Killing cops in the street is not enough- we must aim our bullets at the cops inside our heads.
We look around in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single entities trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is much simpler, there are things in the darkness beneath us which wish us harm. [1]
To begin, we wish to address a simple yet potentially contentious issue which will form the basis of our appeal here. Police Officers must be killed, the families of Police Officers must be killed, the children of Police Officers must be killed, the friends and supporters of Police Officers must be killed. We mean this both materially and immaterially (though both meanings do not necessarily apply to all of the above examples[2]); in undoing the murderous reign of terror inflicted upon us by the guardians of ‘civilization’, it is required not only to wipe them from the face of the earth; but further that we act in such extremity that the reemergence of any ‘police style’ force inside the reality proceeding policings’ annihilation is not only discouraged, but is in fact impossible.
We will not address, nor entertain questions of morality here, whether murder is right or wrong, whether or not the children of Police Officers deserve to die, whether we will be able to live with ourselves after the rivers of blood. Neither will we argue the reasons why policing in general needs to die, appeal to some framework of political justice, or set out a coherent list of reasons why things will be better when all of the Police Officers are dead. If you are reading this text expecting us to argue this position, give reason, or explain why policing is bad, you may as well stop reading. If you were looking for a practical analysis about how we might approach such an unfathomable project, then friends welcome to hell.
Further, we will not address questions regarding the future; we won’t hypothesise what might happen after police is abolished and all the Police Officers are dead. We won’t masturbate to the idea of a collapsing society, nor bemoan the potential funeral of law and order. We won’t present an detailed image of a future which we don’t believe in, nor rejoice in the assumption of some grand collapse. We don’t know what will happen when all the Police Officers are dead, nor do we have any particular interest in knowing. It might be that death of all the Police Officers is truly the desire of a properly advanced capitalism, where policing is so internalized that the beat officer is no longer necessary and medicated criminals simply walk themselves to the jail; it might be that the death of police destroys this whole paradigm of reality. Either way, we don’t care, we want them dead, and we want it now.
Perhaps here it is necessary to define two points; first what do we mean by ‘police’, and second what do we mean by ‘to kill’.
We understand that for many people (even among self proclaimed anarchist milieus) the word police refers generally to the state apparatchik standing between us and the proliferation of our destructive desire; the ‘thin blue line’ which prevents the breakdown of society, the stick in the carrot and stick motif. Through this discourse we conjure up the image of the cop as a blue uniformed target, carrying a gun, handcuffs, and radio, driving a squad car, and kidnapping our friends.
Whist none of these analyses are necessarily incorrect we feel that they miss the bigger picture, ‘policing’ permeates the logic of every social relation, and frames our movement through this world. ‘Police’ is not a job title but rather a description of a series of social relations and actions, police is an act, a living breathing methodology, and a medium of communication. Police is something people do, are doing, have done, not something they are.
This doesn’t mean that those who do policing can stop to be a member of the police or that they can simply hang up the handcuffs and absolve themselves of guilt, but it does mean we need to expand our definition of police beyond the uniformed thug in the street. We would further advocate, for a dissection between ‘Police’ and ‘Police Officers’/‘Police Force’ in so far as we feel that ‘police officers’ refers to the specific individuals outlined in the anarchist imaginary who are components of the organized ‘police force’[3]; whilst we believe ‘police’ refers to something much broader which we will outline now.
We will briefly touch here on a point regarding etymology. We feel this point is important for, and complementary to the theory we are trying to outline. In English the word ‘police’ draws its meaning from the ‘Middle French’ policer “to keep order in” which in term is a development from the Latin Politia ‘government or state’ and the Greek ‘Polis’ “city”. For us, police then is not a word limited to those assigned the role ‘police officer’, but is rather a reference to the maintenance of order within society- a role which we believe is performed by a plethora of diverse individuals through a set of insidious social relationships. First, we want to expand the definition of police to include doctors, midwives, and psychologists who violently police gender and sexuality at the point of birth, those who ‘name us[4]’, who interview us at the GIC,[5] who call our genders a disorder and who police the creation of our identities and define there limits. Second we want to expand the definition of police to include teachers, social workers, and parents; those who police our social roles, inform on us to their colleagues (the uniformed ones) through schemes such as ‘Prevent’[6] and who punish our first forays into criminality[7]. Thirdly, to our rapists, our abusers, and our attackers who are the informal enforcers of the laws of identity set by our doctors, teachers, and psychologists. Fourth we expand police to mean the ‘have a go heroes[8]’, ‘neighborhood watchers’[9], and community snitches who limit our criminality by creating networks of policing throughout our neighborhoods. Finally, we want to expand the definition of police to include our friends, our comrades, and ourselves[10]; those who tell us it is too dangerous, that it will be unpopular or ‘unpeopley’[11], that we will end up in jail, and even to the tiny voice inside our head that tells us not to throw the Molotov in the riot.
