Filler Distro || Pittsburgh Anarchist News, Analysis, DIY Publishing & Distribution

This issue of Filler explores the growing resistance to the Pitt Patriarchy. A lot of bullshit prompted this issue, some of which you can read about in the collection Milo Goes to Pitt. A print-ready PDF will be uploaded whenever we get around to it. Content warning: misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, sexual assault, violence… probably more. Not a light read.

Reality Isn’t Safe

“Reality isn’t Safe” is the Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition‘s response to an open letter that accused PSSC of “anxiety-mongering” in their opposition to far-right and proto-fascist organizing on campus. As part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” the alt-right propagandist Milo Yiannopoulos came to Pitt to give a lecture billed as “Free Speech in Crisis.” Roughly 30 people engaged in a variety of tactics to protest the event.

“Reality isn’t Safe” is broken into two sections. The first takes on specific right-wing arguments against the existance of the heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. The second contextualizes the controversy on Pitt’s campus within the broader social war. READ.

On Tactics: A Response to PSSC’s “Reality isn’t Safe”

Written by Liam Swanson, a Pitt and New-SDS alumni.

“The Student Government Board at Pitt, if I remember correctly, came out of radical student struggles in the 20th century as a concession, a ‘pressure valve for would-be dissidents’, as you say. However, this characterization, on its own, minimizes the actual impact the SGB has on everyday life. It is not just a pressure valve; it is a positive formation, a method of distributing bodies, affects, labor. It is unimaginable, in the reign of the ‘marketplace of ideas’, that this distribution could be specifically anti-fascist. If the liberals succeed in making the SGB anti-fascist, even in this minimal way, they have achieved the impossible, and achieving the impossible is a radical, leftist goal.”

READ MORE

It’s a Man’s Campus, Let’s Fuck it Up! (Part I)

Notes toward organizing an anarcha-feminist assault on campus rape culture.

Written by Angel and Brett. Angel is an organizer with Illegal Queers PGH. Brett does Filler stuff. They both volunteer with The Big Idea Cooperative infoshop, participate in PSSC, and hang around the autonomous student scene.

“Anarcha-feminism is not merely intersectional feminism taken to its logical conclusion. It is a fluid framework that is capable of informing and evaluating our resistance to patriarchy within a broader vision for offensive revolutionary action.

Anarcha-feminism expands the feminist project of gender equality by asking questions that aim to facilitate the merger of means and ends. Do our efforts merely educate and raise awareness, or do they challenge the material conditions of patriarchy? Do our efforts disperse power and legitimacy, rather than concentrating it? Do they build our sense of autonomy? Do they empower survivors? Do they meet our needs?”

READ MORE

 Destroy Gender

Written by Lena Kafka, a Pitt and PSSC alumni. She fucks shit up and stuff.

“Gender is but another apparatus to be smashed, burned, and scattered. To destroy an apparatus, we must destroy its roots. But first, the soil that covers and protects the roots. The police, racists, misogynists—patriarchs of all varieties—this is the soil we must dig up.

Easier said than done. Confronting police requires militancy (vigilance + awareness + tactical knowledge), but militancy demands the kind of commitment and preparation many aren’t ready for. In most ‘progressive milieus’, going on the offensive is seen as hasty, ill-advised, or at worst, as reactionary. Revolutionaries know that those who wait for the state’s offensive to hit them, who wait for some tragedy to use as leverage and justification for reform, are the real reactionaries. Revolutionaries need to push beyond half-measures, beyond reform, concession and rollback, and push for breaking from the normalcy of daily life. We must push for insurrection against all governance.”

READ MORE

Perspectives on respectability, power disparities within movements, and the whitewashing of struggle.

Filler #3, released Fall 2015. Print-ready PDF available HERE and alternate version HERE. When printing, remember to select “short-edge binding” and make sure that the option “fit image to paper” is selected, otherwise parts will be cut off.

The Black Lives Matter Schism: Towards a Vision for Black Autonomy

Written by J. Northam
[Black Autonomy Federation // twitter @BlackAutonomist]

“‘Black Lives Matter’ should not be declared as an appeal to ruling power or racist white America to accept us as human. They don’t and they won’t. Our value in this country has always been directly proportional to the amount of profit we produce. With the advent of financial mechanisms that no longer rely on Black labor to produce wealth, we have now become disposable. The increase of extrajudicial murders by the state and relative impunity that racist vigilante murderers of our people seem to have are indicators of this. We say ‘Black Lives Matter’ as a reminder to us as Black people that our lives matter regardless if we’re accepted as human by white society or not, and is said as a declaration of resistance to our condition as beasts of burden for capital.”

Dangers of Funding

Written by Kai
[Filler Collective // AID-USAS Local #31 // Divestment Student Network // Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition // Pgh Autonomous Student Network]

“Fuck respectability politics. Social and environmental justice will not be achieved by some suits in an exclusive boardroom meeting. If you don’t recall, that’s how we found ourselves in this mess to begin with. If you organize within a ‘professional’ or reformist or non-profit framework, you must also recognize the need for others to do revolutionary, explicitly anti-capitalist work. If you are a college student or otherwise not subject to the ‘real world’ like myself and still trying to figure out your place in activism or radical organizing, I urge you to think outside of the non-profit industrial complex and explore ways of living and working that stretch your imagination beyond existing neoliberal and capitalist structures. It can be done.”

