Anti-Capitalism and Violence: Gord Hill Interviewed by Kersplebedeb

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The opening graphic in The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book is striking, showing a Black Bloc member squaring off against a cop, each as representatives of the clash between Empire and free peoples from centuries past. To what degree do you feel that the clashes at today's summits represent a continuity with the history of anti-colonial resistance?

To start with, I wouldn't limit the concept of anti-colonial resistance simply to counter summit mobilizations. But in general, I do think there's a connection in that free, autonomous societies have always resisted the rule of civilization and its empires, which the graphic you refer to was meant to depict. Looking at just the summit protests, however, they are in some ways the equivalent to battles fought against empire by tribal peoples, including forms of self-organization, autonomy, even tactics. For example, tribal peoples in Western Europe fought in a somewhat chaotic autonomous manner, while Roman legions were in massed units, lines of heavily armoured troops, etc. You can see similar forms of struggle among social movements opposing state security forces today, the Black Bloc being somewhat similar to the "barbarian" tribes fighting Roman soldiers (who look very similar to modern day riot cops).

In the section of your comic book where you talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, you show how assimilated tribal chiefs took advantage of the power vacuum to establish their own kingdoms. Some comrades argue that we're now in a period of the decline of imperialism, but is there anything we can do to prevent history from repeating itself, and today's "assimilated tribal chiefs" in the neo-colonies from similarly filling the power vacuum as warlords to set up their own fiefdoms?

The "assimilated tribal chiefs" are already circulating and jockeying for position within our social movements, if we consider the collaborative role of union bureaucrats, political party members, pacifist ideologues, etc. Internally, we make efforts to keep our autonomy and decentralized manner of organizing while defeating those that would control and contain us. In the event of a systemic collapse, what would prevent warlords as such from rising? Organized resistance capable of defeating such forces, the seeds of which must be planted now so that when the crisis matures so does the resistance. it should also be noted that even among the European tribes collaborator chiefs were targeted with death and there was significant internal struggles among tribes in responding to both the advance of the Roman empire and its collapse.

k: The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book focuses almost exclusively on clashes at protests that have occurred in the media spotlight. Do you consider these protests, which some people have criticized as "summit hopping", to be particularly strategic? Is there a particular importance in telling these stories?

gh: The summits depicted in the comic are historical events that involved tens of thousands of people directly in the streets, and which affected many more (via corporate and alternative media, etc.). They inspired many and showed the power of the people when mobilized, despite the vast deployment of state security forces. This is a strategic gain that is absolutely necessary for resistance movements. In regards to telling these stories, it is up to us to maintain our history of resistance, no one else will do it for us. It is in fact in the interests of the ruling class that such histories be erased because they are such "bad examples." I personally don't like the term "summit hopping" as it belittles the efforts of organizers attempting to mobilize against such events in their areas. It also arises from the false belief that we either organize "locally" or "summit hop," a division that doesn't exist in reality.

k: I think what you're saying there is really borne out by what we're seeing at the moment in Quebec, where some of the same people who were involved in the militant actions at the G20 or even at Montebello before that, have been participating in the present mobilization.


gh: Ya, I've heard the same thing about the #Spanish Revolution, which Occupy Wall Street was modeled after.  Many of the organizers were 'veterans' of the so-called anti-globalization movement.

k: In your comic book, you show the Mohawk uprising and the Zapatistas in 1990, but then skip ahead to APEC in 1997 and then J18 in 1999. In many cities, the 90s were a decade where militant antifascist politics became an important area of action. Do you see any connection between the antifa activism of the 90s and then much broader antiglobalization movement that followed?

gh: Yes, certainly, in that many of the Anti-fa militants were key organizers in some of these mobilizations and also promoted militant tactics such as Black Blocs over those years. But I had limits on how much of the story could be told, and the anti-APEC and Zapatista rebellion more directly influenced the so-called anti-globalization movement with the focus on neo-liberalism, which I think really made people aware of the global restructuring then underway.

k: In Toronto there was Anti-Racist Action, and in Montreal we had the somewhat pathetic example of the "World Anti-Fascist League" and then (much better) RASH and SHARP; what kinds of groups were active on the West coast at the time?


gh: In Vancouver there was less of a fascist threat during this period.  There were smaller numbers of neo-nazis organized around Aryan Nations, and there was an Aryan Resistance Movement, as well as Tony McAleer's "Canadian Liberty Net," mostly a telephone line that had racist messages and info.  As a result there wasn't an active ARA chapter.  We did set up a group called Anti-Fascist Info, which was mostly an informational group that organized film screenings, forums, etc.  There were numerous autonomous anti-fascists who would show up at anti-racist rallies, for example in 1993 I think the Canadian Liberty Net attempted to organize a forum with Tom Metzger from the White Aryan REsistance (WAR).  This meeting was shut down after militants learned of the meeting place.  There was also a liberal reformist group called the BC Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR) which had formed in the early 1980s when the KKK was more active here.

k: Your work over the years, both as an activist and a movement artist-intellectual, has focussed on Indigenous resistance struggles, which have been going on uninterrupted for over five hundred years. Yet you also obviously have an affinity for some of the traditions of resistance that emerged much more recently in Europe, especially the German Autonomen. There seem to be glaring differences between the circumstances that have given rise to these resistance struggles - to what degree do you see them as being compatible, or perhaps more to the point, what how do you see them as being relevant to one another?

gh: Yes, my main focus is anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. As capitalism arose from Europe's colonization of the Americas, I see the two as intertwined. The imposition of capitalist relations among Indigenous peoples has resulted in class hierarchies, today manifested in the Aboriginal business elite and their collaborator political organizations. I think decolonization must include an anti-capitalist analysis or it risks simply being another form of assimilation (neo-colonialism). And since we have to develop anti-capitalist resistance it makes sense to study and understand such movements both historically and current. The Autonomen, as an autonomous and decentralized political force/social movement, share some qualities with Indigenous tribal society and also serve as a model for radical anti-capitalist resistance in a modern industrialized nation-state.

k: In the 1970s, at the time when the Autonomen were first developing in West Germany, and during the second wave of Autonomia in Italy, there was the related phenomenon of the "Urban Indians" - was this just a racist rip-off, or do you see there as something positive in this kind of identification, especially as the people who identifies this way may have been anti-imperialist, but really had no connection or contact with the anti-colonial Indigenous struggles here?

gh: The "Urban Indians" were probably sincere in their efforts to "decolonize" from Western Civilization, but ya it is a kind of racist appropriation of culture which would not go over very well here in North America.  The ironic thing is they could have reached back to the tribal history of Europe itself--the Vandals, the Goths, Celts, etc. all resisted their colonization by the Romans and had numerous military victories, including the sacking of Rome itself on a few occasions, which seems like a great historical legacy of their own ancestors engaging in anti-colonial resistance.

k: At the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, one of the best moments for me is when a guy came over to my table and was excited because he recognized himself in your comic - he had been arrested at the G20 and his story and\ made it into your pages. Other people i know also get a grin when they see someone who might be them. Leaving aside the question of how autobiographical your book may be, what is the significance of using art to keep alive the stories and anecdotes from these events?

gh: Tribal peoples have always used to art to maintain their histories and culture, as have social movements. In regards to the historical events depicted in the comic, I hadn't seen too much artwork attempting to maintain this history, for example with comics, which I find to be a great form of communication.

k: I imagine your art will continue to serve this function for the movement in the years to come. Do you have any future projects along similar lines that you'd like to tell us about?


gh: Not at the moment, perhaps you have some ideas?

k: Ha! Well, you could always come to Montreal, lots of interesting things happening here these days...

k: Violence is central to your stories, and the idea seems to be that the more of it, the better. Why is violence so important, and what do you have against peaceful protest?

gh: I would say violence is central to the stories I depict because they are a critical moment in the social conflict out of which they arise. It isn't every day that the state mobilizes thousands of cops and soldiers, or when thousands of militants converge on a specific battlefield as it were. In regards to levels of violence I think this is a tactical question that is very much dependent on conditions and context. In Seattle 1999 there was a fairly low level of violence engaged in by protesters, certainly in the downtown core where it was much more of a classic "police riot." In the Capitol Hill area there was more sustained street fighting, but of course the most spectacular impact arose from the small Black Bloc action in the downtown which saw a fairly low level of violence (there were no confrontations with riot police with a good amount of property destruction carried out). I have nothing against "peaceful protest" and have participated in many more such protests than "violent" ones. It's a question of tactics and strategy. I would say, however, that I am opposed to pacifist ideologues attempting to impose their beliefs on others while undermining militants.

k: Various writers have argued that violence against the oppressor can actually be psychologically liberating for people, a way of dealing with and healing from the violence of everyday day life under patriarchal colonial capitalism...


gh: Ya that was the message of Franz Fanon.  I would say it can be psychologically liberating, and an important part of that is showing that the oppressor is not omnipotent, that they can be fought and even defeated.  Without this people feel powerless, which contributes to apathy.  People need a fighting spirit and the will to resist, and I don't think pacifism is very inspiring to a lot of people.

k: In the context of the antiglobalization movement, which you literally illustrate in your comic book, there were debates about nationalism, about cooperating with the right (i.e. Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, etc.), about conspiracy theories - but the only debate that appears in your comic book is the debate over violence. Did you purposefully decide to highlight this one question?

gh: Yes, I think it's a much more critical debate than those over larger strategic ones at this time, such as nationalism or conspiracy theories. I think within more radical social movements there is already an understanding around nationalism and the right-wing, a consensus of sorts that generally rejects these concepts. But within this there is a division over the question of violence and militant actions that must be resolved to some degree before greater unity of effort can be achieved. As for conspiracy theories, they certainly had an impact on the Toronto G20 due to the involvement of some conspiracists promoting the idea that the Black Bloc was a police operation, and maybe some debate on this should've been included, but by the end of the G20 comic I was seriously pressed for space...

k: This spring in Quebec there has been a student strike which has developed with strong anticapitalist politics and a rapid escalation on the streets. A lot of the protest tactics which were pioneered by small, even tiny, groups over the past fifteen years are now in the headlines every day, and being taken up by much larger numbers of people. How much potential do you see for this kind of urban militant resistance to spread in North America? Do you see any potential pitfalls?

gh: I think it can spread very far and wide in a very short period of time. I began to realize the potential for this after reading a report from Greece on the 2008/09 rebellion there, where a similar phenomenon of thousands of youths adopted the tactics and methods that had been used by smaller numbers of anarchists for years. This wasn't simply natural intuition--these kids and many others in Greek society have watched the anarchists in action for over two decades now. It's like "monkey see, monkey do" and that's the importance of showing examples of militant resistance and serving as a model of how it can be carried out. The Canucks Riot of 2011 here in Vancouver was similar--during the 1994 hockey riot there were no cars arsoned. In 2011, over 16 or 17 cars were torched, including 4 police cars. I'm sure many of these youth rioting had seen some coverage of the Toronto G20 and the four burning cop cars that resulted. The Occupy movement, whatever its shortcomings, shows that a large segment of the population believes that some form of social change is necessary. They weren't willing to join the Occupiers, but they're sitting there and observing all this social mobilization and conflict going on in the world. It might only take one incident or issue to instigate social revolt, and as conditions continue to deteriorate this potential grows. The potential pitfalls are greater repression of social movements and an increase in police controls over the population, but that's part of the process of resistance.

k: If or when things do fall apart, isn't there a risk that the racism, patriarchy, and capitalist values that people have internalized might lead significant sections of the oppressor nations, especially its middle classes, to veer to the far right?


gh: I'd say it's a very real possibility and one that we can see occurring even now, with the right-wing Christian patriot militia movement in the US.  This movement expanded during the 1990s but then declined after 9/11 when the so-called "War on Terror" began.  In 2008 however, when Obama was elected amidst an economic crisis, the patriot militia movement expanded rapidly with part of it mainstreaming as survivalism (itself a sign of the times).  As of yet this right-wing has not coalesced into a unified movement, although all the ingredients are there for fascist style paramilitary organizing on a large scale.  But the thing about the declining economic conditions is that significant segments of the middle-class may become working class, as occurred in Argentina during the 2001-02 economic crisis there.

k: Still thinking of Quebec, after a few weeks of demonstrations in which police were repeatedly sent running, both the federal government and the city of Montreal began drafting legislation and changing bylaws to criminalize wearing masks and increase penalties for even being present during a militant demonstration. With potential consequences of up to ten years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines, the movement is now going to face significantly heavier repression in the courtrooms, and perhaps in the prisons too. On top of that, the provincial government has passed Law 78 which criminlizes a broad range of protest activities, and is clearly meant to break the back of the movement. What will be necessary for radicals to break through this escalation on the part of the State, and what effect will this have on our struggles?

