Every year, like many other people, we observe April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day. This year, April 15 finds a new cast of authoritarians in control of the United States government, recklessly overhauling it to spread terror and fill their pockets. But this will not put an end to workplace theft. On the contrary, it only intensifies the factors that give rise to it. Consequently, this year, in hopes of promoting good behavior, we celebrate “Robin Hood employees”—those who steal from their workplaces in order to share with others. A Society Based on Theft Every year, employers rip off their employees to the tune of $50 billion in wage theft—and then the government swoops in to collect taxes, which are disproportionately put towards purposes that tend to benefit employers more than employees. Through the eyes of loss prevention, we are all just obstacles to profit. All this was true before Donald Trump returned to the White House determined to loot everything in sight. Now, as Elon Musk guts every government program that doesn’t benefit him personally while setting his sights on lucrative state contracts, it is laughable to pretend that capitalism is anything other than highway robbery. Forget insider trading—at this point, the entire United States government and the economy it presides over are the equivalent of a Trump-owned casino in which the house always wins. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has been hard at work coming up with new ways to rip off ordinary human beings. Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence, for example, functions by plagiarizing human creative activity—with the intent of making human authors superfluous. This is just the latest innovation in the longstanding field of profiting on others’ labor. Mind you, it has always been true that—like the Large Language Models—every individual human being benefits immeasurably from the effort and innovations of the countless human beings who preceded them. As Peter Kropotkin wrote in The Conquest of Bread, There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines… every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry. Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle—all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present. By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say—This is mine, not yours? The solution is not to figure out a system via which every single person who has ever done something that someone else later benefitted from can be paid precisely in proportion to their labor. Most of those people are long dead, and any system for appraising and compensating them for the value of their contributions would be hopelessly arbitrary. The point is that the system of attribution and intellectual property itself has always existed in order to serve a small number of beneficiaries at everyone else’s expense. Rather than quixotically trying to make the system fair, it would be easier to abolish the various forms of gatekeeping that impose artificial scarcity in the first place. If that’s not something we can do on the scale of society as a whole yet, we can take immediate, concrete steps to redistribute wealth in our workplaces whenever our oppressors are not watching. Steal Something from Work Day: Discouraging retail security consultants from hiring employees since at least 2012. In Praise of Robin Hood A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, a Home Depot employee was arrested after allegedly admitting that she had been permitting customers to take commodities from the store without paying. Because she had not accepted money for the goods herself, there was no way to ascertain the value of the items that had reached people thanks to her. Let’s put this in context. It was a time of tremendous financial uncertainty; the first stimulus checks had gone out, but $1200 per taxpayer (or just $500 per child) is hardly enough to sustain anyone through months of unemployment. It was a time of tremendous danger; the first vaccines against COVID-19 were more than six months away, and by the time they were available, hundreds of thousands of people had died. From the safety of their homes, middle-class people were hypocritically celebrating “essential workers” at precisely the moment that those workers were being treated as expendable. Rather than the working class, one could speak simply of the endangered class. In these conditions, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Home Depot employee was risking her life as well as her freedom to ensure that people got access to the resources they needed regardless of whether they could afford to pay for them. The news report about this courageous employee appeared on May 29, 2020, a day after protesters burned down the Third Precinct in Minneapolis in retaliation for the gruesome and senseless murder of George Floyd. If the mass resignations of the pandemic era can be read as an expression of anti-work sentiment, we should also understand this lone employee’s risk-tolerant generosity as a part of the George Floyd revolt. The band Godspeed You! Black Emperor once described this as “slow rioting”: repudiating the premises of capitalism, even in the heart of conquered territory. When an employee does this on the job by refusing to charge for essentials, we might call it retailiation. In an article about the upstanding Home Depot employee for Loss Prevention Magazine, the publication of choice for security guards, the author acknowledged that most human beings are more inclined to foster equality than to abide by rules that arbitrarily benefit some people over others: James Fowler, a political scientist at University of California at San Diego, tested if there were such a thing as a “Robin Hood Impulse.” He tested 120 participants to determine if they were inclined to take from the rich to give to the poor, finding that humans’ “taste for equality” is a driving reason why we cooperate with one another. In his money experiment, he discovered that over 70% of participants at some point would take from the richest players and donate to the poorest players, in an attempt to equalize the income among all participants. Fowler’s team said that even players whose own money had been lost in previous rounds of play were willing to redistribute the money in an egalitarian manner. For most human beings, this is something to be proud of—evidence that our species has a deep-seated capacity for empathy and solidarity. For security guards and other mercenaries, however, it is a problem to be solved. The Loss Prevention article goes on to point out that so-called “Robin Hood employees” can inflict losses on a corporation much more efficiently than ordinary shoplifters or employees who only steal for their own benefit. In other words, when it comes to redistributing wealth, the most effective approach is not to take things for yourself, but to share them with everyone. You, too, can be a Robin Hood at work. A diagram in Loss Prevention Magazine alleging that “in one hour, a Robin Hood employee can generate a massive amount of shrinkage vs. more traditional forms of theft/fraud.” A New Ethic In a society founded on violence and theft, in which violence and theft are becoming more and more pervasive, we need a new ethical framework to evaluate them. In the case of violence, when violence is everywhere and being “non-violent” is little more than an alibi for doing nothing to interrupt the violence that is already taking place, it is of little use to appraise the value of a given action according to whether it is violent or not. We might do better to ask a more interesting and instructive question: does the action in question reinforce existing power disparities, or counteract them? Likewise, in a world in which laws are profoundly biased in favor of the owning class, the judiciary is increasingly subservient to autocrats, and top-down theft is par for the course, it is absurd to fixate on the question of whether a given action constitutes theft as if that were sufficient to reveal its value. We might ask, instead—how does a given theft distribute power? Does it reinforce existing power disparities, or counteract them? Further Reading In Praise of Those Who Leak It’s Time to Even the Score The Mythology of Work Steal Something from Work Day main page What Work Steals from Us Workplace Theft in the Age of “Essential” and “Remote” Labor

This account picks up where our previous article about the Anti-Deportation Collective left off, chronicling scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump attempts to put $45 billion towards expanding the gulag system of immigrant detention in the United States, it is crucial to learn how people in other countries have resisted state violence against undocumented people in the recent past. This true story is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, a narrative from within the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. You can back it on Kickstarter through April 11 and follow the author here. The Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective) was explicit that our support for the sans-papiers was intrinsically linked to our anarchist principles. We emphasized that our interests were linked to theirs in our desire for the abolition of states and borders, for the end of capitalist labor exploitation, for the freedom and autonomy of human beings. At the same time, we worked hand in hand with the collectives of sans-papiers that were largely autonomous of party or NGO structures and who were most welcoming of solidarity in the form of direct action. Charles de Gaulle Airport Ibis Hotel, January 23, 1999, Noon The Ibis hotel at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport is about what you would expect of a two- or three-star airport satellite hotel. Drab exterior and unspectacular office-style architecture on the outside, sullen-looking businessmen and stereotypical stressed-out families with 2.3 children running around the lobby on the inside. The lobby is the one and only particularity. It’s a ground-floor-only structure with a flat roof that connects the significantly taller buildings where the hotel rooms are located. What makes this particular hotel unique is inside one of those towers. And what is inside it is the reason why two hundred people are about to storm through the main doors, access one of the towers (with the assistance of a comrade who has entered incognito to hold open a strategically important access door), rush up a flight of stairs, smash a window, and take control of the rooftop over the lobby. What makes this particular hotel unique is a testament to the mundane and banal nature of oppression