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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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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Anonymous submission received on 04.14.21

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The following are three very initial reflections on events in PGH. They developed from discussions between individuals in a small, multiracial group of former area residents.

1. The abolitionist struggle is a struggle towards a free and egalitarian society. Its leadership must be collective, and power must flow from the bottom up. This is the organizational structure of successful anti-authoritarian social movements and anti-colonial struggles in the United States and worldwide for hundreds of years.

2. The singling out of fellow march organizers and affinity groups with verbal abuse and threats mirror the tactics used by evangelical preachers, cult leaders, and other grifters. It enforces an abuser’s power over a group of increasingly docile participants by marking other potential leaders as “out groups” based on lies regarding said group’s racial makeup. In the future this should be met with a harsh response, and that response should come from anti-authoritarians of color and backed up by their white comrades.

3. Bad leadership destroys social movements. Bad leadership puts us all at risk: newcomers, progressives, revolutionaries, bystanders. Leaders worthy of the title do not verbally abuse and threaten those they seek to lead. They don’t scream in their faces, attempt to publicly humiliate them, or force them to sit in the mud to listen to them talk about their own personal experiences. Good leaders do not berate disabled and queer people, nor do they accuse black people who disagree with them of somehow being “white”. That is the behavior of bullies: of abusive parents and cult leaders. And that is the behavior that you unfortunately now are dealing with.

This dangerous behavior, if left unchecked, will (and already has) lead to drastically smaller turnout in the streets. It has made abolitionists in Pittsburgh vulnerable to police and fascist violence.

Good leadership seeks to build coalition with others. It seeks to bring new comrades into the fold and to embrace their unique experiences and worldviews. It is based on solidarity — not a misguided sense of self-importance and shame.

Bad leaders should not be allowed to hold on to the power that they are abusing.

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FUCK IDENTITY,
WE NEED SOLIDARITY
by William Peduto
Pittsburgh Radical Perspectives
October 2020

Pittsburgh Radical Perspectives is a collective of students who have been participating in the movement for black lives and in the struggle of latinx people against state-sanctioned violence. We are anarchists, afropessimists, maoists, and socialists that are united in our desire for an autonomous revolutionary movement.

Contents
Synopsis – Page 2
I. We Need Autonomous Organizing! – Page 4
II. The Situation Today! – Page 5
III. Anti-Oppression Theory & Practice in Pittsburgh has Failed! – Page 9
IV. Pittsburgh as an Example – Page 11

Fuck Identity, We Need Solidarity was written collaboratively by a group of people of color, women, and queers – most of whom are students at Point Park University and University of Pittsburgh – in deep solidarity and in the spirit of conversation with anyone, be they anarchist, Marxist, progressive, socialist, or what have you, who is committed to ending oppression and exploitation materially. We’d also like to extend our unconditional solidarity with all Pittsburgh protestors who are facing charges.

This is a critique of how privilege theory and cultural essentialism has been a boom in our city and how it has incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by taking identity categories and equating them with culture, and culture with solidarity. This conflation minimizes and misrepresents the severity and structural character of the violence and material deprivation faced by oppressed people, and plays up the division among the people who are out rebelling to a point of making liberation impossible in the long-term.

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Anonymous submission received on 07.14.20

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Fred Hampton said that we fight racism with solidarity, and it is in the spirit of solidarity that I write this message. I write this as a person who has been doing organizing and activism for racial and economic justice for nearly 20 years. I write this as someone who will continue to do that work, to fight for marginalized communities against the forces trying to keep us marginalized. I write this as someone who wants to see our movements continue to grow, for struggle to spread, for the racist systems controlling us to fall. I hope that, in this spirit of solidarity and struggle, this message will be taken constructively, as that is how it is meant.

At the various protests happening in Pittsburgh over the past months, I have seen powerful testaments to the anger felt by many in the Black community. This anger is clearly justified, and I am glad there is finally a consistent, public outlet for it. Audre Lorde said, in her brilliant piece The Uses of Anger, “anger between peers births change.” “Between peers,” I will repeat.

In my past years of organizing, one thing that has become clear to me is that, if we want a movement to grow, it can only do so by empowering its participants. It does this by making space for autonomy and solidarity, solidarity between peers, as it is only between peers that solidarity can truly be built.

