Peninsula Anarchist Collective

New Website URL: deathbybungabunga.com/pac

2006-04-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

Comrades,

Found out or peninsulaanarchist.org site is way out of date? Check out our (indefinitely) temporary website:

deathbybungabunga.com/pac

Downloadable pamphlets and audio of our events should be up in the near future. To receive updates about upcoming events and actions, email us at: penanarchist@riseup.net .

Solidarity,
Peninsula Anarchist Collective.

Ward Churchill Speaks on Developing a Strategy to Win

2006-02-26T10:10:00.000-08:00

Ward Churchill Anti-Imperialist, American Indian & Author on:

Developing a Strategy to Win

Sunday March 19 6:30pm
San Jose Unitarian Universalist Church
160 N. 3rd St. San Jose, CA

"The nature of the criminality in which the U.S. engages... translates into piles and piles and piles of rotting, stinking corpses all over the planet... and perpetually."

Labeled "controversial" by politicians and pundits alike, Ward Churchill's scholarship endures the test of time. Rational, angry, yet ultimately hopeful, his is a leading voice against the ongoing genocide perpetrated on Native American peoples and the international crimes of the US government. Intellectually cogent while remaining accessible to the general reader, Churchill will challenge you to think, and the act, in the fight for justice waged since Predator came in 1492.

Sponsored by: Peninsula Anarchist Collective, MEChA, Muslim Student Movement, Justice for Palestinians and AK Press

Contact: penanarchist@riseup.net

Ward Churchill: Indigenism, Anarchism, and the State

2005-11-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

Indigenism, Anarchism, and the State:

An Interview with Ward Churchill

April, 2005

Ward Churchill is one of the most outspoken activists and scholars in North America and a leading commentator on indigenous issues. Churchill's many books include Marxism and Native Americans, Fantasies of the Master Race, Struggle for the Land, The COINTELPRO Papers, Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization, Pacifism as Pathology, and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas. In his lectures and published works, Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, racism, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, environmental destruction of Indian lands, government repression of political movements, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo.

Churchill has recently come under attack for views expressed in the article Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. An important part of the future of US academic freedom in the coming years will likely be determined by the outcome of the ongoing attempts to strip Ward Churchill of his academic position at Colorado University in Boulder. Two members of Autonomy & Solidarity sat down with Ward Churchill in Toronto in November of 2003 to do this interview. It was transcribed by Clarissa Lassaline and edited by Tom Keefer, Dave Mitchell, and Valerie Zink.

Upping The Anti: We want to start off by asking you about your thoughts on the anti-globalization movement which, in terms of anti-capitalist struggles, has been one of the most significant developments in the past decade. This movement has also been criticized in the US context, as being largely made up of white middle class kids running around "summit hopping". What's your take?

Ward Churchill: I think the anti-globalization movement, for lack of a better term, is a very positive development in the sense that it re-infuses the opposition with a sense of purpose, enthusiasm, and vibrancy. The downside is that it’s a counter-analytical movement in that it thinks it’s something new. We used to call it “anti-imperialism,” just straight up. The idea that “globalization” is something new, rather than a continuation of dynamics that are at least 500 years deep, is misleading. That needs to be understood.

UTA: In your book Struggle For The Land, there’s an essay called “I Am Indigenous.” Can you elaborate a bit on the politics and genealogy of indigenism?

WC: Perhaps I can by way of your introduction of yourselves. You know, you say you're post-Leninists. Fine. But why are you something that goes beyond Leninism, rather than something that isn’t?

UTA: It’s a reflection of the roots of where our political grouping came from.

WC: But you top that off by describing yourselves as revolutionaries, and I’m saying “why?” Do you aspire to overthrow the presiding order in the Canadian state so that you can reorganize the state in a more constructive fashion? Then you’re a revolutionary. Do you want to see the Canadian state here when you’re done in some form or another? If not, then you’re a devolutionary and you might want to call it by its right name.

UTA: So would you say that no anarchists could call themselves revolutionaries?

WC: If they do, they’re deluding themselves. They’re not understanding themselves or the tradition that they’re espousing in proper terms because, for starters, anarchists are explicitly anti-statist. And the object of a revolution is to change the regime of power in a given state structure. So I think “revolutionary” is a misnomer.

UTA: One of the issues with devolution is that, at least potentially, it represents an attempt to go back to some kind of ideal way the world once was. But we can’t just roll back the clock of history.

WC: No, of course not. But again we’re into this implicitly Marxist progression, and anarchists aren’t especially progressive. In fact, you get a physical fight from some of them for using that term, because they consider it an insult. And I think properly so. There’s no immutable law of history. The structures, however, aren’t immutable either, and they can be devolved.

One conflation of terms that really bothers me a lot, which seems to be plaguing the discourse still, is the conflation of the term “nation” and the term “state.” You have this entity out there called “the United Nations.” It really should have been called “the United States,” because to be eligible even for admission to the Assembly you have to be organized in that centralized, arbitrary structure. No “nations” as such are even eligible for admission to the United Nations. “The United States” was a name already taken, however, and this was very useful in obfuscating the reality.

But the upshot of that is that you’ve got a whole lot of anarchists running around thinking they’re anti-nationalist, that nationality, nationalism in all forms, is necessarily some sort of an evil to be combated, when that’s exactly what they’re trying to create. You’ve got four or five thousand nations on the planet; you’ve got two hundred states. They’re using “anti-nationalist” as a code word for being anti-statist. With indigenous peoples, nationality is an affirmative ideal, and it hasn’t got any similarity at all to state structures.

You may have nations that are also states, but you’ve got most nations rejecting statism. So you can make an argument, as I have, that the assertion of sovereignty on the part of indigenous nations is an explicitly anti-statist ideal, and the basis of commonality with people who define themselves as anarchists. We’ve got to deal with our own bases of confusion in order to be able to interact with one another in a respectful and constructive way.

UTA: Are there correlations between your indigenous perspective and anarchism? Many people might make the argument that, in fact, indigenism is an ancestor to anarchism, and not vice versa.

WC: Well, that is precisely my argument. The two are not interchangeable, point for point, but they have far more in common than they have dividing them, if each is properly understood. And part of the task here is to make them properly understood. If you look at green anarchy, for better or worse, you’re going to find all kinds of references to commonalities with indigenous peoples on every basis, from social organisation to environmental perspective. It will take some time, but you can make that conceptual bridge between indigenism and anarchism, and it’s understood.

I would see the main distinction, on this continent, as being a detachment from base. Indigenous peoples are grounded, quite literally. There’s a relationship to the land that has evolved over thousands of years, and that’s completely denied to the people from the settler culture who self-describe as anarchists. With that distinction made, however, we’ve got all kinds of principles in common, aspirations in common, perspectives in common, and we need to build upon those in order to develop a respectful set of relations that allow us to act in unity against that common oppressor that we share.

UTA: After the Seattle actions, you were part of the debate around the whole question of “diversity of tactics.” Do you see the Black Bloc as being an interesting or relevant political phenomenon?

WC: It’s not that I think that breaking the windows of Starbucks is somehow going to bring the system crashing to its knees, or that they even had a conception of what they were actually up against. Clinton deployed Delta Force for that one in case things really did start to get serious. I mean that’s as serious as it gets in terms of repressive capacity in the United States. These are the surgical assassination units, and they were deployed in Seattle.

But if you’re going to go up against that, or if you’re actually going to do serious damage to the structure of things, it isn’t going to happen in some sort of a frontal confrontation with whatever deployment of force the state makes. So it is symbolic, in the sense that it’s educational and kind of empowering. But if you’re going to engage with that force, you’re not going to simply wake up one morning, take a pill along with your glass of water and go out prepared to do it. You have to build the consciousness, you have to build the psychology, you have to build the experiential base, and you have to build the theoretical base, and that happens step by step by step. Maybe the thing that happened in Seattle was a sort of, “let’s get out of the chat rooms and see if we can’t actually make a physical confrontation.” There hasn’t been anything significant along those lines for 25, 30 years in the US.

Now, on the level of street confrontation, what can we deduce from that experience? Well, maybe a first lesson would be: if you actually want to engage in street confrontations as part of a further building trajectory, you might want to ditch the uniforms and stop self-identifying as somebody the police want to neutralize immediately. Unmask yourself, put on a phony beard, or a clean shave. Mask yourself in another way. Just this level of tactical evolution, they’ve refused. And this is part of what leads some people to purport that the Black Bloc is more of a fashion statement than it is a serious political tendency. I’m not convinced of that, but people are clinging to their signs and symbols at a very basic level, in a way that precludes taking the action further. You get these cataclysmic statements of what is necessary, and yet they won’t even ditch the funny little signifier of their identity as a Black Bloccer.

UTA: Is there a correlation between the militant tactics and direct confrontation against the state proposed by the Black Bloc, and the ways in which the Weather Underground evolved from the Days of Rage in Chicago? Do you see a similar kind of progression? What are the lessons to be learned from how those movements failed in the 60s?

WC: The Weather Underground is another thing that I will completely defend. Of the spectrum of responses mounted by the white left at the time, Weather was the most valid response of all, which does not mean that it actually had a viable strategy. But the response pattern was entirely legitimate. But ultimately, they got boxed into symbolic actions, and that is explicitly the case now as well.

Brian Flanagan and Mark Rudd, who are in this new film about the Weathermen, are saying “you know, we made a conscious decision to do only property actions,” which was not the original impulse and not the original understanding. It was a sort of wounded response to having three people killed in the Greenwich townhouse explosion. Well, in human terms I understand that these were their friends and all that, but if you are actually serious about engaging in an armed struggle and plan on testing the capacity of the United States, you have to anticipate that you’re going to incur casualties. And three is hardly an insurmountable toll that’s been taken. So again, you had middle class kids who were posturing as something else, and legitimately wanted to be something else and tried to transcend their origins. But they couldn’t do it in and of themselves, and they didn’t really have an interactive relationship with other movements, organisations, or people coming from a different experiential background and temper. They were a sort of bourgeois response. So you’re saying you’re going to do one thing, but actually you’re unprepared to do it. I can understand that, but I don’t accept that as being a model.

