From Nightfall

This past month Frostbeard Studio, a Powderhorn shop specializing in “homemade candles for book nerds,” had its windows smashed out and its walls tagged with anti-gentrification graffiti. Responses to this incident have varied, from citizens raging about the nerve of someone carrying out such an attack upon ‘community’ or ‘art’ to people stopping short of endorsing the property destruction yet acknowledging the negative effects shops like Frostbeard, whose candles cost $18 apiece, have on historically black and brown neighborhoods like Powderhorn. In what should come as no surprise to regular readers, we have this to say about the smashings: good. We’ll delve into reasons why we think attacks such as this one, as well as the recent vandalism of a local real estate office/art gallery, could help prevent Powderhorn and similar neighborhoods from becoming homogenized hellscapes like Uptown in a bit, but first we want to spend some time deconstructing the often-invoked but rarely examined concepts of ‘community’ and ‘art’.

As was argued in the anonymous essay ‘The Clash of Communities,’ written during the 4th Precinct occupation back in 2015, the concept of a static overarching ‘community’ that includes all people who live within a certain area or who belong to a certain group holds no weight when examined closely. Instead we would do well to think community as something that is constantly in the process of becoming, with different communities “flowing in and out of each other, forming conscious and subconscious bonds, exchanging words and stories,” and at times coming into conflict with each other. From this perspective, community can for some mean working together to police the neighborhood and protect private property and for others mean working together to safely carry out actions that decrease the ability of trendy businesses to thrive and thus attract further waves of settlement and development to the neighborhood. Criticizing an action on the grounds that it is anti-community flattens out this nuance, perpetuating the myth that those who live in an area and want the rent to stay low and those who own businesses or property in the area and want more capital to flow into it somehow share a set of common interests.

Like ‘community’, the word ‘art’ is deployed again and again to deflect criticisms made about the effects that different actions have upon our environment. Art is assumed to be a universal good and thus anything that is labeled art is beyond reproach. But just as there is no ‘community’, there is no ‘art’, only arts, and different arts clearly impact the world in very different ways. There is the art of beautifying capitalist restructuring and the art of exposing it for the shit-show it really is. There is the art of soothing society’s winners, assuring them that they are human after all, and there is the art of reminding society’s losers that defeat is never final. There is the art of convincing yuppies to buy overpriced candles and there is the art of throwing up tags in the middle of the night. Claiming to act in the name of ‘art’ does not excuse one from having to justify one’s actions on ethical grounds.

Of course if the necessity of justifying one’s actions on ethical grounds applies to artists opening businesses in Powderhorn then it applies to those who smash their windows too. After all, we are sure the owners of Frostbeard were being sincere when they asserted in a Facebook post following the smashing that they are “not a big corporation trying to gentrify the neighborhood (quite the opposite).” Isn’t strategizing to run them out of business a little cruel? Well maybe, from a certain standpoint, but the thing to remember is that gentrification is a structural problem, even as that structure is the outcome of thousands of personal decisions. The owners of Frostbeard don’t intend to gentrify Powderhorn; gentrification is simply an unintended consequence of fulfilling their dream of selling nerdy candles. Conversely, we don’t necessarily wish to see their dream fail (in fact we are fans of many of the books their candles reference), but if their dream succeeding takes us further down the path towards the neighborhood being broken apart then we are forced to take a side and it won’t be theirs. Ultimately the question we should ask in relation to attacks such as these is this: do they work? Because only a reactionary would argue that a few boutique businesses failing and some developers not getting their expected return on investment is somehow ethically worse than hundreds of people being displaced.

Whether or not these attacks work is difficult to determine, and we certainly don’t intend to claim that all that is needed to stop gentrification is to break windows, but in our opinion actions such as these have definite impacts. Despite how it is typically framed, gentrification is not inevitable. Sometimes neighborhoods reach the point that much of Minneapolis is at now and then continue along the road to condo hell, and sometimes they don’t. Much of what determines the success or failure of various development initiatives is out of our control, but not all of it. We have the power to make life much harder for developers. As anyone who has tried to open one will tell you, small businesses are incredibly precarious, especially for the first few years of their existence, and even more so when they are expensive specialty stores that much of the neighborhood can’t afford. For examples of this we need look no further than the multiple trendy restaurants in and around Powderhorn, such as Blue Ox Coffee and La Ceiba, that have gone out of business in the past year or so, not because of any intentional assault but simply because the neighborhood doesn’t yet have the density of yuppies needed to sustain places that charge $5 for coffee or $20 for an entrée. The accumulated costs of the broken windows, higher insurance premiums, and decreased business that could result from increased agitation against these shops could push things into the red for businesses like Frostbeard that have so far been scraping by. If more and more of these businesses fail, fewer and fewer people who desire to live in neighborhoods full of trendy boutiques will move in, preventing the landlords from raising the rent, or at least as much as they would otherwise.

