R E G A R D I N GThis is a manual for war, or in other words, a template to our present moment. Within the steady stream of events, we hope that this journal will elaborate a por-trait of our current situation, allowing for points of tension to become polarizing lines of antagonism.

At this point in time, all acts disputing the forces of Order are subjected to moral plays of good and evil, a moralism of the law that signals the criminal phase of de-velopment, a period in which we must research, synthesize and circulate a form of understanding and techniques of struggle -- an orientation towards the world. This journal reflects a variety of perspectives on the present situation, an ensemble that can hopefully serve as a point of reference for struggles to come.

The form that the struggle between exploiters and the exploited, the oppressers and the oppressed, the dominators and the dominated, takes at this current moment, a war of civil society with itself, leaving no one untouched by the ethical desire to revolt.

All images come from our experiences as participants of struggles around the Bay Area. All collected intelligence comes from correspondences between OPD, City Hall and Downtown Oakland business interests during the existence of the Occupy Oakland encampment.

The day after Oscar Grant Plaza was re-taken, the fences were re-tooled...

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

FIRSTLY, WE’D LIKE TO EXPRESS OUR PRIDE IN BEING ABLE to introduce you to the journal you’re now holding: lawless. In putting to paper and arranging the words contained herein, our desire is to

contribute to what we understand to be a deepening and spreading subversive current in the Bay Area of California. In the years since the explosions of the Oscar Grant riots, our cities and neighborhoods have been center stage in a series of intense and spectacular moments of revolt. We’ve seen street battles, police raids, riots, blockades, encampments and building occupations. In recent months we’ve seen these fires of revolt spread to unexpected sites: Denver, St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta. Much of the content in this journal will analyze these events, and yet it is not the events in and of themselves that we’ll focus on.

While we celebrate their intensity and frequency, we also realize that these events represent the exception to our daily life. They stand out against and interrupt the monotonous and deathly day-to-day reproduction of this

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EDITORIAL STATEMENT

metropolis – its financial districts and its ghettos, its shopping centers and its jails, its condominiums and its homeless encampments. The focus of our project is specifically on the tension, the horror, of the grim reality that after each joyous explosion we are forced to return to work, to sell our labor. We focus on the schizophrenia where each day of revolt is followed by days of normalcy; normalcy with its labor, its bills, its subjects, its relationships. This is increasingly becoming the rhythm of our existence. The crisis of our daily survival punctuated by the willed crises of events and moments of rupture. Between these events and this nothingness, we see our project as the weaving together of a fabric that can hasten and multiply the moments of interruption and that can at the same time create the consistency of struggle that can outlast the duration of these mere moments. As much as we concern ourselves with the event, we seek to elaborate and tease out this subversive current in the periods of quiet. Broken locks, disabled security devices, jumped turnstiles, squatted homes, pirated power, sabotaged cars, re-arrangements of our environment, stolen food, conspiratorial whispers,

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j28 Move-In Day

a lover’s embrace: we want to explore and lay out an etiquette of subversion that permeates the times of excitement as well as the times of rest.

Though we attempt to proceed with ease and precision, we recognize that the tasks before us are daunting and infinite. It is obvious then that out of fear or confusion, so many of our friends and comrades turn toward the numerous paths away from this project. The generalized hopelessness of our time exists as a massive obstacle to insurrection and at each of its sides are dual traps: activism on the one hand, passive nihilism on the other. Though partisans of each would present themselves as being opposed to one another, they are trapped in a dialectic wherein each reproduces the other, and as a duality they reproduce everything about our world.

Activism concerns itself with the daily performance of an endless number of meaningless and mundane tasks, all motivated by the ever-fleeing possibility of a better future. A barrage of meetings, outreach, press conferences, workshops, and community projects form a futile response to the fundamental disconnection between individuals and the context that would give their activity any potential. This position is largely based upon a practice without perspective, fleeing from issue to issue without the continuity that could build a coherent project of subversion. The activist does not seek to transform the miseries of everyday life, but to manage and represent them. Whether building the community or taking the streets, this constant extraction of energies, intellects and bodily capacity guarantees little more than that everything will stay the same.