I’m more encouraged by the fact that people are looking seriously at the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and such, despite the valid critique that there was a certain Stalinist content to the organization. And that raises the question of how exactly, without getting into a centralized, arbitrarily disciplined organization, you mount a clandestine struggle. That’s a serious question. How do you go about it? It’s not laissez-faire, it’s not everybody do your own thing. It can’t be, or you’re dead. But the BLA and other such organizations were willing to sustain casualties in a serious way over a protracted period. And they were ultimately burnt out because they had no basis for recruiting additional members from some broader context or mass movement to replace the casualties, and that’s a lesson to be learned and addressed as well.

Weather presented a certain example, but not a model. From that example you can extrapolate the next model, say, the BLA or the Puerto Rican Independence movement. You can analyze and understand where it was that they went wrong, address those issues, and build a more viable model now. But you can’t do that based on knee-jerk reactions and notions of personal purity, which is my critique of pacifism. You’re probably familiar with that critique, and the people who will be reading this are probably reasonably familiar with it as well.

But pacifism is not the only dimension that this would apply to, anarchists in general have this zealous notion of the purity of the political. They are dismissive of anybody who defines themselves as being part of a national liberation movement, without examining that movement in any coherent way. When someone sits down and talks with them about it, well then their objections evaporate. But they won’t abandon the purity of whatever the particular posture is that they’re occupying long enough to become effective.

That’s the problem with the refusal to abandon the mask and the black T-shirts in a certain context too. The Black Bloc is more interested in the affirmation of identity than they are in actually accomplishing their goals and objectives. These are transient things, I would hope. I don’t see them as being a basis to dismiss or discard the impulse at all. I see the impulse as being primarily a positive impulse, and you need to take to its logical set of conclusions. The Black Bloc is the preoccupation of anarchism. Their willingness to physically engage the state at a certain level, as well as to engage in discussions that interrogate their own sets of precepts, are both encouraging signs.

UTA: It’s clear that the Canadian and US governments have expressed serious concerns about the anti-globalization movement and the radical wing within it. You’ve written extensively on the repression of radical movements in the 60s and 70s, and specifically about COINTELPRO. Can you talk about some of the key lessons that radicals today should keep in mind?

WC: You have to be a thinking movement. We can outthink these guys in certain respects. Part of that is never underestimating what it is that they’re capable of, and never underestimating our capacity to come up with a situational response to them. In what used to be called counter-intelligence, now it’s called counter-terrorism, you have guys who devote their entire careers to this. They have an aptitude, a flare for it. And by the time they retire they get really goddamn good at it. In a certain sense, their work is based on perceiving what in the immediacy of a situation might be best, based on their experience, to accomplish a desired result. You could say that it’s more intuitive than codified, and our response has to be the same. We have to develop bodies of expertise based on experience in dealing with these things, not just reading the books, and understand that we can’t come up with a formula or a recipe of what it is that will work. We have to use common sense and critical understandings of how counter-intelligence processes have worked in the past, and to the best of our ability, obtain information on what they have in place now.

I mentioned the Delta Force earlier. There’s actually a protocol that allows the President the discretion to suspend the Posse Comitas act and to utilize particular forces within the US military for the maintenance of civil order. They go to the very highest shelf, the “special” of the Special Forces. All the Delta Force does is train for and execute missions to take out strategic targets among oppositional groups, wherever they happen to be. They were in Seattle in case they were necessary to eliminate the leadership, as defined by the intelligence sources of the US, of the people who shut down the World Trade Conference. They’ve also been introduced to control prison riots. They were deployed at Waco, which ought to tell you something, and they were deployed at Ruby Ridge. This needs to be absorbed into our collective understanding of what we’re up against and to shape the nature of our response patterns accordingly.

I think that this takes care of the idea that we’re going to do this by candlelight vigils, moral arguments, petition drives and electoral politics: all of these can be useful in terms of organizing our own communities, but it’s going to have absolutely no effect on the structure of power. We’re going to have to go to bare knuckles and understand the mechanics of power, and how it ultimately maintains itself – obfuscation, mystification, and by keeping people confused and divided. If people don’t stay divided they’re going to ratchet it up to the next increment, which includes false incarcerations and all the rest of that. And ultimately you’re going to be dealing with the US military’s Delta Force. Those are the terms of engagement.

I run through all of that because by and large, even among the self-described most militant sectors, there’s not really a recognition of what it means. They consider themselves to be imbued with certain sets of options based upon varying degrees of social privilege, as if those are going to continue to apply if they actually become a serious threat to the status quo.

Now based on that consciousness, you can begin to develop techniques that apply to the given situations, and there is no recipe for that either. Maybe it’s affinity groups in some places but it’s really contingent on the situation. For example, in some cases Black Bloccers say that they’re going to organize based on long term friendships and interaction with people who they know are not infiltrators because they hooked up together when, in all probability, they were too young to have been recruited by the FBI. And they’ve evolved as an insular, self-contained little group ever since. It’s certainly hard for intelligence agencies to penetrate groups like that.

The national structure of the American Indian Movement was penetrated pretty successfully, because you had people drawn together in an organization from a whole variety of locations to function as a sort of a governing council. That was a really bad model. Where we were impenetrable was actually on the ground with the action end of the organization, because these were all family units. The Means family, the Robidoux-Peltier family and their cousins were all related and had grown up together. Well, how exactly do you plant somebody in the middle of that? You don’t.

So I would say that affinity groups, however they are to be defined, might be the situational response in a given context. There are others. The thing that is most critically important is to thoroughly understand the techniques that are used by counter-intelligence, usually at the lower levels, and not do the job for them. That means not gratuitously calling people ‘cops’ in order to resolve political disagreements, which has been an endemic practice on the left. Often intelligence agencies don’t even need to insert provocateurs because they can rely on the activists to do it to themselves. Maybe they stimulate it a few times; they plant a few documents, they do whatever they do. The rule of thumb should be: if it acts like a cop and talks like a cop, maybe you treat it like a cop. But you don’t call it one. You don’t feed into that. If somebody is destabilizing and threatening and they’re compromising the integrity or the security of the group, you simply eliminate that person by putting them outside the group. You don’t make a public show of it, and you don’t put out wanted posters unless you actually have concrete evidence that this is a police operative or infiltrator.

See, we put ourselves in such a compromised position from internal dynamics and bad practices that all they have to do is take this tottering structure, push it, and give it some momentum. At the level that we’re organizing now, bad practice is our worst enemy, not the police state. There isn’t anybody that I know of who is actually mounting a clandestine operation to try to challenge the authority of the state at this point. We’re in a building period, and how we build is contingent, in a large part, on the internalization of these lessons.

UTA: In the US in the 60s, some people on the radical left saw that the elements that were moving first into struggle, the actual radical forces that could overthrow the system, were the movements that had the least to loose and the most to gain from such struggles: the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, etc. But how can we achieve the destruction of state power without the conscious, active support of the majority of the people, including significant sections of the white settler population?

WC: You can’t win so long as the bulk of the population is actively in some fashion or another deployed against you. But that doesn’t mean that the bulk of the population ultimately has to actively join you either.

I think this is where the Weathermen misunderstood what the dynamic was at the time. They thought people were much more actively committed to physical engagement with the state than ultimately proved to be the case. In retrospect, it’s clear that they weren’t. The Weathermen thought they saw a parade and tried to position themselves to lead it. They were going to be the vanguard. What’s new? We’ve got three hundred white guys who decided they had their finger on the pulse of history, so they were going to jump in front. They said they were acting in solidarity, but they were defining themselves as a vanguard. The white guy is going to lead the Revolution. They just misdiagnosed the conditions that might precipitate revolution, and ended up isolating themselves.

This would also apply to the BLA, although they had far stronger base in the community than the Weatherman ultimately turned out to have. The significance of the role of the armed struggle was profoundly misunderstood at that particular juncture by virtually all of the actors. They believed that the armed struggle was going to be the catalyst in bringing about a comprehensive transformation of society. And that wasn’t the case at all. What led them to this false conclusion was a withdrawal of consent on the part of increasingly massive numbers of people. You really had a significant proportion of the population that was rejecting, in substantial part, the thrust of US policy. They weren’t going to go to war with it, they were just not going to contribute to it. That’s the key.

You don’t have to have the preponderance of the population engaged in some sort of a final campaign to bring down the government. What you do need is the ability to cause an increasing number of people to withdraw consent from some key sectors that keep the system functioning. And if an appreciable number of those people are going into more active forms of resistance and are supportive, at least to the extent that they won’t give you up to the cops and that maybe they will make a contribution, be it monetarily, or by providing you sanctuary, I think that’s attainable over the long haul. You have to have a much greater weight in order to take the structure intact and then rearrange its organization, than you need to have it begin to unravel and collapse, and that’s actually the aspiration that I hold.

You also have to create counter-models that people can look at, that they can be attracted to: ‘Oh yeah, there is another way of doing this and maybe I’d be more comfortable in that context. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t lived in it, but it looks like something I might like to explore.’ That leads to withdrawal, and creates doubt as to the inevitability of state structures and that’s what you’re trying to create.

Not that you’re going to supplant the structure of the state with co-ops, or little land occupations, collectives and so forth. In the 70s in particular, there was this whole notion that you could simply create a society that you want within the shell of the old one, and eventually the old one will wither away. Well that ain’t going to happen either. You’re going to reach a certain threshold and then the state will begin to actively repress you and try to crush you.

The Black Panthers’ breakfast for children program, their community clinics, alternative educational institutions, job placement programs, housing initiatives, and all the rest, when viewed as a package in and of themselves may seem like a very liberal agenda. But it was framed in terms of a very coherent program of self-determination, of self-sufficiency, that sought to remove those service delivery sectors of responsibility from the state, and to place them in the hands of the community.

