Anarchy in Wisconsin!

An interview with an individual involved in Burnt Bookmobile, a blog out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin run by some people influenced by various anti-authoritarian tendencies, including insurrectionary anarchism, left communism, and nihilism, among others.

During the spring of 2011, when the ‘Wisconsin Uprising’ or ‘#wiunion movement’ was in full swing, they put out a number of flyers, leaflets and posters that pushed the occupation or general strike concept forward and contributed to the more militant atmosphere that Madison saw traces of. When I was still in Madison, I tried to stay in touch with at least one person who was involved in running the site, sending updates and perspectives back and forth. Recently I had the chance to make a trip to Milwaukee where they agreed to do an interview.

When was Burnt Bookmobile started and what were the initial thoughts behind it? Have they changed since then?

The Burnt Bookmobile was first started as a distro around 2004 and at the time spent the majority of its activity intervening in the hardcore, punk and counter cultural scenes revolving around the subjects of veganism, a kind of inarticulate post-left anarchism and anti-civ trends of thought. This was an orientation that was largely moral in character, but it would more and more come to reject this for a focus on the question of what constitutes living within capitalism and strategic concerns situated within the struggles which we had found ourselves, such as the end of the anti-globalization era, the anti-war era, consumer politics, alternative identity, and the more general anti-capitalist movement.

Since then the Burnt Bookmobile has been present at wine and cheese festivals, occupied campus buildings, neighborhood block parties, film screenings, lectures, poetry readings, shows, etc. Its mode of intervention has always been primarily through the text, offering things as much as we could for free in the form of zines and posters, and books sold for as much as it costs to restock.

Certainly the content of these texts has gone through different phases reflective of different questions we were thinking through, ideas and practices which resonated with us and which we experimented with. These phases articulated themselves in insurrectionary anarchism, left communism, illegalism, egoism, nihilism, Situationist theory, critical theory and the partisan cannon of philosophy, fiction and poetry. Though obviously contradictory, these traditions form a nexus of ideas that have been useful to us in an effort to think and act out a general antagonism against capitalism.

Do you think the blog has helped introduce local people to communist positions or benefited the projects the local milieu has taken on?

Without a doubt the character of the local projects and the critical tools they employ are indebted to years and years of establishing a more critical and articulate discourse. Whether people read the texts or see the posters, it has produced a certain standard of critical thought within the anti-authoritarian, anarchist, and communist milieu, that must in some way be responded to.

I know this is a big question, but for those unfamiliar, what is Milwaukee like and how does the local situation influence or determine your projects and activity?

I’m no expert on the history of Milwaukee, so these are my reflections. Milwaukee is a Rust Belt city much like other Rust Belt cities and like these cities is a site of former industrial centers of production, the labor of which has been either made redundant through automation, outsourced for cheaper often less skilled labor, or been the subject of more general capitalist restructuring. Milwaukee is also one of the most segregated of the major cities in the US. These are the major dynamics at play within the city. Development in spacial terms certainly happens in Milwaukee, but it happens at a pace much slower than many other cities where value circulation attains a much more ruthless speed. It has a large surplus population pushed into crime and then into the apparatus of law (jail, prison, courts, criminal history, criminalization) that appears extremely racialized.

The Bookmobile responds mostly from the point of the shared positions as points of departure, coming from largely white, heterosexual, middle class, male, student, service industry subjectivities. The project bases its activity within the processes of undoing and active confrontation with these positions in material and symbolic terms. We most easily relate to others who feel ill at ease within these subject positions.

Certainly the question of how to approach those who share a similar disposition of hatred for their conditions and who share similar gestures to respond to them is very pressing. One must assess the risk of vulnerability in exposing one’s antagonistic intentions and activities to a general population to find the active minorities that these practices may resonate with. We agree with others who have said that a shared language is built through shared struggle, as counter to the forced relations which already constitute the language of capital. Certain moments with enough force behind them allow for the space of extreme exposure necessary to breakdown barriers of subjectivity allowing for such a language to develop.

We would love to communicate with those who resort to flash mobs out of boredom, who resort to collective crime as mode of resistance to their conditions. Perhaps we’ll meet someday in the streets warmed by a burning bank building, but until then a great many things prevent such a convergence.

Madison was (and is) sort of a bubble. I kind of had an idea of what was going on in Milwaukee last spring but could you describe what was going on?

