Friendly Fire Collective

by Ian Alan Paul, of the Friendly Fire Collective

With the rise of neoliberal economics and the proliferation of the police state after September 11th , the working class in the United States has found itself robbed of the securities and comforts that it had fought so hard to secure since the beginnings of the labor movement. As we look around at the conditions of our everyday lives, we find ourselves lost in the cacophony that is precarity. With little to no job-security, no hopes of owning property, rising food and energy costs, and the privatization and mediation of our social and cultural spaces, we are left adrift in a violent storm of social and economic disorder. In this society we do not fight for our own genuine desires, but rather we are forced to fight for our very survival. This article is an attempt to properly articulate the conditions of precarity, as well as identify possible paths forward in the fight for a new society free of such conditions.

The Current State of Things: Defining Precarity

We live in times defined by precarity. We, the precarious, are the wage-laborers and the renters in society. We are the landless and the dispensable. As the rich continue to own more and more of the available housing and neighborhoods become gentrified, we find ourselves not being secure in knowing where we’ll be living next month. With the flight of industrial labor to the third world, and with it the vanishing of unions which once served to protect the working class, the only means of survival left in the metropole are jobs which provide no security, temporary jobs which provide the lowest possible wages and rarely give access to even the most basic forms of healthcare. As more and more of our everyday lives are invaded and occupied by the forces of capitalism, we are left unstable and insecure. To be precarious is to be in-between, to be without a foundation and to be without any control over the course of your own life. To be precarious is to be living in fear: fear of eviction, fear of unemployment, fear of sickness that you won’t be able to afford to recover from, fear of being a victim of the police and the violence they enact everyday completely unrestrained.

The current state of precarity has proliferated itself so successfully in recent times due to a concert of neoliberal and existential forces acting in unison to concentrate power in society. The middle class in the United States continues to dissolve, and the rapidly growing divide between the rich and the poor is only gaining momentum. Due to the spread and intensification of precarious conditions into large sectors of society, we’ve found a large community of people whose primary struggle has been simply to survive. With more and more people moving to cities, and fewer and fewer stable jobs being available in our post-industrial society, instability has become a fact of life for the majority of people. It is in this that we find the potential for new struggle. While previous mobilizations focused on specific issues such as foreign policy, war, the environment or identity politics, the new mobilizations of our time have little choice but to focus on the conditions of our everyday lives. The new struggle will focus on the question of how we can meaningfully and sustainably create alternative and autonomous societies which exist in parallel to the old ones. These new societies we struggle for would have no choice but to be founded upon principles of horizontalism and equality, consciously in complete opposition to the foundations of the old society that is responsible for creating precarity in the first place: isolation and hierarchy.

When we try to look for ways in which we can begin to realize and construct a radical movement in such harsh conditions, the answer that we continue finding ourselves arriving at is that we must organize to fight against the conditions of capitalism itself. Rather than try to reform the current society by winning small concessions here and there, we must instead look to autonomy as an avenue for constructing institutions and spaces that will constitute the material needs of the new society we hope to build. In the United States, anarchist and anti-authoritarian networks have had brief moments where they’ve been able to come together collectively, whether for summit protests or convergences, and experiment with the formation of these new autonomous societies. It is in these informal networks that the seeds of the new society exist. However, in order to move forward, we must critically examine why these networks have failed so far to build the new society that we all desire to live in. The central question of the struggle for the new society must be centered on precarity: How can we begin to move forward in a direction which would concretely start building a new autonomous network which provides for entire lives to exist outside of the conditions of capitalism and precarity instead of just providing brief fleeting escapes from it?

A Network without Hubs

The anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist left in North America has remained underground and dormant for the most part since the collapse of the left during the 70’s and 80’s. What has been the defining property of this network is its tendency to only emerge when very specific and concentrated sites of struggle present themselves. In the United States, this has almost always meant economic summits (the WTO, FTAA, World Bank and IMF) and political spectacles (the RNC/DNC and the Presidential Inauguration). While the majority of the time the radical left stays dormant, resorting mostly to cultural and social events, when opportunities to confront power on a national scale do present themselves, the network activates itself and, seemingly out of nowhere, thousands of individuals come together for a few days to collectively resist capitalism and the state. They form collective kitchens, go on mass bike rides together, create tent cities, squat buildings, and perhaps most memorably march in the streets and clash with the police. This lasts at the most three or four days, usually culminating in some sort of spectacular confrontation, and then, as soon as the summit/convention is over, the network which emerged so quickly and which collectively accomplished so much in so little time, dissolves and fragments as quickly as it had come together.

It’s important to analyze this phenomenon closely for two reasons: the first reason being that it shows what the anti-authoritarian left is capable of accomplishing when acting together collectively and in unison, and the second reason being that it exposes the current shortcomings of the network as a decentralized mass of isolated individuals, really existing more as an idea than as a physical mass. What the network currently looks like is a loose affinity of individuals and small groups with little capacity to act except during moments of great opportunity, either when a big enough target emerges for the network to attack (summits/conventions), or when the network is being repressed (though a networked organizing of defense campaigns). What this has meant is that the North American anti-authoritarian movement has been largely a reactionary force in society, with little to offer the majority of the working class other than the occasional spectacle of resistance.

