In this anonymously submitted report, participants in the occupation of the engineering building at the University of Washington explore their motivations and recount the events in detail. This courageous action comes as the Israeli military prepares to open a new chapter in its effort to exterminate the Palestinian population of Gaza. At the same time, millions around the United States are impatiently awaiting the emergence of tactics via which to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to consolidate power in the hands of an autocracy. Report from the Occupation of the Sha’ban al-Dalou Building Note from the Authors: We use the term occupation throughout this text. We mean this as the taking over and filling of a space, transferring control from one actor (in this case, primarily the state) to another (in this case, the revolutionary community). We cannot occupy anything within Turtle Island without recognizing that any real “people’s occupation” would necessarily entail decolonization: the return of all occupied settler colonial space to the resilient Indigenous communities of this stolen land. Palestine continues to resist under the harshest of conditions. Today, food supplies are cut to Gaza, while bombs rain down on refugee camps and resistance fighters alike. Yet none of this dampens the Palestinian somoud (صمود), the spirit of steadfastness. Palestine shines a bright light upon the walls and prisons of this world, directing us towards another. The route between the two worlds is escalation. As Palestine lays bare the colonial nature of this world, it becomes clear that so-called “peaceful” marches and rallies alone are not enough. Appealing to the mercy of this violent system is not enough. On Monday, May 5, students and community members took over a building at the University of Washington (UW) funded by Boeing, one of the world’s largest war profiteers, reclaiming it in the name of the martyred student Sha’ban Al-Dalou, who was burned alive when Israeli forces bombed the Al-Aqsa hospital on October 14, 2024. A banner hanging in the window of the Sha’ban al-Dalou Building on May 5, 2025. The Target Founded in Seattle, Boeing is one of the world’s largest war profiteers. The company hides the harm it causes by focusing its branding around commercial airplanes, but the reality is that Boeing makes over 50% of its revenue from weapons manufacturing with contracts supplying militaries around the globe. This includes missiles, bombs, military helicopters, fighter jets, and other weapons of war that are implicated in the genocide in Palestine and other crimes against humanity, such as Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. The University of Washington has been collaborating with Boeing for over a century. UW President Ana Mari Cauce has described Boeing as “a close friend” of the university. In 1917, Boeing made its first donation to UW to build a wind tunnel, which is still operating today. This tunnel has been used to test almost all of Boeing’s war machines, including the B-29 bombers that were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Boeing has continued to provide institutional funding through donations and grants ever since. Their most recent donation of $10 million was designated for the construction of the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building (IEB), renamed the Sha’ban Al-Dalou building. Those ten million dollars are only a small percentage of the over $100 million Boeing has donated to UW since 1917. Boeing has already promised $40 million more in the near future. The University of Washington plans to use this building to deepen their relationship with Boeing, establishing a closer partnership to further the development of war technologies. Both the university and Boeing aim to benefit from this by sharing access to research facilities, establishing an AI educational institute for developing military technology, and securing Boeing’s influence of the engineering curriculum, which functions as a pipeline channeling UW engineering students into Boeing internships and contracts. These contracts promise financial compensation, yet often result in labor abuses and unsafe products. As students and community members of the University of Washington, we condemn this relationship and the intended use of the building. This is why we sought to reclaim the building and repurpose it as a much-needed community space. Graffiti at the University of Washington following the occupation of the Sha’ban al-Dalou Building on May 5, 2025. The Events To reclaim Boeing’s genocidal engineering building for Sha’ban al-Dalou, protesters moved into the building immediately before it closed, aiming to minimize potential escalation from those inside. (We keep us safe!) Outer defenses were set up on exterior entrances to the building, including lockboxes. The exterior walls of the ground floors are made up of mostly floor-to-ceiling glass windows, rendering it near impossible to defend every entrance of those floors from police battering rams. Consequently, protesters focused their serious defenses on the second floor. Artists filled the building with banners and flyers condemning Boeing’s violence and declaring the building renamed in honor of Sha’ban. Access to the second floor