The Angle Grinder of Revolution: Against the Commuter and its World

A new essay and zine published anonymously by Filler PGH.

The commuter is the modality through which every other identity is shaped and borne within this techno-industrial prison. The negation of the commuter is the negation of civilization and the bare life it has enforced; the negation of the commuter is the affirmation of wildness, of freedom, of possibility.

We therefore affirm again, our hearts full with insurgent ferocity: every commuter is a target.

The Angle Grinder of Revolution: Against the Commuter and its World

"There is a specter haunting the Earth; it haunts the minds of movement managers, formalists, leftists, and those who otherwise find themselves aligned with — entrenched within, even — the existent. It waits for no orders from self-appointed leaders and pays no mind to the hand-wringing of moralists. In an indomitable fury against the current totality, it seizes the opportunities that stand before it. Shrouded by the night, each u-lock is cut away from the bicycles secured by their grasp; beneath every automobile chassis, quick work is made to liberate the rare earth minerals trapped within the prison of catalytic converters.

There is a specter haunting the Earth, and it is the angle grinder of revolution — the glimmer of revolutionary horizons and the setting sun of the old regime. Without a glimmer of remorse and with an unflinching resolve, it speaks: Every commuter is a target.

From the university student peddling between gentrified neighborhoods, part-time jobs and classes, to the lowly prole whittling away the waking hours of their life in grid-lock traffic, every commuter creates the present nightmare. In every form it takes, the commuter is the primary, operative role within our present industrial civilization. Other social categories naturally cannot be ignored — the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the precariat among them — but they are secondary to the commuter, for in order for all other identities defined by socio-economic position and relation to production to be realized, the individual must initiate the commute — the very activity that defines the commuter.

As they travel along this miserable Leviathan’s many economic arteries, colloquially known as “roads,” this disgusting way of life is animated and reproduced with the slow lurch of bare life headed towards annihilation pushed along evermore. For those of us who seek a different life than the hollow rituals of the commuter, there is a clear approach to cease the functioning of this miserable machine. With only a bit of courage, the angle grinder’s spite cuts away the regime of non-life. The commuter takes a multitude of forms, but within the context of the imperial core we write from, two forms constitute a significant plurality of commuter-identities above all others: the motorist and the cyclist. While there are nuances in the subversive methods against each respective commuter-identity, both are readily sabotaged by the angle-grinder.

The cyclist can be immobilized indefinitely once the false security provided by their precious u-lock falls away, the facade pierced with a single cut. From there, the repulsive contraption can be whisked away into the night. The cyclist who projects some false, pathetic propriety over this miserable commodity is left empty-handed. Without the material basis for the abstraction they’ve dissolved themself into — trading the fullness of life in exchange for the poverty of commuter-identity — they are left only with themself, naked and bare, alone in the night. Struck by the convulsive rage of the angle grinder’s insurrection, they are left no choice but to ponder, on foot, their uniqueness, their place in the world and the industrialized nightmare that plagues it. Certainly this constitutes robbery, but within that robbery there is an invitation, an opening for something else: a glimpse into a world beyond the commute.

The motorist and the multi-ton death trap they adore is a somewhat different prospect. Instead of targeting the locking mechanism that ensures the motorist‘s false propriety over their commodity-identity’s material basis, the target is instead the very functioning of this mechanized monstrosity. Beneath the chassis of the vehicle, an essential component is seated, exposed and readily accessible: the catalytic converter. Without it, the vehicle is useless. A skilled operator can identify, target, and extract the catalytic converter in a mere matter of minutes, disappearing again well before anyone would have noticed. In all likelihood, the sabotage would only be noticed during the following morning. The motorist, intending to step into their role as commuter via the commute as the necessary pre-condition to realize all other roles, would find the usual choke of an engine turn-over missing, instead replaced by a tremendous, startling roar. In the vacancy created by the catalytic converter’s absence, wild nature howls and the euphoric laughter of the fallen wild’s spirit fills the early morning air. The motorist is denied the ritual of the commuter‘s realization. All other identities that flow from the commuter are denied, too, aborted before coming to term in the commuter‘s absence. Like the cyclist before, in the robbery of the motorist, the gift of possibility is endowed: a life beyond economic exchange, an escape from the poverty of bare life into the freedom of self-creation.

Finally, with every subversion of commuter-identity — each stolen bike, every scrapped catalytic converter — a unique material reward is found.

The illegalists of generations past were able to fund their subversion with bank robberies and the burglary of bourgeois households; in our present condition of technological hyper-surveillance, these methods have become overwhelmingly more risky. Naturally, cybercrime remains a possible avenue in the face of this reality, but the foreclosure of this horizon, too, is well under way as repressive techniques catch up to subversive ones. In turn, subversive techniques are pushed further and further into the domain of technical specialization and the tools that follow, creating a terrain of engagement that is ever more difficult to penetrate. What we offer here, however, is a subversive technique that demands very little technical skill and is available to anyone that can obtain a commonplace tool: the battery-powered angle grinder.

