I woke up with a start, I’d fallen out of bed. We were moving again. I don’t know why it surprised me, we’re always moving these days it seems. I asked my broodkin what was going on. They replied, “Giant attack overnight, had to move the tribe again.”
“Ahh, that tracks, there were reports of one nearby when we set up outside of town,” I grimaced while I grabbed a snack and said, “I just woke up, you want me to lead the caravan for a few hours while you get some sleep?”
They handed me the meld orb faster than they could sigh “thanks”. As they climbed back into the sleeping cart they told me “someone will relieve you in a few hours” so I mind-melded with the Atlas beetles and took over guiding the caravan.
The road was flat and straight and the beetles aren’t as dumb as most people think, so it was a fairly simple matter of nudging the bugs one way or the other every once in a while when a curve came up.
Nobody ever did end up relieving me, but we still made it to the next town eventually. They weren’t pleased about a goblin tribe setting up shop so close to town. People don’t think highly of us. But they got over it when they saw our goods and silks. People seem a lot less likely to be overtly bigoted to you when you have something they want.
“We’ve got fine silks and rare goods!” One of my broodkin was shouting at passersby to get their attention, drawing in customers with the kinda shit they’d never be able to get this far out from the Metropoli. “We’ve even got powerful magics! And exciting new technologies!” It seemed to be working because there’s six customers trying to get our shipments of silk blend and the new portable phones.
We sold twelve of the new portable phones and eight bolts of the silk blend. We noticed a lull in customers coming by and called it a night.
We all set up in front of the visocast with news on. It wasn’t surprising that most of the reports were on the giant attack we just fled, but the report that it was coming our direction again was a very unwelcome surprise.
We changed it to cartoons to keep the fresh brood distracted while we packed up. It seemed to work because none of them asked any difficult questions. Whether that’s because they’re used to the nomadic lifestyle already and know the answers, or because the distraction worked was hard to say for sure.
I can’t stand pulling all nighters. We just finished with work for the day, and we have to fucking leave town and run the caravan another three hundred damned miles east towards the metropolitan core.
We finally got far enough from town that it was no longer visible. Myself and my broodkin all shared a collective sigh of relief. The Atlas beetles didn’t even need to be melded throughout the trip, they sensed the danger and kept going without our nudging. They didn’t settle down at any point in the journey. Even when I melded with them and started urging them to stop they kept going for another 10 miles.
We’d made it about a hundred-fifty miles over the span of two hours when we finally settled down for the night. The bugs didn’t seem to understand that the danger was over now; they wouldn’t stop chittering. I wish I’d known how right they were to still be scared.
Later in the night, after we’d made camp following our mad dash out of town, we’d all gone to sleep and had learned to tune out the chittering from the bugs. In the early hours of the morning we were all woken up by rumbling and stumbled out of our tents and sleeping carts. We felt it more than heard it, a deep periodic rumble that trembles through your guts.
Then we saw it covered in shadows. Deep inky, oily black shadows that obscured any details I could’ve made out. I’d never seen one this close and suddenly all of the stories about them being taller than the clouds seemed true. The bugs saw it too, evidently, because they all ran whether there was a cart hooked up to them or not. They ran faster than I’d ever seen them run before.
It all happened in an instant. The giant appearing, the bugs running, and now the giant reaching for a storage cart. It ate the entire thing. It swallowed the cart whole without chewing. It looked angry when it realized that the cart didn’t have anyone inside, then it looked around to find more prey. It spotted some of the young brood huddled together in fear. They were all scooped up at once and then swallowed. The entire tribe was in an uproar after that but we couldn’t do anything, none of us were powerful enough.
The elder brood started casting the most powerful combat spells they had at the giant, the spells shot through the air like fireworks, all of the colors of the rainbow blending into each other, into the brightest whitest light I’d ever seen. It lit the night sky around us and left several of us blinded for a few seconds and then we could see again. The giant was completely unaffected, in fact the giant looked bored, and it just… walked away as if terrorizing my entire tribe and eating our young wasn’t even a noteworthy event in its day.
