Dripread - Book

If you are a high school student, you can steal the attendance book, arrange to takeover the intercom ? system to make an important announcement, lock alarm clocks set to go off at random times in unused lockers, coordinate with other students to arrange for everyone to fail a test for which some are unprepared, or organize a walkout to protest a local or world issue or just give expression to the rage students feel about their incarceration. Remember, you can getaway with a lot before you're legally an adult.

Classroom Takeover

If you are a high school student in

the United States, you can probably

get your school to pay for you to take

college classes, if the classes aren't

available at your school.

You can use universities as a

source of funding for your projects.

Encourage your friends who are

enrolled in college to join or form

student organizations, and have those

organizations book you or a comrade

for a speaking engagement, with the

school budget footing the bill.

we hoped, would convince some students that they too are perfectly capable of being radical. Two of us are land of scary-looking fiick-shit-up no-compromise kind of anarchists. Ted, on the other hand, looks almost like a coUege student himself, and while he harbors many of the same ideas as us, he presents them in a much subtler, more pacifistic manner. He also works in a cafe, where he talks and talks and talks to all kinds of people with all kinds of political ideologies, so he is quite a bit better than the rest of us at getting his point across in a sugarcoated way. Discussion often turned out like this: One of the more militant of us would present a polarizing radical opinion in some scary militant fashion. The students would gasp and be like, "No! Never! I'll never believe you, you dirty, violent criminals!" Then Ted would jump in and be hke, "Well, I wouldn't really advocate that exactly, but they are correct that..." and then he'd explain it more thoroughly in a manner more familiar to the students. This allowed us to present views that were a world away from the views that the students held, but in a way that bridged the gap so that they could see where we were coming from?and where we are going!

The class ended with Ted shovidng a video about the US government's compHcity in the September ii* terrorist attacks. Some left gritting their teeth, but all were contemplative, and even our most ardent ideological foes stopped after class to congratulate us on "the most interesting class they'd ever had." Oh yeah, and they took all our pamphlets.

You can still get ainnost all the books

you need at the library, especially

if you ask them to order the ones

they're missing; many libraries also

have free video borrowing.

Classroom Takeover 182

Coalition Building

Assembling coalitions is a way to foster solidarity and build social power. Good coali- Instructions

tions enable people from a broad range of perspectives and demographics to work together and benefit from their differences. Affinity groups and collectives can be powerful on their own, and even more powerfiil when they work together?but when such groups find common cause with people from other organizing traditions and walks of life, a new range of possibilities opens.

Coalition building can enable activists to move beyond the limitations of outreach. When you have much in common with others, it makes sense to invite them to consider your viewpoints and join in your activities. But the less similar your context and needs are to theirs, the more important it is for you to avoid recruiting and focus on building alliances; this means finding ways to make your separate projects complement one another, and to pursue goals together even when your motivations diverge. Assuming that your group has figured out the one right way to do things and that everyone else should drop everything and join you is bound to be ineffective, not to mention exasperating. Such an attitude is often a holdover from hierarchical conditioning: people from the social classes that are accustomed to organizing and directing everyone else sometimes unthinkingly attempt to retain this role even in the stiruggle against hierarchy, casting themselves as the branch managers of the revolution.

There's a lot of radical sentiment out there that doesn't go by any name familiar to those who consider themselves radicals. Likewise, two self-proclaimed anarchists, how- 183

Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook