We’ve prepared a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s. Up Against the Wall Motherfucker gained notoriety participating in the occupation of Columbia University in 1968; they were instrumental in introducing anarchist politics into the hippie counterculture and resistance to the Vietnam War, emphasizing the importance of affinity groups and direct action. The text is taken directly from an Up Against the Wall Motherfucker broadside. Click on the image to download the poster. Our utopia is an environment that works so well we can run wild in it. Until our most fantastic demands are met, fantasy will be at war with society. Society attempts to suppress fantasy, but fantasy springs up again and again, infecting the youth, waging urban guerrilla warfare, sabotaging the smooth functioning of bureaucracies, waylaying the typist on her way to the water-cooler, kidnapping the executive between office and home, creeping into the bedrooms of respectable families, hiding in the chambers of high office, gradually tightening its control, eventually emerging into the streets, waging pitched battles and winning (its victory is inevitable). We are the vanguard of fantasy. Where we live is liberated territory in which fantasy moves about freely at all hours of the day, from which it mounts its attacks on occupied territory. Each day bring new areas under our control. Each day a new victory is reported. Each day fantasy discovers new forms of organization. Each day it further consolidates its control, has less to fear, can afford to spend more time in self-discovery. Even in the midst of battles, it plans the cities of the future. We are full of optimism. We are the future. Fantasy Armed In a time of escalating repression and desperation, it is bracing to revisit the avowed optimism of our revolutionary forebears. This optimism concerns not just whether it is possible to win, but what would constitute victory and who stands to benefit. Fantasy—the imaginative excess that escapes the confines of prevailing reality—is common to all human beings. The most repressed and conservative individual could ruthlessly suppress his tendency to daydream while awake, but nonetheless, every night, when he closes his eyes to sleep, he will dream uncontrollably. To side with fantasy is to side with the suppressed creativity within every human being against everything that is constraining about our institutions, everything that is suffocating about our rituals and routines. It means fighting on behalf of all against everything we do to limit ourselves and each other. Fantasy represents sensitivity to possibility itself. Anarchists aspire to create conditions in which all creatures are able can fulfill their potential on their own terms. This entails abolishing the boundaries between the excluded and the included, the subordination of what is called “wild” to what is called “civilized,” the subordination of the physical to the mental and the body to the mind. If fascists have gained the upper hand in our society for now, it is precisely because they have been so successful in subjugating fantasy, channeling it towards their narrow-minded pursuit of coercive power rather than letting it run wild and free. Fantasy can serve oppressors when it is caged and yoked to machinery of domination—but fantasy, liberated, liberates all in turn. The Source The original version of this text appears in two different forms. The collection Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: the incomplete works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group presents it with two frames of an image of a primate, whereas page 46 of this collection includes three frames and an additional phrase: To put thought underground… so that wildness can come above ground. The more complete version bears the letters “ESSO” in the lower left, with a hand-drawn circle around them, standing for the East Side Service Organization. Sometimes known as the East Side Survival Organization, this was the business front that UAW/MF established to receive donations with which to support the hippie runaways and others who were living precariously on the streets of lower Manhattan in the mid-1960s. Those who want to learn more about Up Against the Wall Motherfucker can read Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion, a memoir by prominent participant Ben Morea, just released by Detritus Books this spring. You can consult Ben’s Instagram page to see some of his artwork. His now-defunct blog is archived here. Further Reading Up against the Wall, Motherfucker—The Game? Revisiting a Simulation of the 1968 Occupation of Columbia University Up against the Wall Motherf**ker : A Memoir of the ’60s, with Notes for Next Time, Osha Neumann

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. ↩

This May Day, gather in defiance of tyranny and oppression. Gather to create communities based in solidarity and mutual aid. Gather with everyone who wants a better life. Gather to honor those who fought before us. Gather to show that another world is possible. As May Day 2025 approaches, we face an increasingly grim situation. Donald Trump and his lackeys are restructuring the state, redirecting even more resources towards repression and filling their pockets along the way. They are already deporting students on the basis of their political views and they have made it clear that they intend to escalate to deporting US citizens as well. All the while, the ecological damage, climate disasters, wars, and genocides that were already in progress are only intensifying. While some are laying low, hoping that the tide will turn, that is a terrible mistake. How far this nightmare can go will be determined by what people do now to build movements of resistance. The more time passes, the firmer Trump’s grip on the institutions will be, and the better positioned he will be to expand and intensify repression. Even if Trump’s ill-thought-out policies alone suffice to turn the majority of the population against him, that will not answer the question of how to push him out of power—he has already shown that he will not leave office willingly. It also will not ensure that what comes after will be any better. Remember, we ended up in this situation because of the catastrophic reign of the Biden administration. There’s no way around it: we have to build powerful grassroots movements through which to defend each other and popularize a radical analysis of what we are up against. May Day offers a perfect occasion for this. For nearly a century and a half, anarchists and other revolutionaries have observed it as a day of celebration and resistance. Tapping into this longstanding tradition offers many