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

Filler, July 2021

Click here for a PDF imposed for zine printing.

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Anonymous submission received 07.14.21

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Civilian control of the police has long been a demand of groups seeking an end to the predation of police in their communities. It is an also an end that abolitionists have viewed as unworthy of attention. This resource created by Mariam Kaba and others outlines why civilian control has failed in the past and remains a mistake to implement now. But in our present moment groups in Pittsburgh are renewing a push for this flawed, failed program.

Pittsburgh’s Community Control Over the Police (CCOP) initiative has as a stated goal to create “a democratically-elected Civilian Police Control Council with full powers over the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police”. CCOP grew out of the #StopTheStation, a campaign by Socialist Alternative to prevent Pittsburgh Police from moving into a new station in East Liberty. Currently, activists are gathering signatures to get their legislation as a ballot initiative.

A brief digression illustrates the best case series of events for CCOP.

• The signature drive must gather enough signatures for the legislation to be put on the ballot.

• The ballot initiative must be successfully voted into law.

• The legislation must survive inevitable legal challenges from the FOP et al.

• The PA state government must at no point pass language preventing Pittsburgh from adopting such a measure.

• The movement behind CCOP must win and continue to win the elections that fill the CCOP board.

Following this, at the next contract renewal (possibly years in the future) between Pittsburgh Police and the city the CCOP board will notionally be able to negotiate with the FOP. If police sympathizers happen to win enough of the elections any notional benefit of the whole system will be undone. This idea that systems of hierarchy can be good as long as the right people hold the levers of power is the strategy of the Democratic Party in the USA. That CCOP seeks to create more systems vulnerable in this way is pure folly.

Initiatives like CCOP legitimize the institution of policing. They make us think that policing can be “good” as long as the right people are in charge of hiring, firing, and discipline. This will not fundamentally change the brutality baked into the system. The only way to reduce the harm of policing is to defund, dismantle, and finally abolish. 

It is better if CCOP fails sooner rather than later. We do not need community control of the police, we need no more police. CCOP moves to entrench policing in our communities. I condemn the organizations and individuals who hold up CCOP as a goal. CCOP will not help liberate us and instead do the opposite.

A Pittsburgh anarchist, July 2021

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Anonymous submission received on 07.15.21

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Resistance to the Line 3 Pipeline in Minnesota is escalating. This past month saw thousands from across the country joining frontline activists and organizers during the Treaty People Gathering, using well-organized mass direct action to both shut down construction and to force the issue onto society’s front burner and front pages. Many remain, bolstering forces with long term frontline activists. Resistance has also been escalating geographically, spreading far and wide and using the arts-based tactics of resistance; from wheat pasted street posters, to painting street murals on the pavement, to sing outs and creative actions and disruptions of the banks that fund and profit from Line 3 and fossil fuels.”

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/03/defund-line-3-art-solidarity-we-will-paint-future

Answering the call for a week of Arts Visibility Actions to Defund Line 3 — from July 12-17, a couple of friends in so-called pittsburgh decided to make visible the ongoing anti-Line3 struggle. We dream of an end to this settler-colonial nightmare, and of a world without climate catastrophe looming large over our past, present and future. We fight for #LandBack to our Indigenous relatives, and to eradicate the pervasive anti-Blackness and xenophobia enforced by cops and borders. We refuse to concede that the future is ‘settled’ and that Indigenous sovereignty can be eroded at will by this white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist state. 

At the Line 3 construction site, there has been a hyper-militarized response by police, who are funded by Enbridge (multinational corporation) to Indigenous people exercising their treaty rights.  Even as we fight state-funded cops here, we must be aware of the tactics of corporation-funded cops and develop ways to resist and subvert their advances. Water Protectors are fighting to preserve their cultural heritage, ecosystems, food sources, and putting their bodies on the line for a livable future. We see past all the greenwashing from fossil fuel companies, and the utter failure of govt/corp/nonprofit ‘leaders’ in taking meaningful action against the unfolding climate catastrophe.

We can only succeed if we whack this machine from all sides. Indigenous relatives are calling for more people to come join the struggle on the frontlines – more info here: 

https://www.stopline3.org/hub

https://archive.org/details/line-3-resistance-dashboard

Carry out your own art actions with this kit:

https://archive.org/details/defund-line-3-art-kit

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Submission from Denise Bosynak received on 07.12.21

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A Critique of Pittsburgh’s Anarchist Milieu

In reading the recent piece submitted to Filler about murals motivated by socialist realism point to an ideology that is inherently reformist and demobilizes people, I could not help but feel that this was a strange (albeit very literary and beautiful written) vague post.