Much of what I was involved in was centered on the UW-Milwaukee campus, the prospect of shutting it down to spread the occupations and aid in or initiate a wildcat general strike. The possibility of such a strike seemed more possible than any other time in my life because of all the seemingly unexpected and unprecedented (at least for my time in Milwaukee) activity that was already happening.

The first student initiated rallies were 20 times bigger than anything else I had seen on campus. Many students stopped going to classes, TAs were doing spontaneous sick outs, and everyone was caught in a flurry of going back and forth between the occupation in Madison and Milwaukee. Some teachers, most TAs, and school staff all had the talk of striking or some kind of workplace activity on their lips. The question being posed and discussed by many made the possibility of such a strike and what would be after and beyond a strike all the more tangible. The strategic and immediate importance of what we were doing seemed to carry so much more weight during this moment. It appeared to matter what a couple of extremists were suggesting.

Many people in Milwaukee had already initiated the conversation about campus occupations and had been discussing it since being inspired by the events in California in 2009. Because of this, when the time came to possibly employ occupations here it was mostly a question of strategy and not whether the idea would be accepted by the minority of students and non-students who would initiate it. Student leaders made every attempt to not let the situation get out of their control, but it started out of their control, would have never become what it was if it was in their control, so they found themselves further obsolete. Then, reacting to their obsolescence with further control they were made blatantly absurd by open collective criticism. Out of this occupation would come large discussions on topics ranging from the role of the police to how to support and further strikes, dance parties, many nights spent with little sleep on hard floors, calls for and the planning of other demonstrations, a general sharing of resources and maybe most importantly the collective experience of taking and sharing space. The rest of the occupation was fairly complicated throughout the sixty some days of its stay, and it would take up a lot of room to discuss it, so I won’t. What was important was that it was attempted as an effort to spread the occupations and define space on its own terms different from the pacifying “Madison model.”

Certainly I can’t claim to know much more of what was happening in Milwaukee than what I was in some way connected to or had my ear out for. Other than the university occupation, there was some activity surrounding the end of Good Time within the legislation1, which included an unruly prison demo at which fireworks were shot at the jail in downtown Milwaukee, people chanted anti-prison slogans and made noise for those inside, then minor property damage was done to the building. Afterwards a big swath of wheatpasting covered mostly the east side of the city with a communique of the action. There was a general assembly, in the Riverwest neighborhood where I live, to address the question of how to support strike and workplace activity. There were multiple larger scale lock gluings of the university and other places connected to important dates, as well as other sporadic acts of vandalism and sabotage. Posters and slogans where everywhere. Strangers talked to strangers about what was happening throughout the state. People involved were constantly in communication, meeting, assembling, etc.

At the time, some of the propaganda you all were putting out seemed to me to be 10 steps ahead of the movement. However, since then, I’ve changed my mind about this and think one can “meet people where they are at” and introduce what seem like extremely militant ideas. What are your thoughts on accomplishing this?

Compared to what we felt was necessary and what we desired, we were quite restrained in our interventions into he situation in Madison in particular and there was therefore an obvious tension in placing ourselves within discourses and events that were frankly, shameful. The terms with which to engage in struggle were so vapid that all that had never been problematized within the old workers movement (that of workers identity, progressivism, programatism, etc) was still acting as a web of restraint defining the conditions of activity. We felt at the same time a need to act within these events in order to push them to define divisions and limits within what was said and done, then to act against those limits and further the necessary divisions. We wanted to present and proliferate a collective capacity to do this, however minimal our own capacity for proliferation was.

It has been important for us to realize that there was no movement in particular. This idea which acts to enforce and impose the most empty, vague identity, “We Are Wisconsin“, upon the mass of angry people who were affected by the event in Wisconsin acted as a means to curtail and defer any modes of resistance beyond the most pacified symbolic acts, calls for legitimacy, family values, and other normative frameworks that are generally always more operative for capitalism than they are for any resistance. A lot more could be said about the function of such an imposition. More than just within the specific event of the Madison occupation we felt a need to provoke and communicate in a way that opened up means of acting rather than defining and containing them; not being any model in particular, but instead spreading that disposition to act and take collectively. This was generally the intention with the posters and activity we were involved in. More so, what we wrote and said was lost in the suppression of event or erased by the victors of the struggle which appear now to be democratic politics. At the time we attempted to offer critical tools to understand and surpass barriers to self-organization outside of the limits of syndcalism, “politics”, democracy, work, etc etc. Amidst the now apparent failure of our interventions, they now appear to us to be far too mild and timid.

