Tomorrow: Community meeting to organize against SB1070 in Tempe

Tomorrow at Mitchell Park in Tempe (9th Street and McKemy) at 5pm, residents of Tempe will be gathering to meet and organize towards forcing Tempe to take a non-compliance/no-enforcement position on the racist law SB1070. People will be grilling and eating food, talking and finding common ground towards this goal.

Flier below:

Financial support needed for the 6 people arrested at the Tucson border patrol lock down

Financial support is needed for the six people who locked themselves together in the lobby of the Tucson sector border patrol office for over three hours last Friday.

In the statement released the day of the lockdown, the group demanded the end of the militarization of the border, in addition to the end of the racist SB1070 law, and the 287(g) program that allows police to act as immigration agents. As if on cue, the federal government answered today as President Obama has decided to militarize Arizona's southern border with 1200 National Guard soldiers, and over $500 million dollars in funds. It's clear the government, from the local, county, state, and federal levels, is declaring war on indigenous communities, immigrants, and the communities of the border states. Likewise, it's clear that many more will stand up to the repression and terror of the authorities, and to fight for autonomy, dignity, and freedom that is under increasing attack every day.

We can't fight alone, and we hope we won't have to, so please consider showing solidarity to our O'odham, Dine', Latin@, and anti-authoritarian comrades who locked down and are now facing misdemeanor trespassing and misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges. Click the link below to make a donation that will aid our comrades with their court fees and related expenses over the next few months.

No borders, no state, no papers!

1st NATION AND MIGRANTS OPPOSE SB1070 DEMAND DIGNITY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND END TO BORDER MILITARIZATION

Many comrades of ours, with whom we have organized in a variety of ways this year, including the DO@ Bloc and the Inglourious Basterds Bloc, occupied and locked down in the Border Patrol HQ this afternoon. This statement was issued to press and various resistance and anarchist sites for proliferation and discussion.

The statement further pushes the discussion around freedom of movement and the rights of people to be free from state harassment and, most importantly in my view, directly attacks the idea that "immigration reform" must come with a commitment to militarizing the border. These two ideas must be de-linked! To continue the dialog as it predominates now is to concede to further shifting the burden of controlling movement onto native land and to force indigenous peoples to suffer even more attacks from the state and its myriad racist agents.

Those who do not currently include the perspectives and concerns of those who live everyday with the extreme expression of border militarization do everyone, including themselves, a disservice. If one is not free until all are free, then it is impossible to support "immigration reform" as long as it includes militarization of the border. At least until that is no longer true, we must be opposed to reform.

The occupation lasted several hours. Through persistence and creativity, all who participated in the action were released with a citation and no one was taken into custody. Solidarity, comrades!

Statement follows:

OCCUPATION OF BORDER PATROL HEADQUATERS
DAVIS-MONTHAN AIRFORCE BASE, TUCSON, AZ

1st NATION AND MIGRANTS OPPOSE SB1070 DEMAND DIGNITY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND END TO BORDER MILITARIZATION

“The militarized border imposed by the U.S. has lead only to cultural and environmental destruction of the indigenous peoples whose land is on or near the border. This militarization brings death and terror for indigenous peoples from other parts of the continent migrating to this land.”

21 May 2010

Tucson, AZ – More than a dozen people occupied Border Patrol headquarters at Davis-Monthan Airforce Base today in an act of peaceful resistance. The group includes members of Indigenous Nations of Arizona, migrants, people of color and white allies. Six people used chains and other devices to lock themselves in the building. These Arizona residents disrupted the Border Patrol operations to demand that Border Patrol (BP), Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), their parent entity, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Obama administration end militarization of the border, end the criminalization of immigrant communities, and end their campaign of terror which tears families apart through increasing numbers of raids and deportations.

The protesters also call on the State of Arizona to repeal the racist Senate Bill 1070 that criminalizes immigrant communities on the state level, makes it illegal to transport or harbor an undocumented person regardless of family relationship, requires police agencies to engage in racial profiling, and ultimately is an attempt to ethnically cleanse Arizona of those with brown skin. This act of civil disobedience was only the latest in an increasing wave of direct action targeting the federal government’s terrorist immigration policies.

Border militarization destroys Indigenous communities.

The development of the border wall has lead to desecration of our ancestors graves, it has divided our communities and prevents us from accessing sacred places.

Troops and paramilitary law enforcement, detention camps, check points, and citizenship verification are not a solution to migration. We have existed here long before these imposed borders, my elders inform us that we always honored freedom of movement. Why are our communities and the daily deaths at the border ignored? The impacts of border militarization are constantly made invisible in the media, the popular culture of this country and even the mainstream immigrants rights movement which has often pushed for “reform” that means further militarization of the border, which means increased suffering for our communities.

Indigenous communities such as the O’odham, the Pascua Yaqui, Laipan Apache, Kickapoo, and Cocopah along the US/Mexico border have been terrorized with laws and practices like SB1070 for decades. Indigenous people along the border have been forced by border patrol to carry and provide proof of tribal membership when moving across their traditional lands that have been bisected by this imposed border; a border that has been extremely damaging to the cultural and spiritual practices of these communities. Many people are not able to journey to sacred sites because the communities where people live are on the opposite side of the border from these sites. Since the creation of the current U.S./Mexico border, 45 O’odham villages on or near the border have been completely depopulated.

On this day people who are indigenous to Arizona join with migrants who are indigenous to other parts of the Western Hemisphere in demanding a return to traditional indigenous value of freedom of movement for all people. Prior to the colonization by European nations (spaniards, english, french) and the establishment of the european settler state known as the United States and the artificial borders it and other european inspired nation states have imposed; indigenous people migrated, traveled and traded with each other without regard to artificial black lines drawn on maps. U.S. immigration policies dehumanize and criminalize people simply because which side of these artificial lines they were born on. White settlers whose ancestors have only been here at most for a few hundred years have imposed these policies of terror and death on “immigrants” whose ancestors have lived in this hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, for time immemorial.

In addition, the migration that the U.S. government is attempting to stop is driven more than anything else by the economic policies of the U.S. Free trade agreements such as NAFTA have severely reduced the ability of Mexicans and others from the global south to sustain themselves by permitting corporations to extract huge amounts of wealth and resources from these countries into the U.S. This has led to millions of people risking the terror and death that so many face to cross into the U.S. looking for ways to better support their families. Thousand of women, men, children and elders have died crossing just in the last decade. If the U.S. really wants to reduce migration it should end its policies of exploitation and wealth extraction targeted at the global south and instead pursue policies of economic, environmental and social justice for all human beings on the planet, thus reducing the drive to immigrate.