In contrast, the passive nihilists recognize the futility of this ceaseless motion. Understanding that something else is necessary, they do nothing to contribute to the possibility of this something else. Fearing the immensity and danger intrinsic to a consistent project of subversion, they seek to justify their own inaction. To justify their position, they’ll turn to any number of theories and ideologies. Whether marxist determinism, academic postmodernism, or theories of ‘negation’, each demonstrates the same nothingness at the heart of daily life. This is the position that critiques the spectacular nature of revolt while religiously perpetuating mere aesthetics through its blogs and social networks; that rushes home to write its critique of a still-unfolding event while its comrades remain on the streets; that moves effortlessly from one

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trendy philosopher to the next, consuming the words and discarding of their fire; that tells us to find new methods of attack and yet offers no proposals toward this end.

Between the naivete of the activists and the cynicism of the passive ones, we are attempting to forge an active nihilism that evaluates our situation and then seeks its abolition. We want a nihilism that starts from the understanding that everything must be destroyed and quickly proceeds to imagine how it might be done.

Some of our comrades speak of the Movement, of a massive segment of society that is awakening to get active and to move toward some already determined and universal goal. They may critique the notions of the 99% and consensus and democracy, yet they participate in the same populist fantasy at the heart of the concept. A fetish for quantity and form leads to the same mathematic logic of politics and social justice that can only ever be society itself. Others speak of the Ego, some mythical anachronism that somehow survived the nineteenth century. We applaud their rigorous critique of society and all its institutions and defenders. And yet we cannot get behind their positivism surrounding the Free Individual, subsumed as he is within the subject formations and desires of the market. Even more absurd, are the comrades who argue for escape. They urge us to flee to “the outside”, to farm and to study, while missing that there is no outside to which we might flee. Capitalism and the control it necessitates has evolved into the most dynamic and all-encompassing form of domination the world has ever known. With its mass movements for empty concepts such as social justice and equality, it has found in the Left a way to capture antagonism and put it in the service of the system itself. In its diffusion and decentralization of control mechanisms, it has taken the old ideas of horizontalism and anarchism as its own. In the double-move of capital’s autonomy and workers’ self-management it has realized any outdated notion of worker’s control. Whatever was once dangerous about separatist struggles has since been captured and neutralized by the horror of identity politics. The egoist Unique Ones are not only cultivated by the current arrangement of capital, they are the lifeblood upon which the market continues to feed. Through a whole range of rhizomatic and fluid police operations and business models, Capital has learned more from the academy’s post-modernism than we could ever hope to.

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In the joyous moments of rebellion, we have each been severed from our attachment to these dying ideologies. The impossibility of these dogmas to adequately describe what we’ve experienced together has forced us away from them; tightening our focus on the single project that alludes to the over-throwing of the present. It is all the more painful then, that the receding of these moments leaves a vacuum wherein the ghosts of these ideologies take hold once-more. We experience counter-insurgency, in part, as the circumstances which tear our friends from us; delivering them to these bleak positions. We experience it as well, in our loneliest moments when it gnaws at our confidence in our own project. The prevalence of these easy, yet false, answers corresponds to the depression and ennui which defines our existence. When we are at our weakest - when we cannot bring ourselves to leave our bedrooms and face the day, when we cannot be together for the shame of having failed one another, when the immensity of our task weighs so heavily upon us as to leave our muscles inert – it is then that counter-insurgency confronts us as the real character of our own being.

This is why we say that we must begin again. We must begin again from the realization that all the old options are an infinite bouquet of dead ends. There is not a Movement, an Outside or any fully-realized Individualism that might save us from the nightmare of the present. That capital has become everything has ensured the integration and the defeat of all these models.

