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Category: Analysis

Banner Drop Against Cop City in “Queens” – Full Communique

Posted on by neversleep

September 7, 2024

NO COP CITY IN QUEENS! FUCK YOU, ADAMS—THIS MEANS WAR.

In September 2021, the city of Atlanta leased 381 acres of Weelaunee Forest to the Atlanta Police Foundation for a $90 million dollar training facility, funded by bloodthirsty corporations. Atlanta’s Cop City is modeled off of the iof’s “Little Gaza” facility, which was built in 2006 with $45 million dollars of US aid. These mock cities are the training grounds in which the pigs perfect “urban warfare strategies” with the express purpose of stifling organized dissent, perpetuating gentrification, and increasing violence against our most vulnerable communities—particularly Black, Indigenous, and brown communities. As of July 31 2024, there are 80 cop city projects in the works in 49 of 50 states, all of this against the backdrop of a for-profit penal system.

In New York City, the concept of a cop city extends far beyond official training grounds, bleeding into all aspects of civilian life. Even before the greenlighting of Queens’ $225 million dollar pigsty, New Yorkers have been facing unpreccedented levels of state repression, and relentless surveillance by a police force large and powerful enough to be considered a standing army.

The purported goal of Queens’ cop city—set to break ground in 2026, in College Point—is to consolidate training for 18 city agencies, including the department of sanitation, homeless services, the administration for children’s services, parks enforcement, and the department of corrections, among others; essentially, it aims to militarize city government workers.

Meanwhile, eric adams is slashing hundreds of millions of dollars from homeless services, children’s services and other programs that New Yorkers depend on—SNAP, medicaid, libraries, and rental vouchers, for exanple—in order to pad the nypd’s already-bloated budget to a record-breaking $12 billion in 2025. We’ve all seen the increase of pigs in our communities, the national guard at subway stations, private security firms such as Allied partnering with  the MTA. We’ve seen the blueprints for a 300-ft. high jail im Chinatown. We’ve seen an increase in violent sweeps of both street vendors and our homeless neighbors.

NYPD, KKK, IOF, THEY’RE ALL THE SAME.

As we heed the Palestinian resistance’s call, we must remember that the nypd and israel are two heads of the same snake. The “war on terror” of the early 200s led u.s. law enforcement (including the nypd) to attend official training expeditions to the zionist state in order to exchange “best practices” in “counter-terrorism”. After his 2023 trip to the zionist state, adams returned “inspired” by the iof’s use of drone technology, and subsequently implemented unmanned surveillance drones across nyc. In Gaza, drones are used to much deadlier effect. On numerous occasions, such as the Flour Massacre in Februarry 2024, drones have been used to kill unarmed civilians in densely populated areas.

We know by now that pigs do not keep us safe: 600+ people are killed and more than 250,000 civilians are injured by police annually in the united states. Reports of abuse at the hands of the nypd have surged since adams became mayor. Annually, an average of 9 New Yorkers are murdered by pigs—in 2022, that number rose to 13. That same year, 9 people were pronounced dead while in nypd custody, Since 2021, complaints filed with the Civilian Complaint Review Board have increased 51%, with New Yorkers filing 5,604 complaints—a ten-year record. The nypd spent $115 million on misconduct payouts last year alone. Not only that, but officers enjoy relative impunity within the nypd’s internal affairs process. adams’ first police commissioner, keechant sewell, reversed internal affairs’ discipline rulings at a record rate, reducing or annulling penalties for more than half of all pigs found to have committed misconduct at an administrative trial during her term.

What is this cop city for, if not training up masses of trigger-happy pigs? What can we do when these violent hordes are set loose on civilians as a means of protecting the interests of a rich minority? How do we respond to a state and system hellbent on the total suppression of any and all resistance to the capitalist, imperialist nightmare threatening all human and nonhuman life?

What does it mean for us when we’re faced with organized abandonment, dispossession, disenfranchisement, and the reality that our tax dollars are currently funding the Palestinian genocide?

THIS MEANS WAR.

