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anemone161 · 1 year

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The End of Symbolic Resistance

An Eco-Nihilist Argument For Violent Insurrection

Disclaimer

I've been having this conversation with my family, in one form or another, for several years now. We take the argument back and forth, but there never seems to be enough time to address the whole thing. It returns to the surface after particularly bad nights and when we feel hopeless about the trends of our current situation. The conversation has become so fractured and frustrated sometimes I thought it would make sense to set down my positions into a concrete medium. That way I can point to this little document and say that. That is what I believe.

The context is important so that this is not confused for a halfhearted academic project or any attempt to be objective or authoritative. This essay is written for myself and for a few in particular with whom I share many beliefs and experiences. It is primarily a piece of rhetoric intended for those already familiar with our struggle. I'm not trying to prove that anything exists so much as to point at the things we already know a thousand times over and ask why we have not addressed their painfully obvious implications.

As much as I wrote this for some specific individuals, I can't believe that we are the only ones who feel this way. I think it will make sense to the sort of people it was written for, and to others it will seem extreme or unreasonable. I wouldn't even disagree with that. It is my belief that our circumstances now call for action that is legitimately extreme as it is unreasonable.

Last disclaimer is for some of the language and tone that I use. At times I will drift into "we must..." language, make predictions, or speak with a confidence of purpose that could be misread as expertise. I am only a person with the particular experience that I have, which becomes more difficult to communicate precisely the further from my circles that the reader is. For reasons that will become obvious I'm not going to clarify anything about who I am or what experience I have or where. When I make any decision I rely on the collective knowledge of my extended family, and as such I am not going to be a last source for anything. This is an argument I have that seems to me to be self-evident. It is not by any means an objective assessment. Trust yourself and trust your community before you trust in anything I have to say here.

1. Introduction

We are so very familiar with our problems. The names of our enemies are not a mystery. We understand their motivations and methods. It doesn't make sense to ask why one atrocious act or another has been committed because we already know why. Capitalism requires truce between its victims and their oppressor. This truce requires bloodshed to self-maintain. We recognize the processes that are killing us. We know how and why they function, and we understand their many solutions that we will never be allowed to explore.

Capitalism cannot function without white supremacy and imperialism. It cannot function without patriarchy, and patriarchy is antithetical to all kinds of queerness and human autonomy. Conversely, these evils listed and their ilk could not survive without their entanglement with domineering power structures such as Capitalism, or its earlier forms of subjugation i.e. Monarchy or Absolute Theocracy. These are all of one and thus cannot be destroyed independently of their symbiotes.

Having identified our enemies and their methods it should be simple to destroy them. We have our countless theories of how to replace society. There are mountains of written theory concerning the many facets of oppression. Somewhere among these and the living discourse we have our paths forward. If only they could leave the realms of the hypothetical it will be simple to iterate them and to learn how to live our lives well. This is the crux of our dilemma. The choke point to liberation that we're all so familiar with. Considering how Capitalism will never allow itself to be replaced, and humanity cannot coexist with the death machine, the solution is very simple. Incredibly difficult, but also very simple.

2. We Must Destroy The Death Machine

That is all. It is a zero-sum equation. Either Capitalism is destroyed and forgotten or its fist will continue to tighten until humanity is exterminated. We can hope that the resource instability brought on by climate change will cause the machine to self-destruct. More likely is that Capitalism will evolve as its ecosystem does. This is a conversation about survival and nothing else. We know that it is too late to stop or reverse climate change. A worldwide revolution launched today, completely synchronous with total victory and ideological cohesion on this point could only maybe create a future without environmental collapse. This is the least likely scenario among everything and it would still not be certain to save us.

Environmental collapse is a fact of our present day. It will be exacerbated every year that we are alive. It is not a question of whether we will face this, it is a matter of how. Extreme weather claims lives every day, and every one of these deaths is preventable with proper treatment and planning. We know that the summers will be too hot to survive outside. We know that the winters will be too cold. Adequate shelter is a first defense against the elements and we know that Capitalism requires a vacant surplus of housing. Every death from exposure could be prevented if the laws of Capitalism did not require them to self-sustain.

Mutual aid groups do everything they can to reduce suffering and death among houseless communities. The sharing of resources and DIY first aid is invaluable, but it cannot compare to the benefits of stable housing, professional medical care, unrestricted mental health resources, and regular access to nutritious foods and clean water. Artificial scarcity is alive in every part of our world and Capitalism could not survive without it. There are plenty of homes, plenty of medicine, such a surplus of food and water that nobody should live in poverty. It would be physically and logistically simple to expropriate and redistribute these resources if their squander did not represent the beating heart of Capitalism. It is necessary that people die preventable deaths to keep the system operational.

