here in San Francisco, where skyrocketing rents, unscrupulous evictions, and the Ellis Act (a state law that allows landlords to cheat rent control by taking their property off the rental market in order to evict tenants and move into the vacant units, sell them as condos, or raze them and put up “live/work spaces”, condos by any other name) have tenants taking up arms, even the Tenants Union Web Site has gone provocateur, posting advertisements from the group Homes Not Bombs that read: “SQUATTERS! ELLIS BUILDINGS AVAILABLE NOW!”

recently i went to something called “RAGE AGAINST RENT”, a forum and video-screening that was standing-room only at a place in the heart of the gentrified Mission District called Artist’s Television Access (ATA). sitting next to my friend Peter Plate, a longtime anti-gentrification activist, he said he was amazed. he said he remembered coming to “this very room for a meeting exactly like this one nine years ago...and like eight people showed up.”

if San Francisco is the battleground that rent wars are to be fought on, the Mission District is ground zero. and it is precisely there, last year, that posters calling for the vandalization of Sports Utility Vehicles and signed by the “Mission Yuppie Eradication Project” began to appear, capturing the imaginations and fears of its older and more recent occupants and focusing attention on the buzzing issue of G-e-n-t-r-i-f-i-c-a-t-i-o-n.

that poster and the one that followed (suggesting a hit-list of local yuppie hangouts) were claimed as the work of a certain “Nestor Makhno”. last month the SFPD arrested a guy named Kevin Keating at his home, seized his books and computers and films and notes, and charged him with being this pseudonymous propagandist. Kevin was a member of the panel at the RAGE AGAINST RENT event and I talked to him a little while afterwards. let’s clear the disclaimer first:

on the advice of my attorney, I can neither confirm nor deny that I am Nestor Makhno; the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project...let’s just say i know a whole lot about it.

cool. could you tell pirate enclave a little about how you think the project started.

the poster campaign began around June of ‘98 and ended, coincidentally enough, right around the time that i got arrested. funny how those things happen. my understanding is that a couple of long-term mission residents were standing around lamenting the deplorable changes that had been taking place in the neighborhood over the last three four five years and one of them noticed that the upper middle class carpetbaggers were real car spawn....you can tell when you move down the sidewalk who the real urban dwellers are: they tend to bob and weave around the winos the couple with the kid in the stroller the asshole policeman coming your way but the Yuppies move as if none of that is really there, as though they are still encased in their metal and glass utility vehicles...thus was born the idea of advocating vehicle vandalism as a way of scaring the boojies [read bourgeoise] out. the first poster which called for vandalizing yuppie cars specifically mentioned Jaguars, Porsches, Lexuses, Sport Utility Vehicles, not pickups and VW bugs and stuff well those puckish posters raised the profile...or made it so that that instead of the typical american attitude of resignation in the face of deteriorating living conditions under capitalism, i think that those posters, by having a message that was transparently clear, by being extremely provocative and in inflammatory language, helped people realize that gentrification is not natural it’s not inevitable it can be resisted and turned back.

they caught the imagination...

yeah...

not just of the community but in a different way the yuppies...

yeah the bourgeois invaders...

who keep moving here and are surprised to find that even though they’ve moved in, kids still come and sit on their front stairs and piss on their garage doors and resent their ass for having so much and caring so little...

yeah and i think the posters helped politicize something that’s seen mostly as unconscious...vandalism gets regarded as this completely  nihilistic gesture devoid of political or social content i think the poster drew attention to the fact that sabotage has always been a weapon of the working class in the fight against capitalism. if you examine gentrification struggles anywhere in the world: NYC, Berlin, Barcelona, Johannesburg South Africa you’ll find that when bourgeois types move into a neighborhood and start displacing people the immediate logical valid legitimate response is to vandalize the property of the people who have money. there’s this left-communist theoretician Jean Barrot who was in the May ’68 movement in France. i like the way he put it: “In the silence of the proletariat, sabotage resembles the first murmurs of speech.” i like that.

and the situationist concept of detournement, where you take an existing situation and just shove it a little in the direction it’s already going...

yeah the situationsists would be like Public Enemy Number One in my book. they were like the most advanced revolutionaries of the social movement of the ‘60s. and Berlin and Zurich dada. surrealism: i like some of those paintings by di Chirico. and ultraleft marxism and class struggle anarchism are my sources of inspiration.