The protestors are demanding:

-An end to border militarization
-The immediate repeal of SB1070 and 287g
-An end to all racial profiling and the criminalization of our communities
-No ethnic cleansing or cultural genocide
-No border patrol encroachment/sweeps on sovereign native land
-No Deportations
-No Raids
-No ID-verification
-No Checkpoints

-Yes to immediate and unconditional regularization (“legalization”) of all people
-Yes to human rights
-Yes to dignity
-Yes to respect
Yes to respecting Indigenous Peoples inherent right of migration

The fight continues: A reminder from the Phoenix Class War Council about the struggle in Arizona

Friends in the North American anarchist movement,

I suppose it goes without saying that things here in Arizona have been moving fast and furious since the week or so before SB1070 passed. The resistance continues to broaden. Direct actions and civil disobedience continue to spread in a state where "responsible" leaders on all sides try hard to pretend that such things are not necessary for social change. In the face of the attack, the twin "trust the politicians"/ "trust the political process" mantras that have been repeated for the last several years have become ridiculous to the point of absurdity.

The racist rift that has, for the rest of the country, burst quite impolitely out into the light of day continues to deepen and polarize. In Phoenix, violence has already broken out on at least two occasions, leaving one dead, and we're heading into what promises to be a particularly hot summer, even by Arizona standards. If nothing happens to change it, SB1070 will go into effect on July 28th, when the temperatures march towards 120 degrees. The kind of days where you sweat just sitting still. The forces of reaction, armed and ready, prepare to form up to defend the border again. The National Socialist Movement, who we successfully countered last year, have re-emerged from their holes at long last and are interviewed on television by a complacent, cowardly and pitifully uncritical media afraid to call them the Nazis that they are. Things are in flux and the struggle intensifies. It's too early to call this "Bleeding Arizona", but we do wonder: are we on the verge of an explosion?

It is in that context that we decided to put up this note to our comrades in the state and, in particular, outside it. We know that you rely on us for analysis and news about the class war here. We apologize for not updating the site as much as we have in the past. And for not directly addressing the ever-growing crisis in our backyard with the written word as much as we would like to. It may help you to know that we have begun along with some other comrades a new site to chronicle all the resistance to SB1070. You can get updates on the situation in Arizona very easily there and we add several new articles a day from a variety of sources.

But the truth is, we have been very busy intervening, fighting and organizing, and taking the time to write has not been easy (especially with the Suns in the Western Conference Finals!). Likewise, aside from the pace of struggle, a lot of what is going on cannot be written about for a variety of reasons. We hope you understand. When we get a minute to put something comprehensive together, we will. In the meantime, we hope that our past analysis has helped prepare the way for those interested in acting in solidarity or joining us in the fight.

Along with everyone else, we are running to keep up with events, which is natural in situations like these, where the people show ever increasing signs of pushing past vampiric politicians and professional managers of struggle and making a break for it. The movement leadership here in Phoenix, at least, have failed miserably in their obligation to deliver even the most modest self-defense for migrants in town, not to mention to provide a vehicle for the fight back. This most recent bill (a particularly onerous one indeed, but not the first of its kind in Arizona by any means) has revealed this bankruptcy to many. With each internal movement peace cop and every repeated, failed tactic or strategy, the defeat delivered by mainstream organizers to us all seems more and more clear, which is why more and more people are stepping outside the conventional movement organizations and taking action themselves.

It has been our contention and continues to be that the struggle in Arizona contains all the elements necessary for a social explosion. In Arizona we have reflected the segregationist, colonialist history of America (the Arizona territory was in the Confederacy, for instance, and imposed a regime of segregation after the Civil War).

In fact, there's a semi-famous story about a Nazi officer, a prisoner of war, being shipped across the country to a POW camp during World War II and who passes through Arizona on his way. Among his military police escort is a black soldier. The unit stops at a roadside diner to eat, taking a seat in the dining room. Almost everyone takes a seat there, that is. Because Arizona is a segregated state, the black MP has to eat in the kitchen, with the Mexican staff. That's Arizona in a nutshell: Nazis eat in the dining room.

Of course, there's another story about a cadre of imprisoned Nazis during the war who managed to get a map of Phoenix and to construct a rubber raft while they were held at a camp in the city. A crafty bunch, they got over the wall and to the Salt River, where they expected to float to the Colorado River, Mexico and, ultimately, to the ocean and to whatever Nazis consider freedom. Unfortunately for them, the Salt River had long ago suffered from dry weather and damming upriver. They were quickly recaptured.

So our history isn't everything -- it's also what people bring with them. While we have a racist past to be sure, we likewise have the ongoing settler expansion, which continues to this day as an internal influx of people from other parts of the US. The population of Arizona has more than doubled in the last thirty years, thrusting Phoenix practically overnight from a backwater to the fifth largest city in the nation, and gobbling up land at a rate that quickly gave our city a geographical area larger than LA, bumping uncomfortably up against the two O'odham reservations that sit to the south and east of the Valley.

While many people in states outside Arizona bemoan the backward nature of Arizona politics, it's important to note that given this flood of people from other parts of the US, Arizona's politics are not really just "Arizona's politics". They are the politics of the rest of the country, magnified -- smashed together in collapsing now but once overpriced suburbs and set on fire by long commutes to work in the company of hot-headed right wing radio jocks.

In Arizona, white people who have moved two thousand miles in just the last few years to set up their suburban homestead or to secure their cheap retirement denounce the movement of people who may have only traveled a few hundred miles, or who may have migrated back and forth for generations. Or, it's true, who may have been deported during one of the previous economic crashes, dispossessed of their labor and their meager earnings and deposited across la linea when they became inconvenient to the demands of Capital, just like the Wobblies from Bisbee in an earlier era, the largest part of whom were Mexican.

Perhaps people who move here can be forgiven for not knowing the history of Arizona, but did they not at least look at a map before they piled their possessions in a U-Haul and headed West? That funny shaped thing to our South is Mexico! And Phoenix is in the "Sonoran Desert", a name it shares with the Mexican state of Sonora that borders us. The Sonoran Desert also contains the O'odham pilgrimage site of Magdelena. The rising border fences and military deployments that so many new Arizonans request will impede or even make impossible this yearly voyage. Likewise the demands for papers cannot be met by many traditional people, born outside cities and unable to acquire documents acceptable to law enforcement and border authorities. Sometimes the obvious ain't so obvious to everyone.

But, unfortunately, when these internal white American "immigrants" and migrant workers to Arizona (and what else do you call people who moved here for jobs at Taser International and Boeing that now find themselves foreclosed and dispossessed in the era of the new austerity?) left their crowded East Coast cities and turned West, their RV's and East Coast and Midwest accents weren't all they brought with them: they also brought their racist politics, which finds fertile grounds in the not-so-long-ago-stolen Arizona land.

So, we have the default white supremacist class politics of the white middle and working classes, who substitute their vulgar and petty cross-class alliance with the white ruling class for what ought to be a genuine class consciousness of solidarity, selling the rest of their class out in the process. But we also have a long history of open borders and free movement of peoples. The border with Mexico has, for all intents and purposes, been open for all of human history until just the last few years. And we have a history of indigenous resistance, which stretches back hundreds of years but continues today in the resistance to the predations of corporations like Resolution Copper in Superior and Peabody Coal on Black Mesa.

