Tactical urbanism, bicycle rebellion, Right to the City.

Fighting for Life Against the Death Cult of Capitalism

In a week this total fraud of an election will be over, and among the great number of things they have in common, one of the two disaster candidates elected will be in full support of the Dakota Access Pipeline. We could have had Bernie Sanders. We could have had Jill Stein. But nope. The fossil fuel industry owns both the Democrat and Republican parties.

What’s so impressive is how many so-called progressives have convinced themselves that their center-Right neoliberal candidate shares their values and morality. Hillary supporters say Jill Stein is crazy, yet their reasons for supporting Hillary are all issues that Stein actually supports and Hillary actually doesn’t support. Are they just selectively sexist or what?

So once again we get conned into a rigged oligarchy that caters the illusion of choice, and once again the real work, the real Hope and Change rests on the front line communities; the rebels chaining themselves to bulldozers, building barricades, getting beaten by police and bitten by attack dogs.

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Where Would George Hayduke Bike?

Earlier this month the LA Times reported dozens of luxury cars were torched in Berlin by a group calling itself the Social Democratic People’s Bicycle Commando. Clearly this sort of over-the-top name was meant to be cheeky, but their tactics were quite serious.

The Bike Commandos claimed they “wanted to remove the windows from the luxury cars and scrap them the warm way,” according to a statement RT News linked to IndyMedia. The vandalism was in response to rapid gentrification in the city, and to recent police raids targeting squatters and other homeless people.

The Times claimed all 50 “masked left-wing extremists” were in fact on bicycles, but didn’t cite an eye-witness to confirm this. But let’s assume they were, and that a brigade of cyclists torching bourgeois automobiles has an implied environmental connotation beyond mere housing politics.

I shared the article in several online bike forums, and as you’d expect responses varied from “Hell yeah, fuck cars!” to “That’s terrible, it makes bikers look bad, violence is always wrong!”

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