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Cop City Is Everywhere : Learning from the Movement to Defend the Forest

2025-03-14T02:48:22Z

The movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest was one of the most important social struggles of the Biden era. Its trajectory tells us a lot about the challenges we confront today under Donald Trump. In the final chapter of our chronology, we trace the movement’s concluding phase, beginning in 2023 and ending with Trump’s arrival in power, and explore what we can learn from it.

You can consult a timeline of events in the appendix.

In the wake of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020, politicians and profiteers in Atlanta set out to create a compound in which to train police to use militarized force to suppress protest activity. In response, a movement emerged to defend Weelaunee Forest, the forest slated for destruction to make way for the training facility known as Cop City. This movement picked up where the George Floyd rebellion left off, seeking to channel widespread anger against police violence into a campaign mobilizing a wide range of people and tactics against a concrete target.

Over the following three and a half years, this movement gave rise to one of the fiercest struggles of the Biden era. Opponents of Cop City repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction project. In response, the authorities killed one forest defender and distributed outlandish terrorism and racketeering charges charges at random. While the movement became so broadly popular that the government of Atlanta was forced to use a variety of strategies to prevent voters from participating in a referendum on Cop City, politicians across the political spectrum unified in favor of pouring a virtually unlimited quantity of public funds into the coffers of the police and their allies.

The arrival of the second Trump era has vindicated the decision to focus on resisting police militarization. Every repressive policy that Trump decrees will be imposed by police and other state mercenaries. The opposition that emerged in Atlanta sets the template for the social struggles that will play out under the second Trump administration. On one side, a political class unified in favor of repression unhampered by precedent or law; on the other side, a popular movement involving many different elements of the population using a wide array of tactics and strategies.

This makes the lessons of the fight to stop Cop City essential reading for all.

The movement to Stop Cop City was exemplary in several ways.

First, the movement began from the premise that victory might be within reach. Although they were taking on powerful adversaries, the participants in the movement did not take it for granted that they would lose. Rather than simply setting out to make a gesture, they began from the premise that it was possible to achieve a concrete change in society—or at least, that they had a responsibility to discover whether it was possible through ambitious action. They set concrete goals and experimented with a variety of strategies to achieve them.

Second, the participants did not water down their politics or tactics out of a misguided desire to appeal to a broad range of people. The George Floyd uprising, which began with the burning of a police precinct, demonstrated that boldness and a radical analysis can be at least as galvanizing as a timid approach calculated to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Finally, the participants set out to create a movement that was both popular and combative. Rather than accepting a role on the margins, they asserted direct action and the aim of abolishing the police as core to the movement. They made a point of articulating their intentions clearly and accessibly, making them known far and wide, with the goal of welcoming as many people as possible into a movement aiming to enact profound change.

If every movement began from these points of departure, it seems likely that many of them would succeed.

In the United States today, the wealthiest members of the ruling class control hundreds of billions of dollars apiece, while tens of millions of people struggle to put food on the table. The impossible task of imposing this state of affairs on an increasingly restless population is left to the police. Without police, politicians and executives would not be safe for an instant, as recent events have demonstrated.

In this context, it is not surprising that the authorities threw every resource at their disposal into imposing Cop City on Atlanta, freely shedding blood and violating their own laws in the process. In the Biden era, this sufficed to overcome resistance to the project, because a large part of the population remained aloof from the movement, retaining faith in democracy and the rule of law. As we enter the second Trump era, however—which is already characterized by the abandonment of all compromise and the erosion of whatever perceived legitimacy state institutions still possessed—no one will be able to stand aside from social struggles for long.

In view of this, the most important question is not whether the movement achieved its express goals, but how its legacy will equip people for the next round of struggles. At the minimum, it has helped to clarify the complicity of the entire political class in the violence of the police while setting important precedents for movement solidarity and diversity of tactics.

“From the border to Weelaunee and Palestine, we defend life.”

Already, the confrontations between those who seek to militarize the police and those who aspire to create a world without domination have spread from Atlanta all around the country.

In 2022, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources announced that the National Guard training center at Camp Grayling sought to take over an additional 162,000 acres of publicly-owned land, more than doubling the area under its control. Inspired by the example of the movement to Stop Cop City, protesters mobilized against this expansion. In the end, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources was compelled to reject the original request, instead offering 52,000 acres to the military via short-term use permits.

In the Bay Area, anarchists launched a movement to oppose a “Cop Campus” in San Pablo, California. In Charlotte, North Carolina, locals initiated a campaign targeting the construction of a local Cop City project. Even where resistance does not immediately emerge, building these facilities could prove difficult in a climate of widespread opposition: in East Somerville, South Carolina, developers scrapped their contract to build a new police training center in favor of building condos on the valuable real estate slated for development.

As the US government increasingly emulates carceral states like El Salvador, stopping these facilities may be among the principle responsibilities of revolutionary movements. But whether it is a question of opposing police militarization, standing up for housing and the environment, or preserving public health, the same dynamics that emerged in the fight over Cop City will come to characterize more and more social conflicts.

Cop City is everywhere. Our resistance must be, as well.

This is the concluding chapter of our chronology of the movement. You can read the earlier installments here:

“The City in the Forest,” chronicles the first year of the movement.
“The Forest in the City,” chronicles the second year of the movement.
“Beneath the Concrete, the Forest” collects first-person accounts from the occupation of Weelaunee forest through the first half of 2022.
“Balance Sheet,” explores and evaluates the strategies that different currents in the movement have employed.
“Living in an Earthquake” chronicles February through June of 2023, including the fifth week of action, the repression that followed, and the City Hall mobilizations.
“Don’t Stop: Continuing the Fight against Cop City” chronicles the movement’s fortunes through the second half of 2023, including the Block Cop City mobilization.

To Pick up Where We Left Off

In the previous chapter, we discussed the Block Cop City mobilization and some of its immediate consequences, including the burning of sixteen Ernst Concrete trucks that same night, which led to the company’s departure from the project.

In November 2023, mobilizing in response to the RICO charges against 61 people in late summer was a bold move. Only 500 people showed up, partly due to warnings from nonprofit staffers and activist groups—liberals and anarchists alike—about how “dangerous” the action would be. Despite this, no participants were arrested, a significant achievement for a movement that has often seen riot police tackle elderly picketers.

After Block Cop City, autonomous groups organized around two new efforts. One idea, a nationwide convergence outside Georgia, emerged during the sixth week of action, alongside the Block Cop City proposal. The other followed the anniversary of Tortuguita’s death.

The Day of the Forest Defender

On January 2, 2024, anonymous authors published a statement titled “The Day of the Forest Defender,” which circulated widely online and in print. The statement briefly described the January 18, 2023 killing of Tortuguita by Georgia State Patrol and proposed a permanent commemoration of that day through resistance. The authors drew parallels to global commemorations, including Black August (honoring George and Jonathan Jackson), The Day of the Young Combatant (March 29, remembering Rafael and Eduardo Vergara Toledo’s deaths fighting the Pinochet regime in Chile), November 17th (commemorating the 1973 Polytechnic University revolt in Greece), and December 6th (marking the 2008 police killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos and the subsequent insurrection in Greece).

The statement called for January 18 to be recognized as a day for actions, workshops, vigils, and other events honoring Tortuguita and all those who have died defending the Earth. It emphasized that movements in the United States must confront the repression targeting the Stop Cop City movement and respond with ongoing acts of resistance beyond just supporting those facing charges.

As the anniversary approached, it became clear the government sought to assassinate Tortuguita’s character, as Tortuguita had become a martyr for the movement. Attorney General John Fowler filed a cynical motion to include excerpts from Tort’s journal in the RICO discovery, claiming it contained evidence relevant to the case against other activists. Filing this motion made the private journal a public record, and right-wing commentators spread what they considered to be shocking quotations across the internet and television.

In the end, the court denied that motion, but the journal’s contents had already been digitized and published. The public saw notes from Food Not Bombs meetings, fragmentary thoughts, jokes, scattered remarks, abbreviated lists, dates, and drawings. Among these were instances of hyperbole, anti-police humor, and iconography, the kind of thoughts shared by millions of young people across the country. None of the leaked material scandalized the movement. We may never know how the television-viewing public perceived the coverage at that time, as many simply adopt the most recent perspective they hear. In any case, the news outlets and their audiences did not have the final word on the killing of a 26-year-old anarchist.

On January 16, two days before the Day of the Forest Defender, a feller-buncher was set on fire in Weelaunee Forest. This machinery was burned at the forest’s edge near Interstate 20, on a parcel of land owned by Shadowbox Studios. The online communiqué reaffirmed the movement’s commitment to this section of the forest and highlighted the continued vulnerability of the developers to sabotage, despite the $41,500-per-day security budget allocated by the Atlanta city government to protect the construction site. In acting early, the saboteurs presumably hoped to set the tone for the days to follow.

After the action, the government announced it had spent $20 million on security for the project, bringing the total cost to $110 million. This figure excluded the damages incurred by private contractors but included increases in insurance premiums.

On January 18, Day of the Forest Defender events drew a total of over 1000 participants across approximately fifty locations. Vigils, rallies, movie screenings, and marches took place in cities including Seattle, Portland, Corvallis, Boise, Arcata, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Pablo, Stanford, Sacramento, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Tucson, Lincoln, Denver, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Columbus, Akron, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Carbondale, Minneapolis, Lansing, Pontiac, Richmond, New Orleans, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Savannah, Tallahassee, Miami, Asheville, Chapel Hill, DC, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Binghamton, Bridgeport, New York, London, Berlin, and Atlanta. There was an event in Rojava, as well.

That night, anonymous groups carried out acts of vandalism and sabotage. In Atlanta, anarchists broke windows at two Nationwide Insurance subsidiaries. In San Francisco, activists smashed eighteen windows at the Police Credit Union. In Novi, Michigan, caltrops were placed at the driveway of MTU Solutions. Elsewhere, windows were etched with corrosive chemicals.

Anarchists overseas also conducted invite-only actions, reflecting global sympathy for the movement and its sacrifices. In Hanover, Germany, anarchists burned an Autobahn GmbH. In Amsterdam, saboteurs slashed the tires of UPS trucks, a Police Foundation funder. In northern England, activists raided a chicken farm and liberated the animals. The communiques for all of these actions referenced Tortuguita.

As tragedies pile up, movements for liberation must focus on rigorous, ongoing education. Without it, they will remain trapped in cycles of short-lived outrage, unable to build lasting movements, organizations, or projects. The Day of the Forest Defender could serve as an opportunity for education, clarifying important lessons for years to come. If it succeeds, future activists will be able to learn from our struggles and mistakes, just as the movement against Cop City draws inspiration from past struggles.

Day of the Forest Defender demonstration in Berkeley, California on January 18, 2024.

The Stakes Keep Going Up

The Day of the Forest Defender reinvigorated networks in Atlanta and beyond. On January 25, activists burned four machines owned by Brent Scarborough Company at a construction site on Boulevard Drive, near Custer Avenue.

Four days later, on January 29, activists rushed onto a Brasfield & Gorrie jobsite in Midtown (at 12th and Juniper) and locked themselves to construction equipment. Dozens of supporters gathered at ground level, halting construction for several hours. Two people were arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing. Could this method become a new approach for forest defenders fighting Cop City? It seemed to spark enthusiasm among a new layer of activists who were committed to resisting Cop City even after the clearing of the forest.

Before this approach could be tested further, events took a drastic turn with severe consequences for the movement—and perhaps for all movements in the near future.

Machines belonging to Brent Scarborough burned on Boulevard Drive. The company was repeatedly targeted for their contract with Brasfield & Gorrie to build Cop City.

February 8: Coordinated Raids Across Southeast Atlanta

At 6 am on February 8, hundreds of police officers, federal agents, and state patrolmen raided three houses simultaneously. This was not the first time they had worked together to raid a home. But it was the first time they had targeted multiple houses at once within context of the movement.

Two homes in Lakewood Heights were near recent acts of arson and sabotage targeting Brent Scarborough Company. The third, in Starlight Heights, was a few hundred feet from the Cop City construction site. The raids followed a joint investigation by the Atlanta Police, FBI, and ATF. The APEX Unit led the raid at one Lakewood home, the ATF at another, and the FBI at the Starlight Heights residence, with support from the Georgia State Patrol and Bureau of Investigations.

At the house raided by the APEX Unit, a helicopter hovered overhead as officers arrived in armored vehicles. Wearing balaclavas, brandishing long guns, and obscuring their name tags, they pounded on the door. One resident, hands raised, opened the door before it was broken, possibly avoiding gunfire. Another resident, topless, was dragged outside despite asking for a shirt. Masked plainclothes officers photographed detainees on their phones. Neighbors filmed and shouted at the officers. Inside, police overturned furniture, punched holes in walls, and ransacked the house. They seized t-shirts, laptops, a camera, and phones. One resident was detained for eight hours at police headquarters; agents photographed his tattoos but did not interrogate him before releasing him without charges.

APEX Unit of the Atlanta Police blocking a residential street in Lakewood Heights after conducting a raid on a single-family home.

At the house that the FBI raided, dozens of agents arrived and loudly announced themselves. Those inside were permitted to sit while agents searched through the shelves, cabinets, books, and cushions. The intruders seized some phones, but made no arrests. The agents combed through belongings with meticulous care, avoiding errors or oversights.

At the ATF raid, agents surrounded the house, shining flashlights and barking orders. They detained the residents of a backyard unit and broke down the front door of the main house, throwing flash-bang grenades inside. The agents abused residents and destroyed belongings, dragging one person down the porch stairs by their hair and staging intimate photographs in order to humiliate the residents. They arrested one person on charges of First-Degree Arson, later accusing them of involvement in the June 2023 attack on a police training facility in which eight police motorcycles were burned using time-delayed devices.

Unlike the 2023 raid on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, the targets of this massive operation were not public figures. They were not known to the media, did not face RICO charges, and could not easily express what connected their situation to the broader movement. Setting aside concerns about why the police decided to target these individuals, the movement’s ability to rally support was uncertain. When the police raided the Solidarity Fund, activists, journalists, and even politicians spoke out in their defense. Who would come to the aid of accused terrorists and arsonists?

“Bless Them”

Before the end of February 8, the movement responded boldly. The Stop Cop City Vote Coalition (the group organizing the referendum campaign), Emory Stop Cop City, and others called an emergency press conference at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters. As a result, the Police Foundation—which had been vandalized during the first Week of Action in 2021 and again after Tortuguita’s killing in 2023—sent all staff home early.

During the press conference, public figures associated with the movement spoke out, condemning the repression and asserting that it was not just an attack on the fight to stop Cop City, but an assault on everyone’s right to organize and resist social injustices. This would have sufficed to counter the media narrative that the police chief had attempted to craft with his self-assured, misguided statements earlier that day. But the organizers went further. When a journalist asked if the pro-referendum coalition condemned the burning of police motorcycles—the act the police cited as justification for the raids—a prominent local activist associated with the Movement for Black Lives answered:

“Hell no. No. Not at all. And if I’m being completely honest with you, Atlanta deserves even more than that. Real talk. They are lucky. This city is lucky. This country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all. But some of us cannot take that risk. But those who can? Bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows I’ll sit with my lighter and be like ‘damn.’ But the best thing I can do is use my voice, use my feet, use my heart, talk to my people, and organize. And I’ll put my body on the line and show up and do as much as I can. Because we need every, every means necessary to deal with the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care. No! And I would imagine my comrades would feel the same. No! We are not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every ‘proper democratic process.’ As one of the students says: ‘If we can’t get this in the courts, if we can’t get this in the council, then we are going to take it to the streets!’ Because our people, our children, my babies, are worth the risk.”

In the days following the raids, others worked to demonstrate that both the principle of solidarity and the spirit of resistance remained intact despite the intensifying repression.

Press conference, downtown Atlanta, February 8, 2024.

Trading Blows

In the early morning of February 10, anarchists in St. Paul set fire to two Home Depot trucks and the trailers carrying expensive lumber. A claim of responsibility posted online expressed support for the individual arrested in the raids and quoted the “March 5th Movement” communiqué accompanying the action that the arrestee was accused of participating in: “The time has come to destroy those who destroy the Earth.”

That same night, in Lakewood Heights—the location of two of the raids—a police cruiser was set on fire. The car was parked outside a cop’s home. An anonymous statement published online with the action read:

“We wish to dispel any notion that people will take this latest wave of repression lying down…We all have something to lose; it is simply a matter of living out our beliefs or submitting to the police state. Inaction is a choice just as much as action, and we all have to live with the choices we make.”

This act targeting a police officer at home, shortly after a major operation, sent authorities into a spiral they wouldn’t recover from for nearly six months.

By mid-morning on February 10, Lakewood Heights was effectively under occupation. Local, state, and federal agencies laid siege to the area. Police cruisers lined highway off-ramps, intersections, and major streets. An armored vehicle was stationed on Jonesboro Road, a key street in the neighborhood. A helicopter circled overhead for days. Unmarked cruisers sped through the area, parking outside the homes of suspected “militant anarchists” (in the words of Chief Shierbaum), tailing individuals, photographing them, pulling over motorists, and asking pointless questions. The GBI, FBI, and ATF canvassed door-to-door, dug through trash cans, and paraded K-9 units through the community.

Around 4 pm, dozens of police vehicles gathered at Kipp Vision Elementary on McWilliams Street, marking the southern border of the Lakewood neighborhood. They drove north several blocks, shut down roads, and established a perimeter around a single-family home. After kicking in the front and back doors and finding no one inside, they ransacked the place—flipping over chairs and tables, pulling posters off walls, and breaking furniture. Finding nothing of interest, they left as quickly as they had come.

Outside, Chief Shierbaum addressed the media. With nothing to show for the raid, he focused on the burned police cruiser, absurdly claiming that “someone could have died.” Though he admitted no one was home at the time, he claimed that police had targeted the house based on a “preliminary investigation” suggesting the arsonists might have returned there after setting the cruiser on fire. He ended his press conference ominously: “The person we were looking for knows who he is,” and that the police would like to speak with him.

In a courageous countermove, the resident of this home held his own press conference the next day. He asserted that he was targeted not for any crimes, but because of his support for the movement. He refused to yield to leading questions from journalists, who tried to imply he had prior knowledge of attacks on Cop City. Instead of denouncing the attacks, he maintained that it was the police who had created the dangerous conditions, not anarchists. At the end of the conference, he invited journalists into his home to show them the damage from the raid.

Had more community members responded this way, publicly asserting their unity and refusal to accept raids and harassment of activists, the following months might have played out differently.

Faith leaders denounce the repression of Cop City protesters.

From a Distance

If there had been no militant response to the raids, the government might well have carried out more raids and arrests, something they had explicitly stated was in the works. Politicians and police often fail to make good on their promises. Possibly, the authorities thought they would find evidence in the course of their raids that they did not find. Perhaps they expended too much political favor kicking in so many doors for so few arrests. Both could be true. The courage of the responses from the movement probably impacted the situation as well.

Movements that fail to respond swiftly to attacks often lose morale. It is a significant weakness only to be able to advance with the consent of one’s adversary. At the same time, movements should resist the temptation to get caught in high-risk grudge matches, boxing themselves in ever-shrinking fields of action that involve fewer and fewer participants. This applies to everyone, not just those who burn police cruisers.

In the weeks following the raids, the movement stalled. There was no systematic canvassing of the besieged area, nor were large demonstrations organized to denounce the raids. Local engagement was missing precisely when it was crucial. While many recognized the need to mobilize in such a way, many key figures in the movement were in retreat—intimidated by police drones, unmarked vans, or still out on bond from their felony RICO charges. To have been able to seize this missed opportunity, the movement would have required broader participation, more people prepared to take initiative, and greater support from the wider community. Perhaps this was a “chicken and egg” dilemma.

One advantage the movement had long held over the Atlanta Police Foundation was the ability to stage interventions outside of the forest, outside the city, outside the state of Georgia. Convergences allow movements to remain focused and precise, drawing together many of the movement’s most dedicated participants and supporters. Decentralized action makes the movement more agile, resilient, and capable of replenishing its ranks, since organizers can introduce new participants to the movement far from the epicenter of repression.

What if these two strengths could be combined, converging far from the center of surveillance and intimidation?

Nationwide Summit against Cop City

By the second week of February, police cruisers began parking outside the homes of more than a dozen Atlanta residents, day and night. According to local media reports and The Guardian, officers parked their cars, shined floodlights, and generally created an air of menace in Lakewood Heights and southeast Atlanta. Between mid-February and early September 2024, officers parked outside these homes up to ten times a day. This amounted to well over a thousand instances of overt surveillance against alleged participants in the movement and their neighbors.

Even before the February raids and subsequent harassment, opponents of Cop City began organizing a nationwide convergence in Tucson, Arizona. This marked the first large-scale attempt to mobilize forest defenders and anti-Cop City activists outside of Atlanta in the three years of resistance to the project. After the inconclusive events the previous November, this was a creative innovation worth pursuing. If the movement could catalyze participation on a larger scale by cultivating centers of participation further from the epicenter of repression, it might give itself a new lease on life and continue deploying both confrontational and participatory means.

On February 23, just weeks after the raids in Atlanta, hundreds of people converged in Tucson. They gathered at Mansfield Park, exchanging food, pamphlets, schedules, and embraces. For those who had participated in previous weeks of action in the Weelaunee Forest, this scene was familiar—though this time, without helicopters overhead.

In the late afternoon, 150 forest defenders marched from the park to a nearby lot that had been abandoned by developers and authorities; they transformed it into a temporary autonomous zone. Participants redecorated the lot with graffiti, tents, and folding tables. Workshops, presentations, and skill-shares drew several hundred more people over the next few days. For those who had traveled from afar, the warm Arizona night was likely a pleasant surprise.

That evening, away from the reclaimed plaza, an anonymous group smashed windows at three Nationwide Insurance locations. The weekend had officially begun. Around one hundred people slept beneath the Tucson sky.

Generations of Resistance

On Saturday, February 24, local residents and seasoned anarchists intermingled all day long in strategy sessions, workshops, and assemblies about the movement and the challenges it faced.

That afternoon, Ben Morea, of the legendary New York City anarchist groups Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), addressed 75 people in a corner of Mansfield Park, sharing the lessons he had learned as a lifelong rebel against all authority, domination, and closed-mindedness. Young participants asked him questions and received heartfelt responses.

The movement against Cop City and to defend Weelaunee Forest has benefitted from its continuous cross-pollination with autonomous and unruly youth subcultures. It has also benefitted from the participation of elders, movement veterans, and seniors who offer their own perspective and insights on the world, with the wisdom of many decades of hard-earned lessons and experiences.

That night, a few hundred people gathered at a nearby community arts space for a hardcore punk show organized within the context of the convergence. Anarchists distributed pamphlets and posters about the movement, while punk bands played fast and angry music into the late hours of the night.

In Santa Cruz, California, a Nationwide subsidiary was vandalized with spray paint, its locks glued shut.

New Ambitions, Old Templates

On Sunday, February 25, 80 people gathered in downtown Tucson, dressed in black clothing and masks. The crowd had apparently assembled on an invitation-only basis. They marched toward the Presidio Plaza, down Stone Street; some began smashing windows. The sound of hammers and stones colliding with glass rang through the night. Masked protesters smashed the plate glass windows at a Wells Fargo. Paint fumes drifted into the air, rising above the glimmering wreckage. PNC Bank shared the same fate.

A few police cruisers confronted the crowd. Hooded protesters responded, lobbing stones and fireworks, sending the officers into retreat. The crowd circled back to Presidio Plaza before dispersing. Pairs of protesters sprinted in different directions. Sirens wailed in the distance. Within minutes, the crowd vanished, just as police flooded the area. Three pedestrians were arrested and charged with felonies. Later, the charges were dropped.

PNC Bank on Stone Avenue redecorated by protesters.

This demonstration echoed the march on the APF headquarters in Atlanta during the first Week of Action, when the movement still lacked mass sympathy but possessed the element of surprise. It also recalled a specific type of protest undertaken by US anarchists between 2007 and 2011—small affinity group actions that exploited the element of surprise and mimicked the energy of a riot, albeit on a smaller scale. The most infamous example was the May 1, 2010 vandalism of a gentrifying shopping area in Asheville, North Carolina, followed by the arrests of eleven people, facing felony charges and bond amounts of $65,000 each.

Such demonstrations are risky. The crowds involved are often too small to effectively repel police incursions, leaving stragglers and passersby vulnerable to snatch squads. Moreover, these actions are often ignored or misrepresented by the media, and because they’re not destructive enough to warrant widespread attention, their broader political or social impact is negligible—at least, in terms of public perception. However, the February 25 demonstration was accompanied by a press release, which ensured extensive media coverage. Though the worst consequences were avoided, it appeared that this demonstration neither galvanized nor demoralized the movement. In that regard, its impact on the movement was more similar to Block Cop City than to the January 21, 2023 black bloc or the March 5, 2023 raid on Cop City.

One might wonder if the risk was worth it, given the lack of tangible results. If nothing else, considering the context, it was remarkable that so many people were willing to take part in such actions just weeks after the recent raids in Atlanta. Arguably, the virtues and courage that movement participants are able to embody for one another are more important than what they communicate to their adversaries. Perhaps the networks that enable these actions are more durable than those that rely solely on other tactics. In that case, it is the relationships and organization of those networks that gives them strength, not risk tolerance or bravado alone.

Windows broken at the Stone Avenue Wells Fargo during the “Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City” in Tucson, Arizona.

From Scottsdale to New York City

The next day, as media outlets published dramatic images of broken glass from the night before, dozens of protesters gathered at the Nationwide Insurance headquarters in Scottsdale, two hours from Tucson. Armed with poster-board signs and whistles, they faced off against hundreds of police officers. The office was closed, the entire area under heavy police surveillance. Law enforcement clearly expected a militant confrontation at the office building, but the office itself was tucked away in an office park far from the city center, easily policed. The few protesters who gathered there, undeterred, courageously faced down the absurd overreaction of the police.

Meanwhile, in Forest Hills, Arizona, six activists locked themselves into concrete-filled barrels blocking the entrance to a gated community housing a regional executive of Nationwide Insurance. With only a few journalists and medics for support, they successfully shut down access to the wealthy community for hours. During that time, they explained their actions to the neighbors of the Nationwide executive.

At the same time, in New York City, over two hundred people marched to AXA XL and Nationwide offices. AXA XL insures Brasfield & Gorrie, the contractor behind Cop City, while Nationwide insures the Atlanta Police Foundation. The crowd surged into the building, pushing past police and security. They flooded the atrium and stairwells, dropping banners from the second-floor balconies as their chants echoed through the halls. It was the largest demonstration against Cop City to take place outside Atlanta. The next day, several Nationwide offices in New York City were vandalized. The day after that, someone slashed the tires of ten NYPD cruisers in an expression of solidarity with the movement.

These actions in Arizona and New York illustrated the relationship between participatory and clandestine tactics, as the Weeks of Action in Atlanta often led to greater sabotage against those destroying the forest.

Scottsdale, Arizona, February 26, 2024.

Spring into Resistance

By March 2024, a new round of actions against Cop City were in full swing. The weekly picket at the construction site, established over the winter, continued to grow as temperatures rose. On March 5, the anniversary of the historic raid on the Cop City site, around 20 Black women gathered at Mayor Andre Dickens’ private residence at 6 a.m. They held banners, chanted slogans, and delivered speeches condemning the repression of the movement and demanding the city unblock the referendum process in order to permit residents to vote on the land-lease ordinance.

Two days later, on March 7, another activist locked down to construction equipment at a Brasfield & Gorrie worksite in Midtown. A crowd gathered outside with megaphones and banners, just as they had during the January lockdown at a nearby construction site. After several hours, the forest defender was removed by police and cited for misdemeanor “trespassing.”

At the same time, authorities continued extensive surveillance and harassment in Lakewood and southeast Atlanta.

On March 11, a crowd of Austin residents confronted Mayor Dickens while he was participating in a panel at the South by Southwest music event. As Dickens began his speech, protesters unfurled banners, hurled insults at him, and chanted “Viva, Viva, Tortuguita” while throwing fliers into the air. The event was ruined. In a desperate attempt to shield himself, Dickens called out, “Look at who is doing this,” cynically using identity politics to deflect from his responsibility for the harm occurring in Atlanta. The disruption continued, and Dickens was heckled all the way out of the building.

Three days later, on March 14, eight machines owned by Brent Scarborough were set ablaze in a suburb south of Atlanta. Anonymous saboteurs issued a statement online, highlighting the lack of coverage surrounding the attack. They argued that while actions in the city often prompted police statements and media coverage, news of attacks in the suburbs was generally suppressed. This may have been the most destructive act against Brent Scarborough yet.

What Goes Up…

As the movement regained its footing after the February raids, new activists flocked to meetings, fundraisers, and direct action trainings. This led to more daring actions. Two activists climbed a 250-foot crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie construction site in Midtown Atlanta. Unlike previous lockdowns, which involved small groups stalling work for a few hours, this action was riskier and posed a serious challenge to security. After several hours, police scaled the crane and used an angle grinder to capture the activists, who had locked their arms inside a steel pipe.

The courts reacted harshly, charging the two with “False Imprisonment,” a felony kidnapping charge. The police claimed the crane operator, on the ground, was “unable to leave” due to the activists suspended nearly 20 stories above him.

This absurd charge gave pause to many. If camping in a forest, passing out fliers, civil disobedience, breaking windows, and rioting were all punished with the same severity, what actions remained for those unwilling to risk imprisonment? What would it take to stop the construction?

A Stop Cop City protester locked down to Brasfield & Gorrie construction equipment in Midtown Atlanta in March 2024.

From Weelaunee to Gaza

At the same time, across the Atlantic, the Israeli invasion of Gaza continued. Graphic images and reports arrived daily showing the brutal toll on Palestinian civilians. Horrific footage recorded and broadcast by Palestinians depicted scenes of unimaginable violence. Soldiers decapitated children. Fighter jets vaporized hospital wards. Aid workers shoveled human remains into trash bags to turn them over to loved ones.

For six months, protesters in the United States blocked highways, disrupted speaking events, shut down ports. While often small, these actions were passionate and contributed to growing momentum. On April 15, coordinated highway blockades took place around the country. Two days later, a group at Columbia University in New York established a protest camp. When the administration brought the NYPD in to attack students and faculty, outrage spread across the country. By the third week of April, protesters had established or attempted to establish “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” at over a hundred campuses.

Atlanta was no different. On April 22, an anonymous group wheatpasted slogans around Emory University, linking the institution with Cop City and the Israeli occupation.

On April 25, dozens of protesters rushed onto Emory’s Quad at 7:30 am, erecting tents and banners that read “No Cop City,” “No Genocide,” and “Defend the Forest.” Protesters were able to assemble tents, but not much else. At 10:15, protesters attempted to march but were blocked by officers who fired pepper balls. Riot police used rubber bullets and batons. In the chaos, medics were tackled, journalists maced, and professors arrested.

“Divest from death—no Cop City, no genocide.” A banner raised at the Emory University Gaza Solidarity Encampment in April 2024.

While the police reasserted control of the Quad, students rushed from classrooms, eager to witness—and join—the unfolding conflict.

By 11:30 am, nearly 500 people had gathered around Emory’s Quad. A group surrounded the Atlanta Police cruisers holding detainees from the earlier chaos. The crowd chanted, “Every city is Cop City.” Tensions flared as the cruisers tried to leave and protesters rushed into the road to block their exit. Police fired pepper balls into the crowd and tackled another student. People poured out of nearby classrooms, pushing closer to the police lines while chanting, “Shame on you.” In the standoff, snatch squads arrested several more protesters. The crowd then swarmed to de-arrest them, hitting and shoving officers, successfully freeing at least one person. Some began throwing bottles. The cruisers left and the crowd marched toward Convocation Hall.

Students, community members, faculty, clergy, and activists then reconvened in the Quad. Supporters brought food to the protesters, who gathered in small groups to discuss their next steps. At least 28 people had been arrested and many others were injured. Though the police were absent, those assembled were uncertain how to proceed.

Word spread that students at the Candler Theology School had occupied the atrium and were calling for supporters to join them. Around 300 people headed to the school. By the time they arrived, police had blocked the doors to prevent an occupation. Masked protesters with reinforced banners pressed into the police lines, throwing bottles and signs in an attempt to break through. For the third time, police fired pepper balls at the crowd, sending many running or retreating from the building.

Despite the efforts of a few dozen who tried to push through, the larger crowd lacked the will to confront the police directly. Had they been more unified and prepared, they likely could have seized the building. Instead, exhausted and underprepared, the crowd—still several hundred strong—retreated to the Quad.

Around 9:15 pm, most protesters dispersed, anticipating the 11 pm campus curfew.

Between us and peace, a line of police officers. Clashes outside Emory Candler School of Theology.

No Confidence

The next day, 500 people reconvened in Emory’s Quad following an autonomous call to action circulated anonymously online. The flier outlined two demands: divest from Israel and the Atlanta Police Foundation, and drop all charges against those arrested in the previous day’s protests. As the crowd gathered, students and activists delivered impassioned speeches on a megaphone, connecting the fight against Cop City to broader issues like US imperialism in Palestine and systemic racism.

After an hour of speeches, the crowd marched toward Cox Hall. A few protesters forced open the doors and hundreds poured inside, chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Stop Cop City.” The atmosphere was upbeat but cautious—there was no immediate threat of arrest, but most participants quickly retreated to the Quad after the brief transgression.

Representatives from the “Open Expression” committee—the Orwellian name of the group that the university established to monitor protests under the guise of “protecting rights”—warned the crowd that if protesters set up camp or took over a building, the police would be called. They claimed that, because someone had painted “Escalate 4 Gaza” on a bathroom mirror, the entire event was at risk of forced dispersal. These mediators exerted significant influence over the movement; on April 26, they effectively neutralized momentum, discouraging further action.

As the hours passed, hundreds lingered in the Quad, blasting music and socializing, before dispersing by the 11 pm curfew.

Go Where They Go

Amid nationwide protests, on April 27, the Atlanta Police Department hosted a recruitment event in New York City. In August 2023, forest defenders had disrupted a similar event, blocking the doors and throwing buckets of shrimp into the convention center atrium. Protesters sought to disrupt this event as well. The evening before, someone poured fast-drying cement into the Marriott Hotel’s toilets, repeatedly flushing them to mix it with the water. This presumably caused extensive damage to the plumbing. Activists also covered the courtyard with posters of Tortuguita and graffiti denouncing Cop City. The next day, anonymous activists released 300 crickets into the building and pulled the fire alarm. The event was ruined once again.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Emory President Greg Fenves sent an email warning students and faculty about dangerous “outsiders” supposedly spreading violence and vandalism at protests. His rhetoric aimed to divide campus affiliates from the broader Atlanta community to better control dissent. When someone spray-painted the word “genocide” on a campus building, Fenves condemned it as “hateful.”

While the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published opinion pieces claiming that Palestine solidarity protests were at risk of being “co-opted” by activists seeking to stop Cop City, activists from Arcata, Los Angeles, New York City, Tucson, Richmond, and New Orleans drew explicit connections between the two struggles, emphasizing the link between US military operations and domestic policing.

Despite the attempts to undermine the protests, including the outrageous ruling from the internal conduct board that found protesters had “violated” the rights of Open Expressions the previous fall, public sentiment remained firmly opposed to the repression. Nearly all of the 28 arrestees from April 25 were Emory students, faculty, or alumni, undermining allegations about outside agitators.

On April 28, hundreds gathered again in the Quad. Faculty and students announced their intention to hold a “No Confidence” vote against President Fenves for summoning the Atlanta Police Department to arrest and abuse protesters. The vote resulted in a 75% supermajority against Fenves and the administration.

A Defend the Forest / Stop Cop City banner at the Gaza solidarity encampment at Emory. These are the alleged “outside agitators” described by President Greg Fenves.

Breaking and Exiting

Protests across the country escalated, with dramatic confrontations between protesters and police. Scenes of police beating and gassing students, alongside moments of protesters linking arms and overpowering police encirclement tactics, inspired many. On May Day, around 300 people gathered once again at Emory, carrying reinforced banners.

For the third time that week, protesters flooded into a building, this time filling the atrium of the Undergraduate Admission Bookstore. To hold the building, participants would have had to broadcast their intentions to stay; some people would have needed to barricade doors with tables, chairs, and other obstacles. However, the crowd lacked unity and tactical direction. Representatives from Open Expressions again informed protesters that they would call the police if the action continued. With no clear plan to withstand a police response, the crowd dispersed, leaving the building unoccupied.

