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On January 20th 2017 Border-guards, modern day slave catchers, paramilitary, military, and armed vigilante groups converged to protect the swearing in of a new leader to the White Supremacist State known as The United States of America.

Tens of Thousands of bravehearts also converged upon our nations capital in collective defense, in resistance to oppressive everyday reality. Arm in arm, in solidarity, hundreds from our beloved Rustbelt city manifested beautiful acts of resistance and aligned themselves with fellow renegades and insurgents to strengthen vocal messages and make bold gestures of revolution.

Pittsburghers gathered in mass to protest our country that was never great and to unmake fascist America.

Efforts were made to end segregation and bring about emancipation in much the same way those who have came before us have – in the streets.

During the demonstrations many were arrested. We, the organizers of this fundraising campaign, pledge to supporter our local comrades. Regardless their perceived guilt or innocence, we have solidarity with them and their trajectory.

The confines of laws are set up against those who dare to dream and act upon another reality.

We ask you to take a moment and pause, to consider we are in this together, and that our sisters and brothers, our neighbors who grew up and live on the same streets as us, who pass over the same bridges as us, are under attack.

Contributing to this bail fund is an act of love and an attack on the proponents of a segregated society that would have us all rotting in jail cells or slaving away as subservient women and barbarish men.

We are not divided and we will not leave anybody behind. For some the thin vale of American Racism has been taken off, for others we have always known it to be true and we are glad you have joined us.

Matty Thomas of the Morgantown Ultra-Left Network
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The Relevance of Max Stirner to Anarcho-Communists

Introduction

Since the publication of Max Stirner’s book Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum (translated into English as The Ego and its Own; more accurately, The Unique and its Property) in 1844, reaction has ranged from complete repudiation to total, uncritical acceptance. Many strange and contradictory things have been said about Stirner. The respected anarcho-syndicalist academic Noam Chomsky has labeled him an influence on the devotees of extreme laissez-faire capitalism erroneously known in the United States as libertarians. However, there are those who have made Stirner’s ideas the very basis of their anarcho-syndicalist organizing. Perhaps such varied interpretations are inevitable when faced with a book that at times seems almost deliberately intended to disturb and disconcert.

The goal of this pamphlet is to explore the ideas of the great German thinker and their value to anarcho-communists. Some readers familiar with Stirner’s work will bristle at this immediately, pointing out that Stirner was an outspoken critic of communism. He was indeed. But the communism that Stirner critiqued was the same variety of communism that anarchists critique – authoritarian communism. Anarcho-communism, as a developed political theory, did not really exist in Stirner’s day, and the communism that Stirner had in mind was the communism of the monastery or of the barracks, a communism of self-sacrifice and general leveling. Those who would instead prefer a communism that guarantees the freedom of each individual to develop themselves as unique can find much that is of value in Stirner.

Stirner’s Ideas

Stirner begins his book by asking, “What is not supposed to be my concern?” He answers that an individual is supposed to be concerned first with God’s cause, then humanity’s cause, the cause of the country, of truth, of justice, and 1,000 other causes. The only cause that is not supposed to concern the individual is her own cause, the cause of self. My cause is not supposed to be my concern. The person who makes their own cause their concern is a selfish person. Instead, the individual is always told to put another cause before their own. We are to work tirelessly in the service of an other or others, never for ourselves. To think of doing otherwise would make one an immoral egoist. We are moral only when we are unselfish, when we take up a cause alien to us and serve it.

Stirner will have none of this. He asks, Does God serve a cause other than His own? No, reply the faithful. God is all in all, no cause can ever not be His. Does Humanity serve a cause that is not its own? asks Stirner, and the humanists reply, No, Humanity serves only the interests of Humanity. No cause can ever not be the human cause.

The causes of God and Humanity both turn out, in the end, to be purely egoistic. God concerns Himself only with Himself, Man likewise.  So Stirner encourages his readers to follow the example of these great egoists and make themselves the main thing altogether. In other words, to become conscious egoists. For Stirner, all individuals are absolutely unique, and once the individual has become conscious of her egoism, she will reject any attempt to fetter her personal uniqueness or to restrict her individual autonomy. This of course includes calls to act only in the service of something higher than one’s self. Those who sacrifice themselves to serve some higher being or cause are duped or unconscious egoists, seeking their own pleasure and satisfaction in the name of whatever cause they’ve subordinated themselves to, but refusing to admit it. They are egoists who would like to not be egoists:

“All your doings are unconfessed , secret, covert, and concealed egoism. But because they are egoism that you are unwilling to confess to yourselves, that you keep secret from yourselves, hence not manifest and public egoism, consequently unconscious egoism — therefore they are not egoism, but thraldom, service, self-renunciation; you are egoists, and you are not, since you renounce egoism.”

Stirner begins and ends his book by crying, “I have set my cause upon nothing!” This quotation from Goethe would have been familiar to Stirner’s contemporary German audience. The unstated next line of the poem is, “And all the world is mine.” The self, for Stirner, is something impossible to fully comprehend, because each one of us is constantly consuming and recreating his or her self. Stirner refers to this process of self-consumption and self-creation as the creative nothing: “Not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but nothing in the sense that I as creator create everything.” The external causes that are always asking the individual to put herself last, that treat her as if she were nothing, are now subject to being actively appropriated and used by the egoist as she sees fit.

