Category: Articles

By Dagmar (Slingshot Collective, Class of ’11)

I’m an educator now, and last year I began teaching humanities classes at a college in a supposedly liberal state. Something that shocked me right away: none of my students had the faintest clue how to identify fascism.

Over the year of teaching, I tried different approaches to amend this gap in my students’ knowledge — which seems to be a gap in nearly every American’s knowledge — and honestly, I think this utter lack of education about what fascism actually is explains why we’ve slid so far into fascism in the U.S. 

If folks can’t identify even fascism, how can they resist it? So class is in session! Where does fascism come from? How is it made?

Ingredient #1 – Mass Media

Fascism is an authoritarian mode of governance intertwined with mass media. 

Mass media is a neutral tool, and isn’t necessarily fascistic by its nature. Mass media is also a very powerful tool. Nothing like it has ever existed before in recorded human history, it’s only been around about a hundred years. We are still getting a handle on it. 

Mass media allows a small number of people to control the narratives and imagery that most people encounter in their daily lives.

Mass media is like the force in Star Wars: There’s a light side to it and a dark side. It can be used to humanize others, or it can be used to dehumanize others. 

Ingredient #2 – Capitalists deflecting blame

The next key thing to understand about fascism is that it takes hold when capitalists begin trying to deflect blame from themselves for harm caused by business-as-usual capitalism. Capitalism emerges from and leads to massive forms of harm, and it is also wildly unstable, so capitalists often create allies by promising relatively stable lives to some groups of people. Capitalism leads power and money to be centralized into fewer and fewer people’s hands.

This leads to eras of mass impoverishment, in which even the people whom capitalism promised to protect are thrown into poverty. This can lead people to get mad at the capitalists.

Before mass media, it was common for bankers to be executed during times of economic downturn, such as the global recession of the 1890s, when many bankers were hanged. Eras of pervasive impoverishment are especially dangerous for capitalists. 

Think back to a moment when you were a child and you knew you did something wrong, but you didn’t want to get blamed for it. What did you do? Did you blame a sibling for breaking the vase that you smashed?

Once in second grade, I totally loudly farted while the teacher was talking in class, and the whole class fell quiet. I immediately blamed the kid next to me, but I don’t think they bought it and the whole class laughed. 

Now imagine if, rather than farting, I’d been running a political-economic regime that had led thousands of people to lose their homes, experience food insecurity, or worse. And imagine I’d let things get worse and worse until nearly everyone in society had been impacted by unnecessary forms of economic hardship. What if after years of trying to hide what I was doing, people are starting to figure it out — and they are also hurt, traumatized and angry because of the harm my economic actions have created? What do you think I’m going to do? Own up to my actions? Or blame my fart on someone else? Also, what if I’m so rich that I can hire someone to blame my fart on someone else? That’s more or less what capitalists do in times of rising fascism. They use mass media tools to elevate the voices of those who are pointing fingers and blaming anyone but the capitalists for the problems they have caused.

Ingredient #3 – Dehumanizing Minority Groups 

Fascism arises when capitalists begin deflecting blame for the poor social conditions that they caused onto minority groups — usually immigrants, queer folks, ethnic minorities, disabled people, etc. This approach is similar to “union busting,” in which capitalist bosses will hire undercover provocateurs to enter workplaces and try to pit people against each other. 

In fascism these same types of “divide and conquer” tactics are deployed against the entire populace. Capitalists would rather see society fall apart than give up their power. Their goal is to pit everyone against each other so we don’t all join together and put an end to the capitalist regime. 

Ingredient #4 – Poor Economic Conditions 

The economic doom spiral has been getting worse and worse, with escalating rates of poverty, homelessness and addiction. People in the mainstream are beginning to identify capitalism as the culprit… 

Ingredient #5 – Magical Thinking

Most Americans think fascists are mean, sinister people because we’ve been inundated with dumbed-down Hollywood storytelling that tends to portray fascists, using standard media tropes to make the audience root for the hero. 

The trouble is, fascists can be weirdly charming. In fact, cultivating an “aura” of jolliness and positivity is often part of fascist doctrines. This goes back to Hitler’s favorite philosopher, Nietzsche — Hitler literally wrote an entire book that was a sequel/riff upon Nietzsche’s work. One major thread in Nietzsche’s work is the idea that anyone who doesn’t seem like they are having a good time is fundamentally broken and should be murdered — at least according to Zarathustra, a proto-superhero that Nietzsche invented and claimed was the ultimate human being. 

This bizarre line of thinking can be compared to a relatively new form of American pop spirituality called “the Law of Attraction” that was made popular by the bestselling book The Secret, which was published in 2006. While some may take The Secret lightly, it has sold over 35 million copies, and has profoundly influenced American pop culture. According to the Law of Attraction, bad things only happen to people who “manifest” them. So basically, “Think happy thoughts—or else.” If you are a believer in this pop spiritualist movement, you’ve been trained to believe that those who experience forms of systemic harm “brought it on themselves” by not “manifesting” hard enough.

Fascism often emerges from a regime of self-policing in which people are made to feel as if they must constantly be jolly and/or “manifest” positive vibes, otherwise they will become part of an “undesirable other” category, upon which they project all that is negative about themselves. Eventually, as propaganda against “othered” groups ramps up, fascists get worked into a frenzy in which they feel that groups that have been labelled “undesirable others” need to be eliminated, and murdering a member of an othered group becomes a way that the fascist attempts to affirm their own identity.

#6 – Stir in a heavy dose of Malthusianism

Thomas Robert Malthus was a wildly problematic thinker born in the 1700s who advocated for population control. Fun fact: The supervillain Thanos was inspired by him.

Malthusian thinking has unfortunately become interwoven with Eurocentric environmentalism — that human population control is good for the planet. 

When a person is led to believe that population control must occur, they quickly get pulled into thinking about *which* populations should be controlled. And then suddenly everyone is fighting over who gets to have kids and who doesn’t, who gets to have stable living conditions, and who doesn’t. 