The worst part was the apathy afterwards. None of us could actually do anything to stop the giant and once the terror bled out of us we just started trying to get the Atlas beetles mounted back to the caravan so we could keep moving. It’s all we can do, just keep moving and hope it doesn’t come again.
We caught the beetles and got back on the road. We had another two-hundred miles to the next town and a lot of sorrows that needed to be drowned, so we carried on in silence until we made it to the next town.
“We live in capitalism, it’s power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often our art, the art of words.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin.
People take capitalism as an axiom, an unquestionable truth of life and existence. It’s not, and it never has been. The greatest lie told by capitalists is that it’s the default, and the greatest truth that can be told is that it isn’t.
In fact, there is no default. As the late David Graeber put it “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Humanity didn’t fall out of our tree and start building governments and systems of economics. We fell out of the tree and started foraging for the ripest, juiciest fruits and berries and the least bitter nuts. We fell out of our tree and started chasing the slowest antelope.
We kept chasing that antelope and foraging for berries for millennia before we established anything more complex than people living with each other and helping each other out. Helping each other get those nuts and berries and helping each other catch that antelope. We spent millennia just practicing mutual aid. Because the truth is, the only default humanity has isn’t capitalism, it’s mutual aid. Mutual aid is the bedrock of humanity, and the systems in place today are designed to see us forget that, but you can’t forget bedrock.
That urge to give a dollar to the homeless person on the street, that feeling in your gut when someone else is hurt, and that compulsion to help dig your neighbor out of their driveway in a snowstorm are all examples of the mutual aid ingrained in us from millennia of only having each other to rely on. These are all things that are disincentivized by the society in which we find ourselves.
Capitalism is designed to divorce you from the product of your labor. And to force you into needless competition with your fellow members of the working class. It’s designed to ingrain the idea that life is a zero-sum game deeply into your psyche. And as such, it’s designed to make you fight the instinctual urge to help out those around you.
The sole purpose of this entire socioeconomic system that’s been constructed around us right now is to prevent us from thinking too hard about why Elon Musk gets to be the richest man on earth while Joe Schmo is starving under an overpass. It’s designed to sow division and inhibit class consciousness. It’s designed to fuck you over in the name of the rich.
Our oppressors have shed the shackles of feudalism and monarchy. Monarchy was an intrinsically unstable system of economics and government for the wealthy because it was deeply centralized by virtue of its basis in a single powerful head of state. There was a single head to cut off the snake.
Under feudalism, it was less centralized but ultimately still had just the one head because there was still a king providing legitimacy to the feudal lords. Barons and heads of fiefdoms no matter how powerful they got, could never be more powerful than the king. They were dependent on the king as their source of legitimate systemic power. And so they overthrew the king.
Under capitalism the king has been replaced with capital. The source of legitimate systemic power has been decentralized. There’s no longer a wholly real and tangible source of abstract unquantifiable political power. It’s been replaced with a wholly abstract source of quantifiable political power. It can be quantified with a dollar value. The capacity to be quantified further legitimizes the power wielded by the ultra wealthy due to the apparent transparency provided by having hard numbers. Under capitalism, money is merely an exchangeable unit of political power. Money being an exchangeable unit of political power encourages and incentivizes the greed we see from the capitalist class.
The billionaires of today are collectively able to extract wealth at a scale the kings of old could only dream of. It’s turned from a snake into a hydra, there’s no longer a single head to cut off that collapses the entire system. Like Heracles, the solution to our hydra problem is to cut off the heads and cauterize the necks.
To cut off the heads we as the working class need to take the wealth back from these billionaires and hundred-millionaires, and to do that we need strong labor unions that ensure the working class receives the maximum possible share of the value of their labor. Ultimately, we need to cauterize the necks by replacing capitalism with an altogether more equitable system such as libertarian socialism or syndicalism.
The only paths forward are libertarian socialism or syndicalism, because they’re the only paths that will always ensure that the power remains in your hands as members of the working class.