In saying all this we want to add an important note, we don’t think that all cops are the same even if we do think that all cops are bastards. By ‘not the same’, we mean that there is a material difference between the effect of the actions of say a member of the anti terror squad and those of a small town traffic cop. In the same vein, there is a material difference between a teacher and a psychologist, or a doctor and a police officer. On the immaterial level however, in terms of a networked police which permeates all of our current culture, we feel that it is nearly impossible to differentiate between the negative impact on our criminality caused by the police work of say a teacher and the police work of the anti terror brigade. It is this notion which motivates us to expand the definition of ‘police’- All cops are Different, All Cops are Bastards.
Moving to our understanding of ‘killing’ then we want to present a definition of what it means to kill beyond the limits of a purely material approach. We wish to split killing into both its material (e.g. gunning down a uniformed officer), and immaterial (killing the voice that tells us not to throw the Molotov) components, to dissect there meanings and advocate for there proliferation.
We believe in the necessity of both the material and immaterial killing of police in order to fully annihilate them (which as earlier stated is our goal). Through the course of this text, we will attempt to extrapolate further the differences between these two variations of killing, and how as combatants against police (and indeed even against ourselves) we might develop strategies for this annihilation.
Addressing again the question of morality, we don’t wish to propose in which moments material or immaterial killing should be the go to tactic; but rather to propose that each situation and each individuals response to a given situation is nuanced and personal. Therefore, we will not argue here whether we think gunning down yourself or your teacher as opposed to incapacitating your/their immaterial police role is the right way to approach police annihilation (we leave this for you to decide); simply we want to map out concretely what they are and how one might enact them.
We will however concede this; the writers of this text fervently and uniformly believe in the necessity of the material killing of all police officers (current and former), have a go heroes, and snitches. We disagree to varying degrees as to whether material or immaterial killing should be used for teachers, psychologists, neighborhood watchers, rapists, abusers, and parents. We agree that immaterial killing is the solution for our friends, comrades, and ourselves. In the same moment, we totally advocate for our own/our comrades material killing/s in specific circumstances, such as if you ever find us trying to stop you throwing a Molotov at police officers. We reveal these positions because we feel that they are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the practical program we will now outline, and influence our approach to the annihilation of the police.
“I want to kill cops until I’m dead”
The immortal words of Raul Moat ring in our ears as we begin to try to explain the nature of our immaterial conjuncture. Although Raul himself meant these words in there purely material sense, and further enacted detestable police work through the perpetuation of gendered violence (against his partner prior to and during his time on the run)[12]; we think that as a place of departure from which to launch our hypothesis of a self abolishing[13], auto police assassination this sentence is of great value.
In exploring Raul’s outlining of a material proposal to kill cops until he died, we want to tease out an immaterial something that could perhaps be better phrased as “after I have killed cops I will be dead”. The dead which we refer to here can be viewed as roughly correlating with the killing we outlined earlier; not necessarily the burying of a corporeal form in the dirt, but rather the destruction of a self that was before, that is, a self which is totally voided and destroyed; stripped of its essence and totally killed. We are talking here about a practice of self abolition, of the ending of an existentialist nightmare[14] which sees the framing of human life as individualistic, essentially and empirically true “I think therefore I am”[15]. We are advocating for the “end of ourselves[16]”, of social relations, and the world- we are advocating that these steps are the first in the ending of police. In short, we believe the practice of an immaterial killing of cops will be the death of ‘ourselves’.