This is something that drives my climate scientist friends crazy. They will be trying to get the conversation going toward ending fossil fuel use — which is what we actually need to focus upon — then some Malthusian asshat will chime in and instead redirects the conversation towards population control. 

This is why decolonial, intersectional, and anti-racist frameworks are so important when we do environmental work. There is likewise a lot of deprogramming that needs to happen among environmentalists who have been subjected to Malthusian thinking and who have succumbed to this dark type of illogic.

#7 – Treating “the nation” as a princess to be rescued 

Another key feature of fascism is that it’s a fantasy roleplay where you’re supposed to rescue the nation-state you’re part of. The purveyors of fascism want you todefend ”the homeland” at all cost, including against its own denizens who have been labeled as others.

#8 – Nostalgia for some mythical past

Things have never been perfect, but fascists tend to point towards some prior era and claim things were better in that era. Better for whom?

#9 – Worship of the father figure 

At its core, fascism is just the latest iteration of an old-ass empire that still lurks among us: colonial patriarchy, a form of organizing power relations around worshipping cis-dudes while firmly enforcing binary gender relations.

#10 –Enforcing binary gender 

Fascism organizes power relations by firmly enforcing binary gender relations, while encouraging everyone to treat cis-dudes as if they are mini-kings of whatever patch of land they’ve stolen by virtue of pledging their allegiance to this nonsense.

#11 – Playing the victim

A major part of the illogic of fascism is to play the victim, while also playing the “hero” who is “rescuing” the nation-princess at the same time. Capitalists use mass media to frame anyone fighting back as the bad guys. 

Fascism always comes from a place of pain — pain that’s been misdirected against minority groups. The good way to disarm that pain can be to listen. The types of pain that tend to fuel fascism often come from a place of privilege — and it can be hard to listen to someone cry about losing access to some privilege they felt entitled to that your family never had access to to begin with. White middle class folks who have never been evicted, who have never been homeless, who have never been denied medical care all started experiencing these things for the first time in living memory, and they have not developed the coping skills and support networks to deal with these things that the rest of us have. So then their former bosses (or people who play bosses on TV) start telling them, “It wasn’t us capitalists, it was actually Minority Group X that hurt you.” That’s how they get tricked.

But at the core there’s still pain, there’s still actual material things that have happened to these people, and they are scared and ashamed and are trying to make sense of everything amidst grief and pain and guilt. They are watching family members die of poverty, they have pain in their teeth they can’t afford to fix. 

I wonder what happens if we take a moment to allow their pain to be real and voiced. Sure, work needs to be done to make sure the more privileged oppressed folks don’t hog all the airtime, but under capitalism we are all fucked. The fascists have pain too — they’ve just been tricked by the capitalists into blaming the wrong people for their pain. 

Breaking the spell – Trick #1: Listening to the experts — former fascists who have been rehabilitated. 

When it comes to breaking the spell of fascism, hearing about it from a recovered former fascist can help. Often, when students want to better understand the features of fascism, I will point them towards the work of Umberto Eco, a professor of literature and novelist who lived under Mussolini’s fascism in his youth. Eco had to write essays to please the fascists in charge at that time, and he learned about fascism in this really intimate way.

Decades later, he wrote an excellent essay, ‘Ur-Fascism,’ in which he really gets into the psychology of fascism. In this essay he goes into a number of other features of fascism beyond what I’ve described here. Even though he’s describing a fascist regime from nearly a century ago, many of the things he describes ring eerily similar to the behaviors and rhetoric of certain contemporary American politicians. 

It’s worthwhile to read Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism” which can be found online here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

Breaking the Spell of Fascism #2: Rolling out a vision for a better future.

As you fan away the fart fumes of fascism, the trick is to replace the delusionary vision of a non-existent better past with a real, achievable vision of a better future. For me, that vision is constantly shifting, but looks like a blend of Star Trek, Ecotopia, and Braiding Sweetgrass. But also, maybe we can’t even come up with a good vision until we start listening to everybody, until we work to heal the wounds that everyone is feeling. We have a huge task ahead of us if we are going to get to net zero emissions and heal the trauma everyone is feeling right now, including the capitalists. Honestly, I hope we don’t end up having to eat the rich; violent rebellions rarely seem to ever fix anything, but rather just leave us with different brutes in charge. My hope is that the capitalists will throw off their suits and ties and join us. Let’s build a better world, where we stay within ecological budgets and keep our planet habitable. A world that values consent more than property, where we do better at supporting and caring for each other. I know it’s possible. 

Further reading:

Readings and materials that can be useful in book groups and classrooms exploring and understanding the basic features of fascism:

• The Last Cuentista (2022) YA novel by Donna Barba Higuera
• Jojo Rabbit (2019) film by Taika Waititi. This really gets into the weirdly jolly, seductive nature of fascist thinking. Probably everyone should watch this before it’s too late
• Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism”
• https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
• Performing Truth: Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia by LM Bogad (2022)
• The Book Thief (2005) novel by Markus Zusak.
• On Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
• Black Mirror s3:e5, “Men Against Fire”
• “Environmental Malthusianism and Demography” by Emily Kalancher Merchant 
• “Open Letter to the Lambda Awards” by Joshua Whitehead 
• When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty by Mark Rifkin (2011)
• “The many genders of old India” by Gopi Shankar

– My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem

– “One Book Destroyed Western Civilization. No, It’s Not The Bible” by Jessica Wildfire (OK Doomer)

By P. Wingnut

February 29, 2024 is Leap Day — how come it is not a holiday with the day off? Since it’s an extra day and only comes along every four years, shouldn’t we get to do something special and exciting — better than all the other days? The answer is yes — you can do something exceptional for Leap Day, but strictly on a DIY basis. The bosses, the government and other forces of wretchedness hope you won’t hear that since 2000, Slingshot has declared a universal general strike, jamboree, street party and be-in each Leap Day everywhere. If you’re reading this, you are part of the organizing committee / conspiracy and all you have to do between now and Leap Day is to talk with your friends and community, figure out a time and place to meet and what you want to do with your extra day — be it carouse, rebel, redecorate, enhance, promenade, engage, shindig, dissent or soirée.

