Attacks on the 100th Night

via Puget Sound Anarchists

Portland: Starbucks & multiple Whole Foods attacked for night 100

Last night, while our comrades battled the police in the street, some anarchists targeted multiple Whole Food stores as well as Starbucks in a synchronized attack, just as the clock struck midnight. The cops have made public statements addressing how they are not responding to 911 calls due to their focus on brutally attacking and arresting protesters. Using this to our advantage, we spread out around the city with the intention of sending two messages:

First, to our comrades: The past 100 days with you have been inspiring, wild, traumatic, and everything in between. Our collective strength in the streets has surpassed everything we ever expected to come out of this city. For 100 nights we have fought the police – but the police are not (and should not) be our only target. Capitalism feeds the police state. The police developed out of slave patrols; slavery is the backbone of capitalism. We smashed Whole Foods because we are against capitalism in all its forms, and because we want you all to know that autonomous actions are not only possible, but they are happening and they are an integral part of how we remain uncontrollable. As the police response to the demonstrations becomes more organized and more brutal, autonomous actions become ever more important. Sometimes, it feels like we cannot act unless there are a hundred, two hundred people. Don’t underestimate your own abilities! It takes only one person to act; two to make an affinity group; three or four to get the job done faster. The more of us who act independently, the more small actions spread across the city, the less the police know how to respond; the less they can contain us; the less they understand us. Get your friends together, make a plan, carry it out. We’ve got your back.

Secondly, to the police: You are powerless in suppressing small cell autonomous actions, and as the inspiration and experience of our accomplices grows, you will learn that. You cannot patrol the entire city. We will find the places you are not, and we will attack them. We will move while your eyes are closed. Being the descendants of slave masters, your complete destruction is what we seek, and we will settle for nothing less. Whole Foods represents everything we despite about this world. Owned by the richest man in the world, and selling products made by the slave labor of prisoners. Every cop is a target. Every capitalist is a target. Every bank, every precinct, every courthouse, every condo, every yuppie haven.

It is our hope that others take advantage of the windowless and doorless Whole Foods around the city to feed themselves, their families, their friends and their communities. We should not have to pay for food to survive, and yet you beat, tase, arrest and sometimes murder those who take food for free. You protect the capitalists at the expense of our lives. One day, hopefully soon, we will dance amongst the soft glow of a burning empire, while you both drown in the stagnant pond of your pathetic, miserable lives. Good fucking riddance.

See you at the barricades, friends.
For Black liberation & against property, love,
some anarchists

There are 27 Comments

The original poster writes:
Our collective strength in the streets has surpassed everything we ever expected to come out of this city. For 100 nights we have fought the police – but the police are not (and should not) be our only target...

I have an acquaintance or two who have been participating in the events in Stumptown. According to them the largest number of people participating has never exceeded roughly 9000 people. This is in a city of a bit more than 650,000 people within a Portland Metro area of about two and a half million.

This is not exactly a hallmark of glorious success.

These street protests, like all street protests, are entertaining theater -- entertaining for the people who participate, watched passively by everybody else, including any people who may be watching passively while also sympathizing wholeheartedly.

If this had any potential to spread, and turn into something deeper and more widespread, this would probably be happening by now.

The author writes:
slavery is the backbone of capitalism.

Wrong. Wage labor is the backbone of capitalism. And since nothing you are about has anything to do with wage labor, or with resistance to wage labor, you are not against capitalism.

While I'd rather be a wage slave today than a chattel slave in the plantation South, I'd also rather help generate a mass social movement against wage labor. And nothing like this is going to emerge from the Stumptown stuff, no matter how viscerally pleasing these events might be.

kevin ... I know its impossible for you to actually discuss or learn or do anything except spit misdirected accusations from your sad little cardboard pulpit ... BUT

don't you think you contradicted yourself? when you say "It's not about slavery! It's about WAGE LABOUR" and you even ... used the phrase "wage slave" in the same paragraph ... like, that's a pretty fine distinction there, with all due respect to the horrors of the plantation south, anyone who understands the history knows that wage slavery and prison slave labour replaced the old plantations because it was more efficient from the perspective of the slave owners.

Or put another way, you don't even disagree with these people in a meaningful way, you're talking about the same shit... dumbass.

he's the one who used the terms interchangeably and then contradicted himself, if you read a little harder? hmm?

but yeah, sure. I'm compelled to serve the sewer pipe that is the comments section

Splitting hairs over these distinctions is a sinister diversion from the fact that there have been a 100 nights of protests and these were graced with acts of sabotage. What's behind the urge to curate a minutiose catalogue of nuanced distinct categories of oppression, and to tease it out in this comment section? The world is burning around you and you can't cover the fact that the time is ripe for breaking your own chains through bold actions, not through nitpicky definitions.

