Catgirls Book Club ~ lectures pour catgirls anarchistes ~♥

The search for tools with which to make war on society is a central element of struggle. History, theory, analysis, propaganda: all vital to the spread and sharpening of revolt. However, as with all weapons, each of these can turned against us; each of these we can turn against ourselves. Academia recuperates radical historical research and theorizing, stripping it of its teeth and its relation to practices of attack. As anarchists become more concerned with the aesthetics of revolt (and their own careers as the avant-garde of capitalist cultural production) than with counter-information and generalization of subversive ideas, propaganda becomes indistinguishable from advertising. Artists draw from images of insurgency, captured moments which suffocate and die in the sterility of the gallery. Academia, advertising, the fashion industry, and the art world all operate vampirically, draining revolt of its purpose, its beauty, its joy. Those who engage with the word must be conscious of this, attempting to navigate away from and against recuperation, even as we use the enemy’s language. With this as our context, why design and distribute a publication about Direct Action and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade? Certainly, when researching and drawing attention to any identifiable tendency or group, we run the risk of creating another historical spectacle to wonder at, or another “radical” commodity to consume, all as we continue to stay our hand in our daily lives. This risk is multiplied if the subject is far enough in the past, or closely enough related to an already recuperated cultural milieu, that its charge can be defused by nostalgia. One need only look at the Weather Underground, with its spectacular actions and relation to hippie youth culture, to see how revolutionary action can be effectively turned into an artifact. Direct Action and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade certainly fit these parameters: their attacks were spectacular, and most members of the group were tied to the punk scene, a subculture that has been wholly subsumed by commodity culture. Despite this, it would be a victory for the careerist parasites to allow a group which in many ways acts as a forebearer to contemporary anti-civilizational struggle to be reduced to an historical or cultural museum piece. Rather than simply present these texts as they are, I hope to engage with them critically, with fervor, and always with an eye towards refining the daily practices of attack and subversion.

Direct Action and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade are not the first, nor the most significant, example of feminist militancy or “women’s war.” The history of gender is a history of revolt against the impositions of the gender binary, of compulsory heterosexuality, of the gendered order. This goes beyond the simple understanding that, amidst uprisings and riots, there are women, queers, and gender rebels participating. From Harriet Tubman’s clandestine guerrilla warfare against slave society, to street queens and hustlers attacking police at Stonewall, to the bombings by the Weather Underground women’s brigade, to the diffuse armed struggle of the Italian feminists of the 70s, women and gender rebels have always employed whatever means possible to attack the causes of their misery. All this is to say, the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade’s firebombing of three Red Hot Video porn outlets has its context: a continual war against women and gender rebels, and a counter-war against the structures that maintain the gendered order. Still, the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade is somewhat of an anomaly within feminism. With the exception of the George Jackson Brigade, a botched attack on homophobic politician John Briggs by a splinter group of the Weather Underground, and the participation of some gays and lesbians in anti-imperialist struggle, the women’s and gay liberation movements in North America, unlike its brother and sister movements, did not adopt armed struggle as a strategy. While the reasons for this rejection are complicated, the essentialist critique of violence as a weapon of patriarchy and heterosexism played a major part in stifling struggle. The respectable gays and bourgeois feminists, having a stake in the continuing function of society, employed any means – including cooperation with state investigation of underground groups, in the case of Jane Alpert – to destroy the capacities of those in revolt. The specter of pacifism hung over the feminist movement in particular as it descended further into the mire of essentialism in the 80s. The Wimmin’s Fire Brigade, in just one night, broke free of these suffocating restrictions, showing the possibility of women’s informal violence against our oppressors. What sets the attacks by Direct Action and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade apart from many of the guerrilla groups of the time is their explicit critique of both the state and techno-industrial society as connected to the creation and maintenance of patriarchy. Unlike groups like the Weather Underground, Direct Action opposed the state in all of its forms; no Marxism-Leninism and hierarchical structures, but a hatred for all state structures, communist as well as capitalist. And perhaps because of this total rejection (and their connection to indigenous struggle), the group attacked, with both words and bombs, technological and industrial infrastructure. It was not only capitalism, but civilization itself, that Direct Action sought to destroy. In this, they have more in common with the crossdressing Luddites, faggot heretics, and clandestine witches than with the aspiring Stalins of the New Left.

