Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
15
Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy. “Counterintuitive though it is, in a confusing situation, often the best, if not safest, place to be is the front lines, so you can get a clear visual grasp of what is going on around you.” -“How I Came to Be a Victim of Molotov Cocktail Friendly Fire and Lived to Tell the Tale,” an account from the demonstrations against the 2003 European Union summit in Thessaloniki, published in *Rolling Thunder #1.” My friend’s grandfather grew up in Germany in the 1920s. Being Jewish, he got involved in radical organizations and sometimes engaged in physical altercations with Nazis. In a memoir that he recorded for his family decades later, he describes the situation when the Nazis took power: “In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. I thought we would now start a revolution, but actually nothing happened. The...
3 weeks ago

Improve your reading experience

Logged in users get linked directly to articles resulting in a better reading experience. Please login for free, it takes less than 1 minute.

More from CrimethInc.

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

As Donald Trump and Elon Musk subordinate the United States government to their pursuit of totalitarian power, Democrats remain in a defensive posture, accusing them of lawlessness. But neither courts nor laws will suffice to halt the descent into autocracy. Massive numbers of people will have to take it upon themselves to organize concrete acts of resistance, to take direct action on a horizontal and participatory basis—in other words, to become anarchists. Tyranny Is the Opposite of Anarchism On February 8, the editorial board of the New York Times wrote that Elon Musk “is on a mission to rampage through the government’s confidential payment systems with an anarchist’s glee.” If you know any real-life anarchists, you know how absurd this is. Given access to the government’s payment systems, no anarchist would begin by cutting off resources to starving children or medical research. An anarchist would begin by cutting off funding to the police and the other instruments of state violence—precisely the institutions that Donald Trump and Elon Musk will expand at any cost. Anyone who tells you anarchism is about abolishing the social safety net for the sake of unbridled profit is lying to you outright. There are other words for that—for example, neoliberalism. Anarchism is something else entirely. Anarchists propose to abolish all institutional means of coercion, so that no one can dominate or oppress anyone else: Anarchism is the idea that everyone is entitled to complete self-determination. No law, government, or decision-making process is more important than the needs and desires of actual human beings. People should be free to shape their relations to their mutual satisfaction, and to stand up for themselves as they see fit. Anarchists oppose all forms of hierarchy—every currency that concentrates power into the hands of a few, every mechanism that puts us at a distance from our potential. -To Change Everything In other words, anarchists seek to bring about a situation in which no politician or billionaire, elected or not, could ever be in a position to cut off essential resources to millions of people with the flick of a pen. This is a profounder commitment to freedom, equality, and the well-being of the general public than one can find within the halls of any government. At this moment of peril, when aspiring autocrats have taken power and are attempting to consolidate permanent control of the state, why would the New York Times muddy the waters by taking a cheap shot at some of Donald Trump’s most determined enemies? Looking more closely at the quote above, it seems that the editorial board’s chief concern is not what will happen as a consequence of Elon Musk’s actions, but whether Musk and his cronies are following the rules properly. A Three-Sided Conflict As Trump and Musk carry out a hostile takeover of the United States government, outlets like the New York Times are narrating a story in which there are two sides: on one side, democracy and the rule of law, and on the other side, the criminal oligarchs that threaten to undermine them. But this is not the only way to understand the situation. It would be more precise to say that there are three camps—those who desire to return to the forms of governance that prevailed until January 20, 2025; those who are currently in the process of overturning that system in order to impose an even more oppressive system; and those who reject both of those options in favor of a more egalitarian alternative. In the first camp, we find people who believe that a certain amount of self-determination is acceptable, as long as it falls neatly within whatever laws happen to be on the books. They are also comfortable with a wide range of ruthless self-seeking destructive behavior, provided that it, too, complies with those same laws. When people in this camp talk about “equality,” they do not mean that all of us should have comparable leverage on the conditions that determine what we can do with our lives. They mean equal opportunity on the market and equality before the law—both of which are preposterous to speak about when some people start life with pennies while others start with billions. People in this camp are concerned about Elon Musk overhauling the federal government, but they had no objection to him amassing hundreds of billions of dollars while a hundred million Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. They are concerned about Trump’s plans for Gaza, but until a few weeks ago many of them were perfectly at ease with the United States government funding a genocide there. In the second camp, we find those who are determined to consolidate power in their own hands, regardless of what laws happen to be on the books. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their various capitalist, nationalist, and fascist backers will preserve whatever laws assist them and overturn the rest. They have no allegiance to any particular legal system or protocol. They seek their own advantage by any means, mendaciously claiming that they are the only ones who can address the problems of our time (“I alone can fix it”). Such people have always existed, but only over the past few years have resources become so unevenly distributed that a handful of them could take over the United States government. Finally, in the third camp, we find anarchists and other rebels who also have no allegiance to the system of governance that has prevailed until now, but for entirely different reasons. Anarchists believe that everyone deserves the maximum amount of freedom, regardless of what laws happen to be on the books—and therefore, that no one deserves to be able to dominate anyone else, whether by hoarding access to resources or wielding the instruments of state repression. People in this camp hold that regardless of what any constitution proclaims, regardless of how an electorate votes in an election, none of us owe any allegiance to institutions that exist