and what about Nestor Makhno.

in using the pseudonym Nestor Makhno, the handle did double duty. on the one hand it was good to remain anonymous as long as possible, the proof being the extreme reaction of the police who basically seized everything that i can use to effectively communicate with other people other than my phone and my ability to speak. so it guaranteed whoever is Nestor Makhno anonymity and also it called attention to this undeservedly-obscure very admirable revolutionary from the past. when it started getting press coverage it was inevitable that some pedant was going to write in and say: “hey that guy can’t be Nestor Makhno, Nestor Makhno’s an anarcho-communist revolutionary who helped to incite a mass uprising of the poor in the southern Ukraine during the Russian Revolution.”
 so now there are tens of thousands of people who’ve heard of Nestor Makhno who never heard of him before...
i hope i’m not wandering too much. well, you’ll edit this, right...?

yes. and lie. do you think the Y.E.P. has legs...do you think the project will spread?

yeah i hear from Laurel Wellman, that woman at the SF WEEKLY, that she’s getting email and voicemail from people in Boston and New York and Chicago saying “yeah we’re totally down with the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project we’re going to do that here...” we need an Anti-Yuppie Internationale.

i think it’s only natural that there’s this growing disparity between the really really rich and everyone else...

yes, one of the most glorious defects of the whole Reagan/Clinton era is this massive redistribution of wealth up away from working class people, low-income people and even legislate the middle class into a smaller and smaller number of greedy parasites and exploiters.

seems like either you have it really have it or you’re just kind of scraping by there’s no middle ground anymore

the only thing that can reverse that is mass collective action...

do you think anything can turn it back...?

oh yeah definitely. the main reason we enjoy any kind of relative liberties or concessions is that capital has been compelled by people taking actions by going on strike, by rioting, by capital having to back down. that’s a big part of the labor movement of the ‘30s and part of what the civil rights movement was able to bring about.

there were some actions you talked about taking at the rage against rent forum that i couldn’t really understand...about anticipating yuppie move-ins and staging...what would you call them... “closed houses”...

i mean, granted, the physical presence of the yuppies and their cars is a blight on the neighborhood the bars and restaurants that lure them here to stay on a permanent basis but the main problem is the luxury condos. they all sell for 300-600K, no working people can live in them and even among bourgeois types, old people, handicapped people and kids can’t live in them. they are just for the Young Urban Professional set: the people who eat at [a local sushi joint that Kevin calls “White Army Sushi”]. real estate speculators believe “if we build them they will come” but what if they build them and they don’t come? if the yuppies show up on open houses and there are several dozen angry rowdy poor people saying “Yuppie Go Home” and “This Is Not Your Home... You Can’t Have Our Neighborhood...We Don’t Want You Here...You’re Not Welcome...Get Out” the yuppies aren’t going to move in and the real estate speculators will lose their shirts. may be the last part is wishful thinking but i think we should be optimistic.

what do you think of electoral politics?

electoral politics is no use whatsoever to working class and poor people and it never has been. you can never vote the system out. not just a waste of time but a mystification about the nature of capitalist society. one good thing about the US among all the negative ways that they lead the rest of the industrial world rate of police violence against civilians, use of the death penalty, number of children growing up in poverty. one positive way that the US leads the rest of the world is the rate of abstention from electoral politics. even if all those people aren’t actively fighting for a society worthy of people living in it there at least don’t have any illusions about voting...

what about more direct action? those posters were so illicitly, anarchically joyous. the nice thing about graffiti and vandalism is: it’s something you can do. right here. right now. any day. any time. you don’t have to organize a bunch of people to go anywhere or do anything.

yes. if i do say so myself, i think there’s a lot of humor in the posters. most people read them and they can see there’s a puckish mischievous quality to them...and i don’t really care if some yuppie creep gets their utility vehicle trashed or someone puts a brick through the window of Blowfish Sushi...

remember when they were first trying to put a mcdonalds in on haight street and the windows kept getting smashed out and all that graffiti kept appearing: “You deserve a brick today”?

yeah. [laughs] but what matters to me is that the provocative use of language in the posters helps make the gentrification of the Mission a fighting issue. of course i’m somewhat biased. i’ll leave it up to other people to judge.

