Phoenix stands with Oscar Grant: Film showing and discussion on police brutality

Oscar Grant

Is the police meltdown in full effect? Not a day goes by, of late, without news of some scandal, brutality, or murder coming from one of the valley police agencies. It's not just here either, across the country there appears to be a rise in the reports of increasing violence and abuse coming from the authorities, much of it coming to light because the people witnessing these incidents are recording it, sharing it on the internet, and a corporate news outlet eventually catches wise and reports on it.

In no case is this more clear than the murder of Oscar Grant, an unarmed man shot and killed by Johannes Mehserle, an Oakland transit cop, on a BART platform in the early hours of new year's day 2009. A friend, and activist from the Los Angeles solidarity efforts in the Grant case, is in town and is giving a presentation and showing a video on Oscar Grant's case to commemorate the annual October 22 national day against police brutality (albeit a day late, there was a scheduling conflict with the event being hosted on the 22nd). This will also be a good opportunity for anyone interested in meeting up and networking with others who are also interested in organizing and fighting back against the police.

If there's one lesson I've learned over the years of agitating against the police and in support of community control, it's that reform is a failure. Whether in the form of a citizen review board, or sensitivity training for officers, these are superficial changes to an institution that was created to protect the rich and their property, and to keep poor people down by force, when necessary. When we say we have to abolish the police, that includes this whole stinking system, the bureaucrats, politicians, and capitalists who demand social peace maintained by the police, so that workers go to work, pay the rent and bills, and line the pockets of everyone who controls where we sleep, what goods we use, and where we travel.

As anarchists, we having nothing but contempt for the social peace of the state, achieved through coercion and violence, which is why when we demand justice for those murdered by cops, we are demanding the abolition of those who seek to control and dominate.

A sign at a recent protest against killer Phoenix cop Richard Chrisman

The statement below was written up by the organizer of Saturday's Oscar Grant event in Phoenix, if you're interested in putting armed authoritarians in their place, this event is a good start.

STOP POLICE BRUTALITY!

THE YOUTUBE VIDEO OF THE EXECUTION OF OSCAR GRANT SHOCKED THE WORLD--WE HAVE A REAL CHANCE TO MAKE SURE THE COP WHO MURDERED OSCAR GRANT SERVES PRISON TIME --COME HELP MAKE IT HAPPEN!!

Showing of the Film, "Operation Small Axe"
Discussion of Police Brutality and the Oscar Grant Shooting

Moderated by Elizabeth Venable of the LA Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant & AZ Immigrants Rights Activist

Saturday, October 23 • 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Conspire Coffee Shop and Art Gallery
901 N. 5th St., Phoenix, AZ

Oscar Grant was an unarmed 22 year old father who was shot in the back by police even though he was fully restrained by two officers and unarmed. The shooting was captured on videotape by multiple people who were on the Oakland BART train.

The officer who shot Grant, Johannes Mehserle, was the first police officer to be tried for Murder for an on-duty offense in the state of California. Immediately before the shooting, one of the officers restraining Grant, Tony Pirrone called Grant the N-word multiple times.

The videos spread throughout the internet and Oakland residents became very angry at what they viewed as the execution of an unarmed man. You can see the video on Youtube.

The Murder trial of Mehserle was moved from Oakland to Los Angeles so that the jury would not be "biased". Judge Perry-- who the case was assigned to-- was the same judge that let off 81 corrupt officers in the RAMPART scandal. There were no African American jurors. The LA
Coalition worked directly with Oscar's family and friends to raise awareness when the trial of Mehserle, the officer who shot Grant, was moved from Oakland to Los Angeles.

Mehserle was convicted of Involuntary Manslaughter--with a weapons enhancement that could get him prison time. However the family of Oscar grant fears that the weapons enhancement will be thrown out so that Mehserle does not have to face prison time.

The sentencing is coming in November and it is critical that advocates pressure the Justice Department to investigate the court proceedings and ensure that the weapons enhancement is not thrown out.

IF THE WEAPONS ENHANCEMENT IS THROWN OUT HE WILL NOT GO TO PRISON.

We will have postcards to sign and send to the Justice Department and Judge Perry. We need pressure from the whole US to make it happen!

ARIZONA CAN HELP CALIFORNIA GET JUSTICE
PUT COPS WHO EXECUTE BEHIND BARS!

Some things of note from the last week

To the left of this article you can see our Reddit feed, which we update regularly with items, mostly articles and news, that we find interesting. That feed gets continually added to, usually several times a day, as we encounter ideas and information that we think are worth considering. If you sign up for Reddit, you can comment and discuss them.

But because of the volume of news that gets posted to the feed, sometimes things can get missed that I think deserve a closer look, so from time to time I like to highlight some of the more important things that showed up on our feed during the week.

(1) The first item I want to point out is Rowland Keshena's piece "J. Sakai and the Struggle for Onkwehonwe Liberation". I first ran into Sakai's ideas in early 2001 with his interview/pamphlet "When Race Burns Class", a deep critique of the revolutionary potentiality of the white working class (and whites generally). This essay, which takes what can only be said to be a deeply pessimistic view of whites' ability to engage in liberatory activity, led me to Sakai's book, "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat" and then on to Red Rover and Butch Lee's "Night-Vision: Illuminating War & Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain" and "The Military Strategy of Women and Children".

These works are interesting in their almost nihilistic assertion that the white proletariat represents a bought off labor aristocracy which, even when it appears to be defending larger libertarian goals, is in fact defending its privileged status within American imperialism, a deal it enjoys at the expense of the rest of the class. This stands in stark contrast to race traitor thought, for example, which recognizes the contradictory position of whites in society without writing them off entirely. Indeed, following the Settler logic, one inevitably comes to the same conclusions that Weather did in the 70's: if the white working class is reactionary by nature -- and unredeemable -- then what else can one do but "fight the people".

This is problematic for a variety of reasons, including, as the author points out, the obscuring of class differences within whites by painting them instead with a broad brush. But it also denies the agency of whites in their own liberation and the liberation of others. I find this particularly wrong-headed not least of all because US history provides plenty of examples of whites struggling against white supremacy and the cross-class alliance that it represents. Consider the Abolitionists, to use an example that PCWC is fond of. How does Sakai explain them? To him, they are exceptions, plain and simple. Keshena does a good job of taking on Sakai's arguments and showing their weaknesses.

