Some Recent Actions We’ve Taken:

In the spring of 1993, San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan launched an attack on the living standards of the working class in San Francisco by demanding 25 cents per ride fare increase on MUNI. MUNI is San Francisco’s primary municipal public transit system, made up of motor coaches, trolleys, metro trains and the famous cable cars, with approximately 686,000 passenger boardings every weekday.

As we pointed out in the first issue of our magazine in the context of a similar action oriented towards Bay Area Rapid Transit workers, class struggles occurs not only in the context of wage struggles by wage workers in workplaces, but wherever the exploited and dispossessed confront market relations and the state. The potential social power of proletarians is greatest wherever we are gathered together in large numbers. The overwhelming majority of MUNI riders are wage workers and poor people.  We engaged in a seven-month long campaign against various possible forms of fare increases, using a number of different approaches.

Our efforts were inspired by what we’d heard and read about similar social struggles in other countries, particularly movements for self-reduction of prices in Italy in the mid to late 1970’s:

“With an inflation rate of over 25%, widespread unemployment, and increasing repression, Italy‘s current economic crisis shows how far capital is willing to push its attack against the living conditions of the working class.

“One of the distinct marks of this crisis - in Italy as well as in other capitalist countries - is the extent to which class conflict has widened, involving directly the area of social consumption. The dramatic increase in the cost of living is in fact setting off a wave of struggles dictated by the working class need to protect their wage gains, and to ensure adequate access to essential goods and services such as food, housing, utilities and transportation...

“The practice of ‘self-reduction’ - i.e. the refusal to comply with price increases of essential services - ‘is the answer that has emerged from this terrain of struggle...

“Self-reduction is not an entirely new phenomenon in Italy...What is new is the way in which this practice has spread to other sectors of essential social consumption, such as public transit, electricity and home heating.

“When viewed in the context of parallel practices - such as squatting and organized mass appropriation of groceries from supermarkets - this struggle becomes more than a merely defensive one.  It becomes - as some militants have called it - a struggle for the re-appropriation of social wealth produced by the working class but unpaid by capital.”

                from The Working Class Struggle Against The Crisis: Self-Reduction of Prices In Italy, by Bruno Ramirez, February 1975

One year after the riots of ‘92 we hoped to catalyze potentially explosive anger in San Francisco against an attack on a largely atomized and divided working class.

Leafleting Drivers

Our first step was to draft and distribute a leaflet to MUNI drivers and station agents. We drew a clear connection between the impending attack on proles who ride MUNI, and inevitable future attacks on the wage levels and benefits of MUNI employees. We began with only the vaguest notion of how to go about getting copies of our stuff to roughly 2,000 drivers and train operators and a much smaller number of station agents in MUNI’s underground stations.

Clearly our efforts had to begin with MUNI employees. The wage workers of the transit enterprise are in the most crucial position for making a self-reduction effort possible. And we wanted to undercut the anger of proles who ride MUNI being inappropriately directed at MUNI workers, and help focus anger at the proper target, the commodity system and its administrators.

Our leaflet mimicked the layout and font of the San Francisco Examiner, one of SF’s two daily bourgeois lie-sheets. The Examiner had run a series of attacks, penned by the asshole journalists named in the leaflet, against city employees. These articles had singled out MUNI workers as overpaid, shiftless bums. We put our address at the bottom of the leaflet.

We began our campaign by boarding a MUNI streetcar, briefly talking with the driver and giving him or her a leaflet, then leaving the train car at the next stop. We went in this manner from one car to another up and down the main inbound and outbound underground MUNI line from Church Street to Embarcadero. After several days of this we were running into a number of the same train operators that we had earlier leafleted, and moved onto leafleting bus drivers.

Conveniently for our leaflet distribution efforts, a large number of MUNI bus lines begin and end at Mission and Steuart Streets, and also in front of the Transbay Terminal building a few blocks away. We spent between two and four hours during several afternoon rush hours, giving leaflets to drivers at these locations. Over the course of a couple of weeks we were told by drivers that other drivers were reproducing the leaflet on MUNI photocopy machines and distributing leaflets in workers’ mailboxes at MUNI yards.