The system is unsustainable — it’s crumbling around us while the environment teeters on the brink of collapse. It’s easy to feel gloomy and fearful. A lot of people are wallowing in doom, denial or resignation — which only decreases our chances for survival. Some of us yearn for a different world based on cooperation, pleasure, love, and harmony with the Earth, but it’s hard to know how to fight back or how to make a difference. You can’t revolt alone — the structures of oppression and destruction are designed to feel inevitable, unavoidable and overwhelmingly powerful. 

Someone or a small group of people has to take the first terrifying step off the sidewalk and into the streets to create change. The right time to revolt is right now, but the precise day is arbitrary. Revolt transforms those who make it. We were not put here to passively go along with the end of the world nor to aid and abet those who profit from murdering the Earth. 

In 2000, in the wake of the huge protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, some of us in Berkeley created what we think was the first Leap Day Action Night.  One tiny meeting organized to a night of mobile disruptive tactics with music blaring from a bike mounted sound system in front of banks and chainstores throughout downtown Berkeley. We carried finger puppets, not the huge puppets you sometimes see at tamer protests, because you can run while wearing a finger puppet. Confused businesses just shut down and the police didn’t know how to react. 

Leap Day 2004 saw decentralized protests in Berkeley, Houston, New York, and Manchester, England. In Berkeley, black clad marchers carrying a “closing” sign threw glitter, foam “bricks” and popcorn at dozens of chainstores and banks while using a pretty red bow to tie doors shut. The action was festive yet determined with no arrests. 

In 2012, right in the wake of the Occupy Movement, we had a funeral for capitalism in Oakland, complete with a real coffin and a brass band leading a procession through the streets to a dance party. The police had taken our camps, but they couldn’t make us love our bosses or the 1%. The 2016 Leap Night coincided with San Francisco Critical Mass bike ride — it’s hard to improve on critical mass. 

The 2020 Leap Day action in Berkeley unfolded right before the pandemic shut down all public events…. A rowdy downtown march with a brass band led by a giant paper mâché frog invaded banks that are funding climate change and left piles of compost. The march also handed out heart-shaped “climate solution” awards at cooperatives and Berkeley’s Bike station bicycle parking garage. 

We refuse to be consumers, viewers and objects to be managed. Let’s build a world that’s awake and engaged — shifting the focus from things and entertainment to firsthand experience. Life is too short and the world too beautiful to waste more time muddling through tedious jobs, polluted air, swaggering billionaires and endless wars.

Leap day offers an extra day and invites us to shake off our routine. The capitalist system, its technology and its distractions are fragile. Alternatives exist. February 29 offers an invitation. How do you really want to live? What would you do if you were living life like it really mattered? What will you do with your extra day? Plan ahead. Leap for it!

Email slingshotcollective@protonmail.com and we’ll send you free copies of a 23 x 35 inch Leap Day Action Night poster. 

If you want to help organize an East Bay leap day action on Thursday Feb. 29, 2024, email leapdayaction2020@protonmail.com. 

By TANC

Formed in 2016, Tenant and Neighborhood Councils (TANC) is a member-run, member-funded tenant union in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our area-based Locals organize tenants of particular landlords into councils or associations, and as a union we pressure landlords directly to meet our demands. We are an anticapitalist organization aligned with abolitionist and internationalist struggles, and a founding member of the country-wide Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN). Since the pandemic, membership has grown to more than 600, and our councils have organized rent strikes and other direct-actions against slumlords to win rent reductions and repairs. Recently, local politicians lifted pandemic-era eviction restrictions, prompting a union action in Berkeley. 

On Tuesday, September 12, TANC mobilized more than 100 tenants to disrupt an obscene celebration, where Berkeley landlords organized through the Berkeley Property Owners Association (BPOA) gathered to celebrate the end of the local eviction moratorium and thus the renewal of their rights to evict people from their homes in order to profit.

With less than a day’s notice, TANC members rallied with banners and signs outside Freehouse pub, where the BPOA hoped to celebrate. We carried into the party a cake decorated with the words, “Hey landlords! Get a real job!” and chanted, among other things, “Eat the cake.”

As widely reported in local and international news, BPOA members were quick to anger, attacking tenants unprovoked. We stand with our members who were assaulted by landlords, just as we stand with any tenant facing eviction. 

We are not surprised by BPOA’s behavior. The landlords’ cocktail party was a celebration of the violent process of eviction. Systematic violence and interpersonal violence go hand in hand. This is why TANC intervened.

As a Bay Area-wide tenant union building power through tenant organizing, we are preparing for a long-haul fight. 

The Bay Area’s double crises of extreme rent profiteering and homelessness stem from the landlords’ business model. Landlords are structurally invested in skyrocketing rents, extracting money from working-class people under threat of eviction. Real-estate capital’s unchecked profits have corroded the Bay Area’s culture and life. It must be stopped.

We reject the notion that landlords have a right to a return on their investment. Rents should be immediately rolled back regardless of how this impacts landlords’ balance sheets. Tenants deserve a high quality of life, dignity in our housing, and a life free from landlord exploitation and harassment.

By disrupting the Berkeley landlord group’s cruel party, we have proved that tenants aren’t passive. Tenants will fight back! We call on tenants across the Bay Area to join the tenant union. We will beat back the forces of gentrification together. The union makes us strong!

Evictions spike as politicians lift ‘moratorium’

Summer of 2023 saw COVID cases rising across the East Bay, yet the pandemic-era eviction restrictions began ending all across the region. 

These restrictions started during an increase in tenant militancy in 2020, which dramatically changed our organizing terrain, including increasing the viability of the rent strike. To stabilize tenant-landlord relations, politicians then implemented the massive landlord bailout known as “rent relief.” This was government money that helped landlords pay their mortgages while tenants were out of work, but offered nothing to tenants beyond the ability to (temporarily) stay in their homes.