The Gaza Solidarity protests at Emory University had ended for the time being.

A demonstration at Emory Undergraduate Admissions, spring 2024.

Protest at GILEE

Since April 2021, activists have focused on the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program at Georgia State University. The program facilitates exchanges between metro Atlanta officers and Israeli police, sharing tactics for controlling marginalized communities. Some argue that GILEE’s training of US police in Israeli military tactics may have inspired the concept of Cop City.

On May 4, around one hundred people gathered at Hurt Park near Georgia State University and marched to the GILEE office at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Upon arrival, protesters faced off with police at the front doors. Using reinforced banners as shields, they charged the police lines, hoping to enter the building. Police responded with batons and mace, but the protesters held their ground. After several minutes, recognizing that they couldn’t enter, and anticipating police reinforcements, they left together without arrests, showing the power of direct confrontation in the Gaza solidarity movement.

The next day, sixty protesters returned to Hurt Park. Surrounded by riot police, they held a meeting to discuss next steps before leaving without marching. Law enforcement, hoping for a confrontation, was left frustrated.

On May 6, Emory University moved its commencement ceremony off campus to Gwinnett County in hopes of avoiding disruption from Cop City/Gaza solidarity protests.

Yet as the semester ended, campus-based protests subsided nationwide. In Atlanta, eight months later, protests had not returned.

Protesters and police clash outside of GILEE headquarters in downtown Atlanta.

It’s Already Too Late

When movements lose the ability to innovate and set their own timelines, participants often convince themselves the pause is not politically risky. “Once the semester starts…,” they tell themselves. “After May Day…” or perhaps “After the election…” This mindset can signal a movement’s collapse. Patience and strategy are vital, but waiting on things to develop “organically” or on others’ timelines is generally a sign of stagnation. Bold action, audacity, and collective organization are essential to the pursuit of change.

As attention shifted from the forest to the city, the opportunities to take action expanded, in theory, even as the ability to take advantage of them contracted. The will to act had spread, but the vulnerabilities of the Cop City project were shrinking. Construction continued day and night, funded by contractors with deep personal and professional stakes in the Police Foundation. It began to appear that only a serious revolt could halt the project—if even that could. Across the country, mayors and local governments announced their own Cop City projects—in New York, Oakland, Nashville, Charlotte, and beyond.

In early June, autonomous groups within the Cop City and Gaza solidarity movements called for a joint action to disrupt the first Biden-Trump debate, which was scheduled to take place in Atlanta. The call encouraged people of all tendencies to act. If unrest could unfold outside electoral events, as it had in Costa Mesa, Albuquerque, and elsewhere in 2016, the fight against Cop City might expand its purchase upon the public imagination. Failing to do would mean consigning millions to passivity and spectatorship as the US power structure sought to monopolize their attention, narrowing the spectrum of political possibility to two elderly candidates who both sought to increase police funding and continue sending billions to Israel to fund the genocide in Gaza.

But catalyzing confrontations at a national security event was a tall order.

Rising Tension

The weeks leading up to the Presidential debate were eventful. Police harassment in Lakewood reached new heights. On May 29, The Guardian reported officers shining lights into residents’ homes, running sirens at random. In one instance, someone placed a lit traffic flare in a bush outside an activists’ home, sparking a fire.

Around this time, cameras appeared on the streetlights outside the houses that APEX and the ATF had raided. The camera outside the former was concealed in a metal box with black duct tape, peering through a tinted window at the home’s entrance. The box containing the other camera wasn’t covered in black duct tape, but simply labeled “High Voltage.” It resembled the devices placed outside the homes of several Memphis Black Lives Matter activists in 2018.

At the end of May, several water mains burst in Atlanta, cutting water access to large parts of the city, especially Black neighborhoods south of I-20 and west of the I-75/85 connector. The morning that the system failed, Mayor Dickens flew to Nashville for a fundraiser with wealthy elites and lobbyists. For nearly a week, tens of thousands of residents had only brown or murky water, and some in the southeastern parts of the city had no water whatsoever. On social media, many linked the water crisis to funding for Cop City.

As the geopolitical influence of the United States wanes and climate disasters worsen, such breakdowns will likely become more common. Unless we reclaim our resources from warmongers and police, social chaos will merge with catastrophe. It’s easy to anticipate the consequences, as desperate people are already experiencing the equivalent in many parts of the world.

New fronts of repression were opening further afield. In Charleston, South Carolina, federal agents surrounded a sedan on the interstate and forced it to pull over. The driver, a 20-year-old anarchist, was served with a subpoena for a federal grand jury investigation into the December 31, 2023, arrest of a person accused of painting anti-Cop City slogans on multiple Thomas Concrete trucks and setting them on fire.

On June 25, the legal team representing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in the RICO case targeting the movement filed a motion in court. It revealed that local and federal law enforcement had mishandled confidential client-attorney communications, primarily emails. These were supposed to be processed by a third-party “filter team” to protect the rights of the accused, a process the defense had warned the prosecution about three times. As the trial approaches—dates still pending—more such violations are expected, as the charges against the movement are largely political rather than legal.

A camera on a light pole outside of a home raided by Georgia police. The metal box is covered in duct tape to obscure its similarity to a similar device installed on the same day at another house a few blocks away. The camera inside the plastic window is difficult to see with the naked eye, but can be seen clearly in this photograph.

The Presidential Debate

On June 27, several activists locked themselves to the entrance of Hudson Technologies in Smyrna, an Atlanta suburb within the I-285 perimeter highway. Hudson Technologies works with the Israeli Defense Forces; the activists were drawing attention to its role in the violence in Gaza. They also emphasized the right of Atlanta residents to participate in the popular referendum against Cop City. This was the third time that anti-war protesters had targeted Hudson. Earlier, on February 14, activists had glued the locks and spray-painted the building. On June 3, all the windows were broken in retaliation for the US-backed Israeli invasion of Rafah, a Gaza Strip area designated a “safe zone” for refugees.

Later that afternoon, protesters gathered in west Midtown, between Spring Street, the 17th Street bridge, Northside Drive, and south toward Home Park and Georgia Tech University. Advocates for affirmative action and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs stood on the 17th Street bridge. Nearly a hundred protesters, most of them Black, were surrounded by police separating them from a pro-Trump rally just fifty feet away. At the Israeli consulate on Spring Street, around a hundred socialists and anti-war activists gathered at 5 pm, chanting slogans and listening to speeches. Another demonstration was assembling in a small park in Home Park.

This group stood apart from the others. On Hemphill, 10th Street, and surrounding streets, helmeted police squads stood watch with bicycles in hand, their heads swiveling. Undercover vehicles crept down side streets, likely carrying federal agents. Atlanta Police vehicles and motorcycles blocked roads and shone their lights on sidewalks and intersections. Meanwhile, ninety people in black hoodies, face masks, keffiyehs, and helmets assembled near 10th and State in a green space. The sound system nearly drowned out the noise of helicopters overhead. As the sun began to set, many waited for others to arrive to begin the march. In the end, no one else came.

A few speakers delivered fiery speeches, grounding the crowd in the gravity of the moment and the need for militant action. Forty cops stood watch on the adjacent street, many just out of sight.

What could be done? With over a hundred people facing charges—61 of them under RICO—it’s easy to see why the crowd was small. Without the prospect of confronting a Cop City contractor, it was hard to grasp the stakes of the event, especially for those still focused on direct action rather than mass disorder. One could blame other groups for scheduling “competing” events at the same time, but would two hundred people have done what the boldest one hundred could not? Would one hundred people taking confrontational action elsewhere provide a real boost to resistance against the electoral farce or against Cop City? Probably not—unless they had breached the fortified construction site. The movement, like society at large, was being squeezed by immense forces it had yet to take the measure of.

After some deliberation, many of the brave individuals present determined that the demonstration they had hoped for was not feasible. They made the decision to march out of the park together and disperse. Following a brief standoff with police, the crowd managed to leave the controlled zone and exit the area without any arrests.

Perhaps unknowingly, the participants had arrived at the end of a movement trajectory.

At that very moment, as the debate reached living rooms around the country, everyone could see that by permitting the bureaucracy behind Joe Biden to maintain its ossified grip on power and siding with the forces of repression at every step, the Democrats had ceded the 2024 election to Trump and the future of America to a new breed of autocracy:

Suddenly, in the midst of Biden’s debate with Trump on June 27, it became inescapably obvious that their pragmatism was about to lose them the 2024 election, their only alibi for all the atrocities they had endorsed up to that point.

A new cycle was opening, even darker than the Biden era. The fight against Cop City had represented the best hope to continue the social movements of the first Trump era and the best chance to address the challenges they had confronted. The struggle reached an impasse at the same moment that the contours of the second Trump era came into focus:

“Every time we lose a battle, we are forced to fight it once more, but on worse terms.”

How Was the Movement Undermined?

As of March 2025, it appears that the movement to defend Weelaunee Forest and stop Cop City has been effectively neutralized. The pace of actions has stalled, and the kind of qualitative interventions that might spark new forms of resistance or mobilize additional communities have come to a halt. The petition for a referendum against the land lease remains mired in legal battles. Much of the forest has already been destroyed. Key support structures, including the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, are entangled in high-stakes litigation. Long-term participants have faced harassment, intimidation, and collective punishment. Direct action to isolate Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractors from the Atlanta Police Foundation no longer appears feasible.

Unless something unexpected were to happen to the heavily fortified facility itself, which is now nearing completion, the only remaining hope for the movement would be a mass uprising capable of shifting the balance of power from the police to the population at large. But there is currently no sign of such an uprising on the horizon.

How Did We Get Here?

In analyzing the repression of the movement, we must be careful not to attribute more insight, strategy, or strength to our adversaries than they actually possess. At the same time, we owe it to ourselves and to those who will come after us to honestly assess the limits and challenges the movement faced so that future movements can anticipate similar obstacles and overcome them.

This process can feel like studying a volcanic eruption: those with the clearest view risk perishing in the flames.

Isolation

From its inception in April 2021 until the murder of Tortuguita in January 2023, the movement remained remarkably small. While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the movement’s size, we can say that during this early period, all public marches, rallies, and demonstrations drew fewer than 175 participants. Concerts, raves, and other social events occasionally drew up to five hundred people to the forest, including a generator party along the banks of Intrenchment Creek during the first week of action in late summer 2021. At any given time, only a few dozen people maintained the encampments in the forest.

Why is this? The United States had just emerged from the most powerful social movement in living memory, involving millions of people protesting against police violence.

Non-participants are notoriously difficult to understand. Analyzing the Stop Cop City movement, it is hard to attribute its shortcomings to a lack of outreach, media coverage, or information sharing. For years, anarchists, abolitionists, and radicals implemented a comprehensive media strategy—conducting interviews, drafting press releases, and writing articles for a range of outlets from anonymous anarchist blogs to international media platforms. Organizers also directly contacted hundreds of thousands of people through face-to-face canvassing.

The anarchists at the core of the movement were aware of the risks involved in conducting a militant but isolated campaign. Significant strategizing went into addressing this challenge from the earliest weeks. Within the direct action wing of the movement, countless hours were devoted to developing frameworks that were both confrontational and accessible to those new to radical politics. The theory of escalation that the organizers shared held that only a mass uprising could pose a serious challenge to the police; the direct action campaign was intended to ignite this.

Why, in the wake of the 2020 revolt, did so many fail to rally to the struggle against a new police facility? How could so few engage in the fight to save a vital urban greenspace during an era of cataclysmic environmental collapse? This is difficult to grasp. But perhaps those aren’t the right questions. Maybe it’s not just a matter of awareness or political consistency.

Urban Sprawl

As of 2023, Atlanta’s population stands at just 520,000. Adding in the populations of its largest suburbs—DeKalb, Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett—the total rises to about 3.3 million, spread across 1300 square miles. That’s roughly 2500 people per square mile. The broader “Metropolitan Atlanta Area,” with its six million residents across 39 counties, spans a vast, mostly semi-rural expanse in a deeply conservative state. Most of these people live an hour or more from the city’s core. During rush hour (roughly 3 to 8 pm), some areas are nearly three hours away from the city limits. Consequently, we can’t realistically count all these millions as potential participants in a movement centered in Atlanta.

To grasp the functional population distribution of Atlanta’s “inner metro” area, it’s useful to compare it to cities like Tampa (2300 people per square mile), Indianapolis (2400), and Charlotte (3000). These cities are more similar in terms of urban density. When considering outreach programs, local participation in protest movements, and attendance at rallies, marches, or encampments, the most important factor is the will and enthusiasm of the public. That will is shaped by several factors including the difficulty of getting around, the city’s notorious traffic, its underdeveloped public transit, and the sprawling neighborhoods that keep people isolated within their specific quadrant of the city or the surrounding suburbs.

Consider the 2020 George Floyd protests. At their peak in late May and early June, only two or three protests drew more than five thousand people. Most barely exceeded one thousand. When residents clashed with police and burned down the Wendy’s on University Avenue after Rayshard Brooks was murdered that summer, the crowd likely did not exceed six or seven hundred. This is important when we consider the prospects for a mass protest movement in Atlanta and whether it could be driven by local residents. The same is true for many other cities across the United States, as most are not significantly denser than Atlanta.

“Spatial De-Concentration”

These conditions are neither neutral nor accidental. Atlanta was once a far denser city. In the early 20th century, streetcars carried workers and visitors through neighborhoods filled with brick townhomes, corner stores, and thriving industry. The first challenges to this dense, “walkable” urban core emerged in the 1920s and ’30s, when General Motors began dismantling streetcar lines and promoting cheap automobiles. However, after the summer of 1967, a year marked by open confrontations between Black youth and police across the US, the federal government took a special interest in this process. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, convened by the FBI, examined the causes and protagonists behind over three hundred rebellions against police across the country, especially in Newark and Detroit. At the end of their report, they recommended a drastic restructuring of cities, emphasizing “spatial deconcentration”—the deliberate dispersal of urban populations, particularly the Black working class.

In the 1970s and ’80s, this concept became a government mandate. The federal government poured billions of dollars into infrastructure, promoting the construction of interstate highways that cut through the heart of Black communities in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration’s deregulatory policies gave a massive boost to the automobile and construction industries, enabling them to widen roads and expand freeways, while also outsourcing production overseas to regions with lower wages. These highways were not built in vacant lots—they ran straight through low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods, shattering communities and displacing families.

Black communities were gutted. Industry and jobs moved to the suburbs (or overseas), and white flight followed, leaving Black workers behind. As factories relocated and middle-class white families moved to the outskirts, the policy of “last hired, first fired” ensured that Black workers, already facing systemic discrimination, were the first to lose their jobs.

This was not simply poor urban planning. It was a deliberate reorganization of cities intended to decimate the urban core and reshape the economic landscape. The scars of that era continue to mark cities across America today.

The decision to build a movement that could draw in activists from outside Atlanta—indeed, from outside Georgia—was surely made with these considerations in mind, and for good reason. Still, the participation of out-of-towners was neither consistent nor decisive enough to halt the project. Local participants lacked the tactical leverage they needed; without the resources of national support, they were at a disadvantage. The authorities could concentrate local, state, and federal forces against the movement; only outside support could even the odds.

The government understood this. That’s why Allison Clark of the Community Stakeholders Advisory Committee, Michael Julian Bond of the Atlanta City Council, Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, Mayor Andre Dickens, and countless other proponents of Cop City sought to normalize a simple, devastating, repressive formula, encapsulated in one of their oft-repeated mantras:

“Traveling out of state to protest is a form of domestic terrorism.”

I-85, I-75, and I-20 all pass through the heart of downtown Atlanta, segregating the city into four quadrants.

The Spiral of Repression

As repression intensified, the movement lost its flexibility and capacity for innovation. After the City Council approved the project in fall 2021, one faction of the movement adopted a simple framework: defend the forest, pressure contractors to withdraw, and evade or repel police operations. But as police violence escalated and prosecutors leveled increasingly outrageous charges, the once vibrant and audacious movement faltered. It struggled to match the force of the state, especially after the killing of Tortuguita.

This was also evident in the difficulty of planning the next steps. There was no unifying strategy capable of addressing both the intensifying attacks of the state and the passive spectatorship of the wider public. The principle of “decentralization” did not suffice to resolve this problem.

Thousands considered themselves to be on the movement’s “front lines.” Between the first and fifth weeks of action, this perception was an asset, regardless of whether it was accurate. During those early months, generating widespread sympathy and engagement was a key priority. Organizing cultural events, mushroom walks, bike rides, and similar activities in the forest or across town played an important role in maintaining visibility and involvement.

After the police lost control of the forest following the July 2022 burning of Boyette Brothers equipment and the music festival during the Fourth Week of Action, the balance of forces shifted definitively in favor of the movement. For a brief period, it seemed theoretically possible that the movement could pursue more conventional tactics, such as mobilizing hundreds for a direct assault on the site—which at that time was still little more than a police staging area—or launching a mass encampment at the Prison Farm. However, what was theoretically viable was not always politically realistic. Who would have carried out such a raid at that time? How would they have been organized? Here, we see how tactical questions are always political questions.

Some well-intentioned commentators—many of them participants in the movement—have suggested that the movement contracted after Tortuguita was killed on January 18, 2023. On closer examination, this is simply not true. The movement grew significantly after Tortuguita’s death. The number of participants increased; the frequency, scale, and intensity of actions increased. These grew even more after the March 5, 2023 raid on the Cop City construction site. It is true that they did not increase enough to counterbalance the extent to which the state was concentrating force against the movement. It is also true that the tactics that had made the movement feel powerful for a small dedicated core became impossible after Tortuguita was killed. But the movement should not be reducible to the tactics of any specific group or tendency. Therefore, it cannot be argued categorically that the potential of or participation in the movement receded after the killing. The movement arguably reached its peak of participation in the summer of 2023, during the City Hall mobilizations. The period of lowest participation was actually in fall of 2022.

With this context in mind, we can see that the domestic terrorism arrests and the killing of Tortuguita were, in part, a consequence of low participation, not a cause of it. Tragically, fall 2022 was the moment when the movement had gained the greatest leverage against Cop City, as it had created a stalemate between forest defenders and police. To break that stalemate, city officials and law enforcement began spreading lies about protesters, labeling them “terrorists” and falsely claiming they had fired guns at contractors. In this way, they gradually built the political will to employ deadly force against the movement, as well as persuading state and federal authorities to get involved.

Some participants recognized this danger at the time. To maximize the leverage that the movement had gained against Cop City, many people concluded that they needed to expand the struggle as rapidly as possible. Their goal was to involve a large number of people in viable tactics that had the potential to halt the project. For some, this meant organizing community meals and concerts in the forest. Others focused on building infrastructure, such as cabins and warming stations, to encourage mass participation. These “place-makers,” if you will, organized around the idea of making the forest a place where people would want to spend time.

One of the structures built by the movement in Weelaunee People’s Park, also known as Intrenchment Creek Park.

The grassroots left had largely abandoned the movement, leaving it to anarchists to organize against Cop City. Punks, ravers, and artists contributed what they could, but their involvement was mostly peripheral. Some activists worked tirelessly to draw these communities deeper into the struggle, seeing them as potential key players who could fill in where the traditional left had fallen short.

Organizers of the weeks of action sought to mitigate the participation problem by drawing in large numbers of people for short periods of time.

By fall 2022, the actions that were needed were far beyond what the available forces could mobilize. While city officials and law enforcement sought to prepare the ground for lethal violence, the only ways for the movement to break the stalemate in its own favor would have been to mobilize massive numbers of people or deal a series of blows so devastating that they eroded the political will of those behind the project.

Yet only a handful of people were still circulating through the forest, mostly in the context of parties, plays, or concerts. Even fewer were focused on leveraging force against Cop City outside of the forest through demonstrations, blockades, or occupations. Those committed to direct action were not able to compensate for the absence of large numbers of people, as their tactics remained largely confined to hit-and-run acts of destruction, presumably necessitated by their own small numbers.

Those who lived in the forest faced difficult challenges. At times, some individuals behaved in ways that made it more difficult to solve problems, reconcile differences, and pursue shared goals. This also contributed to the isolation of the encampments.

The efforts of those involved in direct action outside the forest, those working on “place-making” efforts within the woods, and those curating cultural experiences that connected the forest with surrounding communities all plateaued.

Instead, as the pressure increased, the movement’s capacity for creative, sustained resistance dwindled. Early on, abolitionists argued that some environmentalists were less concerned with the police than with protecting “nature.” This tension was compounded by the fact that some of those temporarily living in the forest framed their interests as opposed to others, claiming parts of the forest as their “homes” and suggesting that weeks of actions, fundraisers, or protests were violating their personal space. In turn, some anarchists criticized others for lacking a sufficiently militant vision, accusing them of pushing for mere policy changes. Meanwhile, many working groups within the movement failed to prioritize the forest’s physical integrity, not realizing that once the trees were gone, it would be considerably more difficult to resist the construction of Cop City.

In the end, not enough participants pushed beyond their comfort zones. When their preferred tactics became too difficult, many stopped participating entirely, regardless of their stated objectives.

What If?

How could this story have turned out differently?¹

Let’s return to summer 2022, when the movement showed that it was too powerful for the local authorities to control. What if, at that moment, people around the country had organized a massive outreach campaign calling people to converge on Atlanta for a range of broadly confrontational and participatory actions?

All of this did in fact occur a full year later, in fall 2023, when several speaking tours crisscrossed the United States promoting the Block Cop City mobilization² and hundreds of people gathered in Atlanta for a weekend of action. Perhaps if something similar had taken place in 2022—when the movement was up and coming rather than embattled, when the state had not yet used spurious charges of terrorism and racketeering to intimidate potential participants, when supporters were not yet busy trying to respond to the genocide in Gaza—it might have drawn much larger numbers, which might in turn have made it more difficult for the government to regain the initiative.

For that to have taken place at the end of summer 2022, however, a critical mass of people outside of Atlanta would have had to realize how pivotal the movement was and immediately invest energy in organizing to support it. They would have needed to recognize—long before the police murdered anyone or charged anyone with terrorism—that the movement’s apparent success introduced new perils. Had they succeeded in bringing new forces to bear against Cop City, this would likely have contributed to tensions with established local organizers in Atlanta and with those who were already occupying the forest. They would have needed to accept those tensions as necessary growing pains.

The outcome of the struggle over Cop City has had profound implications for movements around the United States and, consequently, for people all around the world. If nothing else, we can learn the importance of recognizing the stakes of a fight while there is still time.

Infighting

Every movement that undergoes severe repression experiences internal conflict, and the movement to stop Cop City was no exception. As has been said before, the function of repression is not simply to strike the immediate targets, but to send shockwaves through a movement in a way that opens up fault lines.

The movement endured three years of intense struggle, in part, by adhering to one fundamental principle: members refrained from publicly denouncing each other. Disagreements or critiques were handled internally whenever possible. Groups that could not reconcile their differences simply avoided each other. Saboteurs, tree-sitters, rioters, and others took action against Cop City, secure in the knowledge that they would not be labeled “crazy” on prime-time news—at least, not by other activists. Canvassers, community organizers, fundraisers, and event coordinators could rest assured that, for the most part, social media would not be flooded with rage-fueled rants denouncing their strategies as hopeless or naïve.

Anonymous internet users violated this principle repeatedly. Each time, it threw the radical segments of the movement into temporary disarray. Coinciding with moments of intense repression, spiteful statements and semi-coherent allegations flooded the internet, contributing to an atmosphere of fear and tension. This underscores the need for well-delivered, constructive criticism—whether in public venues or private face-to-face exchanges.

From the earliest days of the movement, some grassroots organizers sought to smear it. Through whisper campaigns, gossip, and private conversations, they tried to prevent it from gaining momentum. They labeled it “all white,” or claimed that organizers hadn’t “consulted the community” before launching actions, echoing the “outside agitators” narrative pushed by the police chief and Mayor Dickens. On a podcast, one person shamelessly declared the movement “more disappointing than Cop City itself”—a pro-repression stance thinly disguised as progressive politics.

Until the struggle became too large to ignore, some local activists derided it. On Signal groups, they sowed doubt, division, and paranoia—particularly targeting out-of-towners and newcomers—while technically adhering to the movement’s commitment to discretion. As large non-profit organizations began to support the movement, some activists discouraged them from allocating resources to the participants who were taking significant risks.

Ironically, many of those who attempted to undermine the movement also sought to benefit from its momentum. NGO staffers and careerists continue to cash in, earning accolades and grants on behalf of a movement for which they risked very little. Meanwhile, many of those facing felony charges and living under surveillance continue to struggle below the federal poverty line.

Critique is essential. Aspiring revolutionaries should actively seek critical input, as the cost of error can be extremely high. Criticism helps refine strategies and fosters humility in the face of immense obstacles and uncertainty. Anyone serious about dismantling the carceral state, overthrowing capitalism, and transforming the world must first admit that they don’t know everything and that it will be necessary to refine their theories and strategies on an ongoing basis.

Unfortunately, petty and self-serving forms of criticism remain all too common. Real critique uplifts, educates, and transforms the participants. When people engage in denunciatory attacks and gossip, this can obscure the true cost of political errors, burying self-reflection under an avalanche of invective and rumor. This fosters defensiveness, stubbornness, ego trips, and factionalism, ultimately leading to the propagation of dogmas that remain untested. This isn’t just a problem for collectives, crews, and organizing groups—it can stunt entire movements. It’s a challenge that all humanity has a stake in overcoming.

Moving Ahead in a Cop Nation

Those who have fought to oppose the construction of Cop City in Weelaunee Forest were correct to identify the project as marking the dawn of a new era of police militarization in the United States. Local authorities plan to build at least eighty additional police training facilities across the United States; every state except for Wyoming is planning at least one.

Despite courageous efforts, they did not manage to save the forest from destruction or prevent the completion of the project. Only two options remain for closing down Cop City: pressuring policymakers to defund it after it opens or directly destroying the site. Only a mass revolt or carefully planned acts of sabotage unlike any that have occurred thus far could achieve either of those outcomes. During the movement, thousands repeatedly chanted, “If you build it, we will burn it.” It remains to be seen whether they were serious or bluffing.

The police are a central pillar of the state. Appearances aside, the government is not primarily composed of bureaucracies, libraries, clinics, or universities. At its core, it is made up of armies, borders, prisons, and police.³ Societies embroiled in destabilizing conflicts often see social services, welfare, and even parliamentary systems collapse, but the repressive functions of the state never collapse on their own—they can only be dismantled by powerful revolutionary movements.

The power of the police will not simply fade away. Those who rule depend upon it; it is essential to preserving the inequalities that are the foundation of their authority. All evidence indicates that the power of the police will continue to expand until the social order that requires it is destroyed. If that occurs, it will not simply be the consequence of a change in public opinion; it will involve real people taking real actions against real infrastructure. Because the concentration of armed force is inevitable in all unequal societies, doing away with the police will require abolishing artificial scarcity and war between classes, castes, and nations.

We did not fight to stop Cop City because we believed that all it would take to reform capitalism and the state would be a few concerts and a little vandalism. We fought because we hoped that this particular fight could clarify the stakes of the struggle that is taking place at this critical juncture in history, drawing more people into action and deepening our joint effort to change the world.

And that is something we still believe in.

Timeline: December 2023 to January 2025

December 27: A Chase Bank in NYC is vandalized with “Stop Cop City” and “Free Gaza” painted on its veneer and its doors locked. A demonstration takes place outside the home of Jonna Hamilton, the senior legal counsel of Nationwide Insurance, which provides coverage for the Atlanta Police Foundation.
December 31: Charleston Police and FBI arrest a 21-year-old in Charleston, South Carolina. Police allege the accused is responsible for burning two trucks belonging to Thomas Concrete, and for painting “You build it, we burn it” on the trucks, as well as slogans about Weelaunee Forest.
January 1: A car is burned outside of Portland City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez’s house. The action is dedicated to fallen revolutionaries, including Tortuguita, as well as two unhoused people in Portland who died as a consequence of police enforcement tactics advocated by Gonzalez.
January 2: A proposal appears online inviting people to conduct solidarity actions and events on January 18, the day of Tortuguita was killed. Manuel’s Tavern is vandalized in advance of an appearance by Mayor Dickens; its doors are glued shut, its walls painted. The scheduled visit is canceled.
January 16: A feller buncher belonging to Shadowbox Studios is burned in the forest.
January 17: The news comes out that the cost of the Cop City project has increased from $90 million to $109 million. The authorities blame security costs, damage from protests, and increased insurance costs.
January 18: On the “Day of the Forest Defender,” around the country, hundreds of people participate in events commemorating the death of Tortuguita. Nearly fifty events take place for the occasion, including vigils, teach-ins, rallies, film screenings, and fundraisers. In addition, 18 windows are broken at the San Francisco Credit Union; in Hanover, Germany, a car belonging to Autobahn GmbH is burned; windows are broken at two different Nationwide subsidiaries in Atlanta; MTU Solutions is vandalized in Novi, Michigan; UPS tires are slashed in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
January 19: Someone liberates ten chickens in the Northern UK in memory of Tortuguita.
January 25: Four machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned on Boulevard Drive near the Federal Penitentiary in southeast Atlanta. No communiqué appears online, but local police stage a press conference nonetheless.
January 27: A bank in Chicago is redecorated with posters in memory of Tortuguita.
January 29: Protesters lock down at a Brasfield & Gorrie job site in Midtown.
January 30: A cybersecurity incident cripples the municipal government in Atlanta.
February 1: Someone sabotages 11 ATMS belonging to Truist Bank with glue and glues the doors shut.
February 8: Atlanta Police, the ATF, and the FBI raid three homes in southeast Atlanta in a joint operation, each targeting one house. They arrest one person, charging him with first-degree arson, and detain another for several hours. Police attempt to violently humiliate the residents of the house they raid, forcing one resident outside without her clothes on to be photographed by masked thugs; at another house, officers drag a resident down the stairs by his hair.
February 10: In Lakewood, Atlanta, just blocks from two of the houses raided on the 8th, a police car catches fire in front of the home of an APD officer. The accompanying statement reads, in part: “We wish to dispel any notion that people will take this latest wave of repression lying down, or that arresting alleged arsonists will deter future arsons.” In St Paul, Minnesota, two trucks and trailers loaded with timber are burned at a Home Depot in solidarity with Jack and those affected by the raids. “It is time to destroy those who destroy the earth,” the statement reads.
February 11: Police raid another home in Lakewood, in broad daylight, following the burning of the police cruiser the day before. Nobody is arrested or detained, and nobody is home. FBI, GBI, ATF, the bomb squad, helicopters, armored vehicles, and undercover police vehicles establish a presence in the area for days. In San Francisco, Waymo self-driving cars are vandalized “with hammers and knives” in solidarity with those in Atlanta facing police harassment.
February 12: The owner of the home raided on February 11 holds a press conference denouncing the police action at his home. Elsewhere, the Davinci Development website is vandalized by hackers.
February 23: The Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City in Tucson, Arizona brings together a few hundred activists from the Southwest. Three Nationwide subisidiaries lose their windows in Tucson, Arizona.
February 24: A Nationwide subsidiary in Santa Cruz has its locks filled with glue and its walls covered in spray paint.
February 25: During the Nationwide Summit, 80 people gather in a black bloc in Tucson. They march several blocks and smash all of the windows of Wells Fargo and PNC Bank in Presidio Plaza. Some decorate the walls with Tortuguita’s name.
February 26: Dozens protest at the Nationwide Headquarters in Scottsdale, AZ. Hundreds of police are deployed. At the same time, six activists lock themselves down to concrete barrels in entrance to a gated community in Fountain Hills, Arizona, where a regional executive of Nationwide lives. In New York City, over 200 protesters march into the offices of Nationwide and AXA XL—insurers of the Atlanta Police Foundation and Brasfield & Gorrie, respectively. This is the largest protest connected to the movement to take place outside of Georgia.
February 27: A video release shows multiple Nationwide locations vandalized in New York City.
February 28: Ten New York Police Department vehicles are splashed with paint and have their tires slashed.
March 5: About twenty Black women protest outside the home of Mayor Dickens in the early hours, demanding the city government drop the court appeal blocking the referendum to stop Cop City. In the United Kingdom, a dairy farm in Leistershire is extensively vandalized in solidarity with Jack and others facing repression in Atlanta.
March 7: One person locks down to construction equipment at a Brasfield & Gorrie site in Midtown as a crowd gathers below. After several hours, he is removed and charged with misdemeanor trespassing.
March 11: Protesters disrupt a Mayoral panel featuring Andre Dickens in Austin, Texas. The event is canceled and Dickens is chased off-site. In Oregon, a butcher shop in Portland is vandalized in solidarity with Jack.
March 14: Eight machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned in Henry County, GA.
March 27: Two activists climb up a 250-foot crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie job site in Midtown Atlanta to disrupt work. This time, the activists are charged with felonies. Elsewhere, an I-5 highway sign is redecorated.
March 28: Anarchists in the northern United Kingdom liberate 41 ducks from a farm in memory of Tortuguita and in solidarity with Jack. Also, at some point in March, someone tampered with the tables of the Atlanta Police Department, temporarily freeing the horses.
April 16: Several pieces of machinery belonging to Brasfield & Gorrie are burned in Fayetteville, Georgia. No communiqué accompanies the action, but police publicly speculate that it is related to Cop City.
April 22: People wheat-paste posters and paint slogans all over Emory University campus denouncing the institution for ties to Israel and the Atlanta Police Foundation. Six surveillance cameras are disabled by various methods.
April 25: Students and others set up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza at Emory University in the context of a national mobilization against US support for the Israeli genocide in Palestine. Protesters connect Israel to Cop City. Emory Police and Georgia State Patrol attack the crowd, firing pepper balls at protesters, tasing medics, and slamming professors to the ground. As the day passes, crowds descend from classes onto the quad to confront police and block prisoner transport vehicles. Police shoot rubber bullets at students. In the early evening, faculty and students occupy Candler School of Theology atrium. As police arrive, protesters use reinforced banners to clash with police and to protect each other from rubber bullets and pepper balls.
April 26: More than 500 people reconverge on the Emory quad after a day of clashes with police on campus. Protesters flood Cox Hall, temporarily occupying the building. During an emergency faculty meeting on campus, staff move to hold a “no-confidence” vote on President Fenves. Fenves sends an email to thousands of students, alleging that “outsiders” were converging on campus in buses. Despite his allegations, corporate news platforms report that over 90% of the previous day’s arrestees were students or faculty. In New York City, during an Atlanta Police recruitment event, someone pulls the fire alarm of the Marriott hotel and 300 crickets are released inside the building. Graffiti decorates the courtyard.
April 27: To further disrupt the Atlanta Police recruitment event, cement is poured into the plumbing system of the hotel.
April 28: Faculty and staff walk out on Emory campus, denouncing President Greg Fenves for calling the police on student protesters.
April 29: Three OMNY machines and three MTA machines on the New York subway are smashed in memory of Tortuguita. At Cal Poly Humboldt, a Gaza solidarity protester builds a tree-sit beside occupied Siemens Hall in memory of Tortuguita.
April 30: During the eviction of Hamilton Hall and the West Lawn at Columbia University, the crowd begins chanting “Stop Cop City.”
May 1: Hundreds march on Emory Campus with reinforced banners, temporarily seizing control of the Oxford/Undergraduate Admissions building. Police drag George State University students wearing keffiyehs at the graduation ceremony off stage.
May 3: Some 75% of Emory faculty vote “no confidence” in President Fenves. Protesters march to the headquarters of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program on Georgia State University campus, long the target of the stop Cop City movement and now of the Gaza solidarity protests as well. Protesters clash with police while trying to enter the building, using shields, reinforced banners, and umbrellas to protect each other. The crowd disperses with no arrests.
May 4: About 60 protesters gather near the GILEE headquarters again; several dozen riot police stage nearby. The crowd decides not to march and assembles in deliberation instead.
May 6: Morehouse students issue a public letter to the Board of Trustees, reiterating their call to sever ties with Cop City and the Atlanta Committee for Progress and to cut ties with Israel.
May 7: The Atlanta Journal Constitution attempts to split Stop Cop City and Gaza solidarity protests by urging anti-war activists not to be “co-opted” by activists fighting police militarization in “southeast Atlanta,” just a few miles from Emory campus. Spelman students issue an open letter to the Board of Trustees urging them to cut ties with Israel and Cop City.
May 10: Columbia University Hamilton Hall arrestees issue a statement directly connecting the genocide in Gaza to the GILEE program and the construction of Cop City and similar projects around the United States.
May 11: Thirteen Emory arrestees issue a public statement demanding that Emory cut ties with Israel and Cop City and drop all charges against protesters on campus.
May 20: The Atlanta Police Foundation pays twelve temp workers hired by “Our America” to attend a City Council session in order to read statements in support of Cop City.
May 21: An NYPD bus is burned in Brooklyn in memory of Tortuguita and in retaliation for police brutality at a Palestine solidarity protest in Bay Ridge, NYC.
May 29: The Guardian publishes an article exposing constant surveillance and harassment of southeast Atlanta residents. The harassment includes hundreds of visits by police at homes day and night; during these visits, officers sometimes park outside of the houses for a few minutes without approaching. Other times, they shine lights into windows and blare their sirens outside the homes of activists with suspected ties to the Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City movement. In one instance, a lit road flare is placed in the bushes directly outside a window.
May 31: Multiple water mains explode across Atlanta, leaving a majority of residents without clean running water for a week. Many people connect the collapse of city infrastructure to the channeling of tremendous amounts of funding to police.
June 3: Groups involved in the movement join Palestine solidarity activists in calling for disruptions at the first US Presidential debate on June 27.
June 5: A 20-year-old anarchist named Cyprus is subpoenaed in Charleston, South Carolina and summoned to a Federal Grand Jury investigating alleged acts of arson against Cop City subcontractors.
June 20: In NYC, people disrupt a budget session at City Hall. NYC Mayor Eric Adams wants to cut the public library budget in order to build a Cop City-inspired facility in Queens. Local New Yorkers begin organizing against the project.
June 25: A lawyer representing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund files a motion to dismiss the case against them after it is learned that the Attorney General’s office failed to hire a “filter team” to redact client-attorney emails subpoenaed by the State. Those emails were read by law enforcement and included in evidence.
June 27: Using reinforced pipes, activists lock down in the driveway of Hudson Technologies in Smyrna, Georgia. Hudson produces arms for the Israeli army. Activists denounce the war on Gaza and demand a right to vote via referendum on Cop City. That night, two demonstrations take place in the vicinity of the Presidential debate. Several hundred police officers swarm the area, both in uniforms and undercover. Around one hundred protesters gather for a black bloc but decide not to initiate a combative demonstration. They march a few blocks before dispersing without arrests.
July 4: Cyprus publicly declares their intention to resist the Federal Grand Jury targeting the Stop Cop City movement. They call for others to resist the hearings without compromise. Six Flock cameras are destroyed in Savannah, Georgia.
July 10: In Okemos, Michigan, protesters visit the home of Paul Kearney, Chief Claims Officer for Accident Fund Insurance.
July 31: A grand jury subpoena targeting Cyprus is withdrawn, likely as a consequence of their commitment to resist the hearing.
August 13: A machine belonging to the Brent Scarborough Company is burned on Memorial Drive. Unknown saboteurs use “improvised incendiary devices” to destroy the machines of the Cop City contractor.
August 22: A industrial railroad bridge burns near Milwaukie, Oregon. The saboteurs connect the shipping company to the Israeli war in Palestine and to Cop City.
January 18, 2025: Day of the Forest Defender events coinciding with “Festivals of Resistance” against the incoming Trump-Vance-Musk administration take place in over twenty locations. Five hundred people gather in Richmond. In Olympia, a thousand people march. The mother of Tortuguita joins local musicians at an event in Atlanta. Somewhere in Northern California, anonymous saboteurs disable a dozen trucks belonging to Green Diamond Resource Company in memory of Tortuguita.

