defense

Our Freedoms Shrink as Our Military Expands

By Brad Wolf

Republished from Counterpunch.

The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

Raytheon knew we were coming. The police were waiting and would not permit us to enter the enormous building even though other businesses and a public restaurant resided inside. “You’re not allowed in,” the police said. “The owner of the building said no to you.” Others were free to enter for lunch or to conduct business. The officers were polite. Respectful. “We are only doing our job,” they said, seeming more like a hired corporate police force than a public police force.

“And you cannot remain on the sidewalk,” the police said. We responded that it was a public sidewalk. “Not anymore,” the police said. “Raytheon bought the sidewalk. And the sidewalk across the street.” When asked how a private corporation can buy a public sidewalk, the officers shrugged not knowing the answer. “You can move down there,” they said, pointing to a corner across the busy street.

We asked to see a deed proving this bizarre acquisition of public property. Lo and behold, the police dutifully produced a deed stamped by the recorder of deeds office indicating Raytheon did in fact own the sidewalk all the way to the street.

Using US tax dollars, including the dollars of those of us who stood there, Raytheon bought up the very freedom they claim they’re building weapons to defend. Freedom of speech and assembly is drastically reduced when corporations as powerful as Raytheon control the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, and our corporate media.

In fact, in the belly of the beast of the Raytheon building was the corporate media itself, an ABC television affiliate which refused to talk to us last November. When we had approached an ABC spokesman outside, they refused to admit they worked for ABC despite wearing ABC attire. From corporate wars to corporate police to corporate media, all in one monstrous, taxpayer-funded building.

In 2023, approximately $858 billion will be taken from the paychecks of US citizens to help squelch our most fundamental Constitutional rights of privacy and assembly.

Across the street from Raytheon, we unfurled our banners and carried our signs. We held Raytheon in contempt for refusing to comply to a subpoena issued by the people of the world. We noted their shame of their own corporate behavior such that they purchased police and public sidewalks to keep public scrutiny away.

A young woman approached, noticing our signs. She was an Afghan refugee who had been there during the invasion. She and her family had suffered immensely from the US bombing. Her father barely made it out alive. She was crying as she spoke. Off to the side, a man in a suit carefully took pictures of each of us. We were photographed everywhere we went this Valentine’s Day.

To evidence Raytheon’s complicity in war crimes, we read the names of the 34 victims—26 of them schoolboys—killed in the horrific 2018 bombing of a school bus in Yemen. The bomb, a 500-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb was made by Lockheed Martin while Raytheon was responsible for the infrared system which targeted the bus.

Under the careful eye of our National Security State, we traveled to the Pentagon to deliver a subpoena compelling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to testify before the Tribunal. Mr. Austin, before being Secretary of Defense was, of course, on the Board of Directors at Raytheon. This, after retiring from the military.

Mr. Austin had cashed in at Raytheon and was now in the catbird seat at the Pentagon sending billion-dollar contracts to his former employer. He is certain to cash in a second time when he leaves his current office. And so, we had a subpoena asking Secretary Austin to speak about these allegations epitomizing the “Revolving Door” between the military, defense contractors, and public office.

A dozen police waited. They counted the number in our group making hand signals between themselves. “You’ve just come from the Raytheon building,” they said to me. “And you plan on spending one hour here. And then you’re going to the Hyatt Hotel for a protest.” I asked how they knew that, especially the information about the Hyatt Hotel since that had not been made public, and the police officer smiled and said, “We have our ways.”

We were told we could protest in a small, fenced-in grassy area away from the metro stop, out of sight from most. We, the people, had been corralled behind a fence in a small grassy patch to peacefully exercise our freedom of speech as the billion-dollar behemoth of war and death, surveillance and repression, stood before us.

Similar actions of subpoena delivery had been carried out the same day in San Diego, California; Asheville, North Carolina; and New York City. Surveillance and corporate resistance had occurred at each location.

Valentine’s Day, this day meant for the opening of hearts, was one of recognizing the Orwellian state in which we live, funded by our own dollars. Our military not only consumes our money, but our freedoms as well.

We again read the names of the dead, sang, some prayed. As we were leaving, one of the police officers cheerfully said, “It’s 64° outside and a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it and go play golf.” A frightfully common thought in such perilous times.

Brad Wolf is a former prosecutor, professor, and college dean.  He is the Executive Director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster and writes for numerous publications.

Today, Defense of The Revolution Rests with the Media

Photo: © Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Shutterstock.com

By Saheli Chowdhury and Steve Lalla

Víctor Dreke, legendary commander of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, called for those defending the Revolution today to recognize that the battlefield of the 21st century is the media.

The comments were made at a conference held on Thursday, April 22, commemorating the 60-year anniversary of the Bay of Pigs—Playa Girón to the Spanish-speaking world. Comandante Dreke, now retired at age 84, spoke alongside author, historian, and journalist Tariq Ali; Cuba’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Bárbara Montalvo Álvarez; and National Secretary of Great Britain’s Cuba Solidarity Campaign, Bernard Regan.

“It is no longer about us, the over-80s,” said Dreke. “It is the next generation, those who are here, who are going to be even better than us. It will no longer be a case of combat… Right now, the media across the world has to defend the Cuban Revolution, and we and you have to be capable of accessing the media across the world to spread the truth about the Cuban Revolution. That is the battle we are waging today—to fight attempts to weaken the people, to soften the people, to try to take the country again. They have changed their tactics. We are ready, but we want to say to our friends in the Americas and around the world that Cuba, the Cuba of Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida, the Cuba of Che Guevara, will never fail, neither with us nor with the future generations.”

Dreke joined the 26 July Movement in 1954, fought under Che Guevara in the Cuban Revolutionary War and in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1965, and commanded two companies in Cuba’s historic defeat of US imperialism at the Bay of Pigs. Dreke’s autobiography, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, was published in 2002.

Cuba and Venezuela provide inspiration for Latin America and the world

Comandante Víctor Dreke drew a comparison between Cuba’s historic defense of the revolution and that of Venezuela, as both countries now face a common weapon in the arsenal of imperialism: the economic blockade.

“They block medicines for Cuba, they block aid for Cuba,” said Dreke. “They blockade the disposition of aid for Venezuela because of the principles of Venezuela, the principles of Chávez, the principles of Maduro, the principles of Díaz-Canel, the principles of this people, due to the historical continuity of this people.”

Regarding the failed 1961 US invasion of Cuba, Dreke remarked, “it was an example for Latin America that proved that the US was not invincible; that the US could be defeated with the morality and dignity of the people—because we did not have the weapons at that time that we later acquired. It had a meaning for Cuba, the Americas, and the dignified peoples of Latin America and around the world.”

Tariq Ali: we must see through ideological fabrications to defeat imperialism


Tariq Ali, esteemed author of more than 40 books, recalled the precursor of the US invasion of Cuba, the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala in which President Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown and forced into exile. A young Ernesto Guevara was living in Guatemala at that time and bore witness to the multifaceted CIA operation PBSuccess, which included bombing campaigns with unmarked aircraft and a propaganda blitz of leaflets and radio broadcasts. Ali described the evolution of CIA tactics since then:

“Normally the way they choose is to occupy a tiny bit of territory, find a puppet president, and recognize the puppet president. They are doing that in the Arab world today, or have been trying to do it. They did it with Guaidó in Venezuela, except that the Venezuelan army would not play that game and it blew up in their face, their attempt to topple the Maduro regime. They are trying it in parts of Africa. The weaponry has changed, it is more sophisticated, but the actual method they use, ideologically, is the same. That’s why it always amazes me as to why so many people believe the rubbish they read when a war is taking place.”

Ali also weighed in with a forecast for US foreign policy under the Biden administration:

“We can be hopeful for surprises… But effectively, whoever becomes president of the United States, whether it is Obama, or Biden, or Trump, or Clinton, or Bush, they are presidents of an imperial country, an imperial state, and this imperial state is not run all the time by the Congress or the Senate or the Supreme Court. The military plays a very important role in the institutions of the state, and the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency are in and out of the White House, so the president who decides to make a sharp shift—it can be done, I am not saying it cannot be done—would have to be very brave and courageous indeed.”

“Whoever from the Democrats gets elected—whatever their position—immediately comes under very heavy pressure,” Ali elaborated. “If you look at AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]… initially very radical, but now she is totally on board… I have never heard her say sanctions should be lifted, and she certainly supports even the old Trump line on Venezuela.”

Hybrid warfare in the information age

“Direct warfare in the past may have been marked by bombers and tanks, but if the pattern that the US has presently applied in Syria and Ukraine is any indication, then indirect warfare in the future will be marked by ‘protesters’ and insurgents,” detailed Andrew Korybko in the publication Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change. “Fifth columns will be formed less by secret agents and covert saboteurs and more by non-state actors that publicly behave as civilians. Social media and similar technologies will come to replace precision-guided munitions as the ‘surgical strike’ capability of the aggressive party, and chat rooms and Facebook pages will become the new ‘militants’ den.’ Instead of directly confronting the targets on their home turf, proxy conflicts will be waged in their near vicinity in order to destabilize their periphery. Traditional occupations may give way to coups and indirect regime-change operations that are more cost effective and less politically sensitive.”

Hybrid warfare, waged today by the US and its political allies in conjunction with transnational corporations that wield powerful influence over mass media and political institutions, comprises the fields of economic warfare, lawfare, conventional armed warfare, and the information war. This last and most important—according to Commander Dreke—element in turn includes the manipulation of the press to serve capitalist and imperialist interests, the manufacture of fake news stories out of whole cloth, and targeted attacks on individuals, parties, or peoples who speak out against the failings of the present order. Moreover, hybrid warfare extends to interference in the political field and in electoral processes, the mounting of media campaigns to drive public attention into particular channels, and myriad assaults on our consciousness that attempt to turn us against each other, prevent us from seeing our common interests, and confuse us as we try to overcome defeatism and work to build a better world.

Originally published by Orinoco Tribune.

In Defense of Self-Defense (1967)

By Huey P. Newton

Source: The Huey Newton Reader

Men were not created in order to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society. There is no disagreement about this function of law in any circle the disagreement arises from the question of which men laws are to serve. Such lawmakers ignore the fact that it is the duty of the poor and unrepresented to construct rules and laws that serve their interests better. Rewriting unjust laws is a basic human right and fundamental obligation.

Before 1776 America was a British colony. The British Government had certain laws and rules that the colonized Americans rejected as not being in their best interests. In spite of the British conviction that Americans had no right to establish their own laws to promote the general welfare of the people living here in America, the colonized immigrant felt he had no choice but to raise the gun to defend his welfare. Simultaneously he made certain laws to ensure his protection from external and internal aggressions, from other governments, and his own agencies. One such form of protection was the Declaration of Independence, which states: ". . . whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

Now these same colonized White people, these bondsmen, paupers, and thieves deny the colonized Black man not only the right to abolish this oppressive system, but to even speak of abolishing it. Having carried this madness and cruelty to the four corners of the earth, there is now universal rebellion against their continued rule and power. But as long as the wheels of the imperialistic war machine are turning, there is no country that can defeat this monster of the West. It is our belief that the Black people in America are the only people who can free the world, loosen the yoke of colonialism, and destroy the war machine. Black people who are within the machine can cause it to malfunction. They can, because of their intimacy with the mechanism, destroy the engine that is enslaving the world. America will not be able to fight every Black country in the world and fight a civil war at the same time. It is militarily impossible to do both of these things at once.

The slavery of Blacks in this country provides the oil for the machinery of war that America uses to enslave the peoples of the world. Without this oil the machinery cannot function. We are the driving shaft; we are in such a strategic position in this machinery that, once we become dislocated, the functioning of the remainder of the machinery breaks down.

Penned up in the ghettos of America, surrounded by his factories and all the physical components of his economic system, we have been made into "the wretched of the earth," relegated to the position of spectators while the White racists run their international con game on the suffering peoples. We have been brainwashed to believe that we are powerless and that there is nothing we can do for ourselves to bring about a speedy liberation for our people. We have been taught that we must please our oppressors, that we are only ten percent of the population, and therefore must confine our tactics to categories calculated not to disturb the sleep of our tormentors.