And we have a history of worker resistance, too. The bitter Phelps Dodge copper strike in 1983 wasn't that long ago, even if the Phelps Dodge Tower sits now victoriously in the heart of downtown, in the "Copper Square" district named for it (and copper's place in Arizona is enshrined on our very flag). But we remember that the very same National Guard units that racist politicians now threaten to deploy at the border in order to satiate the demands of the white working class for the the recognition of their white privileges, dividing Tohono O'odham lands and disrupting their natural right to travel freely, are the very selfsame units that Governor Babbit deployed to break that strike. It's interesting to note that the Bisbee City Council just voted to oppose SB1070, joining Flagstaff and Tucson, so let's never say that lessons can't be learned and that things can't be different. Other cities will, we hope, soon follow.

As for us, we continue to believe that another dialog is possible around movement and dislocation, as well as the conditions that cause it, hinder it and seek to control it. In particular we have learned from our O'odham comrades, with whom we have worked very closely over the last couple years, that we must maintain the heat on those who demand immigration reform. Because from our experience such demands usually contain a call for militarization of the border, and we firmly believe that we should not "solve" the question of illegalization by shifting the burden onto people at the border, in particular indigenous people.

We remain committed to the principles laid out in the Diné, O'odham, anarchist/anti-authoritarian bloc statement. The process isn't easy, but the fight to elbow out some room for a broader discussion continues. At the same time, as white revolutionaries, we still take very seriously the admonition of Malcolm X to organize within the communities we come from and amongst white people. The struggle continues to find arguments and to push on contradictions that can open up opportunities for white people to act against whiteness so that a genuine ethic of solidarity can prevail, creating the kinds of conditions that can turn this struggle into a revolutionary one. We will continue to intervene in white movements and to see what shakes out.

In the near future we hope to get together a statement that can offer direction for those anarchists/anti-authoritarians interested in engaging in solidarity actions. Your solidarity means a lot to us, and to those who have been in contact or who have come out already, many thanks. As we said before, there is a real opportunity for anarchist ideas to spread in this context. Much is happening, though, so to list a lot of specific actions is beyond our means right now.

In solidarity from occupied O'odham land,
Phoenix Class War Council

P.S.
Go Suns!

Four legs and a heart: A tribute to the Greek canine riot corps!

Greek protest dogs are finally getting their due. People who came to PCWC's Beer & Revolution featuring our Greek anarchist friends will already be familiar with the phenomenon, but it seems with the riots last week the general population is at long last becoming aware of the courage and steadfast loyalty that is the Greek canine riot corps. Here's to the Greeks, including those with four legs, and their unending determination to resist domination! You continue to inspire us all.

The Suns of Anarchy

by Jon Riley

It's that time of year again, the NBA playoffs are in full swing, and we at PCWC are closely following our favorite sports team, the Phoenix Suns, as they battle it out with the San Antonio Spurs in the Western conference semi-finals. Game two was tonight, and it was a fantastic game, and not just because the Suns took down our biggest rivals for two games in a row ("rivals" may be too kind to describe the vitriol Suns fans reserve for the Spurs, "immortal enemies" may be a better fit), but we're pleased for their actions off the hardwood. Yesterday the Suns organization came out against the racist bill SB1070, sponsored by state senator Russell Pearce, signed into law a couple of weeks back by Governor Brewer, and the focus of numerous protests locally, and solidarity demonstrations, rallies, walkouts, boycotts, and direct actions across the US.

Thousands march against SB1070 during tonight's game

In an act of solidarity with the state's immigrant and Latino communities, the Suns donned their "Los Suns" jerseys, originally worn as part of the "Noche Latina"promotion, tonight it was an act of defiance to the terror being spread by the reactionary and white supremacist political and social forces at work in Arizona. Suns general manager Steve Kerr made the Suns' case at a press conference yesterday:

"It's hard to imagine in this country that we have to produce papers," Kerr said. "It rings up images of Nazi Germany. We understand that the intentions of the law are not for that to happen, but you have to be very, very careful. . . . It's important that everyone in our state and nation understands this is an issue that needs to be explored. So, we're trying to expose it."

While the announcement came from the Suns front office, team owner Robert Sarver said the decision to challenge the new law came with the final approval from the players. The Phoenix Suns players came to consensus to wear the Los Suns jerseys, and stand in solidarity with Arizona's Latino community, a bold move in these days as the social tension is ever so present.


Suns point guard Steve Nash, winner of two MVPs with the Suns, and one of three foreign born players on the roster, has earned a reputation for his political stance. During the opening days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Nash caught a firestorm of criticism after taking a very unpopular stance against the war, and it's encouraging to see him step up once again, this time in defense of the state's Latino community:

"I don't agree with this bill, I don't agree with the spirit of the bill or the message it sends, not only to people in our community but how it represents our community across the country and the world.

"I think the bill opens up the opportunity for racial profiling, racism. I think it puts the police in an incredibly difficult position that isn't fair to them. It's an infringement on our civil liberties to allow the possibility for inequality to arise in our community."

Other Suns spoke out on the bill as well, Grant Hill, Amar'e Stoudamire, and coach Alvin Gentry, even our long term rivals are in support of the stance against SB1070. Spurs coach Greg Popavich had this to say in defense of the Suns management and players:

"It's kind of like 9/11 comes, and all of a sudden there's a Patriot Act, just a knee-jerk sort of thing, and it changes our country, what we stand for. This law smacks of that to some degree. So, I think what he's doing . . . is very wise and very correct."

To be clear, I hate the Spurs. Hate 'em. Their bad behavior in previous playoff series with the Suns was just as despicable as the notoriously poor officiating from the refs (or was it something else at work?), but I will reach across the aisle on this, they should be commended for supporting the Suns stance. Popavich and the Spurs will show a little solidarity with AZ on the hardwood by wearing their own "Los Spurs" uniforms during one of the next couple of games in San Antonio.


For those outside of the valley, I'm not saying this is a perfect political moment, we get very few of those after all, but it is a moment to build momentum from. The Suns are run by a bunch of billionaire and millionaire investors, the players themselves are millionaires, I understand that. However, the significance of this should not go unremarked by anti-authoritarians, regardless of your inclination towards professional sports. The Suns are a staple of life in Phoenix, they were the city's first professional sports club, many a Phoenician has fond memories of their grade school class receiving free tickets to Suns games at the old Veterans Memorial Collesium ("The Mad House on McDowell"), and the greatest season of all, the 92-93 team led by Charles Barkley who took it all the way to the NBA finals to challenge Michael Jordan and the Bulls.


