Anarchoblogs

The Santa Cruz Sentinel inaccurately reported yesterday that the government District Attorney’s office had mounted a smash-and-grab raid on SubRosa Cafe, the Anarchist space in Santa Cruz that has been black-baited and scapegoated over the past month for a riot they had nothing in particular to do with. The situation in Santa Cruz got pretty scary, with SubRosa collective members receiving frequent harassment and death threats from Respectable Citizens. What actually did happen sounds here sounds worrying, but the SubRosa collective has made clear that the newspaper story is wildly inaccurate. There has been no raid so far — although there were four armed deputies dispatched to nose around on a pretty flimsy pretext:

Four armed deputies visited SubRosa Wednesday May 19th. SubRosa was closed at the time. They told a neighbor they wanted to talk to SubRosa staff about worker’s comp issues. One of the deputies was an inspector from the Santa Cruz District Attorney’s Office.

Beyond this unsuccessful visit, SubRosa has not had any contact with law enforcement. SubRosa was not raided, and our door was not broken. We did not, and do not call the police.

SubRosa is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and has no paid workers and is an all-volunteer space. SubRosa has a business license to operate in the City Of Santa Cruz. SubRosa is in compliance with all city and county fire codes, zoning requirements, entertainment permits, health codes, workers compensation, and sales tax requirements. No workers comp claims have been filed, nor have we been contacted by the Division of Workers Compensation.

—SubRosa (2010-05-21): A Word About the Reported Raid

It sounds to me like the District Attorney’s office and the po-po would like to take the opportunity to go fishing for connections between SubRosa and the riot. Which is worrisome. Not the same thing as the raid the Sentinel spread sensationalistic rumors about — but still a reason to worry, and to offer your support and solidarity to SubRosa if you believe that they should not be threatened, attacked or harassed by the state’s armed goons solely on the basis of their political beliefs. If you’d like to support the SubRosa project, I’m sure they could use it these days;

Donations

SubRosa is fiscally sponsored by a 501(c)(3) non-profit and your donation is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. We will happily provide you with a tax-deductible receipt.

We can accept donations by check, money order, or credit/debit card.

If you can’t make it down to SubRosa, one-time donations can be sent to:

SubRosa
703 Pacific Ave
Santa Cruz, CA 95060

—SubRosa: Support

From Vandals Strike Downtown Santa Cruz, City on a Hill Press (2010-05-06):

Emily Bernard, a manager at Dell Williams Jewelers, was shocked by the event.

[…] While the police department has not publicly verified individuals or groups that are involved except the two transients arrested […], it is investigating the group of vandals as a possible anarchist organization.

Business owners and Santa Cruz community members alike ^[1] are focusing their blame on SubRosa, an anarchist café, partly because one of the men arrested admitted picking up fliers for the event there.

We can’t let [an] anarchist café exist now that we know the potential of what they can do and publicize, Bernard said.

—Jenny Cain & Julia Reis, City on a Hill Press (2010-05-06): Vandals Strike Downtown Santa Cruz

I don’t know why Emily Bernard thinks that the existence of an anarchist café should be subject to her personal sufferance. She manages a business, but she doesn’t own downtown Santa Cruz. SubRosa pays their rent to a landowner who is willing to have them, and they have as much of a right to be there as anybody else. But in any case, the SubRosa community space is being scapegoated, harassed, and targeted by other business owners for eradication, for no other reason than the fact that they are Anarchists.

See also:

• GT 2010-05-06: Rad Geek answers your questions (Cont’d)

1. ^[1] Sic — The article is operating on a rather selective notion of who counts as a Santa Cruz community member (apparently Johanna Isaacson, Simone Chandler, and other Santa Cruz residents who support, or are part of, the SubRosa collective, don’t count). ↩

Received in my e-mail inbox this past Monday, from someone who has not yet learned that half of all human decency in political thinking is just learning to keep your personal pronouns straight.

From: fuck you
To: AnarchistCafe.org working group
Subject: Message for AnarchistCafe.org working group
Date: 05/03/2010 09:47 AM

You fuckers started a riot in Santa Cruz!!! Why would you have a site like this???? You cased tens of thousands of dollars in damage!

In order:

1. No, I didn’t.

2. Because some people evidently don’t understand the ideas of Anarchism or what Anarchism stands for as a social movement. So, I think it’s cool for Anarchists, and people curious about Anarchism, to have places where they can meet each other in an informal environment and talk about what anarchy might mean.