Around this time we received a letter from two MUNI workers running for election to the Transit Workers Unions International Convention. Among other things they said, “We agree with No Fare. We are organizing at MUNI around that concept and others. Please send us more details on fare boycotts and fare strikes. We would like to publicize this. Also let us know what you plan to do at MUNI besides leafleting at the Ferry Terminal.”

They enclosed a copy of their electoral program. It included demands for  shorter hours with no loss in pay, part-time work by choice only, and a third point:

“Increase transit funding by a transit assessment district on the downtown. [Getting employers to pay] No fare increase or service cuts.”

Their fourth point: “Strength through working class unity and organizing. Unite with riders and other bay area transit unions. Our goal: through education every transit operator to become an organizer. ”

Many of these goals are valid and useful, and we debated contacting them, but partly due to time constraints we didn’t get around to doing it. We were and still are interested in talking to combative workers who hold what we feel are mistaken ideas about the validity of unions as organizations of working class struggle. But we also knew this particular effort was a project of MUNI workers who are politically allied with or members of the Progressive Labor Party. PL doesn’t have much of a public presence today, but in the 1960s they were the most prominent and combative Marxist-Leninist group in the US New Left. Unlike other M-L groups, PL was and is clear on the need for a proletarian revolution that would abolish wage labor, commodity production and national frontiers. However, their model for this allegedly having once existed was the Stalinist Soviet Union of the 1930s and Maoist China in the 1950s. While we are willing to talk to almost anyone under the right conditions, we do not engage in any form of joint action with Stalinist groups, and we are determined to fight for a communist perspective that will eclipse Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc.

At the time that we wrote our leaflet to MUNI employees we didn’t make specific reference to the union. We didn’t know what union officials were up to, and chose not to speak rather than shoot our mouths off without a clear understanding of what was up. We also suspected that we would learn more about the unions’ specific police function against MUNI workers as we made further contacts with drivers. The leaflet was generally received with sympathy from drivers, and drivers frequently asked for a few extra copies to give out to other MUNI employees.

By the middle of the summer we’d received sufficient verbal feedback from MUNI bus drivers to indicate we’d reached a saturation point among the employees of the system.

The Mass Psychology Of Democracy

Soon after the asshole Frank Jordan announced plans for a fare hike, a series of public meetings were convened in high school auditoriums in various San Francisco neighborhoods. These meetings were excellent examples of how democratic regimes allow their victims to petition the exploiter class to govern them more effectively. At the meeting one of us attended at the Mission High auditorium on March 30th, 1993, the vox populi enabled the stupidest members of the audience to suggest measures more draconian than those initially proposed by the mayor.

Mayor Jordan appeared on the platform with several other city government bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, their freedom of speech and assembly guaranteed by nine or ten armed policemen in the lobby and at posts at the entrances of the auditorium. Jordan’s press secretary Noah Griffin walked around the audience with a microphone, like on Donahue or Oprah, offering members of the audience a chance to express their opinions while the real decisions, of course, were being made off stage.

NOTE: In SF, when you pay the fare, on request, you get a little paper transfer. The hours of the day run up one side of the transfer, the transfer is usually torn by the driver so it is good for around two hours, or two more boardings, whichever comes first. For many years, street people have sold “Late nights” for 25 or 50 cents. These are intact transfers, not torn by the hour and good for the entire day. Books of intact transfers are either ripped off from idled, unattended busses, or are sold by MUNI drivers to people who in turn hawk them to riders waiting for the bus at the plazas of BART stations, like 16th and Mission, and at 24th and Mission.

Towards the end of the evening, a number of speakers from the audience denounced the hardships that would result from a 25 cent (and 25%) fare increase. Concerned for the fate of the city government’s budget, they demanded more action by the SFPD against sales of stolen bus transfers, and deploring the prospect of a 25% fare increase, these mathematically-challenged suppliants demanded an alternative - that transfers be eliminated altogether. This would result in a 100% fare increase each time a rider boarded MUNI. Given that many MUNI lines were designed with a pattern of transferring from line to line in mind, this would mean that riders coming from outlying working class neighborhoods like Bayview or Excelsior, going downtown to work, to deal with the welfare office and social worker pigs, or shop, and possibly having to transfer two or three times in either direction would face a whopping 400% to 600% MUNI fare increase.  