For years, the state has been wielded as a weapon by the owning class in order to dispossess and subjugate those at the mercy of their predations, both within and beyond the borders of the united states. To those who put their faith in reform: you do not understand that the entire system is compromised, septic, unsalvageable. It is not enough to merely “kill the cop in our heads” or “decolonize our minds”. We must attack the physical strongholds of the colonizer, the cop, and all those who unjustly wield their powers, and we must strike from all angles. Leaving them unchecked allows the rot to spread; pig deputy mayor phil banks that he “hopes the academy will be a model for other cities across the country”. We must refute this.

This banner drop is not an action, but a call. May we heed the burning of Minneapolis’s 3rd precinct a thousand times over. We call on our allies to organize, escalate, to shake off the torpor, the weariness, the fear. Resist. As for our enemies—the false comfort and peace that you take for granted is bought with the blood of millions. When our time comes, we will make no apologies for what we do to you.

FUCK 12, FUCK ADAMS, FUCK THE U.S. EMPIRE, AND ALL GLORY TO THE RESISTANCE.

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A Friend of Mine or a Friend of Ours? – An Essay On Vouching

Posted on by neversleep

Zine: A Friend of Mine or a Friend of Ours? – An Essay On Vouching

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Vouching means different things to different anarchists. For some, to vouch for a person means the vouchee is felt to be trustworthy and competent enough for an action. For others, vouching means that the voucher has concrete evidence of the trustworthiness and competence of the vouchee, and is willing to stake their reputation on that evidence.

To agree on whether to vouch for someone or not, we need to be clear about what we mean by vouching. We propose three components of a vouch that might be helpful in discussing that meaning: trustworthiness, competence, and the voucher’s reputation.

Trustworthiness refers to whether or not the vouchee has or will intentionally or unintentionally assist law enforcement. This includes that the vouchee is not currently, and has never been, a law enforcement agent or worked for law enforcement as an infiltrator, that the vouchee has never been a confidential informant and is not currently one, that the vouchee will not intentionally or unintentionally reveal information to those not involved in the action, and that the vouchee will not cooperate with any investigation in the future, even if facing prison time.

Competence refers to whether the vouchee is mentally and physically capable of doing the proposed action, including not abandoning the action before it starts, not having a panic attack during the action, and not becoming physically incapacitated during the action.

Reputation refers to the consequence of giving a bad vouch. Depending on the severity of the violation, and risk of the action, the reputational consequences could range from not taking the voucher seriously in the future, to not doing actions with the voucher or vouchee ever again, to retribution against the voucher and the vouchee for deception or gross incompetence.

Below we give additional detail on the strength of evidence that can be used to assess the trustworthiness and competence of a vouchee, along with a short discussion of the voucher’s reputation, and the consequences of a bad vouch.

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From a Matter of Principle to a Matter of Tactics

Posted on by neversleep

Zine: From a Matter of Principle to a Matter of Tactics

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Anarchists who want to take action, when confronted with the choice of tactics, often default to large mass actions, like black bloc. Imagination is ceded to tactical hegemony; autonomy diminishes; creativity recedes; resistance is franchised with stale, processed, prepackaged ideologies and tactics; questionable organizational methods like spokes-councils and democratic decision making give a participatory veneer to a sealed deal–just like in any liberal democracy; most participants spectate rather than act, learning by passive imitation of the leaders rather than active involvement in intimate relations with experienced trusted friends.

We hope to put an end to this stagnation by giving anarchists some ideas about tactical alternatives to large mass actions. Here we discuss Coordinated Attacks, an extension of single group clandestine actions to multiple groups operating in loose collaboration simultaneously. While the tactics discussed here are not new, we believe our analysis can help anarchists better understand their action options, avoid getting into a rut of the same old tired tactics, choose the option most suited to their objectives, and most importantly, be creative and experiment with new ways of acting.

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Follow the Fires: Insurgency Against Identity

Posted on by neversleep

By Haraami

The following essay was adapted from a talk that has been given in slightly different forms at three gatherings in three different regions of the U.S. in the last six months. It emerges from the broader efforts of some nonwhite revolutionaries based in and around the Southwest who are using talks, workshops, and discussions in an attempt to combat liberal and otherwise counter-revolutionary forms of identity politics which present themselves as militant and anarchist.

