The Seeds of Anti-Capitalist Revolt Found in Everyday Resistance: A Review of Guerrillas of Desire – Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible by Kevin Van Meter (AK Press, 2017)

By Scott Campbell

Source: Institute for Anarchist Studies

Back when I first began selling my labor for a wage in the wasteland of suburbia’s strip malls, I can recall the tedium of stocking shelves, summoning up insincere courtesy in the face of entitled customers and obnoxious bosses, comparing the stacks of money counted at the end of the day with the totals on our paychecks, and feigning adherence to whatever motivational façade management cooked up to mask the reality of our exploitation.

Yet I also remember, much more vividly and fondly, the latent and occasionally eruptive defiance among my co-workers. This included the constant collective complaining about the job, taking more and longer-than-approved breaks, working as little as possible, fudging time sheets, stealing, and the intermittent screaming matches with the boss in the middle of the store. Underpinning all these actions was an unspoken but broadly understood code of silence when it came to such transgressions and, when appropriate, expressions of support for them.

At the time, I didn’t think much about this, it was just how things happened and I’ve encountered similar experiences to varying degrees in every workplace since. Our actions weren’t guided by a political framework nor was there any attempt to organize them in a directed manner. It was more a spontaneous, innate reaction to experiencing the coercion of capitalism. I had cause to reflect upon this anew while reading Kevin Van Meter’s new book, Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible, published by AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

In the preface, Van Meter observes that the question motivating him is not “What is to be done?” but “How do people become what they are?” Throughout the course of the book he seeks to provide an answer by locating power in the resistance of workers, apart from any political ideology or organization. Whether and how that inherently anti-capitalist refusal of work develops into revolt or rebellion are the questions he compellingly urges us to reflect and act upon.

To reach that point, Guerrillas of Desire ambitiously takes on multiple tasks that feed into and build on one another. Van Meter initiates a dialogue between anarchism and Autonomist Marxism that leads to a reconceptualization of the working class, bolstered in part by a historical accounting of workplace actions such as the ones I recounted. He labels these “everyday resistance,” committed by “guerrillas of desire,” and proposes a focus on those deeds as the entry point for organizing revolutionary resistance to capitalism. The impetus for this initiative, concisely carried out in under 160 pages, is his proposal that the current approach to organizing is conceptually flawed and therefore destined to fail. “Guerrillas of Desire offers a contentious hypothesis: the fundamental assumption underlying Left and radical organizing, including many strains of anarchism, is wrong. I do not mean organizationally dishonest, ideologically inappropriate, or immoral. I mean empirically incorrect” (13). The incorrect basis for current organizing is the assumption that the poor and working classes are unorganized and passive and that it therefore rests upon activists and organizations to educate and mobilize them for their own sakes. Van Meter instead proposes that there is in fact informal organization and resistance occurring, it is just of a sort that does not fit within the Left’s organizing vision and therefore goes unseen, unrecognized, and unincorporated into political theories, analysis, and action.

To provide a political frame for understanding the “everyday resistance” of the working class, Van Meter draws upon anarchism’s mutual aid – the material and emotional cooperation and reciprocal support that exists in societies – with Autonomist Marxism’s self-valorization – autonomous working class action that counters the state and capitalism, primarily the refusal of work in its myriad forms. Combined together and reinforcing one another, mutual aid and the refusal of work comprise the “everyday resistance” of the working class.

These phenomena also give definition to what is meant by “working class,” which Van Meter defines as “autonomous from both capitalism and the official organization of the Left, broadly including all those who work under capitalism, based in relationships between workers rather than as a structural component of the economy or sociological category” (32). Rather than being premised on income, occupation, or union membership, the working class under Van Meter’s formulation is made up of all those who must perform work under capitalism – be it waged or unwaged, in the factory, home, office, bedroom, affective, or social spheres. However, when they are not taking action in response to their subjugation under capitalism, these people are just workers. They become a class through the process of struggling against the conditions imposed upon them by capitalism. This struggle initially takes the form of everyday resistance based on mutual aid and the refusal of work. It is everyday resistance that unites individual workers as a class because such resistance, even when performed by one person, requires at a bare minimum the tacit complicity of co-workers and preferably their active collaboration.These acts and the social relationships they create and depend on lay the groundwork for the broader and overt organizing against capitalism more commonly interpreted as working class struggle. Using this framework as offered by Van Meter, we can understand the working class as composed of the relationships forged among workers actively in resistance against capitalism.Without anti-capitalist struggle, the working class does not exist.

