'Black December' by Sean Swain (USA)

From seanswain.org:

Black December is coming, and none too soon. We’ve hashed out our theories and we’ve analyzed our reality, we know what kind of future we want and what we are going to have to tear apart in order to get it. The time for philosophizing and talking it out has ended and we face the inevitable moment of conflict with the forces of control and conformity and subjugation.

December really is the perfect starting point, here in the U.S. anyway. It’s the darkest month of the year, the most non-daylight hours to carry our acts of resistance and rebellion. Also, in the cold, everyone wears ski masks. So, a rebel about to strike a Walmart or a police car or some fascist administrator’s house doesn’t look quite as conspicuous as he or she might look in, say, July or August in the same gear.

Having read the Black December proposals, I would like to speak to those who are, so far, paralyzed by fear and skepticism, who still don’t believe that we can undertake radical, militant actions against the common enemy, that political violence even of the clandestine variety is doomed, and that it’s okay to “play” at being anarchists, but it’s foolhardy for us to put our proverbial money where our mouths are. I want to speak to that fatalism, but I currently have no way to communicate with the outside world because the FBI, likely the NSA, and a sprawling prison industrial complex have all devoted huge amounts of resources and effort to cut off my every word. So, clearly, you’re not reading this, and I’m unable to speak to your fatalism.

See what bumbling clowns we’re up against?

Our job in carrying out Black December is to make the larger system of oppression unwieldy and unmanageable, to destabilize it so it collapses in its own footprint under its own incredible weight. Daunting? Not really. We’re only taking down swivelization.

Look, we don’t attack head-on, face to face, like regimented soldiers. And we don’t attempt to take it all down at once, as if there was some magical, singular target where we could accomplish that. No – we simply go where they are not guarding and we destroy what we can and we go. We pull the proverbial fire alarms where there is no camera. The fact is, the managers of the matrix cannot put a camera or a cop on everything and everyone.

The idea on an individual or small group level is not to bring the whole system down on your own. Slow and steady wins the race, right? So we take what the system is essentially willing to surrender. The idea for each of us is to make our acts of rebellion outweigh our daily acts of forced complicity. That is, if our daily contribution to this vast concentration camp through forced labor and commerce is “x,” whatever “x” represents, then we have to cause enough disruption of the process during non-daylight hours, wearing masks, that add up to “x+1.” Our only real responsibility is to make the end result a loss for the larger systems exploiting us and subjecting us to non-freedom.

What I’m suggesting is that each of us doesn’t have to conduct large-scale operations. If every single one of us commits to conducting millions of small acts of monkey-wrenching over the long-term, the proverbial pulling of the fire alarms, the cumulative effect over a very short amount of time will be pretty obvious and will feel really rewarding.

For everyone not paralyzed and looking forward to Black December with great enthusiasm, I would remind readers that banks foreclosed on millions of houses still sitting empty that they plan to re-sell, and you can likely find them easily online. I would also point out that arson is the least-solved crime in the United States, and that gasoline is really cheap, and matches are free.

I would also point out that the individual people who call the shots and murder the future can be followed home from work. It’s very de-moralizing when folks at the top of the hierarchical food chain are held personally accountable and made to pay for their crimes, suddenly reduced to sleeping in tents and bicycling to work as everything they own still smolders. It instills great misgivings in other shot-callers and in the upwardly mobile that maybe the corner office with the window comes with too high of a price tag.

Judges, prosecutors, FBI agents, racist cops, executives of every variety – they all have to get home somehow on those dark December nights. Of course, there are places like blastblog.noblogs.org that already have information posted if you would prefer to get right to the good, clean, family fun.

Despite its projection of invulnerability, the larger control program we have to take down is really a constantly-unraveling mess too dependent on too many sprawling systems that are left unguarded for miles (a truckload of shoes dumped from an overpass can stop a workforce from entering a city for hours) and power is too concentrated in the hands of the few (who must be protected from the many), but there are not enough guards to put guards on the guards, or to put guards on the guards’ guards, and even if there were, they all must drive home.

We’re talking about vulnerabilities here. Very serious ones. So, let’s break that paralysis and start living our resistance, even if on a small scale, baby steps, and we build, all through those dark December nights, until we find ourselves in the midst of a Black January or a Black February, and by then the police will be patrolling in those military vehicles like we saw in Ferguson.

Good thing. By Black May, we’ll need those. We’ll have to defend the armed convergences that the Invisible Committee predicts, and we’ll evolve Occupy into Shockupy.

It begins with one proverbial fire alarm. Just six pounds of pressure to pull the lever.

We own the future.

It starts now.

If you’re participating in Black December, you ARE the resistance…



Sean Swain

Tags: Black December, Letter, Sean Swain, USA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2015 at 3:01 am and is filed under Prison Struggle.