War in the Streets: Tactical Lessons from the Global Civil War 2009-2016

“How is it to be fun?’ first appeared in Sept 2012 on

anarchistnews.org

Signals of Disorder: Sowing Anarchy in the Metropolis

first appeared in August of 2010 on anarchistnews.org.

The Riot or the Attack? Solidarity and questions for US

Anarchists after May Day appeared in February 2011 on

anarchistnews.org

“Yes, And: Results from the North American Contagious

Antagonisms Inquiry” first appeared online in April 2012,

attributed only to the “North American Society for the Ad-

vancement of Criminal Science”.

“Reflections on Violence” first appeared on the French

website Lundimatin (Lundi.am) on April 18, 2016, during a

rolling wave of revolt against the El Khomri Labor Reforms.

Translated by Ill Will Editions, based off an anonymous

draft submitted to anarchistnews.org. Thanks to whoever

posted that.

“Build the Hacienda, Burn Down the Palaces” appeared on

Lundimatin in April 2016. Translation by Edicioneschafa.

wordpress.com (thanks!) with revisions by Ill Will Editions.

“The Unassignable Riot” first appeared on Lundimatin in

late June, 2016. Translation by Ill Will Editions.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

The idea for this zine was to collect a series of situated and

intelligent reflections on black blocs, street clashes and related

tactics of confrontation. Each of the texts collected here tries to

spell out in concrete ways what seems like it has worked and what

hasn’t, while trying to be clear about how each tactic relates to the

larger insurrectional process.

Given the current US climate of increasingly open social hostility

and the more ‘mass’ nature of some of the rage already foresee-

able in the coming years, the time seemed right to assemble a few

strategic pathmarks to help us orient and operate effectively on

shifting sands.

While the texts emerge from very different moments and places,

what links them is the effort to examine the limits and poten-

tials of street combat in their specific context (which was, broadly

speaking: the waning alter globalization malaise of the late 2000’s;

Occupy & the global “squares-movement” sequence of 2011-12;

and the 2016 Loi Travail revolts in France).

As one of our authors puts it, “the practice of conspiracy, of stra-

tegic thought, of breathing together, must be a commons of skills

and new forms that we all draw from.” We hope this zine can serve

that purpose, in however small a way.

Ill Will Editions

Chicago, Dec. 2016

HOW IS IT TO BE FUN?

(anonymous)

It’s been almost a year since Occupy Wall Street began and quickly

evolved into a nation wide series of events. In that time we have wit-

nessed an increase of attention and interest in anarchism and black

bloc activity. We are excited about all the new arrivals but are also con-

cerned for their safety. There are many texts available about black bloc

tactics as well as about how to minimize your risk of experiencing harm

while engaging in these kinds of actions, but these texts are largely

only available through obscure publications and websites. We wonder if

things would have been different for the Cleveland five if they had been

able to access some of this information prior to winding up in a police

trap. The following is a letter to the new arrival, may it find you well and

be of some use to you as you experiment with new means of approach-

ing freedom.

So you caught wind of some of the media hype about the black

bloc or maybe you saw us at a protest doing what we do and now

you want in. Sweet, welcome! We’re not an organization so you

don’t have to sign up anywhere, we are people all over the world

who employ a certain tactic against domination when we see fit

to do so and we’re excited to meet you. Together we’ll create and

destroy history. However, before crossing that line into illegality

with us there are some things you could benefit from knowing and

considering.

Alright, first things first, Security Culture.1 Security Culture is ex-

actly what it sounds like, it’s when we adopt a set of habits and

practices that allow us to create and maintain a culture in which

we keep ourselves and each other secure from police repression.

Obviously, we hate the police and the police hate us. We attack

them when we can and they attack us when they can. This does

not only take place in the arena of protest. When we’re not openly

fighting them in the streets we are doing everything we can to

undermine their authority and make their jobs more difficult. We

spread anti-police propaganda, we collect and exploit information

about them, we clandestinely sabotage their infrastructure, we fig-

ure out ways to solve our own problems and keep ourselves and our

neighbors safe without them, and in rare cases throughout history

we’ve even murdered some of the bastards! And likewise, when the

police are not beating, gassing and arresting us at protests they’re

doing everything they can2 to put us in jail. They3 listen to our

phones, read our text messages, infiltrate our events, surveil our

spaces4, record keystrokes on our computers, plant evidence, raid

our homes, force our friends to give up information on us, send

undercover agents to entrap us5, and in some rare cases throughout

history they’ve even murdered some of us6 bastards. The State has

and uses many agents towards this end; they’re expanding their

1 http://security.resist.ca/personal/culture.shtml

2 http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-a-murder-of-

crows#toc45

3 http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2012/05/29/inside-the-fbi-entrap-

ment-strategy/

4 http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=9755

5 http://snitchwire.blogspot.com/2010/07/police-infiltrate-anarchists-and.

html

6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m070JhUt6SM

technologies7, developing their tactics and getting paid well to do

so.

This brings us to the most basic element of Security Culture, keep-

ing your goddamn mouth shut. This means not talking to people

about illegal things you’ve done to prove you’re cool. It sounds easy

but a lot of people fuck this up. The only people you talk to about

sketchy stuff are the people who you’re doing it with (those people

are your affinity group, we’ll explain what that is in a second). It

also means never talking to police or feds for any reason ever; the

only thing you will ever have to say to them is “I want to speak

to an attorney”. And the second most basic element of Security

Culture is staying off their radar. This means being careful of what

you say on your cell phone and where you bring it, the same goes

for email and what you look up online. It means not announcing

your intentions to overthrow the government via violent means

during and Occupy General Assembly in Cleveland. The whole

thing basically boils down to being careful that the government

has no idea what sneaky plans you have cooking up in your head,

you don’t want to go to prison for years BEFORE you even got to

burn a bank just cause you let it slip to the wrong person you’re

going to bring Molotovs to the party.

You’ve probably heard all that before but it never hurts to hear it

again. Even experienced criminals can sometimes find themselves

caught in police traps, and inexperienced criminals often fare little

better than fish in a barrel. Type Cleveland Bridge 5 into an inter-

net search engine to find out what can go wrong when inexperi-

enced people allow a sketchy dude they just met into their affinity

group.

Now for some basics about a key elementary component of the

black bloc: the Affinity Group.8 If you haven’t got one yet don’t

worry, you can still riot, it just won’t be nearly as much fun or

as destructive. An affinity group is basically three to eight people

who trust each other well enough to get their hands dirty together.

Don’t just grab a hold of the first few anarchists you meet and form

7 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

8 http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Anonymous__The_Affini-

ty_Group.html

an affinity group. These should be people you know well, preferably

people you like and get along with. Friendship is helpful in these

groups for developing bonds of trust, but remember that someone

who is an awesome party buddy might be a total liability in an

arrest scenario, and likewise someone who is totally solid, down,

and capable might be a complete bore to hang out with. It can

also be helpful if you share subcultural roots like punk or hip hop

or fly fishing enthusiasm or whatever. This is not because a shared

subcultural identity is in any way a magic defense against betrayal,

but because it makes it easier for you to find out about someone’s

personal history. You can find out through friends of friends what

this person was up to before you met them last year. Were they

volunteering at an infoshop somewhere with people whose friends

you’re acquainted with, or were they getting busted with a bunch of

drugs and mysteriously doing no time for it only to show up later

in activist circles trying to get people to do illegal actions? Also

it’s best to avoid having people in your group who are mentally or

emotionally unstable, as well as people who are addicted to drugs

or alcohol. You’re not going to get much sleep if someone from

your group gets busted and they’re sitting in a jail cell with a head

full of information the police want to mine and they’re getting

dope sick or having a panic attack. You might also want to be cau-

tious of committing crimes with rich kids. It could be very easy for

someone to decide that their rebellious phase is over when they are

forced to make a choice between going to jail, or enjoying wealth

and leisure. For more on why you should avoid doing actions with

drug addicts or rich kids look up ‘Jake Ferguson’9 and ‘Jennifer

Kolar10’ on the internet.

Once you’ve gotten with a sick tight clique and are ready to go all

out, it’s probably a good idea to start small. Before paintbombing11

the face shields of a line of riot police together, you can instead go

out at night and do some wheat pasting or graffiti together. After

that try moving on to more risky nighttime vandalism, a smashed

9 http://snitchwire.blogspot.com/2011/04/lead-elf-infor-

mant-jake-ferguson.html

10 http://snitchwire.blogspot.com/2011/09/earth-first-journal-pub-

lishes-giant.html

11 http://www.woostercollective.com/post/wooster-how-to...-6-ro-

busts-how-to-make-a-paint-bomb

ATM here a slashed cop tire there, use your imagination. You’ll get

a better idea of who you’re working with and whether or not you

want them by your side when the stakes are higher. A great way for

you and your group to deepen your knowledge of each other is to

do a reading group12 together. Not only is this helpful for expand-

ing and deepening your own ideas about why you wish to destroy

the current order, but you also learn important stuff about who is

in your group. Someone who is an adrenaline junky just in it for

the kicks will often have little interest in reading and discussing

ideas. This person is a liability because if they are motivated not by

a desire to resist domination but only by a desire to get their pulse

up, then the likelihood that they’ll roll on you when the fun part

is over and they’re facing charges increases greatly. Often, but not

always, an informant or provocateur will also have no interest in

developing and expanding their analysis and will only be interested

in pushing you to commit crimes.

There are no easy answers13 for dealing with snitches and infiltra-

tors. It’s important to out snitches publicly so they can’t just move

onto their next victims, but before outing someone as a snitch or

an undercover you want to be completely sure which is usually

difficult. If you get too hasty you could end up needlessly ruining

friendships and reputations just because you let your paranoia get

the better of you. It’s a good idea to discuss your suspicions with

others and get some feedback; you might find out there is a reason-

able explanation for what was making you suspicious. But if some-

one is acting in a way that makes you uncomfortable and you’re

having a hard time trusting them, just stop associating with them,

they can’t entrap you if you don’t plan or commit crimes with them.

There have been instances where people have collected information

about people they’ve suspected of being infiltrators and found out

for sure, like when Peter Bohmer14 managed to get a hold of the

parents of a suspected informant on the telephone, he pretended to

be an insurance salesman and they mentioned that their son gets

insurance through his employer, he then asked who their son was

employed by and they proudly told him that their son is an FBI

agent! There have been other times when informants have been so

12 http://theanarchistlibrary.org/

13 http://www.icdc.com/%7Epaulwolf/cointelpro/coinwcar3.htm

14 http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/peterbohmer

obvious about it that there was never a period of doubt. It would be

cool if we dealt with snitches the way the mob does but so far as I

know, no one snitching on anarchists has wound up in stitches yet.