   That, or I’m trying to make it easier for people to organize riots in Santa Cruz, California. You decide.

3. No, I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

I’m sorry to hear that rioters smashed up some stores in downtown Santa Cruz and spray-painted some circle-As around the place. But I, fucker that I may be, had nothing in particular to do with that. Neither, incidentally, did most Anarchists in and around Santa Cruz. Some Anarchists believe in street riots as a worthwhile tactic for social transformation; others don’t. In any case, those who want to holler about property damage ought to holler at the individual people who went out and committed it, not at any random stranger who happens to wear the same symbols or read the same books.

Anyway, Comrade You did not provide an e-mail address with the message, so I can’t reply directly. However, they seem to have written me because they had me confused with the SubRosa Cafe in Santa Cruz — which is currently being bearing the brunt of an increasingly nasty campaign of black-baiting, scapegoating, harassment, and direct threats from local Chamber of Commerce types, based solely on their political beliefs, on the assumption that, since they are part of the International Trotskyist-Anarchist Conspiracy, the riot is obviously their fault, even though they had nothing to do with it. In light of which I can only say that I regret that I have no affiliation with the fine folks behind such a wonderful community space. However, the message did inspire me to add a new Spaces section to the AnarchistCafe.org website, where I’m happy to include a listing for the SubRosa project. If you’re in the Bay Area, I encourage you to drop in and show your support. The SubRosa organizers also have a list of Ideas for creating a supportive atmosphere in Santa Cruz.

So, here is the latest on the Alliance of the Libertarian Left at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair.

First — I’d like to give a big shout-out to the three very generous donors who chipped in to cover all of the costs for the table registration fee and the shoestring-budget travel expenses from Las Vegas to [...]

Continue reading at Rad Geek People's Daily » Las Vegas …

The Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair is going to be held the weekend of March 13-14 in San Francisco at Golden Gate Park. It’s a great time; it’s also one of the largest annual Anarchist community events in North America. And I’m in the process of organizing a table for A.L.L. at the bookfair.

In addition to a great lineup of speakers, panels and workshops, the main event (this is a bookfair, after all) will be the space in main hall with dozens of vendors with tables to show off their Anarchist books and materials from 10:00am–6:00pm on Saturday, March 13 and 11:00am–5:00pm on Sunday, March 14. Among them will be us — members of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left from Vegas, California, and around the Western U.S. I’ll be there, along with fellow Anarchists from Southern Nevada ALL. We’ll have books, journals, buttons, and more from the Southern Nevada ALL Distro available for sale as fundraisers, along with a lot of free pamphlets, smaller pieces to give away, and information about ALL as an organization and what we do back in our hometowns.

This will be Southern Nevada A.L.L.’s third appearance at an Anarchist bookfair (after appearances at last year’s Bay Area bookfair, and this year’s Los Angeles bookfair). These bookfairs are a real blast to work: partly because the bookfair a great opportunity to make connections with fellow Anarchists and to get the good word out about individualist anarchism, market anarchism, mutualism, counter-economics, to an audience of engaged radicals and movement anarchists. And also because, for a dispersed, Internet-coordinated network like the A.L.L., working the bookfair table is great opportunity to posse up with ALLies from many different towns, meet folks you’ve only known online, have some great conversations, and work together on some practical counter-economic outreach. (It’s also a good opportunity for local organizing on the ground — since we can put out a sign-up sheet and get contacts for people who are interested in ALLiance in the Bay Area.)

Anyway. If all this sounds like something you’re down with, interested in, excited by, here’s three things you can do:

1. If you’re in the Bay Area, or will be around March 13-14, drop on by the table and say hi and see what we’re doing.

2. If you’ll be there and you’re interested in selling books or merchandise for your hometown Alliance of the Libertarian Left local — or if you’re interested in hanging out with ALLies from other towns and helping with the table — then get in touch with me to coordinate. We’ll definitely have space for you, and it’d be great to posse up.

3. If you want to help support the A.L.L. presence at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair (and other bookfairs in the future), you can help us out by covering the costs of the table and the transport. Bound Together Books just recently boosted the cost of reserving a table (last year it was $100 for both days; now it’s $150). We’re doing this on as thin a shoestring as possible. With support from y’ALL, we can make the most of these opportunities to do local organizing, make connections between our locals, and put the word out and about among our fellow Anarchists.