One thing in particular that I think is worth considering that Sakai misses entirely is the power of the negative example of whiteness. Whiteness, constructed as it from the top and at the same time from below (as Sakai probably correctly points out), while not liberatory, is still a sign of the ability of the white working class to act politically. That is, whiteness is a political relationship to power (by the way, that's a main reason why the "national anarchists" are not anarchists at all, since they defend that relationship) and as such it shows that whites are capable of thinking and acting politically, however wrongly at times.

Indeed whiteness itself is precisely constructed to limit the political imagination of whites -- to ensure that their struggles reinforce rather than challenge power -- and this is in part why some of the most imaginative and transformative periods in American history have been times when whiteness was in crisis. However, this, combined with the examples of whites acting against white supremacy gives us direction where Sakai fails: it allows us to approach the problem of whites and politics from the perspective of tacking how we can change the basic facts and assumptions that lie beneath their choices, how we can frame a politics that doesn't revert back to the short-sighted politics of white supremacy.

In PCWC's opinion, this has always meant fighting to foster the crisis in whiteness. Or, as the race traitors say, to create situations where whiteness cannot be counted on to resolve in the favor of the powers that be. When that crisis happens, dramatic change becomes possible.

(2) The second piece I want to single out is the article "Leninist front-groups and the problems of 'tail-ending' the Left", posted at PropetyIsTheft. As was pointed out at our most recent Beer & Revolution featuring Lawrence Jarach, I think a lot of us here in Phoenix have had a refresher course this summer in the failures, opportunism, obstructionism and parasitism of the left, delivered free of charge by out of town organizations like the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party and local leftists, Puente and Tonatierra.

Time and time again groups like these have proven their unfailing ability to head off militant and radical action, to collaborate with the police in attacks on anarchists, to co-opt grassroots struggle and to divert actions into useless and ineffective petition drives and inane marches. Nothing epitomizes this more than the idiotic attempt by Left party apparatchiks to divert the migrant struggle away from broadly democratic and empowering tactics like general strike and into voting and boycotts. Voting, for instance, is a silly waste of time in any movement, but in this one, composed as it is of such a high percentage of non-citizens who by definition cannot vote, reaches heights of absurdity not seen around these parts in quite some time.

This feature of anarchist history (indeed, general history) -- that tendency to be sold out and attacked by our supposed "comrades" on the Left -- remains a difficult lesson for anarchists to learn, it appears, because the tension reoccurs in every movement. In my organizing experience over the last decade and more, it has been a constant feature of the anti-globalization movement, the anti-war movement and the migrant struggles of today. Such problems have bedeviled anarchists since time immemorial, from the splits of the First International to the Spanish Civil War to the various uprisings in Eastern Europe against communist domination and on through the French May Days of 1968 into the present day. Indeed, I just read John W. F. Dulles' "Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900-1935", and the same thing went on then. It turns out that anarchists and communists don't really want the same thing at all. Who knew?

This simple fact, as obvious as it may seem, still remains very hard for many anarchists to grasp. Post-leftism within anarchy, as I understand it, is an attempt to struggle to recognize this basic truth and to consider ways of relating, supporting and opposing various tendencies and organizations in society as we struggle to overthrow the state and capitalism. Primarily, what post-leftism does is bring into question these generally accepted but also undiscussed quiet alliances, maintained for a variety of reasons (habit seeming prominent among them), between anarchists and the Left that often work not just to our detriment as anarchists, but also to anyone who seeks out genuine self-organization as opposed to that imposed by bureaucratic socialists and capitalists.

"Leninist front-groups and the problems of 'tail-ending' the Left" doesn't identify as post-Left, but it is essentially grappling with the same issues, the problems that come from orienting oneself and the movement towards the Left, especially the authoritarian Left. Finding one's way through disentangling the various biases and reflexive relationships of support and opposition that come with an uncritical relationship with the Left is hard. It requires considering one's moves carefully because one doesn't want to risk, by unshackling oneself from the Left, the danger of adhering somewhere even worse, like the Right, as has obviously happened with the racist unanarchist "National Anarchists".

With PCWC, we have opted to engage critically in all directions. We have reached out to libertarians on the right, and received some criticism for it within the anarchist and Left milieu -- criticism that essentially boils down to the knee-jerk opposition to all elements on the Right that comes with the default affiliation with the Left. This even though our appeals and interactions with the libertarians have been exclusively around anti-racism, anti-fascism and the defense of free movement. And despite our deeply critical and open discussion of what we view as the flaws in the Right libertarian movement in Arizona. The Leftist is concerned primarily with contagion, as if one can engage with authoritarians on the Left without fear but that any association with libertarian elements on the Right is inherently dangerous.

Likewise, when we have stood up in solid opposition to movement hacks and outside authoritarian communist groups, we have been similarly attacked for the Leftist sin of sectarianism, as if remarking on the fact that a group wants a society that is distinctly un-anarchists is a crime against the movement. But which movement? As is pointed out in the piece, maybe it all comes down to how you look at it.

Are anarchists merely a minority wing of a movement that we concede to the more authoritarian, manipulative sections? Or, instead, are we a movement unto ourselves, tireless defenders of self-organization, and participants in a broader struggle that we refuse to allow to be dominated by authoritarian factions. A movement that overlaps various other groups and individuals, but which has its own distinct aims and objectives? Answering this question is at the heart of the way forward, I think, if anarchists are to be anything but the alternating conscience and punching bag of whatever movement happens to be in vogue at whatever time.

(3) Lastly, I want to share an excellent little film (about an hour long), entitled "The Betrayal by Technology" about French theorist and technology critic, Jacques Ellul. Despite the long description of our group in the sidebar, PCWC has always sought to remain un-ideological about our anarchy. We may have a very specific kind of anarchy, with regards to the general anarchist milieu, but we try to avoid getting ourselves too wedded to a particular set of ideas. That's why you see a wide variety of perspectives at our Beer & Revolution night: not because we are big tent anarchists, but because we want to promote ideas that we find valuable and useful, even if we don't agree with the entirety of the rest of the presenter's politics. We've tended, I think, to take what's worth taking and ditch the rest from various strains of anarchism.