The incapacity of the network to move beyond these infrequent emergences is caused directly by conditions created by precarity. Radicals are simply too busy trying to protect their own well being from the shocks of the market that they do not have the energy or the time to commit to radical projects. What this has meant is that radicals who try to simultaneously work to provide enough resources to provide for their own lives and at the same time work on collective projects often end up burning themselves out, as the struggle to maintain both under the intense pressure of precarity is often too much. If the network is to escape this cycle of explosions of action followed by months of inactivity, we must develop new strategies to make resistance and autonomy sustainable and contagious.

Materializing the Network: Building and Defending Hubs

If we hope to escape the pitfalls of the current network and form a new radical society capable of not only surviving, but attacking the current hegemony, we have to begin to search for examples around the globe which have managed to effectively combat precarity. The worker cooperatives in Argentina , the Autonomists in Germany , and the Zapatistas in the south of Mexico have all provided working models for what autonomist strategies could look like in different contexts; however the conditions in each of these areas are very different than what is found in the United States. Each of the aforementioned examples provide lessons which are applicable to our movements, but we must be able to turn to our own imaginations as well in order to draw the plans for a horizontal alternative to the current capitalist structures that we are currently forced to participate in out of necessity.

If we are to confront precarity in a meaningful way, we must begin to establish autonomous spaces, or hubs, within the network and be able to defend them from attacks from the repressive forces within our society. These spaces must be constructed with the needs of the precarious primarily in mind. If we look around, we can see some of these already exist. The infoshops where people are able to educate themselves about radical movements are some of these hubs. Radical venues that host benefits and events for mobilizations are other hubs. Housing cooperatives are yet another example of currently existing hubs within the anti-authoritarian network. All of these spaces contribute a great deal to the current movement of movements, and are responsible for maintaining what remains of the radical left in our society. Yet the question remains: If some hubs already exist within the network, then where is the new society we had hoped for? As I see it there are three major problems with the current way radical hubs are first envisioned and then constructed in our society and are stopping them from becoming a serious counter force to the hierarchical structures which occupy our everyday lives.

The first of these problems is that there are no mechanisms in place within these spaces for growth. While these institutions are able to produce the material and monetary resources to perpetuate themselves, they lack strategies for creating other spaces within the same communities. Each hub in the network must be able to use their resources to assist in the creation of new autonomous spaces and projects which would act in parallel to current ones. Some housing cooperatives have managed to this, which has resulted in their proliferation into neighborhoods all over the U.S. By providing loans to groups who hope to start new cooperatives, using their houses as collateral, they’ve managed to continue to create new spaces and hubs for the movement. Infoshops, venues, radical health centers and collective kitchens should all be adopting this model as well. If spaces cannot provide monetary aid to new and existing projects, they certainly could provide skill shares and could allow for the collective use of materials in a network of mutual aid across regions. If our strategy of creating hubs and spaces within the fabric of the current radical network fails to be contagious and spread, then we will continue to face the same shortcomings that we have in the past. With communication technology so accessible and cheap, there is no reason that hubs shouldn’t be acting in unison and sharing resources in every way imaginable.

The second problem that we face as a network of radicals is that the hubs within the network aren’t acting as a collective force. While each radical collective may be organized on horizontal and anti-authoritarian principles, the hubs themselves remain incredibly fragmented and have little to no communication, making mutual aid or collaboration difficult and sometimes even lead different collectives to compete for resources rather than cooperate. If the hubs within the network were able to act in unison either through the formation of regional councils where members of different autonomous spaces could meet and discuss their problems and needs, or through project collaborations which would involve several different autonomous spaces/hubs, then we would see greater potential for collective actions and projects to emerge beyond the specific services that are already provided by each individual autonomous space or hub. When we think about being able to defend radical spaces from outside attacks, we will only be able to accomplish this through collective organizing of autonomous spaces. We can see examples of this in the networks of squats that existed in Manhattan and in West Germany in the 1980’s. There was an understanding that there was a collective interest in defending each and every squat from attacks by the state. This understanding arose from both the acknowledgement that if your own squat were attacked, you would need the aid of others to hold the space, and the only way of ensuring you would be helped by others in such a situation would be by helping others who found themselves under such attacks. We can envision such a network of mutual aid expanding beyond just squats onto all sorts of hubs and autonomous spaces.