But too often I have seen a relationship between organizers and participants of these actions that is not one of peerhood. I have seen, rather than the spreading of empowerment, the spreading of shame, of guilt, of people talking down to each other, not as peers at all. I have seen fellow people in the streets talked to as though they are incompetent and ill-meaning, from being corrected on the proper way to raise their fist in solidarity, to a white person being told they are racist simply for wanting to speak, to show their solidarity.

White supremacy is a system which ultimately benefits the powerful by maintaining divides among the powerless, divides based on false narratives and superstitions. Some of us are manipulated with the carrot of privilege, and others with the stick of the police baton. If we do not overcome these manipulations, we will only ever be fighting for table scraps. It is for this reason that when the powerless organize we need to walk the tightrope of neither pretending that differential treatment doesn’t exist (through some “colorblind” approach), or by reproducing those same divisions within our own movements. If we want this to be about more than changing the way corporate PR campaigns are run for a few years, we need to empower people by overcoming the very divisions that keep all of us too weak to be a threat. Being made to feel guilty simply for existing is not a recipe for solidarity. Audre Lorde said in that same essay “All too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness, destructive of communication.” Only empowered people are willing and able to stand up to the police, to take the actions necessary to combat racism, to go on the offensive and to communicate with each other constructively.

People who are ashamed of themselves, who feel guilt and condescension, will not be willing to continue this struggle for the long term, and it is a long struggle we face, and have been facing. Despite my years of doing this, I am well aware that there are people who have been fighting this fight for far longer. I have continued in this fight for this long only because of the empowerment it makes me feel, and the empowerment that has been spread to the communities I care about.

But guilt-tripping participants is anything but empowering. “I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own,” Lorde continued, “Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.”

Clear choices do indeed need to be made, and I choose to feed the earth and bend the trees together with all of you. My hope is that I will find many other empowered people in the streets with us. Not people cowed by shame and guilt, but ready and willing to lift each other up, as peers, to continue this struggle for as long as necessary.

In solidarity,
a friend

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click here for a print-ready pdf

 

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Who is the Gender Abolitionist?

L. T.

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Dear friend,

I was surprised to hear from you today given how busy we both have become, but I am grateful for your letter. I have no doubt you’ve heard me mention the person you are inquiring after from across the room or have seen their text on occasion across the various social media platforms. I openly acknowledge the enigma surrounding the person you’re looking for. It seems they are too-often explained in only the fuzziest usages of language, and so this begs your question: who is the gender abolitionist?

It is probably best to begin by pointing out who the gender abolitionist cannot be. They are not a feminist, for what they strive for is neither the equality of gendered bodies nor the liberation of women from men. This latter point is important, because while the gender abolitionist admits openly that the millennia-old subjugation of women’s bodies is the root of immense and ongoing global catastrophe, they do not see the continuing existence of these bodies as possible after that patriarchy has been truly dissolved. The culmination of a global, years-long campaign to eliminate all misogynistic practices only arrives for the gender abolitionist when women and men have been rendered so materially indifferent to one another that the distinction between the two is decided to be eliminated. I will return to this point later.

The gender abolitionist is, similarly, not one who tolerates the crux of performative accounts of gender such as those advanced by scholars such as Judith Butler. Certainly, transgressions against norms of gendered practices are punished, but this does not reduce the vast structural forces that enforce those norms to the role of policing one’s appearance alone. It is true that trans women faces misogyny in-so-far as they attempt integrating into what is conceived as a normative womanhood, and that trans men may, conversely, reap social and political benefits. Yet we should not forget that it is equally true violence against a trans woman stems from their body’s challenges to a coercive and mandatory practice of strictly gendered sexuality; a body may be altered or disguised, but so long as these two methods by which one pursues performance lies strictly within the structure of gendered discourses, the gender abolitionist must reject them.

If the preceding two approaches do not set out satisfactory practices for the gender abolitionist, what does? I am not sure I can answer this question on every gender abolitionist’s behalf, but I will try my best to at least elucidate what I consider the most important points.

