Phoenix: October 22 discussion on Race Traitor politics

A presentation on Race Traitor politics is being held this Monday at the Rusty Spoke Bicycle Co-Op in downtown Phoenix. During our active era as PCWC, we wrote with some frequency on Race Traitor politics (with my partner P.I. writing on the subject years back on his old blog, here and here) as we, and many others in Arizona, were exposed to these ideas by the late Joel Olson.  Joel's projects against white supremacy introduced many valley anarchists in the late 90s and early 00s to Race Traitor politics, through his distribution of the Race Traitor journal and his own writings in the New Abolitionist paper.  In more recent years, Joel was primarily recognized for his role in the national cadre organization Bring the Ruckus (BTR), and locally for his involvement in two groups created by BTR members Phoenix Copwatch and Repeal Coalition.  Despite a number of disagreements over anarchist organization, the Left, and the role of liberatory projects in social struggles, we in PCWC still shared the position with Joel that white supremacy is the primary contradiction in American society.  We were glad to have hosted a couple of events featuring him over the last couple of years, and we were looking forward to his planned book on fanaticism and political zealotry, which I hear may be released in the near future.

This Monday is October 22nd, national day against police brutality. To mark the struggle against the state and its violence, a Phoenix anarchist friend will present an analysis on Race Traitor politics, drawing inspiration from Joel Olson's writings on race and whiteness, and what significance these ideas have for anarchist projects in Phoenix.  Some info on the event is below, along with one of Joel's final writings before he passed in March of this year, an introductory essay on white supremacy he contributed to the Institute for Anarchist Studies' Lexicon Pamphlet series.


Race Traitor Politics
October 22nd 7pm
"Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." This workshop will give an explanation of "Race Traitor Politics," aka "New Abolitionism." Many of us in AZ have been influenced by recently-deceased Joel Olson (1967-2012), a founder of Phoenix Copwatch, who wrote and lectured on this approach, but still remains unknown to many. "Race Traitor politics" sees "race" (specifically the creation of "whiteness") as a political construct that acts to divide the working class, and white supremacy as a system continues this, rather than simply a set of prejudices and privileges. What is the value of this approach, and what are the criticisms? What does this look like in practice?

This event is in recognition of 10/22 as National Day Against Police Brutality.

Rusty Spoke, 1023 Grand Ave, Phoenix
The building is on the S/W side of Grand (which is a diagonal street). Entrance is through the back alley which is accessible at Taylor/10th Ave/Grand or Fillmore/11th Ave/Grand.
Rusty Spoke is about 0.3 miles from 7th Ave. and Fillmore where Route 8 stops. Or 0.8 miles from the Van Buren/1st Ave. light rail stop.



White Supremacy by Joel Olson 

Biologically speaking,there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to come up with an adequate definition of it. Yet the social and political effects of race are very real. Race is like a dollar bill—a human creation rather than a fact of nature that has value only because people say it does. And like money, people give race “value” because it serves a function in society. That function in the United States is to suppress class conflict.

 In the United States, the system of race (what we now call “white supremacy”) emerged in the late 1600s to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. Through a series of laws, they granted the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to be excluded from enslavement, move about freely without a pass, acquire property, bear arms, enjoy free speech and assembly, change jobs, and vote. For their part, they respected the property of the rich, helped seize indigenous lands, and enforced slavery. In accepting this arrangement, the English poor (now called “whites”) went against their class interests to serve their “racial” ones, and thereby reinforced the power of the rich.

This cross-class alliance between the ruling class and a section of the working class is the genesis of white supremacy in the United States. It continues to this day. In this system, members of the cross-class alliance get defined as white, while those excluded from it are relegated to a “not-white” status. By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploits their labor, too, working-class members of the white group or “race” have historically tied their interests to those of the elite rather than the rest of the working class. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy ever since.

As this white alliance grew to include other ethnicities, the result was a curious form of democracy: the white democracy. In the white democracy, all whites were considered equal (even as the poor were subordinated to the rich and women were subordinated to men). At the same time, every single white person was considered superior to every single person of color. It was a system in which whites had an interest in and expectation of favored treatment, in a society that claimed to be democratic. It was democracy for white folks, but tyranny for everyone else.

In the white democracy, whites praised freedom, equality, democracy, hard work, and equal opportunity, while simultaneously insisting on higher wages, preferential access to the best jobs, informal unemployment insurance (first hired, last fired), full enjoyment of civil rights, and the right to send their kids to the best schools, live in the nicest neighborhoods, and receive decent treatment by the police. Even white women, who were otherwise denied full citizenship, enjoyed the benefits of white democracy, such as the right to legal representation, favored access to certain occupations (teaching, nursing, and clerical work), easier access to better housing (including indoor plumbing, heat, electricity, and time-saving household appliances), and/or the all-important guarantee that their children would never be enslaved.

In exchange for these “public and psychological wages,” as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, whites agreed to enforce slavery, segregation, genocide, reservation, and other forms of racial oppression. The result was that working-class whites and people of color were oppressed because the working class was divided. The tragic irony is that many poor whites often did not get to make use of these advantages, yet despite this, they defended them bitterly.

The white democracy continues to exist, even after the end of slavery and legal segregation. Take any social indicator—graduation rates, homeownership rates, median family wealth, prison incarceration rates, life expectancy rates, infant mortality rates, cancer rates, unemployment rates, or median family debt—and you’ll find the same thing: in each category, whites are significantly better off than any other racial group. As a group, whites enjoy more wealth, less debt, more education, less imprisonment, more health care, less illness, more safety, less crime, better treatment by the police, and less police brutality than any other group. Some whisper that this is because whites have a better work ethic. But U.S. history tells us that the white democracy, born over four hundred years ago, lives on.

The white race, then, does not describe people from Europe. It is a social system that works to maintain capitalist rule and prevent full democracy through a system of (relatively minor) privileges for whites along with the subordination of those who are defined as not white. The cross-class alliance thus represents one of the most significant obstacles to creating a truly democratic society in the United States.

This is not to say that white supremacy is the “worst” form of oppression. All oppression is equally morally wrong. Nor is it to imply that if white supremacy disappears, then all other forms of oppression will magically melt away. It is simply to say that one of the most significant obstacles to organizing freedom movements throughout U.S. history has been the white democracy, and that it remains a major obstacle today.

In a global economy (and a global recession), corporate elites no longer want to pay white workers the privileges they have historically enjoyed. Instead, they want to pay everyone the same low wages and have them work under the same terrible conditions.

Generally speaking, whites have responded to this attempt to treat them like regular workers in two ways. One is through “multiculturalism.” This approach, popular in universities and large corporations, seeks to recognize the equality of all cultural identities. This would be fine, except multiculturalism regards white as one culture among others. In this way, it hides how it functions as an unjust form of power. Multiculturalism therefore fails to attack the white democracy. It leaves it standing.