Re-litigating the past can be tempting for those who have experienced traumatic failures and setbacks, as it allows us to take responsibility for the past by criticizing ourselves and others. It is important to approach such questions with humility and to resist the temptation to shift the goalposts in response to setbacks. From the outset, participants in the movement boldly maintained that they intended to win. Some of them criticized discourses that trivialized the concept of victory or made apologies for failure. “The real stopping Cop City is the friends we made along the way”—it might be easy to say something like this today, but it would not represent the spirit of the movement. ↩
Speaking tours promoting the movement to defend the forest did take place in 2022, but on a smaller scale than the speaking tours in the lead-up to the Block Cop City mobilization. ↩
In contexts where the power of the police is subcontracted out to third parties or paramilitaries, we could say that the state itself has already transformed into a corporate or factional enterprise. ↩

Then They Came for the Palestinians : How to Respond to the Kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil

2025-03-11T10:20:24Z

On March 8, Department of Homeland Security agents kidnapped Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian organizer and graduate student at Columbia University who had permanent residency in the United States. Donald Trump’s State Department arbitrarily revoked his residency. They are holding Khalil in Louisiana, over a thousand miles from his home.

This is part of Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on Palestine solidarity activism at Columbia University and other schools around the country. Above all, however, it is a test, and how we respond will determine what happens to the rest of us later—as Martin Niemöller described in his well-known poem.

Here, we will explore the stakes of this moment and share experience from anarchists whose comrade was similarly kidnapped for participating in the Occupy ICE movement in San Antonio, Texas in 2018.

The Antisemitic Plan to Smear Palestine Solidarity as Antisemitic

The Trump regime has promised to deport millions of undocumented people, and their efforts are already underway. The kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil is something different. Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States who is being targeted for political reasons. Trump is seeking to set an additional precedent in order to open a new front in his campaign to purge the United States of dissidents.

This is the culmination of two years of planning. In April 2023, the billionaire-backed Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a playbook to overhaul the federal government of the United States in order to consolidate autocratic power in the hands of Donald Trump. Although Trump temporarily distanced himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, it proved to be a solid predictor of his game plan once in office.

In October 2024, the Heritage Foundation followed up Project 2025 with Project Esther, a playbook for repressing those who oppose the genocide of Palestinians. In the text of their report, the Heritage Foundation depicts all concern for Palestinians as participation in “a global Hamas Support Network” and explicitly accuses Jewish Voice for Peace and many other Jewish people of being “antisemitic” for refusing to support Zionism. At the same time, the report relies heavily on anti-Semitic tropes such as fearmongering about George Soros. This exemplifies the way that the far right has sought to appropriate concerns about antisemitism to promote racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

A slide from a Heritage Foundation presentation about Project Esther. Note that “Soros” and Jewish Voice for Peace are at the tops of the columns titled “Masterminds” and “Organizers.”

The chief source of Trump’s appeal is that he has been able to channel the considerable anger of the downwardly mobile away from those who hold power and towards scapegoats, creating a pressure valve for a wide range of resentments. But in order to scapegoat people without consequences, it is necessary to undermine their social ties, to prevent others from identifying with them, to carve up society into isolated and mutually hostile factions.

Reducing all empathy for Palestinians to support for Hamas is a discursive maneuver intended to frame all who speak out against genocide as legitimate targets for Trump’s government. In addition to demonizing Palestinians, Project Esther lays the groundwork to attack Jewish people as “antisemites” if they don’t get on board with Christian Nationalist priorities. This strategy weaponizes an existing rift that cuts through the Democratic Party—the question of whether Palestinians deserve to be treated as human beings—in order to create the conditions for a fascist takeover of the United States as well as further colonial violence abroad. The ones who stand to gain the most from this strategy are not Zionist Jews, but authoritarian Gentiles.

In view of the significance of Project 2025, we should not underestimate how central Project Esther is to the Trump administration’s strategy. This will help us to understand the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil.

The core of Trump policy is performative violence. That is why they have kidnapped an activist who has never been charged with a crime, whose wife—an American citizen—is eight months pregnant, who has a legal right to reside in the United States according to all established precedents. That is why they intentionally targeted a negotiator, the same way that the Israeli government routinely murders negotiators in Palestine. The point is to be shocking, to terrorize, to show that they can do things in public that the Biden administration had to do secretively.

Everyone who has excused or minimized the genocide of Palestinians—for example, by spending at least as much time talking about the 1139 Israelis killed on October 7, 2023 as they do addressing the tens of thousands of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people slaughtered since then—must understand that today, supporting Israel means supporting Trump’s brand of fascism. The escalating violence of the Israeli colonial project helped create the conditions for Trump’s return; now that he is back in office, excusing Israeli colonialism can only facilitate Trump’s own consolidation of power. As we argued on the night of the 2024 election,

The Biden administration has already done much of the work to desensitize the general public to the program that an emboldened second Trump administration will attempt to carry out—above all, by supporting the Israeli military in carrying out a brutal genocide in Gaza. In so doing, Biden and Harris have accustomed millions of people to the idea that human life has no inherent value—that it is acceptable to slaughter, imprison, and torment people based on their status in a targeted demographic.

You either embrace the struggle for the liberation of Palestine or you become an accomplice in the rise of fascism. This was always true, but today there is no possible excuse not to recognize it.

Even if your sole concern is fighting antisemitism and you do not care what happens to people of any other ethnicity, you pave the way for antisemites to gain power by standing aside as Palestinians are kidnapped. Like Palestinians, Jewish people are on the hit list of potential scapegoats, and what befalls one scapegoat will eventually befall another.

If there are no serious consequences for the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, then soon enough, the Trump administration will push the envelope, moving on to kidnap other activists who obstruct the far-right agenda. Likewise, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is a template for bloodshed that will be used again and again as long as there are no significant consequences. If politicians like Trump retain their sway by inflicting violence, they will have to continuously expand the range of people they target and the intensity of that violence, just as the Nazis did between 1933 and 1945.

What Will It Take?

For now, a judge has ordered a temporary delay in the expulsion of Mahmoud Khalil from the United States. But this should reassure no one. If we count on judges to restrain Trump, we will have no recourse when Trump’s administration simply ignores the laws, and no plan when he manages to replace them with loyal flunkies—or has his flunkies replace the laws themselves.

On March 10, demonstrators gathered in New York City for a protest that took the streets, resulting at one point in tussles with police. On March 11 and 12, further protests will ensue in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.

But the point of these protests must not be to petition the authorities. Donald Trump is not a well-meaning public servant looking to represent his constituents. He is a power-hungry sadist who benefits from our displays of grief and impotent rage. Politics in the United States today is a question of relations of raw force. When we take the streets, we are not addressing Trump or his ghoulish underlings; we are addressing each other. We are setting out to demonstrate that resistance is possible, that there are tactics that can exert concrete leverage against our oppressors, that there are enough people invested in solidarity that it can become a social force capable of compelling Trump and his lackeys to stand down.

At the March 10 demonstration in New York, participants handed out fliers to this effect:

Fascist politicians need the police. But we know masses of people can get the better of the police, their cars, equipment, cameras. All we have to do is to start acting like our friends, neighbors, and our own lives are at stake. All other options have been exhausted. We have to pull down the new fascism before it consolidates control. If we settle for waving signs and chanting, our fate is sealed. If we remember the summer of 2020, we stand a fighting chance.

Mahmoud Khalil.

Learning from Experience

Mahmoud Khalil is not the first person in recent history to be targeted by ICE for political activism. To get more perspective, we reached out to anarchists in San Antonio whose comrade was kidnapped during the Occupy ICE movement in 2018.

This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. In 2018, ICE targeted a filmmaker and student for their participation in the Occupy ICE camp in San Antonio. They were targeted as a consequence of their activism; the authorities used their political beliefs and tweets as evidence against them.

Both our movement and the campaign to free our friend were held back by our decision to defer to the lawyers. The lawyers wanted to run a PR campaign based on respectability politics and innocence narratives, erasing our radical politics from the conversation. As time went on, the lawyers related with hostility and suspicion towards some participants in the movement.

Deferring to the lawyers and separating the legal support from the movement itself was detrimental to both. We gave up many tools that we could have used to fight; this contributed to fragmenting our movement. There was no rally, no day of action, no unrest, no political scandal. Not even a phone zap!

In 2018, we were aware of the example of the Northwest Detention Center resistance, at which ICE detained the activist Maru Villaplanado. Maru Villaplanado was ultimately released and granted legal status due to a campaign of pressure and mobilization. Unfortunately, this knowledge did not lead us to take the kind of action that could have made a difference for our friend.

Many of us were young and inexperienced. We did not know better than to trust the lawyers. We didn’t know how to draw on the experience of other movements before us or around the country. Since then, we have learned that lawyers should have a very limited influence on our movements. They should focus on their work in the courts. We must prioritize organizing a strong political response, as that is the only real source of power and pressure that we can draw upon outside the legal system.

There is no silver bullet or magic combination of tactics that would be guaranteed to stop Mahmoud’s deportation. However, if we limit ourselves to depending upon a legal system that has no regard for the humanity of its captives while the state targets an activist on explicitly political grounds, we will fail while simultaneously sabotaging ourselves. We wonder how differently things might have gone if we had called for national days of action. We wonder if there was some chance that we could have stopped them from deporting our friend. We don’t know the answer because we didn’t try.

To have any chance of saving Mahmoud Khalil or any of the millions of immigrants in the crosshairs of the white supremacist state, we will need movements that are resilient, that grow in numbers and combativeness. Palestinian, immigrant, Black, Indigenous, and working-class organization and action must create a political crisis that interrupts the deportation machine. If we lead with an organized political response, we will have a better chance of stopping the deportation of Mahmoud and our other comrades and of interrupting the entire system it relies on. I hope that everyone who is confronting this tragedy today can learn something from our experience and put those lessons into practice.

This is not the first time this has happened. If our enemies have their way, it won’t be the last. It is up to us to organize in defense of our friends, families, and neighbors.

-Some Cicadas from Abolish ICE, San Antonio, Texas

We Are Made for Each Other

Let us conclude by expressing gratitude for the courage of Mahmoud Khalil and others who have risked their own freedom in order to express solidarity with other people. In doing so, they show us what is best in humanity—and that gives us a reason to fight for ourselves and each other. Khalil has already distinguished himself in the fight to create a world without ethnic cleansing or genocide. It remains for us to do the same in return.

For everyone who has met Mahmoud, they can attest to his incredible character, humbleness, selflessness, and his love for helping others. He is always willing to stand up for the oppressed. He is funny, kind, and sometimes a little messy. He constantly puts his needs last when it comes to helping others. I always tell him that sometimes he needs to put himself first. He always responds with, “People are made for each other, and you should always be willing to lend a helping hand.”

-Mahmoud Khalil’s wife (identified thus, rather than by name, in the original source)

There is a fundraiser for Mahmoud Khalil here.

The Palestine solidarity movement on Columbia campus in spring 2024.

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

2025-02-21T10:26:25Z

As Donald Trump and Elon Musk subordinate the United States government to their pursuit of totalitarian power, their opponents remain in a defensive posture, accusing them of lawlessness. But neither courts nor laws will halt the descent into autocracy. Massive numbers of people will have to take it upon themselves to organize concrete acts of resistance, to take direct action on a horizontal and participatory basis—in other words, to become anarchists.

Tyranny Is the Opposite of Anarchism

On February 8, the editorial board of the New York Times wrote that Elon Musk

“is on a mission to rampage through the government’s confidential payment systems with an anarchist’s glee.”

If you know any real-life anarchists, you know how absurd this is. Given access to the government’s payment systems, no anarchist would begin by cutting off resources to starving children or medical research. An anarchist would begin by cutting off funding to the police and the other instruments of state violence—precisely the institutions that Donald Trump and Elon Musk will expand at any cost.

Anyone who tells you anarchism is about abolishing the social safety net for the sake of unbridled profit is lying to you outright. There are other words for that—for example, neoliberalism.

Anarchism is something else entirely. Anarchists propose to abolish all institutional means of coercion, so that no one can dominate or oppress anyone else:

Anarchism is the idea that everyone is entitled to complete self-determination. No law, government, or decision-making process is more important than the needs and desires of actual human beings. People should be free to shape their relations to their mutual satisfaction, and to stand up for themselves as they see fit.

Anarchists oppose all forms of hierarchy—every currency that concentrates power into the hands of a few, every mechanism that puts us at a distance from our potential.

-To Change Everything

In other words, anarchists seek to bring about a situation in which no politician or billionaire, elected or not, could ever be in a position to cut off essential resources to millions of people with the flick of a pen. This is a profounder commitment to freedom, equality, and the well-being of the general public than one can find within the halls of any government.

At this moment of peril, when aspiring autocrats have taken power and are attempting to consolidate permanent control of the state, why would the New York Times muddy the waters by taking a cheap shot at some of Donald Trump’s most determined enemies? Looking more closely at the quote above, it seems that the editorial board’s chief concern is not what will happen as a consequence of Elon Musk’s actions, but whether Musk and his cronies are following the rules properly.

A Three-Sided Conflict

As Trump and Musk carry out a hostile takeover of the United States government, outlets like the New York Times are narrating a story in which there are two sides: on one side, democracy and the rule of law, and on the other side, the criminal oligarchs that threaten to undermine them.

But this is not the only way to understand the situation.

It would be more precise to say that there are three camps—those who desire to return to the forms of governance that prevailed until January 20, 2025; those who are currently in the process of overturning that system in order to impose an even more oppressive system; and those who reject both of those options in favor of a more egalitarian alternative.

In the first camp, we find people who believe that a certain amount of self-determination is acceptable, as long as it falls neatly within whatever laws happen to be on the books. They are also comfortable with a wide range of ruthless self-seeking destructive behavior, provided that it, too, complies with those same laws. When people in this camp talk about “equality,” they do not mean that all of us should have comparable leverage on the conditions that determine what we can do with our lives. They mean equal opportunity on the market and equality before the law—both of which are preposterous to speak about when some people start life with pennies while others start with billions. People in this camp are concerned about Elon Musk overhauling the federal government, but they had no objection to him amassing hundreds of billions of dollars while a hundred million Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. They are concerned about Trump’s plans for Gaza, but until a few weeks ago many of them were perfectly at ease with the United States government funding a genocide there.

In the second camp, we find those who are determined to consolidate power in their own hands, regardless of what laws happen to be on the books. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their various capitalist, nationalist, and fascist backers will preserve whatever laws assist them and overturn the rest. They have no allegiance to any particular legal system or protocol. They seek their own advantage by any means, mendaciously claiming that they are the only ones who can address the problems of our time (“I alone can fix it”). Such people have always existed, but only over the past few years have resources become so unevenly distributed that a handful of them could take over the United States government.

Finally, in the third camp, we find anarchists and other rebels who also have no allegiance to the system of governance that has prevailed until now, but for entirely different reasons. Anarchists believe that everyone deserves the maximum amount of freedom, regardless of what laws happen to be on the books—and therefore, that no one deserves to be able to dominate anyone else, whether by hoarding access to resources or wielding the instruments of state repression. People in this camp hold that regardless of what any constitution proclaims, regardless of how an electorate votes in an election, none of us owe any allegiance to institutions that exist solely for the purpose of imposing disparities in power, whether we are talking about government departments, banks, or private military contractors. In contrast to those who are comfortable with oligarchy and ethnic cleansing as long as no one breaks the rules, there is no way to bribe or blackmail anarchists into making excuses for oppression.

Whatever your politics, you are probably sympathetic to the anarchist analysis to some degree—perhaps more than you think. Try this thought experiment:

How much do you buy into the idea that the democratic process should trump your own conscience and values? Imagine yourself in a democratic republic with slaves—say, ancient Athens, or ancient Rome, or the United States of America until the end of 1865. Would you obey the law and treat people as property while endeavoring to change the laws, knowing full well that whole generations might live and die in chains in the meantime? Or would you act according to your conscience in defiance of the law, like Harriet Tubman and John Brown?

If you would follow in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, then you, too, believe that there is something more important than the rule of law. This is a problem for anyone who wants to make conformity with the law or with the will of the majority into the final arbiter of legitimacy.

-From Democracy to Freedom

No Law Will Give You Freedom

Staking the defense against Donald Trump on the principle that “no one is above the law” has failed for eight years now. Worse, with Trump back in control of the government, it’s a self-defeating narrative. What happens when his lackeys in Congress pass new laws and the judges he appoints rule in his favor? At that point, all this rhetoric legitimizing the law as a good in itself will only strengthen Trump’s hand.

Many people spent several years of Trump’s first term waiting on former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. As we argued back then, before Mueller’s investigation ended in a complete washout, this doomed strategy reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the balance of power and the nature of law itself:

Democrats still don’t understand how power works. Crime is not the violation of the rules, but the stigma attached to those who break rules without the power to make them. (As they say, steal $25, go to jail; steal $25 million, go to Congress.) At the height of Genghis Khan’s reign, it would have been pointless to accuse the famous tyrant of breaking the laws of the Mongol Empire; as long as Trump has enough of Washington behind him, the same goes for him. Laws don’t exist in some transcendent realm. They are simply the product of power struggles among the elite—not to mention the passivity of the governed—and they are enforced according to the prevailing balance of power. To fetishize the law is to accept that might makes right. It means abdicating the responsibility to do what is ethical regardless of what the laws happen to be.

In the long run, the courts cannot constrain Donald Trump. He controls the executive branch, the part of the government that is supposed to enforce their rulings.

Nor will the courts constrain Elon Musk. Even apart from Trump’s support, he has unlimited money for court cases. If the courts attempt to punish him by imposing fines, he can afford to pay for tens of billions of dollars’ worth of illegal activity. He already routinely refuses to pay rent and other bills that no ordinary person could ever get away with shrugging off.

Nor will the police and other law-enforcement agencies constrain Trump or Musk. In theory, the police exist to enforce laws; in practice, the average cop knows very little about the law—they’re not lawyers, after all—but a great deal about obeying orders. Trump is the favorite politician of the mercenary caste, the ones who sell their capacity to inflict violence to the highest bidder (be that the state or private security contractors). Just as Trump has filled his government with disgraced public figures who depend on him, the police are his natural allies—the more so as a consequence of their compromised relationship with the general public.

Continuing to emphasize the centrality of law in objections to Trump’s agenda can only hamstring future movements, discouraging the emergence of the only kind of resistance that could offer any hope once he has completed his takeover of the federal government.

The truth is, neither the powerful nor the oppressed have ever had good cause to obey laws—the former because the same privileges that enable them to write the laws release them from the necessity of obeying them, the latter because the laws weren’t established for their benefit in the first place.

-“Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom”

Remember How We Got Here

The binary narrative about criminal oligarchs undermining democracy and the rule of law is misleading in another way. The authoritarians who are overhauling the government do not represent the opposite of the preceding order, but the inevitable consequence of it. Their power grab is the result of several decades of democratically-managed capitalism, which enabled a coterie of billionaires to accumulate so much wealth and power that they no longer believe that they need the trappings of democracy to keep the populace appeased.

It was the rules of the previous game that created this situation. Wanting to go back a single step in history, to the previous stage of the process, is foolish, because that was the stage that led us directly to this one. It is impossible to rewind the clock—and even if we could, that would only mean arriving once again at the same situation. The problem is not simply that Musk’s protégés have run rampant through the databases of the government, though that is already producing consequences that will likely be impossible to undo. The real problem is the emergence of a caste of billionaires who no longer require the services of democracy and have enough power to do away with it.

These billionaires can buy up communication platforms, buy up both politicians and voters, use the global infrastructure under their control to determine the outcome of geopolitical struggles. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the ones who are currently attracting the most attention, but behind them are Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and many more. The individual character flaws of these men are beside the point; the significant thing is that the mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism are systematically concentrating power in the hands of people who are completely disinterested in others’ agency or well-being.

This is why milquetoast centrism cannot offer a convincing alternative to the despotism of the fascists and technocrats.

Describing the Democrats’ unsuccessful strategy of chasing Republicans further and further to the right, one Democratic politician quipped that “voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke.” This doesn’t put things strongly enough. Considering that Trump won the election on an explicit platform of mass deportations and autocracy, Democrats imitating Republican talking points while promising to “defend democracy” is like offering Diet Coke to a cocaine addict. Today’s Republican voters are motivated in great part by the desire to see violence directed against those more vulnerable than themselves. It is autocracy itself they desire, not any particular policy.

This bloodlust is the consequence of the avarice and narcissism that neoliberal capitalism fostered in so many people and then failed to fulfill. Those who have become accustomed to powerlessness and passivity, who urgently desire revenge but do not understand who is responsible for their situation, will elevate tyrants to power for the vicarious thrill of seeing someone made to suffer, even if the consequences make life worse for practically everyone. Doubtless some of them would change sides if they saw a real opportunity to improve their lives, but that would require much more than a promise to go back to the Biden era.

If the defenders of democracy cannot offer anything more inspiring than a return to the previous state of affairs—the one that caused this catastrophe in the first place—they will lose, and they will deserve to lose. It will take a more ambitious and far-reaching vision to defeat oligarchy.

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

In 2020, the most powerful uprising in living memory took place in the United States. Millions of people filled the streets. They were not galvanized by a timid electoral campaign, nor simply by the footage of police murdering George Floyd, but by the brave actions of ordinary people who stood up to injustice—above all, by the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis. By driving the political discourse in the election year, this uprising not only turned voters away from Donald Trump—it also showed billionaires that Trump would not be able to preserve conditions suitable for business, forcing them to temper their ambitions.

One poll showed Americans supporting the burning of the police precinct by a larger margin than any victorious presidential candidate this century.

In response to the uprising, Joe Biden and other Democrats doubled down on supporting the police. This shows that the Democrats believe that it is impossible to maintain power under capitalism without channeling more and more resources towards repression, tasking the police with keeping an increasingly desperate population under control.

Today, the Republicans are going even further, cultivating support for explicitly patriarchal, racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian politics—in short, for fascism. The implication is that as billionaires accumulate more and more power and the consequences of their rapaciousness trickle down to the rest of us, it will take more than police to keep the population under control: it will also take informal militias, and falsehoods about why some demographics deserve to have more power than everyone else, and probably, in the long run, ethnic cleansing and genocide on a larger scale than we have yet seen.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. invited us to trust that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But today it is clear that things are not slowly, steadily getting better, neither in the field of civil rights, nor in regards to the natural environment, nor justice, nor governance.

“The function of government is to centralize power and impose domination: to enforce, to punish, to administer. Politicians preside over an economy more oppressive and invasive than any dictatorship could be by itself.”

The state is not the solution to these problems. It is a protection racket that—until recently—purported to solve our problems in order to lull us into dependence (“I alone can fix it”!) while suppressing our ability to meet our needs without it. Now, under Trump and Musk in the United States and rulers like Javier Milei elsewhere, there is no longer any pretense that the state exists to do anything besides oppress people and defend the profits of the rich. All this time, the state has been accumulating the means—both technological and social—that are required to force this new reality on us, and now the tyrants are intent on using them.

Yet in doing so, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are giving millions of people cause to reevaluate their priorities and dedicate their lives to profound social change. The 2020 uprising offered a glimpse of what it looks like for large numbers of people to act on their own initiative, creating a groundswell of resistance that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Our chief error, in 2020, was in imagining that we could simply return to business as usual afterwards, when in fact our only hope is to change the world.

As Trump and Musk gut every aspect of the state that is not about profiteering and repression, the stakes of this moment are coming into focus. There is no more middle ground. If you care about public health, you have to become a revolutionary. If you care about medical research, you have to become a revolutionary. If you care about climate change, about labor conditions, about the well-being of children in warzones, there is nothing else for it—you have to become a revolutionary.

In the movements to come, we must make space for the civil servants Elon Musk has fired, for the scientists and academics whose funding has dried up, for those who once sought social change through electoral politics. They should put all their skills to work in new contexts, experimenting with new forms of resistance and spreading whatever strategies work far and wide. But we should not simply try to rebuild the broken system that brought us to this dire situation. We must build a new vision together along with the means to bring it into being.

Anarchists propose to build our collective capacity to act on a horizontal and decentralized basis, rather than entrusting our agency to leaders. We seek to create a lattice of overlapping participatory and voluntary associations that can meet people’s material and spiritual needs. Rather than hoarding resources for ourselves the way the billionaires do, we seek to abolish all of the mechanisms that impose artificial scarcity, to create commons that benefit everyone. We seek to generate abundance, not profit.

To be an anarchist means to recognize that our freedom and well-being are inextricably bound up with the freedom and well-being of billions like us. It means discarding all the old excuses for remaining subservient to those who only endeavor to enrich themselves at others’ expense. It means becoming fiercely loyal to what is best in ourselves and each other, to our capacity for compassion and cooperation and courage. Across two centuries, anarchists have resisted under monarchies and persisted through dictatorships. Now that liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism are concluding in a new form of tyranny, a new generation must draw on this long legacy of struggle.

There is no going back to the way things were, to the future that we once anticipated. The old world is in flames around us. Become an anarchist, or forever hold your peace.

It's Safer in the Front : Taking the Offensive against Tyranny

2025-01-28T22:57:33Z

Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy.

“Counterintuitive though it is, in a confusing situation, often the best, if not safest, place to be is the front lines, so you can get a clear visual grasp of what is going on around you.”

-“What I Do for a Living,” an account from the demonstrations against the 2003 European Union summit in Thessaloniki, published in Rolling Thunder #1.

My friend’s grandfather grew up in Germany in the 1920s. Being Jewish, he got involved in radical organizations and sometimes engaged in physical altercations with Nazis. In a memoir that he recorded for his family decades later, he describes the situation when the Nazis took power:

“In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. I thought we would now start a revolution, but actually nothing happened. The communists defected—often en masse—to the Nazis and the social democrats held out a little longer but ultimately dissolved their organizations.”

In May 1933, when he was twenty years old, he learned that he was about to be prosecuted for having broken a Nazi’s nose in a street brawl. Rather than face trial in a judicial system controlled by Nazis, he immediately obtained a passport and boarded a train for Holland that same night at 8 pm.

Some years later, the rest of his family died in the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

This story succinctly illustrates a surprisingly common phenomenon. Had my friend’s grandfather not participated in open confrontations with Nazis from the very beginning, had he kept his head down and avoided trouble, he probably would have remained in Berlin and met the same fate as his relatives. By taking the offensive, he put himself in harm’s way—but paradoxically, in the long run, that worked out better than playing it safe.

Likewise, participants in the guerrilla underground of the Jewish resistance were among the only ones to survive the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. In organizing to meet the Nazi threat head on, they developed a robust relationship to their agency, and this served them well when the only way out was to organize a daring escape from the besieged and burning ghetto through the sewer system.

For members of targeted groups, the initial impulse is often to withdraw, to go into hiding. Yet when it comes to both individual and collective self-preservation, it can be wiser to act assertively at the beginning, while it is still possible to influence the course of events. Even if this goes badly, it can be better to bring the conflict to a head immediately, before one’s adversary becomes more powerful. If nothing else, this strategy has the virtue of making it impossible to lull oneself into a false sense of security while the threat increases.

It doesn’t always work out this way, but sometimes, it’s safer in the front.

“There’s no reason to sleep curled up and bent. It’s not comfortable, it’s not good for you, and it doesn’t protect you from danger. If you’re worried about an attack, you should stay awake or sleep lightly with limbs unfurled for action.” Artwork by Jenny Holzer.

It was noon on April 20, 2001. My comrades and I had assembled alongside hundreds of other anarchists and anti-capitalists at Laval University in Québec City to march on a transcontinental summit intended to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas.” In the center of town, behind miles of protective fencing and thousands of riot police, George W. Bush and his fellow heads of state were plotting to override labor laws and environmental protections to enrich their patrons at our expense.

The sun was shining. More and more people were arriving at the departure point. One group even rolled up a catapult. The police were nowhere to be seen.

Still, I was anxious. Most of my experience of violence was subcultural—fighting skinheads, hardcore shows. I’d never taken on an army of police before. At a meeting the preceding evening, a local organizer had told us that it would be impossible to reach the fence around the summit—there were just too many cops with too much armor and weaponry.

As the crowd began to make its way out of the university towards the street, I consulted with a more experienced comrade. “Should we hang back and see what happens?” I asked.

“If we want to be able to see what’s happening, we’ll have to be in the front,” he answered, matter-of-factly.

We marched directly to the fence surrounding the summit and tore it down. The police could not stop us. The “Free Trade Area of the Americas” was never ratified.

Anarchists marching on the so-called “Summit of the Americas” in Québec City, April 2001.

My friend’s advice served me well four years later, on the day that George W. Bush began his second term. That night, following the daytime march against the inaugural ceremonies, a second march surged through the neighborhood of Adams Morgan, smashing banks and corporate businesses and attacking a police substation. Some participants dropped an enormous banner across a building façade reading “From DC to Iraq—with occupation comes resistance.” We were attempting to compel the Bush regime to end the occupation of Iraq, which inflicted countless civilian casualties and later contributed to the catastrophic rise of the Islamic State.

As the march dispersed, a comrade and I found ourselves among a number of people walking through an alley. Ahead of us, police officers appeared at the exit.

We could have turned around and run the other direction. But then we would have been at the back of the crowd, unable to see what we were running towards. “Run, run forward,” I said to my companion. We were already running.

We dashed past the cops just as they closed their line across the mouth of the alley. “Don’t let any more of them out,” I heard one bark to another.

We were the last ones to escape. The police had blocked the alley from the other side, as well. They forced the people behind us to kneel in the snow for hours. Years later, the detainees won a settlement from the city, but it was better to get away.

Washington, DC, January 20, 2005.

On August 25, 2008, in Denver, during the demonstrations against the Democratic National Convention, a couple hundred people gathered for a march that had been announced but never organized. We were still protesting against the ongoing occupation of Iraq and against capitalism in general.

Armored police were positioned in groups of a dozen each all around the park and the surrounding streets, outnumbering the young people sitting around with black sweatshirts in their laps. A vehicle was supposed to deliver banners, but a rumor reached us that police had detained the driver. Yet just when it seemed certain that nothing was going to happen, a few young folks pulled up their hoods and began chanting.

Who are these people? I recall wondering. What are they thinking, masking up and linking arms with hundreds of riot police surrounding them and undercovers at their elbows? What can they hope to accomplish?

Nonetheless, the other people who had gathered for the march regrouped with them and they began marching out of the park. They only made it as far as the road, where the nearest squadron of police formed a line blocking their path and showered them with pepper spray. No protest had occurred yet, I had heard no dispersal order, and already the police were using chemical weapons.

A comrade and I watched all this with dismay. There were still about two hundred of us, but the police were closing in from all sides and the crowd was disoriented and uncoordinated. It was a recipe for disaster.

We were at the back of the crowd. But the back can become the front—it’s just a question of initiative. My comrade began shouting out a countdown. Others joined in, instinctively. Counting together concentrated our attention, our expectations, our sense of ourselves as a collective force capable of concerted action. And then thirty of us were sprinting over the grass away from the police line.

Seeing this, the rest of the crowd fell in behind. In a few seconds, hundreds of people were running across the park to the intersection at the far side of the lawn, where police had not gathered yet.

Now the energy in the air was electric, in contrast to the malaise and uncertainty of a moment earlier. We passed through the intersection, into which some enterprising young people pulled a municipal sign reading “Road Closed”—and suddenly, we were approaching the business district.

The same principle served us well later in the evening when we saw a line of riot police fanning out across an intersection a block ahead. Without pausing to confer, my comrade and I bolted towards them. We reached the line of police and dodged between them before they could block our path. They had orders to create a barrier, not to chase us. We were safe.

Denver, August 25, 2008.

On the morning of January 20, 2017, another comrade and I joined the march in downtown Washington, DC opposing the inauguration of Donald Trump. In the decades that had passed since Bush’s second inauguration, police all around the country had militarized, receiving bigger and bigger budgets even as politicians claimed there was no money available for anything else. This time, the streets were crowded with 28,000 law enforcement personnel.

There was open conflict with the police as soon as the march got underway. The wail of police sirens, the deafening explosions of flash-bang grenades at close quarters, the acrid scent of pepper spray, the roar of police motorcycles, the sizzle of adrenaline—it was a terrifying situation, but the demonstrators around us were giving as good as they were getting. The idea was to set a template for resistance on the first day of the Trump administration, sending the message to everyone that no one should passively accept the intensification of tyranny.

The longer we were in the streets, the more dangerous it got. When we passed Franklin Square again, doubling back on our tracks, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before we were surrounded.

In downtown DC, between the intersections, the streets are like long stretches of canyon between the cliff faces of the buildings. I knew the police wanted to box us in and kettle us. Every time we passed through an intersection, I glanced at the intersections a block away on either side to see if police were shadowing us on the parallel streets, preparing to cut off our exit routes. Every time we moved out of an intersection into another stretch of canyon, I watched the intersections ahead and behind for police. Whenever we were moving between intersections, we were vulnerable.

As we approached 13th Street, police on motorcycles passed us on the sidewalk on our left, attempting to overtake us and seize the intersection ahead. We were still hundreds of feet from it. I urged my companion to run ahead with me, and we sprinted past front of the march, past the bike cops and motorcycle cops, who began ramming their vehicles into the people immediately behind us. When the cops saw that a few of us were already at their backs, they gave up trying to form a line and once again focused on racing ahead of us. Police hate to be outflanked—they can’t risk being surrounded themselves.