While targeting small businesses will always generate controversy, it is important to recognize that this is a decisive time for Powderhorn and similar neighborhoods. Wait another five to ten years for less-controversial targets like Starbucks to move in and any resistance will be too little, too late. Unlike Frostbeard, stores like Starbucks have sufficient capital behind them to weather broken windows and boycotts if they are confident that they will eventually get a return on their investment. Next year’s Super Bowl also offers developers an opportunity to ramp up their activity across the city; it is likely that this event will have effects that will be felt long after the game is over and all of the drunk executives leave town. Another reason that we can’t afford to waste any time is the fact that various tech companies have their sights set on making hip, progressive, white, artsy Minneapolis the Silicon Valley of the Midwest, “Silicon Prairie” as they call it. The main thing standing in their way is that they are finding it hard to convince top job candidates to endure the winters here when they could get jobs in Austin or the Bay Area, but as the winters continue to grow milder this will hold them back less and less. Now is the time to act—let’s sabotage Silicon Prairie from the get-go.

Beyond the concrete damage done to gentrifying businesses by attacks such as these, in our mind they have an important impact on the semantic field upon which the social war plays out, exposing fault lines within the city that are typically covered up by the progressive image of Minneapolis that is continuously forced down our throats. Such an exposure can be messy, but in our opinion is ultimately therapeutic; certainly it is preferable to the refusal to acknowledge conflict like good Minnesotans. Once an attack like this takes place, everyone who hears about it is forced to take sides, to define their views and act them out, instead of continuing to exist in some progressive fantasy where they can shop at stores like Frostbeard yet claim to oppose gentrification. They may have an “All Are Welcome” sign in their window, but it should be obvious that “All” can’t drop $18 on a candle, much less withstand another rent hike.

From Nightfall

March 2017

– Keep It Local

– A Word On Security

– Wheatpaste: A How-To Guide

– AgiTater Tot

and more!

PDF

From the Belli Research Institute

I. The protest marshal wears a neon vest and has a walkie-talkie.
The protest marshal sets themself apart in the protest by wearing a high-visibility vest, making their position look like one of expertise and authority. The intention to be seen is paradoxical: even though they stand out visually, the generic safety vest makes them also look like the invisible worker of any urban environment. The walkie-talkie communicates to the crowd that they are included in a secret loop of information, setting them at a professional distance from the protesters. It appears like they are protesting with you but they are instructed to keep their distance. The protest marshal relies on symbolic markers of legitimacy to aid in the control of the protest.

II. The protest marshal is in constant contact with the organizer.
The protest marshal assumes the position of a protest ‘expert’, whose authority is not supposed to be challenged. The authority of the police can be called into question when it is obvious to everyone that they are acting ‘unjustly’—e.g., when the police tear gas a bunch of ‘peaceful protesters’. The authority of the protest marshal, however, with their aura of activist expertise, is not so obviously repressive. They want protesters to see them as helpful, legitimate, knowledgeable; as experts in dealing with the police and in protest ‘safety’. They use this perceived position to control the protest and maintain the same order that the police keep with their tear gas and guns. The control that the protest marshal wields over the protest stems from the perception that they are a leader of the group, or at least ‘one of us’.

III. The protest marshal wants you to express yourself.
The protest marshal thinks it’s your right to carry the craziest sign, chant the loudest chants, and take the most revolutionary selfies, as long as you follow the unspoken rules of obedience and only express yourself symbolically. The protest marshal has already determined for you how best to demonstrate without causing too much disruption. The protest marshal helps guarantee that expressions of rage have no direct effect on anything and that demonstrations remain non-events. Rather than acknowledging the differences that bring people into the streets and respecting the actions people might choose, they only see the enforced, empty unity espoused by the controlling organizations. Any action that might threaten the actual powers you are demonstrating against will attract the attention of the protest marshal, who is there to step in and stop anything that doesn’t abide by their rules. The protest marshal turns the protest into a parade, a perfect selfie opportunity, in which nothing actually happens.