The power structure inflicts pain and brutality upon the peoples and then provides controlled outlets for the pain in ways least likely to upset them, or interfere with the process of exploitation. The people must repudiate the established channels as tricks and deceitful snares of the exploiting oppressors. The people must oppose everything the oppressor supports, and support everything that he opposes. If Black people go about their struggle for liberation in the way that the oppressor dictates and sponsors, then we will have degenerated to the level of groveling flunkies for the oppressor himself. When the oppressor makes a vicious attack against freedom-fighters because of the way that such freedom-fighters choose to go about their liberation, then we know we are moving in the direction of our liberation. The racist dog oppressors have no rights which oppressed Black people are bound to respect. As long as the racist dogs pollute the earth with the evil of their actions, they do not deserve any respect at all, and the "rules" of their game, written in the people's blood, are beneath contempt.

The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people. When Black people really unite and rise up in all their splendid millions, they will have the strength to smash injustice. We do not understand the power in our numbers. We are millions and millions of Black people scattered across the continent and throughout the Western Hemisphere. There are more Black people in America than the total population of many countries now enjoying full membership in the United Nations. They have power and their power is based primarily on the fact that they are organized and united with each other. They are recognized by the powers of the world.

We, with all our numbers, are recognized by no one. In fact, we do not even recognize our own selves. We are unaware of the potential power latent in our numbers. In 1967, in the midst of a hostile racist nation whose hidden racism is rising to the surface at a phenomenal speed, we are still so blind to our critical fight for our very survival that we are continuing to function in petty, futile ways. Divided, confused, fighting among ourselves, we are still in the elementary stage of throwing rocks, sticks, empty wine bottles and beer cans at racist police who lie in wait for a chance to murder unarmed Black people. The racist police have worked out a system for suppressing these spontaneous rebellions that flare up from the anger, frustration, and desperation of the masses of Black people. We can no longer afford the dubious luxury of the terrible casualties wantonly inflicted upon us by the police during these rebellions.

Black people must now move, from the grass roots up through the perfumed circles of the Black bourgeoisie, to seize by any means necessary a proportionate share of the power vested and collected in the structure of America. We must organize and unite to combat by long resistance the brutal force used against us daily. The power structure depends upon the use of force within retaliation. This is why they have made it a felony to teach guerrilla warfare. This is why they want the people unarmed.

The racist dog oppressors fear the armed people; they fear most of all Black people armed with weapons and the ideology of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If a government is not afraid of the people it will arm the people against foreign aggression. Black people are held captive in the midst of their oppressors. There is a world of difference between thirty million unarmed submissive Black people and thirty million Black people armed with freedom, guns, and the strategic methods of liberation.

When a mechanic wants to fix a broken-down car engine, he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun. Only with the power of the gun can the Black masses halt the terror and brutality directed against them by the armed racist power structure; and in one sense only by the power of the gun can the whole world be transformed into the earthly paradise dreamed of by the people from time immemorial. One successful practitioner of the art and science of national liberation and self-defense, Brother Mao Tse-tung, put it this way: "We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."

The blood, sweat, tears and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind.

Guns Don’t Kill People, Settlers Do: The Second Amendment and the Myth of Defense

By Oliver Baker

"Our nation was built and civilized by men and women who used guns in self-defense and in pursuit of peace." - Ronald Reagan


"If you are coming to the idea of resistance as a resolute no to the Empire, then armed self-defense is as much a yes to liberated life as the yes of community gardens." - Ashanti Alson



Many of the households where I grew up in rural Missouri have at least one good hunting rifle in their collections of firearms. Every November, most families here-usually the father and son, but sometimes the father and daughter-will go deer hunting, not only for sport but also for the meat it provides households. They will often say hunting is the reason they own firearms.

Several years ago, I was invited to go target shooting at the property of a long-time acquaintance. He was proud of his expansive and comfortable set-up: he owned several dozen acres of land in the country with a nice three-bed, two-bath home and a stable income to support it all. His property, in other words, allowed him to be a gracious host for friends, neighbors, and acquaintances looking to shoot guns, improve their marksmanship, and build community and comradery.

When I arrived, there were 15-20 men armed to the teeth, strutting around with ARs slung tightly around their chests and handguns of various calibers holstered on their belts. Their wives were inside preparing food and tending the kids. As the men-some dressed in army surplus gear, others still wearing their work clothes-blasted away at various targets, the property owner began talking to me about why he loved his home(stead) so much. It was, in his words, "out in the sticks, good and far away from all of that inner-city mayhem." After showing me a sample of his extensive gun collection, spread out before everyone on the tailgate of his truck, he continued his white-to-white conservation with me:

"Yeah, I have all this firepower because I gotta protect my property and family when, you know, shit hits the fan, and all them inner-city people dependent on government hand-outs are left high and dry and start coming out here where the pavement meets gravel looking to loot food and other things."

It was clear he wanted me to understand that he had guns to defend against, in his eyes, Black people coming to loot his home in the event of a "societal collapse," and that he'd be ready with an arsenal of firepower to repel them. That is, gun ownership for him was about using violence to defend his property-as-whiteness from racialized populations whom he recognized were deliberately excluded from the formal economy and corralled in inner-city ghettos. His guns were the lynchpin for maintaining this line between the "good guys" like himself-the productive worker, the property holder, the respectable law-abiding citizen-and a zombified surplus population marked for death. This metaphor is telling: of all the firearms he showed me that day, he was most proud of some recently purchased specialty ammunition with the tagline: "Supply yourself for the Zombie Apocalypse." Guns and zombie rounds animated the fantasy of defending whiteness by mowing down a racialized surplus humanity on the gravel roads of rural Missouri.

I heard this fantasy many times growing up in such hyper-masculine spaces, in which it is taught that the man of the house has to be prepared to defend his home(stead) from perceived criminal (racial) threats and maintain order in his home . True men are providers and protectors; anything less, and you're an emasculated loser. In this way, the property holder was simply being a good patriot and male leader by preparing for the moment when, in his eyes, he would use guns in self-defense against the racialized poor. From this perspective, all the patriots out there that day sharpening their firearm skills claimed to be doing so for reasons of self-defense. Each saw himself as a Josey Wales , John Wayne, or Dirty Harry, or (more recently) anAmerican Sniper or Rick Grimes, neutralizing racialized criminal threats encountered on the Indian frontier or spilling out from the Black ghetto.

People will often say hunting is the reason they own firearms, but the underlying structural reason, whether acknowledged or not, has more to do with white settler fears of racial rebellion. Indeed, the NRA-the most politically influential gun organization-isn't powerful because it has a lot money to spend, but rather because it markets gun ownership as a means of reinforcing white settler sovereignty. Gun ownership is about staving off the loss of the white settler's power, honor, and privilege, which the global economy no longer respects and the state, it is believed, tramples in its accommodating of the marginalized. Despite the rhetoric, gun ownership has never been about hunting or defending democracy against authoritarianism, which white settlers are ready to embrace if it maintains their power.

In other words, the fear of the dispossessed challenging their subjugation drives gun ownership and gun culture among white settlers in the United States-not hunting, a tyrannical government, or, as I argue, reasons of self-defense. American gun ownership has its structural roots in the desire to uphold and reproduce colonial and racial hierarchies and to maintain the power and benefits received from such hierarchies, putting guns in the hands of white settlers with fantasies of nostalgic redemption through violence. Make America Great Again, indeed.

At its core, then, gun ownership for white settlers is about using tools of violence to defend the political category of white settler sovereignty, which is to say, using guns to harm, kill, or terrorize colonized and racialized people in order to keep them unfree-as their freedom means the dissolution of these categories of power and honor. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's recent book Loaded (2018) argues that the history of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms was fundamentally the state-granted right of settlers to arm their households and form voluntary militias in order to seize Native land and/or police enslaved Black people. Gun ownership today maintains what Dunbar-Ortiz contends was the founding vision of the settler state to distribute its monopoly of violence to its settler-citizens in order to carry out campaigns of dispossession and secure white property against threats of rebellion:

"Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations. With the expansion of plantation agriculture, by the late 1600s they were also used as 'slave patrols,' forming the basis of the U.S. police culture after enslaving people was illegalized."

In fact, joining a militia was less of a right than a requirement of settlers; in some cases, particularly at the state level in the South preceding the Constitution, service in the militia or arming one's household was required by law. Dunbar-Ortiz explains this history:

"European settlers were required by law to own and carry firearms, and all adult male settlers were required to serve in the militia. Militias were also used to prevent indentured European servants from fleeing before their contracts expired, in which case they were designated 'debtors.' [. . .]. In 1727, the Virginia colony enacted a law requiring militias to create slave patrols, imposing stiff fines on white people who refused to serve."

These state laws fed into the Second Amendment to enshrine the imperative of gun ownership at the federal level. Requiring participation in counterrevolutionary violence was thus written into the law directly. Today this duty to defend settler dominance continues not through state laws requiring militia membership but through informal gun ownership. The Second Amendment deputized settlers to use violence to steal land and people-in short, to expand empire.

Building on Dunbar-Ortiz's analysis of the Second Amendment, I want to suggest that we understand gun ownership as a material practice through which white settlers engage directly in the work of counterrevolutionary violence that consolidates and maintains U.S. liberal democracy. It is a way of strengthening settler democracy that promises empowerment and redemption. Firearms are the tools and symbols of a larger counterrevolutionary policing that binds settlers together despite contradictions of class in their mutual support of upholding colonial and racial hierarchies. Through gun ownership of today-what was, earlier, participation in militias-the white settler defends the state that in turn ensures his sovereignty and superiority.

In this way, the settler state depends on deputizing its settler-citizens to be the police of dispossessed populations, just as the settler relies on the state upholding his rights of property, or his "pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness." This is why gun ownership is seen as fundamental to liberal freedoms. The Second Amendment is upstream from the other amendments precisely because counterrevolutionary policing maintains the public order of civil society in which liberal freedoms can flourish.

There are three conclusions, then, I would like to discuss that follow from the claim that Second Amendment-sponsored gun ownership in the United States is counterrevolutionary violence harmonizing intra-settler relations. The first is that self-defense belongs to the oppressed and never to the oppressor. From a structural prespective, there is no such thing as white settler self-defense. The second is that gun culture from the 1960s onward serves as an important site at which settlers organize politically across class and gender lines to protect whiteness in response to marginalized peoples' demand for freedom and neoliberalism's attack on labor. The third is that the practice of community self-defense among those targeted by colonial violence radically undermines the ideology of white victimization through which counterrevolutionary violence is legitimated.


Guns and White Victimization

Perhaps the best example of how counterrevolutionary violence is coded as white settler self-defense is the now iconic Gadsden Flag. From its inception during the American Revolutionary War to its revival and proliferation in right-wing gun culture in the years following 9/11, the Gadsden Flag, with its image of a rattlesnake and phrase "Don't Tread on Me," illustrates how the effort to maintain white settler power in the face of marginalized peoples' demand for freedom is branded as self-defense. The coiled rattler signifies a defensive and victimized position, but one that is deadly if provoked. The Gadsden Flag serves as an important symbol for those identifying as patriots, law-abiding gun-owners, and defenders of the Constitution because it supports a larger ideology that holds that white America is under attack by minorities (and the federal government taken over by minorities in the post-Civil Rights era) whose commitments to equality have turned into the discrimination against, exclusion of, and attacks on whiteness.

Some of the earliest versions of the Gadsden flag, as many patriots will mention, is Benjamin Franklin's drawing of the colonies as a snake divided into sections underwritten by the ultimatum of "join, or die." Yet the tyranny the colonies were fighting against wasn't simply taxation without representation, but more broadly the right to expand its own empire rather than remain merely another exploited colony-to form a state strong enough to defend the colonists' pursuit of wealth from Native and Black rebellion. Indeed, Jefferson makes this clear in the Declaration of Independence when he argues that the Crown had prevented the colonies from clearing the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains of "merciless Indian savages" and encouraged slave insurrection in the colonies.

The rattlesnake represents a white settler body politic that feels continuously threatened and anxious about defending its power over conquered and subjugated populations. It claims to take up a position of self-defense when this position is actually one of stopping the efforts of marginalized people to free themselves from structures of violence. The fetish of Franklin's coiled rattler as the iconography of settlers coming together through counterrevolution suggests there is unity and strength precisely through this position of shared white victimization. If disjointed by cleavages such as class or gender, they will be overrun by the dispossessed, but if unified in their mutual opposition to the dispossessed, white settlers will flourish despite such intra-settler contradictions.