solely for the purpose of imposing disparities in power, whether we are talking about government departments, banks, or private military contractors. In contrast to those who are comfortable with oligarchy and ethnic cleansing as long as no one breaks the rules, there is no way to bribe or blackmail anarchists into making excuses for oppression. Whatever your politics, you are probably sympathetic to the anarchist analysis to some degree—perhaps more than you think. Try this thought experiment: How much do you buy into the idea that the democratic process should trump your own conscience and values? Imagine yourself in a democratic republic with slaves—say, ancient Athens, or ancient Rome, or the United States of America until the end of 1865. Would you obey the law and treat people as property while endeavoring to change the laws, knowing full well that whole generations might live and die in chains in the meantime? Or would you act according to your conscience in defiance of the law, like Harriet Tubman and John Brown? If you would follow in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, then you, too, believe that there is something more important than the rule of law. This is a problem for anyone who wants to make conformity with the law or with the will of the majority into the final arbiter of legitimacy. -From Democracy to Freedom No Law Will Give You Freedom Staking the defense against Donald Trump on the principle that “no one is above the law” has failed for eight years now. Worse, with Trump back in control of the government, it’s a self-defeating narrative. What happens when his lackeys in Congress pass new laws and the judges he appoints rule in his favor? At that point, all this rhetoric legitimizing the law as a good in itself will only strengthen Trump’s hand. Many people spent several years of Trump’s first term waiting on former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. As we argued back then, before Mueller’s investigation ended in a complete washout, this doomed strategy reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the balance of power and the nature of law itself: Democrats still don’t understand how power works. Crime is not the violation of the rules, but the stigma attached to those who break rules without the power to make them. (As they say, steal $25, go to jail; steal $25 million, go to Congress.) At the height of Genghis Khan’s reign, it would have been pointless to accuse the famous tyrant of breaking the laws of the Mongol Empire; as long as Trump has enough of Washington behind him, the same goes for him. Laws don’t exist in some transcendent realm. They are simply the product of power struggles among the elite—not to mention the passivity of the governed—and they are enforced according to the prevailing balance of power. To fetishize the law is to accept that might makes right. It means abdicating the responsibility to do what is ethical regardless of what the laws happen to be. In the long run, the courts cannot constrain Donald Trump. He controls the executive branch, the part of the government that is supposed to enforce their rulings. Nor will the courts constrain Elon Musk. Even apart from Trump’s support, he has unlimited money for court cases. If the courts attempt to punish him by imposing fines, he can afford to pay for tens of billions of dollars’ worth of illegal activity. He already routinely refuses to pay rent and other bills that no ordinary person could ever get away with shrugging off. Nor will the police and other law-enforcement agencies constrain Trump or Musk. In theory, the police exist to enforce laws; in practice, the average cop knows very little about the law—they’re not lawyers, after all—but a great deal about obeying orders. Trump is the favorite politician of the mercenary caste, the ones who sell their capacity to inflict violence to the highest bidder (be that the state or private security contractors). Just as Trump has filled his government with disgraced public figures who depend on him, the police are his natural allies—the more so as a consequence of their compromised relationship with the general public. Continuing to emphasize the centrality of law in objections to Trump’s agenda can only hamstring future movements, discouraging the emergence of the only kind of resistance that could offer any hope once he has completed his takeover of the federal government. The truth is, neither the powerful nor the oppressed have ever had good cause to obey laws—the former because the same privileges that enable them to write the laws release them from the necessity of obeying them, the latter because the laws weren’t established for their benefit in the first place. -“Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom” Remember How We Got Here The binary narrative about criminal oligarchs undermining democracy and the rule of law is misleading in another way. The authoritarians who are overhauling the government do not represent the opposite of the preceding order, but the inevitable consequence of it. Their power grab is the result of several decades of democratically-managed capitalism, which enabled a coterie of billionaires to accumulate so much wealth and power that they no longer believe that they need the trappings of democracy to keep the populace appeased. It was the rules of the previous game that created this situation. Wanting to go back a single step in history, to the previous stage of the process, is foolish, because that was the stage that led us directly to this one. It is impossible to rewind the clock—and even if we could, that would only mean arriving once again at the same situation. The problem is not simply that Musk’s protégés have run rampant through the databases of the government, though that is already producing consequences that will likely be impossible to undo. The real problem is the emergence of a caste of billionaires who no longer require the services of democracy and have enough power to do away with it. These billionaires can buy up communication platforms, buy up both politicians and voters, use the global infrastructure under their control to determine the outcome of geopolitical struggles. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the ones who are currently attracting the most attention, but behind them are Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and many more. The individual character flaws of these men are beside the point; the significant thing is that the mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism are systematically concentrating power in the hands of people who are completely disinterested in others’ agency or well-being. This is why milquetoast centrism cannot offer a convincing alternative to the despotism of the fascists and technocrats. Describing the Democrats’ unsuccessful strategy of chasing Republicans further and further to the right, one Democratic politician quipped that “voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke.” This doesn’t put things strongly enough. Considering that Trump won the election on an explicit platform of mass deportations and autocracy, Democrats imitating Republican talking points while promising to “defend democracy” is like offering Diet Coke to a cocaine addict. Today’s Republican voters are motivated in great part by the desire to see violence directed against those more vulnerable than themselves. It is autocracy itself they desire, not any particular policy. This bloodlust is the consequence of the avarice and narcissism that neoliberal capitalism fostered in so many people and then failed to fulfill. Those who have become accustomed to powerlessness and passivity, who urgently desire revenge but do not understand who is responsible for their situation, will elevate tyrants to power for the vicarious thrill of seeing someone made to suffer, even if the consequences make life worse for practically everyone. Doubtless some of them would change sides if they saw a real opportunity to improve their lives, but that would require much more than a promise to go back to the Biden era. If the defenders of democracy cannot offer anything more inspiring than a return to the previous state of affairs—the one that caused this catastrophe in the first place—they will lose, and they will deserve to lose. It will take a more ambitious and far-reaching vision to defeat oligarchy. Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace In 2020, the most powerful uprising in living memory took place in the United States. Millions of people filled the streets. They were not galvanized by a timid electoral campaign, nor simply by the footage of police murdering George Floyd, but by the brave actions of ordinary people who stood up to injustice—above all, by the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis. By driving the political discourse in the election year, this uprising not only turned voters away from Donald Trump—it also showed billionaires that Trump would not be able to preserve conditions suitable for business, forcing them to temper their ambitions. One poll showed Americans supporting the burning of the police precinct by a larger margin than any victorious presidential candidate this century. In response to the uprising, Joe Biden and other Democrats doubled down on supporting the police. This shows that the Democrats believe that it is impossible to maintain power under capitalism without channeling more and more resources towards repression, tasking the police with keeping an increasingly desperate population under control. Today, the Republicans are going even further, cultivating support for explicitly patriarchal, racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian politics—in short, for fascism. The implication is that as billionaires accumulate more and more power and the consequences of their rapaciousness trickle down to the rest of us, it will take more than police to keep the population under control: it will also take informal militias, and falsehoods about why some demographics deserve to have more power than everyone else, and probably, in the long run, ethnic cleansing and genocide on a larger scale than we have yet seen. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. invited us to trust that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But today it is clear that things are not slowly, steadily getting better, neither in the field of civil rights, nor in regards to the natural environment, nor justice, nor governance. “The function of government is to centralize power and impose domination: to enforce, to punish, to administer. Politicians preside over an economy more oppressive and invasive than any dictatorship could be by itself.” The state is not the solution to these problems. It is a protection racket that—until recently—purported to solve our problems in order to lull us into dependence (“I alone can fix it”!) while suppressing our ability to meet our needs without it. Now, under Trump and Musk in the United States and rulers like Javier Milei elsewhere, there is no longer any pretense that the state exists to do anything besides oppress people and defend the profits of the rich. All this time, the state has been accumulating the means—both technological and social—that are required to force this new reality on us, and now the tyrants are intent on using them. Yet in doing so, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are giving millions of people cause to reevaluate their priorities and dedicate their lives to profound social change. The 2020 uprising offered a glimpse of what it looks like for large numbers of people to act on their own initiative, creating a groundswell of resistance that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Our chief error, in 2020, was in imagining that we could simply return to business as usual afterwards, when in fact our only hope is to change the world. As Trump and Musk gut every aspect of the state that is not about profiteering and repression, the stakes of this moment are coming into focus. There is no more middle ground. If you care about public health, you have to become a revolutionary. If you care about medical research, you have to become a revolutionary. If you care about climate change, about labor conditions, about the well-being of children in warzones, there is nothing else for it—you have to become a revolutionary. In the movements to come, we must make space for the civil servants Elon Musk has fired, for the scientists and academics whose funding has dried up, for those who once sought social change through electoral politics. They should put all their skills to work in new contexts, experimenting with new forms of resistance and spreading whatever strategies work far and wide. But we should not simply try to rebuild the broken system that brought us to this dire situation. We must build a new vision together along with the means to bring it into being. Anarchists propose to build our collective capacity to act on a horizontal and decentralized basis, rather than entrusting our agency to leaders. We seek to create a lattice of overlapping participatory and voluntary associations that can meet people’s material and spiritual needs. Rather than hoarding resources for ourselves the way the billionaires do, we seek to abolish all of the mechanisms that impose artificial scarcity, to create commons that benefit everyone. We seek to generate abundance, not profit. To be an anarchist means to recognize that our freedom and well-being are inextricably bound up with the freedom and well-being of billions like us. It means discarding all the old excuses for remaining subservient to those who only endeavor to enrich themselves at others’ expense. It means becoming fiercely loyal to what is best in ourselves and each other, to our capacity for compassion and cooperation and courage. Across two centuries, anarchists have resisted under monarchies and persisted through dictatorships. Now that liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism are concluding in a new form of tyranny, a new generation must draw on this long legacy of struggle. There is no going back to the way things were, to the future that we once anticipated. The old world is in flames around us. Become an anarchist, or forever hold your peace.

