prescribed course of mainstream capitalist society, and thought my life was ending. Thanks to Occupy SF, Homes Not Jails, and Noisebridge (as it was then), I discovered another life outside the mainstream that offered total freedom at the heavy cost of constant struggle, insecurity and instability. Unfortunately, I became addicted to crystal meth, which took me away from the larger activist community I’d begun to be involved with. Eventually, after brushes with the law and worsening circumstances, I emerged with a heightened spiritual sense and consciousness level — there is something to be said for the view that suffering leads to enlightenment, I’m afraid! I was determined to plug back into the grassroots communities and make up for lost time as best I could. I still sleep in abandoned houses and explore, but now I don’t need heavy drugs to do so.

Contact the author at longshanks@spaz.org

By A. Iwasa

The decline of squatting in the East Bay has been one of the most heartbreaking signs of its rapid gentrification. I believe, without a doubt, this is a critical time for people to stand up to the moneyed interests by doing things such as squatting. Like Slingshot itself, whose roots are in the land struggle of People’s Park and the Haste St. and Barrington Co-op squats, we need to struggle for space or we will surely lose it. East Bay Homes Not Jails (HnJ) can be one of the many ways that we fight.

East Bay HnJ is a collective of squatters and squat supporters that meets Wednesdays at 7PM at the Oakland Omni Commons. Its goal is to open and enter as many vacant houses as possible, and keep them open as long as possible. Its politics are anti-oppression, and those who display oppressive behaviors such as racism, sexism and/or homophobia will be asked to leave meetings.

I first became aware that a new East Bay HnJ had formed around New Year’s Day, 2016. I was living in a rather large “commune” in the Mission District of San Francisco (SF) with two other people, and was so miserable I had taken to an audio book to help me fall asleep at night and get my mental wheels turning in the mornings. I had come to the East Bay to celebrate New Year’s Eve by goofing around with comrades, and saw a flyer for HnJ meetings at the Long Haul Infoshop.

Those mental wheels got turning the old fashioned way, and after my reluctant return to SF, I got my final pushes to get back to the serious work of the East Bay between the commune’s creepy “guru’s” attempts at micro-management, and loose travel plans with a freight train rider I met at Voku, a semi-monthly free meal in SF similar to Food Not Bombs in spirit, the next Friday. I packed up my gear and split for the East Bay.

The deadline for Slingshot #120 was also coming up, so I figured worst case scenario: I wouldn’t leave the East Bay after all and would be sleeping out again soon, but I had another newspaper to look forward to helping get out and my living arrangement wasn’t worth all the hassle.

Of course I hoped for a best-case scenario: getting back into a great squat with another issue of Slingshot on the horizon and all the East Bay’s other happenings. As might be expected, reality was somewhere in the middle.

Frankly, squatting in Oakland and working on Slingshot had been the two reasons I had come to the East Bay in the fall of 2013; having hitchhiked, rode freight trains and walked here from the White Castle Timber Sale Blockade near Myrtle Creek in Oregon.

I had been following the squatting scene in the East Bay for years in the pages of Slingshot, and though I had very mixed feelings about it, I wanted to come see things for myself. Similarly, I felt worst case scenario: I’d still have something to write an article about and then it would be back off to Arizona sooner rather than later, where my year had started.

At that time there had been an East Bay HnJ, but it had folded by the time I got to town. There was also an HnJ in SF, and some of its veterans are the folks who initiated the current East Bay HnJ. Though the squatting scenes in SF and Oakland are very different, the comrades are pretty cool and they are very skilled in the basics of scouting vacant houses, cracking them open and navigating the legal waters of occupying them.

Most of them are tenants now, but have been busy supporting squatters such as the Land Action 4 and other land struggles such as that saving the Gill Tract, supporting the Ohlone re-occupation last year and the civil disobedience earlier this year that stopped construction destroying the farm.

Also they are eager to share the previously mentioned skills; weekly meetings frequently include skill shares such as lock picking and key making.

Plus if more people get involved with the meetings and keep coming, we could start having more Away Team Missions where new squats can be scouted and cracked open.