If you have to, go it alone for your first few times out with the

black bloc.15 Keep in mind that even though you won’t have an

affinity group watching your back or helping you to pull off some

of the more exciting things we black bloc’s have been known for,

you at least know your group isn’t compromised. Patience is key

with forming a crew. Choosing the right affinity group could be

the difference between a series of exciting adventures in your war

on Control or an excruciating sentence in a prison cell. While it is

important to stay snitch free and safe, there’s really not too much

to worry about so long as you keep your senses sharp and exercise

good judgment. For every agent or snitch out there trying to bust

you there are a hundred people like you who want to destroy this

world and experience joy and freedom in the process. You’ll end up

meeting just the right people and you’ll be doing this for a long

time, I promise.

So how do you find out where the next rowdy action is going to

take place? There’s a number of ways to find out about upcoming

Black Bloc marches and/or riots. The best and easiest way is to

be in a community of anarchists - don’t worry you’ll meet them

(although after a while you might wish you hadn’t, I won’t lie to

you, we’re a strange bunch!). But barring that, you could look for

call-outs for upcoming black bloc actions on websites like [its-

goingdown.org] or Infoshop News16, but you might find it easier

to try to connect with anarchists in your region through more local

sites like Puget Sound Anarchists for Seattle or Bay of Rage for the

SF-Oakland bay area or Sabotage Media for Eastern Canada. If you

live in a big city try and look for posters at anarchist spaces or just

around town announcing any upcoming anarchist demonstrations.

You can usually tell whether or not it’s going to be a riot based on

the language in the call-out and the imagery in the posters. There

is no point in going to a liberal protest march with very few other

anarchists and proceeding to vandalize ATMs and fight the cops.

It’s much better when it’s 300 or more of us chasing off the riot

15 https://vimeo.com/25952876

16 http://news.infoshop.org/

police17 and helping each other loot and burn the property of the

ruling class. Again be patient and vigilant because there’s gonna

be some crazy shit going down as the system continues to crumble

and you won’t want to miss it!

Now let’s say you know the date, time and location of the anti-cap-

italist march. You know there’s going to be a black bloc18 and you’re

either going it alone or with your affinity group. You’re bound and

determined to get fierce against oppression, but do you know the

terrain? You might consider walking, skating or biking around the

area beforehand to take it in and familiarize yourself with its fea-

tures. This could include noting the locations of Corporate targets,

banks, State buildings like courts and probation offices, as well as

other insidious institutions like anti-gay mega churches or white

supremacist meeting places. Note whether or not these places are

near the march routes. Try to locate CCTV surveillance cameras,19

escape routes, good places to hide things before the demonstration,

rooftops with quick and easy access, bars or coffee shops you can

dip into. Keep an eye out for weapons caches, maybe a hotel’s foun-

tain is full of heavy river rocks, or perhaps there’s a construction

site guarded by a rickety chain link fence that’s full of rubble and

rebar. Take note of whether it’s on a hill or not, what the weath-

er will be like and anything and everything you can think of. If

there is a lot of hills try to remember where the dumpsters are,

those things can get rolling pretty fast with the help of gravity and

whatever they crash into is going to feel it. Captain Obvious gets

caught, so look sharp, and try to not act suspicious.

So now you know the area and the demonstration is still a few days

away, what are you going to do during it? If you’re alone you might

want to start small. You might have fun printing or photocopying

a leaflet you made for the demonstration or printing already made

ones from anarchist websites. If you size it so you can cut the paper

into fourths with the text and images on the front and back, you

can fill your backpack with these and throw them up into the air

when people start breaking shit20 and that way the gawkers can

17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaiTexJPtiI

18 http://www.infoshop.org/amp/bgp/BlackBlockPapers2.pdf

19 https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2012/04/494643.html

20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPjMs4VFa9g

be informed of why this thing they just witnessed took place. You

might have noticed that there is a staircase to a roof overlooking

the march route and you took steps to make sure it was open during

the march so you could run up those stairs and make it rain propa-

ganda leaflets as the march passes. You could also shoot off some

fireworks or hang a banner21 from up there. Any of these things can

serve the purpose of both communicating to others and raising the

excitement level of the march, which is important because a bored

march is a vulnerable march. Maybe you just want to show up

with a can of spray paint express your ideas22 all over the walls of a

city in the midst of revolt. You might consider bringing something

sharp you can use to slash the tires of police cruisers or corporate

media vans before blending back into the bloc. Perhaps you’ll bring

a hammer, crow bar, U-lock, plastic bag of rocks, a chain or some

other blunt instrument you can use to smash capital (literally) and

or protect yourself and others from police attacks. Remember to

keep these items concealed from the cops when they’re lining both

sides of the march looking for troublemakers like you, or you can

hide your heavy wooden pole in plain sight by attaching a black

flag to it and waving it proudly! (A flag pole by the way will go

through a window easily if instead of swinging it like an axe or

a baseball bat you use both hands and jab with the end of it.) It’s

also helpful to know that the flow and mood of the march at some

point might call for mobility, defense from police attack, and to

not to stick with preplanned march routes. When this happens be

ready to use the forces of spontaneity and improvisation.

Now let’s say you do have an affinity group and don’t need to act

alone. What can groups do together that you can’t do by your-

self? Well, for starters, you can act as organs within the bloc.23 You

could be medics, window smashers, paint bombers, graffiti writers,

wheat-pasters, scouts, a communications team, a shields team,24 a

video team, looters, or you could just hold a sweet banner25 you and

your friends made. Your crew could take on the task of building

barricades with whatever is around to impede the police. Newspa-

21 http://pugetsoundanarchists.org/node/476

22 http://anarchistnews.org/content/slogans-yo

23 http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/pastfeatures/blocs.php

24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46UeXGhvaTI

25 http://fuckyeahanarchistbanners.tumblr.com/

per boxes, trash cans, tables from fancy restaurants, or dumpsters

(lit or unlit, your choice) can all be used to slow the pigs’ roll with

little effort. Some clever graffiti during the May 68’ riots in Paris26

read, “Barricades close the street, but open the way” referring to

their use of cars to block roads in their informed push towards

freedom. Even though the demonstration you’re planning to at-

tend probably won’t involve burning barricades or hanging the last

capitalist with the guts of the last bureaucrat, the point is that it is

a good idea to have a game plan.

Police and Feds call the part where you and your crew come up

with said game plan as ‘the conspiratorial stage of a crime’, so it’s

important to do this part carefully. Many arrests happen because of

mistakes people made while putting their plan together. So watch

what you say on the phone, or what you look up on your comput-

er. Don’t buy sketchy things on your credit cards or from a place

near where you live. Before excitedly hashing out your menacing

plans with your affinity group make sure you’re someplace where

you’re not going to be heard. It could be a good idea to ditch your

phones and go for a walk in the park, or on a hiking trail just to be

sure that your conversation isn’t under surveillance. Not that you’re

going to be doing anything larger than Black Bloc but when Fox

News27 uses “Black Bloc” and “Al’Queda” in the same sentence it

makes sense to take precautions.

Now that the big day is coming you might be thinking ‘what do I

wear’?28 Obviously you want a black jacket with a hood to hide your

hair and something to cover your face. A black ski mask will cover

more of your face than a black bandana will but you also might be

the only one there wearing a ski mask and will therefore be easier

to single out. It’s probably best to go with a solid black bandana

or pulled-up black neck tube (solid black means no pictures or de-

signs printed on it) and maybe some dark sunglasses. Underneath

your black party clothes should be some normal-flauge, something

you can blend into an unmasked crowd with after you’re done tear-

ing shit up. You want to look like a yuppie, a college student -a lib-

26 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/

27 http://anarchistnews.org/content/men-black-violent-agenda

28 http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2008/10/11/fashion-tips-for-the-

brave/

eral peacenick- someone the police aren’t going to think to search

for the hammer that just smashed that ATM ten minutes earlier.

Maybe wear a nice button up, or an Obama 2012 shirt, or a preppy

blouse. At this point you might be wondering, do I just show up

to the march already in bloc? No. Have your black bloc clothes in

your backpack ready to put on when you start to see other people

mask up, if you show up to the bloc and everyone is already masked

then go inside the crowd (these are your friends) and mask up, if

not, then duck down behind a car or something and quickly assem-

ble your ensemble. The reason you duck low behind something is

so there aren’t photographs of you bloc-ing up that can be used to

connect you with all the crazy shit you did that’s featured on the

next days’ front page. Something not so obvious to some that the

police use to sort out the differences in the black bloc are shoes and

backpacks. Insurrectionary anarchists in Chile29 have dealt with

this by wearing their hoodies over their backpacks and covering

their shoes with plastic grocery bags so they don’t have to throw

them away afterwards. Maybe showing up to your first or second

riot with plastic bags on your shoes isn’t the best idea, but it does

gives you an insight in the ways the police police the bloc. Some-

times police will kettle and mass arrest entire crowds, if for some

reason you can’t get away make sure you do not get arrested with

your party clothes on you or in your back pack. Mass arrests take

a long time to execute, giving you plenty of time to ditch anything

sketchy you’re still carrying.

This might be a good time to go over body armor. Unless you plan

on confronting the police head on with sticks, shields and helmets

along with thousands of other people in the streets all day long,

which does happen but not often (enough), you probably don’t

need it. If you’re new to this whole riot thing, try to wear things

that help you remain agile and reflexive to your surroundings; al-

ways remain ready to run, attack, defend, de-arrest30, disperse and

blend in. You’ve probably seen many of us pick up tear gas canisters

and throw them back the way they came. Well those things will

burn your hands so we do this with gloves, heavy duty gloves sto-

len from Corporate chain stores, like just about everything we arm

29 http://crimethinc.com/movies/chicago.html

30 www.portlandoccupier.org/2012/02/28/defensive-black-bloc-tac-

tics/

ourselves with, even computers and video cameras. If you think

you might find yourself in a situation of prolonged conflict in tear

gas, a gas mask is handy to have and if that fails lemon juice and

apple cider vinegar on a black bandanna pre-sealed in a ziploc bag

will help counter the effects. During the December 2008 riots in

Greece, people neutralized the tear gas in the air by setting fire to

cars, dumpsters, and whatever else was around to burn up the gas,

while the jury’s still out on the scientific merit of these anecdotes,

word on the streets of Athens is it works. However, it’s usually a

bad idea to play with fire outside of the context of total open in-

surrection in the streets. If you find yourself in something like the

92’ LA riots, or the above mentioned Greek insurrection, then sure

go for it, but if it’s forty people in hoodies breaking away from an

anti- war march, then maybe don’t up the ante so much.