While we've been life long Suns fans, we don't mistake these acts of solidarity from the players or management with a developing anti-capitalist, or anti-authoritarian critique. Make no mistake, we see this for what it is, this is a multi-million dollar sports franchise weighing in on the very oppressive atmosphere in Arizona, and some may be speaking up because they recognize the egregious rise in racial profiling and detentions by police, others from the Suns organization probably see a profit incentive with a future Latino audience. If, however, there is some chance of a breakthrough during this playoff run, it's will originate from the commonality that sport offers us, the sense that we are all on the same side as long as we cheer on our team. So, yes, their decision to speak out is massive, but it's no cure all, we remain certain of the ability of ordinary people organize their own lives, to struggle, and to wage war on their oppressors on their own terms.

On a final note, I had a good laugh watching the evening news the other night as the racist politician Russell Pearce was interviewed by a Channel 3 reporter on his reaction to the Suns move against SB1070.

Reporter: Are you surprised that the NBA and the NBA teams taking a stance like this, do you think it's their place to?

Pearce: No it's not their place to. It's the rule of law, I mean, that's anarchism!

Ah, "anarchism" and "anarchy", time and time again this simple utterance by a blowhard politician is intended to strike fear in the hearts of every law abiding, god fearing, immigrant hating, patriotic American citizen, but there's a catch. See, when he calls the Suns' actions anarchism, or labels anyone opposed to his brand of racist terror as an anarchist, he is effectively saying that the common sense of the society is "anarchy." By his logic what the Suns are doing is anarchism. Those who speak out against Sheriff Arpaio are anarchists. All those critical of immigration policy, or law enforcement are obviously for open borders, against the rule of law, or so the logic goes. Everyone else is the anarchist. If only this were the truth.

Then again, perhaps we need not look too far. The kids are self-organizing and walking out of school, or the 90 cities across the USA had solidarity rallies against SB1070 and bills like it, are closer to the visions of a popular movement than we may give them credit for. We may all be anarchists now, in the eyes of the state, or the reactionary social forces, but the challenge we still face is how we can contribute to a popular anti-authoritarian common sense. The Suns position is certainly a step forward, but also not enough, the position against racial profiling is right on, but where is the defense of immigrants, legal or not? How far will we have push the limits of the debate before the mainstream acknowledges that comprehensive immigration reform (as it's proposed now) means the militarization of the border lands, and as a direct result the lands of indigenous people divided by the border wall?

At best we can thank the Suns for opening this void, but it's up to all of us to fill it, and to keep pushing forward. Reform will never deliver freedom or autonomy. The state will never concede anything to those demanding liberties beyond its own laws and constitution. So we forever look beyond compromise and the state.

No controls on movement, no borders, no militarization. It's a start.

***
For a previous writing on our pro-Suns and anti-authoritarian orientation/contradiction, I recommend checking out the old blog of PCWC member Phoenix Insurgent for some thoughts on the Suns, anarchy and basketball, and former Suns center Pat Burke.

I'd also recommend some of the writing from lefty sport writer, Dave Zirin, on this matter. Check out "A New Era: Here Come the Suns", an essay he wrote a few days back, I've posted it over on the Resistance to SB1070 blog, a little side project of ours dedicated to recording the struggles against SB1070 and other forms of resistance to controls on movement.

GO SUNS! BASKETBALL KNOWS NO BORDERS!

Today's recommended reading: Luigi Galleani and the anarchists of Barre

As we witness yet another wave of anti-immigrant hysteria and mass deportations, this article reflecting on the history of anarchist firebrand and advocate of propaganda of the deed Luigi Galleani couldn't come at a better time. Of course, the immigrant community historically has been a hotbed of anarchist thought and action, so it's worth taking the opportunity provided by this article to look back at past anarchist responses to the attacks of the state. The whole article is very interesting, but in particular I want to highlight the last few paragraphs.

Enjoy!

Luigi Galleani and the anarchists of Barre

...In 1919, as the Justice Department resorted to wholesale deportations to quell dissent, the Galleanisti turned to ‘direct action” in protest. They proclaimed their objective with a bluntly worded pamphlet. “Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores. The storm is within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire. You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. And deport us! We will dynamite you! Either deport us all or free all!”

The anarchists-avengers embarked on a terrorist campaign targeting important American institutions and individuals (such as J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller). Sixteen mailed explosives were discovered at the New York post office (undeliverable due to insufficient postage) but others delivered by hand caused panic in cities around the country. Even Palmer was targeted with a bomb delivered to his Washington, D.C., address. The bomber died in the explosion which caused significant damage to Palmer's house.

Extensive anti-terrorist actions were undertaken by the government with little success. Their investigations were hampered primarily by the inability of anyone within the Federal Bureau of Investigation to speak or read Italian. Eventually, Italian informers were recruited and their efforts finally yielded meager results. Their most-effective informant was able to connect the Galleanisti with the bombings, and the anarchists hurriedly began to conceal their pamphlets and supplies of explosives. The U.S. government deported Galleani in June 1919 in an attempt to tame the burgeoning anarchist threat to American institutions.

It was during these efforts that Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, and their claims to have been hiding anarchist literature during the robbery/murders in Braintree were considered to be insufficient alibis to offer the authorities. It is safe to say that the Palmer Raids in 1920, instigated by the U.S. Attorney General, whose home was partially destroyed by the anarchists in the previous year, were precipitated by the Galleanisti bombings. In the aftermath, more than 10,000 people were arrested in an effort marred by the absence of due process and extorted confessions. Although the anarchist movement in the United States was greatly diminished, a defiant Galleani continued to publish the Cronaca after his forced return to Italy. But the fascist government of Italy repeatedly jailed him. Destitute and ailing, Galleani, once considered the most dangerous man in America, died in Tuscany Nov. 4, 1931.

A Strike, a Boycott, a Holiday, a Refusal: Peter Linebaugh on May Day.

With May Day looming, I think it's always worth looking back and remembering its origins -- and this year perhaps more than others in recent memory, given the uprisings currently happening here in Arizona. Lucky for me that Jon Riley and I were shooting the shit over beers the other night and he reminded me of this wonderful essay on May Day by Peter Linebaugh.

Linebaugh is absolutely one of my absolute favorite authors. You really can't go wrong with any of his books, but in particular I have really, really gotten a lot out of "The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century" and "The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic".

Indeed, you'd be doing yourself a favor if you went out right now and bought them, to tell you the truth. The lessons I learned from those two books pay unending dividends. Anyhow, enough of my praise. Delve into a little bit for yourself below. When you're done, perhaps check out some of his talks on youtube, one of which includes a walking tour of revolutionary London with some perhaps familiar Class War notables and other rabble.

Anyhow, I hope with all the nice things I've said about him and his work, he won't mind if I repost the entire essay on May Day below. Cheers!

-Phoenix Insurgent

A Strike, a Boycott, a Holiday, a Refusal

May Day with Heart

By PETER LINEBAUGH

The moon and hours have revolved again, dear hearts, and May Day is upon us. Spring has sprung as usual, though a strike, a boycott, a holiday, a refusal--call it what you will--looms hopefully on Monday morrow, and that is unusual. We'll wear white in solidarity with the immigrant worker against rampant criminalization, against the universal miserablism, the broken levees, the constant enclosures, great walls, razor-wired borders, burning frontiers, and the castrametation of the planet by the USA (as the Romans called the science of military base construction).