The Ego and its Own is organized around a three-part dialectical structure. Stirner begins by giving us the example of a human life, and then compares the three stages of human development to the three stages of historical development. We begin life as realistic children. During this phase, the child is subject to physical, external forces such as his parents. However, the child begins to break free of these constraints through what Stirner calls the discovery of mind. The child, by using his wits and determination, begins to evade the purely physical forces which previously kept him in check. In this way, we move from realistic childhood to idealistic youth. The external constraints of the physical no longer hold any terrors for the youth, yet now he is subject to the internal constraints of reason, of conscience, of the ideal. The child is infatuated with the earthly side of life, the youth the heavenly. Only when one reaches egoistic adulthood is one free from both external, earthly constraints and internal, heavenly constraints. Stirner summarizes it thus:

“As I find myself back of things, and that as mind, so I must later find myself also back of thoughts — to wit, as their creator and owner. In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies — an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, e.g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: ‘I alone am corporeal.’ And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself. “

Stirner then shows these same three phases in the context of historical development: the realistic world of antiquity, the idealistic world of modernity, and the egoistic future that has not yet dawned. He compares the ancient, pre-Christian world to realistic childhood and the modern, Christian world to idealistic youth. With the rise of secularism, modern society claims to have escaped the domination of religious modes of thought over life. Not so, says Stirner. Modernity has only served to increase the domination of religion – the domination of higher essences set over the individual. One example is the Protestant Reformation. While the Reformation is and was widely regarded as a liberatory event which opened the door for “the religion of freedom of conscience” and freed life from the authority of the church, Stirner viewed it as an expansion and strengthening of religious domination. Religion was, through the Reformation, able to intrude into areas of life where it had previously been unknown. The Catholic church prevented priests from marrying; Protestantism made marriage religious. In a similar fashion, the Catholic church with its institutionalized, formal priesthood, placed religious authority outside of the individual. Protestantism, however, abolished the institutional clergy in favor of a “priesthood of all believers” and so placed religious authority within the believer – an authority that she could never escape. The result left individuals at war within themselves, torn between fulfilling their desires and being tormented by the fixed idea of internalized religious authority. Stirner compares it to the struggle between citizens and the state’s secret police.

This pattern, argues Stirner, has continued throughout modernity. Although there has been much talk of progress and achieving a freer society, of transcending the worn-out values and dead traditions of the past, modernity only transforms authority – enlarging and strengthening it by virtue of making it more invisible. The rise of humanism, for example, dethroned the crucified God and in His place exalted Humanity. But since Humanity is also an ideal placed above the individual for her to subordinate herself to, Stirner considers humanism just as much a religion as the Christianity it claims to have outgrown. “Our atheists are pious people.” Humanism, says Stirner, is actually more tyrannical than theism because the phantom Humanity is able to terrify non-believers along with the faithful. For Stirner, modernity has only increased the number of abstractions (which he called “spooks”) to which people subordinate themselves.

Stirner accuses those who fancy themselves “the free” (we might call them “progressives” in today’s jargon) of posturing as iconoclasts when in reality they are only “the most modern of the moderns.” He was highly critical of the left-Hegelians dominating German philosophy at the time and the liberalism that was rising as the prevailing force in political and social thought. Stirner grouped liberalism into three types: political liberalism (what would today be called classical liberalism), social liberalism (socialism), and humane liberalism (humanism). Political liberalism dealt with individuals as free citizens within a state, social liberalism with individuals as workers, and humane liberalism with individuals as human beings – but all of the varieties of liberalism essentialize some aspect of the individual and set it above her as something that they should subordinate themselves to. For Stirner, all individuals are more than citizens, workers, or even human beings. Human nature or the human essence can not be separated from the individual and set above her, because then it becomes nothing but another spook. For Stirner there is no universal human essence to be set above people, only individuals as they exist in the here and now as flesh and blood.

From his searing critique of modernity, Stirner moves to anticipation of the egoistic future. He urges individuals to demolish all sacred ideas and free themselves from the chains of authority. This liberation is not something the individual can let someone else do for her. Stirner makes his position clear in one of the most eloquent anarchist arguments for self-liberation ever penned:

“Here lies the difference between self-liberation and emancipation (manumission, setting free). Those who today ‘stand in the opposition’ are thirsting and screaming to be ‘set free.’ The princes are to ‘declare their peoples of age,’ i. e., emancipate them! Behave as if you were of age, and you are so without any declaration of majority; if you do not behave accordingly, you are not worthy of it, and would never be of age even by a declaration of majority. When the Greeks were of age, they drove out their tyrants, and, when the son is of age, he makes himself independent of his father. If the Greeks had waited till their tyrants graciously allowed them their majority, they might have waited long. A sensible father throws out a son who will not come of age, and keeps the house to himself; it serves the noodle right…. The man who is set free is nothing but a freed man, a libertinus, a dog dragging a piece of chain with him: he is an unfree man in the garment of freedom, like the ass in the lion’s skin.”

As more and more people become conscious egoists, they will deny restrictions to their individuality, whether these restrictions are physical or spiritual. It should be pointed out that Stirner’s idea of egoism differs significantly from other philosophies sometimes called egoism. Stirner was an advocate of self-interest, even selfishness, but he did not use these terms in the typical narrow way. Stirner was not an apostle of the never-ending pursuit of profit, nor did he preach isolation or use selfishness as an excuse to never give a damn about anyone else. For Stirner, self-interest consisted of the individual egoist actively seizing the world around her as her property. Stirner’s use of the word property has caused many readers to misinterpret him, but he was not referring to property in a limited, economic sense. Rather, he used the word to refer to anything that was not alienated from the egoist. Thus, when I take a personal interest in an idea, I reach out and make that idea my own, my property. To the conscious egoist, the only determining factor toward gaining something as one’s property is the willingness to reach out and take it. The aim of this active seizure of egoistic property is self-enjoyment. Even other people are, for Stirner, a means for (mutual) self-enjoyment:

“For me you are nothing but my food, even as I am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use.”

Those who see Stirner as an advocate of exploiting others fail to read what is written. Stirner used the example of lovers, friends going to a cafe, and children at play as examples of this kind of mutual self-enjoyment or consumption, relationships that he termed unions of egoists. The union of egoists is a relationship in which all who participate in it do so freely and voluntarily out of egoism. The egoist uses the union, the union does not use her. All participants in the union constantly renew the relationship through an act of will; if any participant is coming up short or losing out, then the union has degenerated into something else. The union was Stirner’s proposed alternative method of organizing society, a means by which egoists could “scuttle the ship of the state” and give rise to a state of affairs in which individual autonomy would flourish.

This has necessarily been only an extremely brief summation of Stirner’s ideas, intended to arouse interest and provide context for the second half of this essay. The broadness and scope of Stirner’s thought make him difficult to summarise, and this section could have easily been twice as long. Those hungry for more should refer to the recommended reading list at the end of the pamphlet. Everyone will have to decide how much of Stirner they want to take and what to do with it, but as Stirner himself said regarding interpretations of his work, “that is your affair and does not trouble me.”

“I have set my cause upon nothing!”