You don’t see a lot of that happening these days. For most people in the anarchist community who organize in their little collectives and get together and eat their bean sprouts and shit… it’s only for themselves, at the present time. If you want to talk to factory workers, you need to connect with them where they are, not where you think they should be. You need to get over your prohibition on ashtrays. You keep asking me why nobody shows up, except you, when you organize an event – there’s the answer. I’ve answered the question about 15 times. You may have ideas, you may have counter models and they might be constructive, but if people – coming from the bowling alley or something – have to spend 15 minutes reading your fucking signs about what they can or can’t do in exchange for the privilege of entering your sacred premises, they’re going to go bowling instead. Get over your bicycles and go down and bend a wrench with a gear-head for a while. Do what he’s fucking doing. Maybe he’ll learn how to talk to you and vice versa.

But that’s like shedding the black uniforms. It’s a real psychological barrier to some anarchists, because they’ve got the solution to the world’s problems somehow in code form in their minds. They posit an implicit demand that people are supposed to acknowledge the superiority of their vision as the price of admission. So get the fuck off the university campus and down into a union hall. Put ashtrays on the goddamn tables. Make some babysitting services available. And try to package it in a set of terms that can appeal to the people you’re trying to reach. Call it spin if you will, call it packaging, call it Madison Avenue – but how you pedal it, how you try to reach people, is really important. They’re probably not about to put safety pins in their eyelids and all the rest of that shit. I understand why you’re doing it, and I’m not objecting: it’s just that you’ve got to realize that there are some other people out there you need to reach if you’re going to be successful, who don’t feel that way. And you need to respect that. Because you’re ultimately demanding that they respect you. That’s a reciprocal proposition.

Police Beat College Students in Violent Protests Against Powell

2005-11-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

By Aman Mehrzai, November 13, 2005.

Eight people were arrested, mostly college students in a violent protest against former Secretary of State Colin Powell in the San Francisco Bay Area, Friday night.

Protesters gathered at De Anza College in the South Bay starting Wednesday, to kick off a three-day rally with visitors such as Cindy Sheehan and Yuri Kochiyama present.

Chants such as; "Whose College? - Our College. You get out," and "This is what democracy looks like, this is what a police state looks like," were heard while police attacked and beat certain protesters.

Friday nights protest gained most attention when certain groups and individuals joined the rally that left destruction to police vehicles and school property. Police car windows were smashed and Anarchy symbols were spray painted on the back of some local media outlet vans. A message that said "Paris Rising" was tagged on the back of one police buss.

In order to disperse the crowd, fully armed riot police in multiple groups of 15 to 20 spread out and chased anyone who was present including reporters and legal observers. One group of riot police moved the remaining crowd down the campus pushing them through bushes and assaulting them with their gear. Another group of troops crossed the street into commercial property forcing a corridor around the block, in order to peruse and arrest certain protesters they had spotted earlier in the crowd, who were on their way to their cars.

Some of the protesters went inside a local coffee shop across campus out of fear of the riot police who were quickly approaching them. "At one point, the riot police surrounded the coffee shop and one undercover officer with an earpiece came inside and waited outside the bathroom door and was staring at me when I was going in," said protester Susan Barrientos. Barrientos is a Muslim convert who was dressed in Islamic attire.

Some protesters who were arrested were previously refused access to their cars when they wanted to leave, and were later beaten and captured in plain view of many eyewitnesses and legal observers.

Out of seven of the protesters who were arrested outside of the Flint Center, six were Muslims of Arabic and African descent, some members of the Student Muslim Association. "They [police] saw that we had the most energy and were not afraid of them and were riling up the crowd," said De Anza student Hanni Zaki, 22, who was hospitalized for receiving injury to the head from police who stepped on his face and beat him with their batons. "They couldn't stand that we were dressed in Palestinian and Arabic clothes and weren't afraid of them. They wanted revenge so they chased down, every one of us who were Muslim, until they could beat and arrest us, that's what they were waiting for, that's why they wouldn't let me go to my car." De Anza's Students for Justice Member, Mark Anthony Medeiras, asked police to go to his car and was allowed to leave, minutes before Zaki was beaten and arrested. Zaki, who parked in the same garage as Medeiras, was refused access to his vehicle and when he asked how he was supposed to leave, was told, "You should of thought of that earlier," by one of the riot police who leaned over with his baton to start the attack by multiple officers. De Anza student Abdul Kareem Al-Hayiek, 19, was chased by two officers on their dirt bikes until they knocked him down and pepper sprayed him in the face. Al-Heyiek began choking while officers jumped on top of him; he soon after lost consciousness. Another De Anza student Aiman Eltilib, 17, who just got out of class that night pleaded for the officer to get off of Al-Hayiek and was also pepper sprayed in the face and told by an officer, "Do you want to end up like him?" Eltilib responded by asking the officers to let Al-Hayiek go and that "he didn't do anything." The officer then put his left arm around the minor's neck and choked his Adams apple with the fingertips of his right hand until he collapsed to the ground. Shakir Eljurf, 19, who attended the same night class with Eltilib walked towards his classmate in concern, with books still under his right arm, when a third officer from behind twisted his left arm behind his back without warning, but was alarmed to find an angry mob pursuing them from behind. All three were then quickly released as the officers retreated to take cover from the approaching mob.

Two other Muslim students, Mohammad Abdo, 23, and Adonnis Graves, 22, ran towards the local media vans for safe haven after riot police hit Graves in the face with a baton and forced him through a high bush, only to be rescued by Abdo who pulled him to safety. The two nearly made it to the news reporters, but were blocked off by officers on motorcycles who told them to get off campus. They crossed the street and walked through a public park to get to their cars where officers apprehended and arrested them both.

Elgrie Hurd, 24, an African American student from San Jose State University was asked by officers to back off the edge of a street. Although Hurd was complying, officers dragged him forward by his shirt and arrested in plain view. Many photographers took footage of the incident. He was charged with Battery on a Peace Officer and False report of a bomb.

Protester, Brian Helmle, was the first to be arrested inside the Flint Center earlier that night, during Powell's speech and was charged for Disturbing the Peace and Resisting Arrest. Helmle, who is 27, stood up while Powell was speaking about the virtues of American kindness and yelled out "Liar - liar, murderer – murderer," and blew his whistle until officers carried him across the stands to arrest him.

Helmle, who later met with other arrestees, was shocked to find that they were treated with such harshness and brutality and that he was the only Caucasian to be arrested that night. "I think that this is all about white privilege," said Helmle. "I wasn't treated in any harshness whatsoever by the police. The fact is that the eyes of the white crowd were on a white male doing strange things inside. What happened to those outside in the protest is ridiculous and racist. All they were trying to do was leave and get to their cars. I was intentionally trying to get arrested."

Police released Helmle by 1 a.m. that same night without taking him into custody. The seven others who were arrested outside the Flint Center were taken into custody, including the minor Eltilib, and detained overnight in harsh conditions. Al-Hayiek is the only one to still be in custody awaiting an arraignment for bond.

In 1984 the Santa Clara County was sued by the law offices of Carpenter and Mayfield when police sweeped a large number of protesters on De Anza College and illegally detained them on a parking lot during a demonstration against Ronald Reagan.

One officer, who was at the protests on Friday night said, "Although profiling shouldn't happen, when certain people dress the way they do they become a target. It shouldn't happen, but the reality is that when most officers see someone dressed in that kind of clothes [Middle Eastern], they associate that with terrorism." The officer said that they regularly attend terrorism-training classes, and that many officers associate such garb to terrorists because of the training videos they see in which "terrorists prepare themselves for Jihad and martyrdom." Multiple legal organizations are investigating the allegations that police singled out the Middle Eastern and African American protesters, although the majority of the violence was conducted by others. Excessive force allegations will also be a focus of the investigations.

Community Riots Against Nazis, Police

2005-10-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

From Columbus, Ohio indy media:

Sunday, October 16, 2005

On October 15th, 2005 the National Socialist Movement (NSM) held a picket and march in northern Toledo, Ohio. The neighborhood the NSM planned to march in is an economically depressed predominately black area policed by a mainly white police force. The event was protested by members of various Anti-Racist Action chapters, the International Socialist Organization, and large numbers of people from the community itself. The ISO was dedicated to a non-violent approach while ARA was dedicated to disrupting the nazi march as much as possible. The nazis were forced to cancel their march after widespead rioting by members of the community.

Tensions were high that day, as large members of the community had stated they intended to disrupt the nazi march. Racial tensions were already high in the neighborhood as one white resident reportedly invited the NSM to have a rally there against "black violence" against him and other white members of the community. The community was angered by an already tense situation between the police and black members of the neighborhood and the city allowing a group of racists to insult them and march through their streets.

The day started at around 10am as approximately 100 people including members of the community, the ISO, and ARA protested a group of about 7 nazis standing on the lawn of a local high school. They were protected by an all-white force of police officers, some armed with semi-automatic rifles. Many of the officers were smiling and eventually forced the protestors across the street and brought in officers on bikes and horses to block the crowd on the sidewalk. Protestors used their phones to call their friends and family to come down and join them, and their numbers swelled.

As the nazis started their march people started throwing baseball-sized rocks at them and the police protecting them. The police were overwhelmed as the crowd surged forward and forced the nazis to retreat to their cars and leave the city. What followed was large-scale rioting against the police, with participants targeting police cars, media vehicles, and a military recruiter's vehicle.

Participants of the riot against the police numbered at least a thousand, and the severely outnumbered police force was forced to retreat as they were charged and pelted with stones and bottles. Many community members armed themselves with shovels and makeshift shields. Police cars were destroyed and officers on bicycles were attacked as they tried to make arrests. Large numbers of riot police in a shoulder-to-shoulder formation were driven back by the surging crowd. Community members shouted "Power to the people!" as they forced the police to retreat from their neighborhood. The police retreated and left their vehicles behind to have their windows shattered by advancing rioters.