yesterday 4 votes
The Students Walk Out in Los Angeles : A Report from the Streets

In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency, some of the fiercest expressions of defiance have come from the communities that Trump is threatening to attack. In Los Angeles, students have engaged in weeks of walkouts and other protests against the mass deportations Trump promised. In Cincinnati, the historically Black community Lincoln Heights responded to a neo-Nazi rally by chasing off the white supremacists, burning their swastika flags, and conducting an armed watch lest they attempt to return. Both of these communities draw on deep roots of resistance. The students in Los Angeles are walking out in the footsteps of previous student rebels, including those who participated in the historic protests of 2006 against the repression of the undocumented. People in Cincinnati rose in rebellion in 2001 against police violence, foreshadowing the movement that got underway in response to the murder of Oscar Grant in 2008 and arrived on the world stage in 2014 with the uprising in Ferguson. In continuing these legacies, today’s protesters show how difficult it will be for Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and other racist billionaires to control the population of this continent. They also point the way for others who are still trying to figure out how to defend themselves against the new regime. Here, participants in this month’s demonstrations in Los Angeles offer a short report from the streets. You can view many other photographs depicting the week’s events by the same photographer here. Report from Los Angeles The ongoing anti-ICE protests in downtown Los Angeles have been led by Latino and Latina youth, including striking high school students and fleets of teenagers on 29er BMXes, minibikes, and lowriders. The streets are significantly livelier, compared to the last year of demonstrations protesting the genocide in Gaza. The Los Angeles Police Department has reported several injuries to officers, as well as slashed tires on police vehicles. Unencumbered by formal speeches and megaphone-driven chants, the participants have instead spent their time setting off fireworks and smoke bombs, doing burnouts at intersections, and chanting “Culero!” at the cops. Anger, frustration, excitement, and joy have mingled in the streets as cumbias and corridos blast from car stereos and live bandas and the smell of burning rubber fills the air. The events of Sunday, February 2, began at the El Pueblo de Los Angeles historical monument, where thousands rallied with speeches, music, and performances organized by a loose coalition of political organizations and social media influencers. After the performances and speeches, the participants marched to City Hall, where hundreds of people occupied the steps and lawns. The rally formally ended at 11 AM, but the crowd continued to march from City Hall back to El Pueblo de Los Angeles where protesters remained until 11 PM. This protester’s ensemble succinctly conveys an entire political program. Credit. It was clear that although the rally was called by formal political organizations, the crowd’s energy quickly exceeded any control they may have had over people’s movement. Crowds took over the 101 freeway in downtown three separate times, leaving the walls painted with “Fuck ICE,” “Brown Pride,” and “Chinga tu Madre Trump!” An estimated three thousand people, including street vendors who flocked in to sustain the protest, held down the blocks between the 101 freeway and Olvera Street all evening, until LAPD eventually used tear gas to disperse the crowd. According to one participant, “A crowd of about 100 swarmed an LAPD vehicle, seemingly trapping it as they danced cumbia on all sides. Orders to disperse were met with empty cans of beer thrown in the vague direction of police cruisers.” The next day, on February 3, students across Southern California and in parts of the rest of the country skipped classes and crowds gathered to mark “A Day Without Immigrants,” echoing a 2017 call to protest and boycott in response to the first Trump administration’s rhetorical and material attacks on immigrants. Los Angeles Unified School District attendance was reported at 66%, and traffic on the 101 was temporarily stopped by hundreds of protesters again. Graffiti on Los Angeles City Hall. After the previous day’s disordered and timid response to protesters, the LAPD was actively looking for opportunities to escalate and perform arrests. At least one man was arrested on a felony vandalism charge during the demonstrations. Minor skirmishes between protesters and police on February 3, including the use of green-strap 40-millimeter less-than-lethal rounds, culminated in the police kettling a group of 200-250 protesters in a tunnel on Chavez Avenue. At this point, the LAPD faltered, failing to muster and coordinate the necessary resources to carry out mass arrests. The tenacity of the crowd and protesters outside the kettle effectively succeeded in de-escalating the police response; after several hours, the protesters were cited and released. The strength of these initial protests laid the groundwork for the following week of resistance across Los Angeles County. Student walkouts have happened nearly every day and continue still, with community and mutual aid organizations supporting them. This form of resistance follows in the legacy of the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts (also known as the Chicano Blowouts), during which 20,000 high schoolers walked out demanding anti-racist education. The March 2006 rally for immigration reform also saw tens of thousands of students walk out. The energy in the streets and the overall swagger of the protesters recalls the rowdy celebrations after the Dodgers won the World Series in October, which escalated to looting in downtown and the burning of a Metropolitan Transit Authority bus in Echo Park. You can view more work by this photographer here. The speed of response, scale, and sustained nature of the protests in Los Angeles were notable. However, marches in San Diego, Phoenix, Austin, and dozens of other cities showed that the draw to make resistance public is not isolated to Southern California. While people have taken to the streets less rapidly than eight years ago, this should not be understood as a public disillusionment with the tactic of mass protest. We don’t have a complete answer for what tactical role street protests should play in the current political moment, but this week in Los Angeles has reminded us that there is still an intoxicating joy to be found in the streets in these collective gatherings of resistance. And regardless of whether activists, organizations, and organizers call for them—they are going to happen. The demonstrators at City Hall on February 4, 2025. A video shared by People’s City Council, Los Angeles. Further Reading Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE No Wall They Can Build