So the big day is here! You’re so glad you went to bed early last

night, but you’re so nervous you wanna throw up. Well I’m glad you

noticed because on a day like today it’s really important to listen

to your body. It’s normal to feel some butterflies but if you’re gut

tells you something is Totally Wrong: listen to it. This might mean

ditching your super sketchy plan and just going and playing it by

ear, seeing how the day unfolds and striking only if an opportunity

arises. Even if you decide to commit no crimes at all, just being an-

other body in the crowd dressed in black is helpful, the more of you

there are the harder it is for the police to single anyone out. Try to

have a Plan B scenario worked out beforehand in case one of you

doesn’t feel up to it. Make sure to stay well hydrated throughout

the day and avoid eating huge meals. Have a lite meal before leav-

ing home and eat small amounts of food periodically throughout

the day, think apples and protein bars. Also do some stretching;

you’re going to be on your feet all day so you want to feel limber

and agile. Make sure you and your friends look inconspicuous on

your way to the demonstration. Arrive 5 to 10 minutes later than

it officially starts, avoid police lines, and find your people. It’s cus-

tomary for at least one person to raise a black flag high so that

others can find the black bloc before the demo starts.

So what ends up happening? Maybe nothing memorable. Maybe

you just go home with blistered feet and no cool stories. Maybe

you all just get beaten and arrested. Or maybe you start a fight that

sets off something big and the police flee in terror while you and

your friends burn the banks and loot the shops. Whatever happens

remember, we don’t do this because we believe we have a road map

out or a blueprint for a better world, we know that any one who

claims such absurdities is a lying politician. We do this because

capitalism has created a world here and now that has nothing for

us and this is just one way our deep and total desire to destroy that

world can manifest itself materially. We don’t believe in waiting31

for some magic moment to strike. The system perpetuates itself by

controlling you, promising you a future so long as you politely en-

dure a miserable present that seems to never end. When we resist

their control the present becomes ours for as long as we can keep

it. This is the state of exception, this is what we want to create and

expand. We might never end up expanding it into perpetuity, but

we don’t see that as a reason to simply accept the conditions of the

nightmare we’re currently living. We refuse to go down without a

fight.

Be dangerous and stay safe. We’ll see you in the streets.

ATTACK!32

31 http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sasha-k-some-notes-on-in-

surrectionary-anarchism

32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_ZNE6E3jJU

In an article in the recent book, We Are an Image from the Future:

the Greek Revolt of December 2008, I briefly made a point that a

friend convinced me needs to be elaborated. The idea is that of

“signals of disorder,” and their importance in spreading rebellion.

As far as Greece is concerned, the argument is that by carrying

out attacks — primarily smashings and Molotov attacks against

banks and police stations, which constitute the most obvious sym-

bols of capitalist exploitation and State violence for Greek society

— insurrectionary anarchists created signals of disorder that acted

as subversive seeds. Even though most people did not agree with

these attacks at the time, they lodged in their consciousness, and

at a moment of social rupture, people adopted these forms as their

own tools, to express their rage when all the traditionally valid

forms of political activity were inadequate.

An interesting feature of these signals is that they will be met with

fear and disapproval by the same people who may later participate

in creating them. This is no surprise. In the news polls of democra-

cy, the majority always cast their vote against the mob. In the day

to day of normality, people have to betray themselves to survive.

They have to follow those they disbelieve, and support what they

cannot abide. From the safety of their couch they cheer for Bonny

and Clyde, and on the roadside they say “Thank you, officer” to the

policeman who writes them a speeding ticket. This well managed

schizophrenia is the rational response to life under capitalism. The

fact that our means of survival make living impossible necessitates

a permanent cognitive dissonance.

Thus, the sensible behavior is not to reason with the masses, to

share the facts that will disprove the foundations of capitalism,

facts they already have at their fingertips, and it is not to act ap-

propriately, to put on a smiley face, and expect our popularity to

increase incrementally. The sensible thing to do is to attack Au-

thority whenever we can.

Attacking is not distinct from communicating the reasons for our

attacks, or building the means to survive, because we survive in

order to attack, and we attack in order to live, and we communicate

because communicating attacks the isolation, and isolation makes

living impossible.

Why do signals of disorder constitute attacks on capitalism and

the State? After all, the police are basically the punching bag, the

shock absorbers, for the State, and one of the limitations of the

insurrection in Greece was that anarchists focused too much on

police, rather than on the State in all its manifestations. And what

about smashing insured bank windows? Creating a signal of dis-

order could even involve mere spray-painting, or hanging out on

street corners. Isn’t this just the ritualization of aimless and impo-

tent rebellion, as the naysayers are so quick to say?

Turns out, the devil is in the details. In a way, the idea of signals

of disorder is an inversion of the Broken Windows Theory of po-

licing. Wilson and Kelling’s article, “Broken Windows,” first ad-

vanced the policing theory of the same name in 1982, but it wasn’t

until Kelling was hired by the NYC Transit Authority later in the

decade that this flagship of minute social control was launched.

When Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor of New York in 1993,

Broken Windows policing took on city-wide dimensions, and it

soon spread to the rest of the country. By the early ’00s, Broken

Windows was being adapted for the social democracies of Europe.

Among the technocrats, Broken Windows is controversial, be-

cause it easily blurs causation with correlation: just because broken

windows and other signals of disorder often accompany higher

crime rates does not mean they are the cause of crime. Occasion-

ally, you’ll hear a whimper that without proper sensitivity training,

Broken Windows policing encourages harassment of minorities.

All this misses the point: the State is not interested in reducing

crime, the State is interested in increasing social control, and Bro-

ken Windows policing is a critical expansion of its arsenal. Gi-

uliani’s reign of “zero tolerance” didn’t just go after fare-dodgers,

graffiti writers, and the squeegee men. Under his stewardship, the

NYPD became the first ever police department in the history of

the world to log more arrests than reported crimes. Entire neigh-

borhoods became depopulated of certain demographics as young

black men were shipped to the prisons upstate. A policing that tar-

gets the petty details of everyday life, that criminalizes our minor

strategies to cope with the impossibilities of life under capitalism,

is part and parcel of an expansion of police power as a whole.

Why does the city government in San Francisco want to criminal-

ize sitting or lying in the streets? Why did the city government in

Barcelona ban playing music in the streets without a license? Why

did the government of the UK prohibit a detailed list of “anti-so-

cial behaviors”?

Because the goal of the State is total social control. Because the

trajectory of capitalism is towards the total commercialization of

public space. Every time we identify another invasion of State and

capitalism into the minutiae of daily life, every time we confront

that invasion, we are potentially fighting for revolution. As Au-

thority increasingly manages us at the nano-level, the can of spray

paint, the rock, the Molotov, deserve the same significance as the

AK-47.

Spreading signals of disorder accomplishes a number of things. It

increases our tactical strength, as we hone a practice of vandalism,

property destruction, public occupation, and rowdiness.

It interrupts the narrative of social peace, and creates the indis-

putable fact of people opposed to the present system and fighting

against it. It means the reason for this fight, the anarchist critiques,

have to be taken more seriously because they already exist in the

streets. In this way, the attacks create the struggle as a fact in a way

that would otherwise only be possible in times of greater social

upheaval and movement. To have this effect, the signals of disorder

need to explicitly link themselves to a recognizable social practice,

one that would otherwise be ignored or chopped up into discon-

nected eccentricities of lifestyle. People in the neighborhood must

know that the graffiti and broken windows are the doing of “the

anarchists” or some other group that has a public existence, because

signals of disorder that can be isolated as phenomena of urban

white noise can be legitimately and popularly policed with tech-

niques reserved for inanimate objects and aesthetic aberrations;

they would rub us off the streets with the same chemical rigor as

they clean graffiti off the walls.

Signals of disorder are contagious. They attract people who also

want to be able to touch and alter their world rather than just pass-

ing through it. They are easy to replicate and at times, generally

beyond our control or prediction, they spread far beyond our cir-

cles. They allow us, and anyone else, to reassert ourselves in public

space, to reverse commercialization, to make neighborhoods that

belong to us, to create the ground on which society will be reborn.

In a neighborhood where the walls are covered with anarchist

posters, beautiful radical graffiti stands alongside all the usual tags,

advertisements never stay up for long, the windows of luxury cars,

banks, and gentrifying apartments or restaurants are never safe,

and people hang out drinking and talking on the street corners and

in the parks, our ideas will be seriously discussed outside our own

narrow circles, and the state would need a major counterinsurgen-

cy operation to have just the hope of uprooting us.

Whenever we can break their little laws with impunity, we show

that the State is weak. When advertising is defaced and public

space is liberated, we show that capitalism is not absolute.

But at the same time, we cannot make the mistake of exaggerating

the importance of the attack, of signals of disorder. At times it may

be necessary to be a gang, but if we are ever only a gang, if at any

point only our antisocial side is visible, we are vulnerable to total

repression. There is a lot of rage circulating, without an adequate

outlet, which we resonate with through our attacks. But there is

equally a lot of love that is even more lacking in possibilities for

true expression. People desire the community and solidarity that

capitalism deprives them of, and our way out of this labyrinth of

isolation is to go looking for the others and meet them where

they’re at. To encounter people, in our search for accomplices.

Except in the magical space of the riot, we cannot safely find spon-

taneous accomplices for the attack. But in the stultifying oppres-

sion of everyday, we can find accomplices to share in the little ges-

tures of defiance, the small tastes of the commune we are building

— a random conversation, a flyer someone is actually interested to

read, the passing around of a stolen meal, collaboration in a com-

munity garden, the giving of gifts.

The anarchists must simultaneously be those who are blamed for

acts of startling indecency, of inappropriate extremism in all the

right causes (“they burned four police cars at our peaceful march!”)

and those who are around town cooking and sharing free commu-

Since the disruptions in Pittsburgh during the G20, the Portland

riots, and the coast to coast May Day smashings of 2010, anarchists

in the US have proven they are a force. My beloved Glenn Beck

even has to protect his wayward libertarians from us by insisting

that we are communists, and that, laugh of laughs, we’re working

for the trade unions. The rightwing in the United States plays the

curious role of recuperating a very popular anti-state sentiment,

and as relatively weak as American anarchists are, they are starting

to threaten this monopoly. That’s the thing about non-vanguardist

anarchists: when we speak and act honestly, we tend to have an

influence far beyond our numbers.

Because we now have proven to ourselves that we can start shit

almost whenever and wherever we want, anarchists in the US no

longer need to be so desperate for a riot that they are willing to

throw everything away just to get their game on. Less combative

anarchists have intuited a weakness in this new direction, a po-

tential for isolation and repression, but unfortunately for everyone

they couched it in the tired old terms of a fetishization of violence.

