Notices by CrimethInc. Ex-Workers (crimethinc@todon.eu), page 4

Insurgent Survival: Reflections on the Fight Against Sweeps Targeting the Homeless in Austin, Texas

https://crimethinc.com/StoptheSweeps

In 2019, militants in Austin, Texas started an organization with the aim of defending homeless camps against sweeps—forced removals disguised as “cleanups” carried out by police and work crews. We explore the history of Stop the Sweeps and the strategic thinking behind it, seeking to distill lessons about autonomous organization that can aid revolutionaries in future struggles.

"The camp is an image of the future—a future in which increased economic precarity, climate crises, wars, and state repression produce new waves of displacement and migration, and new forms of repression and managerial governance arise in response."

We've prepared a zine version of "The Case for Resistance."

https://crimethinc.com/zines/the-case-for-resistance

In this analysis, we explore what we can expect from Donald Trump’s second term and how we can prepare to confront it.

Please print and distribute these!

"The lesson is clear. We will only get what we win by our own efforts. The Trump era was not a historical anomaly. It’s not behind us. We are still in it, and we can only get through it by fighting."

If we let Donald Trump and Stephen Miller expand the infrastructure of state violence, involving the military and building "vast holding facilities," they will not stop at deporting undocumented immigrants.

Once that infrastructure exists, they will turn it against one scapegoat after another. They will come after one "internal enemy" after another. Eventually, they will come for all of us.

All of us have a stake in resisting. It's our own lives at stake.

https://crimethinc.com/borders

We've produced a zine version of our text "Anarchist Techno Attacks," revisiting the history of Reclaim the Streets—a viral model for the joyous transformation of urban space that emerged in the 1990s from the intersection of ecological resistance movements and the rave scene.

https://crimethinc.com/zines/anarchist-techno-attacks-a-brief-history-of-reclaim-the-streets

Please print these out and distribute them! Pass on the history of our culture of resistance!

The photograph shows our Brazilian comrades tabling at the anarchist book fair in Porto Alegre last weekend with many of our publications in Portuguese, including our new poster design, "Capitalism is the dance of death."

https://crimethinc.com/posters/capitalism-is-the-dance-of-death

It's also available in Basque and Spanish!

If you ever need any of our publications in a language other than English, whether an article, a poster, a zine, a book, or something else, just look at its page on our site. Under the title, you'll see a list of the languages in which we offer it; just click on the one you need. Thanks to the tireless work of translators, we have material available on our website in four dozen different languages.

We announce all non-English versions of our projects as they appear on our Telegram channel ( https://t.me/ExWorkers ), as that is the most widely followed by non-Anglophones—and we don't want to overload those who follow our other platforms.

Get off X/Twitter now!

It's not strategic to try to hold territory on a platform where the algorithms are designed to systematically center authoritarian narratives and cryptocurrency schemes. At this point, the participation of those who are not in favor of authoritarianism only serves to preserve the illusion that X/Twitter is a public square, when in fact it is a means of social control.

With Elon Musk playing a role in the incoming Trump administration, it is a safe bet that X/Twitter will be providing intelligence directly to federal agencies for the purposes of monitoring and attacking dissent. Musk is already looting everything on the platform for his AI ventures.

Millions are joining Bluesky, but Mastodon is a more decentralized and autonomous option. Set up Signal loops. Get in the habit of meeting regularly in person.

https://crimethinc.com/TwitterCanary

Spread this far and wide!

A few months ago, the conservative party came to power in Valencia, Spain with the support of the far right. One of their first acts was to eliminate climate emergency services. At the end of October, flooding exacerbated by climate change killed over 200 people in the region.

Massive numbers of people mobilized horizontally to respond to the flooding through mutual aid. Despite their ties to the conservative government, far-right groups have tried to hijack popular anger over the state's failures. This is the classic strategy of fascists and demagogues: create a crisis, then try to capitalize on it.

We salute the anarchists and anti-fascists in Valencia organizing against the flood, the government, and the far right.

The sign in the attached images reads "We clear out politicians like we clear our mud"; the logo reads "We clear out fascism like we clear out mud." The photograph shows Valencia City Hall smeared with mud and graffiti calling the right-wing mayor a murderer.

Capitalism is the disaster! 🏴

This is a good time to make sure that everyone in your broader community is using Signal and knows how to anonymize their identity on it. This flier offers QR codes to make it easy. You can print out this design here:

https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/09/signal.pdf

You could use the blank space on the flier to add a third QR code directing people to a local announcements-only Signal thread to stay abreast of developments.

You can learn how to set one up here:

https://crimethinc.com/announcementsonly

How to Organize an Assembly

Preparing to Respond in an Era of Disasters and Despotism

https://crimethinc.com/AssemblyHowTo

There are times when people who have counted on politicians and specialists to solve their problems suddenly realize that their only hope is to make contact with others like themselves and work together. But how do we connect with them—or at least connect them with each other? One answer is to host an open assembly.

Here, we offer a brief guide, along with some sample discussion questions you could use to talk through how to prepare for the second Donald Trump administration.

In the United States, we have two months to prepare to confront fascism on a scale we have not experienced in our lifetimes.

Now—right now—is the time to call for public assemblies to connect people who are disillusioned with the electoral process and prepare the ground for grassroots organizing and resistance.

We can help to equip you with posters, stickers, and reading material, including how-to guides and introductory literature, with which to make the case to your community.

https://store.crimethinc.com/

Get started now while there is still time.

Welcome to 1953, a pit stop on the way to 1933.

With the election looming, both the far right and the Democrats will be jockeying to capitalize on the catastrophe that Hurricane Helene inflicted on western North Carolina.