Who’s Co-opting Whom?

Written by A. Sid
[Filler Collective // Students for Justice in Palestine // Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition // Pgh Autonomous Student Network]

“After centuries of inadequate solutions to economic injustice, systemic racism, excessive militarism, and every other battle the left has fought and lost, our fear is that the system will embrace our cause with one hand and legislate it into irrelevance with the other. But when the people cry out for the destruction of the system itself, the political elite find themselves in a bind: either deny the people’s wishes and reveal their so-called democracy to be a sham, or accept and cede control over the American political process.”

Originally Submitted to It’s Going Down

On April 13^th Pittsburgh anarchists participated in an attack on a Donald Trump campaign rally. This is a message from some of the organizers of this anarchist contingent as well as thoughts on our current situation.

On April 11^th, the Trump campaign announced plans for two events on the same day in different neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. Earlier in the day he would participate in a “town hall” with Sean Hannity in Oakland, a college neighborhood, and in the evening would hold a large campaign rally in the downtown area. Almost immediately, different factions of the Left issued calls for actions and began planning demonstrations. Shortly thereafter came the all-too-common threats from the Right of armed confrontation with demonstrators.

Actions against Trump’s Oakland event were called for by various student activist groups on the University of Pittsburgh campus as well as by WHAT’S UP?!, a local anti-racism group. ANSWER, a front group for the Pittsburgh chapter of Party for Socialism and Liberation, issued a call for a rally and march to Trump’s main campaign event in downtown.

Anarchists and autonomous anti-fascists knew from the very beginning that our goal was full disruption and confrontation with both Trump and his supporters. We felt that established organizations such as WHAT’S UP?! and ANSWER would both work to disrupt this goal in favor of their own visions of what a successful anti-racist action should look like. We chose to organize our own contingent so as to maximize our autonomy and control of our actions and desires.

Actions against Trump’s events began in the early afternoon in different parts of the city, but for the purposes of this piece we will focus on the events surrounding his main campaign rally in the downtown area of Pittsburgh. We choose this focus because it was here that the main energies of anti-authoritarian organizing were placed, and also because we feel that it offers a road map for the fight against the white supremacist Right.

The main gathering of anarchists was a few blocks from Trump’s event and was timed to coincide with the arrival of other marches from different parts of the city. We weren’t aware of other groups’ intentions, numbers, or desired level of disruption, but we thought that our best bet was to time our march to meet the other crowds after they had already arrived at the convention center. This would allow us to bring a surge of our energy and numbers while at the same time pushing forward with our momentum into the crowd of Trump supporters to achieve our primary goal of confrontation.

We were successful with this tactic. Our contingent came prepared with a dozen black and Anti-Fascist Action flags on strong poles and a large black banner. As we arrived at the convention center, we marched and pushed straight through a crowd of Trump supporters, knocked aside barricades, and pushed to the main entrance of the building. Many other demonstrators had already made it that far and were blocking the roads; others followed us through the hole in the crowd we created. Once our contingent arrived at the entrance, immediate physical confrontations erupted as we marched directly into the line going into the building. Trump supporters were tackled, punched, and pepper sprayed as we attempted to fight our way inside.

During these fights the police moved in, made some seemingly random arrests of those not involved in the fighting and pepper spraying, and formed a line between us and the group of Trump supporters. People then lit flares and began to throw objects over the police into the line of supporters and repeatedly attempted to push through. At this point it was clear that the rally inside had already begun and the people we were fighting were those stuck outside, unable to get in.

After about an hour of this, Trump’s rally ended and attendees began to leave out of the exits. The crowd rushed the exits, following, screaming at, shoving, and pepper spraying people as they left. The exits were blocked and police inside the convention center redirected the supporters to doors out of our reach. Despite this, stragglers continued to find their way into our crowd and were heckled and attacked. The city and county police eventually donned riot gear and formed a line to clear the streets. Without any more arrests the crowds dispersed and the event ended.

Our Situation:

We see the rise of Donald Trump as a major aspect of the Right’s direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Barack Obama’s presidency, and what they see as an existential threat to white supremacy in this country. This reaction from the right wing has taken other forms, as we have seen with the armed Bundy Ranch standoff, the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and the non-fatal shooting of demonstrators during an anti-police violence demonstration in Minneapolis by white nationalists.

According to The Atlantic, aside from the demographic markers of lower class membership, whiteness, and low education attainment, the main factor tying Trump’s base together is support for authoritarianism and white supremacy. The main policy points of Trump’s campaign have been rooted in the widespread criminalization, detention, and expulsion of Muslims, Arabs, latin@s, blacks, and other non-whites from the United States.

Support of Donald Trump and by extension these aims is enough to justify oneself as a target of anti-racist violence.