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a collection of items found by police after a demonstration for Occupy Oakland

And yet it conceals a new reality and a new situation we must operate within. If every aspect of our lives has been captured and immiserated by class society, this means that we embody lives from which we can start anywhere. To say that we are the crisis, is to definitively say that every moment of our own reproduction carries with it the possibility of rupture and subversion. We can’t afford to wait for the correct moment in history or for the real movement that will redeem us. This is the crisis, this is the moment. Conditions will shift, movements will unfold, the terrain will change before our eyes: and yet we will consistently come up against our own existence as the soulless enemy to be overcome. Our project reveals itself at the moment when we concern ourselves with how we might overthrow the elements of our existence: our abusive relationships, our nagging insecurities, our terrible jobs, our never-ending expenses, our mediocre food, our depression and anxiety, our court cases, our imprisonment, our addictions. Our project is the science that studies each of these daily atrocities and reveals the State, the police, and the innumerable apparatuses that make them possible and that chain us to them.

Though we criticize the dead ends of the past and the corpses that they animate in the present, our project is really a very old one. Wherever living beings have refused the subjective and objective constraints that create them; wherever they revolt against the infinite proliferation of their bleak futures; wherever the exploited materialized their hatred against the bodies and institutions of their exploiters; wherever rebels found one another and engaged in insurrectionary struggle, we must investigate their revolutionary spirit and annex it into our own life-project. Whether taking the name of the commune, the Idea, anarchy, wildness, autonomy, vengeance, or even the kingdom of heaven on earth: we locate ourselves within the subversive current of history that willfully attempts to break with the ongoing tragedy of the progress of society.

To continue this project, we cannot look for the simple answers: the party lines, the mass organization, the activist formulas, the safe loneliness of inaction. We must engage in the difficult process of autonomous self-organization, of criminal science, of intervention and of attack. We do not write to participate in ideological discourse. We aren’t concerned with Anarchism and Communism as much as we are with anarchy and the

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commune. Neither do we write to lay out a platform. We are not concerned with a crass historicism that explains how things must happen. Neither are we concerned with constructing a morality that says what should be done. We know the world of capital and the state must be destroyed; we know it will be a chaotic series of events, ugly and at the same time beautiful. We’ve produced this journal so that we might unveil an etiquette of struggle, a way of proceeding, a science of social war. We’re circulating our words so that they’ll reach those who struggle alongside us, who are already or want to become our co-conspirators in a the crime of revolt. We are not seeking readers to consume our words and experiences as entertainment from afar. We want to avoid contributing to a romanticization or mythology about the Bay Area. Instead we seek to transmit the etiquette developed here to those who will be taken by it and will apply it to their own context. We’re sending this letter-in-a-bottle to sea so that we might contribute to the growing tendency of conscious nihilism, active revolt, and an insurgency without end.

In solidarity with those who have the fire, In conspiracy with those who will not wait,

some lawless ones in the bay area

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a n e m a i l c o r r e s p o n d e n c e b e t w e e n c i t y h a l l o f f i c i a l s

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WE, THE LAWLESS

“I believe neither in constitutions nor in laws; the best constitution possible would not satisfy me. We need nothing less than the bursting out into life of a new world, lawless and therefore free.”- Mikhail Bakunin, letter to Herwegh

“If we make ourselves free from the sacred, if we have become graceless and lawless our words too will become so.” - Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

Our project begins with those whose hostility is expressed as an affirmation of life as war. We are a force that is undefinable and diffuse. Regardless of our

proximity, we are friends and this is our advantage.

This world is a living nightmare. Children in slums are running for their lives from the gun barrels of police operations in Brazil. Services necessary for survival are being cut or totally eliminated with the passing of austerity budgets throughout Europe. In the United States police murders occur with frightening regularity. A year after the insurgent Arab Spring of 2011 public displays of anger are still being brutally repressed through out the entire Arab world with state led strategies reflective of the current situation– resistance

14 | Lawless N2 General Strike . Downtown Oakland.

anywhere is met with the brute force of technologically advanced counter-insurgent policing strategies. Some are killed in struggle while others continue on to avenge the deaths of their comrades and lovers. Many are wounded but that deters only a few from returning to the streets. People nurse wounds in alleyways and houses with the hope of finding enough strength to continue on. When they do continue to fight it is against a society, a system and a world that makes their lives unlivable every single day.