gh: People join resistance movements for a variety of reasons--some ideological, some for friendship, some for financial reasons or personal security. But an important factor is the potential for victory--only those committed ideologically will join a group doomed to failure or defeat. If movements surrender or abandon a struggle after the first act of repression many will see it as weak and impotent. If a movement overcomes this repression and continues to advance, it will more likely gain new members and inspire others. But it also depends on the context--what is the struggle and how much emotion is invested in it by the participants? Is it a matter of life or death, is it a significant part of the core beliefs of the participants, an important matter of principle? In regards to the Quebec student strike, it seems that many participate or sympathize because it is a matter of principle (the right to education, or the right to assembly and protest). They seem to be able to mobilize the numbers necessary to defy the ban on protests and masks for the moment, but the real question will be how social movements without such a large base will fair. To answer the question more directly, I would speculate that mass disobedience of the new law would be crucial to show that the movement cannot be intimidated and controlled so easily. The disruptions resulting from the protests can create political pressure to repeal the legislation, just as they did to create it. But the movement might have to raise the level of struggle to one that it cannot maintain, given that its base, even though large by our standards, is ultimately limited. The law itself will undoubtedly contribute to the radicalization of even more people, just as the student strike itself has.

k: What do you think of the North American left today?

gh: It has great potential considering the worsening socio-economic conditions, the convergence of ecological and economic crises, etc. In general, at the moment it seems weak and fixated on intellectual efforts rather than physical activities, dominated by middle-class social democrats and their suffocating pacifist doctrine, and likely to turn tail and run at the first sign of aggression by our class enemy. The only hope lies in the radicalizing influence of militants, which is why the state sees the bogey-man Black Bloc as the greatest threat, and not those sectors of the left which can be easily co-opted. Furthermore, I think many people don't join "leftist" struggles because they see little potential for victory, and little that actually inspires them. 

The N. American left today largely inspires middle-class liberals and reformists, and the last thing they want is radical social change. The left or social movements in general will become far more effective when working class people actually join and participate in significant numbers, which I think will happen as the economic conditions decline further. I believe this is one of the reasons we must promote a diversity of tactics within out movements, because many working class people intuitively understand that radical social change requires some level of conflict, as opposed to middle-class reformists who seek to avoid both.

k: Violence aside, can you think of any other strategies or tactics that people are using presently that might challenge middle-class control of the left?


gh: I'm not sure, but I think some examples may be found in Occupy Oakland, where more people of colour and working class people were involved and radicalized what was a predominantly white middle-class movement.  Another example might be the Wet'suwet'en in central 'BC' who are resisting the Enbridge pipeline as well as the Pacific Trails Pipeline, a couple of years ago they severed their connection to mainstream environmental NGO's and began working with grassroots resistance groups.  But overall I think middle-class control will be undermined as social conditions continue to decline and more working class elements become mobilized in the resistance.

k: In the time that you have been involved in resistance movements, we have experienced numerous battles on multiple fronts, with both surges forward as well as defeats. What do you think we need to prepare ourselves for over the next ten years?

gh: Preparation must be based on our analysis of what may occur over the next ten years. Worsening economic conditions, ecological crisis, increased state repression... and potential systemic collapse in localized areas. Typically under such conditions there arises the need for greater solidarity and mutual aid to be practised, greater efforts at self-sufficiency (including food production, shelter, etc.), physical self-defense, survival skills, and better education on security culture. Given the growing cynicism with the current system, anti-capitalist resistance should find fertile ground for mobilizing. Anti-fascist or anti-racist efforts may become more important in some areas as well, as the state and ruling class typically resort to fostering fascist movements and racist sentiment among the population in times of crisis.

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 The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book
Paperback
96 pages
Published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2012
ISBN 9781551524443

available for $12.95 from leftwingbooks.net

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Fire and Flames, Black Blocs, and Militant Resistance

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On KPFA's Letters and Politics show featured an interview with Gabriel Kuhn, on the subject of the West German Autonomen, and the book Fire and Flames (which Kuhn translated into english). i have mirrored the interview here; it is well worth listening to. i found his comments on the evolution of the Black Bloc to be of particular interest, and so i have transcribed the relative passages here:

GK: The history of militant resistance is a long one; i think the particular form that the Black Bloc took on in Germany during the 1980s was determined by the conditions of political conflict at the time, the level of policing, the level to which you could take militant resistance as protest in the streets. i mean what is also interesting if you look at it, what we understand as the Black Bloc tactic has also changed in the course of the last  thirty years. Because today very often we see smaller groups that, kind of guerilla-tactic-like, move from place to place, who act quickly, who do a direct action maybe also making use of an area that at that point in time has no security forces and then you try to disappear before the security forces arrive and get to the next point where there are none. So its a kind of cat and mouse kind of thing.

Whereas in the 1980s for the Autonomist movement, it was the opposite. The Black Blocs were formed actually as a force that could confront the security forces head on. So it was a sign of showing strength in street battles, of showing the strength and the will to take on the security forces. Now there are several reasons why this has changed over the years, but as i said, i think it was a form of militant protest that was suitable to the conditions in Germany at the time.

Q: And the importance of taking on the security forces?

GK: Partly it was to demonstrate strength. State power and the security forces as the agents of State power were seen as a major factor in upholding an order than the Autonomist activists saw as problematic in many ways. So there was this symbolic aspect to it. But at times it was also very concrete. The squatting movement was big then1980s it was a very big part of the Autonomist movement. Squats were threatened by eviction and were ready to defend themselves militantly. So if you in a very concrete way demonstrated that it wasn't that easy to evict Auomomist squats because there was a militant tactic of resistance that was ready and able to take on police assaults, that of course influenced the decisions by politicians and by the people calling the shots within the police whether such an assault would be undertaken or not.

Q: Do you think tactics then over the years changed in part just because of the weaponry that police have now?

Yeah, i definitely think that is one aspect. If you look at the equipment police had in the 1980s in Germany for example compared to what they have now, also the weaponry and things that the police is allowed to do and is now allowed to do, it has become harder in many ways to have this head on confrontation because i think the differences in the resources and the use of power have become even bigger. So this is one factor i think why Black Bloc tactics have changed a little but, from this head-on confrontation to this more guerilla tactics and trying to find the right place at the right time where you can do your direct action. So this is certainly one of the reasons.

Fire and Flames:
A History of the German Autonomist Movement

The timing of Kuhn`s interview is fortuitous for this little blog, as i was just about to post the following talk that i gave earlier this week as part of the book launch that we held for Fire and Flames, at the Belle Epoque anarchist space. Here it is:

Hello everyone, and thanks for coming - we're here tonight to launch and discuss this book, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement.

This is a movement history, in two sense of the term. It is written by a guy under the pseudonym "Geronimo", a longterm Autonomist and who was involved in many of the events he describes. And it is a history of a movement, not so much of the debates and theory within it. This may even make sense, as the West German Autonomists were famously hostile to political theory, but it is also unfortunate, because there were ideas behind the tactics and campaigns described in this book. Luckily, while Geronimo does focus on actual campaigns and actions, he does also tell us about the debates and discussions that surrounded them, so it’s not as if theory is completely absent, more like it comes through incidentally rather than being at the center of our story.

Reading this book has been an educational experience, not only in terms of the subject-matter itself, but also in terms of the process of reading history. The last time i read the book prior to its publication was in February, and at that time it seemed like an incredibly inspirational but also otherworldly story, about a movement and a conflicts that far surpassed anything i had ever seen. Now, rereading the book over the past weeks since i received my box from the publisher, it is a completely different experience. The kinds of battles may be different, but the tactics, and the scale and intensity of struggle, no longer seem out of reach. In fact, reading some of the accounts of riots and resistance in Germany in the 1980s, i now find myself thinking, “Huh, we’re doing better than that.” i had never expected to feel this way. [For those out-of-towners who are not sure what i am talking about, check out this Report on Quebec's Student Strike.]

This points to the importance of this book, not just as a historical account, but as a story of battles similar to those happening today, of a movement not unrelated to the ones many of you may belong to. In other words, this book should be useful. Not in terms of tactics so much – this is not a technical how-to guide – but rather in helping to prepare comrades for the arc that struggles are likely to travel, and for the political and organizational challenges that are likely to confront us in the months ahead.

Rather than going on about how useful this book is, i’m going to briefly go over the history it covers. And then we can watch a video and have a few readings from the book, to be followed by a discussion.

OK, first off, this is a book about the German Autonomen in the 1970s and 80s. Autonomen is the German word, one could also say the “autonomists” – i tend to use both terms. There were Autonomist movements in several European countries in the 1970s, and they often varied greatly from one place to another. To understand the differences, and the specificities, you really need to look at the context in each country, both in broad terms and also in terms of the left. To do so i’m going to backtrack a bit to the 1960s.

So in Germany, or actually West Germany at the time, the sixties were a time of revolt, much as they were elsewhere in the world, a revolt that hits its high-point in the unsurprising year of 1968. This West German revolt was known as the “extraparliamentary opposition,” and as in many countries, it was centered in the universities. This initial surge met a series of challenges in 1970: splits within the movement between anti-authoritarians and Maoists, a lot of dissatisfaction among women activists due to sexism in the movement, and the election of a Social Democratic-Liberal coalition government that passed an amnesty for over 5,000 student protesters who had been arrested in the previous years, and that also passed legislation responding to many of the students demands, ushering in a period of what has been referred to as "reform euphoria".

The result was that the movement fragmented. Hundreds of thousands of people joined the Social Democrats. Of those who remained committed to more radical ideas, many found a home in various Maoist Communist parties. While in terms of numbers, this may have been the largest section of the radical left in the early 70s, it would really have no influence on the Autonomen, except as a negative example of the kind of politics they were not interested in. Meanwhile, other people remained committed to antiauthoritarian and anti-system ideas, most notably the Spontis, or spontaneists. For the Spontis, personal liberation, creativity and humour, as well as militant resistance, were all important themes. Many women formed groups and movements separate from the male left, most importantly in opposition to Paragraph 218, which criminalized abortion. There was also a tiny urban guerilla, with perhaps hundreds of people directly involved, but which had a support scene of tens of thousands, and which constituted an important political reference point.

Last but not least, about mid-way through the 1970s, there developed what was initially a very reformist anti-nuclear movement. Ironically, it was out of this movement that the Autonomen would emerge, though not immediately. Initially, various anti-nuclear protests appealed to members of all sections of the rest of the left for a variety of reasons, not least because it was “new territory” and provided a place where you could reach out to people and enjoy some popularity with so-called “ordinary folks”. Even better, pacifists and middle-class forces were unable to take complete control of the movement, which meant that it became a laboratory where different groups could try out different tactics. Militant battles with police, and attacks on nuclear plant construction sites, became a regular feature. If the older sixties-era left provided a lot of the infrastructure, what was most important was the political effect that this had on a new generation who became politicized through these protests.

As Geronimo explains, “Nonorganized activists—who would later form the bulk of the Autonomen—were an important element of the militant wing and emerged as a strong political force in their own right.” (87) and “The core principle of the nonorganized activists was “practical resistance,” by which they meant that each individual could partake in the struggle self-determinedly. For them it was crucial that the protest of the BIs was not purely rhetorical, but that practical steps were taken to meet the demands, even if this required breaking bourgeois notions of morality or the legal framework of the constitutional state. This approach was particularly popular since the decentralized character of the antinuclear movement provided a certain level of protection against state repression. It was in this context that the term “Autonome” began to signify a particular strain of activists.” (89)

So it was within the incubator of the antinuclear movement that the Autonomen developed as a potential movement. However, if they had not broken out of the confines of that one movement, it is unlikely that they would have developed the significance that they did.

In the late 1970s all the sections of the left that had emerged from the 1960s entered into crises. The Communist groups essentially imploded, largely due to the unbearable internal culture, both in terms of demands on the individual, and also in terms of authoritarian structures. The Spontis retreated into lifestyle politics, dubbed the Alternative Movement, when their militant forms of protest proved unable to cope with heavy police repression. The urban guerilla groups likewise went into crisis as they attempted to out-escalate the State on the military level, and failed. In fact the only movements that fared relatively well were the antinuclear and womens’ movements. Not coincidentally, each of these movements had developed their own understanding of the importance of “autonomy”, although the women’s movement was severely hampered by a strong pacifist wing. Also in this context, strong Autonomist movements in Italy, France, and Switzerland caught people’s attention, drawing on aspects of anarchism and anti-Leninist Marxism to make something new.