After three more public meetings, the mayor’s office announced that the representatives of the people had been swayed by the will of the masses. Instead of jacking up the fare by a quarter, the mayor’s office decided to put a measure before the Board of Supervisors proposing the elimination of transfers.

Everywhere A Small Party

At this point we drafted and began putting up copies of an 11 by 17 inch wall poster, Refuse To Pay, aimed at MUNI riders, encouraging mass collective fare shirking. On one or two occasions we had enough people to form two separate wall-postering squads. More often than not we only had enough people to form one postering group. Three or four of us would get together sometime after sundown at a punk rock record store in the Mission District. We’d mix a one pound bag of wallpaper paste into a one gallon bucket of lukewarm water, then go out postering, slapping wallpaper paste on inviting surfaces with a large paint brush. The person carrying the bucket did the brush work, (and ended up wearing a lot of wallpaper paste) the person carrying the posters would pass a poster to the third member of the group, who‘d slap the poster into place. We usually scammed 100 to 150 photocopied posters each night before going out of a photocopy store that has admirably lax security. Going out two to three nights a week, over the course of six to eight weeks we covered streetlight poles, ground level billboards and other spots near bus stops along a number of busy streets in central working class neighborhoods of San Francisco, the Mission District, the Western Addition and Fillmore District, the Tenderloin, areas around key BART stations, around City College and SF State University and to a more limited degree the foot of Market Street in the Financial District. The day after postering one of us would usually check to see if the posters were still up or if they had been trashed by responsible citizens. Except for some reactionary working class alcoholics at McCarthy’s bar on Mission Street, for the most part no one messed with the posters. After foggy nights the posters would often still be damp by dawn. But once they had dried they clung to streetlights and walls as if welded into place. After several months of this the posters attained a high degree of visibility along key bus routes in the city, which was gratifying, since this part of our efforts in particular had been bust-ass hard work. In retrospect we should have covered outlying working class neighborhoods like Hunters Point and Bayview, but there was only so much time, none of us knew those neighborhoods well, and usually only two or three people were willing to show up for postering.

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain...

After the Public Utilities Commission and the Board of Supervisors approved the elimination of transfers, the mayors office pushed back the date for the elimination of transfers several times, ultimately deciding that October 1 would be -day for their attack on MUNI riders.

At the public meeting at Mission High, one of us picked up a copy of a letter from Mayor Jordan distributed to citizens attending the public meetings, thanking attendees for coming, piously reminding citizens that we must all make sacrifices, etc. Using this as a style model, we drafted our fake letter from Jordan.  Our version of the letter from the Mayor graciously included official-looking fake MUNI transfers, and for that extra added touch of verisimilitude we stamped a meaningless sequence of numbers at the bottom of each transfer, and cut the spaces between the transfers to make them easy to tear off. We photocopied about 600 of the letters from the mayor, and bought a couple of tape guns at an office supply store. The tape guns are the kind used to wrap boxes in mailrooms, UPS, etc.

We wanted to spread as much confusion as possible in the Financial District, so beginning at around 3 pm, the afternoon of Oct. 1st, we started at the foot of Market Street (the main street in that part of town) tape-gunning leaflets one by one next to one another on bum-proof MUNI bus stops, the leaflets forming a belt around the insides and outsides of the glass walls of the stops.

We worked our way up the street. Since the elimination of transfers was the big news that day we attracted a lot of attention. To curious inquires we replied that we were sent by Mayor Jordan’s office, and we sang praises to his generosity and concern for the difficulties faced by MUNI riders on the first day of the elimination of transfers. People started taking the transfers. A MUNI operator pulled up alongside of us as we covered a bus stop, she jumped out of the bus, enthusiastically saying, “I’ll give em to riders! Give me some!” The complimentary transfers went quickly. We did a MUNI stop on Kearny near Market, then quickly moved on, and looking back from a block away we saw the sidewalk completely blocked by people mobbing the bus stop, going for the fake transfers.