Calvin, the contiguous land mass where you're standing is burning around the edges. It's on the news. It's been trending for weeks. If you breathe in deep enough, you can smell the smoke. If you stand still outside for long enough, you can feel the panic. There are other fires that are not as near to you, but still around this round globe of an Earth.

so ... if I understand you correctly: nitpick my chains til they shatter under the nuance by never leaving my house?

okay, lumpen, you realize that if everyone just assumed that slavery and wage labour were exactly the same thing, then nuance in the english language would be a lot more difficult?

youre talking like a REACTIONARY, you go for the heartstrings when talking politics but dont really care about the details. There are better ways to argue with people than making allusions to how smart you are, how dumb the person is you disagree with, and the fact that you read books.

Sure i am currently at home but clearly: SO ARE YOU, and me being at home right now has little to do with any of the seemingly apocalyptic stuff going on the world right now, so using the fact that somebody is at home is just a red herring.

I love that we know Keating's rant style so well we can tell it is him. I miss you buddy. You gave me and others so much shit in the bay area during the ill fated Fare strike. Those were good times.

yeah, why? Is he dead? I suspect there's a troll who's adopted his keating rants as a meme, so he can live on forever as an obnoxious zombie troll ghost. Or maybe it's really him? still alive somehow, ranting in to the void and immune to replies ... @ news mysteries!

Im curious about your thoughts on numbers. modern civil wars, Isis shit, generally are a small percentage of the population.
Yeah maybe it is still just super intense street theater, but im not sure what you're trying to make of that numbers point.

who's arguing?

Pretty sure there's many Amazon employees who'd like to debate on the distinction between slavery and wage slavery. Or not!

Can we raise the critique above the gut/libidinal level and consider windowless and doorless Whole Affection portals, where kìds in stress can go and get all the care the system has excluded them from?

The actions described above are actually quite good. It's the original posters analysis that's wholly lacking -- and in a wholly typical U.S. of Aye-brand anarchist subculture type of way.

Yeah, actually I think Amazon employees knowing the difference between chattel slavery and wage slavery might be mighty useful. And I'm not the one selling them short on this one, either. But, as always in dopey-dumbbell-America-land, some savant will claim otherwise: ignorance is strength, or something like that.

This is from an article in the Berkeley CA anarchist newspaper' Slingshot,' in early 2012, in reference to the day of the so-called Oakland General Strike of Nov. 2011, which grew out of Occupy Oakland:

" The admirable and exemplary targeting by Black Bloc youth of windows of a store of the despicable market-libertarian-owned Whole Foods Market chain during the 2 p.m. "anti-capitalist" march points the way to where the Occupy movement must now go; into a much deeper involvement with the everyday life struggles of the mainstream wage-slave class in capitalist America, from a public, highly visible, aggressive anti-market/anti-money/anti-wage labor perspective.
Some of the specific forms this might take are:
1. Borrowing from the tool kit of rebels in Chile and Egypt, and using so-called social media to initiate some kind of autonomous, widespread, sub rosa workplace resistance among employees of Whole Foods Market Inc.
With its combination of a large number of non-union employees, abysmal wages, frantic working conditions, and a creepy, Scientology-like workplace management psychology, Whole Foods is an easy to hate enemy -- and is just dying to be targeted. The right kind of ongoing bare-knuckle direct action against Whole Foods can become a template for similar actions against other retail sector exploiters..."

or rather, abandoning occupy and placing a greater emphasis on the destruction of an entire system (both ideological and mechanical) that seems to subjugate and erase everything in its way...the generals in the american army who wiped out native americans and their way of life admitted that anyone who didnt live by their designs were not necessarily bad or evil by christian standards, but interfered with the progress of the new private-property oriented empire.

That Occupy slogan, "We are the ninety nine percent" was wildly inaccurate and vulgar populism in the extreme.

The wealthiest (roughly) top eleven percent are irredeemable class enemies. They need to be recognized as such by the rest of us, fought tooth and nail, completely politically defeated, and expropriated of of everything they own this side of the shirts on their backs.

Everything happening in the US right now is barreling towards this goal.

"barreling towards this goal" of "The wealthiest (roughly) top eleven percent" being "completely politically defeated, and expropriated of everything they own"

^^^ this must be galactic levels of sarcasm, yes?

"Barrelling",,,? Unless you refer to justice based on a karmic system whereby the wealth of a person is inversely related to the happiness they intrinsically possess, I cannot see any physical mechanisms working to annul their monopoly of capital.

The only way forward as the United States collapses is a class against class, anti-wage labor social movement of the wage-earning class. This is the only way out.

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