This was the context in which the West German Autonomen first appeared. In May 1980, an anti-military protest in the city of Bremen turned into a major riot, military vehicles were set on fire, cops were attacked with Molotov cocktails, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage was done. This inspired people, and was the first sign that things had broken out of the antinuclear shell.

Later on that year a militant squatters movement developed in West Berlin. Here too, it was not the sixties left that was in the lead, but young people, who had often cut their teeth in the antinuclear movement. Or, increasingly, were joining the movement for the first time. By 1981, 160 buildings were occupied, and over three thousand people were living in squats in West Berlin alone. Police attacks were often met with barricades and rioting. Beyond the actual numbers involved, the fact that West Germany was in an economic crisis with unprecedented youth unemployment, led to widespread sympathy with the squatters. The nature of the squats – where people were living collectively in illegally claimed spaces, having to organize defense against the police, but also developing physical structures out of which to base other forms of activism – all this was conducive to the politics of the Autonomen, who were clearly the political center of this movement.

At the same time, in the early 80s NATO and the united states were stationing thousands of nuclear missiles in West Germany, and so anti-war activism became a very important field of activity for the entire left. Here too, the Autonomen got involved, and were notable for their use of militant tactics during demonstrations. Notably, this is the origin of the Black Bloc. Also, this is a period when one of the urban guerilla groups, the Revolutionary Cells, succeeded in connecting to this new movement, and so you had a guerilla group that was carrying out numerous attacks – bombings and the like – as a complement to Autonomen campaigns.

Fire and Flames goes through this history, not in a seamless narrative arc, but in a series of reports on different aspects of the struggle, highlighting not only the tactics employed, but also the debates between different Autonomists groups about how best to bring the struggle forward. Very usefully, this book describes not only the high points of struggle, but also the dynamics that led to the defeat or at least neutralization of each of these forms of struggle. While repression often plays a part in defeat, repression always relies on our own weaknesses to do its work. As these weaknesses are difficult to identify beforehand, this kind of after-the-fact overview of what went wrong can be very useful in training us to see these kinds of problems while there is still time to fix them.

Of course no book is perfect, and this book in fact has some major weaknesses. George Katsiaficas, in his introduction, points out two of these. First off, as i mentioned earlier, there were Autonomist movements that emerged in a number of West European countries at this time, however Fire and Flames only really deals with the Italian movement, which in a sense is the “original Autonomist movement”. This is unfortunate. Secondly, and far more importantly, Fire and Flames ignores the women’s movement as a source for Automonist politics, and ever worse, ignores those Autonomist campaigns and debates that were centered on women’s politics and struggles. This is a really incredible omission, as according to everyone i have spoken to, women often formed the backbone of Autonomist scenes in various cities, and struggles around abortion, around sexual violence, and also around other issues – for instance war, and genetic engineering – are impossible to fully understand (or even notice) without taking women into account. Katsiaficas’s own book, The Subversion of Politics, is much better in this regard, however unfortunately it has its own problems, namely his hostility to militant resistance. So we are unfortunately left with this big gaping hole in our account.

Nevertheless, i think that this book can be helpful to us, especially in the context that presently exists here in Quebec. We are at the beginning of a political surge forward that might last for several years, and that is a wonderful thing. Checking out the lessons of others who have similarly tried to develop a culture of resistance without authoritarianism or reformism will prove well worth the effort.

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Report on Quebec's Student Strike

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Reposted from the excellent signalfire blog:

We are now in the 13th week of a Quebec student strike against a 75% tuition hike - the longest student strike in Quebec history - the conflict has become a rallying point for any and all opposition to austerity here, and clearly represents a political milestone, perhaps (we can hope) a real turning point.

The following is an incomplete overview of what has happened so far. It is not a history of the Quebec student movement, or of protest in Montreal, or even a partially complete account of this strike. It is really just an attempt to provide a sense of what has been happening for comrades outside of the province, as well as a sense of the context in which some of this resistance has been occurring.

The three main student organizations involved in this conflict, the FEUQ (Quebec Federation of University Students), FECQ (Quebec Federation of CEGEP Students - cegep is an intermediary school system between high school and university unique to Quebec), and the CLASSE. (There is also a fourth, the TaCEQ, a split from the FEUQ, but it only represents 3% of the strikers, mostly in Quebec City.) The CLASSE has the best demands of the three, it's the group where anyone on the left would likely be found - it is in fact a "temporary" structure set up to deal with the struggle against tuition hikes this winter, by a smaller group the ASSE, which is left-wing in orientation, committed to fighting for universal access (i.e., free education), and has a structure inspired by syndicalist principles of direct democracy and decentralisation. The media says that CLASSE represents almost 100,000 students, which is calculated by how many students are represented by the student associations which have voted to affiliate with it. There is a good background article (though the analysis is left-soc-dem) here: http://rabble.ca/news/2012/04/massive-student-movement-Quebec

The Parti Liberal du Quebec (Quebec Liberal Party) currently controls the Quebec government, with Jean Charest as premier. The Liberals are the most right-wing of the two main political parties in Quebec. It is also the province’s federalist party; that is to say, it opposes Quebec independence. The party is currently implicated in a variety of corruption scandals, heavy graft, etc. The key opposition party is the Parti Quebecois, which in the 1970s was social democratic in orientation, but now oscillates between right- to left-of-centre, depending on which way the wind seems to be blowing on any given issue. The PQ is pro-independence and, as such, stakes out the nationalist vote; historically, it had tight connections to the three major trade union federations, though these have diminished over the past twenty years. The caveat to this right-left characterization is that on issues having to do with racism, the Parti Quebecois is normally worse than the Liberals. There are two smaller third parties, Quebec Solidaire (which has 1 member of parliament, from Montreal’s Mercier riding in the heavily gentrified and trendy Plateau neighborhood) and the Coalition Avenir Quebec (7 MLAs). The latter is more stridently neo-liberal, pro-business, hostile to immigrants, etc., whereas the former is a left social democratic, soft nationalist party, with a sprinkling of trotskyists and others eager to pin their hopes to whatever.

Things have been escalating constantly throughout the months of March and April - daily demonstrations, militant actions of economic disruption, etc. In fact, many days have seen multiple demonstrations and actions in Montreal alone - as well as other things in other cities - and pickets at universities and cegeps.

This unparalleled student mobilization has been buttressed by unprecedented public support. For the first time ever, there have been non-student demonstrations in support of a student strike. CLASSE organised two specifically "family" demonstrations, on March 18 and April 9, with as many as 30,000 people participating, and where students were in a minority. And of course, this has been accompanied by the regular left noise; i.e., i was at two events, very different, in the first week of April - a Philippino political prisoner event, and a memorial for Madeleine Parent, a feminist and labour organizer/icon who died in March - at both, everyone was wearing the student's red square symbol, mention was made of the strike, and at Parent’s commemoration reps from the CLASSE gave the speech and got the loudest applause.
Within a context of daily protests and actions, on March 7 a student, Francis Grenier, was hit by a police stun grenade, and suffered a serious eye injury. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/Canada/Montreal/story/2012/03/08/Montreal-student-protest-eye.html). That same day there were other more minor injuries and tear gas lobbed as students gained entry to Loto Quebec's offices. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/Canada/Montreal/story/2012/03/07/student-protest-Montreal.html) This happened one week before the annual March 15 demonstration against police brutality, which police appealed to students not to join (see below). Nevertheless, this advice was ignored, it was a large March 15th (perhaps the largest ever), between four and five thousand people, with police using more stun grenades, tear gas, baton charges, etc. and making 150 arrests. (http://rabble.ca/news/2012/03/police-violence-rise-Montreal and http://Montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120315/mtl_police_brutality_march_120315/20120315/)

(For some years now this has been standard fare at large militant demonstrations in Montreal: the police violently attack in order to divide the demonstrators into a few smaller groups, which they then chase around for hours throughout the downtown core.)

Actions aimed to cause economic disruption increased throughout the month; for instance, on March 21, Montreal's Champlain Bridge (a busy connection to the south shore suburbs) was blocked during rush hour.

On March 22, there was a large demo - the largest in many years, at least since the 2003 lead-up to Iraq, perhaps even larger than those - of 200,000 people. The trade unions were involved in backing this demo. Personally, i saw very little organized left presence - i.e., no newspapers, fliers, or even banners from left groups - but it seems that this is because the march was just so big that it was possible to be there for several hours and yet not see any of them, as the CLAC (Anti-Capitalist Convergence), several anarchist groups, as well as the Maoist PCR-RCP were all there distributing literature and agit prop.

Already by this point, the strike had taken on dimensions not seen for decades. Hundreds of thousands of students were participating, and a majority of post-secondary institutions were affected.

Right-wing students opposed to the strike began going to court, asking for injunctions against the strike. Just like injunctions pertaining to labour strikes, these court orders are used to criminalize pickets, and to give police an excuse to arrest strikers.

The injunctions started arriving in late March. First, a community college in Saguenay was ordered to resume classes - the college hired security guards to enforce the court order, and students trashed the college.

Next, Laval University in Quebec City received a similar injunction on April 3. UQAM is the francophone university in Montreal where working-class people are more likely to go; it has been a center of radical activism in this city since it was founded in 1969, and not surprisingly has been the militant core of the entire strike movement. On April 4, UQAM’s administration obtained a similar court injunction.

Against these injunctions, the student unions upheld their right to strike with militant direct action (i.e., mass pickets) against the administrators, the cops and the private security guards. This is the first time this has happened since 1968, some of the best direct actions having now taken place on the picket lines (including fighting the cops to the point that they have had to retreat, on several occasions).

Indeed, the use of injunctions, while not affecting all striking students, contributed to an escalation, as strikers successfully met the challenge. As a member of Professeurs Contre la Hausse (Professors Against the Hike) warned, "This kind of judicialization may create an explosive cocktail among students, teachers and administrators." (http://www2.Canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=6519058) Indeed, if anything, the injunctions have spurred on the strikers’ direct action tactics, and the strategy of economic disruption and mass street protest that has come to define this spring. (http://www.Montrealgazette.com/news/Roving+student+protesters+tackle+multiple+Montreal+targets/6442031/story.html)

On April 4, 71 people were arrested after the ritzy Queen Elizabeth Hotel was stormed; they knocked over buffet table and smashed dishes. Two security guards were apparently hurt in the melee. (http://www.Montrealgazette.com/news/UQAM+gets+injunction+against+striking+Montreal+students/6409104/story.html)

On April 5 (Passover!)  locusts were released inside the University of Montreal, forcing classes to be canceled. (http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2012/04/05/19598226.html)

On Friday, April 13, students at the University of Quebec’s Outaouais campus in Gatineau received an injunction to go back to class. The next Monday, the administration had to cancel classes after students barricaded themselves inside a building. Police brutalized one student, who was hospitalized. (http://ssmu.mcgill.ca/tuitiontruth/news/crisis-at-uqo-riot-police-enforce-injunction-160-arrests/) A few days late, on April 19, there were 151 arrests at the Outaouais campus, as students defied the injunction for the fourth day in a row; crickets were also released into this university's library and walls got some red paint. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/Canada/ottawa/story/2012/04/19/gatineau-protest-Montreal-students-bus-to-join-arrests.html) More police brutality, some of it getting noticed, especially as one kid was photographed with blood pouring down his face.

On April 16, police would claim people shut down the Montreal subway system by throwing bags of bricks on the tracks. Police also claimed that molotov cocktails were left outside of a residential building which people incorrectly thought housed government offices. That same evening, several government buildings had their windows smashed, red paint thrown on them, and molotov cocktails found outside of them, unexploded. One can make of these claims what one will - people do make mistakes, people do sometimes make bad choices as to targets; but police also do plant "evidence" to discredit our side, both on their own initiative and as the result of orders from on high. Many comrades, not usually prone to conspiracy theories, feel that this string of events, especially so many molotov cocktails that all happened not to explode, was very fishy.

All the more so as the government moved in very quickly to make political hay from this, now framing its refusal to negotiate with CLASSE in terms of the latter not having denounced violence, even though there was no evidence tying them to these attacks. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/Canada/Montreal/story/2012/04/16/Montreal-vandalism-student-movement.html) In a show of unity, neither the FECQ or FEUQ agreed to negotiations unless the CLASSE was included - this was historic, nothing like it having ever happened before. Indeed, FEUQ lost thousands of members in 2005 because they broke solidarity with ASSE to accept a shitty deal. This time around, they made the political choice to stand solid with CLASSE, not so much because of some newly discovered political principles, but because they realised they would be completely gutted from the inside if they repeated that mistake.