It is our belief that recent events have marked a shift in the political struggle of this country. More and more of the populace has fled mainstream political forces for “outsiders” seen as on the fringe, such as Trump and Bernie Sanders. We see a demarcation developing between the Left and the Right – between those who support corporate control of resources, the expulsion of non-Whites, and increased police militarization for urban pacification, and those who support individual autonomy, collective ownership of resources, and racial and socioeconomic justice. The inherent bilateral structure of the American political party system leaves us with bastardized social and political movements – the “Left” must abandon its Marxist tendencies to fit into a Democratic narrative, while the “Right” must attempt to fit its authoritarian Judeo-Christian white supremacist ideology into the Republican establishment.

As we saw inside Trump’s campaign event in Chicago, on the streets of Minneapolis, and in downtown Pittsburgh the other night, militant physical conflict between these two forces – between those who wish to maintain white supremacy, and those who wish to see its abolition, has come into the open and forefront of American political discourse. We see an opportunity here to forcefully attack both the dominant American political structures while at the same time fighting back the far-Right tendencies that we see with Donald Trump’s rise to political fame.

It is our hope that the threat posed by the white supremacist Right, as well as the exploitation of the opportunities that we speak of, can help our movements to more clearly place ourselves in the struggle for liberation. Militant self-defense from authoritarianism can help grant us the individual and collective autonomy necessary for any liberatory revolt to occur. We see this as a time for libertarian anti-capitalists to learn to take seriously the threat posed by the new Right and to take the steps necessary to forcefully fight the structures of white supremacy. This is not a time for the introspection and critical self-reflection of the popular anti-racist praxis, but a time for mutual self-defense and collective force against the American white supremacist system of apartheid.

The time has come to Burn the American Plantation.

– Your comrades from the hills and valleys of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Originally submitted to It’s Going Down

Report back and perspective from an uncaptured participant of the Anti-Fascist contingent that confronted Trump supporters in Pittsburgh 04/13/16.

Western Pennsylvania has a split. There are those who seek a better existence for all. Dreamers, who see possibilities beyond the Giant Eagles, condo developments, politicians, the gossip of the nightly news on what black person did what. They saw a way out of the cyclical grip of unchallenged rhetoric, the pounding narratives that regularly kill people because of identity, religion, class, gender. Such deaths are often not seen as murder because the structural institution of white supremacy and capitalism have shielded them from contest with an intentionally despicable education system and apathetic, individualistic culture.

A pervasive discourse that makes exceptional the wealthy white man above all has plagued this region. To live in this land is to be ruled by this marker, to see ones self in contrast to this and make every opportunity to find validation and security alone. Class unconsciousness and racism make for an easily manageable population by politicians.

That is the provincial. The way out was to meet together.

As news that the evangelizing force that has been encouraging and emboldening Right-wing politics of white convenience, entitlement and supremacy across the nation was coming to town rang, rebels across this city held a necessity to act. Like Ferguson, St. Louis, New York, Anaheim and countless other cities accomplices were found in resistance to White Supremacy.

An anti-fascist contingent was manifested as a way of locating sanity, self-defense and autonomy. A quick boisterous march to David L. Lawrence Convention Center found a visceral repulsion to organized racism. Immediately upon reaching the line of attendees flag bats and impassioned energy met the domes of Make America Great Again (the slogan worn proudly on Trump hats). Fists hit those who love to see nothing less than walls put between our brothers and sisters. That particular sinister smirk and chuckle that is given by bullies who look down at others as meager and incapable were maced away with pepper spray. On and off for three hours white supremacists were beat as the celebratory roar of the crowed reverberated off the tunnels of the convention center.

Marching bands, colorful signs, chants of “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA” tangoed with the black flags of anarchy to unleash a chaos some internet denizen would later characterize as “Feral, frothing, rabid and violent“. To me it was much more disciplined than that but still wild. Spit landed in the faces of one Trump supporter giving a Nazi Salute as others drowned him out with chants and protest placards.

The Secret Service was made to shut the doors to the event as attendees were turned away. Our movement proved capable of social self-defense. At the end of Trump’s speech the crowd exited, they were met with a gauntlet of trips and berating, more fights broke out, more police, more policing. Heated arguments cleared the air of what people really thought as civil unrest was realized.

The Trump crowd was judged by what its material actions were: attending a white supremacist rally. The only ethical response to this decision was confrontation, eviction, and to grant a denial, perhaps for the first time to those who have have the golden ticket – a wealthy white life.

The slave catchers (police) were also targeted in this attack and will continue to be as long as they continue to serve as an institutionalized oppressive force that seeks to uphold the current ruling order, lock people up, and deny free existence – which is to say as long as they are police. Each officer had a decision to make when they formed a line between the White Supremacists and the crowd of Anti-Fascists. It comes as no surprise that they chose to form and face off with rebels. They had a decision to make when they arrested three comrades. That is why they were maced and hit.

Negative actions like this are the lived act of being present with our capabilities. Pittsburghers like the rest of the planet have it within to bring closure to a traumatic era of racism, policing, class based society, slavery (in the modern form of prisons). An unknown freedom is made within this negation.