We spent several hours covering bus stops in the Financial District this way. At the end of our effort, downtown bus stops were covered by bands of leaflets utterly denuded of their fake transfers and people still reading the letter from Jordan. Towards 6 pm, we were down to our last leaflet, and we tore off three fake transfers for ourselves to ride back to the Mission District. We went to the MUNI underground at Montgomery and tried to give them to the man in the booth, a supervisor, who refused to take them. We hiked up Market to Powell Street. Again, we found supervisors staffing the booth instead of the usual MUNI workers. The supervisor in the booth was steamed.

He said: “No way! You guys know you didn’t pay for those things! Those are some kind of practical joke!”

Apparently the mayor’s office had issued a statement at 5 p.m. that day denying responsibility for the letter and the fake transfers.

This prank concluded our Fall 93 MUNI campaign.

Six months after the elimination of transfers a haphazard and ridiculously complex new fare system proved to be so unworkable that transfers were reinstated, and as of this date (spring 1996) there has been no fare increase on MUNI.

To the best of our knowledge there was no mass self-reduction movement in SF in response to the abolition of transfers. We didn’t think that a self-reduction movement would rapidly blow into existence simply in response to our actions. We don’t expect to be the leaders of the class struggle. But we do hope that our actions, the actions we’re now engaged in and those we intend to pursue in the future will help spread an awareness among the exploited and dispossessed that the needs of proles and the needs of the economy, (the market system, wage slavery, the world of money, buying and selling, those who profit from it) are mutually and violently exclusive, and that mass, collective action must be taken on this basis.

An Action Against Earth Day At Ohlone Junior College-

A small group of people disrupted the spring ‘94 Earth Day celebration at Ohlone Junior College in Fremont, California. Fremont is a somewhat racially mixed sleepy suburban town of 300,000 on the southeast shore of the San Francisco Bay.

This action took place in three phases:

1)  Local skateboarders and high school students were drawn to the campus by fliers posted around town advertising that a Southern Alameda County Skateboard Competition would be held at the same time and location as the Earth Day event. Approximately eighty skateboarders showed up, causing much confusion and consternation on the part of the campus authorities and a solitary excitable elderly campus policeman. From ten that morning till around noon the skateboarders and our friends roamed noisily through the terraces of the campus, playing tag with the elderly cop, now joined by other ineffectual security goons. Overwhelmed by hordes of skateboarders, the forces of authority at Ohlone Junior Campus apparently radioed for assistance from Fremont city cops, and soon a police helicopter was spotted, hovering high in the sky above the sight of the event.

Soon many of the skateboarders left, but around twenty remained along with a small group of outside agitators. We reassembled in the central quad area where the Earth Day festivities were being held at around noon.

(2) At noon, our friends brought out a television set. Some ecology weenies, seeing that the television set was going to be destroyed, came to the defense of the TV and seized it. After a protracted tug-of-war we got the TV back, and the television was smashed to pieces with furious skateboard blows. The destruction of the TV set appeared to shock and amaze most of the J.C. students and teachers in the crowd. After this, leaflets were distributed by our friends.

(3)  A fatuous liberal college instructor read a statement over a P.A. system. This statement was to the effect that, although capitalism with soon destroy all life on earth, seeing junior college students attending Earth Day events made her feel better about our impending extinction.

After she spoke, one of our group jumped up on the stage and explained our actions: We disrupted Earth Day because Earth Day is an empty gesture. Events like Earth Day serve to hide the fact that capitalist social relations are the reason for the degradation of the planet and of our lives. This statement was unplanned but sufficient for our purposes.

Protest actions like this, in obscure suburbs, are an important step in the fight against capitalism’s division of social space into unruly cities and complacent suburbs. Fremont is an especially excellent place for actions of this sort. It is a town filled with large numbers of bored and dissatisfied young people and public protest still has some shock value there.