First, to return to a previous point: the gender abolitionist sees patriarchy, and not gender binarism, as the root of the gendered conundrum humanity has found itself in. This is a not unimportant distinction. To decry gender binarism as too limited a model for the possibilities of gendered expression is entirely anti-ethical to the understanding that it is the oppression of one class (women) by another (men) that gives rise to gender in the first instance. By shifting rhetoric from patriarchy to gender binarism, the critics of gender abolitionism immediately give up the ghost of any potential for revolutionary change, and instead embrace a comfort-oriented politics aimed at a mere expansion of terms for those beings men will ultimately, and usually already do, work to subjugate. As I’m sure you are already aware, the historical struggles of black anti-racists have shown us there is no room for the inaction of moderates who prioritize their personal comforts over substantive change during revolutionary struggle.

This is not to say that those who feel as if they to need to step outside of gendered terms in order to describe their way-of-being are at any fault for recent rhetorical shifts. Obviously, the constraints of gender have been felt by much of humanity for many thousands of years, and those who protest these limitations to their desires have always existed. Yet the ways in which this problem has been addressed have been historically unsatisfactory, often leading (if they lead anywhere at all) to the creation of new social roles which are still uniformly constrained but can function as a release valve for the pressures of ongoing, patriarchal oppression. For the gender abolitionist, the various alternatives to what is merely gender binarism, and not gender itself, are not satisfactory in a post-colonial world.

More contemporarily, an increasing number of people now describe themselves as non-binary, genderqueer, or some other variation of an essentially anti-gender impulse. For the gender abolitionist, this is an encouraging development, but it is also a potentially dangerous one. These anti-gender identities are not themselves revolutionary in content; this is all the more apparent to the gender abolitionist who, as I have already pointed out, rejects performativity as an accurate accounting of gender. On one hand, this allows the gender abolitionist to correctly locate the root of anti-gender identities and acknowledge them in their friends as something not based within performativity-based practices such as “passing”; on the other hand, the gender abolitionist recognizes that anti-gender identified friends who fall short of practicing a politics that centers the destruction of patriarchy are not yet themselves gender abolitionists. The non-binary person who still reproduces patriarchy by refusing women dialogue, by not acting in direct opposition to legislation targeting women, and by not even disputing gender directly outside their own self-affirmation cannot be recognized by the gender abolitionist as a comrade in pursuit of gender’s systematic destruction.

All of this to say: representation is dreadfully incapable of telling the gender abolitionist who can be called a friend.

As you know, it is not enough, nor has it ever been enough, for white people (myself especially) to simply call ourselves “not racist.” We long ago agreed that every white person worth their salt in a fight carries out anti-racist practices in order to not just abolish race, but specifically their own whiteness. The gender abolitionist would, I think, hold that this logic extends to gender, ham-fisted of an analogy though it may be. It is not enough for those who refuse the constraints of gender to be not men or neither woman nor man. Those who go about their lives being systematically recognized as a part of manhood must seek to be anti-men; not just among their fellow radicals, but everywhere they go. This is not a process that can leave any stragglers: trans men and non-binary people cannot abdicate their practical complicities in the subjugation of women due to a misguided belief that it is only the binary or the binary’s lack of inner mobility which is the fundamental problem. Such a belief reeks of all the mistaken judgements that characterize the white person who is racially “moderate” and believes the simple construction of a black middle class will soothe all the ills of society.

Ultimately, the gender abolitionist is the one who asks everyone to take up the practices of leveling gender just as readily as they would ask them to be anti-capitalist and anti-racist, because it is only via this leveling that gender’s horrors will be forced to exit from our collective history. Forcing some to give up their real or desired power over others will never be a peaceful or comfortable process, but it is a necessary one.

My friend, I am sincerely sorry for the length of this reply; I do hope it goes some way in prompting even more questions about this topic that we can discuss next time we sit down over a meal.

Yrs.,
L. T.

 

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Filler is a DIY media platform, recording studio & anarchist zine distro affiliated with Pittsburgh’s autonomous student network and the Steel City Autonomous Movement (SCAM).

You can send your report-backs, zine submissions, critiques, graffiti/action photos, demo tapes, hate mail, memes, etc to FILLERCOLLECTIVE [at] RISEUP [dot] NET … we’ll try to get back to you in a reasonable amount of punk time.

We recommend using Tor and guerrilla mail together if you want to submit something anonymously.