The other response is color-blindness, or the belief that we should “get beyond” race. But this approach also perpetuates the white democracy, because by pretending that race doesn’t exist socially just because it doesn’t exist biologically, one ends up pretending that white advantage doesn’t exist either. Once again, this reproduces white democracy rather than abolishes it.

There are right- and left-wing versions of color-blindness. On the Right, many whites sincerely insist they aren’t racist but nonetheless support every measure they can to perpetuate their white advantages, including slashing welfare, strengthening the prison system, undermining indigenous sovereignty, defending the “war on drugs,” and opposing “illegal immigration.” On the Left, many whites assert that race is a “divisive” issue and that we should instead focus on problems that “everyone” shares. This argument sounds inclusive, but it really maintains the white democracy because it lets whites decide which issues are everyone’s and which ones are “too narrow.” It is another way for whites to expect and insist on favored treatment.

Multiculturalism and color-blindness (on the Right or Left) are no solution to white supremacy. The only real option is for whites to reject the white democracy and side with the rest of humanity. Fighting prisons, redlining, anti-immigrant laws, police brutality, attacks on welfare (which are usually thinly disguised attacks on African Americans), and any other form of racial discrimination are valuable ways to undermine the cross-class alliance. So are struggles to defend indigenous sovereignty, affirmative action, embattled ethnic studies programs in high schools and colleges, and the right for people of color to caucus in organizations or movements.  All of these struggles—which people of color engage in daily, but whites only occasionally do, if at all—seek to undermine whites’ interest in and expectation of favored treatment. They point out the way toward a new society.

We can see this in U.S. history, when fights to abolish the cross-class alliance have opened up radical possibilities for all people. Feminism in the 1840s and the movement for the eight-hour day in the 1860s came out of abolitionism. Radical Reconstruction (1868–76) very nearly built socialism in the South as it sought to give political and economic power to the freedmen and women. The civil rights struggle in the 1960s not only overthrew legal segregation, it also kicked off the women’s rights, free speech, student, queer, peace, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American Indian movements. When the pillars of the white democracy tremble, everything is possible. An attack on white supremacy raises the level of struggle against oppression in general.

Even today, the white democracy stands at the path to a free society like a troll at the bridge. The task is to chase the troll away, not to pretend it doesn’t exist or invite it to the multicultural table. Of course, this doesn’t mean that people currently defined as white would have no role or influence in such a society. It only means that they would participate as individuals equal to everyone else, not as a favored group. Political movements in the United States must make the fight against any expression of white democracy an essential part of their strategies. The expansion of freedom for people of color
has always expanded freedom for whites as well. Abolishing white interests is not “divisive,” “narrow,” or “reverse racism.” It’s the key to a free society.

PCWC presents a discussion on "Whiteness and the 99%" with Joel Olson

The Phoenix Class War Council presents: "Whiteness and the 99%", a discussion at Occupy Phoenix.

Where: Cesar Chavez Plaza/Occupy Phoenix, on Washington between 2nd and 3rd Ave in downtown Phoenix.

When: 2 PM this Saturday, November 26


Joel Olson, member of Bring the Ruckus and the Flagstaff Repeal Coalition (which demands the repeal of all anti-immigrant laws in Arizona), will be discussing his recent essay "Whiteness and the 99%".

In addition to the general focus of the essay, the talk will place a particular emphasis on the attitudes of white people towards police historically and what that means for the current occupy movement. In addition Joel will be engaging the question of how the other largest social movement of our time, the immigrant movement (which called a general strike in 2006), remains largely unnoticed by -- and unconnected to -- the occupy encampments, and what that means for the trajectory of white and non-white movements fighting against economic dispossession and state repression.

From the essay:

"Occupy Wall Street and the hundreds of occupations it has sparked nationwide are among the most inspiring events in the U.S. in the 21st century. The occupations have brought together people to talk, occupy, and organize in new and exciting ways. The convergence of so many people with so many concerns has naturally created tensions within the occupation movement. One of the most significant tensions has been over race. This is not unusual, given the racial history of the United States. But this tension is particularly dangerous, for unless it is confronted, we cannot build the 99%. The key obstacle to building the 99% is left colorblindness, and the key to overcoming it is to put the struggles of communities of color at the center of this movement. It is the difference between a free world and the continued dominance of the 1%."

Read it here:
http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node%2F146

A historical fragment- Dispossession and control in occupied O'odham land

Phoenix, 1898

A reconstructed selection from an invaluable resource of local history, Bradford Luckingham's PHOENIX: THE HISTORY OF A SOUTHWEST METROPOLIS:

As Phoenix entered the 1880s, violent language and racist laws were common when it came to the white settlers and their treatment of the people indigenous to the valley. The federal government had recently enacted the policy of indigenous peoples' containment to reservations, and the seizure of lands for the interests of business and Euroamerican/white settlers. Akimel O'odham, Pii-posh, Maricopa, and Apache people were regularly scapegoats for white politicians and citizen groups as the cause of social unease, crime, and vice in Phoenix. White settlers, while newly present in the region, organized a mass meeting in Phoenix in September 1881, hoisting a banner which read "Removal or Death for the Apache." The violent and genocidal attitude of whites wasn't just aimed at the Apaches, who had been in anti-colonial armed conflict for thirty years at this point, but even the local people from the Akimel O'odham and Maricopa communities, who were not engaged in armed conflict with the Phoenix colonial occupation, were also treated with hostility and contempt by the state and citizenry.

The presence of Akimel O'odham and Maricopa people who ventured into the new cities was detested by the white population, who complained that "lounging about the streets are a great many Indians." In addition, whites gave violent physical and verbal abuse to indigenous people who were perceived as hanging around local landmarks such as city hall, or the train depot. In May 1881, racist and colonial legislation was passed by the city making it illegal for any indigenous person to be on city streets "without sufficient clothing to cover the person", or to be in the city after dark unless employed by a white Phoenix resident. The white settler enacted criminalization and banishment as a response to any resistance to the Anglo-colonial mentality that the early founders of Phoenix sought to impose on the original inhabitants of the region. Similarly, Scottsdale was also a "sundown town" for O'odham people who were coming from the neighboring Salt River reservation.

Some things of note from the last week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New PCWC Poster: Boycott Rosita's - No Love for Rightwing Tacos!