The crowd was very diverse. Young and old, black and white fought together despite mainstream media claims that the participants were "mostly young black males" and "gang members". Whites and blacks fought side by side against the fascists and the police protecting them that day. Many anti-fascists who had come to counter the NSM joined with the community in their fight. It should be noted that the out of towners did not play an escalating role, and only played a supporting role in activities the community members were engaged in.

Over 100 people were arrested, and mainstream media reports 12 police officers were injured, although the number is probably much higher. One officer was in the hospital with a concussion after a brick came through her window and hit her in the head. Several of the anti-racist participants were also injured. One person was struck by a police SUV with shattered windows as it tried to escape the barrage of stones. The protestor got away with minor injuries.

The crowds dispersed later that day and the city declared a state of emergency and an 8pm curfew enforced on selected neighborhoods in the "problem" area. 20 people were arrested on curfew violations that night as over 100 officers patrolled the small neighborhood in North Toledo.

The NSM planned on marching against "black violence" and said they would "stand up to the gangs" in the neighborhood. They showed that they are disorganized and weak. When large numbers of people come out to oppose them they put their tail between their legs and run home to Virginia. The fractured white supremecist movement must be opposed every day like they were in Toledo. They are weak, divided, and we must oppose them every time their show their faces in public.

Reporter Handle:
Johnny Ignit Antifa

Fighting the Fascists: A Small Victory Against the Minutemen and FOBP

2005-09-22T13:37:00.000-07:00

This weekend from September 16-18 there were
protests and direct actions along the US-Mexico border
to stop vigilante groups such as the Minutemen and the
Friends of the Border Patrol (FOBP).  There was a
borderless protest (people met on both sides of the
border and played a game of volleyball over the fence)
and various actions to stop the vigilantes, such as
confronting them at an FOBP traning session, storming
the building and refusing people access.  Members of
Peninsula Anarchist Collective and other revolutionaries
from the Bay Area went down to San Diego and
Calexico.  It appears that, at least temporarily, we
have forced the groups underground and they had to
cancel training sessions.  In addition, our actions
were confrontational enough to turn off people from
joining the Minutemen and FOBP!

For more info, check out these websites:

http://deletetheborder.org/

http://organiccollective.org/

http://indybay.org/immigrant/

Below is an article about it.. report back still to
come.

Solidarity,
Peninsula Anarchist Collective.

Protesters, turnout shake up organizer
By Leslie Berestein
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

September 19, 2005

The organizer of an anti-illegal immigration group
that tried to kick off a large border-watch event over
the weekend, but met with lackluster turnout and
resistance from protesters, said yesterday that he may
take what there is of his operation underground.

"We're not scared," said Andy Ramirez, organizer of
Friends of the Border Patrol, but he added that he was
worried about his and participants' safety after a
run-in with protesters Saturday. "If it means that we
put our people out there quietly, then that's how we
do it."

Ramirez, 37, of Chino insisted that his plans to stage
civilian border patrols have not been canceled,
despite a low turnout of 25 participants for a
training session Saturday morning at the Mission
Valley Resort Hotel.

Some participants said others were scared away after a
confrontation with a small crowd of protesters at the
Scottish Rite center, where sign-ups were held
Saturday morning. Both sides accused the other of
shoving and one protester was cited. No one was
injured.

Ramirez, who for several months has promoted his plans
to stand up to immigrant smugglers and drug runners by
monitoring the border in San Diego and Imperial
counties, sounded rattled as he talked about his fear
of winding up "with a toe tag."

"We have to plan our security better," said Ramirez,
who accused the protesters of being violent. "We're
going to assess for the next few days, and we'll be
out there later this week."

Ramirez, who ran two unsuccessful campaigns for state
Assembly in the mid-1990s and has said he eventually
would like to run for office again, at one time said
that he had interest from 2,000 potential volunteers.

Last week he said he had trained 125 people, and that
30 to 40 of them had conducted secret patrols this
summer. Yesterday, he said there was just a skeleton
crew guarding private property where they had planned
to stage patrols, for fear of protesters.

Ramirez's waffling on plans for his operation, which
he organized after the relative success of the
Minuteman Project in Arizona last April, was welcomed
by opponents, who criticize the presence of civilian
patrols in Southern California.

"All he wanted was the media attention," said Enrique
Morones of Border Angels, a group that sets up desert
water stations for migrants, and one of the organizers
of an anti-border watch rally Saturday in Calexico
that drew about 300 people.

"California is not Arizona," Morones said. "One-third
of the population is Latino. We have been through
Proposition 187, and this is the Proposition 187 of
our time. Californians are against this type of
racism."

A recent Field Poll showed that a majority of
California voters, while concerned about illegal
immigration, do not approve of civilian border-watch
groups.

Robert Burns, an Orange County resident who was among
the few participants at the Saturday training session,
said yesterday that as far as he knew, plans were
still on for a second training session in a rural area
next weekend.

"I don't think what happened (Saturday) changed
anything," Burns, 44, said of the scuffle at the
Scottish Rite center. "But I do think it gave them a
little pause."

Leslie Berestein: (619) 542-4579;
leslie.berestein@uniontrib.com

Supporting Troops... Towards Mutiny

2005-08-22T22:47:00.000-07:00

Counterpunch has a great review of the reprint of the
book Soldiers In Revolt about the Vietnam War.  I
think the peace movement has underestimated to what
degree rebellion in the armed forces caused the end of
the war in Vietnam.  Personally, I think when people
talk about supporting our troops, I think we should be
more clear about what we support.  For example, "I
support the troops when they rebel against their
officers."  You can support them as human beings but
you don't support them as troops, since as troops they
slaughter people; that's their job.  It's pretty
simple.  These remarks are food for thought, hopefully
to raise discussion.  Feel free to comment.

Check this out (from article):

"In an official report, Gen. William Westmoreland,
commander of U.S. armed forces during the war,
confessed that rebellion within the military during
the Vietnam period--including "underground activities,
racial antagonism, resistance to authority, drug
abuse, absenteeism, desertion, crime and battlefield
misconduct"--WAS A GREATER THREAT TO ORDER AND
DISCIPLINE THAN THE CIVILIAN ANTIWAR MOVEMENT(emphasis
added)."

The article's URL is:

http://www.counterpunch.com/smith08202005.html

Also, check out this wonderful pamhplet called
"Mutinies: Vietnam":

http://prole.info/pamphlets/mutiniesnam.pdf

This is about working class resistance to war.  This
is about poverty stricken people tricked into being
sent off to war and causing a serious threat to the
interests of the elite.  We shouldn't forget this
history AND WE SHOULD MAKE IT PART OF THE DEBATE in
progressive circles.  Thanks for listening.

Solidarity,
Rob.

A Response and Rebuttal to Our Points of Unity Statement

2005-08-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

Dancing Dragon, in response to our Points of Unity Statement, wrote:

What about workers who are also landowners, or such? It's nearly impossible to separate people into black and white, one or the other. There are a lot of real people who work as cleaners, retail workers, in the working class, who also own land which they make money off of other people from, as one small example.

What is effective? Is violence effective? How effective have the War in Iraq and violence in Israel/Palestine, etc. been in achieving anything. Choosing effective tactics is good. But who can say what is effective...

To Dancing Dragon:

Thank you for your comment. I'll just clarify a little bit. When we say landowners, we of course stress people who own land that is used to take money away from people that the landowner does not rightly deserve. That money is a product of the labor of an individual and should, therefore, belong to the individual who worked for it, not the landowner. Anarchists during the Spanish Revolution burned land deeds and declared, "The people who live in the house own the house." I’m sure most anarchists understand that the landlord, not necessarily personally but as a job description, is part of the problem.

Personally, I don't know many retail clerks or house cleaners, as you suggest, that are also in roles of illegitimate authority, such as a landlord or a large business owner. The main problem, of course, are corporations who own large tracts of land, the airwaves, control wage-slaves, etc. We have to understand though that the problem lies very deep in the structure of the institutions of society. If we truly believe in democracy, in democratic institutions, we have to understand that capitalism inherently breeds top-down structures, which are not democratic at all. Therefore, we must oppose capitalism in all its parasitic forms, including the landlord. Again, the landlord or CEO might be a good person in his personal life. So were many Good Germans though. And I don't think many working class people, as you suggest, have that kind of authority.

As far as violence goes, I think you've missed the point. We don't say we're for violence. We simply state that the movement should be pragmatic rather than dogmatic when it comes to tactics. On top of that, I think you're confusing the violence of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressor, something we warn against in our Points of Unity Statement. You ask has violence been effective in Iraq and Israel? To answer your question: yes, it has been. Violence has been very effective in those cases for the ruling elites of the U.S. to push their economic and military goals through. However, these tactics are very different than tactics that could bring social change. The tactics you describe only as violent are part of a strategy to maintain and strengthen the status quo.

You then at the end imply that violence is never effective and, rather contradictory, write, “But who can say what is effective…” We certainly can't say for certain.But, for those who do care about creating fundamental social change, we should think about what is effective rather than sticking to the same old pacifist and militant arguments. That’s all our Points of Unity Statement suggests.
I would further suggest you look at the role of violence in social change a little closer. For a recent and quick example, in Bolivia, protests have forced their president out of office and, dare I say, there was violence at times. They also, thorough militant struggle, forced Bechtel to stop being in control of privatized water, making water publicly owned once again. Another example: in decolonization struggles, there was heavy violence in social change. However, I would say most social change movements are at least 90% nonviolent in their tactics. If you’re interested in reading more, I suggest you read Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology.

The question of tactics is something that must be learned about through both theory AND action. Unfortunately, I see less people learning about tactics through action, which is depressing considering the fact that it’s action that will create social change. Action, that is, that has realistic goals and tactics. Hopefully we can learn to think more critically about these important subjects.