For more details on this action, see An Action Against Earth Day in The Harbinger #3 #127 39120 Argonaut Way, Fremont, CA 94536

Bart Stickers

One evening sometime in 1994, one of us boarded a Bay Area Rapid Transit train in San Francisco and found himself confronted by a new style of anti-fare evasion poster, unlike others we’d seen before. This poster trumpeted the Message FARE IS FARE in large grimly totalitarian block letters, above a more politely and lengthy worded request to “Play fair-Pay your fare.” He pulled the poster down off the wall of the car and took it home with him.

Over the course of the next few days we saw these posters, and other posters featuring similar variations on the same stupid theme up on most of the subway cars throughout the BART system. Using their contrasting good cop/bad cop character fonts as our inspiration, we designed our own more clearly worded version of the message in the anti-fare evasion poster. Our sticker aped the contrasting fonts of the anti-fare evasion poster, and borrowed its slogan from an advertising campaign of the Argentine military dictatorships Dirty War of the 1970s. On the bottom of the poster that had been taken off the BART car, a message exhorting riders to report fare evaders to the nearest station agent had been taped over an earlier message exhorting riders to rat out fare evaders by calling the BART police directly, giving the BART pigs phone number. We included this phone number on our stickers.

We had a print shop make between 1200 and 1300 of the stickers. Friends would slap up a few stickers going to and from work on BART.

One morning, after the morning rush and well before the afternoon rush a small number of people took a large number of stickers and spent several hours systematically altering a large number of posters.

Later that same day an irate BART rider called the phone number on the sticker, 1- (510) 464-7000:

(Bart cop answering phone): “Bart police.”

Irate rider: “What’s this about you jacking up the fares by fifty percent!?”

Bart cop: “What are you talking about?”

Irate rider: “You got stickers up all over the trains saying you’re gonna jack up the fares by fifty percent!”

Bart cop (now pissed off): “This is the Bart police emergency line, do you have an emergency?!”

Irate rider: “Yeah! You’re jacking up the fares by fifty percent, I’d say that constitutes an emergency!”

If they were caught before the adhesive backing dried the stickers could be peeled off. But after 30 minutes or so the stickers clung fast, and couldn’t be pulled off without trashing the posters.

After about a month and a half or two months we had succeeding in adding our stickers to almost every one of the anti-fare evasion posters, and for the time being BART management apparently gave up trying to replace altered posters.

BART management also had anti-fare evasion stickers placed on top of the gates into and out of the paying areas of the system. These stickers were about the same size and had a similar appearance to our stickers, and as such had served as something of a style model for us. We put some stickers over these, though our efforts at this were more desultory than what we did to the posters on the train cars. When our stickers were removed they tended to remove the underlying anti-fare evasion stickers, too.

No BART fare increase was known to be in the works at the time we did the stickers. To highlight the ridiculous qualities of BART management’s anti-fare evasion propaganda we wildly overestimated the likely size of a BART fare increase, pulling the 50% figure out of a hat. But as it turns out, at the beginning of 1995 BART bureaucrats decided to go for a 45% fare hike over the course of the next three years. Did they get the idea from us, or what?! The absurdities of contemporary capitalist austerity and repression are so pronounced that they tend to escape our ability to lampoon them.

Gloria La Riva For Sheriff Of San Francisco!

Among the candidates for governor of California in the November 1994 elections was an ersatz Socialist candidate, Gloria La Riva. La Riva is one of the leading cadre of a group called the Workers World Party. Workers World is a hybrid of Stalinism and Trotskyism, politically situated somewhere between the pro-Moscow Communist Party and the Fidel Castro groupies of the Socialist Workers Party. The WWP combine social democratic political activity (running Socialist candidates for office, organizing tightly controlled leftist demos, etc.) with long distance cheerleading for state-capitalist regimes like the former Soviet Union and Cuba.