in consumer capitalist society. In this hotel, side by side with the hustle and bustle of the businessmen and the joy of the vacationing white European families, is the despair of other human beings who are being held here against their will. An entire wing of this Ibis hotel is a prison, where people without documents (sans-papiers) are held before their definitive deportation on an Air Afrique or Air France plane. It is a prison made possible by the collaboration of the Accor hotel group with the French state’s deportation machinery. As we pour out onto the first-floor rooftop through the busted-out window, a few comrades unfurl a large banner reading “Stop Deportations!” and hang it over the front of the building, covering the Ibis logo, to the loud cheers of the few dozen supporters who remain outside the building. Sophie and I manage to clamber out onto the roof—and there, we make an important discovery. The prison, or “temporary detention center” as the supposedly human-rights-conscious socialist government prefers to refer to it, is apparently on the same floor, just opposite from where we entered onto the roof! We can make out shadows through the windows of people throwing peace signs. We can see them banging on the windows. Our reaction is visceral and instinctive. Fifteen or twenty of us break into a run toward the other side. We’ve barely reached the windows—the first kicks and elbows are flying against them—when we hear people yelling, “Stop! Stop!” They are from the action group that planned this action. “I know what you’re thinking, but it probably won’t work, and most importantly, the immigrants themselves asked us not to do it.” What we are thinking is, obviously… prison break! There are still no cops here to speak of, so what would it take to pull the plug on the largely symbolic action and flee here while giving cover to whoever wanted to use the chance to escape? If they were to succeed, then the action would be an all-around success anyway. Accor publicly shamed, the detention center breached, some individuals given another concrete chance at freedom. The action group from our collective, the Collectif Anti-Expulsions, has been in touch with a collective that is in contact with these detainees. “We explained to them that the chances of a successful escape are low,” they explain. Sadly, this is objectively true, since we are outside the city and at an airport of all places. There is only one train in, as well as a few buses and a highway, which makes it almost impossible to escape as a mob. “They know that if they try to escape and fail, they’ll be subjected to penalties; it will allow for a legal extension of their detention time, and it’ll possibly earn them a ban from the French territory. They said they’d rather take their chances with the passengers on the plane.” I take an uncharacteristically deep breath and quietly process my feelings of anger, frustration, and sadness. The point isn’t lost on me, and there’s a good chance they’re not wrong. My comrade is referring to the strategy of appealing to passenger solidarity in order to get deportees taken off the planes, a tool we have often used successfully to prevent deportations and run out the clock on a person’s detainment.1 But that doesn’t make it feel any less frustrating. Other comrades, though, are less introverted than I am, and a shouting match breaks out. “What the fuck is this shit? This isn’t supposed to be a lobby group! We’re standing in front of the windows of a fucking unguarded prison and you’re telling me I shouldn’t touch them because some people I don’t know and who I’ve never spoken to are against it? What kind of process is that? You think this is autonomy? If I wanted to be told what to do without being asked my opinion about it, I would have joined a party or become a cop.” The comrade speaking, Alice, is one of the classic totos among us. Toto is the either loving or derogatory francophone shorthand for anarchist autonomes. To put it mildly, she and the affinity group around her are not fans of delegation or of tempering messaging or tactics to account for optics or appease others. “If they don’t want to escape through the open windows, nobody is going to force them, but I don’t see what that has to do with me breaking them or not,” she spits out, before turning furiously and walking away. The tension between collective members subsides for the rest of the day, but it’s indicative of a growing strategic rift inside the group. Graffiti in Paris outside an Ibis Hotel, reading “Accor collaborates to deport the undocumented. Let’s attack Ibis, Mercure…” It is signed CAE for Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective). The middle-aged man leaning through the shattered window and trying to interact with us is a walking, living stereotype of a French detective. Flannel shirt over a notable beer belly, light-brown suede jacket, balding, and a prominent mustache. He is missing the obligatory aviator glasses that would complete the look, but I guess sunglasses might be a bit much since it is past 4 pm on a cloudy and rainy afternoon in the dead of Parisian winter—in other words, basically night. And indeed, regardless of his unconvincing promises that there will be no arrests if we leave soon and peacefully, we’re about ready to make our exit. We’ve been on this roof for a few hours now, and since the initial excitement of being out here (and yelling at each other) wore off, we’ve spent the last few hours milling around and chatting in the freezing cold. The monotony was only broken when some comrades arrived with drinks and sandwiches, which they tossed up to us. There is no further practical or symbolic objective to be attained by our continued presence in the rain on this windswept roof. The only way off the roof is through the same broken window we used to get onto it in the first place. It’s barely wide enough to fit one person at a time, so any kind of concerted mass attempt to get out of here is completely off the table. Worryingly, as we peer our heads through the window to look down the hotel corridor, we see that quite the welcoming committee is waiting for us. The hall is packed on both sides with a veritable gauntlet of riot cops. We confer among ourselves, determined not to let them split us up, intending to protect each other against targeted arrests. We quickly agree that we’ll all enter the corridor through the window and begin massing there, in order to then head down the corridor and stairs as a compact group. As the first brave souls climb through the window and into the cop-filled hallway, it becomes clear that the cops have something else in mind. They begin to push and shove people, trying to muscle them down the hallway and toward the stairs. Preferring to stick to the original plan, our comrades meet the baton swings with kicks and blows. Those of us who remain on the roof hesitate, unsure whether it’s best to use the threat of our continued presence here as leverage—to this day, I have no idea how they would have evacuated us from there if we had decided to stay indefinitely—or if we should hurry to get as many people into the hallway as possible to defend our comrades. Somebody yells at the mustached detective cop that if he doesn’t get the other cops to back off and allow everybody into the hallway, we’ll all stay on the roof. Incredibly, the move works and the cops retreat partially, allowing all of us to get into the hallway, together and untouched. We begin heading down the stairway, once more flanked by riot cops. As most of us reach the ground floor and begin exiting the building, I hear shouting and immediately feel a football-stadium-like avalanche of people pushing from behind. We pour out into the street in a disorganized blob. “They started hitting us with batons from behind and arresting people in the middle of the stairs.” It’s Sophie, who was one of the last people off the roof. In the middle of nowhere, with cops everywhere, it’s clear there is nothing more to be done here. As we hastily head to the train station, somebody proposes the usual idea, “We should go to the police station until they release them.” A woman speaks up. It’s Alice, the toto from the argument at the beginning of the occupation. “Yes, we could go to the police station and beg for their release. Or we could pay a visit to some of the other Ibises in the city until they beg us to stop, as a way to force the police to release our comrades.” With that, the remaining hundred of us head into the city under cover of night, minutes later erupting into the first of the evening’s three Ibis hotels, where a masked crew of ten corners a frightened-looking concierge. “Get on the fucking phone and call your boss. Now. Tell him this isn’t going to stop until our comrades are freed without charges.” Epilogue: Strasbourg, April 4, 2009 We’re in the heat of battle in the midst of the annual NATO summit. A black bloc of about a thousand people, mainly from Germany and France, has fought intense battles with the police all day. The bloc has just fought the cops back off of a railway overpass, and we now have an endless arsenal of rocks from the tracks at our disposal. The clearly overwhelmed cops retreat under the ferocity of the attack. Fifteen thousand robocops have been assigned to protect this summit, with the goal of rendering militant resistance impossible. For the second day in a row, they are failing spectacularly. As we advance into the Port du Rhin neighborhood, revolutionaries join local residents in looting a pharmacy, then set it aflame. The day before, local immigrant youths guided black bloc activists around the neighborhood as they erected barricades, fought running battles with the riot cops, and attacked a military jeep. In turn, black bloc’ers aided local youths in prying open the gates of a police storage space where seized scooters were stored, returning them to the community. We have now arrived at the border; only a river stands between us and Germany. German riot cops line the other end of the bridge, and the bloc is content with building barricades to prevent them from crossing while lobbing the occasional stone in their direction. I walk back from the front line for a well-deserved break and take in the scene behind us. The first thing I notice is the now-abandoned border police station, completely ablaze. Schengen has rendered this border obsolete—at least for a time—but the symbolic value of a burning border crossing is enormous. Not far behind the border crossing, flames are starting to emerge from a five-story building. Just a few minutes earlier, a hundred black-clad militants ransacked the lobby and turned the furniture into flaming barricades in the street. It’s a sign that our movement does not easily forget and a reminder that collaboration does not pay. Strasbourg’s Ibis hotel is engulfed in flames. The burnt husk of Strasbourg’s Ibis hotel—a consequence of the corporation profiting on the kidnapping and deportation of immigrants. If the Ibis hotel had to burn, it was not as an act of senseless destruction, but a concrete protest against the Accor brand (which owns, among others, the Ibis chain) and its complicity in the deportation of “illegal” immigrants through the rental of its rooms to the State as a last “housing” location for immigrants before their deportation. -Antifascist Left International, “Riots, Destruction, and Senseless Violence,” Göttingen, Germany, April 2009 The cover of the Antifascistische Link International’s text “Riots, Destruction, and Senseless Violence,” with the inscription “Offensive. Militant. Successful.” At that time, the French state could only hold undocumented immigrants for a period of ten days, at the end of which, if they had not yet been deported, they had to be released again until their eventual date of deportation. ↩