Stirner’s Relevance to Anarcho-Communists

It is a fact that until relatively recently, most of the anarchists inspired by Stirner were not communists. In the United States, the most well-known exponents of egoism were Benjamin Tucker and his comrades, centered around the individualist anarchist journal Liberty. Indeed, Tucker was the driving force behind the publication of the first English edition of Stirner’s book. However, he has also been a significant influence on thinkers more in the mainstream anarchist tradition. In the 1940s, the anarcho-syndicalists of the Glasgow Anarchist Group made Stirner’s ideas the basis of their organizing. They took Stirner’s idea of the union of egoists literally as a way of freely organizing within industry and thus explained syndicalism as “applied egoism.” The anarcho-communist activist and cartoonist Donald Rooum was introduced to Stirner by members of this group and has adhered to conscious egoism ever since. Emma Goldman’s anarchism was profoundly influenced by thinkers such as Stirner and Nietzsche. In the introduction to her book Anarchism and Other Essays, Goldman defends Stirner against shallow and erroneous interpretations, commenting that his philosophy contains “the greatest social possibilities.” Even the younger Murray Bookchin, whose attitude toward the German egoist later soured considerably, wrote:

“Stirner created a utopistic vision of individuality that marked a new point of departure for the affirmation of personality in an increasingly impersonal world.”

Clearly, socially oriented anarchists have been interested in Stirner’s ideas. They continue to be interested today, and for good reason. In a world where even revolutionaries too often find themselves lost among enemies of the individual and calls for self-sacrifice, the uncompromising egoism of Stirner is a breath of fresh air. So many communists, while rejecting God the Father, God the State, and God the Corporation, set up instead God the Community, a fearsome deity that Kropotkin called “more terrible than any of the preceding.” For Stirner, as for the egoistic communist, these are all spooks.

The communist egoist does not serve the People, the Masses, or any other spook. She serves herself, because she is part of the people, part of the masses. How can Humanity be happy when you and I are sad? As the self-described Marxist-Stirnerists of the Bay Area group For Ourselves observed, “Any revolutionary who is to be counted on can only be in it for himself; unselfish people can always switch loyalty from one projection to another. Furthermore, only the most greedy people can be relied on to follow through on their revolutionary project.”

Anarchists who wish to demolish the authority of the state and of capital but want to leave the authority of fixed ideas like morality, humanity, rights, or altruism intact only go halfway. For the egoist, these spooks can be even more vicious than the more visible forms of authority. Altruism, living to serve others, is one of the most pernicious superstitions extant in our civilization today. Workers engage in a terrible altruistic action every day when they labor to enrich the capitalist, who receives much simply by virtue of the fact that he has so much already. Women are victims of altruism when they waste away “living to serve” a man who is nothing but a tiny tyrant over the home. The other crimes that come from altruism are endless, and it’s clear to conscious egoists that altruistic socialism is a farce, capable only of transforming authority but not abolishing it. Egoism encourages individuals to no longer die slowly giving presents to those who give nothing in return, and from this idea flows the egoist communist desire for insurrection and expropriation.

When one applies Stirner’s notion of the spook to one of Society’s most sacred idols, private property, the implications are almost necessarily communist. How many individuals have had their ownness sacrificed and lives ruined by this horrible Moloch? Stirner ridiculed the idea of any right to property (as he ridiculed rights generally), pointing out that property is based on might, or one’s power to get it and keep it. Private property – alien property – is just another spook, because the entire world is the egoist’s property, waiting to be taken. In other words, the communist egoist has for the object of her appropriation the totality of life. Stirner hinted at this with his memorable quotation, “I do not step back shyly from your property, but look at it always as my property, in which I ‘respect’ nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!”

Stirner likewise attacked such fundamental aspects of capitalist life as the division of labor and even work itself:

“When everyone is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery . . . Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. Therefore he must become a master in it too, be able to perform it as a totality. He who in a pin-factory only puts on heads, only draws the wire, works, as it were mechanically, like a machine; he remains half-trained, does not become a master: his labor cannot satisfy him, it can only fatigue him. His labor is nothing by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another’s hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.”

In contrast to enforced, degrading, regimented capitalist work, Stirner juxtaposed egoistic labor,  which people would take part in purely from egoism and would provide opportunities for self-realization and self-enjoyment. Such egoistic labor might be done alone or in a union of egoists with others, but each participant would remain consciously egoistic. Indeed, Stirner recognized that cooperation was often more satisfying than competition:

“Restless acquisition does not let us take breath, take a calm enjoyment. We do not get the comfort of our possessions…. Hence it is at any rate helpful that we come to an agreement about human labours that they may not, as under competition, claim all our time and toil.”

Stirner’s principle critique of socialism and communism as they existed in his day was that they ignored the individual; they aimed to hand ownership over to the abstraction society, which meant that no existing person actually owned anything. Authoritarian socialism cures the ills of free competition (which Stirner correctly noted was not free) by alienating everything from everyone. This sort of communism was based on Community, on Society with a capital S, not on the union that Stirner desired. A communism that places possessions into the hands of a phantom while leaving nothing for the individual can not really be much more than a new tyranny. Anarcho-communism can benefit from these egoistic insights since they serve as a reminder that communism isn’t sought for its own sake, but as a means to guarantee each unique individual self-enjoyment and self-actualization.

Understanding Stirner’s union of egoists is crucial to understanding his ideas concerning insurrection and how they can be reconciled with more mainstream anarchist views of revolution. Stirner rejected revolution in favor of insurrection, in the etymological sense of “rising above.” “The revolution aimed at new arrangements. Insurrection calls upon us to no longer let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on institutions.” However, Stirner recognized the liberatory potential of group action and the interweaving of each egoist’s personal insurrection, even commenting on the value of strike action:

“The laborers have the most enormous power in their hands, and, if they once became thoroughly conscious of it and used it, nothing would withstand them; they would only have to stop labor, regard the product of labor as theirs, and enjoy it. This is the sense of the labor disturbances which show themselves here and there.

The State rests on the — slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the State is lost.”