Here, Haraami offers a diagnosis of how counter-insurgent forms of identity politics leverage scenes and milieus as incubators of insular and fickle social competition and calls upon revolutionaries to focus instead on fidelity to uprisings and practical questions of revolution. You can download a zine version of this article here.

Source: Living and Fighting | Submitted anoynmously over email

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Revisiting Social Revolution in the Aftermath of 2020

Posted on by neversleep

“Our task as anarchists, our main preoccupation and greatest desire, is to see the social revolution come about: a terrible upheaval of men and institutions which finally succeeds in putting an end to exploitation and establishing the reign of justice.

For we anarchists the revolution is our guide, our constant point of reference, no matter what we are doing or what problem we are concerned with. The anarchy we want will not be possible without the painful revolutionary break. If we want to avoid turning this into no more than a dream we must struggle to destroy the State and the exploiters through revolution.”
-Alfredo Bonanno, Why Insurrection?

Few anarchists today have any speak of social revolution. Many laugh off or roll their eyes at the mention of it or worse, talk about realism and reform. The few who talk talk about it as if it were a religious desire or an otherworldly force. But what is social revolution, and what is anarchy without the social revolution? A desire, a goal, an over arching project of our entire lives – without it, what are we, what are we doing, and why?

The anarchist movements in the U.S. today are largely a reactive force, always waiting for another movement or uprising to come along to attach ourselves to. Emptying anarchy of its content, anarchists are content to be the militant auxiliary or informal organizational vanguard of social movements or simply sit back and look for forms of anarchy in other peoples and places so we can rest assured that anarchy is a latent impulse in all peoples, that we are less alone than we really are and that it’s a simple matter of time before everything falls into place. If I were to sum it up, I would say that there is a great confusion about what it means to be an anarchist and what it is anarchists aspire to.

The last time I spoke to someone about the idea of revolution the person responded with how it has become such a meaningless word. I couldn’t agree more, but the conclusions we drew from this were totally different. For him it meant that we shouldn’t bother with the idea. For me it means that we must return to the basics of anarchy – reexamine, explore and draw out our ideals to their conclusions and the means to realize them lest they get captured and killed by the enemy like what has happened with once dangerous ideas like Direct Action, Mutual Aid, Anti-Authoritarianism and Free Association.

Our ideals and actions – what anarchism is and what it means to be, act, fight and live as an anarchist – are not static, unchanging things. They must be continually gone back to and re-examined or else we will unconsciously fall into paths and ideas defined and re-defined by those who aren’t anarchists. It’s no different than when we don’t examine our own lives and fall into unconscious patterns and suddenly wake up 5 years down the line somewhere we don’t recognize and someone we didn’t want to be. It’s the same because anarchy, too, must be lived and examined.

So this is my small contribution to the re-examination of anarchy with a particular focus on the concept of social revolution, a long neglected desire gathering dust in the old tomes and broken dreams of anarchists past. I hope to take it out, dust it off a little and rekindle its fire to help us orient ourselves in struggle. Anarchy isn’t merely a beautiful idea to be dreampt about yet never realized but it is a concrete condition of possibility – something that can be realized at any point in time but only if we set about the task of realizing it ourselves. But we will not stumble our way into anarchy, without an idea of the ways and means to get there we will find ourselves in a great confusion, running around in circles conflating ourselves with reform movements, labor movements, leftist movements, helping others realize their goals but finding ourselves no closer to our own. No, we need to know our goals and desires, we need to study and examine the means and processes to actualize them, we need to dig into the grand process of destruction and creation and get re-acquainted with it.

I do this as much for myself as for others because I am tired of half baked ideas leading to half baked action, of being led around by others whims or waiting around for someone or something else rather than concretely moving towards something. Because I am tired of stopping half way because I have no conception of what to do, or what could happen, next.

I can no longer be unsure, I have one life to live and it is what I wager each day I take up the fight for anarchy.

Continue reading “Revisiting Social Revolution in the Aftermath of 2020”