There is no essential human, what we are is entirely constructed by the paradigm of reality in which we have been socialized, manufactured, created; it is the sum total of our constructed identities, our experiences and our interactions with others- the names we have been called and the roles we perform. It is the knowledge that we have been raised to think stealing is bad, that God is a man in the sky, that right and wrong- good and evil are neutral concepts which transcend humanity and hold a universal trueness. It is a belief in this essential nature of the world, in the essential nature of the human being which have lead us to our individual roles as police. Even within so called anarchist milieus which profess to attack social relations and shake off a policed socialization we can still see the ever present specter of a policing morality raise its head in arguments over whether or not it is OK to steal bicycles, endless critiques of left on left violence[17], and the silencing of trans and/or women of color when they step beyond the limits of pacified social engagement.
This essential human can be conceptualized through what western society has dubbed ‘the conscience’; that little voice which tells you that what you are doing is right or wrong, that tells you to stop, that tells you your going to jail. This ‘conscience’ is the cop inside your head. It is not a universal creation that transcends humanity, it is the invention of a humanity which feared its own destructive capacity; a humanity which fears a world without jails, a humanity which yearns for leadership and guidance and which whilst convinced of its inherent evil neither imagines or desires its own annihilation[18]. It is a humanity which invented gender to enact division and control over itself; which appointed teachers to pass on it’s ‘knowledge’ and physiologists to identify its deviants- it is a humanity which must be destroyed. This destructive negation is the start and end of the project, there must be no reeducation, creation, or after, if it is done right, there will be nothing left.
The undoing necessary to kill immaterial policing, to kill humanity, cannot be an individual project; whilst it is true that we can shed our own fear, (perhaps through the worsening of material conditions of an absolute commitment to some misplaced nihilism) that we can trick ourselves into acting, that we can move into positions from which we feel materially comfortable to attack policing we can do this alone only to a very limited extent. We return here to Raul Moat; in loosing his fear and shedding himself of the moral conditioning which told him murdering police officers was wrong, he was able to materially attack policing; yet he was unable to shed himself of his own police role- of his maintenance of gender policing. Only in corporeal death did he achieve what we are hoping to achieve whilst still breathing, the annihilation of our own roles as police.
We think a good starting point here, is to look to collective moments of insurrection, or rupture, of riot; moments in which the cop inside our head is surrounded on all sides by black clad individuals carrying weapons and threatening her harm. We posit, that our ability to act within the context of a riot far surpasses that which we have achieved in clandestine actions alone or in small groups. When we act together, when we collectively struggle against each others ‘consciences’ we are no longer atomized existential entities concerned as to whether burning a car is morally right or wrong. We become a nebulous host which shares a collective irresponsibility for that burning, a host which far from consulting morality asks rather, ‘What can I do next to destitute this world’.
We believe we must expand the rupture of the riot into ourselves each other and our personal relationships. Concretely it might begin by testing ones own limits- by breaking rules that you thought were once concrete- by stealing the metaphorical bicycle or battering the people who tell “this is a cis womens only space”; it takes a tremendous lack of belief in the existence of a self that will be judged as good or bad but it is possible and it is a start. It also means, reaching out to friends and comrades, encouraging each other to act, creating space where criminality is encouraged and by refusing to hold each other back.
Beyond oneself or ones co-combatants, it might mean encouraging your doctor to quit there job (by force if necessary) or breaking down social relationships such as parent and child, teacher and student. We don’t necessarily have a clear idea of how this particular wing of immaterial killing can be enacted; and we fear the possibility of advocating for some kind of Maoist reduction program in which everyone is taught how they are policing each other and why they should stop (think anti oppression workshops as example). What we are suspicious of then is the proposal of solutions beyond destruction- we know we have to kill the cops in our heads, and those inside the heads of for example a doctor through the destitution of the human subject and the through building a bonfire of social relations. What we don’t want to do is offer the creation of something new to replace them with. Just as the destruction of gender will not be achieved through the expansion of a multiplicity of different trans genders, the end of policing will not come about through policing each others behavior or trying to re-educate ourselves or each other. It as program of total destructive negation, with nothing offered afterwards- we must accept that there are no solutions.
Of course whenever we engage is such a project, we must be prepared for the counter insurgency: “The legitimacy of “the people,” “the oppressed,” “the 99%” is the Trojan horse by which the constituent is smuggled back into insurrectionary destitution. This is the surest method for undoing an insurrection—one that doesn’t even require defeating it in the streets. To make the destitution irreversible, therefore, we must begin by abandoning our own legitimacy”[19]. We must be constantly vigilant of our tendencies to police, we must constantly combat ourselves where we enact racism or discourage our friends from carrying guns; we must also be vigilant to this tendency in our fellow combatants to prevent the birthing of a new moral compasses within our scenes. Sometimes this might mean material attack (such as stabbing a rapist) and sometimes it might mean an immaterial one such as apologizing for discouraging someone from revenge.