Anarchists locally have abdicated the responsibility of revolutionaries everywhere, which is to look at past defeats and failures with thorough scrutiny. It has been unable to grow and instead withers every few years, is replaced by new recruits usually coming to town as students, and then ebbs again. Rinse and repeat.

If Communism bears responsibility for heaping piles of corpses produced by Communist regimes, if Christianity is to be blamed for the Crusades, Inquisition and witch-hunts, then we likewise must look at the practical results in peoples’ lives and not by the pie in the sky promises of helping people “live communism.”  

What Responsibility?

This critique is not necessarily directed to the author of that piece or to Filler specifically, it is not to those whose political horizons extend no further than establishing either a “temporary autonomous zone” or a semi-permanent Bohemian enclave in the form of squats, distros, and bars where many frequent consistently. For many who cry about “red fascism” and “tankies,” it is clear that anarchism for them is less interested in overthrowing the existing oppressive order than of washing one’s hands with it. This concern with ensuring the passage of one’s soul to anti-authoritarian heaven can range from the obsessive efforts to perform a certain lifestyle that is “anarchist” to the sectarian refusal to join or work with any group or organization that shows any sign of being “authoritarian” in any way.

For the people, who believe in the need to overthrow the institutions and social relationships that stand in the way of realizing the majority of humanitys needs, this one is for you. Those who are interested in creating a movement from that point rather than presuming we are at that point and those few disparate and disunited individuals engaging in (some good, some bad) shoplifting, gardening, petty vandalism, and riots are already part of that living movement, this one is likewise for you. It may be possible that H.C., because of their references to civilization, is thinking that this oppressive society will collapse on its own without anyone needing to intervene, in which case, this may not even be for them. Hopefully it can be instructive to others who see similar problems.

If one thinks an authoritarian society can collapse on its own, or if they’ve succumbed to such an expectation that the people can’t possibly overthrow this government and that its more probable for society to fall apart, then they should question what was drawn them to politics in the first place.

Mutual Aid’s Lack of Mutality, Or How Survival is Not Automatically Revolutionary

Most anarchists in Pittsburgh have been able to involve more people than are in their immediate scene or proximity through mutual aid projects, usually revolving around free food, meal and/or clothing distribution. While this has perhaps fed some empty stomachs, it still perpetuates small groups working in isolation by creating very minimal political links with those that it is started to serve.

In the abstract politics of “solidarity, not charity” tables are set up at local parks and people are encouraged to come and grab what they need. This orientation of creating services for people to use can often serve to support struggles (of tenants, of youth, of workers, of prisoners, of queer people, and colonized people everywhere) and are thus undeniably important, but divorced of them actually supporting active struggles, it often appears as strangers in different geographic areas providing food items to people.. The interaction between these people is one of help, of being granted something that someone can use to survive, and then typically ends or is continued later on by future asks for additional help. But it seldom, if ever, leads to the initiation of a larger struggle.

This is because most “mutual aid” serves to suffocate class struggle, because instead of organizing people in a political class struggle to ensure that they don’t have an empty stomach in the first place (with those services as a support), it instead treats that support as an end in of itself. This thinking of ‘to survive is revolutionary’ exalts the individual and provides to their needs, but does not provide any road map to getting to liberation. Where have anarchists been for local rent struggles? Around workplace struggles?

This is because one, these services are provided in a way that does not threaten the state, two, because it has not arisen from a struggle, so it is not perceived by the people as the basis for fighting the current social order. In other words, even anarchist-led mutual aid projects do little to look different from any NGO project with funded staff. Its celebrity may win temporary support with the activist left, but results in making few friends with the mass of people who are struggling against the current order. We have a responsibility to note this and change course.

Objective Conditions

It is hard to understand what the Hell H.C. is talking about. Flowery language should be made more direct. As H.C. argues, the comrade-artist thinks the worker needs evangelism and the revolutionary education of the Party, and that the necessity of attacking one’s individual poverties is in contradiction to this, as the Party-teacher helps the workers slowly become aware and capable of governing society. The comrade-artist just does not understand that human nature is such that we are not bound by some convention of “historical determination” (does H.C. mean that Marxists are making up rules for what people are capable of doing? Who knows) and that what we’ve always been doing is out looking for some opportunity to create some sort of unnamed and non-territorial anarchist space. This drive has always been innate in all humans, besides those who have congenitally been drawn to joining authoritarian organization.

One thing is just facts: creating “anarchist spaces” is not some unconscious and spontaneous result of people wanting freedom, it is the result of the historical development of social antagonisms. While treating Marxism as an opportunist ideology that is pre-existing to and ultimately alien form the people and that is then popularized from the top-down by vanguardist parties, H.C. privileges their anarchist theory as being natural to how humans have always thought. Any time anyone regardless of their class background or social circumstance riots or goes on strike, they are “living” anarchy. The only time when anarchist is posed in opposition to some practical-activity is when it involves organizations which are “authoritarian,” in which case, abstracted, dehistoricized people have left this metaphysical area of existence for something which is then determined and external to the people.

The facts are that people belong to classes, where people are from and what their relationship is to others in society creates certain forms of thinking and modes of being, and that this determines ones social and political line of combat. Another is that if everyone was spontaneously anarchist or if spontaneous rebellion alone could construct a revolutionary society needed for our liberation, this would require no intervention by anyone. Given that people have taken the time and pains to label themselves anti-authoritarian and anarchist, one can presume that they want others to assume this political label and to “evangelize” the necessity of this. If one does not think its important to talk about this idea with people, then maybe they should just shut up, because if everyone has some inherent revolutionary potential to them, then there is no need to openly talk about what we believe in. Such propaganda is evanglization and we need none of that, says the anarchist.

H.C. creating a boogeyman of democratic centralism is ridiculous for this reason, anarchists have created their own distinct political circles and like any other Marxist wants others to see the world as their small group does, so as to create one that is free like they want it to be. They are their own “vanguard” without actually taking the responsibility of creating the world that they purport people to need. Leninists, likewise as smaller group, see that there is a relationship (can I say “dialectic” instead of relationship without being fined?) between the mass knowledge people have and the class knowledge of the Marxists, the latter which fuses with the former by the militant participating in the spontaneous movement of the people in order to develop a political program.

The anarchists see the Marxist understanding there needs to be a voluntary intervention on the basis of spontaneous antagonisms in order to create a political party of the proletariat at this point as inherently authoritarian. Whereas their smaller group that is likewise comparing their subjectivity in the form of the affinity group, “crew,” etc. to the people and the organizations they participate in are not authoritarian because they do not dare to encourage them to take leadership. Keeping an invariance from the people allows them to stay pure.

Anarchism in One Neighborhood? One Squat? One workplace?

Under what we are to presume anarchy to be, one can “live anarchy” in just about any space that people temporarily illegally occupy. This does not make sense and is not revolutionary for two reasons, one is economic and the second is militarily.

Capitalism is a world system, meaning no one anywhere is self-sufficient. Obviously some countries have more or less potential for self-sufficiency, but certain problems are effectively universal. Neighborhoods, as a consequence of their population, simply can not hope to meet their own food needs. Some countries, as a consequence of their underdevelopment under colonialism, don’t have the means of producing manufactured goods (clothing, tractors) on which they depend. Another thing is revolution and revolutionary spaces erupted unevenly, because different parts of the world are exploited and face oppression more, so they are required to make decisions in their sociological space that require concessions.

The point here is that there can’t be the eventual creation of a self-sufficient economy (whether one created under conditions of gradual collapse by a vanguard of crust-punks who take upon seizing increasingly re-wilded spaces for the people) within a particular small area, but rather than the economies that revolutionaries inhereit are not self-sufficient and the severing of links with one another will have very disruptive consequences.

The practical answer inevitably is that dependence on the world market and on larger economic systems is reduced in steps. Whether the administrative apparatus is a “federation of free collectives” or a “worker’s state” does not matter, must be able to retain some element of capitalism and of a structure in which decisions are made that may not be voluntarily accepted by one group or another. Good intentions or flowerly language are feeble.

Likewise it is impossible to repel the police or the military on ones own. Making war, even a war of resistance, involves a certain authoritarian logic. In every guerrilla war today, from Colombia, to Philippines, to Vietnam or Cuba in time’s past, there has to be decisions to kill people and send some people off to die so that others may live. Anarchists sometimes claim that decentralized, non-authoritarian structures are inherently so much more efficient than centralized ones and that, as so, this can be applied to military operations. Yet when it comes to day to day planning and operations of war, whether it be in a street battle or in a massive theater of war, decisions of how to strike the enemy can not be decided by a simple up and down vote or by consensus. There has to be an element of surprise and the ability to swiftly strike an enemy, there likewise needs to be internal discipline to make sure there is no defections.