From an anti-Klan/anti-cop riot in Washington DC on Nov. 27, 1982 to numerous street actions in Berkeley and San Francisco, including the Rodney King riots in SF, we and many of our friends have seen the so-called Workers World Party sending its parade monitors into the street to divide and repress outbreaks of rioting and rowdy actions at demonstrations. For example, their cadre have often pointed their fingers at people throwing rocks at the cops while shouting “He’s a provocateur!” In the classic manner of 20th century Leninism-Stalinism, these clowns try to outflank the action faction every chance they get. They don’t just have bad politics; they have consistently acted to jeopardize the safety of combative demonstrators and rioters. Thus we respond to them in the terms they deserve.

We got La Riva’s photo from the State of California’s voter information pamphlet. We wallpaper-pasted the poster along a few of the main streets of the Mission District, outside of polling places, etc.

Our poster says most of what there is to say about La Riva and Co. When dealing with capitalism’s bureaucratic pseudo-opposition we find that to clearly attribute to them the opinions they profess is often the worst thing you can say about them. And humor is one of the most powerful weapons of revolutionary anti-capitalist propaganda.

“From a negative point of view, any critique which helps destroy the mystifying apology of capital made by the state, the left, the official Communist Parties or the extreme left, is also a communist act, whether it is a speech, a text, or an act. Theoretical activity is practical. There are no theoretical concessions to be made.”

Jean Barrot, Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement

Black Bart Rides Again

Late in 1994, it became apparent that a strike by BART workers might take place. We drafted the BART ATTACK #2 leaflet, #1 having been distributed to BART workers under similar circumstances in the summer of ‘91 (see PBA #1, available in photocopied form from us for $3). We distributed the leaflet to train operators in our now usual manner, by having two groups of people at each end of the platform of the MacArthur BART Station in Oakland. All the trains in the system go through this station, and in the course of a few hours we were able to get leaflets to all the train operators working one afternoon commute period. The leaflet went through a series of revisions as we got more information and as events unfolded. We also went from station to station giving the leaflet to station agents. The leaflet was well-received by train operators and somewhat less well received by station agents. After another round or two of leafleting, BART employees told us that the leaflets had been reproduced on BART photocopiers and left in employees mailboxes at work.

We knew from our previous efforts that MUNI workers in SF were hopping mad at management, and we rode busses in SF, talking to drivers to get useful info for a slightly revised version of the leaflet. We suggested to MUNI workers that they could use a BART strike as an opportunity to stage a wildcat walkout around their own demands and grievances and in support of BART strikers. In the course of our conversations, and in talking to people we know who work for BART we discovered that MUNI management was planning to run special BART Express busses on Market and Mission Streets getting MUNI drivers to scab on BART employees and help break their strike. So we distributed a slightly revised version to MUNI bus drivers and streetcar operators in San Francisco, making an issue of the plans for scabbing. As always, we used this context to attack the unions as organizations of wage workers’ atomization and defeat; the unions are enemies of union members in particular and of the working class as a whole.

A BART employee we became acquainted with in the course of our efforts later told us that the union representing MUNI drivers had been told by drivers that they would refuse to go along with plans to scab on a BART strike, and he credited our actions with having brought this about. It was gratifying to hear that at least one aspect of our efforts had borne fruit.

Several of us rode trains before the morning commute hour a few days in advance of the possible date of the strike and taped our (8.5 x 11 inch) BART FLU flyer over ads on the trains, hoping to encourage an effective widening of a BART strike into a wildcat walkout by thousands of atomized proles.

Before the strike, SEIU, Local 790 and Amalgamated Transit Workers Union, Local 1555<$FATU, local 1555 represents around 660 train operators, station agents, foreworkers, clerks, comunications specialists and power support people.  SEIU, local 790 represents approximately 1500 maintenance and clerical workers.> issued a BART rider bulletin, offering commuters tips on how to undercut the effectiveness of a walkout by BART employees. And when the time came, the unions devious and chickenshit maneuverings resulted in acceptance of a lousy giveback contract by BART workers. At that time as well, a number of combative workers were forced out of various positions in the union apparatus.