3. We Will Not Be Allowed To Save Ourselves

The laws of Capitalism ensure that the game is played as intended. The Capitalist's wealth should always accumulate and the poor should become increasingly desperate. Any other application of the law is an unintended loophole, or anachronicity left in to camouflage the system's purpose. Any activity that moves economic freedom away from the Capitalist and into the hands of the impoverished is swiftly illegalized and brutally repressed. Such as it is now it will continue during this rising period of displacement and resource scarcity. Stealing food or water, trespassing, defying zoning laws, defying curfew or practicing illegal medicine will attract harsher punishments as they become life-saving practices. We are living through the intersection of multiple attempted genocides, rendered obscure by a Capitalist media cycle and the distorted Amerikan world-view. These genocides are enacted because they are useful for the Capitalist and, as such, to resist them in any way will be rendered illegal. We are always at war with the police, the death machine's best guarantor of compliance. We can decide the circumstances of confrontation, or they will be decided for us at our lowest points.

We have already left the prologue to conflagration. Ideological war is alive in the streets and it claims its victims. Amerika has gone past where it can maintain the facade of unity. Fascist paramilitary groups multiply themselves out of sight. They choose to fight where they are many and they prey on the unaware. Their greatest strength so far is their cryptic alliance with the Capitalist, and the multiplication of force it allows them. On opposing street corners there are two militant groups, say twenty of each. Twenty of our people, twenty of theirs. Down the street between and around the corners there is a magnified police presence, forty or sixty officers controlling the area. Twenty of our people, eighty of theirs. Any one of those could fight or kill with impunity during the interaction. Our people will be lucky to leave to leave the place alive. Victory is almost out of the question unless it will be pyrrhic.

The alliance leads them to act with undue confidence. If the street were empty, if it were just the two sets of twenty, there would be a different story. It's easy to draw a crowd when there is already a crowd, especially one armed and equipped by the State. It's easy to face an enemy that you know will be outnumbered 4:1, whose hands are tied by disproportionate legal scrutiny. Our people have never once fought with these assurances. If the little war between our groups were allowed to find its natural conclusion, there would be no war to speak of. The question would have settled itself long before it became relevant to national politics. The solution was always trivial, and completely impossible to enact.

It is never a question of how to solve the problem. The only question is how to solve the problem without bringing the police to your door. We try to be clever, to outmaneuver their interference, but whenever they catch hold of our projects it is often the undoing of whatever progress was made. Every plague of the modern world can be traced to Capitalism's interference, with only a few degrees of separation to the more obscure. Capitalism is a system of force that insists itself into every corner of the world. It was never adopted by popular consent. A free world would have removed this malignant growth as soon as it was considered. Capitalism can only survive while it carries the endless promise of violence. Were this capacity revoked, the system would become instantaneously abolished.

4. The Death Machine Will Fail When Police Are Extinct

The destruction of the immune system will lead to the destruction of the body. So long as it is capable of defending itself, there will be no permanent victories, especially among the battles fought in the imperial core. Every community or network we build is intimately vulnerable so long as they are built within the reach of the Capitalist engine. So long as it lives, the death machine will strive to encompass all the physical world and will infect our every day. We cannot escape to a parallel experience while Capitalism remains ubiquitous and powerful. We can choose the time and place to fight or we will be hunted. Whatever resources we need to survive, it can be assumed that Capitalism will have already claimed ownership. We can choose to resist, or submit to defeat as inevitable. We can choose to ignore the question until it becomes unavoidable and thus seal our fate as reactionary combatants and to failure.

A landscape without police will instinctively reject Capitalism. Total abolition then is our primary goal, as it will naturally accomplish every other goal by cascade. After the end is decided then we determine our means. This is not a new project. It is, however, a confused project that has failed to learn from its practice. Years pass with the same questions, the same uncertain answers, and we do not adjust our technique. There are many excuses for this, many distractions and limiting factors. We have been exhausted and beleaguered during the seasons of riots, seasons of economic instability, and turbulence in our personal lives. It is easy to do what we have done before because that is how we learned. It is difficult to take apart our methods and consider how they do or do not function toward achieving our ends. Considering the world's current trajectory, it will never be easier than it is today to reassess our strategy.

The logic is simple. If we know the point we want to reach, that is most of the work done. Next we consider the results of our actions past. Which of our tactics moved us toward that end? Which resulted in a holding pattern, a waste of energy to accomplish nothing, or worse, resulted in a "loss of ground" to the enemy? This can and should be applied to every decision we make, theoretically in advance and retrospectively. Every failure is opportunity to learn, but a failure not interrogated is an opportunity to make the same mistake again and again.

5. A Protest Is An Act Of Surrender

There is no tactic more heavily associated with liberation struggle than the protest. The mass gathering, the rally, the riot, the demonstration. There is no tactic more misguided. We have always played these roles as long as we have been engaged with the fight for liberation and the return is always negligible, even negative. Something terrible happens in Amerika, something terrible within the scope of its imperial territories, and our response is something scripted. A flier goes out with time and place, we get into costume and march. Some nights draw police attention, others we yell at civilians or into the empty air. Occasionally it evolves into something else entirely, the spectacle of riot that is so alluring.

