RNC, DNC, And Strategy: Crossfire

Alright, alright, I haven't posted in a while, but I've had other crap to do and unfortunately blogging about anarchist strategy doesn't pay the gas bill. But in response to a request, and because I've been thinking about this for a while, I'd like to get a discussion going about the RNC, the DNC, and strategy. I can't write a lengthy essay of the quality the subject deserves right now and I'm too undecided about it anyway, so I'm going to ask some questions and I'll throw in my two cents in the comments section if a conversation gets going. Cool?

So the first thing on my mind when I heard about all the planning going on for these conventions was this: why are we getting back into the business of crashing summits? That's not a rhetorical question and I'm not rolling my eyes when I ask it, I really mean it. I just haven't heard an explanation of why people feel the summit thing is the way to go right now. That's not to say that it's not the way to go, and frankly I don't have an opinion either way right now, but I would like to hear a solid argument for it. So hopefully someone involved in the organizing can give us something work with here. Why these conventions? Why now?

Second, what's the goal? What I get from the material I've seen is that the goal is to "shut down" the conventions, which I suppose means "prevent them from happening." Am I right on that? If so, why? What's the intended effect? What happens if we succeed? In the more likely event of failure, what do we gain? Again, I'm not asking these questions in a negative or doubting way, I'm just posing them because I want to hear solid answers so we can talk about it.

Third, some of the organizers have made their strategy and even some specific tactics public, which to me feels like an innovation. Which bridges/roads/whatever to lockdown at used to be a tightly (or not so tightly) guarded secret, revealed in hushed tones at the last minute of a spokescouncil. They've gone the opposite route and published thousands of copies of their plans and distributed them all over. It'll be fascinating to see how this plays out (will we just be met by a wall of cops?) I don't know that I have a question really since we'll have to wait and see the effect of this, but I think it's noteworthy. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Fourth, the rhetoric surrounding the conventions has been very intentionally, um, Europeanized, for lack of a better word, by which I mean there seems to be a shift away from protest and towards rioting in the rhetoric. Sure, there's always been breakaway marches and black blocs, but this seems to be conceived of as more like a large-scale riot. Is it because all the liberals will be inside and we can finally party like we want to? Is it a change in the collective political thinking of the anarchist community in the U.S. away from class war politics and towards insurrectionary/post left thought? Can we actually pull off a large-scale riot in the U.S.?

Fifth, what alternative are we putting forth? What's the take-home message for people watching, whether at street level or through the lens of spectacle? If not Obama or McCain or Hilary, what? How? Why? And how are those questions being asked, what's the medium of delivery?

I think that's all I've got for now. Again, in no way am I asking these questions to bash the hard work of the organizers, whom I respect very much and I think they're doing great, valuable work; I just want to have a solid conversation about strategy. Let's talk about why we're doing this.

Ok, let's hear what you've got to say, and feel free to post your own questions as well.

The Day's News...

• The Senate voted on Tuesday to broaden the government’s spy powers and to give legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in the President's program of eavesdropping without warrants. The bill allows the government to eavesdrop on large bundles of foreign-based communications on its own authority so long as Americans are not the targets. A secret intelligence court, which traditionally has issued individual warrants before wiretapping began, would review the procedures set up by the executive branch only after the fact to determine whether there were abuses involving Americans.
  

• The credit crisis is no longer just a subprime mortgage problem. As home prices fall and banks tighten lending standards, people with good, or prime, credit histories are falling behind on their payments for home loans, auto loans and credit cards at a quickening pace, according to industry data and economists. The rise in prime delinquencies, while less severe than the one in the subprime market, nonetheless poses a threat to the battered housing market and weakening economy, which some specialists say is in a recession or headed for one.

• Hollywood screenwriters can get back to work Wednesday after voting to end their three-month strike, bringing to a close the US entertainment industry's most damaging dispute in 20 years. Writers downed tools on November 5, a move that sent shockwaves through the industry, forcing the postponement or cancellation of several television shows and movies, and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."--Aesop
  

The Day's News...

• The seizure of electronics at U.S. borders has prompted protests from travelers who say they now weigh the risk of traveling with sensitive or personal information on their laptops, cameras or cellphones. In some cases, companies have altered their policies to require employees to safeguard corporate secrets by clearing laptop hard drives before international travel. Anarchist travelers are warned not to carry sensitive digital information with them on flights.

• Sixty-one percent of the public believes the economy is now suffering through its first recession since 2001, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. The fallout from a depressed housing market and a credit crunch nearly caused the economy to stall in the final three months of last year. Some experts, like the majority of people questioned in the poll, say the economy actually may be shrinking now. The worry is that consumers and businesses will hunker down further and pull back spending, sending the economy into a tailspin.