Crisis and disaster are the oxygen capitalist society breathes. As a complex matrix of social relationships capitalism depends upon crises and disasters to function. They are both products of and inherent to the daily functioning of society. Capitalism as a total system is expansive by nature and has reproduced unfathomable misery in every corner of the globe. People daily are violently confronted with the realities of capitalist relations. These ever expanding social relationships are predicated upon exclusion and separation. This means that our lives exist as a series of separations from the material world around us, from our own bodies and from one another. Separation and exclusion are inherent in every aspect of our lives and manifest everywhere – unemployment, home foreclosures and evictions, slums,1

15 | Lawlessracism, patriarchy, wage labor, market induced disasters, policing, prisons and everything else that prevents us from truly living. We were born in a world where life is purgatorial. We are waiting for an absent future in the tragic and violent monotony of the present.

There are moments that speak to another world, to a life that means something beyond the drudgery of work, inevitable jail time, debt and the struggles of how to honestly relate to each other. These moments transcend all of the social relations we wish to escape. We live in these moments whenever we can. While it is impossible to live outside of capitalism we can create situations that speak to its destruction and dream of what it would mean to actually live. There is no definition for these moments that either break with the present or allude to something else but there is an essence that can be spoken of, that can be felt. When you are drunk off of living and see potential for something else with others around you this is the essence we desire to recreate and expand. Our project is as much about the destruction of capitalism as it is about combating misery.

This world is made up of social relations and apparatuses that keep most of us in conditions that are of material and spiritual misery. There are managers and defenders

[1] The exisT-ence as well as evicTion of slums are examples of sep-araTion and ex-clusion. These zones where people live and reproduce Their own lives are maTerial represenTaTions of exclusion. Their evicTions are The mosT bruTal form of sTaTe repres-sion as people who are al-ready excluded are violenTly kicked ouT of Their homes for The sake of capiTalisT valorizaTion.

of these relations whose dominant positions in society depend upon these relations existing, reproducing, and infinitely expanding. These individuals and social bodies are our enemies and must be treated as such. While these enemies may not always be easily identifiable it is as much a part of the project to expose them as it is to attack them materially. Material attacks simultaneously destabilize enemies and speak to friends. The development of friendships that are hostile to this world are intimately linked to our pursuit of eradicating capital and the state. Friendships rooted in this material disposition are not easily broken and have a tendency to multiply.

“...one must know who everyone is, who is a friend and who is an enemy, and this knowing is not in the mode of theoretical knowledge but in one of a practical identification: knowing consists here in knowing how to identify the friend and the enemy.”

Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship

Historically capitalism has been able to simultaneously expand it’s own social relations while creating the conditions and situations for their own decomposition2. We identify the whole of ourselves and the entirety of our project with this decay. We seek the destruction of this world because

16 | Lawless we wish for what we cannot have: a life worth living. This goal will only be accomplished through the coalescence of social antagonisms and hostilities into an insurgent social force. If we believe ourselves to be actively participating in this coalescence than we must reflect on the terrain and geography upon which we walk. We must not act without proper exploration of our surroundings, research of our enemies, and critical consideration of our relationships with emergent social movements and moments of combative social explosion. Asking the basic question of how we understand ourselves is necessary if we are to understand our relationship to the active destruction of this world and the elaboration of new social relations.

Regardless of whether or not capitalism will end3, struggles will continue to emerge all over the globe taking on many different forms with distinct content. There is no such thing as a genuine struggle nor a real revolutionary subject . There is only a constant state of war. Participants in this war do not hesitate to act in contradictory ways depending on the specifics of their given situation.