This fear of insurgency-from-below justifying the use of counterrevolutionary violence helps explain the emergence and proliferation of right-wing gun culture in the years following the 1960s to the present. As theorist Sylvia Wynter has argued, the global anti-colonial rebellions of the mid-20th century that empowered and inspired national liberation struggles in the United States sent shocks throughout the white-settler body politic. These rebellions ended in the settler state granting concessions to colonized and racialized groups in the form of civil rights legislation, the dismantling of legal forms of racial apartheid, and the overall turn away from overt, codified forms of white supremacy to new forms of colorblind racism. Black, Brown, and Native militancy terrified settlers, compelling concessions as a means to pacify their militant struggle.

It was these attempts of federal government to conditionally include marginalized groups that led white America, using a zero-sum logic, to feel betrayed and abandoned. As a result, white middle- and working-class settlers gave up defending the welfare state as long as it was also going to include nonwhites. In this moment when the state seems to accommodate nonwhites-an act that failed to respect, in the eyes of white America, the colonial and racial divisions binding together settlers-gun ownership became much more meaningful for white settlers looking to hold the line of these divisions where the state had, it was believed, given up doing so.

During Obama's presidency, this fear that the state had abandoned white settlers by catering to marginalized people had a resurgence. Gun purchases were at an all-time high and patriot community-building became widespread, which is to say, gun ownership and patriot communities were seen as necessary measures for saving the original and founding vision of a white settler republic from a federal government that was believed to have sided with the very people whose demands for equality would unravel the sovereignty and power of white settlers.

Militias such as the Oathkeepers and Three Percenters emerged during these years and embodied the view that it is the job of "true patriots" (white male settlers) to save white America from a state that has gone rogue in its perceived embrace of "open-borders" multiculturalism. The Constitution and the Second Amendment are sacred for such groups because they authorize freedom-loving citizens to form militias to restore the founding colonialist vision of the United States.

For all the wrong reasons of preserving their power, such groups actually have a perceptive understanding of the Second Amendment as a law authorizing counterrevolutionary violence. For them, guns are not about hunting or even self-defense, but about the right to ensure colonial and racial rebellion is controlled and that state power is recaptured in ways that it abandons neoliberal multiculturalism for more direct forms of settler-colonial white-nationalist capitalism. Indeed, it is not surprising that Oathkeepers and Three Percenters show up to police Black rebellions or put down antifascist counterdemonstrations. They see themselves as an extension of the police, the National Guard, and border patrol. Like the KKK of yore, these militias, filled with current and former police and military, believe they fulfill the original function of the state-under the Obama years seen as liberal and weak-in putting down racial rebellions. Gun culture, then, serves as a symbolic yet very material compensation for the state's support of neoliberal multiculturalism and the dismantling of welfare capitalism. Just as credit is offered in place of decreased wages, gun culture supplies compensatory ammunition to bolster the value of whiteness in the face of deindustrialization, increased intra-settler inequality, and globalization's attack on U.S. nationalism.


Arming the Police, Arming White Supremacy

It is important not to forget that support for counterrevolutionary violence extends far beyond patriots and right-wing gun culture. Liberals who call for gun regulation but fully support the police and military and their work of upholding mass incarceration at home and imperial violence abroad support the same structures of violence celebrated by the gun-nuts such liberals love to disparage and against whom they define their commitments to nonviolence. The difference is a choice between a monopoly of state violence in repressive state apparatuses or the distribution of state violence among individual settlers and citizen militias. In other words, patriots believe the violence should be democratized and liberals believe it should be concentrated in the hands of state institutions. While one wants to stand alongside the police and military, the other wants the bloody work to be accomplished without getting their hands dirty. Avowed and disavowed to varying degrees, both support counterrevolutionary violence to protect settler democracy. In this way, liberals, despite their pacifist posturing, are not any less supportive of colonial violence than their gun-nut counterparts because they call for a strengthening of the settler state and a disarming of the populace, which will only make marginalized people more vulnerable to killings and incarceration.

This is a view that has the audacity and class privilege of asking marginalized people targeted by state violence, and its extended forms of vigilante violence, to appeal to the same state for protection. While patriots take up actual weapons to target marginalized people, liberals weaponize gun control policy to the same ends of putting people of color in body bags or cages. The only gun control that would reduce gun violence would be disarming the police, the military, domestic abusers, and anyone with ties to white nationalist and misogynist political groups, along with demilitarizing schools and campuses. Whether they are appealing to the Second Amendment or asking people to trust the authority of the police and military, white settlers on the Left or Right demonstrate that the violence they commit, fantasize about committing, or have no problem with the police and military committing for their protection is necessary for their redemptive vision of liberal democracy. It matters not if this vision is a return to when liberal democracy more forcefully upheld colonial and racial hierarchies, or some future point at which this violence and policing ensures genuine equality of opportunity for people believed to be formerly colonized and enslaved.


Community Self-Defense

While it may be easy to oppose right-wing white victimization and liberal support for state violence, it's still very hard for many to accept the premise that marginalized peoples, those targeted by such violence, have the right to use any means necessary to defend themselves and their communities. Yet we have to see, as Malcolm X made very clear, that the only people who have the moral authority to lay claim to the use of force as a means of self-defense are the people targeted by colonial violence in first place. The struggle to get free, gain control over one's life, and have a say in the governing of one's community is always a struggle of self-defense rather than aggression or provocation. The meanings of self-defense in settler society are purposely inverted to legitimate counterrevolutionary violence and to discredit the self-defense actions of communities struggling to get free.

Robert Williams emphasized this point over and over again while organizing armed community self-defense to protect the Black community against KKK violence in Monroe, South Carolina in the 1960s. In Negroes with Guns , Williams explains:

"The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system-the violence is already there and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself. When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence' what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists."

When a relationship between people is asymmetrical, meaning it is structurally impossible to rectify or reconcile, the violence that defends this power imbalance appears legitimate while anything that would take power away from the oppressor or build power for the oppressed registers as illegitimate and irrational violence.

With the same force, then, that we can acknowledge the illegitimacy of the notion of white settler self-defense, we should recognize the legitimacy of marginalized peoples' right to self-defense. As theorist Chad Kautzer argues, "our understanding of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformative power of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups." What this looks like is, on the one hand, disempowering, delegitimizing, and disarming institutions of white settler violence such as the police, patriot, and other white-nationalist gun culture groups, and on the other, using a diversity of tactics to create and maintain community self-defense networks among marginalized communities. Community self-defense, as a theory and praxis, can help produce identities, relationships, and habits necessary not only to deter and prevent violence and build/protect power, but also to delegitimize the ideology of white victimization so crucial to white settlers' use of violence to defend their power. This framework reveals who is fighting a war of counterrevolution and who is fighting a war of liberation, whose fight is legitimate and whose is illegitimate.

In this way, community self-defense helps clears the way for matters of seeing where allegiances lie in a war that has been ongoing for over 500 years. For those picking up a gun to defend property that sits on stolen land and that has value through an economy built by and through stolen people, it becomes clear they are arming themselves to kill and die for colonialism and anti-Blackness. For those calling for peace between the oppressor and oppressed, community self-defense forces their hand, exposing where their allegiances actually lie: in support of colonial and racial violence. For those told that their struggle to exist, to be free, to control their own lands and bodies is irrational and illegitimate, they prove through community self-defense that it is irrational, let alone careless, to think that the structures of violence holding them captive or targeting them for elimination will be destroyed through peaceful negotiation and compromise.


This was originally published at Pyriscence .


Oliver Baker is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University.

A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense

By Chad Kautzer

Editor's Note: This essay is an adapted excerpt from Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense (ed. scott crow).



In his 1964 speech "Communication and Reality," Malcolm X said: "I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence." Earlier that year, he made a similar point in his Harlem speech introducing the newly founded Organization of Afro-American Unity: "It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent."

To portray self-defensive violence as natural, in no need of justification, or as so commonsensical that it could barely be called violence has a depoliticizing effect. Since the goal of Malcolm X's speeches was to undermine critiques of armed black resistance, this effect was intentional. For good reasons, he was attempting to normalize black people defending themselves against the violence of white rule. When Malcolm X did speak of self-defense as a form of violence, he emphasized that it was lawful and an individual right. In his most famous speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1964), he explicitly stated: "We don't do anything illegal." This was also, of course, how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense justified its armed shadowing of police in Oakland in the late 1960s: it was the members' Second Amendment right to bear arms and their right under California law to openly carry them.

To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The self-defense I discuss in this essay is political because the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations. This project seeks to articulate the dynamics of power at work in self-defense and the constitution of the self through its social relations and conflicts.

Because communities of color defend themselves as much against a culture of white supremacy as they do against bodily harm, their self-defense undermines existing social hierarchies, ideologies, and identities. If we were to limit ourselves to the language of individual rights, these interconnections would remain concealed. Violence against women (but not only women), for example, has a gendering function, enforcing norms of feminine subordination and vulnerability. Resistance to such violence not only defends the body but also undermines gender and sexual norms, subverting hetero-masculine dominance and the notions of femininity or queerness it perpetuates. Since the social structures and identities of race, gender, class, and ability intersect in our lives, practices of self-defense can and often must challenge structures of oppression on multiple fronts simultaneously.

In the following, I do not focus on the question of whether self-defensive violence is justifiable, but rather on why it is political; how it can transform self-understandings and community relations; in what contexts it can be insurrectionary; and why it must be understood against a background of structural violence. It is necessary to clarify these dimensions of self-defense for two reasons in particular. First, arguments advocating armed community defense too often discuss the use of violence and the preparations for it as somehow external to political subjectivity, as if taking up arms, training, or exercising self-defensive violence do not transform subjects and their social relations. The influence of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) on the early Black Panthers, Steve Biko, and others derives precisely from Fanon's understanding of the transformative effects of resistance in the decolonizing of consciousness. "At the individual level," Fanon writes, "violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude."

The second reason for clarification is to distinguish the strategies, ways of theorizing, and forms of social relations of liberatory movements from those of reactionary movements. There is an increasingly influential understanding of self-defense today that reinforces a particular notion of the self-a "sovereign subject"-that is corrosive to horizontal social relations and can only be sustained vis-à-vis state power. This notion of the self runs counter to the goals of non-statist movements and self-reliant communities. To be aware of these possibilities and pitfalls allows us to avoid them, a goal to which the following sketch of a critical theory of community self-defense seeks to contribute.


Resistance and Structural Violence

At the National Negro Convention in 1843, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet issued a rare public call for large-scale resistance to slavery: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency." I describe resistance as opposition to the existing social order from within, and, as Garnet suggested, it can take different forms, such as self-defense, insurrection, or revolution. We can think of an insurrection as a limited armed revolt or rebellion against an authority, such as a state government, occupying power, or even slave owner. It is a form of illegal resistance, often with localized objectives, as in Shays' Rebellion (1786), Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831), the insurrections on the Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841), the coal miner Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), Watts (1965), Stonewall (1969), and Attica (1971).

Distinguishing between defensive and insurrectionary violence can be complicated. In the Amistad case, for example, white officials initially described it as a rebellion and thus a violation of the law, but later reclassified it as self-defense when the original enslavement was found to be unlawful. In a rare reversal, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the captives on the Amistad as having selves worthy of defense. That was never in question among those rebelling, of course, but it does indicate the political nature of the self and our assessments of resistance. "Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me," writes Fanon, "there was only one answer: to make myself known." On the Amistad, rebellion was the only way for the enslaved to make their selves known, meaning that their actions were simultaneously a defense of their lives and a political claim to recognition.

A sustained insurrection can become revolutionary when it threatens to fundamentally transform or destroy the dominant political, social, or economic institutions, as with the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico in 1994 and the recent wave of Arab uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, including most significantly Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan. The armed rebellion led by John Brown in 1859, which seized the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, was intended to instigate a revolution against the institution of slavery. Although the insurrection was quickly put down, it inspired abolitionists around the country and contributed to the onset of the U.S. Civil War.

Brown's rebellion was not a slave revolt (and thus not an act of self-defense), but it did highlight the nature of structural violence. Henry David Thoreau, the inspiration for Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience and, in turn, that of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the most insightful analysis of this violence at the time. In his essay "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau defends Brown's armed resistance and identifies the daily state violence of white rule against which the insurrection took place:

We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. . . . I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause [i.e., Brown's insurrection].

In this passage Thoreau highlights how the so-called security of one community was achieved by oppressing another and making it insecure. To properly understand the insurrection, he therefore argues, one must view it as a response to illegitimate structural violence. He enumerates the commonplace mechanisms of this rule, which, for whites, fades into the background of their everyday lives: law and order upheld by a neutral police force, enforced by an objective legal system and carceral institutions, and defended by an army supported by the Constitution and blessed by religious authorities. The violence of white supremacy becomes naturalized and its beneficiaries see no need for its justification; it is nearly invisible to them, though not, of course, to those it oppresses. "The existence of violence is at the very heart of a racist system," writes Robert Williams in Negroes with Guns (1962). "The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system-the violence is already there and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself."