We have to understand, as well, how we in the Left play into the hands of what the ruling classes want us to do. Yes, they want violence from the oppressed that they can use to justify further repressing the population. But they would also prefer passivity. Not just apathy, but passive tactics as well. Chomsky writes:

“From the doubly privileged position of the American scholar, the transcendent importance of order, stability, and nonviolence (by the oppressed) seems entirely obvious; to others, the matter is not so simple. If we listen, we hear such voices as this, from an economist in India:

“’It is disingenuous to invoke ‘democracy,’ due process of law,’ ‘nonviolence,’ to rationalize the absence of action. For meaningful concepts under such conditions become meaningless since, in reality, they justify the relentless pervasive exploitation of the masses; at once a denial of democracy and a more sinister form of violence perpetrated on the overwhelming majority through contractual forms’ (From Chomsky on Anarchism, p. 19).”

Chomsky goes onto say “Moderate American scholarship does not seem capable of comprehending these simple truths.”

To those seriously committed to doing away with injustice and the organizations that perpetuate it, the question of nonviolence vs. violence is not so clean cut. There must be more debate and, more importantly, more action, before we become too dogmatic on the question.

Solidarity,

Rob of the Peninsula Anarchist Collective.

ATTENTION: Our Newsletter is Now Available

2005-07-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

Peninsula Anarchist Collective has come out with our first newsletter. We're printing out hundreds. If anyone wants a copy emailed to them or wants copies to distribute in their neighborhood, please contact us at: peninsulaanarchist@yahoo.com . Thanks.

PAC's Points of Unity Statement

2005-07-11T18:34:00.000-07:00

The Peninsula Anarchist Collective was formed in order to educate and present people the ideals of anarchism, and make anarchism accessible to the average person. Below is an outline of our ideals

1) As socialists (and as working people), we understand that the underlying issue of all the great injustices of society is a class issue. As anarchists, we feel equality and opportunity for all cannot be achieved through reform; no politician or trade union bureaucrat will bring lasting and meaningful social change. The only people that can bring about this change are the workers themselves. Change will come from the bottom up.

2) The enemy is the boss, the landowner and all other social parasites of the capitalist class who live off the labor of the people who make society run- the workers. Our struggle is of the worker against the capitalist.

3) The current struggle for justice can only end with the fall of the system of capitalism and in its place a system based upon free association, mutual aid and federalism, free of any coercive authority such as government. It is not a political struggle, but a class struggle. By this, we mean the struggle will not be won by electing kinder-and-gentler rulers. The class struggle will be fought and won through direct confrontation with the capitalist class. This is called direct action, which takes the form of strikes, militant protests, self-defense, etc.

4) We feel anarchism to be the greatest expression of socialist ideals. Anarchism addresses the main problem facing the working class: workers’ self-management of production, free of bosses and exploiters. In other words, it addresses how to get rid of the boss, the politician and all illegitimate authority.

5) The goal is workers’ self-management. By that, we mean a system based upon direct democracy where workers themselves are in control of the productive process. It means workers making the decisions without a boss, bureaucrat or corporation telling them what’s best. We feel a system of workers’ councils would be a just alternative. In workers’ councils, local collectives and individuals possess the fullest amount of autonomy for decisions that affect their community. Any delegates are elected by the workers and can be replaced at any time. Although workers’ councils are a means to the end goal of self-management, we reject it as a concrete blueprint for a future anarchist society. Through the class struggle itself, workers will decide what system of production works best for them and their community.

6) Racism, sexism, homophobia and war all serve to pit one group of workers or poor people against another. This allows the capitalist class to divide and conquer all. Political boundaries serve this purpose of division as well. The rich and their riches freely pass through borders. Meanwhile, inhuman laws label some people as “illegal,” allowing their labor to be easily exploited by the capitalist class. Nationalism and patriotism, inherently ethnocentric and elitist, serve to unite all, exploiters and exploited, in one nation-state against another, just because of artificial lines drawn on a map. Real compassion is borderless, and the real enemy (the capitalist) is not so far away.

If the workers united together, the social revolution would be inevitable.

7) Capitalism and representative government cannot be reformed to stop the exploitation of the working class. Therefore, we feel a social revolution is necessary. A political revolution is when one ruling group takes over and rules, imposing their will. A social revolution is where the people revolt, take power away from the ruling classes and set up a society without rulers and ruled; without imposing their will on others. The social revolution is a democratic process, where society is changed from the bottom up, without any “revolutionary” vanguard barking orders. Peninsula Anarchist Collective provides people with information to help generalize a revolutionary consciousness, but in the end it is the workers themselves that will add the most to the collective (and their individual) consciousness of society. This consciousness comes from the class struggle itself, through both theory and action.

8) We are not pacifists. We deny all pacifist and militant arguments that claim moral superiority when discussing tactics; we want tactical strategies that work… that are effective. We understand that the United States government is, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. In the face of this violence, we support a person’s right to self-defense. When confronted with the question of how to create change and do away with injustice, we say by any and all means necessary. The State is violent and it is the very existence of this violence that makes non-violent revolution almost impossible. We feel it dangerous and counter-productive to equate the violence of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressor. The oppressor (i.e. the elite and their State) is inherently more violent.

In this struggle, we support, network and work with other groups. At the same time, we claim the right to our own autonomy to work freely as a collective and as individuals. We wish to associate but not to lead. Our collective is against any group leading the working class for them. Our main goal is not for our group to grow, but for the principles of anarchism to spread and grow.

We are idealists but we hold no illusions of what we’re up against. There will always be new struggles. There will always be new obstacles of oppression to overcome. But there are battles to be fought and won for the greater good of all. There is no better time to start than now; no better people than you or us. REVOLT!

-Peninsula Anarchist Collective, July 2005.

Worldview Through Eyes of Anarchists

2005-06-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

This is one of the only decent articles in the mainstream press leading up to the anarchist organized anti-war march in Palo Alto on Saturday June 25th. It's from the San Jose Mercury News.

Thank you Anarchist Action Palo Alto for organizing such a wonderful event. Check out their website:

anarchistaction.org/paloalto

-Peninsula Anarchist Collective

By Patty Fisher

Mercury News

Between press conferences, day jobs and preparations for tonight's protest in downtown Palo Alto, it's been a busy week for the leaders of the Peninsula Anarchist Collective. But they took time out to talk with me because they wanted to clear up some misperceptions about who they are and what they stand for.

First, they are real anarchists, so don't call them ``self-described'' anarchists. They're gathering at Lytton Plaza to protest crimes committed by our government -- the very existence of our government, actually -- and not to give bored rich kids something to do on a Saturday night. They wish the corporate media would focus on the principles of anarchism instead of the window that was broken at the American Express office during their May 20 protest -- or the possibility that more windows will be broken tonight.

A broken window is nothing compared with people dying in Iraq, they say. I can't argue with that.

No piercings, no profanity

I spend a lot of time around teenagers, having two of my own. This bunch is earnest and articulate. No pierced tongues, no profanity. They speak in complete sentences that don't begin with, ``Like . . . .'' One 16-year-old girl who showed up in a ``Puppy Love'' T-shirt took advanced placement classes her sophomore year and works as a camp counselor.

They want me to print their comments, but not their names. Their parents might not approve.

But Rob Genevro doesn't mind seeing his name in the paper. At 20, he's the veteran protester, having been arrested several times. He's an anarchist communist, and has ``ANTI-CAPITALIST'' tattooed in block letters on his arm. He hands me a pamphlet on Noam Chomsky and talks about the rich history of anarchism in America: labor unions, the Haymarket riots, etc.

Even as a member of the corporate media, I agree with some of their positions. The war in Iraq was a bad idea. The divide between rich and poor in this country is obscene. Our political system is dysfunctional. Yes, it's wrong that cosmetic surgeons and basketball players live in luxury while the people who actually contribute to society -- farmers, nurses, teachers, writers -- barely get by.

Why our windows?

But why protest in Palo Alto? I ask. We sympathize. We recycle and write checks to Second Harvest Food Bank. Can't you leave us to shop for designer sunglasses and sip our vente chai lattes in peace?

Well, no, they explain to me. If you're protesting conspicuous consumption and the Starbucksization of America, there's no better place than Palo Alto. So smug, so full of BMWs and Range Rovers, so protected from the real world.

OK, so protest peacefully. Why break windows? Doesn't violence just alienate folks who might support your ideals?

Anarchists only perpetrate violence in response to far greater crimes, they say. Besides, bringing down capitalism means hitting 'em in the pocketbook, disrupting commerce, destroying the old system.

One window at a time, I suppose.

It's hard to argue with someone who sees the world so clearly. Freedom and equality are good. Capitalism and authority are bad.

For parents, city leaders and police, it's not quite so simple. A broken window may be nothing compared with killing people in Iraq, but if it's your window, it's not nothing.

I couldn't help slipping into mother mode. If they want to change the world, wouldn't a college degree be more useful than a rap sheet? Why risk getting arrested -- or worse, hurt -- in some minor protest?

Yet, I remember how important every Vietnam War march seemed when I was their age.

We raise our children to know right from wrong, to stand up for what they believe. We urge them to challenge the status quo.

Then one day they're off to a protest march, to stand up for what they believe. We trust them, but we don't trust everyone else. We're afraid they'll get into a situation they can't control.

So, we tell them to be careful. We can't bring ourselves to tell them we'd rather they stay home and watch MTV.

Patty Fisher writes about the Peninsula on Wednesday and Saturday. Contact her at pfisher@mercurynews.com or (650) 688-7510.

Solidarity Call Out From South Bay Mobilization for Anarchist Anti-War Protest

2005-06-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Many South Bay Mobilization (SBM) members were there last night [June 25^th] to support the anti war protest and also the young people in Palo Alto [and the area] who are coming together to protest war. They are taking it to the street.