   Here’s the shoestring, for reference.

   ALL @ Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair 2010 shoestring budget

   Cost	Description
   $150	Table reservation (Saturday and Sunday)
   $87	Car rental for transport from Vegas (driving up Friday; returning car Monday).
   $86	Cheap hotel in Bay Area (Friday and Saturday night)
   ~$0~	Gas costs will be covered by carpooling ALLies and our allies from Vegas up to the Bookfair and to the Empowering Women of Color conference, which is being held at UC Berkeley the same weekend. Food costs will be covered through Food Not Bombs.
   $333	Total costs

Hope to see y’ALL there!

We’ll be here. Will you?

Government cops protect you by dragging a bunch of unarmed young Black men out of a train and lining them up against the wall — in response to an alleged fistfight — and then forcing one of them down to the ground and shooting him in the back. While he is lying prone on the ground, surrounded, and physically restrained both by the shooter and by a gang of other heavily-armed uniformed cops.

Then government cops protect you from being tainted by knowledge of the incident by rounding up everyone in the crowd that they can get their hands on and seizing the cellphones they had been using to take videos. You have only seen these videos because some dastardly criminals hopped back on the train before the cops could grab them, and then set out to taint us all with the truth.

The cop in the video is a Bay Area Rapid Transit cop named Johannes Mehserle. His victim, Oscar Grant, was either shot in the back when he was already handcuffed, or handcuffed by Officer Johannes Mehserle after he had been shot in back, depending on which witness accounts you listen to. I’m not sure which is worse. In any case, no-one has produced any reason whatsoever why Oscar Grant — who was unarmed, who was clearly showing his hands just before he was forced down and shot, who was forced down on his back, who was being searched and held down by two cops, with a third standing by and a gang of other cops standing around only a few feet away — could pose any credible physical threat to anybody at all, let alone the sort of physical threat that would justify standing up and drawing a gun on him.

We are told that (of course, of course) it’s a terrible tragedy what happened, and we should feel in our hearts for all the people who suffered so much because of this incident, but Officer Johannes Mehserle didn’t really mean to shoot Oscar Grant in the back. Maybe he pulled his gun and pointed it directly at a completely helpless victim who was clearly unarmed and under the complete physical control of the police, and then — oops — slipped and fired his gun into an unarmed man’s back by accident. Maybe he meant to pull out his taser so that he could torture a completely helpless man lying prone on the ground who clearly posed no physical threat to anybody with powerful electric shocks, but — oops — he just got so freaked out by The Situation that he couldn’t tell his hay-foot from his straw-foot and he accidentally whipped out his handgun instead, from a holster on the opposite side of his belt, even though it’s a completely different size and shape and weight, and then pulled the trigger and shot an unarmed man with a bullet instead. And, of course, none of this means a goddamned thing.

As I have said, and at the risk of controversy I will repeat: it doesn’t matter if Mehserle meant to pull the trigger. He had already assumed the role of sole arbiter over the life or death of Oscar Grant. He had already decided that Grant, by virtue of his skin color and appearance, was worth less than other citizens. And rather than acquitting the officer, all of the psychological analyses and possible explanations of the shooting that have been trotted-out in the press, and all the discussion of the irrelevant elements of Grant’s criminal history, have only proven this fundamental point.

If a young black or Latino male pulls a gun and someone winds up dead, intention is never the issue, and first-degree murder charges are on the agenda, as well as likely murder charges for anyone of the wrong color standing nearby. If we reverse the current situation, and the gun is in Oscar Grant’s hand, then racist voices would be squealing for the death penalty regardless of intention. And yet when it’s a cop pulling the trigger, all the media and public opinion resources are deployed to justify, understand, and empathize with this unconscionable act. One side is automatically condemned; the other automatically excused.

—George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch (2009-01-09): Oakland’s Not For Burning?