In short: Nobody has ever needed some man yellin and telling us what to do!

Past all the patriarchal call to arms of the right, the kitschy politicking of sensibility as a tool of suave leftism exists a structural reality that neither the right nor the left truly want to change; politics seek to manage our movements and life. To act with dignity and autonomy was to do what needed done. In particular some 4,500 jagoffs were dealt with.

This city is unexceptional in its white supremacy but unfuckingbelievable in its resistance.

In solidarity, love and rage,

uncontrollable /// ungovernable
One of many Pittsburgh Anti-Fascist

CW: discussion of anti-trans violence

This past Friday the 8th of April, Pitt lent its spacious dining room in the O’Hara Student Center to Reverend Scott Stiegemeyer. He is a Lutheran pastor who often uses the pulpit as a means of furthering a transphobic agenda that would see prayer and crocodile-tear “compassion” take the place of life-saving hormone treatments and surgeries that allow many trans individuals to feel at home in their own skin. Even before the event, Stiegemeyer’s crusade against the “sin” of deviation from his interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story by making our bodies match our minds could be gleaned from his numerous writings and interviews available online.

Thus, a large contingent of the Pitt community was deeply concerned and angered that Stiegemeyer would be welcomed by the administration to speak on campus. Around 100 transgender individuals and cisgender “allies” showed up at the event, outnumbering the rest of the attendees. Still the Reverend went on with his brazen diatribe against trans bodies based on the idea that an unseen entity has the sole right to decide who is male or female, with the ecclesiastical class as God’s gender police. Early on, Stiegemeyer told an anecdote, in rather poor taste, about a child disfigured by a botched circumcision who was raised as a girl but later decided he was a man. He seemed to imply that this story reflected the experience of most trans people; that transition is something brought about by external forces of confusion, malice, or sin. Thus he concluded that we, as trans people, were “disordered”. Quickly he amended this, saying that everyone was disordered because of original sin. And in a way he is right. All of us, cisgender and transgender alike, are caught up in the cultural disorder of enforced gender norms. But the source of that disorder is not original sin. It is something the church is far more familiar with: the patriarchy.

A small contingent of trans people and their cisgender accomplices stood up in defiance, refusing to sit in silence until the “Q&A” period. We saw that this hate speech contributed to the same internal angst and suicidal tendencies the Reverend says saddens him deeply. We raised our trans flags and banner with a battle cry of “Your God Can’t Control My Body.” Immediately self-appointed “peace police” within the body of “protesters” sprang into action, demanding that we sit down and continue to take Stiegemeyer’s bullshit while our trans siblings die every day through murder and suicide. With at least five cops present at the event other than the “volunteers,” we decided to leave the space with a chant of “No Justice, No Peace, No Gender Police.” Though we didn’t stay for the Q&A session, our friends who remained inside told us that most of the questioners saw Stiegemeyer as the wolf in sheep’s clothing he was and asked some very pointed questions to expose his thinly veiled hate speech.

Those who stood up to oppose us played directly into the hands of the Reverend’s ilk. By presenting themselves as the “respectable” LGBT community, they took the side of the Reverend and the cops against those who were not willing to be silent in the face of the war against our trans bodies. They forget the war cry of ACT UP’s fight against AIDS during the 80’s and 90’s: Silence Equals Death. Only those “allies” who are not directly threatened by hate speech against trans people and the violence against us it engenders have the option to remain silent without potential deadly consequences. When our fellow queer folk call for us to be quiet, many trans people are greatly upset. Instead of joining our mutual enemies in attempting to snuff out our rage, we’d prefer you to accept our methods as equally valid to other forms of struggle so we can all take on our adversary in our own ways. We see you as potential accomplices in our liberatory project, and would much rather fight beside you than against you.

Speech that can bring bodily harm is not “free speech.” Even if Stiegemeyer has no personal malice towards trans people, his de-legitimization of gender transition is an invitation for others to engage in even harsher attacks on our experiences and our bodies. Make no mistake: we trans people are in a war for survival whether we like it or not. We are dying by the hundreds and thousands. This society wants to kill us, either physically to erase us entirely, or rhetorically to be “born again” as good law-abiding cisgender men and women within patriarchy. The only way for us to survive and thrive is to transform the social landscape by dismantling patriarchal structures and ideas in our communities. To that end, we must regard the priests of patriarchy not as partners in a “dialogue” but as an enemy force to be smashed.

Nor should we allow the self-appointed peace police to colonize the trans experience that had its birth in the insurrectionary street battles of Stonewall with demands that all us angry trans folk quiet the fuck down and assimilate into the trendy bourgeois white gay male culture. The waning of the AIDS crisis from public view and the passage of marriage equality are not grounds to retire direct action as a means of queer liberation. Far from it. That time will not come until the murder and colonization of trans and queer bodies and the heteropatriarchal artifice that enables it comes crashing down in flames.

Fuck gender cops, peace cops, all cops.