At the check in of every meeting people are asked if they are housed and available for an Away Team Mission that night. The only place I’ve squatted in the Bay Area this year I was brought to through these meetings.

We also have a strong tendency towards sharing food and goofing around the way comrades can when you actually get along, so participating in HnJ has helped improve my life a great deal even if I’m still mostly homeless.

As one of the comrades told me about HnJ around 2013 in SF, “All I did was crack open houses and cook Food Not Bombs.” Sounds like a dream to me! But with the old membership requirements of showing up to three meetings in a row, then half of the subsequent meetings, I’m the only one who has joined the new collective since it started towards the end of last year.

Please consider joining, or starting your own HnJ Collective, and letting us know how things go for you all. eastbayhnj@riseup.net

by Asar Imhotep Amen, Ph.D. (aka T. T. Thomas)

“One of the most tragic beliefs widely shared by Blacks throughout the world is that white people need or want us or will treat us equally and share societal resources with us. Faith continues to prevail in spite of overwhelming evidence, which disputes this belief. Blacks continue to ignore the irrefutable truth that, in a racist social system, all institutions will reflect, protect and sustain values that are consistent with racism/white supremacy. This should not be considered surprising or profound since all institutions serve to perpetuate the social theory of the group that created them.” – Dr. Bobby E. Wright, African- Centered Psychologist

Sometimes, different people can independently arrive at the same conclusion. I didn’t start and haven’t been affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, but I respect their analysis of the problem and their desire to end it. Around the same time as #BLM was starting, I, like other people, was thinking along the same lines about what the fundamental problem was behind seemingly rampant police murders of Black people. And for once, I didn’t feel alone in centering the problem on what Black life means. If Black life doesn’t mean anything, the USA would be a genocidal slave state in which the killing and punishment of Black people is meted out and widely considered acceptable, regardless of guilt or innocence, gender, socioeconomic status, or other factors. And that’s exactly what it is.

#BLM (Black Lives Matter) is a grassroots coalition-based social movement started in the United States by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in the wake of several unpunished (or lightly punished) incidents of police killing unarmed Black people, including the killing of Oscar Grant and Kenneth Harding in Oakland, as well as Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, and Michael Brown. While it consists of people with diverse viewpoints and tactics, the movement’s central aim is to oppose the systematic normalization of Black peoples’ deaths, which makes violence against Black people more likely and more acceptable. #BLM began as a social media movement, but has quickly become an on-the-ground social movement with many different actors and organizations that aren’t necessarily connected as one organization but have the same general aims.

Actions and policies of the state result in the disproportionate killing, injuring, and incarceration of Black people, but the struggle for Black life to matter is not just about opposing policing practices against Black men, boys, & girls. It is also about how domestic abuse victim Marissa Alexander was not allowed to defend herself against her abusive husband under the same “stand your ground” defense in Florida law that George Zimmerman used to get exonerated in the killing of Trayvon Martin. It is also about how Black transwoman Cece McDonald was prosecuted and convicted for defending herself against a hostile and racist group of white youths in Minneapolis. It is also about how broader political practices, like the mass disenfranchisement of Florida and Ohio Black voters, the shutting down of water services to Detroit residents, and the anemic federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, show a remarkable disregard for Black lives.

Because the nature of racism is not just prejudice but also the power to enforce prejudice, punishing or educating those who commit violence against Black people without justification cannot address these problems individually. It’s too big a problem. The conservative Wall Street Journal reported that in 2011 NYPD had more stops of young Black men in Manhattan than there are young Black men in Manhattan. And at least one former NYPD officer has stepped forward to say that he was specifically ordered to stop young Black males at every opportunity. But he is just one officer, and NYPD is just one department. Police officers everywhere have broad latitude to stop anyone they suspect may be involved in a crime and use that latitude to systematically target Black and Latino men and boys. The problem is deeper than any one department and it’s “stop-and-frisk” policies.

For one thing, it’s everywhere, not just New York. One report described anti-Black racism as “baked into” police practices. “The root of the problem,” says #BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, “is anti-Black racism.” In other words, there is a unique, deeply ingrained, and pervasive kind of racism that American society at large feels toward Black people that goes a long way toward explaining these disparities as well as many others. What does Blackness mean to America? There are not-so-subtle hints everywhere.

