A Periodical
of Frustration
#12 / Spring 2015

IT’S NOT ABOUT

ANYTHING

IT’S ABOUT
EVERYTHING

“WE MUST ABANDON ALL
MODELS & STUDY OUR
POSSIBILITIES.” -E.A POE

DISCONTENT
What is the point?
This is for the world’s exploited and dominated
groups or classes. It is for the uncomfortable, the miserable, the disempowered, or the lost. It is also for the
uncontrollable, empowered, fed up, and criminalized.
It is a reminder for those living in conflict every day
with the social order that reigns upon the earth, that
they are not alone.
We are a revolutionary publication that hopes to report on struggles that will otherwise be mentioned
inappropriately or not at all. We report on struggles
that stem from a frustration with different forms of
domination, and intend to achieve freedom from
them, without compromise.
We are against all forms of domination; especially
the existence of the state (government) and economy
(capitalism). Institutions that help mobilize or expand
the current systems of domination, like patriarchy or
industrialism, are also institutions we oppose. We
also avidly oppose social dividers like sexism, racism, or classism, and believe that they are a result of
the current systems of domination, and can be most
easily exposed of from our humanity through a struggle against the totality of control and exploitation
today. We also place a deep importance in defending the natural environment and its other non-human
habitats that this current society is intent on exploiting and destroying.
Our priority is to confront and expose that which exists today that we oppose. This opposition must be
most easily understood as a perspective motivated by
a broad and radical idea of desired freedom. A freedom that is only foreseen as possible in the ruin of
what it is we are fighting against.
We very much envy bank robbers. We hope that every party we attend will turn into a riot if the police
shut it down. When police are shot it is always revenge. When somebody kills or wounds somebody
who raped them; such blood arouses us. When the
rich suffer the poor are revived. When the banks are
in crisis, we are all a little closer to being rich. “In a
world which really is topsyturvy, the true is in a moment of the false.”
We hope that this magazine will act as another voice
helping to foster discontent and frustration to all
forms of domination today. As we said in our last issue: “this is why we exist. This is why we continue
to come out with a new magazine every few months.
But we hope to not be around forever, because like all
revolutionary literature, we will only continue to exist until the current conditions we are frustrated with,
cease to.
-From Issue #11 / Spring 2011

Table of Contents

Disclaimer /
To Whom It may Concern

It’s Been A While

An Attempt at Explaining our Hiatus & Return
Pg. 3

Why Riot?

An Essential Re-Print
Pg. 4-5

Buzz Word: Gentrification

In An Ever Changing Social Geography
Pg. 6-8

Updates On Repression
Pg. 8-10

Just One More:
Santa Martha Prison for Women
By Amélie Trudeau of the 5E3
Pg. 10-11

On the 5E3
Pg. 11

A Chronology
Of North American Prisoner Resistance
Pg. 12-14

Ferguson & Beyond

Introduction
Identifying Enemies
The Day After the Eric Garner Verdict
Time line of Anti-Police Resistance
Not Surprised / Not Mourning
Forget Hope
Pg. 15-22

In Defense of Looting
An Essential Re-Print
Pg. 23-24

Against a Century of False Notions
Ecological Disaster is Not Debatable
Pg. 25-26

An interview With Zig-Zag
Editor of Warrior Publications
Pg. 26-27

4 Years Later

An Interview With Tom Nomad on the State
of the Middle East Since the 2011 Arab Spring.
Pg. 28-31

A Blast From the Recent Past
An Interview Regarding the 2012 Quebec Student Uprising
Pg. 32-33

LINKS
Pg. 34

Fire to the Prisons (FTTP) is for informational and
educational purposes only. This magazine in no way
encourages or supports any illegal behavior in any
way, it looks only to provide a printed forum for conversation and news.
We are reporting, not inciting. The entirety of the
information helping us to create the content in this
publication was all found as public information, and
later compiled or reorganized for this magazine.
Nothing here stems from any exclusive knowledge
of any illegal conduct of any kind. Additionally no
person is responsible for this project, nor does one or
any person claim ownership or responsibility for this
project’s production.
The topics brought up in this magazine in no way
reflect the perspectives of any specific person allegedly involved with this publication. They also do not
reflect the perspectives or outlooks of any individual
or group mentioned in or receiving this publication.

Generalize Distribution
This magazine is in NO-WAY a “for profit” publication, neither is it in any way a formal enterprise or
business venture.
We encourage the re-distribution and re-printing of
this magazine by anyone with resources to do so.
PDFs of this magazine are also available for reading
and printing online at our web site listed below.

ORDER MORE / CONTACT US
Email / Website
firetotheprisons@riseup.net
firetotheprisons.org
For Free Bulk Copies Go To:
www.littleblackcart.com
Free Copies for Prisoners without
Internet Access can be Ordered Here:
NYC ABC
Post Office Box 110034
Brooklyn, New York 11211
&
East Bay Prisoner Support
PO Box 22449
Oakland, CA 94609
“We wish we could provide some coherent politics,
a concrete identity, or a precise program; but we
are not looking to make decisions, only to realize
frustrations and unify different tensions as a result of
them. We need to act on our desires now, worry about
where it takes us later. ” -FTTP #9
FTTP #12 - T.O.C. - Pg. 2

It’s Been a While:
An Attempt at Explaining our Hiatus and Return
“Don’t ask for the
formula for opening up
worlds to you in some
syllable like a bent dry
branch. Today, we can
only tell you what we
are not, what we don’t
want.” -E. Montale

t's been a few years since the last
one of these. The unfortunate reality has been that this publication
has itself become a victim of repression.
We stress the term victim, because due
to the continued finger poking of the
state's most vile law enforcement goons,
we have shut our mouths in fear. While
of course this project is not formally an
illegal project, and we are sure that we
are not among the priorities of the state's
enemies, we are very aware that we are
without a doubt taken into consideration
by those in law enforcement.

I

techniques of repression by the state,
where little to no evidence is needed to
institute punishment.

by the state as well as the finances that
come with a printed propaganda project such as this. We are not specialized
guerrilla warriors secretly out there in
the night doing clandestine actions. We
are just frustrated individuals that found
a niche in this ever-weakening society that helped us to feel like we were
creating a voice, both for ourselves, the
contributors, and those discussed in this
publication. We found strength, and to
be blunt, a certain existential fulfillment
through this project that drove us to endure the financial, social, and emotional
requirements to keep going with it.

Even as we sit here and write this, we
struggle with an incredibly frustrating anxiety. Thoughts play over and
over again in our minds about coming
in close encounters with the men and
woman who make up the structural
framework of state control. We probably share some of the same fears that
the editors of ‘Charlie Hedbo’ face. But
we can never expect the sympathy of the
mainstream because we are not worried
about ISIS and Al-Qaeda inspired youth
attacking us, but of the American version of such fascist-fanatics. Whether
it's the typical buzzcut white men of the
FBI or JTTF, or steroid ridden goons of
local law enforcement across the country, once an encounter is made, we are
aware that they already know of our hatred for them due to the words we print.
We are also aware of the obvious power
disadvantage we have — socially, politically and, most of all, financially. It's
also well known at this point that if they
can't arrest us for a crime, they will seek
other methods of intimidation. While
obviously long prison sentences with
politically driven punishments such as
solitary confinement and harsh visitor
regulation give the most joy to the state,
the state is very aware of other methods
if those are not possible. Sabotaging our
jobs, grand juries (which carry prison
time for not talking), threatening friends
and family members with the sole intention of upending our communities, restricting travel, and border detention are
but a few more examples of effective

The sensitive specifics related to the
state attempting to repress this periodical is not something we wish to print,
but they have deliberately assaulted this
project for years, solely based on an issue with our content. Through publishing a new issue, we hope to grasp our
feelings of rage and contempt for the
state, while alleviating the anxieties
they want us to feel. The thought of their
Wounded Warrior charity BBQs (The
one political cause every cop can get behind. We think they just like the logo.) or When things first started to get creepy it
Trayvon Martin dart boards (See Pg. 22 seemed as if every few months new storegarding the Dade County Police Train- ries of police intimidation of comrades
ing Targets) remind us of the brutally would taunt our efforts with anxiety.
gross nature of their mindless culture, Then it got worse. Both informants
and the need for us
that choke differto continue being
ent radical circles
It is an axiomatic,
vocal despite their
(whether they inself-evident truth that
inherent interest in
tended to be or not)
the revolution cannot
silencing us. We
and actual agents of
be made until there are
know who they prothe state sabotaged
sufficient forces to do
tect. We understand
this project. And
so. But it is an historical
their lack of huunfortunately up
truth that the forces that until we recently
manity. The hatred
determine evolution and
we return to these
felt too angry to
thugs doesn't come
social revolutions cannot remain quiet, they
from some fanatihave been victoribe calculated with the
cal/delusional noous since our last
census lists.
tion of patriotism as
issue in 2011. And
-Malatesta
it does for these soagain, they know
ciopathic cowards
who they are, and
in blue (or suit). Our hatred for them is what they did, and again we know
out of a knowledge and perspective that that they hate us, and have read all the
grows out of deep-seated experiences in reasons we hate them throughout the
our every day lives. We see what they years. Today though, we don't feel any
do. We see who they protect, and who different. We have grown in different
they spit on under the veil of "safety.” ways, and obviously had life changing
We witness who is comfortable in this experiences here and there, but we will
society, and who can't get any sleep be- never find joy through the choices this
cause uniformed robots aren't concerned society grants us. Many other publiabout sirens waking up any children in cations would whine and cry about
the neighborhood. They have, and al- freedom of speech or the press if they
ways will act in defense of a system that had to deal with the hardships we did,
betrays humanity, and we, this project, but we won't. We are not press, we are a
will forever claim the opposing side.
periodical display of discontent that no
The lapse in time was both due to the paper that can afford a tag of legitimacy
stress of frequent acts of intimidation would ever dare resemble. We also

would never succumb to an ideology that somehow sees being granted
certain freedoms (free speech?! Scoff!)
and not others, to be freedom (or something to strive for).
Right now, the world's civilizations are
clashing. And the civilizations of the
world are simultaneously clashing with
the earth. Vice News and Al Jazeera have
made discussions of the prison-industrial-complex or climate change everyday
bar talk. You can see twitter and facebook posts about drinking water running out, police murderers, or genocide
in some far off country more than ever
before; yet authors shy away from the
prescription that something drastic must
be done against the system and culture
that are to blame. While some call for
reforms and some simply "expose the
modern condition,” there is still an underlying faith that this system will repair
itself, and redeem itself of all wrongs.
Counter to such narratives, we offer a
space for discussion that presumes one
solution: insurrection against the state
and capitalism.
We hope this new issue helps continue
the tradition of unifying different struggles and social tensions by reporting on
them. We hope some will be inspired,
and some will be angered (when not
both at the same time). We hope these
pages do not go to waste, and help to
contribute to a dialogue that will push
for real change that will allow us discontents to freely breathe.
Sending love and solidarity with all
those who have supported us over the
years. Sending disgust and contempt to
those in and out of law enforcement that
have sabotaged us over the years. -FTTP

FTTP #12 - An Explanation - Pg. 3

Why Riot?
“Getting out of
control is the
point, which is
precisely why
the riot is the
foundation from
which any future
worth the name
must be built.”

T

wo years ago in Seattle, on May 1st,
2012, roughly four to five hundred
people engaged in the largest riot
the city had seen in more than a decade.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of property were destroyed, a minor state of emergency was declared, and the next day’s
headlines were filled with horror stories of
crazy, “out-of-town” anarchists run amok.
This event, occurring on the tail end of
the Occupy movement, also quickly became the post-facto excuse for extensive
federal, state and municipal investigation,
surveillance and ongoing repression of political dissent. Several anarchists in the Pacific Northwest were put in prison without
charge in the fall of that year, only to be
released months later, still with no charges
filed. Houses were raided in search of anarchist literature and black hoodies. Up to a
year later, people were still being followed.
I was one of the five people originally
charged for crimes on May Day 2012. I’ve
since pled guilty to slightly lesser charges,
in order to avoid going to trial on two felonies. I pled in the fall of 2013 and completed the bulk of the sentence in the winter,
spending three months in King County’s
Work-Education Release (WER) Unit.
Technically an “alternative to confinement,” living in WER effectively means that
you are imprisoned at all times that you are
not allowed out for work, school or treatment (for mental health or drug offenses).
This puts me in a unique position. Since
I am one of the few people who has pled
guilty to certain crimes from May 1st,
2012, including Riot, I do not necessarily
face the same risks in talking about—and
defending—the riot as a tactic or the impulses behind it. This by no means makes
what I say below an exhaustive or fully
representative account of why others may
have engaged in that same riot. They mostly got away—a good thing in and of itself,
though federal charges may still be pending for one window that was smashed in
an empty courthouse. But this also means
that they cannot speak of or defend their
participation without risking repression.
To be clear: I’m not speaking on behalf of
any groups who wound up engaged in the
riot that occurred on May Day 2012. To
my knowledge, the riot was by no means
planned ahead of time, and the anti-capitalist march that the riot grew out of, technically an Occupy Seattle event, was itself
planned in public meetings. I’m not even
speaking on behalf of this specific riot,
but instead on behalf of rioting as such,
in the abstract. The question “Why Riot”
is not simply: why did you engage in this
riot, but, instead, why riot at all? And the
perspective given here is that of a rioter.
So I’m writing here for simple reasons:
to defend the riot as a general tactic and
to explain why one might engage in a
riot. By this I mean to defend and explain

not just the window breaking, not just
“non-injurious violence,” and certainly
not just the media spectacle it generates,
but the riot itself—that dangerous, ugly
word that sounds so basically criminal
and which often takes (as in London in
2011) a form so fundamentally unpalatable for civil society that it can only be
understood as purely irrational, without
any logic, and without possible defense.
I aim, nonetheless, to defend and explain
the riot, because we live in a new era of
riots. Riots have been increasing in absolute number globally for the past thirty
years. They are our immediate future, and
this future will spare Seattle no less than
Athens or London, Guangzhou or Cairo.
Who am I?
I am a member of the poorest generation
since those who came of age during the
Great Depression. Born to the “end of history,” we watched the ecstatic growth of
the Clinton years morph seamlessly into
the New Normal of Bush and Obama.
We have no hope of doing better than our
parents did, by almost any measure. We
have inherited an economy in secular stagnation, a ruined environment on the verge
of collapse, a political system created by
and for the wealthy, skyrocketing inequality, and an emotionally devastating, hyperatomized culture of pyrrhic consumption.
The most recent economic collapse has
hit us the hardest. According to a study by
the Pew Research Center, the median net
worth of people under 35 fell 55 percent
between 2005 and 2009, while those over
65 lost only a fraction as much, around 6
percent. The result is that if you calculate
debt alongside income, wealth inequality is today increasingly generational.
Those over 65 hold a median net worth of
$170,494, an increase from 1984 of 42 percent. Meanwhile, the median net worth of
those under 35 has fallen 68 percent over
the same period, leaving young people today with a median worth of only $3,662.
Despite cultural narratives of laziness and
entitlement, this differential is not due to
lack of effort or education (my generation
is the most educated, as well, and works
some of the longest hours for the least
pay). The same Pew Study notes that older
white Americans have simply been the
beneficiaries of good timing. They were
raised in an era of cheap housing and education, massive state welfare and unprecedented economic ascent following the
creative destruction of two world wars and
a depression—wars and crises that they
themselves didn’t have to live through.
And the jobs that older Americans hold
are not being passed down to us, though
their debt is. When they retire, the few
remaining secure, living wage and often
unionized positions will be eliminated,
their components dispersed into three or

four different unskilled functions performed by part-time service workers. The
entirety of the job growth that has come
since the “recovery” began has been in
low-wage, temporary or highly precarious jobs, which exist alongside a permanently heightened unemployment rate.
In the long term, this means that, after having been roundly robbed in almost every
respect by our parents’ generation, our
own future holds nothing more than the
hope that we might be employed in two
or three separate part-time, no-promotion
positions in the few growth sectors, such
as healthcare, where we can have the privilege of being paid minimum wage to wipe
the asses of the generation that robbed us.
It is no coincidence, then, that every time
we hear a fucking baby boomer explain
how we’re so entitled, and how they
worked summers to pay for college, we
contemplate whether or not disemboweling them and selling their organs on
the booming black market might be the
only way to pay back our student loans.
Where did I come from?
Meanwhile, this economic overhaul has
led not only to a global reordering of where
things are made, and by whom, but also to
a spatial concentration of economic activity in the US. Those metropolitan regions
that were capable of becoming network
hubs for global logistics systems fared
best, with their amalgamation of hi-tech
industries and producer services. These
became the urban palaces, with concentrations of “cultural capital” and redesigned downtown cores (lightly cleansed
of “undesirable” populations) built to appeal to tourists and foreign dignitaries.
Beyond this, large swaths of the country
were simply abandoned as wastelands,
where resource extraction was either
hyper-mechanized or too expensive, agricultural goods were produced under
heavy government subsidy, and small urban centers were forced to compete for
the most undesirable jobs in industrial
farming, food processing, waste management, warehousing or the growing private
prison industry. In many areas, the informal economy expanded enormously—
consistent with global trends, most visible in the worldwide growth of slums.
I am from one of these wastelands where
the majority of work is informal, the majority of formal industries are dirty or miserable, and where rates of poverty, unemployment, chronic disease, illiteracy, and
mental illness are often two to three times
the national average. Raised in a trailer
several miles off a reservation in one of
the poorest counties on the west coast, all
of the structural shifts mentioned above
were for me not academic abstractions,

but living reality. I come from that part
of America—the majority of it—where
weed is the biggest cash crop, where kids
eat Special K like it’s cereal, and where
the only “revitalization” we’ve ever seen
is when the abandoned factory down
the street was converted into a meth lab.
And I was, due mostly to dumb luck, one of
the few who was able to earn enough to pay
the exit fee. Upon arrival in Seattle, despite
having a degree I was fed into the lowest
tiers of the labor market. Rather than being
some “out-of-town” suburban youth using
Seattle as a “playground,” as commentators
would claim of the rioters, I was, in fact,
one of the multitude of invisible workers
that the city depended on—whether hauling
goods to and from the port, working in the
south county warehouses, cleaning downtown’s sprawling office towers, or, as in
my case, working behind the kitchen door.
At the time of the riot, I was working for
ten cents more than minimum wage in a
wholesale kitchen in South Seattle, where
we produced tens of thousands of pre-packaged sandwiches and salads for consumption in upscale city cafés and office buildings. It is not an exaggeration to say that my
full-time work schedule (for the duration
of Occupy Seattle, which I attended every
day after morning shifts at work) amounted to me feeding hundreds of thousands
of Seattleites over the several months that
Occupy was a present force in the city. It’s
likely, then, that those hysteric KIRO-TV
commentators claiming that I was part of
some “outsider” gang come from the heart
of chaos (or Portland, maybe?) to fuck up
Seattle have themselves regularly eaten the
food that I was paid poverty wages to make.
Despite the language of post-industrial,
guilt-free success common to many wealthy
Seattleites’ image of themselves, the fact
is that Seattle, like any other global city,
relies on what is called a dual labor market. Higher tiers of skilled labor, cultural
production, finance and producer services
exist atop a secondary tier of less skilled,
minimally compensated work in high-turnover jobs with little chance of promotion.
This creates a fundamental spatial problem
within capitalism: despite the outsourcing of the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in
manufacturing and resource extraction, the
rich can never entirely get away from the
poor. The extension of surveillance, incarceration and deportation, the militarization
of the police, and the softer counter-insurgency of philanthropy foundations, social
justice NGOs, conservative unions and
various other poverty pimps are all methods to manage different dimensions of this
problem. The riot is what happens when
all these mediations fail. And in an era of
crisis and austerity, such mediation becomes more and more difficult to maintain.
So in all the media’s talk of “outsiders,” “anarchists” and other terms meant
FTTP #12 - Why Riot? - Pg. 4

to make the rioting subject opaque to
those not immediately engaged in the
riot, the one fact that was consistently
distorted was the simplest: the thieves
in the palace were, in fact, the servants.
I, the terrifying, irrational rioter, am you.
Why don’t I engage in more
productive forms of protest?
The other common theme was, of course,
the morality play between the “good protestor” and the “bad protestor.” The rioters somehow “infiltrated” the march. They
distracted from the “real” issues. They
turned “normal” people away from the
day’s events, ultimately hurting attempts
at reform that were already underway.
There is in this an implicit assumption that
there exist “better” forms of protest, and
that we rioters do not also do these things.
This produces a few small ironies, as when
the local alt-weekly, The Stranger, contrasted the negotiated arrest of fast food
protestors, who showed their courage by
standing their ground and “demanding arrest,” with the May Day rioters, who did
nothing but “hide behind bandanas while
hurling rocks.” The irony here was that I
was myself one of those rioters and one
of those fast food workers—having been
involved in the fast food campaign from
its inauguration, leading a walkout at my
workplace in the first strike, planning segments of the intermediate actions (including the wage theft protest, though my
pending riot case prevented me from being
arrested there), and then briefly taking a
paid position with Working Washington for
two weeks leading up to the second strike.
Beyond the irony, though, there is the troublesome presumption that this highly negotiated, thoroughly controlled and largely
non-threatening activism is somehow
more productive in the long term. When
I did engage in the fast food strikes, I did
so initially as a fast food worker, and the
short-term goal there was to build power
among food workers in the city. Despite
this, no amount of organizing for (often
much-needed) reforms can get over the
basic problems of reform itself, which is
today equivalent to trying to take a step
uphill during an avalanche—you may
well complete that step, but the ground
itself is moving the opposite direction.
What would have been easily achievable,
relatively minor reforms in the boom era of
fifty or sixty years ago, such as raising the
minimum wage to match inflation, enforcing laws against wage theft, and coming up
with an equitable tax system, today require
herculean effort and mass mobilization,
even when ninety percent of the original
demand is usually sacrificed simply to
show “good faith” at the negotiating table.
Why don’t I like capitalism?
There is plenty more to talk about here—
which you can explore if you please. But the
basic problem, cut to the size of a tweet, is
that the economy is the name for a hostage
situation in which the vast majority of the
population is made dependent on a small
minority through implicit threat of violence.
If we challenge the system’s capacity to
infinitely accumulate more at a compounding rate, it goes into crisis—this is basic
definition of crisis: when profitable growth
slows, stops, or, god forbid, reverses.
Whenever this accumulation is challenged,
whether by contingent factors such as poor
location, or intentional ones, such as a resistant populace, those who hold the power
(the wealthy) will start killing hostages.
This is precisely what has been happening over the last fifty years of economic
restructuring. Any regions that show significant resistance to the lowering of wages, the dismantling of social services, the
export or mechanization of jobs, or the
privatization of public property can easily be sacrificed. The American landscape,
circa 2014, is littered with just such dead
hostages: Detroit and Flint, MI, Camden,
NJ, Athens, OH, Jackson, MS, the mining

towns of West Virginia or northern Nevada.
The handful of cities (such as New York
and Seattle) that were able to escape this
fate today pride themselves on being
such good hostages. The only reason they
were able to survive this rigged game of
neoliberal roulette was because of a mixture of sheer geographic luck (often as
port cities or pre-existing financial centers) and their absolute openness to do
whatever the rich wanted. Public goods
were sold off at bargain basement prices,
downtown cores were redesigned according to the whims of a few large interests
in retail, finance and real estate, and tax
money, paired with future tax exemptions, was simply handed out as bribes to
big players like Nordstrom and Boeing.
If we then zoom out to the global scale, it
is abundantly obvious that the currently
existing economic system—which we call
capitalism—is a failed one. If it ever had
any grudging utility in raising general livelihoods after its mass sacrifices in war and
colonization, that time has unequivocally
passed. Aside from the numerous examples
cited above, there are a few especially appalling illustrations. Slavery is growing
worldwide at a rate higher than at any other
time in recent history. Mechanization is set
to push massive swaths of workers out of
the production process entirely, even while
the gains of this increase in productivity
are themselves concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of the wealthy. The
central role of finance and speculation in
the global economy has resulted in massive
spikes in global food prices, causing famines and food riots, as well as a situation in
which the majority of grain in the world,
to take one example, is controlled by
just four companies.

In the face of a collapsing environment, a
hyper-volatile economic system and skyrocketing global inequality, it is simply utopian to believe that the present system can
be perpetuated indefinitely without great
violence. Opposition to capitalism has
become an eminently practical endeavor.
But… Why riot?
Despite all of this, the riot itself may still
seem an enigma. On the surface, riots appear to produce little in terms of concrete
results and, when you add up the numbers, often do less actual economic damage to large business interests than, for
example, blockading the port. They produce a certain spectacle, but so does Jay-Z.
In one sense, there is often a practical side
to many riots, which can be far better at
winning demands than negotiated attempts
at reform. Despite the fact that reform itself
is designed to treat symptoms rather than
the disease, it’s also evident that riots are
a useful tool even in reform efforts. Riots,
accompanying illegal blockades, occupations and wildcat strikes, have proliferated in China’s Pearl River Delta over the
past several years, and the result has been
that workers there have seen an unprecedented rise in manufacturing wages, which
more than doubled between 2004 and
2009. Some scholars have called the phenomenon “collective bargaining by riot.”
Similarly, more and more historical work
has been emerging showing that riots and
other forms of armed organizing were
very much the meat of movements like the
civil rights struggle in the US, despite the
common perception that these things were
somehow “non-violent.” It is, in fact, difficult to find any example of a successful,
significant sequence
of reforms that did not
utilize the riot at one
point or another. As
Paul Gilje, the pre-eminent historian of the
US riot, has argued:
“Riots have been important mechanisms
for change,” and, in fact, “the United States
of America was born amid a wave of rioting.” The tactic, then, should by no means
be seen as in and of itself exceptional.
And it’s also not a sufficient tactic unto itself. The function of the riot is less about a
religious or petulant obsession with the act
of breaking shit and also not entirely about
winning any given demand. This was apparent in examples like Occupy, which had
no coherent, agreed-upon demands, aside
from a general rejection of those in power.
This demandlessness was a feature not only
of Occupy, however, but of nearly every
one of the mass movements that began in
2011, starting with the Arab Spring. In each
instance, the only thing that was agreed
upon was that the system was fundamentally fucked, and it was this aspect alone that
transformed the riots from mere attempts
at reform into truly historical procedures.
My generation was not only born into the
ecstatic “end of history” of the 1990s, but
is also the global generation—of slumdwelling youth and “graduates with no future”—who are inducing the first pangs of
history’s rebirth. And this rebirth has taken
the figure of the hooded rioter, as has been
evidenced by the increasingly frequent
transformation of mass riots into occupations of public squares, which themselves
evolved into new forms of rioting and,
ultimately, the first major insurrection of
the 21st century—which took place in
Egypt and has since been largely crushed
by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces.
The riot is most important, then, not in its
traditional ability to win demands that progressives can only drool over, but instead
when it takes on a demandless character.
This absence of demands in the riot and
occupation implies two things: First, it implies a rejection of existing mediations. We
do not intend to vote for fundamentally corrupt political parties or play the rigged game

Our future’s
already been
looted. It’s time
to loot back.

Meanwhile, the bulk
of the globe’s basic
goods production is
increasingly concentrated—both in the
producer services of
high-GDP metropoles like London, New York and Tokyo
and in the “world’s factory” of South and
Southeast Asia. The production of these
goods is not only dominated by vast, lowwage retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon,
but also increasingly dictated by massive
contract manufacturers like Foxconn or
Yue Yuen, which concentrate their production in factory cities where the lives
of migrant workers are surveilled and
managed in a quasi-military fashion.
The concentration of the production process coincides with the concentration
of the wealth generated by that process.
Even within the old “first world,” poverty
and unemployment have been on the rise
since long before the most recent crisis.
Greece and Spain are only the most visible
signs of this trend. In the US, especially,
the trend splits along racial lines. Cities
and schools are resegregating, though the
patterns of segregation are more complex
than the redlining of the Jim Crow era.
One dimension of this resegregation has
been the growth of the US prison system
into one of the largest the world has ever
seen. Even if calculated as a percentage of
population, rather than absolute number,
the US today imprisons roughly the same
fraction of its population as the USSR did
at the height of the gulag system—and
our prison population is still on the rise.
Curable diseases are returning en masse,
while new viruses are being developed at
record rates in the evolutionary pressurecooker of industrial agriculture. Each economic crisis is larger than the one preceding it, and these crises are not just “business
cycles.” Or, more accurately: the so-called
business cycle is simply a sine wave oscillating around a trajectory of absolute decline. And this decline, like the last major
ones in the global economic system, will
only be reversible through an unimaginably massive bout of creative destruction.

of activism. Though it may be important
in particular instances to fight for and win
certain demands, such as the demand for
$15 an hour, these reforms in and of themselves contribute nothing to the ultimate
goal of winning a better world. They can
contribute to this project only in very particular contexts, and only when superseded
by forms adequate to that true project, as
when the growing spate of strikes in Egypt
in the years leading up to 2011 was suddenly superseded by a mass insurrection.
Second, it implies the question of power.
The riot affirms our power in a profoundly
direct way. By “our” power I mean, first,
the power of those who have been and
are continually fucked-over by the world
as it presently is, though these groups
by no means all experience this in the
same way and to the same degree—the
low-wage service workers, the prisoners, the migrant laborers, the indebted,
unemployed graduates, the suicidal paper-pushers, the migrant workers on the
assembly line, the child slaves of Nestle
cocoa plantations, my childhood friends
who never got out of the trailer or off
the rez. But I also mean the power of our
generation: the millenials, a label that already implies the apocalyptic ambiance
of our era. Or, more colloquially: Generation Fucked, because, well, obviously.
The question of power, though, isn’t simply a question of the devolution of power
to the majority of people, though this is the
ultimate goal. At the immediate level it is
a struggle over power between shrinking
fractions of the population dedicated to
maintaining the complete shit-show that
is the status quo, and growing fractions
of the population dedicated to destroying
that shit-show as thoroughly as humanly
possible, while in the process collectively
constructing a system in which poverty becomes impossible, no one is illegal, power
itself is not concentrated in the hands of a
minority of the population, our metabolism
with the natural world bears less and less
resemblance to the metabolism of a methhead scouring the medicine cabinet, and the
collective material wealth and accumulated
intelligence of the human species is made
freely accessible to all members of that
species, rather than being reserved as party-swag for half-naked Russian oligarchs.
Pretending that power does not exist directly serves those who presently hold it.
And the riot overturns such pretense by
exerting our own power against theirs. It
is a mechanism whereby we both scare
the rich and attract people to a project
that goes far beyond the reform of a collapsing world. In this particular instance,
it has worked. Many of the fast food
workers with whom I organized in the
year following the riot understood its portent perfectly well. By May Day 2013,
the riot had taken on a life of its own.
The riot, then, is not a hindrance to “real”
struggle or a well-intentioned accident
where people’s “understandable” anger
gets “out of control.” Getting out of control is the point, which is precisely why
the riot is the foundation from which any
future worth the name must be built. And
we will be the ones to build it.
Our generation: the millenials, generation fucked, or, as we’ve taken to calling
it: Generation Zero. Zero because we’ve
got nothing left except debt—but also
nothing to lose. And zero because, like the
riot, it all starts here. In the end, then, you
can lose the economics, you can lose the
spectacle and the moralizing and the godawful appeals to cute and fuzzy “social/
racial/environmental justice.” Throw all of
this in the alembic of the riot, and it boils
down to the simplest of propositions:
Our future’s already been looted. It’s time
to loot back.

FTTP #12 - Why Riot? - Pg. 5

Buzz-Word: Gentrification
In an Ever Changing Social Geography

T

hrough a large part of the 20th century,
the suburbs were where the American
dream of comfort and privilege was
most visible — a safe haven from the urban
poor for middle-to-upper class (notably)
white people. These new communities lay
beyond the noise, overcrowding, and pollution of the inner city, yet were equipped
with easy access to the cultural and industrial resources of the urban core. Such
became the appeal of suburban life for
those who flocked into the suburbs, often
taking advantage of home loans offered to
the working class as a means of achieving
social peace after the post war strike wave
receded. But in the post-Great Depression
20th Century, a social geography of economic, educational, and racial segregation
inscribed itself along the sprawling urban
and suburban fault lines. White flight into
the suburbs split America not only along
lines of class, but also race.

(both with huge and prospering financial
and tech sectors) have a perceived worth
that can rationalize the price tag of a brand
new condo. The stage is set for a new dawn
of urban gentrification.

Now in the 21st century, suburban America is losing its appeal. Inner cities are
again becoming the home for the wealthy;
the “suburbanites” of a dying era. If you
walk through any major city, you can
see condo after condo being developed,
while communities of color, the poor, and
working-class former residents are all displaced – often into the newly abandoned
suburbs. Condos have thus become the
visual symbol for what many people call
gentrification. Gentrification, simply put,
is a systematic effort by the State (through
institutions such as policing, zoning policies, and the giving of tax breaks to various
businesses) and capitalism to re-appropriate and “develop” neighborhoods that were
once affordable. I want to explore the logic
and politics of this capitalist social maneuver as someone living in a city that is notorious for its gentrifying efforts, as well as
someone who is repulsed by it. My hope is
that this article helps to articulate the process of gentrification and I aim to expose
the authoritarian social order that it inherently serves.

On the other side of the United States, in
Manhattan, a city inside a city, the borough
is expected to grow by at least 1 million
residents before 2030, on top of an estimated 1.6 million current residents as of
2013. One can only assume that this will
mean the elimination of countless public
housing units (“The Projects”), the conversion of these units to condos, the displacement of thousands of current residents, and
continued “new experiments” in real estate
development. Examples of this future to
come already haunt Manhattan’s intimidating skyline. In 2014, the 96th floor of
the brand new 432 Park Avenue residential
tower will be the highest apartment in the
Western hemisphere. This apartment sold
for $95 million dollars (with estimated
monthly maintenance fees of $60,000)
shortly after it was made available for
purchase. As Manhattan sets the ground
to perpetuate itself as a dense fortress for
the wealthy, we will see it at the forefront
of grossly ambitious developments such
as this one. Five other midtown luxury
condo towers, ranging between 900 and
1400 square feet, are expected to be finished in the next few years. The 96th floor
apartment will lose its status as the highest apartment in the Western World shortly
after a similar residential tower standing at
1,423 square feet is finished at 225 West
57th Street. These buildings are also expected to have a real estate value averaging between $7,000 and $11,500 dollars a
square foot.