A complete guide to assembling and employing lockboxes and other means of blockading. There is a broad spectrum of tactics to choose from between simply holding up a protest sign and setting things on fire. If you are looking to intensify a pressure campaign or to stand your ground more effectively when challenged, consider the following options. From the vantage point of 2025, more than two decades after the original version of this guide was published in the book Recipes for Disaster, civil disobedience has become somewhat more dangerous as far-right politicians have put more laws on the books and police and other fascists have become less concerned with preserving human life. Civil disobedience presumes that your adversary is constrained from inflicting permanent harm upon you. In some cases, if you are prepared to get arrested, you may be able to accomplish a great deal more by remaining mobile and risk-tolerant rather than engaging in an activity that is scripted to end in arrest. Nonetheless, there are still many regions and contexts in which the following information will be applicable. Why, Where, How There are many reasons to blockade: to call attention to or prevent an injustice, to support other direct actions by securing a space or creating a distraction, to decrease traffic fatalities. There are many sites that can be blockaded: highways, factory and shopping mall gates, business districts, the front doors of restaurants that are to host corporate dinners or party delegates. Intrepid blockaders can lock themselves to the equipment that is to destroy a forest, or lock authorities out of a building that has been occupied in a political action. One of the most common implements for blockading is the lockbox. A Stop Cop City protester locked down to Brasfield & Gorrie construction equipment in Midtown Atlanta in March 2024. Locking Down with Lockboxes When it comes to blockading, lockboxes can be very useful, assuming that you are not facing adversaries who are willing to do serious harm to you and that you are willing to be arrested. The design described here has been used in many cities, including some in which the police are experts at handling protests—and all the same, it can take police hours to move blockaders who use these devices from a busy street. This is one of the simplest designs; there are many other possibilities. You can make lockboxes with 90-degree angles in them that accommodate both arms of one individual, so one person can comfortably lock down to a gate, a truck axle, or even a railroad track. For serious engagements, you can make big concrete barrels with lockboxes fitted inside them, or dig a hole in the ground and build a vertical one-way lockbox into it with concrete and rebar, or drive a junker car into place, disable it, and lock down to it. Lockdowns can be used to stop movement into and out of an area, providing a spectacle perfect for attracting media or other attention. They can stall traffic to allow support teams to hold an awareness-raising rally, and distribute leaflets to or otherwise engage drivers stuck in traffic. After blockaders are removed from the area, police generally block the area for another hour or more themselves, lengthening the impact of the action. Lockdowns can appeal to the public by showing that people are dedicated enough to put their bodies on the line; they are descended from a long heritage of non-violent civil disobedience that many civilians find less threatening than other brands of direct action. A June 2018 demonstration against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Second Avenue in Seattle. Impeding the actions of heartless mercenaries determined to rend apart communities is a moral duty if there is any such thing. Ingredients Metal or plastic tubing or piping—such as PVC pipe Bolts and nuts—at least one bolt and one nut for each box Chain or rope Carabineers Glue—optional, but encouraged Hacksaw Drill Bolt cutters—optional At least one person ready to put their body on the line Instructions A lockbox is a piece of pipe by which a person can be locked securely to another person or object. The average lockbox accommodates two people; with several lockboxes and people, you can form a human chain. Lockboxes utilize the width of your torso and arm span to take up space. To lock down, you attach yourself to a mechanism inside a piece of pipe; in order for a police officer to unlock you, he would have to get his arm into the pipe as well, but as the pipe fits snugly around your arm, this is impossible. Should police attempt to pull you apart, the strain will be on the metal chain and bolt, not your shoulder joints, assuming your box is built correctly. If you use a carabineer to connect to a bolt within the pipe, you will be able to detach from the box immediately whenever you choose. With lockboxes, a group of people can swiftly move into a space, block it, and defy the efforts of police officers who would remove them. Scouting the Target, Planning the Action1 The first step is to scout the area you want to blockade. There are a wide variety of environments in which you might choose to apply lockboxes, but for the purposes of this introduction, we’ll assume that you will be operating in an urban environment. You could blockade the entrance to an event or business, or an entrance to a tunnel, highway, or access ramp. The first step is to figure out where the traffic—whether it be car, foot, or other—can best be bottlenecked. Often, if you block one street successfully, you can snarl traffic in a large area. Look for streets that lead to main roadways, and watch the traffic patterns. If you are planning to block a road, listen to traffic reports; determine which roads gridlock easily and which roads feed major transportation routes. Note all the details of your target, including the length of traffic lights, which lanes are open at certain times, and which directions the majority of cars turn. Once you have found the location that best serves your purposes, you’ll need to determine how many people it will take to block it. If you have a well-chosen target, but you do not have enough people, traffic will still be able to pass, and you will simply be a nuisance, not a blockade; if you cannot create a “complete circuit” with your human chain, connecting it at either end to immovable points, it may be easy to move you out of the way even if the lockboxes that connect the participants are secure. To measure distances quickly without drawing too much attention to yourself, you can count your steps heel-to-toe across an area, or run string or yarn across it. You’ll also need to take into account the sizes of the lockboxes you are making and the people locking down. If a street is 20 feet wide and your lockboxes are 3 feet long, you’ll probably need five or six people. Plan your formation carefully. If you are locking down in a line, the two people on the ends can be locked to stationary objects—with bicycle U-locks around their necks, for example, or by a less secure means such as chain locks. If you use bicycle locks or any other locks that require keys, have an accomplice on hand to spirit the key away quickly, or be prepared to hide it where it cannot be recovered. For a less durable blockade, you could leave the ends of your formation open and sit or lie down. Alternatively, you could close the formation at both ends, locking down in a circle, or form two lines crossing each other in an X. When planning, take into account the strain of being locked in place for a long period. If the lockboxes are not supported by something, those locked together will quickly be worn out by holding them up. There are also the matters of food and blood circulation to consider. On April 2, 2025, a Jewish-led group of Columbia University students chained themselves to the locked campus gates in solidarity with Palestinian students, demanding that the University provide the names of the trustees who reported Mahmoud Khalil to ICE. Chains may suffice, but a lockbox will usually provide more staying power. Gathering Materials Once you have worked out your plan, the next step is to gather materials. These can be expensive, so look around for places you could acquire them for free. PVC pipe can be found at construction sites; chain can be cut from a locked dumpster; tools can be borrowed or stolen. If you do not want to draw attention, you may prefer to buy the supplies at multiple locations. While purchases of bolts, carabineers, and glue will not attract attention, a septum-pierced revolutionary may raise eyebrows if she brings thirty feet of PVC pipe to the counter. Rumor has it that before and during mass mobilizations, store employees are told to look out for such purchases. Use the same care you would for buying spray paint, crowbars, bolt cutters, or glass etching solution. Do not use a credit card if you do not wish to create a paper trail. Design, Construction, Adaptation, and Fortification Summary: Cut the pipe to the appropriate length. Drill a hole all the way through both walls of the pipe at its midpoint (or thereabouts, depending on the differing armspans of the two who will be using it). Pass a bolt through both holes. Secure the bolt. Cut a length of chain to fit around your wrist and reach up to the bolt. Fasten a carabineer to the chain by which to secure it to the bolt. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for the person who will share the lockbox with you. Fortify the lockbox. Constructing lockboxes can be a fun group activity. Make sure the people who are going to use the boxes try them on and modify them according to arm length and other variables. How much of your arm goes inside a lockbox is a matter of preference and tactical strategy, but on average your pipe should be about 4 feet in length. The more of your arm is covered by the PVC pipe, the more of your body is safe from police action. For example, if your bicep is exposed, the police could attempt to use pain compliance there to force you to unlock yourself; if your entire arm is in the pipe, this is impossible. Everyone’s arms are unique. If you are locking down, you need to be able to put your arm far enough into the pipe to grab the bolt, so you can easily connect and disconnect your carabineer. If the people who are to use the box can be present during the construction, measure their arms and custom-fit the pipe. If this is not possible, build the box to a length that almost anyone can use—say, between 3 and 4 feet. If you are using PVC pipe, it can easily be cut with a standard hacksaw. For more long-lasting lockdowns, use more durable piping. It’s important that your pipe be the right diameter; you should be comfortable sliding your arm in at least to your bicep. Unless your arm is especially small or large, the pipe should be between 4 and 6 inches in diameter. After the pipe is cut so that both people who are to use it can put their arms in as far as they want and touch fingers, secure a bolt at the point where their fingers touch. The length of the bolt should be longer than the diameter of the pipe; if you use 5 inch pipe, make sure your bolt is at least 5.5 inches. Stay away from bolts with sharp threads or a sharp point on one end, unless you are prepared to modify them for safety and comfort. Your bolt should be thick and difficult to cut; it will probably be the weakest link in the chain, so you’ll want to make sure it’s as secure as possible. Drill a hole all the way through one wall of the pipe and out the other. If you have to drill the top hole first and then flip the pipe to drill the bottom hole, make sure the holes line up! Put the bolt through both holes. It should be slightly off-center in the pipe, so the people locking to it can fit their fingers around it and have space for their knuckles. Now use nuts to secure it in place; these can go inside the pipe, or outside it, or both. You can use powerful glue to strengthen the bolt; better yet, if you have the means, weld it into place. You could include multiple bolts in your design, to make it harder for the police to know where to start. If you have more than one bolt, you can also experiment with attaching yourself to all of them. Now you have to build the chain bracelet that secures you to the bolt inside the pipe. Cut a length of chain that can loop around your wrist at one end, and attach at the other end around the bolt in the pipe; it will be in the shape of a P. Experiment with chain length until you have a comfortable fit. Make the clasp that holds the chain around your wrist permanent and durable; use a carabineer to clasp the chain around the bolt, so you are able to unclasp from the lock box in an emergency. Attaching the chain to the central bolt with a carabineer is a very secure and safe option, but there are others. For a simpler, though weaker, variation, skip the central bolt entirely and run a length of chain through the tube to attach your wrist to the wrist of your partner. This option might be useful if you have limited time and funding to prepare for the action. A benefit of the central bolt is that when you are pulled, the bolt absorbs some of the force, and gripping it can provide some control; if you are connected to another person by a chain directly, and one of you is pulled or dragged, both of you will bear the brunt of it. Once the device is assembled, the holes drilled, the bolt secured, and the chain attached, make sure it all fits comfortably. Put some padding around the chain at your wrist, and pad the entrance to the tube if need be. If nothing else, wrap the chain in an old sock or two, and sand down the edges of the pipe to prevent it from cutting your arm. The final step is to fortify your creation. Many police departments now understand how lockboxes are constructed and know how to disassemble them. This does not mean locking down is ineffective, since it still takes the police time to react, retrieve the necessary tools, and cut apart each lockbox; but it is worth brainstorming about how to stay ahead of their technology. The police are likely to try to cut the pipe to expose your hand and the carabineer, or attack the box at the bolt. Consider ways to slow this process. You could wrap the lockbox in materials that dull saw blades, for example, or wind layers of duct tape and wire around it, or cover it in viscous tar and sand, or weld rebar armor to it—or do all of these! The more layers of material that require different forms of cutting technology, the better.2 For heavy lockboxes that can anchor you in place, you could put a layer of concrete around your pipe, and a layer of plastic or aluminum drain tubing around that. A police officer attempting to cut through a lockbox. Practice and Transport After all of the boxes are constructed, practice locking in and out of them. Do this alone until you have it down, then try it with a partner, locking at once into both sides of a box. Before an action, practice for speed and organization with everyone who will be involved, so things will go smoothly on the big day. To prevent confusion, you can label each end of each lockbox, and plan out which direction each person will face and the order in which people will lock together. It can help to have individuals involved who do not actually lock down on the line; not only can they help get things together quickly at the beginning, they can also provide food and water to the people who cannot move their arms, and help deal with police and others. It can be a challenge to get all the lockboxes to the site of the lockdown. You could hide them nearby in advance, or bear them there in a march, disguised as puppets or banners. If you have access to a car, you can use it to drop off all the lockboxes at the very moment your group suddenly converges at the chosen site. If you are doing a long blockade line, you have access to several cars, and speed is of the essence, pairs of blockaders could lock together in vehicles before driving to the area, then all be dropped off at the site and link up in a matter of seconds. A large group of people walking any distance with bulky lockboxes will probably attract the wrong kind of attention, especially if the authorities are on the lookout for civil disobedience, but you could come up with clever ways to camouflage them in a pinch. As in all blockading, if you are blocking a road or highway that is in use, it is crucial to stop traffic first. This can most easily be accomplished by another group working in concert with those who lock down; it is a lot to ask of a small group that they stop traffic, then lock themselves together properly while holding it at bay. Angry drivers can be even more dangerous than police under these circumstances; be careful not to give them the opportunity to do anything stupid. Once You’re Locked Together The people who have come with you to play supporting roles can complement your blockade with a rally, street party, or outreach event. If you are blocking a street, there will be drivers to witness street theater or receive pamphlets; if you’re blocking the entrance to an official event, there may be reporters to record you issuing your statement. Either way, there will be curious passersby who deserve to be told more about what’s going on and why, and perhaps to be entertained in the bargain. If your lockdown is going to create a traffic jam, and you are concerned that the action might be misinterpreted as an attack on civilian drivers, consider distributing peace offerings of some kind. Those locking down can be dressed in symbolic or expressive garb or draped in a banner explaining the reason for the action. If your human chain is not connected to anything at the ends, you could conceivably move from one point to another while locked together, but this will not be easy or particularly safe. If you are planning on moving at all, you should practice in advance, and perhaps designate coordinators to talk everyone through certain movements or count off marching steps. Whether you expect this to be an issue or not, it is wise to prepare a basic communication and decision-making structure in advance, if there are more than a couple of you planning to lock down together. Police Reactions, Legal Consequences Ultimately, there is no way to predict for sure how the police will react, so there is probably little to be gained spending hours debating it in your group. It is important to have a police liaison present to negotiate with the authorities or at least make sure they understand the situation, and reporters or other witnesses to temper or at least document their behavior. If they start to do something that seems dangerous, calmly inform them that your arm is inside the tube and that you are unable to remove it, and that a team of crack lawyers eagerly awaits the chance to sue them into oblivion. Police will always try to intimidate you; call their bluff while maintaining your composure. They may use pepper spray or similar weapons on you, but this could cost them a lot in the public eye, especially if you bear this persecution courageously. If your line is anchored at each end, they may begin by trying to disengage the people in the anchoring roles. If they can move the entire line out of the way and work on you once you are no longer blocking traffic, they probably will, but this will be difficult if you are seated or supine. If they can’t move you all, they will work lockbox by lockbox, cutting the line into smaller, more moveable sections. The method the police use to cut you out will depend on how experienced they are. No police department wants a lawsuit, so they will probably try not to injure you. If you hide the location of the central bolt, they will have no way of knowing where your hands are inside the tube; this will prevent them from simply cutting the tube in half. Often, the police will call in the fire department to use special tools designed for removing people from wreckage. Last time I locked down, the police brought special wooden frames to support our PVC pipe lockboxes, then slowly dismantled the boxes with wire cutters, saws, and various other tools. It is also difficult to predict what your charges will be when you are arrested at the end of your lockdown. In the past, at least, the charge was often “incommoding,” the same charge