-Black people make up approximately 12 percent of the US population, but constitute more than 40 percent of the prison population.

-White Americans use illegal drugs at rates that are comparable to, or well in excess of, the rates at which Black Americans use illegal drugs, but Black Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses 10 times more.

-In 2012, police and security forces killed a Black american at least once every 28 hours. According to another report, “Black teens were 21 times more likely to be shot dead [by police] than their white counterparts”.

The problem is not just that a de facto police state is ready to descend on Black people at any time, but also, more broadly, that the entire population of African Americans is perceived by the broader society (1) as a potential threat and (2) as unworthy of being listened to when we protest through legal, institutional, or other means. This problem must be viewed as a systemic one, not just an individual or institutional one, and it must be addressed on multiple levels, including not only institutionally or interpersonally but especially in our unconscious thought, the deeply ingrained thought processes that are reflected by our actions before we even have the opportunity to think. Before we can change our thinking to make Black lives matter, we must truly understand that the problem of Black lives not mattering is a problem of meaning that isn’t just individual or institutional but structural. It is rooted in what America is.

America needs Black lives to not matter. Due to centuries of negative images and stereotypes about Africans and racial Blackness, in the collective psyches of the United States, throughout the Americas, and across the world Blackness means, as the late psychiatrist Dr. Frantz Fanon said, “the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul”. A field of study within cognitive psychology known as implicit cognition (or implicit bias) finds quantifiable evidence of what Black people have been knowing for better of 1,000 years (had anyone with power ever bothered to listen): that deeply rooted negative attitudes towards people of African descent are held widely across the American population, even among those who claim to be non racist, even when other possible causes for these attitudes (like socioeconomic class or education level) are taken into consideration — and these attitudes tend to increase people’s willingness to use violence (interpersonal, institutional, or state) and punishment against Black people.

One recent quantitative study from Stanford, titled “Not Yet Human”, shows that people of African descent are commonly associated with apes at an unconscious level of mental processing. According to the study” “this Black-ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about white convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those that are not.” This finding agrees with the earlier work of Stanford literature professor Sylvia Wynter, who found that police in Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s commonly used the incident code “NHI” — meaning “no humans involved” — for incidents involving African Americans. While many people acknowledge this police code have been racist, the Stanford quantitative study shows that even people who don’t think themselves racist have the same thoughts.

Other studies show that children of African descent are believed to be older, more mature, and less innocent than their white counterparts are, something that might explain why teachers suspend African American preschoolers at triple the rate of white preschoolers and why police and prosecutors are more likely to charge African American youths with harsher crimes or in adult court than they are in cases involving non-Black youths. It might also explain why 12-year-old youth Tamir Rice was shot dead by police at a playground in Cleveland, Ohio, while holding a toy gun, whereas white youths are free to regularly play with toy guns in their neighborhoods.

Another set of studies (“shooter bias” studies) shows that Black males holding cell phones are, on quick glance, believed to be holding guns, while white males are believed to be holding cell phones. These studies also found that people would be quicker to draw and shoot their weapons when faced with a Black male who might be holding a cell phone or a gun, compared with a white man in the same position. These studies might explain why plainclothes police shot unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo after he reached for his wallet presumably thinking the officers wanted to see his identification or were trying to rob him.

Still other studies have shown that a stereotypically-named hypothetical Black defendant will receive a higher rate of conviction and harsher degree of punishment for the same crime than will a stereotypically-named hypothetical white defendant, even when identical evidence is presented.

A hypothetical job applicant with an African-American-sounding name is less likely to receive further consideration when a hypothetical job applicant with a white-sounding name is granted further consideration, even when both have the exact same resume except for the name at the top. An applicant for housing or mortgage will be similarly screened based on assumptions about whether they are Black or not, thereby shaping geographic segregation patterns.

African-American employees are more likely to be evaluated poorly by employers than are white employees.

Black NFL players are required to return from injury sooner than their white counterparts with the same injury. Other studies show that the medical profession is slower to give aggressive treatment to African Americans and less sensitive to the pain of African American patients.