From far off, it seems Occupy has either not taken off much in Wisconsin or has been absorbed into the recall effort of the Governor. Is this accurate? What has Occupy been like in comparison to what you know of other places?

I’m unfamiliar with what is happening or has happened in Madison regarding the occupy movement, but this has been accurate for Milwaukee, and I assume much more so for Madison. The specter of the recall campaign continues to haunt Wisconsin with counter revolution at a time when much of the rest of the country is experiencing the awkward becomings of open contestation of space and a more generalized resistance to the crisis.

What future ‘ruptures’ or openings do you see in Milwaukee or the state as a whole?

Frankly I don’t see anything interesting coming out of Milwaukee or the state as a whole that resembles anything like what happened in Madison. It will be a surprise when it does, just as the event last spring. It wouldn’t have been an event if we would have expected its coming. But the series of crises that are coming won’t be resolved easily, won’t be swallowed we hope without a fight, so for now we’re forced to keep our ear to the ground and be ready for the next round.

Thanks for making time for an interview.

Definitely. Thanks for asking.

http://libcom.org/blog/interview-burnt-bookmobile-26042012

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses. 

-Vladimir Lenin

All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.

– Karl Marx

1.)THE MORTIFICATION OF THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF

Well wasn’t that fun! A real hoot in all of its pathetic signals of irrelevance and concession. As though anything would have been fixed if Tom Barrett would have become governor instead of the incumbent Tea Party humping Scott Walker. It is all seemingly quite ridiculous and peculiar, how fast and easily a popular uprising was corralled and broken. Rewind to a year and a half ago and a force of popular change is taking Madison by storm; mass strikes, people camping inside the state’s capitol and firefighters driving around the city blasting their sirens in response to Walker’s plan for making state wide cut backs. His design to fix the budget – Wisconsin’s austerity measures – was a series of cuts that stripped collective bargaining and massive amounts of state funding from state employees (ie. teachers, janitors, cops …etc. However, the police were later removed from these cutbacks. Though Walker is a jack – ass, he was not completely unaware of who does his dirty work when the people start constructing a guillotine). Fast forward a year and a half and this force has just been silenced and basically defeated. Not by any real sort of policing apparatus or governmental repression, but by the results that came out of the liberal’s demand for recalling the conservative governor; the June 5th verdict on Wisconsin’s re-election. This re-election materialized inside the liberal camp around their desires for more job creation and more workers rights, proving to all us from the start that this discourse was limited entirely to simply making work better. At the risk of sounding obvious, we must clarify a crucial point here, as much as one cannot expect a police officer to preform their job in any sort of decent way, we can not expect anything similar from the most insidious form of our collective exploitation; that in which is our servitude to the citadels of production. Though Barrett centered his campaign around the creation and loss of jobs here in Wisconsin, it didn’t really matter.  Because as the recent outcome showed us, in the end Walker remained in the capitol.

Well what have we learned from this sham? So, Scott Walker is back in office and the entirety of the Wisconsin popular uprising was vented, crammed, and neutralized into an overly simplified and extremely irrelevant re-election. Thus, creating a situation where many people now are worse off than when it all started. Cast your vote the liberals proclaimed to no end, calling my phone, putting shiny things in my mail box, and in some cases approaching me while at work to proselytize for their newly found savior. And what did the liberals win, besides a bad taste in their mouth after the unintended embarrassment from their own brainchild back firing; nothing. Despite this outcome, the majority of the left in Wisconsin still remains loyal to democracy and capitalism. It is all very insidious and quite pathetic, not as much from the blind admiration of the two pronged yet one body perspective of bipartisan politics. As much as, regrettably, that a huge portion of those who were pissed off and wanted to tear some shit up, now feel drained, burnt out, and essentially defeated by this year and a half long wasteful pursuit of another ruler. That is only to have their desired ruler defeated at the polls by what they call a worse option. The day after the liberals dooms day, I walked to work and saw a docile cow – eyed mass of people staring quietly at the ground and following their daily routine, as though nothing in regards to their own true desires actually occurred. As I said before, it is all very insidious and pathetic, but that is to limit our frustrations to mere words. So, what does this mean overall for creating stronger allies and building larger and more autonomous forces towards social insurrection? Once again we ask, what have we learned?