Twitter @PghAutonomy
IG @Filler_PGH

 

 

 

Received on July 12, 2018.
Originally published by Torchlight PGH — Anarchist News from Pittsburgh

As everyone now knows, on June 19th East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld murdered Antwon Rose Jr. by shooting him in the back three times as he ran from a traffic stop. When a video of the shooting went viral on social media, Pittsburgh exploded in protest. Explosions are relative of course, and the riots, looting, and torched convenience stores that characterized analogous uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore have here translated to peaceful marches to block traffic. Nonetheless the current situation is a major departure from the usual activist routine that anarchists in Pittsburgh suffer through. We offer the following points for consideration.

1. The cops are taking this very seriously.

Pittsburgh police chief Scott Schubert has showed up in person at at least two of the protests, and all of the actions inside Pittsburgh city limits have featured a gaggle of commanders and assistant chiefs, none of whom ordinarily work nights. Pittsburgh has also called in the PA state police on short notice for several protests. The cops call that “mutual aid”, but that doesn’t stop them from charging for it. Pittsburgh will be getting a bill from the state. The Pittsburgh cops have even switched to 12 hour shifts for the duration of the crisis, in order to monitor the protests and still carry out day-to-day oppression. This policy is reminiscent of the All Hands on Deck weekends in DC that the police union there fought against so bitterly, except it’s not just a weekend, it could last for weeks.

Yet despite the massive amounts of cops and money being thrown at the protests, arrests have been sparse. As of this writing there have been only five that we’ve heard of, not counting hecklers. This is not for lack of opportunity. The cops are obviously bending over backwards to avoid provoking an already furious community further and sparking a Ferguson style riot. One recent action provides a telling example.

On the evening of June 27th, a smallish crew held a noise demo at Rosfeld’s house near Penn Hills. The action was pre-planned, unannounced, short, and came off without a hitch except for one thing. Somehow word got out, and a bunch of latecomers rushed to Penn Hills, assuming reinforcements were needed. They got there after the first crew had gone home and taken most of the legal support with them. The “reinforcements” therefore arrived to a hornets nest of pissed off cops protecting one of their own, most of them from random boroughs in eastern Allegheny County that never see protests. It was the kind of situation guaranteed to send cold shivers up the spine of any experienced street demonstrator, but the bloodbath never happened. No arrests, no injuries. Even in Penn Frickin Hills the cops have now been inoculated against antagonizing protesters.

[Filler would like to add a side note here: the second home demonstration was materially supported in a variety of ways by several of the previous demo’s crews, and the action contributed to many great new relationships. This should not be overlooked.]

Anyone who thinks this forbearance indicates any good will on the part of the police should keep in mind the second prong of their strategy – shadowing every demonstration for Antwon with ridiculously obvious undercover cops (three at the morning march on the 27th had the flashers on in their unmarked cop car). Torchlight sources have spotted them at every march they have attended. People who have confronted them report that they seem very uncomfortable about being outed, so the obviousness is probably not an intimidation tactic, they’re just incompetent. They’ve still been taking tons of pictures however, presumably with the aim of identifying all the new protesters who have emerged since Antwon’s killing. This too is unprecedented here.

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2. Stephen Zappala’s job is probably safe.

“THREE SHOTS IN THE BACK, HOW DO YOU JUSTIFY THAT!?” Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala worked harder than anyone else to come up with an answer to that question. After a week of valiant effort however, he finally threw in the towel and admitted that no, he couldn’t justify that. That hasn’t stopped self-appointed organizers from first announcing an electoral campaign to unseat Zappala, and then scrambling to recruit a Black former public defender named Turahn Jenkins to take him on in the Democratic primary next year. In their haste they skimped on their research, and missed Jenkins’ blatant homophobia. Presumably they’re going to give it another shot however. We have said this before, but the electoral approach makes a lot more sense as a strategy to remove protesters from the streets than a serious attempt to replace Zappala. Just for fun though, let’s take it at face value for a minute.

As calculated and political as Zappala’s decision to charge Rosfeld with criminal homicide was, it’ll probably be enough to mollify white liberal voters who just need to be reassured the system still works. By next year’s Democratic primaries only the angriest of liberals will still hold it against him. Right wing voters on the other hand, are going to be pissed. Pittsburgh’s Fraternal Order of Police are unlikely to be any more enthusiastic about those 12 hour shifts than their DC counterparts, and all cops will be angry with Zappala for what they consider his spineless pandering to protesters. Reactionary douchebags and closet racists, who make a sizable voting bloc, will surely feel similarly. This leaves Zappala more vulnerable from the right than the left. If he has to run to his left to fend off a progressive candidate he will leave himself even more open to a Republican opponent in the general election.