The clash at the intersection showed that the march was no longer in control of the territory around it. It was time to make our exit. We ran down an alley on our right shortly before the next intersection. A hundred others did the same. Those who continued forward were blocked by a line of police at the next intersection, and turned around only to discover a much stronger police line blocking them from behind.

For two long minutes, the crowd paused in confusion and dismay. Some people towards the back of the march had already taken off their gear and were hoping to pass as civilians in order to make their way out of the area, not realizing that they were already trapped from all sides.

The participants at the front of the march kept their gear on and linked arms. Someone called out “We’re going to do a countdown!” They counted down quickly from ten to one and charged directly at the police line ahead of them. The person at the very front of the charge held open a flimsy umbrella as they all ran blindly forward. Somehow, the umbrella protected them from the answering stream of pepper spray.

Fifty of them broke through the police line and escaped. The ones who lingered, waiting to see whether the charge would break through before joining it, remained trapped in the kettle.

Someone later posted a humorous comment on social media to the effect that the cheat code for the J20 Protest Simulator was to be always running at the cops holding a hammer. But there was something to it. Afterwards, watching police footage released to defendants in the subsequent court case, we saw that even after the police and National Guardsmen had tightened up their line, one enterprising individual had escaped simply by sprinting as fast as possible directly at them and ducking between two of them.

Everyone who was detained was charged with eight felonies apiece—up to eighty years in prison—for the crime of being mass-arrested in the vicinity of a rowdy march. A few took plea deals, but everyone else stuck together, establishing a collective defense plan and confronting the legal system head on. In the end, after two trials at which all the defendants were declared not guilty, all of the remaining defendants saw their charges dropped. Years later, all of them received payouts from the state to settle the resulting lawsuits.

It sounds like a metaphor, but I mean it literally as well as figuratively. Whether it’s a march or a court case, sometimes it’s safer in the front.

Washington, DC, January 20, 2017.

Several years later, I was in Atlanta for the Block Cop City mobilization. Protesters had been trying to stop the construction of a multi-million-dollar facility to further militarize the police. In retaliation, the police had murdered one person and arrested a large number of people at random, charging them with terrorism and indicting sixty-one of them on trumped-up racketeering charges.

Before the action proper, there were two days of deliberations at a local Quaker community center. Everyone was on edge. The goal was to try to march into the forest and occupy the construction site. Would we all be arrested? Would we, too, be charged with terrorism and racketeering? The discussions went in circles as people fruitlessly attempted to predict what would happen and negotiated their own risk tolerance.

It was decided that there would be three self-organized blocs within the march: essentially, the front, the middle, and the back. Officially, this distinction was not based on anticipated risk, because the organizers could make no promises about what the police would do. But no one was able to consider which bloc to join without panning back to larger questions. How much do I fear the violence of the police and the judicial system? What am I prepared to sacrifice for this movement?

Only the bold few who had made peace with their fears and committed to taking the front of the march seemed at ease. Even within the “middle” bloc, there was a lot of agonizing and bargaining going on. “I’ll be in the middle, but not at the front of the middle…”

That night, I explained to my family what to do if I didn’t come home from the demonstration. Both of my romantic partners, independently of each other, asked me whether it was really that important for me to participate in this particular march. Couldn’t I just leave it to the younger activists?

It’s safer in the front. I remembered this saying from earlier mobilizations—but thinking it over, I wasn’t so sure. How could it be safer to charge directly into police lines? The slogan distilled lessons drawn on my own experience, but heading into yet another dangerous situation, I was dubious.

On the morning of the mobilization, we assembled at the park. Despite a few festive flourishes, the atmosphere was somber: a few hundred people risking injury, arrest, and prison time for the honor of an embattled movement. Many people had decided to stay home at the last minute. We marched out of the park in a column, everyone assiduously sticking to their particular position in the risk tolerance spectrum. As long as we were marching down the narrow pedestrian walkway, this made sense, but it made less sense when we emerged onto the main road and advanced towards the construction site. We should have fanned out to present a broad front as we approached the lines of police and armored vehicles blocking the road, but no, the crowd stretched out into what was almost single-file line, like lambs lining up for slaughter.

Nonetheless, the ones at the front picked up speed, forming a V-shaped wedge with their reinforced banners and pointing their umbrellas forward to block the cops’ view as they charged directly into the shields of the skirmish line. The rest of us dragged along behind, holding the positions we had committed to holding—no less, and no more.

People assembling to begin the Block Cop City march, November 13, 2023.

The people with the reinforced banners pushed the first line of cops back until it was reinforced by a second line. Even then, they didn’t relent; they kept on pushing forward against the police. The cops lashed out with their batons, but went on losing ground. The bloc at the front of the march stuck together, protecting each other, acting deliberately. Maybe they were afraid, but it wasn’t fear that was determining their actions.

Looking on from behind them, I was terrified. I was grateful I wasn’t in the front, having to make decisions. Police batons are scary, jail time is scary, felony charges are scary, but the truly frightening thing is responsibility. People will accept a lot of negative consequences in their lives just to avoid responsibility. And unfortunately, it’s impossible: try as we might, there is no avoiding the fact that as long as we are able to make decisions and take action, we are responsible for ourselves. That is true whether you position yourself at the front or at the back, or even if you don’t show up at all.

I watched the front-liners ahead of me push both lines of police back until they reached a third line comprised of futuristic stormtroopers. No sign of the stormtroopers’ humanity was discernible beneath their military gear; not even their eyes were visible. They had withdrawn themselves from the human community completely.

The stormtroopers pulled out tear gas canisters. I watched in disbelief as they tossed the canisters one after another over the heads of the ones at the front into the middle of the march—into the midst of those of us who had hoped that others would run risks on our behalf, who had intended simply to be an appendage of others’ agency. Perhaps it would have been safer in the front, after all?

Then everything vanished in a poisonous white haze.

We staggered blindly back in disarray, choking and coughing. But the stormtroopers had gassed the rest of the cops, as well, and the other cops were not wearing gas masks. They, too, had retreated. Against all odds, the battle concluded in a draw.

In the end, the only person who was arrested that entire day was someone who had opted to play a support role far from the site of the action. They were detained in a vehicle near the park from which we had set out. No one was charged with terrorism or racketeering.

In all our anxiety, we had forgotten the greatest risk of all: that we might do nothing, that we would let ourselves be cowed into abandoning the streets. With so many people already facing outlandish charges, marching on the construction site was a risky proposition—but permitting the state to crush the movement would have set a precedent that would threaten other movements, emboldening the authorities to use the same tactics elsewhere against many others like us.

Sometimes you can only find out what the risks are by taking a chance. This time, we had gotten lucky. But in a way, we had also passed a test.

Anarchists at the May Day demonstration in Bandung, 2019. Photograph by Frans Ari Prasetyo.

It’s not really safer in the front. Staying home is safer—at least, it’s safer until the long-term consequences of abandoning the streets set in. Then nowhere is safe, and it turns out it would have been better to take some smaller risks earlier on.

The anti-fascists who went to Charlottesville in August 2017 to confront the “Unite the Right” rally were putting themselves in harm’s way. One of them was killed; several of them were severely injured. But if they had stayed home, if they had permitted fascists to establish control of the streets, the whole world would have become more dangerous. The likelihood that we may be forced to fight that same battle all over again today does not diminish the fact that they won us eight precious years of relative safety.

Even when all really is hopelessly lost, it is generally better to act boldly, sending a signal flare of hope across the generations, the way the Communards and the Kronstadt rebels did. In so doing, you at least preserve the possibility that others will be inspired to continue attempting to build the world you desire, so that one day, your dream might be realized—even if without you, at least due in part to your efforts.

But that’s not where we are today. We face powerful adversaries, but the majority of people, including many of their supporters, have good reason to oppose them alongside us. If we bring people together, if we demonstrate effective ways to fight back, putting our own risk tolerance at the disposal of larger struggles, many more people will eventually join us. There’s no reason to hasten into glorifying martyrdom or accepting defeat when the future is unwritten.

Not everyone can be in the front all the time, of course. It can be exhausting. But the front isn’t a spatial location. Understood properly, it doesn’t necessarily require a particular kind of physical ability or skillset. It’s a way of engaging with events, of remaining focused on our agency, taking the initiative wherever we can rather than just reacting to our opponents’ initiatives. Everyone can open up a new front of struggle by identifying a vulnerability in the ruling order and going on the offensive. The more fronts there are, the safer we all will be.

Facing the second administration of Donald Trump, many anarchists and anti-fascists don’t know where to begin. During the previous Trump administration, we fought hard against an adversary that was much more powerful than us, and won—only to find victory snatched from our hands by cowardly Democrats, who eagerly took over where the Republicans left off, disappointing so many people that Trump was able to return to power. But that is no reason to give up, this time around—it just shows that all along, we were right about the nature of power, and we owe it to the world to demonstrate a real alternative.

In countries ruled by fascism or other forms of despotism, the majority of people do not necessarily support the authorities; they have simply become dispirited, accustomed to passivity. Much more so than liberals, anarchists are used to being outnumbered and outgunned, to fighting against incredible odds. While Democrats make excuses for the fascists or even embrace their agenda, we should demonstrate that it is possible to take ambitious, principled action to resist.

If you feel despair, if you feel defeated, if you catch yourself dissociating or focusing on what our oppressors are doing rather than on what you can do yourself—that is territory that the enemy has claimed within you.

Give them nothing without a fight. Stay focused on your agency. Every hour, every day, wherever you are positioned, there is always something you can do. Take care of yourself and those around you. Keep your eyes out for opportunities and seize them. We are in a fight—but it is a fight that we can win. It’s safer in the front.

The umbrella charge on January 20, 2017.

Sacrificial Violence and Retribution

2024-12-23T15:05:21Z

In the following analysis, we explore the responses to two different extrajudicial killings as a way to understand the different forms of violence that are coming to the fore in our society right now. In the appendix, we offer an incomplete roundup of various responses to the shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

Every day, something like fifty people are shot and killed in the United States. On December 4, 2024, one of them was Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the most profitable health insurance corporation in the country. In the weeks since, we’ve all heard a great deal more about that particular CEO than about any of the hundreds of other people killed by gunfire this month. At the same time, there has been an outpouring of support for the attack, despite the efforts of media platforms and employers to suppress it.

On December 13, president-elect Donald Trump and vice-president-elect JD Vance invited Daniel Penny to join them at the Army/Navy football game—solely on account of his having senselessly murdered a Black person and been acquitted.¹ Here, we see some of the most powerful political figures in the world attempting to drum up enthusiasm for extrajudicial killings—provided that they target the marginalized.

We must understand the popular response to the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in the context of a society in which life is increasingly cheap. After the far right lionized George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse; after millions participated in a countrywide uprising demanding that police stop killing Black and brown people, only to see politicians across the political spectrum double down on supporting police, with the consequence that police have continued to murder people at a steadily accelerating pace; after bipartisan support for the genocide in Gaza; after hundreds of school shootings, hundreds of thousands of opioid overdoses, and millions of COVID-19 fatalities, not to mention the countless avoidable deaths resulting from the for-profit health and insurance industries—is it really so startling that one person took a shot at an executive? What is startling is that in nearly every other case, the killers have targeted those less powerful than themselves.

Trump’s decision to host Daniel Penny is a literalistic fulfillment of Frank Wilhoit’s dictum that “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” By contrast, the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO suggests that the law cannot always protect the in-groups from the out-groups.

But this is not just a question of violence aimed down the social hierarchy versus violence aimed up it. We are talking about two entirely different kinds of violence. Let’s call them sacrificial violence and retribution.

Sacrificial Violence

What is sacrificial violence?

According to René Girard, writing in Violence and the Sacred,

When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.

Girard is part of a long tradition of European anthropologists whose speculations boil down to a series of just-so stories about humanity.² But we don’t have to buy into his entire framework to recognize what he is speaking about here:

The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.

Sacrificial violence, in short, is scapegoating carried through to the point of murder, functioning as a ritualized means of preserving a society in which there are tremendous unresolved internal tensions.

If left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into “proper” channels.

And who makes for an ideal scapegoat?

All our sacrificial victims […] are invariably distinguishable from the nonsacrificeable beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act of vengeance. The considerable importance this freedom from reprisal has for the sacrificial process makes us understand that sacrifice is primarily an act of violence without risk of vengeance.

This equation explains why ordinary bigots seek their targets among the most marginalized—those no one will avenge. But Girard’s framework goes further, showing how this can help to protect the state in times of crisis.

Perhaps this explains why Trump was able to win the 2024 election by promising to carry out gratuitous violence against undocumented people and trans people. Carrying out “the largest deportation operation in American history,” as Trump has explicitly pledged to do, will wreck the US economy. It will deliver no material gains to the vast majority of his supporters, who benefit from the underpaid labor of the undocumented and the resulting cheapness of commodities. From a purely economic perspective, exploiting the labor of the undocumented inside the borders of the United States provides more advantages to Trump’s supporters than deporting them ever could. By any measure, it’s a waste of resources: deporting a million people in one year will cost eighteen times more than the entire world spends annually on cancer research.

In other words, mass deportations are a costly luxury indulgence that Trump’s supporters regard as worth the expense because they experience the need for violence so intensely.

The same goes for the desire to see violence enacted—both judicially and extrajudicially—against trans people and against women as a whole. The mendacious propaganda falsely claiming that trans people are carrying out mass shootings or that undocumented immigrants are contributing to a crime wave is not received by its intended audience as cool-headed statistical inquiry, but rather as an indulgence of their desire to do violence to the truth itself as a step towards doing violence to those that they imagine can be harmed “without fear of reprisal.” They have not been misled by erroneous reporting; their desire for violence has created a market for falsehoods.

As we argued during the first Trump administration, Trump did not become popular by promising to redistribute wealth, but by promising to redistribute violence. This redistribution of violence creates a pressure valve for a whole host of resentments. To quote Girard, once more:

The desire to commit an act of violence on those near us cannot be suppressed without a conflict; we must divert that impulse, therefore, toward the sacrificial victim, the creature we can strike down without fear of reprisal, since he lacks a champion.

Why are societies driven to desire sacrificial violence in the first place? If it is true that sacrificial violence serves to channel rage away from those who provoke it, then we can infer that the more injustice there is in a society—the more that people are oppressed and exploited and humiliated by those who have more power and more privilege than they do—the stronger the urge for sacrificial violence will be.³

This brings us back to Trump’s decision to fête Daniel Penny. In a time when there is increasingly widespread anger, the role that sacrificial violence plays channeling violence away from those who are responsible for harm is essential for maintaining the stability of the prevailing order. This is the world of The Hunger Games, become real.

What would all these angry people be doing if their rage was not satiated via violence against those more vulnerable than themselves?

A banner seen hanging in Chicago over Lake Shore Drive on December 9, 2024.

Retribution

Retribution is fundamentally different from sacrificial violence. For its target, it seeks the person who is most responsible for a particular injustice, regardless of where that person is situated in the social hierarchy.

As a general rule, those who are most responsible for injustice are usually among those who possess the most power—otherwise, how would they have the opportunity to do so much harm? The average person in the United States has considerably more to fear from corporate executives than from undocumented immigrants.

It is the powerful who are able to pose the greatest threat to others: this is practically self-evident, despite the efforts of billionaire-owned media and social media platforms to humanize the wealthy and dehumanize the poor.

When we see people fixating their rage on the powerless amid the worst inequality in generations, this is a dead giveaway that they have been hoodwinked. It is telling that the populist movement around the wealthiest man to ever become president of the United States is presented as a “revolt against the elites” even as it rallies people to worship oligarchs like Trump and Elon Musk. There is no longer any way to rally people without at least pretending to have a go at some subset of the ruling class.

It is terrifying to realize that one’s enemies are considerably more powerful than oneself. It is much easier to take out one’s misfortunes on those who are even worse off. Easier—and utterly pointless—and despicably cowardly.

The shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare galvanized such a powerful response because it posed the question very clearly: should violence be enacted against the most vulnerable—or against the most responsible? It spoke to millions of people because, across the political spectrum, all of them understood that insurance profiteers are responsible for their suffering or for the suffering of people they empathize with. Precisely because it was legible as retribution, the shooting illuminated that injustice has been taking place on a mass scale.

Commenters on Youtube discussing their feelings about the shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

Girard cautions us against vengeance, arguing that a single act of retribution can set off a chain reaction:

Vengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal… The multiplication of reprisals instantaneously puts the very existence of a society in jeopardy.

It would put the very existence of this society in jeopardy, at least. Of course, a society in which capitalists are able to amass billions by ruthlessly exploiting everyone else—a society that can only remain stable by targeting more and more people for sacrificial violence—already involves a certain amount of jeopardy.

Indeed, what the capitalists fear most is that this single act of vengeance might come to involve the whole social body, that it could initiate a chain reaction. This is why Luigi Mangione, the person accused of shooting the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, is being charged with the same crime on both state and federal levels, and with terrorism besides.

Is Girard right about the risks of vengeance? We can grant that many people hold sincere but erroneous beliefs about who is responsible for their suffering, quite apart from the inclination towards sacrificial violence that the powerful seek to foster for their own protection. But is it better to inhabit a society in which the powerful can inflict any amount of death and suffering on the powerless without fear of consequences, up to and including outright genocide? Is that really the best way to protect society?

We can also grant that it is far better to resolve conflicts to the satisfaction of all parties than it is to descend into interminable blood feuds.⁴ But the state does not actually exist to resolve conflicts. The judicial apparatus and the hundreds of thousands of police who serve it exist to ensure that conflicts need not be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. They exist to force unsatisfactory outcomes on people, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy—thereby perpetuating the conditions that stoke the desire for sacrificial violence.

If Girard is indeed correct that sacrificial violence is always directed against those who can be “exposed to violence without fear of reprisal,” then it stands to reason that retribution is the only way to hold it at bay once it is unleashed.

Opposing retribution and accepting sacrificial violence in its place will not serve to avert bloodshed; it can only function to ensure that bloodletting will not threaten the social order. Today, the vast majority of us are closer to being among those who can be killed “without fear of reprisal” than we are to becoming executives whose deaths will be mourned on nationwide media—and the less we act in solidarity with each other, the truer that will be. If we do not wish to risk one day being subject to sacrificial violence ourselves, we must become capable of forging common cause with those who are worse off than us in order to defend ourselves from those who seek to exploit and oppress us.

In the absence of effective collective models for self-defense and social change, retribution hangs in the popular imagination as the only remaining way to take a stand against injustice. Sacrificial violence corrupts and debases all who derive relief from it; by contrast, retribution at least expresses a forlorn longing for a world without injustice. As Girard himself admits,

It is precisely because they detest violence that men make a duty of vengeance.

Beyond Martyrdom

In the iconography of sacrificial violence and retribution, the scapegoat and the martyr are twin archetypes. The former is sacrificed to stabilize the existing order, the latter serves to sanctify a new order by giving his life for it. By sacrificing himself, the martyr demonstrates that the new order has a transcendent value—that it is worth more than life itself. These archetypes are thousands of years old; their influence on us is deeper than we understand.

Of course, most people are only drawn to martyrdom as a spectator sport. Martyrs’ sacrifices often prove most useful to those who have no intention of risking their own lives for any cause. The popular response to the shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare shows how disillusioned millions of people are with capitalism and its beneficiaries, but this response is also a symptom of widespread despair and demobilization. The shooting aroused such an outpouring of pent-up frustrations precisely because these people have not been able to figure out what they themselves can do to put a stop to injustice and exploitation.

It is up to us to show that there are ways to resist injustice and exploitation that do not end in martyrdom. If we do not popularize collective models for bringing about social change, if we leave people to choose between passivity and martyrdom, the vast majority will choose passivity.

Those who approve of neither sacrificial violence nor retribution had better demonstrate an effective alternative. Arguing against retribution without doing anything to change the conditions that provoke it can only set the stage for even more sacrificial violence to occur in its place.

Make no mistake, as economic and ecological crises intensify, we are going to see more and more sacrificial violence—and more public figures will come to view it as necessary, even if they dare not call it by its name. Trump’s violent rhetoric is not a temporary excess; it is just the most visible manifestation of a mechanism that has already resumed the essential role that it plays in stabilizing the social order during every era of unrest.⁵

As anarchists, the spiritual economics of guilt and punishment that underlies the framework of retribution is foreign to us. Calculating culpability and meting out suffering is the work of the state, its judiciary, and its God; we have other ambitions. We do not wish to see the guilty punished as an end unto itself—we seek to do away with the means via which they oppress. We would pass up the fulfillment of any vendetta if we could thereby bring about the abolition of capitalism, even if that meant permitting every former billionaire to walk free. We don’t seek to goad others into becoming martyrs on our behalf. We aspire to model the sort of courage, humility, and care we hope that others will express alongside us so that together we can change the world.

But until we succeed, there will be sacrificial violence—and retribution.

Graffiti seen in Seattle, Washington.

Appendix

According to a survey, over 40% of young people polled deemed the assassination of Thompson “acceptable.” Photographs of graffiti, banner drops, and altered billboards expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person currently being charged with the killing of the CEO, have gone viral and generated headlines. The December 4th Legal Committee is helping to run a fundraising campaign in support of Mangione’s legal defense; interviews with spokespersons Sam Beard and Jamie Peck have been featured on outlets such as CNN, drawing hundreds of supportive comments. As of this writing, the online fundraiser has raised over $186,000.

Here follows an incomplete roundup of graffiti, posters, corporate media interviews, and demonstrations addressing the shooting of Brian Thompson or expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person accused of carrying it out.

Sam Beard speaking on CNN on behalf of a fundraising campaign in support of Luigi Mangione’s legal defense.

Pacific Northwest

A poster seen in Portland, Oregon.

Graffiti on a freeway in Medford, OR

California

A banner appeared in Turlock, California.
Two banners appeared on the bridge connecting San Francisco, California.
Graffiti seen in Riverside, California.
Billboard redecorated in Inland Empire, California.
Graffiti seen in Hollywood, California.
Graffiti seen in San Diego, California.

Freight train graffiti photographed in the Bay Area.

Southwest

Graffiti seen in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Graffiti seen in Tucson, Arizona.

Central

A stencil seen in Austin, Texas.
Also in Austin, on December 21, several people participated in a demonstration and circulated the following report:

Today, six Luigis took a couple banners to a highly trafficked foot bridge in downtown Austin and danced to the Mario theme song. Pedestrians cheered, wrote letters to Luigi, and even took photos with the banners. Letters ranged from heart-wrenching stories about family members being denied healthcare to love letters. The overall reception was extremely good. Flyers were handed out that called out the largest health insurance company in Texas, Blue Cross Blue Shield. They read:

“On December 4th, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down. The bullet casings told the story: this was act of vengeance against UnitedHealthCare, who denies over 30% of health insurance claims—a company emblematic of a system that kills. Every year, over 50,000 Americans die from lack of insurance. 38% percent of us avoid necessary care because we’re scared of the cost. One in twelve is drowning in medical debt. Health insurance companies aren’t doctors. They don’t heal—they profit by restricting access to care. While we ration medications, delay appointments, and worry about bills, they rake in billions. We get sicker and they get richer. This violence isn’t on the evening news. It’s buried beneath their marketing, their endless paperwork, their fine print. But make no mistake: this is violence. And they’re laughing all the way to the bank. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Texas’s largest insurer, denies one in five claims while pocketing $18 billion in revenue. Whether Thompson’s death filled you with joy or horror, it ripped the mask off. The truth was laid bare: these companies are complicit in widespread suffering. Think about the last time you or someone you love worried about a medical bill. Put off care because of the cost. Cut pills in half to make them last. You’ve felt the violence they inflict. Now, the media and government scramble to spin the narrative, calling working-class mother Briana Boston a “terrorist” for uttering “Deny, Defend, Depose” when her claims were denied. We must remain clear headed: a small group gets rich off our illness. The solution is just as simple: abolish these corporations and nationalize health insurance. Single-payer healthcare works everywhere else in the developed world, where people live longer and healthier lives. Texans, by contrast, die three years younger, victims of private healthcare. The only question left is this: When will we stop waiting and take what is ours?”

Austin, December 21.

Midwest

Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.
More graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.
A banner displayed in Chicago, Illinois.
Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.

In addition, a rally in occurred Indianapolis, Indiana. From a report:

Today, we protest against Elevance Health not in its role as a distinct actor in the health insurance market, a single agent in the hall of mirrors of contemporary capitalism. Elevance operates in just the same manner as UHC in the way it ranks bodies and judges some to be worthy of care and the rest simply not worth the time or effort. In this manner, the only difference between the two is a matter of degrees in subdomains. We believe it is necessary to oppose this system of broad ranking of life expectancies in an age of depreciating life expectations. It is necessary as a precondition to a life worth living. We believe that everyone is worthy of care. We believe that everyone deserves access to a healthy life according to their own standards. Both Elevance and UHC stand as barriers to this possibility. This is why we oppose them.

Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Southeast

Graffiti seen in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Graffiti seen in Richmond, Virginia.
A sticker seen in St. Petersburg, Florida.
A banner drop photographed in Atlanta, Georgia.

Northeast

Posters appeared in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Graffiti appearedin Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A banner displayed Vermont.
Graffiti appeared in Baltimore, Maryland.
Several instances of graffiti appeared around New York City, as well as CEO “Wanted” posters. A noise demonstration also took place outside of the Ziegfeld Ballroom. One participant said,

“You know the theme of the event tonight is the roaring ’20s. In the roaring ’20s, there was a lot of wealth and inequality, just like now. So while they’re drinking champagne and thinking about glamor, we’re thinking about the people that we love who are poor, who are sick, and who can’t afford healthcare.”

Artwork in Santiago, Chile.

When they invited him to the football game, Penny had just appeared on Fox News describing the “guilt” he “would have felt if someone did get hurt”—making it explicitly clear that he did not consider Jordan Neely to count as a human being. ↩
For example, Girard argues that desire emerges imitatively and that this inevitably provokes violent tensions between people, as it causes them to compete for the same scarce objects. One might counter that while some of the things that people desire are indeed subject to scarcity, imitative desire could also give rise to cooperation, producing abundance in place of scarcity and diminishing the impetus towards violence, sacrificial or otherwise. In short, Girard does a compelling job of describing the role of sacrificial violence in afflicted societies, but he does not succeed in proving that it is inevitable. ↩
This explains why some of the new voters that Trump picked up in the 2024 election are immediately adjacent to the demographics he is pledging to attack: positioned near the margins, on the receiving end of injustice, they feel the urgency of violence more than most. ↩
There is a longstanding tradition, stretching back to Aeschylus’s Oresteia, of works of philosophy and literature claiming that state power and its attendant centralized judicial system were invented in order to put an end to the cycle of violence that Girard claims is the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of retribution. In the Icelandic tradition, the equivalent work is probably Njáls Saga, which recounts blood feuds and conflict resolution across a half century in the days before Iceland had a centralized government. Centralized state governance took hold in Iceland much later than in ancient Greece, however, so we can compare the myth presented in the Oresteia with the reality of Icelandic history. In fact, centralized government did not spontaneously emerge in Iceland as a means to resolve conflict; rather, once conflicts between various local parties became irresolvable, the king of Norway was able to take advantage of the opportunity to bring Iceland under his control and impose his rule upon it. If this example is any indication, the reality is precisely the opposite of the myth: those who cannot resolve conflicts among themselves will eventually be subordinated to the state, which is itself the result of unresolved conflict that has metastasized into a permanent condition, not the solution to unresolved conflict. ↩
In order to supply the American public with sacrificial violence, the previous generation of Republican politicians repeatedly invaded Iraq. That was a kinder, gentler time, when sacrificial victims were chiefly sought outside the borders of the United States. Just like today’s war on the undocumented, those invasions were justified with discernibly false pretenses and scaremongering. The result was sort of drunken spree from which politicians of both parties emerged with regrets, having completely destabilized the Middle East and made the world a considerably more dangerous place. ↩

Resisting Local Authoritarianism and Multipolar Imperialisms in Georgia : A Deeper Look into the Protests

2024-12-11T05:20:06Z

On the one-hundred-year anniversary of the uprising in Georgia against Soviet annexation, the struggle for independence from Russian rule remains the chief force driving the popular mobilization that has been growing over the past several months. Yet today’s movement points to a horizon beyond the choice between Europe and Russia, two of the imperial powers contending for influence in the region. It expresses a growing social anger at both the local authoritarian regime and the grip of foreign economic powers upon the Caucasus in general.

Contrary to the dominant media discourse, this popular mobilization is not simply a demand for Georgia to be integrated into the European Union. From a distance, it may seem reminiscent of the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine, but to grasp the deep tumult that this particular struggle represents, we need to look closer.

This article was prepared by a Georgian anti-authoritarian in exile in communication with local collectives in Tbilisi, Kutaisi, and Zugdidi. The photos are courtesy of მაუწყებელი / Mautskebeli. Georgians themselves refer to the country by the name Sakartvelo.

Introduction

In order to understand what is taking place in the streets of Georgia without falling into nostalgia or insurrectionary romanticism, we need to listen to the expression of social anger. This article is aimed at readers in the West, particularly in Western Europe, where many people are trapped in a reductive campism, which presents the movement in Georgia—as well as other struggles in the post-Soviet context, such as in Ukraine or Chechnya—as simply aligned with the interests of the Euro-Atlantic bloc, omitting the geopolitical stakes vis-à-vis Russian imperialism and internal authoritarian policies.

Others looking on from a distance are swept up in a confused exhilaration. The sudden burst of media attention—on a scale we apparently did not deserve even during the 2008 war—tells only part of the story, focusing on the insurrectionary aesthetic of gold stars and European flags waved bravely in the face of water cannon jets.

To attract the attention of the West, you need either tragedy or spectacle. We’ve experienced plenty of tragedy throughout the last few decades. But the recent history of the post-Soviet territories remains a gloomy stain in the backdrop of wars and conflicts, not close enough to really grip the media consumer, not far enough away to inspire guilt.

In our country, the spectacular is more in the mountains than in the street. This time, however, the images of protesters with fireworks, the scenes of direct confrontation with the police, faces covered in blood, have had an effect, both on the corporate media and on the insurrectionists.

The French news network BFMTV reports on the riots live from Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi, while the Georgian Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, employs a discourse that we had already heard from the same channel during the Yellow Vest movement in France, speaking of “violent rioters” and “assailants of the forces of law and order.” European politicians are expressing shock at the police violence and denouncing the disproportionate use of the repressive apparatus, while Georgia’s ruling party, “Georgian Dream,” broadcasts scenes of police charges and raids on demonstrations in Europe in its own anti-Western propaganda.

So why all the attention now? What geopolitical and economic stakes underpin these events? We see pro-Western and pro-Russian forces, a local authoritarian regime rubbing shoulders with BRICS [the transnational alliance involving Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa] and the Euro-Atlantic far right, neoliberal progressivism employing murderous methods. But what is the Georgian population’s own struggle, what are the reasons for their anger at the government and its increasingly authoritarian policies?

For a deeper understanding than can be gleaned from the images that reach Western Europe, we need to situate the events in their immediate local context, and at the same time, frame them in the post-Soviet period in general.

A National Protest Movement in the Context of Local Authoritarianism

Although protesters have been taking to the streets all night long for the past week and are gaining momentum in several cities, they are part of a social movement that began last spring against the “foreign agent” law.

Against this backdrop, the parliamentary elections were clearly rigged to keep the ruling party in power: Georgian Dream, led by the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Even before the Prime Minister’s declaration suspending discussions about integrating Georgia into the European Union until 2028, people were organizing demonstrations to contest the election results and call for new elections. Police violently dispersed those demonstrations, brutally attacking and arresting people; demonstrators faced ununiformed assailants alongside the police, as well as imprisonment and other forms of legal repression. Yet strikes, resignations from the state bureaucracy, and student mobilizations in regional schools have only gained momentum, going beyond the issue of the election. People have occupied the Georgian Public Broadcaster, First Channel. Already-existing collectives are participating in these protests, including residents of peripheral regions who were already resisting environmentally destructive projects, student movements fighting for access to housing, queer and feminist collectives, and people mobilizing against evictions.

Today, the threat of authoritarianism hangs over everyone, heralding the establishment of a state of emergency and a curfew to stifle the possibility of protest, as well as the reform of the state bureaucracy—a maneuver intended to inflict mass layoffs of opponents and anyone deemed critical of the regime.

At the same time, police repression is intensifying: hundreds of people have been arrested, including minors and young adults; police have sent people many people to the hospital, leaving one young man in intensive care, while carrying out mass searches and beating and humiliating people in the streets. Officers in the riot police who seek to resign are themselves repressed by their colleagues, as revealed by an officer who left the country. For several nights, it has been the “zonderebi,” the “titushkebi”—the armed plainclothes “strongmen” employed for the “dirty work”—who have been prowling the streets to brutalize demonstrators and journalists. The government has also announced a reform of the police, facilitating access to services without going through competitive examinations, in order to speed the recruitment of new personnel in order to achieve the capacity to stifle a movement that is now taking on national proportions.

If the Georgian Dream party came to power in 2012 by opposing the neoliberal government of Mikheil Saakashvili and its bloody police state, it has since come to represent the same police system. It uses police and judicial violence in a tripartite form: French-style street repression (anti-riot weapons, kettling, beatings, and the like), Russian-style judicial repression (arrests and prison sentences for activists and opponents), and mafia violence (beatings by the “thugs,” violence targeting people at their homes, threats to relatives and family members) reminiscent of the methods of the regime of Mikheil Saakashvili, who left office in 2013.

Images of people wounded during the demonstrations.

The generalized rage against the “Kotsi” and the “Natsi”—derogatory terms designating respectively the party in power and the opposition, the United National Movement (UNM), as well as their allies—is evident in the tirade of insults launched against both camps during the rallies. There is too much anger for people to use refined rhetoric; the insults fly in outbursts on television and during public speeches. For the same reason, the politicians of the UNM are driven out by demonstrators, some of whom suffered under their regime before Georgian Dream came to power. “The resistance to the police regime that allowed this government to take power will also mark its end,” activists declare during their speeches, particularly during the rallies organized for the release of all detainees.

This rejection of both parties reflects a profound defiance of the authorities and a refusal to submit to the caricatured dualisms that they promote: the Western civilizational project versus the Russian war project, progressivism versus obscurantism, subservience to Western hegemony versus subservience to territorial imperialism, ultra-liberal nationalism versus ultra-conservative nationalism. The point where these dualisms converge is also their breaking point: unbridled policing, policies that make it impossible to live, exploitation of natural resources as part of the global imperial market, the impoverishment of the population in exchange for economic and geostrategic alliances with foreign powers.

To delegitimize the movement, the government uses rhetoric to revive the divisions associated with “polarization,” putting UNM politicians in the spotlight. The government presents itself as the guarantor of national sovereignty in the face of the threat of war from the north and the danger of a coup d’état by Western forces, constantly manipulating the example of Ukraine to sow fear. They compare the current movement to the Maidan uprising in order to argue that it is not self-managed but controlled by partisans of the Maidan and the UNM, insisting that the Ukrainian revolution led to hundreds of deaths and then, to war.

This anti-Ukrainian rhetoric minimizes both the social dimension and the form of agency specific to the Maidan movement, which cannot be reduced to neo-Nazi forces alone. It is consistent with the anti-war rhetoric deployed throughout the electoral campaign. The way that the government displayed images of the wars as election advertising proves that, behind the illusion of maintaining peace, we find the most despicable methods of maintaining power. They are exploiting the traumas of our collective memory, which remain raw—not only from the war that occurred in 2008, but also from the tumultuous years of the 1990s, which saw an independence movement accompanied by a putsch, a civil war, and inter-ethnic conflicts.

The “Foreign Agent” Law

The current use of police brutality and legal repression was facilitated by new legislation passed last spring, which also serves as the foundation for ideological rhetoric based on anti-Western authoritarianism.

The law regarding “transparency of the influence of foreign forces” reintroduces a project that was dropped a year and a half ago after mass protests. The law was adopted last spring, a year later, after two months of demonstrations and the circumvention of a presidential veto.