And, more often than not, we've likewise tried to use anarchist ideas as critiques rather than reifying them as holy writ. For instance, PCWC is deeply critical of technology, but we approach it from a variety of angles. Our range of influences with regard to technology start first and foremost with our own lived experience, but are also informed by technology critics as varied as labor historian David F. Noble, who focuses on technology as a class war attack on workers and our ability to self-organize our own lives; by technology critics like Kirkpatrick Sale and his analysis of the early resistors to industrialism; and by primitivists like John Zerzan and his deeper questioning of the nature of technological society and the inherent alienation that derives from it.

We do not necessarily identify as primitivist explicitly, although I do think that PCWC falls within the anti-civilization current in a lot of ways, or at least we are not in opposition to it. However, what we do appreciate is the criticisms that primitivism makes possible, both of society and history, but also of movements and the often unstated goals and assumptions that frequently underlie movements, such as ideas about work, resource extraction and the faith in progress. By merely using primitivism as a tool rather than an ideology, we are free to consider the questions it raises, but at the same time to free ourselves from the burden of defending it as a part of our identity. We recognize that there are various ways of looking at technology, even from within the anti-tech current (hell, even from within the labor movement), and each offers something useful when it comes to understanding our relationship to capitalism, the state and technology.

In this film, Ellul makes a point that really resounded with me. Discussing a friend of his, a surgeon, who was confronted with a person amazed at the wonderful advances in transplants made possible by modern medicine, the doctor replies that all those wonderful transplants must be done with healthy, young organs, which means that people with those organs -- young people, naturally -- must die. And most of those young people die in auto accidents. In that sense, as the safety of car travel improves, the availability of organs and the miracles of modern science, diminishes. At the very least, there is a hidden relationship between the two which, if not interrogated, remains obscured largely because of the blind ideology of progress hides it.

At several points in the film Ellul expounds on his general thesis that, despite any sentiments to the contrary, in reality technology is at odds with freedom, a point he drives home most clearly in his analysis of the automobile, that most revered symbol of modern capitalist, industrial freedom. A car on fire at a demonstration is shocking, he says, because it is an attack on the central symbol our modern religion, a technology that purports to deliver us to freedom, but instead drives us to the surgeon's table to be parted out under the knife.

Summing up, I'd like to invite people interested in the ideas PCWC puts out there to join our Reddit feed. There discussion can be had about various issues, political and otherwise. We've considered various other ways to engage with people, including a message board, but until then hopefully the Reddit can be one more way that those of us interested in these kinds of politics can find each other and debate, and hopefully move the anarchist movement out of the activist ghettos and university classrooms, beyond the cliques and scenes and towards something approaching relevant to people and movements outside ourselves, where we can deliver an updated, meaningful anti-authoritarianism as a viable option to the boring, limited movements and ideologies of the present day.

Until all are free: Two political prisoner support events in the valley this week.

State repression is nothing new to anarchists, it has been a facet of revolutionary and liberatory movements throughout history because, let's face it, systems of power react with hostility to those who desire a reordering of relationships. We saw this earlier this year with the notorious police attack on the DO@ bloc, resulting in a large number of people near the bloc being hit by pepper spray, and five Phoenix anti-authoritarians and anarchists getting arrested and facing a number of serious charges. We also have six other comrades who locked down at the Border Patrol HQ in Tucson and are still facing charges for their act of resistance to the militarization of land and movement along the border, they too need our support.

The further we look back, the longer and longer the list gets of our anarchist and anti-authoritarian comrades who are locked up or facing trial across the country. Some of the most notable examples from the last few years are also the most outrageous examples of the lengths the state will go to disrupt our movements' activities, from the resistance to grand juries on fishing expeditions, to the criminalization of organizing protests, and the distressing pre-crime conviction of Eric McDavid.


Keeping our comrades' spirits high while locked up means that they need support from those on the outside, and I'm glad to help get the word out about two events happening this week that are supporting political prisoners.

Above is a flier for a new political prisoner support event being held tonight in Phoenix, organized by our friends at Stronghold, this event will help those attending network and share information on writing to and supporting political prisoners. This event kicks off at 6:30 at Conspire in central Phoenix.

The second event this week will be held in Tempe as the Phoenix Anarchist Coalition (PAC) is once again sponsoring a 5k Running Down the Walls event this year. PAC has maintained a longtime political prisoner support fund, and has organized a number of events to support and get the word out on our comrades locked up for nearly 10 years. For the last few years PAC has organized a solidarity run/walk/ride with other events organized by the political prisoner support organization, the Anarchist Black Cross Federation (ABCF), all funds raised at this run will be sent to the ABCF for their prisoner support Warchest. It is scheduled for Saturday Oct. 16 at Mitchell Park in Tempe, people will be gathering at 5:30pm. Organizers request that you bring your favorite (preferably vegan) covered dish as there will be a potluck picnic after getting back to the park from the 5k.

Beer and Revolution Archives: The Greek Insurrection audio is up!

With the debut of Beer and Revolution "Season Two" last night, featuring Anarchy Magazine contributor and editor Lawrence Jarach, it seemed like a good time to get off our asses and put up some more audio from last year's sudsy symposiums. A couple weeks ago I posted the audio to John Zerzan's presentation at last January's Beer & Rev and this week I finally got around to adding the presentation on the Greek insurrection by Sissy, Tasos and Peter (which was a big hit). Below I've embedded the first part of what was a wide-ranging and very entertaining discussion below.

The more I reflect on the Greek tour, especially having spent some time with them (and quaffed more than a few beers together here and in the Bay) and seeing their presentation twice, I think it is very likely that their visit will be remembered as one of the more remarkable and influential events in recent American anarchist history. Already I have heard the "Cops, pigs, murderers!" chant ring out at more than one anarchist action across the country. In a time where police murder seems more and more the norm, I expect to hear it a lot more. I certainly feel lucky to have had the chance to learn from our Greek comrades about their struggle.