reference points for what we can do right now. Wherever you are, you can do something for May Day. Better yet, organize a week of events, including education, mutual aid, arts and entertainment, and a march or demonstration. We’ve prepared a poster design to support you in organizing and promoting events in your community. Click on the image to download the poster. Most of the suggestions that follow here are things you can do with two dozen people. Organizing doesn’t have to involve massive numbers to be worthwhile. Even in movements that do involve massive numbers, the best way to ensure that they will be resilient and effective is to make sure that people are in the habit of talking, making decisions, and taking action in small groups so as to maximize the agency of the participants. In Washington, DC, an ad-hoc group is calling for an occupation of the National Mall: Our strategy is to establish a 24/7, legal, non-violent demonstration on the National Mall, calling on Congress to take the only logical step in this crisis: impeach and remove Donald Trump. You can follow their announcements here. Elsewhere around the country from Seattle to Minneapolis, longstanding groups are planning events. But don’t leave everything to them. If anything really exciting is going to happen, it’s up to you. Outreach Spring is in the air; it’s a good time to make new connections. Even if you are already organizing in a tight-knit community of anarchists, this is a chance to reach out to people you don’t know yet. Invite them to events! Talk to them about their concerns! Propose ideas for what you could do together! Even if you are completely isolated and cannot organize events with other humans, you can order stickers from Municipal Adhesives—and, sure, from us as well—and bring the bus stops and electrical boxes of your neighborhood to life. Pocket a paint marker and add “ICE” to every stop sign in your county. Cut a stencil design into the bottom of a thick paper shopping bag and walk around your neighborhood with a can of spray paint in the bag, leaving a little trail of messages everywhere you go. If you are not a gifted artist, Municipal Adhesives mails out stencils, too. Download and print posters, make wheatpaste or obtain wallpaper paste, and go out putting postering. You could do all of these things even if you are the only sentient life form within a hundred miles. On the other hand, if you are not the only sentient life form within a hundred miles, you could also print or order some zines and set up a literature table at a punk show, a campus, a farmer’s market, or, failing all else, at that bus stop where you put up your first sticker. Education For May Day, you could organize a reading group around a text engaging with the history of May Day. You could host a presentation on anarchism, or on the history of resistance in your local community. You could call for a discussion connecting one of those themes to the various attacks that the Trump administration is currently carrying out, with an eye to strategizing a response. You could also announce a gathering in a public location at which people read aloud the final statements of the Haymarket martyrs—the ones whose sacrifice for the labor movement gave rise to May Day as we know it today. Likewise, you could read one of the speeches of lifelong anarchist organizer Lucy Parsons, whose husband was among the murdered. As the Trump administration smashes and loots the infrastructure of state-sponsored education, it is important to be building up our own educational models in their place. Organizing You could call for an assembly bringing together different people affected by or working on an issue such as ICE deportations or environmental damage, at which to coordinate resistance. Even if the administration has not targeted your local community yet, you should do this now, in order to be prepared. For example, you could come up with a plan and get all the resources in place to respond as soon as they take a given action. Arts and Entertainment The May Day parade is a time-honored tradition, especially in places like Minneapolis. If there is already something like that happening near you, great—all you have to do is organize a contingent for it. But if there is not a May Day parade in your area, that is also great—it means that you can organize one according to your own preferences. Don’t neglect to prepare banners, giant puppets, or other artistic elements. In 2017, anarchists in Portland made giant spiders for their May Day parade. The spiders of mutual aid, solidarity, and direct action: May Day in Portland, 2017. How to make spiders of your own! For later in the evening—or over the weekend—you could book a benefit show featuring local bands. For extra credit, you could host a show in a subversive location, such as under an overpass or in an abandoned warehouse. End the night with a dance party! Mutual Aid For the occasion, you could host a Really Really Free Market, a potluck, or a work day at a community garden or community center. Taking the Offensive All of this will be of little use if we can’t also go on the attack. Limiting ourselves to attempting to manage the details of our survival in a non-hierarchical way while the state inflicts brutal violence on more and more people means accepting defeat in advance. We should respond to their offensives, but it is crucial that we pick the time and place of our own. Thus far, the one solid example of this is the Tesla protests, which have opened up a new front of conflict, distracting the attention of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and laying bare their vulnerabilities. But there are many other ways to take the fight to our oppressors—recall the ICE occupations of 2018. Identify a target and call for a protest or some other form of action there. If there is no obvious target available, you could still organize a public demonstration for the purposes of getting people used to moving together and engaging in collective expression, however symbolic. A smaller group of people preserving the element of surprise could also take action, sending up a signal flare to let others know that they are not alone in their rage. Remember, at any demonstration that could be subject to repression, leave your phone at home and dress to preserve your anonymity. You can find more resources about taking action here. Further Reading “A Day Without an Immigrant“—The General Strike of May Day 2006 May Day 2018 in Paris May Day 2019 in Paris May Day 2020: Snapshots from around the World—How People Demonstrated During the Pandemic The May Days: Stories of Courage and Resistance—Snapshots from the History of May Day A Poster for May Day 2006