Love and rage,
An angry-as-fuck trans girl

Filler received this message from a newly formed crew of radical youth living just a few hours away in Morgantown, West Virginia (you know, WVU town). We’re looking forward to hearing more from them, and especially looking forward to throwing down together when shit gets real! Check out their tumblr HERE.

Just south of Pittsburgh, in the college town of Morgantown West Virginia, the Morgantown Ultra Left Network is being formed. We have lived and worked here for some time now and have made the decision to strike out on our own. While we have had successes, we collectively made the decision to break out after many bad experiences trying to work with authoritarian leftists. At the time, “left unity” was what brought us together. Quickly that fell apart and became just another shell for old school Marxist-Leninist party building and movement stealing.

This is a new chapter for us and the Appalachian region. As we fight the rising fascism in West Virginia, gentrification in all its major cities, over bearing local and state police forces, privatization of education, and the extractivist regime, we send out a call to all fellow travelers who want to be involved in liberating Appalachia and building a better world. Our Appalachia is not romanticized: we live on colonized land, racism and the erasure of Black Appalachians continues, transphobia and homophobia is institutionalized. We have much work to do, but it’s worth it. We hope this message finds you well!

-Morgantown Ultra Left Network (MULN)

MORGANTOWN ULTRA LEFT NETWORK

It’s time for the big reveal!

There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another… There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. 

– Gilles Deleuze

This group was born from lessons learned. The big tent doesn’t seem to work so well, it falters under the strain of bad faith and bad tactics.

Instead of speaking to our truth, we are forced to build consensus. But consensus doesn’t work in these conditions. It just leads to concessions.

Capitalism has evolved beyond the need for orthodox Marxism.  Marx is a friend and a teacher to the left, but is not its master.  The Earth has changed since the 1860s, and the left will either evolve or become just another means of control for the subjugated “masses.”

The libertarian strains of socialism have offered a viable alternative to rigid Marxian dogma since the latter’s inception and continue to do so today.

Governments lie and cheat, steal and kill, just like capitalists and racists and authoritarians of all stripes.  If any dialectic can signify the totality of history, it must be based on authority and subjugation, but this only indicates how vacuous the terms become here.

We are derided as life-stylists and petit-bourgeois, and at the same time called reformists. The work we value is put down as idealist and childish. Our values of building socialist space, being honest, and horizontalism have been abused and co-opted for authoritarian aims.

It is not possible to work and live like this any longer.

We have to venture on a new path, independent of authoritarianism and inter-community subjugation. Let us develop something new together!

CLICK HERE for a print-ready PDF of the Destroy Gender series by Lena Kafka.
CLICK HERE to read part 2 – Beyond Another Gender Binary

Gender as Governance

Gender is a hierarchy, one of the apparatuses of governance, that differentiates and categorizes bodies/people. Bodies are categorized into genders based on one’s appearance, behavior, economic/social/cultural position, and others. The categories are stacked in a hierarchy, where men and men’s labor are more valued than women and women’s labor (domestic work, youth/elderly care, psychological/social work, food service, retail, all jobs based on emotional labor, etc).

Gender uses its categories to play a part in governing the social sphere to maintain social reproduction. It creates a gendered division of labor, between masculine and feminine, “man’s work” and “women’s work”. Women’s work is valued and paid less, and for much domestic work not at all. The valuing women’s labor less than men’s attempts to make working class women reliant upon men economically. The forced reliance on heterosexual relationships is as old as civilization and class society. Women are coerced, structurally and interpersonally, into relationships with men for the sake of survival, and the reproduction of civilization. As “Against the Couple-Form”  puts it, “rather than an essentialist concept, the category of woman stems a gendered mode of exploitation and relegates certain types of labor to a private, unwaged sphere.”  The sphere of reproductive labor.

Economic exploitation is not the only way gender governs us. On a social level, gender sets standards and norms for our bodies and behaviors. Bodies get put into categories based on secondary sex characteristics, voice, behaviors, dress/aesthetic/ethnicity, etc. These expectations vary based upon social/cultural situation and position. Gender regulates bodies into certain norms to be interpreted into certain categories (man/woman, etc). These norms are regulated by stricter interpretation for women, and with harsher punishment for transgression. Gender is what tells women that we are not enough or too much anything and everything. Gender regulates our movements (“it’s not safe at night”) and our capabilities (“that’s not what women do”, “women shouldn’t do this or that”). Gender creates our anxieties/desires to be “manly” and “womanly”, to meet the capitalist ideal of easily identifiable, categorizable, and predictable bodies and actions.  Gender governs the social sphere.

Governance and gender define all aspects to the hierarchy of civilization. Governance is the regulation, normalization, and (re)production of bodies/people and territory. It does so through prisons, police, surveillance, borders, gender, work, evictions, school, racism, debt, xenophobia, etc, creating a class of those who benefit and a class of those who suffer.

Done be to is what?

Everyone in the milieu knows to make total destroy, abolish whatever, to smash this or that. Gender is but another apparatus to be smashed, burned, and scattered. To destroy an apparatus, we must destroy its roots. But first, the soil that covers and protects the roots.  The police, racists, misogynists—patriarchs of all varieties—this is the soil we must dig up.