If the solidarity with CLASSE represented a political breakthrough within the student movement, a breakthrough on the streets occurred in late April, as the government was hosting a big to-do about the Plan Nord, a massive development plan in Quebec's north, where the population is mainly Indigenous (Cree, Inuit and Innu). Plan Nord promises to be a version of northern development in the tradition of the James Bay hydro dams, i.e., some people will oppose it on anti-colonial grounds, some on environmental, and then eventually some on colonial capitalist and nationalist grounds, based on the argument that "our" resources being sold too cheaply to foreign corporations.

There were demonstrations against Plan Nord on April 20 and 21, much of the mobilization for this being done by anti-colonial forces, green and insurrectionary anarchists, who were reinforced by student protesters. People got into the conference center and cops at one point were sent running. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=83SLtpBiJjg) As one comrade explains, "The first day was actually a momentous event, in that we started fighting back for real, fear had disappeared and we managed to kick some serious pig ass on that day. Also solidarity was felt in the street fighting to a level never seen before."

Although the people who had gotten into the conference center were violently ejected by police, a victory had been won. After the premier gave his speech, the conference was delayed and the job fair that had been organized as window dressing was canceled for the day - and even this speech, an attempt at damage control, backfired, as Charest tried to joke that the protesters were welcome, after all, he would give them a "job in the north" (i.e., in his massive colonial ecocidal development project). Suddenly mainstream commentators started wondering if Charest himself might be to blame for the escalating tension on the streets; ever since, one of the most popular chants at demos has been, "Charest, dehors! on va te trouver un job dans le nord!" (Charest, get out! We’re going to find you a job in the north!)

This registered as a big step forward for the radical left, and a real black eye for the Liberals, with less than two dozen arrests on the Friday. Demonstrations continued on the next day, however not as aggressively, which led police to take advantage of the change in tone by making several dozen arrests, ostensibly to prove that they had "regained control" and to make up for the humiliating youtube videos showing them running away from protesters.

Sunday April 22 was Earth Day, which turned out to be the second demonstration of more than 200,000 people in Montreal this spring. Earth Day this year had become a place for all kinds of people on the left and all the various "causes" to gather, with everyone wearing red squares, the symbol of the student strike. The event has since been incorporated into the narrative of a "Quebec Spring" or "Maple Spring" that has emerged, of a spring of struggle that goes far beyond the issue of a tuition hike.

Also on Sunday, April 22, the FECQ passed a resolution that it would negotiate if the CLASSE did not renounce violence, as it claimed this would amount to the CLASSE "excluding itself". At the same time, the FEUQ offered to allow CLASSE reps to join the discussions as FEUQ reps, with the understanding that once there they would speak for the CLASSE. Later that day, after a lengthy assembly, CLASSE adopted a resolution to condemn violence targeting people except in self-defense. The wording was obviously the result of a compromise between different political tendencies, and specifically did not denounce property attacks, fiercely defended civil disobedience and direct action, and framed things in terms of the greater violence being economic violence, and the violence of the police.

These first negotiations started Monday, April 23, with the Minister trying to impose a 48-hour "truce" while they were going on, meaning no actions of economic disruption, interpreted by her to include demonstrations of any kind. While CLASSE did not technically agree to this truce (to do so would have required a general assembly), spokespeople did state that they could go along with it as they had not planned any disruptive action within that time frame. This was somewhat disingenuous, as a night-time demonstration had in fact been planned, and members of the CLASSE executive now tried to use bogus reasons to have it moved to the Wednesday.

Defying this move, hundreds of people gathered regardless on the evening of Tuesday, April 24. This first night-time demonstration was organized largely by students at CEGEP du Vieux Montreal, a working-class CEGEP which has one of the most hardcore student unions, affiliated with CLASSE. It was clearly framed as a rejection of any truce, and the point was made that when CLASSE started making deals about how people were allowed to protest/resist, it was no longer representing the protesters. While newspapers talked of "dozens", roughly 500 people attended, with some property damage, including a bank window smashed.

Wednesday morning there were allegedly smoke bombs set off in the Montreal subway system, while students joined with laid off Air Canada workers to block the street outside an Air Canada shareholders' meeting. Despite attempts by union reps to have only their people speak, rank and file workers insisted on taking the microphone and then passing it to student reps. Around lunchtime Minister Beauchamp announced she would no longer negotiate with CLASSE because the truce had been violated, amongst other things by these latest occurrences and the demo the night before. FECQ and FEUQ left the negotiations in protest. That same day, three high schools voted to go on a three-day strike. At the same time, the call went out for another demonstration that night.

Roughly 10,000 people showed up Wednesday night, and the demonstration got off to a good and militant start, with extensive attacks on property: all the banks on the route had their windows smashed, the Apple store and other establishments received red paint - the police would say a car was set on fire, though that has yet to be confirmed. For their part, the police attacked people with stun grenades, pepper spray, and beatings, making over 80 arrests. (Later on, police station 21 had its windows broken.) Some good video footage: https://vimeo.com/41177705

Thursday night there was a third demo, again with thousands of people attending. There were fewer arrests and vandalism than on the previous night. At this point, it became clear that there would be night-time demos every night until the Minister returned to negotiations.

Friday (April 27) was the fourth night time demo. This time i decided to attend, and i was both surprised, heartened, and disappointed by what i saw. I’ll go into some detail here, not because this was a particularly important demonstration, but because it was one where i was there so i can give a bit more detail.

For one, it was not a warm night - just under zero (celsius), with occasional very light snow. Thousands definitely did show up when it started at 8pm, perhaps as many as ten thousand at first. It felt very unleft, which i mean in a good way, meaning just that it was not the left activist crowd i am used to hanging with, or who i normally see at demos. Obviously a lot of young people, but i definitely was not the oldest. Getting a slice of pizza before it started, a Black guy in line in front of me said, "It's going to be a thousand white kids against two thousand cops, crazy!" - i asked if he had gone to any of the other demos and he said he wasn't into that bullshit. Then i bumped into a woman i have known for years, a veteran of decades of various kinds of social justice/peace activism, who explained to me she had come to tell the students "how it's done" - by which she meant nonviolently. I didn't know what to expect.

The crowd was overwhelmingly white and francophone. Essentially, this was a Quebecois event. Which makes sense, as the entire official class-oriented apparatus in Quebec is Quebecois, from the trade unions to the student unions to the antipoverty groups. This strike is "historic" amongst other reasons, because the English universities and cegeps have not voted to participate in a strike in decades (or ever, depending on who you talk to) - yet even in this strike, the English universities have no solid pickets, and as a result many classes continue pretty much as usual. All a reflection of the fact that social democratic politics in this society is Quebecois. Plenty of exceptions, but that's what they are: exceptions.

Given that, the April 27 demo had relatively non-existent visible nationalist politics (2-3 flags or signs), though some of the chants ("Whose Quebec? Our Quebec!") could be understood that way. The complexion of the march was largely middle class, but the politics were of class struggle from below, i.e., the bulk of people there experience the tuition hikes as part of a process pushing them out of the middle class, endangering "their future", whereas the political core (and thus the people formulating the slogans, etc.) have a clearly left-wing perspective and frame things in terms of working class struggle.

This is not an unusual situation in the First World, especially in North America - the pitfalls are fairly well-known, even if the way to deal with these remains elusive. As such, in the future this is likely to split, along much the same lines as the Occupy movement and other swells in protest in North America. So long as we remain in this stage of the capitalist crisis, most people politically affected by such protests will initially end up lining up behind some kind of progressive, soft-nationalist social democracy, while a minority will be won to radical left positions. As international capitalism is pushing sections of the middle class (including the labour aristocracy) downwards, it is important to also recognize that a minority will develop a radical resistance that may oppose this, but along exclusionary and authoritarian - even fascist - lines. (Here, as in the United States and English Canada, we see signs of the potential for this in the attraction to conspiracy theories and exclusionary nationalist solutions.) The task at hand for our side within these metropolitan societies is to intervene politically from an anticapitalist, anticolonial, and internationalist perspective in order to increase the numbers who will take option #2, though we should not have any illusions about that ever being more than a minority.

In this regard i was shocked at how little - as in zero - organized left presence there was at this demo. Nobody handing out newspapers. Nobody with fliers for upcoming events. No groups with banners. Nothing, nada, zilch. This is an example of the fact that, while the radical left has been present at these events, it’s capacity to do outreach has at times been outstripped by the size of the upsurge taking place, by the sheer number of protests, as well as the number of people who attend them.

Despite - or perhaps because of - such a lack of organized left presence, at first it felt like a really big militant march, snaking through the city. It felt a lot more disappointing after the first half-hour, when police blocked an intersection (Ontario and St-Laurent) and would not let us pass. Someone had been arrested, and 20-30 cops, not rigged out in super-heavy riot gear or anything, were standing against 10,000 people, maybe 200-300 of whom were masked (though not a black bloc as such) and looking like in theory they'd have been in favor of rumbling - yet the arrested comrade was never rescued, and it took 20 minutes to even get the cops to move and let us pass. Worse, the main chant at that point was "We are staying peaceful!" Very bad.

As the demo snaked on, this happened a few times, and by 11pm it was a little smaller, but still many thousands. The cops then announced it had turned into an "illegal assembly" and had to disband, but this had no effect. Between 11pm and midnight there were a few more standoffs, increasingly tense, a bit of pepper spray, some kind of flashy thing shot into the air, and a few arrests. Although there was no black bloc, someone blocked up did throw a stone through the window of an army recruiting center - they were actually physically attacked by "pacifists"; although you can't see it all, you can see some here: http://www.cyberpresse.ca/actualites/dossiers/conflit-etudiant/201204/27/01-4519835-une-marche-pacifique-malgre-la-tension.php. I also heard that people applauded when police made arrests, of which there were 34 in all that night. Although the media described these as the result of police making "surgical strikes", what this really amounted to was retaliatory and often random arrests; i.e., see this youtube video showing a group of kids under arrest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiib7CVafw0

On the other hand, i did not see anyone intervene when the small unlucky contingent of cops who were assigned to accompany the demo had (empty plastic lightweight) bottles and marbles thrown at them. And i did notice that as the demo got smaller the "We are staying peaceful" chant was overtaken by "We are staying in one group", meaning physically tight.  Cool tankie chant of the night: "Charest, sans blague - on t’envoie au gulag!" ("Charest, we're not joking - we're going to send you to the gulag!")

I left the demo at 1am; there were still thousands of people, but i was tired and wanted to get the last bus home. The next morning's headlines were all about how the demo policed itself and was anti-vandalism. What several comrades have pointed out to me is that during the month of March and April things were escalating in the streets, but that many students who were not in the streets every day were experiencing this filtered through the media. When CLASSE was kicked out of negotiations, this led to thousands of people joining the nightly demonstrations and turning them into the main form of protest; however, when these thousands of people saw folks carrying out militant actions, they reacted based on their own understanding of "good students vs. bad vandals" that had been constructed in the media. So it is not that the protests turned against people carrying out more militant actions, so much as that they were swollen by thousands of new people who did not grasp the dynamic of what had happened before. (For mainstream media on the overall relationship of black bloc and student strike: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/05/04/graeme-hamilton-hard-to-claim-Montreal-violence-isnt-tied-into-wider-protest-movement/ and for a sympathetic explanation which appeared in the mainstream media but was written by a comrade: http://rougesquad.org/en/content/black-bloc-and-red-square)

In any case, talk of the black bloc,and militant tactics being marginalized, while puffed up by the media and social democrats, proved to be premature.

While nightly demonstrations did continue, albeit with far fewer militant actions and arrests, the next major confrontation occurred on May first, at the annual anticapitalist demonstration.

Unlike English Canada and the United States, where Mayday is mainly a radical left thing, in Quebec it is the main labour march, with trade unions, politicians, etc. jumping on board. Tens of thousands of people, sometimes more, take to the streets in Montreal.

In the 1990s, there developed a situation whereby younger anarchists were often getting vamped on by trade union security marshals, frequently because they would be chanting anti-nationalist slogans or else acting militant. This was both bad politics on the part of the unions, and also a bit of a generation gap - i remember hearing a security marshal at the first demo where this happened, he was panicked talking into his walkie talkie about how "nazi skinheads" had invaded the march - it was in fact a very disorganized proto-black-bloc of anarchist teenagers. This split with the trade unions was deepened every year, in part by the security marshals being heavy handed - especially those from the FTQ (the Quebec Labour Federation), the least progressive of the three main trade union federations. With the rise in Maoism that culminated in the official formation of the PCR-RCP in 2007, Maoists became even more visibly present in the mix. (Prior to 2007, this group had been known as the PCR(OC); it had been founded in 2001 out of the group Groupe Action Socialiste.)