Modeled on a Russian original, this law requires any nonprofit organization receiving 20% of its annual income from foreign sources—whether those are grants or individual funding—to register as an “entity representing the interests of a foreign force.” In a local economy marked by the absence of public subsidies and alternative sources of income, contrary to the official rhetoric, this law does not endanger the large NGOs as much as small associations, unions, and independent media, as well as local and self-managed collectives.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze openly stated that this law is primarily aimed at silencing the centers of resistance and struggle during his briefing on December 3: “We will build the Namakhvani Dam.”¹ The implication was that with this law in place, nothing will prevent the implementation of hydroelectric mega-projects, considered the pinnacle of economic development. Kobakhidze was referring to the Rioni Valley movement, which is now labeled pro-Western, despite being labeled pro-Russian three years ago. This movement, a self-managed environmental struggle led by locals which managed to force a Turkish company to back down from building a mega-hydroelectric dam, has become one of the main targets in the government’s rhetoric; they frame it as a threat to so-called energy sovereignty and independence. In response to the prime minister’s statement, residents of the valley held a banner at a rally in Tbilisi: “The Namakhvani Dam will not be built.”

Protesters carry a banner opposing the Namakhvani Dam.

In addition to the Rioni Valley movement, many local resistance movements are fighting against the social and environmental injustices caused by large-scale economic projects, including the exploitation and extraction of natural resources.

In Mingrelia, in western Georgia, residents of the village of Balda are mobilizing to prevent the beginning of construction work on an ecotourism development project involving the privatization of the river, land, and living spaces, as well as significant damage to mountain slopes.

In Shukruti, residents are fighting against the exploitation of the soil for manganese extraction by the Georgian Manganese company, a British holding company of Stemcor. Due to the explosions, the village is sinking into the ground, taking the houses of its inhabitants with it. The usual vigils occupying the construction site were moved this autumn to the Parliament in Tbilisi, with more radical forms of protest: hunger strikes and lips sewn shut.

Energy Geopolitics

But behind these small popular struggles are the stakes of the big economic players: China, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran and, of course, the European Union. Their power struggles are translated into inter-imperialist alliances, conflicts, and wars in which energy is a weapon par excellence.

The war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia have strengthened Georgia’s geostrategic position within economic infrastructure projects like the gas and oil corridor, hydroelectric resources, and maritime and land transit routes. The law on foreign agents presents itself as a guarantor of the realization of such projects. At the same time, the government has adopted the offshore law, the anti-LGBT law, and amendments to the law on pensions, as well as signing energy and economic memoranda with Turkey and China.

All of this seems to be part of a strategy of rapprochement with BRICS, particularly with China and Azerbaijan, to strengthen trade by expanding its role as a transit corridor. Georgia plays a strategic role in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s initiative to create a “new silk road” by integrating the China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor. Georgia’s involvement is based on two key projects: the construction of a new port in Anaklia, which is intended to become a major hub, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway line, intended to strengthen logistical connections between Asia and Europe.

This strategic position enables the Georgian government to exert pressure on the European Union, in particular because of its involvement in the colossal project to build an extensive undersea electricity cable, which would transport electricity supplied by Azerbaijan to the European Union, passing through the Black Sea in Georgia. A significant amount of energy transit already takes place through pipelines crossing Georgia, including the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) oil pipeline and the SCP (South Caucasus Pipeline) gas pipeline, which connect the Caspian Sea to Turkey via Georgian territory.²

Considering these geostrategic alliances for the conquest of resources, we can see that the simplistic division of the world into two major blocs—on one side, the Euro-Atlantic bloc and on the other, Russia—no longer makes sense. Now, we must understand the geopolitical chessboard as a multipolar space. Similarly, geopolitically speaking, the Georgian Dream party allies itself as much with the governments of the Euro-Atlantic extreme right (Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán) as with regional powers on the basis of a populist, sovereignist, and conservative discourse. Economically speaking—in terms of its rapacious extraction policies and intent to dispossess and impoverish populations—it is fully in line with the globalized capitalist market alongside the progressive camp.

The Anti-LGBT Law

In order to reinforce the social conflict already initiated by the establishment of Western hegemony in this country, in particular through the interference of institutions and NGOs in the economic and cultural spheres, the government has skillfully appropriated an anti-Western discourse, arousing the sympathy of a part of the population despised by the “pro-Western” part. This rhetorical masquerade allows it to set up certain “social groups” as scapegoats in order to justify the establishment of an authoritarian regime for the defense of “peace, tradition, and economic sovereignty.” In addition to those “blocking” energy independence, it is “the LGBT group” that supposedly represents one of the chief threats to our cultural and religious identity.

This is the context in which the new anti-LGBT law, called the “Law on family values and the protection of minors,” came into force on December 2. The law, which equates homosexual relations and gender identity with incest, criminalizes queer people themselves as well as access to healthcare that the law deems “medical manipulation.” In addition to the queer community, the law also criminalizes any form of support, demonstration, public gathering, or public stance that could be labeled as “pro-queer propaganda.” The collective Queer Resistance wrote about the law’s application in its “anti-fascist manifesto”:

“In Georgia, where nearly a million people have left the country to migrate in search of work over the past five years, one in three children lives in extreme poverty, while the education and healthcare systems are in ruins, the greedy oligarch has based his election campaign on false promises of peace and the propagation of artificial hatred.

“By criminalizing a part of the population—queer people—and legalizing hatred and censorship to establish totalitarian control, the law also designates as criminals all those and everything that opposes the legislation of this evil.”

Confronting the impoverishment and widespread indebtedness of the population, a situation in which banks and private services hold absolute power while the question of national identity still remains to be defined, it became necessary to create a new image of the enemy. This enemy is not far away in Russia or Turkey, but right before our eyes, forcibly imported by the West: the enemy whose very life itself, as well as appearance in public, threatens our morals and traditions and contributes to demographic problems. This is part of an operation to redirect anger over social problems, aiming to replace an old archetype of the enemy with a new one as a catalyst for the construction of identity.

However, if the responsibility for criminalizing queer people lies with the government, Western sexual imperialism bears some responsibility for instrumentalizing the queer question. While the missionaries of “human rights” were supposed to protect oppressed minorities, the ultraconservative response made them one of its first targets, using the anti-Western argument. Queer-washing only reinforced the social and cultural divide, separating “religious obscurantists” from liberal progressives. The government exploits the LGBTQ issue with such vigor because it knows how to provoke a strong cultural and existential tension by reproducing this opposition and defending the anti-progressive camp that is scorned by “civilizational” policies.

The Desire for the West?

This massive protest movement, which has been represented merely as pro-European rallies, has its own specific forms of organization, sociality, and mutual aid.

This is something you would never find on the streets of Europe. During the rallies on Rustaveli Avenue, traditional dances, folk songs, and religious songs take center stage; the cool kids of Gen Z shout slogans—the “Gaumarojos Sakartvelos”—that could just as easily be heard from the mouths of the “obscurantists” as a toast to the fatherland, freedom, and the church; mothers accompany their children.

Mothers accompany their children—in the vain hope of protecting them from police abuse. A mother’s cry—“Let go of her, she is my child”—has become the watchword of the protest, now inscribed in graffiti. Grandmothers, when they still have the strength to move, are surrounded and protected by demonstrators against water cannon fire; priests come out of the Kashveti church to shelter persecuted demonstrators.

Behind the gas masks, the shields painted with the numbers “1312,” there is also the idea of the common, which expresses itself first and foremost as a sense of collective belonging, crushed throughout the history of its existence, and adds a strong cultural, even existential dimension to political resistance.

Rustaveli Avenue has seen many police, military and paramilitary raids since the independence movement of the 1990s. Protesters from the “parents’ generation” evoke the memory of April 9, 1989, the date that marks the tragic beginning of the independence movement with the deaths of young protesters crushed beneath Russian tanks. The use of ununiformed forces and the manipulation around the question of war invoke collective memory: the war crimes of the Mkhedrioni paramilitary group, particularly in the regions of Mingrelia and Abkhazia, a collective trauma arising from the destruction of both bodies and souls following the massacres of Ossetians and Abkhazians, the ethnic cleansing of Georgians and forced displacements, as well as the rupture of inter-ethnic and family ties.

To understand what is at stake behind what can be interpreted as the desire for the West, we must bear this history in mind. First the Tsarist empire, then the Soviet empire made Russia one of the chief colonial powers ruling Georgia, following the Ottoman empire.

To recall the course of the recent history of liberation, Georgia and then Chechnya proclaimed their independence in 1991, before the fall of the USSR. All this took place in a landscape marked by the intensification of both nationalist and ethno-nationalist struggles, calling for the secession of minority ethnic groups under the protection of the USSR (Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Ossetia).

Following a coup d’état, civil war broke out in the capital between Georgian separatists, led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and the putschist opposition, which became the State Council led by former communist leader Eduard Shevardnadze. This war degenerated into a so-called inter-ethnic conflict from 1991 to 1993 in Abkhazia.

The 2008 war with Russia, although it took place in a different context than in the 1990s, revived the same wounds related to ethnic and territorial conflicts. This time, it was South Ossetia, another region mostly populated by ethnic minorities, that ended up being occupied by the Russian Federation.

But let there be no mistake: although the question of the autonomy of ethnic minorities in a territory where a multiplicity of languages, religions, and traditions coexist is a crucial issue, Russia remains an external superpower that uses ethnic tensions as leverage in a power struggle with the sole aim of expanding its territorial reign. Just as in Ukraine, Russia has always known how to associate the violence of its imperial regime with the conflicts over ethnic identity in the Caucasus, setting itself up as the “savior of oppressed ethnic minorities.”

This is why, behind the European flags, we find the hope for a better world, and behind the desire for the West—the desire for independence. But the idea of Europe as a horizon does not only arise in opposition to Russia. It also emerges from the propaganda and soft power of Euro-Atlantic neoliberal hegemony, which has continued to extend its zone of influence over post-Soviet territories since the collapse of the USSR.

For us, the generation of the 1990s, who grew up in the post-war period following the decline of the independence movement, the promise of the pro-Western path represented the dream of a better world that had been on the other side of the Iron Curtain: peace, bread, electricity, hot water, education, and health. Today, even if Europe continues to embody some kind of promise for a part of the population, no one is fooled.

Since the liberalization of visas in 2017, Georgia remains on the list of countries with high asylum demand, alongside Afghanistan and Bangladesh. This statistic shows that, in a population of 3.5 million inhabitants, each family has at least one member in exile and migration, seeking protection and subsistence conditions, in order to gain access to free health care or sufficient financial resources to support the relatives who have remained in the country, or else to repay the loans of a family that is deep in debt. Labeled as “bad exiles” because they are “economic migrants” or migrating “for health reasons,” not only are they denied the right to travel freely, but, in addition, they are subjected to all kinds of institutional and police violence, ranging from hundreds of illegal expulsions to the deaths of detainees in detention centers following police violence.³

While Europe would like to map Georgia under its sphere of influence, its treatment of the Georgian population in exile and economic migration has revealed its deception and duplicity.

Consequently, for the emigrant population, particularly in the context of growing racism and the rise of the extreme right, Europe no longer represents a mythical power that could save us from warlike imperialism and guarantee better social policies in a country prey to private predation. For the population of Georgia, insofar as geopolitical issues are mixed with questions of identity, if turning towards Europe represents a survival strategy for some, the chief concern, now even more so than before, remains the authoritarianism of the local government.

For Internationalist Solidarity

To conclude, I’d like to share the message of support sent to comrades in Georgia from Paris:

“From the gathering of Syrian comrades celebrating the fall of dictator Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, and of Georgian comrades organizing in support of the current protest movement, we want to bring the message of internationalist solidarity to peoples in struggle against imperialism, local authoritarian regimes, and social injustice.

“At a time of genocide in Palestine, wars in Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, the rise of authoritarian regimes in Georgia, Iran, and Russia and the extreme right in Europe, the only hope lies in building alliances and solidarity between oppressed peoples. Only the people can save the people!

“From Syria to Georgia, may the regimes fall everywhere!

“Freedom to all the prisoners in Georgia!

“Love and rage,

“Internationalist comrades from Paris”

A solidarity demonstration in Paris. “From Syria to Georgia, may the regimes fall everywhere!”

The construction of the Namakhvani Hydroelectric Cascade, the largest hydroelectric facility on Georgian territory since the end of the USSR, by the Turkish company ENKA. ↩
Already in 2006, the construction of the pipeline had aroused much opposition from locals. It goes without saying that the local economy has not received any financial benefit from these pipelines owned by the multinational consortiums BTC Co. and South Caucasus Pipeline Company. Their management is shared between European companies like British Petroleum and those of Azerbaijan and Turkey alongside Russia and Iran. ↩
Vakhtang Enukidze in 2020 at the CPR Gradisca d’Isonzo, Italy; Tamaz Rasoian, a Georgian-Kurdish national, at the Merkplas detention center, Belgium, in 2023. ↩

Insurgent Survival : Reflections on the Fight Against Sweeps Targeting the Homeless in Austin, Texas

2024-11-26T11:02:30Z

In 2019, militants in Austin, Texas started an organization with the aim of defending homeless camps against sweeps—forced removals disguised as “cleanups” carried out by cops and work crews. This organization, Stop the Sweeps, intervened in a cycle of struggles that included the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and the winter storm of 2021 while attempting to consolidate a pole for confrontational activity and strategic thinking. Here, we explore the history of this movement in detail, seeking to distill lessons about autonomous organization that can aid revolutionaries in future struggles against dispossession.

In June 2019, Austin City Council passed a reform legalizing “camping,” taking away the tool of misdemeanor ticketing from the Austin Police Department, which had used it for two decades to push homeless encampments into the deep woods and routinely dispossess the residents. The NGO left promoted this as a dramatic advance in the civil rights of houseless people, while NextDoor reactionaries decried it as a sign of the debasement of the once great city of Austin. In the news and on Twitter, Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott exchanged barbs with Democratic Austin Mayor Steve Adler, each taking one of these sides.

The following November, friends and comrades formed Stop the Sweeps Austin (STS), a political intervention intended to undermine both of those positions. The core aim of STS was to show that both the progressive city and the reactionary state used similar techniques, rationales, and low-wage contractors guarded by police to systematically dispossess the poorest and most marginalized people in Austin—and that in doing so, they were continuing policies of displacement that had begun more than a century earlier with colonization and the policing of enslaved and formerly enslaved populations. Confronting the sweeps was both materially and discursively strategic. The idea was to cut away at the foundation of the post-decriminalization strategy for displacement, heightening antagonism towards both of the political factions that depended upon it.

To do this, Stop the Sweeps Austin rallied sympathizers to intervene against weekly encampment sweeps by city and state forces while building parallel networks of mutual aid and political support. STS drew on existing solidarity networks descended from decades-running projects, informed by the living memory of the social movements of the homeless in the 1980s. We also benefitted from historical research and movement elder storytelling to extend our understanding of local history to the founding of Austin.

The sweeps are intended to destroy what little stability and sense of home the houseless are able to establish.

We now recognize that we were a part of a national movement against sweeps that peaked early in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on the momentum of the George Floyd Uprising. Autonomous groups in California, including the Sacramento Homeless Union and Where Do We Go in Berkeley, had been organizing against sweeps through 2019. In an early phase of STS organizing, we were roped into coalition building and national legal work by the Western Regional Advocacy Project; yet these projects did not offer meaningful coordination between groups to advance an autonomous vision grounded in direct action. There were efforts in Los Angeles to build out anti-sweep programs that seemed similar to ours from afar, though they started from a stronger orientation towards social democratic city politics. Fiercer resistance in Minneapolis built to flashpoints in 2020 including the occupation of an empty hotel and militant encampment defense. The circulation of the insurrectionary framework “You Sweep, We Strike” saw attacks on contractors and city infrastructure in Seattle, Santa Cruz, and Minneapolis. It was difficult to connect with these projects to learn from them directly, but easy to boost each other’s content from afar.

Five years after the founding of Stop the Sweeps Austin and two years after its quiet dissolution, we are writing this piece in hopes of refining the lessons of this recent high point of movement activity. We will begin by painting a picture of the moment in 2019 when Stop the Sweeps emerged, then situate that moment in a longer history of colonization, development, and homeless resistance. Having done so, we will distill the strategic frameworks that guided our organizing, then follow the trajectory of the movement to the limits it encountered. In each section, we will present our hypotheses and the lessons we learned along the way, illustrated via specific practical experiences.

We offer these as reflections both for the local movement—to remind it of its history, its victories and defeats—and for revolutionaries everywhere seeking to think through crucial questions about autonomous organization. Today, we are preparing to confront a new phase of camp repression in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Grants Pass” decision, which green-lights criminalization and displacement in California and elsewhere.

A sign on a tent in downtown Austin.

1000 Tents Bloom

Before 2019, most encampments lasted about three months before police evicted them—a cycle of temporary inhabitation and dispersal. This constant motion is essential to the cycle of development, as it opens up land and keeps bodies moving through the various infrastructures built to profit on them—shelters, social services, housing, prisons, hotels, and stores, all of which increasingly resemble each other.

Though “camping” was formally legalized in June 2019, enforcement had actually ceased during the winter of 2018-2019. Citing a paucity of funds due to the consequences of the catastrophic Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) paused its contracts providing camp removal, attempting to hand them off to the City of Austin. The city government did not immediately pick up the contracts at the same pace. At the same time, informal directives were given to APD to slow the pace at which they inflicted tickets for camping, fearing court rulings enforcing an expansion of the Martin v. Boise circuit court ruling, which had slowed camping ban enforcement on the West Coast. This occurred alongside a soft strike by organized Austin Police officers who had significantly slowed their response times to minor crimes, aiming thereby to press their demands for more power.

The repeal of the camping ban created a political opening, enabling the camps to survive indefinitely on public land. Tent cities blossomed in January and February, mainly under state-owned freeways, and grew more elaborate. Shanty towns and shelters made from wooden pallets, political signs, and tarps as well as more modest tents and cardboard populated the city north to south and east to west, dotting the parks and the underpasses of major highways and appearing beside libraries and around the social services buildings downtown. This offered new forms of collective stability and security for the unhoused: the camps served as points of connection, stable locations at which to receive social services, and places for those new to life on the streets to get oriented and find support. They represented a strategy for mutual safety against harassment by reactionaries and police, providing a sense of collective life and care.

An encampment below the I-35 overpass in the heart of downtown Austin.

This occupation of space shocked liberals and conservatives alike, many of whom saw it as a display of public disorder or an embodiment of the ever-intensifying crisis in affordable housing. In Stop the Sweeps, for our part, we saw the expansion of the camps as a sign of the self-organizing capacity of the homeless and a demonstration of the power of land occupation—indeed, a signal of disorder for those invested in the property system. STS sought to build connections centering this sense of self-organization to build a defense network against the waves of displacement that were the cause and consequence of life in the camps.

At that time, the displacement of the housed poor had continued unabated across Austin for decades, in keeping with national trends and local plans to develop and gentrify first West Austin and then East Austin, which was historically home to Black and brown Austinites following a century of segregation. Recent statistics show that most homeless Austinites were displaced from the zip codes that they currently reside in, often in areas suffering intense gentrification. While most recent literature on rising rents in Austin focuses on the spike following the pandemic, money had been pouring into Austin neighborhoods long before that, aided by historically low interest rates intended to flip houses and entire blocks into money makers. Projects that had been paused since the previous real estate bubble burst in 2008 were resumed during the 2010s with towers and “luxury” apartment blocks mushrooming from the mycelial networks of capital and property that had accumulated and expanded during the “bust” period.

In the late 2010s, the local Maoist movement (now mostly disbanded and critiqued as a cult by former members) waged a years-long struggle against a development slated along East Riverside, an effort to reinvent a low-income area as a luxury new-urbanist hotspot: the Domain on Riverside. The developers ultimately succeeded in evicting low-income renters from multiple high-density apartment complexes, which consequently remained boarded up for years just a short walk away from one of the largest encampments on that avenue.

These Maoists represented a political pole in 2019 Austin, offering a mixture of public and secretive activity that prioritized direct action and confrontation with a diffuse array of enemies that they saw as aligned with the interests of capital. On the one hand, this meant that developers were confronted in public meetings and at their homes, and on the other, that former allies were castigated online and in person after political breaks. The Maoists also confronted other minor political figures, including DSA-oriented candidates, and disrupted their meetings. At the time, the Maoists had developed a reputation for being arrested, both at marches and in their homes, and facing elevated charges. Their former leader, Jared Roark, who went by the name Dallas, was arrested in his home for weapons possession after a tragicomic confrontation with an expelled former member of the Maoist’s armed unit.

The DSA and an array of activist non-profits oriented towards electoral and council-level reforms represented another pole of activity. While less active in the streets, this alliance fused respectable political activity—rallies, press conferences, and testimony at City Council—with flirtations with abolitionist frameworks. The Homes Not Handcuffs coalition emerged out of this scene; they won the 2019 camping ban rollback, spawned the autonomous mutual aid organization Street Forum, and recomposed briefly to defend the camping ban at the polls in 2021. Their organizing relied heavily on personal relationships with City Council “progressive” heavyweight and current Texas Representative Greg Casar and on a progressive political machine comprised of organizations like Grassroots Leadership and Workers Defense Project, which had won reforms at similar scales through the City Council in the 2010s.

STS oriented ourselves by drawing from political traditions and organizations that overlapped with these but were distinct from them. Many of the initial organizers were drawn from the local anarchist milieu, which had been working to draw links between different tendencies and organizations. One was the Peaceful Streets Project, which had emerged from right libertarian circles amidst the Occupy Wall Street cycle at the end of 2011, but had split left in the course of a decade of anti-police struggle. PSP served as the local Copwatch, filming police interactions and developing an aggressive interventionist style in which they named and shamed local cops, occasionally becoming personally known to the police themselves.

Another influence were members of the Autonomous Student Network, who had cut their teeth organizing at the University of Texas and had gone on to participate in the Peaceful Streets Project and the Occupy ICE movement that established an occupation outside a detention center in San Antonio; they also helped to start Street Forum. These organizers brought an experimental streak to organizing, with a willingness to take risks and say what only anarchists can say.

Contributing historical memory and serving an organic link to Austin’s homeless movement were members of The Challenger Street Newspaper, also born in 2011 out of the ashes of The Advocate, a long-running more traditionally NGO-style paper. From its beginnings, The Challenger was smaller and scrappier than the Advocate, with more will to participate politically in social movements. The Challenger published monthly issues with articles written mainly by homeless people in Austin, focusing on life on the streets of Austin, political commentary, poetry, and art. The Challenger had resuscitated the memory of Homer the Homeless Goose, the mascot of the Street People’s Advisory Council—a direct action organization of homeless Austinites in the 1980s who led occupations of vacant buildings and, famously, the downtown lake.

Along with contributions from other early members involved in anti-prison struggles and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the DSA (which was focused on mutual aid), these organizations helped build the political framework that STS used as we attempted to build an alternative pole, intervening in the fight to defend the camps. This enabled us to synthesize tactics and strategic insights from a variety of experiences. Coupled with insatiable demands and a hostile attitude to the state, that equipped us to punch above our weight.

The shelters were full.

A History of Displacement and Contestation

Now that we have set the stage in 2019, let’s back up to explore the history of homelessness in Austin and the movements combating it.

The City of Austin was established as a military maneuver intended to project burgeoning Anglophone power westward after Texan independence from Mexico in 1836. Settlers established a semicircle of forts to the west to defend the new capital from raiding Comanches and other Indigenous people. Austin’s famed Barton Springs are part of a chain of springs in Central Texas that had been in continuous use by Indigenous peoples for over 10,000 years; they appear in some Texas rock art. Military campaigns and raiding and surveying parties sought to drive Indigenous peoples from their lands throughout Texas. The city’s first camping ban excluded Indigenous peoples from camping inside city limits.

Slavery was an integral part of the economy of early Austin, with up to a third of its earliest recorded population comprised of enslaved Black people. White people who enslaved twenty people or more were known as “planters” and held special status. As a consequence of the boom-and-bust cycles of for-profit agriculture, planters often enslaved more people than they could put to work on the plantations that ringed the city. Consequently, many enslaved people worked and lived in the city instead of on plantations. They provided various urban services, remitting a percentage of their income to their enslavers.

Some elements of the ruling classes sought to target these Black people who were enslaved but living somewhat independently. They formed Vigilance Committees of private citizens to maintain white power in the districts where these people lived. Later, they demanded the establishment of a municipal police force so that the public would have to pay for the policing of Black people. This was one of the origins of what became the APD.

A continuing history of white supremacist violence: troopers playing a role in the sweeps targeting the houseless.

Another famously followed the Civil War some years later. With slavery abolished and the fighting over, freedmen and former Confederate soldiers arrived in the city alongside other poor whites. Black freedmen established communities—sometimes permitted on private land, but often squatting near creeks and in other undesirable or far-flung areas of town. To discipline these surplus populations, the city government proposed a police force. The Black Codes forced Black people who did not find employment to labor in conditions resembling slavery. Black work crews assembled that way played a major role in constructing Austin’s State Capitol.

Alongside the police, a series of city plans served to structure the racial order of the city. Following the official decree of segregation in 1928, slums comprising over ten percent of the town’s area were evicted. People who were renting or who did not have clear title to the land where they resided were displaced en masse through these “Slum Clearance Plans” and federally funded Urban Renewal programs, and the land was often turned over to state use (including the sites of the University of Texas, the state government, and the hospitals between Congress and the I-35 Freeway). These displacements served to impose a line between a Black and brown East Austin and a white West Austin. This segregationist project shaped the messy post-emancipation reality of scattered Freedmen’s towns and Mexican enclaves over the following 80 years.

According to Gus Bova, in the 1970s and 1980s, subsidized housing fell out of favor alongside a generalized crisis in manufacturing work. Across the country, people were being thrown out of industrial work while cheap housing was disappearing, and Austin was no exception. The local booms and busts in the housing construction market, which employed low-wage labor, contributed to this. Federal policy also began to support housing as a collateralized asset, both for big banks and consumers, seeing a hot real estate market as a sign of a healthy economy that bolsters consumer spending and debt. Periodically, this policy gets ahead of itself, spawning crises like the one in 2008—but even at the best of times, it inexorably raises housing costs for everyone while concentrating property in the hands of fewer and fewer landlords.

The city’s “Innovation Team” traces the beginning of NGO work intended to benefit the homeless to 1966, citing a charity’s pamphlet offering services to “transients” and “non-residents.” Bova and the “Innovation Team” both point to 1985 as a watershed year in which the city set up the first of many task forces to fight homelessness. Bova concludes that by 1985, the accumulation of crises in employment and housing had produced considerable homelessness in Austin.

Not long after, the Street People’s Advisory Council (SPAC) formed, bringing together rebels from the Task Force with politicized homeless people. Drawing lessons from actions against the Vietnam War, these activists purchased a goose which they publicly threatened to kill and eat, after first considering a swan donated to the city by a member of the local elite. After the goose drew the attention of an outrage-hungry press, they pardoned the goose and named him Homer. Homer and his human compatriots went on to lead occupation marches on abandoned buildings and the flotilla occupation of Town Lake.

Activist Molly Ivins, who camped out in protest of Austin’s 1996 Camping Ban, meets Homer the Homeless Goose.

The SPAC and Homer captured headlines, hearts, and minds for several years, helping to generate an activist milieu that included the Mad Housers (a collective of builders that constructed mobile shelters and the flotilla rafts that were used to occupy the lake) and the Blackland CDC (a neighborhood organization which co-organized the occupation of vacant houses being demolished by the University of Texas in east Austin). They operated as a part of nationwide movements, joining organizations like the National Homeless Union, the Houston Homeless Union, and others in coordinated campaigns, including one dedicated to takeovers of vacant housing.

They won some reforms, including increased shelter funding, the dedication of vacant housing to serve as transitional housing, and a decades-long detente on UT development of the Eastside; but the SPAC campaign was ultimately repressed. The APD consistently hounded the organizers; allegedly, so did other homeless people, and “animal rights” activists concerned for the well-being of the adventurous Homer. City officials played a role in repressing the flotilla protest, changing a “night-fishing” ordinance that allowed the legal occupation of the lake to create new restrictions that made it possible to seize the boats. Nonetheless, the story of Homer and the SPAC and their direct action served as inspiration for activists from the Challenger Street Newspaper to launch several efforts of their own throughout the 2010s.

The next major cycle of struggle emerged in response to Austin’s camping ban in the mid-1990s. Research by Gus Bova locates the impetus for the camping ban in activism by the Downtown Austin Alliance (DAA), a consortium of downtown business and land owners. According to Bova, the DAA was incorporated as a Business Improvement District, a quasi-governmental organization to which businesses pay special taxes to fund private security and political activity. Their first move was to organize “Downtown Rangers” who biked around downtown harassing homeless people and acting as the DAA’s private arm of the Austin Police Department, which supervised them.

Austinites protest the camping ban proposal at City Hall in 1996.

The DAA also began to organize for a camping ban, picking up model legislation from the American Association for Rights and Responsibilities—which shared white nationalist co-founder John Tanton with the anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform. Though the ban passed easily in 1996, its passage led to a brief wave of campouts by housed people in protest. A year later, the city council was preparing to repeal it, as it had only served to shuffle people from place to place in the city and deeper into the woods. Amid pressure from the DAA, the council led by then Mayor Kirk Watson “compromised,” keeping the ban but establishing homeless services in downtown Austin. This led to the establishment of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH), which served as an anchor for similar services in the area. It also illustrates the connection between homeless services and policies that police and harm their clientele.

In addition to the camping ban, city police and administrators used their powers to harass homeless people and encampment communities. One example is captured vividly in the 1995 documentary Bouldin Creek Greenbelt Family, filmed by camp residents themselves as well as housed cable access volunteers. The film chronicles the daily life and communal practices of the camp, including a scene in which the residents grill burgers for more than a dozen people for dinner time. This pastoral peace is disrupted by cops on horseback who bark orders at the residents to vacate before sending heavy machinery to destroy their property and territory. The family is scattered about town with whatever possessions they can carry.

The Bouldin Greenbelt Family.

These practices of harassment and disruption met an opponent in the late 1990s in Leslie Cochran, a gender-defying homeless resident who, encountering repression upon moving to town, became a one-man army agitating against the police. Leslie’s crusade—which included city council appearances, elaborately painted signs protesting his treatment by APD, and a run for mayor—put him front and center in the popular imagination of Austin in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His legacy is complicated. His nonlinear, playful relationship with gender made him the butt of jokes about trans people and a celebrated spectacle of the Austin Weird. Many people forget that around his much gawked-at thong, his ass was often painted “Kiss this, APD.”

Alongside Leslie and the camping ban campout, other homeless organizing lacked the thread of direct action and independence that had characterized the SPAC. One such campaign was House the Homeless, established by legal aid worker Richard Troxell. Troxell took credit for creating the concept of the police Winnebago in Philly, and for the one-hour health exemption to the no-sit no-lie ordinance that followed the DAA’s campaign for the camping ban. Troxell, to his credit, acknowledged the roles of both the wage system and the police in creating and perpetuating homelessness, but followed these ideas into increasingly wonkish policy proposals. Also on the scene was the Austin Advocate, which successfully organized the first street newspaper with homeless vendors, including Leslie, staged prominently around Austin. While the Advocate relied heavily on these vendors, the vendors had little role in the writing or publishing process.

A split in the last months of the Advocate led Val Romness, a longtime producer of homeless media involved in the Austin Cable Access scene that released “Bouldin Creek Greenbelt Family,” to establish the Challenger in early 2011 with Advocate vendor Fred Pettit after the Advocate had ceased meaningful production. The Challenger began operations without nonprofit status or funding, operating more horizontally, though helmed consistently by Romness. This openness, along with creative participation by local anarchists, led to increased ties between the paper and radical milieus, with early collaborations with Monkeywrench Books, Austin Anarchist Study Group members, Treasure City Thrift, and remnants of the then-dissipating Rhizome Collective. In late 2011, these relationships helped to foster the Challenger’s intervention in the local iteration of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.

When the revolutionary wave that took shape in Tunisia and spread to Tahrir Square in Egypt reached Austin in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the results were mixed. The first General Assemblies were announced by a distinctly Austin mixture of white yogis and libertarians, who hoped for a non-confrontational interpretation of “Occupy.” In contrast to the tent encampments popping up in other cities, they proposed a 24-hour protest at Austin City Hall with sleeping quarters in an electric taxi warehouse several miles away. The ad-hoc leaders cited the camping ban as the main reason they chose this tack, not wanting to break the law and burn bridges with the police, whom they regarded as part of the “99%.”

Challenger Newspaper members saw themselves as a part of this eclectic upswell of the downwardly mobile and called for an alternative encampment called Tent City across the river from City Hall to bring attention to their own issues, including the 1%-driven camping ban. Organizers attempted to rally support from Occupy Austin (OA) participants for a sunset confrontation with police, but APD moved in early, dispersing the camp before it could gather steam. Tent City organizers and anarchists relocated the tents to City Hall and set them up, confronting several more conservative members of OA. Tent City and the Challenger made a bold claim for autonomous action early on with the support of an OWS founder, the late, great David Graeber, who was in town visiting his girlfriend and happened to save a toddler occupant from an overzealous opponent of the tents.

Through shrewd maneuvering and the opposition of a roused crowd, the ones with the tents won a standoff with APD, establishing precedent for a more robust occupation and the participation of the homeless movement. As the occupation wore on, more and more of those in the occupation at City Hall were homeless, sleeping at the site overnight, though usually on the limestone stairs rather than setting up more tents. This led to tensions within the Occupy Austin movement, as some participants grumbled that their movement had been “coopted” by the poor. Against this tendency, and alongside organizing by participants of color, a more radical streak emerged, making space for a diverse array of voices and actions. The “anniversary” event in 2012 was led by Challenger/Tent City-oriented occupiers. The Challenger had moved its weekly meetings to the occupation and was organizing within it through the Ending Homelessness Working Group (EHWG). On the first birthday of Occupy Austin, the EHWG, the OA General Assembly, and the Challenger called for a march on the City-owned vacant Home Depot building with the intention of occupying it, taking inspiration from OWS and Occupy Oakland.

The march on the Home Depot was unsuccessful, but led to several other attempts to occupy other vacant lots around Austin. Homeless occupiers established a camp, also called Tent City, in South Austin, which focused mostly on recreating daily camp life rather than advancing political conflict. Though it was intended as an experiment, the camp hosted a small group of members mostly focused on avoiding the cops, not unlike other camps. It gradually disbanded after several evictions, without the sort of flashpoint of camp defense that might have re-politicized it. Its fizzling led to questions about what sort of organizational capacity successful camp defense would require, questions later consciously taken up by Stop the Sweeps Austin.

Tents line the trail along the Colorado River on the south edge of downtown Austin.

Surrounding the City from Below

From 2019-2022, the camps that surrounded and besieged the Capitol practiced an ungoverned and unregulated form of life that violated the order of capital. Recognizing the camps as forms of insurgent self-organization on the part of the dispossessed, we sought to defend them and expand their potential in the face of attacks from a wide array of political forces. This runs counter to the logic of specialization and legibility that typically characterizes activist campaigns, which often aim to represent the dispossessed as a distinct constituency (“the homeless”) through demands and negotiation on the terrain of policy, recruiting to an organization to negotiate on their behalf, and cultivating a specialized minority of “directly-impacted” activists. Instead, we emphasized the defense, generalization, and expansion of forms of insurgent self-organization that are illegible to politicians, social service providers, and activists alike. Where much of the NGO left saw a lack of organization, demands, interests, and representatives, we saw an abundance of potential in the camps themselves.

We did not romanticize camps as the revolutionary communes-to-come. Different camps had different cultures and different levels of cohesion. In some camps, people took lots of responsibility for each other, checking in to ensure others were fed, warm, and healthy, with those taking responsibility for assisting others and mediating conflicts forming an organic leadership. In other cases, big personalities declared themselves leaders, with mixed reactions from other residents ranging from dismissiveness to outright hostility. Some camps’ internal dynamics were defined by competition and hostility, with fights and thefts common as people merely tolerated living alongside each other. People would often move between camps as a consequence of conflicts with other residents or as a means to seek different conditions in regards to drug use, fights, noise, pests, or other issues. Recognizing the camps as self-organized phenomena means taking all these contradictory realities into account while still affirming the self-activity at their core as a response to a shared condition of dispossession.

Whatever the internal dynamics of each camp, their occupation of public space constituted an attack on the logic of property and capitalist development. Land belonging to the city or state government was taken over by forms of organization beyond their control and put to unauthorized and unregulated uses. While privately held property was never directly taken over, the public presence of the dispossessed rendered class conflict explicit and impeded development. The proliferation of camps in close proximity to sites of commerce or luxury apartments made these places less appealing to the comparatively wealthy, who complained about the numerous signs of the dispossessed living their lives in public—including accumulated survival supplies, the buildup of waste from humans living without infrastructure, and public expressions of mental and emotional crisis and other things that those with houses have the luxury of doing in private. A public homeless population coming into contact with students, tourists, consumers, and investors threatened to make Austin an unattractive location for new festivals, conferences, companies, and residents.