was cut off via the temporary disabling of elevators (jamming the doors) and the establishment of barricades to make it impossible to open the stairway doors. One staircase that had no doors to block or hinges to manipulate was left open, providing a safe exit for anyone wishing to leave. This became a site of confrontation later in the night. The occupation gets underway at the University of Washington on May 5, 2025. Within 45 minutes of the occupation, most of the previous occupants had left the building. Those who remained inside when the occupation began were invited to stay and enjoy the space or to leave of their own free will. Some students and community members who saw what was unfolding joined a rally outside. This rally also attracted a small contingent of participants in black bloc attire; this contingent played a critical role in the later defense of the building. Light barricades successfully repelled the first attempt that University of Washington police (UWPD) made to enter. They entered the basement floors but were unable to access the ground floor or any of the floors above it. As the black bloc outside used dumpsters to cover the access roads to the building via which UWPD retreated, UWPD dialed for support from Seattle police and the Washington State Patrol (WSP). (Ironically, they term this request “mutual aid.”) Their effort was hampered by incompetence from the beginning. Some protesters successfully misled lost police officers simply by pointing them in the wrong direction. Demonstrators walk back security personnel during the occupation at the University of Washington on May 5, 2025. The Fires Outside As the gaggle of third shift, overtime, ill-equipped police grew, so did the threat they posed. The black bloc contingent outside took on the tasks of reinforcing exterior barricades, scouting the growing police presence, and engaging in creative tactical landscaping to support the occupation inside. Our enemies are never going to give us the freedom and access to resources that we deserve. We have to take these for ourselves. To do so, we must understand the logistical flows that feed their violent system and the choke points at which those can be interrupted. On Monday, those choke points included the connection from the onsite police hub to the building itself and the nearby entry roads. The black bloc repurposed heavy bike racks and dumpsters, positioning them to block access to the building at the three main points of entry. Later in the evening, as police lined up to enter the building, the dumpster caught fire. Consuming multiple barrels and e-bikes, the conflagration effectively delayed the planned attack by over an hour. The protesters inside knew their allies from the bright reflection of the blaze off a nearby window. This is the true meaning of mutual aid. A burning barricade at the University of Washington campus on May 5, 2025. Police scrambled to find a way to get the Seattle Fire Department (SFD) to the scene to put out the fire. The black bloc held the line against them, as well. The fire posed no danger to the crowd; putting it out was unnecessary. Eventually, SFD moved around the campus to reach a location from which they could hose down the remaining embers. The black bloc succeeded in deterring the police for more than an hour after the police had demanded that the protesters disperse, buying those inside additional time. Taking the offensive can create more opportunities than simply standing our ground. Ultimately, after demonstrators had held the building for more than six hours, the police presence had increased and the number of supporters had dwindled to such an extent that the police finally obtained the ratio of 3:1 that they desired for invading the building. They used the fire department as human shields to advance on the crowd, pushing the few people who remained to the sidewalks. The barricades blocking access to vehicles remained in the street for several hours longer, as the police moved to invade the building on foot. The standoff outside the Sha’ban al-Dalou Building at the University of Washington on the night of May 5, 2025. Stronger Together Inside, after establishing a medical care center, a sleeping room, and a political discussion space, the demonstrators had shifted their focus to preparing for the inevitable police assault. Equipped with trash can shields, reinforced banners, and the spirit of Palestinian somoud, the protesters had sealed off all entrances to the second floor aside from a single open staircase. They designed a defensive formation to hold that staircase, toward which the cops would be funneled for the final confrontation. Energy waxed and waned throughout the night. By this point, the participants had worked hard to secure the building for over nine hours. However, when it became clear that a police assault was imminent, everyone sprang into action. Tactically, the situation left a lot to be desired. There was no easy route for retreat. The principles of guerilla warfare developed by anarchists, communists, and anti-colonial revolutionaries alike emphasize the advantage of striking an opponent’s weak points and getting out with minimal losses. The people have the numbers against the state, yet the state has the weapons, military training, and