Beyond our Hatred of Yuppies
It's important to view the rapid pace of people moving to big cities across the world as
a result of a post-modern global capitalism.
Jobs once provided by American agriculture and industry have disappeared from
home soil, due to outsourcing of labor and
production costs abroad and and increasing
automation. Major cities such as Stockton,
Fresno, and Detroit that don’t have “recession proof industries” such as finance
and computer technology, are declaring
bankruptcy. Thus, as fracking employees
pay Manhattan prices to live in a trailer
in oil-rich North Dakota, the employment
opportunities of individuals coming to cities like New York City and San Francisco

In San Francisco, a recently constructed
bridge with a whopping 6 billion dollar
price tag was quickly thrown together despite major design flaws; all to ferry the
estimated 2.1 million people that are expected to move into the area by 2040. With
this growth and profit in mind, developers
are building with no holds-barred as landlords evict thousands and rents across the
bay area continue to sky-rocket. Following
the construction of this bridge, I was visiting San Francisco and found that the median market rate price of a house was now
1 million dollars. At the same time, many
of my friends face eviction (if they haven't
already been evicted).

While New York City and San Francisco
have ever-increasing populations due to finance, tech, and service industry (to serve
the former) jobs, other former manufacturing hubs have turned into near ghost towns,
and centers of unemployment and despair.
For instance, Detroit has lost 25 percent of

its population since 2000 and over 60 percent of its population since the 1950s (the
peak period for employment in America's
auto industry). This is part of a shift in the
American economy as well as an attempt
to reign in the working-class in the United
States: to make the American worker get
by and proportionately live on what workers in other countries make; to roll back
the gains made by the working-class in the
19th century. Detroit is thus a prime target,
as a former powerhouse of union labor and
manufacturing jobs. What has happened in
Detroit is not an isolated incident, though,
as large portions of its population have
moved to the suburbs due to the city’s declining services and the breaking down of
its infrastructure. Currently, one in seven
Detroit residents faces eviction due to tax
foreclosure by the end of 2015. This ongoing crisis is also coupled with a push to
gentrify downtown Detroit for the sake of
generating massive profits for developers
and investors. As a 2013 Salon.com article
reads:
The city is in a financial death spiral: so
overtaxed and unlivable that most people
who can afford to get out are moving to the
suburbs, further reducing the tax base and
requiring more cuts. Detroit is no longer a
city, in the sense of a self-supporting entity:
It’s the lower-class district of a metropolitan area, abandoned to its dwindling devices. Demographers estimate the population will bottom out at a half-million, but a
Detroit News poll found that 40 percent of
Detroiters expect to leave in the next five
years.
But while poor and working people, especially people of color— currently the
wealth gap between whites and blacks and
Latino families is wider than ever, are either
stuck in deteriorating cities or pushed out,
many “ambitious” mobile young people
are flocking to urban centers to find work
in booming financial and tech sectors. The
ability to relocate to a city where opportunities are available to you is a privileged
practice. Recognizing this reality can also
help to explain the typically impoverished
circumstances of populations that have no
choice but to stay in a city like Detroit or
Fresno (deemed blighted economic wastelands by capital). It also explains the financial expectations that property owners
and developers see in this population shift.
In turn, these new residents will pay high
rents, will buy expensive coffee and goods,
and in turn the police apparatus will welcome and protect them. The architecture of
the condo — the aesthetic of contemporary
gentrification — tells this story. The condo
model was born out of post-WWII Europe
exigencies; the need for mass housing and
smaller spaces to adapt to the bombed out

parts of Europe. It could be said that these
buildings are being built to re-populate the
war torn streets of the modern urban ghettos with a different culture of wealth. Compensating for the lack of classical luxury
(that had more space for experimentation),
the new aesthetic of the urban rich must
be minimal and homogenous (so there is
an easier mandate on the aesthetic of high
class), but isolated to areas deemed approved for the wealthy (proximity to financial centers and a loyal, well-armed police
force is indispensable to high condo market rates). This aesthetic has been so associated with the urban wealthy that city
governments in San Francisco or Seattle
are building housing projects in a similar
design to help keep up real-estate rates in
extremely poor neighborhoods.
Interestingly enough, in many urban centers, there are often two different kinds of
entrances into condo buildings (which in
turn contain some amount of usually mandated “low-income” housing). Thus, one
entrance for the poor and another for the
rich, which keeps the classes (and often
races) separate. In a city like Oakland, this
also means that renters in “affordable” or
“low-income” housing often are located on
the bottom of the building and lack access
to facilities such as the communal gym,
and thus never have to rub elbows with
their more wealthy neighbors who lord
above them in their condos, with views
overlooking the city. Modern design does
not hide the everyday class war within racist America; it displays it front and center.
Meanwhile, a rootless generation of wealth
occupies city space without connection to
the neighborhoods it infests. In the age of
techno-capital, connection to local community becomes dispensable.
Selling the Neighborhood by its
“Planned Future”
We live in a society where it is easy for
people living in a dense environment to
wake up, get on the subway, go to work,
then go back home again without ever
speaking to anyone they live near (simultaneously being in touch with people the
whole time through Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, and consuming food via online shops like GrubHub, FreshDirect,
and Seamless). You can witness this sort
of cultural bubble start to rise with the
beginning efforts of gentrification. Affluent Americans produce for themselves a
bubble world in geographic locales, which
once seemed like permanently violent and
criminalized ghettos. This sort of ability by
new tenants to exist inside a bubble of social distinction from their immediate surroundings provokes serious social tensions
based on race and class between gentrifiers
FTTP #12 - Gentrification - Pg. 6

and the residents threatened with economic exile. A culture both inaccessible and
alienating to the original neighborhood is
imposed. Even groceries become unaffordable. Eventually, the original residents are
entirely priced out by a culture of gentrification.
But this also means that entire development
schemes often rest on the success or failure of the bubble itself. If a condo development really wants to sell itself, it also has to
sell the neighborhood it is in. This includes
access to things like grocery stores and upscale cafés. If these institutions are scared
off, then often these projects will be harder
to get off the ground. For instance, several
years ago in the Phoenix area of Arizona,
anarchists successfully stopped a planned
yuppie development project by disrupting
a push by Whole Foods to develop in a
certain area. By stopping the Whole Foods
development, they in turn stopped the condos.
The Police & Broken Windows
A police offensive always accompanies
gentrification. A “safe” neighborhood does
not mean a neighborhood where people are
assured that they will eat, their kids will be
safe, and they will have a place to sleep.
In the abstract reality imposed by the logic
of gentrification, a “safe” neighborhood
means an area that is reserved for the lives
of the socially included and comfortable:
the wealthy and the professional class.
Since the 1990s, New York City has been
setting a precedent for prospering cities
around the world to expand the profits of
local real estate markets, while protecting
the comforts of the political and financial
elite. The notorious New York Police Department (NYPD) has been a driving force
in this informally appointed position of
leadership in modern urban planning and
policing. In understanding this precedent,
I want to focus on the "broken windows"
theory made most popular by the NYPD in
the early 1990s and which continues today.
This theory has helped to eliminate communities through the formal criminalization of poverty and Blackness. Room is
made for the wealthy in the ruins of their
exile. Although the theory does not explicitly tie itself to gentrification, the approach
and results of this style of policing have
typically made it possible to completely
re-appropriate neighborhoods from ghettos
into high-end real estate.
The broken windows theory was originally
the name of an article in a 1982 issue of
The Atlantic magazine. The "broken windows" reference itself stems from this specific comment by the author:
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the
tendency is for vandals to break a few more
windows. Eventually, they may even break
into the building, and if it's unoccupied,
perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

allowed police to detain and search "suspicious" looking individuals or groups without reasonable grounds, in hopes of finding drugs or weapons that would lead to
arrest (Nearly 9 out of 10 people "stopped
and frisked" were Black or Latino). This of
course led to a feeling of fear among New
York's new generation of urban poverty —
being in public meant risking arrest. Poor
and targeted residents are made uncomfortable where they live. Tenants harassed by
police see the appeal in selling their leases
(a landlord loophole in getting rent stabilized tenants out by literally paying them
to forfeit their leases), or rationalize picking up and leaving entirely. It’s this kind
of aggressive policing of everyday life that
lead the police to harass and murder Eric
Garner.
The theory and article itself became better
known when it was republished as a supportive piece behind the notion of "quality of life policing.” It reached the ears of
the powerful in the early 1990s, when class
divisions were reaching a tipping point
in New York City. The crime that defined
New York City in the 1980s was beginning
to bother the wealthy. A collaborative effort between the conservative minds of
New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and
his appointed police commissioner Bill
Bratton began to formally claim this theory
as a new guideline for modern policing and
the urban order to come.
Homelessness, low-level violations and
poverty became the NYPD targets du
jour, with minor marijuana arrests driving police quotas under the ill-conceived
War on Drugs. Criminalizing “unwanted”
elements in a city also laid the groundwork for massive displacement. Poor and
minority communities were violently reified as a criminal element that has failed
societal obligations, as opposed to a social class that exists due to the social order failing them. For the police, ticketing, arresting,harassing and marginalizing
everyday people became daily business.
This is something that has played itself out
across major urban cities and helped fuel
the hatred shown to police agencies in the
rebellions after Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri.
Today, the early 1990s legacy of Bratton
and Giuliani live on in New York City —
Bratton is oh-so-liberal Mayor De Blasio’s
top cop. Developers and property owners
are demanding more police presence to
pave a path for wealthier residents to feel
more comfortable moving to neighborhoods still in financial and social transition, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant or Flatbush in Brooklyn (home of murdered
youth: Kimani Gray). But with the increased comfort expected to be provided
by the police to those who can afford the

Brooklyn real estate market, there can be
an expected increase in everyday stress
among communities that cannot afford
new rent hikes and so forth set in store by
the police.
Bratton (also creator of the CompStat system that the New York City police department uses to create statistics and arrest
records to help provide direction for police in targeting "unsafe" neighborhoods)
has spread his legacy beyond New York’s
streets. He has been an advisor to the Oakland Police Department in the wake of Occupy, stood by London police in the wake
of the Mark Duggan riots, and also built
ties with Israeli occupation forces putting
down the indigenous Palestinians. And
with crime statistics falling (conventionally speaking) in the two largest American
metropolitan areas, Bill and Rudy are seen
as visionaries for using police in the process of reserving new safe spaces for the
wealthy in big cities. All the while the issue of what gets deemed “criminal” goes
unaddressed in problematic stats stories.
Bratton and Giuliani have both traveled
from city to city, in America, and across
the world (Los Angeles, Oakland, San
Francisco, Seattle, Amsterdam, Salt Lake
City, and Rio de Janeiro have all claimed to
incorporate these methods into their police
practices after being consulted by Bratton
or Giuliani) spreading the gospel of "quality of life policing" to police departments
and political elites, eventually syndicating
NYPD tactics across cities where real estate development is looming.
When this theory of policing was proposed, the authors and followers probably
could have never imagined the leaps and
bounds of surveillance and technology that
have come about since the 1980s. With this
approach reaching new technical means to
further invade the everyday lives of the
criminalized, we can expect to see a generation growing up feeling more claustrophobic than ever before; a generation that
will never be allowed to feel at home.
A Post-Gentrification Generation
“It is necessary to see, then, that the murderous gangbanging phenomenon which is
presently halted has not been, as the bourgeois press would have it, the result of the
breakdown of ‘family values’ and the loss
of the restraining influence of the middle
class as they left for the suburbs ; rather
it resulted from: 1) the economics of capitalist restructuring (the replacing of traditional industries with drugs) and 2) the
active destruction of political forms of selforganization by state repression. The solution to the problem is the sort shown in the
rebellion. The solution to inter-proletarian
violence is proletarian violence”
-Aufheben #1 1992
On the LA rebellion over Rodney King.

The suburb of Ferguson, Missouri exploded in riots, protests, and looting after
police killed the unarmed Black teenager,
Michael Brown. What was unique about
Brown’s death (because Black kids shot
by American police is not unique) was that
it provoked a real uprising by residents in
response, and eventually spread out across
the country and even into other countries.
Ferguson was a one-time middle class
white suburb that later came to house the
increasing population of poor Black families exiled from the developing St. Louis
inner city. St. Louis is the 16th fastest
growing city in the United States. In the
early 1990s, Ferguson was 73.8 percent
white. As of 2010 Ferguson had become
70 percent Black. Notably, the 53-officer
police department has only three Black
cops. This racial transition also meant a
complete change of Ferguson's GDP. As of
now, 25 percent of the Ferguson population
falls under the 2012 poverty line ($23,492
annual income), and 44 percent fall below half that level. It's no coincidence in a
white supremacist culture such as America
that poor Black families will be forced into
conditions of poverty no matter the social
terrain. In the same light, it is no coincidence that police efforts were refocused
on the newly impoverished suburbs of St.
Louis, a city that in 2000 was only 28.1
percent white, and by 2010 was 49.2 percent white. If you grew up in the inner city
ghetto, then were moved to the suburbs,
one might assume that new opportunities
would be on offer. This is not the case. In
fact the de-gentrification of the American
suburbs exposes the fact that the fate of
poor, Black, or excluded communities is
at the complete mercy of municipal economic interests. Understanding society as
a place that has appointed you a member
of the American ghetto can only encourage a strong feeling of helplessness. You
can never really call a place home at this
point, because there is a system in place
that will always remind you that nothing
can ever really be yours. This helplessness
is not isolated to Ferguson— social eruptions such as those in the St. Louis suburb
will undoubtedly continue to pop up in the
headlines as exiled urban populations continue to be forced into the de-gentrifying
suburbs.
Unlike in America, the suburban locales in and around Paris have, for some
years, been the home of the French lower classes. Parisians enjoy scoffing at the
outsiders who cannot afford the privilege
of existing and thriving in their 'beautiful' European metropolis. In Paris, being poor, homeless, Roma, Black, Arab,
or an undocumented immigrant of any
kind means you will most likely find a
place to live in the suburbs of the big city.

Broken windows theory was based around
a desire by the State to police every aspect
of daily life and stop small crimes from
happening. This desire did not come out of
a vacuum, but grew in the wake of large
scale riots, uprisings, and insurrections in
urban centers in the 1960s and 70s. By
preventing low level crimes, (and more
importantly policing and managing the
people who commit them), elites hoped
to prevent the building up of large scale
disorder and rebellion from the poor and
especially communities of color. This was
coupled with a push towards “community
policing,” or the imbedding of police forces in the communities that they occupy and
police.
In New York City, the infamous “stop and
frisk” tactic is a better-known method of
this approach to urban policing. This tactic

FTTP #12 - Gentrification - Pg. 7

UPDATES ON
REPRESSION
I

This sort of socio-geographic exclusion
in Paris, stretching out from the wealthy
center to the surrounding suburbs has
led to some of the most dramatic riots
contemporary Europe has seen. In 2005,
for example, France declared a state of
emergency when youth across the suburbs of Paris began burning cars, fighting police, and destroying government
buildings. This followed a grim incident,
in which a group of young boys being
chased by police tried to evade interrogation by hiding inside the walls of an
electrical substation, eventually being
electrocuted to death. The youth came
together in solidarity with the boys who
died, they knew the fear the boys who
died felt when they ran from the police
(as do the youth in Ferguson, coming out
for Mike Brown). Through these riots
and smaller daily examples of unrest,
the young and rightfully angry forcefully tried to manifest their idea of political
power. The Paris riots reached far greater heights of violence and destruction
than Ferguson — militarized US police
armies will have that effect on unrest —
but they both shared very similar frustrations and enemies. Also having more
of a history of conflict with the ruling
central city, there were more models for
rioting for French youth. This will come
to the US in time if discontent youth in
Ferguson and beyond refuse to listen to
state anointed community leaders trying
to quell and disempower the unrest.
There is no room for comfort in this
system for the excluded (Black, Latino,
immigrant, poor). Gentrification is a process that doesn't tire of reminding us of
this. We cannot fight back and defend
our livelihood via alleged rights for tenants or legal defenses. Community leaders and municipal housing groups will
never act in the interest of those affected
by gentrification. This was made very
clear in Ferguson and Paris alike.
The wealthy will continue to win in the
process of claiming what is theirs, because the system of rights and legality
is completely under their control and in
their service.
We must establish a “We” and a “Them”
in the fight against gentrification. We
must be prepared to contribute to the

tensions that will arise with the proactive re-shuffling of America's social plateau, because no matter what community
leaders or politicians say, these are never
incidents in isolation, nor is this process
something that will ever benefit the poor.
Whether it's over a farm in South Central
Los Angeles; Gezi Park in Istanbul; the
murder of a Black teenager; or in housing slums in Rio, Brazil or Phnom Penh,
Cambodia, in the process of re-structuring the fortress of the world’s wealthy,
a re-occurring suffering and discontent
will be ignited. We can also assume,
based on the typical shape of gentrification efforts, that the most equally hated
targets of community unrest will be the
police and real estate developers. Inevitably, one would have to conclude that
the biggest enemies of those struggling
against gentrification are the state and
capitalism.
As the years pass, we will see the liquidation of cultures and communities
across major cities. As mentioned before, the estimated population growth in
major cities is immense. We can expect
the loss of cultures and histories that
have defined inner cities for decades.
Most likely, the bland suburbs will be
re-inscribed as the bland inner city. We
all know that the rich are typically boring, self-important, and douchey. The
estimated population growth of cities
like New York City and San Francisco
only means a similar displacement of
residents to make room. It also means
that we can expect new cultures to arise
from wasteland cities such as Detroit or
de-gentrified suburbs such as Ferguson.
These places will continue to generate
rage, and this rage is likely to erupt more
and more often.
Gentrification is not based in a new logic; it comes from a capitalist mentality
that asserts that the land we all stand
on belongs to the few who own us all.
It's important that revolutionaries contribute to the dialogue in neighborhoods
being undone by gentrification. And with
the shifting of US social geography, opponents of this system must wake up to
the changing terrain of the perennial attacks on the poor by the rich.

n the past we have dedicated pages
and pages of this publication to updates on political prisoners around
the world. At this point in history though
we are concerned with printing information that is most likely to change. This issue's 'repression' section will focus a lot on
confirmed releases of prisoners in the
states (alone) in the last year. We are
proud to include an original article below
by the NYC Anarchist Black Cross that
will help to update us on that specifically.
There are links included here as well that
are frequently updated regarding political
prisoner statuses and overall repression
to explore in learning about what some
face now and some may face in the future.
In permanent and revolutionary solidarity with imprisoned comrades everywhere,
and all enemies of the social order that imprisons the earth and all who inhabit it!
COMRADES RELEASED
& COMRADES CAPTURED:
2014 U.S. Political Prisoner
Update From NYC
Anarchist Black Cross

A

s it’s been a while since this magazine has been published, we’re limiting our focus to the last year or
so. In that year, the trend that’s emerged
is comrades being released from prison.
Some of these folks have been convicted
and sentenced within the last five years,
while others were imprisoned for decades. All told, in the United States alone,
we’ve seen 19 political prisoners come
home in 2014. What that means, beyond
the obvious elation of welcoming them
back to their homes and communities, is
the urgent need for folks committed to
the work of providing support to amplify
the importance of post-release support.
Over the past few months, NYC ABC,
along with a former political prisoner
and folks from Bloomington ABC have
facilitated a couple of strategic discussions around post-release support. The
goal of the discussions is to develop a
guide for this specific aspect of prisoner
support that will also be of use to a
wide range of prisoners and those supporting them. For now, we’ll catch you
up on who has been recently released.
Our year started off strong with the release
of radical attorney Lynne Stewart. Lynne
was freed after a successful campaign
for compassionate release. Lynne served
over four years before being released.
A couple of weeks after Lynne’s release,
CeCe McDonald finished 19 months of her
41 month sentence and was released. The
remainder of her sentence will be served
under supervised release. CeCe was attacked by a bigot with a swastika tattoo
on his chest, most likely due to being an
African-American transwoman. In defending herself, she stabbed her attacker,
who later died. As there is no justice in
the courts, CeCe was convicted and immediately sent to a men’s prison where
she served the entirety of her time inside.
Later in January, we saw the release of
grand jury resister Jerry Koch. Jerry served
over eight months without being charged
with a crime, because he was unwilling to
cooperate with a grand jury in New York
City. The focus of the grand jury seems
to have been on actions taken by the “Bicycle Bomber,” but really what matters
is that in New York City, as in the Pacific

Northwest, anarchists resisted grand juries
and the cops were unable to break them.
In February, John Tucker, of the Tinley
Park Five, was released. As John later
wrote, “Your letters, donations, and noisy
solidarity were things of beauty to eyes
forced to view the despair of a broken
system day after day and eyes that could
not help but watch as any glimmer of hope
faded from so many youths as they were
dehumanized by the tortuous conditions in
which they were forced to dwell.”
A few weeks into February, Earth Liberation Front prisoner Steve Murphy was released. Steve’s release came after almost
five years in prison for an attempted ELF
arson on a town house construction site in
Pasadena in 2006.
By the end of February, Cuban 5 prisoner
Ruben Campa was released after completing a sentence of over fifteen years in federal prison.
In March, after having served over 44
years in prison, Marshall Eddie Conway
was released. Eddie’s release came as
the result of a 2012 Maryland Court of
Appeals decision that was applied retroactively to his case. Despite our ideas of
breaking comrades out or helping if they
escape, more often than not, we see them
released due to public pressure campaigns
and the ability of radical attorneys to find
ways to exploit court findings in our favor.
In June, Cody Sutherlin was freed. Cody
is the third of the Tinley Park Five to be
released, having served over two years.
The Tinley Park Five are anti-fascists
from Indiana who were arrested after a
group of almost twenty folks smashed
up a gathering of white supremacists in
Tinley Park, Illinois. In his words, “With
so many wonderful people, faces old
and new, doing so many amazing things,
it’s impossible for my thanks to have
a beginning or an end. The thanks that I
have for all of you is so deep and infinite
that it can’t be measured or explained.”
Also in June, after forty years in prison,
Black liberation prisoner Sekou Kambui was granted parole in the state of
Alabama. This was the first parole attempt in which Sekou had a committed support campaign behind the effort.
One month later, in July, Richard Morano was released from a Canadian prison.
Richard was one of five individuals from
the United States pursued by Canadian
police across international borders years
after the 2010 Toronto G20 protests.
Also in July, Cecily McMillan was released after serving about two months
on Rikers Island. Cecily was an Occupy Wall Street activist convicted of assaulting a cop, though the reality is that
she was sexually assaulted and arrested
to cover up the groping she endured.
Finally, near the end of July, Dylan Sutherlin was released after serving over two
years in prison as part of the Tinley Park
Five. A couple of months later, the last
of the Five, Dylan’s brother Jason was
released, having served the longest prison sentence of the Tinley Park Five.
In September, 2010 Toronto G20 extradited Joel Bitar was dropped off near the
United States border, having met the requirements making him eligible for parole
FTTP #12 - Gentrification/Repression - Pg. 8

an entire month earlier. Joel served about
half of a 19 month sentence for, among
other things, smashing up a cop car with a
hammer*.
In November, NATO 3 prisoner Brian
Church was released after serving two
and a half of a five year sentence. The
NATO 3 were convicted of possession
of an incendiary device with the intent
to commit arson and possession of an incendiary device with the knowledge that
another intended to commit arson in the
run up to the 2012 NATO gathering in
Chicago, Illinois.
Later in November, former Black Panther
and Black Liberation Army soldier Sekou
Odinga was freed. Sekou served thirtythree years after being convicted of the liberation of Assata Shakur and the attempted
murder of six cops (for defending himself
against a raid that left one of his comrades
dead at the hands of those same cops). Sekou’s freedom came as a result of a public
campaign and the work of radical attorneys.
In December, the remaining Cuban 5
prisoners— Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon
Labaniño, and Antonio Guerrero were released.
Reviewing the nineteen comrades released in 2014, how they secured their
freedom runs the gamut— time served
to compassionate release to public agitation. Understanding that each prisoner
has unique needs and that strategies for
freedom vary from one to the next is essential for making sure we prepare in ways
that are most effective and use any and
all tactics and strategies at our disposal.
While the overall trend was positive,
we also lost several comrades to prison.
The case against Tyler Lang and Kevin
Olliff, which seemed resolved at the state
level, has now been taken on by the FBI.
Tyler and Kevin have been charged under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act
(AETA) for allegedly released fox in the
American Midwest. Currently, Tyler is
free on bail, while Kevin, having completed his state sentence, has been remanded
into Federal custody pending trial. Check
supportkevinandtyler.com to stay up to
date on that case.
In August, Luke O’Donovan accepted a
non-cooperating plea agreement in lieu
of the decades in prison he faced if convicted— a conviction for defending himself against a vicious queer-bashing in
late 2013 that left several folks, including
Luke himself, stabbed. Luke is currently
serving a two year prison sentence that will
be followed by eight years of supervised release in exile— he will be banned from being in any county in Georgia, save for the one
in which he serves his supervised release.
Visit letlukego.wordpress.com for updates
and ways to help.
In September, Eric King was arrested for
allegedly attacking a government building in Kansas City, Missouri. As of this
writing, Eric is still pre-trial. Practically
speaking, that means, if you choose to
write him, do not mention his case,
anarchist politics, or anything that
you wouldn’t want to see transcribed and used against him at trial.
Visit supportericking.wordpress.com for
more information and updates about Eric’s
case.
We’ve chosen not to list addresses, as they
quickly change and mail does not necessarily follow prisoners. For current addresses,
go to nycabc.wordpress.com/guide or visit
the support sites of the respective comrades.

*While Joel has been released, the other
American anarchist extradited for similar
crimes, Kevin Chianella is still serving the
remainder of his 24 month sentence for his
actions during the Toronto 2010 G20.
You can write to Kevin at:
Beaver Creek Medium Institution, 200
Beaver Creek Drive, Post Office Box
1240, Gravenhurst, Ontario,
P1P1W9, Canada.
You can find updates on Kevin at:
notorontog20extradition.wordpress.com
NYC ABC NOTES THE
FOLLOWING OCCURRED
SHORTLY AFTER THEIR
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
WAS CONTRIBUTED

I

n Mid-January 2015, Tsutomu Shirosaki was released from a federal prison
in Indiana, into the waiting clutches of
ICE, who will send him to Japan to begin
another prison sentence. This comes after
nearly twenty years in prison for a mortar
attack on a U.S. embassy in Jakarta.
One day prior to Shirosaki’s release,
Puerto Rican independence prisoner and
member of Los Macheteros, Norberto
González Claudio, was released. Norberto helped plan the single largest armored
truck expropriation in U.S. history, grabbing over $7,000,000 to fund revolutionary projects in furtherance of self-determination for Puerto Rican people under the
colonial yoke of the United States.
Also in January, Phil Africa of the MOVE
group in Philadelphia died after decades
in prison. An article by Ramona Africa
of MOVE regarding his death is included
below. For more information on MOVE
or Phil Africa you can visit: onamove.com
On Saturday, January 10th 2015 Phil
Africa, revolutionary, John Africa’s
First Minister of Defense, and beloved
brother, husband and father, passed away
under suspicious circumstances at the
State Correctional Institution at Dallas,
PA. On Sunday, January 4th Phil Africa
wasn’t feeling well and went to the prison
infirmary. Though he wasn’t feeling well,
other inmates saw Phil Africa walking,
stretching and doing jumping jacks. Hearing that Phil was in the infirmary MOVE
members drove up to visit him and were
denied a visit by the prison. While they
were visiting with Delbert Africa, Phil was
secretly transported to Wilkes Barre General Hospital where he was held in total
isolation, incommunicado for five days.
Prison officials at SCI-Dallas wouldn’t
communicate about Phil’s condition. They
told MOVE that Phil was at Wilkes Barre
General hospital but the hospital denied
he was there and this back and forth lie
went on for days almost the entire time
Phil was being held. The hospital and the
prison behaved very suspiciously denying Phil the ability to call family members or his wife of 44 years, Janine Africa,
stating that she was not a blood relative.
The hospital and prison received hundreds of phone calls in support of Phil
from around the world. When they finally
submitted to pressure and allowed Phil
to call Janine on Thursday, January 8th
he was heavily drugged, incoherent and
couldn’t even hold the phone to talk to her.
On Friday, January 9th Phil was sent back
to the prison infirmary and placed in hospice care upon arrival. On Saturday, January 10th Ramona and Carlos Africa were
granted permission to visit Phil in the
prison infirmary. When they reached him
he was incoherent and couldn’t talk or
move his head to look at them. An
hour after they left Delbert called
with the news that Phil passed away.

Inmates in the infirmary and others in the
prison were shocked when they heard the
news. They had witnessed his vigorous
health for decades in the prisons, had just
seen him stretching and doing jumping
jacks six days earlier. This rapid decline all
occurred while he was being literally held
incommunicado from his MOVE family
at Wilkes Barre General Hospital or Dallas prison or wherever these conspirators
were holding him with murderous intent.
The fact that Phil was isolated for the
six days before he passed, The prison
even refused to acknowledge that he
was in the hospital is beyond suspicious.
This is another example of how the system hates MOVE and will do anything
to stop MOVE. You can look at the example of August 8th, 1978 when the
MOVE 9 were illegally imprisoned, and
May 13th, 1985 when the government
dropped a bomb and intentionally murdered 11 MOVE members to see this point
clearly. When Merle Africa died in prison
on March 13th, 1998 the conditions were
very similar. She had been one way in the
prison, but within hours of being forced
to go to an outside hospital she was dead.
Phil made a deep impression on people
all around the world. He was constantly
writing, often dozens of letters a day, encouraging solidarity and strength, and
warmly advising hundreds of people. Phil
worked hard to learn to paint and created
countless paintings which he sent to supporters for free to draw attention to issues,
get raffled off for the struggle, and bring
people together. Phil took his commitment
and work as a revolutionary very seriously,
but was often smiling, laughing, and giving people hugs and encouragement. He
was a warm father figure to many in the
prison where he taught inmates how to
box, to think, and how to get stronger.
Despite having two of his children murdered by the system and being separated
by prison, Phil was a father figure to many.
He was separated from his wife Janine for
over 36 of the 44 years they were married,
but he worked hard to stay connected with
her even though they were so callously isolated by the system.
It’s this system’s intention for MOVE people to die in prison. The MOVE 9 never
should have been imprisoned at all, and
according to their sentence they should
have been paroled over six years ago.
The death of Merle and Phil Africa rests
directly at the feet of this government!
Phil will never be forgotten and this is not
the end he is dearly missed but his strong
example should inspire everyone to fight
harder for the freedom of the MOVE
9 and all political prisoners. This latest
government treachery will be the fuel
needed to motivate people to step up the
pace for this revolution.
Long live Phil Africa!
Long live Merle Africa!
Free the MOVE9!
Long Live John Africa!
For More Info Or How You Can Help
Contact Ramona Africa:
OnaMoveLLJA@gmail.com
Following this contribution by the NYC
Anarchist Black Cross, Eric McDavid was
released from prison on January 8th, 2015.
This has been some of the best news we've
had the delight to print in this publication
for years, as Eric has been a frequent focus
of our prisoner support section since the
beginning of this publication 8 years ago.
The following is a statement from the website greenisthenewred.com regarding Eric's
release.

An eco-anarchist who was sentenced to
19 years in prison as an “eco-terrorist”
was released from prison today following
a court ruling where the government acknowledged withholding evidence during
his trial. Eric McDavid was convicted on
conspiracy charges in 2007 related to what
the government called a plot to blow up
the Nimbus Dam. This “conspiracy,”
though, was the creation of a paid government informant named “Anna” who
traveled the country with the group of
eco-anarchists, encouraged them to plot
illegal activity, supplied them with food
and housing and even provided, with the
FBI’s direction, bomb-making recipes.
“Anna” began working with the FBI after
writing a community-college paper on infiltrating protest groups.
“Today we corrected one of the most
egregious injustices I have ever encountered in my legal career, if you consider being released after nine years of
wrongful incarceration justice,” one of
Mr. McDavid’s lawyers, Ben Rosenfeld,
That statement from Mr. Rosenfeld is no
exaggeration. During McDavid’s trial, the
court heard recordings of “Anna” berating
McDavid and his two codefendants — who
were pressured to turn against McDavid in
exchange for a reduced sentence — that they
were not taking action. The entire operation was terminated after it was repeatedly
demonstrated that McDavid and the others were never going to blow up any dam.
Still, the FBI trumpeted McDavid’s case as
a victory in the War on Terrorism. And reveled in his outlandish sentence of 19 years.
Prosecutors in court documents actually stated that “McDavid’s homegrown
brand of eco-terrorism is just as dangerous
and insidious as international terrorism.”
What prompted this final round of court
proceedings were documents released
through the Freedom of Information Act.
In turns out that letters between McDavid
and “Anna” were given to the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit for review. The FBI
wanted “Anna” to undergo a polygraph
exam to evaluate her outlandish claims.
These documents, which clearly cast
doubt on everything this woman said in
court, were never turned over to the defense. The polygraph never took place.
McDavid’s release is a victory, and should
be celebrated. But it is also a reminder of
how the FBI’s obsession with “eco-terrorists” — who have never injured anyone —
and the relentless drive to proclaim victories in the War on Terrorism, have robbed
McDavid and his family of years of his life.
The brutal reality is that there will be
more cases like this, and the FBI’s rogue
operation will continue, until there is a
full-scale government inquiry into how
“terrorism” resources are being used to
persecute political dissidents. Without a massive change in oversight
and accountability, the FBI will be allowed to continue sabotaging the
lives of those who dare to resist.
STATEMENT FROM ERIC
SHORTLY AFTER HIS RELEASE:
i cannot begin this without an over flowingly gushing heartfelt thanks for the amazing
support, aid, and solidarity provided by so
many people from so many places - seeing
me through these past 9 years to bring me
home...
tears of release and joy will continue to
wet my cheeks - i don't wipe them away...
the folks at Sacramento Prisoner Support
have never wavered in going above and
FTTP #12 - Repression - Pg. 9

Phil
Africa

too much love.
find UR joy

Jerry
Koch

Luke O’Donovan

We would like to add that Eric McDavid
was one of three individuals who were
arrested as a result of “Anna,” a vile sociopath. Unlike his former codefendants,
Eric's extreme sentence was a direct result of his refusal to cooperate with the
state. His two other codefendants have
already served their short sentences years
ago, at Eric's expense. Their names are
not important though, as, like all snitches
who think it's possible to start a new life
after cooperating, they have chosen in
their shameful decision to be completely
abandoned by the anarchist community
they insincerely claimed to be part of at
the time of their arrests. That said, Eric
is not only a courageous figure for those
actively defending the earth or resisting
the social order of today, but a victory
for those resisting state repression everywhere. You can donate to Eric at the
website below. There is also an address
that he can receive letters or gifts at listed below. He absolutely deserves both.