The proliferation of camps from 2019 to 2022 was an impediment to development and gentrification in Austin, alongside and overlapping with system-wide shocks including the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic downturn, and the George Floyd Rebellion. While the camps are sources of power that impact the political and economic terrain around them, they are not properly political: they do not make demands, they are not legible forms of organization or constituents that can be represented. In recent years, others have used the term ante-political to refer to forces that precede or exceed the traditional sphere of politics. This framework helps us understand the power of the camps and the nature of the political attack on them.

The attack on the camps and on the unhoused in general was carried out according to two distinct logics of governance. One is outright exterminationist, its aim being to socially cleanse undesirable populations by dispersing the camps and driving people out of town or into jail cells. The other is managerial, the aim being to regulate the homeless and precarious through services and facilities administered by the state, social service providers, or private and non-profit landlords. The former attacks the camps for simply existing; the latter aims to subjugate their ungoverned activity to managed and profitable social services. Both attack them for violating capitalist order. The same institutions can make use of both logics, like when Governor Greg Abbott opened a Texas Department of Transportation parking lot—now known as Camp Esperanza—as a “shelter” to regulate the homeless and legitimize his sweeps, or when the city government used sweeps to enforce the newly reinstated camping ban in 2022.

A hole in the fence at the sanctioned camp opened by Governor Greg Abbot on a Texas Department of Transportation lot in 2019.

The mainstream movement to repeal the camping ban framed the struggle as a conflict between conservatives and progressives: Greg Abbott and the reactionaries of Take Back Austin on one side, Austin’s social movements, city council, and social service providers on the other. This battle was encapsulated in the ongoing Twitter war between Abbott and Adler over the camping ban repeal. In reality, both the state and city governments depended on the sweeps to manage homelessness, only according to distinct logics. Before the repeal of the camping ban, the city government had been sporadically using sweeps to clear camps, and they kept their own sweep schedule parallel to the state government’s sweeps under the highways. When sweeps resumed after pausing for the pandemic, the city government had taken over all of the sweeps from the State. This shared dependence was most explicitly laid bare when the city government swept the ARCH camp the same day the state government began its sweeps of the highways.

Re-framing the camps as an ante-political insurgent force can give us a clearer picture of the competing forces that aim to attack this form of insurgency, enabling us to move away from some of the limitations of activist frameworks. Reformist activist approaches can lead us into the trap of allying with the managerial logic of governance in the name of pragmatism, as seen in groups like The Other Ones Foundation (TOOF), Austin Mutual Aid (AMA), and Little Petal Alliance (LPA). More radical activist approaches can end up fetishizing the thinking and activity of the activists themselves, creating organizations that exist for no sake but to reproduce themselves or insular scenes that become disconnected from any material force. Rejecting both of these errors, we believe that focusing on our relationship to existing forms of insurgent self-organization can provide a counterweight to both reformist managerialism and radical impotence.

While Stop the Sweeps used activist tactics, we did so while understanding the insurgency of the camps as primary, rather than our own activity. Faced with the practical question of how to join forces with the camps and mount a defense against sweeps, we recruited and mobilized from within activist milieus, and we used activist tactics such as creating media, pushing limited demands (but not policy), rallies, home and office demos, and call-ins as part of campaigns against specific targets. Similarly, after Abbott opened what eventually became Camp Esperanza, we maintained an early presence to build relationships, trace the fault lines, and conspire with the residents to undermine this new form of management. When the COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis, we participated in shaping the camp support infrastructure that filled this gap, temporarily helping sustain the camps while developing new forms of collaboration with them. But we did so with a determination to bolster the defense of the camps, not seeing these things as ends in themselves, nor claiming to “organize” the homeless or integrate the camps or their residents into the terrain of political representation.

Now, on the other side of this movement arc, we feel it is important to re-articulate this position, which may have been forgotten amid the frenzy of service-oriented mutual aid, activist infighting, and reacting to our enemies’ offensives.

Governor Greg Abbott, scumbag.

Asymmetrical Conflict against the Infrastructure of Oppression

Informed by the tactical sensibility emerging through the last two decades of struggle—the port shutdowns during Occupy, the highway takeovers during Black Lives Matter protests, the targeting of ICE and prison contractors, and other struggles that we have participated in or learned from—Stop the Sweeps understood power as a question of infrastructure and logistics. Decision-making bodies are largely empty political theaters carrying out the will of dominant social forces—be those reactionary populist movements or factions of capitalists, non-profits, or police. Their emptiness makes demonstrations at the well-guarded halls of power ineffectual. The real power in this world is in the infrastructure that is used to administer and maintain this civilization; a decision to carry out sweeps can only be enforced if there are workers, trucks, and money that can be mobilized to that purpose. Infrastructures can be vulnerable to pressure, and this makes it a strategic site for potential pressure and direct action.

We understood that City Hall and Abbott would never willingly stop the sweeps. Instead, once the state government started conducting sweeps in November 2019, we paid attention to who was conducting them. The sweeps were carried out by a work crew driving a few contractor trucks and overseen by a couple supervisors directly from the Texas Department of Transportation. The police were not actively removing people’s belongings; they served as a passive backup force that intervened only to suppress unrest or resistance. They were largely hands-off with us, allowing us to be in the camps as we filmed, harassed the work crew, and talked to residents. We noticed the same dynamic when the Austin Public Works Department carried out sweeps in November 2019 along other public easements with a different contractor’s name on the truck.

A group of contract workers throw away belongings at a sweep under a highway overpass.

Digging through city and state contracts, we traced a whole web of contractors. We discovered that the city and state both contracted through WorkQuest, a central contracting agency offering services and products and employing disabled people. WorkQuest, in turn, contracted out to other agencies: EPSI for the state sweeps and Relief Enterprises for the city sweeps. Sometimes these subcontractors also recruited labor from temporary staffing agencies like Pacesetters or received people doing “community service” through Downtown Austin Community Court. Sometimes the work crews themselves consisted of other homeless people, though some we met ended up leaving because they couldn’t stand to participate in oppressing other people in the same position as them.

Once we uncovered the contractors, we saw the WorkQuest contract as a strategic vulnerability. Our theory was that if there was enough pressure to make contractors back out or make the sweeps more costly, it would diminish the political will to carry them out. We hoped that if WorkQuest dropped out, it would impair both the City and State from doing sweeps. We identified the phone numbers of WorkQuest employees, the locations of offices, and the addresses of executives; we used these for targeted phone zaps, a home demo, and a guerrilla fliering action at the WorkQuest store. This strategy draws a lot from the “tertiary targeting” model used in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign and more recently in the Stop Cop City movement. While the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted our focus on WorkQuest, we learned months afterwards that they had dropped the contract in March 2020 due to our pressure.

A home demo.

Unfortunately, WorkQuest dropping the contract did not stop the sweeps. As the city government took over the sweeps in the fall of 2020, WorkQuest passed off the contract directly to Relief Enterprises; we had only removed the middleman. Relief Enterprises had fewer physical sites to target; we had little luck finding a truck lot where we could mobilize a blockade or some other collective action. The few locations we did find appeared to be shared with other businesses in industrial parks, and the vehicles appeared to be dispersed between a few sites rather than concentrated in a single lot. Much of our energy targeting them was directed into call-in campaigns to City Hall when their contract came up for renewal, or car demos targeting the Mayor and City Council members. Beyond the car demos, we lacked effective ways to mobilize groups of people offensively during the height of the pandemic, and our energy was tied up in other initiatives like the camp support network.

From 2020 to 2022, we succeeded in using these methods to win concessions that softened the sweeps. The authorities let people keep their tents and belongings, permitting them to name what was and was not trash and to remain in their camps during the sweeps; the City tried to frame them as progressive “clean-ups” to appease critics. While they continued throw away furniture, mattresses, structures, and temporarily unattended belongings—and we continued to push back on each of those fronts—these sweeps were a far cry from the early Texas Department of Transportation sweeps that forced people to move all their belongings across the highway or lose everything.

All these advances were undone when Prop B, a reactionary referendum initiative spearheaded by local anti-homeless forces with Save Austin Now, reinstated the camping ban and the sweeps returned as a force of devastating displacement. Since we had tied up so much of our energy in pressuring City Council alongside initiatives like the camp support network, we had not built up the forces we needed to take the fight directly to the sweeps infrastructure once the political terrain was closed off to us. By the time Prop B came down, the movement was already declining, and it was too late to reorient towards a new strategic framework. When we got started, we had been critical of Homes Not Handcuffs for only pushing the policy front without building the capacity to defend that victory against the inevitable reactionary backlash. In our pursuit of political leverage on the sweeps contract, we fell into a similar trap: we had not built up the power to defend the gains we had made against an inevitable reaction in the political terrain.

In our experience, an infrastructural understanding of power also opened offensive paths for us to avoid getting locked into head-on, symmetrical conflicts with better-resourced adversaries. It does not usually make sense to attempt to meet our enemy’s repressive forces head on with greater numbers or force—whether in a defensive attempt to hold a space against a siege or an offensive attempt to besiege the guarded fortresses of our enemies (City Hall, the Capitol, downtown). While there are conditions under which such confrontations are strategic, in general, we have found that if a movement’s strategy is defined around pursuing those, this will exhaust the movement, incur defeats, and reduce it to largely reactive activity. An asymmetrical approach instead considers where our adversaries are weak, how to stretch them thin by going where they are unprepared, and finding pressure points that maximize impact—such as the infrastructure undergirding a project. This enables a movement to take the initiative, forces its adversaries to respond from a position of weakness, and creates the conditions to win victories and mobilize greater forces.

We learned some of these lessons the hard way in camp defense. While the initial defense of the ARCH was inspiring for stopping a sweep head on, it also illustrated the difficult of repeating such a victory: our adversaries could come back at any time, and being ready to stop them on short notice would have required an unsustainable level of vigilance and capacity for rapid response. Similarly, the weekly schedule of the highway sweeps meant that one day’s victory could be swept away by the work crew’s return the next week. By pivoting to an asymmetrical conflict model, targeting WorkQuest with pressure at places we weren’t expected, we opened up new fronts and took the initiative, acting on our own schedule rather than responding to the sweeps schedule.

The camp outside of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (right) and its late-night removal by city workers armed with a mechanical claw (left).

This does not mean that movements should abandon defensive fights, but that we should shift our approach to them. Asymmetrical approaches de-emphasize holding terrain at all costs, while recognizing it as essential. Rather than an all-or-nothing fight, defending terrain becomes a question of maximizing the costs for our opponents, minimizing our own losses, increasing combativeness and offensive opportunities, and rebuilding or seizing new terrain after the siege. Even when our movement was smaller, our efforts were strongest when they balanced tactical, defensive retreats with counteroffensives against the infrastructure of the sweeps.

We continued to maintain a presence at sweeps, where we aimed to maximize delays, build connections and courage to support resistance in the camps, and help people rebuild afterwards. We knew that the sweeps operated according to a tight schedule, and that substantial delays along their route would either force them to come back another day, delay a sweep until the following week, or impact their obligations to other contracts. We reasoned that any delays we could force might give some relief to those further down the schedule who would get passed over that week, and that delays would drain more money and labor out of the contract. We also helped people to replace the tents and other survival gear that they had lost in sweeps in order to minimize the impact on people’s lives and ensure that the camps could persist.

Employing this strategy, we achieved a couple major victories when entire camps resisted the sweeps, refusing to move or harassing the sweeps crews to slow them down. Some of these moments of resistance emerged spontaneously; others only after sustained efforts building direct relationships that gave us a basis of trust and courage to act alongside camp residents. Based on internal emails from Public Works, we know that our presence was a major nuisance for them. Eventually, they cracked down on our ability to mess with the sweeps from within the camps by enforcing a “work zone” rule allowing them to arrest people for trespassing while a sweep was ongoing.

An early graphic used by Stop the Sweeps to orient new volunteers to the wide range of ways to engage a sweep.

By the end of the sweeps defense movement cycle, many of these lessons had been forgotten or had not spread widely enough, or we simply lacked the capacity to act on them. We had lost the ability to put pressure on the infrastructure of the sweeps or to turn the conflict into an asymmetrical one rather than a head-on clash. By 2022, due to the enforcement of the work zone rules, sweeps watch crews were unable to do much more than bear witness to the suffering of others or help them move their belongings. At a moment when the movement was declining, some tried to mobilize larger groups to resist each sweep head on, but these groups never really materialized. Actions like the City Hall occupation, while politically important in other ways, remained focused on targeting the symbolic halls of power rather than the material infrastructure of the sweeps. There was one small appearance at the home of the Relief Enterprises CEO, but it was far less forceful than the 2020 home demo against WorkQuest.

While it likely would not have stopped the post-Prop B sweeps, it remains an open question how returning to an understanding of the infrastructural nature of power and a strategy of asymmetrical conflict might have opened new avenues for the movement when it was facing decline. What if sweeps watch didn’t just invite people to bear witness to devastation, but converted camp defense into highway blockades that stopped the circulatory system of the city? Such a strategy could have employed the car demo tactic as well. What if the occupation of City Hall had targeted the offices and homes of sweeps contractors, or other politically and economically important parts of the city beyond the trap of downtown?

There are no guarantees, only possibilities and questions to bear in mind in future fights. But it is essential to recognize that for now, our enemies are much bigger and better equipped than us, and we are strongest when we target their weak points rather than being drawn into direct clashes.

Posters left behind after a small 2021 home demo at the home of the CEO of Relief Enterprises, the contractor responsible for the sweeps since 2020.

Movement Polarities

One of our hypotheses, tested and refined through our experience in Stop the Sweeps, is that what we call social movements can be better understood as an open field of forces, each engaged with others to various degrees in relationships of collaboration and contestation, affinity and hostility, coalition and competition. What we describe as a “movement” is an emergent culmination of the interplay of these forces, irreducible to any sum of its component parts. Distinct actors within this field might be understood as poles—rallying points around which cohere a set of ideas, strategies, and ways of acting. These poles exert forces within the field of the movement, attracting new people and connections, pushing back on others, and spreading or clashing with other ideas within the terrain. Some poles may be able to affect those around them through their actions, transmitting ideas or causing shifts in the field of possibilities; other poles may find themselves isolated or ineffective, unable to act on their own terms or influence others.

This view of movements as a field of forces and polarities clarifies a few things. First, it directs our focus not just to what an individual or a group is but to what it can do—how it affects the field of the movement and others in it. This emphasis on doing can help us let go of anxieties around recruiting people to join our organizations, focusing us instead on ways to spread autonomous and militant ways of acting. Influential poles can generate powerful proposals, models, or invitations to act that spread across crews, organizations, and networks. Furthermore, we can better understand the lines of transmission between groups, factions, and ideologies in movements through this framework. Rather than perceiving distinct sects (as implied by the term sectarian), we can discern how the force exerted by a pole can overflow the boundaries of a particular organization, or how people and groups themselves can move between different poles of a movement through their activity.

Using this framework, we can perceive and act upon the possibilities latent in open-ended situations. We can see how these situations emerge as organic reactions to flashpoints of oppressive force; we can grasp how a protest movement can reach a scale and intensity that escape the control of those who “organized” it to become more potent and infectious. Perceptive and strategic militants can find the openings in such moments to contribute in ways that help to shape the outcome—forging new relationships, advancing new strategies or tactics, and enabling greater coordination, self-organization, or escalation. In Stop the Sweeps, this was one of our greatest strengths, whether we were engaging with a sweep, the waves of activity in the course of the George Floyd Uprising, the Abbott encampments and city COVID hotels, or rallies and occupations initiated by other groups.

Stop the Sweeps emerged to fill a gap in the existing movement. While the Homes Not Handcuffs (HnH) coalition had secured the legislative victory of repealing the camping ban, they had failed to build the political force necessary to defend their win. So, when the city government responded to a wave of reaction a few months later by sweeping the ARCH at the same time that the state government cracked down with sweeps under the highway, the non-profit coalition was caught flat-footed. They scheduled a meeting at Street Forum the weekend before the sweeps to plan a response that would focus on legal observing, documentation, media campaigns, and continued legislative advocacy. The non-profit coalition kept most of its focus on Abbott’s exterminationist rhetoric, drawing no attention to the city’s or NGO’s use of sweeps to control the unhoused.

The cell that became Stop the Sweeps began as a group of friends who started showing up in the mornings at the camp outside the ARCH in anticipation of the sweep. The timing of these sweeps was left vague and constantly delayed; but keeping this rhythm for two weeks led to a series of connections with people at that camp and some strategic conversations among the handful of us. When the announcement finally came that the ARCH sweep would occur on the same day as Abbott’s sweep of the camps under the highway, we had already laid the groundwork for launching Stop the Sweeps.

A Homes Not Handcuffs rally at the Texas Governor’s Mansion in 2019, protesting Abbott’s threats to sweep camps.

When we attended the Homes Not Handcuffs response meeting and noticed that their plan did not include any attention on the sweeps at the ARCH, nor plans for direct resistance to the sweeps, we decided to break out into our own group adjacent to their meeting. At that meeting, we developed our own plan to mobilize a combative presence at the ARCH. While we could not stretch ourselves to mobilize on multiple fronts, we retained some presence at the highway sweeps to support any organic resistance to them. We took the name Stop the Sweeps—both a demand and a form of action—and put out our own call to action on our nascent socials.

Rather than attempting to convince the HnH coalition to adopt a more confrontational strategy (or calling them out for their failure to do so), we identified an opening in the movement where we could act and filled it. We sidestepped direct conflict with the non-profit wing of the movement in favor of opening up space for autonomous action alongside the non-profit’s strategy. Seizing the opportunity to mobilize where the rest of the movement did not have a presence was advantageous in this regard, and helped avoid conflicts over “hijacking” or about escalating beyond the risk tolerance of HnH. Similarly, while those of us at the highway camps communicated with HnH forces on the ground, we made separate decisions to support unhoused people planning to resist the sweeps while the others focused on their strategy.

Making our own plan enabled us to connect with other scattered forces, both within and outside the movement, that had been looking for more combative forms of engagement. In the days leading up to the ARCH sweep, we connected with members of the DSA-LSC who were involved in HnH and hungry to employ direct action tactics against the sweeps. They were able to leverage some of the contact lists that the coalition had not utilized, using email blasts and phone banking to turn people out to the ARCH. Through our existing connections, we were also able to pull in friends from anti-fascist and anti-police organizing.

Consequently, a small group without its own base was able to bring together about thirty people on a Monday. We temporarily prevented the destruction of the camp at the ARCH—at least, until they came back at 4 am.

From its inception, Stop the Sweeps existed in this delicate balance between maintaining connections to other actors in the movement and acting on our own terms. We attended the meetings that Homes Not Handcuffs hosted and maintained lines of communication with people in those groups; at the same time, we planned our own ways to engage on the ground, created our own narrative, and called our own actions. Calling our own action at the sweep that Homes Not Handcuffs had decided not to respond to was one example of this; mobilizing to support unhoused people who planned to resist the sweeps under the highways was another.

Homes Not Handcuffs held one more meeting after the sweeps started. We attended and made up most of the “sweeps defense” breakout group; the other two groups were focused on policy advocacy around criminalization and housing. We ultimately absorbed the sweeps defense group into our efforts; we later learned that the other groups never got off the ground after that meeting. The consolidation of this pole and its rapid growth gave us the momentum to transition into confronting the Texas Department of Transportation’s weekly sweep schedule after November 4. As the only group still actively following, resisting, and shaping the narrative around the sweeps, we were able to shift the movement towards a more radical position.

Mercenaries destroying the homes of the houseless.

A few months into our work together, we had started to develop relationships with a wider range of groups. Seeking to increase the coordination and strategic intelligence of the movement, we initiated a closed assembly called The Hive. We framed it as an assembly that we were curating to be focused on shared action and reflection, explicitly not a decision-making space. The space was organized around three central principles: priority to grassroots, autonomous groups over non-profit and political organizations; a commitment to not undermining the work of other groups; and a commitment to not collaborating with the police against other wings of the movement. This last principle was intentionally crafted to make space for groups organized at state-run camps, which navigated complex relationships with the police and security that governed them, while holding a line to insulate the rest of the movement.

The Hive brought together a wide range of factions including non-profits, self-organized homeless collectives, the street newspaper, DSA, mutual aid groups, tenant organizers, and harm reduction groups. It served as a venue for communication and cross-pollination across different groups and fronts of the struggle. At various points, the assembly grappled with questions related to squatting and takeover schemes, pushing back against policing in the COVID hotels, and forming locally-rooted support and defense groups for camps. Many of the relationships that formed through this assembly came to form the initial core of the Camp Support network.

Building on the relationships formed in the Hive, we were positioned to bring groups together to build out the Camp Support mutual aid network after existing social services shut down following the outbreak of COVID-19. One comrade connected us with a church kitchen; the local Food Not Bombs chapter provided know-how and a network of cooks to start sending out meals. As we met more groups after the George Floyd Uprising, we were able to help them connect to this work in addition to sweeps watch, bringing together a dozen or so small organizations offering everything from harm reduction to resources for sex workers. At first, the success of this network underlined the painfully slow response of the city government to the public health crisis.

This was complicated when city resources finally caught up months into the pandemic and approached the network about using our volunteers to shuttle its prepared meals. The network accepted this deal, opting to use them as we pleased and to build what we hoped would be fighting relationships with camp residents. This part of the mutual aid work remained underdeveloped; the volunteers who brought food only showed up to fight alongside people at sweeps on rare occasions. Camp support coordinators did use their access to city food program meetings to pester city bureaucrats into putting pressure on the agencies running sweeps, and this was one prong of a successful effort to defeat most of the sweeps during the initial months of the pandemic.

Our ability to act decisively and maintain a wide range of complex relationships with other formations depended in large part on the high degree of trust and shared context within the core group of Stop the Sweeps, which emerged from our long-term relationships and experience throwing down together. The strong connections among our core group enabled us to take bold action and gave us the emotional resilience to engage in more complicated coalitional relationships with tact and grace. We had space to voice and think through critiques of other formations and strategies and to reflect on our relationships to other groups despite our differences. This helped release pressure and avoid unnecessary direct conflict.

As time went on and some of our initial crew stepped back, we started to bring in new people we met through our activity. We developed a set of principles and a process for onboarding people, emphasizing experience working together and a sensibility that resonated with our principles and strategy. We avoided rushing to recruit people, and emphasized the many ways to get involved in specific forms of activity that did not require formally joining Stop the Sweeps—such as planning specific actions, coming to the Hive, and coordinating around sweeps defense. This process helped to expand our crew and bring in new energy at crucial moments, especially when the movement was beginning to scale up and we encountered a number of other fellow travelers.

This also meant that the group composition slowly shifted so that there were fewer long-term, high-context relationships in the group. Eventually, many of us only knew each other from the movement against sweeps. As the latter phases of the movement brought more intense conflicts and we encountered new limits, members of our crew responded differently to these situations. Some members pushed to engage more directly in the intra-movement conflicts, such as by making demands of Austin Mutual Aid (AMA).

Unhoused people and activists rally at an encampment set up at City Hall by Little Petal Alliance in response to the passage of the new camping ban.

When Little Petal Alliance (LPA) launched an occupation at City Hall in response to Prop B, our group was divided in new ways. Some members saw the occupation as an open-ended situation full of potential and self-organization that exceeded any one group, and wanted to engage with it; others were wary due to a combination of tactical critiques and legitimate criticisms of the harmful and opportunistic behaviors of members of LPA. When the camping ban ushered in the demolition of camps, some members pushed for more urgent activity and took out their frustrations on other participants in the movement. Most devastatingly, this led to a split with one of the unhoused activists who was a founding member. Our experience demonstrates the need to remain attuned to how the changing composition of a group over time, alongside shifting movement conditions, can change the forms of trust and collaboration that are possible, even if it nominally remains organized around the same principles and strategy.

Understanding our activity in terms of the constitution of poles allows us to evaluate our relationships with other formations on the basis of what they make possible or foreclose. Relationships with other groups—even those with whom we have significant differences when it comes to our orientation towards demands, reform, the state, or other institutions—can open up opportunities to leverage information, increase our ability to circulate proposals and influence other factions of the movement, and produce openings for creative forms of activity. If we understand the porous, shifting, open-ended nature of all groups, we can see how they might transform in the course of a movement. Cultivating relationships with groups that work with the state while maintaining our own irreducible antagonism towards it can create new tensions, reshaping the demands of other wings of the movement and making it more difficult for the authorities to divide a movement into those they can co-opt and those they can repress.

The central consideration in such relationships is to keep the initiative and always maintain autonomy. Relationships can also have the effect of stifling possibilities rather than generating them; we can stifle our own initiatives for fear of upsetting other factions, end up tailing other formations, or become absorbed in the efforts of other groups. Maintaining the initiative within the field of movement polarity moves us away from the habit of merely critiquing other groups’ activities that we disagree with, so that we focus instead on how to develop and spread our own ideas and models for action as we collaborate and compete with others for influence.

These relationships require minimum standards of respect. Active hostility or denouncements, undermining others’ efforts, collaborating with the state against other wings of the movement, or acting as an extension of state, politician, or capitalist influence over the movement often precludes such relationships. Such dynamics have often defined the relationship between autonomous groups and other factions of movements, whether reformist, non-profit, or authoritarian left. However, it is not inevitable that these relationships must always be antagonistic. An understanding of movement polarity can identify the avenues for collaboration beyond simplistic ideological categories, so that autonomous groups can avoid becoming trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict with everyone else.

Our relationships with Homes Not Handcuffs enabled us to receive and leverage certain forms of information regarding the motivations of city council members and the dynamics between them, upcoming meeting items and policy changes, and pressure points and information about the effects of our actions on the departments enacting the sweeps. We were also able to produce scandals as a means of shaping the demands that HnH brought to City Council, which enabled us to exert influence on the negotiations without participating in them. At the same time, we were able to continue agitating against the city departments and social service providers that the coalition negotiated with.

This framework also helped us to locate our work in this particular campaign in relation to the broader radical milieu in Austin. In 2019, the organizing terrain was complicated for autonomous organizers. Most organizing was dominated by non-profit organizations, the vast majority of which were hostile to more radical activity. There was a range of progressive non-profit and community advocacy organizations that had more radical political ideas, but whose activity was mostly oriented around policy advocacy and rallies at City Hall. Within the radical milieu, the Maoist milieu surrounding Red Guards Austin (RGA) had absorbed many of the people looking for more militant activity who were dissatisfied with the community organizer scene. As a consequence of sectarian conflict with other movement organizations, abusive authoritarian dynamics, and reckless disregard for their members’ well-being, Red Guards Austin had poisoned the well for militant activity. It was hard to engage in militant organizing, criticize non-profits, or even to wear a mask without being accused of being part of Red Guards.

An encampment at City Hall.

Part of our goal was to use our activity in Stop the Sweeps to open the field for more activity beyond the influence of the non-profit organizations and the Maoists. We developed a way of acting that emphasized autonomous principles without explicitly flagging ourselves as anarchists. We experimented with ways to push the tactical repertoire of the movement without entering into direct conflict with other factions or alienating potential collaborators. Many of us were intimately familiar with the caustic effect that the Maoists specifically had on movements that they entered and knew that we could not maintain our autonomy or initiative while working with them. We also knew that they thrived on direct conflict and polemics against other groups. So when they made attempts to gain inroads into the movement, we simply ignored them and did our own thing.

There is a long history of conflict between the autonomous factions of various movements and those oriented towards reformist negotiations or party organization building. In some cases, the strategies of autonomous militants contribute to this dynamic, particularly when they create a situation in which the contradictions between groups are resolved through a simple sorting of ideological or tactical alignments. Call-outs and polemics, direct conflict with reformist or “less militant” factions of a movement, and filtering all political allegiances through a rigid ideological filter can mirror liberal denunciations, collaboration with the state, and peace policing.

Ideally, the framework of movement polarity offers an experimental path beyond this impasse, though it can challenge assumptions about the role of ideology. How correct our critiques are will make no difference if they only result in us constructing isolated cliques instead of developing the ability to intervene in complex situations. Our hypothesis is that positioning ourselves within these contradictions rather than forcing them towards a simple resolution can open up generative possibilities. We hope others will test and refine this.

Using and Being Used: On Media and Communications Tools

We were media savvy yet media critical. This is rare in a milieu divided between anarchists who oppose any engagement with media on principle and anarchists whose primary form of communication is the Instagram-Infographic-Industrial-Complex.

We used social media as a tool to develop our own narrative and analysis of the sweeps. Every week, we would get practice writing reports on the previous week’s sweeps—drawing attention to their cruelty and to the growth of the resistance. This regular rhythm helped us document the sweeps at a point when most of the media coverage had dried up along with the attention of the larger organizations. As our posts spread—sometimes, ironically, due to reactionary hate comments boosting our performance in the algorithm—we were able to invite more people to join us in sweeps watch. For those who wouldn’t or couldn’t join, combining these posts with calls for phone and email blasts offered ways to enable spectators to participate.

At the same time, we strategically engaged traditional news outlets. We had access to some media contacts thanks to Homes Not Handcuffs, and we mobilized a number of these outlets to cover the ARCH sweep and create political pressure around it. In the process, we developed a number of relatively friendly media connections who helped to circulate our narrative and occasionally follow up on reports and questions that helped to inform our campaigns.

Austin police move to arrest a homeless Stop the Sweeps member who set up a protest tent outside of the downtown homeless shelter after the camp there was evicted.

At a certain point, we were able to use an offensive media strategy to produce scandal. Whenever we caught the sweeps crew on camera in an egregious act—throwing out water during the height of summer, destroying camping supplies in violation of their stated “clean-up” policies, or harassing and threatening sweeps watch volunteers—we could circulate the media and draw negative attention. Sometimes, this alone was enough to exert pressure on the higher-ups, and we saw the crews act differently on subsequent sweeps.

Sometimes, we took this further. We would generate a scandal, then tap one of our friendly media contacts to reach out to the relevant city department or company for comment. The department, trying to maintain public legitimacy, would make some minor concession to something we were demanding. The journalist would tweet out this response and, without waiting for a formal article, we would seize on this as new “policy.” Then we would launch a new set of demands, always pushing the envelope. We did not treat these demands as points of negotiation, but as discursive trenches—as soon as our enemies made a concession, we would dig new a new trench to keep pushing them further, ensuring they remained on the back foot. Combined with phone zaps and on-the-ground resistance, this approach de-fanged the sweeps for most of 2020.

Whether we were publishing our own reports or engaging with journalists, our strength came from developing our own strategy for engaging each of these media forms rather than letting them impose their logic on us. We used social media to circulate report-backs, but we avoided using it for discourse or petty conflict; we did not subordinate our political activities to the pursuit of followers or engagement. Similarly, we used corporate media to circulate our analysis and to produce scandals for our opponents while refusing to get mired in concerns about optics or respectability. Releasing a press release for a home demo was a way of seeking publicity on our own terms. We intentionally avoided news stations that we knew were hostile; we did not fetishize talking to media as an end in itself.

All media and communication tools contain their own internal logic. If we don’t intentionally impose our own logic on them, they will impose their logic on us. Our movements already recognize how corporate media represent specific class interests. We are starting to become aware of how social media do the same—from outright censorship to the ways that algorithms privilege certain forms of interaction while suppressing others, thereby shaping how we think, act, and relate.

This became especially clear to us as we reflected on one of our most-used tools, the Signal chat.

What happens when all organizing moves to Signal?

Early on in our campaign, we used Signal chats in limited ways. We communicated via one core chat for the Stop the Sweeps crew. Some of us maintained a small text blast system that we would plug new contacts into; we used this system to announce upcoming sweeps and bring people out to sweeps watch. We would follow up with them in direct messages, then orient them on the ground. This worked well enough until one week, the person bottom-lining follow-up fell ill. To streamline communication, they made a Signal chat including all the people who would be coming out for sweeps watch that day so we could coordinate with each other. Over the next few weeks, this pattern of starting coordination-focused group chats for sweeps days continued until we created a general sweeps watch chat, where a growing layer of participants from outside the core group could share information and self-organize breakout chats for specific sweeps.

The sweeps watch Signal chat became the movement’s defining platform. As we encountered new allies and plugged them into sweeps defense, they would be added to this chat. The chat took on a life of its own, with people announcing upcoming sweeps and self-organizing separate chats for each week’s sweeps. At first, most people in the chat probably knew most other people in it, or else came to know them by participating in sweeps watch. The conversations were mostly limited to sweeps-related planning. The big Signal chat enabled us to scale up our organizing by taking the labor of follow-up and orientation off our hands: someone new could connect with other people on the ground and get the lay of the land from whatever experienced people were there. Creating another large channel to coordinate camp support—complete with its own array of breakout chats related to specific projects, infrastructure, and camps—increased the movement’s capacity to scale.

If you’ve been running in activist circles long enough, you know where this is headed.

At some point, the Signal chats hit a crucial turning point. They had expanded in size, in part due to the ballooning camp support network that was bringing new people into sweeps watch. By that time, a large number of the participants had not met each other. The expansion of the movement ecosystem meant people in each chat were likely involved in a number of other projects, with varying degrees of affinity or tension with other groups in the ecosystem. While this communication system worked for a while, it began to break down around the same time that the movement began to hit other limits.

The big chats slowly lost their focus on coordination as people started to use them as discussion forums in which to debate strategy and tactics. At times, a small group of people would engage in lengthy discussion in the chats, with dozens of others as a captive audience. This became particularly fraught in moments of emotional intensity (for example, immediately after a sweep)—especially when the parties in conflict did not know each other or already had existing tensions. Over time, other movement conflicts were imported into the chat, as well. By the time the camping ban came down, these dynamics had already drained collective engagement in the big chats. Consequently, the movement fragmented as economic normalcy was imposed at the conclusion of the lockdown.

The Signal chat is a useful tool, but like other communication platforms, it tends to impose its own logic. As a Signal chat grows, two things happen. First, the chats can generate too much noise to be helpful. High-traffic conversations among dozens of participants quickly add up to hundreds of messages, especially if there are not shared norms regarding what sort of information belongs in the channel. Second, the levels of trust and vulnerability decrease as fewer of the participants are connected by real relationships. This compounds with the way that tone, body language, and other aspects of communication are lost via text—so that when conflict takes place, it occurs without a basis for trust, leading to escalating tension and hurt feelings.

In our experience, Signal chats were most useful when organized around a defined purpose, usually limited to coordinating and sharing information. Ideally big, chats should keep chatter to a minimum, making space for deeper coordination or planning conversations in smaller breakout chats, such as the date-specific sweeps watch chats. Strategic debates and conflicts should be worked out in small groups or private chats between comrades engaging in good faith. Higher-stakes emotional conversations or strategic debates should ideally take place in person or at least on a call, to maximize the extent to which the participants can be emotionally present and engage in a full spectrum of communication. It may be helpful to set a precedent for moderating and maintaining norms in a chat early on to ensure that chats do not devolve into meetings or amorphous discussion forums. Because we had not set that precedent at the outset, it was difficult for us to intervene as moderators.

Sweeps watch.

These are ways to adjust how we use the tool; but we should also reduce our dependence on the tool. If a Signal chat is frequently being overwhelmed with other kinds of conversation, that indicates a need for additional containers. In our experience, while there were lots of meetings to deal with the week-to-week activities, our movement had few containers for broader reflection or debate, few release valves for tensions and conflict. Building these missing components into our movements is essential—otherwise, what you repress will eventually burst into the chat in explosive ways.

Some of these things are more feasible with Signal now. Signal has since added Admin roles and permissions, which enable better moderation and the creation of announcement-only channels. Movements may benefit from centering dedicated announcement-only channels in order to ensure that a broad range of participants receive the most essential updates. Letting smaller chats handle planning, coordination, and strategy can create more intentional and sustainable avenues for those conversations.

On the other hand, it can inhibit a movement to over-correct and impose limits too early. If your organizing channels consist of small chats without much activity, it’s not helpful to impose rules to limit activity—and rather than reducing message quantity, too many breakout channels containing the same five people will only gratuitously inflate the number chats. While it eventually limited us, for a time, the open Signal chat enabled us to grow. The best thing is to anticipate the limits and develop plans for addressing them as you reach them.

Home: don’t steal.

Movement Money Problems

The last year or two of the camp support movement was defined by conflicts around money. This mirrored similar conflicts elsewhere around the country between 2020 and 2022. Questions about who raised money and what they used it for became divisive, provoking inflammatory conflicts that dissolved organizations, even entire movements. We want to reflect on our experiences for the next time these questions resurface and offer some thoughts for movements elsewhere to consider as well.