associated with blocking a street or similar conduit with one’s body. The use of lockboxes is not a separate crime, though the police may make threats or try to tack on additional charges such as “possession of implements of crime” (PIC). In both the lockdowns in which I participated, the police told us that because we used the lockboxes we would be charged with an additional PIC offense, but of course, as police are wont to do, they were lying. PVC pipe, chain, and carabineers are not implements of crime, no matter how you slice it. In multiple cases in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta in 2024, demonstrators who locked down were repeatedly charged with misdemeanor trespassing, but when two activists climbed a crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie construction site and locked themselves in place, a prosecutor charged them with “False Imprisonment,” a felony kidnapping charge. Absurdly, the police claimed that the crane operator—who was on the ground the entire time—was “unable to leave” due to the activists suspended 250 feet above him. In any case, you should have a group ready to provide immediate legal support. Barricades and blockades have a storied history in labor struggles in the United States. In this illustration, police officers face off with striking streetcar employees in New York City on March 4, 1886. Committing to a lockdown is a serious matter. You must be prepared for the ordeal of interacting with infuriated police officers over a protracted period of time, while being unable to move freely. This will be followed by the further ordeal of being arrested and spending time in jail. Embark on a lockdown in a state of inner peace and resolve, properly fed and hydrated, prepared to weather storms of danger and drama—and if you think you might be there for a long time, wear an adult diaper! Other Blockading Methods There are many other ways to create blockades. The most traditional is to build a barricade. An individual who desires to lock herself to something or someone can do so by putting a bicycle U-lock around her neck, though this requires the same support infrastructure that a traditional lockdown does. Extremely experienced and prepared groups can build tripods and suspend individuals from them, taking the civil disobedience of lockdowns to another level. Dirt roads can be blockaded by digging ditches across them; fencing, metal or wood poles, cables supporting such poles, or other materials can be planted in them, too.3 If police become anxious or confused enough, they may block off an area for you. A barricade at la ZAD in France. When blockading a busy thoroughfare, it is important to slow traffic to a safe speed first. A bicycling group could slow to a stop, becoming a blockade in itself and offering the opportunity for more permanent blockading to take place. Old bicycles, perhaps outfitted with extra metal, could be locked together and abandoned as a blockade at the conclusion of a bicycle ride. It is possible to set off the automatic arms of railroad crossings by using jumper cables to complete the circuit between little trigger wires on the tracks. Individuals dressed as construction workers can put out traffic cones and barrels and wave down cars; for that matter, giving drivers a spectacle of any kind to stare at will slow them down. A banner drop over a busy highway can slow traffic significantly, potentially creating a traffic jam which might itself constitute a blockade of sorts—nothing obstructs cars like more cars! Speaking of cars, you can drive old junker cars into place and disable them; better yet if you managed to buy them with cash from people who won’t remember anything useful about you if the authorities come asking. They can be loaded with barricading material, ready to be deployed wherever they end up; people can even lock down to them.4 Once traffic is slowed or stopped, you can stretch cables or fencing across highways and affix it to telephone poles, light posts, or guardrails. Don’t forget that quick-drying concrete can effectively seal many gates and other means of access. Mixing nuts and bolts or other material into it can make it more durable. For a humorous effect in a low-risk environment, you could brick up the door of an office or business. Pick a quiet night, so the mortar will have enough time to dry. When blocking off both ends of a street or bridge, make sure you leave an exit. You don’t want to let traffic in, but you also don’t want to trap civilians—or yourself. Always make sure that you are not blocking access to a hospital or similar establishment. Ecuador. A supposedly unstoppable force meets an actually immovable object. “Let your tears freeze to stones we can hurtle from catapults.” Account In winter 2003, before the second Gulf War began, people were carrying out direct action all across the globe in an attempt to stop the war before it started and to connect the impending invasion of Iraq to the larger war that capitalism wages everywhere. Direct actions in New York City and San Francisco had shut down the Holland Tunnel and Financial District, respectively, and other protests were also making headlines. Anarchists and other direct action enthusiasts in Washington, DC were organizing regular actions while trying to prepare a plan to carry out as soon as the bombs started falling on Iraq. Our theme was “When the War Starts, America Stops.” We put out fliers calling for an “Emergency Response Direct Action—the Morning After War on Iraq Starts.” People who wanted to participate on bikes could show up for a “Race Against War” in Dupont circle; at the same time, people who wanted to participate on foot would head to the other side of town for a “March of Resistance” at the Eastern Market Metro stop. We also put out a call for groups to carry out actions on their own to further disrupt business as usual throughout the city. We had organized a lot of direct actions in DC over the preceding few years. The state was usually aware when there’s going to be a lot of protest activity, and the police presence would be really intense. Given this atmosphere, just meeting up for a protest without being shut down from the start could be really difficult. To account for this, we came up with a complicated plan like nothing we’d done before. We would use the city’s public transportation system and the fact that Washington, DC is wedged between two different states to our advantage. The march started in southeast DC, near the US Capitol. But instead of the march taking to the streets of that area, a typical setting for DC protests, the crowd was led down into the subway station. We handed out different colored slips of paper corresponding to the colors of the flags participants were to follow onto different cars of the same subway train. The people leading the groups into the different cars were responsible for making sure no one got separated from the protest and that everyone made it to the correct stop. On the train, people sang, chanted, had conversations with commuters, and passed out fliers about why we were there. A lot of folks in DC ride the train to work at that hour, so it was a good opportunity to take our message directly to many people. You can disable cars and trucks quickly and easily by using a stick to push a large raw potato into the exhaust pipe and out of sight. This technique can baffle even skilled mechanics. Once the potato is removed the automobile will work again. After the train crossed the river into Virginia, the various color-coded groups were instructed to exit at the Roslyn stop, a short walk from the Key Bridge. The Key Bridge is a main artery between DC and Virginia; it serves as the entrance to Georgetown, one of Washington’s wealthiest and most upscale shopping districts and also full of targets which could be related to the war. In addition, the Metro stop was only a few short blocks from the offices of the Boeing Corporation, another possible target with obvious connections to the war. As the march headed toward the Key Bridge on the Virginia side, the Critical Mass ride was weaving its way through the DC streets to meet the march on the DC side of the bridge. We hoped that this would enable us to block the bridge effectively from both sides, bringing business as usual to a halt, focusing attention on the war that had begun only hours before. To add to the display of resistance and accompany our actions with precise and pointed messaging, other affinity groups, separate from the march and bike ride, brought banners to the bridge and hung them up around the main intersections while still other groups handed out fliers detailing our reasons for shutting down the bridge and explaining our opposition to the war. Two drivers sat in junker cars near the bridge on the Virginia and DC sides, waiting for the word that the march and bike ride were nearing so they could get into place. When they learned that the march was coming, both cars drove out and stopped and parked at the DC side of the bridge. Originally, there was to be a car on each side, but the police presence on the Virginia side of the bridge, combined with the landscape of the area, made it seem very unlikely that a driver who had to abandon a car there would be able to make a successful getaway. The drivers parked their cars at an angle to take up as many lanes as possible, hopped out, moved to remove the license plates that had enabled them to drive around safely, and ran like hell to get away. Unfortunately, there were hundreds of cops on the DC side of the bridge, some of whom immediately began chasing one of the drivers. They eventually caught up to him, punched him a couple of times, and threw him in the back of a paddy wagon. They also picked up one of the scouts who was doing communications on the bridge, mistaking her for the guy who had been driving the other car. In custody, she heard over the radio that the cops had realized their mistake. They suddenly opened the doors to the police van, saying, “Get out, we don’t want to deal with you right now”—and let both people go! Three people were arrested on the Virginia side of the bridge. We had a bail fund and legal support team ready to go to get them out. They were out in a couple of hours, and thanks to the coordination of the National Lawyers Guild and DC’s local direct action legal collective, a local lawyer took the cases for free. Let’s back up and talk about how we put this together. This action posed several organizing challenges because we did not know when the war would start. Because of that, we took steps to ensure that we had all the needed action roles sorted out weeks in advance. We even had understudies for some of the roles, in case