Regardless of whether one stands on the side of those addressing the problem, like the founders of #BLM, describing the problem, like researchers at Stanford, or even denying the problem or defending police murders of Black people, the central problem is not a swirling morass of practices to be altered. It is a structure. These problems of anti-Black racism are not simply problems of individual or institutional practice or prejudice because they are repeated across widely disparate individuals and institutions with the same independent results. The psyche of anti-Black racism is not individual or institutional. Both the psyche and the institution are networked together as part of one dynamic, fluid, and massive structure. The psyche, like the institution, is a structure. The problems of Black life mattering are hence fundamentally problems of structural power. In other words, structural racism encompasses the entire system of white supremacy, diffused and infused in all aspects of society, including our history, culture, politics, economics, and our entire social fabric. Structural racism is the most profound and pervasive form of racism-all other forms of racism (e.g. institutional, interpersonal, internalized, etc.) emerges from structural racism.

The key indicators of structural racism are inequalities in power, access, opportunities, treatment, and policy impacts and outcomes, whether they are intentional or not. Structural racism is more difficult to locate in a particular institution because it involves the reinforcing effects of multiple institutions and cultural norms, past and present, continually producing new, and re-producing old forms of racism.

The problem of Black life mattering extends to unconscious levels of thinking and is not only deeply rooted, but also widely diffused and reinforced through multiple networks of power. It is therefore quite challenging to uproot without a massive change in the social structure that abolishes the ways that both personal and institutional practice, as well as individual and social frames of meaning, are tethered to the genocidal slave empire of the “modern” world, the United States. If we only think about the practice of prejudice without centering the ways that all racism derives from structural racism — what I call anti-Blackness — we will be at pains to explain why there is so deep a reserve of animosity that can result in normalized violence toward Black people (and people of color in general) and why the mass loss of Black life does not constitute a national emergency or a cause for widespread grief. True dedication to the principle that Black Lives Matter will require a revolution using all means necessary to end the structure of anti-Blackness.

Racism/white supremacy in America is deeply rooted in a global system of settler-colonial capitalism, land theft, mass murder (or if you prefer the sanitized euphemism of the term “genocide”) racial chattel slavery and its consequences. White privilege is the manifestation, consequence, and flip-side of Black oppression and exploitation, attacks on indigenous sovereignty, and the Eurocentric imposition of private property relations on both land and people is to extract profit through domination. This is a global Empire, and it is an empire here within the US itself as well. White supremacy, white privilege, and racism can only be uprooted by overturning that system of settler colonialism and imperialism, here in the US and throughout the world. Nothing short of decolonization, self-determination of oppressed and colonized people, and revolutionary social, political, economic and ecological transformation of entire society will do.

“Powerful people never educate the victims of their power in how to take their power away from them… the ideology of our “former” slave masters cannot save us. We will not be truly liberated until we are the main instruments of our liberation”. – Dr. John Henrick Clarke

Correspondence:

Troy T. Thomas, H-01001,

CSP-LAC A1-137-UP

PO Box #4430

Lancaster, CA 93539

By Ian Mayes

There has been some talk occasionally about forming a new nation-wide anarchist organization. This is a project that definitely has caught my attention and interest, and I do think that some of the points that are made in this appeal are valid ones. At the same time I am also a bit skeptical, for I have been around long enough to see countless national and regional anarchist organizations come and go. This has all got me thinking though about the topic of formal nation-wide anarchist organizations. The thought of repeating the same old kinds of attempts that have been tried in the past does not appeal to me – whereas trying out something new does.

The real value for having a formal anarchist organization, I think, is that of providing a means for different anarchists to meet up face-to-face and having a venue for people to find folks to work together with on common projects that they all believe in. The focus of an anarchist organization should not be to provide content that reflects the beliefs and views of everyone who is associated with the organization, but rather to be a networking hub for anarchists to find each other. Having a publication is not necessary, nor is having a formal membership structure.

The idea that an anarchist organization should have ideological unity and should have common positions that everybody agrees on ultimately leads to frustrating endeavors which become a big discouraging waste of people’s time and energy. Even the term “anarchist” itself can be left undefined, although if some people want to meet up to discuss that they are welcome to do so. The key thing is for anarchists to be connecting with other anarchists, and from these connections the individual anarchists can create whatever common projects they want.