There were 400 police in anti-riot gear, it was an ARMY of police there from Morgan hill to Redwood City and all the area in between including Milpitas police compare to the # of the protesters.

I have several pictures of them in anti-riot gear, horses, helicopters, undercover police, motorcycles and 2 very big fire trucks to block the protestors and maybe use water pressure against the protesters (they parked two streets down from the plaza).

How will the police chief justify the expenses for this army to come out to scare these young kids mainly from high school?
We have to ask them.

I was happy to see we had so many SBM people there last night and I'm glad that many of us will be supporting those in the anti-war movement regardless of their strategy & tactics. By the way, I was on Channel 5 on the 11 o'clock news saying the same thing last night.

Last night was great, very spirited and full of energy with very good anti-war songs.

Police took 'Anarchist' sound system and I suggest to raise money for them to buy another sound system.

The anti-war music was great and at the last note it was the best entertainment on Saturday night in Palo Alto that we all ever had. It was lots of fun being with these young political people at an anti-war rally. Don't miss the next one on July 8th in SF anti G8 rally.

This was the most serious anti-war rally that I have attended. These kids were willing to sacrifice for their anti-war beliefs. They are not e-mail activist by any means!

They are taking it to the streets peacefully and forcefully and we have to support their efforts.
As an antiwar group we have to support them regardless of their tactics and strategy.

Vida of South Bay Mobilization.

<>www.sbm4peace.org

SBM is a progressive group of activists from the San Jose area. I appreciate their call for solidarity with all trying to do away with the miserable conditions that are perpetuated on this earth by the institutions of power and the economic system of capitalism. As Martin Luther King said, whether you read Gandhi or Frantz Fanon, regardless of tactics, we must show solidarity with those who are posing a threat to the status quo. Solidarity between militants, like myself, and pacifists is a step towards a true “Rainbow Coalition,” the likes of which organizations like the Black Panther Party and Fred Hampton tried to create. I don’t care if I’m at risk of being called a Marxist, I’m just going to say what I feel: All Power to the People!

-Rob of Peninsula Anarchist Collective

Short Press Statement

2005-06-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

The media have distorted our collvectives' message (could we have thought otherwise?). I offer one statement the press can quote me on:

"To be silent and passive while people rot and die at
the hands of the US government is a an act of
violence.  To stand up to the crimes of government is
a form of violence prevention.  I am not a violent
person and that is why I am an anarchist.  Anarchism
is a peace movement that is bent on doing away with
the system of power that creates so much pain and
suffering all over the planet."

-Rob of the Peninsula Anarchist Collective

Holy Shit! We're famous!

2005-06-23T13:04:00.000-07:00

Well, not really. Meg is! A local celebrity I suppose!

So all of the sudden a google search of "peninsula anarchist collective" reveals a bunch of hits. Not bad! I hope people will get our message, which is basically a rather simple one. "We'd like our freedom and we'd like our autonomy!"

I'd like to discuss something I read today that affects all of us. Yes, even the police can relate to it.

Let's say you're sitting in your living room watching the latest episode of desperate housewives with your families (yes, even anarchists have families). There's a knock at the door and it's the police, you ask through the door (you dont expect us to open it do you???): "What is it?" and the reply is, "We're taking your house, looks like we need to make room for a strip mall!"

Christ! That's terrible, but you know what, thanks to you're elected leaders and the Supreme Court, governments (fed, state and local) now have the complete power to take away the house you live in. Yup, the house you or your folks struggled to buy. Poof, gone, why???? Cuz we're putting in a strip mall, its in the states "economic" interest that you get the fuck out of your house and surrender it to the developers.

Why Ken, you sound angry?

Damn right I am, why shouldn't I be? This is terrible, this kind of stuff should be illegal, this kind of stuff WAS ILLEGAL, and now this kind of stuff can happen to everyone!!!! Nope, we're not just bulldozing the ghetto these days, the laws been changed and now not even white people are safe!

That's right!! I'd like to welcome all the REAL americans to the party!

With changes like this, do you still think autonomy and free will (aka anarchism) are bad?

When you hear news like this, do you still think the anarchists have got it all wrong?

Anyways, there's a protest in Palo Alto this weekend. I'm not from Palo Alto but if they want to get together and voice their opinions, that's a good thing. The city belongs to them, the police need to remember who pays them as well! If they start beating up high school kids, maybe the good folks of palo alto will stop paying their taxes? OK, thats highly unlikely. But who knows.

And if your skin color ain't white, I suggest wearing running shoes!

Ken

Military Recruitment

2005-06-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago we attended a discussion with Fernando Suarez del Solar. I had intended to write something sooner, however, for some reason I put it off.

Fernando Suarez del Solar is the father of one of the soldiers killed at the beginning of the Iraq war. His story by now is probably not that uncommon given that everyday we hear of more people being killed during the occupation. His story is touching none the less. He is Mexican and came here to California from Tijuana, BC Mexico. If anyone reading this has ever been to Tijuana they'd know why he left with his family.

Anyways, immigrant families generally tend not to have the same opportunities as those who have been here much longer and have assimilated. They are looked down upon by the ruling class, and seen as subhuman. No one thinks twice of asking them to do the most difficult manual labor. They are resented by the middle class, viewed as a leach on society. Yet, we have no problems asking them to go to fight a bullshit war to defend our lifestyle. To defend the right of Shell, Exxon-Mobil, BP and the rest to supply our insatiable appetites for oil.

Fernando was sincere in his speech. He spoke of the recruitment tactics used by your military to deceive his son and other people of color. He spoke of what he saw at the frontlines. I was pissed when i heard him say that ten of the 11 soldiers working the Faluja checkpoint were brown, with the only white person being the commanding officer. It shows me what this country thinks of us, and thinks of me. We're good enough to work and we're good enough to die. However we're not good enough to take advantage of simple necessities. In the past, during years of high immigration, money for education was increased, except now. I suppose we're not worth it.

I sat thinking about this reality for so many of my people here. For so many of the other poor and working class people regardless of their color. We're all fucked. Not just brown but the majority of whites, blacks and yellows as well. We are the ones who have the most to gain from embracing anarchist ideals. We have nothing to gain by providing the system with cannon fodder.

I'm writing my thoughts down in the hopes that other anarchists can get a glimpse into this reality that other normal poor and working class people face. Many of my own family members sign up and consider signing up because we just don't have the resources to continue with education or even the knowledge that there are other ways to move on without having to resort to supplying the country with warm bodies to kill. These are the people you fight for, don't lose sight of that. Don't lose sight of the goal: freedom and complete autonomy from this bullshit system for everyone.

Ken
Peninsula Anarchist Collective

Anarchism vs. Bourgeois Anarchism

2005-05-24T12:12:00.000-07:00

Anarchism vs. Bourgeois Anarchism

Bourgeois Anarchism

The anarchist movement in the US has turned from a workers movement into something increasingly alienated from ordinary people who would benefit from a serious anarchist movement capable of making changes to the way the country functions. The capitalist controlled media have been repeating for so long the image of the anarchist with bomb in hand that people believe it, and no one who is seriously concerned about their fellow human beings wants to be associated with that. At the same time, popular entertainment has been glorifying that same figure, the “rebel without a cause,” that there are a significant number of “anarchists”, who are upper class kids that have no idea of the meaning behind the word and just like the image. They dig through trash and smoke, or dig through trash and go straight edge, looking down on working class people who eat meat or shop at Wal-Mart. These people will never grow up to become revolutionary men and women because the type of revolution they follow doesn’t extend beyond the infantile, individualistic, and selfish feeling that their lives lack excitement. The fact that their lives of boredom and leisure are built on the shoulders of hard working people who earn nowhere near what they deserve is of far less importance to them than the fact that they bought a pair of new balance shoes or that they ride bicycles. The goal of anarchism is not to stop rich kids from being bored; the goal is for workers to take power from the bosses who exploit their labor, to achieve more equal distribution of wealth, to end the racism and sexism that keeps the people divided and powerless. Once these bourgeois anarchists realize that anarchism is very different than what they thought, they either return to their places as the privileged few (not that they ever really left) or continue to call themselves anarchists and follow their own delusions about what that mean

Anarchism

Most anarchists however, do not grow out of their ideals, because his ideals have substance, because they are realistic. At the core of anarchism are the ideas that all people should be free and equal, that all people should be rewarded for the work they do, that all people have the right to self determination, and that the success of a community should be measured by the health, freedom, and happiness of the members, and by how they achieve and maintain their community, at the expense of others, or by their own labor. These are principles that are subject to adaptation as we grow and learn, and so we can change constantly over our lives while working towards these things. There are anarchists who are 18 and there are anarchists who are 90, because we have no party line to stick to, and we identify as anarchists throughout radical changes in how we feel these goals can best be worked towards. Malatesta says, “better disunited than badly united”, and in that spirit we work with the people whose values we share. We unite with people who we find agreement with while still retaining our individual differences that lead to discussion and development of our ideas. With that in mind there are some things that all anarchists share in common.

Anarchists feel that government is inherently conservative and hinders the natural inventive tendencies of the human spirit. Rigid structure does nothing for people. Enclosed, we are useless and can do nothing but compete, lost in bureaucracy and hierarchy we can seek only to improve our own material condition; free and equal, we can work for the material and social wellbeing of people everywhere. We promote the idea of federalist organization, where worker’s councils, community councils, and regional councils communicate and organize through their own free will. These councils should have no authority to lead or direct past the extent that people accept and want to follow the suggestions they put forward. We believe in mutual aid, meaning that people help each other when help is needed and trade or give extra goods that can’t be produced in various areas but are needed.