2.)TOWARDS BECOMING MORE NEGATIVE AND CONSISTENT

On the evening of June 6th a group of occupiers and anarchists a like meandered through the streets of Milwaukee.[i] A force denying the options posed, a force proclaiming in materialization that the results of this re- election never really mattered: the problem does not lie in the head, but at the core. The numbers involved in this isolated expression of rage and nihilistic tendencies were a fraction of what was the totality of folks involved a year and a half ago. Still in spite of these quantitative realities, this organ conveyed a thousand times more than what the liberals did in that wasted time, proving to us our focus shall be on the quality and consistency of our acts not the quantity of those involved. Despite the millions spent, the television commercial slots, and all the fancy paper printed with shiny catchy slogans of patriotic liberal fervor, the left’s movement was resoundingly ineffectual. It is true that the more people involved in a force of change,  the more inertia it will have behind it. And with regards to the laws of physics, the larger and faster that motion is, the more an external force will have to act upon it to slow/stop it. Still in the light of these scientific elucidations we were reminded, as history has taught us time and time again, to be very weary of mass movements in all their popular appeal.

Frankly, we don’t give two shits which ass- hole sits on their throne in Madison, whether they rock upon their sleeve the donkey or the elephant, they are both in need of a swift kick towards the door. Our beef does not start or die with one politician; we are speaking in totalities here. If the flooring in your house is rotten you don’t patch it, you rip the whole rotten thing out.

So, to answer our own question; we have learned the Spectacle still exists, in all its distracting capabilities. The re-election proved this to us. It re-directed a real force of change away from its true power of negation and corralled it into an arena quarantined by its participants’ own self imposed limitations, by validating that systems method over their own (Here we see the true environment of Empire, Biopolitics working hand in hand with the Spectacle). A re-direction brought on by those who believe social justice is still somehow obtainable, that is despite how demented this system is, thinking that it could potentially mend a lifetime of wrongs with a single right. It is similar to someone trying to put a band- aid over a severed limb; the outcome is obvious from the start. Therefore the believers in this divine (yet unobtainable) social justice engage whether intentionally or not with the state in a reformist discourse strictly confined to the language of democracy’s political functions. Simply by choosing the methodology of a re-election as the means of solving this ‘problem’- which truly is unsolvable as long as Capital still flows into our lives – Wisconsin’s left sealed their fate as a potential real force of change. In addition, the uprising by steering away from the consistent deployment of direct confrontation and the human strike negated any real chance it had at reoccurring and intensifying. We believe some here in Wisconsin see this, while others choose to focus on the football style rivalries of bipartisan politics. Reform and concession were the uprisings down fall that put Wisconsin’s popular revolt back into the hands of its rulers. By believing that democracy can work out the complexities of our lives and desires through voting, they put stock in reform over revolution. Reform is not an external method of accountability, it is an integral part of Empire’s ability to survive and re-adapt to the changing of times and collective desires. So, what we are saying is the Wisconsin popular uprising sold out and we go back to the drawing board.

3.)REALIZING SPACE IS NOT WHAT TRULY SEPARATE US, BUT ONLY FAILURES TO ACT

The totality of our generalizations coat Wisconsin’s motion towards insurrection in a series of blanketing statements, that at times invalidate other folks efforts; we get that. There is obvious room for other events to occur and we are sure they will to certain degrees. With frustration running so high and no legal legitimate avenue to turn to, people may start doing their thing all over Wisconsin. Milwaukee’s action encourages us to remind ourselves and the ones we care about that their politics are dead. We could care less which politician is where. Their politics strive for our validation and much as we do not care, we understand that Empire is the environment we were born into. An  environment riddled with hostilities positioned against us becoming something different and powerful. We must remind ourselves we are at war and as such, we must recognize what warriors do. This is just another reason to not buy into their bipartisan politics, for in form it is an endless circle of isolation and neutralization. We have learned a lot from the last year and a half, a lot of which we already knew. But, the biggest reminder was recalling how programmed Capital’s subjects are to its deadly system. Work is not the terrain we shall liberate ourselves within or upon, it is another method of domination that needs to be destroyed. As early as kindergarten they have conditioned us to believe work can be good, “one day you may grow up to become president.” How early they start on conditioning us to believe that death is not really death. For these are the spectacular politics of reform,  an exception that has become a norm in their world of constant crisis. A world in which we wish to subtract ourselves from. We shall see what these searing summer months bring us, as comrades the world over continue to remind us what it means to actualize our will to power.