A few years ago, this process culminated in a decision on the part of a coalition of anarchists, Maoists and others to organize a separate march with an explicit anticapitalist basis of unity. The demo took place in Hochelaga, a heavily Quebecois neighborhood, one of the poorest in Montreal - and also the site of years of class-oriented organizing and activism by anarchists, Maoists, and other communists. The straw that had broken the proverbial camel’s back had occurred the year previous, when comrades who had occupied the office of then-FTQ president Henri Masse to protest against union corporatism were violently ejected - i.e., kicked, hair pulled, etc. - by union goons. (See pages 3 and 11: http://www.clac-Montreal.net/sites/default/files/coup_pour_coup_web.pdf ) As one comrade explains, "We split from labour to organize the anticapitalist demo because they are just too pathetic and sold out in general, and extremely fucking pathetic when it comes to anticapitalism and acknowledging the radical history of May Day."

As a result, since 2008, every May 1st there have been two marches, a trade union march and a militant anticapitalist march; while at first the trade union march was by far the largest of the two, for the past couple of years they have been roughly the same size. The Anticapitalist May 1st has been another place where militant street tactics have developed; the demos have routinely been attacked by police - in 2008, boneheads seemed to be a part of a setup - and people have been hurt and have received heavy charges.
In 2011, some police were roughed up - while some suspect this was a setup, it could have also just been pure stupidity, as some relatively unprotected cops felt they could enter the march and make arrests without anyone resisting - leading to a several-month covert investigation of the PCR-RCP, following which some people’s homes were raided and three comrades were arrested. It was initially reported that these arrests were carried out by the anti-gang squad, but it soon came out that the organized crime division had established a red squad (or maybe a black-and-red squad?) over the past year, named the GAMMA (Guet des activites et des mouvements marginaux et anarchistes - clunky literal translation:  "Surveillance of Activities of Marginal and Anarchist Movements") - in order to respond to the increasing militancy of local anticapitalist demonstrations.  The GAMMA agents were accompanied by someone from the integrated national security unit, and amongst the subjects the comrades were questioned about was a bombing of a recruitment center in Trois Rivières (a city about two hours from Montreal) in 2010 just after the G20 in Toronto.

On 2012’s Mayday, the anticapitalist demo was clearly larger than the trade union march - several thousand people. In fact, the trade union march was hardly even mentioned in the media. The tone was set before it even started, as police vamped on a Maoist comrade (who was arrested as part of last year's GAMMA investigation) on the grounds that he was breaking his conditions.

Nevertheless, the demo started peacefully enough, however within an hour street fighting had broken out between the black bloc and police. The demo was declared an "illegal assembly", and soon after the cops got pelted with some rocks, a massive police charge broke it apart. In fact, as we wandered the streets, we assumed it was over, although isolated standoffs between people and police, and tear gas and stun grenades going off, made the downtown area seem surreal. We trekked along for about a half an hour before, by accident, coming across the remnants of the demo, several hundred people, at Carre St-Louis. More marching through the streets, anti-police chants, etc., ,ending at Place Emilie Gamelin, with some more tussles with police, a few more arrests, and then finally many of those who remained joined with that night’s student demonstration. In all, there were 108 arrests at the Mayday march. Sympathetic left report here: http://www.mediacoop.ca/story/what-really-happened-montr%C3%A9al-may-day-protest/10727 and video footage here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhQv-dDdHf4

Throughout this period of escalation, which started in March and has still not necessarily ended, a dynamic relationship has been created between one protest and the next. The people in the streets have been creating momentum, and a political crisis that the government has found itself unable to manage or reverse so far.

This is the context in which the Liberal Party was scheduled to hold its party conference in Montreal between May 4 and 6. This is where they were to decide upon their platform for the elections that will have to happen later this year. Due to the protests that have rocked the city every day, the week before it was to take place, it was announced that it would instead be moved to the town of Victoriaville, a couple of hours away.

The  anti-cutback Coalition opposee a la tarification et a la privatisation des services publics, as well as a variety of student associations quickly organized buses to bring the fight to them. Which is what happened. Between two and three thousand people traveled to Victoriaville.  Demonstrators quickly knocked over the police barricades, but then simply gathered in front of the line of police and listened to speeches. The police attacked the demonstration just ten minutes later, shooting tear gas and hitting people. As one comrade recalls, "I was shot point blank with an impact projectile (pepper powder) and they started to launch CS grenades at the same time; then all hell broke loose." Some people resisted, throwing things back at the police, who had begun firing stun grenades and plastic bullets. See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A_6QnK1w1i4

During this initial attack, three demonstrators were badly injured by police projectiles; initially it was reported that one was at risk of dying, though this is fortunately no longer the case. Two men suffered severe head injuries; in one case, requiring 8 hours of surgery, and resulting in the loss of an eye. As police were firing various "sublethal" weapons at people’s heads, the most likely hypothesis at this point is that he was hit on the side of the head with a tear gas canister, as these explode upon impact, and his ear was sliced open. A woman also lost several teeth as she was hit in the face by a police projectile. There were also countless people who received leg injuries from plastic bullets.

In the case of one of the seriously injured, Alexandre Allard, there are several eyewitness reports of what happened, including video footage from CUTV (the Concordia campus television station, which has been providing live coverage of many of the Montreal protests). Police, when informed that someone was injured and possibly dying, refused to phone an ambulance. Demonstrators phoned for one, while street medics - many of whom belong to a group formed out of the nurses’ union, who have attended several of these protests in uniform - attempted to provide first aid. (Given the severity of his injuries, this likely proved critical.) Police continued to lob tear gas, and as people began to run, demonstrators had to form a human chain to protect Allard from being trampled. As police continued with the tear gas and moved in, people then had to move Allard, not once but twice, in order to protect him. Finally, as people cleared a path for the ambulance (which took over twenty minutes), police took advantage of the gap in the crowd to make another assault. Video footage of all of this here: http://cutvMontreal.ca/videos/1132 and a story in the Gazette, Montreal’s English-language mainstream newspaper: http://www.Montrealgazette.com/news/never+seen+police+like+this/6582164/story.html

The fighting continued for hours; there is heartening video footage of one cowboy cop jumping on a demonstrator to arrest him, only to receive a beating from other protesters. The cop was sent running, the demonstrator got to go home that night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1MZMx7eN9w

Nevertheless, there were over 100 arrests, many of which occurred when people were already on their way back to Montreal. Three buses were intercepted by the police: as one comrade later wrote, "we were forced to sit throughout the night - over ten hours - as police processed passengers in the station and armed guards stood watch on a bus transformed into a jail." (http://Montreal.mediacoop.ca/story/riot-police-turn-bus-jail-cell-victoriaville/10800) While this does point to a vulnerability in terms of travel logistics, it also indicates police were unable (or perhaps not trying to?) to get that many people during the demonstrations/riots themselves, and were instead taking advantage of these easy pickings for the sake of PR.

A first person accont: http://Montreal.openfile.ca/Montreal/text/first-person-account-victoriaville-protest-descends-violence

More media coverage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTQZ60AZ2pQ

On Friday night, in the wake of the riots, all three student federations, including the CLASSE, appealed for people to be calm. The three student federations had entered into marathon negotiations with the Minister on Friday: it would have been a media coup for the government to be able to come up with a settlement during the party conference, and so everything was likely timed this way on purpose - i.e., refuse to negotiate until right before the conference, then hold negotiations with an eye to getting some kind of resolution to put wind in the Liberals' sails for the next election.

Indeed, less than 24 hours later, after almost three months of the students being on strike, on Saturday, May 5, there was word that an "agreement", or at least a "tangible offer", had been agreed to or drafted or something (vagueness ruled!), between the three student federations and the government. Reports are making it clear that this came from heavy pressure from the trade unions, especially the FTQ, which had people at the talks, and which threatened the student reps that they would withdraw their support if there was not an agreement reached. (http://www.lapresse.ca/debats/chroniques/yves-boisvert/201205/06/01-4522604-la-contribution-syndicale.php)

Essentially what the "proposal" boils down to would be that the tuition hike would still happen, but would be balanced in the upcoming semester by an equivalent reduction in institutional fees, so the way it was being presented by the government was that the actual amount paid would stay the same. This has been denounced as a farce, as it would mean the hike would still happen but would in effect be paid for in the form of cuts to student services. While there may be a lot of waste (i.e., perks to administrators and such), the places to make these cuts would be decided by a committee comprised of 4 student reps, 4 reps from the trade unions, and 11 reps from school administrators, government, etc. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that even if the cut to institutional fees matches the tuition hike in the first year, that it would do so next year or the year after. This view has been buttressed by Minister Beauchamp's making public statements over the weekend about how the government has won, has not given in, etc., which may prove to be an error on their part, as the agreement has not been ratified (as of May 8) by any of the still-striking student associations, and the latest media reports have student reps saying they doubt it will pass.

(Francis Grenier, the guy who lost his eye to police in March, had this on his facebook status: "For myself and many other of those injured in the student conflict, the strike of 2012 is never going to be over with, so we cannot be content with so little"; for a good left response to the offer: http://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.ca/2012/05/mouvement-etudiant-cette-entente-est.html )

At the same time, in the wake of the months of increasingly militant protest here, the State is responding, and not just with violence on the streets.

On May 7, it was announced that CSIS - the internal spy agency, unlike the FBI, but like the German Verfassungschutz, unable to make arrests but with a focus on infiltration/surveillance - has begun investigating the Union Communiste Libertaire (anarchists), the PCR-RCP (Maoists), the CLAC (Anti-Capitalist Convergence, mainly anarchists but also some others), and the RRQ (Quebecois Resistance Network, nationalist) and their activities in the riots. (http://tvanouvelles.ca/lcn/infos/national/archives/2012/05/20120506-183028.html)

That same day, referring specifically to events in Quebec, a (federal) private member’s bill was drafted to criminalize the wearing of masks at riots or "unlawful assemblies", with jail time of up to five years - given that the Conservatives have a majority in the federal parliament, it would be difficult, and would require a militant extraparliamentary struggle, to stop this from passing. Such a law will apply Canada-wide. (http://www.680news.com/news/national/article/359688--conservatives-back-private-members-bill-targeting-masked-protesters). (It should be noted that all it takes for a demonstration to become an "unlawful assembly" is for the police to say it is one; i have been at dozens such "unlawful assemblies", often the police make the call right at the beginning and then attack. One gain of the past few years is that demos are sometimes able to withstand this attack, and indeed during the strike many such "illegal assembles" have proceeded, with the police not feeling sure enough of their position to make a move.)

This was followed, on May 7, by Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay announcing that a series of bylaws will be passed to counter the rise in militant protest. Organizers will have to tell police the route of their demonstration beforehand, or else the demonstration will be automatically classified as an "illegal gathering". Wearing a mask at any demonstration, whether it has been declared an "illegal assembly" or not, will likewise be criminalized; however police will be given wide latitude to decide how to apply these rules, as the mayor has indicated he only wants demonstrations "that are likely to get out of hand" to be targeted. What’s more, fines for being present at such illegal gatherings are to dramatically increase, to $500-$1000 for a first offense up to $3000 for repeat offenders. (No crime need have been committed, simply being at the scene will be enough - there are literally thousands of cases of people who have been swept up by police in this context simply for having been walking down the street at a time when a protest is being kettled or smashed.) (http://www.Montrealgazette.com/news/Montreal+masked+demonstrators/6580627/story.html)

Repression is both predictable and inevitable when we go on the offensive, and as such these legislative moves are the logical result of the escalation that has taken place over the past months. That said, it always remains an open question whether repression will end a cycle of struggle, or fan the flames - in and of itself, all it does is confront people with a choice to either push ahead further still, or else back down. Backing down always leads to demoralization, the fragmentation and scattering of our forces, and in the long term plays into the rise of exclusionary and right-wing forces, not only pro-State, but also (and separately) pro-fascist. At the same time, escalation comes with its own risks too, for every step on our part will be matched by steps taken by our opponents. Historically, there are no long-term blueprints for success (that’s why we’re still stuck with capitalism), though in the medium-term maintaining political focus while extending the scope of the struggle, both geographically and in terms of the issues mobilized around, seems the best way of keeping one step ahead of the State.