Follow the link back to our youtube page for the rest of it (it's almost two hours total). As usual, to get the full experience, you really need to come to the event. Since it takes place in a very social atmosphere, the sound quality on the recording is not always the best, especially during the q and a. All the more reason to come out and join in the conversation yourself! While you're at our youtube page, check out the favorites section, because there's some interesting talks there that we think are worth checking out. We add to it periodically, so check back from time to time.

Last night's B&R with Lawrence drew a little more than forty people and was a raucous affair. I hope to have that online for your enjoyment in a few days if all goes well. As usual, if you're coming to town or if you're already here and have something that you think may fit in the Beer & Rev format, hit us up. Maybe we can work something out. These are irregular affairs, in that rather than stick to an arbitrary calendar, we do them when we think there's something worth talking about. As of right now, we do have another tentatively planned for March or April. We'd love to do another one (or more) before that, so hit us up if you're interested.

One of the things we want to do with Beer & Rev is to encourage the discussion of anarchist ideas and the development of critical anarchist thinking here in Phoenix, and to do it in a social way that breaks out of the stale lecture model that so often dominates the genre, as well as to challenge ourselves and our ideas. Suggestions, tips, criticisms and comments are always welcome.

Beer and Revolution is back this Sunday! Featuring Lawrence Jarach on Anarchism with(out) the Left

Beer and Revolution returns for the eighth installment this Sunday after taking a lengthy hiatus since we hosted our Greek comrades from the VOID Network back in March. We're pleased to have Lawrence Jarach, a long-time anarchist and a regular contributor to and co-editor of the magazine Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. He'll be giving a talk on one of the more influential anarchist critiques of the left-wing, something Lawrence has described as along the lines of "What's this Post-Left Anarchy Thing I Keep Hearing About?"

Lawrence has written pretty extensively on the historical roots at the base of the modern conflict between authoritarian socialists and libertarian socialists, beginning with the split in the First International over the question of the state. This conflict is summarized in his essay Anarchists, Don't let the Left(overs) Ruin your Appetite:

The initial place where the rivalry between leftists and anarchists occurred was the First International (1864-76). Besides the well-known personal animosity between Marx and Bakunin, conflicts arose between the libertarian socialists and the authoritarian socialists over the ostensible goal of the International: how best to work for the emancipation of the working class. Using parliamentary procedures (voting for representatives) within a framework that accepted the existence of the state was the main tactic supported by the authoritarians. In the non-electoral arena, but remaining firmly within a statist agenda, was the demand of the right of workers to form legal trade unions. In contrast, direct action (any activity that takes place without the permission, aid, or support of politicians or other elected officials) was promoted by the libertarians. Strikes and workplace occupations are the best examples of this method. The leftists preferred persuasion and the petitioning of the ruling class while the anarchists, recognizing the futility of this approach, preferred to take matters into their own hands: peacefully if possible, more insistently if necessary.

The question of the state was just the beginning of a long and contentious relationship between anarchists and the Left, as there have been notable disagreements over other potential "deal breakers" for any anarchist-left unity, specifically over questions on nationalism, self-organization, or political representation. We've seen our ideological differences play out in the battlefields and barricades of a number of revolutions and civil wars in Russia, Spain, Mexico, and Cuba to name a few, as anarchists were attacked, betrayed, and murdered by our "comrades" on the left.

For valley anarchists, we've seen the Left groups dissolve and absorb the popular responses that broke out to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently with the immigrant movement, into the electoral process. My buddy Phoenix Insurgent took note of this on his old blog on a few occasions, and regular readers of this blog have probably come across our criticisms of the leadership of the immigrant movement, specifically their ongoing working relationship with the Phoenix PD, who, it should come as no surprise is no friend to immigrants. As throughout history, we have seen in our own struggles and movement those anarchists who continue to defend, and even justify the actions of left-wing groups whose ideas and actions run counter productive to an anarchist or anti-authoritarian vision. So, needless to say I have great interest to see what Lawrence will have to say when it comes to the possibility of an anarchist movement sans the Left.

Come and join us this Sunday for some beer (if beer's not your thing, perhaps some iced tea or water) and politics. I believe this latest installment of B&R promises to be another challenging and engaging discussion for freedom minded people!

Beer and Revolution will be held at Boulders on Broadway, a restaurant and bar located on the NE corner of Roosevelt and Broadway in Tempe. We have the upstairs section reserved, and this is an all ages event. We'll be there at 8:30 and things will kick off soon afterward, hope to see you there!


***
I also want to give a shout out to our friends up north at the Taala Hooghan Infoshop in Flagstaff, the inaugural Root Beer & Revolution is happening this month, a sober take on our own night of suds and politics. Their first installment will see folks from Black Mesa Indigenous Support speaking, it all goes down at 6 pm on Tuesday, October 26. $3 gets you in the door, along with a glass of root beer, as I hear it additional root beer and root beer floats will be for sale as well.

I've always been a Groucho Marxist anyway...

Some other recent writings by others on work to complement "Union of Arsonists"

The most recent piece on work "Union of Arsonists" has been getting a pretty interesting response and getting some conversations going. I deliberately tried to avoid a lot of theory in writing it, trying to write in a more straightforward way. However, for people interested in following up on some of the ideas in a more academic way, there's a lot of older theoretical works that I could point people towards, since workers and others have been grasping with the new organization of work under late era capitalism since at least the Italian autonomist movement and the Situationists of the 60's and 70's.

But rather than link to those older works (which are certainly well worth checking out), in order to further contribute to that discussion I'm going to link to some recent articles on work that I have found interesting of late. As some may know, I've had a forced vacation recently thanks to a cop-induced broken arm, so I've had a little time to delve into some of the more recent developments in the anti-work field, so to speak. From these writings I have culled a few pieces that I think folks who found the "Arsonist..." piece interesting would find worth checking out.


(1) Bone Idle: or Work Doesn’t Work! An Interview with Ian Bone and Ray Roughler Jones

The first is an interview with Ian Bone (Class War) and Ray Roughler Jones on their relationship to work growing up in England's working class. The most interesting bit here is their explanation of the general refusal of work that permeated that time and the way that the UK welfare state allowed for a general shirking of work.

An excerpt:

H: And when did you both take against work?

RRJ: It’s just that nobody worked, none of our friends worked.

