How to Start a Fire

An Invitation

Anonymous

2017-07-10

STRAIGHT TO THE POINT:

Our civilization is in collapse.

This collapse is well-documented: philosophers, scientists,
politicians, military strategists, economists, and even NASA
have begun sounding the alarm for ecological catastrophe, the
technological singularity, and the general collapse of life as we
know it. The news anchors appear no less panicked than the
environmental and survivalist fringe of the past: the Arctic is
‘melting, Japanese teenagers refuse to have sex, a private com-
pany wants to build a colony on Mars, Europe is being looted
by hooded protestors, and humans may be extinct by the end
of the century.

Through all of this, at the precipice of insanity, there are
those who are organizing to save mankind by dissolving all
civie life into a continuum of warfare. Urbanists work along-
side military specialists. SmartGrowthers and green capital-
ists hope to maintain present levels of exploitation without
the parking lots and fossil fuels. Cybemeticians can no longer
conceal their imperial fantasies: "imagine uploading a criminal
mind onto a computer to simulate eternal imprisonment! Think

of all o the resources we could save!” Holding it all together are
the citizens who long for quiet, who will defend this civiliza-
tion and its false ideas just as so many peasants once fought for
Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas, and a million other dying regimes.

And yet, a global struggle — a tremendous global struggle
— has emerged from this crumbling edifice. An insurrectional
wave has washed over every inhabited continent. Tunisia,
Egypt, Spain, Greece, Italy, the United States, Libya, Syria,
France, Chile, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, Bosnia, Taiwan,
Ukraine, and beyond. Everywhere people have decided to
fight for another way of being — for a life actually worth
living. The same techniques appear across the globe and
have been refined for local conditions: the occupation of
plazas and buildings, flaming barricades, the reappropriation
and automatic communization of food and clothing, masked
demonstrations, molotov cocktails, street clinics, information
hacking and leaks, highway blockades, and strikes. In 2008,
we watched in awe as Greece was engulfed in flames. Today,
scenes like this are astoundingly normal. We do not expect
this scenario to end soon.

In sum, there is a side organized to preserve this civilization
through every crisis that signifies its impending collapse, and
there is a side getting organized to usher in a very different fu-
ture from the one in store for us. These two sides, situated on
either pole of a collapsing order, are the forces that constitute
a global civil war. This conflict cannot be reduced to a debate
over who should run the government, nor what sort of govern-
ment we ought to have. This conflict transcends questions of
the economy or social inequality. This conflict has to do with
the future of human and non-human life, of what it means to
be alive in a time where all social interaction produces com-
puterized information. We have entered a new geological age
‘marked in its emergence by a fantastic tragedy. We must grap-
ple with the real questions of our time: What does it mean to
be human in the 21* century? How will we feed ourselves in

2
a desert, in a nuclear wasteland, in the ashes of a city? How
do we shut down a metropolis? How do we meet with those
trapped in the rural-suburban mess? How do we pursue our de-
sires? With whom do we live — and how? How do we learn?
How do we love ourselves and each other? We must be will-
ing to see our situation for what it is and to provide practical
answers to these questions. The whole world is at stake.

We would like for each insurrectionary event, witnessed on
a global scale, to make itself permanent. We would like to live
inside of these phenomena, inside of these communes which
feed themselves, clothe themselves, debate, dance together,
fight together, grieve together, and expand. A number of
obstacles rush to meet us — a number of ready-made answers
to the questions we never should have asked, barbed wire at
the edges of the path to prevent us from wandering elsewhere.
So what now? We'd like to make a break for it, right away, to
really be done with it all — but at the end of the day, the force
of our “no” depends on the collective power behind it. That
power must be built