The protest is a regressive tactic, a willful destruction of resources and energy that conflates progress with catharsis. At its most practical, the protest is a dramatic propaganda without direction. Constantly attempting to swell its own ranks so that it might return tomorrow to more efficiently swell its ranks. We know that political fervor without a tangible outlet will always be captured by electoralism, or else dissipate. The effective tools of protest are in advertisement and the crowd's implicit capacity for violence. We proselytize bystanders and threaten our enemies into silence. We know that the State will never agree to disarm itself, therefore any play with electoralism becomes net loss. In its best light, the protest is when we meet together to ask the Amerikan empire to commit suicide. There are other ingredients and effects to the experience of protest we can consider, but the core of the act is a fallacy. The ongoing decision to protest is a confession that we just don't know what else to do.

6. The Five Bystanders

The bystander is a recipient to the tactic of protest. They can be sorted into five crude varieties according to their relationship with liberation struggle and the character of their interaction with the protest.

First are the indifferent, who we pass in the street with little engagement. The apathetic liberal or the uninterested who may pretend at sympathy when confronted but will never follow through of their own accord. They do not believe that the struggle for liberation is relevant to their daily lives, or they continue with a deferential faith in the electoral system. There is no amount of encouragement that will bring them to choose the discomfort of revolt. Attempts to sway them will be inconsistent, frustrating and wasteful. This subset should be disregarded, walked past without acknowledgment as we approach our goal.

The complication of the first type is how they can seem indistinguishable in behavior from the second: the sympathetic bystander. Those who have already become or are in the process of being radicalized. Among the most legitimate arguments for protest is how it can provide these fledgling insurgents a venue to find community and test their capacities. It comes against the same faltering point as the other reason, that political disturbances without concrete goal or mechanism can only become indirect fuel toward electoralism. If we do not use our resources wisely, it does not matter how many or how few of us there are. Alternatively, I believe that an effective insurgency campaign with careful attention paid to limited communique would vastly outpace the protest as a meaningful tool for recruitment.

The third bystander is, circuitously, the self. The sense of importance and empowerment, the sense of community to be found provide the consistent reasons to return night after night. You break the window for the imagined ripple effect against your enemies, for the catharsis it can give, and also to demonstrate to yourself that it is something you are capable of. We find our community and share ideas around. Occasionally our actions obtain more or less radical coverage and those feelings of community and empowerment are broadcast to comrades who could not attend the event. The protest is a balm for the disenfranchised heart. It is also a place to discover and decide what you are capable of. All of these are necessary to our emotional survival and explain well why the protest continues as a primary tactic when its application has been so inconsistent and costly. It is completely necessary that we meet these needs somehow, but none of them are a means toward our total goal. It is not possible to repeat and build these into any meaningful progress. The protest has some limited value as a venue for these particular ends, but at the same time it carries unlimited opportunities to forget our purpose against myopic habits and catharsis.

The antagonistic bystander is another: police, politicians, aggravated liberals or civilian fascists, or any kind of unsympathetic news coverage. Our demands from these types are relatively consistent, though the method and its effectiveness will vary by encounter. Whatever these groups or individuals do is in service of empire and domination. Their way of life that feels threatened is a product of the Amerikan death machine. Our success fundamentally requires that they lose access to what makes them feel so comfortable. We are enemies, and the interaction will reflect this. It will simplify to either a physical/verbal conflict, a retreat by either party, or, least likely, a genuine change of heart. The last is so rare it is no a function worth planning around. A retreat from conflict has unpredictable results: it can embolden the aggressor or build resentment in the opponent. Neither of these are likely to change the beliefs of either party or constitute a step toward our goals. The same can be said of a conflict which escalates. A fight can make you feel strong, especially if you win, but we are not going to physically attack every fascist or bigot in the country. We don't have the resources to accomplish that on a meaningful scale, and the method is doubly unrealistic when police are like to intervene and punish the attempt. Street fighting can have some useful effects on the individual level, but as a tactic it is only another propaganda to say that we are strong. It is only catharsis, and catharsis is just illusion. We don't need more propaganda. We need a winning strategy.

The last and least significant bystander is the Capitalist. Least significant because we are least able to catch their attention or effect a change in their perspective. The broken window does not matter to the corporation when it can be used as a propaganda back against us and then repaired at little cost. We break the window to show our community that it is possible to strike back, but we seem hesitant to acknowledge that the broken window itself is not an act of resistance. The building of a movement is not inherently meaningful if there is never a meaningful application of its energy. Several times over we have built a mass base, and several times over it has simply dissipated. We know that electoralism is a stalling tactic, but still we seem unprepared to explore the alternatives.