• It has been described as the world's largest rubbish dump, or the Pacific plastic soup, and it's starting to alarm scientists. It is a vast area of plastic debris and other flotsam drifting in the northern Pacific Ocean, held there by swirling ocean currents. Discovered in 1997 by American sailor Charles Moore, what is also called the great Pacific garbage patch is now alarming some with its ever-growing size and possible impact on human health. The "patch" is in fact two huge, linked areas of circulating rubbish, says Dr Marcus Eriksen, research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, founded by Moore. Although the boundaries change, it stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the northern Pacific to near the coast of Japan.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid."-- Friedrich Nietzsche
  

The Day's News...

• Determined not to let anything spoil their party, organizers of the 2008 Summer Olympics said Wednesday that they will take control over the most unpredictable element of all -- the weather. While China's Olympic athletes are getting ready to compete on the fields, its meteorologists are working the skies, attempting the difficult feat of making sure it doesn't rain on the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies. The weather modification would be used only on a small area, opening what would be in effect a meteorological umbrella over the 91,000-seat Olympic stadium. The $400-million stadium, nicknamed the "bird's nest" for its interlacing steel beams, has no roof. C.S.A. policy analysts believe that weather modification has many applications beyond sporting events, and that it is a potentially potent weapon in the hands of our enemies.

• Consumer spending slowed in December and inflation continued to rise, the government said Thursday. Spending by consumers, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the nation’s economic growth, rose by an anemic 0.2 percent in December after jumping 1 percent in November. Adjusted for inflation, spending was flat for the month. Economists have predicted a significant downturn in spending as consumers grapple with record-high oil and food prices. The report from the Commerce Department reinforces the disappointing holiday sales figures that leading retail chains released in the last few weeks.
  

• Much to the dismay of freegans everywhere, Starbucks has announced that it will stop selling sandwichs in order to focus on its "core products." The move comes after the company announced that profits rose by less than 2 percent, as U.S. customers grappling with a soft economy lined up in smaller numbers for a second quarter in a row. Sales at stores open at least 13 months, a key measure of a retailer's health, fell 1 percent in the U.S. as traffic declined 3 percent. Stronger growth overseas helped boost global comparable-store sales a modest 1 percent, compared with 6 percent in first quarter 2007.
  

• In other Starbucks news, a series of emails by Starbucks managers sheds light on the company's efforts to thwart union organizing among its baristas. The emails, which are part of a labor-dispute proceeding in New York, could prove embarrassing because they show managers using various methods to identify pro-union employees, including searching internet message boards. The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, has been trying to organize workers at Starbucks since 2004 and has been able to organize only several dozen at a handful of stores in New York and a few other cities.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: " If the wind will not serve, take to the oars." -- Latin Proverb

The Days News...

• This week, investors were bracing for Black Tuesday. Instead, they got Whiplash Wednesday. A day after the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates, averting a nasty nose dive in the market, Wall Street watched as the Dow Jones industrial average swung like a yo-yo, diving nearly 250 points in the opening minutes, spending the day in a series of rallies and swoons, then closing up — way up — with a gain of nearly 300 points to snap a five-day losing streak. Market volatility is near its highest level in five years. In a three-hour span in the afternoon, the blue-chip index ricocheted by almost 600 points.

• Even as the Federal Reserve grapples with the collapse of a speculative bubble in housing — the second speculative bust in less than a decade — is it at risk of repeating recent mistakes? One day after the Fed slashed its benchmark interest rate to head off a possible recession, a small minority of economists warned on Wednesday that the central bank was in danger of invoking the same remedies that it did after the bubble in dot-com stocks burst seven years ago. Though most experts agree that the economy is on the brink of a recession, and some even contend the recession has already begun, critics say the Fed’s attempted rescue looks uncomfortably similar to the aggressive rate reductions that aggravated the speculative bubble in housing.

• The French bank Société Générale stunned financial markets today by revealing that it had been the victim of a near-€5 billion (£3.7 billion) rogue trading fraud, one of the world's largest and four times the size of the cover-up by Nick Leeson, the man who sank Barings. France's second-largest bank said today that it had lost €4.9 billion as a result of the rogue trades by a Paris-based trader who concealed his positions through "a scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions". SocGen was forced today into an emergency €5.5 billion capital-raising to shore up its ravaged balance sheet.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps."--Confucius
  

The Day's News...

• European and Asian stock markets plunged Monday following declines on Wall Street last week amid investor pessimism over the U.S. government's stimulus plan to prevent a recession. Investors dumped shares because they were skeptical that an economic stimulus plan President George W. Bush announced Friday would shore up the economy that has been battered by problems in its housing and credit markets. The plan, which requires approval by Congress, calls for about $145 billion worth of tax relief to encourage consumer spending.

• The London stock market was in meltdown today as nearly £60 billion was wiped off London shares. A combination of poor economic figures and the worsening global credit crunch sent the FTSE 100 plunging. At one stage the drop was the biggest since 9/11 in 2001, although the index of Britain's biggest companies later clawed back some of the losses. At lunchtime the Footsie was down 250.1 points to 5647.8. It is also the worst start to the year for the stock market since records began in 1936. "I smell the acrid stench of fear and uncertainty," said markets commentator David Buik of BGC Partners.