Nonlibertarian forms of socialism have been attempted repeatedly, and every time a new ruling class asserts itself, and attempts to divorce the working class from the value of their own labor.
Syndicalism has also been tried, and repeatedly it’s demonstrated itself as an effective means of distributing power amongst the entire working class. The effectiveness displayed by syndicalism is why capitalists have repeatedly attempted to stamp it out under jackboot and truncheon. And the effectiveness of syndicalism is why it can never die. Syndicalism and libertarian socialism will be our path forward.
I won’t profess to know the solution, because I don’t. But I do know that our situation is untenable I, alongside many others, am tired of begging for extra scraps from the capitalist class when we’re the only ones actually doing anything. We shouldn’t have to beg for scraps, we should just take what’s ours. And what’s ours is everything, because we created everything. Labor is entitled to all it creates.
We live under capitalism, its cruelty is both intentional and absolute. And that cruelty comes primarily in the form of apathy and indifference. That apathy comes from the system itself and those who represent it. But it’s even forced into the souls of those who wish to simply live.
Capitalism steals everything from those it brutalizes. And I do mean everything, not just money, not just things, not just time. It steals concepts and emotions. No matter how fundamental something is, capitalism will steal it.
That includes simple joys like waking up in the morning and being ready and willing to greet the day. It’s difficult to wake up and appreciate the morning when you have to sell your body, mind, and soul for most of your waking hours with the expectation that you do it all again tomorrow.
It’s even difficult to simply appreciate the quiet moments when we’ve nothing to do because our tasks are complete. Quiet moments that once upon a time would be used for reflection and thought are now filled with dread for what comes next, dread for the exploitation we’re subject to.
And then while at work there’s no satisfaction to be had from a job well done because the reward for good hard work is more work. You’re actively disincentivized from caring about what you do, and you’re even further disincentivized from doing it especially well. Mere competence, but not exceptionalism is instilled into us due to the lack of reward for a job done well.
Beyond that, capitalism also robs us of things that are necessary to us. The capacity to grieve and mourn has been stolen from us, and ironically we’re unable to grieve that loss.
That capacity to mourn that we’ve had stolen from us is due to a combination of a system in which cruelty is the point and apathy which is built into the system to facilitate that cruelty. When someone we know and love dies, we don’t get to mourn how we ought, we don’t get to celebrate their life, we don’t get to stay sad about their death, we don’t get to treat death as anything but an inconvenience.
We’re sad for a day, if we’re granted the day off for the funeral at all, and then we’re forced to move on. The feelings linger, but we’re forced to put them on a shelf to be ignored. We tell ourselves that we’ll get to processing those feelings later, but that’s a lie. Because that’s not how it works. We’re forced to just keep working. All the while never working on processing our losses, and those losses are innumerable.
We’ve had our capacity to mourn stolen from us. Robbed of us by a class which seeks to parasitize us for their own benefit. A class which seeks to subjugate us to their will and desire, but never to allow us our own. Mourning has been killed by capitalism, but it can be resurrected.
An act as simple as taking time to grieve is an act of revolution when that act is disregarded as unproductive and inefficient. So please, mourn and grieve your losses in whatever way you deem appropriate; for we are all, each of us, individuals subject to a system of cruel oppression, but together we are a collective refusing to bow.
Dedicated to Staughton Lynd, friend of the union and Fellow Worker Forever.
This article is about the different kinds of agitprop materials that you can put up and the ways to put them up. I’ll also go over some of the risks and benefits of putting them up. The main materials available to you are posters, fliers, banners, and slaps.
Slaps
Let’s start small: Slaps are small palm-sized stickers that self-adhere to a surface when applied. You can quite literally slap them onto a surface as you walk past. They’re the smallest, second cheapest to buy, and least risky to apply.
Slaps are small, which means they’re unlikely to be seen by as many individual people as the others on this list. But their size is of benefit to your visibility.