Our new PCWC poster "Boycott Rosita's: No Love for Rightwing Tacos" is finished and ready to be posted around town! It recently came to our attention that the Rosita's location in Tempe had quietly been the hub for rightwing and anti-immigrant organizing in Tempe, this included hosting Tea Party groups and a Sheriff Arpaio speaking engagement. The owners at Rosita's took their anti-immigrant and anti-worker activities a step further by firing a longtime employee in retaliation for posting about the Tea Party events on an anti-Arpaio facebook page. This news was all the more disturbing because we have been patrons there for years, all the tacos, burritos, and beers we'd bought were lining the pockets of a rightwing Mexican restaurant. We'd been funding our enemies!

In early July we were tipped off that Sheriff Arpaio was in Tempe speaking to supporters at Rosita's, so we made some calls, got a few friends together, and booked it over to crash the party. We missed that old bastard Arpaio by just a few minutes, but there was still a few dozen Tea Party people in the main dining room where the walls were adorned with a number of Republican "Tea Party" candidates' campaign signs. We were given the boot pretty quickly by management, who insisted they have the right to host Arpaio, the Tea Party, and whoever they want, regardless of how uncomfortable or fearful it makes the customers or employees.

One worker wasn't having it, so he went to the facebook group "People against Sheriff Joe Arpaio" and posted a call out for people to come down to Rosita's to confront the anti-immigrant gathering.

A disclaimer: We did not learn of this event from this employee, in fact a friend was eating lunch at Rosita's and saw Arpaio arrive and speak, it was this person who hit us up to tell us this was going down. I want to address this because the employee who wrote the post on facebook was fired a couple of days later, and that if the worker was fired because of our appearance at the restaurant it was not because of the post on facebook, because we hadn't seen it.

I've since met the worker, he told me that when he came to work a couple of days after the Arpaio-Tea Party event that his manager was waiting for him with a printed copy of the facebook page in hand. It struck me as bizarre that his boss would think to take a look at the anti-Arpaio facebook group for some evidence behind our interruption earlier that week, as this is a page that is monitored by Arpaio's security detail, and possibly other law enforcement agencies, it's not unlikely that the management was in collusion with MCSO. While this information could have been provided to Rosita's by one of Arpaio's goons, it also could've been a customer who saw the post and called it in, or some rightwinger keeping an eye on the anti-Arpaio site who reported it to the management.

This isn't the first incident in recent months of workers being fired in retaliation for standing in solidarity with immigrants, or taking action against rightwing anti-immigrant groups . In June I wrote in support of the 13 Latino Pei Wei workers who were denied a day off to attend the large immigrant demonstration back in May, these workers defied the company's orders by taking a wild cat strike to join the thousands of other people at the march. Like the Pei Wei workers, the Rosita's worker took action by blowing the whistle on the rightwing organizing going down in the restaurant, but unlike the Pei Wei workers this came from a white worker who took the initiative to go public on Rosita's love affair with the authorities and the racists from the right.

For all of the efforts of media outlets, politicians, and anti-immigrant activists who continue to exacerbate tensions between white workers and workers of color, these incidents show that while action by workers is isolated, there is an undercurrent of class solidarity that could grow to push the debate on SB 1070 in a liberatory direction. Along these lines, it may be surprising to workers who fight back to find that, whether brown or white, the capitalist has a pink slip waiting for those fighting against the white supremacist order by fighting for their dignity, or for those who defy their perceived elevated status on the class/race hierarchy to stand with workers struggling below them. This is the fragile truce between white workers and the capitalist class, a system that rewards white people with a series of privileges in return for their loyalty to the system of private property and profit that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of our counterparts from communities of color.

The disciplining of workers who challenge the white supremacist order and the collaboration between the owners and the rightwing and anti-immigrant groups cannot stand, we ought to discipline the bosses who find it acceptable to bring this level of terror into the workplace and community. In this "right to work" state an employee can be fired with or without cause, so taking walk outs, strikes, or other forms of collective action almost certainly guarantee getting laid off.

We are calling for a permanent boycott of the two Rosita's restaurants in the valley, not with the intention of harming the workers, the owners of this restaurant do that enough by hosting the enemies of working people. We want to drag these cheer leaders of repression into the light, to shame them publicly, and to withdraw any monetary support for them since they've used so much of our money spent there to attack immigrants and communities of color, this is unacceptable. In these times it's important to "out" businesses that provide shelter or a space for anti-immigrant, rightwing, racist, and/or fascist groups.

General Plutarco Calles, Dec 1924

Perhaps the owners of Rosita's (Rosa's son and his wife) would do well to look at a little history, it could be easy for them too, they wouldn't have to start any further than their own restaurant's menu. Rosa Keeme, the founder of Rosita's, would probably have never made it to Tempe or opened a restaurant fifty years ago if her family had to contend with the border, movement, and immigration controls that Mexicans face these days. Rosa's mother, Maria Jesus Calles-Moreno, benefited significantly from the lack of border controls, in fact it may have saved her life.

If the biography on the menu is to be believed, Rosa's great uncle was Plutarco Elías Calles, a Mexican general, politician, and later a president and dictator-like figure who founded the group which later became the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the corrupt and brutal political body that ruled Mexico for seventy years. Plutarco ruled formally as president for awhile and then informally after that through his political machine until he was finally forced into a short exile in the United States. So, the Calles family, like many Mexican families during this era, was forced to flee to Sonora, Mexico to escape political repression. Over the years, the family moved back and forth from Sonora to Arizona, to Sonora, and back again, not all together any different than thousands of other Mexican workers who had to travel to the U.S. and back for decades doing seasonal work, or the millions of families that NAFTA uprooted and divided with the border wall.

We can't change capitalism, it has to be abolished, so we won't pretend that even if the owners of Rosita's came to their senses and put a stop to their cooperation with the anti-immigrant groups, that their restaurant, or virtually any other workplace, will be a workers' paradise. At the end of the day it's still an underpaid, overworked, misery inducing job, but I'll be damned if we let those who seek to actively lower our material conditions have an open place from which to propagandize and organize to keep us all down.

Shutdown racist, anti-immigrant, and rightwing organizing in Tempe, boycotting Rosita's is just the start!

Freedom of movement is no joke: The Daily Show catches on to the contradictions of every day white supremacy in Arizona

Bravo to the Daily Show! Aside from the pass given to the pro-camera group, the Daily Show does a great job of highlighting one of the most glaring contradictions at work in the right-libertarian/constitutionalist milieu here in Arizona. For sometime now, PCWC has taken aim at the tension between white peoples' demands for free movement, with the expectation of increased policing for immigrants, coupled with the militarization of the border.

The Daily Show reporter Olivia Munn gets it right, demonstrating that the anti-camera movement's reactionary call for "cops, not cameras" is essentially a back door to a racist argument that says "free movement for whites, increased policing for everyone else". This position was probably best served up by the Tempe "Santas Against 1984" who disabled the traffic cameras a few years back and delivered a solid message against all controls on movement. Their youtube video went viral back in 2008, and takes Munn's send-up of the anti-immigrant/anti-camera tendency a step further by attacking both the cameras, and those who would control movement with borders.

