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Torchlight, a new anarchist counter-info site based here in Pittsburgh, released this response to an anonymous submission we published several weeks ago. (Pretty cool to see a dialogue starting, although it looks like they think we wrote “Solidarity in the Streets,” which we didn’t. We just used to be the only counterinfo game in town, but now we’re not!)

Pittsburgh activism has long and sordid history of cooptation by the police. Liberal organizers invariably honor a tacit agreement in which they guarantee that their “actions” generate minimal material disruption of the prevailing order, in exchange for the cops’ allowing them to proceed unimpeded. The police, notoriously lazy in Pittsburgh, benefit from protest organizers doing most of their work for them, plus they don’t have to tarnish their image by pepper spraying and arresting protesters. Organizers in turn get to boost turnout by offering a risk-free, conscience salving experience, while claiming success based on nothing more than seamless logistics, regardless of the lack of movement toward their claimed goals.

On the ground the result will be familiar to anyone who has attended a protest in Pittsburgh in this century. Dozens of marshals, police liaisons, and PR flacks, few to no legal observers or medics; inspiring speeches by carefully chosen “leaders”, zero opportunity for spontaneous action; occasionally unpermitted, but always pacified.

Sometimes though, an action breaks this mold and the police end up having to do some work, which brings us to a recent article by the Filler Collective. The piece is a criticism of a pair of noise demos at Allegheny County Jail at which some windows were broken, the most recent of which took place on March 20. Eleven people were arrested and are currently being charged with multiple felony counts. The other noise demo happened on New Years Eve 2011 and resulted in dozens of protesters being detained, but no arrests. The author focuses their criticism on the 2011 demo, claiming that they weren’t at the more recent one and do not wish to risk jeopardizing the cases of the arrestees. However the timing of the piece, and in fact the very inclusion of the recent demo, make a joke of this posture. If Filler really doesn’t want to criticize the March action why mention it at all?

Instead, the author uses the 2011 noise demo as a proxy, in an attack that is misguided as well as displaced. Their thesis is that since the organizers didn’t intend or prepare for windows to be broken, the window breakers are responsible for the detentions that followed. More generally, they believe that all protests should have a pre-planned and communicated level of risk so that participants can make informed decisions about whether and how to involve themselves.

That’d be nice wouldn’t it? If you could know ahead of time exactly how risky an action was going to be, if everyone who showed up could be counted on to follow the same script, if there was never any uncertainty about how the cops would respond to a particular tactic? The only problem is it’s impossible. There is no way to reliably predict what will happen at a protest without going full liberal and extinguishing any possibility of militancy before it can begin – the usual approach in this town.

That doesn’t mean organizers haven’t tried, and Filler cites a couple of very selective examples from recent history. One is the mobilization against the 2009 G20 summit meetings in Pittsburgh, which featured the Pittsburgh Principles, a framework designed to let activist groups with different politics work together effectively throughout the demo. (Ignore for now the vast difference between a multi-day mass mobilization and a half hour jail noise demo.) While the Pittsburgh Principles were reasonably successful in their purpose, they didn’t prevent the cops from brutally attacking a completely non-confrontational protest against police brutality on the Pitt campus in the final hours of the event, not because any windows got broken, but just because they wanted to. The author of the Filler piece conveniently fails to mention this.

Filler’s other example is the J20 mobilization in DC against Trump’s inauguration, where a wide variety of tactics were used by a broad coalition of groups, all of which were clearly announced ahead of time, supposedly allowing participants to gauge the risk involved. While the various blockades, rallies and permitted marches were left comparatively unmolested (by G20 standards at least), J20 was hardly a testament to the predictability of police repression at mass mobilizations. The 200-plus felony arrests at the black bloc march were an unprecedented departure from past police practice in DC, even to the point of violating court orders.

A broader look at the history of big demos (not to mention small ones) reveals similar patterns. The practice of designating red, yellow, and green zones during the global justice movement never worked. In fact arrests were probably more frequent in green zones because protesters there weren’t expecting them. The Miami Model of protest policing involves cracking down on protesters of all stripes, peaceful or otherwise, actually protesting or not. Witness the raids against the puppet warehouse at the 2000 RNC in Philadelphia, and the convergence center and legal support office at the 2008 RNC in St. Paul, where no one was even protesting anything, let alone breaking windows.