To Marxists, these questions are far more simple. People can not be expected to defeat the enemy in one day, we all (including the comrade-artist’s political organization’s members) must gradually learn how to, and must do it under leadership that creates a relative centralism necessary to manage the economy and to win in a war. I have my own criticism of PSL but to ignore the work that they have done in getting people to understand this is wrong. The responsibility of seeing the cultural gutters most anarchists have put themselves in as dead-end in achieving liberation for the people must be grasped.

Martyrdom, Or Why “Join An Organization” Is Better Than Being An Anarchist

The prevailing anti-Communism on the Pittsburgh left has meant that most people who consider themselves anarchist find themselves uncritically tailing whoever has the courage to make themselves a leader. “Reflections on Leadership and Collective Autonomy” calls for good leadership but ultimately ceded it that day, as it has again and again and again.

Most anarchists in Pittsburgh talk about “fuck left unity” but end up showing up to rallies organized by other “authoritarian” groups and then inevitably feel betrayed or like the people have been policed when the rally organizers do not do something that they think matches the revolutionary credentials of opening up ground for autonomy.

When they have marched with groups who permitted direct action or more illegal forms of struggle, they have acted sectarian towards these groups, baptizing themselves with sectarian behavior and distancing in order to feel cleansed of having to actually engage in something. The truth is many individual anarchists in this city are capable organizers and, yes, leaders, but because of their attitude to political organization and to those who are not anarchist, they find themselves being more friendly with liberal and social democrats who likewise have a preference for handing out lukewarm vegan burritos because of how nonthreatening it is, then to get their hands dirty with Marxists and other revolutionaries willing to take an arrest.

Denise Bosynak, July 2021

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Submission from H.C. received on 07.08.21

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For those sick of biting their tongues….

On a casual stroll among the rows of houses and storefronts during my all-too-short shift break, I noticed for a moment how the weatherbeaten jumble of townhouses jammed together from block to block would occasionally – and troublingly, increasingly – give way to the drab monoliths of modern condo apartments. Although so common now it has become unremarkable, upon meditation one cannot help but recognize that these bland structures serve as the symbolic and the material manifestation the violent force of capital attempting to fully dominate and shape our lives. They have become a much-hated symbol of our forced coexistence within and around these structures, perhaps to a nearly cliched degree. The sterility of their architecture marks yet another terminus-point in the march onward toward something greater in the rationalist machinery of urban planning; each distinct style of architecture marking away eras of alienation, forming a kind of rock-strata by which one could see the tandem progression and decomposition of time manifested upon a neighborhood; of ownership and the embedded speculative finance of real estate becoming more and more abstracted and alienated as time marched on. Reassuringly, even under this ever-looming spectacle and its near-total enclosure of daily life, there are still the gestures of refusal – hurriedly sprayed upon the rationalist megaliths or etched into the dark mirrors of storefront windows – articulating a desire to be free of the miasma of the political program of urbanity, and its march toward utopian ends.

In stark contrast to these actions, one sees the attempt to recuperate the grey march of modernity into expressions of art. A four-story mural on the side of a building, painted at the height of a pandemic which pushed the contradictions of the existing order into stark contrast for so many, declares that “Essential Workers Make The World Work”. Skinned with softened aesthetics of Soviet Socialist Realism, red and gold banners surround the manifold identities and uniforms that make up the abstraction of The People or The Worker. They are posed, heroic, arms akimbo as if in some vitalist physique pictoral, to be lauded for the essential nature of their work to the function of the spectacle, of commodity and capital. Nothing is mentioned of the impoverishment of their daily lives, or the nature of their exploitation that makes their work “essential” to the profit of the industries they toil within, those hours of unwaged time dominated by recovery from each valor-laden shift; many represent the wage slavery of massively-profitable local industries such as UPMC, Whole Foods, Amazon, even the contractors who bid upon the forward progress that displaces neighborhoods and terraforms our streets in the service of capital and speculative real estate.

In extolling their service to the functioning of the economy, we are meant to find hope in the struggle of the factory, the jobsite, the grocery, etc, – which we anarchists recognize as the struggle for self-management of our own immiseration. A change in factory management barely haunts the mildest contours of our imagination. We refuse to bask in commendation for being coerced to work in the name of the functioning of state and empire – either under the capitalist order we have now or some speculative order in the Worker’s utopia. To see the employment of The Proletariat in some heroic moralist form that greases the wheels of the endless progress of our enclosure by capital is hardly surprising – it is not the destitution of empire and the refusal of the existent – just the recuperation of our coercion and alienation, the veneration of grey dead time that segments our lives into hours of labor and hours spent recovering from it – all in the service of profit, accumulation, speculative finance – no matter who holds the economic reigns.