Historically war is an uneven and complex matrix of hostilities, lines and skirmishes. It is a state of things that is not romantic but divisive.

[2] crisis, insur-gency, rioTs,

Technological innovaTion,

unemploymenT, revoluTionary

movemenT as well as general crime and sabo-

Tage are some among oTher

examples of how capiTalism un-

dermines iT’s own relaTions.

[3] There are some who believe

ThaT capiTal is indesTrucTible

and even in The evenT of social

collapse will conTinue on by anoTher name.

There is also The Tragic deTermin-

ism of cerTain marxisms which

bases acTiviTy on a naïve posiTion

of believing capiTal will

ineviTably die. boTh under-

sTandings miss The capricious-

ness of capiTal-ism as well as The

maTerial reali-Ties of civiliza-

Tion. concern wiTh whaT is To

come ineviTably deTracTs from

whaT is already happening. we

begin from whaT is, noT whaT will

be.

It is constant and active even in moments of tranquility or retreat. We understand that there is never a moment outside of struggle – like capitalism, war is everywhere. Every situation illuminates different aspects of war. This means that we must approach and engage all situations with critical rigor and a desire to discover their potential. Every situation has potential to become something, to be pushed to a limit. These potentials are not always clear but emerge within the context of a specific situation and the relationship that situation has to the development of an insurgent social force.

It is important not to judge a specific situation merely on its ideological grounding or Political position. History has taught us that the ideological foundations to any situation are malleable in the streets. It is the material force of these ideas that give them any weight. We do not see a demonstration comprised of liberals as just what it seems. Nor do we see a riot as merely a riot. Instead we approach every situation with a conscious desire to push them to their limit, expose their contradictions and expand their desirable and conflictual elements. This means that situations like the US Occupy Movement (a social movement) and the London Riots (a moment of combative social explosion)4 must both be considered

17 | Lawlessas moments of war and part of a more general plane of struggle – we desire to see them go as far as possible towards combating capital and the state. We wish to see situations turn into moments where anything and everything becomes possible. When these moments expand and take on resonance, when they become social, we have a situation where insurrection pokes its head from the shadows and lovingly embraces anyone in its path.

These moments must not be confused as merely tactical escalations. Tactics and strategy are one and the same as opposed to two separate considerations. As the two basic elements for maneuvering against the state and capital any strategic question becomes a tactical one and vice versa. One cannot move in any direction unless they see where to put their feet. To take the metaphor further: if you aren’t wearing the proper shoes you wont be able to run in any direction. If we are to take every situation seriously then our tactical position must be strategic as much as our strategy must always be tactical. Ultimately the dismantling of capitalist social relations will be a technical and material question (tactics) as much as a social and spiritual one (strategy).Every situation and geographical setting makes certain types of activity possible and others not at any given moment. It is important

[4] There is a disTincTion beTween a social movemenT and a combaTive social explo-sion. There are also momenTs and siTuaTions where They are indisTinguishable like The oak-land, ca oscar granT rebellion in 2009. These momenTs are ofTen The mosT inTriguing.

to relate to any social movement or combative social explosion from the inside5. Even though we approach a situation with the desire to see it go one way this does not mean that we are separated from the situation its self. When a social movement emerges like the recent US Occupy movement, it is important to see at first what is possible and then act accordingly. With the critical study of infrastructure, of a political, material and technological nature, how we must act will be that much more apparent. It is important to act in ways that either immediately resonates with friends or destabilizes the enemy.

We will never be able to choose the context upon which a social movement or a combative social explosion will happen. There are

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factors out of our own personal control that create the conditions and social will for these situations to unfold. Despite this we always have the capacity to act. Sometimes to act is to retreat, to think, to write, to build. Other times it is seizure of private property and attack. If we do not act we have chosen to let the mythical tale of determinism choose our fate for us. Some will say to wait for a moment to come, a moment that is not now. However when we say we have “no future” we mean it seriously, that there is nothing redeeming about what is to come, what some will tell us to wait for. For us to wait idly through inaction means to watch our executioner sharpen the guillotine above our heads in peace. Even if we are already destined to lose and our doomed fate is waiting before us, the point is

N2 General Strike . Wells Fargo Bank . anti-capitalist march .