You can buy slaps in bulk for relatively cheap, which is key: you can put a lot of slaps in a lot of places without being seen. But that same benefit is also a real drawback to slaps: basically, your only option is to buy them.
You can make your own slaps, but it requires a fairly steep upfront cost for the materials and the vinyl cutting machine.
Fliers
Since I arbitrarily decided we’re proceeding from smallest to largest, next up are fliers. Fliers are substantially bigger than slaps. Fliers are at minimum the size of a standard sheet of printer paper, 8.5″x11″. Naturally, that makes fliers the easiest to manufacture yourself. They’re also the cheapest to buy whether in bulk or individually.
This is a flier.
And so is this.
The trade off is that fliers are generally more inconvenient to place than slaps– if you want to guarantee they’ll be seen. You can hang fliers in a number of ways. The gold standard is wheatpasting but that’s not the only method. Fliers can be taped up, stapled, pinned– you can even leave a stack somewhere with a small sign that says, “take one.” Hell, just hand them out by store exits.
Because hanging fliers is more involved than throwing up a slap, it’s also riskier. Keep in mind that time is danger. Hanging fliers isn’t usually illegal, but it’s often not something cops will just ignore. Why? Because cops have a real soft spot for leftists, of course!
Posters
Now we’re onto posters. Posters are essentially big fliers. For our purposes, I’ve arbitrarily decided that a poster is at least the size of four sheets of paper: 17″x22″.
Posters are highly visible basically anywhere you put them. But if you don’t pay extra to have them printed professionally, they can be pretty inconvenient to hang. Otherwise, your first option is to hang four fliers. Because of their size, you can’t hang posters anywhere the way slaps and fliers can be. It almost goes without saying that you can’t hand them out.
Posters require a fairly large area, such as a wall or junction box. Because of their size and the fact that they’re being hung on hard surfaces, you can’t hang posters with staples or pins. That realistically leaves you with tapes and wheatpaste. And you may as well wheatpaste, because posters aren’t dirt cheap and quick to hang. You can’t just put a bunch up with less-reliable methods and call it a day.
It’s riskier to put up posters because they’re big, they take time to get up, and they’re visible. Be just a little bit extra cautious while hanging them so you don’t get pinched.
Banners
Banners are huge! They’re at least 36 inches in one of their dimensions. Until you get to ridiculous sizes, there’s no reason to hang a banner instead of a couple of posters or a bunch of fliers.
And this one is a rad banner design. It would be fucking awesome if one of you readers hung it over an overpass.
Banners that are worth hanging are so big that you can only really hang them on an overpass. There, your banner is high visibility at all times. So if you’re hanging a banner, be super extra cautious. (That last part can be largely disregarded if you have legal and convenient access to the roof of a low-rise building!)
Important Considerations for Hanging Banners
You can best hang banners using rope or zip ties. Banners that you hang well (and aren’t taken down by anyone) can last for years. Most large banners are printed on tyvek, which is the same material used to make most tarps. Just like tarps, banners usually have metal eyelets at the corners which you feed rope through.
Tie one end of the rope to the eyelets and the other to the hard structure you’re hanging the banner on. Alternatively, you can loop the rope through the eyelets and tie both ends of the looped rope to something. This will generally give a more secure connection.
It’s also essential that you secure all four corners. Otherwise, you’re creating a safety hazard. With an overpass, that means tying all four corners either to the fencing or to a hard point on top, and to the structure underneath.
Typically the structure below is difficult to access. In these cases, you probably shouldn’t use an overpass without a fence unless there are four accessible hard points to tie your banner.
Because of their size, banners are fairly expensive. Expect to pay anywhere from $100 to $400. Banners are all around a pain in the ass, but if you can pull it off they’re the best option. Easily thousands of people will see them in a single day.
The Fundamentals of Agitprop
I’m not a graphic designer. I’ve designed some slaps and fliers before when a good idea struck me, though.
The main things to keep in mind are the K.I.S.S method, and “bold is your friend.” K.I.S.S stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” You don’t want a design to be too busy; if it’s too busy, people won’t notice the message.