Many BART workers were pissed off at the concessionary contract, and one issued a leaflet on E-mail, titled Stop The Sellouts. A few months after BART management’s successful attack on BART employees it became evident that a major BART fare increase was in the works. We used information about the raw deal that management and their union waterboys had run on BART employees in our Bart Crimes leaflet

To The Richmond Station

Our Bart Crimes leaflet mimicked the name and appearance of an asinine news letter BART management distributed from plastic slots mounted on fare gates in stations. We began by leafleting the last two of a series of public meetings held by BART bureaucrats in SF’s Chinatown and at BART headquarters near Lake Merritt in Oakland. The meeting in Chinatown was attended by three bureaucrats and two riders. The meeting at BART headquarters was attended by fifty or sixty irate BART riders and a half dozen functionaries. It was entertaining to see the BART bureaucrats, seated in front of their audience, looking over the leaflet and furtively whispering to each other.

Subsequently we managed to scam a source of unlimited free photocopying and leafleted riders during the afternoon commute period at stations in San Francisco’s Mission District and at Balboa Park, at Berkeley, in Oakland at MacArthur and at the Richmond Station. We did this two or three days a week for three weeks prior to the April Fools Day beginning of the fare hike. Also we went onto empty trains before the morning commute period, from 5:45 to 7:00 AM, moving from car to car leaving leaflets on the seats of trains.

One morning while leafleting empty train cars we ran into a BART janitor, holding a large transparent garbage bag in which we saw a bunch of our leaflets. This unpleasant sight prompted us to leaflet trains during the main period of the morning commute, moving from car to car giving leaflets directly to passengers. Our unexpected activity on the trains seemed to offer an abrupt interruption of the stupefaction and somnolence of the morning commute. Between surfing the trains at dawn and leafleting afternoon commuters exiting stations by Friday March 31st we had distributed around 20,000 leaflets, our first experience in industrial strength leafleting. Friendly BART employees faxed the leaflets around the BART system to other BART workers.

In the final week of March we photocopied a wallposter-sized version of the leaflet and wallpaper-pasted these up around a number of stations. A friend helped draft a press release. This was faxed to a number of the local bourgeois news media outlets.

We’ve been giving out our letter to BART station agents. And we’ve had various forms of pro - fare evasion paraphernalia printed up.

A Few Conclusions:

Our efforts have aimed at breaking down corporatist attitudes, the division of exploited people into wage workers and non wage-earning, the badly paid and the slightly less badly paid, unionized and non-unionized.

We’ve tried to make it clear that the degree to which market relations dominate daily life is the degree to which life becomes more oppressive and degraded, and the degree to which we go outside of and against market relations is the degree to which our lives can improve.

Contemporary capitalism works to get everyone, no matter how impoverished and fucked over, to internalize the mindset of the entrepreneur and the cop.

The contemporary capitalist project of increasing surveillance and control of social space can be turned on its head by a mass refusal to cooperate on the part of wage workers and the poor; employees of mass transit systems are in a crucial position in this regard and have a greater potential power than other wage workers. No matter how sophisticated the technology, the human element can sabotage and subvert the machine.

To play by the system’s rules is a guarantee that we will lose. Notions like fair play, appeals to justice and democratic rights, leaving it up to the union apparatus and assuming that the law is there to help are false notions, ideological obstacles to the emergence of class consciousness and class action.

“Cheating” on subway fares and “stealing” from the system that exploits us and degrades the world is an affirmative act.

The first stage of the BART fare hike has been implemented, but that isn’t the end of the fight.

Perhaps most importantly of all, we’ve used what Corporate America and its media apparatus present as a seemingly mundane inconvenience as a hook for getting an anti-capitalist analysis of the world out to many thousands of proletarians who otherwise wouldn’t hear it.

In all this we’ve kept our language accessible and disdained to conceal our aims.  We haven’t soft-peddled our message. We’ve been completely upfront about our hatred of work and market relations, our hatred for bosses, managers, the unions, the government and the law.

In South Africa, “Riding public trains for free and refusing to pay rent... were once seen as legitimate protests [against] apartheid.  

“Now the ‘culture of non-payment’ has become ingrained among the impoverished black majority, despite attempts to erase it by the black-led government that took over in historic all-race elections in 1994.” USA Today, August 1, 1996