The two videos are posted below, enjoy!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Arizona's Photo Radar
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes

Considering the immigrant crackdown in the context of the Chinese Exclusion Act

The other day I revisited a chapter in Christian Parenti's excellent book "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror". The cause of my return was the recent awakening of the local right libertarian movement to the connection between the demand for the policing of immigrants and the steady march of the police state in general. Local anti-immigrant hothead and state Senator Russell Pearce has recently come under fire from within the Right for an anti-immigrant bill that libertarians believe, with good justification, will open the door to the imposition of the Real ID or similar national ID card.

Parenti's book, a good read overall, has a truly amazing chapter on the relation between the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other similar laws and the rise of the first ID cards (the chapter can be read online for free). Likewise, it goes into a good amount of detail about the ingenious ways that Chinese immigrants developed for resisting and overcoming increasingly onerous State regulation of their movements and relations. Forgery, bribery, flaunting of the law, lying, reliance on familial relations, mass resistance and refusal -- all of these and more constituted the tool box from which Chinese immigrants drew upon in their fight to define for themselves the terms of their lives in the land of the Flower Flag Country.

The story parallels so precisely the situation here in Arizona that the chapter ought to be required reading for anyone organizing against controls on movement, not least of all right libertarians interested in understanding the roots of the national ID card and the ever-present excuse of policing people of color that makes it possible. Parenti writes, "Ultimately Chinese exclusion was the first campaign of mass identification and registration of a civilian population by the US federal government. Conversely, the paper sons industry was the first largest informal anti-surveillance movement in US history."

So, the awakening on the right to this scam is a very important development. We at PCWC have engaged that movement several times over the question, what we see as the contradiction between the demand by the Right for a police regime for immigrants at the same time it demands immunity for itself and declaims the increasing infringement by the state on their own freedoms. This contradiction stands in stark relief when that same movement insists that the demands it makes -- against all evidence -- are somehow not racist. Being interested in contradictions, PCWC has focused on revealing this incongruity and pointing out that, contrary to what many on the Right say, it is in fact the latent white supremacist immunity from policing that is the hidden solution to the conundrum.

To us it's obvious: one can't support the expansion of police power in one sector without expecting it to expand generally. The support by the white population for increasing controls on immigrants, from eVerify to the border wall, has allowed the State the cover it needed to vastly expand the overall system of policing. Now, these controls are being generalized in the forms of freeway speed cameras, national ID cards, national police powers for local cops, internal checkpoints, etc. Lacking an analysis of white supremacy and its affect on the working class (and similarly without a true understanding of class), libertarians have had a hard time recognizing this contradiction.

The white supremacist influence on their politics blinded libertarians on the Right to the encroaching police state under their very nose. They assumed -- perhaps only unconsciously in the case of many -- that, as whites tend to be generally, they would be exempted from the unblinking gaze of the surveillance state as its domain grew. Indeed, as we have analyzed here in the past, some of their attempted resistance to enhanced policing, because it is perverted by the system of white supremacy, has indeed sought precisely to undermine the broadening of the police apparatus and technology only to demand a return to older methods that tended to land disproportionately on people of color. Not very libertarian!

That is, their fight uses the false cover of a fight against tyranny to obscure what is in reality a demand for a "get out of jail free card" from a system that they hope will focus on people of color specifically and leave them, the "good citizens" that "don't break the law" alone. For example, the dominant tendency within the fight against freeway cameras reflects this tendency, since it demands the removal of a relatively "democratic" policing system (in the sense that it tickets anyone who goes over the limit regardless of race) and its replacement with more human police who will, naturally, tend to reflect the general anti-people of color biases that dominate in other spheres. Of course, some in the struggle against surveillance have dissented, most notably the Santas who disabled speed and red light cameras in December 2008. Overall, however, their position was an extreme minority at the time.

The dominant dialog on the Right with regard to the question of immigration is of course problematic not just because it allows the unobstructed -- even welcomed -- advance of the police state, but also because strategically this blind spot undermines class unity by turning one section of the working class into the complicit police officer and jailer of another section. Under these conditions the kind of unity that is required to project a real working class power against Capital becomes impossible. The white part of the working class, then, is in many ways operating within a cross-class alliance with the capitalists, serving the function of a hammer on people who should naturally be their comrades in struggle.

What's important is not just the way that the ruling class exploits or encourages this backstabbing, but also the way that white workers demand the protection of the nanny state's policing apparatus in order to preserve their privileged status in the workplace and other areas. This should be noted because it reveals the common cause of white workers and the capitalist elite. For instance, in the case of Chinese exclusion white workers wanted regulation of the workforce in their favor and the ruling class wanted a timid, marginalized and exploitable foreign labor pool. The two complemented each other and form, in the case of the white working class, a kind of white welfare system, guaranteeing higher wages and other social benefits in exchange for loyalty to the cross-class alliance of whiteness.

So the realization amongst some in the libertarian Right milieu of the true nature of the anti-immigrant agenda -- at least as far as the policing angle goes -- is a very positive development. They may reject the point I am going to make next, but I don't think that makes it less true. When libertarians support resistance to the application of special police powers over immigrants (and thus people of color in general) by seeing within that attack an assault on themselves as well, they are defying the traditional political bonds of whiteness. And, in doing so, they open the way for broader struggle that can further bring the attack on capitalism and the state.

Free Movement, Reaction and the Fascist State: Critical Questions for the Patriot Movement

By Phoenix Insurgent

Everywhere the right to free movement is under attack. Cameras now track our travels from our workplaces to our roads to our neighborhoods to our schools, stretching all the way from the border to the county jail. The cameras on public transportation and outside private businesses increasingly make free, anonymous travel – a fundamental ingredient to a free society – very difficult if not impossible.

Had these conditions prevailed in Revolutionary times, would the war have turned in Britain's favor instead? Would revolutionaries like Tom Paine have been able to agitate and organize? In slavery days, would such a surveillance state have prevented the Underground Railroad? If the Dixieland border had been as well spied on would the Abolitionists have been able to stage their anti-slavery raids into the authoritarian slavocracy? Whither then, John Brown and Harriet Tubman? What about Frederick Douglass and his daring escape to freedom in the North? If the border had been so well watched, would indigenous resistance have been able to hold out so long against white settlement? Where would Geronimo have gone when escaping the swords and bullets of the US Cavalry? Where would Ricardo Flores Magón have planned his Mexican insurrection?