We want to touch here on the difference between revenge and policing, and to incite that maybe revenge will mean an endless cycle in which none of us are left. In all our talk of destroying morality, we do not wish to present a critique which advocates for rape, or trans-phobia et al; for us these are not questions of morality, but rather expressions of a material policing which for want of better language we can call structural oppression. Structural oppression is a material manifestation of the immaterial policing inherent in our current structure of social relations. Revenge against policing, even where it uses some of the same tactics as policing (e.g. violence) is different from policing itself in so far as it is an attempt towards a destructive undoing whilst policing is a structure of creative control.
Equally battering a trans-phobe might be understood as imparting upon them our idea of some kind of ‘justice’ (though we would argue it is simply an attack on their police role) and a discouragement to them and others of behaving similarly in the future. Whilst we believe that this is a worthwhile and destructive project against policing, we will accept that some may conceptualize it as a constructive mode which polices behavior using violence or the fear of violence. This trajectory in fact, can clearly be observed in the ideological outpourings of radical feminism, such as the call to ‘self defense’ which over a long period has imbued racist and trans phobic forms of policing into its analysis and is now clearly a structure of creative control. However, as said before, we wont put forward a program of how attacking policing will lead to something better, and we are prepared that our vengeance may in turn incite others to vengeance against what they see as our form of policing. Who are we, who believe in the murder of policing to argue against this, if our attacks are allowed to become a form of policing, then it may be necessary for them to to be annihilated.
This said, we will defend ourselves materially and immaterially against those counter insurgents who would frame our destructive desires as police work. Those who accuse us of policing to shield themselves from acknowledging there own roles in structural oppression, and who attack us from their platform of privilege. We are already prepared for all out war, being survivors of the eternal social war, and we are escalators; escalators who have but two wishes. To win. To die.
’We would’ve of course preferred if these words were accompanied by the vital strength of an action, an attack, the intensity of a fire in the dark, the sound of an explosion, the twisting of a bullet in a barrel.’ [20]
In this section, we wanted to provide some practical advice about how one might prepare the project of the assassination of police officers and their allies (snitches, have ago heroes etc). We don’t want to treat our readers as children, so we want go into overly long detail about where to buy guns (the dark web if your best bet if your not U.S. based in case your interested) or how exactly to prepare oneself, but we did want to provide a few philosophical and practical ideas for how combatants might engage.
To kill all existing uniformed officers would and will of course be exciting, difficult, sickening, and joyous but more important than all of this it will not be enough. Even if every single uniformed officer was taken out tomorrow morning, policing would not have suffered a total defeat. As mentioned before, police is a networked organism permeating ever more corners of the world. Even as new escapes (such as the Dark Web, or so called ‘temporary autonomous zones’[21]) form in rupture, policing finds ways to turn these ruptures, these holes to its advantage and to use them for its own proliferation. Destroying police will no just take mass murder, it will take mass property destruction, data deletion, the end of government recruitment drives (and indeed government itself), the annihilation of armies and ultimately the destruction of state weapons caches. It will mean the leveling of every cop shop, the burning of every squad car, the severance of under sea fiber optic cables, the destruction of Google, and the smashing of cameras. It will take a huge collective effort of insurgency, of armed combatants, hackers and medics acting with a clandestine co-independence from one another towards a global project of total annihilation.
Further, it will take a great undoing, a collaborative revenge aimed at those who have perpetuated the nightmare of police officering. It will mean showing up at the doors of dawdling grandpas with parade uniforms pinned up on their walls and letting off a 9mm in their face. We want to spend some time on this point, retired police officers are still police and undoing there role will take material revenge. When a cop retires, the people they have arrested do not magically walk out of the jail, dead friends don’t simply slip up out of the grave and back in to our arms, traumas are not undone, and policing continues to profit through the material example of those “heroes” who served justice. Networked policing requires that there are current police officers, trainee police officers, and retired police officers; this system acts a proof of legacy and an investment in proliferation, a collective history which offers legitimacy to a futurist nightmare. Murders, thieves, ’terrorists’ are still convicted years after they give up criminality and nobody bats an eyelid; why is it that even within the anarchist milieu the murder of retirees is still so contentious? If ending policing could be achieved simply by ‘hanging up the handcuffs’ it would have died out years ago.