certain people happened to be unavailable the day we needed to carry out the action. In the planning for the action, we secured two junker cars to help stop traffic from reaching the bridge. The two cars, one of which was a minivan, were also loaded up with big scraps of wood and metal (including a bed frame), chains, and locks that would be used to form barricades that would fill in the areas around the cars. In the vicinity of the site of the action, there were also road signs and other construction-related barricades that could have pulled into the street. The plan was for an affinity group in the march to open up the cars and pull out all the materials to set up the barricades—but it happened that the folks who were going to do this were tied up on the other side of the bridge by a heavy police presence. By the time they got near the cars, the police had blocked them off and made them inaccessible. In addition to getting drivers for the vehicles and people to assist in building the blockades, we secured volunteers for several other key roles. We had a loop of communications people within the bike ride, the march, and on the bridge as scouts, as well as folks on site in advance to check for any early police presence. Cell phones were used to insure the simultaneous arrival of both the march and the Critical Mass ride. We also had a couple of people set to lead the various risk levels of the march: those who couldn’t risk arrest followed one color flag to a support rally across the street, while those who could engage in blocking the street followed another. While our ultimate goal was for no one to be arrested, we wanted to make sure that those for whom arrest was not an option were able to participate as well, and to feel comfortable participating. Action medics and legal observers accompanied the march, and the variety of roles allowed for those who could not engage directly in the blockades to play an equally active and important part. This plan was largely organized in public, so the police presence awaiting us was unavoidable. Only a handful knew the full details of where we would end up, but unfortunately that must have been leaked. Had we done a better job of keeping the target a secret, we might have had more time to get things in place. On the other hand, the bridge we picked is one of the main entrances to the city, so it might have had a large police presence regardless. However, the bridge was completely shut down for about 30 minutes, and partially shut down and made into a spectacle for hours after that. It was a nasty day, cold and pouring rain. The action didn’t entirely go as planned—the idea was to shut down both ends of the bridge and have a street party against the war in the middle. Instead, the police cleared all of us from the bridge pretty quickly. But it was shut down, our message against the war and business as usual was all over the news, and the action clearly affected the morning commute to work. In addition, we gained useful experience for our future endeavors. A barricade in Lebanon. Further Reading “Lock-Ons, Devices, Tree-Sits, and More” by the Direct Action Movement Subsequent to the original publication of this guide in the book Recipes for Disaster, the Swedish d-beat band Auktion took this section title for the title of their hit song of the same name—a dream come true for any anarchist publisher. ↩ For example, barbed wire need not only appear in your life as an obstacle; you can also apply it yourself to obstruct the movements of your foes. ↩ You can heat rocks in a fire and use them to blockade a road or thoroughfare. Use porous rocks, as nonporous rocks will simply explode, and be sure to identify them for everyone’s safety. For the sake of convenience, you could set the fire, rocks within it, at the location to be blockaded, so as not to have to work out how to move them. ↩ When puncturing tires, aim for the sidewall; if you want to be sure the spare won’t help, you can puncture at least two of them. You can also use a pocket-size valve stem remover to disable tires without puncturing them. ↩

In the following account, the author recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places. This is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, narrating experiences from the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. If you’re interested in reading the rest of the book, you can back it on Kickstarter now. Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998 It’s early evening and Sophie and I are sitting in the long-distance-train waiting area of Paris’s Gare de Lyon, one of Europe’s busiest train stations. All around us are travelers scurrying to and fro. Stressed-out tourist families, a camera still flung around Dad’s neck, rushing their kids through the station mix with tired-looking businessmen waiting to get back home. “You did a great job with your outfit,” she says to me as she looks me over from head to toe. I met Sophie at an action (or demonstration, or concert, or something of the sort) about a year ago, and we have been inseparable at political events since. She is my age, a student at Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School),1 and if I didn’t know very well the context in which she’s making this comment, I might think she’s flirting with me. “You’re looking pretty good yourself,” I respond in kind. She has managed to transform herself into the spitting image of your perfectly forgettable average French teenage girl. Basically, she looks like a younger Sporty Spice in her Adidas tracksuit and sneakers. I, on the other hand, have gone with a significantly preppier look: khaki pants, polo shirt, nondescript jacket, and moccasins. She looks at me again, pauses, and slightly withdraws her compliment: “It’s not the most functional wardrobe, though. The khakis stand out and the moccasins probably aren’t great for running.” I shrug. “I did what I could. I was mainly concerned with getting this far.” While we are sitting among the tourists and businessmen, doing our best to look like a somewhat mismatched young teenage couple waiting for a train back to their city, we are in fact not travelers, and the correct term for our attire is not outfit but disguise. We are not here to take a train, but to stop one. A train that transports imprisoned human beings against their will every single night. The 21:03 to Marseille, otherwise known to us as the deportation train. Our objective is to stop the Paris-to-Marseille overnight train, which the French National Railway Company, better known for its French initials SNCF, permits the French government to use to transport North African immigrants, usually of Algerian or Moroccan origin, by rail to Marseille. Once in the port city, they are expelled from French territory by boat. The attempt to block this train is an idea born of the Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective), and it was decided that if we were to have any chance of success, we should disguise ourselves as best as possible and infiltrate the station in small groups, since trying to march in there as a demonstration probably wouldn’t get us very far. The Anti-Deportation Collective The CAE, officially formed only a few weeks earlier in early April 1998, was an autonomous collective born in the heat of the movement of the sans-papiers of the mid-’90s, a French term meaning “without papers” that refers to the movement against the deportation of undocumented immigrants and in favor of their “legalization.” The collective’s broadly accepted guiding principles2 were as simple as they were clearly steeped in anarchist modes of organization, thought, and action: Practical opposition to deportations. We are not “allies” to the sans-papiers, we struggle with them out of motivations and convictions that are our own. These motivations vary among individuals, but are in all cases rooted in anti-capitalism. The collective is autonomous and collaborates with sans-papiers collectives that are autonomous not merely in theory, but in practice. Decisions are made by way of general assembly. The plight of the sans-papiers had exploded into the public consciousness following a series of highly publicized church occupations in 1996 by undocumented immigrants themselves. This culminated on August 23, 1996 in a raid in which nearly two thousand police officers stormed the Saint-Bernard church, resulting in the detention of 210 undocumented immigrants. After that, solidarity demonstrations with the sans-papiers in Paris regularly numbered in the tens of thousands, with the participants—and their demands and methods of action—representing the broad spectrum of the French center left and radical left. This included the Communist Party and the CGT union, but likewise the sizable anarchist blocs of the CNT, Anarchist Federation, Alternative Libertaire, SCALP, and everything in between. Importantly, the sans-papiers themselves were organized into several collectives and structures; they were active and leading participants in their own struggles. As with all communities, they were not a monolith. Within the sans-papiers organizations, one could find a similarly broad spectrum of ideas and strategies in regards to demands, objectives, and methods of action. While the sans-papiers organizations, regardless of their politics, were limited in their methodology by the logical constraints of their situation—the fact that an arrest or identity control could quickly lead to a possible deportation with devastating, even deadly, potential consequences—the reformist organizations were unsurprisingly bound by the constraints of their respect for legality and their acceptance of the basic premises of states and borders and the idea that a human being should in some way or another be bound by the possession of a particular piece of paper, or lack thereof, based on their place of birth. Or, even more absurdly, as is the case in France, their bloodline. We anarchists, on the other hand, had no such constraints. Our solidarity with what were clearly some of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society—workers, people of color, many of them women, escaping from what were some of the most horrendous conflicts in the world at that time—was immediate and instinctive. But through our position of unconditional solidarity with the sans-papiers and the assertion that in the world we are fighting for, no human will ever be illegal and freedom of movement will be for people and not just for commodities, we articulated a position of necessary rupture with the concepts of states and borders. If our demands could not be granted by the state and our objective could not be realized within the framework of its existence, then it