Whether brought into possession through the legitimizing shroud of commodity exchange, the denial of such through shoplifting, or brought into temporary possession through a tool-lending library, very few circumstances would truly prohibit access. Once in hand, every bike and every catalytic converter that follows sustains our war against society with a trip to that ever-present ally to the criminal class, the scrapyard: cash in hand today.

We can anticipate the critics of our method, those who speak with corpses in their mouths in defense of the current miserable state of affairs. They will claim we are too extreme, that our approach is too indiscriminate, that it is alienating, ineffectual, and criminal. To them, we have nothing to say; in their moralistic anxieties, they have made their alignment clear. They have become lost within their respective commuter-identities and as such, wish to defend the commuter and the world it demands. Thus, they have positioned themselves as our enemies, despite whatever other supposed subversive affinities they declare. The commuter is the modality through which every other identity is shaped and borne within this techno-industrial prison. The negation of the commuter is the negation of civilization and the bare life it has enforced; the negation of the commuter is the affirmation of wildness, of freedom, of possibility.

We therefore affirm again, our hearts full with insurgent ferocity: every commuter is a target.

Every commuter will move through every day anxiously wondering when their time will come, peering through the blinds to check if today was their bicycle or their car’s last; every night will be spent restless and sleepless, wondering who might be lurking in their backyard or under their car, stealing away the material basis of their commuter-identity, delivering it to some faraway scrapyard. There can be no compromise with commuter society; for the possibilities of life to unfold before us in the realization of total liberation, every aspect of this world must be met with total negation, beginning with the commuter."

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There are 33 Comments

Ok so while I'm 1000% into /r/FuckCars, the Commuter is our new main target.

Not that I completelty disagree... but!

The new ACAB?

Regardless... pretty sure you've just pitted yourselves in a funny war with the Pothole Fixers. Sometimes I just love the US so much! From a distance tho.

this is truly the most insightful piece of writing I've read in a while. after reading this I immediately went out and stole three bikes. thank you for offering this truly incendiary piece of analysis

even tho it's almost an ad for electric tools.

Portable angle grinders the new broken windows, yes. They're fun and edgy, but wear protective goggles, kids!

Who?

Me. :0)

Wow a rambling, French academia style manifesto, complete with pretentiously idiosyncratic jargon and typography, mashed up with nihilistic fetishization of random crime - giving me serious late 00s flashbacks. Don’t be that guy.

I have stumbled upon and read this out of curiosity. I found it to be interesting, though I can't agree. While you may think this will help, who are you to impose your will on some poor guy just wanting to bike to work? Oh, he isn't supposed to work? That's not spiritual or eco-friendly enough?? Well, what do YOU eat? How do YOU get clothing? What cardboard box do YOU live in and in what climate?!
All you will do is make yourselves fugitives from the law, fuel the resentment people already have toward activists of all sorts, and not change anything for the better.
BTW , you CAN drive a car without a, Cat and it'll run. Maybe louder but it runs. I know a guy cuts them for other reasons, and the vehicles still start up. Bikes, I have no idea why you hate them. Because they take someone to the job they support their family with?! That's a terrible thing?? You are sick and twisted and you will not get what you want with this approach. Hate to pee in your Wheaties but that's just fact.

tell me, wise ones, the difference between a bicycle locked up because someone went to work and a bicycle locked up because someone just went for a joyride . . .

doesn't matter, still commuted, still reproduced the cyclist's commuter-identity. you are not immune to the angle grinders indiscriminate rage

oh, sweetie, what's next stealing shoes because someone fell asleep on the bus ??

listen, it's all gotta go. i agree. but why target the poor in the meantime? i know you think you are going hard with this but indiscriminate attack will always hit the marginal first because they (we) can't hide behind paid security and high gates. maybe attack those gates instead ... oh, nvmd, care is weak i know can't have that.

...and selling them for meth?

who knew crackheads were the ultimate enemy of civilization!

The angle-grinding Individualists Tending Towards freebase Crack live in those gated communities! Well insulated from the effects of "muh indiscriminate rage", they don't have to work because mommy and daddy pay for everything, even their beloved battery-powered angle grinders...

I really did meet a Spanish magician who walked out of a store with a huge bag full of lifted things. Since it was so lousy and obvious to not arouse attention I suppose that was a kind of next level magic... but a trick anyone with balls can pull? This especially can work for "irate customers who came back to change a damn dysfunctional angle grinder".

Use thy brains may laaad!

While I am not employed, I DO bike to protests etc. I amsl build my own customized bikes, so I don't want them mistaken for a yuppie's purchased steed and stolen.

Now for something folks using angle grinders may not have thought of: Since given time and privacy any plain steel bike lock can be cut with an angle grinder, someone came up with a more effective stopper: the Skunk Lock. The shackle of this lock is filled wirh a skunky, incredibly stinky concoction. Cut the lock and the grinding wheel throws the liquid all over thief and bike. Both smell absolutely DEPLORABLE!