The totality of this project, will no doubt take intensive personal and collective training. Police forces are well organized, heavily armed, and generally well trained- officers spend every day practicing for the potential of an insurrectional destitution and fear above all other things their own annihilation. As a less well armed and arguably smaller force (although non police officers obviously outnumber police officers we reckon that any force wanting to destitute policing will likely be in the minority) it will be necessary to act in diffuse and unpredictable ways. Here disorganization can be our ally, the thing that makes us unpredictable, difficult to target. The recent wave of so called ISIS[22] attacks for example show us the inefficiency of any police force to deal with an insurgent force appearing suddenly from within its own citizenry and attacking with extreme force. It will mean laying low, drawing as little attention as possible and then striking as quickly and effectively as possible before disappearing again into the mass of unregistered bodies. It will mean in short a practicing a diffuse guerrilla war on a multitude of platforms. All of these things take a commitment to training, practice and learning, to finding groups to operate with and studying skills which best suit your preferred methods. Some concrete examples of this might be learning a martial art or how to shoot guns, reading manuals and communiques on guerrilla war or bomb making by insurgents, studying hacking skills or encryption or having a go at burning a cop car. This might all sound a bit daunting, but every day insurgents all around the world are participating in such a project, learning through doing and sharing that learning through communiques, videos and info-graphics. We recognize that in all our talk we start to sound like idealistic revolutionaries handing out hopeless pipe dreams; this may well be true, but in the pipe bombs blowing holes in walls of cop shops from Athens to Addis-Abeba we feel there is the faintest glimmer of possibility.
Towards the annihilation of police and the destitution of humanity.
We know that the annihilation of police is pretty unlikely to come about any time soon, but we thought it might be nice to throw out three little tricks to aid you in your insurgent attempts. We’ ve picked three which we think are pretty easy, potentially less well known, and cause material harm to police forces or their officers.
1. A simple Timer Device for Torching a Cop Car
Our favourite simple timed device to burn a cop car is a ethanol jelly stove (the small Grey metal containers with blue jelly inside used for cooking/catering) . They are relatively slow burning and do not immediately produce a large flame, giving you time to get away afterwards. Depending on the desired effect they can either be placed underneath the tire of the front wheel (which will result in burning a usually severe engine damage) or on top of the rear wheel bellow the petrol tank (causing the petrol to heat up and eventually explode) . Home made versions of the same device can be made using beer cans, candles and/or fire lighters though success rates in these methods vary wildly and take extensive home testing and device refinement . It is also possible to exclusively use fire lighters, although we reckon this is a slightly larger flame and you have a little less time before things gets hot!
2. Removing a small amount of air from tires in the hope of enabling a car crash.
It is Possible to let the air out of a car tire by unscrewing the dust-cap of the tire, and placing a ‘ mong bean’ , or a very tiny pebble (the ones found where the highway and the sidewalk meet) , or similarly small hard object inside the dust cap and then screwing it gently back on so that the new obstruction pushes on the tires valve slowly forcing air out. If this is done in such a way that the vehicles driver does not realize the tire is loosing air it may be possible that they drive off with the tire still in the process of deflating; there is some possibility here of causing the tire to explode whilst driving or deflate to a dangerous level whilst the vehicle is at high speed.
3. Partly Severing a Vehicles Brake Cables.
On most cars, the brake cables run near by one of the front wheels inside the wheel arch. They are long thin metal cables which enable the vehicle to stop when necessary. If these are cut 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through the driver of the vehicle is unlikely to notice until a moment when they are relying on the brakes at high speed, increasing the chances of successfully annihilating a police officer.
“Communists and anarchists [alike] have long shielded us from the truth, the enemy is not just our boss, the cop, or politicians, it is also our friends, our lovers, and ourselves” Fight For Nothing- ‘Contradiction, Complicity, Exit’
[1] Neil Gaemen “Only the end of the world again”. We substituted the word ‘men’ in this quote for the word “entities” since it serves our purposes better.
[2] More on this later, bare with us.