Easier said than done.  Confronting police requires militancy (vigilance + awareness + tactical knowledge), but militancy demands the kind of commitment and preparation many aren’t ready for.  In most ‘progressive milieus’, going on the offensive is seen as hasty, ill-advised, or at worst, as reactionary. Revolutionaries know that those who wait for the state’s offensive to hit them, who wait for some tragedy to use as leverage and justification for reform, are the real reactionaries. Revolutionaries need to push beyond half-measures, beyond reform, concession and rollback, and push for breaking from the normalcy of daily life. We must push for insurrection against all governance.

The Coming Insurrection states, “The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible.” To be irreversible means the roots are dug up and patriarchy, and all forms of hierarchy, are dismantled. In more real terms, it means that we have communities and spaces that aren’t just safe, but dangerous to those who oppose our desires and our spaces.  Not just a reading group safe space, but reclaimed territories capable of providing for the needs of the working class/women/the excluded (free from gender/gendered violence). These spaces can’t simply be given to us by a higher power.  Through occupations of the borderlands and sites of production, or less formal territories of resistance, such as friends who have each other’s backs, we will make or take the commons back.

No Tucking, No Masters

Our insurrection against gender cannot stop with just gender self-identification, or with a new list of terms for everyone to learn to respect. Insurrection must push beyond these limits to a free-play of actions, behaviors, sexuality, etc. Where doing or enjoying one action or another does not categorize you into a limiting role.

To be free from governance entails being free from gender. Being free from gender entails being free from categorization, normalization, and exploitation of governance.

Endnotes:

[1]  if one can separate the social from the political, private, etc

[2] these are not universal categories, exceptions may exist but we are looking at the structure of it all

[3] Lies: a journal of materialist feminism, Volume 1

[4] Distinct but not separable

[5] Viewing attacks on police as reactionary is a view normally held by those more liberal in our milieu, who still take their morality from the state despite the state being the one who facilitates our murders and misery. While I don’t think we should take their critiques to heart, we should still be aware of their presence in our circles and spaces.

[6]  Pg 130, Semiotext(e)

Lena Kafka

Further Reading/Inspiration
Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto
Whipping Girl
Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
Lies: a journal of materialist feminism
Caliban and the Witch
Feminist Theory: from margin to center

CW: patriarchy, rape culture, violence

Notes toward organizing an anarcha-feminist assault on campus rape culture.

by Angel and Brett

While academia theoretically exists as a space reserved for education and intellectual growth, universities across the country have been making headlines as they continue to fail to provide safe and equal access for women, gender nonconforming folks, and people of color—all of whom are at greater risk for sexual violence.

But the university is not alone in its failure. Patriarchy permeates social life on every campus; from frat row to sports teams, and often even to the social justice organizations that claim to fight it. We’ve all heard the statistics by now. One in four of our classmates will be assaulted at some point in their academic career, every 21 hours there is a rape on an American college campus, and on and on. 

To assert that sexual assault is simply a failure of the university to provide proper security or advocacy groups is to completely ignore the roots of the epidemic. Sexual assault doesn’t thrive because there aren’t enough police on campus, but rather because assault is the violent enforcement of male dominance in the social sphere. [“Reality isn’t Safe” explores this premise in greater depth.]

Despite the programs discussing and advocating prevention measures, the painfully inadequate counseling centers, and the countless ways to navigate the labyrinth that is Title IX, none of the existing efforts address the heart of the issue: the fucking patriarchy. Obviously men are not the only ones committing assault, but rape culture is deeply tied to the patriarchal attitudes that surround sex and intimacy. Rape culture is a frontline in the social war, and even the most marginalized person might choose the side with more power.

Until we find concrete ways to disrupt and deconstruct both institutionalized patriarchal structures and their socio-cultural roots, sexual assault will remain a staple of the college experience.

To begin, we need to analyze the ways in which the administration, media, and campus culture rationalize and trivialize assault, not as problematic or internalized attitudes, but for what they really are: strategies in perpetuating and reifying systems of patriarchy. All social hierarchy, from gender to race to class, is imposed by the threat of violence. It’s irrelevant whether a media pundit understands their logic as serving an agenda of strategic oppression or as a “rational” and “objective” approach to a contentious issue; the logic remains the same, with the same violent impacts, and it is all the more insidious.

Analysis is a continuous process, as patriarchy has proven to be one of the most flexible hierarchies in that it is quick to absorb the aesthetic of our opposition without detracting from the violence of male dominance. We need not look farther than the irony of having a sexist like Joe Biden speak at Pitt for the “It’s On Us” campaign as proof of this.1, 2 We have to constantly challenge ourselves to hash out the details of enemy strategies in order to better defend and empower ourselves.

The most prevalent strategy in seizing and erasing a survivor’s narrative is the tactical redirection of classic American individualism.