Hell, the cops don’t always manage to honor their own designated safe areas. At the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto police pepper sprayed and beat people in the free speech zone. And let’s not forget the 2001 FTAA meetings in Quebec City, where the cops used so much tear gas it got into the ventilation ducts of the building where the delegates were meeting.

In short, the idea that we can predict what the cops will do in the face of any meaningful protest is ridiculous. It might look like we can in Pittsburgh, where protest theater too often takes the place of militant action in the streets. But that’s just policing ourselves to save the cops the trouble. So instead of blaming arrests, detentions, beatings and other repression on our own comrades, let’s pin the blame where it belongs – on the cops. Instead of relying on our enemies to restrain themselves if we don’t provoke them, let’s rely on ourselves. It’s time to build the support structures necessary to resist police action as it happens, to propagate a culture of tactical awareness, instead of expecting followers to show up and blindly follow the orders of few self appointed organizers.

Determining what this might look like in practice is left as an exercise for the reader, but in the Trump era it is one well worth undertaking. Just don’t forget to tell Torchlight about it…

Anonymous Submission

Solidarity and Broken Windows

On March 18, around 80 inmates at Allegheny County Jail participated in a one-day sit-in strike demanding access to adequate medical care. Healthcare at the jail is reported to be among the worst in the country. The same day, a community organization that had formed to address healthcare issues at the jail, the ACJ Healthcare Justice Project organized a rally outside the jail in support of striking inmates. In the announcement for the rally organizers wrote, “This rally is to publicly acknowledge the demands of those on the inside, to let them know that they have support on the outside, we will make noise, we will speak truth, we will let Allegheny County know that jail is not justice.”

The following day a group of local activists who are not affiliated with the ACJ Healthcare Justice Project organized a “noise demonstration” outside of the jail. The demonstration went smoothly and was well received by prisoners, so the idea for another noise demonstration was spread via word of mouth for the following day. While the ACJ Healthcare Justice Project didn’t organize either of the noise demonstrations it promoted both on its Facebook page.

At some point during the second noise demonstration someone (or several people) apparently broke several windows at the jail and smashed out the windows of some of the police cars in a parking lot. Police rounded up and arrested 11 random people and told reporters that others had gotten away. While windows certainly appear to be broken it is unclear whether any of the people who were arrested were responsible for—or even had prior knowledge of—the property damage.

This incident is likely to ignite a kneejerk (and probably intellectually hollow) discussion over the efficacy of property destruction and the way that social movements in Pittsburgh use different types of tactics. I wasn’t at any of the rallies and all of the information that I have about the events comes from corporate news reports and a press release from the Pittsburgh Police Department so I can’t speak with any level of authority on what happened on March 18^th, 19^th or 20^th. Further, I would never offer critical commentary on an action while people were facing serious charges and state repression.

Hearing about this incident did, however, give me an opportunity to reflect on another demonstration that I participated in a little more than five years ago. The statute of limitations for that action has long passed so I feel comfortable bluntly sharing my perspective.

New Year’s Eve 2012 Global Noise Demo

In 2011, during the waning days of Occupy Pittsburgh, national and global prison abolition organizations issued a call for noise demonstrations outside of prisons and jails around the world on New Year’s Eve.

“Noise demos outside of prisons in some countries are a continuing tradition. A way of expressing solidarity for people imprisoned during the New Year, remembering those held captive by the state. A noise demo breaks the isolation and alienation of the cells our enemies create, but it does not have to stop at that. Prison has a long history within capital, being one of the most archaic forms of prolonged torture and punishment. It has been used to kill some slowly and torture those unwanted – delinquents to the reigning order – who have no need of fitting within the predetermined mold of society.”

Occupy Pittsburgh answered the call. We organized a noise demonstration outside of Allegheny County Jail (which was just a few blocks from the Occupy camp) and about 100 people showed up with pots and pans, flashlights, and even a PA system blasting dubstep. We marched up the bike path behind the jail blaring our music, flickering our flashlights and banging on our pots and pans. Inside the jail, prisoners responded by flashing the lights in their cells and banging on the windows. It was a powerful moment.

At the same time, on the other side of the building, someone smashed several of the big plate-glass windows lining the arraignment court. Our noise demonstration was so loud that none of us heard the breaking glass.

