The following report-backs were sent in to Filler throughout September, 2021.

Each report is autonomous, meaning that it only represents the ideas and actions of the author(s). This rundown is comprised entirely of submissions and is not meant to be a definitive list of recent autonomous action. All reports were sent in anonymously. Dates represent the day that the report was received, and not necessarily the day the action took place.

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09.02.21

“On Saturday August 28th, Pittsburgh protesters occupied the area outside the home of Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald in Squirrel Hill for most of the day to call for his resignation.”

Read the full report HERE.

09.11.21

“We wanted to test out a few methods for slashing tires, and so we went on a walk. We dressed in grey bloc, avoided main streets, left our phones behind, and enjoyed a meandering route. We targeted a CMU vehicle, a gentrifying developer’s vehicle, a corporate vehicle, and a good number of those stupid scooter things cause theyre not funny and it pisses us off that their cutting public transit in favor of “green” individualized data mining operations (btw the alarms went off on all of the scooters)

Theres two methods we liked best. First, the quick intuitive method which is just taking a knife and quickly slashing- grip so your thumb is over the hilt, thrust into the side of the tire not the top, then quickly drag in the direction of the sharp end of the blade. Keep your head away cause that burst of air is loud af. Second, the quiet and discreet method which is to puncture with an awl. Takes a while to deflate if you do it right, which means the release of air is much quieter. Punctured tires can be patched though so keep that in mind.

We know this shit isn’t going to make much of a difference politically or whatever. But we learned a lot about how we operate together, practiced a bit of sabotage, had some fun and got a workout in. Maybe someday we’ll do this again as part of a long term strategy or whatever but for now it sure as hell beats netflix.

– some dumb kids”

09.13.21

“An autonomous delivery robot got got. It was one of those stupid looking ones that makes faces and has some dude with an ipad following it from a block away, he was too far away to do shit about it lol.”

09.20.21

“Your chairman sucks and so does your wheatpasting. Fuck authoritarians.”

[An editorial note for context: Flyers promoting a demonstration commemorating the life of Shining Path’s leader, Chairman Gonzalo, were torn down around Pittsburgh. The legacy of Shining Path is homophobia, indiscriminate violence, punitive “justice,” simultaneous prohibition & drug trafficking. Filler agrees with the author of this brief report: the legacy of Shining Path has no home in Pittsburgh. We can still empathize, because no one should die in prison. That being said, anarchists should translate this sentiment into abolitionist action, and not into a fencewalker’s “Left unity” that would have us ignore the real political differences that we have with authoritarian communists.]

09.23.21

“Early in the morning of September 23rd, an autonomous activist dropped a banner off of the overpass along Tripoli Street. The banner was made to express solidarity with the climate strike happening on Friday, September 24th. Kill the cop/boss/principal in your head and stop participating in capitalist endevours for a day. Stop being complicit in the destruction of our only home; join the strike!“

09.30.21

“Some time early one morning, an autonomous person or group of persons dropped a banner on the fence of the ball field along Liberty Avenue. The banner reads “Fitzgerald Must Resign.” To the sides of the text are two red circles with a line that crosses out the words “Petro” and “Jail.” 

The banner was hung as a sign of solidarity and encouragement for the recent collaborative efforts between local prison abolitionists and anti-petro activists to hold Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald accountable. Fitzgerald has been negligent in his responsibilites to the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ), where three people recently died and torture continues to take place. Fitzgerald has not been attending Jail Oversight Board meetings, as his position requires of him. He has the power to stop many of the heinous acts happening at ACJ. Yet, he does not.

Fitzgerald has also actively encouraged environmental violence to be inflicted upon the residents of the Southwestern PA region by championing fracking and petrochemical facilities. Both industrial practices infringe upon our basic human rights to clean water and living spaces that are free from toxic substances. Fitzgerald’s greed-fueled deeds can also be extrapolated to the entire human population as fracking and petrochemical facilities substaintially contribute to the climate crisis.

For these reasons, Pittsburgh activists are calling for the resignation of Rich Fitzgerald. His harmful (in)actions have proven him to be unfit for the position of power he holds and unfit to hold any future positions of power.“

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Editorial side note / Filler Distro updates: Lately the distro crew has been busy with tabling and printing, so we haven’t been as active with Filler‘s web presence. As a result we haven’t been publishing all of the reports that we’ve received, but this rundown should catch us up. If you sent in a submission and are still waiting for us to publish it or reply, don’t hesitate to reach out and be like “yo what the hell is taking you posers so long” because chances are we either missed it or forgot. Thanks for your patience.