• For much of the world, the United States is now on sale at discount prices, according to a faintly jingoistic article in the New York Times. With credit tight, unemployment growing and worries mounting about a potential recession, American business and government leaders are courting foreign money to keep the economy growing. Foreign investors are buying aggressively, taking advantage of American duress and a weak dollar to snap up what many see as bargains, while making inroads to the world’s largest market.

• Brief commentary in place of a Strategy Quote: Today is Martin Luther King Day, which means U.S. stock markets are closed. When they open tomorrow, it is almost certain that they will fall considerably. By how much, I have no idea, but it's rare that you have a full day's warning for an event such as this. I refer readers to a C.S.A. post on recession and encourage anarchists everywhere to find the strategic opportunities, whether in propaganda or action or both, in stock market turmoil.
  

The Day's News...

A slew of interesting housing news today...

• December housing starts (the number of new homes upon which construction began) fell to an annualized pace of 1.006 million properties, the weakest level since May 1991. The decline was far steeper than analysts' consensus forecast of 1.150 million units. For the 2007 full-year, housing starts plunged by a whopping 24.8 percent from 2006, the steepest decline since 1980. Construction began on a total of 1.354 million homes. "This dismal housing report ... is proof that we might as well get comfy because it'll take some time before we see the bottom in housing," said one expert.

• The housing slump appear to be catching up to the wealthy. High earners with good credit may be heading for trouble as their adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) adjust beyond their means, real estate agents and others say. In a normal housing market they'd be able to sell, but now they are stuck. "The next wave of problems will come from prime borrowers who bought too much house or borrowed too much against it," said Michael van Zalingen, director of home ownership services at Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago. A "prime" borrower is one with good credit.

• With the national foreclosure rate zooming and the real estate market in a two-year funk, the insurance industry fears more homeowners will see arson as a way out of their financial woes. A recent report by the industry-funded Coalition Against Insurance Fraud notes that with "untold thousands of homeowners struggling with ballooning subprime mortgage payments, fraud fighters are watching closely for a spike in arsons by desperate homeowners who can no longer afford their home payments. History indicates such a spike is coming.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "A garden is half-made when it is well planned. The best gardener is the one who does the most gardening by the winter fire."--Liberty Hyde-Bailey

The Day's News...

• In response to reader interest in the coming elimination of sleep by capitalism, the C.S.A. blog directs your attention to the following article on "brain doping" from the LA Times. Also of interest is the drug Provigil, which can keep subjects awake for days on end without cognitive breakdown. Most interestingly, it is prescribed for a new disorder called "chronic shift work sleep disorder," which basically means that if you work the night shift, they've got a drug for you. For more on Provigil, read here.
  

• Wall Street plunged again Friday amid renewed fears that the financial sector's troubles with bad credit won't soon end and that some consumers are buckling under the weight of a slowing economy. The major indexes each lost more than 1 percent, including the Dow Jones industrials, which finished down nearly 250 points. Meanwhile, the Bush administration and Congressional leaders, increasingly concerned about a possible recession, are moving closer to agreeing that an economic stimulus package is needed soon.

• A war game simulation conducted by the U.S. military in 2002 was eerily similar to a near naval clash that occurred between the U.S. and Iran a few days ago. In the game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats. The C.S.A. has blogged on swarming tactics here.
  

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things."--Anonymous

The Day's News...

• A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The study, published in the Dec. 26 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys' cognitive abilities but made their brains look "awake" in PET scans. Scientists consider orexin A a promising candidate to become a "sleep replacement" drug.

• Europe started 2008 with a raft of new laws against smoking, air pollution and even junk food advertisements, but some grumbled that the new laws from the "nanny state" cramped their style. The conservative German newspaper Die Welt noted that 19th century revolutionaries in Berlin had waved the banner for, among other civil liberties, the right to smoke wherever they pleased. "The freedom to smoke in public was one of the few lasting achievements of 1848. That is over now," it lamented histrionically.

• The average sales price of apartments in the heart of New York shot up as high as 34 percent - to $1.43 million - in the last quarter of 2007 compared to the year before, according to reports put out by the city's top real-estate brokerage firms. Experts said New York continues to attract deep-pocketed foreign buyers and Wall Streeters whose purchases of extremely high-end apartments have tended to skew the figures somewhat.

• Hundreds of thousands of people have been struck down by a highly infectious stomach bug that swept the United Kingdom during the holiday period, doctors said on Thursday. The Royal College of General Practitioners estimates that 100,000 people a week caught the norovirus bug, which causes vomiting and diarrhea.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "What do you want to achieve or avoid? The answer to this question is objectives. How will you go about achieving your desired results? The answer to this you can call strategy."-- William E. Rothschild
  

The Day's News...

• The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad. Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

• Americans are falling behind on their credit card payments at an alarming rate, sending delinquencies and defaults surging by double-digit percentages in the last year and prompting warnings of worse to come. Experts say these signs of the deterioration of finances of many households are partly a byproduct of the subprime mortgage crisis and could spell more trouble ahead for an already sputtering economy.