7. The Hunt For Catharsis Blinds Us

Under the right conditions a protest will transform into a riot. Where marching and shouting behave as propaganda, the riot is an expression of pure catharsis. For a short time, a few moments even, we invest our energy together to dissolve the State from this particular place and experience. We defy the police, defy property and time to create a few seconds of positive freedom. We don't like to talk about it but there is a common, implicit belief that this microbe of freedom can be induced to spread and consume the structure of empire from within. There is no amount of property damage that will destroy or even erode Capitalism.

Whether riot is understood as an end to itself, or misunderstood as a method toward lasting freedom, its truest nature remains the expression of repressed anguish. Our lives do not allow us to strike against empire in their day to day, so these unfocused eruptions allow us to survive a little longer in our shackles. Having tasted freedom once we become addicted and return to the riot wherever it appears. It gives us something to look forward to, and briefly produces the illusion of escape.

When we feel as if we have accomplished something and in actuality we have accomplished nothing at the expense of considerable resources, that is the death of our potential. The microbe of freedom, the riot, is always dissipated. The autonomous zone in Amerika is always reconquered. The flames are put out and the damage is repaired. It doesn't matter how long it takes for these processes to occur. Empire is not an animal that dies from its wounds, it only grows around them. Conversely, whoever draws blood from the beast will be repaid. The riot is an attack against the public peace, and the State cannot forgive any public transgressions. There is no amount of property destruction that provides a favorable exchange against months or years imprisoned. In these terms it is not possible to hurt the state worse than it can respond.

Other nights it may occur that everyone escapes from the riot anonymous. If your bloc is good, and your friends are smart, then everyone gets to go to work the next day. It becomes routine: where your days prepare you for the night, and your nights are invested with revolt. An advertisement for revolt. Maybe no one gets arrested because you stay lucky, but you are wearing down faster than you can ever damage the state. A window broken is always just a window, like a building destroyed is only one building among the multitude. Their attack can be understood as a gesture symbolic of the rejection of Capitalism, but there is no real value to be found in symbolic resistance.

We must create a kind of damage that will continue. A wound that will multiply itself after it has been inflicted. When we restrict ourselves to public resistance, we are contained by the limitations of that form. The riot is reminiscent of combat. We tell ourselves this as we are beaten and chased, as the chemicals and fire surround us. When we push against the line of cops we imagine that we can overwhelm them. The sour reality is that we wouldn't know what to do after their ranks broke. The police are not a phantom conjured by order. They cannot vanish. Whenever we get the upper hand it is like we become children again. A multiple murderer in uniform gets his comeuppance by humiliation. A kick or a shove or something thrown. Nobody would think to do more, not with the cameras or the dozens of police nearby. Is this why we have suffered so much injury to fight? To respond with just a shadow of the violence brought against us?

The combat of a riot is pantomime. We pretend that we want to win. It's more exciting that way because the consequences are less than if we actually did the math. We know that we can't vote the police away. We know that our resources are incomparably meager. They will always outlast our commitment, if only because the State's benefaction allows them to weather any attrition. Our future becomes exceedingly bleak without drastic change, and change will remain impossible while the State has power to prevent it. We know all of this, have long known and been unwilling to put the pieces together. If we decide that we do want to win, actually, then the option has made itself obvious. Our peaceful solutions have long exhausted themselves, and our time is running out.

8. Police Will Become Extinct When We Kill Them

We are solving this problem from both ends, working backward and forward from the information we know is certain. We know our history as best we can and we are familiar with the complexities of our current situation. We can close our eyes to imagine a best potential future and it becomes obvious which is the last step we will need to take before that is possible. The death machine of Amerikan Capital will never relinquish control unless it is killed. It cannot be killed peacefully. We know that blood will be shed and, roughly, we know the form that this will take. The Amerikan military is larger and better equipped than any other military force there has ever been. The same can be said of its police force. Our only viable option is the guerrilla approach, adapted to our cities and circumstances. We are several steps back from this still, but it provides a framework to the work that lies in front of us.

It becomes important to clarify my purpose. This is not a revolutionary plan, though it does resemble one. Call it convergent evolution. It is not much of an exaggeration to call this the end of the world. We will not be saved. We also will not be forgotten. Capitalism prefers control to the survival of anything. As this world is driven into the abyss, it becomes a painfully optimistic vision to think we can find reprieve outside the realm of empire. Civilization will retreat as the world becomes completely unlivable and not before. The failing zones at the edge of empire will be more heavily policed than those in the core. Zones of discontent have always attracted greater repression. This will not be different as we enter the time of collapse.

There will be no revolutionary future because there is no future left to take control of. My only aim is to sew self-determination in the age of collapse. If the methods I advocate for were carried to their full effect, the Amerikan government would probably still exist in some form. My ideal version of events puts the empire in a defensive state, struggling to control its territories against secession and wilderness. If the empire is sufficiently weakened it may allow us to discover and fortify some liminal spaces to survive as well as we can manage.