Lynne Stewart

Eric King
CeCe McDonald

You can write Eric or
send him a care package at:
Eric McDavid c/o SPS
Post Office Box 163126
Sacramento, California 95816

Tsutomu Shirosaki

Steve Murphy
Dylan
Sutherlin

Donate Via PayPal at:
supporteric.org/howtohelp.
htm#Fundraising

John
Tucker

LINKS
In addition to the NYC ABC website
listed before, these links are very helpful
anti-repression and prisoner support
websites that can be visited to find out
the most up-to-date information on different political prisoners, cases,
and overall state repression.
Denver Anarchist Black Cross
denverabc.wordpress.com/
prisoners-dabc-supports

Cody Sutherlin

The Nato 3

Eddie
Conway

Tyler Lang
&
Kevin Olliff
Sekou Kambui , 1961

STRONG AND UNCOMPROMISING SOLIDARITY WITH POLITICAL
PRISONERS IS INDISPENSABLE TO EVERY REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE

Bay Area
Anti-Repression Committee
antirepressionbayarea.com
ABC Berlin
www.abc-berlin.net
Please also learn about and support
brothers Jason (convicted anti-fascist
serving 41 months) and Jeremy
Hammond (hacker serving 10 years)
Jeremy: freejeremy.net
Jason: freejeremy.net/jasonhammond

JUST ONE MORE

Eric
Mcdavid

beyond while enduring all the pressures
that come from moving contrary to what
the FBI had considered a closed case i love you all so dearly. to my habeas attorneys, mark and ben, your work on this
process certainly hasn't changed my view
of the legal system - but it has proven to
me that humyns can actually survive the
bar with their strong and beautiful hearts
intact, still connected, and persevering as
a guiding force in their lives = 'thank you'
will never be enough, i love you both...
surviving these last 9 years has brought
me to a new understanding of patience
and how it can be passionate, thereby
sustaining the need for a longer view;
one that will continue to help me as i
move into aiding those still held behind
razor wire fences, concrete, and steel...
so many others have cases as ridiculous
as my own - some much worse, and have
been in for decades; a number i met personally and others i dream of meeting
upon their release. thank you all so much
for all of your love and support as i begin
to move into this next phase of my life.
i'll be in touch again soon. for now i hope
to focus on spending time with my loved
ones and reconnecting with the community that i love and have missed for so long.

SANTA
MARTHA
PRISON
FOR
WOMEN
-Amélie Trudeau

new prisoner arrived in my cell on
Wednesday, three days ago now,
after spending a month in Ingresso (1). We are four now, in a cell with
five beds (One bed is empty). Ingresso
is where you go when you first arrive in
prison. In the days that follow your arrival, your fingerprints are taken and you
have to fill out lots of paperwork. Then,
it's meetings with "professionals" who
assess your character in order to classify
you and finally, you are assigned to a permanent cell with other people who correspond to your profile assessment. You
have to meet a psychologist, a criminologist, a social worker, an addiction specialist, a technician, the person in charge
of cultural activities and sports, and the
person in charge of spiritual and religious
activities. All together, their reports
make up your profile and classification.

A

I start to chat with the new arrival and she
tells me her story, a story that in her own
words denounces the context of the prison in Santa Martha (2). A friend wrote
me a letter asking that I write something for FTTP telling what I wanted of
my experience here. I wasn't sure what
to write, and I didn't want to write another "anarchist propaganda" text filled
with concepts. It's at this time that the
new arrival started to tell me her story:
B. arrived in Santa Martha on October
18th, imprisoned for passing marijuana
into the men's prisons. She arrived here
four and a half months pregnant. On October 21st, a Tuesday, she was transported to
"Juzgado Oriente" (3). This is a common
occurrence at the beginning of a trial;
they can send us to court up to three times
a week. Going to the Juzgado means that
you are told at 2 AM that you need to be
ready by 5:30 AM to get stuffed into a
barred prison-bus guarded by cops with
machine guns at the front. The Juzgado itself is inside the prison for men,
where many co-accused are imprisoned.
On this particular morning, B. was
transported in one of these buses with
17 other women. In these bus-cages,
there are about 40 seats. After spending
the whole day at the court, the women
were stuffed back in the bus to return
to Santa Martha around 7:30 PM, but
this time, there were 80 on the bus.
The guards decided to fill just one bus
with all the women from court, and also
from the conviviencia (4). Throughout
all this, B. decided to stay standing in
the bus and to try to maintain her balance. There was also another pregnant
woman on board with her. Together,
they told the guards with machine guns:
"We are two pregnant women, it seems
to us that there are a lot of people on this
bus."

FTTP #12 - Repression / Just One More - Pg. 10

“Let's be done with
domination, imprisonment,
and domestication. Dignity
and freedom to all.”

And the guards responded: "That's not our
problem, it's the administration that makes
the decisions." The return trip takes about
40 minutes, and all of the women are hyper-stuffed in this bus that bounces every
15 seconds over bumps and holes in the
pavement. Finally B. arrives back at Santa
Martha just before the cells get locked for
the night, around 8 PM. By pure coincidence, the authorities put B. in a cell by
herself – meanwhile, there are cells with
up to 20 people for only three beds.
The prison is pretty old and the metal doors
of the cell lock with a chain and padlock.
In the hallways, there are no cameras.
8 PM comes and goes. The cell door is
closed and locked. B. starts to feel ill and
notices a reddish liquid coming from between her legs. Around 9:30, she alerts the
people in the cell across from her about
what's going on. They advise her to lie
down and rest while they start to call out
for the guards. B. is on the second floor
and the guards are all on the first floor in
the control booth. One after another, all the
other women on the second floor start to
yell out. After 20 minutes, a guard finally
comes upstairs. B. is losing a lot of fluid.
When the guard learns of the situation, he
goes back downstairs to call a doctor. He
comes back five minutes later only to announce that there is no doctor in the medical centre of the prison; there are only nurses. He tells B. that the only way she can get
to the medical centre is by walking there.
She goes down two flights of stairs and
walks the 400 meters to the medical centre all on her own. All along the route, she
is losing fluid. Finally, when she arrives,
the nurse performs an ultrasound to check
the health of the fetus and decides to send
B. to the Bosque de Tlawac (5) hospital.
She arrived at the hospital around midnight. The placenta did not contain any
more amniotic fluid and the baby was
dead. The doctor induced contractions and
the baby was still-born around 6 AM on the
October 22nd. The doctor told B. that if
she had arrived only a little bit earlier, he
would have been able to save the baby. B.
did not get to see her family. The body of
the baby was given to B.'s husband, the
baby's father, later that day and was buried the next day by the family. As for B.,
the guards returned her to Santa Martha that night, the 22nd, around 7:30.
On her arrival, the director of the prison,
panicked by what had happened, asked to
meet with B. She said she was unaware
B. had been pregnant, despite B. stating
so to the prison doctor upon her arrival
and that her pregnancy was recorded in
all her official documents. The director
wanted B. to say that if she had a miscarriage, it was because of what she had been
told in court that day, even though she
only had to go to court to sign some simple
papers. The director added that, given her
crime, the miscarriage must be B.'s fault
due to drug use, even though B. didn't consume drugs at all during her pregnancy.

Next, it was the criminologists' and the
psychologists' turn to make the events
all her fault. One after another, the authorities disavowed any responsibility for the situation, all the way up to
the human rights lawyers of D.F. (6)

rative of foreigners coming in and causing
disruption, thus ignoring and even erasing the rich history of anarchist struggle
against the state in Mexico. Over the
past few years in Mexico City, an insurrectionary anarchist struggle has intensified. Bombings of banks and churches,
among other institutions of domination,
have taken place frequently, and solidarity
with insurrectionary anarchists in Mexico
and worldwide has been central to these
actions. We must recognize that the repression and penalization that comrades are facing now occurs in this context. Regardless
of the guilt or innocence of these specific
comrades, we want to express solidarity,
complicity, and a strong desire to see attacks on the state and capital continue and
spread. In reality, the Canadians causing
disruption in Mexico are the mining companies and military technologies; the same
ones that exploit unceded Indigenous land
in Canada and elsewhere around the world.
Given that capitalist exploitation and misery knows no borders, the struggle against
capitalism and the state apparatus must
not stop at national borders. Our strength
lies in our capacity to recognize the commonalities of our struggles so that they
may spread, and to act in solidarity so that
the struggles of our incarcerated comrades
may continue.

This is just one story among many others. Here, they put us in a cage and treat
us like CATTLE. One more death is seemingly unimportant. All of this happened 30
days ago now, and my companion is telling me this story, one among all the others
that make up our daily existence. This type
of story is SILENCED and everything We write this statement to express our deep
continues like nothing ever happened. solidarity with and love for our friends and
comrades – Carlos, Amélie and Fallon.
2000 women shut into a hole with cock- Although we are writing from a different
roaches, bedbugs, and trash. Meanwhile, context, it is critical that our solidarity is
the prison director and her bosses play sym- also with the struggle in which this action
pathetic figures in the media with their left- occurred. Our friends and comrades facing
ist discourse, because they organize soccer these charges are experiencing the intensity
tournaments and movie screenings "for us." of repression. Our solidarity must meet that
intensity with respect for where they stand,
Let's be done with domination, imprison- admiration for their strength, and a continuation of the struggle in Canada, Mexico,
ment, and domestication. Dignity and
and globally.
freedom to all.
Those responsible for our imprisonment
deserve nothing less than a bomb in their
well-feathered nests.
-Amélie Trudeau
1. Ingresso - From Spanish: "Entrance"
2. Centro Femenil de Reinsercion Social
Santa Martha, D.F. Mexico.
3. Juzgado Oriente - From Spanish:
"Western Court"
4. Once a week, women from Santa Martha can go visit their husband, partner,
or members of their family in the men's
prisons. They leave around 8 AM and
return around 7 PM.
5. Bosque de Tlawac (sic) - Bosque de
Tlahuac
6. D.F. - Districto Federal - Capital city
region of Mexico/Mexico City

ON THE 5E3
Solidarity with Carlos,
Amélie, and Fallon /
Solidarity with the 5E3
The following is an excerpt from
the 5E3 support publication that
can be viewed in entirely here:
325.nostate.net/wp-content/up
loads/2014/04/letters-5e.pdf

Love and freedom to the 5e three,
For freedom and anarchy,
-Friends in struggle
Write to the 5E3
Carlos López Marín
Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente
Calle Reforma #50, Col.
San Lorenzo Tezonco
Delegación Iztapalapa, C.P. 09800,
Ciudad de México, D.F.
México
Fallon Rouiller
Centro Femenil de Reinserción Social
Santa Martha Acatitla
Calzada Ermita, Iztapalapa No 4037, Colonia Santa Martha Acatitla
Delegación Iztapalapa, C.P. 09560,
Ciudad de México, D.F.
México
Amélie Trudeau
Centro Femenil de Reinserción Social
Santa Martha Acatitla
Calzada Ermita, Iztapalapa No 4037, Colonia Santa Martha Acatitla
Delegación Iztapalapa, C.P. 09560,
Ciudad de México, D.F.
México

The 5E3 are Amélie Trudeau Pelletier, Fallon Poisson Rouiller and Carlos López.
They are called the 5e3 because they were
arrested on January (Enero) 5th and they
are 3 individuals. After being indefinitely
held without charge under “anti-terrorism”
laws by the Mexican state for many months
they were finally sentenced based on two
separate charges, two separate times. First,
on October 31st, 2014, they were given a
sentence of 7 years and 6 months. Shortly
after they were sentenced to an additional
2 years, 7 months, and 15 days, as well as
a 108 thousand pesos in restitution. The
sentences will run parallel with each other.
Carlos, Amélie, and Fallon have taken a
completely uncooperative response to the
state assaulting their lives. They continue to
remain active inside prison, and their beautiful hearts have inspired actions in their
name that have reached far beyond their
prison walls. In recognition of their courage
and strength, we have listed a few solidarity actions with the 3 below. Their fighting
spirits are contagious, and impossible to
fully contain amidst our borderless solidarity.
SOLIDARITY ACTIONS
WITH THE 5E3.
January 17th, 2014, USA
Police cars were attacked in Bloomington,
IN in solidarity with the 5E3.
January 31st ,2014, USA
Locks are glued at a yuppie supermarket
in Bloomington, IN in solidarity with the
5E3 and Indiana state prisoners protesting
prison conditions on hunger strike.
February 11th, 2014, USA
Anarchists march on the Mexican
consulate in Seattle, WA.
April 12th, 2014, USA
ATMs were destroyed in Seattle, WA in
solidarity with the 5E3 and prisoners
on hunger strike across WA.
May 22nd, 2014, Quebec, CA
In a small suburb of Montreal, over 60
school buses were attacked in solidarity
with the 5E3 and against the educational
system that looks to condition us all into
accepting capital and the state.
July 18th, 2014, USA
Twenty-three vehicles were attacked at a
Nissan dealership in Olympia, WA, in
solidarity with the 5E3. The solidarity action resulted in $100,000 in damage.
Mid-August 2014, USA
Equipment on a construction site for a new
McDonalds in Portland, OR was sabotaged
by pouring bleach in all the fuel tanks on
the site. The action was claimed in
solidarity with the 5E3.
October 1st, 2014, Quebec, CA
A railroad telecom was burned and three
residential development panels
vandalized in response to an eviction of
Native resisters in Gatineau and in
solidarity with the 5E3, somewhere in
southern Quebec, Canada.
November 10th, 2014, USA
The Mexican consulate in Tucson, AZ was
attacked with paint bombs. Graffiti outside
the consulate claimed the action in solidarity with the 5E3 via the message:
“VENGEANCE FOR LOS
NORMALISTAS AND THE 5E3.”

On the night of January 5th, 2014 Carlos
– a comrade from Mexico, and Amélie
and Fallon – two comrades from Canada,
were arrested in relation to a Molotov attack on the Ministry of Communication
and Transportation and a Nissan dealership in Mexico City. They were arrested
at a time of intense crackdown by the
Mexican state on anarchists; from attacks on demonstrations, torture of arrested comrades – including the torture
and deportation of Gustavo Rodriguez,
							
and barring the entry of Alfredo Bonanno.
The state is now attempting to spin a nar-

“The most important thing right now is
to build a force stronger than prisons.”
-Fallon Poisson Rouiller

FTTP #12 - Just One More / On the 5E3 - Pg. 11

A Chronology
Of North American Prisoner Resistance

17 January 2014 - Freeport, Illinois, United States - A Stephenson County Jail prisoner escaped from the Stephenson County
Courthouse by holding onto the underside
of a transport van.
18 January 2014 - Albion, New York,
United States - A corrections officer at the
Orleans Correctional Facility sustained
back injuries and a laceration on their arm
when a prisoner rushed onto a podium in
the dorm and attacked them.
20 January 2014 - Cooperstown, New
York, United States - An Otsego County
Correctional Facility officer was “intentionally punched” by a prisoner.

From Spring 2011 / Issue 11:

The Chronology:

Naturally, the proliferation of the prison
has been met with significant resistance
from those most affected by it. This may
be best understood as a simple conflict of
interests: the interests of prisoners against
the interests of the prison itself, which
does everything necessary to maintain
their confinement.

“A cage is an unnatural environment…
You can’t put a man or animal in one and
expect him to act natural. And it’s only
instinct to want out.” - Edward R. Jones,
a man who escaped from prison 14 times
and authored Hacksaw about his experiences.

Riots, escapes, inmate fights, staff assaults,
refusal of orders, and disturbances of all
kinds are some ways in which the tension
of this conflict is manifested. Each time
the prison cannot proceed with routine operations it loses control of itself; each time
the prison loses control, its inhabitants are
able to act outside of its constraints, in accordance with their own interests.
All actions which impede prison’s aim of
social control can be considered tangible
resistance.
With only media reports as our sources,
it is impossible to document every single
case. While reading this list it is important
to keep in mind that the inmate is always
living in resistance to prison, regardless
of whether or not a newspaper article is
published about it. The actions reported
here are only to serve as examples of those
who - even up against the grandeur of the
prison and its near-insurmountable walls –
manage to act out despite the dismal reality of the situation.
From Winter / Spring 2015
Due to a lapse of time since our last issue, this ‘prisoner resistance’ section will
be longer than it has been in the past. Although, due to space, we will only be able
to focus on 2013 & 2014. We apologize if
we have missed anything. We also apologize that we are only reporting on prisoner
disruptions and resistance taking place in
the United States.
It is also important to note that we do not
properly research the legal backgrounds of
any individual or group that has commited
any of the disruptions mentioned here. It is
not possible for us, and defeats the point.
While some may be in for crimes we do
not condone, or political affiliations we
may take issue with, we have printed this
section as a tradition in this publication.
There is an entire world behind bars as
we write this. A sort of desperation is felt
by millions incarcerated, every second.
It must be appreciated and recognized in
understanding the indispensable fight that
we must endure until all prisons are eliminated, and the system that requires them
to function is revealed for what it really is.
This isn’t for entertainment, it’s to expose
the violent suffering and desperation millions feel every day and to show the inevitable reaction all humans feel when they
are overwhelmed with constraint.	

8 November 2013 - Rutledge, Tennessee,
United States - Three prisoners escaped
the Grainger County Jail.
10 November 2013 - Newport, Tennessee, United States - A Cocke County Jail
Annex corrections officer was spat on four
times and struck in the face.

21 December 2013 - Lexington, Oklahoma, United States - A case manager at
the Joseph Harp Correctional Center was
attacked by a prisoner and suffered a broken nose.
25 December 2013 - Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States - An Allen County Jail
CO was hit head with a food tray and then
punched in the head more than a dozen
times, kicked twice, and had a second food
tray thrown at their head.
28 December 2013 - Detroit, Michigan,
United States - A Detroit Reentry Center
prisoner leaped from a van carrying five
other prisoners and a corrections officer
and escaped.

18 November 2013 - Represa, California, United States - A California State
Prison Sacramento corrections officer was
slashed multiple times in the neck.

29 December 2013 - Blythe, California,
United States - Four Riverside County Jail
COs were hospitalized after an assault by
four prisoners.

23 November 2013 - Leavittsburg, Ohio,
United States - A prisoner at Trumbull
Correctional Institute took a corrections
officer hostage with a homemade knife.

30 December 2013 - Little Rock, Arkansas, United States - A prisoner at the Pulaski County Regional Detention Center
set their padded cell on fire.

27 November 2013 - Anchorage, Alaska,
United States - A prisoner became disruptive with medical staffers and punched a
corrections officer in the face at Anchorage Correctional Center.

3 January 2014 - Fayetteville, Tennessee,
United States - A prisoner in a lockdown
cell set a fire which temporarily closed the
Lincoln County Jail.

5 December 2013 - Madison, Wisconsin,
United States - A Dane County Deputy
fractured their shoulder while trying to
move a prisoner to another cell.
7 December 2013 - Albuquerque, New
Mexico, United States - A Bernalillo
County Metropolitan Detention Center officer was punched in the back of the head
20 times.
11 December 2013 - San Jose, California,
United States - Approximately two dozen
Santa Clara County Jail prisoners began a
hunger strike to expand visiting hours. The
strike one week and ended with no concessions by the prison administration.
16 December 2013 - Merced, California, United States - A prisoner at the John
Latorraca Correctional Facility climbed
out through the ceiling of their cell and
escaped.
17 December 2013 - Corcoran, California, United States - A staff psychologist
at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility
and State Prison lost consciousness after
being punched in the face by a prisoner.
18 December 2013 - Tallahassee, Florida,
United States - A Leon County prisoner
asked a corrections officer if they were
carrying a taser and struck them in the face
and head several times when they responded “no.”

10 January 2014 - Whitehall, Wisconsin,
United States - A prisoner escaped from
the Trempealeau County Health Care Center by jumping out the second story window and stealing a vehicle parked running
outside a gas station. Unfortunately, they
were taken into custody after a low-speed
chase.
12 January 2014 - Beatrice, Nebraska,
United States - A Gage County Jail corrections officer was injured in a struggle with
a prisoner who refused to enter their cell.
15 January 2014 - Franklin, Indiana,
United States - A Johnson County prisoner
bolted out of the Johnson County Courthouse’s basement door. Unfortunately,
the prisoner, who told a sheriff’s deputy,
“Good luck catching me” before taking
off, was apprehended shortly afterwards.
16 January 2014 - Carson City, Nevada,
United States - The Nevada Supreme
Court was evacuated after a letter containing a suspicious powder labeled as anthrax
was opened. It was determined the letter
was sent from a prisoner housed at High
Desert State Prison or Southern Nevada
Correctional Center, both of which are located in Indian Springs.
16 January 2014 - Napanoch, New York,
United States - Three Gouverneur Correctional Facility officers were injured while
escorting a prisoner to a special housing
unit.

23 January 2014 - Attica, New York, United States - A corrections officer was stabbed
with a pen multiple times at Attica Correctional Facility.
29 January 2014 - Pryor Creek, Oklahoma,
United States - Two prisoners removed a
metal grate covering a window and broke
out of Mayes County Jail.
31 January 2014 - Bellevue, Washington,
United States - A shackled prisoner being
transported from King County Jail jumped
into a waiting car and escaped the Bellevue
District Court.
1 February 2014 - Trenton, New Jersey,
United States - A prisoner beat and choked
a corrections officer at New Jersey State
Prison.
2 February 2014 - Ionia, Michigan, United
States - A prisoner escaped the Ionia Correctional Facility.
3 February 2014 - Clallam Bay, Washington, United States - A Clallam Bay Corrections Center CO was repeatedly stabbed in
the face, head, neck, hands and torso.
5 February 2014 - Alden, New York,
United States - Two Gowanda Correctional
Facility COs were assaulted by several prisoners.
6 February 2014 - Lindsay, Ontario, Canada - Prisoners at the Central East Correctional Centre set fires, tore down lights and
damaged the ceiling as they tried to breach
a section of the building.
8 February 2014 - Attica, New York, United States - Five corrections officers were
injured trying to restrain a Wyoming Correctional Facility prisoner.
10 February 2014 - Fairfield, California,
United States - A prisoner at Solano County
Jail blasted three corrections officers with a
fire extinguisher in an unsuccessful escape
attempt.
14 February 2014 - Indiana, Pennsylvania,
United States - A corrections officer was
punched and kicked following a verbal exchange with a prisoner at SCI Pine Grove.
18 February 2014 - Dahlonega, Georgia,
United States - Two prisoners removed a
toilet, broke through an interior cell wall,
entered a mechanical area, damaged a window and exited the Lumpkin County Detention Center.
18 February 2014 - Parkersburg, West
Virginia, United States - Six prisoners attacked Lorrie Yeager Jr. Juvenile Center
correctional officers using tables, chairs
and throwing other items. The six prisoners
were locked in a dayroom where they broke
windows, a large flat screen television, duct
work and sprinkler heads. The group then
broke into and destroyed property in three
offices and an adjoining laundry room.
FTTP #12 - Prisoner Resistance- Pg. 12

19 February 2014 - Machiasport, Maine,
United States - A prisoner escaped the
Downeast Correctional Facility.

13 March 2014 - Leonardtown, Maryland,
United States - A St. Mary’s County Detention Center officer was bit on the arm.

24 February 2014 - Paris, Arkansas, United States - A prisoner escaped the Logan
County Jail for the second time.

19 March 2014 - Edwardsville, Illinois,
United States - A Madison County Criminal Justice Center officer was assaulted.

25 February 2014 - Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States - A Milwaukee County
Jail prisoner crossed a red line into the
corrections officers’ work area, which is
off-limits to prisoners, and injured three
officers.

23 March 2014 - Marcy, New York, United
States - Two Central New York Psychiatric
Center correction officers were assaulted
by a prisoner with an aluminum walker.

25 February 2014 - Covington, Louisiana,
United States - A prisoner failed to return
to the North Shore Workforce Facility at
the end of their shift.
27 February 2014 - Auburn, New York,
United States - Two Auburn Correctional
Facility officers were assaulted during a
frisk search.
1 March 2014 - Urania, Louisiana, United
States - Three prisoners escaped the LaSalle Correctional Facility in a stolen truck.
3 March 2014 - Bellefonte, Pennsylvania,
United States - A SCI Benner prisoner lit
a fire in their cell and attacked the officer
who tried to put it out.
3 March 2014 - Williamsburg, Virginia,
United States - A Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail prisoner threw unknown liquid
on a corrections officer and then punched
them in the groin.
4 March 2014 - La Junta, Colorado, United States - Four Otero County Jail prisoners rushed a corrections officer as they
opened a cell door and managed to escape.
6 March 2014 - Buckeye, Arizona, United
States - A corrections officer was struck
several times by a prisoner with a small,
weighted bag at the Eagle Point Unit of the
Lewis Complex.

25 March 2014 - Saint Paul, Minnesota,
United States - A prisoner at the Ramsey
County Law Enforcement Center refused
to return to their cell and attacked a corrections officer.
26 March 2014 - Fishkill, New York,
United States - A Downstate Correctional
Facility prisoner assaulted two corrections
officers.
28 March 2014 - Moncks Corner, South
Carolina, United States - Two Berkeley
County Detention Center officers were injured while trying to move a prisoner to a
new cell.
30 March 2014 - New Orleans, Louisiana,
United States - Two sheriff’s deputies were
injured in a scuffle with a prisoner at Orleans Parish Prison who refused orders to
return to their cell.
30 March 2014 - Tucson, Arizona, United
States - A prisoner walked away from the
Federal Correctional Complex Satellite
Camp.
31 March 2014 - Hillsborough, North Carolina, United States - An Orange Correctional Center prisoner walked away from
an outside work assignment.
2 April 2014 - Iowa Park, Texas, United
States - Two corrections officers were repeatedly stabbed by multiple prisoners at
the Allred Unit.

9 March 2014 - Parker, Arizona, United
States - A prisoner escaped the Colorado
River Indian Tribe Adult Detention Facility.

4 April 2014 - Coxsackie, New York, United States - Four correctional officers were
injured during a prisoner assault at Coxsackie Correctional Facility.

10 March 2014 - Rikers Island, New York,
United States - Four Rikers Island prisoners broke down cinderblock walls, crawled
through the holes and assaulted an officer
with bricks in an unsuccessful escape attempt.

11 April 2014 - Douglasville, Georgia,
United States - A Douglas County Jail prisoner grabbed a can of pepper spray that an
officer dropped and sprayed four officers
who were attempting to break up a fight.

10 March 2014 - Moorhead, Minnesota,
United States - A Clay County Jail corrections officer was knocked unconscious and
suffered fractures to their left eye socket
and cheekbone.
10 March 2014 - Albany, New York, United States - A hospitalized prisoner from
Coxsackie Correctional Facility punched a
corrections officer in the face after being
verbally abusive to clergy and staff at Albany Medical Center.
11 March 2014 - Mankato, Minnesota,
United States - For the second time in two
days, a Blue Earth County Jail prisoner
stood on the toilet of their cell and used a
pencil to damage the fire sprinkler.
12 March 2014 - Shelbyville, Kentucky,
United States - A Spencer County Jail prisoner being transported slipped out of their
restraints, choked and disarmed the jailer
who was driving, and tried to shoot both
the jailer and a truck driver who stopped
to help.
12 March 2014 - Lexington, Oklahoma,
United States - A prisoner briefly held a
Lexington Assessment and Reception Center staff member hostage, but unfortunately
they were released without incident.

11 April 2014 - Sunbury, Pennsylvania,
United States - A prisoner assaulted three
corrections officers at Northumberland
County Prison.
14 April 2014 - Indianapolis, Indiana,
United States - A Marion County Jail corrections officer was hit in the face with a
bowl of hot ramen noodles.
16 April 2014 - East Elmhurst, New York,
United States - A Rikers Island prisoner
broke the jaw and nose of a staff worker at
the George R. Vierno Center.
17 April 2014 - Dallas, Pennsylvania,
United States - a prisoner crafted a weapon
from a toothbrush and razor and slashed a
SCI-Dallas corrections officer across the
face.
18 April 2014 - Greenville, Illinois, United
States - a prisoner escaped the Bond County Jail through a vent in the ceiling.
19 April 2014 - Elko, Nevada, United
States - An Elko County Jail prisoner tore
out the table attached to their cell wall and
assaulted a corrections officer trying to
subdue them.

20 April 2014 - Lorain, Ohio, United
States - A Lorain City Jail officer was assaulted as they tried to put a prisoner in a
restraint chair.

13 May 2014 - Fort Madison, Iowa, United
States - Four Iowa State Penitentiary corrections officers were assaulted by a prisoner.

21 April 2014 - Shepherdsville, Kentucky,
United States - The Bullitt County Courthouse was evacuated when a Bullitt County Jail prisoner called in a bomb threat.

9 May 2014 - Fort Wayne, Indiana, United
States - Two Allen County Jail corrections
officers were assaulted.

21 April 2014 - Salt Lake City, Utah, United States - A Salt Lake County Jail prisoner
assaulted a correctional officer after the officer ended their phone call.
22 April 2014 - Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada - Five prisoners breached a
locked door at Saskatchewan Penitentiary
and attacked two correctional officers. A
warning shot was fired to end the fight, but
in the process a correctional officer was
hit in the face with shrapnel and suffered
injuries.
22 April 2014 - Stigler, Oklahoma, United
States - a prisoner entered a plumbing section of the Haskell County Jail and used a
rope they made to break free.
22 April 2014 - Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada - Five prisoners breached a
locked door at Saskatchewan Penitentiary
and attacked two correctional officers. A
warning shot was fired to end the fight, but
in the process a correctional officer was
hit in the face with shrapnel and suffered
injuries.
22 April 2014 - Stigler, Oklahoma, United
States - a prisoner entered a plumbing section of the Haskell County Jail and used a
rope they made to break free.
23 April 2014 - Warren, Ohio, United
States - Three Trumbull County Jail prisoners assaulted and handcuffed a corrections officer. The prisoners covered the
door of the room with sheets and tied them
to the table so that should anyone try to
enter, the sheets would tighten. Unfortunately, the officer was released uninjured
after five hours.
24 April 2014 - Tulsa, Oklahoma, United
States - A Tulsa County Jail corrections officer suffered a fractured skull after being
beaten by an prisoner with a broom handle.
27 April 2014 - Laurel, Mississippi, United States - A Jones County Adult Detention
Center prisoner stabbed two corrections
officers.
28 April 2014 - New Castle, Indiana,
United States - Two prisoners used a stolen
kitchen knife to pry open the metal siding
on a wall near the roof and escape.
29 April 2014 - Fort Edward, New York,
United States - A local lawyer was knocked
unconscious after they were assaulted by a
prisoner in Washington County Jail during
a meeting for a parole violation hearing.
30 April 2014 - Portland, Oregon, United
States - A Columbia River Correctional Institute prisoner escaped.
3 May 2014 - Henrietta, Missouri, United
States - a prisoner escaped through the
ceiling of the Ray County Jail.
5 May 2014 - Madras, Oregon, United
States - For the second time in a week, a
prisoner escaped the Deer Ridge Correctional Institution.
9 May 2014 - Folsom, California, United
States - Two California State Prison-Sacramento correctional officers were assaulted.
11 May 2014 - Phoenix, Arizona, United
States - A Lower Buckeye Jail officer had
their nose broken.

23 May 2014 - Seward, Alaska, United
States - A Spring Creek Correctional Center officer was punched in the face by a
prisoner who “became agitated.”
24 May 2014 - Salinas, California, United
States - 14 prisoners attacked four Monterey County Jail deputies who were attempting to move them from the pod.
26 May 2014 - Madisonville, Kentucky,
United States - A Webster County Jail prisoner escaped while being transported to
Baptist Health Madisonville for treatment.
29 May 2014 - St Albans, Vermont, United
States - For the second time in a week, a
prisoner at the Northwest State Correctional Facility assaulted a corrections officer
who requested they take down an object
covering their cell door window.
30 May 2014 - Licking, Missouri, United
States - Two South Central Correctional
Center officers were assaulted.
31 May 2014 - Anchorage, Alaska, United
States - An Anchorage Correctional Center
officer was assaulted.
2 June 2014 - Nashville, Tennessee, United States - a prisoner at the Tennessee Prison for Women climbed a fence to escape
but was captured before they could leave
the prison grounds.
3 June 2014 - St John’s, Newfoundland
and Labrador, Canada - Twelve prisoners
at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s
destroyed furniture and refused to return to
their cells.
7 June 2014 - Quebec City, Quebec, Canada - Three prisoners escaped the Orsainville Detention Centre by way of helicopter.
10 June 2014 - Adrian, Michigan, United
States - A prisoner broke the lock on a cell
door and escaped from the Lenawee County Courthouse.
13 June 2014 - Henderson, Tennessee,
United States - Two Chester County Jail
corrections officers were assaulted.
15 June 2014 - Honolulu, Hawaii, United
States - A prisoner escaped the Oahu Community Correctional Center by climbing
through an opening in the ceiling, jumping
8’ from the roof and walking through an
open gate.
15 June 2014 - Watertown, New York,
United States - A Watertown Correctional
Facility officer was pushed down the stairs.
18 June 2014 - Oskaloosa, Iowa, United
States - A Mahaska County Jail prisoner
assaulted a corrections officer with a fire
extinguisher in an unsuccessful escape attempt.
19 June 2014 - Comstock, New York,
United States - A Great Meadow Correctional Facility corrections officer was repeatedly stabbed by an prisoner with an 8”
piece of brass.
19 June 2014 - Lambertville, New Jersey,
United States - A Mercer County Jail corrections officer was slapped by a prisoner
who refused to return to lockdown.

FTTP #12 - Prisoner Resistance- Pg. 13

20 June 2014 - Chino, California, United
States - Three corrections officers were assaulted by a prisoner at the California Institution for Men.

16 July 2014 - Purvis, Mississippi, United
States - A Lamar County prisoner escaped
from road detail by stealing a sheriff’s passenger van.

25 August 2014 - Little Rock, Arkansas,
United States - a prisoner escaped from
custody while being transported to the Pulaski County Courthouse.

21 June 2014 - Pine Bluff, Arkansas,
United States - A prisoner escaped the Pine
Bluff Unit with a shotgun.

17 July 2014 - Vienna, Illinois, United
States - A Shawnee Correctional Center
officer was assaulted and suffered a mild
concussion.

27 August 2014 - Atlanta, Georgia, United
States - An Atlanta City Detention Center
corrections officer trying to retrieve a cell
phone was attacked by more than a dozen
prisoners.