• An economics column in the conservative London newspaper the Telegraph contains this explosive excerpt: "As the credit paralysis stretches through its fifth month, a chorus of economists has begun to warn that the world's central banks are fighting the wrong war, and perhaps risk a policy error of epochal proportions...[York University Economics Professor Peter Spencer says] They (the central banks) still have another couple of months before this starts imploding. Things are very unstable and can move incredibly fast. I don't think the central banks are going to make a major policy error, but if they do, this could make 1929 look like a walk in the park." Hyperbolic perhaps, but indicative of a serious lack of confidence in some quarters.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "The highest technique is to have no technique. My technique is a result of your technique; my movement is a result of your movement."--Bruce Lee
  

Recession and Opportunism

The Dow Jones Industrial Average Since 1900

Recently, a reader asked me to summarize the current condition of the economy and to provide some thoughts on an anarchist approach to the situation. The exchange sparked by these questions allowed me to organize my thoughts on these matters clearly and thoroughly, and so I have decided to post them below. While this covers familiar territory for those of you that have been following the C.S.A. for a while, I think it helpfully consolidates scattered thoughts and posts and will help orient new comers. Readers are encouraged to post comments.

So here goes...

The U.S. economy is slowing down right now. It is not yet in a recession, which is defined as a decline in a country's GDP for two successive quarters. The economy is, in fact, still growing, it is just that its rate of growth is slowing. The prices of key consumer goods (food, heating oil, and gas most notable among them) has risen, inflation appears to be on the rise (meaning the real value of the dollar has weakened, which it has to historic levels against certain foreign currencies), and the job market is tepid. The stock market has risen a great in the last few years, but now it looks shaky and there are fears of a "correction." All of these factors together indicate that the U.S. economy has hit a rough patch after years of rapid growth; whether or not it will begin to decline is a subject of debate, but it certainly seems more likely today than it did a year ago.

Exactly how this happened is difficult to pinpoint, as it always is with capitalism's boom/bust cycle. The collapse of the mortgage market and the resulting "credit crunch" certainly had an effect on profits and confidence, but the bursting of the "housing bubble" does not account for everything. The mortgage collapse did lead to a tightening of the credit market, meaning that financial institutions have been less willing to loan money, and abundant credit is certainly a crucial component of growth. Not to be discounted is the dramatic rise in oil prices, which has raised costs in many fields and has thus cut into profits. Additionally, the weakening of the dollar (which was caused in part by the decades old and rapidly growing trade deficit the U.S. runs with the rest of the world) has made it more expensive to import goods, which significantly affects the U.S. economy since it is so reliant on foreign manufactured products.

The U.S. economy is the largest in the world and the extent to which it is connected to the economies of other countries is difficult to overstate. Most relevant to the current situation is the quantity of dollars held by foreign investors. Many countries and corporations keep their cash reserves in dollars since they are tied to the world's most powerful economy and are thus considered safe. The recent decline of the dollar has lead some to reconsider, since the value of their reserves have fallen dramatically.

Most notable among this group is China, which holds an enormous number of dollars in reserve. Were China to trade in their dollars for, say, Euros, the market would be flooded with dollars, thus sending their value plummeting. Such a "worst case scenario" is unlikely, but the public lack of confidence in the dollar by such powerful institutions is enough to strike fear into the hearts of many. Even a limited sell-off of the dollar would be a disaster for the U.S. economy. What protects the U.S. is the fact that a depression in U.S. would almost certainly lead to a global depression, which would harm all of those same institutions that traded in their dollars. Nonetheless, the specter of a major dollar sell-off is haunting the U.S. economy right now, and that has contributed to the current gloominess.

The economy "collapsing" is a term of art. A recession or even a depression does not mean the end of the economy as such, anymore than the death of a president means the end of presidency. The boom/bust cycle is integral to capitalism and that cycle will continue, regardless of whether or not there are people calling for an end to capitalism. The only question for anarchists is how to best take advantage of this inevitability.

The same approach applies to other activities. Take dumpster diving: of course dumpster divers "rely" on the system that produces waste, but their concern is how to best take advantage of an inevitable situation. Seeing the miserable reality we face, one in which eatable food is thrown away and faceless businessmen decide the fates of countless people, as a field of opportunity is, to my mind, the only strategically and psychology viable option for us.

Concretely, this means that an economic downturn should be scoured for opportunities to create anarchy, build networks of solidarity, and put forth an analysis of the forces that are mutilating peoples' lives. To put it succinctly: direct action, mutual aid, and propaganda. Economic downturns create new material needs as capitalism becomes temporarily incapable of providing for segments of the population that were previously integrated into the system.

