To become distinct is to become targetable. If you can be picked out from amongst the people you can be targeted with repression and more easily made alien in propaganda making repression more socially viable.

Tangentially this goes for physics terrain as well. If you can be found in the landscape you can be bombarded. There’s a reason mountains and jungles are the friends of the insurgent. Deserts too, in their vastness and in the moment they ask if their dwellers, offer a smooth space where you can become the territory.

The Signal encrypted messenger being down off and on today is a reminder not to put all of your secure communication eggs in one basket. Though Signal holds a unique place balancing popularity with a trusted security ethic consider diversifying your secure communications so that if Signal goes down you have another means of more secure communication.

One example would be creating adding your contacts in a fallback network in the Zom Mobile Messenger app which is a fork of the original TextSecure encrypted messaging system that Signal is also based off of. It offers end-to-end encryption in a easy to use UI. Instead of phone numbers Zom uses emails to create and find accounts.

Or if you’re worried about service crashing for your burner at a demo using the Briar encrypted mesh net app so you can communicate directly between nearby phones.

We may be entering an era when a variety of political actors will find it more strategic to be positioned outside the government, so as to avoid being discredited with it. Now that the state can no longer mitigate the effects of capitalism, people are bound to become more and more disillusioned and rebellious. Where left parties hold state power, seeking to pacify those who remain in the streets, it will be easier for right-wing groups to present themselves as the real partisans of revolt—as they have in Venezuela, for example. The insurrections of the past decade are sure to continue, but the important question is what kind of insurrections they will be. Will they put people in touch with their own collective power, setting the stage for the final abolition of capitalism? Or will they look more like what happened in the US Capitol?

In 2015, when SYRIZA, a far left party, won Greek elections on the platform of anti-austerity, we correctly predicted that they would fail and that, in their failure, they would pave the wave for a groundswell of far right movements. Looking back at our reflections just six years ago still feels helpful for thinking through the problems we face today:

https://crimethinc.com/2015/01/28/feature-syriza-cant-save-greece-why-theres-no-electoral-exit-from-the-crisis

We are of the opinion that the policing of the break-in at the DC Capitol was indeed influenced by bias, but open sympathy in action was limited to a dozen or so officers. The real bias was in the preparation. The state was, for the most part, caught off-guard.

The threats to disrupt congress were not in fact paper tigers. The police and the feds misread the situation in part due to their bias towards MAGAist rallies. This bias, in our opinion, is not just thinking such rallies are less violent and pro-police, but also in thinking their threats were empty.

Effectively communicating, to other sympathizers willing to give it their all, intent to do something, however vague, and a time/place to do something without arousing an overwhelming repressive presence was the secret to breaching the capitol.

The other secret is there aren’t ever enough cops to control a massive enough group if the group overcomes the cop in everyone’s heads.

The police of course were also acting differently than they usually do as their fallback strategy was to abandon protecting property in order to prioritize protect the politicians et al. This is why a cop only shot someone when they breached a barricade near where House Reps were sheltering. Police of course know better than to generate monumental blowback by martyring dozens of people when they could just yield and let them in and repress them later if they don’t have enough force to hold a perimeter.

“No leaders to round up, no hierarchical organisation to wield power over us in our name, no membership lists to investigate, no manifestos to denounce, no mediators to meet (and then join) the power-holding elite. No public claims are made, no symbolic lines are drawn, no press statements to be deliberately misconstrued and trivialised by journalists. No platforms or programmes which the intellectuals can hijack as their exclusive property, no flag or banner to which to pledge a crass and sectarian allegiance.”

- “Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attack”

When it comes down to it, if you really need to talk securely the best move is to talk in person, outdoors, and away from devices.

If a cop or an agent knocks; best practices for those in the US.

General Know Your Rights for interaction with US cops and agents from the CLDC

https://cldc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/CLDC-KYR-English-brochure-legal-size-6.16.20.pdf

slow is smooth and smooth is fast

Stray thought:

What is the operational function of police review board?

We can look to the history of labor struggles to see a similar mechanism; the complaint box. Taylorist management thinkers found that if they introduced a complaint box that labor organizing lost steam, even without the complaints actually bring addressed.

Official police accountability groups often function in the same way. To give a pressure release valve energy can be spent into and also to garner more legitimacy for local governments in the eyes of the people.

What is the function of an FBI doorknock?

There seems to be two micro objectives; fishing for information and scaring people. As well as two macro objectives; getting convictions and neutralizing threats. “Neutralizing” doesn’t mean killing inherently, rather it means rendering ineffective.

For Proud Boy leaders, and similar types, it seems like trying to talk them into staying home for particular events that may spiral out of control. Arrests may follow that usually end up pulling the person out of the fights for a few months then letting them out.

For their lifelong targets like anarchists, reds, and activists there seems to be a slightly different approach. The feds definitely seem to be trying to scare people out of the streets before large events, but they also seem to be looking to find who will talk to them beyond the usual “I don’t talk to law enforcement without my lawyer” etc. Getting someone to talk means they’ve found a weak link to put pressure on, deploying more complex mindgames. This seems similar to the use of doorknocks in muslim communities as well, tho the demobilization affect is deprioritized and the attempts at entrapment etc are increased.

The opposite of this would be sending communication that in fact provokes a stronger police response, let’s say in a flier with incendiary language or imagery for example.

sometimes we can find ready-made tactics, where life is already resisting being ruled

https://twitter.com/lisaljensen/status/1351046887101624320?s=21

other times we must usher in methods from another world or another time as to bamboozle the state’s immune system

From Greece nine years ago, but somehow as relevant as ever.

“We are surrounded by the picturesque ruins of all explicitly political ideas: schools at which no one learns, families bereft of love, banks whose coffers are empty, armies that only lose wars and laws that are merely expressions of “anti-terrorist” paranoia. What does this mean for any kind of new politics—if “politics” is even a suitable word? This question must be answered because strangely enough, insurrection against the entire social order is increasingly the only option left on the table.”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alex-trocchi-for-the-insurrection-to-succeed-we-must-first-destroy-ourselves

“...insurrectionary assemblies should differ in quality from any so-called “constituent” assembly that creates another state in embryo, and the more self-conscious insurrectionary elements should force out any signs of state collaboration or professional activism, although care should be taken to not impose a singular viewpoint—or worse, identity—on the assembly.”

In honor of MLK Day here’s his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” where he explains his both strategic and moral use non-violent disruptive action to support struggle for civil rights and a place at the negotiation table for black communities on a local and national level.

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

In light of failed the /pol/ attempt to instigate a trucker strike in support of Donald Trump and the very real Teamster strike underway in New York let’s take a moment to explore some potentialities here.

While the social aspect of struggles shouldn’t be ignored and is often a core feature of their power there is a power in blocking important logistical choke points for ‘the economy.’ There’s a reason miners’ struggle were some of the most impactful, they sat atop a critical energy source and exerted leverage over it. It is also not an accident that some of most currently militant and powerful unions like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the longshoremen’s ILWU.

We can also look to the airport shutdowns that fought Trump’s muslim ban as an example of logistics-aware struggle that flexed its power. We can also see this in the train-track blockades that swept Canada in defense of tribal sovereignty and against devastating resource extraction. There’s also the example of highway blockades that have used logistics disruption to bring attention to BLM and police brutal struggles. All these methods have effectively targeted logistics to achieve their aims.

Just something to mull over in the coming days.