Articles like “Are we addicted to rioting” were correct in sensing a

danger, but because their authors were not conscious of their own

position nor empowered by the confidence that comes with riot-

ing, they sounded the call to retreat.

A much better critique, written after the Strasbourg riots by hon-

est to goodness Black Bloc’ers, is “After We’ve Burnt Everything.”

The Invisible Committee as well were on to something when they

wrote, “the question of pacifism is serious only for those who have

the ability to open fire. In this case, pacifism becomes a sign of

power, since it’s only in an extreme position of strength that we are

freed from the need to fire.”

Let there be no mistake. We had to come to this point. And if we

back off now rather than charge across this line, we will deflate,

putter around a labyrinth of invective and disconnected bicycle re-

pair workshops for a few more years, and then once we regain lost

steam only have to face this challenge again. Rather than spreading

recriminations as 11 comrades in Asheville33 and possibly some in

[For background, see Denver ABC’s article “Five Myths about the

Asheville 11: Why They’re Being Demonized and Why It Matters” -IWE]

Santa Cruz face heavy charges, let’s spread lessons, or we’ll only

retreat and have to come this way again.

THE RIOT

What happened in Asheville on May Day was not a riot, and not

because of its size or any matter of scale. A riot expands. It is

spontaneous, or it takes hold amidst a backdrop of social struggle.

Counter-summits provide the unique opportunity of a planned

riot, because there is a larger crowd of people assembled there

among whom the riot can spread, and the mass protest situation

already creates such a logistical nightmare for the police that the

risk, normally idiotic, of trying to start a riot right where the cops

are expecting it is often neutralized. Generally, however, riots oc-

cur as a spontaneous response to the violence of the state or the

humiliations of capitalism, as in Portland, March 2010, and Oak-

land, January 2009. Riots can be and often are provoked by a cou-

ple of people with more confidence in their ability to fight back,

but their necessary characteristic is their expansion.

The riot is good because it is a catalyst, a magical spark that allows

high social tensions to turn into open social conflict. It is a step

towards social war. If, in a certain neighborhood, on a certain day,

there is no simmering social tension, there will be no riot. On the

other hand, if the people are well trained in obedience, the tensions

can be boiling over but the lid will not fly off. The threshold for

the transformation to a riot is lowered if people have confidence,

if they have practice in fighting back. They can win these things

through the attack.

The ATTAck

An attack should never mistake itself for a riot. Normally it never

would because attacks traditionally take place at night or in swift,

unobserved moments. A riot is a moving commune. It can dis-

mantle the temples of the commodities with leisure, it can turn

the smoke filled streets into zones of play. An attack does not have

this luxury, and when it makes the mistake of thinking it does, it

transforms quickly into a mass arrest.

The principal purpose of this type of action is to demonstrate that

it is easy to attack capitalism, despite all the flaunted power of the

state. An attack that does not get away is, at this principal level, a

failure. A demoralization.

I don’t presume that whoever carried out the May Day smashings

in Asheville were trying to adopt a certain tactic that has been

perfected by the comrades in Greece, or that they were trying to do

anything other than what they ended up doing. But I will say that

certain folks have been doing it much better, and it can be useful

to understand how.

Certain anarchists in Greece and elsewhere have been perfecting

the public attack. This deviates characteristically from traditional

attacks in that it happens in the public eye: in the middle of the

day, 20–40 trusted comrades gather punctually on a street where

there are no surveillance cameras, mask up, run around the cor-

ner to their objective, smash it, and disappear, knowing in advance

good escape routes and places where they can unmask and blend

in. At least one person keeps time, down to the second, and lets

everyone know when it is time to move on. Staying at the objective

for more than, say, 30 seconds, is suicide.

The Greek anarchists are courageous, but they would not attempt

a public attack when police were expecting it (e.g. May Day, in a

city where something was also attempted the previous year). Ad-

ditionally, and this point cannot be stressed enough, they were de-

veloping this tactic for years before they got to the point where

they would attempt to smash 6 or more objectives, or objectives

on entirely different city blocks, at the same time. I have no idea

who shook things up in Asheville and how much experience they

have, but one thing that is true for all of us is that if we act out of

impatience, we are inviting imprisonment. We won’t destroy cap-

italism through the amount or value of damage we cause, but by

the significance of that damage and how it communicates itself. If

there’s one thing we can learn from the heavy blows we suffered

with the repression and failure of the ELF, let it be that.

Many other types of public attacks have been developed that don’t

focus repetitively on broken windows. There is the supermarket

expropriation, where 20 masketeers run into a supermarket, fill up

baskets full of food, get out of there in under a minute (some of

them make sure the doors remain open and unobstructed), and

drop the food off in a park or other public place within a couple

blocks where folks are gathered, and disappear. A similar group of

people could open up a metro station to temporarily provide every-

one who passes through with free public transportation. Another

group publicly dismantles a surveillance camera. These and many

other forms of public attack communicate themselves much better,

and are more likely to win sympathy for illegality and anarchy.

This is not at all a denunciation of the broken windows. Without

negation, we are nothing. But it is much easier to understand how

healthy it is to make total destroy if it is connected to a more

embracing practice rather than an almost ritualized, self-caricatur-

izing repetition.

The attack is good because it gives us strength and confidence, it

helps us manifest as a material force in the social conflicts, it il-

luminates the rage and dissension brewing in the ranks of capital,

it disrupts the illusion of democratic peace even at times of lower

social tension, and it communicates that we have an enemy, and

this enemy is easy to attack.

NExT TIME SMASH THE TEMPlATE

A peculiar problem of US society is how televised it is, and I think

this has a negative impact on the anarchists as well. The errant

irony and generic behavior are pervasive. Just like a high school

movie, the anarchist space also has its cool kids. They are certainly

the vanguard in the changing sense of theory and strategy, but it

seems that US anarchists in general participate in a general substi-

tution of fads for tactics. It’s no surprise. The spectacle has trained

us to live in templates, and this extends to our struggles. Smashing

windows can become and is becoming the signifier of belonging

to yet another clique, little different from organizing Food Not

Bombs or riding bicycles or holding mycology workshops. Make

no mistake, the temples of the commodities must be smashed, but

the templates for how we go about that must be smashed as well.

COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY

Does a disdain for populist mass movements mean that we want

to be alone in our struggle? That would certainly be a caricature

of the insurrectionary. If the strongest motion of capitalism is the

movement towards alienation, than the strongest attack would be

the one that communicates, the one that connects us, the one that

mixes us, the one that overcomes isolation. Burn everything but

our bridges!

Where was the communication on May Day? Shattering glass has

a voice, but only sometimes is it the one that speaks most elo-

quently. Where are the other voices to help add meaning to its

words?

From a distance it seems that the provocations shouted by May

Day’s falling shards caused many people to take the side of prop-

erty. There is something valuable in making people’s alliances clear,

but there is nothing valuable in refusing to challenge the alliances

of capital, to instead defiantly occupy a lonely moral high ground

as the only enemy of the system.

We are not Christians who take joy from the mouths of Roman

lions. People who rallied around broken windows and damaged

cars, in their own minds, were rallying around the false constructs

they’ve been given of community, respect, safety, and so forth. Ad-

ditional communication is needed to show what these things ac-

tually mean in the world we inhabit, to clarify what side they’ve

actually chosen.

Social war means society against the state. Homo sacer is the most

honest and honorable member of capitalist society, but also the

weakest. For now, we will be the unpopular ones. To have the hope

of seeing something different, there will need to be ten flyers for

every flying brick, and many more of each.

SOlIDARITY

In “Against the Corpse Machine,” Ashen Ruins wrote how in the

1880s, US anarchists could stand fully in support of the Hay-

market martyrs, but forget to show similar solidarity for all the

sharecroppers and lynching victims in the South. It worries me

immensely that within about a week, a half dozen comrades get

killed or disappeared in Oaxaca, including anarchists, and a dozen

comrades in the States get arrested on felony charges, and all the

attention and solidarity goes to the latter.

This does not at all mean that solidarity with the arrested or the

May Day smashings themselves come at the expense of solidari-

ty with Oaxaca. Only a liberal would counterpoise international

solidarity with attacking the bars of our own prisons. But if this

new direction in the anarchist struggle here could ignore the Oax-

aca massacre even at a moment of growing power, it is empty and

doomed to pathos and narcissism. How we respond in similar situ-

ations in the future will answer the question: are we strengthening

ourselves as part of a global struggle that truly believes in total

destroy, or are we just pursuing the new fad?

Those arrested on May Day deserve our fullest support, regard-

less of things like guilt or innocence. The smashings should also

be celebrated, because they mark an important expansion of the

struggle in the US, showing that anyone in this country is powerful

enough to attack this system. Only by taking this realization and

moving forward can we come to occupy a terrain where we are not

desperate or impatient to attack because we know we can do it at

any time, and therefore choose the best moments.

YOUR COOPERATIVE WIll SEll YOUR SOUl, YOUR

NEMESIS WIll SAVE IT

Anarchist bookstores, cafés, and social centers, squatted or rented,

are a commonplace in our struggles worldwide, so it seems pecu-

liar that in the States so many would be subjected to criticisms of

being businesses, of selling out, of not deserving our solidarity. It

seems even more peculiar that in the wake of riots or instances of

repression, so many members of these spaces should in fact join

the business owners in denouncing illegality and distancing them-

selves from the disturbances, from the bad protestors, from the

masked ones.

The anarchist spaces, even if they are rented, even if they have

to sell things to pay their rent, are our spaces, and they face the

same compromises we do when we decide whether to get a job,

whether to make use of state welfare, state infrastructure. And

these spaces are meaningless without a connection to the anarchist

struggle. Without the struggle, without the masked ones, without

the smashings, they become just another business, and a poorly

managed one at that. Running a cooperative threatens nothing. It

does not provide an image of the future unless it exists to support

a struggle capable of destroying the power structures that stand in

the way of that future. Our spaces sustain us in the struggle and

prevent our isolation, and our attacks give those spaces their true

meaning, but only if they refuse to be separated.

After a bout of smashing, the local media will demonize the visible

anarchists, the public anarchist projects, precisely to get them to

denounce the invisible and illegal manifestations of the anarchist

struggle, to divide us and weaken us all. The plan is for the pub-

lic ones to scramble to portray themselves as upstanding citizens,

which is to say, to defeat themselves; and for the invisible ones to

lose and in fact deny themselves access to those few spaces where

they can show they are only a threat to those who are the enemies

of all of us. In short, the purpose is to isolate those who attack.

More often than not, the public ones and the invisible ones coop-

erate quite well in fulfilling this purpose.