A destabilization of the imperial core would have a profound cascade effect upon the global political story. Many of the world's authoritarian states are propped up by Amerikan interventionism, whose disappearance or sudden reduction would drastically change the odds of future international insurgencies. This country is already straining at its seams. My optimistic guess is that we won't have to contend much with the Amerikan military, at least not primarily, because any real conflict between the military and a civilian group is likely to ignite the country's vast network of tensions. If it comes to that I don't think it will be long before we see mass desertion and infighting, as well as a secession attempt that leads to the sort of Balkanization that works in our favor. This current state of affairs is being held in place by a single hand which, if removed, would create a chaotic ripple effect with unpredictable results. We know that chaos at any scale will benefit our project at the same time it deteriorates our enemy's capacity to function.

We can only survive well if we are able to contend with our problems without Capitalist interference. We can only be left alone to our survival if Amerika becomes too incapacitated to pursue us past its fractured territory. The destruction of empire is a necessary component to basic subsistence among the failure of our planet's ecosystems. This can only be accomplished via destruction of the police, or destruction of the capacity of police to enforce the laws of Capital. There is no way to accomplish either of these without killing a significant percentage of the police officers who currently exist.

9. Start Small, Reconsider Everything

We must be everywhere, doing everything. We must be unpredictable, invisible, unstoppable, powerful and prolific. We aim to accomplish something that is popularly considered impossible, that has never been done before on this scale. Police are everywhere so there should be many of us. There should become uncountably many instances of our tactic, endlessly adapted to particular circumstances. We must be perfect or we will be killed forever. This is not a reasonable stance. It is not reasonable to hope to survive when you were born and live in the thralls of the omnicidal project. It is not reasonable to want to live well.

We should eventually be many, but we must always be and must always have been rigorous in the application of our technique. The capture or destruction of one determined combatant will always be devastating when our enemy is so vast and repairable. It takes a few years to become a cop, but it takes a lifetime to develop an insurrectionary capable of attacking the empire.

To begin, we should imagine success. We start with the conclusion and then work our way backward. A world with capacity for self-determination requires the absence of police. The absence of police requires their mass destabilization, which can only be achieved via war. Guerrilla warfare is the only technique available to a civilian populace attacking its government. A mass guerrilla insurgency cannot be created instantaneously, it is an organism that develops as it is fed and inspired. There is plenty of literature and knowledge regarding the operation of guerrilla tactics. What remains is the instigation to accept them. What seems impossible can be proven otherwise by its accomplishment, and it becomes in time a trivial part of the lives that we live. There are things we do today that once we could never imagine ourselves capable of. This can happen many times again, and the impossible becomes commonplace.

Imagine to yourself the sort of project that could successfully destabilize the empire. We have so many examples to draw from. Imagine the tools at their disposal and the techniques by which they create success. To begin, we should create the smallest possible version of that successful insurgency, a prototype to represent all future endeavors in the microcosm. Every skill or method that will be necessary we should shrink into an innocuous prototype and practice until it is completely perfect. This version of our activity will form a DNA that, once established, can be expanded, multiplied, and adapted against the fractalized battlefields in our upcoming conflict. When it happens that we understand the tools we use so completely that they are a part of us, then we will add a single layer of magnification to every aspect of this prototype. The propaganda element, the training, the sabotage, the live practice, the reflection, all of it will become slightly more. Again we practice with these tools until their application is consistent and effective. The most powerful tool available to us is the control of time. It will become war long before our enemy recognizes it as such, and we can decide how many of their capacities to erase before, or concurrently with, the submitting of that declaration. We can never move backward once it is begun. We can never allow ourselves to have mistakes. Whenever are imperfect we must study ourselves and the circumstance until it will never be repeated. Our enemy must never become comfortable, or we have lost already.

10. Twenty Twenty

The failure of our recent uprising has been analyzed and discussed incessantly since it receded from the public imagination. It has become my opinion that the organic transformation from protest and riots to attempted insurgency was always a doomed prospect. The most vital aspects for a guerrilla effort are its beginning and the one of its escalation. In fighting against the police we hoped to accumulate a destabilizing effect that would spread through the empire. Half of the failure is how our momentum was subsumed into electoralism, local and far, and the other is how we were not prepared to follow through with our convictions.

The most spectacular escalation of our campaign occurred with the burning of Minneapolis's third precinct. This event, which occurred right at the beginning of the uprising, was already a component of its impending failure. It marked the limit to our imagination. The fight escalated so quickly before we could decide our intentions and, once we had an understanding of the revolutionary potential, we were too exhausted and confused to escalate any further. It didn't take long for the police to recognize which lines we could not cross. We became predictable, manageable. As our threats of escalation lost credibility, the momentum left our movement and it wasted away.

