Like other people, anarchists love to take sides. Whatever the issue (or non-issue) is, we can be counted on to express our opinions, to open our big mouths and spout some rhetoric—trite or funny, searing or banal, a century old or made up on the spot. One of the sides we frequently take publicly is against other anarchists. All anarchists agree that there are limits to anarchist practice—we just don’t agree on what those limits are or should be. Often it seems as thought the only thing two anarchists with different opinions can agree on is that a third one with different opinions isn’t an anarchist at all.

Many anarchists who don’t like other anarchists (and their projects) use the curse word sectarian as an emotionally satisfying and sophisticated-sounding way to condemn them. Used this way, sectarian is a short-cut term that almost always means an anarchist who doesn’t agree with me. But the term does have an actual meaning, and can be used properly and accurately rather than as a quick dismissal.

When anarchists disagree with each other, there are (other than ignoring it) two main ways to proceed:

We chose Bank of America because of their exemplary demonstration of capitalism’s principles (sic). Funding toxic coal projects, selling out workers, in bed with the government… Rather than many banks who worship money over people, we chose to stick it to one bank that worships money more than people. After all, it is a bank. But we’ll be back.

Anarchists

There is no denying the tragedy of the violence in Greece, especially the murders by the State’s police forces and their “citizen” allies, but also of all violence which is never pretty except in some illusions. But all the same, this is probably the best and most important news for us since May 1968. It is especially good news after our public discredit in the U.S. during the convention protests. This insurrection makes anarchism an internationally important social and political movement again. Not to say that in itself it will lead to anarchism becoming a popular movement elsewhere, but at least it does not end in public humiliation whereas it does demonstrate the power of a popular anarchist movement to resist the bourgeois State. Still, it is worth making a few more critical notes.

The social rebellion in Greece contains all the explosive potential for a revolution. But an insurrection alone is not a revolution. Now more than ever discipline is needed to keep the struggle going and intensifying — not the discipline of waiting but the discipline of acting, the discipline it takes to step up the struggle faster than the authorities are able to control. More than that, it requires a more definite social content than fighting police and ransacking banks. Insurrections that fail to deepen and intensify inevitably become defensive, then either are defeated by the State or simply fade out. Without discipline and direction, this rebellion will fail to deepen and intensify. By deepening, I mean moving from only immediately fighting the police and State forces to seizing capitalist and State property, as well the need for social self-organizing of the people, more specifically of the rebellious workers and anti-authoritarian students. That is how this uprising can become a revolutionary struggle.

Athens, along with several other Greek cities, has been burning for the several days. The rioting was triggered by the death of a teenager killed by the police on Saturday night. How to make sense of a reaction that appears to be so massively disproportionate?

Several observers have pointed to the usual suspects: maladministration and corruption; the collapse of confidence in the government; political scandals; a growing gap between the rich and the poor.

Up Against the Wall Motherfucker!: A Memoir of Anarchism in the '60s

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time, by Osha Neumann, published by Seven Stories Press, 2008.

In 1967, I became a founding member of an anarchist street gang called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, an unexpected career move for a nice Jewish boy with an MA in history from Yale.

We called ourselves the Motherfuckers. We saw ourselves as urban guerrillas swimming in the countercultural sea of freaks and dropouts (we didn't like the media term "hippies") who had swarmed to the cheap-rent tenements of the Lower East Side of New York. Those young dropouts were our base, and we attempted to organize them for total revolution through rallies, free feasts, raucous community meetings, and a steady stream of mimeographed flyers. Against the vapid spaciness of "flower power" we proclaimed the need for "Armed Love." Our rhetoric was inflammatory and often violent.

Direct Response to Monsters Approaching: Remodeling Triway and OMB HQ

The vote is in, the city council has ignored our needs and desires once again and approved a proposal to rezone the isthmus to make way for condos and yuppies--our burning indignation sent us on a rampage last night. We found ourselves at the following points in the web of evil

Triway Enterprises is one of many that must be held accountable for impending condo developments downtown. We do. Several windows lay in pieces on the ground, and explosions of paint gave this sterile institution of exploitation a new aesthetic…Two messages were left there, clear as crystal.

DEFEND OLYMPIA
FUCK GENTRIFICATION

Dozens of people have been injured and hundreds of properties torched in days of rioting across Greece over the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy.

Trainee lawyer Anna Giabanidis has met the anarchists responsible for some of the violence and explains their perspective on events.

The views are the personal views of the contributor and do not intend to represent any one group in Greece. Anna Giabanidis has been along to protests but has not taken part in any violence.

BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA, 10 December 2008 – Citing US war, human rights abuses, rapacious state capitalism and hypocrisy, Bratislava resident Michael Gogulski announced today that he has renounced his United States citizenship and become a stateless person as a means of “political divorce”.

Gogulski, 36, renounced his citizenship on 8 December 2008 at the American embassy in Bratislava, surrendering his US passport and culminating a two-week process and months of personal preparations. He currently awaits a Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States confirming his loss of American citizenship. As Gogulski has no other citizenship, he is now a stateless person.

Once employed by the political consultancy group Devine Mulvey, and now pursuing a graduate degree at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Gene McHugh says he is interested in "questioning the applicability of [Guy] Debord's own conception of resistance (particularly detournement) in an age of networked, topological communication." Perhaps "Debord's strategies of resistance do not in fact jive with our version of the society of the spectacle."[1] Then why keep bringing him up? Like so many before him, McHugh needs to both cite Debord (an obligation at this point) and put Debord behind him so that he (McHugh) can continue to do what he is doing "in good faith."[2] McHugh's article on the Radical Software Group's version of Debord's cabinet game Kriegspiel -- which drew a cease and desist letter, alleging copyright infringement, from a lawyer retained by Debord's widow, Alice Becker-Ho, in April 2008 -- attacks Debord's relevance on two fronts.

First, McHugh asserts that "detournement, that famous cornerstone of Situationism [sic] . . . is itself, by now, a familiar concept in Internet culture [. . .] The second major Situationist tactic, derive, or the arbitrary drifting through urban space, has become a primary tool of online capitalism [. . .] At least some of his [Debord's] strategies of countering it [the spectacle] have been effectively incorporated into the internal logic of communications media today."

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