Stirner urged egoists to unite, not out of any maudlin sentimentality or misplaced moralism, but out of a desire to see egoism become generalized in order for each egoist to know the pleasure that can be found in other fully realized individuals. The genuinely egoistic individual will never be satisfied with anything less than a universalized egoism. The egoist unites with those who share her interest, and all the exploited and oppressed certainly have a personal interest in putting an end to their oppression. What other anarchists have called the social revolution is, to the conscious egoist, a massive interweaving of each individual’s personal insurrection, a coming together in a union of egoist to perpetuate what Stirner referred to as “an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud crime.” The crime of insurrection, of expropriation, of revolution!

“….doesn’t it rumble in the distant thunder, and don’t you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?”

Recommended Reading

The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner. Stirner’s only book and magnum opus. Unfortunately, there is still only one English translation available, Stephen T. Byington’s. Wolfi Landstreicher is currently working on a new one, slated to appear in the near future.

Stirner’s Critics by Max Stirner. In this essay, Stirner (speaking in the third person throughout) clarifies some misinterpretations of his philosophy.

The False Principle of Our Education by Max Stirner. In this article, which predates the publication of The Ego and its Own, Stirner critiques both the humanism of the aristocratic style of education, which aimed to produce disinterested scholars, and the realism of the democratic school of thought, which aimed to produce useful citizens. Stirner, while tending to favor the latter, argues that the goal of education should instead be the cultivation of free, self-creating individuals.

“The Individual, Society, and the State” by Emma Goldman. Goldman’s most “Stirnerian” essay.

“Victims of Morality” by Emma Goldman. In this essay Goldman attacks the spook of morality as a lie “detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people.”

The Right to be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Absolutely Everything by For Ourselves. An inspired fusion of Stirner and Marx by this short-lived Situationist-influenced group. For Ourselves argue that “greed in its fullest sense is the only possible basis of communist society. The present forms of greed lose out, in the end, because they turn out to be not greedy enough.”

The Minimum Definition of Intelligence by For Ourselves. A critique of ideology and fixed thought coupled with theses concerning the construction of one’s own critical self-theory.

The Soul of Man [sic] Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde. This beautiful essay is one of the most eloquent egoist defenses of libertarian communism ever penned. It is not known for certain whether Wilde actually read Stirner; however, he could read German and similarities in style between this text and The Ego make it seem likely that he did. In any case, this anarcho-dandy’s writing is invaluable to the serious student of egoism.

Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation by John F. Welsh. The most thorough and coherent exploration of Stirner’s thought available in English. An exploration of Stirner’s philosophy, his influence on the thinkers Benjamin Tucker, James L. Walker, and Dora Marsden, and an investigation of the relationship between Stirner and Nietzsche.

By Raghav Sharma

I Got Arrested for Calling Michael Hayden a War Criminal

And I’d do it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected report-backs and statements from PSSC weekly updates – 2015 

Sweatshops Will Never be in Style!
About 15 people from USAS Local #31 and #123 paid a visit to the sweatshop-exploiting H&M in the South Side on Saturday [9.26]. While three people delivered a letter to the management, three others snuck up to the second floor to drop a banner that read “Sweatshops Will Never be in Style.” They then regrouped with the others to chant and hand out flyers to customers, briefly ignoring a security guard that was trying to get them to leave. Eventually they left the building but continued to chant and march around the entrance and hand out flyers.

Corporations abuse and exploit the labor of other countries, regardless of how many are impoverished or killed because of their actions. Unless we can hit them where it hurts – their profit margins – they will continue to get rich off the misery of others. People can bring about change by giving these corporations a bad public image, by disrupting business as usual, by getting our schools to stop buying from them, by extending our boycotts, and through direct action. All you need is a few friends.

***

Bah Humbug, Climate Scrooges! #FloodTheSystem 

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

This article, originally published on counterpunch, was reprinted with permission from the Black Autonomy Federation and comrade Northam in the third issue of Filler, “Resisting Co-Optation: Perspectives on respectability, power disparities within movements, and the whitewashing of struggle.”

The Black Lives Matter movement exhibited a schism since the first few days following the first Ferguson rebellion. I remember watching live streams of the rebellion early on as Ferguson’s youth waged small scale urban combat armed with little more than rubble and glass bottles. The heroic resistance to state power, against all odds of victory in forcing a retreat of the occupying militarized police, and in the face of material consequences in the form of a brutal crackdown, was a demonstration of courage that we all should aspire to.

The repression by the armed apparatus of the state in Ferguson (and Baltimore months later) provoked another popular response. But this response took on a different character. It seemed to want to place distance between itself and those who were engaged in combat with the police. Cloaked in a veneer of inclusiveness, it drowned out the original spirit of resistance that the rebelling youths exhibited nights before. The message was “we don’t want to be associated with them and we will ‘resist’ within the confines of rules and regulations given to us by established power”.

The latter trend did what it set out to do. It attracted a vast segment of the liberal left, respectable quasi-radicals, nonprofit organizations and sympathetic politicians. There were denunciations of riots, looting, and property destruction as these tactics were considered “infantile” and “alienating” to potential supporters and allies. Think piece after think piece was written about themerits and demerits of various tactics of resisting police occupation. The ones who fought back against the police in Ferguson and Baltimore were touted as “misguided” and “lacking in overall strategy” and they were ultimately left with virtually no material support to continue their organic, grass roots, militant struggle.

This schism between militant resistance and respectability has since become more acute. The mass movement has become amorphous, and what should have been channeled into organic revolutionary energy has dissipated under the weight of having an incoherent structure and lack of a declarative revolutionary political program that includes building international, intercommunal alliances with other Black left movements and anti-imperialist organizations worldwide. This flaw was seized upon by petit bourgeois elements, who have seen fit to reduce the Black Lives Matter movement to a “New Civil Rights Movement”, hell bent on simply effecting policy changes rather than assigning it the character of a revolutionary liberation struggle that requires a coherent strategy and a diversity of tactics for its success.

This notwithstanding, there have been enormous organizational strides made by local chapters of Black Lives Matter that have challenged the status quo at an operational level. It shouldn’t be overlooked that the overall indictment of institutional racism that the movement has reintroduced into mainstream discourse has indeed had an effect on the consciousness of various strata of the population. The question at hand is whether or not this indictment can be carried through to its ultimate conclusion: that those invested in maintaining our systemic oppression are not fit to rule and should be removed from power. The longer Black Lives Matter waits to answer this question, the more vulnerable it is to co-optation, derailment and ultimately, dissolution.