We all exist within hierarchical social structures and the meaning and function of violence, self-defensive or otherwise, will be determined by our position vis-à-vis others in these structures. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, described the self-defensive practices of the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and thus insurrectionary, if not revolutionary. Surely his assessment had more to do with the threat self-reliant black communities posed to white domination in the country than with the security of government institutions. "When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence,'" writes Williams, "what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists." These structures of domination and monopolies of violence are forms of rule that operate in the family, the city, and the colony, and resistance to their violence, both dramatic and mundane, "makes known" the selves of the subjugated.

A satisfactory notion of self-defense is not obvious when we view self-defensive acts within the context of structural violence and understand the self as both embodied and social. Writing specifically of armed self-defense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja defines it as "the protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack." While this is appropriate in many contexts, the primary association of self-defense with protection does not capture how it can also reproduce or undermine existing social norms and relations, depending on the social location of the self being defended. Describing the effects of his defense against a slaveholder, Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote that he "was a changed being after that fight," for "repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant" had an emancipatory effect "on my spirit." This act of self-defense, he asserts, "was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me." Our understanding of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformativepower of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups.


Social Hierarchies and Subject Formation

To see how self-defense can have several effects and why a critical theory of self-defense must, therefore, always account for relations of domination, we need to understand in what way the self is both embodied and social. By embodied I mean that it is through the body that we experience and come to know the world and ourselves, rather than through an abstract or disembodied mind. The body orients our perspective, and is socially visible, vulnerable, and limited. Much of our knowledge about the social and physical world is exercised by the body. Our bodies are sexed, raced, and gendered, not only "externally" by how others view us or how institutions order us-as, for example, feminine, masculine, queer, disabled, white, and black-but also "internally" by how we self-identify and perform these social identities in our conscious behavior and bodily habits. By the time we are able to challenge our identities, we have already been habituated within social hierarchies, so resistance involves unlearning our habits in thought and practice as well as transforming social institutions. As David Graeber writes, "forms of social domination come to be experienced in the most intimate possible ways-in physical habits, instincts of desire or revulsion-that often seem essential to our very sense of being in the world."

Since our location within social hierarchies in part determines our social identities, the self that develops is social and political from the start. This does not mean that we are "stuck" or doomed to a certain social identity or location, nor that we can simply decide to identify ourselves elsewhere within social hierarchies or somehow just exit them. To be sure, we have great leeway in terms of self-identification, but self-identification does not itself change institutional relations or degrees of agency, respect, risk, opportunity, or access to resources. These kinds of changes can only be achieved through social and political struggles. Our embodied identities are sites of conflict, formed and reformed through our practical routines and relations as well as through social struggle. Since the actions and perceptions of others are integral to the development of our own, including our self-understanding, we say that the self is mediated, or is formed through our relations with others in systems of production, consumption, education, law, and so forth.

In The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois theorized black life in a white supremacist society as experiencing one's self as split in two, a kind of internalization of a social division that produced what he called "double-consciousness," or "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Although one may view oneself as capable, beautiful, intelligent, and worthy of respect, the social institutions one inhabits can express the opposite view. Part of the experience of oppression is to live this otheringform of categorization in everyday social life. Even when one consciously strives to resist denigration and to hold fast to a positive self-relation, the social hierarchy insinuates itself into one's self-understanding. In the most intimate moments of introspection, a unified self-consciousness escapes us because our self-understanding can never completely break from the social relations and ideologies that engender it. Social conflict is internalized, and it takes great strength just to hold oneself together; to live as a subjectwhen others view and treat you as little more than an object, and when you are denied the freedoms, security, and resources enjoyed by others. Ultimately, only by undermining the social conditions of oppression through collective resistance can the double-consciousness Du Bois describes become one.

Racism produces race and not the other way around. Racial categories emerge from practical relations of domination, unlike ethnic groups, which are cultural forms of collective life that do not need to define themselves in opposition to others. Racial categories are neither abstract nor biological, but are social constructions initially imposed from without but soon after reconfigured from within through social struggles. As with all relations of domination, the original shared meanings attributed to one group are contrary to the shared meanings attributed to other groups and, thus, often exist as general dichotomies. This oppositional relation in meaning mirrors the hierarchical opposition of the groups in practical life-a fact that is neither natural nor contingent.

Masculinity and femininity, for example, are not natural categories: they are social roles within a social order and thus have a history just as racial groups do. Yet, like those of race, the social and symbolic relations of gender are not contingent. Indeed, masculinity and femininity exhibit a certain kind of logic that we find in every institutionalized form of social domination. Because gender is a way of hierarchically ordering human relations, the characteristics associated with the dominant group function to justify their domination. Group members are said to be, for example, stronger, more intelligent, and more moral and rational. Nearly every aspect of social life will reflect this, from the division of labor to the forms of entertainment.

In reality, the dominant group does not dominate because it is more virtuous or rational-indeed, the depth of its viciousness is limitless-but due to its dominance it can propagate the idea that it is more virtuous, rational, or civilized. "The colonial 'civilizing mission,'" writes María Lugones, "was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to people's bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror."

The fundamental dependency of the oppressor on the oppressed is concealed in all ideologies of social domination. Although the very existence of the colonist, capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarch relies on the continuous exploitation of others, they propagate the idea of an inverted world in which they are free from all dependencies. This is the camera obscura of ideology that Karl Marx discusses in The German Ideology (1845-46). The supposedly natural lack of autonomy of the subordinated groups is, we are told, the reason for social hierarchy. Workers depend on capitalists to employ and pay them, women need men to support and protect them, people of color require whites to control and decide for them, and so forth.

Resistance to domination reveals the deception of this inverted world, destabilizing the practical operations of hierarchy and undermining its myths, for example of masculine sovereignty, white superiority, compulsory heterosexuality, and capital's self-creation of value. Violence and various forms of coercion support these myths, but such violence would be ineffective if some groups were not socially, politically, and legally structured to be vulnerable to it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." Indeed, to be vulnerable to violence, exploitation, discrimination, and toxic environments is never the choice of the individual. Any radical liberatory agenda must therefore include among its aims the reduction of such group-differentiated vulnerabilities, which would strike a blow to many forms of social domination, including by not limited to race. This is not to say that vulnerability can be completely overcome. The social nature of our selves guarantees that the conditions that enable or disable us can never be completely under our control, and those very same conditions render us vulnerable to both symbolic and physical harm.

Turning specifically to consider self-defensive practices, while they cannot therefore eliminate vulnerability, they can reduce it for particular groups and undermine it at a structuring principle of oppression. Training in self-defense, writes Martha McCaughey in Real Knockouts (1997), "makes possible the identification of not only some of the mechanisms that create and sustain gender inequality but also a means to subvert them."


The Politics of Self-Defense

If we accept a social, historical, and materialist account of group and subject formation, and understand that groups are reproduced with the help of violence, both mundane and spectacular, then we can see why self-defense functions as more than protection from bodily harm. It will also be clear why self-defense is not external to questions of our political subjectivity. If we acknowledge that we are hierarchically organized in groups-by race, gender, and class, for example-which makes some groups the beneficiaries of structural violence and others disabled, harmed, or killed by it, we see how self-defense can either stabilize or undermine domination and exploitation.

Self-defense as resistance from below is a fundamental violation of the most prevalent social and political norms, as well as our bodily habits. As McCaughey writes: "The feminine demeanor that comes so 'naturally' to women, a collection of specific habits that otherwise may not seem problematic, is precisely what makes us terrible fighters. Suddenly we see how these habits that make us vulnerable and that aestheticize that vulnerability are encouraged in us by a sexist culture." Organized examples of resistance to this structured vulnerability include the Gulabi or Pink Sari Gang in Uttar Pradesh, India; Edith Garrud's Bodyguard suffragettes, who trained in jujitsu; as well as numerous queer and feminist street patrol groups, including the Pink Panthers. McCaughey calls these self-defensive practices "feminism in the flesh," because they are simultaneously resisting the violence of patriarchy, while reconfiguring and empowering one's body and self-understanding. We could similarly think of the self-defensive practices of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement as anti-racist, as decolonization in the flesh.

Although self-defense is not sufficient to transform institutionalized relations of domination, unequal distributions of resources and risk, or the experience of double-consciousness, it is a form of decolonization and necessary for other kinds of mobilizations. The praxis of resistance is also an important form of self-education about the nature of power, the operations of oppression, and the practice of autonomy. When conditions are so oppressive that one's self is not recognized at all, self-defense is de facto insurrection, a necessary making oneself known through resistance. While the most common form of self-defense is individual and uncoordinated, this does not make it any less political or any less important to the struggle, and this is true regardless of the mind-set or intentions of those exercising resistance.

We must, however, also be attentive to how resistance, and even preparations for it, can instrumentalize and reinforce problematic gender and race norms, political strategies, or sovereign politics. A critical theory of community self-defense should reveal these potentially problematic effects and identify how to counter them. There is, for example, an influential pamphlet, The Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869), written by Sergey Nechayev and republished by the Black Panthers, which describes the revolutionist as having "no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name." This nameless, yet masculine, figure "has broken all the bonds which tie him to the civil order." But who provides for the revolutionist and who labors to reproduce the material conditions of his revolutionary life? Upon whom, in short, does the supposed independence of the revolutionist depend?

Although the machismo and narcissism here is extreme to the point of being mythical-George Jackson said it was "too cold, very much like the fascist psychology"-it does speak to a twofold danger in practices of resistance. The first danger is that self-defensive practices are part of a division of labor that falls along the traditional fault lines of social hierarchies within groups. Men have, for instance, too often taken up the task of community defense in all contexts of resistance, which has the effect of reproducing traditional gender hierarchies and myths of masculine sovereignty. Considerations of self-defense must therefore be intersectionalist and aware of the transformative power and embodied nature of resistance, as discussed above. The group INCITE!, for example, seeks to defend women, gender nonconforming, and trans people of color from "violence directed against communities (i.e., police brutality, prisons, racism, economic exploitation, etc.)" as well as from "violence within communities (sexual/domestic violence)."

The second danger is a commitment to the notion of a sovereign subject, which is the centerpiece of authoritarian political ideologies and motivates so many reactionary movements. The growing number of white militias, the sovereign citizen movement, as well as major shifts in interpretations of the Second Amendment and natural rights, are contributing to an increasingly influential politics of self-defense with a sovereign subject at its core. For this sovereign subject-whose freedom can only be actualized through domination-the absolute identification with abstract individual rights always reflects an implicit dependency on state violence, much the way Nechayev's revolutionist implicitly relies on a community he refuses to acknowledge. The sovereign subject's disavowal of the social conditions of its own possibility produces an authoritarian concept of the self, whose so-called independence always has the effect of undermining the conditions of freedom for others.

Although one objective of self-defense is protection from bodily harm, the social and political nature of the self being defended makes such resistance political as well. Self-defense can help dismantle oppressive identities, lessen group vulnerability, and destabilize social hierarchies supported by structural violence. The notion of a sovereign subject conceals these empowering dimensions of self-defense and inhibits the creation of self-reliant communities in which the autonomy of each is enabled by nonhierarchical (and non-sovereign) social relations being afforded to all.


This excerpt was originally published at Boston Review .

Commodifying Neo-Fascism: The NRA's Carry Guard in Trump's America

By James Richard Marra

Neo-liberal fascism reigns triumphant in Donald Trump's great America. This neo-fascism does so in part because over 62 million Americans agree with him concerning America's defense against heralded threats. These include Muslim terrorists, immigrant terrorists, Black terrorists, pro-choice feminist terrorists, eco-terrorists, and a terroristic federal government that intends to imprison law-abiding gun owners in FEMA concentration camps . Anti-gun activists and Black Lives Matter protestors imperil America's Anglo-Saxon culture. Together these "bad guys" offer manifest and pervasive risks, which may arrive unanticipated and perhaps be unavoidable.

In America, protecting oneself from threats is big business, and the modality of that protection for 55 million citizens is the personal firearm. Gun owners are prepared, owning approximately 265 million weapons of various types and lethality. The firearm and ammunition industries earn $15 billion annually , and are politically adroit and entrenched in Washington, thus ensuring a steady flow of profits.