Get property: Pirate radio. Build stoves. Learn to cook. Learn
Languages. Get arms. Open street carts and businesses. Occupy
buildings. Set up cafes. Diners. Restaurants. Pizza shops. Book
stores. Permaculture. Mend wounds. Lathes. Giant pots. Or-
chards. Build friendships. Acquire film equipment and make
documentaries. Talk to old comrades. Learn martial arts, Read.
Travel. Learn from each other. Write newspapers. Weather the
hard times. Loot. Hold regional gatherings. Write internal jour-
nals. Refine the art of sabotage. Distribute counter-information.
Offset presses. Raw materials and the means of production. Three
thousand camping bowls. Survival packs. Organic seeds. Share
thoughts, feelings, and practice. Learn history and learn from
history. Build tables. Make art. Go to the woods. Summer re-
treats. Dance parties. Get cars. Steal money. Move close to each
other Start uncontrollable riots
Over the course of the last four years, we have deliberately
and serendipitously begun the process of constituting our-
selves as a material, insurrectional force. We have found each
other in the parks and the streets, transformed as everything
was for those months during Occupy. Although our story
finds its origins in chance encounters — high schools, punk
shows, art scenes, cafes, bars — we locate the emergence of
our collective power in the wave of unrest we have had a hand
in shaping. Along the way, we have been inspired by many
others who have gotten organized in their own ways: hacker
collectives, urban farmers, DIY art spaces, crisis cults, and
everyday hustlers.

In this time, we have learned well that the environment we
currently inhabit — call it capitalism, civilization, empire, the
West — is constructed to prevent the foundation of any real
threat to the present system. The political identities offered
to us — anarchist, environmentalist, Marxist, socialist — were
constructed for a historical moment which has passed. They
have not, for decades, equipped themselves with the means to
actually fight. We leave behind the baggage that left us weak
and burdened but still hold onto what has given us strength.
As we have struggled together, as we have grown older, we
have been confronted by a number of forces that have threat-
ened, and still threaten, to pull us apart. Against the tendency
to drift away, to become lost, to return to the lonely solitude of
capitalist normaley, to become mired with negativity, we have
chosen to hold on to one another. This is not merely a theoret-
ical decision, but a lived practice. Having witnessed the fact
that every social movement and every struggle ends because
of a failure to create the conditions for its survival, we have
chosen to create an offensive that can sustain itself.

We must discover in every moment that which puts each of
us in touch with our power, with our potential. We must defeat
that which separates us from it
The process of building a force has both already begun
and requires infinite new beginnings — beginnings that occur
within what is immediately present and available. With this
text, we intend to incite the formation of a revolutionary terri-
tory across the region. We are writing to answer the question
we ask and are asked daily: “But really, what should we be
doing?” We have spent too long avoiding an answer, and have
found the common responses impoverished. Too often, the
people we meet only briefly encounter the possibility of living
differently, and are either lost in the compulsion to return
to normaley or mistake an existing political community as
the only opportunity to begin. While friendships are crucial
to our struggle, we believe wholeheartedly in the capacity
of everyone to immediately begin the process of building a
revolutionary force from wherever one may stand. It should
go without saying that there are no gatekeepers: anyone,
anywhere, can and should begin from wherever they are
Immediately.

In what follows, we will present our vision of a possible near
future and offer steps toward its realization, from a weak start-
ing position of isolation to a situation of ever-increasing rev-
olutionary force. The vision is one that we have elaborated
together over the course of several years — in car rides and
Iate night conversations, in bars and in parks, with comrades
from our own city and from across the world. The practical
suggestions contained here should be understood as real possi-
bilities, each connected to the next in the coherence of a strat-
egy. We ask that you think of your own life, your own friends,
your own inclinations — and consider fully, beyond what is
expressed here, the possibility of making a permanent break.

One thing is clear from the start: there's no way in hell that
any of us is going to succeed alone. What is required is some-
thing that transcends “me” as individual actor and every way
that I've been taught to relate to my world, my friends, my self.

Hence, the first practical step in a war against the status quo:
Find each other.

In truth, the potential insurgents are everywhere. Where
the workers movement had factories to meet each other and
the strike to reveal the cowards, we have the entire metropoli-
tan space to link up and innumerable methods of subversion
to identify who's who: the riot, theft, the blockade, the occu-
pation. Cafes, restaurants, bars, gyms, universities, commu-
nity gardens, book stores, reading circles, art galleries, parks,
hacker conferences, farmers markets, salons: all of these places
are crossed by lines of antagonism, by sides and partisans, con-
flicts and consequences, which are hidden just beneath the sur-
face of civil discourse. With certain attention, we can become
sensible to these antagonisms. For us, this means that potential
comrades are lurking in places we wouldn't ordinarily think to
look. In order to compose new rhythms of revolt, we must
become attuned to melodies of struggle and passion which ex-
ceed or otherwise evade recognition through the sociological
and political categories we have been taught