[3] The state structure which recruits officers and provides materials such as police stations, cars, weapons, etc.
[4] “To gather around shared identities is to repeat and affirm the naming that ultimately marks us as criminal, as killable, as rape-able in the first place. I call naming the process by which we are separated as illegitimate (not-normal, worthy of death) while marking others as legitimate (normal, good).” “The progressive and the social justice activist fail to recognize the violence of naming. Instead, they try to name us as normal. This is impossible The attempt to legitimize ourselves and join the ranks of the normal maintains that there are others who are illegitimate, that others are not good citizens- or even citizens at all”- Ignorant Research Institute- ‘How to Destroy the World’.
[5] GIC meaning Gender Identity Clinic, refers to a for m of mental health clinic existing in the U.K. which aims to treat gender dysphoria and other issues relating to trans health. Gender identity clinics always employ psychiatrists and psychologists who gate keep patients access to treatments such as hormone replacement therapy. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Transhealth/Pages/local-gender-identity-clinics.aspx
[6] ‘Prevent’ is the name given to a series of guideline in the U.K. Which oblige teachers, nurssery nurses and other child care providers to report to ‘Police Officers’ and Local authorities any concerns they have about the ‘radicalization’ of children in their care. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439598/prevent-duty-departmental-advice-v6.pdf
[7] “Criminality is is material action in and of itself, the act of braking the laws and the material antagonism towards law”- Tom Nomad and Gallus Stanig Mag ‘An enduring Passion for criminality’. We clarify here that we don’t mean our teachers prevent us from doing our first “crimes” e.g. shoplifting, but rather that they are part of developing a policing framework which attempts to pacify material antagonism through fear of impossibility or consequence. Policing then is the act of targeting criminality, not the work of stopping crime/s.
[8] ‘Have a go Hero’ is colloquial British English which literally means a person who has a go at (tries to be) being a hero. It specifically refers to those who assist Police Officers in their ‘work’ of assault, kidnap, and murder but who are not themselves employed by the police force. Classically they are the person who tackles you to the ground and holds you there just in the moment that you think you have successfully escaped from uniformed officers.
[9] Neighborhood watch is a state sponsored police officer program which encourages home owners and local “citizens” to be the official police forces eyes and ears, to report goings on and to prevent crime- those involved we call here neighborhood watchers.
[10] “But if our rebel eyes rightly look up to find the answer, they should also look within ourselves .” some anti authoritarian barbarians already inside the walls ‘The Veil Drops’.
[11] We have heard countless people within the left scene refer to actions as “peopley” or “unpeopley”. By this they mean whether a given course of action will be unpopular or popular- clearly, many forms of criminality, including the annihilation of the police are “unpeopley”; we don’t give a fuck, in fact we see this term in itself as a form of police that requires annihilation.
[12] Raul Moat is a famous bad guy in the popular imaginary of current British ‘civilized society’. A working class man from New Castle who had a vendetta against police officers and the prison industrial complex which in his own words had ‘Ruined his life’. After hearing that his ex girlfriend was now dating a police officer (a lie which she has invented, fearing that he would try to hurt her following his release from prison for beating up a nine year old member of his family) his hatred of police officers expanded to a new level and provoked a six day rampage in which he shot his ex girlfriend, her new partner, and shot or attempted to shoot numerous police officers. We detest Raul Moats material and immaterial police work as an abusive and vengeful partner and perpetrator of patriarchal violence; but applaud his material killing of and attempts at material killing of police officers. Whilst his actions were primarily material killings we also believe a degree of immaterial killing took place, since it is arguably impossible to shoot the cop in the street without first killing at least a part of the cop inside your head.
[13] “The term “self-abolition” is key, for it locates the power to abolish relations of exploitation within the collective body of the exploited group. It points to the tension inherent in the revolutionary process: a process in which the material bases for the collective affinities that make struggle possible are themselves violently destroyed through conflict and revolutionary movement, leading to the eventual dissolution of those affinities as relevant descriptors of any kind of shared experience. Autonomy is a step toward abolition, not the end goal.” Sky Palace ‘“TO BE LIBERATED FROM THEM (OR THROUGH THEM)” LIES: A Journal of Material Feminism. We feel that this paragraph roughly points to what we mean by self abolition, for further reading see this text or “No Selves To abolish” K Aarons HOSTIS II.