The other important thing is bold lines. Use thick bold linework whenever possible. Try to keep it to two simple colors. You want a background image of some sort, and then you want a bold headline in a strongly contrasting color to make it readily visible against the background and eye-catching.
I’ve already used it, but this is a good example of what I mean:
It pops out at you, it’s eye-catching, and the message is clear.
Designing and Printing Agitprop
There’s a lot of software out there for making your own designs. My go-to is Photopea. It’s 100% free to use and it runs in your browser window. You can make designs on the library computer and email them to yourself. You can even use it on your phone with Android. (I can’t speak for iPhones.)
Now on to resources for manufacturing. For fliers, you can either print those at home or your local library. Most libraries don’t charge much per page– usually something like 10 or 25 cents. You can also get them done on different kinds of paper at a print shop. Kinkos, OfficeMax… pretty much anywhere you’d go to get photos developed and printed.
If you do a four-part poster, you can make them the same way as fliers. Equally valid is asking for a larger size at a print shop. They’ll be happy to do it, though it’ll cost more.
Where to Find Agitprop
You can acquire slaps for very cheap. You basically just have to shop around online. Etsy is a good resource. Redbubble is even better than Etsy. I can’t really point people towards specific resources, unfortunately. The people selling slaps that you’d want to put up are usually just individuals who have spent the upfront capital on materials and a vinyl cutter.
Banners are the same as slaps. There’s not really any specific resources, you kind of just have to shop around on sites like Etsy and Redbubble.
Wheatpasting is an effective and essential tool for any would-be ne’er-do-well, leftist organizer, or unionist. Most of you are probably asking, “What is wheatpasting?” In that case, welcome to ‘wheatpasting for dummies.’ I’ll explain.
What’s Wheatpasting, Anyway?
Wheatpasting is using wheatpaste to hang posters, banners, and flyers on pretty much any blank surface you can find to hang them on where they’ll be seen by a bunch of people. This includes the outside walls of stores, retaining walls, telephone poles, electric poles, light poles, and junction boxes.
Depending on the method you’ll use to apply it, wheatpaste is a mix of 2 parts wheat flour and 3 to 4 parts water. You can apply it with a paint brush or a roller; you can even dab it on with a rag. An important consideration is how you transport the wheatpaste and get it onto your chosen application tool. Cleaned out ketchup bottles are always a favorite.
How to Make Wheatpaste
To make wheatpaste, fill a pot with the appropriate amount of water, and heat it on low. Then add a little bit of flour and stir it in, making sure to scrape the sides. Add more flour and mix thoroughly. Repeat this until all of the flour is mixed in thoroughly.You want to stir throughout the process to prevent burning.
Once your creation thickens, add more water and stir thoroughly and constantly. If you add too much flour, it’s fine too! You won’t have wheatpaste, but you’ve successfully made the batter for hard tack. In that case, add some salt and bake it in a cookie tray at 375° F until it’s hard and dry. (Enjoy!)
When it’s done, the mixture should have a consistency similar to Elmer’s glue. After that, pour it into a container (such as the previously mentioned ketchup bottle). If you’ve got steady hands, you might be able to manage pouring it directly, but I recommend a funnel. You can just make a funnel out of a sheet of paper.
How to Hang Agitprop with Wheatpaste
To hang posters using wheat paste, you’ll want to paste the surface you’re hanging the poster on as well as the back of the poster. Once you’ve done that, put the poster onto the pasted surface. Run a credit card or a paint roller down the front to get any air bubbles out. Then, apply one last layer of wheat paste over the front of the poster to waterproof it.
Helpful hint: if you cut vertical lines down your poster, you can prevent it from being easily removed.
An equally cheap, and in many ways better alternative to wheatpaste, is wallpaper glue. You can buy it at basically any home improvement store. The main benefit is that it’s a much more consistent product. In addition to wallpaper glue, you can also use condensed milk! The point is, you have lots of options.