a week ago 6 votes
Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE

The Trump administration is paving the way for mass deportations by building new prison camps and invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which was used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Motivated by nativism and white nationalism, Steven Miller and other officials are attempting to ethnically cleanse the United States, while tech and prison companies profit on lucrative government contracts and corporations continue to exploit immigrant labor. Knowing that mass deportations will inflict devastating costs, Trump has chiefly been concentrating his efforts in cities like Chicago and Denver that are governed by his political adversaries. Nonetheless, people are getting organized. Communities across the US are mobilizing rapid response networks that can respond to raids and support those targeted by state violence. Students across the US are staging walkouts; people are holding mass demonstrations and fighting back against deportations. If we fail to stand in solidarity with those targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today, the same infrastructure of repression will eventually be turned against others, as well. An injury to one is an injury to all! Do your part to melt the ICE. Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE Click on the image to download the PDF. Please print these out and distribute them in your community! Know Your Rights—Educate Your Community Learn your rights in interactions with ICE and law enforcement. Trump officials have complained that people knowing their rights makes it “very difficult” to carry out raids. Asserting our rights can disrupt their plans, delay their efforts, and shift the power dynamics in encounters with law enforcement. Distribute “Know Your Rights” cards and fliers in your community. Organize teams to get them into schools and workplaces. Host a training at your local community center, church, or union hall. Publicizing this information is an chance to get people together to strategize about how to accomplish the other tasks on this list. Vet Information—Stop Rumors Disinformation spreads quickly when people are afraid. Set up hotlines, Signal loops, and social media accounts that can vet information, verify reports of ICE activity, and circulate reliable updates. If your area already has a hotline, volunteer to help keep it running. Don’t amplify rumors; when you see them spreading, debunk them. Reports about ICE activity should include the exact time, date, and location of the sighting, the number of agents, and a visual description of their uniforms, vehicles, and badges—or better still, photographic evidence. For more information, continue reading here. Organize Rapid Response Networks Organize a rapid response network to mobilize against ICE raids by recording their activity, providing support to the targeted, and organizing an immediate response. Documenting ICE activity has proven useful for understanding how they behave; it has also helped people in court. Wherever possible, block or slow their actions. In the past, crowds mobilized by rapid response networks have blockaded ICE deportation vans and protested outside ICE facilities. You can read about some rapid response networks here and here. Organize Mutual Aid—Support Bail Funds ICE raids disrupt lives and break families apart. Many people are afraid to attend school or go to work for fear of being kidnapped by ICE. Organize mutual aid programs to provide support to those in hiding and to families whose breadwinners have been abducted. Start a free grocery program. Deliver meals. Connect with existing support networks and organizations to expand their efforts. Support bail funds to get arrestees out of the system as soon as possible. Fight Criminalization—Shut out the Police Ordinary interactions with police are one of the chief risks to those targeted by ICE. A single false criminal charge could ruin a person’s life, even if it would never hold up in court. Encourage neighbors and coworkers not to call the police. Organize neighborhood networks, conflict resolution projects, and other ways to address community needs without involving the criminal “justice” industry. Debunk false narratives about rising crime rates—these are just excuses to increase the scope of repression and the profits of those who invest in it. Explain what everyone has to gain by standing in solidarity with those who are on the receiving end of criminalization. Publicly shame police officers and other mercenaries who sell their capacity to inflict harm to the highest bidder. Stand In Solidarity with ICE Detainees—Fight to Abolish ICE Stand in solidarity with those locked inside ICE facilities. Support their efforts to organize. Prisoners in many ICE facilities organize hunger strikes and labor stoppages demanding better food, better conditions, access to healthcare, and legal representation. Organize to prevent the construction of new ICE facilities. Mobilize against contractors that work with ICE or supply technology to ICE. Connect the struggle against ICE to other organizing within and against prisons. Connect Communities These tactics will be most effective if you pursue them in community with those who are immediately at risk. For example, if you maintain a platform sharing verified sightings of ICE in your community, this will do little good unless it reaches those who need that information most. Strengthen the ties between those who are targeted by ICE and the rest of your community. Build a Culture of Resistance against ICE and State Repression Build a culture of resistance in your neighborhood, school, or workplace. Make the walls of your community speak with stickers and posters. Encourage non-cooperation with ICE. Strategize with others in your community about how to support those facing repression and take the offensive against those who are scapegoating the undocumented. Every time ICE wants to attack your community, they should know that their activity will be recorded and reported, that people will converge on them wherever they show up, that there will be consequences for their actions. Every operation should cost them more resources than the last. If all of us do what we can, the accumulation of our efforts will save lives and preserve communities. For More Information Immigrant Legal Resource Center When ICE Comes Calling, Rapid Community Responses Can Make a Difference ICE Watch Programs Can Protect Immigrants in Your Neighborhood A Guide for Employers: What to Do if Immigration Comes to Your Workplace Think There’s Nothing You Can Do to Stop ICE? Think Again. Willem van Spronsen’s Statement about Why He Took Action against ICE Know Your Rights: You have constitutional rights! DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR if an immigration agent is knocking on the door. DO NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS from an immigration agent if they try to talk to you. You have the right to remain silent. DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING without speaking to a lawyer first. You have the right to speak with a lawyer. If you are outside of your home, ask the agent if you are free to leave. If they say yes, leave. GIVE THIS TEXT TO THE AGENT. If you are inside of your home, show the text through the window or slide it under the door: I do not wish to speak with you, answer your questions, or sign or hand you any documents based on my 5th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution. I do not give you permission to enter my home based on my 4th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution unless you have a warrant to enter, signed by a judge or magistrate with my name on it that you slide under the door. I do not give you permission to search any of my belongings based on my 4th Amendment rights. I choose to exercise my constitutional rights. ICE agents often carry administrative rather than judicial warrants. They would like you to think that these are the same, but they are not. If the agent does not have a judicial warrant with all the correct information for the specific person they are looking to detain, they do not have authority to enter private areas without consent, including private areas at a workplace. Talk with your coworkers so that everyone understands which areas are public and private; put up signs and keep doors closed. Create a policy on how to respond if ICE comes to your place of work. You can learn more about how to deal with workplace raids here.