ENOUgH WORDS

Let’s not come this way again. There’s so much to be done well,

why do anything poorly? All power to the communes! Freedom for

the Asheville 11! Freedom for everyone!

INqUIRY FIgURE 1: THE BlACk BlOC

Thesis: The black bloc is limited by obsolete aesthetic forms

and reduced strategic imagination.

Hypothesis 1: The black bloc will spread antagonism more

effectively if it can overcome these limits

Hypothesis 2: The black bloc should:

Abandon identity
Abandon predicates
Develop collective intelligence

Develop tactics

The black bloc is a method to prepare and hasten the clash. It is

an anonymous way of being together, outmaneuvering police, and

making attacks that radically alter the way we think about our-

selves, power and our environments. Contrary to the critiques by

those who fail to understand our contemporary situation, the black

bloc is a long-term project engaged in a monastic work to develop

undocile contagious practices.

The black bloc is a tension between insurgent identity and event.

On the one hand, because the black bloc is a dynamic set of practic-

es, it produces an unstable subject position: the black blocer. On the

other hand, because the black bloc is also an event, rather than a

fixed identity, it radically interrupts our functional roles as workers,

citizens, students, etc. In this way the black bloc is always negoti-

ating a tension between naming—and thus stabilizing—its subject

position and becoming indistinguishable from the riot as a few

antagonistic yet predictable gestures. While the latter claims an

ethics of openness, it also limits how the black bloc can continue

to stay unstable and tactically unpredictable.

III

At the heart of our self-analysis and critique is the question of the

black bloc’s meaning. What does is it connote, describe, and do?

For us the black bloc means: strategic antagonism.

The black bloc has the potential to connote “we who rebel intelli-

gently.” However, it more often connotes “anarchism” because it is

employed instrumentally to essentially advertise for that particular

political identity. In most cases the narrative might go like this:

there is a struggle, it has a dominant reformist discourse, anar-

chists feel marginalized and call for a black bloc in order to bring

more radical ideas to the surface. In this way, the anarchists vote

as bloc—the same way as other political groups—in order to be

better represented in the struggle. However, the tactics deployed

and the images produced create a heroic specter, whose glorious

figure of revolutionary purity doesn’t correspond to the need for

anonymity as a practical necessity of contemporary revolt. The use

of the black bloc as such locates the figure of the anarchist, the

criminal, and the militant all in one place. The black bloc’s objec-

tives: contagiously reversing the operation of power on our bodies,

taking back force, and elaborating practices of offensive opacity–

are accomplished by diffusing these practices throughout the space

and time of a struggle, not by consolidating them in single revolu-

tionary subject. In this way, the very aesthetic that our anonymity

rests upon currently works against us. The employment of all black

everything separates us and functions to produce us as anarchist

subjects with predictable motions and roles we fulfill. Even if a

black bloc is composed solely of self-described anarchists, it must

resist the ideological temptation to claim it as a terrain exclusive to

anarchists. The black bloc should spread anarchy as a practice—not

an idea or identity.

The challenge of resonance and contagion is exacerbated by the

black bloc’s ahistorical ethical and aesthetic positions. The anar-

chist figure appears as a body detached from history, clinging in-

stead to antiquated forms. Whereas each struggle to which we are

bearing witness appears to itself as something new, the anarchist

black bloc remains trapped by the image of Seattle ’99. This is not

a problem of the techniques we use to destroy property—we’ve

seen a lot of beneficial advancements in that—nor is this a prob-

lem in the techniques employed to confront the police. Here we

have seen useful developments as well. The use of barricades, rocks

and bottles, burning cars; the use of laser pointers to disorient the

police; the use of Information Technologies to gather and disperse

with greater speed and agility all amplify our tactical senses. The

challenge we must overcome is the same challenge at the core of

every struggle. How do we lose our predicates? How do we dis-

solve ourselves into a common?

Imagine the event of an insurrection as either a complex experi-

mental symphony or a drawn out improvisational drama, with a

touch of comedic elements and heroism. In either situation, all the

participants will first begin with almost no plan or shared sense

outside of their environment or their knowledge of their instru-

ments—most times no one will have any intent on playing to-

gether. Something happens, someone begins to play, and when the

rhythm touches others they join in. Or in the latter case someone

speaks, asks a question, and others respond and build on the nar-

rative. In each case the primary operation must be endowed with a

force of seduction. This is not to say erotic or pleasurable even, but

decisive in how it approaches its environment. The operation must

pose a question that is irresistible to answer. An experimental com-

poser once said “the hidden secret that makes this thing function

is that the audience wants to be a part of the […] plot” This orig-

inary operation, the gesture that repeats itself even as it grows in

complexity, must solicit the response “Yes, and.” This is how we can

measure the success of the black bloc. In the experimental sym-

phony, this is how each musician adds their own layers of emotion

and aesthetics to the structure, even by altering the initial rhythm.

In the improvisation drama, this is how the narrative grows es-

sentially from nothing, then departs and returns to different plot

elements. “Yes, and” must be the answer to rhythmic question “We

need this, do you?” How this question is posed defines the particu-

lar meaning of the black bloc.

As the crisis deepens, revolt spreads. 1+1. simple math. However,

instability is a familiar sensation for an economy based on the as-

sumption of scarcity and constant expansion. Capital is well cali-

brated to crisis, and the arguments that “it will get better, when it

gets worse” don’t fare well historically. As the economy is thrown

into crisis, control and repression also deepen. In order to inte-

grate antagonisms into a manageable framework, the fields of so-

cial sciences, anthropology, and psychology are enlisted to research

the finest details of life. Meanwhile others specializing in police

science dutifully work to calculate and predict the movements of

antagonism in general. Once these antagonisms can be reduced

to qualities and data, governments can begin to regulate, distrib-

ute and circulate these antagonisms in a way that produces value

or guards against any further disruptions. One thinks of both the

subtle integration and circulation of identities, the brute force of

imprisonment, elimination through police bullets, and reduction

through war. This governmental technique, sometimes called “risk

reduction”, in practice functions as preemptive counter-insurgency.

Here we see that counter-terrorism—as a set of policing measures

and juridical transformations—was a maneuver that foreshadowed

this epoch of crisis, developing its science over the course of several

decades to be perfected just in time to stop the next revolutionary

surge. We can’t count on the simple math.

VII

As the environment of struggle shifts, so should our strategy. The

contemporary sites of struggle are no longer demarcated spaces of

confrontation—summits of the elite where our discourse congeals

around a critique of financial capital and around a moral rejection

of state violence. Revolt is now found in a delimited environment,

more closely aligned with nightmarish war theory, where every-

thing and everywhere is a potential terrain of conflict. There is

an increasing need to develop common techniques that are easily

appropriated. No one would have predicted that by 2010 a specter

of university occupations would hang over the US, much less that

a movement of occupations would erupt across the globe by 2011.

But given the circumstances we believe this will spread, mutate

and deepen. For our own safety locally and to contribute to the

historical struggles emerging at a global level, black blocs must be

able to pose the question: “We need anonymity, do you?” And as

the lulzy hacker group Anonymous proves, the response “Yes, and”

may not take the form we expect.

VIII

At the moment when struggles were cohering as a convergence

of the antagonistic remnants of culture—the cycle of struggles

that included environmentalism, third-wave feminism, anti-death

penalty, anti-war, and anti-globalization—all black everything at-

tacking the symbols of financial capital was clearly contemporary.

The black represented a conscious sense of the way these ethical

practices were excluded from capital, and financial capital was the

example of shameless entrepreneurship par excellence. However, to-

day our anti-social media darlings no longer conjure a meaning

exterior to capital—mostly because these forms (culture) could be,

and were, integrated into the general circulation of commodities.

The black bloc and corresponding meaning that was linked to a set

of subcultural identities is empty. There may remain a caricature in

some newspaper making reference to one of our more loud partic-

ipants–the anarchist punk–Bbut as we all know, there is no longer

a world for such a creature. Some may feel a sense of depressing

nostalgia for how capitalism has drained our subcultures of what

was living, but the emptiness of the black bloc—its abyss of poten-

tial chaos—is precisely what makes it more relevant than ever. The

black bloc drained of identity has the potential to become open

in ways impossible when it was only the practice of a limited set

of subcultures. Strategic antagonism in a world increasingly com-

posed solely of hostility now has the potential to shed its veneer

and experiment.

* * *

What follows is a set of experiments to be immediately put into

practice. The results should be examined, and analyses should be

shared through our internal circuits of communication.

This text, although in public forums, is an example of how our

communication works. We can say there is something, but there is

no need to speak of its content. Thus, a cypher is put into public

spheres. The cypher codes that a black bloc is called. The call speaks

to those who hear it. It happens. If it happens well, if would appear

that there was never a black bloc at all, only the event. However, the

real of the event is not pure spontaneity, but the ease with which

antagonistic techniques are able to spread and mutate.

* * *

Experiment 1. Street clothes is the new black. Plain colors on the first

layer, prints, stripes or plaids for the second layer. Jeans for bottoms.

In some occasions, when the entire struggle is already located as

criminal or revolutionary, all black makes sense—that is, it gen-

erates a certain meaning, a certain attention to our surroundings.

“Black” for us should connote speed and intensity of attack, not ide-

ology. Anonymity can be gained collectively through means other

than the color of our clothing. Hats and scarves alone work quite

well to make a surveillance camera less effective. An outer layer

can be disposed. Shoes can be changed. A large crowd on its own

also helps. If a few people in black are throwing rocks, they are

easily isolated; if what appears to be “anyone” is throwing rocks,

they are concealed by the contagion of the practice. A slow riot,

drawn out street fights, the spread of undocile practices. These can

be achieved when it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the law

abiding citizen from the annotated figures of protest and revolt.

Experiment 2. Slogans and signs are a thin barrier between us and

the police—use them accordingly.

Banners, yes; black flags, sometimes.

Black bloc has meant a different way of engaging in struggle. It

has meant the advancement of tactical anti-police and property

damage sciences. When shedding our facade, we need not lose the

tactical intelligence of banners and flags. Banners call attention.

Contemporary struggles do not cohere over “ideas,” and we first

came to this realization through the black bloc. Like the myth of

“free speech” under the reign of democracy, banners provide a thin

barrier between us and police. Use them accordingly.

Here the movement of occupations has been very clever and in-

structive. The first wave of student occupations against austerity

measures saw the use of shields painted as books—a tactic appro-

priated across an ocean and a few continents. In New York instead

of the demand “Never work!” or slogans that cohere over ideas

such as “against capitalism” banners, we see the intelligent use of an

ambiguous narrative “I will never get a job in this economy.” While

our creativity remains captive until we are emancipated from the

regime of value, our use of slogans and text should be charged with

the same meaning as our defensive technologies.