While the restrictions lasted longer in the East Bay than most of the country, politicians are now bending to the will of landlords and actively facilitating the resumption of mass evictions. 

After county restrictions lapsed, evictions skyrocketed to more than 500 in May, followed by more than 700 in June — more than twice the monthly average pre-pandemic. Now, with restrictions ending in Oakland and Berkeley, the number is expected to continue climbing. 

What this means is landlords and landlord lawyers and landlord associations are preparing their legal notices and scary letters in the hopes of pressuring tenants to self-evict. A little rights knowledge goes a long way for tenants facing these threats. While it is important to respond promptly and formally to initial notices, everyone should know that eviction is a long legal process. 

Don’t move, fight! If you think you’re facing eviction, or you have issues with your landlord, find an affiliate of the Autonomous Tenant Union Network in your area (atun-rsia.org), and get in touch! 

We look towards the end of rent, a time when categories of ‘landlord’ and ‘tenant’ recede into historical memory. We move forward as an organized base of militant tenants. Our organizing develops the collective power we need in order to take control of our own homes and neighborhoods. 

Slingshot collective has made all of its publications in a cozy loft at Long Haul — a radical community center in Berkeley — since 1992. Now, our future here is uncertain after Long Haul’s landlord, the Northern California Land Trust (NCLT), announced plans to demolish the building in 2024 and replace it with an 8-story apartment building. NCLT has received $2 million in grants — against a $40-$50 million price tag — and they are actively seeking loans and investments.

In April, NCLT offered to rent Long Haul a “comparable” space at the new building with terms “comparable” to the current lease — but the offer lacks details and says it “does not create a binding agreement between the Parties and will not be enforceable.” The current rent is below market and some of us are skeptical that rent at the new building will be cheap enough for Long Haul to afford. 

In May, Long Haul responded to the offer by writing “Long Haul has more to lose than it has to gain from the proposed redevelopment. Long Haul is happy in the current building, which meets Long Haul’s needs…. Being displaced for months during construction is not in Long Haul’s interest.  While Long Haul does not support destruction of the existing building, it agrees that returning to the new building … is preferable to being displaced.”

So far NCLT has ignored the May email and hasn’t provided any updates on whether the mid-2024 date is still on or delayed. Long Haul doesn’t have any idea when it may get a six-month notice to move. 

Long Haul is the perfect place to make Slingshot. It has been a radical center since 1979 and it has a funky, underground vibe — murals, radical posters and shelves stuffed with zines and books line the walls. Everything is handmade and DIY — it has a feeling you don’t get in a sterile new building. Besides Slingshot, Long Haul hosts a needle exchange, a community printing press, grassroots organizations, a weekly anarchist study group and meetings and events. It is open to the public 5 days a week, operated collectively by volunteers and welcomes all types of freaks rather than being devoted to soulless consumerism like everywhere else. 

The precious thing about Long haul isn’t just the old building — it’s the community and the continuity with radical struggles that have taken place here over the last 44 years. 

If the building gets torn down, Long Haul will need help moving its radical historical archive that contains thousands of publications dating back to the 1960s. Email longhaulinfoshop@protonmail.com if you can help.  Slingshot will find a new place if we have to — until then we’re enjoying every minute of the sweet afternoon sun streaming through the skylights onto the crazy artwork jigsaw puzzle going into the zine — while we still can. 

Our dear friend, comrade, mentor, inspiration and sometimes critic Michael Delacour died March 9, 2023. Michael was a founder of People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969, but he was much more to generations of Berkeley direct action radicals. Michael was always in the struggle not as a remote self-important “leader,” but as an equal, in the trenches, a ground-level participant. He was the embodiment of direct action — not just fighting the police and stirring up good trouble, which was one of his talents — but building physical stuff in service of creating a new type of society.

He helped build the Park — convening a meeting where the Park was proposed and then bringing rolls of turf and shovels to the park. Building the Park was about living the revolution now — not just talking theory but physically constructing the world we want — a world organized around human needs, fun, freedom and the Earth instead of the system’s violence, pollution, technology and wealth for the few at the expense of the many. Building the Park was a communal effort — “Everyone Gets a Blister!” 

Michael wasn’t just interested in the Park — he wasn’t about nostalgia at all. He was about fighting for the underdog, the working class, the homeless — the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Palestine… He built freeboxes at the Park just as fast as the police would destroy them. He helped organize squats — some as protests and others just to house people. 

Michael was a 1960s figure who treated younger people with respect and as equals — which unfortunately isn’t typical. Part of treating us as equals was giving us a hard time. When Slingshot and younger anarchists moved into the Long Haul, he said was going to organize “workers with axe handles” to fight off the anarchists…

Park activist Max Ventura wrote “If he’s looking down now, he’d probably be yelling at us all as we write about him, calling us elitists because we can write. How many times he yelled that at me when he wasn’t asking me to write something and then when I reminded him I have exactly zero plumbing or electrical or mechanical skills, which he used all the time in the movement, he’d nod. Often, the next moment he’d be chuckling, glad to be recognized for his invaluable skills and work. When there was water backing up in pipes to the park, he was out there trying to pinpoint the source of the issue. Always hands-on.”

Eggplant remembers “The first time i interacted with Michael Delacour was in the late 1990’s at a protest. Fair enough that was his life being at protests. We had assembled at Biko Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus to try to Stop the War on Palestine. It was one of those low tide moments of our movement when there were more cops than protesters. Even in the fucking bathroom. Half a dozen pigs doing the wiggle before the urinal just as we needed to. Upon exiting Michael said, ‘That was odd.’ I’m pretty sure he let out a ‘Brother’ as well. 

“Michael often would say ‘Brother’ and it didn’t sound fake. It actually sounded like he learned it when a great crack came in the consciousness. Saying Brother meant something and wasn’t a cliché. A realization of collective survival, collective work and celebration.