Naturally, within a power structure that is programmed to halt all revolutionary advances and counter all threats to its existence, the reformist trend within the Black Lives Matter schism obviously picked up the most steam; grant offers from foundations, visits to see liberal capitalist politicians and airtime on CNN and MSNBC ensured that. Now we have the ultimate bastardization of militant resistance manifested in the form of Campaign Zero, a series of policy proposals that seek to end police violence in America, as if it’s possible that an institution founded in order to capture and torture runaway slaves and to protect slave masters’ property can be reformed.

Campaign Zero was proposed by so called leaders of the movement and twitter celebrities alike, with virtually no consultation with the mass base of people who put themselves on the line in the streets against the armed apparatus of the state. It is an arbitrary and piecemeal attempt to synthesize militant resistance with the “progressivism” of the Democratic Party, which ultimately leaves white supremacist institutions intact. This overt display of conciliatory politics is nothing short of a betrayal by Black petit-bourgeois liberals who legitimately hate the system, but couldn’t garner the fortitude to imagine what they would do without it. It is opportunist defeatism in writing.

Anyone who has a halfway decent grasp of history knows that the wanton destruction of social movements spurred on by establishment liberals is not a new phenomenon. At this point it’s formulaic. The Democratic party exists to adapt to the ebbs and flows of social changes in this country in a manner that provides concessions while maintaining the current political economy of white supremacist, capitalist society. This is the Democratic party’s only real demarcation from the outward and openly bigoted reactionary Republican party. Both preserve the system. It is not far off to suggest that the rapid resurgence of white nationalist fascism that is currently being nurtured by the political right wing is a safeguard should the liberal wing of the political establishment fail to disrupt the movement and quell Black radicalism entirely.

With Campaign Zero and the corresponding frantic search for support within the current bourgeois political milieu, the reformists within Black Lives Matter are holding their breath for the 2016 elections, where the US ruling class will ultimately decide whether the reactionary or “humanitarian” wings of ruling power will respond to the political unrest in a way that guarantees their continued existence. While this anticipation may signal a decline in movement activity, it should be primer to those activists (who don’t have to be reminded that the white supremacist capitalist power structure will remain in place no matter who wins the presidency) to begin to nurture the elements within the movement that are not seeking to coexist with the system.

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

But a declaration is not enough. Neither are policy reforms, symbolic political actions and awareness campaigns. What is needed right now is an entire shift in orientation. A complete overhaul of all of the resources we have and can acquire at our disposal dedicated to the purpose of relinquishing our dependency on the economic system that exploits us; the building, maintenance, and defense of our own institutions and organs of power, channeled for the general uplift of our people, for our people, and by our people. The institutions that the state uses to oppress us must have their diametrical counterpart built by us for liberation purposes and must function to fill the void that has been left by the excesses and crises of transnational capitalism. Responsibility for the defense of our institutions rests with us, and this defense will also serve the purpose of resisting any and all attempts to put us back on the capitalist plantation.

We must strive for nothing less than the goal of complete self-determination and autonomy of African descended people in the US and abroad, working hand in hand in communal fellowship with other oppressed peoples who have their own contradictions with the power structure. Only by aligning ourselves with the international anticolonial, anti-imperial movement can success be achieved, as we represent only a little less than 13% of the national population.

Our organs of power will create a situation in which dual power will give rise to all manner of reactionary fascism and their corresponding weapons, as we are under siege on two sides: one side by the state that wants to continue our exploitation or annihilate us, and on the other side by the nation’s white nationalist and white supremacist silent majority which simply just wants to annihilate us. Organization, preparation, and development of the means to combat these threats is paramount and should be considered an immediate priority.

This is our reality. We do not live in a reality whereby those who are materially invested in our subjugation will suddenly come to their senses, take pity on us, pay us reparations while we ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after like the reformists tacitly imply by their attempts at negotiating with US elites. The rest of the colonized and neo-colonized world is ready to shake off their yoke of oppression the moment it becomes clear that we’ve made our move. Evidence is seen in the way that African Jews in Israel were inspired by videos of Baltimore’s youth overrunning riot squads. The comrades shutting down traffic arteries and battling police in Tel Aviv were hardly inspired by paid activists with forty thousand dollar a year salaries and 401Ks, but by those who heroically abandoned all respectability and asserted their identity as a threat to the establishment.

US fascism would not have established itself so securely, with every safeguard in place and every mechanism utilized at its disposal to stifle the growth of revolutionary consciousness of Black people in the US were we not innately and at our deepest core threatening to the white power structure. Acknowledgement of this orientation puts US fascism on the defensive. A movement of angry Black people should be threatening. It should heighten contradictions, it should make those invested in the status quo uneasy, and it should provoke raging emotions in ourselves as well as our class enemies.

The movement for Black Autonomy, although nascent, is the inevitable outgrowth of a decaying strategy of reformist appeals to power. We know Black lives matter. The question is whether or not we have the capacity to check any attempts at devaluation by counterrevolutionary elements from the outside and from within. The autonomous movement is building this capacity, synthesizing elements of anarchism and revolutionary socialism. Modern examples of this type of political self-determination include the Kurdish PYD/PKK in Syria and Turkey and the Zapatistas and Autodefensas in Mexico.

The autonomous movement explicitly rejects of the kind of separatist reactionary nationalismwhich is unfortunately endemic to many formations within the Black Liberation movement. It rejects the hetero-patriarchal ethos that women should be relegated to servant status. It rejects the demonization of Black queer and trans people and instead uplifts them as leaders. We hold that one immediately relinquishes the role of “vanguard” if one subscribes to Eurocentric authoritarian hetero-patriarchal standards of gender and their corresponding roles as the norm.

The movement for Black autonomy does not include coexistence with white supremacist authority in its platform. We understand that the development of a scientific, intersectional revolutionary political theory that is applicable to our specific material conditions in the US, and our development of a praxis that tangibly counters the power of white supremacist institutions that control our lives, is the difference between being victims of genocide or soldiers at war. We understand that the striving for autonomy means provoking violent reactionary resistance to our advances. We accept this. We understand that Black liberation means human liberation, so we act in solidarity with the oppressed. Long live the Black resistance. We have nothing to lose but our chains!