legal apparatus to win most direct confrontations. It is much easier to use the element of surprise to strike blows unpredictably across the vast terrain controlled by the enemy than to defend fixed territory. In fact, the staircase that would serve as the final fighting ground was a logistical nightmare. The open space enabled officers to advance in rows against a line that had no anchor points for barricades. Finally, there was the question of attrition. At the beginning, the protesters had enough numbers to repel the police, but any arrests would result in a reduction in numbers. The police faced no such risk. As police in riot gear entered the building, armed with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, we initially registered their presence by the crashing sounds as they began to throw the furniture around. The protesters set up in formation: those with lockboxes attempted to hold a line at the front, while those with mobile trash can shields prepared to defend their heads and any gaps in their line, and those with reinforced banners formed a harder line behind them. Those who did not wish to be in one of these positions stood at the back, arms locked together. The riot cops remove the light barricades in front of our front lines. Then they quickly moved to throw the participants who were connected by lockboxes down the stairs, a tactic we hadn’t been expecting; we had been too kind in our assessment of what they were likely to do. This opened up space for them to charge our shield lines. At first, our line held strong, but as the police concentrated on grabbing one or two people from the line at a time, it began to weaken and eventually collapsed. The night ended with protesters being dragged or otherwise forced down the stairs. At the bottom, a supportive crowd cheered for them as they were loaded into paddy wagons. The participants using lockboxes managed to delay their arrests, with some remaining in the building a couple hours longer. Predictably, the corporate media slandered the protesters, decrying them as violent—though three protesters were hospitalized as a consequence of police violence during the arrests and many more were severely bruised, whereas the protesters did not injure anyone. It appears that out of the over $1 million in damages that the university claims to have assessed, much of it was inflicted by police officers as they removed protesters. Dispelling any illusions of a progressive university, the University of Washington leadership spread a similar message, condemning the burning of dumpsters as violent. Those who control our institutions clearly care more about the burning of trash than the burning of the bodies of their own Palestinian students. Police conduct arrests at the University of Washington on the night of May 5, 2025. Confronting the State The police state of late-stage colonial capitalism poses hard choices to revolutionaries of all stripes and colors. Going after the violent, repressive apparatus staffed by weapons companies like Boeing and reinforced by the neoliberal university requires fluidity, mobility, and creativity. The state has so many fronts and places of weakness—it is large, but shallow—that it might be possible to dismantle it via concentrated attacks on its most critical organs. At the same time, we need ways to meet our needs and each other, to pursue mutual aid. Community and relationship are the heart of resistance—they form the root structures of a beautiful new, communal ecosystem. When the state sells public lands for profit, when rent becomes too high for commmunity spaces to afford, when the places that host our daily lives (like cafés and bookstores) are optimized for business, we lose the space for joy and experimentation. One of the aims of the Sha’ban al-Dalou occupation and of community occupations in general is to take back this space, meeting our needs and creating this joy! Fundamentally, we need places in which to develop food sovereignty, engage with each other in real education, and help house one another. To put it another way, we need greenhouses: places to experiment with and practice communism. When we are dangerous enough to the state, direct action is the only way to create these. Like the liberated zones of 2024, like the occupations of Tahrir Square, Standing Rock, Daybreak Star, and the Yellow Vests, the Sha’ban al-Dalou Building could have been a seeding and strengthening hub for revolution. Building occupations both inside and outside the ivory towers have successfully created community spaces before, such as the ongoing occupation of the Che Guevara Auditorium (OkupaChe) in Mexico that has lasted for almost 25 years and the Indigenous occupation of Daybreak Star (formerly Fort Lawton) in occupied Coast Salish lands. We can look to occupations that have created Indigenous cultural centers and autonomous spaces for self-organized work, education, and mutual aid for inspiration; they illustrate how direct action can meet community needs. One way to connect the tactic of occupation with the need to take the offensive is to plant occupations at the key logistical points of our enemies. This can deprive them of essential resources while reminding us of our strength. Occupations in public spaces often hold out much