a week ago 10 votes
The Day the Émigrés Struck Back : Remembering May Day 2006

In 2006, students around the United States engaged in spontaneous walkouts protesting the repression of undocumented people, culminating on May Day in the first great general strike to take place in the US in the 21st century. Today, as students are once again staging walkouts and people around the country are taking to the streets against the immigration policies of the second Trump administration, it is a good time to revisit this earlier high point of resistance. The following report originally appeared in issue three of Rolling Thunder, our Anarchist Journal of Dangerous Living. You can order these stickers here. May 1, 2006 May Day 2006 saw the first nationwide general strike in the United States in several decades. The immigrant rights movement had declared that fine spring day “A Day without Immigrants,” in response to right-wing rhetoric to the effect that “we don’t need immigrants.” They replied “Ok gringo, if you don’t need us, we’re not going to go to work or school, nor buy or sell anything on this day. Let’s see how well this country runs.” The strike was a stunning success, despite a number of spineless Latino “leaders” condemning the strike, saying that it would create a backlash and send the wrong message. As if the bill in Congress that would deport twelve million people and militarize the US-Mexico border wasn’t a backlash! Across the country, immigrants and their allies walked off the job, skipped school, shuttered the windows of their shops, and refused to spend any money. In Phoenix, thousands of workers took the day off and blockaded the entrances to various Walmart and Home Depot stores. Nearly all the chain restaurants in the city had to close or slash their hours due to the strike. Dozens of meatpacking plants, employing thousands of workers, were closed down nationwide due to that industry’s reliance on immigrant labor. Los Angeles was possibly hardest hit, with a good portion of the city completely shut down. The port of LA, one of the country’s largest, was ninety percent inactive thanks to the overwhelming majority of truckers refusing to haul goods that day. A small but rowdy portion of the more than one million people who marched for immigrant rights in LA chose to round off the day in running battles with the police, throwing rocks and bottles, dragging debris into the streets, and vandalizing outdoor advertisements. California’s state legislature was forced to close when janitors, cafeteria workers, and maintenance people did not show up to work at the capitol building. Meanwhile, across the country, the New York state legislature shut down mid-session when Black and Latino legislators walked out in solidarity with the protest. Back in California, the agricultural counties were hit particularly hard, with major corporate farms such as Gallo Wines being forced to halt production for the day. A riot broke out in Santa Ana, CA when police tried to disperse a crowd of fifteen hundred that had taken over a major boulevard. The crowd responded by raining bottles and rocks on the cops, who were forced to retreat until a riot squad was brought in to quell the revolt. In New York City, scuffles broke out with police when a crowd thousands strong attempted to take the Brooklyn Bridge. Nearly half a million people marched through the streets of Chicago, and another one hundred thousand marched in Denver, where it was reported that scuffles broke out between protestors and Minutemen counter-protestors. Several hundred cities and small towns across the country experienced demonstrations, many of them the largest those cities had ever seen. In a sign that the immigrant rights movement may be diversifying, the windows of a Department of Homeland Security office in Santa Cruz responsible for deporting immigrants were shattered overnight. According to a message posted on the internet, dozens of banks and “financial institutions” saw their locks glued and ATM machines sabotaged in western North Carolina, in an apparent move to support the general strike. South of the border, throughout Mexico, hundreds of thousands of people observed a sister day of protest labeled “A Day without a Gringo,” in which Mexicans boycotted all US business interests. Mexico City saw a crowd of several thousand gather to listen to Zapatista leader Marcos speak and to show their solidarity with their brothers and sisters struggling north of the border. Afterwards, several hundred demonstrators took a tour of the business district, smashing the windows of US-owned banks and restaurants. In Monterey, a group of women gave out free tacos in front of a McDonald’s in an effort to support the boycott. Meanwhile, every major border crossing from El Paso to San Diego was shut down by groups of angry Mexican citizens on their side of the border, preventing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of goods from crossing the border that day. All in all, May Day 2006 was one of the largest days of protest the United States had ever seen. Counting Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, DC alone, there were nearly two million people in the streets, with an equal or greater number joining in smaller demonstrations elsewhere across the US. It was a day of protest based on the principles of direct action, the centerpiece of which was a general strike. In many places, demonstrators went further, blockading businesses that exploit immigrants and engaging the police in battles when push came to shove. It was fitting that it was immigrants who brought May Day back to its former splendor. It was here in the United States, in Chicago, that this international day of workers’ solidarity was born in the struggle for the eight-hour day. Radical immigrant workers, the majority of them anarchists, were at the front of the struggles that made May Day what it is, offering their tears, sweat, and blood in the fight for a better way of life. Appendix: How It Began This contemporary account by an outside sympathizer offers a snapshot of the momentum that led to the general strike of May Day 2006 and a glimpse of political discourse about immigrants’ struggles at that time. Early in 2006, I was riding my bike through downtown Tucson on my way to write a story about recent Indigenous uprisings on a faraway island in Indonesia. My mind was occupied by mundane worries: low air pressure on the rear tire, cars driving too close to me, wondering if I was getting skin cancer from so much sun. I had nearly completed my daily pilgrimage to the office when these trivial thoughts were interrupted by a sea of people moving steadily in my direction from several blocks away. There was joyful shouting, people carrying indistinguishable flags and banners. “Wasn’t Saint Patrick’s day last week?” I thought to myself. As I neared the energetic crowd, I soon realized this was no state-sanctioned holiday, and it sure as hell had nothing to do with the Irish. Instead, I saw two or three hundred mostly Latino youth marching defiantly down the street. Recalling the numerous record-breaking protests against racist anti-immigrant laws of the past week, I realized I had run into a student walkout. As I neared the next block, I was amazed to find a group of three hundred students already rallying in front of the federal building. Over the next half hour, the crowd swelled to over a thousand as more and more fugitive students arrived in groups of ten, fifty, a hundred. The energy and excitement of these youthful rebels nearly overwhelmed me as their chants of “¡Si se puede!” (“Yes, it can be done!”) rang through the air, at times drowned out by the constant honking of supportive passersby. Others chanted “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” in reference to the United States’ arbitrary heist of the northern portion of Mexico over a century ago. Still more carried signs reading “No human being is illegal.” The following day, I was again riding my bike through downtown, somewhat more prepared to run into a protest, because I had heard that students were planning another walkout. I was disappointed when I encountered a small crowd of fifty kids walking on the sidewalk. “I guess they let their steam out yesterday,” I thought pessimistically to myself. As I rounded the corner onto Congress Avenue, I was forced to eat my words. The crowd was nearly double the size of the previous day’s, overflowing the small plaza in front of the federal building into the streets. The initial fifty were just stragglers. Soon, the massive crowd surged towards the federal courthouse, where thousands of immigrants are deported every year, and proceeded to block the entrance to this institution of oppression for half an hour. Meanwhile, hundreds of other students cruised the streets of downtown in perilously overloaded vehicles, blasting the music of their home countries, waving Mexican flags, and carrying posters of Cesar Chavez. Whether or not it was intentional, these cruisers, in conjunction with the sea of protestors swarming downtown from all directions, brought Tucson’s business district to a standstill. The energy, defiance, and sheer power of these demonstrations stands in stark contrast to the dreary, well-behaved, state-approved parades put on by our country’s numerous leftist organizations. “These are no mere protests,” I thought to myself, “this is an uprising.” This initial speculation was confirmed when I got back home and looked at the news reports. Even the corporate media acknowledged that well over a thousand Tucson middle- and high-school students had dropped their pens and paper and taken to the streets to protest the government’s attempted