A Demonstrator’s Guide to Reinforced Banners This guide explores how to construct reinforced banners that can function as a mobile shield wall during demonstrations.
To be clear, we do not encourage anyone to engage in illegal activity with banners or shields. We only offer these designs to satisfy the curiosity of historians.Refining a Defensive Tool: In our city, anarchists have spent several months improving a design for reinforced banners. We use these banners to protect ourselves from police violence. Often, in large actions in which dozens of people arrive with a plan, these banners play a role in both offensive and defensive activities. Initially, we used a wooden frame for our banners. This involved light but solid pieces of wood, metal handles for a firm grip, and a tarp across a wooden frame. The frame was solid and a team of three could carry it. However, even though the wood was light and we made several experiments with different kinds of lighter and lighter wood, the design was still too heavy. In addition, a comrade from another country observed that the banner attracted too much attention going in and out of actions. Where he came from, you could fold banners. Another issue was that it was not especially difficult for a kick or police baton to pierce the tarp that covered the frame. Our new design, which we have tested with satisfactory results, has four core advantages: it is 1) light 2) cheap 3) foldable 4) dense. We prepared this guide after comrades from many different cities responded enthusiastically to our new design.
https://crimethinc.com/2025/06/16/a-demonstrators-guide-to-reinforced-banners-now-stronger-and-lighter Cuba: student discontent continues over ETECSA's rate hike It has been two weeks since ETECSA, the Cuban telecommunications company, suddenly and unexpectedly introduced price hikes on Friday 31 May. Discontent continues to grow. Students are at the forefront of the protests against the drastic increase in mobile phone tariffs. They have held assemblies, issued statements and, in some cases, called for a teachers' strike. As was to be expected on an island that dared to abolish capitalism just 90 nautical miles from an imperialist ogre, the counter-revolution has tried to use the discontent to its advantage. So far, it has not succeeded. As we explained in a previous article, ‘Cuba: ETECSA's rate hike, the bureaucracy and the advance of capitalist restoration’, the measure means a very significant increase in the price of data once the initial 6GB allowance has been exceeded. Considering that, according to the company's own statistics, the average data consumption of Cubans is 9GB per month, the price hike affects a large number of users.
https://marxist.com/cuba-student-discontent-continues-over-etecsas-rate-hike.htmThe Conquest of Breadby Peter Kropotkin Chapter 10: Agreeable work When Socialists maintain that a society, freed from the rule of the capitalists, would make work agreeable, and would suppress all repugnant and unhealthy drudgery, they are laughed at. And yet even to-day we can see the striking progress that is being made in this direction; and wherever this progress has been achieved, employers congratulate themselves on the economy of energy obtained thereby. It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a scientific laboratory. And it is no less evident that it would be advantageous to make it so. In a spacious and well-ventilated factory the work is better; it is easy to introduce many small ameliorations, of which each represents an economy of time or of manual labour. And if most of the workshops we know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the workers are of no account in the organization of factories, and because the most absurd waste of human energy is the distinctive feature of the present industrial organization. Nevertheless, now and again, we already find, even now, some factories so well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the work, be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five hours a day, and if every one had the possibility of varying it according to his tastes. There are immense works, which I know, in one of the Midland counties, unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. They are perfect as regards sanitary and intelligent organization. They occupy fifty English acres of land, fifteen of which are roofed with glass. The pavement of fire-proof bricks is as clean as that of a miner’s cottage, and the glass roof is carefully cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing else. In these works are forged steel ingots or blooms weighing as much as twenty tons; and when you stand thirty feet from the immense furnace, whose flames have a temperature of more than a thousand degrees, you do not guess its presence save when its great doors open to let out a steel monster. And the monster is handled by only three or four workmen, who now here, now there, open a tap causing immense cranes to move one way or another by the pressure of water. You enter these works expecting to hear the deafening noise of stampers, and you find that there are no stampers. The immense hundred-ton guns and the crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic pressure, and the worker has but to turn a tap to give shape to the immense mass of steel, which makes a far more homogeneous metal, without crack or flaw, of the blooms, whatever be their thickness. I expected an infernal grating, and I saw machines which cut blocks of steel thirty feet long with no more noise than is needed to cut cheese. And when I expressed my admiration to the engineer who showed us round, he answered – “A mere question of economy! This machine, that planes steel, has been in use for forty-two years. It would not have lasted ten years if its parts, badly adjusted, ‘interfered’ and creaked at each movement of the plane! “And the blast-furnaces? It would be a waste to let heat escape instead of utilizing it. Why roast the founders, when heat lost by radiation represents tons of coal? “The stampers that made buildings shake five leagues off were also waste. Is it not better to forge by pressure than by impact, and it costs less – there is less loss. “In these works, light, cleanliness, the space allotted to each bench, are but a simple question of economy. Work is better done when you can see what you do, and have elbow-room. “It is true,” he said, “we were very cramped before coming here. Land is so expensive in the vicinity of large towns – landlords are so grasping!” … If necessary, it would be easy to multiply examples proving that as regards the material organization Fourier’s dream was not a Utopia. This question has, however, been so frequently discussed in Socialist newspapers that public opinion should already be educated on this point. Factory, forge and mine can be as healthy and magnificent as the finest laboratories in modern universities, and the better the organization the more will man’s labour produce. If it be so, can we doubt that work will become a pleasure and a relaxation in a society of equals, in which “hands” will not be compelled to sell themselves to toil, and to accept work under any conditions? Repugnant tasks will disappear, because it is evident that these unhealthy conditions are harmful to society as a whole. Slaves can submit to them, but free men will create new conditions, and their work will be pleasant and infinitely more productive. The exceptions of to-day will be the rule of to-morrow. The same will come to pass as regards domestic work, which to-day society lays on the shoulders of that drudge of humanity – woman.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1892/bread.htm#chapter10