I asked Massimo De Angelis, a family man, who went up to Gleneagles last year to protest against the G-8, what to say on May Day. He replied, as is his wont, as if he were a hobgoblin sitting on a mushroom. He likes the mushroom because it is nocturnal, it may cause dreams, and many of the fungi are not yet privatized. As for the hobgoblin it is a country figure of tricks and mischief against the masters. Plus, I know he likes Helen MacFarlane's translation of The Communist Manifesto, "A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe."

"Well," the hobgoblin said to me, says he, "whatever you say, say it with heart."

Very well, but James Green, the splendid labor historian, says that after the terrible events in Chicago beginning on May Day 1886, Americans suffered "a loss of heart." The labor historian tells us we have lost precisely what the hobgoblin asks us to find.

How are we to resolve this dilemma? This year the answer must come from the South. Eduardo Galeano, the historian from Uruguay, reminds us of a simple etymology, that the word "record" as in the record of the past, derives from Latin, to pass again through the heart ("cordis").

We cannot avoid the ache of history; its grief we feel in the gut. In preparation for the May Day general strike (will it be general?) by the undocumented workers we organize our banners (and May poles?), prepare our slogans (open borders, troops home, no enclosures, health care for all), hopefully many will try their hand at a manifesto, and we alert our lawyer friends to prepare defense for the inevitable victims. It is also essential to study our past, and to learn about our May Day. We must study the record. It must pass through our heart again.

So, we take off the classics from the shelf, or make sure our local library has them at hand Martin Duberman's fine novel on Haymarket, Roediger and Rosemont's timeless scrapbook, the late Paul Avrich stirring monograph, or the old CP classic on May Day by Philip Foner. To these we now add James Green's just published Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (Pantheon Books, 2006). Go get it! We need it for Monday and every May Day thereafter. The book is trying to put some freedom back into history telling us that it could have been otherwise. We call this human agency. The theory is something like this. It's human history, we're humans, history is something we make with our deeds and words. This is where free-will rubs up against determinism. As soon as you put class into the theory it begins to make sense: the ruling class is determined to exploit us, so naturally it says that it can't help it - the steam hammer is stronger than John Henry, you can't stand in the way of progress, and so on. That's the determinism. On the other hand, the working-class will be free. We are not cogs in a wheel; we have not forgotten the good old wooden shoe. We do have choices. We will (for instance) wear a white t-shirt on May Day. Human agency thus resolves itself into the struggle between the classes.

It never took any multicultural brilliance to discern that the actual fundaments of the USA are threefold:

a) it was robbed from the indigenous peoples,

b) its swamps were drained, forests felled, and fields prepared by African slaves, or

c) that the railroads, factories, mills, and mines were built and run by immigrants from Europe and Asia.

The ruling class from Madison on forward knew its duty to keep these three, if not fighting one another, then separated. Thus, radical reconstruction came to an end in 1877 in New Orleans beginning that period of Afro-American history called "the Nadir"; the plains Indians were destroyed in 1877 taking the death of Crazy Horse for a symbol of the destruction, and the third, in a word, death at Haymarket.

The Cuban poet, José Martí, lived in exile in New York at the time and wrote brilliantly on the Haymarket martyrs. Although "the disagreements and rivalries of the races already arguing about supremacy in this part of the continent, might have stood in the way of the immediate formation of a formidable labor party with identical methods and purposes, the common denominator of pain has accelerated the concerted action of all who suffer." Here is heart as a political principle.

James Green recovers forgotten dreams, that one, for instance which tied Abraham Lincoln to the cooperative commonwealth. The great sacrifices included the death of Lincoln whose funeral catafalque came through tens of thousands of mourners in Chicago on May Day 1865, amidst a light drizzle of rain. America could become a cooperative commonwealth instead of a competitive camp of capitalism. William Sylvis, Andrew Cameron, and Ira Steward maintained continuity in the north after the Civil War. William Sylvis rebuilt the Molders' Union, foundry workers at the farm reaper works of McCormick. They were the industrial vanguard by 1865. Andrew Cameron was a Scottish Chartist, and an editor in Chicago of the Workingman's Advocate whose idea was that production should be for use, not profit. Ira Steward, an abolitionist and machinist from Massachusetts, established the Eight-Hour Leagues in 1866, on 2 May of that year in Chicago. A year later the first eight-hour law took effect on May Day, passed by the Illinois legislature and signed by Richard Oglesby, governor and friend of Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter. Q.E.D.

What happened in 1886? The context was this. The imperialists had divided up Africa the year before. " accumulating mansions and factories on the one hand, and wretched masses of people on the other," is how Martí painted the background. Otherwise, the founding of the American Federation of Labor by the cigar maker Samuel Gompers, riots in Seattle against Chinese laborers, the capture of Geronimo, the gold rush to Witwatersrand in South Africa, Gottlieb Daimler perfected the internal combustion engine, Das Kapital was published in English, the French Impressionist pointillist canvas Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is displayed and was designed to erase thoroughly the visual memories of the Paris Commune and la semaine sanglante.

Despite boom and bust of the trade cycle, despite unemployment, union workers "began to anticipate their own emancipation from the endless workday and growing tyranny of wage labor." The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, they called themselves, mystical and with a moral code of chivalry and generous manhood. The motto of the Knights was One for All, and All for One." From squalor they proposed nobility. An 1877 circular read,

"Working men of Chicago! Have you no rights? No ambition? No Manhood? Will you remain disunited while your masters rob you of your rights and the fruits of your labor? For the sake of our wives and children and our own self-respect, LET US WAIT NO LONGER! ORGANIZE AT ONCE!"

The freight handlers struck, the upholsterers struck, the lumber shovers went on strike. 400 seamstresses left work in joyous mood. A storm of strikes swept Chicago, on the First of May 1886. The great refusal, Jim Green calls it. It was a new kind of labor movement that "pulled in immigrants and common laborers." Irish, Bohemian, German, French, Czech, Scots, English, to name a few. Socialist Sunday Schools, brass bands, choirs, little theatres,' saloons there was a working-class culture in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune (6 May 1886) hated it and compared the immigrants to zoological nightmares. It demanded deportation of "ungrateful hyenas" or "slavic wolves" and "wild beasts" and the Bohemian women who "acted like tigresses."

In the spring of 1886 strikes appeared everywhere in industrial centers; called the Great Upheaval agitating for shorter hours. Of course they were against mechanization of labor, against the exploitation of child labor, opposed to the convict lease system of labor, and opposed to contract labor. The anthem of the Knights of Labor was the "Eight-Hour Song,"

We want to feel the sunshine;
We want to smell the flowers;
We're sure God has willed it.
And we mean to have eight hours.