First, the stage is set with a “prevention” discourse that asserts that the people most at risk of facing violence (women, queer folks) need to be the ones responsible for preventing it. It’s almost cliché to point out that our society teaches people how to avoid assault instead of teaching people not to rape in the fucking first place. What this discourse really teaches us is how to live in fear, how to confine our self-expression to the culturally accepted practices that reproduce patriarchy. The result is that victim-blaming is effortlessly disguised in the rhetoric of prevention discourse: shouldn’t you have known not to leave your drink unattended at frat parties?

Second, what is objectively a social epidemic is quickly personalized, typically as an issue concerning only two individuals. This is an especially easy maneuver when the survivor has some sort of “romantic” history with the perpetrator.

Now with the stage set and the spotlight focused, the administration, media, or police can completely remove the survivor’s story from the broader socio-political context through tactics like victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and prude-shaming. Let’s be perfectly clear: assault has nothing to do with whether or not a survivor is drinking heavily and incapable of making sober decisions. Nor does it have anything to do with how a person dresses or where they choose to sleep at the end of the night. It has everything to do with the attacker refusing to respect boundaries and choosing to satisfy their urges with the understanding that they’re unlikely to face repercussions. The constant threat of character defamation is what keeps survivors silent and “illegitimate” in the public eye.

The final step in the tactical maneuvering of hyper-individualist logic is isolation. Now that the cumulative weight of prevention discourse, personalization, and character defamation has effectively stolen control of the survivor’s narrative, the social stigma of the whole ordeal can potentially isolate the survivor from any sort of support structure or “legitimate” framework for seeking justice. This is how the constant violence of patriarchy disguises itself, and is just one of many ways the broader social war remains hidden.

There are many more enemy strategies we can and should analyze. But we can only refine our notions and theories through immediately proceeding to action, or else we risk losing relevance in the constantly shifting socio-political terrain. In understanding the discursive and material practices of the administration, we can identify weak points in the authoritarian, patriarchal structures that define the University under capitalism. But so long as neoliberalism continues to creep onto our campus, Pitt will continue increasing tuition rates alongside the size of the student body. And if Pitt wants to do this, it will inevitably try to cover up the violence of campus culture. Because that’s just good business.

Anarcha-feminism is not merely intersectional feminism taken to its logical conclusion. It is a fluid framework that is capable of informing and evaluating our resistance to patriarchy within a broader vision for offensive revolutionary action.

Anarcha-feminism expands the feminist project of gender equality by asking questions that aim to facilitate the merger of means and ends. Do our efforts merely educate and raise awareness, or do they challenge the material conditions of patriarchy? Do our efforts disperse power and legitimacy, rather than concentrating it? Do they build our sense of autonomy? Do they empower survivors? Do they meet our needs?

In Part II, we’ll explore several of these questions as they relate to the struggle against patriarchy at Pitt.

In the meantime, here are some cool local projects to check out:

In Our Hands – a grassroots community accountability skill-building group based in Pittsburgh. They just put out the first issue of their zine!

Night Shade – a new crew of women and queer folks based in Oakland that are organizing a network of safe-houses, anti-fuckboi patrols, community support efforts and more! Contact studentsolidaritypgh@gmail.com and the Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition will put you in touch with them.

The Fourth Wave – a monthly intersectional feminist publication run by Pitt students!

By Raghav Sharma

I Got Arrested for Calling Michael Hayden a War Criminal

And I’d do it again.

On tour for his new book, the four-star general and former head of the NSA and CIA recently spoke at his alma mater of Duquesne University, a mere 20-minute bus ride from my own school. Having learned of the event just a few days prior and unwilling to let Hayden speak unchallenged, an anti-war friend of mine sought me out to help disrupt the event any way we could. There are multiple tactics small groups of activists can utilize to deny a speaker their unimpeachability: banner drops, storming the stage, silent sign-holding, Q&A session hijacking, chanting. It was these last two strategies our squad sought to employ.

Upon arriving in the ballroom, our hopes for the Q&A were dashed. Rather than employing the traditional process of providing microphones to raised hands through facilitators in the crowd after the speaker finished, Hayden’s session was conducted by having audience members write their questions on index cards before the event for his associates to filter through for objectionable content. This served to confirm what many activists — including Occupy co-founder Micah White in his new book The End of Protest — recognize: authority figures have managed to subvert nearly every form of dissent, whether as complex as a massive rally or as basic as a Q&A.

So we improvised. Rather than waiting for a readily co-optable opportunity to speak, we created a conflictual space within Hayden’s shameless recounting of his crimes to express our opposition to the man most responsible for the modern-day NSA. Surrounded as we were by hundreds of people who laughed at Hayden’s off-hand joke comparing CIA torture methods to his own treatment by nuns at a Catholic school, we sought not to convert our ideological opponents but rather to express and establish as a matter of record an attitude towards Hayden contrary to that held by his fans and admirers both in the audience and outside the hall. And for the high crime of shouting over a former government official, my associates and I were dragged out of the ballroom by men in suits who we later learned had been lurking in the back of the room.