As the gun industry's obsequious marketing and lobbying arm since 1977, the National Rifle Association (NRA) offers its extreme right wing political branding to entice Americans to buy guns, accessories, and training for self defense. It does this by launching a tsunami of fear bating, fallacy, and misinformation, propelled by a white Christian and paternalistic nationalism. This is the moral vision that invigorates Trump's political base. Its imperialist military-security consciousness celebrates hyper-masculine intimidation and violence, and elevates "security" to the moral level of "Moses and the Prophets" (to paraphrase Karl Marx). "Freedom's Safest Place" is a Trump Tower of Babel, where a muddle of hysterical jingoism, fake news, and industry "reports" (read "advertisements") are counted as gospel. Not surprisingly, the gun industry funnels massive funding to political candidates guided by the NRA's moral compass, to the tune of $50.2 million.

The use of guns in self-defense comes with, in insurance parlance, a "moral hazard." This is because people may successfully defend themselves, yet in error or through malfeasance. When an injury (physical or financial) occurs due to a firearm discharge, a tort may occur that exposes gun owners to substantial civil liability, or criminal prosecution. These risks are exacerbated by the maze of complex, ambiguous, mercurial, inconsistent, and even contradictory gun regulations and self-defense laws among states. This legal and administrative morass complicates the task of complying with applicable laws. As the Carry Guard web page announces, the threat of litigation looms large: "You can do everything right and still lose….[L]awful self-defense can cost a fortune." Thus, a tool intended to satisfy a need for physical self-defense engenders a new need and a new tool: legal self-defense and the insurance to pay for it.

Thus arises the NRA's Carry Guard membership plan. In addition to a general membership, the NRA joins with the Chubb Group to offer, through its subsidiary Lockton Affinity, insurance reimbursement coverage for legal defense costs, either criminal or civil, resulting from acts of self-defense with firearms; along with a package of related products and services. Carry Guard insurance is a personal liability commodity, combined with financial assistance benefits for criminal defense, which intends to fill a gap in most homeowners insurance that usually excludes potentially morally hazardous acts, like intentionally shooting in self-defense.

Chubb's new product has a potential market of approximately 400,000 gun owners. The $154.95 price of the Bronze-level Carry Guard premium (minus $40 for the NRA membership) covers policy administration and claims costs paid to Lockton, with the remainder going to Chubb. The potential gain for Chubb is considerable, given that the United States Concealed Carry Association's self-defense insurance has an estimated annual revenue range between $30 and $70 million .

Carry Guard embodies the ideological interdependence among the gun industry, the NRA, and Trump's neo-fascist regime. The gun industry exists to maximize profits from selling firearms, regardless of the enabling marketing. While gun manufacturers and the Chubb Group enjoy the profits offered by their partnership with the NRA, the Carry Guard suite of benefits also satisfies two fundamental needs of the NRA: increased membership and expanded political power. They do this by stoking fears that a greedy liability attorney will convince an Untermensch from some disliked group to file a civil suit; or that district attorneys from an overreaching "leftist" and anti-gun government will file criminal charges. Fears of the racial "other" and government "tyranny" are the marketing the NRA brings to Carry Guard.

This marketing finds it origin in the NRA's extreme right-wing Cincinnati Revolt of 1977 . The Revolt established the NRA's aim to make America great again by arming its citizenry to the teeth. By doing so, the nation can be ostensibly defended from threats to its Second-Amendment rights, capitalism, and its social Darwinist worldview. It is no wonder that the neo-liberal Ronald Reagan was the first president to endorse the NRA, or that the NRA's darling neo-fascist, Donald Trump, told the 2017 NRA Convention that he would, "come through" for them. Carry Guard membership affirms a commitment to the threat-filled worldview of Trumpism. That worldview, as the NRA website celebrates, is championed by a cabal of extremist gun-rights advocates, racists, militarists, and proto-fascist law enforcement, and the virulently anti-Muslim Trump supporter Rep. Clay Higgins, who was rendered notorious by his Auschwitz gas-chamber debacle .

As a commodity, Carry Guard satisfies the basic human need for security against threats unmasked at "Freedom's Safest Place," including supposed unjust litigation. It also satisfies a fundamental need for group membership, which is accomplished through an association with a right-wing political organization, along with the blessing of a neo-fascist national leader. Self-esteem comes with one's self-identification as a "responsible" gun owner, a defender of Constitutional rights, and a law-abiding citizen standing for law and order.

Carry Guard's insurance represents a controversial niche market product. However, its notoriety as so-called "murder insurance" should not obscure the fact that Carry Guard is a bundle of mutually supportive products and services. Its "use values" for the NRA, to use Marx's term, are to: 1) promote the purchase of firearms for self-defense, 2) help to increase NRA membership and funding, 3) and provide an additional venue for the indoctrination of NRA members and public advocacy; thereby increasing the political force of the organization. Viewing Carry Guard as a consolidated suite of products provides a basis an understanding the product as a neo-fascist political project which combines, as the Trump "administration" does, neo-liberal capitalist and extremist right-wing political agendas.

As Karl Marx explained, capitalists are adroit at discovering or fabricating new needs, and developing products or services that satisfy them. While some human needs and desires can potentially be satisfied, those that can do so through use values. A firearm is a use value that fulfills the need for self-defense, even if the perceived threats are largely imagined. While some people personally fabricate firearms, ammunition, and accessories, most purchase them on the firearm market; from which the gun industry acquires its profits. However, the employment of a firearm in self-defense, that moment when the gun owner realizes its use value, engenders a new litigation risk potentially requiring a new use value. This new use value might take the form of a personal financial reserve intended to pay for self-defense litigation. However, the cost of litigation is high and the risk of a large civil settlement substantial. The cost of self-funding a legal defense is prohibitive for most gun owners, and " peer-to-peer " funding looks much like the specter of communism. These consumer concerns provide Chubb with an opportunity to sell a new use value in the form of an insurance commodity. As such, it obtains an exchange value within the insurance market; and is for the gun owner the premium price of the insurance. Thus, capitalists double dip into the gun owner's pocketbook. They sell the use value of a firearm as a commodity within the firearm market in order to satisfy a need for personal self-defense. Then they sell the use value of an insurance commodity to satisfy a need for legal self-defense arising from the actual use of the firearm. Thus, Carry Guard members, wishing to enjoy the practice of "American rugged self-reliance," ironically become inextricably dependent upon a capitalist enterprise to insure their financial security and personal freedom.

This irony reflects a deeper alienation of human beings from what Marx views as their own human essence. According to Marx, what distinguishes human beings from other species that exploit natural recourses instinctively to satisfy needs (like birds constructing nests from twigs and human refuse), is that humans do so through purposeful and creative labor. When gun owners are not able to personally design and establish their legal defense, the Chubb Group offers their capital and the creativity of their workers (policy administrators and actuaries, for example) to market a suitable insurance commodity to meet the need. By doing so, gun owners become "alienated" from the means of producing their own protection. Thus, Chubb "rents" NRA gun owners, for the price of an insurance premium, a safe place that is manufactured, so to speak, and administered by the Chubb Group exclusively for profit. Viewing Carry Guard from a Marxian perspective dissolves the myth of the product as primarily an enabler of self-reliant defense. It exposes the function of Carry Guard as a vehicle to establish a dependency of policyholders on the Chubb Group and the NRA (through the needed self-defense training), and for the enrichment of the capitalist class.

This Marxian perspective illuminates the dynamics of the gun market not only in terms of the commodification of physical use values (firearms and their accessories), but also with reference to affective use values; those psychological needs that the physical use values satisfy. Affective utility plays a central marketing role. Most gun owners are middle-aged, white, high school educated, and politically conservative; for whom firearm ownership is exciting and patriotic. The adrenaline rush triggered by shooting firearms creates a sense of physical strength, heightened masculinity, and rugged independence, stirring to life the "badass" warrior within. Badasses don't feel insecure, powerless, fearful of strangers, dependent, or confused in an uncertain world. An obsession with design innovations and hi-tech accessories also proclaims who are the baddest asses; those who possess the baddest ass magazines or laser sights. Given that the shrinking civilian firearms market requires repeat sales to maintain profits, gun manufacturers and the NRA appeal to the super-hero fantasies of hyper-vigilant males to continually stir a toxic stew of affective needs to maximize sales.

In this sense, Carry Guard represents a commodification of "peace of mind" (as all personal liability insurance does) in the face of the looming threats prophesied by the NRA, as well as a social acceptance and self-esteem that comes participating in the defense of hearth, home, and country. When the satisfaction of these basic human needs is couched in the NRA's neo-fascist worldview, the commodity sold is not simply self-defense, but a comforting neo-fascist worldview as well.

Commodity marketing is remarkably successful and adaptable, in part, because it can effectively appeal to affective desires, while simultaneously wrapping them in a self-actualizing political worldview. The Virginia Slims' 1960s accolade "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" celebrated both the vanity of a Twiggy-like female body, and a self-actualization promised by second-wave feminism. Today, the post-sexist spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, has come a long way as well; roaring from the Carry Guard website as a confident and square-jawed gun owner, squeezed into a skin-tight Carry Guard tee shirt. Coca Cola underscored its iconic advertisement with the jingle "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)," sung by a commune of sanitized and serenely spellbound hippies residing in the Nirvana of the 1960's "Counterculture." Now, Barneys is banking on their M65 anarchy jacket to appeal to Millenials who are confronting Trump's neo-fascism in streets across America, in a desperate struggle for a secure and compassionate world; one free from the exploitation and repression of "The System." Barneys hopes there will be value added from sales to those who choose to safely impersonate revolutionaries at a safe distance.

Altogether, Carry Guard's carefully designed and marketed package of commodified use values embodies the symbiosis between neo-liberal capitalism and right-wing extremist politics that forms the core of, and is a marketized metaphor for, Trump's neo-fascist regime.

In Defense of the Hammer and Sickle: On Symbolism and Struggle

By Charles Wofford

According to Cultural Hegemony Theory, often attributed to Antonio Gramsci but also developed by Edward Said and Nicos Poulantzas among others, the ruling class maintains its power by deliberately shaping the cultural discourse to which the populace is exposed. The hegemony theorists recognized that no ruling class can survive by constant application of violence; it must obtain some degree of legitimacy among the oppressed populace. This means normalizing the oppressive status quo. Cultural hegemony is therefore the structure through which the ruling maintains the day-to-day domination, and may be seen as the complement to the deliberate application of violence, which is reserved for those moments when hegemony fails to marginalize the populace.

A major part of maintaining cultural hegemony is controlling language. In American political discourse, that movement whose policies may destroy the world is referred to as "conservatism;" the party openly sneering at democratic processes is the "Democratic" Party; those who advocate a total tyranny of private corporations call themselves "libertarians;" and advocating increasing the number of private bank owners ("break up the banks!"), rather than advocating socialized control of banking, is enough to earn you the title "socialist." This kind of distortion (or actual political correctness) is like the footprint of cultural hegemony.

A different aspect of the control of language is the control of symbols. Given the effort of the Left toward popular democracy (or as we might call it, "democracy"), what are the hegemonic distortions of the symbols of democracy? And does the pattern of turning terms into their opposites (as exemplified above) give us a clue into that distortion?

Obviously I think the answer to the second question is, "yes," and to answer the first question: the hegemonic distortion of the symbols of democracy is to turn those symbols into symbols of anti democracy. What is the word for the purest anti democracy in political theory? The word is totalitarianism. Which society is mostly widely and immediately regarded as totalitarian in the United States? Answer: the Soviet Union.

There are many theories of democracy. If we look at the etymology, we find the Greek "demos," (people) and "kratos" (power). A democracy, taken in perhaps its most literal and broad sense, is a state of affairs where power resides in the populace. Exactly how that state of affairs obtains may vary widely; plenty of arrangements may qualify as "democracies."

But pure democracy, democracy in its most terrifying and effective moment, is revolutionary practice. What is more democratic than a populace so agitated, so politically conscious, that they have decided en masse to forcefully dispose of their ruling class? What is more revolutionary than a class conscious populace that organizes its own communities independently of the dominant organizations, to such an extent that they replace them?

The demonization of the hammer and sickle is part of the demonization of genuine democratic, populist impulses in defense of capitalism. The hammer and sickle, as a symbol of the greatest revolution in history, is therefore a symbol of the purest ecstasy of democracy. We ought to embrace it, reclaim it, make it ours again on the left, and not be scared to be associated with it.