“To say Michael is a co-creator of People’s Park is reductive. He was a die-hard participant in the movement. And a very unique, specific creature of the movement. Michael lived as a Berkeley radical. When i met him he was moonlighting from the Park to uplift our local pirate radio station Berkeley Liberation Radio (based in Oakland) as well as be involved in city politics. Speaking out against the war, the Marines. Running his wife Gina as a progressive for city office, protecting KPFA from neoliberals.

“As Michael got older, our political situation just tanked. Bad people in power making the worst choices. People of conscience felt doom and dread. I would encounter Michael at People’s Park during Food Not Bombs — a good place to catch up with the freaks and gossip about the times. Michael was in deteriorating health. His inclination to complain turned to me: ‘You people at Long Haul what are you doing to stop the problem?’ 

“Yeah. Long Haul. Slingshot. Ineffective in stopping this shit. Band-aids maybe. Clean needles. A toilet and place to sit, to talk, open for 3 hours. A free newspaper. A library of Berkeley radicals ranting on paper. 

“Of course i would see Michael often at the Park his remaining days including that ugly hot mess when UC killed 47 trees. I missed the rally at Biko Plaza — arriving just as they marched. Telegraph Ave filled with hundreds of people, in angry focused chants “PEEEPLES PAAARK!” Very much like i would see when i was a teenager in 1989 but this time no one is breaking windows. Though honestly something is gonna need to scare away the chainstores from Southside. Maybe some fucking windows need to break. We soon occupied the park and Michael was amongst our defiant re-occupation as was Osha Neumann, Karen Pickett, Eddie Yuen, Mac from Funky Nixons, Lisa Stevens, Rusty — the amazing ancestors of crazed Berkeley radicals who were right all long but had to watch society go the other way. The drama heightened since we had about 40 years waiting for UC to wreak havoc on what we built. As awful it was to have the police invade, brutalize our people and the land, it was heart- warming to see ordinary people not be idle, rip down the fence and retake the park. Michael like the rest of us was clearly heartbroken and scared about the future. But he was also caught up in the beauty of the moment where hundreds of people were in the park. Mobilized. Some were heatedly discussing the future. Many were working in teams moving the fallen trees into defensive positions. And many more of us got comfortable standing our ground — ready to take on the next day.”

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.

While making this issue, we’ve been weighed down with the psychological strain of world events — particularly the genocide in Gaza but also all the other uglies of discouraging climate news, racial and economic inequality, gentrification, homeless sweeps, attacks on trans people and immigrants, so many nasty power grabs… Awareness of the rising tide of suffering and danger lays down a floating sense of dread and stress like a wet blanket on our souls. Is it just us or is everyone reading this zine feeling this shit? It’s like when you have a lingering cold that makes it harder to get stuff done, get through the day or just feel okay. 

And yet there are big protests popping up all over — almost every day around the Bay Area and around the world. And there’s also a lot of life-affirming weird art and counter culture — so there can be an alternative narrative if you put down your screen. While we were making the issue we missed an anti-APEC march, a rally for Palestine liberation, a protest to keep the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge open to bikes, the annual anarchist BASTARD conference — and also zany stuff like a tweed bike ride, the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Elmwood theater, Andrea Pritchard at the Freight… 

Slingshot started publishing in the 1980s before cell phones were invented — if you turn the fucking thing off for a few hours or even a few days you may notice the pace and mood lift. You won’t get all those texts and updates that interrupt your consciousness, so perhaps your mind can wander. Without scrolling, you’re left with contemplating the sky, hearing the birds, studying moss, noticing those around you. You won’t have a map and reviews to find a restaurant so you’re left to wander, look in windows and release yourself to serendipity.

Making this issue started with a big meeting, so it seemed like there would be plenty of volunteers and the zine could get put together easily. It takes 2-3 months from the first meeting until all 23,000 copies are mailed out — the collective editing process requires a lot of meetings and painstaking decision making about articles. The first pile of submissions gets sorted, sent back to revisions, then the group reads the revisions, culminating in a so-called all-night meeting to pick what to publish. Different people work with different authors. The paper copies in the binder fill with scribbled comments, suggestions and corrections. While a lot of people were at meetings for one stage of the issue or another, very few folks followed through with the whole process — which can make it hard for the group to be cohesive. There were many moments when it was uncertain if the issue could get finished. Various balls got dropped — articles we liked but the authors didn’t reply to an email about a suggested revision.

The whole issue comes together with a two day, 14 hour a day art party — and as we write this, it’s been feast or famine. Yesterday hardly anyone came by all day and then all at once at the end of the day a big crowd of artists arrived within a 30 minute period. Next time it would be much less chaotic if a few artists came by during daylight hours so the art could cook slowly like stew. 

Right before this issue, FP Press the employee-owned printing press we have been using since 1988 told us they were going out of business. We’re going to miss them — they always treated our odd-ball projects respectfully. We’re hopeful about our new printing press 15 miles from here. 

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 its editing. We are 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: Antonio, Becky, Chris, Daniel, eggplant, Finn, Gerald, Harry, Imani, Ingrid, Jack, Jake, Jesse, Josephine, Josh, Lola, Lucie, Mateo, Natalia, Robin, Ruby, Samiha, Sean, Taylor & all the authors and artists! 

Slingshot Article Submission Info

We’re not going to set a deadline for the next issue. We encourage you to submit articles for the next Slingshot anytime you want. We’ll make another issue when we feel like we’re ready. Please check the Slingshot website, indybay, instagram and facebook for deadline info. We also have an internal email list that will announce the next deadline so please contact us if you want to be added to the list. If you want to work on the 2025 organizer, work will happen starting in March — reach out if you want to draw art or do stuff. 

Volume 1, Number 138, Circulation 23,000

Printed November 17, 2023

Slingshot Newspaper

A publication of Long Haul

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Circulation information

Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income folks, or anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or are $1 per issue donation. 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.

