Enter­ing the rad­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty, many quick­ly find them­selves con­stant­ly hear­ing about debate over prop­er­ty destruc­tion. Is it vio­lence? Does it mat­ter if it’s vio­lence? Is it effec­tive? Is it alien­at­ing? And on and on. I’ve been hear­ing this argu­ment pret­ty much since I reg­u­lar­ly start­ed attend­ing protests. At this point, I almost don’t want to deal with the sub­ject. Nat­u­ral­ly, you’re ask­ing, “Then why the hell do you want to make a zine about it?”

The answer is sim­ple: I may be sick of the debate, but that’s just me. As the war in Iraq drags on (drag­ging blood­ied Iraqi corpse upon blood­ied Iraqi corpse with it) and dis­con­tent and dis­il­lu­sion­ment with this whole socio-polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic sys­tem increas­es, more peo­ple are get­ting involved in the fight against cap­i­tal­ism and its machines of war (both the armies abroad and the police at home). For many, when they start going to protests and demon­stra­tions, they have at best mixed feel­ings about things like prop­er­ty destruc­tion, vio­lent­ly resist­ing the police, or even just march­ing in the street with­out a per­mit. And some appre­hen­sion about these tac­tics is com­plete­ly under­stand­able. After all, every­thing in this sys­tem is designed to teach us that prop­er­ty (or per­haps more accu­rate­ly, cor­po­rate prop­er­ty) is sacred, that police should always be obeyed (or else) and that break­ing the law, even small laws, is moral­ly and eth­i­cal­ly wrong and can nev­er be jus­ti­fi­able.

And so, this is a call for arti­cles, sto­ries, art, or any­thing else about the tac­tic of prop­er­ty destruc­tion and its mer­its for a zine that seeks to give those on the fence about this issue a gen­tle nudge (and maybe con­vince them to rip down the fence!). Since this is meant to be a zine for peo­ple new to social move­ments, I respect­ful­ly ask that the tone of the arti­cles keep that in mind when choos­ing their words. To put it plain­ly, please no anti-lib­er­al rants–they piss me off too, but this is sup­posed to be the case for prop­er­ty destruc­tion, not the case against lib­er­als (maybe next time!).

When I say arti­cles, I mean pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished or unpub­lished arti­cles argu­ing for the valid­i­ty or effec­tive­ness of prop­er­ty destruc­tion. It does­n’t even have to be some­thing you wrote. If there’s an arti­cle that you think is real­ly great and think that it should be includ­ed, tell me about it (things like, where I can find it, who wrote it, and how I can get ahold of them). There’s two kinds of sto­ries that would be real­ly great to have for this zine: per­son­al accounts and “his­tor­i­cal” accounts. Per­son­al accounts would be some­thing talk­ing about wit­ness­ing or even com­mit­ting an act of prop­er­ty destruc­tion, how it made you feel, what impact it had, etc. Obvi­ous­ly this is very sen­si­tive, so try­ing to be rel­a­tive­ly vague is best (and also see the next para­graph for the best way to sub­mit things like that). A “his­tor­i­cal” account would be more of a gen­er­al sto­ry (prefer­ably con­tem­po­rary) of how prop­er­ty destruc­tion put pres­sure on an insti­tu­tion to win a con­crete goal. Art would be any­thing that would be an image. A car­toon, a cool draw­ing, what­ev­er.

If you have any­thing to con­tribute, please send an email to tacticaldiversity@gmail.com. I may want to edit some of your sub­mis­sion for var­i­ous rea­sons (most like­ly space). Any edits or cuts will be run by you first. If for some rea­son you can’t or don’t want to sub­mit some­thing online, send an email and we can dis­cuss oth­er meth­ods of sub­mis­sion. As was said above, send­ing per­son­al accounts about prop­er­ty destruc­tion over email is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a good idea. In fact, for both our sakes, it’s a bad idea. Any per­son­al accounts should be sub­mit­ted will an anony­mous email ser­vice like www.willselfdestruct.com (be sure to make it at least 1 view). If you want me to respond some­how, you can leave an email address in the will­selfde­struct mes­sage and I can respond in kind. If you don’t leave a way to respond to you, I may make edits with­out run­ning them by you first. Also, a major goal is to make sure that every piece pub­lished is pub­lished with the cre­ator’s per­mis­sion. This zine isn’t going to be sold any­where and will be dis­trib­uted for free, but I still don’t want to use oth­er peo­ple’s stuff in this zine with­out their express per­mis­sion. So yeah, don’t sub­mit oth­er peo­ple’s work act­ing like it’s your’s and get peo­ple pissed at me. If you run an infos­hop or any oth­er rad­i­cal space that could dis­trib­ute this zine upon com­ple­tion and are inter­est­ed in receiv­ing copies, drop a line and you’ll be kept in the loop when it comes time to pub­lish.

In love and rage,
Casey Ford