Flags on the other hand have a history which links them to identi-

ty, to nations, to a People. Being that there is no longer any People

outside the global citizen-producing project of Empire, even those

flags waved by the citizens of anarchism and communism are but

an empty threat. Just as the Red and the Black flew next to the Ser-

bian flag during the strike to oust Milošević, just as the Black Flag

flew next to the Mexican Flag during the Immigrant general strike of

’06, these symbols no longer carry meaning.

Flags also have a different history, a technical history in both com-

bat, and festival. Flags can be used to signal just about anything—a

charge, a way of moving together, a certain time in which its good

to disperse; they need not be black. And of course, flags are sticks

with piece a of cloth attached. Here we would do best to not care if

the image is a masked youth waving a black flag in front of a cloud

of teargas or a surly old man swinging the stars and stripes at some

cops, bellowing about taxation.

Experiment 3. Spread the disease.

Conspiracy means strategize together. The sense of a different way

of being together, of getting organized, is one of the paramount

achievements of the black bloc. We need to find ways to spread

this sense across new fields of struggle. With confidence in our

experience, we need to humbly experiment with applying our tac-

tical knowledge to different conflicts, with people otherthan just

seasoned riot-tourists.

The first wave of occupations in the US, from the Newschool in

NYC to the University of California, saw quite a bit of this ex-

perimentation. A line of power grew from a house discussion, a

classroom, a bar, a rooftop, and multiplied.

In the western territories, one saw the insulation of cliques formed

through these struggles grow with experiment, not without the

accompanying pangs and mistakes. The intensity leading up to the

March 4th UC-wide student strike proved to be a misplaced nos-

talgia for summit demonstrations of yore. However, events which

followed the fizzled climax generated a certain intelligence about

how to engage with Marx’s maxim “Men make history but not in

conditions of their choosing.”

The summer of ’11 saw an interventionary strategy, composed of

“anti-cut” events revolving around a discourse of anti-austerity by a

group called Bay of Rage. While the actions—mostly smaller street

parties-cum-confrontations with the police—never generated the

results that the initial Bay of Rage participants wanted, they did

consolidate a shared sense between them, and recreate their envi-

ronment as a laboratory of subversion. Moreover, the shared space

to practice developed a certain endurance, sense memory, and refin-

ing of muscular and mental energy, that, when something happened,

was tuned to the rhythm of struggle. Here the normal situation of

someone murdered by police quickly took on new meaning as Bay

of Rage went from a few hyped actions of die-hards to becoming

host to riotous demonstrations of a few hundred. The shift against

the Bart police also added to this chorus. The anti-policing sense

gave birth to new rhythms and these resonated with others beyond

those closest to the Bay of Rage. Anonymous, street youth, and an

array of many other worlds joined this choir. The situation contin-

ued to build on itself, as more people responded with “yes, and.”

We might see the impressive developments with Occupy Oakland

in this light.

A small song booklet theorized how this taste for strategic thought

might spread outside of our milieu. “When a couple of angry bus

drivers, or grocery store workers encounter some of us in this or

that place, and we say: ‘there are fifty of us, we have these means,

and we want to fight.’ The rest is silence.”

Through practice we develop the means, consistent numerical ca-

pacity, and qualitative knowledge and techniques. When our prac-

tice effectively re-inscribes the meaning of an environment’s signs,

architecture and geography, our presence is undeniable. In such a

situation, the ease with which practices can cross-germinate and

mutate also establishes the necessary condition of communica-

tion—translation, and audibility.

Nearing the end of March 2012 a wild fare strike subtly assaults

the subway fare apparatus in New York. A proper action, smooth-

ing the line between our well known clandestine figures and that

of an everyman mass worker. The attack targets some 20 stations

during the morning’s busiest hours and is claimed by the Rank and

File Initiative, a collection of #occupiers and Transport Workers

Union Local 100 and the Amalgamated Transit Union. Of course

the union’s leadership denies involvement in any such thing. In the

an anonymous interview posted on the Village Voice website, the

Rank and File Initiative says there were around 3-4 people in each

station all disguising their identities, and that union members were

paramount to the logistical elements. While the action doesn’t im-

mediately give birth to mourning shop owners, it does function to

create rupture in the normal flow of metropolis precisely because those

who didn’t pay were all complicit. Here we see the practical mutation

and intelligent application of complicity, resonance, and opacity.

The anonymity we need isn’t limited to the streets. Zones of opac-

ity must be established. We need intimate meetings where we can

discuss, make plans, and sort out the real material solidarities and

resources to achieve our objectives, without the threat of the police.

We need to elaborate a system of deciding what levels of trust are

required, and how to practically implement this. Perhaps we need a

different culture than that of security. Perhaps we need a multiplic-

ity of possible forms of trust. We may not need to know each other

for a million years to engage in a collective criminal attack against

capital—such as the Port of Oakland blockade—but we need to

spread a fluency in this illicit dialect.

The practice of conspiracy, of strategic thought, of breathing to-

gether, must be a commons of skills and new forms that we all

draw from. Here it is important to reflect on the NYC fare strike

interview that followed the release of the communique because

it highlights how they did it. Instead of just privileging propa-

ganda to explain our actions through the matrix of social critique,

we should explain how to participate—as if it were a game with

simple rules. This, above all else, must be developed in the coming

years.

Experiment 4. Determine our own terrain of struggle; become

unpredictable.

Our enemies deeply examine the geography, duration, and intensi-

ty of struggles, and develop their techniques of policing from this.

Recognizing that we cannot count on pure numerical superiority

and spontaneity means we must elaborate a practice of unpredict-

able movements and gestures. A central contribution of the black

bloc to the summit riots was its refusal to have its movements

bared by conventional limits—police, fences, architecture, and pro-

test marshals. A certain fluidity gave it decisive agency. We need

to reorient ourselves to this intelligence. Our environments can

change based on how we act within them. We don’t have to stay

together as a unit, linking arms and marching as a bloc. This is true

for a demonstration and the entire space and time of a struggle. We

can move through a smooth field. The same techniques employed

for communicating where to gather to march and where to regath-

er can be used within the entire terrain of a social struggle and a

gathering point doesn’t have to lead in a linear path to an objective.

A flashmob could converge within a march at a precise moment,

and a precise location (for example: behind the Teachers against

Budget Cuts banner) and then disperse and reemerge once we

reach this building, this line of cops, or some other sign which we

endow with meaning through our self-organization. This could be

extended based on our capacity and levels of organization. Using a

higher level of technology to achieve a circuit of communication is

not the only way to accomplish this, but today’s struggles from the

Banlieue riots to the Flashmobs across the US to the Arab Spring

prove that contemporary revolt has a penchant for collective in-

telligence. Spreading and refining these techniques may not be as

troublesome as some might think. There may be ways that don’t re-

quire everyone involved having a trashphone, or smartphone with

a secure text app; its up to us to experiment.

Experiment 5: Or if we really want to experiment with being

unpredictable:

Imagine a game spread through the same message and image

boards that generate the phantom, Anonymous, except it elabo-

rates the “doing it for the lulz” project in real time. Simple rules:

you have to be invited to play, and if invited, you have to play.

Through the spread of #occupy, one can’t help but notice those

“live feeds.” With UStream, one can watch and hear the events un-

fold, and even communicate through IRC in real time with others

watching and the person who’s broadcasting the live stream. Imag-

ine some players on the ground, in a demonstration or something

else, as avatars, while their friends literally direct their movement.

The on-the-ground player might always decide to do different than

what she is told, but it might also be more fun to be whatever, and

lose oneself. Such a game would generate complicities capable of

producing a far more terrible practice of offensive opacity by bring-

ing the logic of spectacle to its hyperreal threshold. While certain

questions of how to establish the necessary trusting environment,

or completely anonymous environment, for such a game are yet

to be answered, the technological and social conditions are quite

ripe. We see now the spread of YouTube videos highlighting both

social struggles and absurd criminal acts of youth for pornographic

consumption. Such a game might catch on with far more seduction

and malleability than our old game of dignified militant struggle.

Beginning Again.

For almost a decade, for three rounds of struggles, an assemblage

of anti-control sciences has been tinkering with techniques, en-

vironments, and dispositions of struggle. While its clear that the

black bloc is not the single methodology of contemporary struggle,

we privilege it as a site of development because of its easy en-

try-points, relative flexibility and by the way our conditions con-

tinue to summon it. Some have theorized a mythical Plan B in

order to supersede the limits of the black bloc at demonstrations.

Occasionally, this has been practiced as the black bloc’s feroci-

ty and intelligence, deployed outside of the large demonstration

arena. Plan B has also been “attacking your enemy where he is

not” within demonstrations, and as smaller gatherings that make

dramatic public attacks—using speed and anonymity to escape

capture, rather than the cover of a large crowd. While these ex-

periments are conjured by the same spirit, we believe the current

situation–a growth of strange and impressive struggles–is not the

time to focus on how to intensify struggle, but how to alter our en-

vironments in ways that expand the territory of struggle. To us, the

musical question is more one of duration and frequency than in-

tensity. Intensity will follow, provided that initial question is posed

in a way to solicit “Yes, and.”

We will more than likely be forced to continue this work for an-

other decade. This monastic work of building a long term project

of street confrontation and undocile practices is not in order to

prepare for an event in the future. It is monastic precisely because

the time in which this project takes place is a time contingent on

but external to the time of the work-day. Our victory will come not

by messenger, nor by the final orgasm of history. Rather, revolution

will be the complex unfolding of billions of relations of domina-

tion, accented and accelerated by insurrection. From the time we

entered this project to the present, the general geography of every-

day struggle has condensed and multiplied, continuously paving

the urban and suburban human environment in revolt against this

society. There is increasingly less time between capitalist normality

and moments of rupture. We expect our victory will be the slow,

painful saturation of this world in such ruptures. The task set be-

fore us is how we will develop the necessary endurance, means, and

vitality to be able to make these ruptures inhabitable.

PREFACE

Since the events of April 9th and the wild week that followed, the Nuit

Debout (Rise Up At Night) general assembly has placed the question

of violence at the center of its debate. While citizens persist in their

rigorous pacifism, stances in favor of the “diversity of tactics” are also

multiplying. The National Student Coordination has explicitly refused

to dissociate rioters and demonstrators.
Amidst this proliferation of discussions, the Nuit à Bout Action Com-

mittee has gathered a few positions that seem useful for the strength-

ening of the movement as well as pertinent as regards the question of

its repression. The more serious our presence in Place de la République

[the square where Nuit Debout held its assemblies, and from which the

wild marches departed -IWE] becomes, the more frequently situations

leading to confrontation will present themselves. We must prepare for

them. It is not a matter of convincing everyone that violence is a viable

option or necessary route. It is simply a matter of finding those forms of

action, perhaps frightening, that will rid us of our fear.