[5] consider-ing The naTure of capiTal any

and every siTu-aTion speaks To

The general siTuaTion. we

are noT separaTe from any sTrug-

gle or combaTive social explosion.

Those who ex-clude some from

sTruggles are replicaTing The worsT elemenTs

of capiTal and musT be resisTed. we inTervene in

siTuaTions noT wiTh desire To

manage Them buT The exacT oppo-siTe: To prevenT

anyone from doing so.

not to win but to live. This is why we act. To live means to break down the distinction between life and war. This is done through activity. We must be careful to critically consider every situation before us so as not to regress into theatrical resistance. If we want our activity to be worthwhile it must have meaningful and combative content both spiritually and materially.

“This is why we have to keep in mind that we are not seeking followers or adherents, but accomplices in the crime of freedom.”

Wolfi Landstreicher, Autonomous Self-Organization and Anarchist Intervention: A Tension in Practice

If capitalism is a series of separations and exclusionary relations than the organization and spirit of our activity must combat

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that logic directly. To do so means taking what historically have been separations and fusing them into meaningful activity. This fusion, if done with care can further our goal of creating an insurgent social force capable of combating capitalist social relations thereby making something else possible. This begins with the fusion of life and war and continues with the reconciliation of those elements we constantly make the mistake of keeping apart: the clandestine and the visible, attack and defense, the idea and the act, care and force, love and hatred, the material and spiritual, the social and anti-social. These fusions will take us away from a world of abstractions into the grounding of our understandings of the world with a collective criminal spirit. We

wish to combat capitalism on all fronts therefore we must sharpen everything we have into a weapon to be brandished at a moments notice.

Spiritually, we wish to embody the past and those who have made history. All of our heroes are criminals. To build an insurgent social force means we must embody and spread the criminal spirit. This is the foundation of our spiritual project, one that attempts to reproduce a spiritual relationship to the world that is criminal. Capital, the state and all of their apparatuses are dependent upon docility and subservience. This subservience is enforced through laws which are materially reinforced by the policing apparatus. Laws, under capitalism, are meant to enforce the violence and misery of the present system in all of its forms. To subvert these laws and become lawless is the goal of the individual or collective criminal. To attack and confront the realities of capitalist social relations is to subvert and undermine the rule of law. The reign of capital can only continue with its enforcement through laws – without them everything becomes possible.

Our conditions are for the most part directly out of our control. However we can maneuver within our conditions. It is within this

20 | Lawless space that an insurgent social force is able to take shape. If it is to directly contest the spirit of capital, the state and their apparatuses than the spirit of this force must be criminal. This criminal spirit is materialized in many ways. Expropriations of private property, occupations, de-circulation of commodities (theft), property destruction/sabotage, destabilization of enemy infrastructure and direct confrontations with police are perfect examples of the criminal spirit.

The other element of this spiritual disposition is to allow total subversion to guide you, or to put it another way, to develop a criminal mind. The criminal (collectively or individually) must study the geography, the apparatuses, the ins-and-outs of this world in order to subvert it. This understanding is practical and does not come only from books or philosophy but also from experience, experimentation, failure, clandestine investigation, inside sources, and other manuals.6 To truly understand our surroundings necessitates the development of a real war knowledge – how to give someone stitches after a street battle is as important to the criminal mind as is knowing where security cameras are located or how to properly hop a fence. This war knowledge must be generalized and distributed widely so as to nurture

[6] manuals are noT bounded

noTebooks buT anyThing ThaT

can explain The nuTs and bolTs

of a phenom-enon, insTiTuTion

or apparaTus. They are maps,

sTories and insighTs shared

ThaT can aid our abiliTy To

maneuver in any given geography

wheTher maTe-rial, poliTical or

social.

the development of an effective and combative insurgent social force that is by definition criminal.