22 June 2014 - Alcorn County, Mississippi
- Two prisoners attacked a Alcorn County
Regional Correctional Facility corrections
officer and used their keys to escape.
25 June 2014 - Chandler, Oklahoma, United States - 28 prisoners staged a riot at the
Lincoln County Jail.
27 June 2014 - Vienna, Illinois, United
States - A Shawnee Correctional Center
CO was assaulted and suffered a broken
jaw.
28 June 2014 - Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, United States - a prisoner escaped the
Luzerne County Correctional Facility.’
28 June 2014 - Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, United States - a prisoner escaped the
Luzerne County Correctional Facility.
30 June 2014 - Chehalis, Washington,
United States - Three Green Hill School
corrections officers were assaulted by a
prisoner.
1 July 2014 - Canton, Texas, United States
- prisoners at the Van Zandt County Detention Center figured out a way to compromise the locking systems used throughout
the facility. More than 120 prisoners had to
be moved while the locks were replaced.
2 July 2014 - Portales, New Mexico, United States - A Roosevelt County Detention
Center prisoner on work detail attacked a
corrections officer with a pick axe and escaped with a patrol car.
6 July 2014 - Amite City, Louisiana, United States - a prisoner dug an 8” hole in their
jail cell’s cinderblock wall and escaped the
Tangipahoa Parish Jail.
6 July 2014 - Stormville, New York, United States - Four Green Haven Correctional
Facility corrections officers were assaulted
by an prisoner.
7 July 2014 - Racine, Wisconsin, United
States - A Racine County Jail corrections
officer was punched in the head.
10 July 2014 - Belmont, New York, United
States - An Allegany County Jail destroyed
a fire sprinkler head, filling the area of the
jail with several hundred gallons of water.
11 July 2014 - New Orleans, Louisiana,
United States - a prisoner at the Orleans
Parish Conchetta Jail pulled a improvised
knife from a bible and stabbed three corrections officers.
11 July 2014 - Aurora, Illinois, United
States - A corrections officer fractured two
ribs when they were kicked in the chest by
a prisoner at the Aurora Police Department.
12 July 2014 - Camp Verde, Arizona, United States - a prisoner escaped the Camp
Verde Jail by hoisting themselves atop a
basketball hoop, grabbing onto an overhead security fence and pulling it apart.
13 July 2014 - Gowanda, New York, United States - Three corrections officers were
injured at the Gowanda Correctional Facility.
15 July 2014 - Mason City, Iowa, United
States - a prisoner being treated at the
Mercy Medical Center North Iowa injured
a corrections officer in an unsuccessful escape attempt.

20 July 2014 - Bend, Oregon, United
States - a prisoner scaled a fence to escape
from a work crew.
24 July 2014 - Meridian, Mississippi,
United States - Three East Mississippi
Correctional Facility corrections officers
were assaulted by two prisoners as they
were moving another prisoner to solitary
confinement.
25 July 2014 - Vienna, Illinois, United
States - A corrections officer was head
butted and suffered a concussion at the
Shawnee Correctional Center. This was the
third assault on staff in less than a month.
27 July 2014 - Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada - Four prisoners at the Prince
Albert Youth Residence broke windows
and damaged walls after barricaded themselves in a room.
29 July 2014 - Meridan, Mississippi, United States - a prisoner stabbed four prison
employees at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility.
30 July 2014 - Brighton, Colorado, United
States - An Adams County Jail corrections
officer was assaulted by three prisoners in
an unsuccessful escape attempt.
1 August 2014 - Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, United States - a prisoner hopped the
fence of the Luzerne County Correctional
Facility.
3 August 2014 - Wichita, Kansas, United States - A Sedgwick County prisoner
punched a deputy several times in the face.
6 August 2014 - Missoula, Montana, United States - A Missoula County Jail Officer
was attacked and hospitalized.
8 August 2014 - Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, United States - The unit manager of
SCI-Greene was repeatedly struck in the
head with a sock tied to a lock by a prisoner yelling “I fucking told you I was going to get you.”
9 August 2014 - Salem, Oregon, United
States - A Mill Creek Correctional Facility
prisoner walked out of the prison.
17 August 2014 - Grants, New Mexico,
United States - Approximately 60 prisoners at the Cibola County Detention Center
participated in a riot that caused $75,000
in damages. For 45 minutes prisoners destroyed porcelain toilets and sinks, air
ducts, bunks, windows, microwaves, television sets, and security cameras. The prisoners defended themselves with plumbing
fixtures they ripped out of the walls and
improvised maces made of railings from
bunks and shards of porcelain strapped to
the ends with cloth.

1 September 2014 - Nashville, Tennessee, United States - 32 prisoners crawled
through a weak spot in the fence of the
Woodland Hills Youth Development Center.
3 September 2014 - Marcy, New York,
United States - Twelve corrections officers
Central New York Psychiatric Center were
injured when they were attacked by six
prisoners.
5 September 2014 - Saginaw, Michigan,
United States - A lone Saginaw County Jail
prisoner injured three corrections officers.
8 September 2014 - Woodburn, Oregon,
United States - Three prisoners at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility barricaded
themselves in a living unit and used a pair
of scissors and the metal leg of a bunk bed
as weapons to fend off staff workers.
9 September 2014 - Grants Falls, Montana, United States - Two prisoners held
at the Cascade County Detention Center
damaged multiple cell doors causing approximately $4,000 in damages.
11 September 2014 - Williamstown, Kentucky, United States - Two prisoners escaped from the Grant County Detention
Center by climbing through a pipe channel
and walking out the maintenance door.
12 September 2014 - Salem, Oregon,
United States - Two police agencies responded to an incident at Hillcrest Youth
Correctional Facility when prisoners broke
a door and several windows, threatened
staff and refused orders to stop.
18 September 2014 - Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States - a prisoner fought
off deputies and fled the Hennepin County
Courthouse.
19 September 2014 - Madera, California,
United States - Five prisoners escaped
from the Madera County Jail.
20 September 2014 - New Lebanon, Ohio,
United States - Four prisoners assaulted
a staff member in the gymnasium before
running into the main hallway, where they
attempted to break the security glass in an
attempt to escape the Center for Adolescent Services detention facility.

5 October 2014 - Golden, Colorado, United States - a prisoner slipped through a section of metal mesh fencing in the outdoor
recreation area of the Jefferson County Jail
in the facility’s first ever escape.
15 October 2014 - Bordentown, New Jersey, United States - A Juvenile Medium
Security officer was hospitalized for facial
injuries after they were sucker punched by
a prisoner.
15 October 2014 - Rikers Island, New
York, United States - 4 corrections officers
were injured in three separate prisoner attacks. The evening culminated in “melee”
after General Population prisoners refused
to lock into their cells for the night.
17 October 2014 - Freeland, Michigan,
United States - a prisoner at the Saginaw
Correctional Facility assaulted a prison
correction officer shortly after a shift
change. The CO was struck five times in
the head with a padlock in a sock resulting in a fractured skull. Additionally, they
received multiple stab wounds resulting in
a collapsed lung.
22 October 2014 - Indiana, Pennsylvania,
United States - A person in custody at the
Indiana County Jail “became angry and
destroyed a fire suppression/sprinkler system” and waved the sprinkler head around
“in an attempt to taunt and injure the correctional officers.”
23 October 2014 - Huntsville, Texas,
United States - a prisoner at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Prison was
indicted for mailing a death threat to a federal judge.
28 October 2014 - Rome, Georgia, United States - a prisoner at the Floyd County
Jail is charged with Felony Interference of
Government Property after they intentionally flooded one of the cellblocks.
3 November 2014 - Washington, DC,
United States - A prisoner escaped from the
Psychiatric Institute of Washington.
5 November 2014 - Bakersfield, California, United States - A Lerdo Detention
Facility prisoner escaped in an ambulance
from a medical facility they were receiving
treatment at. Unfortunately, they were
caught shortly afterwards.
8 November 2014 - Tacoma, Washington,
United States - A Pierce County Jail prisoner escaped from the kitchen area as trash
was being taken out.
11 November 2014 - Monroe, Washington, United States - A corrections officer
was assaulted in the dayroom of the Monroe Correctional Complex.

22 September 2014 - Okmulgee, Oklahoma, United States - prisoners at the Okmulgee County Jail broke glass and sprinkler
heads, started a fire with electrical wires
and barricaded units in a riot that ultimately
caused $10,000 in damages.

16 November 2014 - Chillicothe, Ohio,
United States - a prisoner at the Law Enforcement Complex tried to use a disposable lighter to burn through a plexiglass
window.

24 September 2014 - Vandalia, Illinois,
United States - a prisoner escaped the Vandalia Correctional Center.

16 November 2014 - Hoffman, North
Carolina, United States - Two prisoners
escaped from the Morrison Correctional
Unit.

22 August 2014 - Florence, Arizona, United States - Thirteen prisoners refused to
enter their cells at the Florence Correctional Center and for 30 minutes smashed televisions, microwaves and other equipment.

29 September 2014 - Tyrone, Pennsylvania, United States - A Loysville Youth
Development Center staff member was
“rendered unconscious” by a punch from
a prisoner.

23 August 2014 - West Union, Iowa, United States - a prisoner being treated at the
Palmer Lutheran Health Center grabbed a
corrections officer’s gun and shot him with
it before killing himself.

1 October 2014 - Bay City, Michigan,
United States - A Bay County Jail CO was
repeatedly slapped by a prisoner.
2 October 2014 - Elyria, Ohio, United
States - a prisoner at the Lorain County Jail
ignored requests to return to their cell and
instead broke the guard’s nose.

17 November 2014 - Abilene, Texas, United States - A corrections officer at the Robertson Prison Unit suffered a broken nose
and several lacerations to their face when
they were assaulted transporting a prisoner
from one area of the unit to another.
18 November 2014 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States - Three corrections
officers were stabbed at the Philadelphia
Industrial Correctional Center.

FTTP #12 - Prisoner Resistance- Pg. 14

Ferguson
& Beyond
INTRODUCTION

T

“BURN

THIS
MOTHER
FUCKER

DOWN”
-Louis Head
Words of Mike Brown’s stepfather the
night of the grand jury verdict dismissing
charges against Darren Wilson.

he name of the town Ferguson, Missouri has taken on a
meaning of its own. We can
say “Ferguson” in a bar, and be
understood that we’re talking
about Mike Brown, Eric Garner,
and the wave of protests across
the United States. While AlJazeera, post-Occupy media, or
the Guardian like to talk about
murders by the police as something new, we have been covering instances of tragedy conducted by the police and disorderly
reactions to them since the dawn
of this publication.
Since last summer, for the first
time in our publication’s history, we feel overwhelmed with
excitement by the amount of
anti-police tension that has been
sparked in the mainstream since
our last issue came out in 2011.
Dialogue among excluded folks,
poor communities, and those
overall of a more liberatory view
or precarious existence is becoming increasingly insurrectionary in nature. Ironically, we are
overwhelmed by the task at hand
for us to try and cover all that has
happened, because it is happening now, and is an ever-changing,
news-breaking phenomenon.
Part of why we’re motivated to
publish another issue is due to
this recent explosion of unrest
against the police, and the clear
need to make an accessible insurrectionary voice present during these times, through this
publication. However, there is

so much to discuss, and so much
happening, that we have decided
to create a #Ferguson section as
opposed to a single all inclusive
article.
More is bound to happen as we
compile this section of coverage
on “Ferguson” after we decide to
go to print, which makes our decision of when to go to print ever
more complicated. But when we
say #Ferguson we refer to a subject that has generalized dialogue
regarding the police and the everyday struggle one part of this
society must face due to them.
When we first started to put together this issue, we looked to
comrades from the American
Midwest to shine a light on what
happened, assuming “Ferguson”
was an isolated event. Since then
it has been generalized across
the country, and remnants of the
sentiment sparked last summer in
the small Missouri suburb are actively happening across different
cities in different ways.
In this section we have included a
few articles about Ferguson specifically — when it first erupted,
that are very time sensitive, but
help to provide origins to the
subject of the city’s eruption.

against the police and system
they protect. In this section, there
are also a few articles that actively engage fringe conversations to
which we think many have been
too frightened to contribute.
With an existing awareness of
police repression and murder,
this section also includes updates regarding some of those
murdered by police that we have
discussed in our prior issues’
Against Justice, Against Peace
articles— namely, checking to
see if any of those cops were
indicted. We also address a few
instances of police murder and
repression that have happened
since our last issue to remind all
of our readers that Mike Brown
and Eric Garner are not unique
cases.
As a printed periodical, it is almost impossible to compete with
the pace of information on the
Internet. However, we hope this
compilation of content we’ve
titled Ferguson & Beyond is appreciated enough to be in print.
We also apologize for anything
that we have missed, specifically
when it comes to news of unrest
or others abused and murdered
by police.

We also thought it was important
to include a time-line of actions
and unrest that happened across
the country in the most concise
way possible. This is with the intention of exposing the interconnectedness and power of our rage
FTTP #12 - Ferguson - Pg. 15

“

IDENTIFYING ENEMIES
Regarding Ferguson & Its Original Eruption / Contributed November 20th, 2014

Author’s note: I do not live in Missouri, but
I used to. And I was not on the streets of
Ferguson as the clashes erupted, but I have
seen those streets inside a level of relative
calm. The anarchists and other combatants
on the ground in those weeks occupy a place
very close to my heart, but I do not write
this from the experience of a participant. I
can only gather information from a distance in an attempt to add to the growing analyses of this scenario. In doing
so, it should be understood that I am not
speaking for or representing anyone, especially those with a more intimate understanding of the scenes listed below.
INTRODUCTION:

o

n August 9th Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and
killed 18 year old Michael Brown.
Brown's body was left, uncovered, in the
middle of the street in a pool of his own
blood for over 4 hours.
Almost immediately, those close to Brown
and others from the neighborhood began
to gather. Images and information flooded
social media sites and the crowd swelled.
Videos of grieving and irate residents
brought more people out of their homes and
into the street. State media and politicians
arrived with the police quickly following.
Local police followed by state police and
eventually national guard were deployed
in a perplexing display of aggression and
militarism. Instead of shocking the grief
stricken and enraged population of Ferguson, Missouri to return to their homes, the
inverse response sparked what became the
largest anti-police uprising in a generation.

Nearly two weeks of rioting and demonstrations followed the actions of the
police that night. Volleys of tear gas and
formations of riot cops pushed against adhoc groups forming in the streets. These
groups pushed back with rocks, bottles and
live ammunition. Anti-police rioters looted
stores and attempted to burn down their
own neighborhood in a move that confused
and shocked the national audiences watching on the nightly news. Crowds demanded
'justice for Mike Brown' and a public release of the killer cop’s identity. Night after
night, residents and those wishing to show
their solidarity and support defied overwhelming police numbers. They ignored
dispersal orders and defied curfews, stole
each other back when snatch squads moved
in, washed the pepper spray from each others eyes. In a cascade of seemingly foolish
maneuvers police agencies escalated their
forces, vastly underestimating the vehemence of the crowd. Each night it returned,
claiming more space and effectively repelling police from entering their neighborhood. The burned out QuikTrip gas station
became a place to converge, celebrate previous night’s gains, and plan for the future.
Amidst the chaos of tear gas and flash bang
grenades people wishing to gain personal
and political footholds positioned themselves as leaders. Men with megaphones
began to direct and heighten the pre-existing divides between those in the streets,
capitalizing on the fissures to prop themselves up. St. Louis City Aldermen, local
celebrities, religious and secular groupings of statist militant left organizations,
church groups, and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) all began to vie for
social control. This battle often strengthened the police and military's ability to

make small gains in the street as well as
to help maintain their control of the narrative being fed to the rest of the country.
Caught in the middle of this melee were
people, residents of Ferguson, STL and beyond, nonpolitical combatants, anarchists,
and anyone who had reached their breaking point of police violence and poverty.
RACISM:
The complicated nature of any scenario
involving the interplay of state violence,
structural racism and politics is obvious.
The way that race has been historically
constructed in Missouri and the racism that
has been built into every facet of life there
is no exception. An attempt to tackle those
ideas in their entirety here would be foolish. Racism does not fit into a stratified field
of quantity, 'more racist' and 'less racist' become absurd concepts when placed next to
one another inside of any lived experience.
However, an attempt can be made to identify the overt ways in which racism is used
as a tool to subjugate others. For example,
the liberal cities dotting the northwest are
no less racist then their deep south counterparts, but the ways in which racism and
racist policies enter into people’s actions
are more obvious in the latter than the former. One would be remiss to call Missouri
more racist than other states in the Midwest
or the country, but the apparent nature that
racism plays into the daily lives of those
who reside their can not be overlooked.
Ferguson is a town of 21,000 residents.
The population is 67 percent Black. The
mayor is white. The city council of six has
one Black representative, and the 53-member police force contains three Black officers. A blip on the map of small towns

ringing the city of St Louis, it's nestled between three immovable objects; decaying
and often forgotten hamlets, the opulence
and wealth of white flight era suburbs and
the Mississippi river. Not a part of “the
south” but intimately touched by both its
racism and civil war-to-segregation era
politics, Missouri finds itself in a severely
unique set of political and economic scenarios. All of which led to the explosion
just witnessed, and the ones yet to come.
The politics of poverty in places like Missouri have not been born over night. Generations of families have grown and lived
under its repressive networks. Therefore,
it’s difficult to discern the specific reasons why a population of people, or a
part of the population decides to make a
combined and concerted effort toward rebellion against the police and policies of
policing around them. The tipping points
are immeasurable. Charts and graphs
and analytic data are incapable of relaying what it meant to see Mike Brown’s
body or the deaths of hundreds of others
killed by police bullets in that state. Data
about the make up of the city and its racist history do not convey the fear or anger associated with routine traffic stops,
daily harassment, state violence, and
abject poverty. The experiences of peoples’ revolt against these realities defy
ability to catalog participants as either
protagonists or bystanders. Retroactively,
the ways in which power was created and
moved can be spoken about in an effort to
better understand the failings and shortfalls.
The killing of Mike Brown was the spark,
but his death itself was indicative of the relationship that a white police force, backed
by a white power structure, has on a maFTTP #12 - Ferguson - Pg. 16

jority Black population. In this, and many
other scenarios, a sentiment of the uprising being a Black movement and first and
foremost for Black people became a device used by political figureheads speaking for large groupings of people they
denoted as homogenous communities.
These individuals did all that they could
to maintain their status as leaders in the
movement. The wants and desires of the
groups they professed to be representing
meant nothing to them if they did not fit
in line with their own political agenda.
RECUPERATION:
Forces on the streets of Ferguson can
broadly be broken down into two opposing groups — those wishing to manage
or control the climate and actions of the
crowd and those attempting to participate in and sustain antagonisms. These
groups were not static, with people finding
themselves on either side of the dividing line for a variety of reasons and at
various times. While the Left pushed an
agenda of identity-based unity and cohesion amongst a broad community, radicals
outside the conflict pushed the imagery
and aesthetic of a union of rioters; a unity
amongst all participants transcending issues of race and class to fight a common
enemy unhindered by interpersonal conflict. While these two basic narratives are
often presented, both are almost always
decidedly false. This fact became very
clear on the streets of Ferguson. While
there was a great deal of cooperation on the
streets, tensions were high amongst participants. Fueled by both their own rage and
goaded by would be managers with megaphones, the crowd at times turned on itself.
Those with the megaphones were political opportunists from all over the
country. They congealed into an amalgamation of “peace police” made up
of community organizers, church leaders, the Nation of Islam, New Black
Panther Party and local city politicians.
Leaders in these organizations helped
create the mystique of the “outside agitator white anarchist,” a scapegoat to be
blamed for the violence against police and
property that did not fit into the programs
being called for by these organizations.
This dynamic was latched onto by both the
press and police forces, creating confrontational atmospheres on social media and
at times in the streets themselves. But, as
many participants can attest, the strategy
gained little traction as the rioting continued and faces became familiar, as tactics
were shared and people showed direct
and material solidarity for one another in
those running street battles. The texts appearing locally from anarchists spoke
with a candor and humility often missing
from the larger milieu about these types
of conflicts. The posturing and vanguardism often associated with political bodies
interacting with this kind of broader anger
were absent from the descriptions of the
nightly events. Those recounting their experiences attempted to find ways to mitigate and negate the dichotomous divides
being pushed by those seeking power.
The notion itself that white anarchists
were the ones engaging in the most riotous behavior, or were the sole instigators
of violence directly plays into the hands
of a broad racist narrative of the inability of communities of color to be able to
self-organize. The clashes themselves
were chaotic, but a sense of linear adaptability to the circumstances became clear.
The tactics built on themselves night
after night. To attribute all of that planning and self-organization to the handful of white people, and the even fewer
anarchists in the crowd is a disingenuous
step made by organizations like the NoI
and NBPP in attempts to create distractions from the fact that their political party

lines had no sway in the moment and that
as organizations they themselves were
irrelevant.
Another group to push the outside agitator
line for their own gain were local St. Louis
politicians, most notably alderman Antonio
French. French positioned himself as both a
leader and mouth piece of people that never
asked to be led. He created a persona of a
“man of the people” for himself, by tweeting from and at some points participating
in the demonstrations. But French and
other self-professed leaders changed their
rhetoric as quickly as they could when the
uncontrollable nature of the crowd became
apparent. French in particular, along with
local rapper Tef Poe, became two of the
loudest voices screaming about the concept of the outside agitator. They vilified
those attacking the police, and called for
wide scale snitching on and confrontations with those deemed to be engaging
in that violence. When arrest records from
previous nights debunked the idea that
the violent nature of the crowd originated
outside of it, they quickly changed their
tunes, switching their attacks towards
anyone— people from local neighborhoods and beyond, interested in violence
as a tactic. Their public rhetoric, that was

easily adopted and interchangeable with
the police narratives, eventually began to
focus on what they called the “canfield
boys.” Described in the media as mindless
thugs with little to no intention, so-called
Canfield Boys are, in reality, a group of
people willing to post up on Canfield Drive
and attempt to keep the police out of their
neighborhoods.
It was imperative for those wishing to
maintain control to decry the rioting and
violence. There are no leaders in chaos,
therefore unless French was going to start
picking up bricks or throwing back tear gas
canisters, his message quickly became irrelevant to other people in the street. The only
way to maintain a certain amount of authority, whether it be real or imagined, was to
try and contain the street demonstrations.
Obviously, police, and city officials directing them, have very similar agendas. The
riot is exponentially more dangerous to
their power than organized political opposition, because it is so hard to subsume, so
nearly impossible to bring under their wing.
The number of people that arrived in Fer-

guson under different political banners
were large at the beginning. Since then
they have synthesized themselves down
into a few smaller organizations. They
have names like HealSTL and advocate
programs for justice that are only mildly
interested in addressing anything on a
systemic level. Mostly, they stick to a
deeply set narrative of the ways in which
change happens and who is in a legitimate
position to help create those narratives.
They distance themselves from people
outside of a structure with discernible
goals and any acts of violence done by demonstrators. Some are clearly positioning
themselves for political gain, others must
have entered the situation with a genuine
desire to stop the killing of young Black men
by the police, which as an aim can not
be refuted. The combinations of people both intentionally and unintentionally creating the concentrated power of
those positions massed a force that swept
through West Florrisant and beyond. That
force is largely to blame for not only a
momentary end to anti-police violence, but a strengthening of the police forces responsible for the deaths
of Mike Brown and countless others.

POLICE:
It took the police nearly two weeks, a lot
of tear gas, and untold violence to regain
control— a control that remains tenuous. Police actions on the streets during
those days have been criticized from every angle, but a common theme amongst
those decrying the police is just how
vastly under prepared and ill trained to
do crowd control on that scale they were.
Other critiques focus on the nature of the
Ferguson police force and its lack of proportional representation of the surrounding populations. Both of these critiques
have gained some of the largest national traction since the original shooting.
A few exemplary responses come from
the Chief of the St. Louis County Police
Department, Jon Belmar. Since the original unrest he has hired a social media
coordinator in an effort to “explain his
department’s use of certain tactics in real
time as things unfold.” In calling for vague
ideas of accountability, the Left has gotten a description of why the police will be
shooting people with tear gas and rubber

bullets in the future, not any indication that
this or other police operations will cease.
The police have been given an opportunity
to explain their actions and attempt to gain
political favor by seeming to adhere to the
needs of a community. The adoption of
this same spin-doctor ideology is what
has brought the idea of personalized officer surveillance in the form of “bodycams” to the forefront of the conversation.
Having a strangle hold on both the general media, and more recently social media, along with suggesting new forms
of technology to mitigate social unrest
are not new or particularly startling concepts. They work very well inside of the
framework being created. What has been
staggering is the rapid response of police
departments to these calls from community groups. Almost immediately, smaller police forces all over Missouri have
started to outfit their officers with bodycams. This new surveillance technology
is being heralded as a break through in
accountability, allowing officers to be
watched at all times and making it impossible for situations like Ferguson to
arise. Now, everything will be caught on
camera, leaving a population of people
perpetually under an authoritative gaze.
While it is easy to see where misguided
liberals are finding solace in that fact, it is
clear to those intent on destabilizing and
attacking power structures that more cameras on the street are never a good thing.
Almost all of the proposed ideas that
could bring about less state violence on
Black bodies can easily be subsumed back
into the State.
Regardless of how many eyes are pointed
towards a police force, the shots will not
stop firing. Young Black men will still
make up the majority of those on the receiving end of that violence, and they will
still find themselves disproportionally represented in prisons and on parole rosters.
It is not the imperative of a power structure such as the US justice system to rework itself into a non-racist body. Power
does not destabilize itself, instead, it will
continue to keep large sectors of the population subjugated in an attempt to maintain the social peace necessary for capital
to flow. All the while touting heightened
surveillance and more community involvement in exonerating killer cops as
“justice.” It will respond to the calls for
accountability with methods of diverting
the responsibilities that are associated with
such a call back onto those same communities it has originally targeted. This
simply creates another layer of future antagonisms where it will be imperative to
attack the civilian review boards as they
become the ones justifying police killings. The structures all around us have
decided that young Black men do not fit
into their idea of “citizen,” that violence
against them is justified on all levels. A
shuffling of these structures is never going
to bring about anything like the realization
of the desires expressed in the streets of
Ferguson or the years of conflicts before.
To be against proposals for the reform of
policing in America is as unpopular as the
riot itself. The violence of the riot is misunderstood as random and the aims are
deemed as unrealistic. This is where anarchists often find themselves positioned,
on the margins of the most widely held
opinions. A place both difficult to move
from, but integral for the continuation of
antagonisms with the structures that keep
everyone subjugated. In the current scenario, as it is still unfolding, anarchists
from around the country have missed
many opportunities to react and respond
to recuperation in Ferguson and similar
processes in cities around the country.

FTTP #12 - Ferguson - Pg. 17

ANARCHISTS:
The fires and Molotovs, rocks being
hurled and profanities shouted, the tshirts over faces and crowds refusing
to run – this set of images are widely
used in contemporary anarchist discourse. “Fuck the police” is a common
slogan and the litany of rap songs with
similar messages can be heard on almost every dance party mix. Amongst
those of this particular milieu, there is
an undeniable fetishization of violence,
particularly anti-police violence. In
the last few months, an opportunity to
turn that fetishization into action was
largely unrealized. The skepticism at
the possible size and scope of this uprising was understandable in the beginning. No one knew it would last so
long. But as the days of street fighting
kept coming, there was still a palpable
silence from a broader anarchist scene.
In some places across the country, anarchists did respond to the events as
they unfolded. Oakland and North Carolina both held demos, a small number
of attacks happened around the country, and immediately solidarity funds
and posters and pamphlets were created. But the scale was skewed. In the
past, when other anarchists have found
themselves in trouble, the response has
been immediate and then sustained.
May Day 2010, the North West Grand
Jury, and attacks on the Oakland commune are a few scenarios that come
to mind. The effectiveness of these
solidarity campaigns is difficult to discern, as cause and effect is a murky
relationship at best. The question better to be asked in this current scenario
is why did this moment, this eruption,
seem to pass across the screens of so
many but so little materialize from it?
It has been posited that anarchists
across the country found themselves at
a loss of ways to engage in a conflict
that was so decidedly not anarchist.
Both the larger and more interpersonal
politics involved in the clashes in Ferguson were and continue to be messy.
At a distance it was not always clear
who was engaging and why. The lack
of sustained dialogue inside well-traveled anarchist channels of discourse
made the general discomfort with engaging in the more confusing aspects
of race and class distinctly palpable.
It’s a lot easier to sing along to a Lil
Boosie song with your friends than
to try and contradict a hostile recuperative force around racism and police violence. But if anarchists hope
to help sustain these moments, and
move them into a larger social rupture in the future, then that kind of
engagement is exactly what is needed.
Without attempting to create specific
ideas of what could have happened, or
what should have, there are a few ideas
worth mentioning. Many of the groups
in Ferguson holding peace rallies and
decrying the violence have counterparts in places outside of the city itself. They were and are able to gain
ground on a social and political level
by their practically unchallenged positions. There was a sentiment that there
could not and was not any other narrative outside of the one they crafted.
Every peace rally and candlelit vigil
outside of Missouri itself was an opportunity to confront that narrative.
Confrontation itself can be terrifying,
and being on the political margin of a
racially charged scenario can seem too
intense to interject into. It is imperative for anarchists, and anyone wishing to see these kinds of rebellions
generalize and grow in capacity, to be
able to identify enemies on all fronts.

Not through the lens of state and its
structures, but in terms of who is positioning themselves to manage and
control the actions of others inside of
the conflict. This also means a constant
internal critique of anarchist’s own
actions and their own ability to stray
into a vanguardist or leadership role.
There is a danger in only taking anarchist intervention to a certain level.
Half attempts easily become training
grounds for the State to more effectively repress those attempting rebellion in
the future. As the question of whether
Darren Wilson will be indicted looms
in the air (UPDATE: unsurprisingly, he
was not), officers are spending thousands of hours in training to deal with
the next wave of unrest. Police will be
better equipped on the ground and in
the media spin that accompanies their
moves. Already the stage is being set
for actions by protestors to be deemed
even less logical or reasonable as civilian police review boards are being
established and precincts are beginning to integrate more representational
structures.
CLOSING:
Inside the hush that followed the initial explosion, a certain amount of
space was opened up. Active combatants, regardless of identity or affiliation had room to experiment and grow.
However, acting in tandem was an
identity-based Left seeking to manage
all forms of protest and the narrative of
the struggle. The specific experiences
of anarchists locally allowed them an
opportunity to confront as far as they
were able such recuperation when it
surfaced. Unfortunately, strategies
went either unrealized or ignored by
most anarchists struggling to formulate
their own responses in other places.
There is no end to what can now be
called “Ferguson,” but a great deal
of the current general quiet can be attributed to the footholds the Left has
gained there, as well as a general failing
of anarchists to recognize and utilize
their skills in perpetuating the uprising.
This was an insurgency, a moment that
continues to defy attempts to return it
to the point before the flash. Even as
West Florissant began to quiet, it was
clear that both Ferguson and the nature
of responses to police killings would
never be the same. This manifestation
of anti-police fervor and the taking
back of space from larger power structures was built on the experiences of
those in other similar moments. People
looted stores while wearing RIP Trayvon Martin shirts, and the echoes of
the uprisings in Oakland, Arizona, and
NYC could be felt in the momentum
and language of the crowd. As those
instances spilled into this one, a new
reality became cemented, that there
could be no return to “before,” that regardless of cooptation and repression
the experiences of those that dared to
stand up against a brutal police force
and pseudo military occupation can not
be taken from them.
The affinity that people found in their
actions as well as their hatred can not
be fractured by the attempts made by a
recuperative Left intent on highlighting
the divides of identity seen in the streets.
Please Go to this Website
to Donate to Individuals
Arrested in Ferguson:
secure.piryx.com/donate/mS25KFCe/
MORE/mikebrown

No More Peace
The Verdicts Mean War

I

t's hard to write about Eric Garner or
Mike Brown. It's hard for me to write
about them because nothing about either case is surprising or new for me. I have
written about multiple similar instances
of police repression towards specifically
poor and Black people. In fact, it has almost been a feature of this publication.
What is unique in these two cases is nothing more than the media attention that has
been given to it, and the surprising will of
certain communities and movements to
respond to it. Sean Bell and Rodney King are
the first two names that come to mind when I
hear people talking about Michael Brown or
Eric Garner this week. Then I think about DJ
Henry or Aiyana Jones. Aiyana specifically
died under even more harsh circumstances
when it comes to media shock and awe, that
being that she was a 7 year old girl and was
shot and killed by an overzealous officer
putting on a show for a reality television
crew, while apparently having the wrong
address for their planned home invasion in
Detroit. The officer was eventually indicted
on misdemeanor charges of reckless use of
a firearm, but due to two mistrials in the last
4 years he is still chilling outside of jail.