At the same time an increasingly unaccountable and sophisticated (and automated) computer/police network accumulates and analyzes the data collected, without even the need for a human to directly oversee the emerging Panopticon. Computerization, generally immune from criticism in popular dialog, has shifted immense power into the hands of the elite under the cover of friends and family plans, YouTube hits and MySpace friend requests. This network increasingly permeates even our very social circles, using our cell phones, GPS systems and internet searches to compile vast amounts of data on our movements, our politics, our interests and our friends. The integration of police and elite power increases daily. As it grows, our ability to project our own autonomous power against their tyranny diminishes. And we become less free.

Before the Civil War, being a Black person headed North not only raised suspicion, but it was enough to get you rounded up and sent home if you didn't have the correct papers with you. If you were a slave, your owner (boss) had to provide you with written permission to travel –- a permission that you yourself probably couldn't read. What's more, white males were required in the South to serve on slave patrols, rounding up suspect Blacks. In exchange for serving on those patrols, whites in the South got certain privileges, including relative immunity from police harassment and, importantly, freedom from slavery. It was a devil's bargain, though, because the Southern slave system over all was a bad deal for all the poor of the South, whether Black or white (or Native). It kept vast tracts of lands centralized in a minority of very wealthy plantation owners' hands.

As the country expanded West, the systems for control of movement spread as well. The first ID's were issued to Chinese laborers. The first police fingerprint database was organized in San Francisco to regulate the movement and employment of these workers. Not long after, the bureaucracy began absorbing Indigenous people as well, despite their many centuries of resistance. It's worth remembering that for many Native fighters, the Mexican border served as a base from which to gather their energies as they planned the next wave of resistance to the controls of the growing centralized American state.

One wonders if the patriot movement (by which I mean that general conglomeration of Constitutionalist and Libertarian activists who take a position against American state & corporate power and its imperial interventions abroad) will soon rue the day it backed beefed up border enforcement, not least of all because those prisons and FEMA camps (and, yes, even Sheriff Joe's tents) can hold more than just immigrants, but also because they may in the not too far off future find themselves pining for the days of open borders and Mexican sanctuary from the fascist attacks of the US government. As we learn from the East German experience, those walls can just as easily keep people in. And as we saw in Eastern Europe in general, the euphoria of the attack on the walls and checkpoints was an integral part of the struggle that brought down the totalitarian communist bureaucracy. Here we are twenty years out from the collapse of those regimes, focused as they were on controlling movement, and yet the patriot movement has forgotten those lessons.

Repeating history in the segregated Arizona territory, poor immigrant whites – many fleeing the repressive dictatorships of Europe and often traveling thousands of miles in the process -- frequently sided with rich white landowners, expelling Mexican families and seizing their lands, some of which had been held for centuries. This cross-class alliance is a hallmark of American history. Not all whites followed this pattern though. The Saint Patrick Battalion, for instance, famously switched sides during the Mexican-American War, opposing the imperialist expansion into the Southwest and joining the Mexican side.

Likewise, as mentioned before, Abolitionists of all colors supported free movement for escaping slaves as a way to attack the corrupt slave society of the South. It would have been absurd to think that the fight against slavery would have been aided by returning Douglass to the tyranny of the Southern slave dictatorship merely to satisfy the demands of the laws that regulated movement in those days. Indeed, it wasn't the deported slave, sent back in chains to her master that toppled the Southern slave system; it was the returning freedman, armed and marching home, combining with the general strike of slaves deserting their posts, that sounded the death knell for the slavocracy. In that context, it says a lot that so many anti-immigrant activists today suggest closing the border as a means of attacking the corrupt Mexican state, rather than seeking a free movement of people and revolutionary ideas between the two countries.

Indeed, the patriot movement has a real solidarity problem in general, and it tends to founder precisely on the shores of the whiteness. Where are the patriots when the cops or the sheriff's deputies shoot yet another unarmed black person or detain a poor, Mexican worker? Where is the outrage of the patriot movement as the settler government imposes a police state on Tohono O'odham land where, under the very same excuse of the patriot movement's desired expansion of border control, all brown people are suspect and must run the gauntlet of border patrol checkpoints? The same multi-nationals that the patriot justly denounces likewise displace and extract in Indian Country, but where is the outrage? Wackenhut and FEMA practice on immigrants, shipping them to and imprisoning them in private prisons, and yet the patriot movement is blind to the monster that they are creating. To think this apparatus of state oppression will not soon be used on all of us who oppose the increasingly fascist American empire is more than naive, it reflects the adherence of the patriot movement, perhaps unconscious in many cases, to the ideology of white privilege.

When it comes to the movement of people across the border, so many patriots, like so many Mexicans, demand change in Mexico. But if patriots want revolution in Mexico so badly, where is their material and financial support for such movements, many of which exist today to choose from. I'm reminded of one white patriot who I saw marching up and down a line of mostly Mexican protesters about four years ago aggressively yelling, “Not here! I'll march with you in Mexico City, but not here!” What made him think that he could march with them in Mexico City, for one thing? But what explained his myopia to the fact that perhaps they were marching not just for themselves in Phoenix, but also for him? Was he not to benefit from their demands for freedom from persecution and controls on movement as well?

This solidarity problem reveals the true contradiction: As it now stands, much of the patriot movement demands not an end to fascism, but an exemption from the fascism that it demands for others. This is typical of white populist movements in the US throughout history. As I have previously pointed out, for instance in the case of the anti-speed camera resistance in Arizona, we see this manifest in the ways that local patriot activists organize. Underlying the support for increased policing but abolition of cameras is an inherent recognition of the general immunity from policing that whiteness represents in general. That is, that some forms of policing of movement tend to come down harder on whites, because of their equal opportunity nature, than others. Given the choice, rather than challenge both the police AND the cameras, the white patriot movement would rather keep the tried and true thin blue line, just like the Southern whites preferred the slave patrols to the abolition of slavery.

In a real way, what we see in American history when it comes to movement is that it's okay for some, but not for others. And generally what we notice is that whites, even poor and working class whites, tend to feel entitled to free movement for themselves at the same time that they oppose it for others. Perhaps there exists no better example of this in Arizona politics than local rich daddy trust fund, working class poseur Rusty Childress, who for so long backed the anti-immigrant movement (financially as well as offering up his inherited car dealership as a place for organizing meetings) at the same time that he posted photos from his Mexican beach vacations on his personal web page. Anti-immigrant patriots falsely defended his inherited wealth as the result of hard work while justifying attacks on Mexicans of their own class who struggled under far worse conditions than the lucky sperm club that gifted Childress a life of privilege. This kind of class treason can only be explained by the cross-class alliance of whiteness.

