Call for Insurrection Days

We don’t demand anything,

we want everything!

People all over the world are taking their protest to the streets fighting for their rights and freedom to overturn the current conditions. But why not here? The German reality is marked by social exclusion and cuts in the supply of basic essentials. Simultaneously, the media is brainwashing people’s mind against every existing resistance that criticises this inhuman oppression by the state and capital. It isn’t just the police who beat us up or arrest us and it isn’t just the political legislative which establishes laws to enslave us. Also responsible are those people who are not offering resistance to this situation and those who are making it possible through their ever-so-important (wage-) labour so that the “machinery of administration” runs smoothly. This machinery kills in agreement with German bureaucracy whether on the street or from one’s desk. Silence gives consent. We don’t know why hardly anyone says “Stop!”. Maybe it is because it is not yet bad enough for people or is it just the result of a traditional submissiveness resulting from centuries of monarchist and subsequently fascist leadership, which is burnt in people’s brains. There are nearly no noteworthy protests in Germany against the current shitty situation. That’s a fact. For sure, there are demonstrations which are sometimes joined by a quarter of a million people but the majority of these people, most of whom are members of parties and unions, are therefore directly responsible for what is going on here. Besides, these people are not willing to fight for real changes. Just complain and that’s all. Real changes would mean the loss of one’s own social rank and of all the privileges with which some people have made themselves damn comfortable. For example, economical privileges that exist because other parts of the world were continually ransacked. These conditions have been maintained for a long time with brutal force.

Why we don’t demand anything!

It makes no sense to go to a government with a list of demands. You cannot hope to find sympathetic ears in a political system which puts power into the hands of politicians who are not even elected by a quarter of the people. They will not listen to concerns dealing with people’s lives but will instead focus on issues with capitalistic relevance. That is why it makes absolutely no sense for us present a list of demands to a government.

We do not have to submit to the rule of those who want to control us!

We do not have to degrade ourselves by pleading and begging!

We have to make sure that the things we don’t like do not exist any more!

It is absolutely possible for us to live a self-determined life. But this will only work if the wish to be ruled and to rule is destroyed, if the state’s repressive apparatus is smashed, if the government is overturned, if the “cop-in-your-head” is killed and to break free from your self-imposed boundaries. Afterwards it will be possible to replace the logic of capitalistic values with collective self-organisation. A fight against the system has to be a part of our everyday life, as anti-hierarchical as possible and we have to show solidarity to one another.

Insurrection Days

For many people it is difficult to find access, to organise themselves and to act beyond their own borders. We want to give you an opportunity to get to know one another, to create networks, to fight together and to learn from each other. Together we want to try to take the initiative and to create a climate of insecurity and fear for the state and social authorities, at least for a couple of days. Its aim is to shock the normative structure of the state and social authorities, consequently to question the state’s monopoly on violence. On May Day the police know where and when it could kick-off and were well organised in recent years. However the nights and days before should be defined by us. Sometimes colourful but also in black. Sometimes peaceful and decisive but also with fiery rage.

Insurrection Days

26th of April – 1st of May 2012 // Berlin

Everytime // Everywhere

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Fire Cells Conspiracy communiqué regarding Supreme Court summons

The following text is in response to a summons received by the imprisoned members of the Fire Cells Conspiracy, who all refused to show up in court as directed. The summons was related to the ongoing investigation into the so-called “complete works” of the Fire Cells Conspiracy, which seems to be gaining steam.

I am an atheist because I don’t believe in any god; I am an anarchist because I don’t believe in any government; I am a criminal because I don’t believe in any law; and (I add) I am me because I am not you or anyone else, and I cannot escape from my “self.” . . .

Walk slow or fast;
but walk.
Think quiet or loud;
but think.
Life is short
and whoever doesn’t self-determine,
neither sows,
nor reaps,
nor enjoys,
nor savors existence.
Walk!
Think!

—Extracted from our brother Gabriel Pombo da Silva’s book Diary and Ideology of a Criminal, which the Fire Cells Conspiracy is currently translating for future release by the Black International publishing initiative

Today, January 4, we are being summoned to personally appear at the Supreme Court for something related to the charges being leveled at us.

To begin with, all of us who take part in the Fire Cells Conspiracy Revolutionary Organization declare that we do not simply consider ourselves prisoners, but prisoners of war—a war we have declared on Power and the State, a war whose objective is to destroy them.

The dozens of charges being flung at us, which have to do with our attacks on the system’s structures, constitute clear proof that we were true to that war. Imprisonment as well as trials are Power’s retaliation for our choices.