We were taken outside the building, where I was cuffed to my friend by the assistant chief of Duquesne’s private police. We stood idly by as he and a uniformed officer discussed what they were going to charge us with. It was around the fourth or fifth time they referred to our supposed crime as “disrupting a meeting” that I realized they had nothing on us. Not for a moment did I regard what we had done as a moral crime, but the realization that I hadn’t violated the law emboldened me and instilled a degree of confidence that would prove immeasurably valuable for the interactions that were to come. Another uniformed cop joined his brother in blue and led us to the parking lot, where my friend and I were split up, handcuffed individually, and put into two separate police cars departing for the station.

I would be astonished if either man believed “disrupting a meeting” was an actual crime. The intention with which they bandied the phrase about was likely an attempt to make us fearful enough for our individual futures that we would comply with the questions they asked us about each other. Upon arriving at the station, my friend and I were led into an interrogation room. In an hour-plus conversation, the officers offered up such gems as “the Constitution is dead” and a lecture about my disrespect for the men and women who died defending my right to speech, the latter of which rang as hollow as the former did true while I sat handcuffed to a wooden bench for talking at the wrong time. After demanding ID and sitting down to fill out the necessary forms, the officers began their interrogation.

The nature of their questions followed an easily-recognizable pattern, coached in a game of good cop/bad cop so blatant I couldn’t help but grin. They would begin with abstract statements intended to get us talking. For the good cop, this meant asking us what our intentions were in disrupting Hayden. He even offered his own take on contemporary America in response to our critiques, giving rise to the aforementioned Constitutional obituary. The bad cop chose to deride us and our cause. We didn’t respect Hayden or his service, or the service of all soldiers, we didn’t respect the gravity of the War on Terror. I’ll admit: we took the bait the first few times. We engaged in conversation with the officers, who continued the discussion for a little while before lifting elements from our responses to transition into specific questions. Questions about our friends. Questions about activist groups we associated with. Questions we answered vaguely, if at all. Awkward silence. Rinse and repeat.

Before long this game grew stale for all involved. At one point a detective entered the room and asked the officers if we’d been read our Miranda rights. I urge anyone looking for a good laugh to request the video footage from the camera in the corner of the room and watch the look on the face of the officer who brought me in. After asking us in vain to submit written statements regarding our motivations, the detective told us we could go. No charges were filed but the case is being forwarded to my school’s disciplinary board and the Allegheny County District Attorney while my friend and I are now legally prohibited from setting foot on Duquesne’s campus. We were led to the door by the assistant chief of police, who pointed us towards the nearest bus stop and sent us on our way.

Having wondered my whole life what my first political arrest would be like, I left feeling an abrupt sense of negation. It was as though I had spent two hours of my life completing a closed loop. No crime so no charges, no changing the minds of any person on either side. But that was never the point. Subjectivity’s straitjacket leaves us all standing with our backs turned orbiting Truth. Can I call Michael Hayden a bad man, or Assistant Chief Sippey, or the audience applauding my arrest, when their entire lives had led them inevitably to our confrontation just as mine had?

Subjectivity also weighed heavily on me as I considered what might have happened had I dared to be daring in a black body, or had my gender identity not conformed to what was listed on the state ID I presented. Born with a level of privilege most of the world cannot imagine, I was relatively sheltered from the consequences of my actions before I even acted. I shudder to imagine the draconian punishments I would have suffered had I publicly decried as a war criminal the head of Turkish or North Korean intelligence.

But those men aren’t doing book tours. Officials of overt autocracies lack the means to subdue their populations through anything but fear and violence. The subtle strongman is a man of the people, and thus those who hide their hegemonic aspirations behind the banner of democracy must at times prostrate themselves before the public. So they give us a vote while conducting their business behind closed doors. They distort their crimes through the lens of patriotism and posit that everything is relative; that had we known what they know, we would have done the same. Loss of life and liberty becomes relative to the value of security, the moral inviolability of human rights relative to the motives of the terrorist.

Recourse to relativity cuts two ways, however, and jingoistic posturing is the only salve capable of soothing the wounds of cognitive dissonance. To deny America’s role in perpetuating some of the world’s most profound depravity is to dismiss en masse the perspectives of those whose lives are crushed under our eternal march to liberate the Earth. The emotional impact of violence remains the same whether its survivors curse suicide bombers or drone operators. On what grounds can we rationalize the fear of Afghan children gazing at a clear blue sky?

Freed from the grasp of nationalism, if we are to accept subjectivity as an objective element of the human experience, we have no choice but to combat the apocalyptic consequences of our lifestyle on the lives of so many around the world. Our struggle may very well be in vain. The opponents of liberty own the banks and the factories. They control the schools and have the press hanging at their every word. The guns and bombs and surveillance networks are on their side. But struggle is defined by seemingly insurmountable odds. To stand against ideological totality demands a competing absolute and an army willing to lay their lives on the line in service of this ideal. What the cops interrogating me feared most was that they had only arrested two of us. They fear a nonviolent coalition committed to rejecting the order police protect and making manifest a new order based not on violence and coercion but rather consensus and peace, human dignity and the potential of a species freed from deprivation and terror. And so long as the old order stands, it our duty as its opponents to stand firm, screaming at its face.