IV. The protest marshal is trained in the art of managing crowds.
The protest marshal exists on the margins of the protest. They move in formation, encircling the crowd, cutting through groups and forming a line between protesters and the police. This modification of the crowd’s spatial form is effective because it doesn’t appear as control at all. The protest marshal appear as a perfectly objective observer, refraining from chanting or carrying signs, simply moving people along the pre-established route. They undergo professional training given by non-profit organizations and are sometimes directly taught by the police. They’re shown the basics of crowd management, risk assessment, and how to profile and single out anyone deemed ‘undesirable’ or ‘uncontrollable’. The protest marshal subtly conducts the protest to ensure an event that is easily manageable and doesn’t threaten to break out of the limits set by the ‘professional’ activists and police.

V. The protest marshal defends oppressed people from the police.
The protest marshal believes they ‘protect’ protesters from the police while they actually assist in carrying out police operations. Like the police, they see themselves as the guarantor of everyone’s safety, but the ‘safety’ they intend to maintain is seldom defined. How ‘safe‘ is it when the normal order of things produces unsafe and unlivable conditions for most people? Deportations, police murder, and ecological destruction are not exceptional occurrences, they are part of the normal operation of modern society. Open businesses, open roads, and a smooth functioning city all facilitate these operations and help make them possible. By prioritizing the normal functioning of the city, the protest marshal ensures that the protest will not actually disrupt the conditions of a society where black life doesn’t matter. Whatever the intentions and personal identity of the protest marshal, they hold a structural position aligned with the police, which can only fortify white supremacy.

VI. The protest marshal allows the police to be virtually invisible at demonstrations.
The protest marshal helps ensure that the police keep a good image. It looks bad when the police are beating (white) people with batons and deploying their arsenal of weapons, so the protest marshal is there to improve police-public relations. The protest marshal, exhibiting their authority, assures everyone that they ‘know’ the police will react only if ‘provoked’ by certain disruptive actions. Whether the protest marshal is explicitly working with the police (like negotiating with them about getting a crowd off a highway) or imagining themself as ‘protecting‘ protesters from the police (by controlling and subduing the crowd), the protest marshal does the work of police so that the police can recede into the background. The protest marshal is deputized to diffuse the power of the police, which has the duel function of blurring the line between citizen and cop and also expanding the reign of the police by creating a mobile, ‘community’-appointed surveillance unit.

VII. The protest marshal is against violence.
The protest marshal is determined to ‘keep the peace’ and promote ‘non-violence’ at events. They assert that ‘violence’ is antithetical to their ‘non-violence’. In doing so, they neglect the reality that the ‘peace’ they are defending is merely the well-ordered violence of those who’ve won—i.e., the violence of the state, going back to Columbus and European slave traders, through rape culture, and carrying on today. This violence is so normalized that it has ceased to register as violence, since it goes into remission once established and only emerges to maintain the status quo. The protest marshal’s insistence on ‘non-violence’ is a grotesque proposition when people’s lives are threatened everyday. They’re willing to betray anyone who would use any means to defend themselves against a world that makes life more and more unlivable. The protest marshal believes that ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence’ are poles on a spectrum, when this spectrum is really only a tool of control to allow for some actions while condemning others that challenge the normal operation of power.

VIII. The protest marshal believes we must respect the free speech of everyone.
The protest marshal advertises ‘tolerance‘ and says we must treat all speech as equal. They believe in protecting everyone’s ‘right’ to ‘free speech’ and think speech is something neutral. In prioritizing ‘free speech’ as a concept above its content, the protest marshal fails to understand that speech comes from a position oriented to history and does not exist in a vacuum of neutrality. Speech from white supremacists perpetuates white supremacy. Despite explicitly advocating for ‘free speech’, the protest marshal implicitly knows that speech is not neutral since they themselves censor speech that is deemed too ‘hostile’. They smile when the crowd chants the harmless ‘love trumps hate‘ but scold those yelling ‘fuck the police‘, insisting on respect because they know where chants like that might lead. The protest marshal speaks as though speech exists in a vacuum but acts in accordance with the reality that speech exists in a war.

IX. The protest marshal is there to prevent outside agitators from hijacking the protest.
The protest marshal propagates the myth that anyone acting according to their own volition (i.e., against the orders of the protest marshal) must be an ‘outside agitator’, there only to hijack the ‘peaceful’ protest and ruin the validity of the message. According to the protest marshal, only tactics imagined to be legal or for ends within the law can be used, even if the means are in fact illegal. They are willing to go to some lengths (such as blocking highways, while deluding themselves that this is legal) but anything past an arbitrary limit is considered ‘harmful’ to the cause since autonomous action eludes the control of the protest marshal. ‘Trouble makers’ who would use any means necessary to oppose oppression are castigated as ‘outsiders’ regardless of what neighborhood they live in. The protest marshal fails to understand that there is no ‘outside’ to police brutality, capitalism, or white supremacy and that all resistance to these things is a part of the struggle.