There are other scenarios, most of them also unfavorable. A centrist law and order Democrat could win the primary if Zappala splits the liberal vote with a progressive challenger. A charismatic progressive-sounding candidate could beat Zappala and then turn out to be no less malicious a prosecutor. Or of course Zappala could capitalize on the donor network and connections he has built up over two decades in office to cruise to victory.

The liberals are taking reformist Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner as a model for Allegheny County. APAB of course, but Krasner’s reforms are lifting some of the weight of the prison industrial complex from the necks of Philadelphia’s impoverished communities. Liberals still need to ask themselves which is more likely, that a newly elected DA would actually carry out a facsimile of Krasner’s program upon taking office, or instead mend fences with the police, mollify the hardliners in his office, and reassure conservative voters that he’s not crazy after all by continuing business as usual with a thicker layer of progressive rhetoric.

The one ray of hope is that there just might be a progressive rebellion emerging in the Democratic Party. It’s not impossible that after another year of Trump Allegheny County voters will be fed up enough to throw the bums out, Zappala included. Turnout is lower in odd year elections, so it wouldn’t take that many voters to elect a Krasner 2.0 if one could be found. Nonetheless an election-based strategy would mean putting an awful lot of eggs in one basket with no guarantee of success and no consolation prize.

But of course that’s the point. Pittsburgh’s liberal establishment would like nothing better than to see militant resistance burn itself out in a failed election campaign and sink back into jaded exhaustion. A successful election campaign would suit that purpose nearly as well.

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3. Brandi Fisher is really good at coopting militant struggles.

A t-shirt popular during the Penguins’ back-to-back Stanley Cup runs read simply “SIDNEY CROSBY IS REALLY GOOD AT HOCKEY”. By that measure Brandi Fisher of the Alliance for Police Accountability absolutely deserves a t-shirt of her own. Her performance since Antwon’s murder has been at least as scintillating as was Crosby’s, and she doesn’t even have Matt Murray backing her up. Put another way, Brandi is near-singlehandedly replicating the work of Al Sharpton and the army of Black clergy that descended on Ferguson to pacify the uprising over Michael Brown’s murder. Pittsburgh isn’t St. Louis of course, but that’s still some impressive shit.

Brandi’s sheer versatility is amazing. Whether taking potential rivals under her wing, canceling their demonstrations unilaterally, or segueing seamlessly from one to the other, she doesn’t miss a beat. Freezing [primarily] white anarchist groups out of protest organizing, corralling angry street marches by strategic use of a bullhorn, coordinating with her friends among the police, lining white liberal groups up behind the APA banner – all part of Brandi’s extensive repertoire. It’s not just the highlight reel moves either. Brandi also displays the attention to detail that is the hallmark of the true superstar. Take the name of her group. By calling it an “alliance” she conveys the impression of being a part of a diverse group of organizations, all focused on the same goal. APA is nothing of the sort of course, it’s just Brandi and a few of her cronies. She gets away with this trick because she was clever enough not to call it a coalition.

Between the three of them, Brandi, Zappala, and the cops have had an effect. The huge pre-announced highway-blocking marches that characterized the first week of the uprising have given way to smaller and more sporadic actions organized mostly in secret. These types of actions aren’t as disruptive, but they’re harder to control. Brandi’s influence is weaker in the suburbs than within Pittsburgh, and a hard core of pissed off Black women is emerging who don’t take her every word as gospel. Medics and legal observers have been a small but consistent presence at nearly every action so far, as have white anarchists, despite Brandi’s attempts to exclude all three. It’s a little early to tell, but there are signs of something exciting coalescing that could last well beyond the current upheaval.

Better late than never. It shouldn’t have required a tragedy for Pittsburgh anarchists to start making connections with those at the sharp end of police oppression, but now that we have an opening we should take it. It’s not going to last forever. We have a natural affinity with the ones who refuse to be intimidated by riot cops, pacified by liberals, or lulled by reforms. The time to start talking to them is now.