So finding ways to meet those needs for ourselves and those around us outside of capitalism, with an eye towards expanding those relationships of mutual aid beyond the confines of temporary economic hardship, becomes the large-scale challenge for anarchists (I'd like to emphasize the word "ourselves" in that sentence because an economic downturn would not just affect other people in other places but would also create real hardships for many anarchists, even those at the margins of the capitalist economy.) This challenge can be combined with some forms of direct action and propaganda.

Take organized theft as an example. Theft can serve as a means of meeting material needs, it can target specific corporations for damage, and it can illustrate the absurdity of abundance in the face of unmet needs. That's just one example; direct action needn't meet an immediate material needs to be effective, nor do tactics for economic survivalism need to take the form of illegal direct action. The point is to respond to changing circumstances by applying our creativity and analysis to a situation created largely beyond our control.

The Day's News...

Please excuse the delay in posts. I'll try to be more consistent; thanks to everyone for their encouragement. And now:

• Employers added 94,000 jobs in November, but consumer confidence fell for the third straight month and inflation appears to be on the rise. Economists now say that the economy is in a state of steady slow-down but cannot be considered in recession. Holiday spending figures have been lackluster thus far.

• The television writer's strike continues with no end in sight, throwing the fall programming season into disarray and placing increased value on "reality" programs, which don't require writers. Most television programs will revert to reruns if the strike continues through the holidays, as many observers predict.

• The economies of many big oil-exporting countries are growing so fast that their need for energy within their borders is crimping how much they can sell abroad, adding new strains to the global oil market, and painting a stark portrait for oil prices in the decades to come. Experts say the sharp growth, if it continues, means several of the world’s most important suppliers may need to start importing oil within a decade to power all the new cars, houses and businesses they are buying and creating with their oil wealth.

• Briefly: 11 Minnesota slaughterhouse employees have fallen ill after months of continuously inhaling airborne pig brain particles; online shoppers can now purchase coffins, pet urns, and other funeral related products from Costco's website, which will deliver the morbid goods to your door; and finally, a team of software developers is hard at work on a "stupid filter" that promises to do away with idiotic online comments in the same way that a spam filter removes junk e-mail.
  

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "As the means, so the end."--Mahatma Gandhi
  

Swarm Intelligence

How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best, according to a fascinating article in National Geographic (a similar article appeared recently in the New York Times.)

Swarm behavior was a trendy topic when observers were stuggling to understand the movements of rioters in Seattle and elsewhere. The use of mass text messages was heralded as the key technological innovation leading to the emergence of the "smart mobs" that brought down trade summits around the world. Like so many other things, such talk has all but disappeared in a post-9/11 world where protest mobs hardly merit a mention in mainstream press coverage, and text messages are as mundane as McDonald's.

But swarm intelligence, not just as a way of coordinating street battles, is a rich field of study for anarchists. The notion that highly complex projects and behaviors can be coordinated without any centralized authority has been an article of faith for anarchists for a long time. Indeed, old time anarchist Peter Kropotkin prefigured much of today's conclusions about swarm behavior with his research (this links to an excellent article by Stephen Jay Gould about Kropotkin and his findings) on the role of mutual aid in evolution.

But now, biologists and computer scientists (and the military) have taken a serious interest in swarm intelligence, and their research is helping to explain how important decisions are made by groups of animals numbering in the thousands, even when many individuals disagree. That's the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we're talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or people, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized control, response to local information, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

The research has lead to another conclusion: crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or anarchists, it relies on its members to do their own part. It should be clear that such conclusions apply not only to rioting. If anarchists as a whole are concieved of as a swarm—unique individuals without leaders following simple rules of thumb (e.g. don't behave oppressively, always try to prevent arrests, create alternative means of subsistence, don't snitch, etc)—the extent to which we follow our own rules and behave responsibly determines our strength. Unfortunately, many anarchists do imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, and wait for someone else to tell them what to do, and the result is that the entire swarm is endangered (look no further than Operation Backfire.)

Swarms accomplish incredible feats, from building underground cities to evading larger, faster predators at a moment's notice. They do so by relying on their keen sensitivity to local information, reliable means of direct communication, and an uncompromising individuality while simultaneously maintaining certain universal behavioral principles. Such a strategy may seem simple, obvious even (and no doubt some will even say, inaccurately, "We already do that!"), but the results are infintely complex and undeniably effective. Swarms do not require all individuals to think alike or agree; swarm intelligence is in fact an approach to making decisions despite differences. Adopting such a strategy would no doubt prove profitable for a decentralized swarm such as ours.

The Day's News...

• Georgian police have trotted out every imaginable crowd control weapon in their battles with protesters in the past weeks. In addition to tear gas, rubber bullets, and stink bombs, they have also used truck-mounted ultrasonic sound devices that temporarily disorient victims, as this video shows.
  

• An article in BusinessWeek reveals that groups of shoplifters are stealing millions of dollars worth of merchandise from chain stores by utilizing well-organized teams, foil-lined bags to fool alarms, and internet auction sites to sell their goods. Thanks to one of our readers for the tip on this encouraging and illuminating piece.