But what is whiteness? Whiteness is not necessarily the color of your skin. It's a political relationship between rich people and other, largely European-descended, classes of society. In reality, it's a cross-class alliance in which people who are considered white agree that rather than upset the apple cart that is the disparity of wealth and power in the United States (think “Goldman Sachs”) that they will accept several privileges to the exclusion of others. So whites, as a result of taking this bargain, receive real benefits. This doesn't make them rich like Goldman Sachs, but it does give them a substantial leg up on others in terms of a whole host of social indicators, from decreased imprisonment to increased lifespan and family wealth. In addition, whites agree to accept those privileges in exchange for agreeing to the reduced status of other peoples not included in the deal. As part of that, whites further agree to police that status, whether through law enforcement or through paramilitary or vigilante organizations (the Klan, the White Caps, the Minutemen, etc). In attempting to defend their class position, they instead defend their racial privilege.

In this sense, without conscious action to the contrary, the political activity of whites tends to default to a distorted class war, manifesting in the defense of whiteness rather than an attack on the elite that controls wealth and power in the US. This is a problem not just because it grants one group of people a undeserved status above others, but even more importantly because it is a flawed strategy for going after the elites that own the lion's share of the country's wealth, to the exclusion of everyone else who produces it in the first place. Organizing in ways that reinforce white supremacy necessarily fractures the working class, and working class power is the way to attack the elite class. If the patriot movement ever truly wants to go after the big money bankers and capitalists that live lives of luxury at our expense, they need to fix their solidarity problem. They need to find common cause with peoples struggles in a way that attacks rather than reinforces white privilege.

The struggle for free movement is a defining characteristic of American history and, with few exceptions, that freedom has been defined by the politics of whiteness. Who can move and who cannot, and who will be displaced and who will not? When movements have defied this tendency, great things have happened. Slavery was abolished. The power of the bosses to force us into the factories was shaken at its core. Segregation was smashed. The domination of women was challenged and the sexual freedom that most Americans now take for granted proliferated. Our power to define our lives autonomously from the arbitrary power of Capital and the State grew in each of these instances.

Will the patriot movement learn these historical lessons? Will they realize that their future is tied up, not oppositional to, the futures of the rest of the working class, no matter from where they come, white or otherwise? Will they recognize that in order to get to Goldman Sachs we have to attack white supremacy? Given the continuing collapse of the economy, and the historical tendency of movements of reaction to emerge from whites under these kinds of conditions, this is precisely the dare that stands before them today.

As it is now, many in that movement have chosen the wrong side in the immigration debate, opting to attack the working class rather than uniting against the elite assault on it. But opportunities for solidarity that challenge this system of white privilege abound, so will the patriot movement recognize them for what they are and abandon the reactionary path that they have for the most part so far taken? Time will tell. But as it now stands, their contradictory position on free movement puts them in opposition to working class power and, therefore, in defense of the capitalist and bureaucratic elite. Regardless of how many Ron Paul evocations to "REVOLUTION" it chants, this puts the patriot movement firmly in a position much more like that of the undertaker of the revolution than those undertaking genuine revolutionary struggle. That has to change if they hope to put the undead society under which we all now suffer in its well-deserved grave.

Phoenix: Where Anarchists Pack Heat and Send Nazis Packing

by Crudo
Special to Phoenix Class War Council

“Okay, you’re a goon, but what’s a goon to a goblin?” – Lil Wayne

As I looked out from my appropriated aviator Forever 21 sunglasses – I won’t lie, I felt a little uneasy. “That’s a big group,” I thought, as a motley crew of mostly large men carrying American and swastika flags began to goosestep my way. On closer inspection, I realized that the large group that looked to be about 100, was in fact, mostly police. This of course didn’t make me feel any less uneasy…

So here I was, on the front line prepared to throw down against the “National Socialist Movement,” a political party that wants a fascist all-white America. The NSM has attempted to take over from where George Rockwell’s American Nazi Party left off in the 1960’s, and attempts to be a force within the White Nationalist movement as it continues to splinter, fracture, and die. I came to Phoenix hoping that the $180 greyhound bus ticket and the 18 hour ride sitting next to a bathroom door that continued to open (despite the ever so delicately placed blue tape over it) and smell the entire room up with rotten piss, would be worth it. It was – and the success of the confrontational and militant actions on the 7th brings up several things that anarchists everywhere can learn from.



Inglourious Basterds

Several weeks ago, a flyer started circulating on the internet produced by the Phoenix Class War Council (PCWC – say it like, Pee Cee Dub Cee) that encouraged people to confront the NSM at their scheduled rally on November 7th at the Arizona state capital in Phoenix. The flyer included an image from the popular new movie Inglourious Basterds, in which an elite group of American Jewish service men in WW II brutally track down and kill nazis in Europe. The looming showdown of anarchists and nazis created quite a large buzz on the internet, getting coverage on several news sites, in the New Times (the major alternative Phoenix newspaper), as well as being picked up by some of the major Libertarian websites. The call to confront the NSM was followed by a well written piece entitled, “The NSM Offers Nothing for the Working Class but more Exploitation and Misery,” also posted on the PCWC blog and across the internet. The text argued an anarchist critique of the NSM and white supremacy, which was presented as a cross class alliance between working class whites and white elites that breaks up the unity of the working class and hindering possible united class action.

The media and internet was abuzz, and the fascists were stating in the press that they would being out 200 people for their “America First” rally, highlighting their opposition to “illegal immigration.” The stage was set for a showdown on Saturday – with only one side coming out on top.



Desert of the Real

Phoenix is a city divided by race politics and the immigration issue. Unlike many cities on the coast, while a left wing is present in the city, it also boasts strong Libertarian and Constitutionalist scenes, which holds a sizeable influence. Struggles against speed cameras for instance which ticket people for driving over the speed limit, have been headed largely by Libertarian type groups. This context makes organizing in Phoenix for anarchists quite different than say the bay area of California.

Probably the man that everyone has the biggest bone to pick with in town is Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has served as Sheriff since 1993. People fucking hate this guy. You see it on t-shirts, in the newspapers, and in the streets. Sheriff Joe has gained so much scorn because of his ‘tough on immigrants’ stance and his harsh management of prisoners. Under federal law 287(g), which gives Sheriff Joe and his deputies the ability to deport people, raids in the area have broken up families and displaced working class people from their means of existence and their loved ones. But while Sheriff Joe has been going after immigrants, Phoenix in the last few years has been the playground of groups like the Minutemen. One of the figures to emerge from this movement, and also known to hob nob with Sheriff Joe and State Senator Russell Pearce, is former Maricopa County Republican precinct committeeman, J.T. Ready – who also just happens to be a supporter of the National Socialist Movement.