But there is another intersection here: as noted Marxist political scientist Michael Parenti has pointed out, democracy itself is an invention of the people of ancient history to guard against the abuses of wealth. A quick survey of the history of Ancient Greece confirms this: prior to Athenian democracy, Athens was ruled by wealthy aristocrats. Political scientist Cynthia Farrar writes in that "The beginnings of Athenian self-rule [i.e. democracy] coincided with Solon's liberation in the 6th century B.C. of those who had been 'enslaved' to the rich." Enslaved to the rich! Athens, the ancestral society whence we trace our democratic lineage as Americans, developed that early democratic structure in order to defend the People from being

! It was a weapon against the abuses of wealth; a fact that today is being thoroughly distorted; where capitalism, a system that emphasizes private concentration of wealth and which posits an ideology that justifies a wealth-accumulating politic, is thought of as synonymous with democracy.

Class struggle is the crucible which forged democracy. Democracy is most purely expressed in popular revolution. The most powerful popular revolution in history is the Russian revolution of 1917, and the emblem of that revolution is the hammer and sickle. The hammer and sickle is closely related to Marxism, a doctrine of class struggle.

To return to the opening point, the demonization of that symbol is immensely useful in the hegemonic battle over the legitimacy or de-marginalization of the Left. Due to a number of factors, the Left is no longer marginal in the United States. That is not to say the Left is portrayed positively in most media, but it is recognized and it is covered. We ought to recognize this battlefield and seize the imagery of our heritage as Leftists.

Building Working-Class Defense Organizations: An Interview with the Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee

By First of May Anarchist Alliance

The General Defense Committee of the Industrial Workers World (IWW) has become an important pole of struggle for pro-working-class revolutionaries in the Twin Cities. While active on a number of different fronts it is the participation of the General Defense Committee (GDC) in the year-long struggle against police killings and brutality in the Twin Cities that has largely led to the significant growth of the organization. The GDC has grown to approximately 90 dues-paying members in Minnesota, and has several active working-groups. In the wake of Trump's election victory, Wobblies (1) and others across the country have begun establishing their own GDC locals - strongly influenced by the Twin Cities' model.

First of May Anarchist Alliance spoke to Erik D. secretary of the Twin Cities GDC Local 14 about the history and work of the General Defense Committee there. Erik is a father, husband, education worker, and wobbly who's also been involved in the youth-focused intergenerational group, the Junior Wobblies.

This interview originally appeared on First of May Anarchist Alliance's website .



Fellow Worker Erik, can you tell us about the origins and history of the General Defense Committee, its relationship to the IWW, and how the militants who founded the current Local conceived of it?

As I understand it, the General Defense Committee (GDC) was first founded by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1917, in response to the repression of wobblies and anti-WWI draft protests. I haven't learned enough about the historic GDC to really speak much about it. I joined the IWW in 2006, and we didn't formally charter the current local as a GDC until 2011. In 2011, the committee was 13 wobblies. But we had actually started organizing ourselves prior to 2011, calling ourselves the Local Defense Committee.


Are there historical or modern examples or inspirations that influence the way GDC sees itself, its activity and organization?

One of the things I've appreciated about the Twin Cities GDC is the very practical intention to learn, with a specific focus on learning in order to act. From the very beginning we engaged in mutual education. Since one of our early orientations was to anti-fascist and anti-racist work, we did a fair bit of reading on the topic of fascism and anti-fascism (Sunday mornings with coffee).

I mention this period of mutual education because we have a lot of inspirations, but none of them have been role models, per se. We have looked to previous movements largely in order to inform our own work and to learn from our elders and the experience of previous generations, but not as Role Models To Be Emulated. That's been important.

With that caveat, we have a lot of inspiration. I get new inspiration every time I read a book, it seems. Some of the inspiration is local: here, I'd specifically highlight Anti-Racist Action and Teamsters Local 544. Anti-Racist Action (ARA) came out of a Minneapolis-based group of anti-racist skinheads who decided they needed to find a way to kick racist skins and organized fascists out of the Twin Cities. Teamsters Local 544 was the local that organized the 1934 strike that made Minneapolis a union town, innovated new forms of the picket (specifically, the 'flying picket'), and engaged for a short time in open physical confrontation on the streets.

Beyond the Twin Cities, I think our members have a lot of very different inspirations. One of mine has always been John Brown, but I grew up partly in Kansas. I guess the Black Panther Party would be the most common source of inspiration among early members; our advocacy of Community Self Defense certainly owes a lot to the Panthers, including their Survival Programs. The most recent addition to my 'Hall of Inspiration' is Rudy Shields, whom I learned about from Akinyele Omowale Umoja's We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.


One of the first projects of the Twin Cities GDC was organizing a "Picket Training", which seems like a kind of simple project, but you all attached some importance to it. How come?

I think the history of the Picket Training is actually the beginning of the history of the local GDC, so forgive me for a longer answer. The IWW was always heavily involved in local May Day events, naturally. In both 2007 and 2008 we had dispiriting and potentially dangerous experiences in marches that were organized by other groups. These happened when we were 'out-marshaled' and 'peace-policed.' Folks might remember the 2006 "Day Without An Immigrant." In 2007 immigrant protection and rights continued to be major issues, and the march was partly centered around pro-immigrant demands.

So it was worrying when wobblies who had been active in local anti-fascist actions saw someone they thought they knew from a fascist rally elsewhere in the state videotaping the crowd (we were never able to confirm the identity because of what happened next). Fascists videotaping an immigrants rights march is extremely concerning; they were likely videotaping either to research immigrants rights' groups (including antifa groups), or to identify potentially undocumented people.

A few wobblies went to talk to the videotaper and get in the way of the camera. Shouting commenced, and the self-appointed organizers of the march successfully pushed the wobblies back into the crowd, allowing the videotaping to continue.

The May Day parade the next year found wobblies promoting militant chants shut down by the same sort of marshals.

At roughly the same time, the local IWW was doing a lot of organizing. While some of us had prior experience in organizing pickets and direct actions, the Starbucks Workers campaign, the Jimmy John's campaign, the Sisters Camelot Canvas Union, and the Chicago-Lake Liquors campaigns all provided early experience and training in planning and executing pickets and direct actions, in a context where we were already committed to IWW ideas and practices. Some of these were particularly challenging, such as doing intelligence and the occasional flying picket of scab canvassers in the Sisters Camelot campaign. Since they never stayed put, it felt like a throwback to the 1934 strikes and the flying pickets. It was cold both Winters.

There was one particular occasion at the University of Minnesota AFSCME strike in 2007 where the IWW promoted, and executed, a hard picket line in the early morning hours at a delivery dock. This was going extremely well until a UMN delivery truck driver rammed the picket line. I was in the wrong place at the moment, and ended up on his hood. I found out later I'd crushed three neck vertebrae; it took two surgeries and a lot of physical therapy to get past it. It also gave me a serious motivation for doing pickets and direct actions better. Just a week after a truck hit me, a delivery truck hit another picketer at an IWW picket of D'Amico's restaurant, thankfully without serious consequences.

Finally, 2008 was the end of an intense two-year process organized at disrupting the Republican National Convention. Most of us already had a critique of 'summit hopping' styles of disruption, few of which have been effective since before the FTAA in Miami 2003. But a number of wobblies were serious and on occasion influential participants in (at least the early period of) the two years of planning that ended up calling itself the "Welcoming Committee." The Welcoming Committee meetings (which were held in the same community space as the early IWW at the time, the Jack Pine Community Center) hammered out some early agreements and principles, including, along with other interested groups, the well-known Saint Paul Principles. This process also gave local wobblies experience in critically thinking through on-the-street tactics and what it would take to actually win goals and actions on those streets, whether in labor pickets or direct actions(2).

All these motivations and experiences were in the forefront of our minds when we thought up the picket training. We knew we had to get better at this, and though we all had some experience, that's not the same thing as having teachable knowledge. So we researched, wrote, debated, and practiced. We adopted a principle of teaching the tactics quickly rather than perfecting the training first, and encouraged people to think about themselves as the next trainers. In order to keep track of our curriculum and to make it portable, we created a trainer's manual, a trainee manual, and a setup manual, which we update frequently.

We offer the trainings to non-wobblies, and while we avoid being an on-call security group, we are trusted locally as providing quality security and planning successful actions. With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and on-the-streets protest since Ferguson, I think the GDC has earned a bit of respect from other local organizations as a result.


Anti-fascism seems to have been a key concern for the Twin Cities GDC from the start. Can you explain a bit about why this was the case and how the GDC intended to "do" anti-fascism a bit differently than other antifa groups?

Partly that was organic, because of the people involved. One of our members was a member of the Baldies, and later Anti-Racist Action, and brought a lot of experience on that front to the table(3) .Others also had anti-fascist experience. Given that density of experience and expertise, it was fairly natural that we were interested in anti-fascism from the beginning.

Our first major action was the disruption of a David Irving event (4). Like most of his events in recent years, promotion and entrance to these is secretive and even paranoid. We created fake identities and profiles, acquired tickets and location information, and mobilized over 80 locals who hated the idea of fascists meeting in our city. This put our early group's planning abilities to the test, since the meeting was on an upper floor of a downtown hotel with a front desk by which everyone would have to walk.

As we went along, and based in part on discussions and debates both internal to the GDC and to the local IWW, we formulated a clearer understanding of the relationship we think should exist between anti-fascist work (I think these days, I'd say "Community Self Defense," which would include antifa work) and unionism(5).

Part of the clearer rationale was to establish faith and credit with groups that may have bad impressions of unions, or prioritize other forms of work, and to bring a more diverse group of fellow workers into the IWW. Another part was the understanding that if the IWW ever gets close to its goal of genuinely challenging the foundations of capitalism, we will have to have a group and an orientation capable of defending the union and its workers. We didn't feel that we should wait until the attack came to organize to fight it.

I think the most significant difference of our anti-fascism from other anti-fascist groups is our relatively public, or mass, orientation. Many anti-fascist groups operate largely as affinity groups, stressing secrecy and small numbers, for good reasons. But the types of pressure we can place on the fascists with these sorts of organizations is limited, and the risks to members enormous. Our anti-fascism has taken a mass orientation: we aim for the largest, most public, and most militant forms of engagement possible, consistently pushing for more radical analysis and actions. While some groups consider mass organizations fundamentally reactive and apolitical, the GDC has made its own anti-capitalist and revolutionary politics clear, in order to avoid being captured by liberals.


It seems apparent that the GDC really "took off" during the recent upsurge against police killings in the Twin Cities (Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Phil Quinn, Michael Kirvelay & others) - could you say a little bit about why this was the case, how the GDC oriented itself and what allowed it to be a place for militants to come and to grow?

Right. The GDC began to grow very rapidly with the engagement at the Fourth Precinct. I want to talk for a minute about the types of engagement that we practiced there, but first I would like to point out the time difference: we'd been meeting irregularly since 2009, were chartered in 2011, and began to 'take off' in 2015. We didn't develop in a rush, despite our feeling of urgency. In retrospect, we should have done more, earlier, and more seriously. You can only prepare to be ready for crisis and then wait to respond in an organized fashion. By the time the police murdered Jamar Clark, after Ferguson and other places had already seen massive protests, we were ready to respond in public, I think.

About two months previously, we'd tested our ability to organize a disciplined mass march and directly confront racists. A group of racists organized a Confederate Flag display on the state capitol grounds. The state sold them a permit. We weren't going to tolerate that. We had meetings ahead of time to organize a counter-protest. We had decided to explicitly make clear that this was a GDC action, and to use our own marshaling teams, and worked with a large variety of other groups. One especially important person in that entire process person is the aunt of Marcus Golden, who murdered by the Saint Paul Police Department in January 2015. She joined the IWW and the GDC shortly afterwards, and seems to be everywhere at all times, moving the work along.

The march began where Marcus was murdered, and ended at the Christopher Columbus statue on the capitol grounds, after ensuring that the Confederate Flag wavers were no-shows. The sheer numbers of people and organizations pledging to come, along with our clearly demonstrated militance, scared them off.

When Jamar was killed, GDC members mobilized quickly. Young Black activists began an occupation of the Police Fourth Precinct. The Fourth Precinct is in North Minneapolis, which is a heavily policed Black neighborhood. In the 1960s, the building of the Fourth Precinct was constructed as a community center called "The Way," in response to two Summers' of uprisings demanding racial justice in the USA. As a metaphor of how unfulfilled the promises made to the civil rights movement have been, I can't think of a starker local one than the transformation of a Black-oriented Community Center into a fortress of blue terror.