An article from Filler  #3 by A. Sid
[Filler Collective // Students for Justice in Palestine // Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition // Pgh Autonomous Student Network]

For centuries, the American political system has served one primary function: to act as a safety valve for this nation’s most vital dissent. By funneling voters into one of two camps, the American ruling class has effectively nullified any and all populist causes that do not receive lip service from either political party. When one of the parties does decide to embrace the desires of their constituents, they do so in the least effective manner possible, opting instead for surface level changes that appease enough of the population to defuel the cause.

Bernie Sanders’s recent call for a “political revolution” has ignited a fire in the hearts and minds of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. Sanders’ economic populism is a welcome sight for a nation still struggling to escape the mire of recession. But for many on the left, Sanders’ decision to run as a Democrat is disheartening enough to dismiss him altogether. In conjunction with his stances on the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people and the Black Lives Matter movement, this has made Bernie seem soft in the eyes of the far left. Once again, our end of the spectrum has chosen to forsake the political process in favor of the tried-and-true methods of direct action and outside agitation.

Herein lies our failure. Our refusal to work with the system is borne out of an entirely justified fear of having our causes co-opted and our missions left incomplete. History has taught us that expecting the system to deliver the reforms we seek is a futile task. But if we’re willing to dig deeper, we find that systemic change can indeed be achieved through the system. A prominent example can be found in the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1989, a bevy of Soviet satellites held elections – preceded by massive protests – which freed these newly independent nations from Moscow’s clutches. By ousting the Communists, the former Soviet republics established democratic systems that, although still plagued by corruption and oppression, allowed for infinitely more freedom than the USSR did.

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

Drastic restructuring of the American political system is not as radical a cause as one might think. Voters from all walks of life – whether Republican or Democrat, young or old, white or black – feel that the system does not serve them. Specifically, Americans harbor a great deal of resentment towards a bipartisan political system that is increasingly polarized and ineffectual. Although politically moderate (at least relative to the far left), these citizens can easily be convinced to support a seemingly radical cause so long as it comes draped in the phony fabric of political legitimacy.

As it stands, the only candidate capable of conveying such a message is Bernie Sanders. A lifelong independent, Sanders has repeatedly called for measures – such as the public financing of elections and rigorous campaign finance reform – which would drastically reduce the power of the two political parties. It is not unreasonable to assume that Sanders could be pushed further. But for this to happen, the restructuring of America’s political system must become the defining issue of the 2016 presidential race.

This is where we outside agitators must direct our efforts. By no means am I suggesting we devote our energy to the Sanders campaign. Rather, we must create an environment in which any viable presidential candidate must be dedicated to substantive structural reform of the American political system. Thus far, the only candidate for whom such a stance seems feasible is Sanders, but the identity of the mouthpiece matters not. What matters is that the only cause captivating the public during the much-touted first hundred days of the next Presidency be busting the two biggest trusts this nation has ever known: the Democratic Party and the GOP.

The ebb of flow of American political power has reached a pivotal point. We live in a nation ostensibly bound to the democratic process whose citizens feel alienated enough to abstain from democracy altogether. In this time and in this place, we have a chance to change everything. Our job? Converting America’s widespread political disaffection into action. Our targets? The very visible elected figureheads preserving the American oligarchy. By making our presence known in the traditional political sphere – through local direct action everywhere we can reach – we can break through the false dichotomy that permeates the chambers of power across the nation. By focusing on campaign finance and electoral reform, we can tap into two issues that draw the ire of broad swathes of the population while also possessing the potential to decentralize political power.

Eliminating legal barriers to entry for third-party candidates would be the next step, ensuring that the most pressing issues – whether local, state, or federal – have someone to speak for them. Further reforms to combat the exclusion of undesirable voters would be needed on a case-by-case basis, in situations such as Jeb Bush’s 2000 purge of Florida’s voting polls or the recent spate of voter ID laws. The specifics can be dealt with later. What cannot be postponed is the struggle to revitalize our democracy.

To many of my comrades who fight to end capitalism and bourgeois democracy, this may appear a betrayal. If our ultimate goal, however, is the decentralization of economic and political power, then certainly any step in that direction is progress – so long as we continue the fight. Furthermore, the existence of a mass movement can serve as a buffer to political subversion, particularly a movement with these goals. So long as there remain voices within the movement clamoring for further decentralization, power cannot remain apart from the people forever. These first steps are nevertheless vital, and it is vital we accomplish them quickly, for the clock is ticking. Climate change poses an existential threat to all humanity and dark clouds of war loom on the horizon. Will our system stand between us and destruction?

Filler #3 (2015) submission – Kai

[AID-USAS Local #13 // Divestment Student Network // Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition // Pgh Autonomous Student Network]

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

In early July I shared a space in New York City with young organizers from 10 different states, all at varying stages of creating or growing a student power state-wide network. An organizer out of Philly that I met serendipitously months ago had reached out to me and another friend interested in establishing a Pgh-Philly connection in hopes of growing a more cohesive Pennsylvania-wide movement. A staff member from Student Power Network bought my Greyhound ticket from Pittsburgh to NYC Thursday afternoon – at 6:15am the next day, I boarded my bus. I arrived at the station in NYC around 5:30pm and immediately headed to the Murphy Institute where I was told most of the conference would be taking place. At this point I knew virtually nothing about who organized the meeting, who was going to be there, or the purpose of the weekend.

A charismatic 42-year-old man named Billy Whimsett helped to welcome everyone – Billy would become a large piece of the enigmatic puzzle I was introduced to over the course of the weekend that culminated in a number of presentations at the Ford Foundation intended to entice large-scale donors into funding this new model for a “grassroots” student movement.

I came to learn that Billy was an author, founder of several organizations and incubators, most recently Gamechanger Labs, and had fundraised over $10 million for politically progressive non-profits and organizations over the years. Gamechanger Labs was the incubator for Student Power Network, which was aiming to replicate state-wide student power across the country after Billy saw what was happening organically with the Ohio Student Association and the Dream Defenders in Florida. A sentiment I heard echoed from different people throughout the weekend was that Billy was a “complicated” character, whatever that means.