J.T. Ready first started getting heat for his after hours fascist activity when photos of him at a National Socialist Movement rally surfaced in 2007 and Ready started handing out anti-Semitic and racist texts at the office. Ready was fired after the embarrassment hit the papers and his Republican bosses buckled, but he continued to be a fixture in the local political landscape. In the days leading up the NSM demo, Ready appeared on several television stations, claiming that while he was not a member of the NSM, (which is interesting because his license plate read “NSM USA”), he supports the NSM because it is a “white civil rights organization.” While J.T. Ready has been pushed out of most of the Nativist movement, he still has been welcomed with open arms by many within the far right of Phoenix, and even spoke at Tea Party rally on July 4th. The ability of very vocal neo-nazis to exist within the Arizona anti-immigrant and far right movement shows the degree in which racist ideas have a sea to swim in.



Reich Here, Reich Now?

With their nazi uniforms and flags, the NSM will appear laughable to many people. Despite this, it is worth while to look at them, their ideas, and their strategy. What becomes clear after watching videos online and sifting through NSM texts and literature, is that the NSM has become very media savvy after so much time in the spotlight. Getting time in the media is perhaps one of the only things that the NSM is able to do well – since the whole website designing, video making, and general writing thing ain’t going to well for them! The NSM knows how to work the media, because they are able to walk a line where they refer to themselves as “white nationalists” and “national socialists,” not “nazis” or “supremacists,” terms which they shy away from, and call themselves a “civil rights organization.” They are not “racist,” they are simply “pro-white.” All this is while they parade through the streets with stickers against “spics,” screaming “ZEEK-HAIL!,” and carrying Nazi flags. The media of course, does not call the NSM out on this and seems to take their claims at face value often – however it is clear to anyone who studies the NSM that they are through and through a racist organization. So, while the whole nazi dress up thing gives the NSM the ability to make the press come to them, at the same time they must hide and dodge everything that makes them and their politics who they are. They are a living contradiction and know it and must constantly duck from the genocidal and racist nature of their political ideology. Their strategy in doing these little rallies of theirs seems to simply be to get their name out in the media – hoping that in doing so people will come to them and their movement will grow. In coming to Phoenix, the NSM hoped to make links with the anti-immigrant movement and build their influence outside of the skinhead and white power subculture – an effort that failed horribly on their part.

Image problems aside, a quick read through the NSM positions on their website tells a different story than the simple ‘merica lovers the NSM would like to portray themselves as. While the NSM states that they are “against illegal immigration,” they state clearly in their “25 Points of American National Socialism” that they are against any non-white migration into the United States. Once their party gains power they propose, they will then begin deporting all non-White people and Jews back to their original counties of origin, “peacefully or by force.” Being that the NSM couldn’t even get more than 40 people to show up to their rally (even after they bussed people in from out of state), I have serious doubts if they posses the organizational skills required to carry out such an operation!

As for all the “pro-white working class” rhetoric that the NSM pumps out, they are clear enemies to all working people: black, white, brown, and everything else. According to our would be fuhers, they want to do away with all “Marxist” trade unions, (by that I suppose they mean the ones that exist now?), and force workers to belong to National Socialist ones, ie, unions run by the state. While the NSM promotes a beefed up welfare state (money for schools and health care – not for Jews!), the NSM are not enemies of capitalism. Breathe easy big wigs and fat cats! In fact, despite all their attacks on “communists,” the NSM are bigger fans of the “nationalization” of major corporations than any Obamaites and probably most trustifarian college Trotskyist grad students that you’ll ever met! That’s right, in the state capitalist future of the NSM, you’ll work for a state run corporation, belong to a state run union, and live under the “unconditional authority of [a] political central parliament over the entire nation and its organizations.” Feel like a wage slave now? You ain’t seen nothing yet!

But that’s not all! In order to make sure that the white people who don’t get herded off into camps for having a Mexicano boyfriend or owning a copy of a Howard Zinn book don’t get any big ideas, they’re also going to control everything you read, see, and say! As the NSM wrote, they want their new government to “[Stop] the publishing of papers which are not conducive to the national welfare...We demand the legal prosecution of all those tendencies in art and literature which corrupt our national life, and the suppression of cultural events which violate this demand.” All of this of course means total political control, all run by the NSM political elites, which equates to a massive political and military hierarchy that can only be protected and backed up by an extensive police state and massive violence. For all their talk of destroying the “evil empire” of “the jews,” the NSM would replace the very real power of the upper class with their own ruling class.

Let’s go over this again, shall we? Under American National Socialism, you’re still a wage slave. You still will pay rent. You still will pay for things that you and other workers create at work. You still live in a class society of property owners and wage workers – only now, many of those property owners are now part of the government! You don’t work for private businesses, you work for state run corporations. You can’t participate in unions except ones that are run by the state. And, if you happen to have the hots for the foxy Korean woman down the street or happen to peep a gay porn website – you’re fucked! Be careful what you say and write as well, or the all-powerful NSM cadre just might pay you a visit. Despite the NSM’s standard line that they simply want to pressure politicians in the US to “put America first” and “end illegal immigration,” the NSM’s positions are very clear. They want a more bureaucratic and totalitarian version of the modern capitalist system. Think China but totally racist. Furthermore – their movement offers nothing for working people. Why drive across two states to a shitty rally with 30 other people who will probably be locked up for selling meth next week, when multi racial groups of workers are taking action all the time to actually better their conditions? For instance, the workers at the Republic Windows and Glass factory who occupied it together and won back their wages and benefits. I’d rather have ferrets dipped in Tapatio fight in my pants while I stand in line at the DMV than live in the America that the National Socialist Movement wants, but apparently a small amount of people would disagree with me – there in lies the conflict.



“IF YOU WANT BEEF THEN BRING THA RUCKUS – PHX AIN’T NUTHIN TA FUCK WITH!”

On November 7th, the anarchists of Arizona, made up of groups from Phoenix, Flagstaff, and elsewhere, numbered between 150-200. The coordination that allowed this to happen was in thanks larger to state wide gatherings that have been organized for several months. Joining the anarchists were Libertarian activists from various groups, as well as various veterans, leftists, queer folks, and Chicano activists. Another large contingent was Native youth, especially from the O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective, which was out in force as well as young people from various reservations across Arizona. Carrying huge banners that read, “THIS IS ANTI-FACISM: No States, No Borders,” and “No Foreclosures, No Deportations! Round Up Nazis Not Immigrants!,” and black flags, anarchists were clearly the largest group in vocal opposition. Most of the crowd wore black and covered their faces with masks. At this stand off, anarchists did several things right; firstly, they stayed ahead of the Nazis, and were able to physically attack them with rocks and paint bombs and did not allow the police to arrest anyone. Instead of physically being directly across form the Nazis, the anarchists tried to stay ahead of them in order to try and get into the street and confront them directly.