Once the occupation was established, which took a matter of minutes to hours, activists began setting up the infrastructure for a long haul. It was already cold, but it got arctic during the eighteen days of the occupation. GDC members were heavily involved in the direct confrontations with police, to be sure, but far more importantly, we created direct relationships with local militants and young people from the neighborhood, whose politics and responses were often directly at odds with the activists who had started the occupation.

Local youth tended to a far greater degree of militancy, and simply understood more clearly what was necessary to protect the encampment, regardless of whether the self-appointed official protest leaders thought. We often provided security at night, when cars would drive at us menacingly, or shots would be fired in nearby alleyways. We were not present in an organized fashion at the moment when White Supremacists showed up and shot people at the occupation, and so I can't say how well we would have responded that night.

An important point about the rise in our local appeal during the struggle for the Fourth Precinct was that we were a largely disciplined group that could reliably be counted on to do what we promised. Equally important is that while we showed up consistently and stayed in solidarity with the protest, we never relaxed our principled criticism of other groups' tactics. Critiques weren't made on social media or publicly, but we were consistent in pushing in person for more radical and militant approaches.

At one point, the self-appointed protest leaders had had enough of being challenged by local youth and militants like ourselves. Pissed that they were losing the obedience of the crowd, which was largely demanding increased militance, one of them grabbed a mic during a tense moment during the encampment and id'd one of our white members as an undercover cop. Frankly, we were fortunate that the person she accused has been active in anti-racist circles for decades and is locally well-known as a result. If the accusation had been made against one of our younger members, the outcome might have been less peaceful.

As a consequence of that event, and a lot of others similar to it, the GDC wrote and released a public statement explaining 'badjacketing' and demanding that no one involved in seeking justice should engage in it (6). We pushed that line hard for what felt like months, but was really just about a week during the occupation. Then the tide started turning and a large number of groups and individuals began to consider the downsides of that sort of action, and condemn it. I think the outcome of our stance against badjacketing actually was greater over time and after the occupation.


For those that aren't so familiar with the last year of activity in the Twin Cities, what have been some high points and challenges of this struggle against the police- and how has the GDC concretely participated in and contributed to this struggle?

With specific reference to our anti-police work, a few things have come together. Those of us who'd been involved in previous actions had some knowledge of police personnel and leadership already; like most municipalities, our local cop leadership would be laughably incompetent if they weren't so oppressive and largely untouchable. A few particular people had started to catch our attention over the years, among them especially Bob Kroll, who was elected President of the local cop union in 2015.

Kroll has a long and documented history of brutality on the job and off, and has been accused of wearing a "White Power" badge on a jacket, and being involved in a process where the then-chief presided over the demotion, retirement, or firing of every single Black officer in the MPD. He also called the first Muslim to serve in the US Congress a "terrorist."

We had already written up a report on Bob Kroll, summarizing his history with documentation, but hadn't really distributed it(7). When Kroll started lying in public about the details of Jamar Clark's murder by two MPD officers, we released the report along with a demand that local reports stop allowing him to comment on subjects related to race and policing, without mentioning his background. We had a big effect in publicizing Kroll's history, to the point that he's been complaining about how frequently people refer to his background, calling him a White Supremacist, etc. We've had little to no effect on local reporters, unfortunately.

While the Fourth Precinct occupation was ongoing, we caught wind of a fundraiser being held by Sheriff Stanek (heavily involved in the crackdown on the protesters at the RNC Convention in 2008) for his reelection at a bar and bowling alley in Northeast Minneapolis. The site was about ten blocks from the Minneapolis cop union's headquarters. We planned and announced a march to the cop union headquarters at night from a local park.

The very same day, however, the police forced the Fourth Precinct occupation out. There was a great deal of anger and disappointment over the course of the day, and people weren't ready to give up just yet. We went ahead with our planned protest, starting with about 20 protesters at our rally site.

We began to march not to the cop union headquarters, but to the bar and bowling alley where the fundraiser was being held. The vast majority of Black Lives Matter protesters were across the river in downtown Minneapolis, inside City Hall. When they left City Hall, a large contingent came and joined us outside the bar. By the time they arrived, many of the fundraiser guests had fled, and the rest had locked themselves inside. We held an impromptu rally outside the bar, and then marched to the cop union headquarters. It was an energetic, militant march. We'd made the cops so nervous that they'd installed security fencing around the property, and had placed snipers in the upper floors of the building across the street.

A few GDC members continued to help hold down the Justice4Jamar movement locally after the eviction from the precinct. They joined a new coalition called the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, and showed up outside the Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman's office every Friday for "Freeman Fridays," keeping Jamar's name in the news and the demand fresh. I was out of the country at the time, but on one of the coldest days of the year, the GDC played a large part in a mass march. The cold caused some innovations: entering local Cub Foods for a while looked like fun!

Of course, the local police haven't stopped murdering people since Marcus Golden and Jamar Clark. This year we had a number of people murdered by the police: Michael Kirvelay, whose sisters called the police for help while he was in a mental crisis, and who was murdered by them; Phil Quinn, a Native man also experiencing a mental health crisis, was murdered in 2015. Map Kong, a Cambodian-American murdered in his car while having a bad reaction to drugs, Geno Smith, and Philando Castile. The last is a bit closer to me than the others, since Philando worked at the school where my son went for 7 years, and my daughter had been there for 6 years already. They both knew and loved Philando ("Mr. Phil," they called him), like all the students did. Personally, I'm grateful I started fighting against police murder when I did; I think if I hadn't had some actual experience I would have been far more shaken when it came that close to home.

We're still fighting for justice for Philando and all those murdered by the cops. After Philando was murdered, a group of mostly younger activists marched to Minnesota Governor's Mansion, not far from the school where Philando worked. That occupation remained in place for some time, but never reached the militancy or organization that we saw at the Fourth Precinct, for a bunch of different reasons. After the occupation was cleared out, the GDC organized and called for a rally and march to shutdown the two municipally owned liquor stores, which help to directly fund the police department whose officer, Jeronimo Yanez, murdered Philando.

We organized this as a GDC-led action, and as such we organized it in our fashion. We did a lot of turnout work, education about the connection between the stores and the police department, and publicly promised that we would picket the stores with the intention of denying them important Saturday evening business.

This action drew the attention of more racists who tried to troll us. This was average and expected. We also drew explicit threats from Wisconsin National Guard veterans who claimed they would show up armed, and posted images of personally owned military weaponry on our pages to scare us off. We took these very seriously and began research and documentation. Shortly after, we released our security report on the situation, along with a public statement that we were unafraid, provide for our own security and don't rely on police, and we were going ahead. We did create a few new security tactics appropriate to the situation, which were useful in keeping us all safe.

Despite the threats, the protest was large and well-attended. We rallied at a point midway between the two stores, not letting on which store we were heading to. Before we even began marching, the both stores closed, which represented significantly more economic damage than we'd even hoped to inflict by picketing one of the stores.


What kind of folks began to join and participate in the GDC? How was its composition similar or different from the IWW or the anti-police movement in general? So far, the GDC seems to have "succeeded" as a multi-racial organization - how is this?

Most significantly were newer Black members and other members of color. Some had joined prior to the precinct, but it's my impression that anti-confederate flag action, and the precinct occupation, were important moments in attracting Black members. The African People's Caucus of the IWW was active prior to both of these events, and I think that their work, which was often behind the scenes, was often the most important work done, communicating revolutionary and antifascist politics to people who may not have encountered them in this way previously.

Probably the best way to describe the membership of the GDC in general is that members often have direct experience with forms of oppression that are not based solely in the workplace, and a desire to confront those challenges from a revolutionary and consistent place. All of our working groups arose either from skills members already had or had developed and were willing to share, or from needs we had. In addition to Anti-racism and anti-fascism, and training people to do more effective pickets and direct actions, we struck working groups like cop watch, harm reduction, and survivor support.

New working groups seem to have a period of incubation after being struck, during which the people involved start to think out, collectively and carefully, what a GDC and community self defense oriented approach would look like, and then get started. Once disciplined action is taken, especially if it's successful, we seem to have an influx of new members who are also affected by or concerned with those forms of oppression. I'm happy with the way that this approach has found knowledgeable and skilled members and connected them with others.


The Twin Cities IWW has been a fairly sizable and active Branch for years - this no doubt provided a good basis to build from, but there has also been some informal controversy and debate within the Branch over some Wobblies' orientation towards the GDC. What were the concerns and how has that played out?

Yes. The local GDC wouldn't exist without the local IWW, and I strongly feel that GDC locals should encourage all eligible members to join the IWW and begin workplace organizing. In terms of controversy, it's my impression that there were criticisms; I was definitely aware from the beginning that a few members opposed the formation of a GDC, but there wasn't ever a clear debate or discussion. GDC members solicited critique and engagement from wobblies, but nothing much really came of it, unfortunately.

Some concern was definitely based in the notion that organizing against fascists would put IWW members as a whole at risk of fascist attack. A few other objections seem possibly to have been that this was macho adventurism, and a distraction from the work of organizing at the workplace. All of these deserve a serious response. In some ways, however, the GDC's more controversial ideas have become common sense. The idea that anti-fascism is optional for unionists, for instance, seems to be moot at the moment. This isn't as much because of our work, necessarily, as because of recent history: it's hard to retain any illusion about the role of the police, or the threat of fascism to workers, after Ferguson, or after Trump's election.


How has the GDC maintained a democratic culture in the context of constant action and growth? What are the main ways for Defenders to communicate, raise ideas, and debate issues? How does political development work within the GDC - what would you like to see in terms of political and educational culture within the GDC?

The people involved at the beginning were all wobblies with a fair bit of experience in the organization and a dedication to democratic practice. So in that sense there was already a basic common culture and attitude. I'm not certain we've always done this as well as we could, though we usually self-correct fairly quickly. I think over the last year the most important nuts-and-bolts contribution to a democratic practice and culture has been found in improving our paperwork and bureaucracy, actually. With regular minutes and agendas, asking people to write motions ahead of time, and being as organized as possible, our organization has grown in transparency.

I'm not certain that we currently have the practices and culture in place to maintain this without serious new effort. The rapid growth in membership proposes a challenge to this: it means that the serious and lengthy process of mutual education, which was the basis of our common understandings and analysis, and made our planning and actions easier and more coherent, will now have to be sped up and transformed into a process that can handle large numbers of new members.

There is a very serious need for lots of educational initiatives, as well as finding ways to encourage people to take part in them. We need lots of writing, lots of one-on-ones, lots of explanations, and lots of patience. If you've been around for awhile, get used to hearing the same explanations of ideas, acronyms, etc. That's a sign that we're growing. If it's irritating, please get involved in making the explanations better. Along with speedily connecting new members to working groups, I think continuing the practice of mutual education is our greatest current challenge.


What initiatives of the GDC are you excited about and what do you see as the biggest challenges and weaknesses to overcome as we move into the Trump era?

The GDC has experienced solid growth as an institution for the last few years. Here in the Twin Cities, we helped folks in St Cloud organize and apply for charters for a new IWW and a new GDC local, both of which I believe were just approved.

The projects we take on in the GDC are organized by working groups. As we've grown in numbers and capacity, the number of working groups has grown. Every new working group makes me excited.

The Survivor Support working group is our newest working group, and has already taken numerous successful direct actions. I'm really excited about this project. It remains the case that many more people of color are murdered by police than fascists, and many more women experience rape and violence at the hands of partners, friends, and acquaintances than they do from the faces of the Men's Rights groups. We must address everyday violence and oppression in our attempt to build Community Self Defense.

The post-election moment feels very new, at least at the moment. In the days immediately following, a very large swell of interest in both the GDC and the IWW happened, and a lot of my personal energy recently has gone into helping other groups charter by giving as much practical advice and history as possible. Because I am convinced that the GDC and the IWW have immense potential for the next few years, this growth is thrilling and exhausting at once.

It's thrilling partly because of the new energy, and the sudden appearance of people who are, perhaps for the first time, to fight. It's exhausting because the task ahead of us is immense, and will require a nearly constant process of mutual education.

Thankfully, creating trainings is something we've been doing well in the Twin Cities, and with the new energy, I'm hopeful we can continue to both grow and consolidate our growing power. We've started thinking about what the process of doing mass, mutual education would look like, and thinking of how to implement it. The point of all of our trainings, beyond the specific skills taught, is to spread the skills and analysis we have as widely as possible among the working class, in order to increase our confidence, competence, and militancy. The next year is going to lit, if we do it right.