After laying this theoretical groundwork, the bulk of the book traces the various forms of resistance by slaves, peasants, and workers in the industrial and social factories (the expansion of capitalist logic from the factory into society at large, in particular in service, immaterial, and reproductive work), creating a lineage and legacy of working class resistance against the various formations of capitalism that spans centuries. “Viewing the working class broadly to include slaves and peasants as well as students, homemakers, immigrants, and factory and office workers reveals the breadth of struggle and generalized revolt against work that continues to be imposed” (128). In doing so, Van Meter further builds the framework of the working class as being formed through its self-activity against the demands and deprivations of capitalism.

The historical survey brings the discussion into the present, where Van Meter offers a proposal to address his initial hypothesis that the Left is carrying out its organizing work in an incorrect way. His suggestion is for the organizers of today and in the future to begin their work by “reading the struggles” already underway in the form of everyday resistance. Through investigation and documentation by organizers, new relationships may be fostered with guerillas of desire that allow everyday resistance to expand into larger and more overt forms of autonomous anti-capitalist struggle. He proposes that the seeds of the new, liberatory worlds sought by anarchism and Autonomist Marxism are to be found in the everyday resistances that are already occurring rather than in the latest organizing manual or official Left strategy document..

While impressed after reading through this formulation, I was left with lingering questions. It remained unclear how, for instance, everyday resistance morphed into more overt, organized resistance and the part organizers positioning themselves as readers of struggle played in such a development. The personal anecdotes he provided on stepping back from ideological assumptions and reorienting towards the collective experiences of communities during his work in Long Island were helpful. It brought to mind the story of Marxist-Leninist intellectuals heading off to the Chiapan jungle with grand plans of starting a peasant guerrilla force. Only when they arrived, they found the population had no time or interest in their grandiose ideology. It was only when they dropped their assumptions and worked within the community to understand its needs, concerns and own history of resistance that the Zapatistas emerged. That, however, is a rather specific and exceptional example. I feel Van Meter’s proposal to begin organizing from within everyday resistance based on the notion that it will lead to more overt resistance could benefit from further articulation and direction.

Similarly, the focus on work as existing solely within the capitalist sphere left me curious as to his vision of the place of non-leisure activity under capitalism or even after capitalism. The refusal of the work that maintains capitalism is indispensable. Yet I would not advocate the refusal of work that maintains communal and personal well-being or builds autonomous organization, or writes books reviews in spare time, for example. Certainly, Van Meter would not advocate that either, but it remains a matter necessitating clarification and one that I believe extends beyond an issue of semantics.

Despite those questions, Guerrillas of Desire is aspirational in its scope and contains ideas and proposals worthy of consideration by radicals reflecting on how to engage in the current moment. In a time when mobilizing and organizing around class has fallen off the radar of many, it is a welcome reminder of the importance of paying attention to the working class and the integral role working class struggle plays in resistance to capitalism, alongside the currently more prevalent resistances to capitalist white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, colonization, environmental destruction and more.

Van Meter assists in this advocacy by accessibly presenting an updated Autonomist Marxist perspective of the working class, expanding it, breathing life into, and imbuing it with its own power, separate from both capitalism and the official Left. As such, he allows readers who may toil in a variety of ways under capitalism to see themselves within the working class, conceptualize their activities as part of a broader resistance with a rich history, and inspire them to build on that legacy.

 

Scott Campbell is a radical writer and translator based in California. He is part of the collectives that publish the websites El Enemigo Común and It’s Going Down. His personal site is fallingintoincandescence.com

Guerrillas of Desire is available here!

 

Revolutionary Terror: Mark Steven’s ‘Splatter Capital’

By Michael Grasso

Source: We Are the Mutants

Splatter Capital: The Political Economy of Gore Films
By Mark Steven
Repeater Books, 2017

“Splatter confirms and redoubles our very worst fears. It reminds us of what capital is doing to all of us, all of the time—of how predators are consuming our life-substances; of how we are gravely vulnerable against the machinery of production and the matrices of exchange; and of how, as participants of an internecine conflict, our lives are always already precarious.”

—from the Introduction to Splatter Capital

Political readings or interpretations of horror films are nothing new. But in Mark Steven’s 2017 study, Splatter Capital, an explicit connection is made between the bloody gore of what Steven terms “splatter” horror films and the dehumanizing, mutilative forces of global capitalism. Moreover, Steven posits the artistic motivation behind splatter horror as an explicit repudiation of this system: “It is politically committed and its commitment tends toward the anti-capitalist left.” In splatter films, Steven tells us, the images of gory dismemberment do double duty. They both offer a clear metaphor for capitalism’s cruelty, and act as a cathartic revenge in which the bloody legacy of capitalist exploitation is often visited upon its perpetrators and profiteers among the bourgeoisie.