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Related counter-information:

*the image below should read: East Pittsburgh police officer…

This report back is meant to show how protest marshals, imposed structure and hierarchically organized groups can prevent cohesive direct action, organic resistance, and collective decision making.

On July 6th, 2017, an attempt to escalate an action regarding an incredibly pressing issue was co-opted by socialists. During rush-hour traffic, about 40 people gathered to participate in a direct action against the Medicaid cuts and “Trumpcare.” Elderly people, disabled people, trans people, a few anarchists and plenty of socialists came together to stage a die in outside of Senator Pat Toomey’s office.

In the pouring rain, we blocked a busy intersection downtown, while laying in the street with tombstones symbolizing the deaths that Trumpcare may cause. While those who could were lying in the rain, 15 marshals in bright orange jackets, most of whom belonged to the DSA or Socialist Alternative (a top-down, nationwide organization that campaigns for policy reforms and is very eager to sell you their newspapers) scrambled to find people to order around. There was some confusion in the crowd that was seemingly caused by the unnecessary visual dichotomy of those with authority (orange vests) and those allegedly without it, (due to their lack of orange vests). Despite this, the die-in was a beautiful and powerful spectacle. After being told to get up, still charged with some adrenaline and energy, the crowd felt that the action shouldn’t be over. Led by elderly and disabled people, the crowd filtered into a lightly trafficked street. While beginning to start up chants, we heard shouts from the self designated marshals to stop the march. Even though there was absolutely no police presence, “leaders” with megaphones and socialist t-shirts shouted “You’re going to get arrested!,” ordering non-affiliated individuals to stay on the sidewalk.

Naturally, authoritative commands from socialists in bright orange jackets split up the once unified crowd of people. But many of us were determined to go on. Among the crowd that kept marching were the most vulnerable people, as well as the people who were most likely to be affected by the new potential legislation: a person in a wheelchair, a person with a walker, a cancer survivor, many elderly people, and a handful of young people unaffiliated with any party. Trailing behind on the sidewalk yelling at us were the young, able-bodied members of Socialist Alternative and the DSA insisting that our marching and chanting was not worth the risk of arrest by the invisible police presence. While urging people that arrest was unlikely, an elderly woman annoyed with the crowd’s hesitance said to a friend of mine “I came out here for a protest, what the hell is this?” It was bureaucratic bullshit and an amazing example of imposed hierarchies thwarting the ability and power of natural, collectivized direct action. The members of SA and the DSA, with their megaphones, fancy jackets, and fancy well-printed signs were able to garner the support of more than half of the march.

In the end, about a dozen people stuck with it. The risk seemed pretty low since there was not a police car in sight, and no calls for dispersal, despite the socialists’ warnings. Perhaps it’s worth noting that even if there was a threat, a few people were prepared for arrest when going into the action, but could not even gain contact with the city police due to the aggressive over policing of the socialist marshals. While turning the corner to reach the starting point of the action, many of those still marching spoke of staging a sit-down occupation of the lobby of Pat Toomey’s office building. On the sidewalk, trailing just behind us were the frazzled socialists and their manipulated squad of people. Before we were able to enter the building, Socialist Alternative demanded that they be heard once again. At this point in time, they announced their official withdrawal from the action. “I gotta protect my people,” one member said. By the time they were done collecting their signs and megaphones, a singular police officer entered the building and assisted the lobby staff in locking the doors. The rest of us looked in each other’s eyes, defeated and fucking pissed off.

 

I actually pity the activists working under the authority of Socialist Alternative and similar organizations. They simply follow orders and conform to pre-established structures, which blinds their ability to see the reality of a situation. It prevents them from thinking for themselves, participating freely and experiencing that magic rush that comes from organic, collective power. And anyways, people who are manipulated, manipulate people, it makes sense.

It could be cool to have a discussion about what happened during this day, but members of Socialist Alternative spend more time selling their organization than talking with people about any campaign, ideology or personal/political matter. If they were to spend less time desperately trying to get me to sign an email list or a buy a paper, perhaps we could have meaningful conversations that would prevent things like this from happening. Perhaps we could have mutual respect and it would actually mean something when they repeat words like “comrade” and “solidarity.”