Finally, we've been debating and developing a long-term strategy for GDC growth in the Twin Cities. Without going into details, I'll just say that the long term strategic and nut-and-bolts planning of our group is inspiring, and gives me hope.


The Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee Local 14 contact info:

Web: https://twincitiesgdc.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TC.GDC/

Twitter: @TCGDC

Contribute $: https://fundly.com/support-revolutionary-community-organizers-in-minneapolis

Address: c/o Twin Cities IWW 2 E Franklin Ave Suite 1, Minneapolis, MN 55404

Members of the First of May Anarchist Alliance are among those active in the Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee. For more information on First of May: m1aa.org


Notes

1 A nickname for members of the Industrial Workers of the World union (I.W.W.)

2 For a discussion of the "St. Paul Principles": http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/2/16/1065414/-A-Principled-Stand-on-Diversity-of-Tactic-Avoiding-Uniformity-of-Failure; For more on IWW activity during the 2008 RNC: http://www.iww.org/nl/node/4384

3 The Baldies were among the first anti-racist skinhead crews in the U.S. Anti-Racist Action, is a radical direct action anti-fascist network that was a key to fighting KKK and neo-nazi organizing from the late 80's until recent times.

4 David Irving is probably the most famous Holocaust-denier "historian" in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving

5 "Unionism and Anti-Fascism" (2013) https://twincitiesgdc.org/antifascism/

6 "No To Badjacketing: the State Wants To Kill Us; Let's Not Cooperate" (2015) https:// twincitiesgdc.org/badjacketing/

7 "Robert Kroll: Not Credible on Race or Policing" (2015) https://twincitiesgdc.org/2015/11/29/ kroll-report/

Striking While the Iron Is Hot: Trump and the Antifa Resistance

By Brenan Daniels

This is a transcript of a recent email interview I had with JA, an administrator of the Facebook page Anarchist Memes where we discuss Trump's rise to the presidency and how people can more actively resist the fascist-esque politics that are currently being put in the mainstream.



Regarding Trump's ascendance to the Presidency, many argued that he would never make it. Seeing his rhetoric and proposed policies at the very beginning, what were your initial thoughts? Do you think that his tapping into social and economic unrest was purposeful on some level?

I thought that Trump was too unpolished and goofy to beat a career politician of Clinton's caliber. It seemed to me at the time that his ascendency to RNC nominee was the result of in-fighting and disarray within the GOP. I never imagined he'd win the presidential election.

I don't think that anything Trump does is particularly strategic on his part. Even when it is apparent he's trying to stick to a narrative, he still seems to go off-script, and delve in to bizarre and perverse tangents. I think the man is totally untethered to objective reality.


There are those who would argue that in some ways a Trump win is impressive seeing as how the media and a large amount of The Establishment was against him. What are your thoughts on this?

I think he is popular for the same reasons right-wing, racist, proto-fascist demagogues are ever popular. Namely, the combination of socio-economic despair and a chauvinistic dominant culture. My intuition is that, those who are deeply invested in the narratives and affirmations of the dominant culture, resolve the emotional and cognitive dissonance of their socioeconomic predicament within the culture as well as dissent against it...by going deeper in to their nationalist fairytales and faulting scapegoats and/or lack-of-purity/faith as to explain the present conditions.

Trump's utter stupidity, incredulity and narcissism allowed him to say and declare things that a more strategic and refined politician would-not. I think this allowed him to out-flank his opponents in the GOP and DNC alike. Likewise, the media seemed either unaware or unconcerned that its tittering responses to Trump, amplified his popularity.


Currently it seems that Trump is hitting the ground running by doing a number of things such as the recent Muslim ban, proposing that the US leave the United Nations, and reinstating a ban on US funding overseas, to the glee of many of his supporters. However, there are those who are expressing dismay over other policies such as a freeze on government employee hiring and salaries. What do you think will happen if/when people realize that many of Trump's policies are going to hurt them? Will we see an increase in violence against marginalized communities?

I think it's decidedly possible that the white-reactionary milieu will react violently if/when their economic conditions are negatively impacted by Trumps policies. Some certainly will. But the flip-side of that, the only possible silver-lining to any of this depravity and cruelty, is that the shock of trumps failures on the reactionary white working class, may bump them out of their racist, right-wing stupor. I think it's incumbent on radicals to strike while things are amorphous and strange, and try to capitalize on the shocks that do come.


What would you make of the liberal's reaction to Trump? There are some who argue that this is an opportunity to push them further to the left, but on a personal level, I have some doubts about that seeing as how they supported Clinton, who seemingly wanted to push us into a war with Russia.

I think it's a mixed-bag. I think some liberals have been bumped ever-so-slightly to the left, become disillusioned with the DNC, with their patriotism, with capitalism etc. I think there are also liberals who are looking for an excuse, a scapegoat, someone or something to blame for the ascension of Trump. I've interacted with both types. Some who have shown an interest in radical philosophy and explanations where before there was a lack of interest...and I've also met some who have tried to blame Sanders or everyone to the left of Clinton for the outcome of the election.


Seeing the rise of the far right in Europe and finally it coming to the US, how would you say that Trump fits into a larger global context of elements of the Western world embracing far right fascistic (and actual fascist) politics?

I think what is happening in the US is a similar phenomenon to what we've seen and is happening in Europe. Where economic stagnation or depression generate a resultant lashing out by those enamored with the dominant culture's narratives and mythology...as well as anyone else critical of that mythology.


Given the recent J20 protests and the black bloc actions, what should anarchists do now that we are in a Trump presidency, someone who many would argue is close to, if not entirely, a fascist?

I think the most useful and necessary and impactful thing radicals can do is join an organization - and start organizing. As well, I think radicals needs to make a concerted effort to try and organize, radicalize, and bring-in working class and rural white people - as tempting as it is to just write-off anyone who is even the slightest bit reactionary (and I wouldn't blame anyone who does), I think work needs to be done to change these people's minds - to help them find another path materially and ideologically.


Seeing as how I have used the term fascism and fascist in the last two questions, where can people go to get a solid understanding of fascism, both historically and modern day as it seems that it is a word that can be misapplied.

There's a ton of literature out there, people just need to reach out and grab it. They can go to the source, like Mussolini or Jose Antonio to even out their understanding of Nazism - or to any number of books comparing and contrasting the various strains in fascism. As well, there is anti-fascist literature which also gives great insight in to what fascism is and how fascists behave (AK press just released Confronting Fascism for free in ebook form, and I know M. Testa's Militant Fascism is available in pdf form for free on the internet).

That said, I think people's impulse to use the label is usually generally correct - in that the people they're assigning the label to exhibit (generally) the basic features of fascism...even if not in an explicitly ideological or intentional way.


In what way(s) can people be organized today to support antifascism and push for change beyond the ballot box, including those who lack time/funds due to personal situations?

Join an organization(s) and just do something - anything one can - for that organization(s)...and try not to fall in to complacency after an absence from involvement. Being broke, having kids, work, social life, health issues etc all invariably inhibit our ability to maintain commitments to organizations we'd like to be involved in and the tendency to stay-away after an absence is common. Try to remember, that our participation is needed, and wanted, and beneficial.

[JA]

Resistance, Anarchism, and the Black Bloc: An Interview with Lacy MacAuley

By Peter Schmidt

The University of California at Berkeley probably will not be the last American college to experience mayhem at the hands of "black bloc" militants.

In the weeks since President Trump took office, such activists have mounted destructive protests not just on Berkeley's campus but in the streets of Portland, Ore., and Washington D.C. Although the target of their Berkeley action, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, has been sidelined as a result of controversy over his remarks about pederasty, other similarly incendiary "alt-right" leaders, such as the white supremacist Richard B. Spencer, remain on the college speaking circuit.

The "black bloc" label, attached to those who broke windows and set fires at Berkeley, refers not to a specific organization but to a specific tactic that involves wearing black clothing to blend in with other activists, shielding one's identity behind bandannas or masks, and causing disruption to get a point across.

Lacy MacAuley, a member of the D.C. Antifascist Coalition, has been a public face for such militants. In January, for example, she was a spokeswoman for DisruptJ20, the group that organized Inauguration Day protests, without permits, at which black-bloc activist destroyed property in downtown Washington and skirmished with the police. On a national level, she has provided media representation for anarchist and leftist activists for about 12 years.

In February, The Chronicle asked Ms. MacAuley about this month's chaos at Berkeley and the likelihood that other campuses will see similar activity. Following is an edited and condensed transcript of that interview.


Q. When protesters this month smashed windows and started fires at Berkeley, the university blamed such actions on "black bloc" members who had "invaded" the campus. Do you have any reason to believe that students were among the people who caused destruction there? If not, how would they have been drawn there?

A. The black-clad anarchists who were present at UC-Berkeley were a blend of students and nonstudents. The group was there in response to someone who was a vitriolic fascist, Milo Yiannopoulos. There didn't have to be a huge system of organization under that action. There was some organization, but I really think that most people were responding to the obvious signs, in front of everyone right now, that the fascists are starting to really gain a foothold and that represents a danger to all of us. That is why we responded in force.


Q. Tell me about the black bloc. Does it have any sort of leadership structure?

A. The black bloc is certainly not under some sort of hierarchy or leadership structure, as a rule. Most black blocs are really just people who are temporarily masking themselves because they fear retribution - either now or at some point in the future - due to their fighting injustices.

The political philosophy of many, but not all, of the people who participate in the black bloc is the political philosophy of anarchism. That is why people associate anarchism with disorder or violence. That is really far from the truth of what an everyday anarchist actually practices and believes.

Anarchism is based on mutual consent, and the so-called violent aspect of black blocs and anarchism really needs to be understood. I mean, can you really commit an act of so-called violence against a window, or is an act of violence something that you commit against a person? What most people in the black bloc would say is that it is not violence to break a window.


Q. How much of a presence are militant anarchists on or near college campuses? Are there specific places where we are likely to see them become active in the coming years?

A. The level of militancy will go up while we see our government, at this moment, actively impinging upon the rights of everyday people. We have already seen the U.S. government make reality policies like the Muslim ban, a "military operation" that enforces immigration law, and violation of trans youths' rights. To a lot of people, the only logical response is to make a strong stand against that.

When the only thing that you can do is flood into the street and demand that your right to exist be protected, that is what you are going to do. On college campuses, where there are a large number of people whose rights are being violated, I suspect you are going to see many more people who are going to be rising up.


Q. Back in the Vietnam War era, colleges themselves became the targets of militants. Are there specific actions by colleges that are likely to prompt actions against them?

A. Colleges that really protect platforms for individuals who are already rich, white males - who already have their voices amplified and valued much more than other people's voices - are going to see, probably, much more resistance.

We are not protesting because we don't respect free speech. We're protesting precisely because we have already heard these people. We have already listened, and we believe them, and we believe that they pose a threat to our right to exist. That is why we don't view what they are doing as a simple act of free speech. We view it as mobilizing for further violating our rights, and therefore we have to resist.


Q. A Tennessee lawmaker has cited the recent unrest at Berkeley in proposing legislation that would require public universities to discipline any student who tries to shout down a speaker. Do you see such measures as likely to be much of a deterrent?

A. It likely would have a chilling effect on protest at a time when we in our country absolutely need to be protesting. At a time that is so crucial to rising up, that would be the wrong action. It is valuable to consider that all of our systems, even in academia, absolutely privilege the speech of rich, white males and others who are somewhere on that ladder of privilege.

What we don't need to do is create more protections for people who already have a platform. We need to create a horizontal structure where everyone's speech is actually equal.


Q. If you are unhappy with the Trump administration or the current Congress, why not join, say, the College Democrats, and try to put new people in office?

A. The perspective of most of us who are anarchists, and who are participants in the black bloc, is that we don't see the two-party system as a viable way to conduct society. We don't see it as just and fair and valuing and respecting people's lives. So the best way is to actually inspire people to rise up, to resist, and to change the way that our system is actually structured.


Q. You have tweeted about being barraged with anonymous harassment and threats as a result of your political activities. Are college students who publicly espouse views and tactics similar to yours going to be safe?

A. We need to realize that, right now, that is going to happen to people who have the hope and the will to stand up and resist. Should you let it dissuade you from taking actions you need to take to protect what you love? No. Absolutely not.



Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.


This interview originally appeared online at The Chronicle and in the The Chronicle of Higher Education's March 10, 2017 issue .