What must be explained is not why things sometimes get out of

hand around the Nuit Debout gatherings in Paris, but why it doesn’t

happen more often. In the end, it’s clearly understood why people

who have been gathering every night for two weeks to envision

the end of capitalism might end up wrecking the windows of the

Société Générale bank (#PanamaPapers). It is obviously correct, it

makes total sense. The problem lies elsewhere. Which is why nei-

ther the moral apologias for violence nor the theoretical or ideo-

logical justifications for smashing things will succeed in bringing

more people to fight against the police or break bank windows.

We shouldn’t forget that if many people are staying quiet in dem-

os, it’s not because pacifism is in their blood, but simply because

they’re afraid. To overcome this fear is a collective task, one that is

nowhere better accomplished than in the streets. This begins with

taking care of everyone, and not only one’s friends—with us all

taking care of each other, even in the worst situations.

“Diversity of tactics” is an expression which, like its cousin, “con-

vergence of struggles”, tells us nothing about what must be done

when people are brought together who don’t have the same way of

struggling, or don’t have any way of struggling at all. The expres-

sion conceals what is actually a pretty liberal idea: everyone strug-

gling next to each other, in their own way, without bothering or

talking to one another. Diversity of tactics is nothing but a subtler

form of dissociation. When will we get a “diversity of corteges”?34 In

fact, the FIDL [Fédération indépendante et démocratique lycéenne]

already asks for it at every high school demo.

III

The question is not whether to be violent or not, but of being

offensive or inoffensive. Three gangs of five friends determined

to smash ATM’s but incapable of organizing on a larger scale than

their own affinity group are just as inoffensive as 10,000 unionized

citizens slowly marching behind the CGT’s sound-system-french-

fries-van. Conversely, 3,000 people holding their ground in a cloud

of tear-gas while a small group throws rocks from behind a banner

almost succeeded in having a nightcap at Prime Minister Valls’

house.

All the most powerful moments experienced in the streets since

March 9th have demanded, at one point or another, that those who

were ready to fight and those who were not took care of each other,

decided to stand together, and not just side-by-side in polite and

diplomatic indifference. On April 9th at Place de la Nation, there

weren’t enough tear gas grenades in all the capital to tear apart

the hundred or so people who were bombarding the CRS lines

from the hundreds of people who booed and filmed the cops, while

cheering or nursing the rioters [émeutiers].

Little by little, the “question of violence” appears for what it is:

a distraction. As long as we continue to talk about it, and moreover

A cortège is a procession, but here means something more like a

bloc within a march. —Trans.

to speak about it in moral and ideological terms, we won’t con-

front the true strategical problems posed by the demonstrations.

To write one more apologia for violence will accomplish nothing.

There are plenty of people ready to defend themselves from the

police. What’s missing is precisely a cortège to defend.

A demonstration is not a symbolic ritual. It is a test of strength,

wherein those who have reasons to revolt physically encounter those

paid to maintain the world in the deplorable state we find ourselves

in. Every demo is the actualization of a rapport de force between

those who are ready to take risks to change the situation, and those

whom we pay to preserve it. The problem of official union demon-

strations is that they deny the very existence of such a force relation.

The image of life and of struggle they offer us is disgusting. Spon-

sored balloons, sausage-slogans and security squads; if “struggling”

means to march like the CGT, then to struggle means to remain

passive, to repeat the same gestures again and again, to never take

risks. That, in addition to being deceptive, is intolerable. We only

begin to fight from the moment we cease to be inoffensive: this may

sound tautological, but the entirely of the union forces spend their

time affirming the contrary. Their gestures in the streets express

nothing but submission.

The police maintain order.35 Because it is a protest against the or-

der of things, a demonstration is, in its essence, a confrontation

with police, no matter what form it takes. Therefore, when night

comes, there is a winner and a loser. Either the police win (April

5th), or the demo wins (March 31st). The police win when ev-

erything goes as planned by the higher-ups. Demonstrators win

when everything doesn’t go as they planned. What freedom we

win consists in what we manage to collectively pull off under the

noses of the police. Winning matters. As much for the construction

of the rapport de force as for our ties to each other, for our cour-

In French, the job of the police is typically described as “le main-

tien de l’ordre public”, which translates literally as ‘the maintenance of public

order’. —Trans.

age. Too many people come to rallies like tourists, unconscious of

the importance of successfully breaking the mold. They might be

sympathetic clowns dancing in front of the CRS, or rioters who

are indifferent to the behavior of the rest of the march. It doesn’t

matter, as both are inoffensive.

VII

To ensure that everything happens as expected, the cops set up

their apparatuses: kettles, closed streets, hordes of plainclothes of-

ficers, and so on. In the demonstration, our challenge is to combat

the police apparatus: we must prevent it from working, we must

break it down. Not only are there thousands of different apparatus-

es, but there are thousands of different ways to break them down

[déborder]36.

Likewise, there isn’t much to say about a demo where the police

apparatus hasn’t been challenged. Which is perhaps why, when the

media talks about demonstrations, they speak exclusively of the

moments that break away [les débordements], for these alone mean

anything. To say that “the confrontations occurred on the fringes

This term appears frequently in writings from this cycle of

struggle in France, as seen the opening paragraphs of “Build the Hacienda,

Burn Down the Palaces” (collected below). It can also mean to breakaway,

outflank, overflow, jam, or to flee-beyond. —Trans.

of the demo,” makes about as much sense as saying “the goals were

scored on the sidelines of the football field”.

VIII

Smashing things [La casse] is the easiest and most obvious way

to break a police apparatus. It is also one of the least interesting,

and most boring. What most narratives about rioters miss is that

the latter would usually prefer to do something else: to free the

demo by breaking the police lines, to occupy a building, to start

a breakaway march, to hold down barricades, paint inspired tags,

etc. Smashing is often a last ditch, stopgap option. It is the de-

gree-zero of the demonstration. As for the classical union rally,

family-friendly and good-natured, it isn’t even a demonstration: it

is a police operation.

It’s worth noting that there’s rarely been as few windows broken

in a social movement as that of the month that just passed. When

you’re confronting the police, you aren’t worrying about smashing

shit. You’ve got better things to do.

Whether or not Nuit Debout’s general assembly can at times be

entertaining, touching or ridiculous, it remains a useless tool for

organizing ourselves in a revolutionary perspective. It’s a practical

problem: you just can’t discuss such matters in the same way one

takes a ticket and gets in line at the butcher shop. The infinite

succession of stopwatched, disconnected speeches effectively abol-

ishes the conditions of a constructed conversation.

Nobody can say anything intelligent in two minutes. Everybody

sees it, but everybody goes along with it. Whatever the “demo-

cratic” will of certain organizers or “facilitators”, the decision and

voting procedures are generally nothing but a farce. What they

parody from “formal democracy” is the powerlessness related to

the fact that the decisions, in the end, touch nothing and reach no

one [n’engage rien ni personne]. And yet, sustaining confrontation

does require that we make certain decisions – decisions which the

general assembly makes de facto impossible. We attend them in

the same way we consume The Voice. To elaborate a revolutionary

perspective requires that other modes of speaking, sharing and of

collective intelligence be deployed in a parallel fashion on site.

Our marches will begin to add up to something when everyone

shares not a principled tolerance towards the actions of others,

but a common strategic perception of the situation. That is to say,

once we perceive all demonstrations as battles we must win by any

means necessary; once we are all inclined, not to violence, but to

speed, surprise, and being offensive. It is by our attentiveness to

the movements and affects that agitate our demonstrations that we

will succeed in finding a common ground allowing a true conver-

gence of struggles—at one central point, Place de la République.

There are thousands of non-violent gestures that then come to

mind that would help to increase our efficiency in the streets:

– Marches should extend onto the sidewalks in order to prevent

the lateral movements of the CRS from catching the demo in its

pincers.

– Think carefully about the routes taken by wild marches. Those

leading the march, in the heat of the action and improvisation,

don’t always choose the best routes. Help them.

– Get in the habit of hiding your face at the right moment: as much

to sabotage the identification and surveillance work systematically

and massively conducted by the police as to render demonstrators

taking part in confrontation indistinguishable from the others.

– Confrontations tend not to unfold in silence or on mute. Slo-

gans and chanting express the spirit of the movement. Thus, they

have their place in all moments of confrontation. When others are

fighting, sing and dance.

– Be mobile and do not allow any holes to form in the march when

security squads or police attempt to divide it.

– Learn to protect ourselves from tear gas so that it’s not just those

who came equipped standing in the clouds.

– Systematically throw back tear gas canisters, or at least keep

them away from the cortege.

– Stay calm during police charges to avoid brawls. Stick together

and don’t back-up a hundred times farther than where the police

line stops, as this only hands them more free space.

I37

What we’ve been living through is new. It is certainly not just

another “social movement.” “Social movements” have a frame, so

that everything escaping it is defined as a boiling-over or a break-

away [débordement]. Yet what we’ve experienced since March 9th

has been an uninterrupted series of such breakaway moments, with

the old forms of politics trailing after them from behind. The call

to demonstrate on March 9th was a breakaway from the unions by

the Youtubers. The demonstrations since then have seen constant

breakaway marches led by the “youths”, while the traditional image

of union marches headed up by the various union bosses has been

systematically replaced by groups of hooded youths defying the

police. Nuit debout overflows every recognized political frame,

while the “wild marches” that leave from its site at Place de la

République are themselves a breakaway from Nuit debout. We

must continue to begin—or in other words, continue to break-

away, to remain on the move, to surprise.

Attempts to assimilate the new into the already-known are part

of the arsenal of neutralization. Just as the demonstrations against

this new labor law have little to do with the struggle against the

CPE [i.e. the large national unions - IWE], Nuit Debout bears

very little relation to the Indignados of Puerta del Sol [Madrid,

Spain]. Whereas the occupation at Puerta del Sol declared itself

pacifist, the occupation at Place de la République had hours-long

clashes with the police last Friday. “Everyone hates the police” has

become a chant hit. Whereas Puerta del Sol called itself “apolitical,”

we have lost count of the calls by unions and the speeches by

unionists at Place de la République. However, Puerta del Sol really

was occupied, which is not the case with Place de la République.