At the end of the demonstration we marched back up the bike path to leave and end saw a single police car with its lights on. Most of us assumed that the officer was just going to tell us to leave (which we intended to do anyway) so we just kept walking. But as we got closer we realized that he had his gun drawn. More and more officers rushed in, also with their guns drawn and ordered us all up against a wall.

Apparently, when the windows on jail broke a court employee thought that someone was shooting a gun at the jail and called 911 to report an active shooter situation.

We were held up against that wall for hours while police reviewed everyone’s identification, ran our information through the system to check for warrants (one person was taken into custody for an outstanding warrant for disorderly conduct), and reviewed security camera footage. By around 1:30 am, police determined that none of us were the ones who broke the windows and let us all go.

No one was ever charged in connection with that incident and, to this day I don’t know who broke the windows. But the situation left me feeling taken advantage of.

I don’t have a political or strategic objection to property destruction. At the time of the New Year’s Eve protest, I had been to plenty of actions where I knew there was a high likelihood of property damage including the G20 actions in Pittsburgh a few years earlier and numerous IMF-World Bank protests in Washington DC. But in those cases, I went into the action knowing what to expect and I chose to participate. On New Year’s Eve in 2012 I didn’t make that choice.

There was no indication in any of the promotional materials for the Global Noise Demonstration in Pittsburgh that property destruction or any other illegal activity was likely to occur, no reference to embracing a diversity of tactics, and no warning to anyone about the risk level. Whoever broke those windows transformed a very low risk demonstration to a much higher risk action without the knowledge or consent of the other 100 people participating.

Informed Consent

If I had known the risks I honestly don’t know whether or not I would have gone to the protest at the jail that night. But if I had, taking the risk associated with participating in that action would have been my choice. If I had known the risk I also probably wouldn’t have downed a half-dozen beers before heading out (remember, it was late on New Year’s Eve).

I want to be absolutely clear that I am not asserting that there are any parallels or similarities between the protest at Allegheny County Jail earlier this month or the New Year’s Eve Global Noise Demo in 2012 (other than that they both obviously occurred in roughly the same place and that during both actions some windows were apparently broken). But in the current political moment the lessons from New Years Eve in 2012 seem important to share.

Solidarity in the Streets

With Trump in the White House and the rise of the fascist “alt-right” the stakes couldn’t be higher. We need to be working together, we need to be taking bold action and we need to be taking meaningful risks. But we also need to respect each other enough to recognize each other’s autonomy and agency in making serious political decisions and choosing what level of risk we are comfortable with.

During the J20 inauguration protests in Washington, DC, organizers did a very good job of communicating about the risk levels of various actions. There were very low-risk permitted marches, medium risk checkpoint blockades, and a higher risk anti-fascist march. People didn’t veer away from the risk; over 1,000 people chose to participate in the high risk anti-fascist march.

We have experience with this in Pittsburgh as well. In the lead up to the G-20 summit, the anarchist G-20 Resistance Project and the liberal Anti-War Committee of the Thomas Merton Center negotiated the Pittsburgh Principles affirming our commitment to solidarity in the streets and ensuring that everyone is afforded the opportunity to chose what type of actions they are willing to participate in by committing to respect each others’ organizing space.

• Our solidarity will be based on respect for a political diversity within the struggle for social justice. As individuals and groups, we may choose to engage in a diversity of tactics and plans of action but are committed to treating each other with respect.
• We realize that debates and honest criticisms are necessary for political clarification and growth in our movements. But we also realize that our detractors will work to divide by inflaming and magnifying our tactical, strategic, personal, and political disagreements. For the purposes of political clarity, and mutual respect we will speak to our own political motivations and tactical choices and allow other groups and individuals to speak on their own behalf. We reject all forms of red-baiting, violence-baiting, and fear-mongering; and efforts to foster unnecessary divisions among our movements.
• As we plan our actions and tactics, we will take care to maintain appropriate separations of time and space between divergent tactics. We will commit to respecting each other’s organizing space and the tone and tactics they wish to utilize in that space.
• We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others. We oppose proposals designed to cage protests into high-restricted “free speech zones.”
• We will work to promote a sense of respect for our shared community, our neighbors, and particularly poor and working class people in our community and their personal property.