The third problem is that hubs more often than not do not have a common analysis or theoretical base. In the United States there is a vast network of student cooperatives in most major cities, yet the number of radical projects which stem from these spaces is quite small. This is largely due to the fact that these spaces are knee-jerk responses to precarious conditions and lack consensus between cooperatives on their analysis of power in society. It’s not uncommon to see anarchists, Democrats, Greens and Leninists all living under the same roof, and as a result it’s no surprise that they remain working on separate projects rather than using their space to collectively build a movement. They make the first theoretical step in acknowledging that they can organize themselves cooperatively to overcome the problems with finding a stable housing situation, but unfortunately they stop there. Rather than form a critique of the processes and forces that have caused the housing problem in the first place (capitalism, racism, precarity), they stop prematurely and lose a great deal of their potential as hubs within the network. In their current state, they act as a reformist force within society, simply making capitalism a tad more friendly and livable. If we want to achieve the construction of a new society, we must at the same time be able to attack the root causes which create the problems in the first place.

I don’t mean to understate the value of the current hubs. Certainly all of these spaces have done a great deal for radicals in North America and have kept the struggle going in a lot of ways. They’ve been successful in combatting some aspects of precarity, have provided a foundation on which to build during summits and other mobilizations, and they have inspired us to push forward. However, if we want to seriously think about building a revolutionary and non-hierarchical society, we must reimagine the way current spaces can be used, and begin to reconstruct these spaces in this vision.

There have been several different attempts to develop a set of principles which would serve as prerequisites for acting in a formalized network. These principles would have to allow for a large diversity of radical projects to act collaboratively and in unison while keeping projects which would hurt the network outside of it. When trying to come up with the most basic demands of autonomous spaces for a radical network to work effectively, we find that simply requiring that the autonomous hubs that participate within the network operate on horizontal/antiauthoritarian principles and that they share a common anticapitalist critique would be enough to make the network healthy. By demanding each hub in the network follow these two simple principles of affinity, we can begin to see how different hubs could act in synergy with one another. The first rule assures that no hub could try to assert power over other hubs, and would halt the development of a hierarchy within the network. Through a shared anticapitalist critique, autonomous hubs would have a shared common ground on which to collaborate on projects as well as a motivation to create more hubs to aid these projects. As more needs are identified with the creation of more projects, we can see how the natural proliferation of hubs within the network would occur.

This has happened several times in the recent history of the anti-globalization movement that sprung up in North America during the 80’s and 90’s, perhaps most famously with the rapid spread of IMCs (independent media centers) after the WTO summit in Seattle and the spread of ‘Food Not Bombs’ chapters into almost every major North American city. Both of these types of hubs (the first meeting the need of unmediated news and communication, the second meeting the need for food) spontaneously spread and networked between themselves at an incredible speed. As different hubs begin to form networks in specific regions and form relationships of mutual-aid, different regional networks could in theory begin to be able to cooperate and even network themselves.

Seeding the New Society: A Prefigurative Strategy

When we imagine and dream of the new society for which we are fighting, we find ourselves with a strong desire to arrive at such a place but at the same time have trouble articulating strategies for getting there. Movements of the past have focused on slowly building that society, by achieving small victories on the way and attempting to reform the system as a whole. This more often than not has lead to reformism and has failed to provide autonomy in any sense of the word. By trying to inch closer and closer to the moment when suddenly we’ll wake up and realize that we’ve won, we are just slowly digging our own graves, getting closer with each project but never quite getting there.

I believe the most promising strategy for constructing the new society lies not in trying to reform the current society, nor in trying to mount a revolution, but rather prefiguratively realizing the future society in the current one. If we can imagine the spaces and institutions that we desire in the new society, then our first act must be realizing those spaces in the current moment. It’s far too easy to think that we can just keep on preparing for the ideal time and place to create the changes we wish to see. This is the line of thinking that keeps on driving us to isolated days of action at summits, failing to build on current projects and driving us to exist in a vacuum completely separate from everything else that is going on.

Only through consciously and deliberately building networks and autonomous hubs in the regions and communities we live in can we begin to separate ourselves from the conditions of precarity and capital. By organizing to create autonomous spaces and projects for our own needs, and by providing aid and support for our neighbors and allies to do the same, we can build a capacity to develop a new society as well as defend it from attacks by the current structures which will be sure to fight for control. By seeing our projects as contagious in nature we can begin to build our own autonomous spaces and projects that will at the same time provide the means for new projects and spaces to grow. It is through this seeding of new hubs by already existing ones that we can start to envision how autonomy could be achieved in our lives.

The beauty of this strategy is that it both combats precarity and creates the new society at the same time, avoiding the reformist mistakes of past radical movements while achieving material gains for the current movement. Each hub within the anti-authoritarian network can only benefit from the existence and formation of new hubs within the same region. We have the means and the ideas to begin to reconstruct the network in such a way that it would be autonomous in its nature. Only when we have an adequate network of autonomous spaces constructed and acting cooperatively can we begin to be focused on our radical desires and less on the pressures of survival that we are forced to endure under precarity. It is time to start building the schools, homes, hospitals and concert halls of the new society free from hierarchy and inequality. In the shell of the old society, we will begin to plant the seeds of the new.

Ian Alan Paul is an artist and writer currently living in San Francisco and is a member of the Friendly Fire Collective.

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Seeding the New Society: Combating Precarity and Fostering Autonomy

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