In the early weeks of Stop the Sweeps, we carried out limited goal-oriented fundraising, chiefly to replace tents, sleeping bags, and other essential survival gear lost in the sweeps. This was strategic as well as ethical: replenishing these supplies helped maintain the camps and thwart the goal of the sweeps. Our largest fundraising effort was a $3000 GoFundMe to buy 100 tents. The member with keys to the GoFundMe tracked itemized withdrawals and purchases. Since the goals were clear and the stakes relatively low, we were able to make most decisions easily over Signal chats, filling time-sensitive needs for shelter after each sweep. Most discussions focused on which stores to purchase from. Occasionally, we also fundraised for bail and legal funds for friends who were arrested resisting the sweeps. Had we expanded the scope of our fundraising, made larger purchases, or made fundraising a core facet of our organizing strategy, we might have needed a different container for financial decisions.

Money played a bigger and more controversial role in the camp support movement, which from its early days networked together a number of different initiatives around shared infrastructure, such as collective kitchens that relied on various organizations for their distribution network. One group, named Austin Mutual Aid (AMA), began to form a fundraising apparatus for this network. Its founder, Bobby Cooper, was a contentious figure; a white man from New York who had organized in Occupy Sandy, his ego and abrasive personality caused some tensions in this network. For the most part, the network was big enough and Austin Mutual Aid small enough that people could hold them at a distance, only approaching them for funds around things like water in the summer or cold-weather gear in the winter.

Things changed with Winter Storm Uri in 2021. AMA had had the forethought to claim a name primed for search engine optimization. As millions around the country turned their attention to supporting groups in Texas, AMA’s winter fundraiser gained mainstream attention—going so far as to be shared by cast members of Queer Eye. It ballooned to some $3 million, and AMA gained the national media spotlight as the face of mutual aid in Austin. Suddenly, a group that had been marginal and annoying was central to the movement. This inflamed the existing tensions and resentments, adding stakes on the scale of millions of dollars.

Volunteers sort through clothes at an ad-hoc Austin mutual aid donation center during Winter Storm Uri.

The following months saw protracted conflicts over the allocation of this money, the handling of the Winter Storm response in general, and AMA’s role in relation to the rest of the movement. The conflict crossed Signal threads, Instagram slide decks, and many-hours-long Zoom and Jitsi calls. Probably every organization in the movement had at least one meeting about AMA, and many participated in AMA’s “community meeting” to decide how to distribute the money. Among other things, people accused AMA of taking credit for work that was largely carried out by other groups, raising money and gatekeeping access to it, white saviorism, charity-style work, using other groups’ media for their own fundraising, and not using the funds to offer people long-term housing, whether in the hotels that were taken over during the freeze or in regular apartments.

Stop the Sweeps participated in some of these conflicts, including private criticisms of AMA, social media call-outs, and hour-long Zoom calls. How might we have approached those conflicts differently? How could future movements avoid or mitigate them?

There was certainly truth to the criticisms of AMA. There was a crucial moment when AMA’s fundraising far exceeded what they had hoped to raise or had plans for. That could have been a good time to pause their fundraiser and direct potential donors to some of the other projects that were raising funds, like the Jordan’s Place police-free autonomous zone established by the Black revolutionary organization 400+1 in East Austin during the 2021 winter storm. Instead, AMA leaned into the spotlight, taking media appearances, speaking on behalf of the movement, and claiming others’ work.

AMA’s blunders should serve as a warning to any group that might accidentally stumble into large sums of money—as a number of pre-existing bail funds and mutual aid projects did in 2020—to take a cautious and disciplined approach to finances. Organize fundraisers with clear plans for how much you hope to raise and how you will use it. While it can be great to exceed goals, at a certain scale, raising more money than anticipated can create confusion, liability, and conflict. It may be better to shut down a fundraiser once it has exceeded its goal and direct people to other groups. This can insulate your crew from money conflicts, redistribute resources in crucial ways, and help build goodwill with the broader movement.

Regardless of who raises them, large sums of money can generate conflict and create liability. While AMA was a particularly controversial organization, we doubt that any organization that ended up in that position would have avoided criticism and conflict. Controlling large amounts of money and attention inevitably stokes resentment, jealousy, and political factionalism. Even if a group has a solid plan for raising and using large amounts of money, and even if that group maintains good relations and collaboration with other factions of the movement, the existence of that fundraising capacity can give rise to all sorts of friction. The project you are funding will be criticized: it’s not militant, not mutual aid, not strategic, not sustainable, not democratic enough, it doesn’t center the right groups, it’s not safe enough, not organized enough. Not all of this critique will be in good faith; some of it will simply be a cover for interpersonal or factional competition.

We should be generous and graceful in our criticisms of groups that stumble into money. While we should generate and share good-faith political critiques of the decisions that they make, moralizing and attacks often do not help anyone. Groups are not necessarily enemies or threats to a movement because they don’t use money in the ways that we think they should or distribute it through the process we consider most just. Many such groups are simply figuring out a complicated situation as they go, the same way we would in their shoes.

If we aim to work in movements that involve a wide range of political and strategic orientations, we will have to accept diverging perspectives on big questions. Unnecessarily escalating political conflicts into movement-wide fractures consumes a disproportionate amount of everyone’s energy, sapping it from more fruitful activities. When we identify the political differences that distinguish us from another group, those offer ripe ground for launching new projects, leading by example, and acting on our own terms, rather than simply criticizing.

Winter Storm Uri in 2021.

Recognizing and Transcending Limits

To understand the rapid growth of the movement against sweeps and its ultimate collapse, it is helpful to think of movements as always running up against and struggling to transcend particular limits. Focusing on the limits of movements moves us from a framework that externalizes our problems (blaming them on liberals, non-profits, the state, the police, sectarians, authoritarians, rival factions) to a framework that approaches our problems chiefly as internal, organizational questions. If our movements will inevitably confront co-optation, repression, or fragmentation, we should look inward to understand what aspects of our strategy make us vulnerable to these and experiment with ways to become capable of overcoming them.

The effectiveness of any tactic is determined by context. This includes considerations such as whether it brings new people into the movement, whether the movement can sustain the tactic, and how prepared our enemies are to mitigate its effectiveness. The same tactic repeated in a different context, or even at a different point in the same movement, can produce completely different results. Innovation and experimentation can help overcome limits related to tactics, while fetishizing or stigmatizing tactics can keep a movement stuck in ineffective repetition.

Sweeps watchers try to save a tent during a sweep off Riverside Drive in 2019. This sweep was one of our early victories; we stalled the crew for hours and ultimately saved the camp.

Transcending the limits of sweeps watch by reorienting towards camp support helped us expand the movement at a crucial moment. For the first few months, the rhythm of sweeps watch helped us connect to people in the camps, plug people into a concrete activity, gather information about the contractors, gain experience in confrontational action, and make a political scandal out of the sweeps. Over time, we began to hit new limits, as we could not add numbers fast enough to keep up with the sweeps and faced arrests as a consequence of new work zone rules. Before COVID-19 hit, we had already begun to imagine alternative ways to approach sweeps watch, such as creating locally-based networks in the neighborhoods near particular camps.

The switch to camp support activated a new, broader network of people and activities. People built consistent relationships with the specific camps they supported, which enabled them to report back on camp needs and any sweeps announcements. This brought more people into sweeps defense generally, so that our smaller group’s capacity wasn’t always stretched to its limit. Camp support also overcame a barrier to using the old sweeps defense model during the pandemic: when traveling between the camps posed the risk of inter-camp viral transmission, the distributed defense model helped mitigate that threat. As camp support grew, so did our capacity to mobilize people against the sweeps through sweeps defense, phone zaps, and car demos. This network also leaped into action with the George Floyd Rebellion. One of the main battlegrounds of the rebellion in Austin was in front of APD headquarters, where protestors shared the space with a camp under the highway overpass at I-35 and 7th Street. After the height of the uprising, many individuals and new groups joined the network, turning to mutual aid work as a continuation of the uprising, sometimes at the same location.

Tactics that generate potential at one time can themselves become limits. This becomes clear when we reflect on the missed opportunities of “mutual aid.” Camp support arose at a critical moment when existing social services had shut down due to the pandemic, leaving many on the street without consistent access to food and other necessities. Filling this gap, mutual aid was a way of securing the survival of the camps; this hearkens back to some of the forms of mutual aid as communal care and support that precede colonialism and capitalism, and which oppressed and exploited peoples have used to survive within them. During the first phase of the pandemic, the Camp Support network basically supplanted the city’s disaster response efforts. This recurred when the network mobilized to supply and shelter dozens of people during Winter Storm Uri, filling in where the city government did nothing. In both cases, the network’s efforts compelled the city to offer access to some food program meetings and to ask to use the network to deliver its prepared meals. The network made use of these resources, nominally towards its own ends.

Supplies stored in an Austin Mutual Aid donation center after Winter Storm Uri.

These efforts were closely tied to confrontational movement activity, as they were connected to sweeps defense, the rent strike movement of the early pandemic, and the George Floyd Rebellion; consequently, they were also part of a broader strategic framework. By the end of 2021, however, something had changed. The initial political context of camp support had been forgotten. Moralistic rhetoric framed mutual aid as a radical act unto itself, putting it above criticism and turning it into an obligation. This erased the need for mutual aid to be connected to other confrontational political activity; the only purpose was to provide the most meals to the greatest number of people. At the same time, the conditions were changing: social services had resumed, making camp support food distribution less essential, and even wasteful in some cases. Yet to make an argument for focusing on something other than “mutual aid” was considered unthinkable.

We suspect that our experiences with the fetishization of “mutual aid” were a fractal reflection of a national trend. For us, mutual aid is important as a political project, not a moral task. Camp support and food distribution are good, but whether they are worth the majority of our organizing efforts depends on the conditions we are acting in and what the results will be. We understood camp support as a way to deepen our relationships with the camps, seeing the meal as a chance to build a foundation for trust so as to collaborate in more militant sweep defense or combative activity around other issues. This framework is distinct from a social services model that treats service provision as the end goal. It demands that we evaluate how much energy mutual aid efforts take and whether they are worth pursuing at the expense of other tasks.

This form of mutual aid also ran up against limits we can see in previous cycles of autonomous disaster response and mutual aid. In the initial window of a disaster, autonomous groups can effectively set up and sustain infrastructure to support large groups of people. While highly effective during this window of time, they are rarely able to translate this into a deeper crisis for the state or the economy, nor to undermine the inevitable reimposition of normalcy, organize new and enduring social relationships, or transform these efforts into sustainable and combative projects after the disaster recedes.

Notably, what people were calling mutual aid was decidedly not mutual; it was a largely one-directional, service-oriented model of activism. Early on, this emerged of necessity due to COVID-19 precautions, which limited our ability to build more collective relationships and gather with people. However, over time, this meant that the relationship between a camp support volunteer and a food insecure person in a camp was primarily defined by the giving and receiving of a meal. Sometimes, this relationship included other “case worker” services, such as help with medical services and public benefits—but that, also, failed to break the dynamic of service provider and recipient. Delivering food did not in itself generate deeper political relationships, enable shared struggle, or build the reciprocity that could grow into new kinds of social relationships and life-giving infrastructure.

Additionally, this meant that very little of the infrastructure built for camp support could actually sustain the ones doing the work—instead, it wore out the small handful of people who coordinated most of the effort. The early growth of camp support was possible in large part due to the pandemic shutdown, with paused or remote work and increased benefits enabling large numbers of people to dedicate time to the efforts. By spring 2021, however, the slow reimposition of normalcy meant that benefits were drying up, life was getting more expensive, and more people had to go back to work, draining the network’s capacity. With most of the infrastructure geared towards outward-facing service provision, the mutual aid networks could not provide people the support they needed to stay engaged in the movement. In the slow decay of the mutual aid networks, we were neither living nor fighting.

This model of activism is ripe for cooptation because it is essentially similar to state or NGO social services—just horizontally organized and less well-funded. Without no political strategy beyond feeding as many people as possible, in the face of waning capacity due to changing economic conditions, it was difficult to justify refusing to collaborate with the city government or social service providers. While the radical wings of the movement decried these changes with radical rhetoric, there was no alternative strategic framework to illuminate the limits of the camp support model. Radical ideas do not sustain people in a movement, resources and infrastructure do—and the radical wing of the movement was largely competing with the state and the nonprofit-industrial complex on their home turf. The limitations of the camp support model set the stage for the cooptation of certain wings of the movement, with groups like AMA working with social service providers like ECHO and Little Petal Alliance forming the mobile outreach wing of Sunrise Church.

If power is fundamentally determined by infrastructure, movements also confront infrastructural limits. What are the supply lines that move resources, the entry points that bring in new people, the sites of care that help reproduce the movement, the hubs where we can organize combative actions or spaces for reflection? What are their vulnerabilities, and how can our adversaries attack them? These may be direct attacks—raids, evictions, restrictions, regulation—or other issues, such as an economic shift that forces people to step back from a movement in order to resume earning money.

If we accept that movements inevitably go through phases of growth and shrinkage, we can orient our strategies towards anticipating and responding to these moments. Movement growth can necessitate new organizing formats or infrastructure to accommodate new participants, lest they overload the existing channels; movement shrinkage also requires abandoning rigid practices to make room for new possibilities. In the growth phase of a movement, the key thing is to be flexible and decisive in order to seize opportunities to level up. During movement decline, it is important to make space for reflection and strategic reorientation, to be prepared to drop practices that are no longer effective or sustainable. A movement increasing its capacity during a growth phase feels very different from a movement contracting in its decline phase, even when the movement’s actual capacity is in fact greater in the latter case.

A tent set up on the lawn of the WorkQuest CEO during a Stop the Sweeps home demo that took place at a time when the movement’s capacities were growing.

What could have helped us to surpass the limits we reached? In view of the camp support network’s ability to out-organize the city government in the early phase of crisis, how could we have used this position of power to undercut its legitimacy, make deeper connections with those we were supporting, reinvent social relationships via new experiments in organization, or build enduring infrastructure to enable collective survival? We can try out Phil Neel’s use of the concept of “competitive control,” a term used by military strategists to describe insurgencies that produce a base of support and an alternative geography of resistance by providing services and stability where the state has failed, often alongside efforts to destabilize the state. While this framework is derived from military thought and applied to a range of repressive forces like the Taliban, it can help us to consider how autonomous forces might build power in conditions of crisis and collapse.

We can consider the efforts of 400+1 to establish an autonomous zone named Orisha Land during Winter Storm Uri as a source of inspiration. 400+1 was a federation and cadre organization oriented towards Black revolutionary autonomy that acted parallel to the camp support network, with some overlap, collaboration, and connection between the movements. During Winter Storm Uri, they declared an autonomous police-free zone called Orisha Land in the historically Black (but gentrifying) Rosewood neighborhood. They occupied a park to establish a resource hub and shelter for unhoused Black people. Renaming the park Jordan’s Place, after a Black man named Jordan Walton who was killed by APD, they maintained the occupation for a few weeks after the storm and broadcast proposals for transforming the park with gardens, community programming, and ambitious visions for shelter and housing.

The city government ultimately cleared 400+1 out of the park in a repressive maneuver parallel to its recuperation of “mutual aid” groups. While the city government incorporated some aspects of the mutual aid network, using the groups as volunteer pools for future crisis responses such as running warming and cooling centers and distributing supplies, it repressed the militant faction that was contesting its legitimacy. This counterinsurgency strategy undoubtedly inflamed some of the later movement conflicts, as those who witnessed the eviction of Jordan’s Place while AMA aligned with the city government and service provider alliance directed their ire against the latter.

400+1 were not without their own limitations, some of which they shared with the broader movement. While they were capable of powerful gestures, these were often primarily spectacular, such as a live-streamed armed procession around the neighborhood to declare the autonomous zone. Some former members report that they did not manage to follow through on all of the promises that they made to people during the Winter Storm occupation. In 2022, the group saw an exodus of members in response to internal hierarches and conflicts over responses to harm within the organization.¹ Still, without romanticizing this organization, we can evaluate the strategic direction they pursued: exploiting the crisis of the winter storm and the failure of the police to maintain order to contest the state’s control of territory and promote combative visions of neighborhood-based autonomy.

What similar experiments could the camp support and sweeps defense networks have undertaken? Attempts to occupy vacant housing, hotels, or restaurants in order to establish autonomous shelters, kitchens, or resource hubs would have served to contest the state and private property. Such gestures, even if unsuccessful, can erode state control and legitimacy during crises, while opening directions that counterbalance the threat of cooptation. Some of us discussed this and followed some of these threads over the course of the movement.

The police and cooptation are two sides of the same coin.

There were moments when this approach seemed possible, such as when the network was able to run a shelter out of a hotel during the winter storm with the acquiescence of the manager. There were loose discussions about turning this into an ongoing occupation after the storm, but the necessary combination of attention, resources, and opportunity never coalesced. Perhaps if some of these gestures had proliferated, they could have worked in tandem with the efforts in Orisha Land to heighten the crisis, creating an ecosystem of escalation that could have frustrated efforts to repress some initiatives while recuperating the others. Since winter storms have become a nearly annual occurrence in Austin, mutual aid groups could build the relationships and capacities over the year to launch such initiatives when the next one hits.

Beyond these offensive paths, the network also could have tried to create lasting autonomous infrastructure. Building infrastructure for outdoor mobile kitchens or collectively-managed kitchens that could operate long term without dependence on churches could have enabled the movement to grow and transform. Perhaps, as vaccination access made it possible to begin gathering with others again, the network’s activity could have shifted from constant meal delivery services to hosting community dinners at which food was not simply given but shared, fostering new kinds of social relationships while sustaining the people making the food and running the space. Such communal gathering spaces could host trainings, assemblies, and strategic conversations—so that sharing food would give rise to collective deliberation, forming the basis for future projects. Ambitious proposals like these could have flourished by making use of the money AMA doled out after the winter storm.

Another path could have included shifting away from food delivery towards projects that addressed a need while simultaneously creating new relationships beyond the service provision model. Community gardens could have opened up new kinds of relationships with housed people supported by the mutual aid network; tending gardens offers a shared project to bring together activists and neighbors, which can help sustain households and open up relations of sharing with other neighbors. The vegetables grown could supply a broader network of food delivery and collective kitchens. A squatted garden in an occupied lot could offer space for unhoused people to camp and a rallying point to defend against gentrification.

We can’t know what path the movement should have taken. Actualizing any of these possibilities would have involved messy, situational questions. We can keep these horizons and strategic directions in mind for the next time we enter a similar cycle of struggle, but seizing these opportunities depends less on analytical precision than on our ability to strategize and plan in the midst of an emerging situation.

Take the offensive.

Conclusion: Partisans against the Coming Dispossession

The dwindling phase of the movement from spring 2021 into 2022 was a perfect storm of movement shrinkage, fragmentation, conflict, and escalating state repression, with each factor intensifying the others in destructive feedback loops. Economic pressures compounded the cumulative effects of over a year of intense movement activity, contributing to a buildup of tension, trauma, and burnout. Unaddressed emotional dynamics exploded around high-stakes contention following the freeze, worsening previous resentments. Escalating conflicts accelerated the process of decline as they consumed the movement’s limited capacity, while others who were less invested simply withdrew. The escalation of repression with the passage of the city camping ban, the statewide camping ban, and the scorched earth sweeps over the summer increased the pressure on the movement in the midst of these dynamics. Heightened urgency and stakes caused an even greater explosion of conflict as people took out their frustrations about the movement’s limited capacity on each other. Decline produces conflict produces decline; repression causes decline and conflict, which amplify the effects of repression. A vicious cycle in which we were the main actors, with our enemies largely in the background.

In addition to being our own worst enemies, our entire milieu was targeted by at least one bad actor using the moniker “Precious.” This person sought to map our traumas and fault lines, extract money, and exacerbate tensions. In the aftermath of the massive monetary windfall received by Austin Mutual Aid, a member of our collective began corresponding with the “Precious” Instagram account. “Precious” was later linked to a set of other accounts across social media that had targeted organizers across the South in Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta using the same playbook of social mapping techniques and warped social justice language to call out organizations for various failings, real or invented. Several of these accounts were revealed to carry right-wing content if one scrolled back.

This episode was later documented and reported on by others using a dossier created by members of the impacted organizations. We mention this here to emphasize that when trust is already low and strategic thinking compromised, other actors will find ways to exploit the opportunities that open up.

Movements in decline must learn to lose better. That means clearly assessing our capacities, the conditions we are facing, and what is and is not possible. This can be a heavy task. Admitting defeats means accepting the grave consequences that come with them; in 2021, it would have meant admitting that we were no longer in a position to stop the sweeps and all the devastation they inflicted. We must grieve these losses while discerning what we can preserve from a phase of struggle in order to position ourselves for the next fight, wherever it emerges. Seeking to do this would shift our focus from desperate attempts to throw what little we have at our enemy to identifying which relationships, infrastructure, practices, and actions can equip us to lay the groundwork for the next phase of struggle. That approach could enable us to return to an asymmetrical conflict framework and to avoid getting locked into losing direct confrontations with our enemies. Strategic retreats, regrouping, and reorientation can enable a movement to continue taking the initiative instead of merely reacting, in order to be better prepared to intervene in the future.

Our enemies in orange.

Strategic thinking should not depend on the analytical, perceptive, or strategic capabilities of select individuals; it must become a political practice involving the entire movement. Even small gestures by crews and collectives articulating new principles and strategies can open a space for reflection. Collective infrastructure or practices can offer space for the movement to reflect on and adjust its activity, analyze changing landscapes, identify strategic opportunities and limitations, and release difficult emotions, tensions, and concerns. Such spaces can help build the strategic capabilities and emotional resilience of the movement. They can enable people to encounter each other across organizational or ideological lines, facilitating a circulation of ideas and strategies that can prevent the calcification of rigid ideological camps.

Such efforts can take various forms. In our experience, they included articulating a set of political principles and strategic interventions through sweeps defense in order to constitute another pole in a movement; building working relationships with a wide spectrum of actors, from factions within encampments to activist groups, in order to enable collaboration and the circulation of tactical insights; and assembling The Hive as a space for coordination, reflection, and proposing new directions. In The Hive, in particular, we see both positive examples and missed opportunities.

The relationships we built through the early Hive assemblies became the foundation of the early camp support network, which implemented some of the strategic conversations that had started in The Hive about neighborhood-based camp defense networks. This enabled the movement to level up at a critical moment. The Hive continued at a slow but steady rhythm through 2020, growing to include a wide range of factions at the height of the movement. However, by 2021, we had fallen out of practice. Assemblies saw less attendance as people focused on more urgent day-to-day work and meetings, and we put less effort into facilitating or reinvigorating them. By the time that the movement began to fracture and decline, there was no dedicated space or practiced rhythm for processing, addressing tensions, or big picture strategy discussions. Without dedicated infrastructure for facilitating these conversations, most organizations simply focused on the immediate needs of their particular project.

Continuing The Hive might not have resolved these problems. Strategic thinking is a habit that must be practiced and built into the rhythms of our work. We can offer a space for it, but that doesn’t guarantee that others in the movement will accept the invitation. If participants do not take it seriously, or cannot dedicate time to it due to the demands of their projects, the benefits will be limited. Nonetheless, such infrastructure has value even if only a minority of movement participants utilize it. It can still position them to make more effective interventions and proposals, holding open the window for strategic thinking and initiative. We must move from diagnosing our movement’s crises in the aftermath of their collapse to actively experimenting with ways to overcome their limits.

Those who participate in future cycles of struggle will continue to grapple with these questions. How can autonomous mutual aid efforts use the opening of a disaster and their ability to out-organize government responses to further undercut the legitimacy of the state and the economy? If we understand daily life within capitalist social relations as a constantly simmering crisis, how might projects that arise in reaction to acute crises (such as COVID-19 and the winter storm) maintain their initiative as the window of the disaster closes? How do we move away from a unidirectional, service-oriented model of activism to a model that generates new social relationships and communal infrastructure for meeting shared needs? How can mutual aid and crisis response enable a movement to take the offensive? There is no single right answer or right tactic; what counts is the ability to pose the necessary questions, stay creative, and take the initiative.

This could be you.

We believe the questions we grappled with will reappear because the struggle against sweeps is a harbinger of the struggles against precarity, dispossession, and displacement to come. We have already seen the encampments reappear in the refugee camps around Gaza and the solidarity encampments on college campuses in the United States—where, in Austin, some have experimented with using Signal to transcend some of the limits we discuss here. The camp is an image of the future—a future in which increased economic precarity, climate crises, wars, and state repression produce new waves of displacement and migration, and new forms of repression and managerial governance arise in response. Migrant caravans form tent cities at the border, facing the brutality of Border Patrol and police alongside the bureaucracy of the immigration system and resettlement programs; migrants bussed to New York end up circulating between camps and shelters, facing the brutality of sweeps and the bureaucracy of NGO management alongside a precarious working class that already cannot find sustainable employment or afford rising rents due to waves of gentrification.

As these crises intensify, the question of insurgent survival appears on the horizon. We need to organize collective sustenance and dignity in the face of the dispossessions to come—and to do so in ways that will undermine and fragment the forces of the state and capital. To do so, we will have to act both from within and alongside the ranks of the precarious and dispossessed and to join forces with the forms of insurgent self-organization that emerge, such as encampments and migrant caravans. The question is how to simultaneously survive the crises inflicted by the prevailing order with dignity while throwing it into crisis in a way that enables us to explore new ways of living.

—Some former members of Stop the Sweeps ATX

The successes, limits, and lessons of 400+1 are not our story to tell. We encourage our comrades who participated in that organization to publish their own reflections. ↩

The Case for Resistance : What We’re Up Against—and What It Could Look Like to Fight

2024-11-20T03:31:21Z

In the following analysis, we explore what we can expect from Donald Trump’s second term and how we can prepare to confront it. If you only have time to read one part, read the proposals for what we can do to resist.

It’s understandable that many people feel exhausted at the prospect of a second Trump era. It’s easy to want to tune out and dissociate. What can we do, anyway?

But we don’t know how the first Trump era would have gone if not for the ways that millions of people engaged in various forms of resistance. Difficult as it was, it could have been much worse. We didn’t topple capitalism or abolish the police, but we kept fascists from taking over the streets, and we prevented Trump and his supporters from accomplishing a great deal of their agenda. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to conceal our collective power.

As long as we relied on our own strength, we became more and more powerful. Our protests galvanized others into action, showing what was at stake and where the regime was vulnerable. Our actions shaped public narratives, counteracting Trump’s efforts to determine popular discourse. The resulting unrest gave the capitalist class the impression that Trump’s reign was bad for business, sapping their support. It was only after we had apparently driven Trump from the stage of history that we let our guard down, permitting our social movements to dwindle and creating a situation in which the Democratic Party could cede power once again.

The lesson is clear. We will only get what we win by our own efforts. The Trump era was not a historical anomaly. It’s not behind us. We are still in it, and we can only get through it by fighting.

Now it is happening again: the Democratic Party is handing Donald Trump the keys to the kingdom, including the most advanced means of repression in the history of the solar system. The popular power expressed in the 2020 uprising—the only thing that has been powerful enough to stop this aspiring dictator—has dissipated, undermined by the same Democrats who claimed that they knew best how to defeat Trump.

This is a pivotal moment, and everyone who isn’t cynically detached is sounding the alarm. Those of us who recognize the necessity of fighting had better find each other, identify the strengths and weaknesses of all the parties involved, recall the lessons of the past eight years, and strategize.

The Balance of Forces

In some ways, we are in a worse position than we were in 2017. Trump’s election in 2016 came as a shock to everyone, provoking an immediate mass response; at the time, the occupation of Standing Rock and the uprisings against police violence in Ferguson and Baltimore were fresh in the minds of millions. This time, the 2020 uprising feels like a distant memory, despite the fact that it was exponentially larger than those earlier movements. Last spring’s student movement in solidarity with Palestine was inspiring, but it did not spread far enough beyond the universities to survive repression and summer break.

Nonetheless, tens of millions of us share the experience of participating in the largest mass uprising in the United States in at least half a century. Those memories have been buried beneath subsequent sedimentary layers of history, but they are not entirely inaccessible.

For the first time, Trump has won the popular vote, making gains with some voters of color. A larger part of the population is prepared to vote for overt fascism than before, knowing full well what they are doing this time. Although grassroots fascist activity dropped off after the abortive coup of January 6, 2021, neo-Nazis have resumed making appearances on the streets. If Trump pardons those serving time as a result of January 6, far-right organizations like the Proud Boys will likely return to the streets in full force.

After eight years of scandals and emergencies, everyone is desensitized and demoralized. Both institutional and rank-and-file Democrats appear to be prepared to roll over and let Trump do what he wants. Like in 2017, Republicans will control the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate; once again, they wield deep institutional power while pretending to be “rebels” against the state that they control. This time around, however, Trump is prepared to push his agenda much further. In 2017, as an upstart in the Republican Party, he was obliged to fill his administration with neocons and other traditional Republicans. Now the Republicans are united behind him, and he is preparing to gut the entire federal government and the upper ranks of the military and install a gang of loyalists.

The fascism they want.

Yet this could create new weaknesses for him. Promoting sycophants to positions of power on the basis of loyalty rather than expertise will not necessarily create an effective government. The more emboldened Trump and his henchmen are, the more likely they are to provoke resistance. In attempting to appoint a cabinet full of rapists, conspiracy theorists, and Fox News hosts, he will force even the most milquetoast liberals to at least temporarily cease to regard the United States government as legitimate. Purging thousands of people from the government and the military while waging open war upon some of the most desperate sectors of society could incite resistance on multiple fronts.

How Popular Is Trump?

Donald Trump is not significantly more popular in 2024 than he was in 2020, nor does he represent a majority of the population. He added a couple million votes to the number he received in 2020, but he still received considerably fewer votes in 2024 than Joe Biden received in 2020, despite the fact that the US population has increased by several million since then. And remember—Biden was not actually popular in 2020, as became obvious afterwards.

So Trump has not really gained popularity. The Democratic Party has lost popularity, that’s all.

This is not surprising. The Democrats have sought to be the party of compromise between irresolvable opposites. They tried to fashion a compromise between capitalism and the working class, between police and the communities that they brutalize, between genocide and peace.¹ Small wonder that they failed. Actually, it is surprising how well they did, considering that they ran on the platform of “democracy” without so much as offering voters a primary in which to choose a candidate. Most other ruling parties around the world fared even worse in the elections of 2024.

But that doesn’t mean people like the Democrats. It just means that people hate Donald Trump.

If some Democrats are eager to respond to this election by chasing the Republicans even further to the right, this only shows how badly they are still misjudging the situation. Their attempt to court the center by cozying up to neoconservatives failed to build a viable majority. This is because the status quo is unpopular. The people who propelled Trump to victory were largely casting protest votes against the ruling order. As we foresaw last July, the center cannot hold.

The 2024 election represents the end of the technocratic neoliberal consensus that dominated the world from the 1970s to the 2010s. Trump’s popularity is not a unique phenomenon. All around the world, far-right populist movements are growing and authoritarian leaders are gaining political legitimacy. For decades, liberals and conservatives have worked together to suppress grassroots movements seeking to address the problems created by neoliberal capitalism; this created a vacuum that the far-right has ultimately filled. In that regard, the Democrats paved the way for nationalism and fascism to succeed neoliberalism. Presumably, they assume that those will be less threatening to their privileges than the end of capitalism would be.

Perhaps this explains how the Democratic Party could spend years decrying Trump as a fascist, then immediately arrange a peaceful transfer of power. Institutional Democrats are hiding their heads in the sand, hoping that if they remain faithful to the institutions of democracy, even unilaterally, those institutions might survive the next four years. But considering how dramatically the playing field has shifted over the past eight years, there is no reason to believe that those institutions will remain intact unless the ruling class needs them as bargaining chips.

The Democrats have no intention to stand up for those that Donald Trump intends to attack. They are the knowing accomplices of fascism.

None of this is good news. Those who are disappointed by the Democrats will not necessarily find their way to movements for liberation. They could drift further to the right, or gravitate towards authoritarian leftist pyramid schemes, or withdraw into apathy entirely. But there are opportunities here.

Billionaire Supervillains

It is surprising that Trump could not add more to his voter base, considering that the world’s richest man supported him by spending $44 billion to buy the world’s chief political discussion platform and considerably more than $250 million more on private election canvassing—including efforts to bribe working-class voters by picking a daily million-dollar lottery winner.

Real supervillain stuff.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump both pretend that they were drawn to politics out of a sense of civic duty; in fact, both are simply scaling up their business ventures by expanding to trade in state power.² The day after the election, a rise in stock shares added $26.5 billion to Musk’s net worth, in the biggest such spike on record. While the Democrats are still trying to preserve neoliberal capitalism as it was, the Republicans represent a new fusion of populist nationalism and oligarchy that seeks to extract profit directly through the state while channeling the rage of the poor into scapegoating the even poorer.

Trump and Musk are only able to masquerade as selfless benefactors because resources have become so unevenly distributed that a few billionaires can determine the outcome of an election. These are the same people who control the supply chain, the communications and news platforms, and the emerging fields of artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, and space travel. This is 21st-century fascism, in which autocracy and technocracy blend together, creating overlapping matrices of control that function at every scale from the intracellular to the interplanetary.³

Whatever promises they make to the white working class, their actual priority is to enrich themselves. You can’t carry out a gigantic wealth transfer into the coffers of billionaires while also solving the economic problems of ordinary Americans. Trump has always succeeded in taking advantage of popular grievances by making poor people identify with him as a symbol of success, giving them the vicarious thrill of cheering for the winning team even as he empties their pockets into his own. But that may not placate people indefinitely.

The world’s richest man canvassed for Trump by picking a daily million-dollar lottery winner, essentially buying an advertisement in which a struggling working-class family had to gush about how grateful they were to their billionaire benefactors. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have no incentive to improve the lives of ordinary workers—the gulf between billionaires and workers is precisely what enables them to pull stunts like this.

Ostensibly, Donald Trump intends to do to the United States government what Elon Musk did to Twitter: seize it, fire everyone who is not loyal to him, and turn it into a vehicle for profiteering and spreading fascism. When Musk took over Twitter, a rash of articles appeared claiming that he would drive it into the ground and the platform would soon cease to function entirely. Unfortunately, that would have been preferable to what actually happened. Despite a few technical glitches, Twitter kept functioning. Musk banned, drove away, or algorithmically suppressed enough of his critics to transform discourse on the platform, leaving just enough diversity intact to preserve popular investment. This is how authoritarians achieve hegemony: with a mix of repression and tolerance.

Regardless of the doomsaying of some journalists, we should anticipate something similar from the second Trump administration. There will be a messy transitional period and a wave of repression, but the real threat is that our society will continue functioning under an even more authoritarian framework—and that most people will accommodate themselves to it.

However, none of these stories has yet reached its conclusion. Ever since Musk acquired it, the platform formerly known as Twitter has been steadily losing credibility and hemorrhaging supporters—not unlike the United States government over the past decade. Historically, emperors surrounded by toadies who only tell them what they want to hear rarely manage to establish stability. We can anticipate chaos and disorganization, then—one crisis after another—and it is possible that the general population, always fickle, will turn against Trump as he fails to solve their problems, just as the Biden administration did.

So now is the time to think boldly, to fight for something more inspiring than a return to Democratic rule. We are not surrounded by fascist bootlickers who desire to be dominated—or at least, they do not comprise a majority yet. We are surrounded by desperate people who are largely disappointed in electoral politics because it has so little to offer them. They will remain on the sidelines until a better way opens up.

The desire to see others harmed in their name has come to substitute for the desire to improve their own lives.

Know Your Enemy

We have at least one advantage. Donald Trump is a known quantity. If it is not always possible to foresee his moves, his reactions are usually predictable. It should be possible to exploit his weaknesses.

Trump thrives on media attention. Seeking to control the news cycle, he manufactures one crisis after another, each intended to distract from the last. During his first term, this forced many people into a cycle of reaction, allowing Trump to set the tempo of engagement. When your enemy controls the tempo of the conflict, he can keep you continually on the defensive.

To this end, Trump is always saying and doing horrible things. With his cabinet picks, for example, it appears that he is trying to provoke a scandal so that his most outrageous nominations function as lightning rods channeling anger and attention, enabling him to push through the rest of his agenda unnoticed.

It is up to us to set our own priorities, to seize the initiative and force our adversaries to fight on the terrain we choose. Knowing some of Trump’s plans for his first days in office, we can begin choosing battles that we might be able to win. The earlier that people can achieve a few decisive victories, even on a local scale, the sooner people everywhere will rediscover that resistance is possible.