When i saw the youtube footage of kids chasing cops outside the Plan Nord conference, throwing sticks and stones at them, i was elated. On a gut level i felt "they don't know that they're supposed to be afraid to do that" - my kind of activism, and most people i've known who have been activists for a long time, would not have tried that, because it looked tactically unwise, and likely to lead to arrest. So, at first blush, it could look like a strength of spontaneous radicalism. Indeed, i can think of other examples where something tactically unwise that people with more experience would "know" could not work has not only worked, but became an element in a breakthrough. I think what we accumulate as mental baggage may always seem to us subjectively to be "knowledge" and "experience" and "good", but in actual fact we may be learning wrong lessons, or the lessons someone else wants us to. In which case, outside repression is not even necessary.

However, my initial reaction was simplistic, and inaccurate. The militant street tactics here have not appeared sui generis. For one, i know many people who were there, and they are people who have been active for years. There were also people who have been active but part of a younger crowd, who have eschewed the demo-etiquette that developed over the past ten years here, and have been consciously developing a more militant praxis in Montreal for a couple of years now. But even they have been doing this on the basis of ideas and debates that existed prior to April 20.

For ten years now, the ASSE has been doing groundwork on campuses across Quebec, providing a radical reference point for students, and developing an analysis that is militant, feminist, and clearly anticapitalist. Over the past three years in particular, there have been repeated blockades, occupations, and the like carried out by students working in coalitions with community groups and even trade unions. Many activists got their training, as it were, at these actions.

More broadly, anarchists, Maoists and others in Montreal have nurtured specific experiments in militant street protests for over a decade now. The oldest such "tradition" is the International Day Against Police Brutality, organized by COBP (which came out of repression against the anti-HLI protests in 1995) on March 15, which has been going on since 1996, and which routinely involves vandalism, some street fighting (or at least violent arrests by police), and an organizing collective which refuses to condemn this or to give the police their demo route in advance. This year police publicly appealed to students to not join the COBP march; this advice was ignored by many, thousands showed up, and there were heavy police attacks, a cop car was flipped, etc. (The week before, Grenier had almost lost his eye due to a police stun grenade, which helped set the tone.) And even March 15 built upon militant tactics developed in the struggle against the first round of neoliberal cutbacks, the Axworthy reform in the early 90s, and a series of militant antifascist mobilizations later in that decade.

Although not annual events, all of this has also existed in a positive feedback loop with occasional summit-style events, such as Quebec City Summit of Americas in 2001, the WTO Montreal mini-summit in July 2003, the Montebello meeting between Bush, Calderon, and Harper in 2007, and the Toronto G8/G20 two years ago.

Similarly, persons unknown have engaged in sporadic acts of protest of a less open nature - police cars have occasionally been torched, etc.. Nothing incredibly big, but enough to have an effect on the consciousness of people who self-identify as activists.

All of which is to say, my initial somewhat romanticized notion of "these are kids who are avoiding the errors of the activist scene" was just that, a romanticized and incorrect notion. What is happening is more complex, and i have no way of measuring it objectively, but it builds upon previous experiments in militancy, is fueled by the spontaneous and fresh wave of protest from people who feel they are being pushed out of the middle class, and occurs in a global context defined by the Arab Spring of 2011, the Occupy phenomenon, and resistance in Greece, Spain, and elsewhere.

It is the best thing i have seen in Quebec in a long time, and the biggest thing of its kind i remember ever seeing here. I say that aware of the much heavier, and more important, Oka standoff in 1990 - but the difference is that at that time the mass mobilizations in Montreal and the suburbs were of a racist, even pro-fascist, nature - this time around, for the moment, it feels like an offensive rather than a rearguard engagement.

And things are far from over, the above is just an overview of what's happened so far. Definitely incomplete, but hopefully useful for some of you.

For more information in English:

• Rouge Squad Tactical Translation Team: http://rougesquad.org/
• CLASSE: http://www.stopthehike.ca/
• CLAC Montreal: http://www.clac-montreal.net/en
• Sabotage Media: http://www.sabotagemedia.anarkhia.org/category/english/
• Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR-RCP): http://pcr-rcp.ca/en/

And on Facebook, News from the 2012 Quebec student general strike: https://www.facebook.com/pages/News-from-the-2012-Quebec-student-general-strike/332377376800387

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Class Antagonisms Inside the Fundamental Contradiction of National Oppression, by Sanyika Shakur

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Class Antagonisms inside the Fundamental Contradiction of National Oppression
7–4–47 ADM (11)

Having just passed the 19th, and quickly approaching the 20th, anniversary of the L.A. Rebellion [1], We should be reminded here of what Rodney King whimpered as he stood in front of a bank of microphones surrounded by class enemies and neo-colonial politicians.

We should remember how he’d been dressed in that non-threatening cardigan sweater, white shirt, and black tie. How his hair had been tortured into submission by a jheri curl. We should reflect, as well, upon how timid and spooked he looked and on how concerned and stern those who flanked him were as well. That was a Kodak moment. It was staged to foster an image of contrition and resignation. Submission. A victim.

Rodney King had been led to believe, thru a bourgeois sense of reasoning, that the Rebellion was really about him. That the reason New-Afrikans and Mexicanos took to the streets of South Central was the result of his filmed beating.

That, of course, is typical of mechanical, bourgeois thinking. What it’s not typical of however, is someone from the ‘hood.[2] And this cuts both ways. No one in the ‘hoods and barrios, ever thought it was about Rodney King. We’d all seen the film, over and over like everyone else. But that was par for the course. We’d always seen that - long before anyone had caught it on tape.

Actually, We’d experienced much more than that. Why, it’s safe to say, that hoods have gone to War with each other, in vicious waves of internal (intra-class) combat, for much less than that. Tho’, because of a general colonial mentality, which prevents the challenging of (from bottom up) oppression, the same “hood” forces will not, in any systematic way, wage war on the pigs! Or for Freedom, Land and Socialism.[3]

Rodney King, alone and of his own accord would not have thought to hold a press conference to ask the asinine question (in the form of a whimpered request), “Can’t We all just get along?” The fact of the matter was We were getting along. New Afrikans and Mexicanos were getting along just fine. What we couldn’t overstand was why he was admonishing Us for getting at the exploiters of our communities? The impression he gave, with his handlers’ hands up his back, like a ventriloquist doll, was that a “Race Riot” [4] was going on. As if we had begun to kill each other, or burn and rob each other’s homes. His handlers compelled him to send up a false flag - a diversion. But, you see, this was the very thing that exposed the class interests and reactionary politics of the Uncle Toms that had been designated to handle him and by extension Us! [5]

Let’s go back for a minute, let’s talk social development (“history”). There exists a fundamental contradiction in Our lives that, like an elephant in the room, no one wants to acknowledge. Here’s the thing, as a consequence of the war waged upon various Afrikan Nations by European powers, those of Us captured and kidnapped where taken out of Our own self-determining social developments and violently forced into Euro-amerikan his-tory. This is not simply a clever play on words. This is a reality. We lost the ability to control Our own destiny.[6] Read that again.

From that time until now, the fundamental (basic) contradiction between the U.S. oppressor Nation and Our own oppressed, and colonized Nation, has been the governing imperialist relationship. Which is to say, Us not being in control of the qualitative factors [7] that determine Our lives as a people. A Nation!

Our tradition of struggle against this fundamental contradiction has taken on many faces - some hidden or obscured, and some open and hostile. But all of these have been to resolve the fundamental contradiction and to regain Our independence.[8] While there have been bona fide struggles to resolve the contradiction, there, too, have been reactionary, neo-colonial struggles, waged by internal enemies loyal to the oppressor Nation and culture, that have tried time and time again to subvert and control Our destiny for the benefit of the capitalists.[9]

They’ve come among Us, always imposed from above, stirring up emotions and giving lip service to “progress”, “equality”, “justice” and “prosperity”. These always within the colonial confines of the oppressors’ arrangements.[10] And none, collectively, ever materialize, because without a resolution of the fundamental contradiction - that is, the freeing of Our productive forces from U.S. imperialism and the governing of Our own affairs, We’ll remain a “minority” within the Amerikan system (as opposed to a majority in Our own) and subjected to the established bourgeois social contract, i.e. colonialism. Neo and Post.[11]

We can parade all thru the empire with “black” congressman, “black” mayors, “black” governors, “black” police chiefs, “black” supreme kourt justices - hell, even a “black” president - and absolutely nothing will alter the genocidal relationship that governs Our national oppression here because the “blacks” are a part of the colonial apparatus. They have made a strategic alliance with the capitalist-imperialists to act as go-betweens in Our oppression and exploitation.[12]

This is a conscious class stand. The “black” petty- bourgeoisie is not innocently confused, like say Mrs. Johnson across the street is about our national oppression. About the existence and subjugation of New Afrika. They are well read, have travelled and are experienced - they have just chosen sides against Us and in favor of Our historical enemies! And, the sooner We recognize and internalize this, the better off We’ll be.[13]


Black ain’t nothing but a color. As a designation of Our national Identity it has played out. It is a superficial overstanding at best and a foolish and dangerous analysis at worst.[14]

We have no collective control over the qualitative factors which determine our lives. We do not, in other words, control Our destiny. Not as a people (Nation) or a state (government). We are not a free, self-determining people. We were, before contact, kidnapping and national oppression - but not now. And until this fundamental contradiction is resolved, until New Afrika is independent of U.S. imperialism and neo-colonial domination, We will remain at the continual mercy of Our historical enemies and their warped worldview. A worldview that breeds, promotes, encourages and finances predation and exploitation!

Which brings Us back to Rodney King and “Can’t We All Just Get Along”. The question that begs an answer is: Who is this “We” he spoke of? The rebellion was against what was generally perceived as the system and particularly against exploiters who parasitically attached themselves to Our oppression, chose to bleed our communities of the little finances we were able to have. The masses, in their choice of targets, were only re-appropriating the wealth they’d invested in these stores and businesses that were then taking that wealth out of the ‘hoods and barrios and giving it to the enemies of Us all. So “We”, the poor and exploited, were already “getting along” with each other. Who We didn’t get along with were those who’d exploited Us. Who’d bled our areas dry of finances while flooding our areas with a bunch of crap and b.s.

It wasn’t the Crips, Bloods or Surenos [15] who’d pulled Rodney King out of his car and beat the hell out of him. Nor was it the Black Liberation Army or the Brown Berets. So, why was his press conference directed at Us in the ‘hoods

and barrios? This also alerted Us to whom had arranged this press conference. The next question in line with his request is: What exactly did he mean by “Get along?“ As in, “Can We All Get Along?”

Didn’t Our “Getting Along” with national oppression lead Us to this point? Didn’t We “just get along” after they kidnapped Us, colonized Us, hung Us, neo-colonized Us, imprisoned Us, ghetto-ized Us, miseducated Us, un-employed Us, assassinated Our leaders, drugged Us, infected Us [16] and sent our youth to fight other oppressed peoples for them? Didn’t We get along during all that? Getting “along” with U.S. imperialism and our own genocide, has gotten Us into this sordid ass state.

“Getting Along” allowed the pigs to feel comfortable with pulling Rodney King out of his car and beating the hell out of him. The pigs didn’t fear reprisal from the Black Liberation Army for harming one of Our nationals because when they imprisoned Our combatants We “just got along” with that. Re-read that.[17]

But you see, here’s the thing - that was not Rodney King’s words, nor his thoughts. Probably not even his will. No, those who were pulling his vocal cords were those who had a vested interest, a stake, in the system - as it was before the Rebellion. Those who had made a political and economic (class) alliance - with the imperialists! His now famous quote was actually a message from our class enemies by way of someone who they thought we could identify with. But, of course, his (their) words fell upon deaf ears because those who’d been treated just as bad (and some even worst) were out in the streets looking for a better day.

All the things people labored so hard to manufacture, at minimum wage jobs, but could not afford to buy, they got for FREE. People were getting food, clothing, diapers, shoes and whatever else they could never afford, but always needed. And this in an Empire who’s wealth began upon their conquests and continues upon their exploitation today. Let Us not forget that the U.S., as an Empire, has never supported itself - EVER! It was born a parasite and grew to prominence - as a parasite. It is today a parasite. But in the wealthiest Empire on the planet, in the history of the world, people are starving, homeless and generally without.