Some definitions are in order here, given that Steven’s schema of genres—“splatter,” “slasher,” “extreme horror”—draws distinctions that might not be apparent even to horror fans. Splatter horror, according to Steven, is all about the violence that can be visited upon the human body and all the abjection that follows. It is machinery tearing apart flesh, blood, and guts: the moment a human body becomes meat. It differs from the personalized and often sexualized “hunt” of the slasher flick. The protagonist in a slasher movie is an individual (often female) resisting violent death at the hands of another individual (often male). In victory against Jason, Freddy, or Michael Myers, this protagonist, in Steven’s words, “restores a social order, which is all too regularly white, middle-class, and suburban.” Splatter horror not only expands the horizons of mutilation and violence allowable in a horror film but systematizes it. The splatter enemy is an implacable, impersonal force, full of shock and awe; its grudge is not personal, but instead overwhelming, inescapable, and, most importantly, class-based.

The language of violence and horror has been with Marxist thought from the beginning. Steven gives us a good précis of Marx’s use of explicitly Gothic (along with bloody and cannibalistic) imagery throughout his works, as well as a splatter-tastic explanation of the exploitation behind surplus value, using an imaginary case study in the manufacturing of chainsaws and knives. The October Revolution in Russia is viewed as a reaction to the inhuman mechanized slaughter of the first World War; Eisenstein’s early filmic paeans to the necessity of revolution such as Strike (1925) demonstrate, thanks to Eisenstein’s pioneering use of montage, capitalism’s role as butcher. Steven also discusses avowed leftist filmmakers from outside the Soviet Union such as Godard, Makavejev, and Pasolini—specifically their use of gore to embody the cruelty of the ruling classes.

As we enter the world of Hollywood film in Chapter Three, Steven examines splatter film as a specifically American reaction to the constant churning crisis of capitalism. Specifically, Steven looks at the two peaks of gore-flecked horror—the mid ’60s through the early ’80s, and the post-Cold War “torture porn” trend of the early ’00s—as expressions of two very important economic and political shifts. The first splatter peak in the ’70s is seen as a clear reaction to the slow, inexorable widening of neoliberal and globalist postindustrial economics and its impact on the American industrial worker. (The aftermath of this trend continues into the 1980s with the evaporation of industry and the establishment of a new information-and-finance-based economy.) The splatter/torture porn trend of the ’00s and beyond is a reaction to the crises of capitalism under a new world order of neocolonialist conflict: the War on Terror, the final disestablishment of the Western industrial base in favor of cheap labor in the developing world, and the new interconnected, networked world’s rulership by speculative capital in the form of the finance sector.

Steven cites too many splatter movies to cover in this review, but central to his thesis is the seminal 1974 Tobe Hooper film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The death of local industry leads Leatherface and family to keep their slaughterhouse traditions alive by carving up and eating young people. These young people, Steven is quick to point out, are only here at all because they were unable to get gas for their car (thanks to the first of two 1970s oil crises). American decline is everywhere; betrayal by global economic forces are central to the trap that’s being laid by the cannibals. (Of course, the carnage of the Vietnam War can’t be overlooked here either, given the visual language of ambush, capture, and torture; Hooper himself has cited this in subsequent interviews.) Steven notes that the victims in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are representative of a bourgeoisie who don’t know how the sausage is made. It’s important and vital, Steven says, that the cannibalistic side of splatter involves the bourgeoisie being forced to eat members of their own class. It’s Burroughs’s famous “naked lunch“: “the frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork.”

As the neoliberal takeover of the world economy begins in earnest in the 1980s, as complex and largely ephemeral systems of mass media and finance take the place of the visceral, grinding monomania of industrial capitalism, splatter horror follows suit. Steven’s analysis of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) is especially sharp, examining the links between the body horror of the film and the Deleuzian body without organs. Max Renn’s body becomes an endlessly modular media node, able to accommodate video cassettes, to generate and fuse with phallic weapons (used to assassinate and destroy the media forces who’ve made him this way), to mesh and mold and mix with the hard plastic edges of media technology. By the end of the film, Renn is a weapon reprogrammed and re-trained on the very media-industrial complex that made him. More body horror: the cult classic Society (1989) and its shocking conclusion posits the ruling class as a cancerous monster, an amorphous leviathan straight out of a Gilded Age political cartoon, eating and fucking and vomiting, red in tooth and claw and pseudopod. Barriers between bodies break down; the system begins swallowing up all alternate possibilities.