Of course, there are two kinds of privileges: sometimes the problem is that a select class of people get consideration that everybody ought to be getting, but other people, not in the privileged class, are unjustly denied. And sometimes the problem is that a select class of people get special consideration that nobody ought to be getting, no matter their social class. Ciccariello-Maher doesn’t make it clear which kind he means, but in this case, the handwringing and We’ll never know chanting and endless excuse-making in the effort to convert manslaughter or murder into nothing more than another Oops, our bad is an example of the second kind. Given the observable facts of the case, there is nothing that could possibly have been going through Officer Johannes Mehserle’s head that could justify this execution-style shooting. If he went drawing his gun on an unarmed and prone and physically helpless man, who posed absolutely no credible threat to him or anyone else in the vicinity, and then, in the course of swinging his gun around, ended up firing it off, somehow, by accident, then he is guilty of criminally negligent homicide. If he planned to shock the hell out of someone who he had no reason to shock and ended up shooting him instead, by accident, then he is guilty of committing felony murder in the course of committing assault and battery. If he shot Oscar Grant intentionally, then, whatever may have been going on in his head about combs in Oscar Grant’s pocket or the folks in the crowd who were booing him from several feet away behind a line of other cops, or the hard, stressful life of a transit cop, then he is guilty of murder in the first.

And then we are told by self-righteous cops and their sado-fascist enablers that (of course, of course) it’s terrible what happened, and maybe Officer Johannes Mehserle overreacted, and zigged when he should have zagged, but really, we shouldn’t rush to judgment, and really, it’s not his fault, because, after all, there was a crowd of unarmed people several feet away, behind a line of other heavily-armed cops, yelling unkind words at him and making allegations as to the character of the police and watching what they were doing; maybe he became so confused and terrified by all this that, consummate professional though he may have been, he just lost all control of his rational faculties, and — oops — it just seemed like a good idea at the time to stand up and draw on an unarmed man being held down face-first on the ground in front of him. So it’s really the crowd’s fault:

We can wait for the official report on the shots fired but the earlier parts of those amatuer [sic] videos are also chilling for the hate-filled crowd reactions to what was, prior to the gunshot, a routine police encounter. We cannot long continue to police in a nation full of antagonists toward law and order. You can find it in videos all over the internet - crowds taunting, jeering, threatening, and obstructing police officers who are engaged in taming disorder.

—profshults (2009-01-07 10:04pm), comment on Tragedy [sic] at Fruitvale Station, at POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine

Well, great. Then let government cops quit. Please. As if anybody ever asked them to go around policing like that in this nation. When government cops go around like this, protecting the hell out of us all, then they need to be taunted, jeered, threatened and obstructed until they stop.

It’s not entirely clear yet what happened during the incident, and it may never be. [Oscar Grant] was apparently not one of the initial group dragged off the train—one of the videos shows him unrestrained and standing up, trying to intercede with the police. According to witnesses, he was trying to de-escalate the situation between the cops and his friends. This is not an isolated incident, not by a long shot. This kind of thing happens all the time: out-of-control police violence in response to non-violent communication. It happens to people of color, and to queer folks too. It happened to me and Jack a little more than a year ago, along with a group of colleagues and friends, for asking the police why they were making an arrest. An officer decided to pepper spray our group, without any real provocation. We’re lucky, and privileged, that it wasn’t a gun.

Who knows what’s going through these cops’ heads? Are they freaking out, paranoid, fearful, are they untrained, do they have no idea what to do? What really matters to me is that they’ve been given weapons to use, and they’re wiling to use them at the slightest provocation, up to and including lethal force. What matters is that any questioning of their authority, whether you’re holding a camera or trying to de-escalate a situation, is seen as a challenge that has to be put down, by taking your stuff away, or crowd-controlling you, or killing you. We should all be scared. Especially if you’re part of a frequently-profiled community.

[…]

I want to stress one more thing. The news is reporting that the police felt outnumbered. This is exactly the same reason they gave for pepper-spraying the crowd that Jack and I were in. But let’s be clear — it doesn’t have anything to do with numbers. If it had been a quiet crowd ignoring the police and just sitting on the train, the numbers wouldn’t matter. They felt outnumbered because a lot of people watching were demanding to know what was going on, yelling, and refusing to just mind their own business. People who were demanding to know what was happening, because they know that abuses happen far too often and take far too many lives, and that someone has to watch the watchers.

Unfortunately, to police this makes you the enemy, especially if you’re making your voice heard, yelling, demanding to know what’s going on. The police, whether because of training or inculcated philosophy or temperament, see this as a potential riot, and they escalate the situation.