The repression required to keep Us “just getting along” is a massive effort undertaken by every branch of the oppressor government: Executive, Legislative and Judiciary. In fact, laws are enacted to maintain bourgeois hegemony over both internal and external colonies. Both Federal (National) and State (Regional) laws function to keep the oppressed tethered to the floor of the Empire.[18] There is a general and a permanent state of war that governs all relations between oppressor and oppressed. Sometimes it’s hidden and tactically called something else - usually something with a benign name that sounds well-meaning. You know like “War on Poverty”, or “War on Drugs” - “War on Gangs”. They militarize everything having to do with relations between oppressed and oppressor Nations. It’s all part and parcel of the general and permanent state of war between Us and them! And just because We ain’t ready, organized and responding to it don’t mean it’s not a war. The ‘hoods, barrios and reservations are virtual prisons. The schools are half-way houses and the prison industrial complex is doing big business. It’s a war alright. Ready or not.[19]

A permanent state of war must exist in order to maintain fear in and control over the internal colonies. This permanent state of war is called colonialism. When they allow someone who looks like you to govern you, for them - this is called Neo (New) Colonialism. And, when they let a “black” run the business, as in Rock Bottom being president of the U.S. - this is called post-neo-colonialism. But colonialism all the same. The system is capable of morphing at moment’s notice in order to survive and continue to oppress. As Butch Lee pointed out, “it can even appear as its opposite in order to evade destruction.” The slogan popularized by the old Black Liberation Movement, “By Any Means Necessary”, actually embodies what the U.S. system of capitalism is really about. In practice. Always.[20]

They will select a “black” sock puppet to be the president to demonstrate to their investors that they are color blind - turn right around and imprison 800,000 New Afrikans.[21] Then, the sock puppet president, turns around and appoints various women to his team to show the people it is not patriarchal - but the same system is waging an authoritarian war on women and children. Tho especially women and children of color - those from the internal colonies (New Afrika, Puerto Rico, Aztlan and Indigenous Nations).[22]

And, of course, We have to contend with the loyal-enemies of the Empire. These are the ones who go hooping and hollering about “racism” and “discrimination” - boo-hooing about how exclusionary the system is - and yet they really only want in. They want “equality” - to be equal with the very ones they claim are “racists”. They use terms like “OUR government”, or “OUR troops in Afghanistan” - “OUR police Force”. They are clamoring against “discrimination” because they feel they, too, should be allowed to prey on people. They want to be “equal” in the system of capitalism. They don’t want to stop the problem - they want to be a part of it. Why else would they ask for “equality” without calling into question the entire grotesque apparatus? [23]

This is what makes the petty bourgeois class of “blacks” so dangerous. They have the resources, approval and backing of the imperialists to carry on their campaigns of accepted forms of protests, even when it appears to question the bourgeois laws of the enemy. For instance: they’ll support both a new trial and the release of Mumia Abu Jamal, only because we can prove that he was wrongly convicted as a part of a frame-up . And while We go on to link this frame-up with a total array of colonial maneuvers carried out to keep New Afrika oppressed and exploited, they’ll pull back at “racism” and ignore Our need for self-determination. This, because their class interests reach an ending at calling into question the fundamental contradiction.[24] We can demonstrate this by the fact that there is no support for Sundiata Acoli, Jalil Muntaqim, Sekou Odinga or any other New Afrikan prisoners of war. Anything that points to the challenging of the fundamental contradiction - that calls into question the actual National Oppression of New Afrika - the petty bourgeoisie will ignore, reject or outright deny support for. This would not be in accord with their class interests as parasites upon Our misery, their collaboration with our oppressors. So, within the framework of their accepted forms of protests, as loyal enemies (as oppo-sames), they can call Mumia’s capture, incarceration and conviction “racist”, “discriminatory” and “questionable”. But that’s where it will end. That’s the parameters. That’s the function of this class. To appear as staunch defenders of “black”, or “Afrikan American”, rights, progress and equality only within the boundaries of established imperial rule. Which is to say only as “citizens” of the oppressor Nation - as “minorities” needing special handling. Victims.

And here we are back at Rodney King. Once the spontaneous L.A. Rebellion had run its course, brought under control only secondarily by the National Guard - it’s primary weakness, of course, was its spontaneity [25] - the U.S. government enacted a counterinsurgency policy called Weed and Seed. This directive was issued straight from the White House, from then president George H.W. Bush. And, let Us not forget, that this same pig had, from February 1976, to November of that same year, been Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. So he was no stranger to counterinsurgency programs.[26]

Weed and Seed was a counterinsurgency program much like the Phoenix Program run previously on the Vietnamese people to, it explicitly said, “neutralize the Viet Cong by assassinating its cadres, destroying its bases among its people and strategically winning over the Vietnamese population”. That is exactly what Weed and Seed was about as well. In the ‘hoods and barrios of South Central.[27]

Once you see New Afrikans as an internal, colonized Nation and not simply as a “black minority of discriminated against U.S. citizens”, you’ll begin to overstand the interchangeability of military tactics used against other colonies around the world. Not only did Weed and Seed implement a weeding out of “troublemakers”, i.e. combatants, leaders and political adversaries, but it seeded points of contention and distrust amongst the various participants in the Rebellion and Resistance that grew eventually into what’s happening now between almost every ‘hood and barrio. These conflicts did not fall from the sky. Their origins are on Earth, issuing from designs that serve someone’s needs. The idea is to follow the conflicts to the point of interest. Which is to say, who is benefiting from the conflicts? Keep the term Weed and Seed in mind as We go forward here.

Nationals of two oppressed and colonized Nations (Aztlan and New Afrika) are involved in shooting wars. Yes, these conflicts largely involve lumpen (criminal) elements. Those involved in street org activity. The lumpen element to a degree played some significant roles in the Revolution of the 60’s and early 70’s. Especially those who were able to transform their criminal mentalities into conscious Revolutionary mentalities. Even tho’ it’s largely lumpen elements in contention in the ‘hoods/barrios, regular, working-class people, students and children, are also being affected by these clashes. But the thing is, the combatants are nationals of oppressed Nations - those the U.S. government has already deemed “social dynamite” [28] and have slated for liquidation thru one of its various methods of collective death and destruction. So, once the enemy culture saw the mass unity during the Rebellion, measures thru Weed and Seed, were undertaken to divide, so as to be in a better position to CONQUER, these elements who obviously had no qualms about rebelling against oppression.

Here’s one of the tactics they used: On Florence and Normandie Avenues, the acknowledged point of origin of the Rebellion, New Afrikans were shown on film pulling a Mexicano priest from his car, yanking his pants down, while he has on the ground, and spray painting his private parts black. This was not what it actually was reported to be. While this priest was, in fact, Mexicano, he’d been pointed out by a Mexicano as a child molester and was thus disciplined by the first group that got to him. But because those who got him were New Afrikan and he was obviously a Mexicano and no sound was attached to the video, the media was allowed to mis-interpret the scene as they wished.

And this is what they did. So, there was Reginald Denny layed out after being pulled from his truck - after he’d yelled “get your black asses out of the street” to the Rebels - and then beaten. And across the street was the Mexicano priest, pants pulled down, private parts painted black - and the Rebels were seemingly targeting anyone who wasn’t New Afrikan as they passed. This is what it looked like from the helicopter and after the news people interpreted it as such. But that wasn’t true.

The Rebels, the lumpen, had just had a very physical brawl with a few dozen L.A.P.D. pigs over their manhandling of a fellow by the name of Marc.[29] During the Rebels’ battle to free Marc from the pigs clutches, a radio call came out which instructed the pigs to retreat - to leave the area. They got into their cars and left. Then the Rebels walked up to Florence Avenue and were attempting to secure the intersection from all vehicle traffic - that is: all vehicle traffic. Any motorists that attempted to pass had their vehicles bombarded with stones, sticks and bottles. The tactic was to secure the intersection against the eventual return of the L.A.P.D. Which, is must be added, has its 77th Division (a notoriously aggressive and hostile station) right down the avenue of Florence at Broadway. So, the idea, on a purely spur of the moment level, was to secure the main intersection from any and all flowing traffic. What is interesting to note is that the young Rebels and lumpen weren’t trying to “start” the L.A. Rebellion. And it certainly wasn’t about the Rodney King beating or verdict. Tho We’d all seen that too. Where earlier in that fateful day the four L.A.P.D. pigs were acquitted after a trial for the taped beating.[30] While it most definitely wasn’t the central factor, it was however one more nail in the coffin of belief in the system. This, if only for a few days, while Rebels re-appropriated various goods and demolished certain structures they knew were used to exploit and extract wealth out of the area. Local, mom and pop shops, were not destroyed or looted.

However, by showing over and over the corner of Florence and Normandie, Reginald Denny’s stoning, the priest’s painting and the chaotic attempts by the Rebels and lumpens to secure the corner, the impression of “Madness” and “Racism” was projected out into the city, region, state and the Empire. And, of course, like most things involving a challenge to capital, exploitation and private property, the states’ propaganda machine put its own spin on these events. With a few agents on the ground, in key places, doing whisper campaigns, it wasn’t too hard to convince right-wing street (and prison) organizations that it was the “Racist blacks attacking Mexicans”. Thus began the acrimonious flow of orders to “get even” that issued from the tombs of the SHU units. Check the stats - after the ‘92 Rebellion, the hoods and barrios across L.A., Watts, Compton and Lynwood erupted in lethal clashes that have culminated in the hostile stand off that exists today. In the midst of the Rebellion nevertheless, there came a ceasefire order observed by some of the most dangerous and combative street orgs within the New Afrikan communities. Eighty percent of the sets complied with the cease fire. Bitter enemies blended across color lines in South Central, Watts and Compton. This was in the historic spirit of the 1965 Watts Rebellion [31] that saw a ceasefire and blending of the older New Afrikan street orgs in favor of United Action Against the L.A.P.D. and National Guard. Weed and Seed was to prevent this from happening again.

Once the streets orgs agreed upon a ceasefire in 1965, they, unlike the Crips and Bloods of 1992, had a social movement to join as an alternative.[32] A social movement that was increasingly becoming an armed revolution. Malcolm had been murdered earlier that year, in February. The Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) was active, and nightly on the bourgeois news, images of civil rights protests were being shown. There existed a more obvious exposure of the fundamental contradiction. New Afrika was being rapidly de-colonized. The system of capitalism was morphing again, looking, searching, for new ways to maintain its control over the internal colonies, while simultaneously struggling to get new colonies in Vietnam, South Amerika and Afrika. The following year, in October, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would start. And, too, would the United Slave Organization. Most of the street org combatants who’d come together in a cease fire during the 1965 Watts Rebellion, would go on to join either the Panther Party or the United Slaves. A move that wasn’t lost on the FBI who, thru its Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro) worked tirelessly to exacerbate pre-existing conflicts between individual combatants that inevitably spilled over into gunfights and murders.[33]

The same tactics were used against the Crips and Bloods under Weed and Seed, after the 1992 Rebellion. Same war, different names of the maneuvers, same objective. What should come across as evident to Us as We reflect on the various tactics used against Us over the centuries is that the enemy has more faith in Our ability to get free than we do. Put another way, the enemy has had to implement so many ploys, to hold, control, exploit and now to eliminate Us that for Us to sit and point these things out make even the most astute observer appear as a wing-nut conspiracy theorist. Tho of course, it’s no theory when its actually happening, as Butch Lee and J. Sakai point out in Rethinking New Orleans,[34] it ain’t a conspiracy when it’s done out right and in the open - it’s a strategy. Why else would the imperialists have to implement plan after plan - sometimes elaborate and varied - to contain New Afrika (or any other colony) if for (1) it wasn’t capable of breaking Free, (2) it wasn’t an asset and (3) it wasn’t able to turn it’s oppression into the actual defeat of the empire itself? [35]

Oftentimes the reaction to an issue can be a lesson unto itself. In this instance the enemy’s reaction to Our very existence is quite enough for those with eyes and ears, to recognize the vast potential in our collective ability to break de chains. Of course, the fact remains that the chains which bind - that at this stage are psychological - are so thoroughly in place that the masses have to be convinced that they are oppressed.[36] Consciousness will not fall from the sky. Nor will people be moved to action by mere thoughts, or ideas in anyone’s head. On both accounts material, earthbound, tangibles - food, clothing, shelter, Land, and control of destiny (Socialism) will motivate the masses. People are moved by interests.

So, in closing, it never was about Rodney King, the verdict, or any singular thing at all. These, however were accelerants, or sparks, at any given time, but the basic most fundamental thing that causes Us to struggle, to resist, is that We are not collectively free to determine Our own destiny. That we are under the thumb of U.S. imperialism. And this imperialism is administered thru colonialism - colonial violence (violence both armed and unarmed). Violence does damage (physically or mentally) - in the streets or in the schools. Thru police shootings or cultural hegemony. The colonialism is in place to exploit

Us through capitalism. Let’s be clear on this. Because whether the people are conscious of this or not, it is the reality We are in. And it follows that it will be Our recognition, challenge to and resolution of this fundamental contradiction that will end Our National oppression. Without overstanding this, We’ll continue to be played on Amerika’s Ferris Wheel of “citizenry” - dazed and confused. Being led by the “black” bourgeoisie to meekly just “get along” with Our oppression. Hau!