longer, encouraging the participation and radicalization of a wider and less risk-tolerant community, yet they often have less direct impacts than occupying a factory, or in this case, a location for genocidal AI weapons research. We share the following conclusions for your consideration. After direct confrontation with the state at Sha’ban Al-Dalou Building, we consider our relationships with one another much strengthened. We also consider our skill sets and capabilities to have expanded. As argued in “Why We Don’t Make Demands,” the development of capability and community is much more important than the granting of temporary concessions. We are actively reflecting on the lack of a retreat plan, which limited our tactical horizon. This is something that should be considered in any building occupation in order to minimize losses and enable us to engage in repeated assaults on the enemy. While risk of arrest should not narrow our tactical horizons, jail support and aftercare require significant resources and the emotional toll can be high. If you can achieve the same goals while escaping arrest, you should always have a feasible plan to do so. The occupation of Sha’ban Al-Dalou Building did not achieve one of its primary goals, to create an open space for non-protesters to enter. Police repression made that infeasible. However, it did foster a beautiful community among the protesters inside, who were able to connect with one another and expand their skills both emotionally and tactically. Demonstrators face off with a security vehicle on May 5, 2025. </figcaption> </figure> Towards Revolt: Reflection and Relationship The University of Washington was the site of one of many occupations for Palestine in May 2024. The occupation ended—disappointingly for most—when a small contingent in leadership agreed to a lackluster deal with the administration, “winning” demands such as partial academic sponsorship for a small number of Palestinian students and the formal consideration of divestment from companies connected to the genocide in Palestine. This “formal consideration” led to a “formal vote” against divestment in early 2025. The UW protests of 2024 largely avoided escalation and confrontation, such as the occupation of buildings, the application of financial pressure tactics, and direct action against specific UW administrators complicit in the genocide. While the liberated zone on campus represented a beautiful expression of community strength and solidarity with Palestine and a space for relationships to grow, it was also a space of political division in which many participants spent time spinning their wheels. Since then, the movement seems to have split into a faction disengaging from confrontation and a more hardcore wing that is interested in direct action. Consistent dedication to direct action has developed the necessary skills and “pollinated” the space with a confrontational mindset. It is in this sense—through the building of community relationships and propaganda of the deed—that the occupation of this school years’ first university Board of Regents meeting, a series of escalations and protests against tech companies complicit in the ongoing genocide, an assault on the UW presidential mansion, and the occupation of the Sha’ban Al-Dalou Building have all strengthened each other, though the participants did not know each other. Demonstrators face off with a security vehicle at the University of Washington on May 5, 2025. Silence Won’t Keep Us Safe Why escalate now? In many ways, the lessons of the UW 2024 protests are similar to the lessons of the current Trump regime. Just as the demobilization of 2020 and counterinsurgency of the Biden regime cleared the way for Trump to cancel the last of the concessions that remained from that uprising, the demobilization of the 2024 Palestine occupations almost universally led to failure. Some universities made big promises, but as soon as the pressure of the occupations had dissipated, they all went back on their word. Yes, we are in a moment of extreme repression. The consequences of action can be significant. Nonetheless, we believe that the consequences of inaction will be greater. Liberal petitions to political leaders will not save us, nor will an apolitical retreat from struggle. That will leave us weaker for next time—and leave most of us increasingly less safe right now. Revolt and uprising were possible and effective during the first Trump regime. They are tools worth applying today. Resist however you can and must. Mutual aid is a form of resistance; it can entail defense, protecting our communities from ICE or alleviating the consequences of the financial crisis wrought by the fascist and neoliberal coalition. Direct action is a form of resistance; it can undermine the violent apparatus of the state. “Occupation,” understood as a decolonial practice, is resistance. Palestine demands resistance—and so does your community. More than a hundred people rally outside the UW Seattle administration building on May 8, 2025 to protest the suspension of 21 students accused of participating in the IEB occupation on Monday. Further Reading In Their Own Words: Messages From The Pro-Palestine Protesters Arrested In UW Occupation

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. ↩