I also want to emphasize the importance of this organization being based upon people having real-life face-to-face connections with each other. In this age of online digital connections being so pervasive I think that one of the biggest barriers for anarchists now to confront is the profound social alienation of our modern society. Much of the mutual understanding and trust that is necessary for enacting real solidarity and mutual aid is lost now thanks to an over-reliance and over-emphasis on digital technology. So a new anarchist organization would still use all the modern online trappings – a web-site, Facebook and Twitter accounts, all of that – but all of these things would exist simply as tools to facilitate real-life face-to-face meetings happening.

I picture such a new anarchist organization as being based around having a large annual national gathering, as well as regional gatherings, local and citywide gatherings of anarchists. The format for these gatherings would be Open Space Technology, a means by which those people who are present at the gatherings determine themselves what the content will be. The organizing collectives for the conference would be concerned only with the logistical matters of making the conference happen, not with the content of what will be discussed at the conferences – that would be up to the conference attendees themselves to determine.

Ever since the National Conference on Organized Resistance (“NCOR”) stopped happening, there has not been an annual national conference for the anarchist movement to converge at. This new organization would exist in part to help support this conference in happening and to be a sustainable endeavor – independent of larger institutions such as universities and independent of any particular anarchist strain, ideology, or campaign. Given that this would be a nation-wide anarchist gathering, perhaps the location should be central for everyone in the country, let’s say: Wichita, Kansas. Unlike NCOR there is no reason to have to have a nation-wide anarchist conference take place every year at the capital city of the nation-state. However, like NCOR there is an advantage to having the consistency of the conference be at the same location every year.

The conference would not endorse any particular anarchist ideology and not support any particular anarchist project, and instead provide the means for different anarchist thinkers and activists to come together to meet each-other, by doing so it is hoped that the depth of anarchist thoughts and the creativity of anarchist projects would be helped more than if any particular partisan approach was supported. This is because more people from more of a diversity of backgrounds would be involved, with more of a cross-fertilization of ideas and perspectives taking place.

Internet-wise, it would be best for the web presence for this organization to support people in meeting up with their local anarchist groups, projects and collectives face-to-face. Picture a kind of online version of the Slingshot Organizer’s radical spaces contact list. The web presence would also have features available to support people in sharing transportation and places to crash at while traveling. There would be no place for debate or discussion online, all of this would be channeled towards other online anarchist projects that do that, or towards individuals or groups who are interested in having such discussion in-person.

With this kind of approach to a nation-wide anarchist organization, my hope is that quite a lot of new things could come out of it, both practical and theoretical, even new formal organizations! This organization would serve as a launching pad for other, separate, new things. The irony is that with having such an organizational arrangement, none of the new things that arise would officially be associated with this organization – they would be things that arose as a result of people meeting up through this organization and then going off and doing something else together.

by arrrgh-bot eggplant

Being a teenager in the 1980’s it was attractive to rebel by getting into the rich music scenes of metal and punk. I found sanctuary from the stupid American game of “capitalism is here forever, Amen.” I noticed quickly that most of the foot soldiers in these two camps of counterculture groups held special contempt for hippies ­—the other being poseurs.  One would think the lingering character flaws of religious fanatics, meathead jock-thugs as well as newly christened yuppies would deserve our primary ridicule. But I get it. The youth felt it necessary to differentiate themselves from the previous generation. Hippies were perceived as ineffectual, narcissistic and horribly stuck in the past. The punks largely ignored the 20th Anniversary of the Summer of Love and of Woodstock. Instead, celebration was saved for the deaths of Bill Graham and Jerry Garcia. The statues made by the Love Generation were more convenient to topple than police stations or World Trade buildings.

By 1996 a weird off-beat anniversary of our parent’s youth was scheduled. The Democrats were having a convention in Chicago for the first time since the disastrous convention protests in 1968. ‘68 went so badly it could be argued that it gave the seat of government to the reactionary wing for the next 8 years — and then 12 years more in the 80’s. The image of uncouth protesters facing off against the naked violence of the Chicago police and US Military is considered a high water mark for domestic radicalism. Many people who were previously eager about the country and its future walked on from Chicago ‘68 hating the government, the police, the courts and dismissing the whole American system as unreformable.