I am an anarchist, but have the distinct experience in my life of knowing many people
who would not identify as anarchist, and at
the same time may not be aware of the daily
misery many face in society. I can't help but
feel so annoyed with the display of shock by
these people around me. They’re “acting” as
if no one was ever troubled by the police before Trayvon Martin and after MLK. Typically the only apolitical people I encounter in
my daily life that are not surprised by this are
Black people. That is because Black people
have been delegated as a race that is to predominantly define the face of poverty, both
in the United States, and globally. Of course
there are exceptions, like Barack Obama or
Jay-Z, but for hundreds of years, the majority of the world's global population that is
Black has been deemed: the unlucky ones.
The same shocked people I refer to resemble
a larger population of general stupidity. I refuse to call these people ignorant, but I will
hold them accountable as choosing to live a
stupid existence. These are the people that
come to protests and explain that anything
other than peaceful resistance to the state
would further demean the memories of Mike
Brown or Eric Garner. These are the people
that beg for folks to wait for a federal intervention in both instances. These are the people
who claim to have sympathies for those
struggling in society, but refuse to negate
their positions of comfort before condoning
a legitimate assault against the system that

sanctioned both recent headline murders.
These are the people that look to brutalize
the dead horse of peaceful protest seen in
movies about the 1960s (that ignore everything else that produced ‘change’). These
people are typically white, middle or upper
class, or in some sort of fancy school (or all
of the above). I am starting to have a very impatient disdain for these people I am forced
to be around, as concern for police conduct
and those effected by it, has become trendy.
Ferguson blew up after the Mike Brown verdict. Despite having a fully equipped police
force, national guard, and heavy FBI presence, people in Ferguson proudly represented their community. Anyone truly exploited
or dominated in this society I'm sure will
gladly demonstrate a voice of respect or understanding for the masked youth that fired
bullets at the pigs, attacked their cars, and
burnt down businesses that sucked the little
bit of money that was in Ferguson out. The
fact that there was even a dialogue by the
police or federal government with the public
about this murder of Mike Brown meant that
the only thing that helped to get such concern or attention was the original violence
against the police displayed by Ferguson
residents when the murder first happened.
But they calmed down in August, waited for
an indictment, and got the message. When
the failure to indict was read, they were told
that the system does not care about them,
the system does not serve their interests,
and the system is willing to go as far as
needed to keep them down. Ferguson, being a determined and self-respecting Black
community, responded to this message with
a desperate and beautiful attempt at achieving revenge. They again did this before three
of the harshest domestic state forces. Basically. they held it the fuck down (#integrity).
Following the failure to indict in Ferguson,
there were demonstrations across the country. NYC had its bridges, highways, and
tunnels periodically blocked over the week
following the announcement. The Bay Area
exploded in unrest; San Francisco, Oakland,
and Berkeley represented with looting, highway blockades, street fires, and battles with
police. Seattle, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh,
Philadelphia, Boston, and dozens of other
cities also reacted. Yet it just seemed like the
Trayvon protests on a colder day. Then, just
a few days later, the Eric Garner announcement came out. In this case, there is a fully
documented (via video footage) police murder, really no questions to be asked. And
again, we are all told that Black people are
inferior, and need to bear the brunt of poverty and repression that is indispensable to
capitalism functioning. So again you have
FTTP #12 - Ferguson - Pg. 18

A Timeline
of Anti-Police Resistance

the standard political groups demonstrating their frustration, the array of newly
politicized facebook accounts posting
about Eric Garner as if they are changing
the world, and another wave of protests
across the country. Now it is the day after
the Eric Garner verdict, and nothing is different. Another Black man is probably being targeted by police, another civil forfeiture is going down as I write this, another
house is being raided by S.W.A.T., and
another person is rotting in solitary. All I
can wait for is for those who demean communities with their so called “calls for
peace” to finally wake up to the stupidity
of their so called “strategies.” Until Ferguson, and the fires that spread the night of
the announcement, are generalized across
the country, and the world, this is simply a containable situation for the state.
A new perspective must forcefully be
put into the minds of the uninformed,
yet allegedly sympathetic, voices discussing the two announcements this
week — that is that riot, looting, and
violence by struggling communities are acts of legitimate self-defense.
There is no debate to be had here. You
either want to eliminate the system that
sanctions these types of killings or you
don't. This means you advocate for every type of resistance to the state or you
don't. The fact that Ferguson was in
shambles the next morning, and the rest
of this country was not, simply implies
that Ferguson meant it more. Other than
simply being out armed by the state,
there is never an excuse to advocate this
self-depleting approach of unconditional
“peace” and “compliance” when it comes
to resisting the state. This perspective is
of the included voices in this society.
I personally had a chance to go to the Eric
Garner protests in NYC shortly after the
verdict. My favorite part of the NYC demonstrations was when it went through the
Avenue D projects, and I heard an older
man screaming at the march, “it's time we
pick up the gun.” I do not think it is possible to bring about change solely through
specialized armed guerrilla cells or general
militancy, but I certainly think that people

can not follow in the footsteps of Gandhi
or MLK (even though the Federal government clearly wants you to). Especially
considering both individuals would have
had no effect without the thousands of angry and violent actions accompanying both
of them throughout both of their political
lives (Which MLK verbally recognized).
How can we not recognize these failures to indict as a statement of war
and a blatantly polarized society? How
can we not unconditionally support a
violent voice in Ferguson after a man in
Tennessee gets the funding to put up a
billboard saying #pantsupdontloot (that
did happen)? How can we not realize that
the powerful and wealthy support George
Zimmerman and Darren Wilson? Which is
why both exceeded the funding for Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown by the thousands. And most of all, how can anyone
even begin to compare the violence by
an unarmed community demanding to
be seen or heard vs. the institutionalized
violence of police in the United States?
Anarchists should be teaming up
with youth that are refusing to listen
to Al Sharpton, ANSWER, celebrities, or
the New Black Panthers. Anarchists should
be helping to defend people from arrest,
and helping to cause more damage to the
state and this country's general normalcy. They should be out there shutting up
those who degrade the beautiful gestures
of violence by wilding youth in Ferguson.
Instead of writing in elaborate detail the
reaction in each city to the announcement,
with help of comrades in NYC and the
Bay, we will report on the actions that we
feel avenge Eric Garner or Mike Brown.
More will most likely happen around
this case by this time this goes to
print. But we are sure that our coverage
of Ferguson will be seen as bias in all the
ways we are proud to report on it. We
are proud to make our stance very clear
here, and prepared to spit in the face of
any individual looking to contradict us.
Until every Darren Wilson is hung with
the guts of every Daniel Pantaleo.

“After all, as someone once observed, one
doesn’t judge the proletariat by what this
or that proletarian thinks but by what it is
necessary impelled to do by its historical
situation.” -Aufheben #1 1992, On the LA
rebellion over Rodney King.
November 24: A grand jury in Ferguson
refuses to indict officer Darren Wilson for
the shooting of Michael Brown. Rioters
in Ferguson burn several police cars and
businesses while many more are looted.
Thousands meet in downtown Oakland,
CA and proceed to block the 580 highway
for hours. Then the crowd marches back
downtown to the police station, where
clashes erupt on Broadway. Participants
erect burning barricades and loot several
corporate stores, including a Starbucks
and Smart and Final grocery store, ending with dozens of arrests. In New York,
thousands march to Times Square where
NYPD commissioner Bratton is attacked
with paint. Afterwards, multiple major
bridges connecting different boroughs of
NYC are blockaded. Protests also take
place in many cities across the country.
November 25: In Ferguson, clashes continue but are less intense than the previous
night as thousands more National Guard
members were deployed. A small crowd
takes over highway 880 in Oakland, followed by the 580 later in the night, and
nearly 100 are arrested. The remaining
crowd creates massive burning barricades
across Telegraph to hold back police. A series of corporate stores are looted and gentrifying businesses are smashed. Another
mass arrest occurs near Emeryville (Oakland) at the end of the night. In New York
City, several major arteries are blocked
by demonstrations, including bridges,
tunnels and highways. Many more protests take place in over a hundred cities,
and several highways are blocked spontaneously from Los Angeles to Atlanta.
November 26: Small protests continue
in Ferguson despite West Florissant Ave
being completely shut down. A destructive march plays cat and mouse with
Oakland police in downtown and West
Oakland for hours before being dispersed by police. Multiple businesses
in downtown are damaged and many
people are arrested. A National Guard
armory is vandalized in Durham, NC.
November 28: Several malls across the
state of Missouri were disrupted by protests. A coordinated civil disobedience
action at the West Oakland BART station
shuts down all service in and out of San
Francisco for over two hours. That night,
in San Francisco, nearly 1000 protesters
lay siege to the shopping district of Union
Square during Black Friday, clashing with
police and damaging fancy stores. They
march into the Mission district, where
stores are looted and banks are smashed.
The night ends in a mass arrest of the
dwindling crowd. In Seattle, marchers
roamed through downtown for hours, after shutting down businesses in Westlake.

November 29: In Seattle, a destructive
march outmaneuvers police for hours before dispersing with zero arrests. In Long
Beach, CA, tires are slashed on police vehicles.
December 1: Roving blockades shut
down several key arteries in Washington
DC during post-Thanksgiving rush hour.
Another march takes the streets of downtown Seattle, but new police tactics are
able to keep it pacified.
December 3: A New York grand jury fails
to indict any officers in the choking death
of Eric Garner. Traffic in Manhattan is
completely paralyzed while several major
bridges are shut down, as well as multiple
highways. In the Crown Heights neighborhood of New York, an unmarked police
car is torched. Crowds block Market Street
in San Francisco. In Oakland, a march
weaves through downtown; riot police prevent it from reaching OPD headquarters.
Instead, participants march through the
wealthy Piedmont neighborhood. More
demonstrations take place in other cities.
December 4: Blockades continue as
thousands continue to take to the streets
in New York City. Another march weaves
through Downtown Oakland, eventually heading east towards the Fruitvale
district, where a police car is trashed
followed by a showdown with Oakland police and a mass arrest. Protests
across the country continue in response
to the New York grand jury decision.
December 5: Hundreds march through
downtown Oakland, holding a noise demo
in front of the jail to support those arrested
during the revolt. The crowd moves on to
take over the 880 freeway before being
pushed off by police. Next, the march surrounds the West Oakland BART station
and destroys the gates protecting the riot
police inside. The station is shut down
for an hour before the march moves back
downtown, where property destruction,
clashes with police, and arrests occur.
Large protests shut down highways in several cities such as Durham and Pittsburgh.
December 6: A march originating near
UC Berkeley (CA) campus eventually
clashes with Berkeley police near their
headquarters and proceeds to loot multiple stores, including a Trader Joe’s and
Radio Shack. The crowds grow as many
students take to the streets. In response,
police departments from across the region
pour into central Berkeley, firing dozens
of rounds of tear gas and physically attacking demonstrators and bystanders,
inflicting serious injuries. In Atlanta,
several marches take place and block
highways before an attempted occupation at Woodruff Park. Meanwhile demonstrators in Seattle attacked police with
rocks during a march through downtown.
December 7: On Sunday night, another
march starts in Berkeley and moves into
North Oakland, clashing with police,
FTTP #12 - Ferguson - Pg. 19

destroying multiple California Highway
Patrol (CHP) cruisers, and taking over
Highway 24. CHP officers use tear gas
and rubber bullets to push back the crowd.
People respond with rocks and fireworks,
then march back into downtown Berkeley,
destroying bank façades and ATMs. Rioters then attack cell phone and electronics
stores, culminating with the looting of
Whole Foods. The night ends with hundreds of people gathering around bonfires
in the middle of Telegraph, popping bottles of expropriated Prosecco. Police are
afraid to engage the crowd, but some participants are snatched in targeted arrests.

December 20: Someone paints “NYPD
Kills” on the Manhattan Bridge in NYC,
and later that afternoon two NYPD officers
are fatally shot in Brooklyn.

December 8: The third march from
Berkeley is by far the largest. Over 2000
people take over Interstate 80, stopping
all traffic for two hours, while another
segment of the demonstration blocks
the train tracks parallel to the freeway.
The crowd attempts to march on the Bay
Bridge but is pushed back into Emeryville
where over 250 people are mass arrested.

December 23: Protests begin as charges
are not brought against police for the murder of Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee.

December 9: The fourth march from
Berkeley sets out once again down Telegraph Avenue into Oakland and shuts
down another section of Highway 24 and
the MacArthur BART station. Increasingly
violent clashes ensue with CHP officers
in full riot gear, who open fire with rubber bullets and beanbag rounds, causing
numerous injuries and ultimately pushing the crowd off the freeway. The march
then looped through downtown Oakland and made its way into Emeryville,
where a Pak’n’Save grocery store was
looted along with a CVS pharmacy and a
7-Eleven. The night ended with another
round of arrests, scattering the crowd.
December 10: Hundreds of Berkeley
High School students stage a walkout and
rally at city hall. A smaller fifth march
from Berkeley makes its way into Oakland where a T-Mobile store is looted and
other corporate stores are attacked. People
point out and attack undercover CHP officers in the crowd, who pull guns on the
crowd as they make an arrest. Students at
UNC School of Medicine and Duke University stage die-ins and a march later
blocks another highway in Durham, NC.
December 12: People in Los Angeles hold
the first of several weekly “FTP Friday”
marches with nearly a hundred people
marching through Hollywood.
December 13: Thousands march across
the country as part of the nationwide “Millions March” protest against white supremacy. In New York, a splinter march
breaks through police lines and trashes
a squad car. In Oakland, another march
departs after nightfall and temporarily blocks the Webster Tunnel and carries
out several attacks on downtown businesses before being split up by police.

December 22: A banner reading “Oakland
- Ferguson - NYC / No Love For The Police,” is dropped at a Oakland Raiders game.
December 23: Antonio Martin is shot
and killed in Berkeley, MO. Several hundred gather spontaneously and clashes
break out at the scene, with fireworks being thrown at police. Police vehicles are
vandalized and a nearby QT is looted.

December 25: In Oakland, another FTP
march departs from 14th & Broadway, during which several stores are attacked, a BevMo is looted, and the Jack London Square
Christmas tree is trashed. In Durham, NC
an officer is approached by two people and
shot at, escaping with only minor injuries.
December 31: In Ferguson, people briefly
occupy the police department before being
removed by the police.
December 31: Annual New Year’s Eve
noise demos draws thousands of people all
over the world to ring in the new year with
those behind bars.
January 1: Hundreds gather at Fruitvale
BART for a vigil to remember Oscar Grant
III, murdered by BART police 6 years earlier.
January 5: Two NYPD officers are shot at
in the Bronx.
January 6: Several cars belonging to
NYPD officers have their lug nuts loosened or removed, which could cause major
accidents if unnoticed.
January 8: Several anti-police slogans are
painted throughout downtown Olympia,
WA.
January 9: About a dozen people staged a
counter-demonstration at a pro-police rally
in Olympia.
January 10: A commuter train on its way
to a New England Patriots football game is
blocked by demonstrators in Boston, MA.
January 15: Protesters blockade both
sides of the I-93 in Boston during morning
rush hour.
January 16: Protesters shut down several BART stations in downtown San
Francisco early morning. In Oakland, the
weekly auction of foreclosed properties
on the courthouse steps was disrupted.

December 15: Oakland protesters blockade the Police Administration Building in
downtown for over four hours by locking themselves to the doors. Later that
day, students from several high schools
stage a walkout and rallied at Fruitvale
BART station in East Oakland, where
Oscar Grant was murdered in 2009. In
Ann Arbor, MI, several hundred marched
and disrupted a City Council meeting.

January 17: In North Oakland, people
block off Telegraph Ave to hold a guerilla film screening of footage from
the Civil Rights Movement in 1960’s.

December 18: Thousands march in Sao
Paulo, Brazil against white supremacy and
in support of Ferguson. In Philadelphia,
anti-police slogans are tagged throughout
the city including, “Cop Lives Don’t Matter.”

January 19: Early Monday morning, several dozen demonstrate in front of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s house in the
Upper Diamond District. Later that day,
large protests take place all over the country, including Oakland, Atlanta and Philadelphia. A large march in St. Paul, MN
disrupted traffic on the I-94 freeway as
well as the city’s light-rail system. During
peak traffic, Stanford students blockaded
the San Mateo Bridge in the Bay Area.

December 19: In Oakland, a sign on the
580 freeway that memorialized the four officers killed by Lovelle Mixon is torn down
and vandalized.

January 18: About a hundred people
march through the streets of Oakland
against the police. Multiple people are
arrested, and eventually arrive at Fruitvale Station which is subsequently closed.

ON NYC

By Members of the Trayvon
Martin Organizing Committee
01/27/15
Successive non-indictments for the pig
murderers of Michael Brown in Ferguson MO and Eric Garner in NYC brought
about an unprecedented wave of organic
class activity in NYC aimed at the disruption of vehicular traffic, public transportation, and commerce. No matter who
called these marches -- whether the dinosaur Marxist-Lenninist parties, non-profits,
ultra-leftists, or anarchists -- the marches
were characterized by spontaneous class
activity and anonymous unaffiliated proletarians taking initiative; often splitting apart, flowing into other marches,
and otherwise blocking multiple hubs of
transportation and commerce simultaneously (West Side Highway, FDR expressway, Holland Tunnel, Manhattan Bridge,
shopping in Herald Square, and so forth).
While there have been five major days of
mobilization -- day of and day after protests for the two non-indictments, and the
recuperative Millions March -- the present upsurge has been equally characterized
by a number of small actions called by a
panoply of small groupings and individuals. Typically these have taken the form of
“die-ins” in busy commercial settings like
high-end retail stores on “Black Friday”,
attempts to blockade foot traffic in places
like Grand Central Station, and most spectacularly, attempts to disrupt the Christmas tree lighting at Rockerfeller Center,
and the Thanksgiving Day Parade. These
small activities have been overshadowed
by the big marches, but as the movement
enters a downswing, they are becoming the
primary figure of the moment, and their
regularization will provide the coherence
and consistency necessary to generate organic militants and advance independent
class activity between upsurges. What
groupings emerge from these practices
remains to be seen, and particular attention should be paid to the tension within
large reformist groupings and coalitions,
between the militancy of the young people
engaged by this struggle, and the disciplinary parameters of the reformist structures.
While this upsurge has been characterized
by mass illegality (taking the streets, refusing police orders to disperse, blocking
traffic and taking major infrastructure),
the content is highly contradictory and
unstable. The reformist core of the movement has congealed around the banner of
“Black Lives Matter”, a constellation of
non-profits and social media savvy protesters operating in the reasonably traditional
framework of “civil disobedience” actions
aimed at calling attention to a social ill.
(The slogan is a work of genius -- one can
comfortably disagree with “stop the war”,
or “legalize gay marriage”, but “black lives
matter”?) However the mass activity of the
class has pushed against these bounds at
every juncture. Groups of unaffiliated proletarians, often joining the marches spontaneously, have taken the streets while the
march leaders stay on the sidewalks, split
marches to strategically outflank the police, and have pushed against the movement’s self-appointed leadership wherever it seeks to inscribe itself. (For a more
in-depth extrapolation of this and other
dynamics of the present upsurge, consult
“The Old Mole Breaks Concrete” on unityandstruggle.org.)
The Millions March brought these contradictions to the fore. A group of nonprofits and other recuperative political
forces commandeered an open ended call
for mobilization, and set up the first permitted march (and as of writing, the last
mass march) of the entire upsurge. It was
ordained to be lead by the families of victims of police violence (which some “anar-

chists” fell for, and used to argue against a
breakaway march), and tightly disciplined
to prevent infrastructure blockage. It was a
massive demonstration, bringing forth tens
of thousands, but at the cost of the positive
class content of the previous demonstrations, and the reinscription of the movement into a legalistic framework. However
this was not the only activity that day. A
small breakaway march snaked through
Murray Hill, breaking the windows of a
police cruiser and watering the pavement
with social democratic tears. More importantly, the planned conclusion of the march,
where the crowd was told to disperse, became the jump-off for more mass snake
marches, blocking infrastructure and winding toward the Pink Houses in East New
York, where a pig murdered the unarmed
Akai Gurley in the stairway the month before. (This case, still pending, will likely
serve as the occasion for the next mass
opening.) This break from the set plan of
the day brought the contradictions into
sharp relief: the self-appointed leaders of
the movement are its right wing, and the
everyday unaffiliated people taking the
streets are to the left. While the later rely
on the former to call convergences, sometimes to lead marches, and otherwise facilitate openings in the everyday life of the
city, the former becomes a fetter to the activity of the latter, which must supersede it.
An insignificant footnote to the Millions
March became the major story of the day,
thanks to the growing tension between the
NYPD, its white supremacist union the
PBA, and the liberal mayor Bill De Blasion who has mandated a tolerant police
approach to these marches. (This tension
-- culminating with the police slowdown
-- is worth investigating in detail but can’t
be examined here due to issues of scope.
But suffice it to say when we speak of “the
state” we are not speaking of a monolithic
entity, but a complex constellation of contradictory class forces with tectonic points
of friction that can either serve or hinder
revolutionary strategy.) As the march
bound for the Pink Houses crossed the
Brooklyn bridge, small band of protesters clashed with two police lieutenants
on the pedestrian deck. Allegedly these
pigs were attempting to arrest a protester
for throwing garbage cans onto the traffic
deck below, where a line of piggies were
tailing the march. A group of protesters allegedly interfered with this arrest, and in
the ensuing donnybrook one of the pigs
supposedly got his nose broken. The arrestee got away, as did the alleged assailants, though the former was arrested after
leaving his identification behind and a bag
allegedly containing multiple hammers.
This very minor victory for the class in action was used by the NYPD, through its
newspaper voicebox the New York Post,
and its reactionary union, to pressure the
mayor to take a harder stance with the
protests. After a snitch posted a video of
the dust-up to Youtube, the NYPD bandied about pictures of alleged assailants,
gracing the front page of the Post, and accompanied by a $24k reward (the reward
for information about a cop killing being
$12k, and the murder of a civilian being
$2k). Despite this appeal to the movement
to snitch, the suspects were not apprehended by the police, but several turned themselves in as the pressure mounted. Their
various legal cases are ongoing, and their
details and subsequent implications for the
movement remain to be seen*.
*A legal fund has been
set up for those facing
repression in this case:
canttouchthisnyc.wordpress.com
At present it is unclear whether the
repression will extend beyond the
suspects and their immediate comrades.
Please Also Visit:
trayvonoc.wordpress.com
FTTP #12 - Ferguson - Pg. 20

Fringe Talk
On the Death of Two NYPD
Cops killed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley
S

“Black or white, they’re all midnight blue to me.”

S

eems like now more than ever is the
time to be contributing to a revolutionary dialogue against the police.
Contempt for the police has become a
unifying force for those discontent in
today's society. It exposes the comfortable and uncomfortable, the included
and excluded, and a polarized society capable of bursting into war at almost any
moment. Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the crazy
man who lost all hope in life and killed
two cops in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, was
a whole new level of escalation in this
unrecognized war. I was in NYC at the
time of the shooting. I remember that afternoon specifically because it seemed
like the cops were playing a cat and
mouse game with one another. They were
acting very unusual. I made a joke about
it at Duane Reade (pharmacy) and the
woman working mentioned that she heard
a cop was shot. It was honestly hard not
to smile a little bit, especially during these
times where all you hear about is cops
getting away with murder. First thing I
did was run home and blast KRS-ONE
while desperately looking for local reports. About thirty minutes later it had
become breaking news. The media was
hard to read without being bombarded
with the delusional and opportunistic
rants of the NYPD's union representative,
Patrick Lynch (fascist), or the counterarguments of career-activist Al Sharpton.
In being interested in voices that matter, I wanted to hear the response of local residents who lived near the corner where the two police were killed. I
thought to talk to a friend of mine who
lived in the projects next to the shooting (to give context to readers not familiar with where those two police were
shot, the area is like a warzone of project
housing and checkpoint style police set
ups. This has been the case for years, but
more so recently in light of new gentrification efforts in the neighborhood.) who
was working just a few hundred feet away
at the time. He is relatively apolitical,
but like everyone in Brooklyn that grew
up here either of color or poor, he isn't
too fond of the police. When I asked him
how he felt (he obviously knowing that I
wasn't losing any sleep over the news) he
mentioned that he was only relieved that
it was someone not from the projects,
because if it was, he knew that he, his
friends, and family would feel the following harsh heat (assuming police would lock

the ghetto down). He was also happy that
whoever did it killed himself, or was identified and concluded as the perpetrator by
the police because he didn't want to deal
with a NYPD manhunt. No sign of sympathy though, none. In fact, he didn't fail to
mention that he wasn't surprised by it and
it was bound to happen eventually. Every
person I spoke to after that who lived in
that neighborhood had either the same concerns or demeanor. A few of the younger
people I spoke to seemed happy about the
deaths, as if someone was avenging their
experiences of torment with the police.
The only people who really seemed that
phased by it in the neighborhood that day
and going forward, were the police themselves (although some folks were confused
as to why neither of the cops were white).
Immediately after you could tell the
social divides that the action caused.
Facebook and twitter were blown up
by folks either praising the action or demonizing all Black people as "animals"
and "thugs" (The 2000's new word for
“n!$*er”). I myself, like many others familiar with the complete lack of security
posed by the Internet, was too scared to
use social media to express my understanding as to why someone would ever
do something like this (Not to mention
there were multiple local arrests of people
for praising the action on social media in
NYC). But in private, I certainly did my
best to challenge anyone who dare try to
use this shooting to demean the resistance
to the police that has been growing in NYC
and around the country since Ferguson
erupted, and Eric Garner’s murder reinforced the tension. Anyone who seemed
to have a problem with the shooting of
the two NYPD cops all seemed to have
one thing in common: the assumption
that Black and poor people should just accept police abuse as something excusable.
They all sounded like the CNN reporters
who with straight faces compare one Israeli
life lost to a thousand Palestinians'. I have
to admit that as someone very familiar with
how the NYPD operates, that I was mad
shook at a backlash, and concerned about
what was to come next for daily life in NYC
by this blue band of armed douche-bags.
One conversation comes to mind. Shortly
after the shooting I held a dinner party at
my home with an old friend in town and
their current partner. Generally speaking,
my old friend is not too fond of the po-

lice, so I assume discussing the subject
of the two dead cops would not turn into
a debate. To my surprise my friend's new
partner wasn't too hyped on my perspective regarding the deaths. They told me
that “this ruined everything, and now no
one will be heard!” I said, “this ruined
what?” They said, "this changes everything, now no one is going to care about
all of these protests that seemed like they
were really changing things.” I stopped for
a second to calm down out of politeness
to my friend and simply asked, "who is
it that will no longer care about poor and
communities of color being systematically brutalized because someone shot two
police?" I knew in their head they were
thinking about the government, the police,
or the middle and upper classes who have
been recently forced to listen to struggling
communities, but to no surprise they just
got very defensive, stating, "My friend
is a cop and police are people, too, and
now they are just going to use this to be
worse.” The conversation made things a
little awkward, so since I don't get to see
my friend very much, and for the sake of
having a pleasant meal, I simply joked,
and said, "maybe Ismaaiyl should have
just waited for a grand jury verdict" and
immediately changed the conversation.
The point is that while these two police
were clearly just in the wrong place at the
wrong time, they were in uniform, and part
of the state sanctioned gang in blue that
chooses to wage war on particular facets
of society. They chose to join this gang that
has been at war with poor and marginalized
people in this society as part of its inherent role, and one of those who have been
taunted by their gang for years of his life
finally had enough. Like enough to "make
pigs fly.”
Since the shooting, the police have chosen the most absurd of reactions to take.
Their terrifyingly gross 'benevolent' association leader Patrick Lynch (would not
let my children anywhere near this creep)
has used the shootings as a way to somehow demonize pretty much anyone who
has ever challenged the police. This man
claimed that the mayor of NYC literally
had “blood on his hands” for expressing
concern over his bi-racial son's experience
with the NYPD, amidst a city paralyzed
with anti-police protests. He even convinced police to turn their back on the mayor at every chance, including the funerals

of both of the killed cops (which I even
thought was a bit weird and crass). Lynch
has made it clear that the police are to use
this as an opportunity to re-assert themselves as a “wartime” police force, which
apparently means they formally act in their
own interest at all times. Ironically, the police have also chosen to conduct a sort of
passive strike, resorting to pre-90's policing. This meaning “arresting only when
necessary” and prioritizing violent crimes
(pre-NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton's
“quality of life” policing program). What is
even more ironic is that since the shooting,
as of January 2015, traffic and low-level
crime summonses have dropped by 94%.
Overall arrests have dropped 66%. Even
parking violations are down 94%. And
amongst these facts, the city seems more
calm and less stressful. That being said, I
am surprised that with all the funding the
NYPD has (from poor people that they
ticket and the 2 billion a year in state funding they receive) that someone wouldn't
point out that this “virtual work stoppage” may appear as a breath of fresh
air by many, and even worse for the police, as a message that shooting them
may lead to more freedom for some.
This article is dedicated to those who are
still serving life sentences for participating in acts of radical self-defense.
Joe-Joe Bowen
“I ain't no angel. I'll do my time.
All we want is to be recognized as what
we are, human beings.”
Joe-Joe Bowen was active outside of prison in the 1970's as a member of the Black
Liberation Army based out of Philadelphia. He originally was sentenced to 10-20
years for the death of a cop. Following his
incarceration in 1973 he killed the warden of his prison in response to intense
abuse. He was sentenced inside prison
to two life sentences. He is also known
for taking over the prison in 1981 to protest harsh abuse and in pursuit of a better
funded educational system behind bars. To
this day he remains active inside of jail.
Write to Joe-Joe:
Joseph Bowen #AM4272
SCI Coal Township
1 Kelley Drive
Coal Township, Pennsylvania
17866-1020
FTTP #12 - Ferguson - Pg. 21

Forget Hope
There is a war in the streets.

I

t's frustrating to us that some people
act as if there is something new in the
murders of Mike Brown or Eric Garner. Nothing is new, the only thing that
has changed is the media spectacle that
surrounds them. In this publication, we
have dedicated prior pages to recognizing some of those who have fallen victim to the hands of the police in the past.
Two cases that come to mind are Aiyana
Jones and DJ Henry. Since our last issue,
the hope that has helped those concerned
regarding these deaths remain patient is a
deceiving one that waits for federal “intervention” by the “justice” department. This
is a very false hope. At some point, the federal government may interject one or two
times in local affairs to prevent the development of more unrest, like we saw in the
1960s. But amidst everything in Ferguson and across the country, it appears that
these days the state really does not even
concern itself with the notion of a popular uprising in response to the behavior of
its everyday enforcers. To prove a point
to our readers who are just realizing how
horrible this system is, we are providing
updates on the cases of Aiyana Jones and
DJ Henry, as well as a short list of teenagers
killed by the police between August and November 2014. Our point with this is to push
a perspective that loses all hope in this system ever healing itself. We want people to
realize that racism and authoritarianism are
as inherent to this system as the slave ships
and colonizers that lay at its foundation.
DJ Henry / Four Years Later
DJ Henry played football for Pace University in New York. After a homecoming
game on October 16th, 2010, he and several friends went to a local bar to celebrate.
DJ was the designated driver. When the bar
closed, he went to get the car. While idling
in a fire lane, he was told by a police officer
to move on, according to witnesses. He immediately listened and tried to move. His
compliance resulted in his death. Police allege that earlier that day, Henry tried to run
over Aaron Hess, the same cop who would
later leap on the hood of Henry’s car, fire
through the windshield, and kill him.
"Since then we’ve learned that almost
every part of that account is false," said
attorney Michael Sussman, who represents the Henry family in a wrongfuldeath civil lawsuit that’s currently stalled
in federal court in New York. “Police
chief [Louis] Alagno, from the Mt.
Pleasant Police agency, spoke publicly
and made it appear that DJ Henry was
driving his vehicle at a high rate of
speed toward two officers who therefore fired at his car, and him, presumably, and shot him to death." Sussman
says depositions taken in the federal civil
law suit contradict the police’s story.
"DJ Henry was going at no more than
7 to 10 miles per hour and probably
closer to 7 miles per hour," he said. "He
had attempted to brake when he saw
Mr. Hess in the roadway, and rather
than evade the vehicle, with a weapon
drawn, he jumped on the hood of the vehicle and immediately began shooting."
Shots indeed were fired with bullets coming from the guns of two different police
officers: Hess and an officer named Ronald
Beckley.
"Mr. Beckley has given sworn testimony
that he was shooting at Mr. Hess, whom he
viewed as quote “an aggressor,” not at Mr.
Henry, and was in fact attempting to kill Mr.

Hess because he viewed him as aggressing
against a civilian," Sussman said. "At the
time he was shooting, he, Mr. Beckley, did
not know that Mr. Hess was a police officer."
But Beckley’s account was never made
public by former police chief Louis Alagno. Four years after the killing of DJ Henry, his family is concerned that the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office
only revealed to a grand jury what they
wanted it to hear. "Ronald Beckley told
his superiors that night what he did," Dan
Henry said. "And has maintained that truth
from that point forward, indicating that he
was only attempting to protect DJ from
what he thought was the only threat being
presented. That was Aaron Hess shooting at DJ and DJ’s passengers. That was
known that evening but was suppressed."
Lawyer Brian Sokoloff represents Hess in
the civil suit. "What I can tell you is there is
forensic evidence and we have a process in
this country in which acts are determined
by admissible evidence put before juries,"
Sokoloff said. "I do not intend to litigate
this case or to discuss the evidence in media because it’s not fair to everybody." This
comment is quite typical of attorneys defending individuals blatantly guilty.
A grand jury cleared Hess of any wrongdoing. But the lawyer for the Henrys says
jurors might have come to a different conclusion, if they knew what we know today
as a result of depositions in the civil case.
What has been the U.S. Department of
Justice’s role in all of this? Sussman says
the family met with 12 officials for the
New York U.S. Attorney’s Office and
with the official who is coordinating the
Justice’s inquiry into the police shooting of Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
U.S. Representative Joseph Kennedy,
at a Saturday-night gala in DJ’s honor,
pointed out that he was among the signers of a letter from the Massachusetts
delegation in recent months to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to
take a closer look at the DJ Henry case.
Since the death of Henry, Alagno, in federal depositions, admitted that he did not tell
the truth about Beckley’s role. Four years
since the killing of DJ Henry, Hess has retired from the Mt. Pleasant Police Department, and is now working at a fitness center.
“His life will never be the same again,"
Sokoloff said. "This incident took
away from him what he loved most in
the world — being a police officer.”
It is important to add that DJ's father
was a police officer in the Boston police department; which is why this case
was even recognized by the media. It's
also important to add that DJ was Black.
Aiyana Jones
The last attempt at a manslaughter charge
against a Detroit cop will be dismissed
as of mid-October 2014. Detroit Police Officer Joseph Weekley has been on
trial for involuntary manslaughter in the
death of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 7, who
was killed during a police raid in 2010.
Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway granted a motion
filed by Weekley's attorney to dismiss
the felony charge. The trial was halted
while the Michigan Court of Appeals reviewed an emergency appeal of the judge's
ruling. But the court denied the appeal.

Presiding Judge Michael Talbot issued the order, saying that the appeals
court was not able to review the decision because the trial court had granted
the defense's motion to drop the manslaughter charge orally and in a written
order before there was an appellate review.
“Although I find that the trial court erred
in form and substance in granting defendant's motion for directed verdict, we are
barred from reviewing that decision,” Talbot wrote.
The prosecution has filed an emergency
motion for reconsideration with the appeals court.
Roland Lawrence, chairman of the Justice
for Aiyana Committee, issued a statement
following the court's decision.
“Surely, the death of a baby by a welltrained police force must be deemed unacceptable in a civilized society,” Lawrence
said.
Steve Fishman, Weekley's attorney, said
in court that the prosecution had not presented evidence that could lead a jury to
find his client guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
“There is absolutely no evidence, none,
that's in the least bit credible, that Officer
Weekley knowingly created a danger or,
more importantly, intended to cause injury,” Fishman said.
A little after midnight on May 16, 2010,
a special police team conducting a raid
in search of a murder suspect entered the
Stanley-Jones home on Detroit's east side.
Weekley was first through the door. As a
crew filmed for a reality show about murder
investigations, another officer is said to have
thrown a flash-bang grenade. Shortly after,
Weekley shot 7-year-old Aiyana, who was
sleeping on the couch in the front room at
the time.
The girl's grandmother, Mertilla Jones, was
on the couch with her. Weekley blames
Aiyana's grandmother for Aiyana's death,
claiming that she struck him, leading him
to shoot her granddaughter. Following the
killing, she was arrested on the spot while
Aiyana was also rushed away from the
scene, but not immediately given medical
attention. The footage of the raid, because
of being owned by television station A&E,
also was not available to the public for at
least 3 years after the shooting.
The prosecution sought to show that
Weekley was acting improperly and in
violation of training by keeping his finger on the trigger of his submachine gun.