When the NSM group came up to where the anarchists where, police quickly moved them onto the side of the streets and kept the two sides from getting into the street. Several bottles where thrown at this point. The nazis then moved onto their rally site after having marched from their parking space a couple of blocks away. Hardly anyone was on the street at this point other than police, nazis, and anarchists. Anarchists made several attempts to get in the street and go at the nazis, but police on horses did there damnest to make sure we would not have the streets. After the nazis had gotten to their rally point, police at first attempted to separate everyone from their rally, which was simply held on the grass of the state capital (not on the steps like rallies in other states). This lasted for about 5 minutes, before people as a group said fuck that and rushed “the stage.” At this point police formed a line between the anarchists and the nazis, while brave souls threw rocks and paint bombs. Anarchists were able to use their large banners to create barriers between the prying eyes of the police and the large stones that littered the Phoenix ground and soon found themselves flying through the air. The NSM quickly responded by getting their “shield team” up in front, in an effort to deflect any projectiles on the leadership cadre. Despite the police presence that numbered at about 100, we should also keep in mind that comrades doing surveillance away from the rally also saw undercover SWAT team vehicles, filled with highly armed police that were ready and stomp anyone into the ground if a riot erupted. Even if we could have rolled on the nazis, we must keep in mind that the state holds much bigger guns.

The greatest irony of the NSM rally was that there was no one at the capital! They spoke to no one outside of those who heard their message through the media. The anarchists who surrounded them were so loud that they could barely even be heard. The speakers on the mike also spent most of their time calling the counter-protesters “faggots” and “jews” that they didn’t really have any time to address anything else. The police quickly had enough, and an hour and a half before they had to leave, the police made them take off and walked them back to their cars. Along the way, anarchists again attempted to get in the street and made several attempts to create barricades but quick police response resulted in botched attempts and several near arrests. Quick action by comrades however resulted in freedom for those grabbed by the police – as anarchists pulled their friends back and de-arrested them. The nazis, over half of which were from out of state (lots of Texas plates), got back in their cars and headed out. As we walked back to our cars, someone pulled up and screamed, “The nazis just got into a car accident and they’re outside of McDonalds!” We rushed to the scene to find a speaker for the NSM with a broken leg. Stephen Lemons of the New Times, wrote:

“The only casualty for the NSMers came as a result of their own error, when they caused an accident at 7th Avenue and Van Buren in one of the rental cars they left in after the demo. An unidentified Nazi was rushed away in an ambulance for an injury to his leg. Phoenix Police Sgt. Brian Murray confirmed at the scene that the accident was the fault of the Nazis, whose small white car collided with a large red truck.

None of the Nazis were taken into custody, though the truck's driver was arrested for not having I.D. and proof of insurance. Murray said the arrested driver would be ticketed and released as long as he had no outstanding warrants. The driver of the Nazi car was ticketed as well, but according to NSM spokesman Charles Wilson, the Nazi wheel man refused to sign the citation. Wilson later blamed the accident on the police, saying the cops were supposed to have kept the street clear for the Nazis' exit.”

Probably the best scene of the whole day was when workers at the stores next to the accident came out and laughed at the nazis as they drove away surrounded by police and people in cars passed by laughing their asses off. While the nazis did some salutes to the anarchists laughing across the street, people in cars were heard to be screaming, “Karma’s a bitch! Hahahaha!”



Stay Strapped

Anarchists carried at this event. Meaning: ANARCHISTS HAD GUNS! Out in the open, and it was legal. That’s right, it’s not just nazis and anti-immigrant types who are packing now at protests, it’s our side. In Arizona, it’s legal to openly carry firearms as long as your weapon is legally yours. This is the first time I have physically seen anarchists at demonstrations carry firearms with them – and I have to say that the experience was very empowering to see. Those in states with similar laws should considering getting firearms and doing the same if possible. This is not me fetishizing armed struggle or guns; the way forward is collective action by working people in their workplaces, communities, and the streets. But, if we are going to go up against people like the NSM, we should be prepared to defend ourselves especially if we can avoid legal risks while openly carrying weapons. It should be noted that members of the NSM have been seen carrying weapons while counter protesting pro-immigration marches. People like J.T. Ready have also been known to follow Mexicano people in the local area, often while armed, hoping to deport them.



Next Time

Confronting the NSM gave anarchists in Phoenix and the wider area a large amount of attention and also a chance to come together and act in a confrontational manner against their enemies. We had the chance to get in the street and see what each other were made of. We made plans, evaded and pushed back police, throw rocks, armed ourselves, and stood our ground. We need only take this experience and begin to apply it to the terrain of everyday life. As Stephen Lemons wrote, “Whatever bad rep the anarchists had before Saturday -- deserved or undeserved -- has now been absolved.” Any political capital that the NSM hoped to have gained from the event on the 7th obviously slid from their fingers. They failed to attract anyone from the surrounding area (outside of party members), not to mention white people from the anti-immigration movement. The media was very clear in all their reports that protestors against the NSM out numbered the NSM greatly. They failed to bring out 50 people, much less the 200 that they were banking on. In hoping to use the media to get the National Socialist Movement name out into the world, they have instead given the anarchists a platform due to their triumph over them. The question is, what are we going to do with it?

Clearly, we have to shift the discourse away from a liberal, middle class one that is focused on the issue being simply about “hate.” Sure the NSM is hateful, but they are a political group that seeks to overthrow the US system and replace it with one that is much more totalitarian, bureaucratic, and violent. In the NSM’s America, the millions who demonstrated and took over the streets on May Day 2006 against borders would have been shot and deported. The workers at Republic Windows and Glass would have been labeled communists and shot. The student workers who today in California occupy their schools against budget cuts and fee hikes would have been called traitors to the state and shot. We must oppose the NSM not only because they are racist, but because politically they offer only a more monstrous version of capitalism than what we have today. Furthermore, attacking the NSM allows us space to attack Sheriff Joe and the wider system that attacks working class migrants. We can begin to combat white supremacy that seeks to divide the working class in this country, which stops working people from coming together against their class enemies. Furthermore, the NSM is a weak enemy and fighting them is good practice. Let us sharpen our knives, load our guns, and train now, as we look out for bigger and better foes.

Next time around, anarchists will have to be on the defensive much more. The police were slow to respond and make arrests on the 7th, and anarchists could have gotten away with a lot more attacks and rock throwing than they engaged in. As the struggles against the speed cameras, Sheriff Joe, in the traditional O’odham communities against freeway expansion, and a huge looming strike at various Arizona grocery store chains lies on the horizon, the possibilities of intervention for anarchists in Arizona remain. We must also stay on our guard against the NSM – unless of course they crash their cars on the way back to Texas. Now that, would be something to salute!