We're summoning our forces from Shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, Eight hours for what we will.

Sam Fielden joined the International Working People's Association in 1884 after fifteen years hauling stone and digging ditches. His father was a Lancashire handloom weaver and a ten-hour man. Sam was a Methodist.

Thanksgiving Day of 1884 they had a poor people's march and Parsons quoted from James (the brother of Jesus?) chapter five,

"Next a word to you who have great possessions. Weep and wail over the miserable fate descending on you. Your riches have rotted; your fine clothes are moth-eaten; your silver and gold have rusted away, and the very rust will be evidence against you and consume your flesh like fire. You have piled up wealth in an age that is near its close. The wages you never paid to the men who mowed your fields are loud against you, and the outcry of the reapers has reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts. You have lived on earth in wanton luxury, fattening yourselves like cattle and the day for slaughter has come. You have condemned the innocent and murdered him; he offers no resistance."

What a remarkable prophecy! The Sioux Wars removed the people of the Plains, the U.S. Cavalry thundered up and down, murdering Indians, and lathering the land with blood, while the mechanical reaper shaved the grasses. When historians speak of "the open frontier," it means the Indians were wiped out. This is the genocide which led to the agricultural depression in Europe, produced by the mechanical reaper scalping the prairie. No, the reapers were not paid.

Fast Food Nation perhaps may not yet have been up to speed yet the starting gun had been fired. Swift and Armour were the big meatpackers: they organized the mechanization of death, the machines of mass slaughter of cattle and swine. The Union Stock Yards had just been constructed. The employers threatened to employ "the whole machinery of government," including the army, "to enforce the laws of the market." Mechanization indeed was taking command.

On May Day 1886 as the workers of the USA struck for the eight-hour day, the police shot and killed four strikers at the McCormick works. August Spies issued the flyer, calling the workers to rise, to arms, for revenge. On the 4 May strikes resumed, now joined by union switchmen, laundry girls, even students from some of the schools.

At the Haymarket, tons of hay and bushels of vegetables were brought in from the Dutch truck farms. Transportation was by horse power. Indeed, then horses were part of the working class, as Jason Hribal has provoked us to thinking. Haymarket in Chicago in May 1886 was like Guernica in Spain in 1937 when the Condor Legion wiped it out by bombing: that is to say it was a busy, crowded market, ideal for terrorism.

The weather changed, the moonlit sky suddenly turned dark, as a cloud blew over, just preceding the blast. The police advanced. A bomb was thrown. In the mêlée a large number of police were wounded by the friendly fire from their own revolvers. Sam Fielden was shot in the leg. Henry Spies took a bullet for his brother. Seven policemen fell. But who threw the bomb? John Swinton, the most influential labor journalist in the land, argued that the police themselves provoked the violence to stop the strike movement for the eight hour day.

A period of police terrorism ensued. There were hundreds of arrests. There were raids at meeting halls, saloons, and newspaper offices. Captain Schaak put suspects into the sweatbox (small pitch dark wooden container) for hours to make them talk. Albert Parsons fled to Mexico, it was rumored, or was "hiding out among the negroes." That summer there was a trial, conducted by passion, judged by bigotry. Green tells the story with verve and drama. Witnesses were paid off. The jury consisted of salesmen, clerks, a high school principal, well-off all.

Nina Van Zandt, the handsome Vassar graduate and heiress, made eyes at August Spies during the trial. In the jailhouse, the love affair developed. Spies told the court, "Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand."

Michael Schwab defended anarchy saying it was the antithesis of violence. Parsons charged the court with "judicial murder." He explained socialism and anarchism. "I am doomed by you to suffer an ignominious death because I am an outspoken enemy of coercion, of privilege, of force, of authority. your every word and act are recorded. You are being weighed in the balance. The people are conscious of your power your stolen power. I, a working man, stand here and to your face, in your stronghold of oppression, denounce your crimes against humanity." Neebe was found guilty but punished with 15 years in the penitentiary. Louis Lingg killed himself. Fielden and Schwab had their sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Albert Parsons refused alcohol. He sang "La Marseillaise" and songs by Bobbie Burns. August Spies newspaper editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung in 1884. On August Spies had said, "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."

We are finding voice. Cindy Sheehan gives us voice. "Si se puede," gives us voice. The Chicago idea' was this: trade unions could take mass action against capital and the state. This idea has been disappeared or throttled. The magical realism of the ruling class proclaims May Day to be Law Day (had they not heard of Ozymandias, or Humpty Dumpty?) None died from a broken neck, all strangled to death, slowly as it appeared to the witnesses, convulsing and twisting on the rope.

That was 11 of November 1887.

James Green tells us that it was a turning point in American history. The killing at the McCormick plant, the bombing at Haymarket, the court proceedings, and the hanging of 11 November 1887 extinguished the Knights of Labor, defeated the eight-hour movement, suppressed the radicals. The Mary Magdalen, so to speak, of the suffering proletariat was Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert, daughter of Mexico. She bore witness to subsequent generations, and touching Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs, with the principles of los mártiri. Henry Demarest Lloyd was silenced, then wrote Wealth Against Commonwealth, the exposé of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, the first of the muck-rakers.

Beneath the concameration of the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City Samuel Gompers of the new American Federation of Labor appealed against the death sentence. Instead fifty years of industrial violence, and when workers, especially immigrants, found themselves at war with their employers, the courts, the police, the armed forces. These laid the "bone deep grudges" which Nelson Algren wrote about. James Green concludes, "we are today living with the legacy of those long-ago events."

The 151 foot Statue of Liberty was dedicated only two weeks before the hangings in Chicago. Inscribed on its pedestal were the words of Emma Lazarus

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

John Pemberton, a pharmacist, who invented a medicine to relieve headaches and alleviate nausea. It combines coca leaves from the Andes with cola nuts from Africa, mixed with water, caramel, and sugar: Coca-Cola, the Atlantic remedy for the ills of the barbarism of capitalism.

Both William Morris in England and José Martí exiled from Cuba in Manhatten likened the Chicago working class to a cornered animal.

William Morris wrote a death march for the funeral of Alfred Linnell, the young man killed by the London police after the 13 November 1887 Trafalgar Square meeting and demonstration. It was two days after the hanging at Haymarket. Alfred Linnell, lo!, will come knocking at the gate, unbidden, insistent, calm, upright. The Harold Pinter moment.

What cometh here from west to east awending?
And who are these, the marchers stern and slow?
We bear the message that the rich are sending
Aback to those who bade them wake and know.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.

We asked them for a life of toilsome earning,
They bade us bide their leisure for our bread;
We craved to speak to tell our woeful learning:
We come back speechless, bearing back our dead.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.

They will not learn; they have no ears to hearken.

They turn their faces from the eyes of fate;

Their gay-lit halls shut out the skies and darken.

But, lo! This dead man knocking at the gate
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.