*The image above is an actual
target used at the North Miami
Beach police training facility. After the target was made public,
North Miami Beach police chief
J. Scott Dennis claimed that no
dept. policies were violated.
FTTP agrees with his statement.

ordinary care, someone was killed.” --That
“someone” he callously refers to is Aiyana.
Weekley still faces the misdemeanor
charge of ‘careless discharge of a firearm
causing death’. -- He was first tried for involuntary manslaughter in 2013, when a
hung jury caused a mistrial. Most likely his
trial will remain in constant bureaucracy,
or be permanently forgotten.
Since Mike Brown:
A Few of the Youth Under Attack
/ Beyond the Headlines
August / Sergio Ramos
18 years old / Dallas, Texas
August 14th / Diana Showman
19 years old / San Jose, California
August 24th / Roshad McIntosh
19 years old / Chicago, Illinois
Sept. 21st / Cameron Tillman
14 years old / Terrebonne, Louisiana
Sept. 26th / Dillon McGee
18 years old /Jackson, Tennessee
Late September / Levi Weaver
18 years old / Cedartown, Georgia
September / Karen Cifuentes
19 years old / Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
October 8th / VonDerrit Myers Jr.
18 year old / Shaw, Missouri
October 20th / Laquan McDonald
17 years old / Chicago, Illinois
October 27th / Jeffrey Holden
18 years old / Kansas City, Kansas
October 2014 / Qusean Whitten
18 years old / Columbus, Ohio
October 2014 / Miguel Benton
19 years old / Decatur, Georgia
Nov. 21st / Carey Smith-Viramontes
18 years old / Long Beach, California
Nov 22nd / Tamir Rice
12 years old / Cleveland, Ohio
No officer has faced any legal repercussions for any of these deaths as of January
2015. Six of these murders were of Black
teenagers. There is no justice, just us.

“Seriously, WTF would
body cameras have
done for Eric Garner?
If anything they would
have provided worse
footage of the murder.
That is not a solution
to shit”

“He could have avoided injury if he
had followed his training,” Assistant
Wayne County Prosecutor Robert Moran said in court Friday. “He didn't, and
as a result of him not following his training and not following the mandates of
FTTP #12 - Ferguson - Pg. 22

In Defense Of Looting
The direct appropriation of wealth
(pejoratively labelled "looting")
breaks the circuit of capital WorkWage-Consumption, and such a
struggle is just as unacceptable to
capital as a strike. However it is
also true that, for a large section
of the L.A. working class, rebellion at the level of production is
impossible. From the constant
awareness of a "good life" out of
reach - commodities they cannot
have - to the contradiction of the
simplest commodity, the use-values they need are all stamped with
a price tag; they experience the
contradictions of capital not at the
level of alienated production but
at the level of alienated consumption, not at the level of labor but at
the level of the commodity.
-Aufheben #1 1992
On the LA rebellion over Rodney King

LA/1992

A

s protests in Ferguson continued unabated one week after the police killing of Michael Brown, Jr., zones of
Twitter and the left media predominantly
sympathetic to the protesters began angrily criticizing looters. Some claimed that
white protesters were the ones doing all of
the looting and property destruction, while
others worried about the stereotypical and
damaging media representation that would
emerge. It also seems that there were as
many protesters (if not more) in the streets
of Ferguson working to prevent looting as
there were people going about it. While I
think there are better tactics, I understand
that they acted out of care for the struggle,
and I want to honor all the brave and inspiring actions they’ve taken over the last
weeks.
Some politicians on the ground in Ferguson, like alderman Antonio French and
members of the New Black Panther Party,
block looting specifically in order to maintain leadership for themselves and dampen
resistance, but there are many more who
do so out of a commitment to advancing
the ethical and politically advantageous
position. It is in solidarity with these latter
protesters–along with those who loot–and
against politicians and de-escalators everywhere that I offer this critique, as a way
of invigorating discussion amongst those
engaged in anti-state struggle, in Ferguson and anywhere else the police violently
perpetuate white supremacy and settler
colonialism. In other words, anywhere in
America.
The dominant media is itself a tool of
white supremacy: it repeats what the police deliver nearly verbatim and uncritically, even when the police story changes
upwards of nine times, as it has thus far in
the Brown killing. The media use phrases
like “officer-involved shooting” and will
switch to passive voice when a black man
is shot by a white vigilante or a police officer (“shots were fired”). Journalists claim

that “you have to hear both sides” in order
to privilege the obfuscating reports of the
state over the clear voices and testimony
of an entire community, members of which
witnessed the police murder a teenager in
cold blood. The media are more respectful
to white serial killers and mass murderers
than to unarmed black victims of murder.
And yet, many of the people who perform this critique day-in, day-out can get
jammed up by media perceptions of protesters. They want to correct the media’s
assertion that protesters were all looters
for good reason: the idea of black people
looting a store is one of the most racially
charged images in the white imaginary.
When protesters proclaim that “not all
protesters were looters, in fact, most of
the looters weren’t part of the protest!” or
words to that effect, they are trying to fight
a horrifically racist history of black people
depicted in American culture as robbers
and thieves: Precisely the image that the
Ferguson police tried to evoke to assassinate Michael Brown’s character and justify
his killing post facto. It is a completely
righteous and understandable position.
However, in trying to correct this media
image—in making a strong division between Good Protesters and Bad Rioters, or
between ethical non-violence practitioners
and supposedly violent looters—the narrative of the criminalization of black youth
is reproduced. This time it delineates certain kinds of black youth—those who loot
versus those who protest. The effect of this
discourse is hardening a permanent category of criminality on black subjects who
produce a supposed crime within the context of a protest. It reproduces racist and
white supremacist ideologies (including
the tactic of divide-and-conquer), deeming
some unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, as legitimate
targets of police violence. These days,
the police, whose public-facing racism is
much more manicured, if no less virulent,

argue that “outside agitators” engage in rioting and looting. Meanwhile, police will
consistently praise “non-violent” demonstrators, and claim that they want to keep
those demonstrators safe.
In working to correct the white-supremacist media narrative we can end up reproducing police tactics of isolating the individuals who attack property at protests.
Despite the fact that if it were not for those
individuals the media might pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn’t looted and
burnt down that QuikTrip on the second
day of protests, would Ferguson be a point
of worldwide attention? It’s impossible
to know, but all the non-violent protests
against police killings across the country
that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no. It was the looting of a Duane
Reade after a vigil that brought widespread
attention to the murder of Kimani Gray in
New York City. The media’s own warped
procedure instructs that riots and looting
are more effective at attracting attention to
a cause.
But of course, the goal is not merely the attention of dominant media. Nor is the goal
a certain kind of media attention: no matter
how peaceful and well-behaved a protest
is, the dominant media will always push
the police talking points and the whitesupremacist agenda. The goal is justice.
Here, we have to briefly grapple with the
legacy of social justice being won in America: namely that of non-violence and the
civil rights movement. And that means correcting a more pervasive and totalizing media and historical narrative about the civil
rights movement: that it was non-violent,
that it claimed significant wins because it
was non-violent, and that it overcame racial injustice altogether.
In the 400 years of barbaric, white supremacist, colonial and genocidal history
known as the United States, the civil rights
movement stands out as a bright, beautiful,

all-too-brief moment of hope and struggle.
We still live in the shadow of the leaders, theory, and images that emerged from
those years, and any struggle in America
that overlooks the work (both philosophical and organizational) produced in those
decades does so at its own peril. However,
why is it drilled into our heads, from grade
school onward, in every single venue, by
presidents, professors and police chiefs
alike, that the civil rights movement was
victorious because it was non-violent?
Surely we should be suspicious of any narrative that the entire white establishment
agrees is of the utmost importance.
The civil rights movement was not purely
non-violent. Some of its bravest, most inspiring activists worked within the framework of disciplined non-violence. Many of
its bravest, most inspiring activists did not.
It took months of largely non-violent campaigning in Birmingham, Alabama to force
JFK to give his speech calling for a civil
rights act. But in the month before he did
so, the campaign in Birmingham had become decidedly not-non-violent*: protesters had started fighting back against the police and Eugene “Bull” Conner, throwing
rocks, and breaking windows. Robert Kennedy, afraid that the increasingly riotous
atmosphere in Birmingham would spread
across Alabama and the South, convinced
John to deliver the famous speech and begin moving towards civil rights legislation.
This would have been impossible without
the previous months of courageous and
tireless non-violent activism. But it is also
the emergent threat of rioting that forced
JFK’s hand. Both Malcolm X and MLK
had armed bodyguards. Throughout the
civil rights era, massive non-violent civil
disobedience campaigns were matched
with massive riots. The most famous of
these was the Watts rebellion of 1965 but
they occurred in dozens of cities across
the country. To argue that the movement
achieved what it did in spite of rather than
FTTP #12 - In Defense of Looting- Pg. 23

as a result of the mixture of not-non-violent and non-violent action is spurious at
best. And, lest we forget, Martin Luther
King Jr., the man who embodied the respectable non-violent voice that the white
power structure claims they would listen to today, was murdered by that same
white power structure anyway.
Though the Civil Rights movement won
many battles, it lost the war. Mass incarceration, the fact that black wealth and
black-white inequality are at the same
place they were at the start of the civil
rights movement, that many US cities are
more segregated now than they were in
the sixties: no matter what “colorblind”
liberals would say, racial justice has not
been won, white supremacy has not been
overturned, racism is not over. In fact, anti-black racism remains the foundational
organizing principle of this country. That
is because this country is built on the right
to property, and there is no property, no
wealth in the USA without the exploitation, appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people.
As Raven Rakia puts it, “In America,
property is racial. It always has been.” Indeed, the idea of blackness was invented
simultaneously with American conceptions of property: via slavery. In the early
days of colonial America, chattel slavery
was much less common than indentured
servitude—though the difference between
the two was not always significant—and
there were Irish, French, German and
English immigrants among these populations. But while there had always been
and continued to be some black freedmen,
over the course of the 17th century lightskinned European people stopped being
indentured servants and slaves. This is
partially because production exploded in
the colonies much faster than a working
population could form to do the work–either from reproduction or voluntary immigration–and so the cost of hired labor
went through the roof. Even a very poor
and desperate European became much
more expensive than an African bought
from the increasingly rationalized transatlantic slave trade.
The distinction between white and black
was thus eventually forged as a way of
distinguishing between who could be enslaved and who could not. The earliest
working definition of blackness may well
have been “those who could be property”.
Someone who organized a mob to violently free slaves, then, would surely be considered a looter (had the word come into
common usage by then, John Brown and
Nat Turner would have been slandered

with it). This is not to draw some absurd
ethical equivalence between freeing a
slave and grabbing a flat screen in a riot.
The point, rather, is that for most of America’s history, one of the most righteous
anti-white supremacist tactics available
was looting. The specter of slaves freeing themselves could be seen as American
history’s first image of black looters.
On Twitter, a tongue-in-cheek political
hashtag sprang up, #suspectedlooters,
which was filled with images of colonial
Europeans, slave owners, cowboys and
white cultural appropriators. Similarly,
many have pointed out that, had Africa
not been looted, there wouldn’t even be
any black people in America. These are
powerful correctives to arguments around
looting, and the rhetorical point—that
when people of color loot a store, they
are taking back a miniscule proportion
of what has been historically stolen from
them, from their ancestral history and language to the basic safety of their children
on the street today—is absolutely essential. But purely for the purposes of this
argument—because I agree wholeheartedly with the political project of these
campaigns—I want to claim that what
white settlers and slave traders did wasn’t
mere looting. It was genocide, theft, and
barbarism of the lowest order. But part of
how slavery and colonialism functioned
was to introduce new territories and categories to the purview of ownership, of
property. Not only did they steal the land
from native peoples, but they also produced a system under which the land itself could be stolen, owned by legal fiat
through force of arms. Not only did they
take away Africans’ lives, history, culture,
and freedom, but they also transformed
people into property and labor-power into
a saleable commodity. Chattel slavery
is the most barbaric and violent form of
work coercion—but as the last 150 years
has shown, you can dominate an entire
people through law, violence, and wages
pretty well.
Recently an Instagram video circulated of
a Ferguson protester discussing the looting
and burning of the QuikTrip convenience
store. He retorts the all too common accusation thrown at rioters: “People wanna
say we destroying our own neighborhoods. We don’t own nothing out here!”
This is the crux of the matter, and could
be said of most majority black neighborhoods in America, which have much higher concentrations of chain stores and fast
food restaurants than non-black neighborhoods. The average per capita income in
Ferguson, MO is less than $21,000, and
that number almost certainly gets lower if

you remove the 35% white population of
Ferguson from the equation. How could
the average Ferguson resident really say
it’s “our QuikTrip”? Indeed, although you
might hang out in it, how can a chain convenience store or corporate restaurant earnestly be part of anyone’s neighborhood?
The same white liberals who inveigh
against corporations for destroying local
communities are aghast when rioters take
their critique to its actual material conclusion.
The mystifying ideological claim that
looting is violent and non-political is one
that has been carefully produced by the
ruling class because it is precisely the
violent maintenance of property which
is both the basis and end of their power.
Looting is extremely dangerous to the
rich (and most white people) because it
reveals, with an immediacy that has to
be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent,
backed up by the lethal force of the state.
When rioters take territory and loot, they
are revealing precisely how, in a space
without cops, property relations can be
destroyed and things can be had for free.
On a less abstract l\evel there is a practical
and tactical benefit to looting. Whenever
people worry about looting, there is an implicit sense that the looter must necessarily be acting selfishly, “opportunistically,”
and in excess. But why is it bad to grab
an opportunity to improve well-being,
to make life better, easier, or more comfortable? Or, as Hannah Black put it on
Twitter: “Cops exist so people can’t loot
ie have nice things for free so idk why it’s
so confusing that people loot when they
protest against cops” [sic]. Only if you
believe that having nice things for free is
amoral, if you believe, in short, that the
current (white-supremacist, settler-colonialist) regime of property is just, can you
believe that looting is amoral in itself.
White people deploy the idea of looting
in a way that implies people of color are
greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite:
looting is a hard-won and dangerous act
with potentially terrible consequences,
and looters are only stealing from the rich
owners’ profit margins. Those owners,
meanwhile, especially if they own a chain
like QuikTrip, steal forty hours every
week from thousands of employees who
in return get the privilege of not dying for
another seven days.
And the further assumption that the looter
isn’t sharing her loot is just as racist and
ideological. We know that poor commu-

nities and communities of color practice
more mutual aid and support than do
wealthy white communities—partially
because they have to. The person looting
might be someone who has to hustle everyday to get by, someone who, by grabbing something of value, can afford to
spend the rest of the week “non-violently”
protesting. They might be feeding their
family, or older people in their community who barely survive on Social Security and can’t work (or loot) themselves.
They might just be expropriating what
they would otherwise buy—liquor, for
example—but it still represents a material
way that riots and protests help the community: by providing a way for people to
solve some of the immediate problems of
poverty and by creating a space for people
to freely reproduce their lives rather than
doing so through wage labor.
Modern American police forces evolved
out of fugitive slave patrols, working to
literally keep property from escaping
its owners. The history of the police in
America is the history of black people being violently prevented from threatening
white people’s property rights. When, in
the midst of an anti-police protest movement, people loot, they aren’t acting nonpolitically, they aren’t distracting from the
issue of police violence and domination,
nor are they fanning the flames of an always-already racist media discourse. Instead, they are getting straight to the heart
of the problem of the police, property, and
white supremacy.
Solidarity with all Ferguson rebels!
-August 21st, 2014
*I use the rather clunky phrase not-nonviolent purposely. For some non-violence
ideologues breaking windows, lighting
trash on fire or even building barricades
in the street is “violent”. I once watched
a group of black teens chanting “Fuck the
Police” get shouted at for “being violent”
by a white protester. Though there are
more forms of violence than just literal
physical blows to a human body, I don’t
believe a conception of “violence” which
encompasses both throwing trash in the
street and the murder of Michael Brown is
remotely helpful. Frustratingly, in protest
situations violence tends to be defined as
“whatever the nearest cop or non-violence
practitioner says it is.” Calling breaking a
window “violent” reproduces this useless
definition and places the whole argument
within the rhetorical structure of nonviolence ideology. Not-non-violent, then,
becomes the more useful term.

“A lot of
people feel
that in order to
come together
we have to
sacrifice the
neighborhood.”
-Will M., a former gang member
interviewed by the ,QWHUQDWLRQDO+HUDOG
7ULEXQH regarding the LA riots in 1992.
Oakland/2011

FTTP #12 - In Defense of Looting- Pg. 24

AGAINST A
CENTURY OF
FALSE NOTIONS

“This is the principal law of our
age. We may quote here Jacques
Soustelle’s well known remark
of May, 1960, in reference to the
atomic bomb. It expresses the
deep feeling of us all: ‘Since it
was possible, it was necessary.’
Really a master phrase for all
technical evolution.”
-Jacques Ellul/Technological Society/1964

I

've been reading about climate change
since I was in 6th grade. I remember
the first time I read about it was for
a school assignment. We were supposed to
go home and pick an article from the New
York Times and summarize it for the class.
I always hated school, and rarely properly
did an assignment. Avoiding more punishment by my parents and school, I
went home, opened the paper, and blindly picked the first article I saw. This was
1997, and the article I chose was about
global warming and the melting polar ice
caps in Antarctica, and was in the opinion
section at the time. I was such a lazy student and found everything related to school
to be boring, so I half-assed a 3 paragraph
article about how I thought global warming was good because summer was way
nicer than winter. I always think about this
when I see how mainstream the concerns
about it have gotten, but it's nothing new.
It seems that those who have come before
us have royally fucked us. And it appears
that those in power intend to continue trying
to fuck our generation and whatever generations follow ours unless those in power
are stopped. Realities regarding our natural
environment and notions of an impending
doomsday type of scenario have belatedly
been given validity by mainstream science
and even the ruling elite. Regardless of this,
the same notion of immortality that laid a
foundation for the industrial grandiosity
and excess of the elites throughout the 20th
century (including the roughest war on nature waged against the earth in the history
of time) is still continuing to play itself out.
It's not just the stereotypical environmentalist or liberal college student criticizing
the current ecological crisis, but actors,
politicians, and the overall mainstream
have finally accepted the reality that industrial civilization is not as immortal as
once assumed. It's yesterday's news at this
point that humanity in the last 150 years
has been able to cause more damage to
the natural world than in the ten thousand
years before it. Even the right-wing think
tanks are looking more and more embar-

threatens everything that validates their
dangerous power. It's still a topic of conversation instead of a situation in need
of immediate action because the ones in
power that people are told to ask to deal
with reversing our influence on it found
their positions in society through the system of capital that is responsible for creating this mess. It’s simple: changing the
course of production would hinder growth
and profits. That’s it, there is no other
reason that debate should even be a consideration. It’s frequently mentioned that
sea levels are rising, and will inevitably
continue to. Demanding that people in
power solve this issue would be like asking someone beating you to wear gloves.
Without eliminating them and their technical means to pollute, rampage, and systematically kill the natural environment you
are left with the same situation as before.

Ecological Disaster
is Not Debatable

rassed when seriously questioned about
their denial of climate change (among other things) and humanity's contribution to it.
But while more and more validity is being
given to the concern of climate change or
our abusive relationship with the natural
environment in general, stories regarding
rising sea levels and dwindling drinking
water are still recognized as a topic for debate within the logic of Western politics;
much like gay marriage or abortion. While
one would think our hyper-informed postmodern humanity would take a less patient
response to something as dire as not having
safe drinking water or losing entire coastal
cities, we are tragically stuck in a logic that
our industrial capitalist society (that created these issues in the first place) is capable of solving them. This is a logic
fabricated by the idiotic generations that
have pummeled our habitat and looted our
future. This is not a logic to be debated - it
is a logic to be negated.
We live in a society where natural resources are approached as infinite commodities,
able to be produced based on the demand
of the capitalist market. An incredible example would be our relationship with water, specifically our drinking water. No one
can deny the indispensable relationship
humans have with drinking water. Realizing this, I wonder how so many seem
unconcerned when it's pointed out that our
drinking water is used more for energy production and industrial agriculture than it is
for drinking. In fact, there are concerns that
even the world's developed nations will experience rampant shortages in fresh water
supplies by 2040 due to human behavior.
This is the same society whose population
continues to grow at obscene numbers. The
logic is that water is a commodity, and it is
to be used as a commodity. It will be used by
those who can afford it, to the extent of
which they can spend, despite the reality
that is a limited resource. If you are super
wealthy you can literally go in your bathroom, turn your water on, and let it flow
forever (Or until you run out of money).
Around 280 billion gallons of water are
used in the United States alone each year
for fracking and coal production. In 2012,
according to the American Meat Institute, the American meat industry processed 92.9 billion pounds of meat. It's
estimated that one pound of meat requires
2,400 gallons of water, that can only lead
me to assume that in 2012 alone 223 trillion gallons of water were used for meat
production— in the United States alone.
While humans can live for months without food, the typical human being can only

survive for up to three days without water.
Based on combined statistics I would assume that at least 876,000,000,000 gallons
of water would be required to keep the
United States alive each year (300,000,000
x 8 glasses a day x 365 days a year). Multiply that number by 7,000,000,000 and you
have an estimate on the required drinking water to support the global population
today. But in this society, under the logic
of capitalism, resources such as water
are perceived as infinite, no matter how
big of an industrial shit is taken on the
earth, or how large the demand is posed
by our irresponsibly growing population. Clearly this is ridiculous, and proven
wrong by the rampant malnourishment
around the world. It's already clear that
we are in crisis, and have been in crisis.
A fifth of the world population today lives
in water scarce environments, and another
1.6 billion of the current human population face economic water shortage where
there isn't the infrastructure to produce
the water needed for an existing population from available rivers and aquifers.
Yet modern societies continue to pollute
the water, sabotage the natural process of
clean water being steadily produced by the
planet itself, and direct water resources
towards energy production as opposed
to keeping people alive. After all this,
companies like Nestle (Poland Spring
& Life Water) or Coca-Cola (Aquafina)
start to bottle up what’s left, and sell it
back to us. If we take a moment to seriously look at this, of course we can
only scoff in disbelief, but this is totally
appropriate logic for industrial capitalism. There is nothing to be surprised about
here, this is a perfect manifestation of
capitalism playing itself out. And while
half of the world is thirsty, there is most
likely a pool being built somewhere in
America right now, further reinforcing a
sense of stability for the populations of
the world that are protected by capitalism.
Climate change is a more complicated
subject than drinking water, but we are
treating it like a smoker; puffing away
even though it is killing us. Whether it's
the Philippines (Tacloban), Japan, Hurricane Sandy, or Hurricane Katrina, there
are already signs of scenarios to come. But
like a smoker waiting for cancer to come
in the morning, it's clear that until the
skies turn black and huge Western populations are killed off, those in power will
both continue to ravage our habitat on an
industrial scale, and we will continue to
allow a debate over their behavior, as opposed to forming an active resistance that

Those in power come from a history of
power that is both sociopathic and unrelentingly authoritarian. No amount of
evidence of crisis will shift the attitude of
those included in the luxuries that industrial capitalism brings to some. Miami,
for example, is expected to experience
an increase in tidal floods in the next 15
years from 15 annually to 240. At the same
time, more and more development along
the city's coastline is being constructed,
with ocean side property at some of its
highest prices in history. Whether all this
will be submerged under water in 15 or
20 years is somehow exempt from consideration. But for those who can determine
construction efforts or live in one of these
luxury developments, there is an assumption that the state and capitalism will protect them, and the ever apparent complications of the very near future are not nearly
as valuable as the quick bucks that can
be made now. While I try to stay away
from any moral debating, this is purely irresponsible. Not only is this irresponsible,
but it is delusional, as is the behavior of
those of us today who stupidly adopted
the logic of our parents and the generations throughout the 20th century
that said shitting where we eat is ok.
Concern over the natural world has fallen
into the cultural trap that surrounds American politics, and while this should be the
most unifying situation in our history as a
humanity; both idiotic sides on the matter
seem to treat it as another headline or political opportunity. As the typical Kochbrothers-vile-white-men continue to pull
the mysterious corporate strings that
perpetuate the destruction of our natural
world, their so-called liberal antithesis
provides a voice for the “earth” that helps
to merely prolong the argument. This happens by refusing to recognize ecological
devastation as a technical necessity for industrial capitalism to continue to grow, and
believing it is something that can be dealt
with without destroying industrial capitalism, and the state which helps to enforce it.
In the 1960s you had a situation where
the United States government was in a
very unusual situation. They were forced
to make concessions to the public in response to an alarming amount of general
unrest. They enacted a raft of anti-discrimination laws and ended (formal) segregation in schools. This lead to a calming in
the streets of America, but we all know
the reality for Black and brown children in
this country today. It still generally means
you are poor, you are more likely to end
up in prison, (in actuality schools are more
segregated than ever), and you will more
likely have a stressful life. The system saw
a disruption, rearranged itself to quell the
disruption, and continued onward as the
same system, simply more efficient. Like
those in power in the 1960s, the order of
today is scrambling to quell concerns with
talk of green solutions neutralizing the existing destruction. It's important that we
FTTP #12 -Against A Century- Pg. 25

do not allow these forces to trick us into
showing patience or being passive. NASA
and other government agencies around
the world have already made it very clear
that we cannot completely avoid all future
consequences from global warming and
climate change. They do however suggest
that we change our behavior in a way that
will procrastinate the worst-case scenarios
made popular by Hollywood apocalypse
movies such as the Day After Tomorrow
or Snow Piercer (helping to view ideas of
industrial collapse and ecological disaster
as fantasies). While they continue to point
out that this is a direct result of human behavior, they propose that we change only
the process of how we exist in a global
capitalist world, not the issue of there being a global capitalist world which has
an inherent logic to constantly exploit
and dominate everything in its assumed
infinite path of growth. NASA being a
government agency can be expected to
minimize radical notions of change as a
solution for the issues the earth face, but
in reaction to their facts I think there can
no longer be any patience for debate or
consideration for politics as we understand them in the United States. There has
to be an immediate attack on the totality of
society, because it is a society that will be
forced into a state of demise by those who
control it, before there is a real transition
in the way that society relates to nature.
As this system continues to push us to
the brink, opponents of climate change
must begin to tap into existing tensions.
Concession cannot be an option in an instance of scarcity— only the elimination
of the system that is making it so some can
live in luxury and excess, and some can’t
live at all. People are over the solar-panel
green capitalist utopia promoted by the
mainstream as our only hope and alternative (especially since most of us can not afford it), so we must be a voice pushing for
an uprising that will destroy the means of
eco-devastation as we know it, additionally providing a sustainable alternative
that is accessible to all (unlike organic
food or electric cars that the liberal elite
claim as solutions). These are drastic
words. Of course I realize that China for
example is out there shadowing America's
stupidity, but I know that the only solution would be to eliminate the system that
created these issues, and that can only be
done by advocating a perspective that is
totalistic in its critique of the world today, and pushes for resistance that is not
negotiable with industrial capitalism. We
are not fighting for future generations at
this point, we are fighting for our lives.
We are that future generation that concerned groups have discussed in the past.
We have inherited the earth from the abusive tenant that was the 20th century. We
must direct our rage and frustration over
this against the industrialists and capitalists before us that have calculated this
mess (and the current generation of them
today). In doing so, our contempt must be
directed at the techniques and systems that
allowed them to do so much damage. I do
not believe that dialogue is possible with
this system, and I am confident in saying
that there is plenty of evidence to sup-

port my position. The terrifying impacts
of coal on communities in West Virginia
is an incredible example of how worthless dialogue is with this system. Across
the country, the horror stories caused by
fracking on struggling communities across
the country are movie worthy (Netflix
can affirm this); and still it’s a prospering
industry. I still see plenty of BPs (British
Petroleum) across the country, and they literally destroyed like a whole chunk of the
earth, for just 7 billion dollars (2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill) There should be
absolutely no consideration for those tolerant of such a society that condones these
atrocities. Not only for anyone selfish,
spineless, or stupid enough to deny these
circumstances and their severity, but also to
the reservations of those who claim to oppose the forces behind climate change and
eco-devastation, but propose absolutely
no revolutionary approach to stopping its
continuance or eliminating the system responsible.
Acting against those who have engaged in
institutional violence against the natural
world must begin to act without compromise or patience. There must be a project
that aims to completely destroy the system
in place that has put our collective destiny
at the hands of a few vile people. That system would be capitalism and its enforcer:
the state. Those in control would gladly
sacrifice billions of people in exchange
for fulfilling their hollow desire for luxury
and superiority. And by would, I mean
they have, they are, and they will continue
to do so. That is why I am writing this article. Both to address the reality we face on
the earth, the system and society responsible for producing it, and the type of resistance movement that must be formed to
avoid falling down the cliff that we are being blindly pushed off of.
Our resistance in defense of nature must
match the violent assault by industrial
capitalism against it!
Support Those Imprisoned
For Defending the Earth
earthfirstjournal.org/eco-prisoner-list
Support & Learn from Those
Struggling to Preserve a
Harmonious Relationship
With the Earth
survivalinternational.org
“It will doubtless be pointed out,
by way of refutation, that production techniques were developed
during the ascendancy of liberalism, which furnished a favorable
climate for their development
and understood perfectly how to
use them. But this is no counter-argument. The simple fact
is that liberalism permitted the
development of its executioner,
exactly as in a healthy tissue a
constituent cell may proliferate
and give rise to a fatal cancer.”
-Jacques Ellul/Technological Society/1964

“WE HAVE
INHERITED THE
EARTH FROM
THE ABUSIVE
TENANT THAT
WAS THE 20TH
CENTURY.”