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By J. River Lerner 

As I walk around certain neighborhoods in Oakland, I notice the Little Free Libraries popping up like slow-growing mushrooms. Their caps bulge, birdhouse-like, on top of slender, painted-lumber stalks. One or two more with each season, spreading old how-to manuals and well-thumbed mystery novels like so many spores. And like mushrooms, though you can never predict exactly where they’ll sprout, it’s always in a predictable habitat: owner-occupied homes with well tended flowers and small signs that say “Science is Real” and “Our neighbors are welcome”. 

That they spring up in those yards, in these neighborhoods, isn’t an accident. Aesthetically, culturally, organizationally, financially: the little libraries absolutely shout ‘landowning class’. They’re built like little cabins, with shingles! They distribute books, one of the only things that we already have robust public infrastructure to freely distribute! There’s a multi-million dollar nonprofit that ‘charters’ the libraries and sells $400 kits to build them! And besides, they’re somehow exactly the sort of home improvement that probably increases a home’s value, but that your landlord, for inscrutable reasons, would never let you build.

So it’s not without reason that Little Free Libraries have become a symbol of gentrification and center-left land-ownership. But I still find them utterly inspiring. Because for all their baggage, these little libraries present a non-utopian vision of what anarchist economic infrastructure can look like, and provide a pragmatic blueprint for getting us there.

Little Free Libraries, fundamentally, are infrastructure to facilitate mutual aid. Rather than the casual transactionalism of a yard sale or petite capitalism of a used bookshop, they are genuinely free and non-coercive, requiring neither monetary payment nor bureaucratic limbo. Rather than the careless charity of a box of books left on the sidewalk, or the structured state distribution of a public library, they encourage those who take to also give, and those who give to take; in fact, the host of the little free library, though often dispro-portionately supplying books, gets the benefit of having this community-replenished library right at their door. And as physical spaces, they’re able to exist independent of, and for those without access to, the increasingly monopolized and segmented internet sphere.

For our communities to flourish, and for us to provide viable alternatives for survival outside of the state and capitalism, mutual aid cannot just be a series of one-off events, acts, and campaigns. We need to build structured opportunities for mutual aid into the physical fabric of our communities, at the most intimate and local level. 

I think this starts by allowing ourselves to imagine places for community members to share goods of all sorts. In Little Free Libraries we have a robust, active model of hyperlocal and hyper-specific micro-distribution centers throughout our streets, stocked and maintained by the community, providing books without coercive demands of payment or registration. 

So, why just books?

Let’s imagine little free everything, all our daily needs distributed via lovingly labeled shoe boxes, dilapidated but well-muraled file cabinets, and excessively bedazzled tool sheds throughout our neighborhoods.

There are long histories of community pantries and fridges to share food within neighborhoods. What else can we build infrastructure to share? Let’s imagine little free pharmacies, with tampons and tylenol and the extra toothbrushes from when buying a 4 pack was only 1 dollar more. With QR codes linking information on no-fee clinics and abortion access. Little free auto shops with the half pint of oil or half gallon of washer fluid you didn’t need, and a link to a whatsapp group for help or advice from knowledgeable neighbors. Little free costume libraries and art-supply drawers and toy shops and seed shares!

I want to walk down my street and see passion fruit vines growing over the crates where canned lentils and peaches can be found. To tuck tightly rolled t-shirts into chain link fences organized by size and find my new summer sandals in a repurposed newspaper box. To steward a little free kitchen supply on my Tuesday afternoons, labeling new arrivals with colored stickers so I can move the oldest to another location if space gets tight. I want to place well-labeled batches of soup made with my grandmother’s recipes into a parking lot fridge muraled with bright flowers and birds.

This vision has inspired me to begin building these genre-specific little free stores in my own neighborhood. As I do so, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to divorce these new projects from Little Free Libraries’ petit-bourgeois ethos. I think we can do this not just by moving beyond books, but broadening aesthetic possibilities, and placing them in reliable public spaces as opposed to land that we own or rent. Why replicate suburban, birdhouse aesthetics in these projects? Put a 5-gallon tub on cinder blocks; give it a little sign. Zip tie a milk crate to a chain link fence, or hang it from a tree. Glue instructions with what to leave onto a dresser or file cabinet that someone is giving away. Landlord not into it? Try the empty lot next door, the center median, the more chill neighbors down the block. What’s important is creating a space with a clear enough purpose to facilitate community use, and upkeep, and love, and stewardship.

This is something that Little Free Library, as a phenomenon, has done brilliantly. The concise, three-word title tells you exactly how to use the space. More importantly, it calls out an ideology behind that space. A means of distribution that is piecemeal, hyperlocal, and utterly non-coercive. Naming our spaces can inspire care, identity, mythology. “The Ursula K. Le Guin Memorial Pantry” and “Little Free Shoe Store” both carry more cachet than an unlabeled box of food or shoes. The name allows that box to become a place, not just a resource to neighbors but a part of the fabric of neighborhood identity and mythology, shaping our local geography to facilitate mutual aid and communal upkeep of infrastructure. And even, perhaps, inspiring more little free distribution centers to follow in its wake.

So this season, new kinds of mushrooms will grow, in different habitats, spreading different spores. But mushrooms are just the fruiting body. If you listen closely, they will always speak softly of the messy mycelium of interconnected mutual aid networks, always growing, just below our feet.

By a beach bat

It’s a foggy morning in the Inner Sunset, where I’m perched on a stool in my sister’s kitchen. The light in the kitchen is gray and flat, and somehow the city feels vague, impossible to make words out of. For a few seconds at a time, though, weak sunlight will filter through the big windows, which are partially blocked by hanging pots of ferns and string-of-pearls. In those moments, the flat light becomes rounder and softer, glowing with a tinge of green. It is in the green light that words come to me, all in a rush. I try to get them down before the next cloud covers the sky. It’s late October, 2023. 