X. The protest marshal’s role can be fulfilled by anyone at the event.
The protest marshal exists at every protest, even without the neon vest. No one ever just is a protest marshal—they become one through their actions. The protest marshal is anyone who draws upon morality (‘property destruction is wrong’) or perceived privilege (‘fighting back is macho patriarchy‘) to stop people from doing things. The attempts people make to be ‘helpful’ at events are generally done through actions intended to control and manage, rather than actions that would encourage the fight against those forces destroying our lives—like supporting queers to bash their bashers. Commands such as ‘calm down’ or ‘don’t do that’ only aim to suppress another person’s agency and reflect a fear of genuine expression. People don’t need to undergo specialized training to become a protest marshal—all it takes to become one is to reinforce the familiar and normal functioning of things. Anyone who tries to manage and control the protest becomes a protest marshal.

This text is available as a printable PDF here.

Anonymous submission to Conflict MN

Our actions may be small now, but with every blow our affinities deepen and we grow stronger.

- Propaganda Actions For September 9th

August 23rd, 2016

On January 20th in downtown Minneapolis, a group broke away from the larger, passive demonstration called in protest Donald Trump’s inauguration. This breakaway action was not simply remarkable because it shot off fireworks or blocked the light-rail. Nor because dumpsters were moved into traffic or because paint was tossed at the juvie. These actions and others are welcome, and one can assume they produced great joy in those who carried them out. However, come morning, the paint will have been scrubbed off, traffic flowing as normal, and Donald Trump will begin his first full day as President of the United States.

No, this breakaway action was remarkable because it exemplified the increasing capabilities that social antagonists have been slowing rebuilding in the past years. This growth has been in quality as well as quantity; the January 20th breakaway certainly outnumbered any other autonomous action in recent memory. Various crews came prepared with their own material contributions, all equally important in the shaping the day’s events. Participants both familiar and unfamiliar were able to cooperate quickly and effectively in the street, moving between targets while avoiding police, unprepared as the cops were for any trouble. After the short excursion, everyone was able to safely disperse into the larger rally without incident.

[D]owntown Minneapolis is a non-space where there is no possibility of building momentum or gaining useful territory. Downtown is the symbol and paradigm of pure function with no necessary human contact. But we continue to drift toward safe non-spaces, as the freeway has now become (when permitted marches take it late at night or on weekends, as we’ve seen recently). We always find ourselves wandering about in the concrete desert of downtown with no people around and very few consequential transit conduits, police at an eerie distance.

- J19 Minneapolis: Well, We Tried To Have a Dance Party

January 22rd, 2017

We caught a glimpse of our potential on January 20th, potential that would be squandered on symbolic, punctual thrashings of the downtown cityscape. As Trump’s regime continues to present us with new challenges over the next several years, this is the time to explore our capabilities as they relate to our own blocks and neighborhoods. Finding terrain that works to our advantage, eliminating barriers between participant and bystander, remaining undetected by police surveillance. The stale practices of activism have left us ill-prepared for the tasks ahead of us.

An action is greater than the sum of it’s parts. It goes beyond the tally of vandalism and destruction.

Let’s remember January 20th as the ascent, not the peak, of our revolt.

From It’s Going Down

And we failed, maybe.

Following the election, we recognized and felt – like so many others – the gathering of momentum against a Trump world. When people started making plans for J20, we wanted to harness some of the energy that built and dissipated after the election and just create some space to congregate, talk, and breathe under no ideology, no platform, and no unified aesthetic. So we called for a dance party on January 19th in a commercial district with the simple idea in mind to dance and block the operation of the city in some way. We were going to blast music and hand out fireworks and encourage rowdy—but relatively low-level criminal—behavior and hopefully meet up afterwards at a bar to talk about where to go next. Taking to the streets the night before the inauguration was chosen to set it aside from the non-profits’ permitted events and build momentum for the days (weeks, years!) to come.

