Anarchist Prisoner Sean Swain Discusses Earth First! News, Blocking Everything, and Taking Down Swivilization

by Sean Swain

Earth First! Journal Editor’s Note: Sean and I have been writing back and forth for quite some time, and his letters never fail to inspire and delight, especially when the crushing gears of industrialization have me in a particularly gloomy mood. So it feels just plain wrong to keep them to myself. I have included here the most recent letter I’ve received from Sean. Another one of his letters was published in the Beltane 2014 issue of the Earth First! Journal. For more information on Sean Swain’s imprisonment, politics, and fight for justice, visit seanswain.org. And if you’d like to write to him, I’m sure he’d like that too. —Rabbit

Rabbit and everyone—

I got the winter issue of EF! News you sent—thank you. It’s awesome because just scanning it, you can recognize all the shit that’s going down. I hear so many people who lament that it feels like nothing is happening… but it is.

So, check it out. I’m hopped up on coffee. A lot of it. I’m going to try to continue to combine nouns and verbs in each of the sentences that follow, but I can’t make any promises.

2015 is the year that swivilization—this oppressive death machine—is going to grind to a halt. We can resolve to make it happen, not in some distant and nebulous future but right now… our every act of resistance, small daily acts in pulling the proverbial fire alarms, can accumulate into one massive clusterfuck.

Case in point—a friend sent me a copy of “Nine Points Why It Is Necessary to Block Everything,” written by anonymous and posted at anarchistnews.org. In it, the case was made for “blocking” or clogging everything in the larger matrix. I’ll now include my response in it’s entirety here:

“This is an awesome and practical idea when we consider that the flows of product and labor create sprawling and indefensible systems, both in the physical and cyber worlds. Every blockage creates a chokepoint that prevents a flow to other places, thereby shutting down production in all of those secondary areas.

“That is, when you leave stolen cars blocking both sides of a major highway in and out of an urban area at rush hour, and you puncture the tires of those stolen cars and yank out the parking brake and light the interior on fire, and walk away, you don’t just block that traffic into work—the absence of those workers halts production of widgets… which later impacts all the products requiring those widgets.

“So, each time you leave dozens of blowling balls in the highway, or steal department of transportation cones and signs, and randomly block off major thoroughfares, or pull fire alarms at the point of production, there are primary, secondary, and tertiary impacts on an already unraveling system.

“Related, in a story on 60 Minutes recently—there are thousands of bridges and roads on the verge of collapse. Pennsylvania has the most. Imagine if those bridges began failing… The impact on transport of goods in the US and the impact on the global system of trade… And, then, the impact when the US must immediately divest billions from wars to build bridges. Not that I would suggest locating those essential bridges and roads for purposes of helping along their collapse. That would be illegal.

“What kind of security is there, anyway, at department of transportation depots where they have drills and trucks and heavy machinery for chunking up concrete?… Just asking.

“Don’t know if it’s true or not, but someone once told me you could buy a pre-loaded phone at Walmart and, using a recording to disguise the voice, someone could call in a fake bomb threat to every single bank holding company and every insurance holding company, in one day, and if you watched C-SPAN, you could watch the stock market flutter and being dropping… Just mentioning in order to provide an example to prove anonymous’ assertion is correct. One Walmart phone and a phone list and a scrambled voice message could bottom out the economy.

“The system is very vulnerable to blockages. Not that I would advocate that, especially with my communications heavily monitored. Doing stuff like that would probably be illegal.”

Now, consider each of us and our small acts of resistance bringing the machine into a state of constant crisis; the profiteers running for their worthless lives still clutching their darling money-bags, pursued by angry mobs carrying torches and pitchforks; the war-mongers’ heads paraded on pikes; those who assumed the right to rule relegated to positions of real service—as mulch.

We’d forage and swim all day, and dance all night around bonfires lit with useless paper currency. We’d tell the children about the nightmare of swivilization just to make sure they would never repeat that mistake.

All we really need to make it happen is a book of matches and a can of gasoline.

Matches are free. Gas is cheap.

Arson is the least-solved crime.

So, what are we waiting for?

No better place than here…

No better time than now…

So let’s resolve that 2015 will be the end of swivilization, once and for all.

We can burn it all down and create something better that we really deserve.

The truth is dangerous.

Stay dangerous.

Freedom in 2015,

—Sean

Naked self-promotion: The next revolution will NOT be televised but it’s already online at seanswain.org… with weekly BOMB THREATS at ashevillefm.org/the-final-straw… If you’re listening, you ARE the resistance.

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