He took it to the street: one week he is beaten up at Trafalgar Square, another week a poor law clerk is murdered by police at Trafalgar Square, and a third time in the streets, to sing this lament. This is heart. With his bids and bides and bades, with the awending and the woefuls, the man is searching for some kind of language that has endurance, that is beneath the radar, off the grid, and might be recognized by hobgoblins and coyotes.

Morris serialized The Dream of John Ball between November 1886 and January 1887. The dates give us the clue, the Haymarket trials had passed. The revolutionary attempt in Chicago had been preempted. The Chicago idea had failed, temporarily at least. In these circumstances Morris dove deep to middle ages, and ranged far, to Afro-America. In that way he maintained his revolutionary commitment. He imagines victory! "To dusk the day," means to win. "They" refers to the police, employers, capitalists, and ruling class. Eloquence arises from silence. He was reading aloud on the same day his own Dream of John Ball and B'rer Rabbit. He is looking for a people's story told in the people's language with the people's future: the opposite of the official story, not at all the evasions institutional prose, nor the commands of cogitation machines.

Prince Kropotkin at the Sunday lecture supper at the Hammersmith socialist hall told the fable of the Russians and the Redskins. He told this story rather than commit himself, one way or the other, to the quarrelsome socialists and anarchists. The African American slave selects a hero, "the weakest and most harmless of animals," Br'er Rabbit of course, "and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox." Not malice triumphs but mischievousness.

In 1887 Lord Acton wrote "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." U.S. wheat prices fell to 67¢ a bushel, England eats bread from grains of North American plains, indirect consequence of defeat of the Plains Indians and the McCormick workers. Jim Crow law passed in Florida requiring racial segregation among railway passengers.

Pablo Neruda, José Martí, even Walt Whitman had a big, hemispheric conception of America: two continents, half the planet, yet united by the German geographer Humboldt's Afro-America, a big S' New Orleans, Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil. What happens in one part effects the other sugar, aluminum, gold, bananas, silver, copper, coffee, rum, pot and coke yes, they are the products, the commodities, ripped from the bowels of the earth. They're easier to recognize than the undergrounds of people, whose migrations, sailings, tunneling have preserved the memory of los martiri.

José Martí predicted that "the world's working class will revive them [memories of the Haymarket martyrs] every First of May. That is still not known, but Martí always writes as if hearing, where it is least expected, the cry of a newborn child," wrote Galeano.

In Havana in 1887 the anarcho-syndicalists started a newspaper El Productor which covered the Haymarket tragedy. On 1890 they prepared a May Day Manifesto calling on Cubans to support the international demonstration for the eight-hour day. The workers responded with a unified, musical parade. Speeches calling for equal rights between Blacks and Whites and called for the unity of all workers. The authors of the May Day Manifesto were arrested and brought to trial. Their acquittal was greeted by a huge demo.

May Day celebrated in Mexico in 1913. From then on Primero de Mayo became a national holiday known as the Day of the Martyrs of Chicago. Italy, France, Spain, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico. In 1903 Teddy Roosevelt signed an immigration law denying entry into the US of anarchists, paupers, prostitutes, and the insane.

Galeano celebrated the marriage of heart and mind. "From the moment we enter school or church, education chops us into pieces: it teaches us to divorce soul from body and mind from heart. The fishermen of the Columbian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to define language that speaks the truth."

In Milan on the first international May Day (1890) a correspondent wrote, "On this day laborers all over the world should feel the unity of their class as a bond superior to all others" Is it possible to make such a solidarity? Can heart be so large? On May Day 1894 Coxey's Army of the Commonweal, arrived in Washington to lobby for the unemployed, only to be arrested and imprisoned for walking on the grass. The Wobblies or I.W.W. printed thousands of stickers, reading

I Won't Work More Than 8 hours After May 1st 1912 How about you ?

On May Day 1917 all Petrograd was en fete as the New York Times reported and business was at a complete standstill. In Germany meanwhile the Spartacus group leafleted, "Women workers! Male workers! The last groans of our thousands of murdered brothers and sons, the sobs of the wasted women and children call us forcibly and imperiously to the red worker's May 1st demonstration, with the gleaming words: down with the war! Up with people's brotherliness!" At the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City on May Day 1925 garment workers raised their voices to sing the "Internationale." Congress mandated the eight-hour day in the Fair Labor Standards Act. 1886 to 1938 = fifty-two years. In May Day of that year a march on the South Side of Chicago was led by a float featuring a hooded man. In one direction of time, August Spies; in another direction of time, Abu Ghraib.

Galeano visited Chicago but his exploration of Haymarket was fruitless, instead he found an old poster at a bookstore displaying the African proverb, "Until the lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter." The hunter had put in 1889 a statue of a policeman at Haymarket. The Weathermen blew up the police monument on 6 October 1969 and then again in 1970.

The urbanocide of Katrina, the castrametation of Iraq, the devaluation of the working class, the absolute rule of the petrolarchs have produced gut-wrenching grief and sorrow. Our head spins and spins in the dizzy search for cause-and-effect, searching the origin of this twisted, agonizing karma.

Half way between the gut and the head lies the heart. The heart and soul of our movement may be found on May Day and it's going to take our arms and legs to find them as well as our brains. So, let us join the hobgoblin.

Take heart with Death in the Haymarket in hand!

All out for May Day!

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com



SOURCES CONSULTED

Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make (1951, and reprinted by University of Chicago, 2001)

Massimo De Angelis, www.thecommoner.org.uk

Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, 1984)

Martin Duberman, Haymarket: A Novel (Seven Stories Press: New York, 2003)

Philip Foner's May Day: A Short History of the International Workers' Holiday, 1886-1986 (International Publishers: New York, 1986)

Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, ii, Faces and Masks, translated by Cedric Belfrage (Quartet, 1987)

Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, translated by Cedric Belfrage and Mark Schafer (W.W. Norton,: New York, 1991)

James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (Pantheon Books, 2006)

Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880)

Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901

Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (Knopf, New York, 1995)

Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz (eds.), José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas (Ocean Press: New York, 1999)

David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, Haymarket Scrapbook (Charles H. Kerr, Chicago 1986)

E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955, 1977)

No state has the right to control movement of free people.

As news comes again today that Democrats are committed to "securing the border" as a prerequisite for immigration reform, I think it's quite fortunate timing that our comrades over at O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective have posted up their compelling piece, "Movement Demands Autonomy: An O'odham Perspective on Border Controls and Immigration". Previously appearing as a pamphlet, this article does a fine job as a primer on understanding the point of view of the O'odham on questions of movement and the border -- a perspective that is sadly marginalized to say the least.