Anarchists are against capitalism, as we feel that the capitalist system rewards people not for their ability to make themselves useful to society, or to create things of utility, but for their ability to manipulate and to exploit the hard work of others. In capitalist economic systems, the people who make the most money are those who own the means of production and the land. They do nothing for society, but buy and sell assets for their ridiculously lavish living, while the people who produce, who are useful, live from paycheck to paycheck, and can’t afford health care, food, adequate education, and little, if any, leisure time. The main question is; what do we value in society? Do we value those who make clothes, grow food, and care for children, who are nurses, mothers, firefighters, coalminers, teachers, writers and scientists? Or do we value CEO’s, accountants, corporate lawyers, cosmetic surgeons and politicians, who do nothing or extremely little to benefit the world. The people who are undervalued in a capitalist society are the very people who do the most for everyone around them, the people who are the most valuable.

Anarchism is a constructive theory for an economic organization of society, and we must stress the constructive elements. When violent acts are committed, we must give explanation and justification, or the act has no meaning; for the same reason, destructive acts must be accompanied by the constructive. What use is it to tear down the old if we have nothing to replace it with? We can have all the justification in the world for doing away with the current system, but without presenting a viable alternative, nothing will come of it. It is a good thing to fight against war, against capitalism, against police brutality, against hierarchy, but it is far better to do those things while fighting for. Fighting for healthcare, education, social services, independent media, and creating our own alternatives to the government programs that do these things poorly and inefficiently, and with the pacification of the people in mind. Bakunin says it best, in referring to the 1848 revolutionary movement. “[The movement] was rich in instincts and negative theoretical ideas that gave it full justification for its fight against privilege, but it lacked any positive and practical ideas which would have been needed to enable it to erect a new system on the ruins of the old bourgeois setup…” Such movements, without enough to offer to the world, must eventually crumble. Without the constructive goals of anarchism in mind, anarchism holds no relevance today. With these goals, anarchism stands as the most relevant, humanitarian, and realistic organization of modern society available.

-Megan of the Peninsula Anarchist Collective

Supporting Not Exporting Revolution

2005-05-21T14:02:00.000-07:00

A very intelligent and radical individual asked me a question today about anarchism and exporting it abroad. This person felt that an anarchist movement is not as relevant in the United States as it is in the Third World. Below are the question and my response. This question must be answered for clarification and to draw the line between statist-socialism and the socialist ideals of anarchism.

Question:

What's your stance on exporting the anarchist movement abroad to, say, a third world country that would benefit from such a revolution?

I myself am not an anarchist in any way but I do believe that establishing an anarchist system in a smaller, poorer country would allow the international movement a home from which the revolutionary ideals could be exported abroad with more ease.

Answer:

Third World countries would benefit from anarchist movements, be it under the name of anarchism or not. Indeed, there are anarchist tendencies found in a lot of Latin American countries. In Mexico, there are strong anarchist roots and have been ever since the Mexican Revolution. Ricardo Flores Magon, a Mexican anarchist who took part in the Mexican Revolution, is responsible for most of the anarchist theory found in Mexico today, and there has been a steady anarchist movement in Mexico since the revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century. People like Emiliano Zapata, who were anarchists, played key parts in the revolution until anarchists and workers were either killed or repressed by the “revolution’s leaders” who became the Pedido Revolutionario Instituionale. In the lower part of Mexico, indigenous farmers, the Zapatistas, have fought the Mexican government for "land, liberty and bread," with broad public support since 1994 until the present day. In Argentina, what's called "horizontalism" (an action theory in hopes of making everyone equal in class, without a pyramid of class structure, on a "horizontal" level), has had wide popular support and has involved workers taking over factories and running them in a non-hierarchical fashion is synonymous with anarchist ideals for workers' self-management. There are other examples: such as the pro-revolution indigenous contras in the Nicaraguan revolution in the 1980's, and the workers’ movements surrounding the Sandinistas; anarchists types, more anti-state Marxists, in Eastern European countries, once with many examples of workers' manangement (especialliy in the former Yugoslavia) are being brought back to Third World conditions in order to make room for corporate globalization ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain; anti-state communists in Iran (they have a history and I have a friend whose parents were anti-state communists who fled Iran when the Ayatollah co-opted the revolution); and other examples.

The point is this: anarchist ideals are out there and the goal is not for an anarchist exporting of revolution, but for anarchist support of revolutions. Exporting revolution, like the Marxists do, tends to lead to another case of rulers and ruled. In the pamphlet I gave you by Malatesta, he states, "we anarchists do not want to emancipate the workers; we want the workers to emancipate themselves," and that this false "good that comes from above and imposed by force" would isolate workers from the revolution and lead to another unjust state of affairs. By support, not export, of revolution, I mean helping the workers organize themselves. In the Spanish Revolution in the 1930's, anarchists, socialists and communists from all over Europe and the US sent supplies and people volunteered to fight the fascists. However, there wasn't an outer source exporting worker's self-management. The workers themselves took over the towns and ran a great number of cities and rural villages in a libertarian communist manner, totally in line with anarchist principles.

<> Also, the revolution does not need to happen just in the Third World, but here. This State is the belly of the beast, the heart of the American Empire and the heart of the counterrevolution. In order to make sure the

does not break up revolutions in the Third World and fuck things up for the populace, as this government continually does (examples unlimited), there must be a fight against this government here. There may not be a serious fight for a while but we must work towards this disruption, not just for the people in the Third World, but for us and people here, too. You have to understand that revolution is necessary here as well and that the population in the belly of the beast is struggling, too. Twenty percent of the population lives in Third World conditions in ghettos, barrios, migrant labor camps, Indian reservations, the Appalachian Mountains, etc. You also have to realize that the majority of the population, though privileged because of the destruction dealt out by the Beast in the Third World, is struggling, work far too hard and for little pay. Two thirds of the population have no savings and live from paycheck to paycheck. Only a few really own land or a house. The prison population, too, is at about 2 million, and almost ninety percent are in prison for nonviolent crimes. These people are in slave conditions because they grew up in poverty and were not given the proper opportunities that the State should but will not give them. People are struggling here, as well, and need anarchist ideals to come into reality. In order for economic inequality to stop, anarchist ideals must be put forth for people to understand them and act on them their selves. We must support poor and working class action without forcing exported ideals on them. If there was a true socialism, a true anarchism, to come about, it would be through the will of the workers and through many different and equally relevant theories and organizations, not through a group exporting and imposing their own values on others.

In solidarity and autonomy,

Rob of the Peninsula Anarchist Collective.

Worker-Bees Sympathizers, Not Enemies

2005-05-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

Worker-Bees are Potential Sympathizers, Not Enemies

There is a misconception that claiming to be an anarchist requires you do insane amounts of work organizing, protesting and other such activities. This idea turns off a lot of people who mainly see themselves as worker bees trying to survive. Although they understand that there must be a better way, due to their conditions they may feel powerless to change anything. Our "vocal-ness" as Anarchists and our fierce passion scares a lot of these folks since they feel they have a lot to lose. However, they still agree with us.

We as anarchists who speak out against the obvious injustices that occur need to be aware of these folks and listen to them and their concerns. I say this because I am one of these people. Those who have a full time job/career, those who have responsibilities not just to themselves and to the cause, but to loved ones and children. The majority of the people within the movement are very young, usually in their late teens and early twenties who do not have these kinds of domestic responsibilities. Too often I hear these people in the movement disrespect and speak against these average worker bees for simply being afraid. Remember these are the people you are asking to sympathize with the movement; these are the people we will need to join us in our struggle when things go bad. Most young activists have no idea of the pressures us worker bees face on a daily basis, in our daily lives; the pressure to provide for the home, which goes along with the pressure to keep a job in the first place.
I say all of this because it is necessary to not isolate ourselves from these sympathizers. In any movement there are those who take action and those who help by sympathizing and understanding that some things need to be done. When a riot breaks out, we need people who will watch the madness on television and say, "Good for them, it had to be done."
How do we accomplish this? Very simply: by conversing. A lot of us wrapped up in the movement can scream and yell but this serves no purpose to the lumpen-proletariat. They don't really give a shit about what happens on the other side of the world since they have problems of their own. I heard Barry Pateman speak at the anarchist book fair and I was very impressed by what he said. He explained that we need not shout, but simply listen to their concerns, and speak to them about the truth. We don't have to be like jimmy fucking swaggart evangelizing about anarchism and the movement. Simply presenting our point of view, explaining the truth of our current government and its administration can pretty much open any rational person’s eyes.

We have nothing to gain by isolating ourselves from those we want liberated.

-by Ken of the Peninsula Anarchist Collective, May 2005.

Malatesta Pamphlet

2005-05-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a pamphlet by the great Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta. A couple of us wrote the introduction and typed out the essay. It's probably the best short, simple essay I've read on anarchist organization. Here's the text:

Introduction

A common misconception when discussing anarchist organization is that order and organization are the antithesis of anarchism. We are taught in our vocabulary from a young age that the word anarchy means “chaos” and “disorder.” This serves, in part, to undermine and distract people from the political philosophies of anarchism.

The term “anarchism” is taken from the Greek words av, which means “absence of,” and apxn, meaning “authority,” “government” or “ruler.” Essentially, anarchist ideals are steps toward trying to create a societal order without rulers and ruled.

When the only examples of organization and order we have are forced on us- through parents, teachers, and “officers of the peace”- it becomes hard to imagine a group of people forming a society without imposing their will on others. How might we articulate how this ideology is forced? We might bring up the fact of a police force, but this can only go so far in convincing people, because there is no police force in the home or the classroom, and we can still feel forced without the threat of being beaten or jailed. With the language of oppression in all aspects of our lives, it becomes difficult to articulate our desire to live peacefully and freely, and in particular how we hope to do that. What we want is not to direct but to associate, and as Malatesta says, “[To] live with others in fraternal agreement in the interests of the greatest good of all.”

To live in this way of free association and mutual aid amongst one another, we must have an order absent of laws put forth by unjust governments. Professor Howard Zinn said, “Laws cannot, by their nature, create a good society; that will come from great numbers of people arranging resources and themselves voluntarily (what Kropotkin called “mutual aid”) so as to promote cooperation and happiness. And that will be the best order, when people do what they must, not because of law, but on their own.”