“The new signs of negation multiplying in the economically developed countries, signs which are misunderstood and falsified by spectacular arrangement, already enable us to draw the conclusion that a new epoch has begun: now, after the workers’ first attempt at subversion, it is capitalist abundance which has failed. When anti-union struggles of Western workers are repressed first of all by unions, and when the first amorphous protests launched by rebellious currents of youth directly imply the rejection of the old specialized politics, of art and of daily life, we see two sides of a new spontaneous struggle which begins under a criminal guise. These are the portents of a second proletarian assault against class society.”

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle There is a tension between our desire to develop a conscious criminality and capitalism’s tendency toward creating a large and swelling criminal class. Capitalism creates conditions that exclude large segments of the population. These segments of the population are rapidly increasing. Whether creating apocalyptic zones and slums or forcing more workers into unemployment,

21 | Lawlesscapitalism reproduces and expands the conditions of precarity and instability.7 This exclusion inevitably forces some people to reproduce their own existence by any means necessary. Many will be thrown into a life of criminality. While subversive, this criminality does not necessarily translate into furthering the development of an insurgent social force. Often it is these segments of the population who endure the most malevolent abuses of the state. These individuals are forced into a criminal existence as atomized as capital itself. That one is excluded and forced into a life of criminality does not mean their spiritual disposition is criminal. The state can force the criminal into passivity and subservience and the criminal can be imbued with the spirit of capital itself. This is most obvious in criminal infrastructure and associations that reflect capitalist social relations. It is for this reason that capitalism will not be consciously undermined merely by the expansion of the formal criminal class. It will take something more. The formal criminal class tends to reproduce social relations that embody the spirit of capital using a criminal methodology. This is because capital itself does not know the formalities of law. Law is used to tame the human elements of capital but not its logic (it is not possible) – this is the reason

[7] “iT mighT seem ThaT The abundance of goods, which re-sulTs from labor-saving innova-Tions, musT lead To an abundance of jobs. buT in a socieTy based on wage-labor, The reducTion of so-cially necessary labor Time which makes goods so abundanT can only express iTself in a scarciTy of jobs, in a mulTiplica-Tion of forms of precarious employmenT” - Misery and debt, endnoTes 2

capital can flourish on the black market. However it is for this reason that we are interested in the methods of and not the mere existence of the formal criminal class. These methods contain a potential to be developed into war knowledge and become the tactical underpinning of an insurgent social force. These include but are not limited to: tactical affinities with others, informal organization, conspiracy, clandestine activity, evasion/confrontation with police, expropriation and anonymity. There is a material relationship to the world that the criminal produces with these methodologies. It is the spirit of this material relationship that has no inherent disposition. When the criminal reproduces capitalist social relations they embody the spirit of capital itself. When the criminal uses these methods to destroy capital they then embody the criminal spirit.

We understand the essence of a conscious criminality, of a criminal will and spirit as being intimately linked with the destruction of this world. We do not wish to become the bourgeoisie of a black market that mirrors the formal world of capital. Instead we wish to use our collective criminal spirit and war knowledge to develop an insurgent social force. This is not possible in rackets or alone. It is only possible with friends.

22 | Lawless “His action must be regarded as a prologue. Let us act, my friends, in such a way that the play will soon begin.”

Sergei Nechaev, in reference to Karakazov’s assassination attempt on czar Alexander II

The criminal spirit knows no class but captivates anyone who listens to it. It permeates all segments of society waiting to emerge in a collective insurgency to destroy the present order. There is no political program nor possibility to manage this emergent force. It is unmanageable. It is everywhere. It is not a bright future that we hold in our hands but a dark anti-thesis of the present where everything becomes possible. Our collective criminal spirit knows only one home and it is in the dark underbelly of this possibility. Here where the nightmares of our enemies blossom in our eyes at the sight of what is to come.

LL

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