IB: No one ever worked… in Bash the Rich there’s a story about “turning to the working class” but we didn’t know anyone who was working! We were all on the dole so we started a Claimants’ Union, a union for people on the dole. We would fight to get you all your entitlements. The classic line was: “If they get you a job, we’ll fight your case!” There were all the jokes about what occupation you gave when you were signing on: Father Christmas, snow clearer. and so on. One job I gave was “Coronation Programme Seller”. “What’s that then, Mr Bone?” asked a puzzled clerk. “Very long hours. On the day, you’re up at five in the morning till all hours,” I countered — not mentioning I hadn’t had the luck of securing such a position since 1953.

(2) Sisyphus and the Labour of Imagination:
Autonomy, Cultural Production, and the Antinomies of Worker Self-Management

The Second piece is an academic by Stevphen Shukaitis published this month in "Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action". Shukaitis takes the analogy of Sisyphus and applies it to the struggle for workers self-management in the modern era, bringing in his own experience working at the collective record label Ever Reviled Records.

This combination of history and experience allows him to look at the problematic relationship between workers control that doesn't topple the overarching capitalist system outside it. Of particular note is the way that, absent a total break with capital, workers self-management can sometimes recuperate capitalism and turn workers from their natural tendency to develop means of resistance to work into self-police watching each other for those same traits under self-management. That, of course, suggests that a complete break is in order to reap the full benefits from it and that previous limited experiments only hint at its potential.

An excerpt:

And so where does this leave the conceptual territory and practices of self-management? Best consigned to the dustbin of history? Tempting, perhaps, although to do so would be a bit hasty, and likely an instance of throwing out the baby with the bathwater of our discontent. WSM can play a vital role in social resistance, but one that is more limited than I thought several years ago when I started thinking about this more deeply. WSM can play an important role in creating networks of knowledge and cooperation laboratories for experimentation and the development of resources and skills for “building the new world within the shell of the old,” to use the old Wobbly phrase. But it is important to never forget that this new world is being built within the shell of the old, within the iron cage of capitalist rationality, which is far more likely to impinge upon its growth than to be torn asunder by other forms of social life developing within it. Practices of WSM exist in a cramped position as a form of “minor politics” and composition. Their radicality rests in this position, in WSM’s capability to create resources and time, and in consciously avoiding becoming a “major” or representative form.[45] In other words, WSM can help to create space and time that foster the cultivation of other possibilities--for other possible worlds emerging. But that does not mean that we can just “buy back the world” from the capitalists, or that WSM can serve as a means to overcome without difficulties the vast arrays of power that still exist. WSM is not an unambivalent outside to the realities of capitalism. But it can create time that partially is one.

It is also fundamentally important that self-management, as an affirmation of the creative potentiality of non-alienated labour, does not unwittingly find itself sliding back into an affirmation of “the dignity of work” that has haunted various forms of labour organizing and radicalism from times immemorial and that has been the target of radicals more prone to celebrate the refusal of work and argue for its reduction, from Paul Lafargue to the Italian autonomists, Bob Black to the Situationists. The idea would be rather to extend and deepen the relation between the refusal of work and its self-management, as when Vaneigem called for the unity of workers’ councils and the refusal of work.[46] This is not nearly as paradoxical (or silly) as it might seem at first. Rather it is an argument based on the realization that socialized labour’s potentiality is revealed most clearly by its absence, which is the basic concept underlying strikes after all. Therefore, the way to affirm such potentiality is not under conditions which limit it absurdly within the present but by the constant immanent shaping of a collective imagination and creativity that will not allow itself to ever be totally bound within a fixed form

(3) Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus? by Chris Carlsson and Francesca Manning

Finally, I've made no secret here about my affinity for the recent work of Chris Carlsson, which I think tries in a very interesting way to bring together Marxist concepts of composition into play in a period in which the demands of workers for control over labor increasingly manifest outside the workplace. This is the result of thirty or forty years of de-skilling, professionalization, automation, computerization and the transfer of productive work overseas.

In such an environment, the working class increasingly finds itself seeking to attack its own class position -- that is, to leave the fight for control of the means of production (such that they are) behind and to develop new means of attacking capitalism outside the workplace. Carlsson and Manning here do a good job of providing a fresh context for the emergence of a variety of tools of resistance often maligned by leftist revolutionaries as drop-out or lifestylist. This article draws extensively from Carlsson's relatively recent book "Nowtopia" which PCWC distributes.

An excerpt:

Nowtopia is a term that attempts to describe the myriad efforts to reclaim and reinvent work against the logic of capital. Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free” (unpaid) work on the other. No longer can our waged jobs be assumed to define us, and no longer can they be the primary basis for politics. Precisely because so many people find their work lives inadequate, incomplete, degrading, pointless, stupid and oppressive, they form identities and communities outside of paid work—in spaces where they are not working class. It is in these activities that people, who are reduced on the job to “mere workers”, fully engage their capacities to create, to shape, to invent, and to cooperate without monetary incentive. They “work” or “labor” in a way in which the particular substance of their activity is meaningful. These communities may not look much like the working class organizations of the past two centuries, but it is important to recognize that in this topsy-turvy period of system breakdown and transition, new political forms are emerging to reshape the endless struggle between capital and humanity. In the face of widespread dismissal of nowtopian movements as “lifestyle” politics or irrelevant “dropout” culture, we argue that they are in fact new political forms that are addressing directly many immediate problems of capitalist society.

Today basic needs are going unmet for millions. Urgent efforts at long-term and medium-term planning to adapt to the increasingly visible collapse of natural systems are rejected out of ideological blindness. But individual human ingenuity flows over government and corporate obstacles. The solutions to social and ecological crises of our time are frequently coming from unwaged work that is done because people want and need it, rather than in hopes of monetary remuneration. Still at the margins of modern life for now, many people and communities are taking more of their time and care out of the market and making ways to live together, to get our needs met and desires engaged, by working together, working hard, and not working for money.

Nowtopians engage in a wide variety of labor-intensive projects, from organic gardening, bike repair, or coding software, to making music, writing fiction, producing radio shows, or painting a mural. Permaculturists, the quintessential nowtopian technologists, have initiated various epistemological challenges to basic scientific paradigms through their unpaid, passionate work. A semi-conscious war between these life-affirming, self-emancipating behaviors and the coercive domination of money, property, and survival is the kernel of a potentially revolutionary transformation.