AN
INTERVIEW
WITH
ZIG-ZAG
The following is an interview with Gord
Hill (Kwakwaka’wakw nation), who frequently writes under the pseudonym Zig
-Zag. He is also the author of The 500
Years of Resistance Comic Book, The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book (both
published by Arsenal Pulp Press), and 500
Years of Indigenous Resistance (published
by PM Press).
Fire to the Prisons (FttP): In 2014 there
has been a flurry of activity in Native
communities who are engaged in blockades of roads against timber sales, mining
projects, against missing and murdered
aboriginal women, occupations of hydro
dams, against trophy hunting, and also
large blockades against oil pipelines. Can
you tell us more about these campaigns
and actions and the context in which they
are happening? What drives these struggles?
Zig Zag (ZZ): Native peoples in Canada
have been carrying out blockades and other actions since the 1970s, in the modern
era as it were. In the last few years, beginning perhaps in the early 2000s, there
has been an increase in these activities of
protest and resistance for various reasons;
I don't think there's one particular reason.
Each campaign or struggle has its own history and characteristics; events that make
them grow or decline. Having said that I
would also add that there seems to be an
overall increase in political consciousness and activity over the last decade, and
I think this is occurring on a global level
so that when Native peoples in Canada see
events such as the “Arab Spring” or Occupy, or the Toronto G20 [riots], there's a
sense that protesting is something that's
more "acceptable" or common, or perhaps
even productive. But as I mentioned, each
struggle also has its own dynamics that
drive it.
In regards to the missing and murdered
women, this has been a campaign that
began in the late 1990s and in particular
the high number of women that began
disappearing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, when there were somewhere around 70 missing women dating
back to the 1970s, and mostly through
the '80s and '90s. By the late '90s, Native
women's groups in Vancouver began organizing, including an annual memorial
march on February 14th. Since that time,
other towns and cities have also begun
organizing similar rallies and marches to
draw attention to this issue. So that's how
this campaign has increased, and more recently, over the last two years, some communities have also carried out temporary
blockades of highways and trains.
The anti-pipeline struggle is another example of a campaign that has emerged over
the last few years, as a result of increased
Tar Sands production and Canada's goal of
becoming a major petro-state for the Asian
and US markets. All this requires pipelines
to transport the oil and gas, originally envisioned as passing through central British
Columbia (BC) from Alberta, to coastal

ports and then on tanker ships. These proposals for several major pipelines have
given rise to an unprecedented mobilization of Natives in central BC and along
the coast in opposition to both major
pipeline projects and oil tanker traffic.
Even government-imposed band councils
have voiced their opposition to some of
these (while making agreements for others). And this anti-pipeline, anti-oil tanker
movement is informed by various factors,
including the Exxon Valdez oil spill in
southern Alaska and northern BC that
resulted in extensive environmental damages that persist to this day, the 2005 sinking of the Queen of the North ferry in an
area similar to the route proposed for oil
tanker traffic, the 2011 Gulf of Mexico BP
oil spill which horrified people around the
world and across BC, as well as ongoing
and frequent reports of new oil pipeline
ruptures and tanker spills.
Protests and blockades against logging
have been somewhat common since at
least the 1970s, and in fact occur less frequently now due to a decline in the forestry
industry overall, although some communities such as Grassy Narrows in Ontario are
still fighting to stop clear cut logging.
In regards to mining projects, some of the
more recently proposed mining projects
have been in central and northern BC, areas which have only been opened up to
large scale exploration and industrial activity since the 1970s and '80s. Some new
mining projects, as well as oil and gas development, is the result of new technologies that make it economically worthwhile
to build roads and other infrastructure, so
in these areas as well Native peoples are
mobilizing to defend vital parts of their
territories, such as the Tahltan in north
BC who have resisted various mining and
gas projects for the last 7-8 years. More
recently, there was a major disaster in BC
at the Mount Polley mine, when its tailings
pond ruptured sending large amounts of
contaminated water into a river and forest
system. Operated by Imperial Metals, Mt.
Polley is located in Secwepemc territory,
who are already opposing other mining
projects. Now, other communities facing
similar mining projects, including those
operated by Imperial Metals, are more determined to stop new mining projects.
Overall, you can see an increase in industrial development in more northern regions
across Canada, as well as an increase in
Indigenous resistance against these projects. I also wouldn't discount the effect of
social media and people being able to not
only gain counter-information, but also
the ability to produce their own communications when, for example, a small isolated community carries out a blockade.
In the 1980s, it would've taken longer for
information to get out unless the corporate
media was covering it.
FttP: There is a long history of indigenous resistance in what is called Canada
dating back to European invasion. In the
last several decades, there has been large
FTTP #12 - Against A Century / Zig-Zag- Pg. 26

scale armed defense of land occupations.
Can you tell us about this history and how
it informs current struggles?
ZZ: The first Native armed actions in Canada occurred in 1974, following the siege
at Wounded Knee in 1973. These were
at Cache Creek, BC, and Anicinabe Park
in Ontario. Without doubt, the most significant armed standoff occurred in 1990
involving the Mohawk communities of
Kanesatake and Kahnawake, both of which
are near Montreal, Quebec. This standoff
emerged over a conflict about the municipality of Oka's decision to expand a nine
hole golf course and to build a condominium project into an area known as the
Pines, which contained a Mohawk graveyard, lacrosse field, as well as the last patch
of trees left in the area. Many non-Native
Oka residents also opposed these projects.
Over the course of about a year the Mohawks and citizens organized protests and
petitions, and in the spring of 1990 began
blockading a small dirt road. On July 11,
the Surete du Quebec (Quebec provincial
police) attempted to raid the blockade and
dismantle it, but their heavily armed tactical unit was met with armed resistance by
warriors. After a brief fire fight one cop was
killed, and the rest of the police retreated,
abandoning their vehicles which were then
used to expand the blockade to include
nearby highways and roads. At the same
time Mohawks in Kahnawake blockaded
the Mercier Bridge, a major commuter link
from the suburbs to downtown Montreal.
This set in motion a 77 day armed standoff.
By August, the Canadian military deployed
a mechanized brigade of about 5,000 soldiers.
The standoff at Oka generated widespread solidarity across the country, with
Natives occupying government buildings and blockading highways and trains.
Some sabotage also occurred, with railway
bridges and electrical transmission towers
brought down. The golf course was never
expanded, and the condos were never built.
Oka had a tremendous effect on Indigenous struggles in Canada and set the tone
for resistance actions through the decade
and to this day. The imagery of masked and
camouflaged warriors has been emulated
across the country at numerous protests
and blockades, without the AK-47s.
In 1995 there was another armed standoff in south central BC at a place called
Gustafsen Lake located in Secwepemc
territory, who called the lake Ts'Peten.
This standoff occurred after a US rancher
sought to evict a Sundance camp which
was located on Crown land. After his cowboys had threatened an elder and his family, warriors traveled to the camp to offer
protection, and the New Democratic Party,
a social democratic party then in power
as the provincial government, authorized
a major police operation involving over
450 heavily armed police from the RCMP.
They acquired armored personnel vehicles
from the Canadian military, flew surveillance planes over the camp, and on September 11th ambushed a vehicle used by
the defenders by detonating an explosive
charge which blew up the front end of the
truck and then rammed it with an APC.
This initiated an hours long fire fight, during which police fired over 77,000 rounds
of ammunition, killing a dog and wounding
one defender. This standoff lasted about a
month, and ended after the defenders laid
down their arms. One elder, Wolverine, received the longest jail sentence of 8 years.
While these acts of armed resistance are
historical events which had profound impacts on Indigenous people’s struggles in
Canada, they are not very common. While
the Mohawks have both the resources and
personnel with military experience to engage in these types of actions, most communities do not. Most communities are

more capable of carrying out low-level acts
of resistance, including blockades, which
are far more common than armed actions.
I think the recent example of the Mi'kmaq
anti-fracking struggle in New Brunswick is
a good example of this, and one that more
communities could engage in. Another
recent example would be the resistance
at Six Nations, where hundreds of people
from the community engaged in blockades
as well as acts of sabotage to stop the construction of a condo project.
FttP: In a recent interview with the Canadian anarchist Franklin Lopez, they talked
about how the success of road blockades
has driven many people to continue and
expand the tactic. Can you attest to this
success?
ZZ: Indigenous peoples in Canada have
been using the blockade tactic since the
1970s, and in the '80s the governmentfunded band councils also began using
blockades during negotiations with government or industry as political leverage/
public relations types of activities. But
certainly many grassroots movements continue to use the blockade because they are
effective in disrupting industrial activity
and creating political pressure on the state.
In addition, many highways, roads, and
railways are located near reserves or cut
right through reserves, so they are easily
accessible.

for policing operations, and lost business.
That condo project has never been built.
FttP: In a recent talk you did on anarchism
and indigenous resistance, you discuss
ways in which the two struggles work together and support each other. Can you tell
us more?
ZZ: Well I think I mostly talked about the
similarities between anarchist and Indigenous struggles and how there were more
possibilities for solidarity as a result of
this, and in particular the general absence
of a centralized State system, the emphasis
on decentralized and autonomous forms
of self-organization, and the need for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist analysis in
both movements. This can be compared to
other forms of organization used by groups
such as political parties or unions, as well
as NGOs, all of which typically have bureaucratic or even hierarchical structures.
These types of groups often align themselves with the Indian Act band councils,
which are often in conflict with genuine
grassroots movements.
FttP: In the same talk, you relate the black
bloc to Warrior Societies. How do you
think anarchists could popularize more
confrontational tactics to be seen in a more
positive light, and not as 'outside agitators'
or people who bring upon repression to social struggles?

FttP: In an interview you did regarding the
Idle No More movement, you talk about
the class dynamics of the leadership structure and the limit of reformist aims. Can
you tell us more?

ZZ: I think one of the big problems the Left
or "progressive movements" have in North
America is a real lack of fighting spirit or
combativeness. They are so controlled
and dominated by professional organizers
who pursue strictly
ZZ: The official
legal-political forms
organizers of INM
of struggle; that
came from middlepeople who want
class professions:
to engage in more
lawyers and acaradical and militant
demics, so this class
actions are marginposition determined
alized and isolated,
their overall methwhich makes them
ods which were
vulnerable to State
entirely focused on
repression. Every
legal-political resuccessful
resisforms. They worked -Chtnweizu, 7KH:HVWDQGWKH5HVWRI8V
tance movement in
closely with another
history has used a
middle-class
elediversity of tactics,
ment which were Indian Act band coun- including militant actions. When a movecilors and chiefs. They came out strongly ment wants to raise the level of militancy I
against any radical actions such as block- think one of the most important steps is to
ades and attempted to impose control over build a culture of resistance, and to begin to
the movement, in particular their pacifist "normalize" acts of resistance. At the same
beliefs. In fact, it was the first time a ma- time, movements also have to go through
jor mobilization like this imposed pacifist learning phases. A lot of people who get
methods on Native peoples. The main goal involved at first think purely in terms of
of this movement was to stop the federal legal-political reforms, petitions to State
government from passing an omnibus bud- officials, peaceful rallies, etc. This is "norget bill that was going to change many malized" by the bureaucrats who run most
federal laws, including ones providing of the social justice, NGO-type groups,
some level of environmental protection for as well as corporate media and entertainland and water. The bill passed in mid-De- ment. Only by participating in struggles
cember, however, and despite a few more and learning first-hand the futility of using
weeks of large rallies the movement was strictly legal-political means will people
unable to sustain itself.
become radicalized and begin using more
militant tactics.
One aspect of their legalistic-pacifist approach was a strict limit on the types of ac- FttP: In one of your latest publications,
tions people could carry out, so they were “Smash Pacifism: A Critical Analysis of
really limited to "flash mob" round dances Gandhi and King,” you argue that in the
in shopping malls and city streets, which
US, pacifist movements are largely headed
ultimately have little impact. Thankfully by middle-class leadership. You also argue
this movement, while it did indeed mobi- that riots had a much larger effect on policy
lize thousands of Natives out to rallies, did changes than non-violent pleas for reform.
not last long. We can compare the tactics Can you tell us more?
of INM to those used during the Quebec
student strike of 2012, which included ZZ: Well the "official" leadership of the
not only ongoing rallies but also occupa- Black civil rights movement were certainly
tions and militant street protests that cost middle class, they were Baptist preachers,
the Quebec government millions of dollars lawyers, and other professionals who, bein property damage and lost revenue. The cause of their greater resources and "lestrike led to the cancellation of the student gitimacy,” were able to exert significant
tuition increase as well as a change in the influence and control over the movement,
provincial government. Or you can look at as occurs in virtually every social movethe Six Nations land reclamation, which ment in North America. In regards to the
cost the state tens of millions of dollars in
riots, the official history of the civil rights
property damage, compensation, paying movements showcases the peaceful rallies

“LIBERATION
IS THE TASK
IMPOSED UPON
US BY OUR
CONQUEST &
COLONIZATION.”

and arrests as being what made significant
change, when in reality it was a diversity of
tactics including armed resistance as well
as mass urban revolts, which inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to
property. It was this economic disruption,
and the threat of even greater unrest, that
prompted the federal government to enact
civil rights legislation and to also begin
dumping millions and millions of dollars
into poor communities and organizations
as part of the "war on poverty," which led
to the institutionalization of the non-governmental organization industry. But I don't
think it's as simple as saying the riots did
more than the civil rights protests, because
they all contributed to overall rebelliousness of the Black population. Some of the
main proponents of militant Black Power
came out of the "nonviolent" groups, such
as Stokely Carmichael, for example.
FttP: As we speak, from droughts to diseases and disasters brought on by climate
change, things continue to get worse as
capitalist civilization pushes us closer to
the brink. Some small towns are without
water, and fracking pollutes watersheds
and threatens people's lives. What advice
would you give militants and radicals
working within this context?
ZZ: Along with anti-capitalist and anti-colonial analyses I also advocate a dual strategy of survival and resistance. Resistance
is necessary to defend land and people to
ensure our survival into the future, while at
the same time we must consider the overall situation and the increasing possibility of substantial systemic failures arising
from various intertwining sources, including economic and ecological crises. If we
were to simply focus on survival we would
prepare, learn skills, secure land, etc, but
vast areas of land could be contaminated
in the meantime that would severely erode
people's ability to survive in the long term.
I think that by organizing a broader resistance we can also build stronger networks
that will also assist in long term survival.
FttP: Throughout your art work and writings, you often discuss how drugs and alcohol are used against Native peoples and
aid in their subjugation. From trailer parks
where meth is produced to ghettos filled
with CIA funded crack-cocaine, we see
similar realities elsewhere. Do you have
any advice to others working for radical
change in these situations?
ZZ: The subject of drug and alcohol addiction is something I touch on, but I wouldn't
describe it as "often." It's a social reality that oppressed populations suffer from
higher levels of social dysfunction, with
drugs and alcohol being common. From
my experience in working with communities it's best to not take a judgmental attitude or you'll just alienate large sectors of
the population. You have to know people's
strengths and weaknesses, and if they have
drug and/or alcohol addictions then that
needs to be considered when planning actions or campaigns, knowing that some
people will not be reliable for some types
of work, or can't be trusted with handling
money, etc. But these people can change,
and I know when communities are actually
engaged in resistance and large numbers of
people participate, the levels of drug and
alcohol abuse decline because people are
working together, feeling solidarity and
purpose for a common good.
FttP: What can people expect from you in
the future? What projects are you working
on that you are excited about?
ZZ: I am presently maintaining the site:
WarriorPublications.wordpress.
com where I post news relating to Indigenous people’s struggles, primarily in
Canada.
FTTP #12 - Zig-Zag- Pg. 27

4 Years Later
An Interview on the Middle East

Picture: Members of Syrian Kurdish People’s
Defence Units (YPG) celebrating their victory in
Kobani, Syria, on January 2015, after defeating
Muslim-Fascist group ISIS.

FttP: In 2011, there seemed to be a glimmer of liberatory possibility unfolding in
the uprisings of the Arab Spring. In light
of the growth of ISIS, as well as the current state of affairs in Egypt and Libya, do
you think there has been a drastic transition in the Middle East towards more authoritarian military conflict? If so, why?
Tom Nomad (TN): To understand how
to approach this question it is important
to understand the fundamental separation
between insurgency and the separate process of capture that occurs in the process of
attempting to end insurgency. Often these
two processes are conjoined in a single
process within the modernist thinking
around the concept of insurgency; that insurgency is for something and attempts to
create something directly. If we pay close
attention to historical moments, such as
the American and French Revolutions,
as well as events in Russia or Spain, we
can clearly see the separation of these
processes. In these instances insurgency
operates as a process of degrading the
infrastructure of State operational capacity; this is a process that is fundamentally
centered not on taking and holding space,
but on logistical degradation and strategic
maneuver. But, at a point, after the logistics of State operations has collapsed there
is a second process, the process of some
faction attempting to end the insurgency,
often through repression, and create a different state logistics.
That is what we have witnessed during
not only the recent uprisings in the Middle East and northern Africa, but also in
Ukraine, although this was a much accelerated process. It is within this dynamic
of the unleashing of political possibility
through conflict, and the attempt to capture that possibility, eliminate outside possibilities and decelerate conflict that we
can read these events. If we take a look at
ISIS we can clearly see this. Their strategic movements across space are typified
by a series of stages. First, they tend to
move into empty space, and do this well.
Sometimes this occurs by launching attacks into other areas, usually small scale
single operations that will concentrate
opposing forces away from their line of
movement, which they then exploit. From
that point they will begin a process of repressing possible opposing factions within
these areas through extreme methods that
are usually public; this begins the process
of the mobilization of a repressive operation. Often, this has occurred in areas in
which a regime has already been driven
out, or is specifically weak, as in what occurred within Iraq. What is not clearly acknowledged about ISIS is that they tend to

move into these sparsely defended or weak
areas, and have had a significant amount
of trouble fighting concentrated opposing forces, as in Kobani. However, what
is also clear about ISIS is that their policing apparatus is not evenly spaced across
the areas that they claim to control, rather,
this is a process of entrenchment, often behind lines, and often in areas that are far
from lines of direct confrontation, in which
they are attempting to end insurgency.
So, on the one hand, many of the conflicts
that have arisen as a result of the uprisings
in the Middle East and northern Africa
have begun to resemble power struggles,
but we should not read this as a logical
outcome. Rather than competition over the
direction of an insurgency, what we have
begun to see is a competition over who
gets to end the insurgency, and this is clear
in Libya and parts of Syria. But, within
the very trajectory of insurgency there
is necessarily possibility generated
through conflict, and this cannot be seen
as the same process as the attempt to
capture and eliminate this possibility.
FttP: What role has the West played in
the Middle East since the Arab spring,
as well as helping to fund the repression of struggles such as student revolt
in Egypt or proletarian youth in Bahrain?
TN: This is a complex question that involves a lot of discussion to actually begin
to sufficiently discuss, but I will attempt
to give an overview. For those that want
to read a good, and lengthy, discussion of
this dynamic I recommend Vijay Prishad’s
book Arab Spring, Libyan Winter. [While]
there are a series of problems with the
analysis of the implications of Western involvement on the actual dynamics of the on
the ground insurgent forces in Libya…the
over-arching narrative is very informative.
To begin to understand Western involvement, and the contradictions of Western
involvement within the conflicts in the
Middle East and northern Africa we have
to first discuss the policy goals of Western, and by Western I mean NATO, government in the region, and this adds to the
complications. Much Western involvement has been centered on the attempt
to influence the direction of economic
projects and access to resources within
the Middle East and northern Africa. We
could see this dynamic play out in Libya,
in which NATO forces gave air support
to units of the Libyan insurgency aligned
with the National Transitional Council, a
well-connected and sympathetic collection of defected regime officials, former international economists and former

Note:
The following is an interview with Tom Nomad regarding the current state of the Middle
East today since the 2011
‘Arab Spring’. Tom is a
midwest-based anarchist
who authored The Master’s Tools: Warfare and
Insurgent Possibility and
a member of the Institute
for the Study of Insurgent
Warfare, which recently
published the first issue
of Insurgencies: A Journal on Insurgent Strategy.
Tom talks about anarchist
approaches towards ethics and strategic choices,
the Insurrectionalist turn
in North America and
the growing focus among
many of a study of Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency for the purpose
of reframing our struggle
against State, Capital and
other enemies.

regime military personnel. It was clear
within this dynamic that NATO countries
were attempting to use NTC support on the
ground to shape the post-Gaddafi Libya,
which not only occupies a strategic place
in northern Africa, but is also home to
a series of shipping ports and large reserves
of both oil and natural gas. In this instance
these concerns drove NATO to support the
insurgency.
This is a different role than the one played
within the conflict in Bahrain, in which
NATO nations supported the repression
against Bahraini activists and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) intervention in
Bahrain. There were a series of considerations that drove this approach, I will discuss three specifically. First, the US Navy
Fifth Fleet is based out of Bahrain. Not
only is this the primary base for all US
Navy operations in the Persian Gulf, it is
also seen as a central deterrent mechanism
to Iranian naval expansion. Second, GCC
nations are not only primary oil exporters and major business influences within
NATO economies, but they also form a
pro-Western power block within the Middle East. The repression in Bahrain came
directly on the heels of GCC air and special forces assistance in Libya, in which
Quatari special forces played a central
role in arming and training commando
units within the Libyan insurgency before
launching the operation in Tripoli that was
essential in the displacement of the Gaddafi regime; this is detailed in a report by
Reuters titled “The Secret Plan to Take
Tripoli.” As Prishad details in his book,
this intervention was part of a deal between NATO and the GCC, to encourage
the uprising in Libya, while turning a blind
eye to GCC intervention in Bahrain. The
third consideration, and this has caused
the most confusion, has been the attempt
to then use this power bloc to contest the
expansion of the Iranian sphere of influence in the region, which includes the Iraqi
State, under Maliki and his successor, the
Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah, all
of which have been reduced to playing the
role of Iranian clients in the past 10 years.
This attempt to counter Iranian influence
in the region is being balanced against an
attempt to maintain regional geopolitical
stability and achieve a deal over Iranian
nuclear research. This has created a series of complications in Syria, as well as
contradictions in the NATO approach to
ISIS. On the one hand the Iranian State
funds the Assad regime, is their primary
economic support structure, trained their
intelligence operatives and informal militias, funds their outside support from
Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militia forces

This interview was conducted in November 2014.
Like the last three years in
the Middle East, the political situation continues
to change every day. For
example, since this interview was conducted, the
YPG officially claimed victory over ISIS in Kobani,
Syria and seventy-three
Bahraini revolutionaries
have had their citizenship
revoked by the state. This
interview provides a great
deal of information and
insight into the situation
in the Middle East, but it
is time sensitive, and we
apologize if things have
changed, or were not mentioned that should have
been.
Another interesting
interview can be found
here: crimethinc.com
/texts/r/Kobani/

and even intervenes directly in combat
situations. This has caused the US specifically to be placed in a situation in which
they are attempting to aid in the elimination of the Assad regime, largely to prevent spillover in the conflict, while also
attempting to not anger the Iranian state.
At the same time Iranian and American
military advisers are both operational in
Iraq in the fight against ISIS. This is all
occurring within a context in which ISIS
now controls most of the major oil fields
in Syria, sells oil to the Syrian regime,
and until recently had an informal alliance with the Syrian regime in order to
concentrate their forces against Syrian
rebel and Kurdish groups. So, on the one
hand it is clear that NATO forces have
been arming a very small number of Syrian rebel forces, though not to a significant degree, as well as training certain
units, through training camps in Jordan,
while at the same time not doing enough
to swing the balance of the conflict, as in
Libya, in order to not end the possibility of
a negotiation on Iranian nuclear research.
None of this says anything about Egypt,
which has very different dynamics. At
the beginning of the uprising, by all accounts, the involvement of Western governments was limited. But, as Mubarak
fell, and the uprising was repressed by the
Muslim Brotherhood, there were indications of Western support for literally any
force that could end the uprising. Massive development loans were signed with
the transitional government and then the
Brotherhood government in Egypt. Then
after the Brotherhood regime, which was
increasingly generating resistance, fell to a
coup, Western governments largely stayed
silent. It is not clear what role Western governments had in the coup, except to support it from afar, but there has been a series
of attempts to legitimize the regime since
that point. It is important to keep in mind
that there are two considerations involved
in this situation that are driving Western
policy. The first is the Suez Canal, which
lies at the center of a conflict between the
Egyptian State, various workers organizations and a militant jihadi movement in the
Sinai. Second, the majority of smuggling
into the Gaza Strip happens literally under the border with Egypt, and it was this
smuggling infrastructure that was the excuse for the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza.
FttP: Why has jihad (religious motivated resistance to oppression) become
so popular to some Arab youth, when
concerns over employment, State repression, or a more free society were a considerable motivation to rebel in 2011?
FTTP #12 - 4 Years Later - Pg. 28

TN: This is a potentially impossible question to really answer, but there are a series
of things that we have to keep in mind.
Western, specifically American, media
discourse around this phenomenon tends
to focus on the rise of jihadi organizations in isolation of the other dynamics
that surround this rise, and tends to overemphasize the perception of the size and
strength of these organizations, and there
is good reason for this. If we go back to
the 1990s, when bin Laden is in the Sudan,
a shift occurs, one that was foreshadowed
by a series of disagreements within jihadi circles around the war in Afghanistan
against the Soviets, and this is documented in detail in Stephen Coll’s book Ghost
Wars. This disagreement did not focus so
much around tactics, it focused on the projection of image, and the use of media, at
that time cassette tapes and video, to project an image of jihad. In the intervening
20 years successful jihadi organizations,
the ones that can attract resources and recruits, tend to be the ones that carry out the
most spectacular attacks, coupled with the
ability to expand access to this spectacle.
This was the case with jihadi organizations before the rise of ISIS, and is more
the case now. This media tactic is usually
coupled with outside intervention from
foreign fighters and large amounts of funding. Again, even before the rise of ISIS this
was the case, with local resistance groups
in Libya and Syria often being poorly
funded and obtaining most of their
equipment through re-appropriation,
and comprised almost entirely of fighters local to the region within which
they were operating.
Early in the Syrian revolution, after ISIS intervened in Syria in force
in 2012, they were known primarily for carrying out big attacks, but
not attacks that had much strategic
purpose or importance. They have
since morphed into an organization
that is excellent at the projection of
imagery, the use of social media,
as well as military operations. This
has amplified the perception of the
size of ISIS, which is in actuality
around 30,000 troops, as well as
their influence, even though most of
the space under their control is isolated desert. This shift has begun
interplay with a series of other dynamics, convenience, and economic
desperation. As ISIS began its drive
through Iraq, which came at the end
of the repression of a social movement against the Maliki regime in
Anbar Province, they began to both align
themselves with other resistance organizations, specifically organizations that trace
their roots to the Baath Party, as well as
eliminate oppositional forces through assassination. They used resources that they
obtained through involvement in Syria to
fuel this rise. As they moved through Iraq
earlier in 2014 they were able to further
displace opposition, drive the forces that
had often set the stage for this rise underground and obtain large amounts of monetary and military resources. So, in many
places within the ISIS area of operations
the conditions that drove these initial uprisings had not changed, both Assad and
Maliki remained in power, with Maliki being replaced by one of his allies, and ISIS
became the only force in the area that one
could join up with. This dynamic is often seen in Syria as well, where fighters,
regardless of the unit they end up with,
often join up with the first unit that rolls
through their area after they decide that
they are going to join the fight. So, while
ISIS began its life as a dedicated force of a
few thousand largely foreign fighters and
veterans of the war in Syria and the Iraqi
insurgency, many of these initial fighters
have been killed or incapacitated and they
are left with a much larger, less dedicated,
less experienced and well trained force.

We cannot also under-emphasize the role
of economic desperation and the failure
of prior uprisings in this equation either.
One thing is clear about ISIS, they pay,
and they pay well. We can see the influence of the role of money in the rise of
ISIS in the rapid growth in combat strength
after the taking of Mosul in Iraq. During
the taking of the city, ISIS fighters were
met with little resistance, other allied units
had been launching attacks on Iraqi forces,
which were numerically strong but under
equipped and led by political appointees
(this is discussed at length in the report
that ISIW wrote about ISIS), and upon the
arrival of ISIS on the outskirts of the city
most of the military forces, around 30,000,
abandoned their posts and left their equipment behind. ISIS then set about robbing
every bank in the city, including the Central Bank branch, and removing as much
military gear as they could. This netted
them somewhere around $2 billion US
dollars worth of cash and enough equipment for around 10,000 fighters. After this
point ISIS began paying fighters a very
high wage, and were willing to take in
any able-bodied male that was capable of
fighting. This recruitment drive locally in
Iraq and Syria was bolstered by the rapid
increase in the number of foreign fighters
that flooded into the area, largely from areas where resistance movements had occurred and failed, places like Afghanistan,

Morocco and Egypt. Unlike other jihadi
groups in the region, ISIS does not draw
a significant amount of foreign funding
compared to coalitions like the Islamic
Front in Syria, a moderate Islamist coalition, but it does specifically target its
operations at resource rich and poorly
defended targets, like oil fields, or cities
like Mosul, in order to maximize the resource windfall and continue this growth.
So, to begin to analyze whether there has
been a political shift in the region, which
seems to be over-emphasized, this has to
be counter-balanced against these dynamics: exclusivity, financial resources, and
the amplification of the image of size
through the use of media and the prevailing political dynamics in the region. These
factors can go a long way toward explaining a process in which, as resources are
increasingly obtained and oppositional
forces are increasingly eliminated, ISIS
seems to continue to gain momentum, as
other more moderate jihadi organizations
and secular groups seem to be waning. It
is not even clear whether we can see this as a
shift in the motivations for fighting, as both
economic desperation and political repression are still playing a role and the dynamics
released by repression and unemployment
have been channeled in a different direc-

tion due to a series of important factors.
FttP: What is happening in the area of the
world known as Kurdistan? Many have
heard for some time that the PKK (Kurdish Worker’s Party) is now influenced by
anarchism. What do you make of this?
TN: Often Kurdistan, a region that stretches through areas of northern and eastern
Syria, south central and eastern Turkey,
and northern Iraq, is thought of as a single region, but this is only partially the
case. This region is a region that has been
formed, to a significant degree, around the
political dynamics of the various states
that Kurdish populations find themselves
in. For example, in Kurdish Iraq, politicians are very much a part of the prevailing post-US State structure, and serve as a
very powerful parliamentary and executive
bloc, which is led by a series of often feuding centrist and nationalist political parties,
aligned around two primary blocs of politicians. This is a dynamic that has existed
around the formation of the peshmerga, or
units of armed Kurds that were formed to
fight against the Hussein regime. This series of political parties and fighting units
are highly formalized, and their influence
extends into the regions in northwestern
Syria. This bloc is in direct conflict with
the PKK, or the Kurdish Workers Party,
which rose to prominence in an urban and

rural guerrilla campaign against the Turkish State. The politics of these regions are
very different, as well as the dynamics of
fighting and social norms that are enforced.
This has led to a series of contradictions
within the dynamics of the fighting in the
region. For example, throughout the battle
for Kobani, and specifically after the US
intervention, the fighting in the city has
been largely carried out by forces of the
YPG and YPJ, which are aligned with the
PKK. At the same time, the Turkish State
is attempting to force the PKK into a negotiation process to end the conflict in Turkey, and as a result they are attempting to
prevent a concentration of PKK fighters
and sympathizers from crossing the border from Turkey to help in Kobani. This
seems to be based on a calculation in
which the Turkish state is assuming that
a YPG/YPJ led victory in Kobani will
strengthen the PKK; this decision, instead,
has led to a lot of resentment among the
Kurdish populations within Turkey, leading to rioting and a resumption of the
armed struggle. To mitigate this effect the
Turkish State has allowed a small number
of peshmerga fighters from Iraq to cross
through Turkish territory, with US supplied arms, to give to YPG/YPJ fighters
in Kobani. So, on the one hand both the

Turkish and American States consider the
PKK, along with the YPG/YPJ, terrorist organizations, but they are allowing
other Kurdish armed organizations, which
they directly support, to enter into Kobani
through Turkish territory. This underscores
the tension between these different regions
within what is often called Kurdistan.
This is further complicated by the often
complex relationships that different fighting units have with different elements of
the prevailing state in Syria, Turkey and
Iraq. As I mentioned, the peshmerga and
affiliated political groups in Iraq work
with the state, carry out joint operations
with the military and are recipients of
American arms; [meaning] they are fighting with American arms in support of an
Iranian client state against ISIS. This alliance with the State carried over into
northeast Syria, where peshmerga aligned
forces and Syrian regime troops existed in
a state of non-confrontational stand-off,
in which Syrian troops did not attempt to
impose control and the peshmerga aligned
forces worked to keep rebel groups and
ISIS out of the area. In north-central Syria, pushing into northeast Syria, and into
Turkey, areas in which the PKK and YPG/
YPJ forces operate, the Syrian regime has
been pushed out of the area, attacks and
logistics are often staged over the border,
and the relationship with non-Kurdish Syrian rebel groups fluctuates depending on which group it is, what coalition they are a part of and so on. In
the case of Kobani, some secular
units of the Free Syrian Army have
been sending troops and supplies into
the city to help the YPG/YPJ fight
off ISIS. We also have a situation in
northeast Syria in which PKK and
peshmerga aligned forces have come
into contact, often keeping their distance and maintaining influence in
different towns, and sometimes coordinating to fight a common enemy.
In many ways the concept of Kurdistan
is impossible to politically conceive of
in a singular way. Even though all of
the Kurdish identified organizations
involved grew out of a nationalist
struggle, they have taken very different
directions based in the wider political
conditions. Not only does this complicate the discussion of Kurdistan, but
it also complicates the discussion of
US military strategy, which is directly
opposed to helping PKK/YPG/YPJ
forces, but arming peshmerga forces
to fight in PKK dominated areas, and
launching air-strikes against ISIS in support
of PKK aligned forces in Kobani, and even
infrequently air-dropping them supplies.
As far as the discussion of the PKK and
an embrace of anarchism, the situation
does not seem to be as simple as it is often made out to be. We have to remember
that the PKK comes from a Leninist formation, and spent years developing a cult
of personality around Ocalan. From all indications it seems that Ocalan has undergone a shift in his political thinking since
being incarcerated in Turkey, and that is
significant. This has led to some changes
on the ground, largely through the structure of the Kurdish Democratic Union
Party, that is the PKK affiliate in Syria
and has been organizing assemblies in
towns under their control. However, there
are two primary complications within this
move. First, the Kurdish Democratic Union
Party, to a certain extent the PKK in Turkey, and [in] the refugee camps they run in
extreme northern Iraq, [people] have been
moving into a process of decentralizing political power [in] assemblies, eliminating
the tax structure, and organizing cooperatives to take on much of the material production and maintenance work. [This is] a
process akin to the [one carried out by the]
CNT in areas they were strong in during
FTTP #12 - 4 Years Later - Pg. 29

the Spanish Revolution. [However], they
are still a coalition partner in the Kurdish
Supreme Committee, the governing body
for Kurdish regions in Syria, in which they
share power with the Kurdish National
Council, a nationalist party tied to Iraqi
Kurdish politicians. Second, there is a certain inertia within the PKK that maintains
a Leninist structure in certain areas, under
certain commanders and so on. This is a
result of the legacy of Leninism and the
cult of personality around Ocalan, which
many PKK fighters and their commanders grew up [with, and are] very much
embedded within. So, it remains to be
seen whether the PKK can or will overcome the legacy of Leninism and the tendency to govern due to the shift in thinking that Ocalan has seemingly undergone.
FttP: What is the extent of the Rojava revolution? In what ways have people taken
control over their own lives? Is there a division between the organizations which seek
to represent people and those who are selforganizing in their own neighborhoods?
TN: As I mentioned above, it is really a
question of where you are. This dynamic
has to be thought of in relation to two
other dynamics, the impossibility of a
form of political perfection or the constant
development of political dynamics, and the
dynamics of insurgency. During the uprising in Syria, and to a lesser extent during
the collapse of the Iraqi State, political
autonomy is something that has arisen
out of necessity. As
the logistics of the
State collapse, as the
logistics of policing
become less able to
project force into areas, (either as a result
of area denial or as a
result of attrition),
the functions of the
State dissolve and
political possibilities emerge as apparent. This is not
just a dynamic that
occurred in Syrian
regions of Kurdistan, but is a dynamic
that has occurred in
many towns and cities across the Middle East and northern Africa during
this process of upheaval, with specific
concentrations in Libya and Syria, where
the State is unable to operate in large areas.
This is not a question of the stated metapolitics of insurgent groups, this is a biproduct of the dynamics of conflict unleashed within direct confrontation with
the logistics of policing, unleashed within
the degradation of the logistical capacity
of the State to project force across space.
The question at this point, as I mentioned,
becomes one of the dynamics of capture;
whether there is an attempt, a successful
attempt, to end conflict and destroy political possibility, to form the State anew.
What seems to have taken hold in areas
of Syrian Kurdistan is an embracing of
this political possibility: a realignment of
political dynamics around the immediacy
of everyday life, and the imperatives of
armed struggle. From reports coming out
of the region there is definitely a process
in which people have seized direct control over aspects of their lives in the midst
of conflict, and that this is a developing
process. This seems to be a process, and
again I am going off reports from the region, which is occurring in different areas
in different ways and to different degrees.
What is important about this process is not
whether it is a political solution, there is
no such thing, and to declare some solu-

tion is to begin this process of capture.
Rather, it is a dynamic, one that is in constant flux, and one that is not embracing a
given form; it is, in this case, from what
can be seen within the US from a distance, a process of embracing possibility.
This has become complicated, however, by
the traditional mechanisms of representation. It is important to keep in mind that
all attempts at representation, as Schmitt
discusses, necessarily implies the imposition of some form of political engagement and a removal of that engagement
from the immediacy of everyday life. So,
the problem here is not so much the parties, although there are problems here that
I will discuss later, but that there are representatives, or those claiming to represent
(something which in itself is philosophically impossible), at all.
In Syria, the so-called representatives
have been locked into this governing
structure, negotiated by Massoud Barzani, the President of Iraqi Kurdistan and
important player in Iraqi politics, which
functions, to the degree possible, as a
governing structure, and is formed from a
partnership between the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, affiliated with the
PKK, and the Kurdish National Council,
a party aligned with the Iraqi nationalist parties, and one that has declining influence in relation to the rise of the PKK
aligned groups in Syria. This complicates

