“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.

In the text The 36 Stratagems this is called Borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul (借屍還魂, Jiè shī huán hún)
Take an institution, a technology, a method, or even an ideology that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for one's own purposes.

Examples of this range from outdated eastern bloc radar picking up stealth bombers to black blocs bringing back drum lines for communication and morale.

The 36 Stratagems is a sort of folk counterpart to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War that has less to do with the virtue of generals and more to do with cunning ploys and phrases that help generate cunning praxis.

To read go to content section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Six_Stratagems

If you watched Biden’s inauguration you may have noticed the red-coated flute players dressed in colonial attire. These are a recreation of the musicians that would play on the battlefield during the American Revolutionary War. They dressed brightly so they could be seen and on top of morale boosting they also signaled communications for maneuvers.

This style of on the field soldier musician has mostly died out and such musicians are reserved for parades, but in the 90s and 00s groups like the Infernal Noise Brigade replicated this tactic along side the black bloc at summit protests.

Morale patches can look cool, but do you really want to be more distinctive?

Deceiving the Sky also has a section on the 36 Strategies where they also discuss the game Go as an operational thinking figure.

A PDF for Deceiving the Sky can be found here: