When Luigi Mangione gunned down Brian Thompson in the streets of New York, the act was met with an outpour of praise and popular support. Leftists, anarchists, and liberals of all stripes joined hands in celebration, recognizing the moment as a powerful and symbolic direct action targeting the profiteers of death within the so called United States. When Elias Rodriguez then shot and killed two Israeli settlers in Washington DC, (one of whom volunteered and served in the IOF to go to Palestine and commit genocidal war crimes), suddenly we’re bombarded with statements of condemnation from so many who lauded the bravery of Luigi. Party building orgs like PSL and DSA go out of their way to condemn this man as “adventurist” and populist-leftist politicians such as Zohran Mamdani go as far as to praise the “victims” of the shooting. What truly seperates Luigi and Elias? What makes one act a deeply moving act of bravery and another a dangerous and cowardly exercise in adventurism? We believe it to be the colonial character of american leftism, and the settler in the head of Americans.
We are no strangers to claims of adventurism. The white marxists call us this any time we take direct action, any time we criticize their endless stream of parades and recruitment parties. When we heed the calls of the Palestinian resistance to actually blockade and disrupt the imperial core instead of waving branded signs and telling people to vote for their millionaire-funded political party. It is well established that the PSL actively worked against the formation of Palestine Action US)(1), calling the direct actions they took “adventurism” and refusing to support the Merrimack Four when they were subsequently arrested and imprisoned shutting down a weapons facility. Yet people still took action. Although heavy repression came down on Palestine Action US)(2) in November 2023, other autonomous actors still took direct action in the form of escalated demos, clandestine night actions and lock-ons to prevent the building from being accessed. These escalated tactics worked in tandem with a weekly picket run by BDS Boston (who not only refused to condemn but actively upheld and lauded the direct actions) which, with the implicit threat of the aforementioned direct actions, succeeded in disrupting work at the facility to such an extent that the office was vacated and Elbit was forced out. When the Merrimack NH factory was occupieds, this directly resulted in resignations of Elbit employees and a drop in their stock. When the DNC came to Chicago we saw this again. Vest-clad peace police, assaulted and threw autonomous protestors to the police for attempting to actually direct the so-called protest to where the DNC was being held, rather than the state-approved marching path. Marxist keyboard warriors quickly took to twitter to call anyone critical of the peace policing ‘adventurists’, constantly echoing the age old fed question “but what have you done?”. Well, what has PSL done? DSA? SAlt? Mobilized a couple votes for their political party, taken a couple big walks around various statehouses (but only on weekends, when nobody’s there), and condemned every single successful act of insurrection they can. It’s all a fucking racket. This obsession with party-building, recruitment, voting, all serves the settler idea that we need to (or can) build some sort of first-world socialism in good old Amerikkka. We can’t take action, we can’t stop the war machine, we can’t destroy western civilization; we just need to build, passively, we need to recruit more members and build out the mailing list until one day, in some utopian future, we have enough people and then maybe we’ll do a revolution. A revolution where the proletarian settlers of europe still dominate indigenous lands, only this time “for the people”, or maybe even “centering BIPOC voices!”. Setting aside the fact that this simply would not work, the fact that these groups are incredibly easy to infiltrate and disrupt (see CPUSA), the fact that their lists of members would be extremely easy to target; and suppress, and the fact that they are controlled by our millionaire class enemies who have far more to gain from the political clout they get by running their spouses for president than from doing anything material; the urge to not go all out for Palestine, to materially defend the institutions of capitalist imperialism by suppressing and condemning insurrection as adventurism, is fundamentally a racist one.
When these party-building marxists talk to us about how we aren’t in a stage where violence can be done, how they’re “building the conditions” to fight for a better world by recruiting to their party, what they’re really saying is that their ‘better world’ is only better for the settlers of the west. They don’t believe violence is necessary because the conditions they are experiencing are not so dire, are not so intense that it would yet be necessary. But it is extremely dire for the people of Palestine, of Lebanon, of the Congo, of all third-world nations, right fucking now. The very existence of the American empire and western imperialism means death and suffering for so many worldwide. Do the children of Palestine have time to wait for your party to recruit for another hundred years while the bombs keep dropping? It’s not a question of “do you believe we can win liberation”, it’s a question of “do you think the liberation of settlers on stolen land is more important than the liberation of brown people in the third world”. These settler communists will tell you the two go hand in hand, but they fundamentally do not. Even if their far away settler revolution were to succeed, millions upon millions of third world citizens will have been razed by the western death cult by then. What we need instead is action. If the thousands of settler communists who preach their revolution and sell their newspapers instead took part in waves and waves of a massified direct action campaign, the empire would be incapable of stopping it (we’ve seen with Palestine Action in the UK that even a tiny fraction of this number is capable of permanently shutting down multiple Elbit weapons factories). If all those who chant “resistance is justified’ at those silly parades actually resisted, if we could simply, truly, bring the war home as Elias Rodriguez did, it would send terror down the spine of any politician or diplomat who even thinks about supporting the genocide. If the army of liberals who glorify Assata and George Jackson, who treat Malcolm X and the Black Panthers as heroes actually lived by the ideals they preached, America might fall in a day. But they’re all pacified, by fear, by voting, by the promise of a revolution they’ll never see. If they were active today, we can say with absolute certainty that Assata Shakur and the Black Liberation Army would be condemned and labeled adventurists by the settler marxists of America.
In the tradition of the Black Liberation Army, American Indian Movement, and others who understood America to be the great satan of the world, we also recognize the fight on our own turf. Our priority will always be third world liberation, but that fight can never be divorced from decolonization right here on Turtle Island. The same settlers that colonize the global south turn inward, encroaching on poor neighborhoods and colonizing what little land black and brown people have been allowed. Indigenous peoples who have stewarded these lands for millenia are relegated to tiny reservations and forcefully assimilated into an empire that will destroy the land on a whim. Every prison, every pipeline, is an act of genocide against Black and Indigenous people in so called America. Every white anarchist that shows up to an indigenous land defense and is unwilling to take action, to risk their own privileged safety to defend the land that they themselves have colonized, is no better than these settler marxists or even the bloodthirsty american middle class which funds the destruction. Every student of a prestigious university like Columbia and Brown must reckon with the fact that they themselves are displacing and killing the poor people who used to live where the universities gentrified, and must rage against the university, not just for divestment, but for total abolition and the return of colonized lands to colonized peoples, It is no wonder these party building pyramid schemes recruit so heavily from universities; they are cut of the same colonial cloth. Make no mistake, the gentrifiers, the students, the white middle class suburbanites are no different than the pilgrims or the Israeli settlers. If you are of this class you have one choice: fight. Do not despair hopelessly or wallow in this guilt. Destroy the systems which have created and propogate you. Betray your race, your class, bring total annihilation to the American dream. The prisons must be burned and the pipelines must be sabotaged. Every single act of insurrection, every delay to construction of the colonial machines, every factory shuttered and shipment sabotaged is infinitely more valuable than the emptynpromises of the party builders and so called “revolutionaries”.
Ultimately, we as third-worldist anarchists seek not to bring about some internal settler revolution but the end of the western world order. As descendants of colonized peoples we have seen the trauma and death forced upon our ancestors, and we have seen the inaction of the various so called leftists, anarchists and communist parties of the west in the face of these atrocities. Our ancestors paid the price for the cowardly inaction of those who thought they could liberate themselves at our expense. We will not make the same mistake for the people of Palestine and beyond. We know that this insurrectionary rhetoric isn’t going to lead us to an anarchist or communist utopia in America, but neither is theirs. Look at the state of fascism in America and look at the state of the broad “left”. Let’s be real, it’s not happening. What we can do is build positive programs to survive the collapse, and do as much material damage to the genocidal war machine as we possible until then. If these are our two options, it would be better that America collapse altogether than continue to wage genocide on the global south. The hardships we might face surviving the fall of the empire are absolutely nothing in comparison to the weight that would be lifted off of the entire third world if America simply ceased to exist. You might not see it, but every comfort we have, from our sweatshop-made clothes to the gas in our cars is a result of destructive imperialism and to not take action against it is to be complicit. We reject all attempts at slowly building a far away settler revolution as colonizer bullshit, and instead join with our comrades of all stripes to uphold the tradition (and understand the imperfections) of the BLA, RAF, AIM, The Rotisken’rakéhte, United Freedom Front, Weather Underground, George Jackson Brigade, Brigate Rosse, The Angry Brigade, Action Directe, and all other militants who sought to destroy western imperialism from within the belly of the beast. We stand with decolonial marxists and all indigenous resistance to settler colonialism both here and abroad. Doing material damage to the war machine will always take priority over building a bullshit party. The resistance in Palestine is asking for our support. Will you answer the call?
1) We are not trying to glorify Pal Action US or act like it was amazing. We hold a number of critiques, primarily around multi-millionaire (and former PSL sponsor) Fergie Chambers, who we think is a total piece of shit and has since fucked off to Tunisia. That said, the actions taken by various people and crews, some affiliated and some not, were objectively significant in the shutting down of Elbit in Cambridge, and we think many of the actions are praise worthy even if one of the groups involved was flawed.
2) Centralized and heirarchical groups are easier to repress than decentralized, autonomous and nameless organizing. Even with the cell model, putting a name to your actions creates a much bigger target, and once the repression hits, it can demobilize parts of the group/cadre/whatever that that share the name. That said, we understand fully that sometimes creating a front group is helpful for inspiring others and creating a throughline with yours and others’ actions. The ELF was extremely successful at massifying eco-direct action, but also faced unprecedented repression for it, leading to a
number of heavy sentences. Do what seems best for your context.
3) Although the action was incredibly brave and arguably pretty successful, the actionists intentionally stayed at the scene to be arrested which resulted in 4 young people serving 2 months (inintially facing up to 37 years). We believe that even those who took part might agree that getting away would have been preferable, though wewill never condemn the action/actionists and understand tactics to be largely situational.
4) Diversity of Tactics Means Don’t Throw People to the Cops — Birds of a Feather Distro.
5) The German Communist Party learned this lesson early in to Nazi rule. Their aversion to action and obsession with electoralist politics & “building the conditions” led them to be wholly unprepared when the Nazis sought out and imprisoned or killed them all. Had they taken up arms and been prepared to fight, history might look very different.
SUGGESTED READING
Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon
Blessed is the Flame – Serafinski
The Black Liberation Army and Hamas – Dhoruba Bin
Wahad
Armed Joy – Alfredo Bonnano
Addicted to Losing – Athena
Repression Breeds Resistance – Akinyele Omowale
Umoja
Anarchists Against Counter-Revolution – Friends of
Russell Maroon Shoatz
Counter-Insurgency (Dousing the Flames of
Minneapolis) – Peter Gelderloos
Voices From the Frontline Against the Occuppation
(Interview with Palestinian Anarchists)
Abolish Whiteness
Black Armed Joy
Dreams of Black Revolt
Accomplices Not Allies
Red Flags (Before you join that org)
Desert
..and PRISMA, How to Have a Fun Night to Forget, A
Recipe for Nocturnal Direct Action & everything else
from the No Trace Project (notrace.how)
source: Decolonize Means Attack