This is what we should learn from that year. When we allow the circumstances to dictate our tactics, it destroys all capacity for agency and surprise. There is a strict place where the riot becomes insurrection, and it cannot be overcome without total confidence. There was a point at which we failed to abandon the protest form and it ruined us. We have to trust each other completely if we are going to kill, and it is not possible to form that trust suddenly in the midst of the ongoing riot. We cannot be strangers to each other. We cannot hesitate. We cannot be guided to making this or any decision. If our tactics repeat, or ever reduce in their scale, that is retreat. We invite our enemy to hunt and corral us, and we are playing to their greatest strengths. If we are going to fight we must be prepared to follow it through until the end. That must be decided from the beginning. If we are going to fight, we should fight to win. Otherwise, we shouldn't even bother.

11. Microcosm

We know where we need to carry this. We know the abstract of how to get started. What remains is to fill out the blank spaces as best as can be done theoretically, and then to simply begin the work. I can recommend my thoughts and observations, but the reality of guerrilla practice will be completely informed by your environment at hand. You take your first step through a book or a few books, then you practice the techniques as best you can in a controlled environment, and the rest you will have to learn as you interact with the world and discover its many permeable boundaries.

There are some simple components to begin with. The animal of a guerrilla insurgency is composed from a vast entanglement of autonomous cells. In order for the macrocosm to function, its many aspects must be distilled across the private competency of its uncountable microcosms. A guerrilla unit will generally consist of four or five individuals working independently from any network, but will remain capable of identifying and collaborating with other units when it will benefit the struggle.

To begin, you should assemble a unit to attempt your projects with. It should only be as many people as can fit in one car, as can begin to fully trust and know each other in time. Fewer is more stable, but also incapable of attempting the more complicated projects that will develop as you gain experience. It is up to you and your circumstances to know how many or how few are right to work with. It is completely vital that you are careful as you approach potential collaborators, as careful as if you were pulling a trigger every time you discuss the project. An incautious beginning could damn it all before you find opportunity to become truly dangerous.

12. Research And Iteration

Assuming your unit is compiled now, it is time for comprehensive research and conversation. Every word I can say on the practical operation of a guerrilla unit will be plagiarized from sources who are infinitely more qualified to speak on these matters. You have to learn and internalize as much as you can safely access before moving on, and discuss ideas and the whole potential operations with your group. It is vital that you are thorough, and at the same time it will be tempting to linger here indefinitely before moving on to the work that requires your hands. Read between yourselves each a few relevant books, study and discuss them while you are discussing the many other decisions that will remain. Your research must continue as the project develops, and will become more dynamic in the midst of its realistic application and adjustment to particular circumstances.

I can make my suggestions, but it will be your responsibility to predict the course of your struggle. Guerrilla work is improvisation, and it is an alliance built with you environment. You should exhaustively discuss this with your collaborators, list all the skills and ideas that might be useful along your journey and begin to practice them covertly.

Some concepts will be invaluable to every group: camping, shooting, situational awareness, unarmed combat, analog land navigation, the construction and use of improvised weaponry, learning to move through your environment without detection, the basics of sabotage, military first aid, and a discussion of the value of propaganda. It is especially important to overlap these practices together as that will help you to perform them under pressure. There are many, many other skills that you should familiarize yourself with. The study of tactical manuals from our predecessors and our enemy will reveal them to you, and further research will uncover the tools you can use to sharpen your competency with them.

You should complete your studies as efficiently as possible, then begin to practice. Practice everything as well as you can without drawing any attention to yourself. To the best extent you can manage, it will be helpful to keep your activities legal or insubstantial during the first and second stages of your development.

You can prepare yourself to destroy a building with fire by learning the more basic techniques of attacking or exploring a property. Study urban exploration, interact with vacant buildings, climb onto roofs, disable the alarms or cameras without actually attacking the building, disable the utilities, break a window and damage the inside of a building, or attack a vehicle if this is an easier prospect. Practice everything you can to familiarize yourself with the methods and to desensitize yourself.

As much as it is necessary to develop your skills, it is more important that you become familiar with your group. Learn about your strengths and weaknesses, your personalities and hopes and desires. There is nothing so demanding as going to war against the entire world, and these are the people that you will be with for the duration of that. These are your family.

At the same time as you practice, you should begin to carve the trajectory of your struggle. Attack often, and escalate. If every week you climb on top of a building then go home, you have only learned how to climb buildings. Learn to be familiar with the discomfort of the unknown. Learn to improvise and analyze from within that discomfort. Once it is begun you will never be safe, so you must learn to act with confidence while your future is always uncertain. Consider every decision. Study yourself and your environment, all of your allies and your enemies. A successful technique may never be practical again, and you should understand the value of your tools well enough to avoid succumbing to habit. Take advantage of everything that you can, everything you know and everything your enemy knows.