What is political in friendship emerges when you and I are
affected by a similar leaning, when our knowledges and our
powers interact and intersect in ways that make us stronger.
Tam bound 10 the friend by some experience of election, under-
standing, or decision that implies that the growth of his power
entails the growth of my own. Symmetrically, I am bound to the
enemy by election, only this time a disagreement that, in order
for my power to grow, implies that I confront him, that I under-
‘mine his forces. Certain events make us more than what we are,
while others dissolve us, make us less alive. We must become
sensible to this reality and run head first toward the former and
flee, despite how it may hurt, from the latter

Initial encounters can give way to ethical-political intensi-
ties, but only if relationships are elaborated to that end. The
problem isn't that people do not know the stakes, but rather
the general state of separation and neutrality. In our society,

6
people are unified by petty acsthetic commonalities and iden-
tities given to them by the economy or the charade of politics.
‘These false unities either constitute limitations that suppress
differences, thereby allowing the production of homogenous,
directionless forms (mass organizations, revolutionary cadres,
political scenes), or they provoke false distinctions, deconstruct-
ing the first signs of intensity. Relationships are typically held
together by mere common interests — the currency of social
clubs, cliques, collectors, Instagram “commaunities.” and subcul-
tures everywhere. When what is common between us is left
at shared interests or aesthetic similarities, our relationships
are easily knowable, and therefore easily manageable as they
harden into a digestible, safe, and controllable identity:

We will only overcome the limits of superficial subjectivities
by elaborating — creating, generalizing, concretizing, and de-
fending — an ethical disposition in the world. An ethic, not a
‘morality: a morality consists in a million litle rules about how
we ought to live our lives and a thousand hypotheticals for pro-
ducing them. Morality is what is performed in the courtroom,
the classroom, the church, and and as such provides no path
toa new way of living. An ethic, not an identity (worker, stu-
dent, poor, rich, black, woman): identities are always provided
to us by a nefarious collusion between democracy and Face-
book. In contrast, the ethical question is the question of how.
Tam in the world. Not existentially, but tactically. An elabo-
ration of an ethic is precisely what is prevented by the array
of mechanisms and devices that constitute the hostile environ-
ment we currently inhabit: the cops and the prison, of course,
but also the metro turnstiles, the commodification and privati-
zation of technical knowledge, the management of revolt, the
interstate. If any ethic at all is permitted in this world, it is
only the epidemic of existential deficiency: the hegemony of
a one-dimensional way of life which requires that every idea

be divorced from its consequences, that every passion “ends
where it begin” The unification of what we believe with what

7
we do is the basis for any true liberation. When this happens
at a party, a concert, a protest, a factory, a grocery store or
elsewhere — the police always show up.

We would be remiss to say that all things passionate are
equally good — this is the pluralist liberalism which has come
to dominate consumer markets and academic circles for the
Iast half century. While the environment we inhabit is coordi-
nated to prevent the emergence of any conflict, the fetishism
of conflict alone misses the mark. As we've seen in Ukraine,
antagonisms against the state can take a multiplicity of forms
— and that includes fascists at the barricades. A common dis-
position — which is to say, the abolition of property and its state
— will be the continuity tying together each of our actions; an
anarchic refusal of control and reification will be the basis for

the proliferation of insurrectional possibilities.

The emotional and affective intensity of our relationships
must be manifested into a material consistency. A failure to
do so will inevitably result in our being pulled part. Every life
decision — where we live and whom we live with, where we
get food and how we share it, how we get money and what
we do with it — is a question that can be answered differently.
What appears initially as an individual duty or responsibility
can be understood as an opportunity to increase our collective
strength

Atfirst, what is shared is small and presents itself in fleeting
moments: a gourmet meal of stolen food; a few graffiti kids
racking paint, sharing the loot, and hitting the town together
for a single night; a conspiracy of baristas stealing coffee from
the back to share with their friends at home. Over time, get
organized to be able to put more in common. Live together.
Share meals. Share money. Get everyone on food stamps,
build farms, share techniques for theft and resource misalloca-
tion. Learn how to cook for two, then four, then twenty, then
a thousand. Building a force means that we always search for
ways to increase our power together and get organized to ac-