crackdown on immigration. At one school, someone pulled a fire alarm after the principle attempted to direct students into the gymnasium, ensuring their escape to the streets. At another school, several dozen students scaled a barbed wire fence after administrators locked the only exit shut. Other students took their anger out on the Border Patrol, notorious for its rampant racism and sadistic abuse of detainees, by throwing rocks at its Tucson headquarters. What I saw in Tucson was no isolated incident. In Los Angeles, thirty-six thousand students walked out three days in a row, shut down four freeways, and repeatedly clashed with the LAPD when the latter attempted to break up this spontaneous outbreak of rebellion. In Fort Worth, Texas, not exactly a hotbed of radicalism, several hundred students walked out and proceeded to take over the city hall. Police responded by injuring several students, one of whom required hospitalization. There’s nothing like a group of grown-up armed men beating school children! In Pasadena, California, police opened up on a crowd of one hundred and fifty students with pepper balls in an attempt to disperse them. The students responded to this unprovoked attack by throwing rocks and bottles at the police. In San Diego, six thousand students took to the streets in five days of class disruptions. On the final day, they attempted to take over the Coronado bridge that spans San Diego Bay, but were stopped by a wall of California Highway Patrolmen. In Santa Ana, student occupations shut down several government offices, including the tax collector’s office. “No human being is illegal.” This massive wave of civil disobedience on the heels of the previous week’s pro-immigrant demonstrations is no doubt a sign of a healthy and rapidly growing national rebellion. Where do predominately white anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial movements in this country fit into the picture? First off, gringos need to understand that immigrants to the US are for the most part fleeing the poverty, hunger, and violent repression manufactured abroad by our country’s government in order to ensure the relative comfort of our lives here at home. It is no coincidence that the “flood” of illegal immigrants from Mexico skyrocketed after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The human beings who are risking their lives (several hundred die every year) traversing the arid borderlands are not doing so to steal people’s jobs. They are trying to ensure the survival of their families by earning slightly more than the starvation wages they find, if they are lucky, south of the border.1 Radicals in the US should extend solidarity to the immigrant rights movement in every way possible. This is not the time for professional activists to step up and “show the masses the way.” The folks fueling the fire of this uprising seem to have a pretty clear analysis of the situation and an equally clear vision of how to win. The last thing they need is some know-it-all honkies to come in and tell them what to do. If you need further convincing of this fact, consider that the immigrant rights movement has managed in a matter of weeks to mobilize an enormous and militant movement that is already beginning to surpass what the anti-war movement, with the “help” of all those well-paid professional activists, has accomplished in the past three years. Sympathetic gringos can offer direct assistance by cooking food for demonstrators, hanging posters, organizing solidarity actions, offering rides to demonstrations and meetings, acting as legal observers, raising funds for legal expenses (hundreds have already been arrested for acts of civil disobedience), and showing up to demonstrations. One role I believe we have a particular responsibility to play is confronting racist boneheads such as the Minutemen who have spearheaded the massive anti-immigrant backlash. The sheer idiocy of anyone of European descent in North America complaining about illegal immigrants is maddening enough—but when these bigots start walking around with guns to “protect the borders of the US” as a code for promoting their racist ideals, and receive significant backing from prominent Republicans and the media in return, we have a duty to stop them. Wherever these racist thugs hold a rally, we should organize a larger counter-rally. Whenever they organize a meeting, we should be there to disrupt it. Those of us who live near the border can interfere with their “civilian border patrols” by warning would-be crossers of their presence. (A megaphone and a spotlight will help.) We can show our solidarity by continuing to fight the colonialist policies that have impoverished other countries and created this whole immigration “problem” in the first place. Shutting down the World Trade Organization in Seattle was a good start, but we totally dropped the ball on NAFTA and CAFTA (the equivalent agreement for Central America). However, it is not too late to defeat the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and resistance to it throughout the rest of the continent is still fierce. I reckon it’s never too late to get the other two repealed either. While welcoming economic and political refugees into our country is a good start, if we want to create a truly just world for everyone, we must destroy the policies that force people to make the trek in the first place. You can obtain these posters here. Radicals must address the anti-immigrant sentiment that sometimes boils up within our own ranks—for example, in certain sectors of the environmental movement. Groups such as the Sierra Club have flirted for years with the asinine notion that poor immigrants are somehow a major source of ecological destruction in the US. The line of logic proceeds thus: the increase in population is causing major sprawl, and by moving to the US—hold your breath for this one—immigrants start to consume at the rate that US citizens do. If I understand this right, it’s OK for us to continue consuming the world’s resources at a suicidal rate, but not for anyone else to? Talk about blaming the victim! Instead of scapegoating immigrants, we should be working first and foremost to reduce our own consumption of resources. It is equally ridiculous to allege that immigrants cause sprawl. They are not the ones building the second and third trophy homes that are eating up wilderness across the country. Come to think of it, they often are the ones building these homes—not for themselves, but for the exorbitant lifestyles of middle- and upper-class US citizens. Don’t even get me started on the devastation that the massive border wall that some are calling for would have on the ecological integrity of the Sonoran desert ecosystem. Radical immigrant groups that are fighting for better wages and work conditions in the US also deserve support. Groups such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) have both launched numerous protests, boycotts, and speaking tours to achieve better pay in the fields. During FLOC’s boycott of Mt. Olive pickles, anarchists in North Carolina helped by protesting at grocery stores (including trashing Mt. Olive products in the store), painting banners, and offering rides to FLOC organizers who did not have documentation or driver’s licenses. The CIW recently won in a boycott against Taco Bell demanding that they pay tomato pickers more per pound, and have just launched a fresh boycott against McDonalds hoping to achieve the same goal. I’m sure you can think of a number of ways to help compel McDonalds to meet their demands. Comida no Migra—“food, not border patrol”—is a new take on the Food Not Bombs model that is catching on in many communities across the US. Instead of serving lunch or dinner in the park, participants get up early in the morning to bring food to immigrant day laborers at the places where they wait for work. Not only does this provide folks with a little sustenance and good cheer, it also puts observers on site to make sure no one messes with them. This is important because the Minutemen, not knowing what else to do with their pathetic lives, have started protesting at day labor sites to intimidate immigrants. Similarly, it’s not unheard of for immigrants to get picked up by some asshole, work all day, and then not get paid; even worse, there have been incidents in which racists have picked up day laborers and beaten or killed them. There is a lot of work to be done in the fight for immigrant rights. Whether that means offering childcare to families so that they can attend meetings, translating information on workers’ rights into Spanish, or blockading immigration detention centers, there are many fronts in this battle and all of them are important. It would behoove radicals in the US to study the solidarity work people in Europe and Australia have done around immigration and asylum seeking. Check out the No Border network—a massive European immigrants’ rights coalition. In Australia, activists have repeatedly broken political asylum-seekers out of detention centers and provided them refuge. In Italy, several years ago, a group of activists actually dismantled an immigrant detention facility while police looked on helplessly! There is much we can offer. The fight for immigrant rights is not about us and how radical our politics are. It is about lending our solidarity to people in struggle. Click on the image to download the poster. Even if they were just “here for a free ride,” as the right wing asserts, I’d say good for them. After all we’ve stolen from them and the places they came from, it’s merely a matter of them coming and getting a little piece of the pie back—in other words, reparations. ↩