The weekend was generally relaxed compared to other intentional conferences/trainings – starting on time wasn’t strictly enforced and there was a lot of “structured unstructured” time where we could bring to the table specific topics/issues we wanted to talk about. I took advantage of this to create space to talk about respectability politics, making activist spaces more accessible and the dangers of the non-profit industrial complex and brainstorming ideas of how to circumvent that.

The first conversation dedicated to respectability politics and the accessibility of “activist spaces” turned into an impromptu people of color caucus where we delved into the dilemma of double consciousness and how it was necessary for organizers of color to be cognizant of how we act and adapt in accordance to ideas of professionalism and well, whiteness. The next conversation we had on how to deal with the growing non-profit industrial complex was ironic given the circumstances of the weekend – several of the folks there were recently full-time organizers who were dependent on grants and other sources of funding to get by.

The other young activists I met throughout the weekend were all on point – radical, militant, and unapologetic. I met several folks that I am sure I will cross paths with again in the near future and look forward to seeing all that they accomplish in the coming years. However, there was a weird tension I felt throughout the weekend because here is the reality – we need money. There’s not a lot of money in organizing. We got bills to pay, kids to feed, and other shit to take care. Although we’d like to dedicate all our time and energy to attacking the imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal system we live in, it’s hard when you don’t got money. One of the most common ways to tackle this is through grant writing and other ways of asking for money from those that do have it. How do we get that money without conceding to the existing power and influence that comes with having money?

After a weekend of learning and fruitful conversations, young organizers from each of the states where a student power network was growing presented on stage at the Ford Foundation in front of wealthy funders who we were told were “on the same page” in terms of our politics, but that was (and continues to be) a hard pill for me to swallow. The Ford Foundation is the second largest foundation in the country and is an organization that has the power to give out million-dollar grants without blinking. It was also created in 1936 by industrialist and capitalist Henry Ford along with his wife, Edsel Ford. Those in the audience, we were told, were once in the same boat as us – young activists dedicated to anti-racist, anti-capitalist organizing. They were now the people young activists had to woo to give them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Immediately it appears there is a glaring conflict of interest – my assumption is that to be in a position of that much money or power is that you play the capitalist game and that it’s in your best interest that the game continue. Here are young people on stage describing actions and organizing efforts in direct confrontation with the current system (that you are profiting off of) and their intentions to build a new one.

Let’s assume that these wealthy funders are all on board with revolutionary change and tearing down the capitalist system. Even at the most basic level of the exchange taking place, the principle behind it is assuredly self-defeating and perpetuating the very power dynamics we aim to change. Here are young folks having to explain to rich (mainly white) funders why the work they’ve done is worth their time and money.

Look at what we’ve done, and lend us legitimacy and give us the power to continue because you, with your money, can determine what history will look like. It’s in your hands.

One major issue with this relationship is the narrative that is being told and how history will be remembered. The climate justice movement regularly erases the work of indigenous people and other people of color because of the overwhelming white narrative. An example of this is an article that was posted covering a march for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate held in Toronto on July 5th. The article named a bunch of the high-profile “climate leaders” present, such as Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, describing him to have “Done more than almost anyone to put climate change on the agenda, leading the charge…” While McKibben has been on the forefront of denouncing climate change, so have countless others (read: PEOPLE OF COLOR, INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, LOW-INCOME PEOPLE, all of whom are disproportionately affected by climate change and are disproportionately paying the cost of an extractive, exploitative economy), but because of McKibben’s status and power through money, he will be the one remembered as leading the charge ten years from now. We must intentionally change the narrative or run the risk of perpetuating the very system we claim to be fighting.

We need not only a redistribution of wealth, but a redistribution done in a radical way. Not a redistribution where those already with money and power and voice are setting the precedent for what a new system would look like. We need funding for revolutionary organizing but must be conscious of how that funding affects our organizing and actively explore ways to challenge traditional models and methods of exchange. With grants, there are often deliverables and tangible results that the recipient must meet and point to in order to justify to the funder that the recipient is doing what they are told. Funding changes the narrative in more subtle ways as well – organizations must cater to certain grants by choosing language carefully and at times even changing their priorities in terms of campaigns, strategy, etc. I’ve heard grant writing described as an art – one must craft a request in such a way that it promises to meet criteria set by the funder but still stay true to the goal that the recipient sets out to achieve. This is a slippery slope. We can see how monitoring language here and there becomes a larger issue when it begins to affect the messaging as a whole.

At the 2015 US Social Forum in Philadelphia, PA, there was a workshop regarding legal aid for future actions at the 2016 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. One of the speakers was a lawyer who was committed to defending protesters and activists. When asked about his opinion on certain tactics used by protestors and what he thought would be most effective, he clearly stated that it was not his role to say. He went on to explain that he stands behind the movement and in order to do so requires trust in organizers and their judgment; he recognized that we each have a role to play in the larger fight for social justice. His role is to guide activists through the legal bureaucratic bullshit and freely deferred questions about organizing to those that were on the front lines. This reflects trust in others in the movement and humility through recognition of our individual roles. Similarly, if we could establish funding in such a way that large sums of money were not given in a coercive manner or as a symbol of power, it could instead reflect trust and solidarity. However, until that day comes, I will be suspicious of large foundations that are notorious for advancing neoliberal and imperialist agendas while professing to be socially progressive. The revolution will not be funded.

How do we move forward from here? What does it look like to challenge ideas of corporatization, privatization and capitalism in the way we organize? I’m not sure – I’m just starting to ask these questions and explore. Thankfully, there’s a wealth of much more experienced folks out there who are and have been actively exploring avenues through worker cooperatives, intentional collective living spaces, and alternative solidarity economies. It’s overwhelming to be sure, but exciting to struggle with the fact that the legitimacy of the rules we live by now are entirely dependent on us being complicit; we need creativity and imagination to start making up our own rules.

“It’s good to see Ford finally putting money back into Detroit,” an organizer from Michigan began his pitch. And it was good to be reminded of why we’re in this mess in the first place.