the move toward direct and immediate
control that is occurring within primarily
Syrian Kurdistan. In Iraqi Kurdistan there
have been moves in this direction, but they
seem to be much more limited, confined
to areas of PKK influence and with only
minor in-roads into areas controlled by
the traditional Kurdish nationalist parties.
FttP: Break it down for us. What is the
YPG (People’s Protection Units) and the
YPJ (Women’s Protection Units)? The YPJ
in particular have captured the attention
of people throughout the world as a fierce
band of women fighters. Are they simply an
arm of the PKK, something else, or both?
TN: The YPG/YPJ are technically a joint
military operation formed by the fighting
units of the parties within the Kurdish Supreme Council. As such, technically, they
are comprised of fighters from both the
Kurdish Democratic Union Party, which
is affiliated with the PKK, and the Kurdish
National Council, which is affiliated with
the Iraqi Kurdish Nationalist parties. Now,
with that said, there has been significant
development within this formation which
reflects a rising influence among PKK affiliated fighters.
At the point of inception the units were
comprised of anyone of Kurdish descent
that wanted to sign up; there was no gen-

der restriction on fighters, and the YPJ
formed as an attempt among female fighters to have more control over fighting
units comprised of primarily women. The
fighting units also elect commanders directly from among the fighters. These
structures are both clearly outgrowths of
developments within the PKK. Iraqi peshmerga fighters, by contrast, fight within
a rigid command structure, often led by
political appointees, and are all men.
At the beginning of the conflict in Syria
the YPG/YPJ units maintained a directly
defensive stance, in that their primary
goal was to assert control over Kurdish areas and prevent the dynamics of the
wider Syrian revolution from spilling over
into Kurdish regions. This stance led to a
complicated relationship with both Syrian insurgents and regime troops, specifically in northeastern Syria; areas where
the Kurdish National Council is much
stronger. However, as the fighting has
stretched on, the Kurdish National Council
has seemingly lost a lot of influence, while
Kurdish Democratic Union Party influence
has grown. This has led to a series of important shifts.
Firstly, YPG/YPJ units are not only comprised of Kurds anymore. Rather, a series
of fighters have defected from other units
of the Syrian insurgency and have joined
the YPG/YPJ. The focus of the organization is also not directly defensive and

nationalistic anymore, with YPG/YPJ
units working to protect other communities in northern Syria. They are also taking
a directly oppositional stance against the
regime, specifically in areas under influence of the PKK; as some Syrian regime
outposts remain in extreme northeastern
Syria. Second, the YPG/YPJ units have,
for the most part, come to eclipse the
Kurdish Supreme Council in importance,
and have seemingly taken on a sense of
autonomy, often organizing their own offensives and initiatives. This has not only
led to some interesting military developments on the ground, but also a process in
which more leftist units of the Free Syrian
Army have been aligning themselves with
the YPG/YPJ in the fight against ISIS.
More and more the YPG/YPJ has become
aligned with the PKK, and this is both a
result of rising PKK influence, and falling Kurdish National Council influence, as
well as combat conditions on the ground.
As ISIS has expanded into areas in Syria
and Iraq much of the nationalist forces
within the Kurdish resistance have become concentrated within Iraq, attempting to prevent ISIS incursions into cities
like Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital. At the
same time YPG/YPJ forces along with the
PKK have not only been fighting ISIS in
Syria, but have also made incursions into
Iraq, specifically to drive ISIS forces away

from Mount Sinjar in order to prevent
a massacre of Yazidi peoples, a group of
Kurdish religious minorities theologically
tied to Zoroastrianism. This came after the
Iraqi peshmerga abandoned the town to
defend more central areas closer to the
core of Iraqi Kurdistan. After rescuing
hundreds of people on Mount Sinjar the
YPG/YPJ and PKK set up refugee camps
to house many of the displaced. This operation coupled with the defense of Kobani, have significantly shifted the political dynamics on the ground, and this has
contributed to increasing shifts in the
structure and politics of the YPG/YPJ.
FttP: Is it fair to call ISIS a fascist group?
Is the growth of ISIS similar to the growth
of right-wing groups in say, the Ukraine or
elsewhere?
TN: I would like to leave the discussion
of political typification alone for the time
being; there are many definitions of the
term “fascist,” all of which would likely
be applicable here. Rather, I would like to
focus on the second part of this question, the rise of the right-wing in Europe
and how this relates to Ukraine and ISIS.
In approaching this question, we have to
draw a distinction between the process of
the rise of parliamentary right wing parties
in Europe and the rise of Right Sector in
Ukraine or ISIS in Iraq and Syria. In the
case of right-wing parties in Europe as
a whole there is a
disturbing trend in
which they are winning mass support at
a time of economic
crisis, and that is a
dynamic that has
been seen in Europe
not infrequently over
the past 100 years or
so. However, this is
very different than
what is occurring
with ISIS or with
Right Sector in a
very important way.
As I mentioned before, the concept that
ISIS has mass support is false by all
indications. Rather
ISIS is a force that
is capable of paying
fighters, in a situation
of profound political alienation, in a space
devoid of much internal resistance, and
even then, their strength is often over-emphasized. As we have seen time and time
again, ISIS is effective as a mobile force
that is capable of utilizing effective strategies of target selection and situational alliance to gain an advantage in localized
areas. However, when they have to engage
with concentrated opposing forces their
weaknesses become apparent; their fighters, the ones still alive, are not specifically
experienced, they are not specifically effective, and they have yet to take a fully
defended urban area in the face of significant resistance. What ISIS is excellent
at doing is maintaining local advantages
through effective strategies and then projecting this to the world, expanding the
image of their effectiveness far beyond
what it actually is at any given point.
The same can be said for Right Sector.
They were able to achieve notoriety far
beyond their size and actual political influence would otherwise generate due to
the dynamics of specific events and their
effective use of social media. During the
movement in Kiev, Right Sector was able
to seize control over the defense forces,
drive events through effective uses of confrontation, and use a cold strategic outlook
to maintain inertia, specifically after it
seemed as if the movement was collapsFTTP #12 - 4 Years Later - Pg. 30

ing a couple of weeks before the fall of the
regime. But, when it came time for parliamentary elections they got less than 1% of
the vote. We see similar strategies in the
US being tried by groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party, which will
organize a generally popular front-esque
sort of demonstration, fill the stage with
their speakers, dominate contacts with the
press and attempt to create a situation that
results in arrests which they can take credit
for, even if people outside of their organization take the fall.
This is an interesting strategy on some levels, but it fails in the attempt to turn this
contextual participation into actual seizures
of power, unless one is in a position to attempt to eliminate all resistance in an area,
which ISIS is attempting but Right Sector
was not in a position to do. The other phenomena that has been occurring in Syria
and Iraq has been that when an organization that is seen as an outside group that
does not have much actual support on the
ground seizes power, they [find that they]
can hold this for a period of time. [But
soon the] shock of the seizure dulls, the
fear of repression wears off, and resistance
begins to rise. This is beginning to occur
inside ISIS controlled areas as we speak.
FttP: How has the resistance against ISIS
been successful? What have they done to
hold them off?
TN: The resistance against ISIS has been
successful, thus far, largely due to both tenacity and the wider strategic conditions
around ISIS operations. ISIS has become
caught in a process which there seems little way out of. They began this process of
massive expansion at a point in which they
were a fraction of the size that they currently are, but at a time in which the force
quality that they had was much higher.
To a large extent their expansion was the
result of a series of dynamics. First, they
are able to move quickly, and with localized command structures. In other words,
commanders, earlier in the development
of ISIS would travel with their forces, often fighting along-side them. This allowed
ISIS to move on areas that were lightly
defended or poorly defended, gather resources, leave behind a skeleton crew, and
then move on to the next area of confrontation. Those that had been tracking certain commanders through Youtube videos
often note that some commanders would
engage in two different confrontations in a
single day, often hundreds of miles apart
from one another.
This spread out ISIS forces and kept them
mobile, a dynamic that was beginning to
pose difficulties for their ultimate political
goal, which is to run a functional State, to a
certain degree. However, as they obtained
resources they were able to expand forces,
making it much easier to hold on to space,
to police space, but at the cost of mobility.
This was coupled with a compression effect, in which forces oppositional to ISIS
had compressed in space. This meant that
ISIS was no longer fighting dispersed and/
or poorly motivated fighters; they were increasingly running into larger and larger
concentrations of oppositional forces, resulting in the need to launch sustained large
scale frontal attacks. This not only further
contributed to their general loss of mobility, (they had to maintain supply lines all
of a sudden), but this also meant that they
were covering less space, even though they
had more forces numerically, as forces
concentrate they are less able to project
across space.
This is the dynamic that we have been
seeing play out over the past few months.
Even though ISIS is still able to take Syrian regime airbases in isolated areas in
eastern Syria, these operations are taking
more time, consuming more resources than

they are obtaining after the capture, and resulting in large numbers of casualties, all
of which have an attrition effect. This attempt to concentrate forces for large scale
assaults has also been complicated by US
airstrikes, which can easily strike a convoy
from 30,000 feet, as well as the rise of antiISIS guerrilla organizations that have been
ambushing convoys and assassinating ISIS
commanders in eastern Syria and western
Iraq.
Back to Kobani, currently there are a series of directions that ISIS forces are being pulled. At the beginning of the assault
on Kobani a large portion of mobile ISIS
forces were thrown at the city, which is not
only the capital of that Kurdish canton, but
also a major commercial trading hub and
a significant border checkpoint. As they
began to be bogged down in the center of
the city they had to pull forces from other
areas in eastern Syria. The Syrian regime
took advantage of this and attacked ISIS
forces in Deir ez Zor and around the gas
fields in eastern Syria. At the same time
ISIS had to pull forces from areas of western Iraq to defend these gas fields, which
required forces from other areas of Iraq to
be thinned out.
As time has gone on, it seems as if ISIS
is maintaining a siege around Kobani, but
with fewer and fewer forces; other resources are more important. This is coupled with
the tenacity of the YPG/YPJ and Free Syrian Army forces in Kobani, as well as the
impact of US airstrikes in the area, which
have tapered off in the past two weeks or so.
This indicates something important about

ISIS; their organizational style depends on
obtaining resources on a consistent basis,
and maintaining a growth rate concurrent
to the space that they are attempting to occupy; neither of these attempts are likely to
succeed in a fight that requires them to deal
with well-organized forces like the YPG/
YPJ fighting in urban areas, where armor
is not specifically useful, where movement
becomes difficult, and in which knowledge
of the terrain is paramount. These factors
have combined to give YPG/YPJ forces a
dramatic advantage in Kobani, and have allowed them to turn the tide of the fighting.
FttP: If Kobani and other areas of Kurdistan and the Rojava revolution was
destroyed and ISIS was to take hold,
what would the result be? How would
this impact the Middle East and future
struggles for freedom and autonomy?
*Note: As this goes into print, Kobani
has declared victory against ISIS as cited
in the picture at the beginning of this
interview. The following speculation can
provide insight on the importance of their
defense recently, and going into the future.
TN: This seems like an unlikely possibility; ISIS is logistically stretched currently,
dealing with a dynamic that requires them
to concentrate force but being unable to do
so, and caught in large scale confrontations
on a series of fronts currently. However, if
this were to occur the first thing that would

likely happen would be large scale executions and the mass displacement of people.
It is often forgotten that for as much as ISIS
tends to be strategically adept their strategy
is often driven by passions and perceived
political imperatives, and one of these is a
modified concept of ethnic cleansing.
If Kobani is taken, for example, the effects
could be profound. On an immediate level,
outside of the genocide and ethnic cleansing that would almost certainly occur, this
would free up hundreds of ISIS troops for
other assignments. There is not much significant resistance left in northern Syria, with
both rebel forces and regime forces locked
into fighting in Aleppo. It could be that
ISIS redirects forces into Iraq to hold space
against a building Iraqi military offensive
north and west of Baghdad. It could be that
they redirect these forces into the deserts of
eastern Syria to take the remaining regime
bases, oil fields and gas fields to attempt to
starve the Syrian regime out. If this were
to occur additional stress would be placed
on Iran to support the Syrian regime with
oil and gas shipments, and they are already
stretched to the breaking point as well.
They could deploy forces into northern
Syria in an attempt to surround and take
Aleppo or send these forces into central
Syria to take either Homs or Hama. They
could also deploy these forces in dispersed
units to attempt to launch attacks in cities
in Syria and Lebanon to draw oppositional
forces away from the line of confrontation
and create space for additional expansion.
Any of these scenarios are possible, and it
is for this reason that the fighting around

Kobani is so strategically important, it is
tying down large numbers of ISIS forces
and keeping them locked in a situation that
they are unlikely to be victorious in, and
this is opening up a series of lines of attack. In the near future we may even see
ISIS break off the fighting to free these
forces up for other deployments, but that
would be a potentially fatal admission of
defeat.
If ISIS is successful, the momentum that
they would gain from taking Kobani is
unable to be measured. They are already
drawing fighters from all over the Middle
East, Asia and Africa, as well as from Europe, Australia, Canada, the US, and this
would likely increase to a certain degree.
However, taking Kobani, for as much as
it would likely change the situation, and
may even spark a Turkish intervention
into Syria to secure their southern border, is unlikely to be the death of movements for autonomy in the region. In the
areas in northern Syria these communities
have already had to deal with military occupations, bombing from the air, massacres perpetuated by the Syrian regime
and years of deprivation. The question is
not even so much whether ISIS can take
Kobani, which they are unlikely to do, but
if they were able to, and this is a relevant
question for the Syrian regime as well,
how do they plan to control a largely hostile population of people, which may have

been displaced, but are not gone forever.
FttP: Throughout history, anarchists and
other rebels have championed those who
have turned the guns of those who support
autonomy and direct action; from the Bolsheviks to Castro and beyond. How can we
support resistance in the Middle East without falling into the trap of supporting the
newest groups of politicians and butchers?
TN: To avoid this we have to be very
clear to draw a distinction that is not often drawn: between those that we have
some form of similarity in objective, those
we can use in furtherance of an objective
(those that we can form immediate alliance with even if their immediate objectives are different) and those that we are
in open conflict with. This means breaking with the mentality of activism and
movements, breaking from the injunction
to work with others, break away from the
focus on numerical quantity, and begin to
be more grounded about our objectives and
strategic capacities.
This means that we have to draw a line between those that we work with and those
that we work parallel with, and in what
ways we work with those we work with.
On a series of levels this is a relevant
question. Most anarchists have either experienced or heard stories of liberals and
communists handing anarchists over to the
police, many of us have had confrontations with the self-appointed peace police
or with some self-righteous meeting facilitator or well meaning do-gooder. This is
not a question of doing good things, it is a
question of doing effective things. On this
level the lines can be very clear, even if
they may shift as conditions change.
But above and beyond all of this we have
to move beyond positionism; this tendency among anarchists to have to articulate the correct political line, often based
on thin and removed understandings
of events. At the point that we become
locked in this dynamic not only is there a
tendency to place capacity in actions that
are unlikely to have much impact, and are
often more militant ways of complaining
loudly, but we distract from our focus on
immediate dynamics and developing an
understanding of immediate dynamics,
and fall back into issue-based activism. It
is also on this level that we fall prey to
the “popular front;” to this tendency to
support the least of bad options, and it is
from this place that these tragedies tend to
occur, of course when mixed with a clear
sense of naivety. Now, this is not to say
that we should not engage in these sorts
of initiatives, cynically, but that the focus
of this intervention still needs to remain on strategic outcomes; we may
even get a lot out of engaging in a social
movement, but that cannot be thought
of as an injunction, a moral imperative.
The question here is not what groups we
should support, but what support means
for us, what we get out of it, how that propels our strategic trajectory forward. If it
does not contribute to our strategic ends,
whatever these may be at any given moment, then intervention is not the relevant
framework to think through this question,
and without intervention support becomes
nothing but a discursive statement. But, if
the calculation is that intervention is strategically important then by all means intervene, but at that point the question shifts
from a question of why one is intervening to how one intervenes, and that is a
question of material effectiveness, one
that we have to engage on that level.

FTTP #12 - 4 Years Later - Pg. 31

A Blast from the Recent Past
An Interview Regarding the
2012 Quebec Student Uprising
In February 2012, as the Occupy movement tapered off, a strike broke out against
austerity measures in the Québécois higher
education system. Prevented from occupying buildings as it had in 2005, the student
movement shifted to a strategy of economic
disruption: blockading businesses, interrupting conferences and tourist events, and
spreading chaos in the streets. At its peak,
the resulting unrest surpassed any protest
movement in North America for a generation.
The following is an interview with Steve
Duhamel aka “Waldo”. A frustrated exstudent, and Quebec-er.
FttP: What was the context for the massive upheavals, mobilizations, and riots
that broke out in Montreal in 2012? What
took place before these events that helped
propel them forward?
Waldo: The original context was an always rising tension between students and
the government around the tuition hike issue and a general conception of what public education should be. Kind of boring, but
it gets better. We all knew about 2 years in
advance that this tuition hike was planned,
and in the previous years/months, there
were different actions and demonstrations
to warn the government that this one will
not pass. This government, who had been
in power for 9 years, didn’t care much
about these protests and arrogantly decided
to go forward. They knew that no “political” opposition (as in the official and classical politics) could defeat them, whatever
they did, and that they had all the legitimacy to repress any form of “street politics”
that wouldn’t recognize their authority.
To get a more general overview of the
context, let’s say that what people call
society was also becoming more polarized than ever, since both political parties
running Québec have a neo-liberal rightwing program and have been alternatively
doing some shitty reforms for the past 30
years in order to save their damned economic growth. While the opposition (PQ)
was getting its popularity from being the
defenders of the French-speakers against
the Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony, they
kinda lost all of that slight legitimacy since
they’ve been doing the same shit as the
federalists from the governing PLQ. This
mostly means that social movements progressively took a distance from the Québécois Party (PQ) which itself was born out
of (the recuperation of) popular unrests in
the 1960’s. This contributed for a long time
to prevent any social upheaval, and helped
justify a lot of what some folks call “class
collaboration” between bosses and the
poor. But now, the PQ has a hard time convincing the Québécois folks that the State
can really work for them. The last time a
tuition hike led to a general student strike
was in 1996, while PQist Pauline Marois
(the one that was elected in the aftermath
of the 2012 movement) was minister of
education. Who could believe in her when
she came back to oppose Charest?
While PQ usually masks its agenda behind
a thin social-democrat veneer, the very
“liberal” PLQ openly shits on the poor and
doesn’t bother with fake public consultations to sell the province to promoters,
mining industries, fracking business, and
so on. The Liberal Party of premier Charest
came back to power in 2003, and as soon as
2005, a large student strike fought against
its plan to cut a huge part of the student

scholarship programs (that were set to be
replaced by loans, i.e. always more debts).
The 2005 strike was really inspiring in its
forms of actions, and its spirit was still very
present to a lot of the 2012 strikers (way
more than what happened in California
in 2009, for instance; to a smaller degree,
some people were inspired by what was
happening then in Chile). Upon entering
the movement, large parts of the students
already had a mistrust of the reformist federations and even of the more militant ones
like ASSÉ. Many people also knew that the
strength of the strike came from the uncontrollable multiplication of all kinds of economic and institutional disruptions. And
not from the ultra-democratic idea of unity
that would decide for any meaningful action and discourse of the movement. That
leads to your second question.
FttP: What was the relationship between
more insurrectionary anarchist/autonomous groups and the student federations?
Waldo: There wasn’t a single attitude
amongst the anarchists in relation to the
federations. Where all of them agreed to
critique even the ASSÉ (the more militant
federation that calls for free education and
some kind of self-management) on its reformist demands, a lot of anarchists, even
insurrectionary etc, thought it was cool
that ASSÉ existed, or at least the CLASSE
(which was a coalition of ASSÉ and different independent local unions) because
it made it easier to organize a large scale
mobilization, to create the event, that could
afterward be overwhelmed. On one hand,
some anarchists really think the direct-democracy model of the federation’s unionbased assemblies is valid and should only
be carried further, that the problem is mostly the lack of consciousness or radical [perspective] of its members, and they think
it’s all about radicalizing these spaces, criticizing their discourse on non-violence; a
lot of these folks kind of wish there wasn’t
a contradiction between the black bloc and
the federations. Some others also dream of
direct democracy but think we cannot hope
anything from the federations except betrayal, and therefore we should build our
own spaces and assemblies and organize/
coordinate outside of the “Rand-formula”
type mandatory unions we’re stuck with.
Attempts to create such parallel assemblies mostly failed, in 2012, except for a
small period between late May and June,
when people had these big neighborhood
assemblies born out of the massive potsand-pan marches against the “special law.”
On the other hand, other anarchist tendencies don’t believe at all in the unions as the
basis for the future anarchist society and
all of these radical democratic mythologies. While some are more into a nihilistic
perspective of the confrontation, against

any form of schooling and any possible
demands, others think it has never been a
question of being for or against the unions,
that we should just never believe in it, never
think any kind of solution can come from
there, or from school in general. It’s rather
a question of how to deal with it, how to
see the potentiality of it, beyond any moralism or radical purity; how can we compose with the federations, if they are to be
there anyway. In any case, federations are
to be considered as something alien, that
we cannot identify with, but upon which
we can intervene, we can meet, make use
of, in a way or another.
FttP: Before large scale street demonstrations began, students occupied buildings.
How did these actions pave the way for
things to come? Were these initial occupations influenced by student occupations in
the US or elsewhere?
Waldo: In fact, I wouldn’t say that 2012
was highlighted by any occupations, not
being the street itself. Some actions involved blockades of schools or public
buildings, disruption of financial centers
and such, but from what I know, none of
the actual schools in strike were really occupied. On the first day of the strike, people did take over the famous CEGEP du
Vieux-Montréal (a pre-university college
downtown) whose occupations were once
considered the stronghold of the student
movement in the previous student strikes.
But this time, hundreds of fully-equipped
robocops came right away to remind the
youth that revolution was no picnic and
kicked their asses out of there. About 45
people were jailed and legally banned from
the protests for months. The others were
dispersed with concussion grenades and
pepper-spay. The college was then locked
out for the next six months of the strike.
This doesn’t mean people didn’t want to
occupy, or that it wasn’t part of our mythology, but the facts are that people didn’t
even use many university spaces in the
daytime to meet and organize. While in
2005 a lot of people would organize sleepins on different campuses, and cook tons
of food to sustain the occupation and make
it possible for people to stand together on
the frontline, the 2012 strike mostly happened in the street, with people moving all
the time, endlessly marching until burning
themselves out— when they wouldn’t burn
anything else. Yes, occupation of the street,
but I would add: mobile occupation, in two
different ways. 1.) There were very few
attempts to take outdoor public space and
keep it, and it was never aimed to last more
than a couple hours (I heard about an “occupy” camp outside U.de M., but it didn’t
work out). 2.) Outside of that, we could say
that it really was the students themselves
that were occupied, busy as they were with

facebook and twitter and all that shit all the
time. No doubt, the strike was really “occupied” by all these new “communication”
devices, livestream and everything...
FttP: Anarchists and insurrectionary autonomists promoted their ideas through
publications and saw many students join
in their ranks during the yearly March
15th protests against police brutality. Can
you talk about how insurrectionary antiauthoritian ideas were spread, and took on
new currency during this time of struggle?
For instance, anarchists and insurrectionists have talked a lot about how the use of
masks spread through the long process of
militants doing it during demos/riots, and
also explained why they were doing it in
conversations and flyers.
Waldo: I’d say that, as opposed to previous movements, this strike was amazingly
rich with radical literature, specifically in
the couple months leading to it, but then
almost nothing consistent was really produced during the movement. It was as if
every political tendency, anarchist circle
or whatever (often born out of the 2005
movement), had their own publication
ready before the strike in order to set things
clear, to share what they had learned from
the past struggles and go forward with a
couple propositions.
Once the strike was launched, very few
texts were circulating outside worthless
opinions on the internet. Still, from what
I recall, at one point (after a demo where
some excited douche bags had beaten the
shit out of a couple of black clad kids) we
saw at least half a dozen different flyers
criticizing the authoritarian pacifist ideology that undermined solidarity amongst
demonstrators. As for the masks, more than
any literature, I’d say it’s the practice itself
of wearing them, and the cops practice of
systematically filming protesters, that led
to widespread use of masks. The same for
the March 15th demo, I think it got bigger
that year because of the context, where a
lot of people were experiencing daily repression by angry cops and a guy lost an
eye like 3 days before the demo. Even the
mayor advertised for the demo on TV, telling people not to go!
FttP: What led to the student movement
spilling out in the wider social terrain?
Waldo: To make it short, I’d say that first,
there was already popular support of the
students, that was made visible by the
widespread use of the “red square” pin by
millions of people and also by the 500,000
people marches like the one on March 26th,
where the majority wasn’t even student,
and showed the growing unpopularity of
the Charest government. People literally
had enough, and students were seen as the
FTTP #12 - Montreal - Pg. 32

only sector of society that could massively mobilize, since all workplace
unions and work laws make it almost
impossible to build a real massive
and coordinated union-based general
strike.
A lot of people that weren’t students
didn’t want to get too into the movement since they thought it wasn’t
theirs, so they remained in a solidarity
position, but what made a clear difference was the insolent and arrogant
attitude of prime minister Charest, his
constant provocations and specifically
the declaration of a “special law,” in
the night between the 17th and 18th
of May, that made demonstrations illegal and added expensive fines for
any acts of striking, blockading, occupation and so on. This law also locked
out students from their schools until the
end of summer to allow businesses to hire
summer jobbers, and incidentally produce
a demobilizing effect, since there was no
more university to block. Maybe worst of
all, the law came with the announcement
of anticipated elections in the first week
of September. The first weeks following
the declaration of the dirty law saw an unprecedented social reaction: daily demonstrations in different towns and neighborhoods, with thousands of people defying
the State; you would see your unknown
neighbors smiling at you, chanting along
the common motto: “The special law, we
don’t give a damn!”
But then, after I’d say the week of the
Grand Prix, (around June 10th), people
slowly started to take a break, go on vacation to rest until, we all thought, the real
war was to begin. The government forced
schools to reopen around August 13th,
starting with the CEGEPs, but even with
all the motivation of the most determined
strikers, a lot of assemblies finally and sadly voted with a slight majority against the
continuation of the strike. Many students
either got scared to lose their semester, and
others thought it was pointless to remain
on strike while there was going to be an
election soon which meant there was no
government to deal with yet. That fucked
us real bad. A lot of leftists started to say
we should spend our energies mobilizing
for the elections, so that Charest would be
kicked out. That was also a big reason why
popular support got weaker; a lot of people
thought we should vote and drop our bricks
and stones.
Then, what we saw was no surprise. PQ
got elected – with only a minority of the
assembly - that silly Marois became premier and she did proclaim the abrogation
of the special law and temporarily canceled
the tuition hike. But that was just bullshit,
it took a couple weeks before she said we
would have to negotiate some kind of tuition hike sometime soon and she didn’t
revoke all the municipal laws that were
declared during the movement— e.g. making it criminal to wear masks and to march
without permission from the cops. The
most ridiculous part of this history is that
Marois, who survived an assassination attempt by an Anglo redneck freak
gone mad the night she got elected,
didn’t politically survive the reactionary populist move she made the year
after, aimed at imposing her “chart
of values,” supposedly to protect the
Québécois “secular” culture against
foreign influences. So multi-culturalist
PLQ came back to power less than
a year and a half after the end of the
strike that our funny syndicalist friends
claimed was victorious!
FttP: During Occupy in the US, we
largely saw that when the state attacked, the movement often quickly
folded. Whereas in Montreal, we

saw people go on the offensive. Was this
because people found that they could win
street battles? As in the famous scenes of
people making the pigs turn tail and flee?
Waldo: Québécois or Montrealers aren’t
more courageous, or even more anarchist
than anywhere else. The end of the movement has proven that. Only, there is the
specificity of the situation: an overly and
counter-productively arrogant government in front of a massive and determined
movement that leaves a lot of autonomy to
its base, all of that in a relatively tight-knit
society where anything echoes really fast.
This might be an explanation as to why
the Anglo campuses weren’t as mobilized,
even if they were, more than ever before.
People were pumped by Charest and the
cops, who underestimated the determination of the students and their popular support (politics is often a gamble). This easily
led to an escalation, were people saw they
were strong and felt it was OK to kick a
few cops asses.
FttP: Can you talk about how resistance to
Plan Nord brought anarchist, student, and
indigenous struggles together? Can you
explain what Plan Nord is and why people
were interested in destroying it?
Waldo: Plan Nord is just the name for a
new phase of in-your-face colonization of
the North-Eastern part of the continent,
that is claimed by the colonial states of
Québec and Canada. It’s hard to tell how
seriously the average students marching
against Charest took Plan Nord, or how
many of those same students stormed the
Plan Nord convention because of anti-colonial and ecologist convictions or whatever. Of course, there is an official sympathy
amongst the movement toward these struggles, but I think the disruption of the congress and the riot that occurred was made
possible because everybody knew it would
make Charest angry, since Plan Nord was
like his “little thing” he was so proud of,
and that every decent person thinks it’s
robbery. I still think that it’s in these kind
of social upheavals that struggles that appear to be different show how much they
are related, and impact one another. It’s still
because of the strike they were involved in
that many people got interested in native

peoples’ struggles, and specifically in the
fight against Plan Nord.
FttP: When the government outlawed protests of more than 50 people, the movement
grew and more people joined. Community
popular assemblies sprung up. Can you
talk about these gatherings? How widespread were they?
Waldo: I’ve talked about that earlier, but
let’s say theses assemblies were spontaneously created in at least a dozen neighborhoods of Montreal, and for about a month,
they would meet around once a week, in a
park or a community space, and, depending
on the neighborhood, there were between
30 and 300 people. This number slowly
went down as the summer came, and also,
we must admit, as they got formalized and
semi-institutionalized. What was interesting is how much different the organizational issue differed from one neighborhood to another. I mean, some were super
obsessed with structures and sophisticated
mechanisms that are supposed to help prevent domination and oppressive patterns
in groups, others were more relaxed, but
weren’t necessarily more effective, some
would focus more on community issues
while some remained in a position of solidarity with the student movement.
But yeah, too little too late, I suppose. I
think it would have been really different if
theses assemblies would have started earlier in the movement, and more than everything (and more realistically), if the strike
had continued in September. It would have
totally changed the quality of the movement. I mean, it could have opened a place
where the union assemblies wouldn’t be
the main space to discuss and organize the
struggle, and it could have spread more
easily to non-student issues and places.
The elections really killed all these potentialities.
FttP: In an interview with Submedia, one
anarchist participant talked about the use
of projectiles in creating/defending space
from the police, and the ability that physical attack gave people in expanding the
conflictual nature of the strike. Can you
speak to this?

Waldo: I don’t know what to say about
that. Is it the expansion of the conflict
that makes it possible to attack, or the
opposite? Is it going both ways? The
ability to attack didn’t always mean
ability to get away with it. A lot of
people got badly wounded with nothing much to show for it. There has been
a lot of talking amongst anarchists in
the last 15 years about “diversity of
tactics,” but very few people thought
about diversity of strategies, leaving
this problem to union bosses, Leninists
and social-democrats. And to the police,
and the capitalists. Let’s say there is a
confrontation. What is the space that
we create, that we defend, while doing
what we do? It’s not always quite clear.
I’m totally not against all kinds of direct action, but I think sometimes there
is a dangerous belief that direct action
is good in itself, while it can often make
us weaker. Black bloc was once a tactic,
nowadays it often looks like an ideology,
an identity. We should never denounce
comrades who engage in this type of action and we should be ready, as much as we
can, to protect them against cops and violent pacifists, but I think “attacking” can
never become a strategy in itself; can never
replace the need for a strategy. This said,
the question should never be whether we
attack or not, but rather how do we do it,
when and where. What makes it possible to
attack in a way that gives us more strength
instead of isolating us? These are serious
questions.
We should not neglect the anxiety that direct actions create amongst the activists
themselves and their friends, when it’s
done without thinking, because it’s seen
as the radical good. It’s not just attacking
that makes people able and willing to attack, that expands the conflictuality of a
movement, it’s the strength that we build
through all kinds of links, shared experiences, shared spaces and materials, tools
and stories, and languages, shared love and
thrust, etc. All kinds of things also come
into play when it’s time to fight, which
constitutes our strength, and that we cannot put at risk for a matter of purity or for
a romantic belief in the power of action.
An action is not good because it’s against
the right enemy nor because it has good intentions: it’s only good when it makes us
stronger. To the moralism of pathological
pacifists, we should not impose another
kind of moralism.
FttP: What does the future hold for those
in Montreal? Will we see continued unrest
at the universities and beyond?
Waldo: Everything is possible. The tuition hike is showing up again and the
federations are already mobilized. The
experience of 2012 is still fresh and a lot
of people don’t want to lose what has been
learned and built. The repressive machine
is better prepared, and more determined
than ever, it’s hard to say if people are too.
There is already some organizing being
done outside the unions, and the electoral
threat should not be part of the play this
time. It’s hard to tell if there will be as
much popular support, but there are
apparently more chances that we will
see different unions from the public
sector go on strike in the next months
(even the cops are currently protesting
against the Québec government). I still
think we should not hope for anything
and just do what we have to do. Things
always happen anyway, it’s just a matter of staying ready.
More on the 2012
Student Strike:
www.crimethinc.com/texts/recent
features/montreal1.php
In French:
faire-greve.blogspot.ca/
FTTP #12 - Montreal - Pg. 33

Links

research / wake up / find each other

Interesting Websites:
325
325.nostate.net

Intercontinental Cry:
intercontinentalcry.org

The Anarchist Library
theanarchistlibrary.org

Fireworks
fireworksbayarea.com

News for Anarchists in the
Pacific North West
pugetsoundanarchists.org

Contra Info
(English Version)
en.contrainfo.espiv.net

Crimethinc
crimethinc.com

LibCom
libcom.org

Anti-State STL
antistatestl.wordpress.com

The Torch:
Anti-Fascist Network
torchantifa.org

Prole:
For the Angry Wage Worker
prole.info

War on Society
waronsociety.noblogs.org
Little Black Cart
littleblackcart.com
The Base / Brooklyn
thebasebk.org

Interesting Books:
At Daggers Drawn
Anonymous
Anything Can Happen
Fredy Perlman
Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
The Technological Society
Jacques Ellul
Guns, Germs, & Steel
Jared Diamond
Against the Logic
of Submission
Wolfi Lanstreicher

“NOT ONLY DO WE DESIRE TO
CHANGE OUR LIVES IMMEDIATELY,
IT IS THE CRITERION BY WHICH WE
ARE SEEKING OUR ACCOMPLICES.”

FTTP #12 - Links - Pg. 34

PICK A SIDE &

ACT IT OUT