—Holly @ feministe (2009-01-07): Execution style

The plain fact is that what we have here is one of two things. Either we have a professionalized system of violent control which tacitly permits and encourages cops to handle any confusing or stressful situation with an attempt to dominate everyone in the vicinity by means of threats and overwhelming force, including attempts to retaliate or terrify people into submission by using violence — up to and including lethal violence — against powerless people under their physical control. Or else we have a system of government policing which has clearly demonstrated that it can do nothing effectual to prevent this from happening, over and over again. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

As you may be aware, a cop shot and killed a man in Oakland, California on New Year's Day. The details make the incident particularly galling for many: the man, an unarmed African American, was laying prone beneath two cops while they restrained and handcuffed him. A third cop standing above them pulled his firearm and shot the victim, Oscar Grant, in the back, killing him. The incident, which took place on a commuter train platform, was witnessed by dozens of people and filmed from multiple angles, allowing news and evidence of the killing to spread rapidly.

On Wednesday, January 7th, a week after the killing, a protest march convened at the train station where the killing occurred. After listening to speeches for two hours, the crowd began marching towards downtown Oakland. At a nearby intersection, the windows of a police car were smashed and a dumpster was set on fire. Riot police arrived soon after and attempted to disperse the crowd with tear gas and targeted arrests. Marchers retreated and splintered, with some groups smashing the windows of businesses both local and corporate, torching two cars and smashing the windows of many others, and burning more dumpsters. As the rioting continued into the night, over a hundred marchers were eventually cornered by a large number of riot cops and arrested.

Yesterday, the windows of an Oakland police station were smashed during the night by anarchists. Further demonstrations are planned and solidarity actions are likely to continue in the coming days.

Corporate media reports of the mini-riot have focused on the damage caused to locally-owned small businesses and the destruction of private vehicles. The windows of a business called Creative African Braids were smashed, and the car of a local school teacher, a man taking tap-dancing lessons, and a local reporter were smashed or set on fire, all apparently at random. Part of what has attracted the media to this element of the story is that the owners of the damaged cars and businesses are mostly African Americans, as were many of the marchers seen carrying out the vandalism, muddying the racial narrative. It remains unclear how local businesses came to be targeted and by whom.

Undoubtedly, this aspect of the events in Oakland will cause the greatest controversy among anarchists. As the rhetoric of European insurrectionists has gained prominence in the American anarchist community, the literal manifestation of bombastic slogans like "Burn them all, big and small!" is bound to make some reconsider their language. Insurrectionary ideologues will likely accuse those made quesy by the sight of smashed Black-owned small businesses of bourgeois spinelessness or some other liberal pejorative.

Hopefully, a discussion of strategy will prevail in this debate. As long as an ideological commitment to one form of action or another remains the norm, whether pacifist or insurrectionary, strategy will be dictated by dogma instead of actual conditions. It's possible to have no sympathy whatsoever for small-time capitalists and still argue that destroying cars and stores at random, regardless of who does it, makes for bad strategy. It's also possible to argue the opposite and not have a fetish for window breaking. The C.S.A. encourages anarchists to discuss these events on their strategic merits rather than the dictates of their preferred doctrine.

As perceptive readers can probably discern from the tone above, the C.S.A. sees the destruction of random small businesses and the cars of tap-dancing students as a strategic mistake. The targeted attacks that have occurred in Oakland on cop cars, police stations, and the symbols of global capital such as banks, are far more effective at conveying the motivations of anarchists, and make a small but real dent in the institutions that actively reproduce capital and the state.

Lending support to undirected vandalism is often a misguided attempt to discover or encourage a direct action ethos among non-anarchists. But ignoring the context of actions and focusing exclusively on tactics is folly (Kristallnacht was a riot that involved a lot of window smashing, too.)

As a matter of power dynamics, hair braiding businesses probably cannot compare as oppressive institutions to cops and banks, and their wholesale destruction would lead no where. Anarchists who wish to participate meaningfully in solidarity actions ought to focus their attention on the institutions in their own communities that enforce hierarchies of oppression and privilege, whether those are physical spaces or social dynamics or something else entirely, not soft targets that are incidentally located along a parade route.

"A protest over the fatal shooting by a BART police officer of an unarmed black man mushroomed into several hours of violence Wednesday night as demonstrators smashed storefronts and cars, set several cars ablaze and blocked streets in downtown Oakland." (link)