***

Not convinced in the dangers of the non-profit industrial complex? Check out the comic / zine,“Non-Profit Industrial Complex” Or the book it’s based on, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

[The original, print-ready PDF of Filler #3 is available at The Internet Archive and another one at The Anarchist Library]

The University of Pittsburgh’s student orientation guide: Very Dank Edition

Disorientation: The Task Ahead of Us

Welcome to Pitt! From the prison of high school, it looked cool and inviting, full of new freedoms and the chance to learn something real for the first time. But soon enough, you’ll watch the excitement fade. The task of orientation is to clue you in on what’s ahead, to provide a glimpse into the new social terrain.

Pitt is the rich suburban kid’s first real glimpse of something resembling diversity. Pitt is the working class kid’s first five-figure loan. Pitt is Chancellor Gallagher, decked out in the best suits money can buy, threading his way through the lines of underpaid janitors, cooks and security guards rallying outside his office for a better contract and a living wage. Pitt is a private police force harassing people of color on Forbes, or taking pictures of student protestors to build files on troublemakers. Pitt is breaking your roommate’s friend’s brand-name bong underneath the Schenley Bridge. Pitt is the ongoing gentrification of North Oakland and outright colonization of South Oakland.

Pitt just raised tuition again this year.

Aging high school rebels now rail lines of crushed-up Adderall in library bathrooms. Teenaged football stars now stagger from the frat party to the Econ recitation. Entire semesters spent studying the latest scientific forecasts of the coming century’s mass extinctions, ocean acidification and sea level rise of five to fifteen feet are consumed with the same glazed eyes found scattered across a college algebra seminar. Lectures on the tipping points recently crossed, on the massive population displacements and inevitable global destabilization, elicit raised eyebrows but nothing more. After all, tomorrow is Thirsty Thursday and my geology lab was due yesterday.

As the illusion of social peace crumbles with this year’s uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Seattle and the Bay Area, Pitt invites you to spend your free time drinking in sweaty basements, to join the iPhone Generation and the growing army of debt-ridden interns. After all, you are some of the smartest people they could find and you’re needed on the team – the Clinton team, the Trump team, the IBM team – pick it, there’s a slot for you somewhere.

All this and more is yours for just four easy payments of $28,000! Welcome to Pitt.

I guess you could say that we – the small group of your new classmates who wrote this nonsense – are a little jaded. Of course it’s not all bad; Pittsburgh is a pretty awesome city. But we can’t help but to feel there is something missing from Pitt’s campus culture. It is an absence that speaks to those vague, fleeting thoughts so many students drag from the classroom to the library. Sure, it’s easy to drown out the doubts leftover from those first college applications with weekend binges and house shows, but perhaps it was the entire high school experience that left us suspicious to begin with. There is a rational angst that we struggle to articulate: the absurdity of what we accept as “normal” today.

We browse shopping malls for aesthetics and attitudes, and then fiddle with social media and smartphones until they fit just right. We namedrop brands and artists as if they count as our own expression, and then we scoff at the banality of our parties and scenes as if we play no part in their creation. Our perceptions of both the successful career and our own imaginations have been swept away by notions more lavish and distant than Aldous Huxley could write about. Apathy is hip.

But how can we students even think to blame ourselves? Youth today look toward a future deflated by ecological and economic collapse; a future where opportunity is postponed in light of the immediacy of debt, stagnating wages, and corporate oligarchy. A future where the promise of sustainability is found exclusively on billboards advertising “clean” coal, “green” skyscrapers, or hope, change, and vote; a future where even the most optimistic visions of climate change include mass migrations, displacements, and extinctions.

The point is we do not choose to be apathetic. Rather, apathy has been institutionalized, integrated into the relationships we have with education, work and culture. Education does not cater to our personal needs and desires, but is instead intended to prepare us for participation in the market.

The logic of the market is also now the logic of the classroom. Students are customers, paying for-profit businesses to consume “products” in the form of marketable career paths. After all, you need to go to college to land a good job. Our understanding of what it means to be a student is confined to a sort of profit-driven pragmatism, where the pursuit of knowledge ultimately becomes a race to the ever-shrinking job market.

This race places us in direct competition with other students to determine who will have access to the most resources upon graduating. But so many people are enrolling in school that the job market is oversaturated with college degrees, and by the time some students finally have enough credentials to follow their dreams they’re pushing 30 and working just to pay back loans.

And so we approach education with the same tired indifference we dedicate to the part-time jobs that prevent us from sleeping in on weekends.

The atmosphere inside today’s classroom is disorienting. Feedback comes in the form of customer satisfaction surveys. The curriculum is set before the teacher even meets their students. Discussions of real world events never extend beyond the speculative bubble of academia, where debate is applauded so long as it neglects social immediacy; systemic racism is discussed without reference to the intersection being shut down by protestors right outside the classroom window.

And just what are students here for anyway? You would think the $1.2 trillion in student loans, a figure that inversely correlates with state funding cuts, would at least give college graduates some sort of edge in the race to the job market, but reality is as sobering as the bills. Over 40 million students will be graduating in a worse financial situation than any generation in American history. Nearly the entire prospective labor force is already faced with a lower standard of living than that of their parents.

But work hard, play hard, amirite?

There’s potential for so much more than this. The curtain is lifting on the same scene at universities all over this country. Whether it’s Berkeley, or Madison, or NYU, students have discovered that the only way to learn anything is to reclaim our passion, and the only way to make life truly exciting is to fight back.

How you fight is entirely up to you. We painted the situation with a broad brush, but students aren’t so monolithic. Our generation is bigger and more diverse than the Baby Boomers, and we all have different interests, needs, desires… maybe you want to throw parties where sexist assholes are kicked out, maybe you want to use your parents’ money to buy weed to share with your classmates who can’t afford it, maybe you want to “redecorate” the walls and alleyways of Oakland, maybe you want to join a student group that vibes with what you feel, maybe you want to kick our asses for writing this bullshit. The point is nothing’s going to change unless you act in your own interests, here and now.

Let’s fuck shit up this year.

***

[Adapted from “The Task Ahead of Us” – Filler #3 – Pittsburgh 2015, Communiqué from an Absent Future – Research and Destroy – California, 2009, Welcome to NYU – New York, 1968]

[The original, print-ready pdf is available at the bottom of the page at The Anarchist Library ]