Indeed, we as anarchists, along with the indigenous peoples of this region, are well-placed to call out this bogus pairing of one so-called "reform" with another for what it really is -- a sell out. First off, if anyone has the right to say who can come and go, it is the original people of this land. And, second, the "securing" of the border that Democrats demand is not only a concession to the right wing but it is a betrayal of the various peoples whose traditional lands cross and are crossed by the border, including but not limited to Tohono O'odham territory in the south of Arizona and north of Mexico. Truth is, the people of Arizona should be turning to the indigenous to answer the question of who shall pass through these lands, not the racist settler state government.

In fact, when we hear "secure" what we ought to really understand is "militarization". Already T.O. is an armed camp of almost Warsaw Ghetto like quality, with border patrol and local cops (beefed up with Federal money) running wherever they please, harassing locals and denying traditional rights of crossing, not to mention maintaining checkpoints at the points of entry and exit from the rez (not just at border crossing points, which would be awful enough). The same controls and demands that will soon be made on migrants and everyone else the state deems worthy of suspicion are already in full effect on T.O. The surveillance we see here on our freeways originates on those border fences, checkpoints and spy towers. And the demand for their proliferation to the south will only increase them up here in the end. The dreadful situation in T.O. will soon manifest everywhere if we do nothing.

Of course, one can appreciate the bind that many indigenous people are in these days. "Reform" sells them out and the attack of SB1070 subjects them to the same profiling and abuse that it does the Mexican and other migrants who cross their lands, a great many of whom are in fact indigenous themselves. And the status quo is hardly acceptable either. These and other facts naturally dictate that there is no option on the table in the mainstream now which is satisfactory to solving this problem.

The fact is, as we and our comrades in OSABC have been saying for quite a long time now, there is no solution to the question of the movement of people without starting from the position of the indigenous. Not only are they more than deserving of justice given their history and ties to this land, but it is precisely their situation that reveals the bogus deal that is "immigration reform".

Knowing that, no one can in good conscience ignore or put their struggles on the back burner, or treat them as an after thought. If there is no justice for the indigenous of this region, then there is no justice at all. No borders, no State, no papers!

Read OSABC's article here:
Movement Demands Autonomy: An O'odham Perspective on Border Controls and Immigration

Resistance to SB1070 that you may have missed.

One of the problems with the overwhelmingly leftist orientation of the anti-SB1070 rally today, as evidenced by the seemingly unending admonitions to register to vote (for Democrats), is that it tends to obscure potential fractures and fissures on what may appear to be unanimity on the right with regard to the bill.

If you know anything about PCWC these days, it's probably that we look precisely for these kinds of potential openings in movements so that we can force open a space for more libertarian (in the traditional anarchist and anti-capitalist sense of the word) organizing, especially if we can encourage the development of contradictions that will cause a falling out on one side or another of white supremacy, and particularly amongst white movements on top of that. In our evaluation, it is the cross-class alliance of white supremacy that screws up what might otherwise be a revolutionary working class solidarity that would allow the overthrow of the capitalist state.

Anyhow, the events of the last few days have been momentous indeed, but in the rush of media attention and, as I mentioned before, due to the overwhelmingly leftist reformist orientation of the anti-SB1070 movement leadership (since they control the bulk of the message -- often with Stalinist like precision), some smaller actions have been overlooked. Here I will highlight two of them.

The first is of someone known to PCWC, and with whom we have interacted very cordially at a variety of our events, but who I won't identify since I don't know if he wants to be named. Regular attendees of PCWC actions and events will probably know him. The video linked below, taken by someone in the counter-protest on Friday, shows this person bravely moving into the reactionary crowd and calling them out vigorously for their support of the bill. In true fanatical fashion, this man begins yelling forcefully "This bill is the mark of the beast!", "Prepare for the New World Order!" and "Who would Jesus hate?!".



This is important for a few reasons. One, it comes at the right reactionaries on terrain that they are familiar with. This is something that we, as anarchists are not able to do anywhere near as effectively. Two, it opens a front on the reactionaries from their rear, hitting them in a way and from a direction that they do not expect. Three, it comes as a heartfelt and genuine defense of the true values professed by the libertarian and even Christian right, while recognizing the general tendency not to live up to them in any meaningful way.

In my opinion the disconnect that is being called out between professed Christianity and actual results derives from their adherence to white supremacist values. They defend their cross-class alliance of whiteness over their professed values of Christian love for their brother and sister, effectively. And, probably most importantly, the charges made in the video demands accountability and asserts an either/or dichotomy that attempts to erase middle ground, asserting, will you be Christian or will you hate? Will you be Christian or will you support the "mark of the beast"? This is very important because to oppose the bill in many ways contains within it the potentiality of refusing the alliance of whiteness. PCWC has spent quite a lot of effort encouraging this sort of thing and I welcome it and support it. Cheers for this revolt!

The second video is one published by Shelton at 4409. Shelton is perhaps best known amongst anarchists for his work around speed cameras. We have engaged on this front several times in the last year, encouraging their work but also being critical of pointing out what we perceive to be the unconscious white supremacist undercurrents of their strategy.

I want to be clear, this is not to say that we consider Shelton a white supremacist or anything of the sort. Even though he opposes what he calls "amnesty" for the undocumented, we believe that the racism inherent in the argument he makes is not conscious or malicious: it is the sort of white supremacy that underlies most of the assumptions that underpin white organizing in general, whether of the left or right. The flaw is not his in particular and it is important to separate it from the kind of overt racist strategy that we see being pursued by those who support the bill.

And, indeed, the arguments that Shelton has made in the past against the bill are generally pretty good although, as with the anti-SB1070 current on the left, he suffers the same problem of demanding increased policing at the border. On the left, this manifests in a demand for reform that included heightened border patrol enforcement at la linea itself. This is important for a lot of reasons, but not least of all because it sacrifices the lives of people that live on the border, specifically but not limited to the Tohono O'odham people, whose land down south is bisected by the border and who have an inherent right of travel across it. This right is currently under heavy assault by the very forces that many opponents of the bill propose to "secure" the border.

On the right the opposition to SB1070 is weakened by a similar assertion that if policing at the border were increased, then there would be less need for internal surveillance and checks on movement. Indeed, this is also the critical flaw in the libertarian/constitutionalist opposition to internal border patrol checkpoints. You can see how, ironically, these two positions, though from opposite poles of the political spectrum, suffer from the same problem. The fact is, militarization of the border must be separated from the discussion of SB1070 (and, of course, it must be opposed). If not, it remains a devil's bargain that sells some out in the name of defending others. That's not solidarity.

So, in that context, consider Shelton's interesting new video, in which he goes to the state capitol and confronts legislators on the bill and its effects. Aside from its entertaining nature, it is really informative about the kinds of opposition to this bill that could -- and sometimes does -- spread from the right. This is a tendency that I continue to believe is worth engaging with and I would be very interested in developing some sort of way of further fleshing out common ground for critical solidarity with elements of this type that are interested in challenging the bill and constraints on free movement generally (the position we defend). Of course, in the end, we will not accept any increased policing at the border because we believe in free movement for all. However, that in my opinion does not preclude the increasing investigation of points of common struggle within this milieu.