• An excellent article from Bloomberg thoroughly explains the origins, dynamics, and implications of the falling dollar in easily understood language. In addition to mentioning that everyone from Korean shipbuilders to Iraqi bankers are trying to move away from the dollar, the article also points out that rapper Jay-Z flashed a wad of Euros in his latest video.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "Our epoch does not need to write poetic slogans, but to realize them."-- Situationist International
  

The Day's News...

• Analysts now expect losses on subprime loans to reach $300 to $400 billion (in a market valued at $1 trillion), meaning 30-40% of borrowers are expected to default on their loans. That's a lot of empty houses. Others believe more losses are still to come, which could spark the worst recession since the 1930s.

• With the screenwriters' strike entering its second week, Americans are faced with a second entire week without late night talk shows, and the possibility that major primetime programs will be cut-off midseason. Now, stagehands at Broadway theaters have gone on strike, bringing all but 8 productions to a halt. The implications for spectacular culture are still unknown.
  

• As the U.S. Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people changed their definition of privacy. He says that human beings can no longer expect governments and companies not to spy on them; instead "privacy" will now mean having the right to expect that governments and companies won't tell other people what they learn when they spy on you.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."-- Napoleon Bonaparte
  

The Day's News...

• A slew of bad news for the capitalist economy today: the Chairman of the Federal Reserve said that economic growth is likely to slow noticeably in the coming months, that the housing collapse has not yet reached its low point, and that a recession is possible though unlikely. Retailers reported worse than expected sales figures for October, following a dismal September. Gasoline prices rose 1.8% last night, and gas now sells for $5 a gallon in some parts of California.

• A three-meter tidal wave is predicted to surge down the English Channel in the next 12 hours, posing an "extreme danger to life and property", experts have warned. Coupled with storms and high tides, the wave could leave swathes of the east coast under water.

• A retired AT&T employee claims that the company gave the National Security Administration access to all of its phone and web traffic. Allegedly, the NSA was also allowed to hook into the company's telecom network in order to access traffic from dozens of other telecom providers as well.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it."--Margaret Thatcher
  

A Note To Readers

Readers of this blog, old and new! This blog can benefit greatly from your feedback, suggestions, ideas, and insinuations. If there are stories, strategies, tactics, or concepts that would be a good fit for the C.S.A. blog, send them to Lobsterbeard@gmail.com. Please read this post, which explains the blog's raison d'être, before sending.

Today a reader sent along this note:

"I was wondering if you noticed this article on the theft of shopping carts. In your August 8th post you stated that, because of the condition of the economy:

"First, we should keep doing what many of us do already: stealing, especially from large corporations."

I would like to propose that a strategic thing to steal would be these shopping carts. Each cart is worth one hundred dollars and if enough carts were taken then the store would be somewhat chaotic the next day. Imagine that on the day after Thanksgiving there were no carts at Target or whatever."

A good idea, indeed. Imagine, too, if the carts where then redeployed in some inventive fashion, perhaps in an unpermitted shopping cart race through the center of town, or as a snake-like barricade on wheels, or distributed to the city's homeless population. Sounds like it has potential, no?

Another exciting tactic, which could be utilized independently or in concert with the above mentioned, is the donning of superhero costumes by large gangs who then raid expensive supermarkets. This tactic has been used to good effect in Germany, serving both to meet material needs and as excellent propaganda by the deed.

As our reader notes, the holiday shopping season is an especially important time for economic sabotage. Retailers make a large portion of their annual income between Thanksgiving and New Year's, so anything that disrupts the annual orgy of consumption would be felt acutely. Perhaps even more critically, holiday sales figures play an important psychological role in the economy, as they are usually interpreted as a signal of the economy's broader health and an important indicator of "consumer confidence." With investors already concerned about the possibility of a recession, poor holiday sales figures would be tremendously unwelcome news. Additionally, it is expected that the full extent of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown will not be known until after the New Year, meaning that poor holiday sales figures and deeper than anticipated losses from bad loans could be reported around the same time, potentially forming a devastating one-two punch of bad economic news.

The Day's News...

• Late night talk shows have come to a grinding halt as the Writers' Guild Of America has gone out on strike, with 12,000 screen writers setting up picket lines today in Los Angeles and New York City. While most programs are recorded weeks or months in advance, the possibility of televisions across the country showing nothing but re-runs is a possibility should the strike continue. The last strike, in 1988, lasted for five months and cost the industry $500 million.
  

• Losses from defaults in the $1 trillion sub-prime mortgage market may reach $250 billion in the next year, a concern that has depressed stock markets around the world. Additionally, as foreclosures have risen, it is becoming increasingly clear that the sub-prime crisis will disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic homeowners.
  

• An article in the New York Times highlights the growing bicycle economy in Portland, Oregon. The proliferation of bike dealers, makers, repair shops, and a plethora of other businesses has thrilled government officials, who welcome the boost they have brought to the city's capitalist economy. The article raises important questions for anarchists, who are sometimes guilty of latching themselves and lending their credibility to easily recuperated subcultural phenomena.
  