We therefore view prosecutors, judges, and magistrates as playing the role of the enemy’s courts martial, and as such our relationship to them can’t be anything other than that of a state of war. In this war, and as long as we remain prisoners, we ourselves will take full advantage of picking which battles to fight and which—by refusing to even show up—to ignore.

Thus, it’s best that they don’t wait in vain for us to make that contrived January 4 appointment, since the only thing we will be giving them is the present communiqué and our hatred.

That’s also why we once wrote that we prefer to “catch” our enemies by surprise at the least-expected moment in order to directly express our intentions regarding their justice, just like we did in the past by blowing up the Thessaloniki Courthouse and the Athens Military Court and by torching the homes of judges.

In addition, it’s best that they don’t think the story of the Fire Cells Conspiracy is over and has now been solely reduced to the act of writing communiqués.

We continue on unapologetically, and if our recent escape attempt had been successful, our persecutors could be certain that the “terms” of our dialogue would be armed and that we would be quite prepared to meet them at an appointment of our own making.

We still don’t know the meaning of the word “truce,” and we’re never going to learn it.

We support the international collaboration of action-minded anarchists known as the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front.

The continuous attacks carried out by our comrades on a global scale and the appearance of new Fire Cells Conspiracies in Mexico and Russia are the best response, as well as verification that:

NOTHING IS OVER.

EVERYTHING CONTINUES.

—Imprisoned members of the Fire Cells Conspiracy/Informal Anarchist Federation, FOREVER IN BATTLE

2011 – Embrace the Resistance, It’s Time to End Injustice

The riots of 2010 are over and a new year is upon us. It has been over seven months since the convergence against the G20, which saw grassroots organisations and anti-authoritarians mobilize in a groundswell of active resistance, only to face a brutal counterattack by the state. And while we have suffered the loss of our comrades’ daily presence to the grasp of the state’s repressive legal institutions – a fact that no doubt delights those who seek to oppress and undermine our movements – our resolve has only been strengthened.

In these seven months, we have waited and watched. With seething rage we have watched as the police and prosecutors have relentlessly targeted our friends, comrades, and partners. We have watched government bureaucrats, in an unsurprising display of hypocrisy, break their own publication bans to demonize beloved community organisers. We have watched as the black bloc, a (de)generative and self-organising outburst of anger, has been falsely depicted as under the command of alleged “ringleaders” (the fictional “masterminds of mayhem” and “queens of destruction”). We have watched with outrage as the closet fascists controlling the country perpetuate plans for the expansion of the prison industrial complex. We have watched as racist governments intensify their demonization of new immigrants and all those who do not fit neatly within its exclusionary colonial framework. We have watched as rich white men continue to enable the raping of the earth for capitalist greed. And, throughout this all, we have seen fierce and widespread resistance against the G20 austerity programs.

We have stopped silently watching.

The state’s scapegoating of a handful of individuals continues to demonstrate their utter misunderstanding of our movements. We are not a movement of individuals. We are a movement of ideas; ideas cannot be imprisoned, they cannot be killed, and they do not require leaders. While some of our allies remain trapped in the labyrinth of illegitimate legal processes, many more have stepped up to take their place in the struggle against tyranny and injustice.

It is from the rain of such state repression that the flowers of our collective resistance bloom. While we understand the systemic violence of this state as an everyday reality for many, we take comfort knowing the seeds of future resistance have been sown by the “democratic” brutality this state displayed for the world to see on the streets of Toronto in June 2010. In the hearts of millions of people across the world, burns an intense loathing of police, politicians, and the collaborators who enable their control. More and more of these same people internalized the serious limitations of scripted protest, and the dire urgency of the situation our communities face. So we see student riots in Western Europe, directing rage specifically at the debt that uncaring elites have saddled the world with. We see mass insurrections defying tyranny in northern Africa. We see intensifying resistance in Greece and Italy. Across the world, it is becoming clear that the capitalist system is in its death throes, and that it must be put out of its misery before it takes us down with it. As this is our inherited system, we increasingly understand our responsibility in its dismantling.

We have learned much during the past several months of watching. While the RCMP, CSIS, and their political masters studied our movements in order to hurt us, so too have we been studying them. We have learned from our first hand experiences with infiltration, surveillance, and incarceration. We have refined our methods and our tactics, broadened our skills and our reach, and we forged new networks of resistance while solidifying the old.