For those interested in more from Carlsson on the concept of Nowtopia, I recommend watching the video below, in which he lectures, of all places, at the Google headquarters. Quite interesting indeed!

Enjoy!

Beer & Rev Archives: John Zerzan audio

With the soon-to-be-announced re-launching of Beer & Revolution season two, we've been going back through our audio archives and posting up more from season one. The more attentive of you may have noticed that we recently re-purposed the old, underutilized "What we're into right now" tab for Beer & Rev. You can now hit that tab for any updates on what's going on. Anything posted relating to that will show up there, including this first new audio from last year.

We're not technical experts and we're working on improving the audio quality for future recordings, but we get enough interest in this series that we think it's worth posting up what we have even if the quality isn't always the best. Of course, there are limits to how good we can get the sound to be (and help is always appreciated). After all, we don't do these things in a library, we do them in a bar/restaurant, so if you want to get the full experience you should come out, get yourself a pint and a pizza (all you can eat) and settle in for a good time listening to and debating with what we think are always interesting and provocative speakers and topics. Last years' attendance varied from 25 to 75, so you won't find yourself drinking alone at these things. Under 21 welcome.

And, as I hinted above, the new season is about to drop. Look for the new flyer in a day or so but in the meantime, mark you calendar for October 10th at 8:30. More details to follow. And, while I have your attention, we're always looking for presenters. Beer & Rev is a loose, open event, so it's not for everyone, but if you're heading our way and have something that you think you can add to the discussion, hit us up. Maybe we can work something out.

Union of Arsonists: The flammable estates of the rich and the class war fires of liberation

Who says the local news is all crap these days? News Channel 3, always a shimmering example of journalistic excellence, has been kind enough to give us rich-hating anti-capitalists more kindling for the bonfires this week by offering up a guided tour of two of the most expensive homes (estates?) in the Valley.

In the photo gallery below we tour two of the most exclusive (and expensive) properties currently on the market in metro Phoenix. An eight bedroom, 12,000 square foot abode nestled on 40 acres in Paradise Valley and a 25,000 square foot villa with a bargain price of $24.9 million.

Get a look while you can at the wealth of the rich parasites that enjoy the good life while those of us down here suffer foreclosure, precarity, unwanted unemployment, soaring health care costs and repossessions, along with all manner of other humiliations from which the rich are immune. With Arizona now scoring the second highest rate of poverty in the country, it's more enraging than ever to see such opulence on open display.

Enjoy the tour. Take it all in. The 20 car garage. The acres of green grass. The huge master bedroom. Maybe make a few notes on your brief foray into the foyers of the rich and spoiled:

5 acre estate with 35,000 sq.ft.under roof & 25,000 sq.ft. ac/heated. Flooring of 6 ft. marble slabs from Italy, library with $350,000 Pierre Lange mahogany cabinetry, $1,200,000 Avia high tech security & sound equipment, a 13 seat mahogany theatre w/true movie projection & D-box chairs that move with the movie action. 2 swimming pools and 20 car garage including a $400,000 ''show garage''

I was told by someone who would know the other day that the rich and powerful in the Valley often complain that their possessions regularly get pilfered by the many workers required to maintain their irresponsible and exploitative lifestyles. Presumably the quick-handed disappear them when the owner is sunning by his Olympic-sized pool. Or perhaps they return in the summer when those with the money are safely chilling in their beach houses far from Phoenix's scorching weather. If you have more than one home, you can't be in all of them at once. That's a risk you take being rich, I suppose.

Which reminds me, did they ever catch those Paradise Valley "rock burglars"? Last I heard they had successfully managed over 300 break-ins resulting in more than ten million dollars worth of crap that rich people have being re-appropriated from the undeserving dresser drawers of the Valley's spoiled rich. It's nice to know that they get robbed, though, isn't it? Coming in through the master bedroom window, broken with a rock (hence the "rock burglars" name), is apparently the way to go according to the newspapers. There's no security system at that end of the house usually, it seems. Again, that's straight out of the papers. Hopefully it creeps those rich bastards out knowing the proles have rifled through their intimates.

Of course, getting a job working for rich people seems to work just as well as a means of procuring their stuff. Or, if you can hold your nose that long, even just getting to know them works. That was the case for antique thief Matthew Walker, who pleaded guilty this week to acquiring many of the prized possessions of the wealthy in his area simply by hanging around them so much. This guy managed to take prized heirlooms and other items passed down, like their illegitimate wealth, from one generation of rich scum to the next. Good for him. Caught now, unfortunately, but it's still more evidence that the rich are far from secure in their persons and items. When the cops came to his house and matched a stolen serial number to the 52 inch tv mounted on the wall, Walker claimed it was a set up. Nice. Fuck their tv and fuck the cops.

Those who say the luxuries enjoyed by the rich are the just reward for a life of hard work are off their rockers. One doesn't have a hard time imagining that they have never walked a thousand miles to stand on a street corner, ducking la poli-migra, and cleaning pools or mowing lawns in the blistering sun. Or tried to hold a job (which they hate anyway) while on work release from one of Sheriff Joe's gulags, suffering after work the routine indignity of waiting in line at gunpoint to sleep in the summer heat in his outdoor jail, all because Phoenix doesn't have a decent public transportation system.

Maybe they have never slaved away for nine or ten hours in a windowless call center, fielding pointless calls or following shitty leads in hopes of making the rent this month. Or maybe they've never spent ten hours in the cab of a truck passing the endless hours and miles bringing consumer goods they can't afford to the bars and restaurants of the wealthy and their even more spoiled children.

If hard work was the key to success under capitalism, the women fishing coins off dead bodies for twelve hours a day at the mouth of the Ganges River would rule the planet. Or those guys who dismantle the beached ships in Asia. They'd be everyone's boss. And don't forget those kids who rummage through the piles of the West's discarded computers for toxic metals. We'd be cleaning their Ferraris if hard work made the world go around.