We got a sound system, some fireworks, and made a simple banner. Basic shit. We passed out flyers around town at parties, bars, and shows. Many people we talked to seemed excited, and, by the last weekend before the event, some people we tried to give flyers to had already heard about it. This process was sometimes awkward and took us out of our comfort zone, forcing us to ask new questions: How much can you emphasize a desire to block the conduits of the city without freaking someone out? How can you tie the idea of a dance party to anti-Trump sentiment? From the beginning, we had decided to avoid the “subcultural” spaces in hopes that we might connect with different people who may have never thought of how to oppose the much-hated cheeto or the apparatuses of the state. We hoped we might expose ourselves to difference and have to explain things anew, outside of coded language and subcultural signifiers.

We also made a Facebook, which may have been our downfall, but we’ll get to that.

Our goal from the beginning was to open up a space for meeting people, specifically people who were afraid, angry, and confused by the Trump presidency and wanted to meet others and gather strength and have fun with them. There was no “event beneath the event,” so to speak, no hidden agendas. We wanted to create a fun situation with new people. No point to prove.

At most demonstrations and public events in the Twin Cities, the police maintain a safe distance, observing and waiting until something drastic happens, like a broken window. The night of the phantom dance party, however, as two groups of freaks in fabulous dance-party rags—pink balaclavas on our heads like a weird gang of petty thieves—rolled up with a stroller (cradling the small sound system) they were greeted by: pigs, pigs crawling everywhere (if only they were literal pigs it would have been really cute). Not only were there lines of cop cars, vans, private security guards, and even fucking tactical vehicles, but they actually occupied the space where we intended to start things by driving their vehicles into and blocking the area.

We moved into a parking lot to get out of sight, but were followed by the most obvious undercover in the world who peaked around the corner and gleefully ran back to report to his squad that he’d found the bad kids. We had to ditch the spot—at least to get rid of the fireworks—and regroup. Our friends were calling us to say they’d ditched after seeing the scene, and we imagine many others did the same. One friend who walked from the next neighborhood away said he saw cops parked at steady intervals for about a mile.

So we retreated. We were sad, yes, very sad, but we’d like to give credence to the tactical retreat.

One major lesson is to certainly use social media more strategically for such things in the future…cops love Facebook. Another is that the cops appear to be really afraid of non-permitted events in the city. This is important. In breakaway marches in the past, participants have broken windows, shot off fireworks, and disrupted traffic downtown, sometimes for hours, with a very small police presence and no arrests. This is because downtown Minneapolis is a non-space where there is no possibility of building momentum or gaining useful territory. Downtown is the symbol and paradigm of pure function with no necessary human contact. But we continue to drift toward safe non-spaces, as the freeway has now become (when permitted marches take it late at night or on weekends, as we’ve seen recently). We always find ourselves wandering about in the concrete desert of downtown with no people around and very few consequential transit conduits, police at an eerie distance. But call for an event in bustling-with-bros Uptown Minneapolis and MPD acts like you’ve declared war on the city itself (of course, not entirely untrue).

Anarchists talk often about “easily reproducible actions.” All too frequently, such actions are actually inundated with aesthetic choices and preconditions that most people are not aware of. If someone is not already wearing all black, how can they be expected to just join a bloc where they would be the obvious exception? Regular-ass people don’t wear all black. All jokes aside, pretty much anything besides a monochromatic get-up makes joining easier for people on the street. Fashion is a tactical concern. In this case, black is not practical, it’s symbolic. And surely an action is not easily reproducible when aesthetic cohesion is a prerequisite. This is not to say that black bloc as a tactic is ineffective but that it’s effectiveness has static patterns and that it is not as generalizable as it is purported to be. The aborted dance party was an experiment in breaking away from anarchist patterns of organizing as well as from gathering around identifiable signifiers. It fell too short to reveal anything about the latter. But, we do believe that if our goal is to produce ungovernable situations we need to work on broadening strategies in both of these realms. We retreated this time, but no-one noticed except the police and our friends. Failure? Nah, just strategy, bebe!

We saw the next day at the “mega-march” held by the “Resist From Day One Coalition MN” that at least some of our tactical ideas were well-conceived. A sound system, for example, invites people to join better than chanting, and encourages rowdiness and a sense of joy—even in a slow-ass march—and fireworks do too. Neither playing music nor shooting off fireworks are arrestable offenses, as MPD pointed out on their twitter, and both can potentially provide cover for riskier maneuvers. If enough people start dancing and shooting fireworks and refuse to leave the street, then the non-profits and the police have already lost control.

If our goal is to produce ungovernable situations, we believe all effort should go into developing broad, less-identifiable, and less risky maneuvers. Then maybe more people would come out of hiding, feeling emboldened to do riskier things together with more joyousness and less fear.