While the Toronto G20 summit has nearly passed from the public memory, the ideas that brought us together against its agenda still remain. The authorities spent 1.2 billion dollars trying to stop dissent, to stop us, and they failed miserably – we are still here. There was a time where they know where we were, when they knew our movements; that time is now over, and now we are everywhere.

This is our declaration: In 2011 the earth will be engulfed by the intensifying flames of popular, radical, and insurrectionary global resistance against dominant, capitalist, and colonial states – we embrace this resistance as our own.

Violence is a Small River: To be with Society is an Ocean

By Jake Carman, The Defenestrator

An Interview with Athens Anti-Authoritarian Movement Comrades

This August I interviewed three comrades from the Athens section of the Anti-Authoritarian Movement of Greece (Alpha Kappa/AK in the Greek acronym). The folks I interviewed live in Exarhia, a neighborhood with a massive anarchist population in central Athens where the December 2008 Greek Uprising began, around which 200 police maintain a permanent security perimeter. AK, the largest anarchist organization in the country, is based around only three points of unity. These minimum core values are:

The antiauthoritarian character of its scope and frame.

The direct democracy in the way of decision-making.

The denial of occupation of any form of power.

Vaggelis Nanos is in his early thirties. He helped found Nosotros, the first and largest social center in Exarhia. He also works on Babylonia, AK’s monthly publication which is distributed in kiosks across the country. Sofia is also in her early thirties, and is a member of the AK working group for the creation of an anti-authoritarian economy. Epaminontas “Nontas” Skiftoulis joined the movement at its beginning,around the 1970s struggle against the Military Junta. He is quite influential for his ideas and articulateness. Police also accused him of being a member of an early anarchist guerrilla group.

Click here to read more…

 

Communiqué from Conspiracy of Cells of Fire commando Horst Fantazzini

Claim of bomb attack against the Administrative Court in Athens

I. “The days are coming when they try…”

“Whoever passed by the front of a courthouse or prison and his look didn’t darken in the thought that he could be there as the culprit, then he did not live his time with integrity and dignity”

The attack on the Administrative Court is dedicated with all our fire to our brothers (G.Tsakalos, P.Argirou, H.Hajimihelakis) of the prisoner’s cell of the members of Conspiracy Cells of Fire. Our comrades and the honest minority of dignified revolutionary Persons political and civil, are not just a piece of our struggle, are not only an aspect of our action, but their choices, attitudes and dignity are the struggle itself as a whole, they are the substance.

Justice is a spider web, catching small prey and swallowing them, while allowing the big reptiles to penetrate and dominate it. Whoever disagrees can visit the prisons to see all these drug addicts and poor devils that fill them up and look around in there to find any businessman or politician who is responsible for the biggest robberies and the most brutal degradation of our lives. So in sight of the political court marshal that’s prepared for January 17th for our Revolutionary Organization CONSPIRACY CELLS OF FIRE we will be sharp and relentless in our options and actions.

If some believe that our Brothers are easy prey and ‘Cook’ the menu of penalties they wish them to contribute to pay dearly for the bill, we would like to inform them they are just fooling themselves and that from here on their personal safety is in immediate danger. So it would good that in the upcoming trial the judges wear black balaclavas and don’t mention their names ever and anywhere. It is “unfortunate” that the system leaves its simple puppets to be targeted so easily and also think that it will escape so easily. It’s a “shame” that these “people” need 24 hour police protection and are afraid to open a letter or a folder. It is a “shame” to believe that they can sleep with a clear conscience when their decisions are the carbon copy of the files of the Anti-Terrorist police in order to judge the Conspiracy. To judge an idea, a proposal, a plan that makes something more beautiful against this world.

The Oaxaca Commune and Mexico’s Coming Insurrection

From Antipode: The Journal of Radical Geography

Was the “Oaxaca Commune” an ephemeral insurrection, an explosion of popular rage, without enduring consequences? Was it a specific expression of autonomous movements, an experiment anticipating the direction some of them are taking? Or was it an isolated, singular episode of people’s struggles? As yet we do not have enough of an historical perspective to fully appreciate the nature and impact of the events of 2006 in Oaxaca that attracted the world’s attention. But it is worth exploring them and discussing a tentative hypothesis about their nature and meaning for autonomous movements in Mexico and beyond, when the gap between means and ends is closed and the shape of the struggle is also the shape of the society the struggle attempts to create. These provisional notes can thus be seen as an introduction to a research agenda.