8
tually do it. Skills and specialized knowledges must be looted
from the intellectual marketplaces they're meant for. Herbal
remedies, auto-repair, home construction, business accounting,
permaculture, programming, and legal work can all be put to
use. An established practice of sharing everything with the
abandonment of all forms of balanced reciprocity can create a
feeling of ease between us that could be dangerous on its own.
Ordinarily, these sorts of mutual care and mutual support are
never allowed to spread past the formation of a monogamous
couple or a nuclear family. As we build our life in common, the
need for money and accounting between us should become less
practical, less necessary, and generally more absurd. We can
share so much more than our Netflix queues

For this, we need places. Places to meet in, whose addressed
can be publicized because they're not connected to any name,
places that can hold the crowd of fifty that won't fit into a
house, places that can hold a thousand who won't fit inside.
Places to get productive in, that have enough room for the sup-
plies necessary to repair the sound cart. Places to print the
newspapers, equipped with industrial printers and drawing ta-
bles. Places of encounter: a cafe, a restaurant, a pizza shop, a
book store, a gym, a bar. Rent space. Better yet, buy buildings,
get property. Don't let rising prices push us further and further
from the parts of town we should be in.

To be clear, we do not propose the mere possession of land
or crafts to “withdraw” into. We want to build a struggle, an
insurrection, which occurs at the level of everyday life and not
asavacation from it, a revolt which could be a pulsing, angular
thythm of small events and breaks, of constant subversion. A
communal house in the middle of a small town can be a node of
partisan reality or a burden to everyone involved. It will never
be enough to simply acquire property, buildings, land. We
must become territory by increasing the circulation and density
of partisan relations in an area and between places. There's lt-
tle sense in obsessing over the morality or “internal dynamics™

9
of such ventures. Avoid exploiting each other and always hold
together what this society separates: practice with thought, ac-
tion with contemplation, thinking with feeling. What becomes
a burden can be abandoned. We want more strength and en-
exgy with time, not less — 5o do what moves you.

Together, we must learn how the devices which control us
function and develop sciences for uncovering their vulnerabil-
ities. We must share tools for tactical thinking, for strategic
vision, for poetic connections. We must understand how our
surroundings constrict and divide us, how ideologies keep us
docile, as very concrete operations. But we must also learn and
share methods of resource accumulation, of scamming, and of
insurrectional conspiracy. When strategic employment oppor-
tunities arise, they should be ours in a heartbeat. When op-
portune shipments come in, we should have ways of collecting
them — “it ell off the back of a truck.” When a riot breaks out,
we must know how to spread it and how to crash police com-
munications. When immigration enforcement is about to raid
our neighborhoods, we should know how to tip people off and
how to help them escape. When a comrade is washed in de-
pression, they should have no doubts that they are loved. The
technical nature of these problems must be reckoned with.

In the century before last, the South was zigzagged by a vast
conspiracy. A strategic consistency linked teamsters, sharp-
shooters, translators, look-outs, saloons, hostels, churches,
farms, rumors, and slaves across literally thousands of miles
Partisans of this conspiracy were followed, surveilled, hunted,
and repressed. Their ability to transform their lives into a
collective practice made hem resilient to these operations
‘They smuggled a hundred thousand runaways out of slavery.
Whether or not not this was an attack on the commercial
institutions of the time or the mere construction of alterna-
tives does not concern us here and we doubt it concerned
them then. We believe that our current scenario could benefit

10
from adopting this legacy as a historic vantage point to be
contextualized and refined.

We will be confronted on all sides by those who wish to frac
ture our struggle by insisting we seek only to build a new so-
ciety inside of this one or that we are extremists who are con-
cerned only with destruction. We can do nothing but shrug
at the morons who call us nihilists one day and lifestylists the
next. We recognize these divisions as a fundamental binary in
imperial logic: normal and abnormal, citizen and criminal.