[14] Existentialism is a philosophy that emphasizes individual existence, freedom and choice. We posit that this school of thinking, which unpins so much of civilizations current philosophical tendency, forms the basis of “the naming” we outlined before as described in ‘How To Destroy the World’. We believe that is is a corner stone of the project of the created human, of the rush towards identity, to enforced categorization and to the inevitable conflicts between ‘Oppressor’ and ‘Oppressed’. In short, existentialism provides the framework for the conversion of disparate entities into ‘Human beings’. Beings which can are then sub categorized into those who deserve ‘protection’ and those in need of ‘control’; these positions can be fluid and ever changing, but the method; a method (which we name here a s policing) is a constant process which first creates ‘life’ and then dominates it.
[15] Descartes maxim which has fundamental shaped the philosophical and political trajectory of western academia points to a belief in the inherent ‘righteousness’, in the inherent ‘realness’ of the human being. We think it has to be undone in its totality; to move to a positions where thinking is in relation to doing (e.g. material acts on a material plain), not being (existence which transcends time, space, or place).
[16] “We aren’t chasing ‘the end of history’, we’re chasing the end of ourselves, and with us the end of the world” Fag Mob ‘Every-thing’s Going to Shit Anyway (why we hate you)’
[17] We observe for example the recent attack by feminists of color in Marseilles against a left scene social center which was holding a racist conference. For us, the attacks themselves broke with the logic of policing since they attacked things which were attempting to pacify, contain, or control there most militant desires or which directly aggressed them. The response of the broader anarchist and left scene was one of abject and radicalized policing, of endless hand ringing over the importance of maintaining the “movement”, of the refusal to publish communiques by the feminists, of arguments for unity on the basis that we are all in one struggle (the class struggle) and of assertions thats the attack was itself a form of policing. FUCK THAT SHIT. If and endless cycle of revenge is what it takes to undo the insidious and networked self and inter personal policing of our milieus then so be it- lets keep fighting until none of us are left.
[18] We think Hobbes “Leviathan” is a poignant example of this tendency.. Hobbes concept of the ‘state of nature’ in which “The life of man, [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” provides him a basis with which to argue for the necessity of civilization, policing, and moral codes to protect humanity from its own wildness. Hobbes sees the creation of the state as the only way to ‘save man’ from his own festering annihilation.
[19] The Invisible Committee- The Coming Insurrection. It is worth noting, that whilst we quote this particular piece of text, we find ourselves in extreme conflict with its writers and many of its proponents. In France the ‘Appelist’ movement which was created by and around the authors of this text is an organized form of insurectional Trotskyism which enacts social policing (especially along the lines of race and gender) and attempts to build the sickening form of a unified social movement which does not auto critique, self annihilate, or work towards the abolition of immaterial policing.
[20] ‘Solidarity: A Crack of the of time in Captivity’ The Members of Conspiracy Cells of Fire- FAI/IRF, Michalis Nikolopoulos, Harris Chatzimichelakis, Damiano Bolano, George Nikolopouslos, Panagiotis Argyrou Theofilos Mavropoulos.
[21] See Hakim Bey ‘The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism’ “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/else when”. Some writers (John Holloway for example) argue that these zones are the spaces from which a new world will blossom pointing to examples such as Zapatista controlled territory or Christiania in Denmark. We’re not convinced, we have seen how capitalism converts these ruptures into new forms of boutique capitalism through the selling of Zapatista coffee in Anarchist Social Centers or the mass production of the ‘Christiania Bike’ for courier companies.
[22] We reference here the plethora of attacks staged across Europe and beyond dubbed by empire as committed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Specifically, we are talking about attacks such as the assassination of writers belonging to the Charlie Hebdo magazine and the cops who were guarding them. We say ‘so called’ because of the attacks we mention, not all necessarily called themselves ‘ISIS’ or were claimed by the organization and anyway this name is one empire itself has chosen to encompass ‘The other’, ‘The terrorist’. The extremist’ etc. In the same moment, we would like to make clear, we do not endorse the organization calling itself Daesh/ISIS in so far as we believe many of its stated politics to be contrary to our goal of police annihilation; for example its abhorrent misogyny and state-ism. What we want to draw out here is the effectiveness of certain strategic attacks, such as the one against Charlie Hebdo, in which a small force was able to enact huge material and even huger immaterial consequence on the world.