In fact, the bulk of the relief efforts in these communities are being spearheaded by ordinary people who oppose both parties, such as the anarchists who have been stocking this mutual aid depot.

In every crisis like this, the social inequalities that capitalism produces compound the problems, state mercenaries and bureaucracy hinder people from helping each other, and the hatred that fascists promote serves to distract from the real beneficiaries of the tragedy. The fight against capitalism, the state, and fascism really is a struggle for survival.

In August 2024, a wave of protests rocked Indonesia, ostensibly in response to political machinations aimed at anointing a successor to President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi. Very little information has circulated about these protests in the English-speaking world. To get a sense of the deeper issues at play, we reached out to anarchist participants in different parts of Indonesia.

https://crimethinc.com/Indonesia2024

🏴 :anarchoheart2:

Rebellious souls in Russia have sent us a photograph of this banner hanging over the train tracks in the Leningrad region. It reads "ПРИЗНАЙСЯ, ЧТО ХОЧЕШЬ ВОССТАНИЯ!"—"Say You Want an Insurrection," the title of our classic text discussing insurrectionary anarchism. While the title has an ironic aspect in English on account of the association with a certain song by the Beatles, in Russian, it comes across more like "Admit it: you want to revolt!"

Along with the photograph, we received this message:

"Rebellion is a time when fear turns into joy. This time is not in the past and does not wait in the future. Rebellion lives in the present. The rebellion of ungovernable lives against the military death machine, of unbridled diversity against xenophobia and patriarchal cynicism, of everything strange against the general fatigue, apathy, and boredom.

"The uprising speaks in each of us in the transcendant languages of rage and love. Our distant friends, we are beside you, we are among you. isn't it time for us to admit, together, that we want the same—many and different—uprisings!"

It is heartening to know that even under conditions of intense repression and autocracy, the desire to revolt thrives.

https://crimethinc.com/texts/insurrection

Students!

As you return to class this month, this is the perfect time to form an anarchist student organization! You could organize social gatherings, speaking events, film screenings, concerts, protests, and more.

We're counting on you to make contact with others like you and radicalize your peers! The future depends on you!

Here's an example of how one anarchist student organization got going:

https://crimethinc.com/uncontrollables

And if you need inspiration, look at what anarchist students in Chile do!

https://crimethinc.com/chilestudents

"Labor Day" is an ersatz holiday created to sap momentum from May Day, the day of revolutionary resistance established by anarchists.

Let's not simply ask for more crumbs from the table—let's fight for the abolition of capitalism and work itself.

https://crimethinc.com/antiwork

"When we say anti-work, we don’t mean an abstract political position disapproving of work; we mean a practice that actively abolishes the necessity to work, the way that anti-matter annihilates matter. In other words, an activity aimed at doing away with all the mechanisms that serve to concentrate power—from debt to intellectual property rights and the prison-industrial complex. All the things that force us to keep putting our noses back to the grindstone when there are so many other things we’d prefer to be doing."

Today, thousands of anti-fascists assembled around the UK to face down racist rallies. Most of the rallies never materialized.

Whenever fascists strike a blow, if we respond quickly and boldly, it offers an opportunity to draw more people into the struggle against capitalism, white supremacy, and the state. We must not let anyone imagine that the police will deal with fascists for us—on the contrary, they are a much greater threat to freedom than any group of ordinary racists.

https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/08/07/far-right-weds-roundup/

Ten years ago today, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri murdered an unarmed teenager named Michael Brown. In response, for a week and a half, an ungovernable revolt raged as angry residents and their supporters used a variety of tactics including arson, property destruction, looting, and gunfire to keep police at a distance and impose consequences for the murder.

Most people outside Black and brown communities had no idea how frequently police murder people in the United States until these events forced the topic into public discussion. This set a precedent for subsequent rebellions around the country, culminating with a countrywide upheaval in response to the murder of George Floyd.

A timeline of the Ferguson revolt:

https://crimethinc.com/FergusonTimeline

A full account from one of the anarchists who participated:

https://crimethinc.com/LootingBack

The wave of racist attacks taking place around the UK is, in part, the consequence of right-wing billionaires acquiring control of social media. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, he reinstated the accounts of Tommy Robinson and many other fascists. One of Tommy Robinson's key henchmen posted the video that contributed to setting off this wave of attacks. Musk has continued to stoke the fires.

While liberals may respond by calling for more crackdowns on "extremism" on social media, such crackdowns would inevitably target the anti-fascists who represent the last line of defense against despotism. Instead, let's start by asking what billionaires like Elon Musk stand to gain from scapegoating immigrants and promoting civil war, then consider what it will take to stop them.

https://crimethinc.com/twittercanary

In the 2024 Republican platform, they explicitly promise to "CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY."

Why this obsession with attacking immigrants and refugees?

Over the past sixty years, wealth inequality in the United States has doubled. In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle of the wealth distribution; by 2022, they had 71 times the wealth of families in the middle.

In 1963, the wealthiest billionaire owned $1.2 billion. In 2022, Elon Musk owned $219 billion.

So it's not surprising that people are angry.

Yet using their vast resources to control the media, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and other elements of the ruling class have managed to direct popular resentment at those who suffer most under capitalism—the undocumented, the poor, those whose families have been exploited for generations. This strategy is calculated to enable the rich to continue fleecing the middle class while avoiding consequences for it.

Gullible bigots blame the penniless for their own problems, rather than holding the powerful to account.

This is the recipe for fascism.

More on capitalism:

https://crimethinc.com/work

More on the scapegoating of immigrants:

https://crimethinc.com/borders