***

The genocide in Palestine seems to be reaching its final stages. On a Tuesday, a hospital in Gaza is bombed and a thousand people die, and then on a Wednesday, Biden is sending $14 billion in aid to Israel. I’m wondering what it might take to get us out of our simulation of normalcy. Here, in the US, we have developed quick and efficient methods of processing this kind of news. It’s hard to grieve through a screen; sometimes the best we can manage is a fleeting anger and outrage towards the state. “Disbelief” is no longer the right word, because it’s all so routine—even literal funding and propaganda for genocide makes sense within this state.

Maybe it’s good that we expect these things to happen, that we have a complete lack of faith in our government achieving anything beyond violent colonialism. But at the same time, I wonder about our desensitization to death, which maybe is caused by our desensitization to life. In other words, would we have a different response to mass death caused by colonialism if we could read our own lives in sharper focus? I don’t want to write an article about Palestinian liberation because I’m not an authority on Palestinian liberation. I know that liberation from any system of oppression only works if it is led by those who are the most oppressed by that system, through any means necessary. But I also know that no one is free until everyone is free, and that our complicity in the US empire not only fuels ethnic cleansing, death and destruction—it also makes our lives duller. It limits our intelligence, shrinks our autonomy, and diminishes our sense of awe and wonder towards life. 

We should care about what’s happening in Palestine—yet another apocalypse for people of color—not only because humans should care about each other, but also because their crisis is intrinsically tied to our own, even if the two cannot be equated. While some of us have no idea what it’s like to live through apocalypse (yet), our self-perpetuated oppression—this commitment we have to living under this state—kind of devalues what it means to be alive in the first place. 

It reminds me of this quote I heard in an interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who was talking about the prison industrial complex and our detrimental eye-for-an-eye approach to criminal justice. She said, “where life is precious, life is precious.” She was referring to the paradox of throwing one life away in an attempt to help heal another (i.e. putting someone in prison because they have harmed another person). If society doesn’t treat all life as precious, we can hardly expect it to treat any life as precious. And if we don’t treat our own lives as precious, if we don’t deeply care about what it means to be living, I don’t think we are going to care as much about all the ways the state can dole out death—from air strikes and concrete cells to the slower killers, nine-to-fives and unaffordable housing…

***

I feel this sense of relief when I go to the San Rafael dump. It’s similar to the feeling I get when it starts raining. At the dump, it’s loud and big and chaotic, and the towering piles of trash make you feel like you’re in a dystopian sci-fi movie. For some reason, they have peacocks there. You go to the dump expecting it to be a chore, the least glamorous part of fixing up your backyard, and instead you end up in another world for half an hour. 

Like when I saw that solar eclipse in 2017. We were in this huge cornfield in Independence, Oregon. There were a bunch of posters taped up around town that read “INDIE GOES DARK!” I’ll never forget how it felt to be sitting there on the roof of our car, my world familiar and true, and then watch the moon pass over the sun. The sky went black in the middle of the day and the birds stopped singing and we saw stars. Someone nearby howled, and I started laughing and crying at the same time. You think life is one way. The job you have and what time your alarm goes off in the morning. The sprawling clocks and calendars inside your mind. The decisions your fucked up president makes on a regular tuesday, and the momentary disgust you feel before you keep scrolling on instagram. But then you go to the dump and there’s peacocks there, or you wake up in your new apartment and on your way to the corner store it’s just pouring rain. You think life is one way until you’re watching an eclipse and everything inverts upon itself and you realize the darkness was there the whole time. For a few minutes, for half an hour, you’re not a citizen of any state. You’re just a creature, autonomous and alive. For half-hours at a time, life becomes precious.

Increasingly, I have found myself living for those moments. Nothing makes sense to me anymore: the way we structure our time, the concept of working, of saving money or spending it. Ambitions and “dreams,” purpose, talent, fate. All the weighty labels, the abstractions of who we are — I can now see that they’ve always been, at least in some ways, tied up in what the system requires of us. I used to think I was very smart, and that there would be a place in society for me to use my skills and do something important. I had faith that there was a clear path to follow, and that following this path was the way to right wrongs, to solve injustices, and to have purpose. The disillusionment has been creeping up on me for a long time, but I guess it recently wormed its way to my core. 

I look around bleakly from where I stand, at twenty-two, and I’m not sure what to make of the view. The sun doesn’t seem particularly warm, but it isn’t cold either. There are people on the street; some of them walking quickly with their heads down, others talking to the road signs or yelling at the sky. And there are coffee shops and abandoned houses and office buildings. Billboards and parking lots. I’m not sure where it’s all headed. Where I’m headed within it. My eyes always seem to rest on the fences. Maybe that’s my own problem. Society all sprawled out in front of me, and all I can see are the artificial barriers. All I can imagine myself doing is buying a pair of bolt cutters.

We are taught to believe it’s all part of the masterplan: people sleeping on streets, colonial states dropping bombs, supreme court rulings, elections, job interviews, getting engaged. Ingrained within us is this false notion that there is a point behind it all — that the path we are on has a destination. But what kind of masterplan is it if it does not honor life? If it has no problem killing thousands of children along the way? We don’t need to wait and see if things will work out. Things did not work out. Are we really holding out for nothing more than a better president, a less miserable job? Is that the best we can dream up — the most accurate amalgamations of our beautiful and messy reserves of desire? 

When you live within a failed experiment, life knows no boundaries. There’s only one thing that we shouldn’t be doing, and that is continuing to follow the obsolete plot. Yeah, the plot was compelling for a while. And maybe when it stopped being compelling, it became comforting. But I think it might be time to follow something else, now. 

I think I’m going to follow the look you’re giving me from your balcony on a friday night, as the stars rise low over west oakland and tires screech from the road beneath us. I’m going to follow the feeling I get from playing pool in the rain at Eli’s, or reading the last page of Josh’s zine, or sexually harassing cops that have the nerve to walk around my neighborhood. I’m going to follow heartbeats and fingertips and flirtatious eye-rolls, and the tears I cry for you and the tears you cry for me. I’ll follow the impulse to fight when I want to fight, and run when it’s better to run, and be quiet and listen when it’s time to take instructions — I’ll follow rage, and tenderness, and I’ll follow the warmth I feel when the light softens in my sister’s kitchen…

***

I guess that’s why it took me so long to write this: I kept waiting for the light to tinge with green. For my surroundings to tip just a few degrees into the abnormal, and for my brain to process it as the extraordinary. In those moments I feel the weight of my life, all tied up in the weight of your life, and the weight of death. 