13. Exploit and Manufacture Distraction Events

A practical tactic to begin with is the re-appropriation of the protest. There is no polemic I can write that will erase the protest from our cultural imagination. Even five participants less it will continue the same, and draw the same attention from news and police it would otherwise. There will come riots to rival our history, and though they will likely follow the same useless pattern that our uprising did, the State will not ignore them. The media and civilians will take such notice that it provides opportunity.

The Panopticon can only function if you don't know where your jailer's attention is focused. It is possible with some effort to learn the habits of your local police department. Which neighborhoods are heavily surveilled? Which neighborhoods are most remote from a request for backup? An officer patrolling a remote suburb, far from the center of disturbance, is an exceptionally soft target for ambush.

A useful supplementary approach can be to compile a list of targets and practiced techniques and save these for a time when the police are suddenly, temporarily distracted. If you have already done your scouting and decided the plan in advance, this can allow you to execute complex attack with short notice and the flexibility afforded by wealth of options. An otherwise well defended objective may become unsupervised, or else neglected in the panic to secure another district of the city.

You can create these situations. There are emergency calls that are not an emergency, that will not draw much concerted response, and these can be taken advantage of to isolate your target. Which retail stores have alarm systems that will summon the police? Which neighborhoods are likely to call 911 about someone loitering or for minor property damage? Something innocuous that can be fabricated as a lure. Even a disconnected cell phone can dial for emergency services.

There are very many ways to outmaneuver a bureaucracy like this enemy. You should learn their rules. Read their handbook. Watch how they react and set traps in their path. Police are not very smart and they are not very brave. There are only very many of them and their funding and perceived invulnerability allow them to make mistakes often and without consequence. If we only invent some consequences for their ineptitude, the police might take an active role in their own elimination.

14. Twenty Twenty Four, An Aside

Of course we reject electoralism, but this shadow theater remains the central focus of Amerikan political culture. A culture that becomes more strained and erratic all the time. Considering the unimpressive performance of our current president, 2024 is likely to see him replaced by one or another of the fascist pedagogues vying for control. Whatever the result of this election, it is sure to represent a new zenith for national volatility. If we truly intend to eradicate the Amerikan empire, this seems like a perfect season for multiplication of our potential. If we utilize it well, this opportunity is a three to six months wherein our every act will cast a longer shadow, and it may become possible to redirect the strength of the empire against itself. This is a chemical reaction that is already happening, we only need to harness the energy created and find where it will carry us.

If we plan to attack in the shadow of the election, it is imperative that we create the foundations for this capacity today. Time is already short and diminishing.

15. A Legitimate Propaganda

As it stands today some massive percentage of our activity is dedicated to self-advertisement. Our banners and graffiti, our mythologies about past conflict. At protest we gather together and announce the principles of our philosophy, but we do very little in physical service of those beliefs. How many times do we actually hunt and attack nazis compared to the breath we spend to fruitlessly advocating that? The statement of intent, without tangible demonstration, becomes unimpressive over time.

Imagine the dichotomy reversed. If we hardly ever announced our intentions, but always accomplished ten times more than we advertised. Instead of protesting Chase Bank for whatever offense was documented this week, simply burn it to the ground. Find an untraceable channel to communicate why this happened and, very loosely, who did it and how. Advertise the effectiveness of your technique by live demonstration, and then advertise the means to follow suit.

I do not mean that you should incriminate yourself, but that the echoes of the attack can carry a small piece of information very far. If you are incredibly careful it is possible to send out a very particular message to everyone who is sympathetic to its content, and also to keep your fingerprints off the transmission. We must always be careful, and always on the offensive. Once it is begun in earnest our enemy should become completely surrounded and under siege before he understands what has happened.

It is important to pick apart the tangible effects of your every tactical decision. You can turn any success into propaganda, but most propaganda you cannot turn into success. An action is only valuable if it draws us closer to our ends. There is no such thing as a symbolic victory. We have either reduced our enemies ability to fight, or increased our capacity, or we have wasted both our time and effort. The State has an unlimited capacity to outlast us if we decide to be patient. Our units will constantly expend their resources that are difficult to replace, while the State is in possession of all the industries of Amerika. If we are not constantly fighting and winning, then we are constantly approaching defeat.

Propaganda cannot be dispensed with entirely, because it is not possible for a unit of five to destroy the Amerikan system of police. There must be a recruiting effort, a multiplication of the fronts in this war. We should maintain a cautious relationship with the aboveground communities because they will sometimes be able to provide us with resources, or act in concert toward some multidimensional projects.

The nature of the resource disparity between our units and the police department means that we cannot afford to be inefficient. The most efficient method by far to recruit allies is to demonstrate commitment, and to demonstrate the total effectiveness of your technique. Demonstrate that you win more often than you lose, disseminate guides on how to imitate your insurgency, and you will find yourself becoming many.

16. Symbolic Resistance

This has been written out of a liminal space. There is a subtext to every conversation lately that our methods have become hopelessly obsolete. We're losing confidence because we have been treading water. We've tied our hands to innovation because we're afraid of what we might invent. We know that we are becoming reactionary.