Struggles and antagonisms are normalized when they are
forced to articulate themselves as a negotiation with the state,
business, or other institutions. This is the purview of activism
and social justice movements. The temptation to be sucked
into community organizations, on the left or right, is persis-
tent and understandable. What these groups — churches, non-
profits, unions, political parties — offer people is continuity,
stability, sometimes money, and always the false pretenses of
pragmatism. But the activist approach has always mirrored the
structures is supposedly challenges, responding to the forces
that divide our lives into separate spheres of work, race, med-
ical aid, marriage rights and so on with piecemeal demands
By conforming to governing discourses, activists have always
missed what is really at stake, confusing life for a collection of
distint issues.

Onthe other hand, and often in reaction to the forces of recu-
peration, others retreat into the “abnormal” category, allowing
themselves to become insulated from society, from its pathetic
ation. They allow

slogans, from its awful methods of pacif
themselves to become militants. But just as workday traffic is
a primary consideration in the planning of interstates — traffic
jams are avoided by, say, an addition of new lanes, a carefully
regulated speed limit, and tactically placed exists and bridges
— political dissidents are accounted for. Government needs a
‘militant subject. No police operation s complete until an orga-
nizing cell, a hang, a mafia, a terrorist, or some other criminal

1
subjectivity has been identified and eliminated. By adopting
a position inside the debates of government, as the antithesis
to their thesis, the violence to their nonviolence, the militants
are doomed before they begin. Their fate s already determined
— isolation and death. Still, the most pressing threat the mili-
tant poses to an insurrection is the specialization of revolt: that
‘millions of people will become assured of their spectator posi-
tion in the private conflicts between the police and the “rebel
forces”

‘The normal and the abnormal, the citizen and the the crim-
inal, and every variation of these dichotomies c
one another — which is to say that neither position offers us a
way out. Our strength lies in our ability to affirm neither, and
occupy both. We must learn to be visible to the movement and
invisible to the State. This is what every drug front does, what
every encrypted email does, and what we must learn how to do.
A mass of kids willing to riot doesn’t mean shit if they re not
smart enough and fast enough to not get caught and if there's
1o money to bail out friends afterward. Similarly, a network
of gardens might as well be the aesthetic indicator that the
yuppies have moved in if we do not remember what kind of
struggle real autonomy entails. What matters isn't a particu-
Iar action (medicine, intellectual labor, cooking) or a particular
object (printers, spray paint, Mason jars, metal), but how it's
connected to every other object, every other practice — and
how we circulate between them. Anything we do and every-
thing we touch can take on a new character when linked up to
other practices, spaces, and comrades. Do not allow yourself
to be fooled by detractors: just as skills and crafts can serve as
distractions, many have lost themselves in alienated c;
petty vandalism and militant activism. The point s to get on
a common path with others and to use whatever means must
be used for the purposes of overcoming obstacles — which are
everywhere.

substantiate

cles of

12
The crisis, the disaster, the emergency have become a foun-
dational element of contemporary government. The crisis as
reorganization of space, of attention, of people. The crisis as
emergency government, as the force of law itself. As many
have been forced to learn, crises are named when things are
about to be restructured. The state of emergency — the gov-
ermental state of anarchy — is the name given to the polar-
ization of the world under the present arrangement of forces:
the state versus society. We have seen this in the days follow-
ing the Boston Marathon bombing when tanks rolled through
the streets of an American city looking for a single teenager.
Natural disasters, pandemic flus, droughts, power outages, in-
surrection, and invasion: for the contemporary governmental
regime, all of these events are simply times of disorganization
to be capitalized on. If this is opportune for our enemies, who
seek to return these temporary disturbances into a new, more
brutal, more empty normal, then could be doubly opportune for
those of us who hope to dissolve this society for good. When
erisis comes to the surface, we should push it to its absolute
conclusions: every strike, a general strike; every black out, a
looting spree; every protest, a riot; every riot, an insurrection;
every picket, a permanent blockade. We must make trenches
of every crack in society.

What begins on a local scale should be pressed across the
boundaries of neighborhoods, towns, cities, and states. Open
up lines of communication. Be smart; if comrades in a town an
hour away have a printing press, it might make more sense to
start a permaculture farm in your city. Instead of duplicating
the things a larger “we” can already do, set up networks of
resources through which all of us can circulate.