Hank Hyena and i were talking and we thought that you should pass out blank house keys with “Yuppie Eradication Project” printed on them that people could use to s-c-r-a-t-c-h their feelings on appropriate surfaces...

what i think was a totally inspired idea is a T-shirt that says “I came to the Mission District and all i got was a vandalized S.U.V.” with a picture of this car that’s got a painful gash and smashed window and the tires are all slashed...

care to tell our readers a little bit about how they could get their own ideas up on the walls...?

yeah, i’ll go into the technical details. i hate to make product endorsements so basically you want to use about a pound of wallpaper paste, a gallon bucket...lukewarm water...and when you put the stuff up you want to make sure you completely cover the surface, but not with too much paste. put the poster up and then massage it into the surface. make sure to squeeze out any excess wall paper paste underneath the poster so that the poster is completely saturated and flush with the surface. that way when it dries it dries as though it’s been painted on. you’ll see posters that were put up years ago...which is gratifying, because it is hard work. you can lose five or ten pounds lugging wallpaper paste around the Mission in the dead of night.

a new diet...!
what about accomplices...?

yeah. but the thing is to have only one person in possession of the incriminating material. that way the cops can only jump on one person and then you have someone to call the lawyer or go to the bailbondsman.

what about your bust? can you tell us a little about that?

as i was coming into my house these two cops came out of the shadows they grabbed me they didn’t tell me what i was charged with what i was accused of they didn’t read me my rights and held me incommunicado for fifteen hours, which is technically illegal according to California Penal Code 851.5: an arrested person is entitled to up to 3 calls within 3 hours of their arrest...and in that time they executed a search warrant on my house. according to the warrant, they were looking for “terrorist materials” and for “materials for generating terrorist messages” [laughs] i don’t know they thought they were going to find...a wireless for getting messages from Khadafi? so they raided my apartment and they stole...

but wait a minute...don’t you consider yourself a terrorist...?

by labeling me an anarchist terrorist the cops have given credibility to my perspective they’ve given me street rep...

i guess as far as that goes, you really aren’t an anarchist until They say you are. it’s like being a poet. you can go around saying you’re a poet as long as you want but it isn’t until people actually start calling you a poet...

[laughs] and to be perfectly accurate i’m a left-communist agitator propagandist rather than an anarchist terrorist but hey why split hairs?
the political character of my arrest is clearly demonstrated in that the cops seized more than 70 books. anything pertaining to revolutionary marxism, anarchism, the situationists. ultra-left communists...any book with the phrase working class or revolution in the title and now two months later the cops have still got all my stuff.

maybe it’s like what Malcolm X said about Islam: you take one step toward Islam and Islam takes two steps toward you. except with anarchism: you take one step toward anarchism and the cops take two steps toward you...

more like you take one step toward threatening capital and capital takes ten steps toward bringing the hammer down on you...anyway, now there’s been this enormous amount of publicity that needs to be channeled into mass political action. i’m hoping that out of this we can come up with picket lines and picket signs and bullhorns for the yuppie condos...hell i think we should have them even when they’re under construction...but definitely have them at the site of condos when the realtors and speculators have open houses for the yuppies. so when Buffy and Chip show up in their S.U.V...

i can see it now...

they’ll have to helicopter them in...rappel down the sides of the buildings to get in. hell, we need to make sure they don’t go up in the first place. but once they’re going up we need to make it so that the bourgeois types don’t even want to move in...and then i think we need to get armies of homeless people to seize them and turn them into squats...

i was staying with some people out in New Mexico out in the desert and they have this ethic that you shouldn’t build on a rise where you can see other houses...like everybody should have their privacy...and they told me this one guy started building a house up on this rise near them and the funniest thing happened: it burned down. twice.

imagine that! lightning strikes twice! enlisting lightning in the cause of anti-gentrification in New Mexico!
    here’s what the struggle is all about: housing shouldn’t be a commodity and nothing else should be. gentrification and the fight for control over social space is being recolonized by capitalism and it’s one element in what has to be a global anti-capitalist assertion of the needs of working and poor people against the dictatorship of the market.
    we need ultimately to have a world revolution where we get rid of the market, money, wage labor, all states, ruling classes, the cops, and create a society that’s worthy of human beings living in it, a society where all production is geared to free direct satisfaction of human needs while respecting the earth’s environment.

listen. i know you’ve got to go meet your lawyer, but before you go: any spare soundbites for our readers?

yeah: the only fair rent is no rent at all.
    we need action not therapy.