The hippie protesters of ‘68 planned their presence to be a Festival of Life; a marriage of sorts between the Heads and Fists. This unification of dropouts with those who were engaged in active resistance seemed inevitable and held promise to gather enormous numbers of people to create a splendid pageant. The rising tide determined to change the dialog of the country and inspire utopian dreams to counter what was really happening on the main stage – the Festival of Death. But the forces of control and coercion robbed the show as it tends to do making the gathering in Chicago the year’s top televised crisis. Just another distraction until rock-throwing protesters could be upgraded into the Manson Family and the SLA — and put people back in line hating dropouts and freaks.

The return of presidential shell games to Chicago in ’96 meant some sort of sequel was being played out. The static buzzing from the media made comparisons to the much publicize fracas of the 1960’s. Cops were said to have buttons that read, “I beat up your dad in ‘68” or some mentally ill thing like it. The message was that people not buying into the game should fear reprisals. The punk scene made for more dynamic options than just laughing off the spectacle and staying home, there was a little nudge to take the stage rather than complain about the show.

The Bay Area not only had a healthy punk and protest scene, it had an alien visit in 1989 in the form of an Anarchist Gathering. The space creatures who arrived that summer set up camp next to and within the punk scene (as well as the existing anarchist, activist and various scenes of freaks). The makeup of the community forever changed. A fiery charge was taken to the normal cycle of local protests. Many in the punk scene like myself were drawn to the vortex like the sudden arrival of a circle pit when a good tune starts up. Protests locally against the University, the police, war and racism sparked interest and passion into issues just outside of our reach. The calls to protect old growth redwood trees, Native cattle rights in Arizona or to confront white supremacist circle jerks suddenly had more car pools to choose from. Chicago’s 2nd DNC came well after this burst of energy but with a twist. The space ship Anarchist Convention was making another landing — promising more than just dull protests. The portals opened once again for freaks and people of strange intelligence to gather.

I hadn’t planned on attending but was offered a seat with some friends who were. Little did I know so many people from my scene (or my scene to come) were going and we managed to change the make up of people on the streets of the Windy City. My posse made a stop at Minneapolis long enough for me to get a good idea of the town. We visited the Profane Existence store/operation. That seemed like a good idea and thereby raised that organization out of abstraction for me. Maybe more people should pay visits to the DIY projects clogging the air space and get a feel of where they are coming from. After passing through Wisconsin for the first time we entered into the bosom of tall buildings that is Chicago. By nightfall we were in the desolate warehouse district where the convergence site was for protesters and other malcontents. The feelings of alienation that comes with a strange land scattered when I encountered my martial arts teacher at the door greeting new arrivals.

The convergence site doubled as Active Resistance, not quite a Festival of Life but at least ground zero for workshops and discussions. Building up to the days of the Convention across town were events outside and inside the warehouse. I think we were also permitted to sleep there or nearby. This allowed us to romp around town for a minute. I got to see Neurosis, a Bay Area band, play a small space that was so tightly packed the walls sweated as much as the people did. This was in the Wicker Park neighborhood, before it transformed like so many places into exclusive wealthy playgrounds. The vibrant street activity reminded me of familiar locales like Telegraph Ave or the Mission District, a multi-ethnic universe in defiance of the city’s segregated lines. We passed a Slam Poetry reading, which at the time was still underground and a little dangerous. It is unfortunate our group wasn’t distributing a message to take with us on the streets like; “Fuck the Democrats”, or “Anarchy Now!” That would’ve elevated us from being badly dressed tourists. We were new to town without a plan and without much purpose. Our politics lacked acumen and that certain kind of insanity that can get away with tampering the line to incarceration.

Eventually the convergence space became insanely busy. A day of workshops came before the days of marches and actions. The warehouse became intoxicating as several rooms offered simultaneous activities. I wandered into a train hopping presentation and the room was filled mostly with traveling kids (later to be called “Crusties”). At the center was a normie looking guy renowned for assembling the crew change guide for the United Stated and Canada. I was drawn into his style of talking and experience, as well as the collective intelligence of the people in the room. Still while learning delicious info about free travel I was missing about 4 other really interesting talks and activities in nearby rooms.