Introduction

From June to October 2006, there were no police in the city of Oaxaca (population 600,000), not even to direct traffic. The governor and his functionaries met secretly in hotels or private homes; none of them dared to show up at their offices. The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) had posted 24-hour guards in all the public buildings and radio and TV stations that it controlled. When the governor began sending out his goons to launch nocturnal guerrilla attacks against these guards, the people responded by putting up barricades. More than a thousand barricades were put up every night at 11 pm, around the encampments or at critical intersections. They would be taken down every morning at 6 am to restore normal traffic. Despite the attacks, there was less violence in those months (fewer assaults, deaths and injuries or traffic accidents) than in any similar period in the previous 10 years. Unionized workers belonging to APPO performed basic services like garbage collection.

Some observers began speaking of the Oaxaca Commune, evoking the Paris Commune of 1871. Oaxacans responded, smiling: “Yes, but the Paris Commune lasted only 50 days and we’ve already lasted more than 100.” The analogy is pertinent but exaggerated, except in terms of the reaction that these two popular insurrections elicited in the centers of power. Like the European armies that crushed the communards who had taken over all the functions of government, the Federal Preventive Police of Mexico, backed by the army and the navy, were sent to Oaxaca on 28 October 2006 to try to control the situation. On 25 November those forces conducted a terrible repression, the worst in many years, with massive violation of human rights and an approach that can be legitimately described as state terrorism. The operation, which included imprisonment of the supposed leaders of the movement and hundreds of others, was described by the International Commission for the Observation of Human Rights (which visited Oaxaca in January 2007) as “a juridical and military strategy … whose ultimate purpose is to achieve control and intimidation of civil population”.² For the authorities, this strategy would dissolve APPO and send a warning to the social movements in the whole country.

This same strategy has been employed since then and has had a profound impact in Oaxaca. The results increased and exacerbated polarization. Some activists are in jail and others exiled out of Oaxaca or even Mexico. It has been impossible to identify all the disappeared; their families are afraid of revealing their names. Many professionals are now joining the usual migrants, out of fear or for lack of economic opportunities. Some people are afraid of exhibiting any support to APPO or participating in autonomous initiatives. People of different sectors of the society blame APPO for whatever economic difficulties they are confronting. Some others take for granted that the movement is over and the tyrannical governor will remain in office for the rest of his term, and are thus trying to accommodate themselves to that prospect. All this is true; there exist many symptoms of intimidation. However, the opposite is increasingly predominating. Marches are growing, as are sit-ins. Everywhere there is intense effervescence. Oaxaca is boiling. There is an increasing risk of violent confrontations in this highly polarized society, which may be used as a pretext for more authoritarianism. Many factors, however, may block this option and nourish the hope that the movement will be able to peacefully evolve and consolidate. The impulse for a profound transformation is very deep and strong and perhaps inevitable.

On 23 November 2006, a week before Felipe Calderón took office as the new, rightist and contested President, subcomandante Marcos, the speaker of the Zapatistas, declared that he “is going to start to fall from his first day” and that “we’re on the eve of a great uprising or civil war”. When asked who would lead that uprising, he replied: “the people, each in their place, in a network of mutual support. If we don’t accomplish it that way, there will be spontaneous uprisings, explosions all over, civil war …”

He cited the case of Oaxaca, where “there are no leaders, nor bosses: it’s the people themselves who are organized”. That’s how it is going to be in the whole country; Oaxaca serves as an indicator of what’s going to happen all over. “If there isn’t a civil and peaceful way out, which is what we propose in the Other Campaign”, Marcos warned, “then it will become each man for himself … For us, it doesn’t matter what’s above. What matters is what’s going to arise from below. When we rise up, we’re going to sweep away the entire political class, including those who say they’re the parliamentary left” (La Jornada 24 November 2006). This is a clear definition of the challenges that lie ahead.

Click here to read the full article…

As the Country Falls Apart, It’s Time for Our Revolution

A call to arms from Ted Rall’s new book, “Anti-American Manifesto.”

November 10, 2010 | The following is an excerpt from Ted Rall’s new book, The Anti-American Manifesto (Seven Stories, 2010).

You can feel it. Or maybe you can’t.

It doesn’t matter whether you feel it or not. It’s happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it — not merely as the world’s dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic, and geographic entity — is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental, and political crises.

Nothing lasts forever, empires least of all. And this one, which only began to expand in earnest circa the year 1900, doesn’t feel like it has the staying power of ancient Rome.

Not at all.

But we’re not here to talk about the vague possibility of collapse at some point in the future. We are here — in this book and within this historical moment — because the collapse feels as though it is currently in progress.

