Appearing in the Alarm one month after the execution of Joe Hill, the following tract is Aron Baron’s call to the anarchist milieu of his time to reaffirm an anti-state principle in the face of ruthless state repression. In light of our current deluge of federal terrorism charges, and what feels like a relinquishing of even basic anarchist principles for a reliance on the logic of the law, it’s important that we recover examples of true hostility toward and refusal of the illusions of that logic throughout anarchist history. What’s most deserving of our attention in Baron’s text is his direct admonishment of the still common urge for anarchists to fall back into legalistic assumptions, whether through declarations of innocence or by pleas to the conscience of the state. “You say you have committed no crime? You don’t have to! If you are known as a man of deep devotion to the Cause of the Workers, never mind about a charge: any shrewd attorney will find one against you, just as they did for Joe Hill.” It must be understood that we are an excessive fringe in the eyes of our declared enemy and will not be spared any mercy by a political apparatus we claim to want to destroy, that will preserve itself by any means at it’s disposal. Repression (the most extreme expression of the law) is the state finding ballast, keeping itself from tipping too far in any direction. It’s not a matter of preference for one ideological camp or another, but rather casting the excess fringes into the shadows of prison or death in order to sustain a project of domination. Despite whatever Manichean justifications are claimed by those that enshrine and enforce the law, the state is not a thinking thing. It’s a dynamic relationship between those that wish to accumulate, wield and weaponize power over a territory and everything in it, including those without the ability (or desire) to engage with that power on an equal basis. Repression is a bonded feature of the life of anyone in true opposition to the existent, no matter it’s shape. It’s to those that accept that fact and still wade into action that we extend our utmost solidarity. Photographs and text hijacked from the Kate Sharpley Library. – SM