Later I went on one of the marches. The police didn’t charge us like expected. They did out number us in obscene proportions. The big news was that the Grey Men in Grey Suits came up with “Free Speech Zones” for us, that quickly was renamed “Protest Pens”. They are what they sound like; a fenced-off cube, but miles away from the eyes of the public or delegates or perhaps even God if such a thing existed. The “Protest Pens” most resembled an out door prison cell. Thankfully our march didn’t enter the cage and drink the Kool Aid. The rest of the time we kept on marching without permits, which in itself brings a certain satisfaction. I don’t really recall any dramatic window breakings or burning dumpsters which we would see in 1999 in Seattle.

The police did raid the warehouse as well as the Seeds of Peace kitchen that committed the crime of feeding the anarchist convergence. This heavy-handed tactic would continue into the next decade with confiscation of puppets and protest signs as alleged threats to order. The dominant culture made sure no organized resistance would step from the shadows of the monuments, be it government or the social movements of the past. Active Resistance did not live up to the Festival of Life. But it can be said that something as compelling came with the social ties people made and lessons learned that would inform later fights. The people who attended the anti-convention in Chicago were on hand for the highly publicized fights of subsequent years. More important they returned to their communities doing small things of consequence.

by Kris Hermes

Around the turn of the century, we saw a concerted effort by the state to stifle dissent. In the late 1990s, a new way of handling political protest was developed for milestone events of national importance, like the quadrennial Republican and Democratic conventions. Adopted by executive order under President Clinton, then later passed by Congress, the designation of National Special Security Event (NSSE) establishes a robust law enforcement apparatus with the FBI and U.S. Secret Service at the top of a multi-agency pyramid aimed at controlling free expression.

With the advent of the Global Justice movement and the effective protests in Seattle during the 1999 meetings of the World Trade Organization, a renewed focus on suppressing street actions and a new model for policing protest was born.

The 2000 Republican convention protests in Philadelphia gave then-Police Commissioner John Timoney the opportunity to develop this new policing model which is still used today. Coined by social scientists as a form of “Strategic Incapacitation,” the model uses a set of tactics that deliberately chills dissent, including heavy surveillance and infiltration, denial of protest permits, preemptive raids and arrests, indiscriminate police violence, mass unlawful arrests, and forms of preventive detention such as overcharging, high bail, and keeping activists detained longer than allowed under the rules of habeas corpus.

After becoming the Miami Police Chief in 2003, Timoney oversaw one of the most brutal responses to political protest in modern history during the Free Trade Area of the Americas demonstrations that year. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz called Timoney’s policing approach a “model for homeland security,” ushering in the repressive “Miami Model” which has been used to great effect ever since.

So, what does this mean for social movements and summit protests today?

Although the NSSE designation was not used against the Occupy Wall Street movement, nor has it been used against Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations, the militancy of these movements has been effective enough for the state to try to control and suppress them.

The police response to BLM activists has caused the movement to use more creative strategies and tactics in order to push back against such repression, including a proliferation of “cop-watching,” ongoing protests at police stations and precincts, unannounced mass civil disobedience on freeways and roadways across the country, and an unwillingness to be co-opted by established political and religious organizations.

The Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia this July will likely see the intersection of BLM-led protests and the NSSE law enforcement apparatus. There’s already been evidence of police spying on BLM activists, and it’s certain to get worse as the conventions approach. We will also see actions by the “Climate Justice” movement and, if militant enough, will undoubtedly draw an aggressive response from the state.

In the past, activists have relied on the element of “spectacle” at summit protests—dozens of TV News cameras and the public’s rapt attention—to broadcast the issues of the day. However, given the vast resources of the state and the increasingly repressive tactics used against dissidents, summit protests like the upcoming RNC and DNC must seize on more than just spectacle. Activist strategies and tactics need to be more innovative, confrontational and resistant to repression. We have to find ways to be in true solidarity with each other. Those with privilege need to better use their socio-economic positions for the benefit of others, especially activists who are commonly targeted by police such as known organizers, people of color, immigrants, and queer/trans folk.