We are here because the U.S. is going to end soon. There’s going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It’s going to come down to us versus them. The question is: What are you going to do about it?

Click here to read more…

Serbia: Fake Revolutions, Real Struggles

From CrimethInc.

A tremendous amount of attention has focused on Greece lately. Looking at the successful anarchist movement there, we can nurture utopian visions to strengthen our resolve; but if we only consider apparent success stories, we will not be prepared for the challenges ahead.

The entire Balkan peninsula is a sort of laboratory of crisis. Studying it, we can discern some of the possible futures that may await us now that North America seems to be entering an era of crisis as well. The vibrant anarchist movement in Greece represents one possible future, in which a powerful social movement establishes hubs of resistance. But only a few hundred kilometers north Serbia shows another: a nightmare of ethnic conflict, nationalist war, and false resistance movements in which the anarchist alternative has sunk almost as deep as Atlantis.

The roots of the differences between these countries are hundreds of years old, but we can identify some recent factors. Only a generation ago, both were ruled by dictatorships: Greece by a US-based fascist dictatorship that collapsed under pressure from rebellious students, winning youth revolt the respect of the general population to this day; Yugoslavia by a socialist dictatorship, in which Tito maintained power by playing various groups off against each other. When the Berlin Wall came down and the socialist government collapsed, the country was torn apart by ethnic strife. By the end of the 1990s, Serbia was reduced to a much smaller nation ruled by a nationalistic communist, Slobodan Milošević.

On paper, what happened next reads like an anarchist fairy tale. An ostensibly decentralized and nonhierarchical underground youth group named Otpor (“Resistance”) carried out a propaganda campaign aimed at rousing popular revolt, despite aggressive repression from the authorities. After a rigged election, hundreds of thousands of people converged on the capital and intense streetfighting ensued. An unemployed vehicle operator, nicknamed “Joe” by his colleagues, drove his bulldozer through a hail of bullets into the headquarters of the state television station at the head of a furious crowd. Other protesters set the Parliament on fire and violently wrested control of the streets from police. The authorities surrendered, the government toppled, and soon a former anarchist was prime minister.

Click here to read the full article…

Beyond the Local/Global Dichotomy: On Summit Demonstrations, Solidarity Actions and the Necessity of Consistency

A Position Paper From the IMF Resistance Network

The problematic aspects of summit demonstrations have been made clear. In the current climate of action in antiauthoritarian circles we have run into a little bit of a bind, both conceptually and practically. Militant demonstrations at the sites of trade summits have done a lot to break the image of the “Washington Consensus” as well as mount actual destabilizations in the functioning of the apparatus of the State in certain areas for periods of time. But summit demos have become something of an abstract anarchist threat that comes to take up a lot of energy and only engages for a short period of time, only to see that energy dispersed after the last dumpsters are rolled back down their respective alleys and the last windows replaced.

But we want to push beyond the absurdities of the recent debates around large scale confrontation. The absurdities of claims to our addictions or speculation about the psychological motivations beyond confrontation aside, we need to move beyond understanding our actions within the borders of spatial divisions of local and global. If we can say one thing about capitalist globalization it is that these divisions have been eliminated and have become part of global commodity flows.

Condo development attacked, bank sabotaged in Seattle

A Bank of America’s atm slots were superglued, and a nearby vacant condo development was decorated with graffiti reading:

NO CONDOS, NO PRISONS, FOR CHILE (A)

An outside hose was also left running into a sliding door in order to flood the lower level.

DWELL Development tears down existing homes and replaces them with expensive “eco-friendly” condos that further the gentrification of Seattle’s neighborhoods. We find it ludicrous that these condos are located mere blocks from one of the most recent sites of Nickelsville, Seattle’s tent city. And, in a world of dying ecosystems, the construction of “extremely energy efficient and environmentally friendly” condos means absolutely nothing.

Bank of America is one of the three joint financial advisers (including Merrill Lynch and Barclays Int.) for GEO Group Corp. The GEO Group Corp. is a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other prisoners. This corporation runs the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

We hold no illusion that these acts of sabotage will cause these corporations to financially collapse tomorrow. Instead, we attack in order to bring about a small rupture in the social fabric of our daily lives, allowing us to express our own personal rage, and knowing that to remain on the offensive is crucial to both our struggle and our spirits.

In solidarity with all prisoners,

In solidarity with our comrades facing heavy repression in Chile,

In solidarity with the victims of police violence in Seattle and everywhere,

– some anarchists