At Puerta del Sol food was made for thousands, people stayed day

and night, the police were not making daily evictions, nor ordered

This text was circulated prior to a national day of action on April

28th, during which comrades in Paris attempted to construct a large fortified

structure in Place de la Republique, the site where the nightly occupation

and assembly movement Nuit Debout had been taking place since March 31,

2016. The structure was destroyed by police during an eviction of the square

that evening, which led to one of countless pitched battles. -IWE

to takedown this or that, or to stop folks from cooking. This last

difference indicates a path to follow: if we want to make Place de la

République more than just an interminable general assembly where

curious on-lookers are giving a first-hand look at its powerlessness

and the inconsistency of its “decisions,” then we must really occupy

it; this means building real spaces and defending them from the

police.

III

What Place de la République really constitutes is a public counter-

space. Since existing public, political and media space has become

an integral lie, we have no choice but to desert it. Not by falling

back into silence, but to positively desert it by constructing

another. And speech is like freedom: when you first take hold of

it you start to say and do some dumb shit, but that’s not what’s

important. What matters is to not to dwell on that first fuck-up.

We must instead say that we have a long way to go, that these past

weeks comprise our first few breaths. It’s been years now that a

coalition of forces have made the situation unbreathable, between

the “threat of the National Front,” “war on terrorism,” “crises” of all

kinds, the emergency laws, climate apocalypse and the permanent

campaign for the next presidency. What characterizes the reigning

public space is that it offers a space for nothing but contemplation:

what we witness, what we hear, what we learn never becomes an act

or bears any consequence because we face it all alone. As was made

evident in exemplary fashion the evening of the ‘nightcap at Valls’

place’, what is vibrant and powerful about a counter-space is the

capacity for acts to follow speech. Consciousness and the capacity

to act are not disjointed. This is the way that a counter-space can

positively destitute existing public space. Hence the great curiosity

and jealousy of the media.

The conflict around the El Khomri law is not just a conflict

about “work” law, it’s a conflict around the possibility–or not–of

governing, which is to say, a political conflict in the true sense

of the term. No one can stand to be governed any more by the

puppets in the National Assembly, which is why, from our point of

view, the law cannot pass; yet the government itself cannot afford

not to pass this law—which means, it has been factually destituted

[destitué de fait], it can no longer govern. This refusal is even seen

in a union like the CGT, whose rank-and-file can no longer can

bear to be governed as it had previously been by its management.

If one listens to the speeches people give at place de la République,

most fall into either one of two camps regarding this question of

destitution: some want the moment of destitution to be followed by

a constitutive moment where a new constitution could be written

and a new society founded, whereas others think the destitution

should be without a conclusion because it is first of all a process of

construction, in which the fiction of a single society is replaced by

the reality of an existing plurality of worlds, each of which express

and incarnate their own idea of life and of happiness. Those of us

writing here share the latter position.

Let’s be pragmatic: no one’s going to be able to write a constitution

until this regime has been overthrown. And being that you do not

overthrow a democratic regime democratically, i.e. that it will

defend itself against any fundamental challenge until its very

last riot cop, the only path leading to a new constitution is an

insurrectional path. However to lead a successful insurrection, like

that of Maidan for example, Place de la République must be really

occupied, barricaded, guarded, etc.; also, all political and existential

sensibilities favorable to insurrection must be able to find each

other; to this end, instead of the desperate search for a consensus

that will never be found in the middle of Paris (a consensus of

a more or less frightened metropolitan petty bourgeoisie), we

must substitute the material existence of a plurality of spaces, of

“houses,” where each of the sensibilities of the insurrection could

collect themselves and enter into fusion. Those who are passionate

about writing a constitution are welcome to build their own house

where they can write up as many drafts as they like. And as for

those who want to put the constitution into place, well, we’ll

discuss this when Valls and Hollande will have already hopped in

their jet and taken refuge in the USA, Africa or Algeria.

A poster in the Parisian metro a few years ago declared, “Those

who organize space, rule over it”; it was decorated with a majestic

lion supposedly representing the sovereignty of the RATP Group

[management of Parisian state-owned transport]. What sort

of power is to be found in Place de la République? It lies in the

management of the square itself, and the forces of order who

impose respect thereby. Power is this grand empty esplanade; the

flux of cars and their din; and the anti-police vans posted on all

sides. How can an assembly seriously claim to be sovereign which

then debases itself by respecting the real sovereignty that dictates

its every move? It’s impossible to take it seriously. But we would

not have gathered together, nor been as numerous and determined

as we’ve been, if we weren’t very serious. By serious, here we mean

that we have taken it upon ourselves to manage this place, but to

express our intention to hold out by constructing the means for

doing so, to refuse to be added to the list of mediatic flashes-in-

the-pan that let themselves be swept away by the first attack. If

we are going to be able to welcome comrades from all over, we

must escape the precarity imposed on us by the current forces of

management, and to arrange things as we see fit—in other words,

we have to be constructive.

VII

We are in the middle of a fjord, at the heart of peril: there are

too many of us to simply return home and not enough of us to

throw ourselves into an insurrectional assault. We must “shift into

second gear” as some say. To hold out till the end of April is already

not bad. We cannot count on the union bosses, because even if a

few strikes that can be re-directed spring up here and there, by

nature these strikes will be against their will. However, we know

the danger that awaits us if this situation closes up again, a danger

we already struggle against even now: that of the electoral system,

the democratic blackmail of having to choose between the plague

and cholera, between Alain Juppé and Marine Le Pen. Those who

are likely to join us are precisely those whom are disgusted by such

a reality, those who cannot bear for politics to be reduced to the

insignificant process of voting. Politics consists of what we plan,

what we build, what we attack and what we destroy. Shifting into

second gear means: build the hacienda, burn down the palaces.

-The Construction Committee

Paris / April 2016

“The novelty of coming politics is that it will no longer be a

struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle

between the State and non-State (humanity), an insurmountable

disjunction between whatever singularity and the state

organization. ”

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

Everyone—including the enemy’s propagandists—generally

agrees that the riotous new figure appearing at the head of the

recent demonstrations [le cortège de tête] is one of the noteworthy

inventions of the current uprising. The governmental attempt by

the media to reduce this phenomenon to a soundbyte that is both

disgustingly depoliticized (the enigmatic “black bloc” or, more

commonly, the “smashers” [casseurs]) and quantifiable ( “dozens”,

“several hundred”, “close to a thousand,” depending on the day)

clearly aims to conceal a reality that is precisely the inverse: the

head of the cortège is growing in numbers, at the same time that

its composition is becoming increasingly unassignable.

One can, of course, find experienced political activists, members

of this or that organization, some of whom have a long history

of social movements and whose presence is expected, predictable,

and normal. But the singularity of the head of the cortège lies in

its generic character, which evades capture by any identity. In it,

people are encountering others who they should never meet under

the normal course of things, whose assigned positions appear

radically incommensurate. What could be more worrisome for

power than to observe (with an impotence proportionate to its

brutality) the practical weaving-together of those very bodies it

busies itself keeping apart? The CGT activist who clashes with

the police instead of strolling along behind his union’s sound

truck, the university professor who dons a hoodie and swimming

goggles instead of signing a petition and once again separating

speech from gesture, the student who leaves her classroom to

go join the employees on strike, the retiree who braves the tear

gas: so many uncontrollable lines of flight, so many miraculous

journeys. If becoming-revolutionary means anything, it is precisely

this assumption of the clinamen , this self-abandonment, this

uncompromising engagement with the possible opened up by the

situation.

“What Empire demands is not that each conforms to a common

law, but that each conforms to his own particular identity.

Imperial power depends on the adherence of bodies to their

supposed qualities or predicates in order to leverage control over

them.”

Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

That everyone remains in their place—this is the injunction of the

dominant order. However, the concept of form-of-life, which to

our eyes seems helpful for grasping the collective élan at work in

this ongoing experiment [or: experience]38, designates precisely

an attraction, an inclination, a taste that exceeds (through the

intervention of an evental contingency) any identifying grasp, any

substantial fixation. The form-of-life is a free use of predicates,

one that suspends, deactivates, and destitutes them. Every

objective determination is hereby rendered inoperative. Trade

unionists, students, precarious workers, the unemployed, workers,

intellectuals, activists, artists, youth from the banlieus: the head of

the cortège embodies the neutral and anonymous coalescence, the

becoming-anyone of this whole human multiplicity whose specific

origins find themselves locally and punctually suspended. As

Agamben put it, “a form-of-life is that which ceaselessly deposes

the social conditions in which it finds itself living.” 39

To our eyes, a similar logic occurred in the refusal of work that

took place on a mass scale during the labor struggles of the early

1970’s in Italy. What was at issue was not defending the identity

of the workers, but negating it, materially destroying it. Whereas

the union bureaucracies claimed to win better working conditions,

thereby maintaining the worker in his alienated function as

laborer, in his submission to the hierarchy of the boss, autonomous

proletarians struggled against work itself through an entire

series of offensive practices, from sabotage to absenteeism, all of

which testified to a refusal on the part of the working class to

reproduce itself as an available labor force, i.e., as capital. To refuse

work, means to be extraneous to the relationship of production,

to struggle against one’s own class identity, against all that is

perceived as a negation and a dispossession of one’s existence. In

short: “to struggle against production and against the command of

In French expérience can mean both experience and experiment.

Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, Stanford, 2016, Part IV.

the market [le commandement d’entreprise], to negate ourselves as

working class and hurl ourselves into an attack on state power.”40

From which we draw the following conclusion: if the enduring

operation of power is to impose upon us a fixed set of predicates,

from which are derived a series of specific behaviors, then the

primordial gesture of liberation is a desubjectifying one that aims

to subvert its own social identity.

«To assume a form-of-life means to be more faithful to our

penchants than to our predicates.”41 For weeks now, we’ve

witnessed the unforeseeable encounter of bodies sharing a single

form-of-life, a single penchant for direct emancipation, open

antagonism, insurrectional audacity. That this has transpired

through the reappropriation of mass violence (the symptom of

an increasingly diffuse radicality), i.e. by the destitution of its

centralized monopoly by the state, should no longer surprise us.

Obviously, the whole question now is whether this fabric of

political friendships will be able to produce its own war machine,

and overcome the momentary culmination inevitable at the present

stage. If everyone simply returns to their old existence (prior to

the event), if the bodies that today are affected by a common

power resume their atomic separation, this movement will have

been a mere convulsion without consequence. It is up to us to

deepen these material and affective bonds, which right now are

merely embryonic, and to give them a duration, an organizational

consistency. To build and strengthen our Party: that is the task

of the coming phase. By which we mean, to follow the line along

which forms-of-life grow, to assume the becoming-common

these networks of affinity, and to invent, far from all all vertical

hierarchies, a new strategic operator.

We can, therefore we must.

-A musician from the head of the cortège.

Marcello Tarì, Autonomie! Italie, les années 1970, La Fabrique

41 Tiqqun,

Introduction to Civil War, 23.