Speaking of stinky, the only thing someone needs to close.up an exhaust system illegally but not detectable until their next auto emissions inspection is a $10 piece of muffler pipe and two muffler clamps. Difference in sound will be a little but difference in pollution will be a LOT. Please do not remove pollution controls from cars.

If you have some doggy treats and a crate, you can steal all the catalytic converters you want from cars at a junkyard that will never be driven again

There's a lot of people in here who are criticizing this piece who clearly cannot conceptualize a world beyond the commute. It's naturally all of the usual leftist pearl-clutching about "what about xyz identity that might be negatively effected by this action?" It is pathetic. Cowardly, even. Clearly these over-socialized types are addicted to the feeling of a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, watching their lives drift into the distance through the rear-view mirror. They can't let go of the commute. It's sad, really! These people wouldn't stop commuting for anything. They wake up every morning and go to bed every night thinking, "thank god I'm a commuter " "what would I ever do if I weren't a motorist ?" As much as they try to fill their emptiness and alienation with a faux-excitement for the commute , they still find their resentment building and building until they're drowning in misery.

Every once in a while, one of these resentful commuters finally breaks and they do the unthinkable: they upend the social reproduction of their commuter-identity , cruising up the highway on-ramp past a little red sign that reads, "wrong way." This is the only answer for the commuters that evade the angle grinder. In this total war against society, we can choose either battery-powered subversion or we can choose the rush of true freedom that flows in the opposite direction of traffic. We confront the wavering forces of the commuter with the option: to the grave or to the scrapyard? Either answer satisfies us. Finally, we reach the edge — we feel the danger of wrongway driving, the embrace of the angle grinder, the miraculous and the unknown — and know: this is life .

it isn't about whether to do or not to do the drastic action - we're on a sinking ship, a doomed planet, clearly something out of the ordinary has to happen. or we'll just continue to fall off this cliff.

i mean, we are going to continue to burn no matter what, (or flood, or contract a virus, or.... ) why be an asshole too?

"we're on a sinking ship, a doomed planet"

Wtf where you get your science from?

The planet has been a fiery ball of lava for ages, ayou had several ice ages. Yet... here we are.

We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!

We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

Plastic… asshole.

i wrote drastic not plastic. it's all good tho, glad to be a prompt for your essay. & i don't disagree about the planet. what i meant to say is we are doomed, on a planet. (not that the planet is doomed.)

my more salient point is don't be an asshole, plastic, drastic or otherwise.., don't be an asshole to all your kin animal vegetable mineral fungal ...

“The earth will be just fine in 1000 years so who cares, existing life doesn’t matter and we have no impact on it” lol

cringe af

Pfft. Classic example of an attempt to identify the Lurker - every time I read something like this it’s like the author is intentionally missing the point. They never even addressed the question that the Lurker answers when they are spotted in the parking lot, or with the angle grinder. Instead, the author talks around the question and fixates on a predisposed answer: the Lurker’shostility to the commute is assumed.

And that assumption is the operating error made in this piece.

In the classic Distroist text, Preliminary Materials for the Theory of the Lurker, the presence of the Lurker “…brings with it questions wherever they appear. Who is that?
When did they arrive?
Is this figure friend or enemy?

The angle grinder is a tool like any other, and its indiscriminate deployment against the commuter-identities negates the possibility of assuming that such a relationship is an inherently hostile one.

The so-called angle-grinder “of revolution” can only be found lurking in the periphery of the commute if we fail to consider the question, “how did they arrive?”

Is the scrapper who speed-walks not also a commuter-identity? Is speed not also an acceleration of work?

I think I’ve made my point.

Remember,
“The Lurker comes to the forefront of contemporary struggle precisely because of their indefinition: a proclivity towards the uncaptureable. At the moment when conspiracies, imagined or real, come to dominate the public psyche, a figure of nebulity emerges. It is a commentary on the inability to define the terrain of State operability for a majority, that an undefinable character emerges to oppose.”

But your first iteration used to write 5x the lenght, and whatever happened to Mach and Merleau-Ponty!? I can only assume you're a cheap attempt at resurrection out of the old code like in Matrix 4.

looks like someone else caught the fill in the blanks detournement rage https://autonomies.org/2022/11/the-urgent-need-to-eat-the-rich/

“What follows was inspired by a short newspaper article on the enormous discrepancy in energy consumption and CO2 emissions between the rich and the poor, in the UK. Recalling Jonathan Swift’s brilliant essay, “A Modest Proposal” of 1729, we took it up again, in all modesty, replaced Irish infants with the wealthy, and discovered that it retained all of its urgent relevance”

eat the rich AND commuters

not all forms of humor are satire and this isn’t satire, call it meta post-ironic political meme if you want

so only those fortunate enough to WORK from the comfort of their own home are immune to this angle grinder rev? fucking elitist crap

Also wondering how angle grinders be useful against those filthy rich commuting by chopper and private jets... Also since Lambos are like at 3 inches from the ground, good luck getting their catalyzers?

CALTROPZZZZZZZZ DUH!
GET TO THE CHOPPA!

Lololol great satirical piece on the vagaries of cultural values and the states they induce. 9.5/10

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