naturally followed that we would not look to the state to grant those things. Consequently, we were embarking on a concrete struggle to prevent deportations and make it possible for people to live where they chose and how they chose. The same stance toward the state applied in this struggle as in our abstract analysis: the state was our enemy, and we were determined to wage war against it within the appropriate context of the time and situation we found ourselves in, in hopes of preventing it from carrying out its objectives. The greater our success, hand in hand with those sans-papiers who were open to our solidarity and methods, the greater our collective power would grow as a movement and the greater the degree of agency, autonomy, and freedom we would be able to realize. We were not making demands, but seeking to force concessions and create realities. Concretely, that meant that deportations are for stopping. To do so, we would attack the state’s machinery of deportation, its infrastructure, and the enterprises that collaborated with it and benefited economically from assisting with the hunting, caging, and expelling of human beings. We did so out of solidarity, out of conviction, but also with the explicit understanding that despite our privileges and different realities, our struggle was the same as theirs. In fighting alongside the sans-papiers, as accomplices rather than allies, we were also fighting for ourselves: “Their situation makes us all more precarious in labor relations, the repression and control developed against them will affect us eventually as well, the hardening of borders is also a barrier to our freedom of movement, because we are also foreigners to this world and we will be pushed further and further into clandestinity (by choice but also by necessity if we are to live our desires) by the constant evolution of the law and the states.”3 The 21:03 to Marseille So there we are, sitting under the elegant industrial-era steel and glass roof so typical of venerable European train stations—a fittingly dramatic setting for the impending confrontation. We are waiting anxiously for the moment when an unknown number of cops will appear, escorting what I expect will be a handcuffed individual through the hall, at which point we are to spring into action and form a human chain to prevent them from loading him onto the train. Failing that, we are to do everything we can to prevent the train from departing. We are not pacifists, and while there is a general consensus that our side will avoid unnecessary escalations, there is an equally clear agreement that the priority is not optics, but accomplishing a concrete and tangible objective. Nonetheless, I’m anxious about our chances of success. “Do you see any familiar-looking faces?” I ask worriedly. I’m scanning the hall as best I can and I don’t like what I see. “No, I can’t even see Alan or Mary. I wonder if they made it in.” Mary is another Lycée Autogéré student and Sophie’s best friend, while Alan is slightly older and the token cliché-looking punk—complete with mohawk and faux leather jacket—in our little youth affinity group. Not one of us is old enough to be a legal adult, yet the four of us already have a fair amount of experience getting into trouble with the state. We met at a Comité d’Action Lycéen (CAL, or “High School Action Committee”) meeting, a place that can only be described as a breeding ground for high-school-age anarchists. We’re young, fanatical, and unencumbered by wage slavery enough to enjoy ample free time, which we use to be regulars at every demonstration, action, occupation, political squat, concert, debate, and confrontation within the greater Paris area. When we’re not doing that, we’re spending our nights together drinking, getting stoned, and listening to Ska-P’s “El vals del obrero” in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Or at least the others are—myself, I’ve discovered Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionist and concluded that my mind and body are weapons for revolutionary struggle, so I should keep them free of drugs and alcohol. This makes me lots of fun at parties. Still, no matter how combative we may be, no matter how sharp I keep my proverbial weapons, if there are only twenty of us when the cops show up, this is probably not going to go well. “Fucking unions,” Sophie mutters under her breath. “What are they good for if they can’t even bring out fifty people for something like this?” Her complaint is directed at SUD, short for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique (“In Solidarity, United, Democratic”), a small leftist union born in the aftermath of the 1995 general strike, whose railway branch had promised to mobilize for this action. I shrug. “Who knows, it’s not like we know what they look like. Maybe it’ll work out.” I’m trying to be positive, because this is the route we have chosen; if we’re at the ball, we might as well dance. It doesn’t seem like there are many alternatives available, anyway. A couple of weeks earlier, we were able to occupy the tracks, successfully delaying the train for a few hours. The cops eventually cleared the tracks via a liberal use of batons and CS gas, and when we returned a few days later, we found an army of police guarding the tracks. “Look, look, right there!” Sophie points to one of the entrances to the hall, her voice trembling with a mix of excitement and anger. I’m just spotting what she is pointing at, a young man probably in his twenties being led by an escort of seven or eight cops, when immediately my concerns about our numbers today are erased. From every corner of the hall comes a loud burst of disapproving whistling, followed immediately by what seems like the entire crowded hall erupting in thunderous chants of “Non, non, non… aux expulsions!” amplified and rendered even more urgent by the echoes generated by the closed space in which we find ourselves. The first few people rise from their seats, sprint over to where the line of CRS riot police are guarding access to the platform and the train, and link arms. A few more join them. Then dozens more. Friends and comrades appear from everywhere among the crowd. The chants declaring that no human being is illegal ring loud and constant as we too join the human chain. There are hundreds of us! There are so many of us that we form two lines across the opening to the platform—one facing the cops who were already stationed there to prevent us from attempting to get access to the tracks, and another facing back toward the hall, preventing the cops who are escorting a captive from reaching the train. Sophie and I find ourselves in the first of those two lines. The next few minutes pass in an adrenaline-fueled blur. The sight of the person we are trying to protect from deportation right in front of us illustrates poignantly what is at stake, and the disconcerted looks of his police escort only embolden us. Clearly, they aren’t sure whether to push through or abort. The police are familiar with resistance to deportations. We regularly show up at airports, informing passengers as well as airline workers about what is happening on their flights and what their employers are making them unwilling accomplices to, urging passengers to refuse to fly on flights that are simultaneously prisoner transports. We have had varying degrees of success. We’ve tried to disrupt and prevent deportations too, as we did a few weeks earlier at this same spot. But we’ve never done this. At least, never by the hundreds, never with the palpable feeling that we might actually succeed. I think the cops sense that, too. The next scene is of an extreme and almost intimate violence. Clearly, the order has been given to clear access to the train. CS gas and batons fly all around us. We are not armed. We have no flagpoles, no helmets, not even the cloth of a banner to protect ourselves with. Masks cover our faces while linked arms keep us together, but this leaves us practically defenseless against the baton blows. With neither word nor warning, the riot cop directly to my right pulls out a metal retractable baton from the inside pocket of his jacket, and in one swift motion he extends it and brings it down with a thud against the head of a comrade next to me. I hear the crack and immediately see blood gushing from the wound at the top of his forehead. His arms go limp, and the best I can do is kind of release my arm, which I have linked around his, and push him backward as he slumps, so that he falls toward the line of comrades facing the station and not at the feet of these unhinged cops. Before I can assess the wisdom of this course of action, I am already instinctively launching a kick at the stomach of the cop who has injured my neighbor. This cop has been sneering at us since we stood up, waiting for his moment to injure a “gauchiste de merde,” the French for “piece-of-shit leftist,” which is exactly what nationalists and fascists like to call us in Argentina, as well. Sophie yells for me to get back, but her voice barely registers on my radar. Comrades break the line to carry away the injured friend just as I broke ranks with my kick. Still others, blinded or unable to breathe due to the CS gas, also break ranks and retreat. The young Algerian is forced onto the train. The following week’s edition of Le Monde Libertaire, the weekly newspaper of the francophone Anarchist Federation, later reported4 that the train “departed with a delay of thirty minutes. […] The train would stop several kilometers farther, in Melun, waiting for another train transporting approximately half of its original passengers.” The missing passengers had been unable to board due to the clashes between demonstrators and police. “The train was again stopped at the Lyon-Perrache station around 2:30 am by activists there, but not before having made an unscheduled stop at L’Estaque station to disembark the prisoners and place them in the detention center at Arenc, as the cops were concerned about the possible actions of further demonstrators in Marseille.” There are still two clearly defined fronts inside the waiting area. We are standing on one side, now about twenty meters or so away from the trains. A small group of people start to leave—about twenty people, all wearing high-visibility vests. They are the SUD railway trade unionists, who had shown up to the action after all, but decided that with the departure of the train, their participation was over. The rest of us still number solidly in the hundreds. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. It’s poor attendance even at a third-division football match, barely enough people to fill a subway car. Even a strictly anarchist demonstration in Paris could number into the thousands. But in my eyes at that moment, these people are the whole world. Who cares about numbers, optics, or the opinion of sheep? I feel at home among these two hundred who have put their bodies behind the conviction that no human being is illegal, who have shown with their actions that the state and its agents are to be confronted head-on. Rather two hundred ultra-leftists, adventurists, extremists, or whatever else they may call us than two thousand who will stand idly by because party or union discipline says now is not the moment and this is not the way—or twenty thousand who will march down the street with us proclaiming that no human being is illegal, only to placidly continue with their day while others are dragged, often drugged and bound, to prisoner transports. I’m grateful for the participation of the sympathizer, the unionist, the party member, the reformist. I understand we need them to exert political pressure. But I feel now that my place is with the militants and the fighters, no matter the numbers. In front of us is a wall of riot cops, now too far to reach us with their gas and truncheons. The idea of police as the armed guards that enforce the dictatorship of capital through the state-sanctioned monopoly of violence gave way to a much more urgent feeling—a burning hatred of those who hurt my friends in order to perpetrate injustice. Whoever wears that uniform is the immediate means of our oppression and therefore my enemy. Somebody has come back from another track with a backpack full of stones. As the chants against deportation continue to roar, a few dozen of us attack the cops. There’s sadness and frustration still, because we failed, but there is also joy. There is a feeling of collective refusal and liberation. Too Much and Never Enough As we finally make our retreat from the station, smashing security cameras, advertisement panels, and automated ticket counters along the way, I am already thinking about the young Algerian whose deportation we were trying to stop. Tonight wasn’t about making an abstract political statement against deportations. It wasn’t a militant yet still symbolic action against the machinery of expulsion and the barbarism that categorizes human beings based on where they happen to have been born. The objective was to stop the kidnapping of a specific human being. And while there is still some distant hope that comrades farther down the line, in Lyon or in Marseille, might still succeed, we, at least, have failed, and my mind is already focused on how I, or we collectively, can do more. Despite my concerns that we didn’t do enough, the very next day, I am confronted with the press and the good citizens of Paris howling that we did too much. I pick up a newspaper on the way to school and find articles pontificating about the extremists at the train station, outraged at the disorder, condemning the supposed outbreak of violence. Too much disorder, too much violence—words coming from exasperated good citizens of Paris as they walk past me at the very same train station and see the smashed ticket-vending machines. The constant hand-wringing about “the extreme left, emboldened, becoming increasingly aggressive, violent, and dangerous” has only intensified since the election of the socialist and communist center-left government coalition. What was damaged? As I make my way through the station, I take note of the “damage.” The only damage to the station is to the machines that hinder our freedom of movement and convert the need to get from one place to another into an economic consideration. To the advertising panels that pollute public space and turn any place where the human eye might rest its gaze into propaganda for the constant consumption of goods we don’t need. And finally, to the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras, ensuring that anyone who rejects this system of consumption and control can be more efficiently surveilled and criminalized. What precious order did we disrupt? If the order they are referring to is this superficial peace and tranquility that has nothing to do with justice, then the problem is not that we were violent or disorderly but that we effectively disrupted the orderly procedures of oppression. The order of those who prefer the continuation of oppression as long as they can turn a blind eye to it—or worse, celebrate it in the name of nationalism or racism—to the turbulence of the struggle to end it. Violence? We threw some stones, probably injured nobody. The injured were on our side, those who faced the armed forces of the state with not much more than our bodies and the occasional flying object. What is a few smashed ticketing machines and advertisements compared to the violence we witnessed? The violence that takes place constantly, unceasingly, in every immigrant neighborhood swept by kidnappers working for the state—during every ticket control in the subway that triggers a domino effect that ends in deportation—on flights leaving constantly with prisoners, often drugged and handcuffed, transported as human cargo against their will. In regards to the life of this man, I don’t intend to shock or traumatize with speculations about what his fate might be, what his circumstances were, whether he was torn from a family, a partner, a project, his dreams. It doesn’t matter. I assert his freedom to live as he chooses and where he chooses because my anarchism demands this as a minimum condition of human dignity and a rejection of the system of states and borders that I seek to destroy. This violence, this war on individuals in the name of states and nations, is the only relevant violence here, the violence that is carried out in the defense of oppression. It is a machine of violence built to protect and perpetuate the system of exploitation and human suffering that pits human against human in a needless struggle for survival. A machine that has colonized the minds of people to such an extent that they can only recognize violence at the point of impact—the fist striking a face, the rock striking the policeman’s shield—and only when it interrupts the order that ordinarily inflicts it. This renders invisible the ceaseless unspeakable violence that flows from the system of nations, capital, and class society: death due to lack of access to health care, famine and hunger created by artificial scarcity, workplace accidents and deaths caused by the drive to skimp on safety measures in order to maximize profits, endless religious and nationalist wars. Immigrants drown in the seas around Fortress Europe or die of dehydration in the heat of the Arizona desert in desperate attempts to escape poverty and improve their lives. This systemic violence, the violence of oppression, barely even registers to most as such. I make my way through the city, still lost in my thoughts as I exit the subway into the largely immigrant neighborhood where the CNT offices are. Two cops are parked outside the subway, nonchalantly checking people’s identification at random. “Papers, please.” The normality of everyday violence. Faced with this reality, who cares about legality? Who cares about popular opinion? When there were few of us and we occupied the tracks, our action was completely peaceful. Yet the mercenaries of the state came and beat us without hesitation in order to achieve its objectives. Although they were able to accomplish this in a relatively “orderly” manner, due to our small numbers and tactical avoidance of violence, was that not the victory of an immeasurably greater violence? Would a greater violence on our end, for the purposes of liberation, not be justified? In what thought process does it follow that nonviolence represents the moral high ground, when adherence to nonviolence makes the perpetuation of human suffering and oppression possible? There is a moment that I will never forget from the day we were beaten off the tracks a few weeks prior to the story I have recounted. I can barely see him through the glass, his complexion and the reflection of the station lights against the train’s windows making it difficult to distinguish his features and facial expressions. Two cops are moving him through the train, one holding each arm behind him, his hands cuffed together in front. Suddenly, as they pass an open window we can clearly see as he turns to us. He lifts his hands and displays a victory sign with each, as he mouths “thank you” to us. There is sadness, dignity, and gratitude in his face. I don’t know anything about him, who he is, where he is from, what brought him here, what he is being sent back to. But I know that violence—life-changing and potentially fatal violence—is not taking place in the delaying of the train. Violence is what is being done to him inside it. It’s not that we are too violent, but exactly the opposite. If we don’t employ the full arsenal of our capacity for collective revolutionary action, to be a force against the system of control that oppresses all of us, are we not as complicit as those who see it but choose to turn away? What we are doing is not too much. It’s not nearly enough. Further Reading The Border Is Everywhere—We Can Attack It Anywhere Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE No Wall They Can Build Solidarity in an Age of War and Displacement The Students Walk Out in Los Angeles The Syrian Cantina in Montreuil: Organizing in Exile Willem Van Spronsen’s Action against the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School) is an experimental public school founded in 1982 that “places students in a condition of autonomy, encouraging them to resolve challenges themselves, in a collective manner if they so choose.” Academically, the school rejects grades, while structurally, its day-to-day operations are decided on collectively by teachers, students, and staff in a directly democratic fashion, principally through working groups and assemblies. Unsurprisingly, the school has steadily provided new and young blood into the anarchist and antiauthoritarian movement, and just as unsurprisingly, it was a target of a fascist attack in 2018. The high school’s website (in French) can be found here. ↩ “Lutter auprès des sans-papiers: Histoire du CAE Paris,” Courant Alternatif, February 1, 2006, http://oclibertaire.free.fr/spip.php?article115; translation by the author. ↩ “Un bilan critique du Collectif Anti-Expulsions d’Ile-de-France,” Cette Semaine, no. 85 (August–September 2002), https://cettesemaine.info/cs85/cs85cae.html; translation by the author. ↩ Jacques, “Étrangers expulsés, étrangers assasssinés!,” Le Monde Libertaire, no. 1123 (May 14–20, 1998), available at https://ml.ficedl.info/spip.php?article3761; translation by the author. ↩