Yours from the upper Midwest.

Claurice Nightengale

Juliette Group | June 2012

Four arrests Wednesday evening. A “keep it in the streets” protest in downtown Milwaukee followed the re-election of Governor Scott Walker, and was scheduled to respond to the victory of either politician. At this time, four have been released and cited with disorderly conduct and one more recently released back into our arms a day later than the rest. The five that were arrested were almost arbitrarily chosen for their close proximity to the blind and fevered panic of the police. The police, despite their smirks, had far less control over the situation than they want to say. At moments they had to put their hands on their guns just to convince themselves of who was in control. Shit was out of control.

After a year and a half being wasted on a recall election, after all of the energy put into the Capitol occupation and state-wide strikes was funneled into useless electoral politics, there is now room to breathe and begin again. This newfound freedom to act was seen in the streets of Milwaukee with surprising clarity. What started as a gathering of talking heads quickly escalated into a push and shove match with police, whose aim was to corner and stop any unpermitted march from taking place. Within seconds of the march, protesters took to the streets as dozens of cops in riot gear attempted to contain them. The crowd was unwilling to be pushed aside, and worked together to shove back and wind around the horses, motorcycles, and beefy baton-wielding helmets.

The black bloc, though dormant in Milwaukee for years, seemingly reappeared (some in all black, some with red bandannas, and some other groups and individuals who wore some form of the mask) and it both engaged in confrontation and helped to defend individuals in the crowd, while others that weren’t bloc’d up joined in and initiated their own actions. Its very presence declared non-violence an impossibility.

Police tried to stop the crowds, but failed again and again to contain its excesses. People pushed against police lines and horses and pulled their friends to safety as cops attempted to arrest them. One startled cop had some unknown liquid thrown at his face during the first attempted kettle. At another moment of police provocation a member of the crowd wrested a baton from the grip of a cavalry officer, hit him, and threw the baton at another, then jumped into the cloak of the crowd. It was unruly, disobedient, and willing to shove, at least 150 deep.

After twelve or so blocks of low-intensity conflict, protestors made it to Zeidler Park, the planned to be space of occupation. At this point the PA once again became an instrument of boredom as the crowd was talked at by people that wanted to give speeches instead of dance, or eat, or fight. Attention was then shifted to supporting those arrested, and a small crowd moved to the local police station to await their release. No occupation happened, but for now that is ok. All in all, the event was a short but inspiring leap away from the silly matter of a recall election.

When asked about the protest, police chief Flynn was quoted saying that it was MPD’s job to “babysit” the crowd while they “pretend to be relevant protestors”. We couldn’t disagree more. It is only now that the police have been identified as a thing to be fought, and the recognition that democracy will always fail to appease its audience that Wisconsin joins relevant contemporary struggle. Last year at the Capitol there was some confusion as to whether or not the police could be considered a part of the working class and it is very nice to see this question can put to rest. There is nothing more salient to present-day politics than an antagonism towards police.

Meanwhile, the media acted with calculation, minimizing and simplifying events, as they are expected to, creating a safe distance from any possible intensity. To them, it was simply a protest, it was “40”, it was “several”. It marched roughly half the actual distance down the forgettable avenue of Plankinton, when the wildness really cut through Water Street, the center of downtown. We blocked traffic “briefly” (ahem, forty god minutes at least). Their tendencies are to be non-descriptive, to imply that those that got arrested deserved it, and to minimize the actual event as much as possible, acknowledging it only so as to explain it away.

Similarly, the Left attempts to erase the excitement and power we experienced at the march. They talk about a peaceful, nonviolent protest where police officers unjustly arrested individuals to stifle free speech. From their press releases to the photos they post, the shining activists of the 99% were all but crushed, helpless victims.

The truth is that the march wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been as unruly and forceful as it had been, and there would have been many more arrests and injuries at the hands of the police. There was anger, and there was power.

To the rest of the world that is fighting and making 2012 the year that the world ends: Don’t wait for us, we’ll catch up!

We were not the 99%. We were 150, and we were angry.