At every turn, the hostile environment we inhabit and the
‘mechanisms that constitute it are ready to prevent us from get-
ting in touch with and building our own power. The counter-
insurrectional process occurs at both the profound, nearly in-
visible level of the production of everyday life and the highly

13
visible level of outright domination. Get organized to over-
come everyone one of these obstacles, one by one.

In the attempt to build a revolutionary force, we are struck
by the impotence of our own imagination. Upon reflection,
our immediate desires can feel as foreign to us as the environ-
ment that produces them. We meet our own stagnation and
our own frenzy, the two automatic responses to uncertainty.
Some withdraw into depression or spectatorship, waiting for
others to take the initiative. Others rush to do something, any-
thing, to stave off anxiety or boredom. By beginning with a
plan to take on the task of building greater a
tential, next steps should become more obvious. When they

cess to our po-

are not so obvious, there is conversation. If that fails, there is
always the gamble.

In the attempt to build a life in common, we are confronted
immediately by limits imposed by the capitalist economy, of
jobs,rent, and unfavorable housing. That comrades and friends
are compelled to work is a sign of profound weakness. Thisis a
collective problem that should be treated seriously. Work must
be rendered voluntary: a tactical or strategic consideration, a
pleasure, nota necessity for survival. OF course, the most press-
ing expense is nearly always rent. It keeps up working and
needlessly vulnerable to the whims of landlords, emergencies,
and city planners. Comrades should organize to purchase hous-
ing as soon as possible. It's cheaper than renting and provide
us with greater permanence and, therefore, strategic insights
to the conflicts around us.

In the attempt to hold on to one another, we come up against
our own ignorance — our utter inexperience in building friend-
ships and maintaining them, our utter confusion as to what it
means to love one another, our utter weakness when it comes
to supporting one another emotionally, spiritually, materially.
None of these conditions should cripple us, but if we allow
them to define who we are or what we're doing, they very well

1
may. Each is simply an obstacle which, like all obstacles, exists
in order to be overcome.

Inevitably, at moments, we will experience our own weak-
ness. A neighborhood is demolished for a new mixed use com-
plex; a meeting spot gets raided; a movement dies out. The
depression that comes as each cycle of struggle closes can only
be encountered with the conviction that time itself is on our
side. The urgency imposed by the impending collapse of civi-
lization gives us no reason for haste. The fall of Rome took cen-
turies. We must find comfort knowing that we can be a part
of an anti-imperial movement that spans generations. History
is not the linear progression that it is usually made out to be.
‘Thoughts, ideas, and actions circulate and reappear throughout
time, and things you thought would endlessly grow suddenly
drop off. Like a garden that dies every winter, the movements
and riots will come, provide us with excitement and energy,
and then fade off. If we understand ourselves as a force that
persists through time, we will survive the depression of a loss
not with exhaustion, but with strength. Next time, we will be
even more prepared.

Different groups of people cycle through the farms in neigh-
borhoods outside downtown, ready to provide food for thousands
of people occupying Woodruf Park. A warehouse on the west
side has trucks and teams to drive to abandoned hotels and indus-
trial waste facilities, gathering ‘raw” material — metal, lumber,
kitchen equipment —that can be used to build brick ovens and fix
up the new building. A partisan cafe downtown functions as an
entry point for visitors and newcomers, as well as a drop-in point
for insurgents from around the state, the region, the country, and
even the world. The dance club lets people in to blend with the
crowd after a rowdy demo while giving them a way to blow off
some steam. Pirate radio transmitters broadcast from secret lo-
cations outside of the city to spread sedition and heresy into the
heart of a great metropolis. University copy machines are hacked
for fiee prints for this weekend's assembly — the print shop is al-

15
ready running overtime. A friend walks out of the store with a
backpack full of goods and a knowing wink. Doctors and herbal-
ists are at hand, equipped to deal with any injuries that might
ensue from tonight's riot, well trained from treating common ail-
ments and injuries. The family lake house is repurposed to sleep
a hundred for a summer strategy meeting. Slowly, something is
growing.

We need neither words nor promises, but the steady accu-
mulation of small realities.

16
‘The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

Anonymous
How to Start a Fire
An Invitation
2017-07-10

theanarchistlibrary.org