2 weeks ago 10 votes

More in history

Die Mondexpedition (1966)

Die Mondexpedition is the original  German book that was translated into English in 1969 as The Log of a Moon Expedition. It's full title at the time was Die Mondexpedition: 14 Mal 24 Stunden auf dem Mond roughly translated as The Lunar Expedition: 14 times on the moon for 24 hours. Which I simplify as "The Lunar Expedition: 14 days on the Moon." The author and illustration was Ludek Pesek, a well known space artist. See his Wikipedia article here. He illustrated space and planetary themes in books and National Geographic illustrations since 1963. This was his first science fiction novel which he chose to illustrate with lush paintings of an expedition to the Moon. I blogged about the English language copy of this book in 2009. If you have not seen these before I am happy to show you some wonderful art you might have missed. Pesek, Ludek. Illustrated by Pesek, Ludek. Die Mondexpedition: 14 Mal 24 Stunden auf dem Mond . Recklinghausen: Paulus Verlag. (126 p.)

18 hours ago 4 votes
Poison for the soul

Review of David Lay Williams’s “The Greatest of All Plagues”

19 hours ago 3 votes
Christy Rupp: Rat Patrol in New York City, 1979

In 1979, American artist Christy Rupp (born 1949) created a street poster of a prowling, life-sized rat. With a keen interest in animal behaviour and habitat, Rupp’s popster coincided with a three-week strike by NYC sanitation workers. As the rubbish bags piled up on the city’s streets, Rupp added her poster wherever rats were claiming … Continue reading "Christy Rupp: Rat Patrol in New York City, 1979" The post Christy Rupp: Rat Patrol in New York City, 1979 appeared first on Flashbak.

8 hours ago 2 votes
Democracy vs liberalism in the heart of Europe

‘All state authority is derived from the people’

10 hours ago 2 votes