By the time the Cold War is finished, the era of post-9/11 eternal war, of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, led to the popular new splatter sub-genre of “torture porn.” Steven identifies the genre’s distinguishing aesthetic feature: the indisputable, systematic, and worldwide victory of capitalism and the hypnotic Spectacle that accompanies it. In this era, there are no longer any alternatives. Everyone, rich and poor, is trapped in the system, and the system reintegrates torture into a worldwide video spectacle. This is embodied in both the global conspiracies of the wealthy in Roth’s Hostel series and in the Jigsaw Killer’s industrially-themed Rube Goldberg devices in the Saw franchise—devices of dismemberment explicitly linked to moral quandaries reminiscent of capitalism’s impossible everyday Hobson’s choices for the working class. The system will go on consuming you, whether you’re unlucky enough to be a splatter film’s victim, or “lucky” enough to wield the power to splatter (for example, Hostel: Part II‘s reversal of fate on the ultra-wealthy hunters, or the Jigsaw Killer’s death from cancer in Saw III—ultimately due to… a lack of health insurance).

Possibly the most intriguing aspect of this already very good book is Steven’s interspersing of personal anecdotes on when and where he discovered some of his favorite horror and genre films. By placing his personal and psychological experience of splatter films front and center, and linking it to his personal growth and increasing political maturity, he demonstrates the personal impact of the political, and the necessity of personal epiphany, mediated by culture, to achieve political awareness. Splatter Capital ultimately is not a book for the already-convinced and committed leftist, the Marxian thinker already well-versed in theory. (Another of Splatter Capital‘s very strong points is how Steven largely eschews jargon and obscurantism for an approachable tone and topic that laypeople can dive into easily.) It is for the fans of these films who’ve always wondered about the ineluctable appeal of visceral, shocking violence on screen, and perhaps why it all feels so strangely familiar.

Rest in Peace, Amiri Baraka

Photo: Gary Settle/The New York Times

Photo: Gary Settle/The New York Times

Yesterday Amiri Baraka, a longtime activist and one of the great American poets, passed away at age 79. The cause of his death, at Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey, was not immediately released, but he was hospitalized in the facility’s intensive care unit since Dec. 21 and had a long struggle with diabetes.

Reflecting the exploratory and always-evolving nature of his mind, Amiri’s career path connected him to the Greenwich Village Beat community, the Black Nationalists, the Black Arts Movement (which he founded in 1964), and Marxist-Leninists. Though his beliefs during different stages of life may have different labels, he was consistently committed to justice, unity, social change and the struggle against oppression. As a revolutionary organizer, cultural critic, poet, novelist, essayist, historian, playwright, publisher and orator, Amiri Baraka’s words and ideas have influenced and inspired untold numbers of people around the world. His works have also been the source of much controversy, outrage and condemnation, at least during the initial time of their release.

One of Baraka’s last great acts as a rabble-rouser was his recitation of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America” before 2,000 people at the September 2002 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival held in Stanhope, New Jersey. This was incredibly courageous because throughout the country (especially on the East Coast) just one year after the attacks, questioning the official 9/11 story was enough to make one viewed as a conspiracy theorist, an apologist for terrorists, possibly traitorous, and/or insensitive to victims and their families. To do so and implicate the Israeli government, as Amiri Baraka did in his poem, led to accusations of antisemitism from the Anti-Defamation League. Many at the time believed the accusations even though under closer scrutiny it was obviously untrue because in the poem he clearly condemns the murder of Jews in the Holocaust and the lines in question could more accurately be described as anti-Zionist.

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion?

This is in reference to the well-documented case of the five dancing Israelis arrested on 9/11.

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away?

The most well-known incidence of Israeli foreknowledge are probably the reports from employees of instant messaging service Odigo. Other cases are listed here: http://911review.org/Wget/www.cooperativeresearch.org/wot/sept11/911mossad.html

Amiri Baraka was appointed Poet Laureate of New Jersey just one month before delivering “Somebody Blew Up America” to the public. Despite pressure from the powers that be to resign immediately, he steadfastly refused. In his own words, from an October 2, 2002 post on his website: “I WILL NOT ‘APOLOGIZE’, I WILL NOT ‘RESIGN!'” Governor Jim McGreevey and state legislators discovered there was no legal way to remove Poet Laureate appointees so in an act revealing their fear, hatred and desperation, they abolished the post in July 2003. This is just one chapter of many from Baraka’s often history-making career, but it’s emblematic of his courage, integrity, dedication to truth, and stubborn stance against injustice. This isn’t to say he was a saint or superhero. None of us are without fault, but what we can learn from Amiri is that development of political thought and civic engagement can and should be lifelong processes, and one can remain true to oneself yet open to new ideas and experiences. Above all, his life is a reminder that simple words (especially when composed and unleashed with skill at the right place and time) contain immense power; sometimes enough to change the world.

Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Somebody Blew Up America

They say its some terrorist, some barbaric A Rab, in Afghanistan It wasn’t our American terrorists It wasn’t the Klan or the Skin heads Or the them that blows up nigger Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row It wasn’t Trent Lott Or David Duke or Giuliani Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn’t The gonorrhea in costume The white sheet diseases That have murdered black people Terrorized reason and sanity Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say?) Who do the saying Who is them paying Who tell the lies Who in disguise Who had the slaves Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations Who genocided Indians Tried to waste the Black nation

Who live on Wall Street The first plantation Who cut your nuts off Who rape your ma Who lynched your pa

Who got the tar, who got the feathers Who had the match, who set the fires Who killed and hired Who say they God & still be the Devil

Who the biggest only Who the most goodest Who do Jesus resemble

Who created everything Who the smartest Who the greatest Who the richest Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

Who define art Who define science

Who made the bombs Who made the guns

Who bought the slaves, who sold them

Who called you them names Who say Dahmer wasn’t insane

Who? Who? Who?

Who stole Puerto Rico Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan Australia & The Hebrides Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings Who got the money Who think you funny Who locked you up Who own the papers

Who owned the slave ship Who run the army

Who the fake president Who the ruler Who the banker

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the mine Who twist your mind Who got bread Who need peace Who you think need war

Who own the oil Who do no toil Who own the soil Who is not a nigger Who is so great ain’t nobody bigger

Who own this city

Who own the air Who own the water

Who own your crib Who rob and steal and cheat and murder and make lies the truth Who call you uncouth

Who live in the biggest house Who do the biggest crime Who go on vacation anytime

Who killed the most niggers Who killed the most Jews Who killed the most Italians Who killed the most Irish Who killed the most Africans Who killed the most Japanese Who killed the most Latinos

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the ocean

Who own the airplanes Who own the malls Who own television Who own radio

Who own what ain’t even known to be owned Who own the owners that ain’t the real owners

Who own the suburbs Who suck the cities Who make the laws

Who made Bush president Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying Who talk about democracy and be lying

Who the Beast in Revelations Who 666 Who know who decide Jesus get crucified

Who the Devil on the real side Who got rich from Armenian genocide

Who the biggest terrorist Who change the bible Who killed the most people Who do the most evil Who don’t worry about survival

Who have the colonies Who stole the most land Who rule the world Who say they good but only do evil Who the biggest executioner

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the oil Who want more oil Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie

Who? Who? Who?

Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan Who pay the CIA, Who knew the bomb was gonna blow Who know why the terrorists Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain’t goin’ nowhere

Who make the credit cards Who get the biggest tax cut Who walked out of the Conference Against Racism Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing? Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

Who invaded Grenada Who made money from apartheid Who keep the Irish a colony Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later

Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani, the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral, Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,

Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane, Betty Shabazz, Die, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo, Assata, Mumia, Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney, Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin’s head

Who put the Jews in ovens, and who helped them do it Who said “America First” and ok’d the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt Who murdered the Rosenbergs And all the good people iced, tortured, assassinated, vanished

Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,

Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo Who invented Aids Who put the germs In the Indians’ blankets Who thought up “The Trail of Tears”

Who blew up the Maine & started the Spanish American War Who got Sharon back in Power Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo, Chiang kai Chek

Who decided Affirmative Action had to go Reconstruction, The New Deal, The New Frontier, The Great Society,

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for Who doo doo come out the Colon’s mouth Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus Subsidere

Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop, Who poison Robeson, who try to put DuBois in Jail Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs, Garvey, The Scottsboro Boys, The Hollywood Ten

Who set the Reichstag Fire

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away?

Who? Who? Who?

Explosion of Owl the newspaper say The devil face cd be seen

Who make money from war Who make dough from fear and lies Who want the world like it is Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.

Who is the ruler of Hell? Who is the most powerful

Who you know ever Seen God?

But everybody seen The Devil

Like an Owl exploding In your life in your brain in your self Like an Owl who know the devil All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog

Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell Who and Who and WHO who who Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!

Copyright 2002. AMIRI BARAKA.