We’ve been distributing regional autonomous/anarchist news, ideas, music, zines and counter-information since 2012, but Filler Distro still isn’t an “organization.” So please keep in mind that we’re just an informal affinity group / network that does Filler (printing/formating zines, tabling, filling mail-orders, reading and study groups, publishing reports on the website, tweeting dumb shit, etc.) whenever we get around to it. Fuck work, fuck professionalism.

Also, we are aware of the situation with protonmail. For the time being, we will be continuing to use protonmail as our primary public email address. Filler does not retain any records or metadata of the original submissions that we receive via protonmail, except in cases of correspondence with zine authors. That being said, we encourage all potential contributors to consider their individual threat models before submitting their content to us.

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

Filler_PGH@protonmail.com

We’ll try to get back to you in a reasonable amount of punk time.

Send reports in email form, as an attachment, or better yet, on an easy to use (and free) Riseup Pad or CryptPad.

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Filler, July 2021

Click here for a PDF imposed for zine printing.

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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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Send reports in email form, as an attachment, or better yet, on an easy to use (and free) Riseup Pad or CryptPad.

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

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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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We’ll try to get back to you in a reasonable amount of punk time.

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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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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 04.18.21

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Take Enthusiastic Walks With Your Friends

Building Capacity Steadily

On a brisk but lovely Saturday afternoon, some friends gathered in a park. We stood chatting and waited for more friends to arrive. Some rode bikes. Many carried backpacks. Of course, we all wore black.

First we gathered and shared among each other stickers, zines, and other printed material. Conversations about topics large and small, the news, the weather, etc. Eventually our group moved east down the park and did a grounding exercise. Immediately following we commenced an enthusiastic walk.

The ways that enthusiasm entered the world are familiar. The state continues to kill at will. At this point, we are literally chanting “I don’t want to say another motherfucking name” because of how many people have been murdered by police.

We walked in the street, even on more trafficked roads like Penn. Our route generally followed a meandering loop that ended back in the park where had started. At that point, people scattered like seeds.

Some takeaways:

We engaged with pedestrians and some of the drivers of the cars we passed. Police abolition remains a topic that people have Strong Opinions about. Bring zines! Literature passed to an onlooker might stay with them longer than your conversation.

Stay mobile! We put the juke shoes on to try to elude a small detachment of motorcycle cops. Getting down alleys, turning off of main streets only to pop out ahead of the cop trying to get in front of us, all frustrated them and disrupted more traffic. We made decisions as a group and more importantly executed on them decisively. There was even a small amount of barricade work followed by a turn to lose motorcycles.

Practice doesn’t make perfect but it will make permanent. Actions like this create camaraderie between the people who show up. These actions slowly sharpen the tactics and practices of people in the streets. There are things that happened today that didn’t happen the last time we were out. We’ll keep honing, testing, tinkering. Opportunities will present themselves to use these lessons.

Do the same. Get out there. Find each other.

In solidarity,
– anonymous

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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 08.16.20

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On Unmarked Vans

As Pittsburgh joins the ranks of cities disappearing protesters into unmarked vans, we implore our fellow residents of Pittsburgh to resist the urge to fixate on procedural details. What happened yesterday was fucked up, and it would have been no less fucked up had the officers been uniformed and the van been clearly marked and all the proper paperwork been filled out. What happened yesterday was fucked up in all the same ways that it’s always fucked up when the PPD, or the DHS, or ICE or whoever, kidnaps a member of our community, regardless of what they’re wearing and what they’re driving when they do it.

Police abductions in unmarked vans scare us because they lay bare the absurdity at the heart of the institution of policing, an absurdity that we are conditioned not to see when the cops are wearing the right clothes and driving the right car. When the van isn’t marked, the spell is broken, and we see the police for what they are, a segment of society arbitrarily allowed to kidnap and kill with impunity.

You are right to be unsettled by what happened yesterday, but please see it for what it is, not an aberration or even a significant escalation, but an exposition into the expected behavior of an inherently violent and oppressive institution that we have tolerated for entirely too long.

– Some Pittsburgh Anarchists

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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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*update: gofundme got taken down & all donations are being refunded, new fundrazr is linked below*

DONATE HERE

Originally published on 07.24.20 by TORCHLIGHT – Anarchist News from Pittsburgh

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A local anarchist who has recently been involved in legal support sent us [Torchlight] this compendium of repressive activities by law enforcement. It has been edited for spelling and grammar, and supporting links added, but is otherwise unchanged.

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

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