- Peninsula Anarchist Collective, May 2005.

Anarchism and Organization

By Errico Malatesta (1897)

Organization which is, after all, only the practice of cooperation and solidarity, is a natural and necessary condition of social life; it is an inescapable fact which forces itself on everybody, as much on human society in general as on any group of people who are working towards a common objective. Since humanity neither wishes to, nor a sufficiently developed social conscience to permit them to associate freely with those of a like mind and with common interests, are subjected to the organization by others, generally constituted in a class or as a ruling group, with the aim of exploiting the labor of others for their personal advantage. And the age-long oppression of the masses by a small privileged group has always been the result of the inability of the oppressed to agree among themselves to organize with others for production, for enjoyment and for the possible needs of defense against whoever might wish to exploit and oppress them. Anarchism exists to remedy this state of affairs …

Now, it seems to us that organization, that is to say, association for a specific purpose and with the structure and means required to attain it, is a necessary aspect of social life. A human being in isolation cannot even live the life of a beast, for they would be unable to obtain nourishment for themselves, except perhaps in tropical regions or when the population is exceptionally sparse; and they would be, without exception, unable to rise much above the level of an animal. Having therefore to join with other humans, or more accurately, finding themselves united to them as a consequence of the evolutionary antecedents of the species, they must submit to the will of others (be enslaved) or subject others to his/her will (be in authority) or live with others in fraternal agreement in the interests of the greatest good of all (be an associate). Nobody can escape from this necessity.

Admitting as a possibility the existence of a community organized without authority, that is without compulsion- and anarchists must admit the possibility, or anarchism would have no meaning- let us pass on to discuss the organization of the anarchist movement.

In this case too, organization seems useful and necessary. If a movement means the whole- individuals with a common objective which they exert themselves to attain- it is natural that they should agree among themselves, join forces, share out the tasks and take all those steps which they think will lead to the achievement of those objectives. To remain isolated, each individual acting or seeking to act on their own without coordination, without preparation, without their modest efforts to a strong group, means condemning oneself to impotence, wasting one’s efforts in small ineffectual action, and to lose faith very soon in one’s aims and possibly being reduced to complete inactivity.

A mathematician, a chemist, a psychologist or a sociologist may say they have no programme or are concerned only with establishing the truth. They seek knowledge; they are not seeking to do something. But anarchism and socialism are not sciences; they are proposals, projects, which anarchists and socialists seek to realize and which, therefore need to be formulated as definite programs.

If it is true that organization creates leaders [leaders in the sense of a political hierarchy]; if it is true that anarchists are unable to come together and arrive at an agreement without submitting themselves to an authority, this means that they are not yet very good anarchists, and before thinking of establishing an anarchist society within the world they must think of making themselves able to live anarchistically. The remedy does not lie in the abolition of organization but in the growing consciousness of each individual member. In small as well as large societies, apart from brute force, of which it cannot be a question for us, the origin and justification for authority lies in social disorganization, [a disorganization which, through force and impoverishment, was created by the state].

When a community has needs and its members do not know how to organize spontaneously to provide them, someone comes forward, an authority who satisfies those needs by utilizing the services of all and directing them to their liking. If the roads are unsafe and the people do not know what measures to take, a police force emerges which in return for whatever services it renders expects to be supported and paid, as well as imposing itself and throwing its weight around; if some article is needed, and the community does not know how to arrange with the distant producers to supply it in exchange for goods produced locally, the merchant will appear who will profit by dealing with the needs of one section to sell and of the other to buy, and impose his/her own prices both on the producer and the consumer. This is what has happened in our midst; the less organized we have been, the more prone are we to be imposed on by a few individuals. And this is understandable. So much so that organization, far from creating authority, is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each one of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in the collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders.

But an organization, it is argued, presupposes an obligation to coordinate one’s own activities with those of others; thus it violates liberty and fetters initiative. As we see it, what really takes away liberty and makes initiative impossible is the isolation which renders it powerless. Freedom is not an abstract right but the possibility of acting; this is true among ourselves as well as society as a whole. And it is by cooperation with our fellow human beings that we find the means to express our activity and our power of initiative.

An anarchist organization must allow for complete autonomy, and independence, and therefore full responsibility, to individuals and groups; free agreement between those who think it useful to come together for cooperative action, for common aims; a moral duty to fulfill one’s pledges and to take no action which is contrary to the accepted programme. On such bases one then introduces practical forms and suitable instruments to give real life to the organization, thus the groups, the federation of groups, the federations of federations, meetings, congresses, correspondence committees and so on. But this also must be done freely, in such a way as not to restrict the thought and the initiative of individual members, but only to give greater scope to the efforts which in isolation would be impossible or ineffective. Thus for an anarchist organization congress, in spite of all the disadvantages from which they suffer as representative bodies, are free from authoritarianism in any shape or form because they do not legislate and do not impose their deliberations on others. They serve to maintain and increase personal contacts among the most active comrades, to summarize and encourage programmatic studies on the ways and means for action; to acquaint everybody with the situations in the regions and the kind of action most urgently needed; to summarize the various currents of anarchist opinions at the time and to prepare some kind of statistics therefrom. And their decisions are not binding, but simply suggestions, advice and proposals to submit to all concerned, and they do not become binding and executive except for those who accept them and for as long as they accept them. The administrative organs they nominate- Correspondence Commissions, etc. - have no directive powers, do not take initiatives except for those who specifically solicit and approve of them, and have no authority to impose their own views, which they certainly can hold and propagate as groups of comrades, but which cannot be presented as the official views of the organization. They publish the resolutions of the congresses and the opinions and proposals communicated to them by groups and individuals; and they act for those who want to make use of them, to facilitate relations between groups, and cooperation between those who are in agreement on various initiatives; each is free to correspond with whoever he/she like direct, or make use of the other committees nominated by specific groupings.

In an anarchist organization individual members can express any opinion and use every tactic which is not in contradiction with the accepted principles and does not interfere with the activities of others. In every case a particular organization lasts so long as the reasons for union are superior to those for dissension; otherwise it disbands and makes way for other, more homogenous groupings. Certainly the life and permanence of an organization is a condition for success in the long struggle before us, and besides, it is natural that every institution should by instinct aim at lasting indefinitely. But the duration of a libertarian organization must be the result of the spiritual affinity of its members and of the adaptability of its constitution to the continually changing circumstances. When it can no longer serve a useful purpose it is better that it should die.

We would certainly be happy if we could all get along well together and unite all the forces of anarchism in a strong movement; but we do not believe in the solidity of organizations which are built on concessions and assumptions and in which there is no real agreement and sympathy between members- better disunited than badly united. But we would wish that each individual joined their friends and that there should be no isolated forces, or lost forces.

It remains for us to speak of the organization of the working and oppressed masses for resistance against both the government and the employers. Workers will never be able to emancipate themselves so long as they do not find in union the moral, economic and physical strength that is needed to subdue the organized might of the oppressors.

There have been anarchists, and there are still some, who while recognizing the need to organize today for propaganda and action, are hostile to all organizations which do not have anarchism as their goal or which do not follow anarchist methods of struggle. To those comrades it seemed that all organized forces for an objective less than radically revolutionary, were forces that the revolution was being deprived of. It seems to us instead, and experience has surely already confirmed our view, that their approach would condemn the anarchist movement to a state of perpetual sterility. To make propaganda we must be amongst the people, and it is in the workers’ associations that workers find their comrades and especially those who are most disposed to understand and accept our ideas. But even when it is possible to do as much propaganda as we wished outside the associations, this could not have a noticeable effect on the working masses. Apart from a small number of individuals more educated and capable of abstract thought and theoretical enthusiasms, the worker cannot arrive at anarchism in one leap. To become a convinced anarchist, and not in name only, they must begin to feel the solidarity that joins them to their comrades, and to learn to cooperate with others in defense of common interests and that, by struggling against the bosses and against the government that supports them, should realize that bosses and governments are useless parasites and that the workers could manage the domestic economy by their own efforts. And when the worker has understood this, he or she is an anarchist even if they do not refer to themselves as such.

Furthermore, to encourage popular organizations of all kinds is the logical consequence of our basic ideas, and should therefore be an integral part of our programme. An authoritarian party, which aims at capturing power to impose its ideas, has an interest in the people remaining an amorphous mass, unable to act for themselves and therefore always easily dominated. And it follows, logically, that it cannot desire more than that much organization, and of the kinds it needs to attain power: electoral organizations if it hopes to achieve it by legal mean; military organization if it relies on violent action. But we anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves. We do not believe in the good that comes from above and imposed by force; we want the new way of life to emerge from the body of the people and correspond to the state of their development and advance as they advance. It matter to us therefore that all interests and opinions should find their expression in a conscious organization and should influence communal life in proportion to their importance.

We have undertaken the task of struggling against existing social organization, and overcoming the obstacle to the advent of a new society in which freedom and well being would be assured to everybody. To achieve this objective we organize ourselves and seek to become as numerous and as strong as possible. But if it were only our anarchist groupings that were organized; if the workers were to remain isolated like so many units unconcerned about each other and only linked by the common chain; if we ourselves besides being organized as anarchists in a federation, were not as workers organized with other workers, we could achieve nothing at all, or at most, we might be able to impose ourselves … and then it would not be the triumph of anarchism, but our triumph. We could then go on calling ourselves anarchists, but in reality we should simply be rulers, and as impotent as all rulers are where the general good is concerned.

Introductions and hellos

2005-05-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

We are the Peninsula Anarchist Collective. A group of individuals working towards
happiness, equality, and autonomy. We are idealists but have no illusions. We work, we
live and we struggle in our everyday lives just as you do. We feel there is a better
way and perhaps by working together, we may be able to wean ourselves away from an
oppressive government and greedy corporate influence.

If we don't do it, who will?