Rebuild!

Sanyika Shakur

---

[1] L.A. Rebellion, 4-29, 5-1– This is the “official” timeline. However, it took the security forces (police - above and undercover– CHP, sheriffs and national guard) at least seven days to regain full control of rebel areas.

[2] Suffice it to say that those of us in the hoods and barrios have always had a running battle with the L.A.P.D. and L.A. Sheriff’s Department. We’ve never found it expedient to hold press conferences to highlight either Our beatings nor our attacks on them. We took our lumps, just as We gave them theirs.

[3] What prevents hood forces from systematic, i.e. organized and sustained combat, is the colonial mentality. This mentality sees the state and its operators as legitimate and reflects upon itself as not. Thus ultimately the lumpen submits to the “legitimate authority” and allows the state to carry out its function – which is to dominate, oppress and exploit. For further reading on the criminal/colonial mentality see: Notes From A New Afrikan P.O.W, Journal, Book One (Spear and Shield Publications) and “Mediations On Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth”, Yaki Yakubu (Kersplebedeb, 2010).

[4] i put both race and riot in quotations because, of course, both are misnomers – false flags designed to not just mis-inform, but to distort the reality. There are no “races”. There’s but the human race. Again, see “Meditations….” (Yaki). Nor was the Rebellion a “riot”. That term was deliberately used to de-legitimize, to belittle and confuse. And of course no reports of private homes or national clashes were reported–or seen.

[5] For a critical breakdown and overstanding of the black petty-bourgeoisie, see: “Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat” by J. Sakai.

[6] A people’s sovereignty is measured by its ability to control, chart and determine its own destiny. That is, who it trades with, who it is, who it gets along with and who it doesn’t. For example, the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika is not at war with Afghanistan – but, the u.s. has so blurred the reality of Our national

reality, that not only do Afghani people believe that all the people in the political borders of amerika are at war with them, the actual colonial subjects of captive nations believe it as well. Thus, even though the PG–RNA is not at war with the Afghanis, it has literally no control over its nationals to prevent them from going to war on behalf of the u.s. oppressor nation. It does not have the power to control Our national destiny.

[7] Of course the qualitative factors are education, health care, employment, judiciary and housing. All these are administered at a hefty and often mind-warping and spirit-breaking price by the colonialists!

[8] As revolutionary nationalists We reject the notion and line that says our freedom is to be found, or “won” by integrating into and becoming “equal” with the very system responsible for our oppression and the people who administer that domination. Therefore we look to the lines of struggle which have sought to regain independence from - out and away of - the colonialists, e.g. the Garvey Movement, Henry Highland Garnet, Pap Singleton, the BLM and NAIM. And similar national liberation struggles here and abroad - all anti-imperialist struggles.

[9] See: Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, J. Sakai, Chapter 4: Neo-colonialism and Leadership.

[10] Here you have to visualize Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, MLK Jr. etc. These are Our “leaders” not because We have chosen them – or because they speak our aspirations to power, but because Our enemies have chosen them to mis-interpret Our aspirations to fit into the colonial scheme of national oppression. Hence at every outbreak of struggle, whether it’s the L.A. Rebellion or the Jena 6 issue, Mumia’s case or the Occupy the Hood struggle in Oakland - here come the neo-colonialists not to help us, but to do reconnaissance for the enemy. To find out what’s going on and then to report it, get instructions on how to twist it, then jump opportunistically out in front to mis-lead it right back into the clutches of the colonial parameters. That’s the function of this class. See “Settlers....”

[11] We should clarify this term “post-colonialism”. Ward Churchill pretty much summed this up in “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (AK Press, 2003) when he said: “...how about we actually complete the process of global decolonization before we announce our entry into “the postcolonial era”? Truly, how can we be in a post (after) colonial era when colonialism still exists??

[12] In our struggle - inside the colonial reality of New Afrika and its struggle to identify itself in the sea of imperialist distortion and neo-colonial ignoration - which, as Ward Churchill points out in “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens (AK Press, 2003), is deeper than mere ignorance. Ignoration is: “...instead to be informed and then to ignore the information”. So, to be ignorant is not to know, but ignoration is to know, but to ignore. Churchill says: “there is a vast difference between not knowing and not caring....” (pg.7.) So, here We are trying to show that within the New Afrikan Nation there is a class struggle between those who identify themselves as “Black” or “African American” and New Afrikans. And further, that those petty-bourgeois forces are actually conscious of themselves as go-betweens in order to steer the masses wrong (rightward) and serve their class interests and that they deftly employ ignoration. So, when We use “Black” here it is to direct attention to this class. As collaborators. Like the Negroes Malcolm pointed out when bringing “Black” into existence.

[13] Ignoration.

[14] To label oneself “Black” or others “White”, “Brown” or “Red” is to fall into the ideological trap of racism. It is to believe and propagate the false social construct that humans are broken down into different “races” which are classified outwardly by the complexion of ones skin, or the texture of one’s hair. Though, of course, it’s deeper than this since it also promulgates ones superiority and inferiority according to those who designed it. What it essentially does is bury the reality of class and politics - the real social determinants of humans. Humans are all one race. No matter if you subscribe to racism or not, if you’re using terms like Black, White or Brown to determine yourself or others you are pushing a racist line. See: “Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth” by Owusu Yaki Yakubu (Kersplebedeb, 2010). We’ll use these terms in quotations to point to their un-reality. Or in distinguishing New Afrikan revolutionary nationalists from petty-bourgeois collaborators.

[15] Here We use the three dominant street orgs in L.A. - Crips, Bloods and Surenos (Southsiders) - to point up the reality that those on the front lines, in the initial stages of the Rebellion were, in fact, street org combatants who’d felt a sense of pride and control over their areas. Of course, the grassroots - the students, working class and the elderly eventually came out en masse and kept it going. And, here, the Surenos (Southsiders) are the conglomerate “Latino” street orgs that function under the 13 (or Trece) numerology.

[16] “Infected Us” points to the various government tactics of smallpox (Trail of Tears), syphilis (Tuskeegee study -1932 to1972), HIV, hypertension, etc, etc. Hepititis, as well. See “Doctors of Death” by Dr. Alan Cantwell.

[17] To recognize Political Prisoners of War is to recognize the reality of the nation. We feel that because there is a low national consciousness level - so few are aware that they are colonial subjects of captive nations that this directly correlates with the low levels of recognition and support for Our captured combatants. Some of the longest held Prisoners of War, hail from internal colonies here (New Afrika, Puerto Rico, Aztlan and the Indigenous Nations), inside the u.s. of a.

[18] See: The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander.

[19] See: Rethinking New Orleans, by Butch Lee and J. Sakai (Kersplebedeb) and The FBI War On Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders, by John Potash (Progressive Left Press, 2007).

[20] See Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Anglo-American Law, by Ward Churchill (City Lights, 2003).

[21] See: The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander.

[22] See: Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover (Vagabond Press, 1993).

[23] There’s another term We could use here to describe this class - or rather what this class suffers from: cognitive dissonance. This, on top of their ignoration. And cognitive dissonance is: even when confronted with overwhelming evidence that what one perceives is wrong, one still, without fail, believes to the contrary. It was coined by Dr. Leon Festinger, of the University of Chicago, in the 1950’s. The petty-bourgeoisie in order to sustain itself as a class of mis-leaders has to submit to a collective sense of cognitive dissonance and ignoration.

[24] Even in giving lip service support to Mumia within the parameters of the bourgeois order, they did so only after the massive effort of the people grew too big to ignore. They safely laid in the cut, and tailed safely behind.

[25] We have to acknowledge what Comrade George Jackson coined “The Riot Stage” of social development, and of consciousness. This stage is characterized by spontaneity and shortsightedness. Usually led by petty- bourgeois sentiment and emotions. This, of course, is a weakness that is exploited by the enemy. They’d easily prefer a quick, spontaneous flare-up - a “riot” - to an entrenched, protracted people’s war waged by the internal colonies. So, in portraying the Rebellion, even by calling it a “riot”, they’ll promote it as if it really was a great threat to the establishment. And as revolutionaries We have to point out that yes, We are glad to see that the masses have not been so lulled to sleep by the illusions of bourgeois democracy that they wouldn’t resist at all. We simultaneously must stress that rebellions are not revolutions. That rebellions are, by and large, reformist. Since one can rebel against something without necessarily being for its opposite. Usually if it’s spontaneous, this is the case. So while the L.A. Rebellion was against exploitation, pig repression and a general sense of oppression, it wasn’t actually for Land, Independence and Socialism. Nor was it actually defined as anti-capitalist. But for Us cadres it was a sign of collective life and a will to resist. Good soil to plant new seeds.

[26] For a very good breakdown on counterinsurgency, check out: “Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America” by Kristian Williams (South End Press, 2007).

[27] To show the audacity of the colonialists, since 1992, they have an actual program called the Weed and Seed Program which is at: 1133 Rhea Street, Long Beach, CA 90806. Website www.longbeach.gov/health/FSS/ws.asp. Here are the “services” it offers: “Clothing, mental health, counseling, social service information, low cost housing, drug and alcohol treatment, WIC, child care and schools. Also provides: education, career preparation, social and economic/life skills activities, job readiness skills, drug and gang prevention and education program and promotes educational programs to ex-offenders to assure work skills for employment”. This is from its website. This is counterinsurgency disguised as a “helpful program”.

[28] See “Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis” by Christian Parenti (Verso, 1999).

[29] Marc Williams is the older brother of Damian “Football” Williams, charged in the L.A. 4 case that came out of the beating of Reginald Denny and the securing of the corner of Florence and Normandie. Damian was captured personally in a media staged moment by chief of police Daryl Gates.

[30] This after they won a change of venue from the city of Los Angeles to Simi Valley where the population is not only amerikan and conservative, but largely inhabited by L.A.P.D. members and their families.

[31] Watts Rebellion began on August 11th and lasted until August 14th. Brought under control by the State National Guard.

[32] This is an important point because from 1965 to at least September 1971, when the Crips began, street org activity was replaced by struggle for liberation within the framework of the Black Liberation Movement. And We need only to give a cursory glance at who all were street org combatants to point up the power of the BLM then: Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, Sekou Odinga, Zayd Malik Shakur, Afeni Shakur, Nuh Washington, etc. - all were bangers before joining the Revolution. Some in L.A. Some in New York or others parts of the Empire. The movement attracted them, though, and cadres transformed them. But after the movement was disrupted by the counterrevolutionary thrust of the state - which was, in part possible by the movement’s own internal weaknesses. Street orgs than again, began to proliferate. So, when in ’92, the Crips and Bloods agreed on a cease fire, they had no movement, no cadres to transform them. In swooped Weed and Seed and the Crips, Bloods and Surenos were easy pickings. It wasn’t long before chaos was back as the norm. Only this time as a shooting war between nationals of oppressed nations. A tactic of counterinsurgency is: Problem - Reaction - Solution.

[33] See: The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders, John Potash (Progressive Left Press, 2007).

[34] Rethinking New Orleans, Butch Lee and J. Sakai (Kersplebedeb Publishing).

[35] To “Capitalism as We know it to be, in present and past form. Which is to say that, no matter the internal struggles in Europe, among Europeans, between those who ruled and those who were ruled, between serfs and lords, etc. - no matter these influences - what cemented and gave assurance to the development of what We know as capitalism, imperialism, was the enslavement and transport of Afrikan people, from the Afrikan to other continents. Was the circumstances which led to the birth of New Afrika. The movement of Afrikan people from independence - to independence, is what will end the life of the Empire. No matter how hard it may be for some folks to accept right now”. Bakari Shanna, Notes From A New Afrikan P.O.W. journal, Book Two (Spear and Shield Publications, 1978).

[36] It used to be that “Raising consciousness” to particular levels was enough to show the masses that no real self-determination existed and that bourgeois democracy was a sham. Now, however, with the initiative firmly in the clutches of the state, globalists and their propagandists, and cadre, We have to literally convince the masses that all this is smoke and mirrors. It’s a daunting task, actually. Especially in the post-9/11 age of “everyone who is anti-state is a terrorist”. Still, however, it is what is to be done.

***********************************

Sanyika Shakur in a New Afrikan Communist currently held in Pelican Bay's Security Housing Unit; you can write to him at:

Kody Scott  D#07829
PBSP-SHU / C-7-112
PO Box 7500
Crescent City, CA
95532

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