The upcoming RNC and DNC also hold the opportunity to involve and engage people who live in areas surrounding the convention sites. Although it may be more work, we must endeavor to make connections between the millions spent by host cities (i.e. the taxpayers) and the failure to spend needed funds on their deteriorating social infrastructures.

Often missed by protest organizers is the network of labor needed to successfully host conventions and the inherent opportunity to involve and agitate workers who have the collective strength to withhold labor and/or sabotage the efforts of the political elite. Whether it’s bus drivers, food preparers and servers, or hotel workers, the opportunity to agitate can and should be exploited.

So, this summer don’t just join a march or rally. Use your political capital to resist the inevitably repressive response by police and push the envelope by designing ways of using the convention protests to truly advance our movements for social change.

By Derek Minno-Bloom

I moved to New York City (Algonquin and Lenni Lenape Territory) in late 2003. The NYPD’s stop and frisk program was going strong. It was a time when quality of life policies and keeping the streets clean of folks experiencing homelessness were more prominent than the city’s history of movement politics and culture, but there were still some burning embers in the streets left over from the largest global protest in world history against the Iraq War on February 15, 2003.

Those embers were easily fanned when the Republican Party decided to have the Republican National Convention in New York City from August 26 to 31 in 2004. The RNC could not have come to a city less welcoming than New York City. The party clearly wanted to play off of the momentum of 9/11 and the importance of the “War on Terror” by coming to the city were it all started.

Over 30,000 NYPD officers were ordered to Manhattan to confront RNC protesters and to protect the delegates coming to the convention. There were more police in Manhattan at that time than US soldiers who were sent into Afghanistan during the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2003. NYC felt like it was under military occupation during that week of August, but as the Black Liberation Army once said, “Repression breeds resistance.” Anywhere from 500,000-800,000 people showed up to protest that week, making it the largest protest of a presidential convention ever. Protesters also set a record that week. Over 1,800 people were arrested, making it the most arrests at a convention in US her/history.

That week I got arrested three times. With hundreds of others, I was thrown into an oily boat warehouse, where we tipped over porta-potties and ripped the chain-link and barbed wire fence, which they had constructed specifically for us, out of the ground. I rode with 6,000 other Critical Mass bike riders. There were constant direct actions and rallies going on. For a while it felt like the ‘60s I had read about. Everybody was in the streets in protest. It felt like there were hundreds of banner drops, and an uncountable number of protesters got into the convention to disrupt it. A diversity of tactics was certainly seen from broken windows and arson to street theater and all kinds of civil disobedience and traffic blocking and some of the largest marches NYC has ever seen. New York City felt alive again for one week that August.

Another amazing part of the convergence in NYC that week was that the politics of intersectionality met the practice. Still We Rise and the Poor People’s Economic Campaign marched and organized against systemic racism and classism. The AIDS Coalition to Un-Leash Power (ACT-UP) did a naked civil disobedience while chanting for the US to drop the debt of foreign countries and to reduce AIDS. The Queer Fist affinity group did a make-out sit-in in Times Square for queer and trans rights. Many groups protested global capitalism and US imperialism, while many radical groups protested the entire existence of the US as a violent and illegal settler colonial state.

There were two main goals during the RNC convergence, either to shut the convention down and send the Republicans packing or to make the RNC feel unwelcome in the NYC. We certainly accomplished the second goal. I probably have never felt as empowered as I did that week, with all two million of us who showed up to protest.

I was recently forced to look back on that RNC twelve years ago, when I received a pretty large check in 2015 from the City of New York, finally settling the last class-action lawsuit I was involved in from 2004, concerning the conditions of the holding facilities they kept us in. That convergence was what really politicized me. I truly believe that because of that convergence I am still an activist today. The memories from the collective power we all had was a glimpse that another world is possible in a US context. The anger I felt toward the NYPD’s unjust policing practices and the collective rage I felt with others against the US government during the RNC are still burning within me today. I got to deeply experience with millions of others that I was not alone, that others believed in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. when he said, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” So if you’re thinking of going out to or organizing at the RNC or the DNC this year, I highly recommend it.