Patriarchy cannot be destroyed through the slow integration of women into the structures of capital and the state. It cannot be destroyed through wages for housework, female cops, female-centered spirituality, women-owned businesses, or separatist exodus. These half-measures will only strengthen control by facilitating its diffusion through all of social life and its colonization of our very being. The more we expand domination to include new subjects, the stronger we make our chains. Technology is not a neutral set of tools to be employed by a liberated society in “new,” “egalitarian” ways. It is an apparatus which captures, classifies, and distorts our lives, assimilating us to its worldview: the worldview of a machine. When we use technology, we accept the world which created it, with all of its implicit and explicit power relations, and in turn reproduce that society through our activity. We are trapped in a process in which we create new tools for our control and exploitation, never questioning this apparatus which has made us our own captors. There is no possibility of a liberated society without the complete destruction and abandonment of technology and its worldview. Direct Action and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade, through attacks on technoindustrial infrastructure and production centers of gender, tore at the very roots of society. Though their actions leave open many spaces for criticism, the intentions and goals of their actions avoided the narrow vision and desire for (technological, patriarchal, and state) authority which characterize most groups who have taken up arms.

A CRITIQUE The debate in anarchist circles about the named or formal organization has been raging for as long as anarchists have chosen to attack. Lately, with the resurgence of named anarchist armed struggle groups, this discussion has come to the forefront once again. Direct Action and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade offer us lessons on the limits of spectacular action and named organizations. Both Direct Action and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade saw themselves as a sort of “armed wing” of aboveground legal protest movements. The members of the group, prior to going underground, were part of the various movements (antidevelopment/indigenous resistance to the Cheekeye-Dunsmuir line, anti-war and anti-nuclear resistance to Litton, and feminist organizing against Red Hot Video) of which they later acted as the guerrilla wing. This sort of division replicates the forms of most New Left guerrilla groups, and of nationalist groups like the IRA. It fosters a division between social warfare and clandestine attack, a separation that prevents those focused on social struggle from taking up arms and those focused on “building the underground” from actually relating to the struggles they claim to be acting for. It also creates in the guerrilla group a stifling isolation and a myopia of vision, turning all acts into self-referential or increasingly-narrow rituals.

Direct Action realized these limits after their two bombings and came partially aboveground. The actions of the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade, which more closely related to the mass struggle against Red Hot Video, was not only the most successful action, but was most free of the limits of the guerrilla group. The action was not done to publicize the group, but seen as a one-shot act of destruction against an institution that social struggle alone could not destroy. Do anarchists need to attach names to their actions? If we see ourselves as part of a general social war against control and exploitation, attaching names to our acts of subversion and attack could contradicts our aims. Attacks that could have existed in and contributed to general social violence against cops and managers can become trapped within legible identities. This aids police investigation, and can also sever our projects from all other acts of antagonism to the social order. We do not need an “armed wing” to the social war, as social war knows its weapons well and employs them when necessary, not out of a gun and bomb fetish (or a fetish for “the social war.”) We do not need spectacular actions that prop up named organizations as the vanguard of struggle. We need the spreading of chaos through the entirety of society, the subversion of our roles and identities, a total overturning of this world. As anarchists internationally experiment with new forms of armed struggle, these questions become important. Even as we propose the strategy of anonymity, we would do well to avoid ideological condemnation of those who choose the path of the diffuse anarchist guerrilla. Whether we act anonymously or with a name, what matters is that the attacks multiply. The tools of our war are everywhere, and we are not the first to experiment with the unknown. Despite (and because of) their limits, Direct Action and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade offer us new tools for our own struggles. What remains is to absorb these tools and continue on our path: toward the destruction of patriarchy, technology, and colonialism. Toward the destruction of civilization itself.

for centuries the authorities have reacted violently to womyn who resisted; they used to brand us as “witches” and burned us, now they label us as “terrorists” and will try to bury us in their cement tombs.