It sounds like a heavy burden to carry, but somehow it’s so much lighter than the dullness I felt in that flat light. 

Cw: murder, Palestinian genocide 

By Laila/Laiq R. Makled

In 1948, at the age of seven, my jiddo (grandpa in Arabic), his parents, and his six siblings were forced to flee from their home in Haifa, Palestine. A few years ago, my jiddo told me his memories of standing on a balcony, seeing naked dead neighbors in the streets, hearing screams in the distance, children “going crazy” because their families were gone. That morning, they ran for their lives to the Mediterranean.

My family was privileged and wealthy: They owned an olive oil mill and property in Palestine, so they had resources to flee and survive for some period of time.

When they got to Sur, Lebanon, my great grandmother, Badrieh Al Khamra, started to sell her jewelry to keep everyone fed. This kept my family alive for a while, but after five months, it was gone, and everyone started to starve.

So, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they got on a cattle train to Aleppo, Syria. The trip took a few days. Eventually, they arrived in Aleppo, where they stayed for six months, before settling in Damascus, Syria. What ultimately helped pull our family from starvation to survival were two things: My great grandfather, Ahmed Izzat Taha, spoke English and also had a college degree.

It was incredibly hard for Palestinians to get jobs at the time, so having an education meant everything to my family. And for the Tahas, they experienced how a degree could mean the difference between having dinner and not. Over his life, my great grandfather published and translated 46 books, including The Oregon Trail and Cheaper by the Dozen.

In 1959, my jiddo Nabil Ahmed Izzat Taha was accepted to Purdue University with less than $20 to his name. He worked as a dishwasher making 80 cents an hour to pay for school and housing. In 1964, while at a church event to get some food, he met my grandma: Sharon Elizabeth Hood, a young white, Baptist, small town girl from Texas. Not long after that, on February 24, 1965, my mom Rhoda Nabil Taha Makled was born in Baytown, Texas to a white Baptist mom and Muslim Palestinian dad.

My grandma’s unexpected pregnancy forced both families to reckon with how they were going to integrate their lives — and so they did. My grandma not only supported my jiddo, the father of her child, in becoming a citizen, but many of his other siblings as well: writing Congress, filling out immigration paperwork, etc. And on March 6, 1969, under the affirmation and witness of my maternal great grandparents, Earl Winfred Hood and Elaina Marie Hood, my jiddo was recognized as a United States Citizen by the District Court of the United States in Houston, Texas.

This narrative of a wealthy family, turned poverty stricken refugees, turned American Dream may seem like the inspiring story the colonizer propaganda machine wants us to hear. But this story continues to be marked by tragedy.

With a darkness looming over him, I can hear my jiddo saying to me: “I am completely broken at this point.”

The impact of this apartheid, of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, continues to impact this generation and generations to come. Genocide carries itself in our bodies, beckoning us to tend to its healing and to honor the pain and devastation it has caused. Every few months, when Palestine is in a news cycle, we are forced to relive the trauma our family went through while watching other families continue to suffer. It’s incredibly painful to witness, and all people who come from Palestinian bloodlines are survivors of this tragedy. Regardless of what’s in the news, my jiddo, now nearly 85 years old, still gets night terrors.

I called my mom the other day to let her know I was writing this piece and to check in with her about how she’s feeling about the news. She was struggling, talking about how her whole life she has felt so confused and hurt and disconnected from the struggles in her heart about Palestine. She told me when she read this essay that I put words to feelings she has long struggled to put words to. This is what she wrote to me after our conversation:

“In a world where colonization still draws painful borders around Indigenous lives, through silent echoes of the past and loud clamors of the present, the narrative of my dad’s shattered dream and unyielding survival stands as a testament. It is a soul-stirring reminder of the human spirit’s unyielding flame, burning fiercely amidst the chilling winds of conquest, illuminating the paths of resistance for generations to come.”

In the spring of 1992, I was born to a Muslim Lebanese dad and my mom. Today, 31 years later, and 75 years after my family escaped the Nakba, I live on Confederate Villages of Lisjan territory in Oakland, California. On Trans Day of Visibility this past year, I posted a photo of me after top surgery, talking about what it means to me to be trans. This is what my jiddo said:

My jiddo fled genocide by Israel in 1948, and I get to be free as a transgender person with access to things like gender affirming care and community in 2023. My jiddo always tells me he is proud of me for just being me, and I truly believe him when he says that. He has endured so much, and to see his grandchild live in such a loving and fulfilling way, is a dream come true for him.

A few months ago, when I asked my jiddo if he considered me a Palestinian, he said, “nothing would honor me more.” 

That is why I’m sharing this story. I carry my Palestinian elders and ancestors in my heart and body everywhere I go. It is not a separate part of me; it is me. It is part of where I come from. I come from the land and people of Palestine. I am a transgender Palestinian.

A free Palestine means a freer world. Wall-shattering resistance from Palestinians is a direct result of 70+ years of colonization, land theft, occupation, and apartheid. It is the result of traumatized, imprisoned, and oppressed people fighting back.

Do not be silent. Have conversations with people in your life. Call and email your legislators and demand a cease fire. It matters when you stand in solidarity with people as they fight against militarized and global forces that want them extinct, especially when those forces are backed by biased mainstream media.

I hold all oppressed people fighting for liberation in my heart. Black liberation, sex worker liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, transgender liberation, Palestinian liberation — it is all intertwined as we aim to decolonize and return home. 

I read this piece to my jiddo before publishing, and I asked if there’s anything he wanted me to add. With a glimmer of hope in his eyes, this is what he said:

“We [Palestinians] are not going away. We’re in this world to stay, and the world is going to have to deal with us.”