Make no mistake, this is not a defense of work. Nor the alleged nobility of the small-headed, broad-shouldered laborer portrayed by communist painters in grand Soviet murals. You know, the worker works, the Party thinks. No, for sure, my sympathies are with the slackers and the shirkers. With the folks who know what "it fell off the truck" means and don't say a word to the boss. And with the ones who clock their friends in and out so they can sleep off last night's party. Long live those who still defend the siesta, sadly long ago now a Southwest memory for most of us, dominated by the boss's time clock as we are. When I worked at the post office the time clock was divided up into one hundred segments per hour instead of sixty. Want to know crazy? Try calculating your 15 minute break in 36 second segments.

Take another example: Domino's worker Jamal Thomas. A trainee for an assistant manager position, he complained that he was jumped by hoodlums outside work one night and beaten. In true corporate form, his bosses accused him of violating security protocols during his beatdown because the front door was unlocked as it took place. Broken in the brawl, Thomas's jaw was wired shut and he couldn't eat solid food or talk for six weeks. He was fired. According to his family he turned bitter at this insult. Understandably so.

But, the police say, Thomas didn't take this affront laying down. Keeping his key and his dignity, Thomas visited various Domino's locations "in uniform claiming to be a member of a secret Domino's unit that measured employee satisfaction." He was scoping out targets. Oh, the irony! And what creativity -- although surely not of the kind his bosses could appreciate. Nope, dressing up and pretending to be an employee satisfaction monitor, visiting various locations and scouting the best targets, and then setting them to the torch -- using their own pizza boxes as kindling! -- that clearly is the kind of creativity that while inspired by Domino's, can never be contained by it.

And isn't that all our experience, in a way? Because no matter how much or how well you do a job like that, your only thanks is more of the same. An assistant manager position, with the small bump in pay and the freedom to play some solitaire from time to time in the office -- that's your prize in this system. No personal development. No chance to control the real substance of your life. No choice in what you make, where you make it, when and how. No control over what's done with it. And the cherry on top is that most of what we are forced to make is crap anyhow. "Time to make the donuts", as the old commercial used to say. Always time to make the donuts. Who wants control over it anyhow? Better to burn it down. Making pizzas at Domino's can never be a fulfilling vocation. In a time of mass layoffs, is it too much to ask for meaningful unemployment?

I can remember a conversation I had -- more like an argument -- with another class war anarchist who had mistaken me for an hardcore primitivist because of a pin I was wearing. Never bothering to see the Durruti pin on the other side, he proceeded to launch into me with a tirade about the dignity of work. How pleased were the janitors he was organizing, he said, when they had finished cleaning a room! What dignity in work! What pride! Bullshit! For most of us, the only dignity at work is ending the day with some intact.

There's a saying that goes like this: "That's an idea so ridiculous only an intellectual could believe it." Well, it's the same with the organizers of the working class. The bosses are right about us. We hate work, we hate our jobs and we hate them. They are right to distrust us. Pride in work as we know it is an idea so ridiculous only a union organizer could believe it because the truth of the workweek is something quite different. Biting your tongue, hiding in the bathroom, grabbing a smoke or pretending to be doing something are the most common activities at any modern job.

Working in a call center and get hung up on? Let it hang there for a few minutes. No need to rush. Just let that dial tone ring for a bit and grab back part of your life a few minutes at a time. That's the reality. Who would want to democratize most of this? Can you imagine the drudgery of the Slurpee committee meeting at the collectivized 7-11? Surely better just to put it to the torch and be done with all illusions. No thanks, budding union bureaucrats: the arsonist is a much better shop steward these days.

And there is no escape for most of us from the drudgery of work and the liberal way it wastes our time and energies. Landlords and grocery stores, mechanics and credit card companies can be strict masters and if you can't refuse work, the best you can do is try to get the most out of it you can, for your own ends. If that's not possible, may as well burn it down. Thomas caused more than a million dollars in damage. As a point of reference, take out the mythic Vail arsons and this guy's up there with the ELF on average and maybe rivals the black bloc rampages through any number of North American streets this year, not that there's anything wrong with them. Different strokes for different folks.

It is natural for us to hate hard work (i.e., compelled work), but for the defenders of the rich, as they always do, to say that it is only hard work that separates the family living out of their car from the millionaire on the mountain is obscene. Likewise the Dominoes assistant manager from the Paradise Valley mansion. Even most the rich don't believe it. The myth of mobility and hard work isn't meant for them. Commenting on why he collaborated with Oliver Stone on his most recent remake of his classic 80's Wall Street attack movie, Anthony Scaramucci, hedge fund director and founder of Skybridge Capital said, "[Oliver Stone] believes that the lower quartile of society is suffering in a megalomaniacal capitalist society — and you know, he's probably right on some of the stuff he's saying."

Which reminds me, there were two forklift drivers killed in the last two weeks in Phoenix. Crushed underneath them. This is something close to my heart, having occasion to drive a forklift at work with some regularity myself. Those things are fucking dangerous. But with the slashing of budgets and the paring of workforces, you can bet that the speedup that is work life under the new never-ending crisis is to blame. More work to be done with less workers means doing it faster, cutting corners, or not having proper assistance. Profits are up, payrolls are down, and more of us are six feet under every day. And trust me, crushed under a forklift is not a death that any of those rich bastards on the mountain will suffer, sadly.

But where are the funerals for these "heroes" of the new crisis capitalism? The people who against their will, against their health and against their human desire to be free, make this economy run, despite being largely locked out of its largess and surely denied its mansions and limos, except to clean and maintain them. Workers killed on the job for the most part are lucky to get a blurb that mentions their name in the paper if they meet their end on the clock. No funeral processions, no media helicopters hovering over cemeteries, no grieving husbands or wives. No plastic-featured anchorman breaking into our regular programming.

Not, that is, unless you are a cop worker or a soldier worker. Only the workers that protect the ruling class are worthy of mention or thanks in this country. The only exception perhaps comes from the pandering politicians in election year, hoping as they do that some of us will accept this bullshit title of "hard working American" in exchange for the acceptance of heightened social war on others, often of color, in other countries, migrants, prisoners, et cetera.