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things."--Winston Churchill
  
  

The Strategy Of Death

A little over a year ago, Brad Will was killed by paramilitaries in Oaxaca City in southern Mexico. The news of his death emerged overnight in a series of confusing reports and macabre photographs, each new piece of information more plausible and more unwelcome than the last. It was a sickening and deeply saddening spectacle, a friend's death played out in a halting stream of data. Unsurprisingly and not inappropriately, it was only about three hours after the initial reports came out that I heard someone say we were going to have to consider the strategic implications of our friend's death.

Looking back on the past year, it goes without saying that Brad's death has in fact had strategic implications. Most obviously, his murder became the primary justification for the full-scale invasion of Oaxaca City by the Mexican federal police. That was easy to predict. The knowledge that our enemies would use Brad's death strategically rightly informed the discussions of our own strategy from the beginning. As much as we may have desired a long period of private, solemn mourning, we knew immediately that the circumstances of his death demanded otherwise. Personally, I was torn by this knowledge and the moves it inspired in those around me. "Can we cut the activist shit?," I thought to myself. "I want to just feel crappy and tell stories, not establish 'working groups.'"

And frankly, the things that have inspired me since then have largely not come out of working groups. There was a beautiful, well-organized memorial service in New York about a week later, but it wouldn't have been nearly so memorable if a small, autonomous group of friends had not cut the lock off of a building that had housed a squatted community center (a project in which Brad participated) during the parade that came after it. The entire parade went charging in, throwing open the doors and dancing around the inside of the building that had been forcibly locked-up years earlier. I will never forget the joy and bewilderment on the faces of some of the former squatters who were there that day.

And the trend of autonomous action continues. Nearly a year to the day after Brad was shot, a lone, unknown figure on a bicycle rolled by the Mexican consulate late at night, tossing two hand grenades at the building's facade.

While there is certainly a place for large, public events, whether memorials or demos or both, in honor of the dead, the idea that the anniversary of Brad's death might become a sort of unofficial time for autonomous direct action is an appealing one. There are no shortage of examples for how such a thing might work, Devil's Night and May Day being the first two examples that come to mind. While specific days of action can sometimes serve to contain or delay action rather than multiple it, a fully decentralized structure, something closer to a holiday than a 'day of action,' can help ensure the effectiveness of such a strategy.

Which brings us to the question of how to remember Brad, or rather, how to disseminate the memory of Brad. Letting his memory fade into obscurity would undoubtedly be both a strategic and personal loss. While I have heard a number of armchair critics express their distaste for his elevation to "martyrdom", I would remind them that the story and mythology of the Haymarket Martyrs radicalized and animated a generation of anarchists (including Emma Goldman), and in fact continues to do so today, a hundred and twenty three years later. While a mythology that serves to canonize imperfect individuals is unhelpful at best and alienating at worst, a mythology that inspires and teaches and motivates is as powerful a weapon as we have.

If we don't claim the mythology, others will. As we've seen countless times, even the dead are not safe from the ideologues. While none of our lives have a moral, the stories we create become the mythology of the past, a past that is always changing as it is shaped by the present. The first line of a poem by the musician Sun Ra bears repeating: "If you're not a reality, whose myth are you?" The choice is ours, or at least we can choose to contest the definitions foisted upon us. The terrain of mythology is governed by strategy as well, and we must not cede it to abstract forces. The loss we suffered in the death of a friend will only be compounded if we miss the opportunity to turn his memory into a weapon. And, in fact, I can think of no better way to heal than for Brad's memory to become a living presence in our own lives.

The Day's News...

• According to estimates, nearly 1 million southern Californians have been displaced in the biggest evacuation in state history as a result of at least 16 simultaneous wildfires. Insurance claims from the fires, which have been burning for 4 days but are now largely under control, could top $500 million. The catastrophic fires are consistent with what climate change models have been predicting for years, experts say, and they may be just a prelude to many more such events in the future -- as vegetation grows heavier than usual and then ignites during prolonged drought periods.

• U.S. existing home sales fell 8.0 percent in September to their lowest level since January 1998 as a persistent housing slump continued to weigh on the property market of the world's biggest economy. The aftershocks of the housing slump have persuaded at least one major investor to dump his dollar holdings and declare the U.S. economy in a recession.

• The head of the International Monetary Fund warned Monday of a potential "abrupt fall" in the US dollar that could roil the global economy. He warned that a global slowdown would exacerbate other existing risks, noting emerging economies' reliance on private capital inflow.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "Everyone has a plan ... until they get hit." -- Mike Tyson
  

The Day's News...

• An "exceptional" drought affecting much of the Southeastern United States has drastically depleted water supplies in the region, leaving about 3 million Atlanta residents with less than 90 days of remaining tap water. Government officials admit there is no plan in place should supplies run out.

• Of the 33 cities predicted to have at least 8 million people by 2015, at least 21 are highly vulnerable to rising sea levels and other disasters related to climate change, according to a recent study. Additionally, more than one tenth of the world's population currently reside in low-lying areas at risk from climate change.