When I first read Che Guevara, years ago, it felt so simple. I couldn't understand why we were forming rank and fighting with our fists against an overwhelming military force when this tactic and solution had already been charted improved across decades. I thought it was too simple, there must've been something that I didn't understand. I have been trying to find that missing piece since and without success.

That fruitless search brought me to my current understanding. There is a vast cognitive dissonance among everyone who lives invested in this struggle. We want to fight, especially as the world is closing in on us, but we are afraid to learn what winning might entail. We are afraid of what it might require of us. Whether we know it or not, many of us have decided that it is better living half a life inside the domain of Capital than to actually seek freedom. For our pride and our sense of self, we can't help but resist. To push back in small, manageable ways that let of steam but can never truly change our circumstances.

There are comrades in prison for ten years, twenty years or life. We have been killed for comparatively innocuous crimes: trespassing, arson, assault of an officer, etc. Crimes that did not advance our cause by an inch have led to so many senseless deaths among our community. The police use violence to keep us contained. They use it randomly and without justification so that we are always afraid. There is a disconnect between the severity of our offenses and the repression they draw. It's obvious to anyone you talk to, but we never seem to analyze the purpose. So many of us continue to believe that we can avoid the worst of our government's violence by remaining underground, by performative citizenship in public. These are contradictory beliefs.

We like to mock the leftists who spend all their time arguing online. We say that we are out in the streets, doing the real work while they argue themselves in circles. How can we consider ourselves so legitimate when our actions are so often the same useless posturing. Direct Action that accomplishes nothing, is nothing. A slogan painted on a wall is no more effective than one posted on Twitter. You want to feel like you are fighting, more than you actually want to fight.

Every living insurrectionary should be an open front behind enemy lines. The war should be happening in every room, in every breath that our enemy takes. We should haunt them in their dreams and be as ungraspable as the specter of those nightmares.

It gets more simple when you decide that you are in a war. You think of your enemy as the army that they are, as they think of themselves. What does an army require to maintain itself and fight? It is not difficult to find these answers and they are an easy guide to follow. Of course they need the soldiers more than anything, but also they require lines of communication, means of transportation, weapons, uniforms, pay, housing, etc. For less than twenty dollars you can build a hundred caltrops. Where do they get the tires for their vehicles? Where do they keep their gasoline? Who delivers their equipment, and which day and time do those deliveries come through? There are a thousand little openings where you can bleed the enemy weak. The police would never admit this, but they can't be everywhere at once. Sometimes they are asleep, sometimes they are unaware. Do you know how many police are employed in your city?

This is not a reason to underestimate their capacity for violence, but we do already know a great deal about the psychology of the average police officer. He is deeply afraid in the course of his work, deeply paranoid. He talks a big game but he would never willingly risk his life, not without overwhelming fire-support from his fellow officers. He is an animal that only feels confident among his fellows, otherwise he becomes an opportunist and a scavenger. Can you imagine the effect on his morale when the first officer is ambushed in the dark? When another is found dead on patrol, his squad car burned and his gun stolen? They're so confident that they're invulnerable, it won't take much to destroy that illusion. And then what becomes of the little man, employed to patrol a city that truly, truly hates him?

Conclusion / Sign Off

Genocide has come to our doorstep now so many times over. It is difficult to keep track of the clothes that it wears. Against the cultural suppression from the Amerikan zeitgeist, it feels like resistance to merely acknowledge these genocides as such. It is not.

My friends and family prepare themselves to fight. They become ready in their cities. The war is approaching us from several directions so it is difficult to keep track of our present. Many fail to consider the impossibility of creating a fortified position inside of an enemy stronghold. We have only placed ourselves doubly under siege.

There is no passive means to escape from this predicament. We have allowed ourselves to become reactionary and, if we do not correct this trend, we will die. One by one, slowly, then all at once. It doesn't so much matter how this happened. The past is gone, but our future is still being written.

I have no intention to wait in line for my own extermination. That life is not worth living. I'm sick of acknowledging all that is wrong with the world and pretending that we cannot intervene. I don't want to pretend myself another bystander when the war is already here, was here before I was born, so thoroughly that I don't know anything else.

It is already war, and we can only decide now whether to be civilian casualties or active combatants. There is no defense of our lives that will not be labeled as extremist agitation. There is no chance for us to come out of this as saints, unless that we are killed for our innocence.

I hope that this writing will find its receptive audience. I hope that these convictions will not die as mere words like so many before them. I hope that we are able to live, and to someday live well.

Stay Safe,

And Stay Dangerous,

And Stay Dangerous.

end

#anarcho nihilism #anarchism #nihilism #leftism #insurrectionary anarchism #anarchist theory #acab #antifascist #guerrilla warfare #election #protest #abolition #anti capitalism

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