After all of the hand wringing of liberals who worried that direct action might alienate people, in the end more people participated in the un-permitted G-20 Resistance Project march than turned out for the permitted, explicitly non-violent Thomas Merton Center march.

This is the time to throw down and it is the time to take risks, but I can’t feel comfortable joining actions if I can’t predict how my comrades might escalate the risk level. I certainly can’t feel comfortable mobilizing other people to participate in actions if I can’t predict the risk level.

This isn’t about holding back or appeasing hand wringing liberals. We’ve seen again and again that if people trust their comrades, they’re willing to take risks. If we’re going to be serious about escalating resistance we need to be serious about a real process for building solidarity in the streets. Let’s respect each other, let’s take our work seriously and let’s work together to build the bold and uncompromising social movements that this challenging political moment requires.

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

Reality Isn’t Safe

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE

 Destroy Gender

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

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

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

READ MORE

Dear Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition,

Thank you for your invitation to those who wish to contribute to your discussion around the reprehensible Milo Yiannopoulos, free speech, and activism/organizing.

First I would like to congratulate you on your communiqué “Reality isn’t Safe”, the strength of which implies (I am far removed from Pittsburgh and Pitt currently) that the movement from which it arises is similarly strong.

However, I found the section “Our Position”, appearing at the end of the communiqué, distressing.

I urge you to consider pressuring the administration to ban rightist and fascist speakers from campus, or/and to stipulate that they must not be funded or offered campus space by the SGB.

Pushing for reform, for minimal or “liberal” demands necessitates pushing for maximal or “radical” demands. Forcing SGB to deny funds or a space to rightist figure-heads and sophists does not set a precedent for SGB to deny funds or space to leftists or anti-oppression groups. These funds and spaces are already closed to us.

The administration and the state already have the power to censor leftists as violent, or dangerous, or unreasonable, or etc. Look at the massive campaigns of censorship deployed against the BDS campaign, or the campaign of fear-mongering rightism against Pitt Students for a Democratic Society (my organization while I was a student at Pitt) in the early 2010s. [1] [2] // [1] [2] [3]

That you say you would march with Pitt Republicans for “human liberty” and “free speech” is distressing. The problem is that Milo, like Trump, is precisely not controversial (you say “Should the liberals succeed in ‘reforming’ the SGB and administration in order to censor controversial speakers, we will march side by side with the Pitt College Republicans to defend free speech”), but is entirely normalized. You spend a fair amount of effort arguing against this idea of controversy, indeed against the very rightist, obscurantist idea of “free speech” and “the marketplace of ideas”, and then turn about-face to defend these ideas once the threat of governmental or administrative intervention in defense of safe spaces appears.

Leftists have nothing in common with libertarians, and decentralization is a trap. Capitalism is decentralized; the State is decentralized. See Bob Black’s “The Libertarian as Conservative” for more on this, and I am sure that the Invisible Committee and Tiqqun would be skeptical of such wholesale rejection of, i.e. turning a blind eye to, apparatuses of power.

Which is all to say: forcing the administration’s hand is not legitimizing its existence or power. The administration is already fully legitimized; it already dictates arbitrarily, which is to say, in a manner (over)determined by power relations, what is and is not “free speech”.

The community you wish to organize, bottom-up, does not exist. At least it exists only as a reflection, a reaction-formation to the “top-down” administration.

Reliance on institutional recourse is not what divides liberals from radicals; rather, a mis-perception of the central antagonism of society on the part of the liberals is what separates liberals from radicals.

The antagonism between the State and the Community is itself constitutive of society, of the community. Liberals privilege the spectral community, conservatives the spectral state, but both are reaction-formations to the central antagonism (hence the obscurantist conservative position that liberals want a form of state socialism). Leftists must not fall into the trap of either side. The result of this is Blanquism.

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

I think, finally, that you will not lose your radical accolades if you sit at the table with the liberals, or if you add to your own tactics the so-called liberal tactics of pushing for administrative censorship. You can fight for egalitarian and radical redistributions of power on campus while simultaneously fighting to censor fascists.

As an aside: please never march with the right wing. Their free speech is not our free speech; their freedom is not our freedom; their society is not our society.

In solidarity,
Liam Swanson