• One in twelve U.S. households now has a net worth of over $1 million, minus the value of their primary residence. Additionally, there are now 916 yachts on order longer than 80 feet, a figure that has more than doubled in the past four years. There are 23 yachts on order longer than 250 feet, which cost upward of a $1 million per meter to build.
  

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”-- Sun Tzu
  

A New Black Monday?

Friday marks the 20th anniversary of Black Monday, the largest single-day percentage drop of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since World War I. The market tumbled 22.6% in a single day, but the damage was even greater than that figure suggests (the Dow consists only of large, established corporations), with many smaller caps being wiped out entirely. The panic spread all around the world. By the end of October, stock markets in Hong Kong had fallen 45.8%, Australia 41.8%, Spain 31%, the United Kingdom 26.4%, the United States 22.68%, and Canada 22.5%.

What lead up to this dramatic plunge? Well, conditions much like those presently effecting the market. Stock prices soaring far past valuations (the Dow broke 14,000 recently; it opened at 2,247 on Black Monday), spiking oil prices (oil topped $85 a barrel today, a record high), a weak dollar (the U.S. dollar is in the midst a two year swoon, hitting an all-time low on October 1st), and geo-political turmoil in the Middle East. Perhaps just as important is market psychology. Leading up to Black Monday, every dip in the market (such as the 5% drop the market suffered on the Wednesday before Black Monday) was quickly corrected by investors who saw the dips as bargain hunting opportunities rather than warning signs, which is exactly how investors have been playing the market in the last 9 months. The recent credit meltdown resulting from the failure of sub-prime mortgages (explained in a C.S.A. post here) has caused only a few market causalities, with most investors refusing to be scared off from the booming market.

The question you're asking, I'm sure, is, why should I care? What does the stock market matter to anarchists? My answer: it matters as much as we want it to. Like it or not, the stock market has a tremendous impact on the lives of people all around the world, at all levels of the economic hierarchy. During boom times, criticism, questioning and sabotage are opportune strategies. We can ask what prosperity really means, whether or not the kind of prosperity offered by a rising stock market is the kind that makes us truly happy. We can question the real meaning of economic data, such as the Gross Domestic Product, which measures the total market value of the goods and services produced by a country. Clear cut an old growth forest, the GDP goes up. Slaughter a billion animals, the GDP rises accordingly. Build a nuclear bomb, that adds up too. We can counter the propaganda of capitalist cheerleaders who use this kind of data to paint a rosy picture of the system by pointing out what it all really means. And we can intervene in the economy more directly, using whatever means are at our disposal to make the exploitation of our planet and our friends less profitable.

A dramatic drop in the stock market would present us with a unique opportunity, one that only comes along every few decades. We can counter the rationalizations and hedgings of the capitalist pundits by explaining that capitalism is a boom-bust system that takes no account of actual human need. We can demonstrate what a gift economy might look like and contrast it with the misery of commodity production and exchange. And we can make sure that when capital does begin to recover, it is not without resistance to its fresh incursion into our communities.

We ought to carefully consider our options, but we must not settle for letting an event such as a stock market crash pass unnoticed, a danger created by the insularity of anarchist communities. If we are to be relevant to the world outside of our small scenes, we must account for what impacts the lives of our neighbors, and a stock market crash would certainly qualify, as lay-offs, withered pensions, and falling income would certainly result.

While a drop in the stock market doesn't necessarily lead to an economic recession, it can, and we ought to be prepared for that too, with insurrectionary mutual aid, incisive propaganda, and scandalous action. Disaster, of whatever kind, creates dramatically new conditions, quickly, and we must be quick to respond if we are to take advantage of them. I look forward to hearing other thoughts on ways anarchists could respond to economic fluctuations.

The Day's News...

• Those of you who have have been following riot control technology for a few years will remember the microwave pain ray. Well, a prototype is now ready and larger models are already being churned out. A journalist who volunteered to be shot by the ray said it was like being hit by a blast from a very hot oven and was too painful to bear. Note: I don't offer this kind of news to dissuade anyone from rioting. Far from it. As with everything else on this blog, I offer it for the potential strategic advantages offered by knowing what's in your enemy's toolbox.

• According to some scientists, plants can warn each other via underground runners if enemies are nearby. If one of the plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal. Once warned, the intact plants strengthen their chemical and mechanical resistance so that they are less attractive for advancing caterpillars. Thanks to this early warning system, the plants can stay one step ahead of their attackers. Experimental research has revealed that this significantly limits the damage to the plants. An object lesson in decentralized networks...

• The recent killing of unarmed civilians by private security contractors in Iraq has lead to an indignant uproar in the liberal press, who are naturally arriving at the story long after it became relevant (the C.S.A. blog had a lengthy post on this subject months ago.) Meanwhile, the U.S. government is trying to figure out exactly what laws apply to private security contractors.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning."--Winston Churchill