The same artist has struck again, blocks away, with a new mural proclaiming “Read More Books” in much the similar style – now with a different abstraction playing at the heartstrings of passers-by. The People – a body politic hungry for the salvation and evangelism that revolutionary education can bring about – are accompanied now by The Child – who in their abstraction represent the promise of futurity, the root of the great motivator for the accumulation of profit that brought us the proliferation of empire, of the mythology of human and societal progress, the enclosure of our lives under labor and the segmentation of time itself. Little future exists for the actual child besides the impoverishment of their eventual conversion into capital and slotting into the rational machine of economy – perhaps moreso now with civilization facing the inevitability of a slow, protracted and unequal collapse that no amount of technology, labor, or self-management – Red, “green” or otherwise – can avoid. Even the dream of The Child (or The People, being made to understand just how oppressed and dominated they really are by the salvation of the rational science of a prefigurative utopia) becoming literate in the dialectical materialism that transforms them into the Revolutionary Subject of the future obscures our immediate desire to unmake what impoverishes us right now, in the hope that some future generation will get it right someday.

Revolutionary programs such as Leninism attempt nothing more than the elevation of incremental reformism to the positionality of revolution. They are an attempt to modify the conditions of life as opposed to destroying them; of building utopias grounded in repression and historical determinism. We can see this in these murals, which attempt to replace actual gestures of revolt with better working conditions and more books that will bring about revolutionary change. No wonder groups like the PSL can simultaneously support the monopoly of violence and sovereign power in other authoritarian states in opposition to American hegemony, yet encourage participation in electoral politics for the reformation of the regime under which we exist – and can talk a big game about some mythological frontal confrontation with the state while adhering rigidly to the the form of protest and activism which is perhaps its most mediated choreography. I tip a hat to our Comrade artist who is perhaps learning that even the Gramscian war of position that creates a metaphysical space of communal proletarian aesthetic can be so swiftly recuperated into the underlying utopian futurism of Americana with just a few “censoring” brush-strokes. Perhaps there is hope that one might find this a demonstration of the dead ends of ideology – or at very least the dead ends of attempting to bring principled Socialist Realism to small business.

The anarchist – unpopular as we are in the era of clearcut dialecticism, formulaic revolutionary programs and the secular catechism of activism that affirms how morally “good” one is for throwing oneself into the struggle to bring about heaven on earth – must identify the architect of immiseration as the massification of society as manifested by civilization, economics, work and the political itself. We must find ways to resist and subvert the enclosure of our autonomy with daily acts of refusal and unmaking that embrace the immediate, with ourselves alone as the actor – not some abstraction what may carry us into a future utopia. We must be willing to name the attempts to recuperate the social relationships of the existent – the coercion we face in our work lives, the transactional economic relationships in which we feel pressured to partake, the social segmentation into atomized units with roles to play in the forward-motion of rational machinery – for what they are, and as such reject and refuse our place in the narratives envisioned for us by would-be revolutionaries. We must open ourselves for conversations that tease out and name the structures of our domination and the way these are reified in our own thought – to build space where we can construct a practice of anarchic daily living beyond the goals and mythologies of the political.

– H.C., July 2021

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You can send your report-backs, zine submissions, critiques, graffiti/action photos, demo tapes, hate mail, & memes to…

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Anonymous submission received on 06.29.21

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PITTSBURGH: Plastic trash left at Rich Fitzgerald’s home to protest petrochemical buildout, communique encourages everyone to do the same.

In the middle of the night on Tuesday, June 29th, four trash bags filled with plastic waste were left on the steps of Rich Fitzgerald’s house. The trash bags bore the message “STOP SUPPORTING THE PETRO INDUSTRY.” One can assume that the purpose of the display was to showcase what the Shell Ethane Cracker Plant and any other subsequent petrochemical infrastructure will likely produce: single-use plastic junk. 

There was a communique attached to the display. It read: 

“Residents of SWPA, you are hereby encouraged to drop off any plastic trash you find at 1314 Denniston St, to send the trash to Fitzgerald’s office in downtown Pittsburgh, or to greet him with gifts of plastic trash in person. Instead of letting the plastic end up in our food, water, and bodies, please give it to someone who loves it so much that he wants to see 1.6 billion tons more of it on our planet!”

The writer of this report can only agree with the unknown creator of this display: politicians should take responsibility for the things they advocate for.

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