But when it comes to the cops and soldiers, we get treated to a fete fit for an angel! There is no investigation. Just how many complaints did that cop have against him? How many civilians did that soldier kill? Quite relevant and related questions these days as more and more of these fucked up veterans come back and join police forces. Once there, their violently short tempers set the tone for the rest of the force. And of course lacking entirely from public discussion when one of these killer-workers gets killed is a critical assessment of the role that cops and soldiers play in the maintenance of everyday order, itself a long, slow murder for most of us. All is forgiven and nothing is remembered when the sacrifice is for the State and Capital.

I know I'm not the only one who looks up at those houses on Camelback Mountain while driving to work and hopes for a landslide or a brushfire or, hell, a meteor strike to erase that whole disgusting scene from my view, likewise relinquishing the stranglehold they have on so many of us. Or maybe, more satisfying, for the fiery justice of a people no longer willing to be exploited, tagged, imprisoned, tracked, beaten, mocked, marginalized and pushed around just so some rich asshole can have a mountainside resort for a second or third home.

We all resist in our own small ways everyday, trying against the odds and against the reality of our no-vacation, low pay jobs, to carve out for ourselves a little bit of dignity and autonomy against a system determined to crush us or -- at best -- to throw us some crumbs if we agree to mind-numbing labor day in and day out. Assistant manager, indeed.

So thanks to Channel 3 for that kindling. Whenever I see those rich bastards and their gilded estates, it just fires me up even more. Sometimes not every article has to end with a grand philosophical point. Today I just felt like a good ol' rant was in order. Those mansions make me think of a day, hopefully not far off, when it will all explode and we'll look up to a long torchlit march up those hills and to the liberating fires of a new day, free at last from work and those who make us do it. Drinks on them in the rec rooms first, of course.

Joke of the Day: Revolutionary Communist Party at Burning Man

What do you get when two RCP members go to burning man? A laugh riot of cultish posi-prose, for one thing! Can you imagine these nutcases from the party that not all that long ago denounced homosexuality as a bourgeois affliction wandering the open sands of burning man, Bob cards and manifestoes in hand, bringing the holy light of Avakian to throngs of naked hallucinating hippies?

You can't make this shit up (note the trademark RCP exuberance dripping off every word -- what kinds of extreme levels of happy pills must the Party prescribe to achieve such heights of emotion from its writers?):

There is a great need for people who are yearning for a different, better world to be introduced to Bob Avakian and his revolutionary vision of the most radical rupture with traditional property relations and traditional ideas, and a vibrant, exciting communist world in which people would really thrive—the unleashing of art and science, awe and wonder, ferment and imagination in mind-boggling dimensions.

What was once a bizarre but relatively harmless Maoist cult busy building bourgeois front groups and disingenuous political alliances with the political middle has truly degenerated into a pathetic and infantile spectacle of fawning hero-worship and self-delusion. I almost miss those days of World Can't Wait and their pathetically simplistic "Anyone but Bush" mantras, designed as they were to sucker well-meaning but silly anti-war liberals into front groups secretly manipulated by RCP cadre behind the scenes. Once captured, these poor saps could be bombarded into levels of unconsciousness sufficient for optimal susceptibility to Bob's flatulent pontifications, administered via marathon eleven hour video watching sessions. No kidding!

But despite their profligate production of thousand word proclamations, don't be fooled! There's not much in terms of real ideas lurking behind all those manifestos, and what little there is to their time travel Maoism can be found in any number of dinosaur commie formations that staggered dazed and tattered out of the ruins of the countless splits of the Seventies when the ever-worshipful Maoists faced the ultimate test of faith that was the collapse of Maoism in China.

Image over substance doesn't even begin to describe the vacuousness that is the RCP. I think the issue of Watchtower left on my door the other day was less fantastical in its evaluation of our current situation and likely future -- and certainly less savior-oriented than the RCP's Maoist millenarianism. It's been said that one of the things that has always distinguished anarchism from communism (and religions) is that anarchism names its tendencies after ideas or strategies, while commies name them after people. So, in that light, we can hardly be surprised when sad little party poopers like the RCP, having lost one dear hero, opt to build up another superman in his place.

Bob Avakian, "leading light" of the RCP

"Who is that man?" the sunburnt masses of burning man apparently demanded, if we are to believe the RCP's flowery text, provoked as they were by the installation of "a large flashing neon version of Bob Avakian's image in the midst of the art on the playa."

Although only visible at night, it looked great! Hundreds of image cards were distributed at the festival itself—left at camps, many of the numerous free bars and parties, and stuck in the spokes of participants' bicycles.

Hilarious! Only the RCP could go to burning man and miss the party (not to mention write a thousand word article about it without once mentioning the word "anarchy"). What I can't figure out is why the new portrait of Bob leaves out the trademark commie cap and hypnotic gaze that we all have come to love over the years? Surely that image, one of the few available to his fans during Bob's self-imposed Paris Left Bank exile, strikes a far more provocative pose than the new stencil! Bring back the old image, I say!

If you're looking for a few more belly laughs, please consider the impending release of the RCP's new "CONSTITUTION FOR THE NEW SOCIALIST REPUBLIC IN NORTH AMERICA" (all caps, naturally, in ironic tribute to its already foreordained irrelevance) which is sure to keep you in stitches. Oh, did you think that, if such a monstrosity were indeed to be considered (and let's hope it never is), something like a new constitution for North America might be the kind of thing that should involve the broad participation of the masses? Wrong again, comrade! The RCP and, more importantly, Chairman Bob has it all figured out for you in advance. Don't you worry your pretty little head about it!

Stay tuned, more comedy surely awaits!

Support the Border Opposition Action Fund!

The crisis continues to escalate but the broader "immigration movement" remains mired in boring, repetitive and failed tactics that privilege moral appeals over attack and engagement. Therefore it is more important than ever to support a diversity of creative tactics within the struggle against colonization, the State, Capital and the regulation of movement. Those willing to step it up need a movement behind them that has their backs from beginning to end.

For people who cannot take direct action themselves, it is important to be an unapologetic advocate for those who do and for extreme ideas in general. As we have seen with the proliferation of the "no enforcement" position and the Tempe neighborhood assembly, anarchist ideas and forms can find fertile ground in times of crisis if only people will advocate for them. And as the attack reaches ever more critical intensity, radical solutions, often of the kind that only anarchists can suggest, look more and more like common sense to a lot of people.