Trump will overreach, especially if we force him to. Recall the heady days of summer 2020, when he was trying to show his backers in the ruling class that he could regain control of the streets. When he sent federal agents into Portland in July 2020, he was pouring gasoline on a fire, catalyzing a massive public response that the federal agencies loyal to him—chiefly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security—could not suppress. Those who had initially watched from the sidelines eventually poured into the streets, taking up umbrellas, leaf blowers, fireworks, and shields. They continued coming out for over a hundred consecutive days.

Arguably, Trump was not defeated at the polls in November of that year, but in the streets in July 2020, when the people of Portland demonstrated that his lackeys were no match for them. This cost Trump the support of capitalists seeking to reestablish law and order—at least in that election.⁴

Portland, summer 2020.

Exerting Leverage

A crucial element of the victory that took place in summer 2020 was the polarization of local and state governments against Trump. The complicity of Democratic officials in “blue” states and cities is well-established, but they still have to pretend to represent their constituencies, which often means chasing after powerful social movements in hopes of coopting them. If we play our cards right, we should be able to force Democrat-controlled local and state governments and agencies to refuse to cooperate with at least some of Trump’s programs. In 2020, popular sentiment forced many local prosecutors to drop the charges against those arrested during the uprising. Many municipalities have been declared sanctuary cities. As empty as those words often are, we can aim to force politicians to give them meaning. Any division that emerges within the ruling class, however small, will be to our advantage.

The first battle will be fought for the hearts—and schedules—of anarchists and other rebels who were active in 2020. Do we have it in us to mobilize again, more, differently? The second battle will be fought for a broader swath of the population, including rank-and-file Democrats. Are they prepared to accept the second Trump era as business as usual, or will they gravitate towards resistance?

If Democrat politicians are not compelled to break with the Republican agenda, we could end up in a countrywide situation analogous to what happened to the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, where the majority of the general population came to oppose the proposed police training facility but politicians of every stripe closed ranks in a bipartisan consensus in favor of imposing it by brute force. But if a critical mass of rank-and-file Democrats conclude that they have a responsibility to become unruly, that will force at least some Democratic politicians to hold themselves apart from the “law and order” consensus.

We should also anticipate defections from the bureaucratic and managerial classes. Trump plans to fire thousands of federal employees and surely many more will resign. The effects will trickle down to every level of society. We need to create opportunities for newly disaffected people to connect with each other and put their skills at the service of the movement. If some of them bring insider knowledge of the bureaucracy, all the better. When it comes to leaks from those who retain their positions, there should be an emphasis on equipping movements to act rather than simply seeking to discredit the administration in an imagined court of public opinion.

To take on an entire government, we have to create friction between the different factions that comprise it and exploit the vulnerabilities that this opens up.

Refine Our Strategies

Some of the tools and strategies that we relied on during the first Trump administration may no longer serve us.

Doxxing, deplatforming, and social media bans could disrupt right-wing formations until the right seized control of social media platforms like Twitter. They are unlikely to be effective under an openly fascist regime in which far-right street fighters are granted clemency and rewarded for their misdeeds via crowdfunding and media hype.

Even before Elon Musk purchased Twitter, social media platforms had become sparring rings in which contenders jockeyed for legitimacy in a zero-sum competition, and this had filtered out to influence the atmosphere of some other organizing venues. Such dynamics do not serve us well. This time around, we will have to set aside a variety of destructive patterns if we are to create ecosystems of resistance that can thrive under such challenging conditions.

Mutual aid projects will be important. People will need hormones, birth control, abortion pills, money for traveling for medical care or escaping a hostile environment, assistance averting various forms of state violence. But these are fundamentally defensive strategies that must be connected with offensive forms of struggle to succeed.⁵ We cannot separate care and struggle, nor should we let the desire for individual safety interfere with the forms of collective action that represent our only hope of following through on the slogan “We keep us safe.”

Fundamentally, this is a struggle between empathy and selfishness, between solidarity and hatred.

Fight Smart

We must refuse to let any aspect of Trump’s agenda become normalized. At the same time, we should not let his actions provoke us into a condition of perpetual outrage that produces diminishing returns. We must pay close attention to what is happening without letting him dictate the pace of our actions or drain our emotional energy. This requires thinking strategically, looking for opportunities to act effectively rather than simply to pass judgment. Every day will be its own emergency, and each one will be truly urgent—and yet we will not be able to change our priorities every day. We will have to build sustainable forms of resistance through continuous action, seeking strategies that build capacity over time rather than burning out.

If we can develop such strategies, they will also prepare us to confront what Adam Greenfield calls the long emergency of intertwined climate change, political instability, and societal collapse. As hurricanes and floods batter our communities alongside new assaults from the state, we must accept that nothing is ever going back to normal and proceed accordingly.

How Can We Resist?

We will not be able to simply pick up where we left off in 2020. Once again, there will be a learning curve—we will have to connect with new people, demonstrate tactics, make proposals, and debunk liberal assumptions about what is acceptable or effective. If we can hold our ground long enough, some sectors of the population that are currently beguiled or demoralized will probably become restless again, especially if the economy does not improve. But we also can’t let Trump steal a march on us. The first few months will determine how far this goes, how fast.

Many of Trump’s ostensible opponents have maintained that two of the negative consequences of the next Trump administration will be that more people will “radicalize” (to the left as well as the right) and that there will be “chaos” (which is to say, disruptive protests). The implication is that Trump wants and benefits from both of these phenomena. It is incumbent on us to articulate which kinds of polarization and chaos actually benefit Trump and which do not. Donald Trump did not win the 2024 elections because people took to the streets—he lost the 2020 elections as a consequence of disruptive protests, and he won the 2024 election in part because those died off. Everyone must understand this.

Demonstrators in Portland, Oregon at the conclusion of Donald Trump’s first term.

Here are some concrete steps that we can take as individuals and movements.

Quit X/Twitter; Diminish Reliance on Instagram; Join Mastodon and Bluesky

In some ways, Trump’s victory can be traced directly to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. With Musk playing a role in the incoming Trump administration, the platform may provide warrant-free intelligence directly to federal agencies, while the algorithms will continue to promote authoritarian narratives. Now that tech billionaires are accommodating themselves to Trump’s rule, the same goes for Facebook, which has already lost status as an organizing space, but also for Instagram, which countless anarchist and leftist projects still depend on. This is not just a concern for self-identifying radicals, but for everyone who relies on social media for information.

Fortunately, since the election, millions of people have been fleeing Musk’s platform. Some are going to Instagram Threads, which is hardly better, but millions have been joining Bluesky, creating a new public sphere that could play a role in circulating news and ideas. While the owners of Bluesky have succeeded in branding it as a welcoming space for many of the demographics that the Trump administration intends to target, it remains to be seen how durable that will be—and as long as capitalism prevails, every corporate-owned platform remains at the mercy of the market. For these reasons, Mastodon is still the best bet, but thus far, people are not joining it in massive enough numbers for it to suffice to inform the kind of mass movements we will need.

The unequivocally good news is that the exodus from Musk’s platform shows that people are not yoked to social media platforms, no matter how well-established. From now on, tech billionaires who seek to control the “public square” will be aiming at a moving target.

Establish Local Organizing Venues

Get people in your community used to coming together in person. Establish face-to-face relationships between people doing different kinds of organizing and impacted by different aspects of the Trump agenda. One easy way to get this process started is to host ongoing assemblies, whether to connect new people to ongoing organizing or for different groups and tendencies to establish complementary strategies. Another option is to establish a public venue, such as a social center or regular meeting place, that can serve as a hub for ongoing coordination and a point of entry for people looking to get involved. A third possibility is to establish neighborhood associations connecting those who live and work close to each other.

Most people learn best through action and experimentation. It is better to try something out, learning in the process, than to attempt to reach consensus about the perfect idea.

Build Rapid Response Networks

Once the Trump era gets underway, it will be important to have means via which to immediately circulate breaking news about opportunities to resist or to support targeted groups. One way to do this is to set up an announcements-only thread on Signal and promote it to everyone who might need it. It might make sense to establish a few different response networks—one to announce federal operations and immigration checkpoints in your area, another to promote local organizing events, and so on.

Get these structures in place now, before the pace of events picks up.

Establish Mutual Aid Projects

Establish mutual aid projects addressing the needs that will be more difficult to fulfill under the Trump administration, such as hormone access and reproductive self-determination.
Establish mutual aid projects addressing people’s economic needs, such as solidarity networks and really really free markets. These need not only serve those in the worst conditions of need; ideally, they should show everyone what they have to gain from participating in mutual aid, connecting people from many different walks of life.

We should take seriously the economic concerns that pushed some people towards Trump. We know the economy will not work for poor people under Trump, either; it may well get worse. Mutual aid projects are one of the only ways that we can demonstrate to some of those who voted for Trump that they are better off making common cause with us than trusting politicians’ lies.

While it will be tempting to retreat into enclaves or break off conversations with those who do not already agree with us, we should seek to nourish social connections that are not yet politically mapped and polarized.

Establish Community Defense Projects

Organize community self-defense classes. In addition to spreading useful skills, these can connect people on a basis that can also equip them to act together. If space is available, you could set up a community gym to serve a similar purpose.
Form affinity groups with those you trust and begin discussing what kinds of action you would be prepared to engage in together in response to raids or fascist attacks.
Establish bail funds, defendant support structures, and resources for collective defense ahead of time, so you’ll be ready in advance. Although some lawmakers have attempted to pass laws against this kind of solidarity work, there are still ways to get around those.
This is also a good time to revitalize prisoner support projects.

One of the challenges that the authorities will face is that the court and prison systems are already overextended. If they attempt to escalate to more widespread repression, they might overwhelm the judicial apparatus. We should be prepared to make the most of this, tying them up in court and drawing out proceedings wherever possible.

Prepare to Resist Raids and Deportations

Prepare to respond to ICE raids in clever and effective ways that use repression to leverage outrage. Mass deportations will require massive logistics and infrastructure, providing a host of opportunities for intervention.

This option is explored in detail below.

Organize Pressure Campaigns

Pressure local and state authorities not to collaborate with the Trump administration in concrete ways. Identify specific politicians and functionaries, find a variety of ways to approach them, and make it clear what the consequences will be for complicity.
Identify local agencies and corporations that will play a logistical role in implementing the Trump agenda and bring pressure to bear against them.

Encourage liberals who have experience with phone canvassing to participate in call-in campaigns to pressure officials or support arrestees and prisoners.

Organize against the Police

The police always comprise the cutting edge of state violence; once again, they will be at the forefront of imposing all of Trump’s policies. Through four years of centrist reaction, the Democratic Party and corporate news platforms promulgated a “law and order” narrative intended to re-legitimize the police; the second Trump era will make it clear once again that police are simply the stormtroopers of the ruling class. What’s more, as Trump calls for new crackdowns, the police may be overextended in new ways.

The most powerful uprisings in this country over the past fifteen years have been revolts against the police, culminating in 2020. Resistance to police connects those who oppose state violence on ideological grounds to those who continuously experience it firsthand. This has made for explosive forms of solidarity before, and it can again.

If we want to make our opposition to police as persuasive as possible, however, we should also be experimenting with grassroots programs to address the issues that they supposedly exist to solve. Capitalism has done real damage to the social fabric, contributing to fentanyl overdoses, increasingly visible poverty and mental health crises, and other forms of mass violence. More policing will not fix those problems. By drawing resources out of every form of social support and channeling them towards state repression, politicians have gambled that they can stabilize an extremely unequal society via continuously escalating exertions of violent force. We should demonstrate that there is an alternative.

Debunk Liberal Narratives

Liberals who chanted “No one is above the law” during the first Trump administration must recognize that, with the Supreme Court and much of the judiciary under his control, it no longer makes sense to count on the courts to restrain him. The same goes for the federal investigations in which Democrats invested so much hope. This should be a teachable moment for them: if they are sincere, they will have to get involved with grassroots forms of direct action.

Liberals must stop thinking about the government as representing what is best within humanity. It has become eminently clear that capitalism and the state are elevating the worst elements of humanity to positions of authority. This is not an accident, but the structural consequence of the systems that distribute power. To navigate the ongoing Trump era, we will need to share a thoroughgoing analysis of these systems.

Sow the Seeds of Defiance

Spread narratives impugning obedience itself. As Hannah Arendt said, in the face of fascism, “No one has the right to obey.” Make sure that these reach functionaries in the bureaucracy and members of the armed forces. Police departments and federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security are already comprised of hardened mercenaries who have no compunction about doing harm in return for a paycheck, but not everyone in the armed forces or bureaucracy will be enthusiastic about serving Trump’s whims.

Study the First Trump Era

For those who have not been on the streets continuously since 2017, it will help to study the various struggles of the first Trump era in order to refine a sense of strategy and historic context.

Reach Out

As resistance gets underway, it will be crucial to make it visible to everyone who has a stake in participating. This could mean making the walls speak with posters and stickers. It could mean distributing literature at your school or in your community. It could mean creating art and music that strengthens the resolve to resist.

Reach In

All of us would probably rather be doing something other than scrambling to prevent fascism from taking hold. We need to find ways to keep this work interesting to us and to everyone else who will have to do it—ways to keep our spirits up and to develop the kind of character that will sustain us through periods of hardship.

Try to organize a concrete victory early on, however small. Brainstorm with your friends: what Trump policy will be least popular in our local community? Make a plan to contest the implementation of that policy. Get started before Trump is inaugurated.

Think about how to offer roles to new people, welcoming them into the fight. To succeed, our strategies will have to be reproducible and contagious. Everything we do—regardless of how popular it is—will have to create conditions that will draw more people into action. It is a mistake to flatten differences into a popular front, but we will need as many people involved in the resistance as possible. When you encounter differences, don’t get stuck in ideological posturing; make a proposition about what you can do together based on what you have in common.

Above all, do not let resignation take hold. Resignation is the foundation of fascism, more so than jackbooted thugs and prison camps. Our enemies are counting on us to assume that resistance is impossible, to keep our heads down while our neighbors disappear, our communities are plundered, our life support systems are dismantled. But resistance is always possible. The fact that you are reading this right now proves that.

Demonstrators mobilize in Berkeley, California at the beginning of Donald Trump’s first term.

Appendix: Strategizing to Stop Mass Deportations

The incoming administration has been very clear about their intention to maintain public support by attacking scapegoats. This was one of the central promises of their campaign and it is popular among Trump’s core supporters. We can understand this as the desire of an increasingly powerless population to enact violence vicariously through a brutal autocrat—an ominous sign of human beings turning on each other as profit margins diminish and prospects for the future decline.

If we let Donald Trump and Stephen Miller expand the infrastructure of state violence, using military funds to build “vast holding facilities” for the millions that they have promised to arrest and deport, they will not stop at deporting undocumented immigrants. Once that additional infrastructure exists, they will turn it against one target after another. Eventually, they will come for all of us.

All who don’t want to see their neighbors, friends, and classmates or coworkers disappeared share a responsibility to act. During Trump’s first term, opposition to his border regime was a powerful cause of popular unrest, from the airport occupations in response to his “Muslim Ban” to the Occupy ICE encampments and the outpouring of solidarity following his manufactured “border crisis” in fall 2018. In 2019, when Donald Trump announced that ICE was about to carry out a new round of massive raids, Willem van Spronsen gave his life in an attempt to disable to the fleet of buses serving a private immigration detainment facility in Tacoma. Afterwards, asked why the raids were not happening, an ICE official expressed that they were concerned for the safety of their officers.

Opposition to Trump’s border policies initially emerged in the streets and airports; only afterwards did legal challenges emerge in the courts. Now, of course, we cannot expect much from a court system that will be dominated by Trump appointees. It will be necessary take steps to prevent the deportation machinery from functioning: to block it via mass action when possible, but also to throw sand in the gears, to disrupt its logistics and organization.

Let’s take a brief look at how Trump might implement these mass deportations and what forms resistance could assume.

According to Jason Hauser, the chief of staff for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Biden, the infrastructure already exists to expand the deportation machine to a massive scale. Guatemalan, Haitian, and Honduran communities may be targeted first, because deportation to those countries is more straightforward than to many other countries. These communities will likely be targeted with raids at workplaces, churches, hospitals, and schools, and the arrests of those who are already on the record for nonviolent offences or because of their limbo status in an asylum process. Expect raids, buses, and camps.

Once apprehended, these people must be transported to holding facilities. Those could be rapidly erected tents, existing jails that are packed to two or three times their official capacity limits, warehouses converted into temporary detention facilities, military bases, or new facilities constructed with military funding. One official claims that 25 temporary detention facilities could be created in existing warehouses in just one week.

Once in custody, the arrestees will eventually be deported by plane flights. ICE currently has 14 dedicated deportation planes that can carry 135 people each, amounting to a total capacity of 1890 people per round trip. They also contract out many flights through Classic Air Charter, subcontracting with Swift Air and World Atlantic Airlines. If Trump succeeds in invoking the Insurrection Act or the Alien Enemies Act to mobilize the military and bypass immigration hearings, this number could rise dramatically. The current ICE director estimates that between 150,000 and 200,000 people could be deported within the first one or two months, and up to a million in the first 100 days.

This is frightening. And yet plans rarely survive contact with reality. Mass deportation would mean visible ICE actions with the cooperation of law enforcement in every sector of society. It would mean buses filled with prisoners everywhere. It would mean local law enforcement agencies being pulled away from other tasks and redirected towards immigration enforcement. It would mean plane after plane full of neighbors, family members, and friends, handcuffed and waiting on the tarmac. All of these are opportunities for resistance to erupt. The deportations will not all occur in darkness; many of them will take place in public, in broad daylight. It is up to us to make sure that no one can ignore them, and to help others to understand what they can do.

Armies succeed or fail based on their logistics. A complex logistical chain involving multiple agencies and forms of transportation, directed by leaders who are attempting to act on a much larger scale than before, will be prone to failure. How might these logistical links fail?

As the saying goes, our enemies have names and addresses. During the first Trump presidency, people doxxed every ICE agent they could find. Every raid will require the cooperation of local law enforcement; each one will involve staging areas and transport buses. Where do the buses come from? Who maintains them? Are those people also ideologically invested in fascism, or do some of them have misgivings? Where will the new detention facilities be staged? Who will build them? What airports will these deportation flights leave from? What supply lines will support them? How many low-wage airport workers have a stake in the fight against fascism?

In one possible version of an anti-deportation struggle, there will be mass demonstrations, moral outrage, fruitless lawsuits, and symbolic civil disobedience. Most of the participants will be self-professed activists. Efforts to center the authority of existing formal organizations that are not in a position to call for certain kinds of action will impose limits on what tactics the movement can experiment with. Internal divisions and interpersonal competition for control of the movement will further hamper it.

In another possible version of the struggle, every sector of society will become involved in resisting the deportation machine. Local liberal-leaning governments will be pressured into refusing to cooperate with federal agencies. Rapid response networks will bring people out in massive numbers to confront raids—and not all of them will limit themselves to following the leadership of official organizations. Bus drivers will go on strike; buses will mysteriously cease to function; coordinated highway blockades could shut down traffic to airports that are critical deportation hubs. Every form of struggle will emerge, and every participant will be encouraged to take whatever action they can, and the combination of anger and small, concrete victories will motivate more people to act.

The deportations—and any struggle against them—will happen in physical reality, not on social media. If a dozen communities begin immediately organizing mass strategic resistance to deportation, researching logistical chains, outlining targets and strategic goals, and welcoming a diversity of participants and tactics, they could demonstrate effective resistance and light a signal fire for others around the country. If people get organized now and begin to map out and target the infrastructure for mass deportation before Trump takes office, they could seize the initiative, set the tempo, and force him to be the one to have to react.

In 2017, when Trump signed the so-called “Muslim ban,” a single mass occupation at JFK Airport in New York sparked occupations involving tens of thousands of people around the country. Tactics spread rapidly when they are inspiring. What can you and your community do, right now, to prepare to inspire nationwide resistance to the deportation machine?

George Orwell wrote “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” But the future is unwritten. What comes next will depend, in part, on us.

History Repeats Itself: First as Farce, Then as Tragedy : Why the Democrats Are Responsible for Donald Trump’s Return to Power

2024-11-06T08:55:49Z

Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. That means that we will have to fight many of the battles of 2017-2020 all over again. But first, in order to understand the scale of what we’re up against, let’s look at how we got here.

The Hot Potato Changes Hands Again

We have long argued that in the 21st century, state power is a hot potato. Because neoliberal globalization has made it difficult for state structures to mitigate the impact of capitalism on ordinary people, no party is able to hold state power for long without losing credibility. Indeed, over the past few months, upset defeats have undermined ruling parties in France, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

In the 2024 election, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were already tarnished by their relationship with state power, but Harris was the one associated with the reigning administration. This is one of the reasons she lost. Tens of millions of Trump voters support his program, yes, but the voters who pushed him over the edge into victory were essentially casting protest votes.

The Democrats have done everything they could to associate themselves with the ruling order: moving their politics to the right, shifting support away from supposed “leftists” within their ranks, demobilizing protest movements. It turns out that this was a losing wager at a time when people are hungry for change.

It remains to be seen how the rest of the country will respond. If the leadership of the Democratic Party are able to roll over and accept a position as the junior partners in fascism, the future could be bleak indeed. On the other hand, if it becomes clear that half the country is going to resist the Trump program, some part of the Democratic leadership will be forced to chase after their position as the representatives of that part of the population, as occurred in 2017.

What happens next will be decided in the streets.

The Party of Complicity

The Republicans have become the party of fascism. In the run-up to this election, the Democrats established themselves as the party of complicity with fascism.

What does it mean to acknowledge that Donald Trump is a fascist, yet do no more than urge people to vote against him? If indeed, Trump intends to introduce fascism to the United States—if, as he has explicitly promised, he will round up millions of people (“the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”), put the military on the streets to suppress protests, and use the court system to attack anyone who opposes him—then limiting oneself to merely electoral opposition means welcoming fascism with open arms.

When fascism is on the way, the appropriate thing to do is to organize underground networks of resistance, as Italian and French anti-fascists did in the 1930s and 1940s. The appropriate thing to do is to prepare to resist by any means necessary. Anything less is complicity.

Beefing up the institutions through which the fascists will enact their policies is complicity. Normalizing violence against the people that the fascists intend to target is complicity. Turning over the communications platforms via which people share information is complicity. Discouraging people from the kind of tactics one needs to fight against a fascist regime is complicity. Over the past four years, the Democrats have done every single one of these things.

The Democratic party leadership is already prepared to coexist with fascists, to be ruled by fascists. They would prefer fascism to another four years of tumultuous protests. Having a more authoritarian party in power gives them an alibi—it makes them look good by comparison, even as they are the ones channeling people out of the streets and paving the way for Trump to carry out his program.

The Road to Fascism

Let’s spell out why the Democrats are culpable for this situation.

The Police

The Democrats began the Biden-Harris era by doubling down on their support for the police, precisely when millions of people around the United States were wondering whether it was time to look for a more effective way to address poverty and mental health crises than to continue channeling massive quantities of public funding towards militarizing police departments. When Trump takes office again in 2025, the police departments around the country that the Biden administration has funded and glorified will be at the forefront of imposing Trump’s agenda.

The Democratic Party’s pro-police turn helped bring ex-cops like New York City Mayor Eric Adams into office in 2020. Adams’s administration has been a disaster; he is currently the first Mayor of New York to face federal charges, including bribery, conspiracy, and fraud. Trump has since reached out to Adams, one corrupt strongman to another. This is what happens when you put state power directly in the hands of the forces of repression.

The Law

Starting early in the first Trump administration, Democrats focused their criticism of Trump on the idea that what he was doing was illegal, using the slogan “No one is above the law.” As we argued in 2018,

If you’re trying to establish the foundation for a powerful social movement against Trump’s government, “no one is above the law” is a self-defeating narrative. What happens when a legislature chosen by gerrymander passes new laws? What happens when the courts stacked with the judges Trump appointed rule in his favor? What will you do when the FBI cracks down on protests?

Now, with the Supreme Court controlled by Trump appointees and Trump preparing to resume power, we will see the answers to these questions. Anyone who is determined to prevent Trump from carrying out his agenda will have to be prepared to break the laws that Trump’s legislature will pass and Trump’s judges will apply.

To march under the banner “no one is above the law” is to spit in the faces of all those for whom the daily functioning of the law is an experience of oppression and injustice. It is to reject solidarity with the sectors of society that could give a social movement against Trump leverage in the streets. Finally, it is to legitimize the very instrument of oppression—the law—that Trump will eventually use to suppress your movement.

As we warned last July, a Trump victory means that all the institutions that centrists have counted on to protect them—electoral politics, the court system, the police, ordinary citizens’ inclination to obey the law and respect the authorities—are now weapons in the hands of their enemies.

The Media

When the owners of Twitter sold it to Elon Musk in 2022, they understood that they were putting control of the 21st century’s chief political communications platform in the hands of a far-right megalomaniac. One of the first things that Musk did was to ban some of the most well-known anarchist accounts that had helped to mobilize people during the first Trump administration. This was a step in the process of reducing Twitter to a vehicle for far-right propaganda.

As we argued at the time,

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is not just the whim of an individual plutocrat—it is also a step towards resolving some of the contradictions within the capitalist class, the better to establish a unified front against workers and everyone else on the receiving end of the violence of the capitalist system.

Indeed, the funding of a coterie of billionaires was one of the chief factors that enabled Trump to win the 2024 election. The billionaires were able to shift their loyalties to Trump in part because, with communication platforms and street protests brought under control, they did not have to fear that a second Trump administration would create chaos that would be bad for business.

This brings us to the next point.

Emptying the Streets

The Democrats’ effort to discredit and demobilize the movement against the police played directly into the hands of their adversaries, preparing the way for Trump to return to power without resistance.

By competing with the Republicans to assert themselves as the party of law and order, the Democrats enabled the Republicans to drive discourse about “crime” so far to the right that Trump and his henchmen could run on rhetoric about crime even though violent crime has been decreasing for years. This contrasts dramatically with the way that Donald Trump refused to dial his talking points back one millimeter.

At the same time, Democrats have sought to prevent new movements from gaining momentum. When abortion access was curtailed around the country, for example, the Democrats did their best to prevent an effective grassroots mobilization in response.

Did it benefit the Democrats’ 2024 electoral prospects to empty the streets? Let’s go back to 2020 for an answer.

At the time, in op-ed after op-ed, centrists expressed concern that the street confrontations of May and June 2020 might swing the election to Donald Trump. In fact, Democratic voter registration in June 2020 increased by 50%, while Republican voter registration grew by just 6% that month. Those who cited the protests as a factor in determining how they cast their ballots in 2020 voted for Joe Biden by a margin of fully 7%.

In other words, the George Floyd Revolt helped get Biden elected.

And remember—the George Floyd Revolt did not begin with a voter registration drive. It got off the ground with the burning of a police precinct. According to a Newsweek poll, 54% of those surveyed believed that this was justified. If that had not occurred, the movement would not have succeeded in pushing the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others into public discourse, and there would have been no electoral gain for the Democratic Party. There is no way to create powerful movements without taking real action against the causes of injustice.

As the party that coopts resistance movements, the Democrats would have benefitted from more powerful movements in 2021-2024. They preferred to lose.

The Political Ratchet

The Harris campaign received the support of former President George W. Bush, former Representative Liz Cheney, conservative talk-radio host Charlie Sykes and many other right-wing figures. This was not just because Trump’s agenda was shocking even to those who previously represented the face of the Republican establishment—it was also because Harris represented a centrist political project, letting Republicans determine the discourse on issues like immigration.

As we have previously argued,

The US two-party system functions like a ratchet, with the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back.

This strategy has helped Republicans normalize what were once marginal ideas about immigration and crime, but it has not made the Democrats any more electable.

To pan back, we can see that Trump’s victory in 2024 marks a crucial turning point in 21st-century political discourse. When Trump was elected in 2016, the neoliberal consensus seemed invincible; his victory seemed to represent a fluke in which an outlier politician had come to power by coopting the rhetoric of the so-called anti-globalization movement. Today, it is clear that the heyday of the neoliberal consensus is over and something else will have to come next. Yet for decades, the Democrats have collaborated with Republicans to crush movements proposing an alternative. They suppressed the forces within their camp, such as the Bernie Sanders campaign, that represented a way forward; this was what made it possible for Trump to falsely present himself as a representative of rebellion.

This has rendered it inevitable that the far right will hold power in the next phase, since the Democrats helped to suppress anarchist, anti-authoritarian, and left alternatives.

Desensitizing the Public

Finally, heartbreakingly, the Biden administration has already done much of the work to desensitize the general public to the program that an emboldened second Trump administration will attempt to carry out. Above all, the Biden administration has accomplished this by supporting the Israeli military in carrying out a brutal genocide in Gaza. In so doing, Biden and Harris have accustomed millions of people to the idea that human life has no inherent value—that it is acceptable to slaughter, imprison, and torment people based on their status in a targeted demographic.

This is exactly the sort of environment that will enable Donald Trump to carry out the kind of brutal domestic policies that he intends to when he returns to office in two and a half months.

The Road Ahead

Ultimately, we cannot blame the Democrats for everything. We are the ones who failed to build movements powerful enough to survive their efforts to suppress us. We are the ones who are as yet unprepared to stop Trump from deporting millions of people and channeling billions of dollars more to billionaires and the security apparatus of the state.

Fortunately, this story is not over yet.

We have a responsibility not to let the election statistics demobilize us. As we wrote in 2016, in response to Trump’s first victory,

Elections serve to represent us to each other at our worst, distilling the most offensive, cowardly, and servile aspects of the species. Many people who would never personally wrest a mother from her children are capable of endorsing deportation from the privacy of a voting booth, just as most people who eat meat could never work at a slaughterhouse. Were it not for the alienation that characterizes government itself, most of the ugly policies comprising the Trump agenda could never be implemented.

There will be a brief window of possibility now when millions of people who had counted on the Democrats to keep them safe wake up and realize that we are each other’s only hope. We have to take action immediately to make contact with each other, to reestablish all that we have lost since the year 2020.

We have to undertake proactive projects that will distinguish us from the political parties, projects that show what everyone has to gain from our proposals, and that offer opportunities to people from all walks of life to get involved in the project of changing the world for the better.

The good news is that we can do this. We’ve done it before. See you on the front lines.

Fell in Love with Fire : A Documentary about the 2019 Uprising in Chile

2024-10-21T20:49:38Z

Five years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.

This is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.

October 2019 in Santiago, Chile. The president has called in the armed forces against the people for the first time since the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.

“Wait, I don’t get it. The advertisements are untouched. There’s not even graffiti. Not a single window is broken.”

“Yes. And?”

“I mean, the shelves are all empty. Did they just evacuate all the merchandise, or was it actually looted?”

“Haha what? Of course it was looted, the whole neighborhood looted it. Well, women and children first.”

“And no one destroyed anything?”

“Look, the idea isn’t to give them a bigger insurance check. Besides, if things keep going the way they are, that building may soon be ours.”

“That would be a serious step. I can’t imagine things ever reaching this point where I come from. Good luck with your struggle.”

“No! No, no, no, brother—our struggle. You’re here. You’re in this. Tell people.”

“I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone back home.”

“Explain it like this: neoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die.”

The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”

On October 17, 2019, Chile’s student movement was on its heels, facing new legislation that put police in schools for the very first time. With the students’ normal organizing environment swept out of their control, the movement launched a campaign against a routine increase in public transit fare. With a right-wing billionaire in the presidency, the prospects for resistance looked dim.

Everything changed in a single day. On October 18, a small rush-hour protest at a metro transfer station triggered a stoppage of Santiago’s entire public transit system. As commuters were stuck in hot traffic, images of police beating students began to circulate on their phones.

Santiago exploded. In one weekend, over a hundred metro stations were attacked, with ten completely destroyed. A quarter of the Wal-Marts (the largest grocery chain) in Chile were looted or burned. The government declared martial law in response to civil disturbance for the first time since the 1973-1990 Pinochet military dictatorship—but the people would not back down.

Chile graffiti reel, 2019-2020.

Stories from the Making of

We decided to take a break from our country after I finally beat criminal charges resulting from participating in combative political activity. We had just crossed the border out of Ecuador when we heard reports about an uprising there. Peasants were marching on the capitol, choking off the highways to force the president to reverse proposed austerity measures.

You said, “We should go back.”

I said, “If it were Chile…”

Just two weeks later, it was.

I’m not from Chile, but I lived there for years.

We arrived in Santiago a week before everything exploded, and almost immediately encountered an evasión [a collective fare-dodging action] that students were staging. It was your first time in Chile, and I was excited for you to get a small taste of student rebellion. And, hey, getting where we were going quicker without having to pay the second highest transit fare in Latin America?

Evasion, 2019.

OK. But the best part was how fun it was. It was so fun that the following day, when we heard the shriek of students rushing down the escalators towards the turnstiles, that we ditched our free bus ride and rushed into the station. As if we had just scored the winning goal, the teenage rebels thrilled, chanting “If you don’t jump, you’re a cop!” as we hopped through the turnstiles they had liberated. We kept evading whenever we encountered fare-dodging actions that week, even if we didn’t really need a metro ride.

On October 18, I was supposed to give a talk at some friends’ anarchist ateneo [social center]. You were out on the town while I was back at my old apartment preparing. You WhatsApp’d me some videos of kids wilding out in the metro station. Was it really Los Heroes [a metro station]?¹ You were at the center of history? God damn. I just YeahYeahYeah’d you because I had seen Chilean riots before. “Oh I’m glad you got to see that. We have to get ready to leave though.”

You—somehow—got back to my old apartment where we were staying. Knowing what I know now, I don’t even understand how you got there in time. But you were always good at finding me in the streets over the coming months, even when things got chaotic. What should have been a 45-minute commute to the ateneo took two and a half hours. Time can be elastic in Chile, sure, but it really shouldn’t take that long.

Somehow, we got there. No one else did, though. Over the months that followed, the coolest people I met flattered me with, “Oh, I was going to come to your talk that day! But then, well…”

The CrimethInc. presentation in Villa Francia on October 18, 2019.

As we waited for an audience, I saw two ten-year-olds walking down the middle of the street with a children’s couch the size of a playpen.

“There’s no way they’re gonna do what I think they’re gonna do to that couch, right?”

They did. Right onto the fire at the end of the block. We started to piece it together: what you had seen, no one at the event, the heavy traffic, this flaming barricade. Santiago was going off.

We crossed downtown to our friend’s apartment, closer to the action, but it turned out the action was everywhere. The husk of a bus. Smoldering buildings. At one point, our cab driver wasn’t sure what to do because the intersection had cops on one side and fighting encapuchados [masked heroes] on the other.

I was still YeahYeahYeah-ing your wide eyes when I left the following day, despite all my friends’ insistence that this was something special. When I got to the anarchist book fair in Buenos Aires—to give my talk again—the whole book fair was cancelled. They managed to get through a couple of the time slots, but everyone was talking about Chile. Looking at their phones. Cheering for our team whenever we struck a blow and expressing outrage every time there was news about repression. It didn’t take long for the organizers to pack it all in and just open up the social center so the whole book fair could simply watch the news from Chile.

My friend, one of the organizers, walked over to me while I was wide-eyeing the events on the television. He whispered to me, “Dude, why the fuck did you leave?”

The third time I tried to give my ill-fated talk, it was in the middle of the revolt, both temporally and territorially. Some anarchists had opened up a squat in one of the looted and abandoned businesses right by the main protest plaza. Enough people said they still wanted to see my talk—even though I didn’t understand why they would be interested in anything other than what was going on around us—that I decided to organize a presentation at the squat. Plus, I loved the space and wanted to keep it active. During talks there, one would regularly hear the uproar of revolt just outside the door, although we occasionally had to tuck our heads into our knees and wait out the wafting clouds of teargas.

Nobody came. The host had been optimistic, but after waiting a couple of hours, he informed me that the legendary 1970s Basque punk band, La Polla Records, was playing in a stadium that day.

Fifty years of punk rock in the middle of an insurrection: “No rest, no peace!”

“I don’t really like punk rock, so I didn’t mind opening up the space for you. But I guess everyone’s there.”

But I do like punk rock. So I grabbed my loosies and hopped on my bike.

Almost ten years ago now, five punks died in Santiago when bouncers violently beat back a rush of poor punks who were trying to get into a show where the British crust band Doom was playing. Wanting to avoid a similar situation—or simply intimidated by the uncontrollable, pay for nothing, fight for everything spirit that was consuming Chile—the security at the stadium would simply allow you to walk in without a ticket. I even took my bicycle in.

Inside the stadium, 15,000 punks were letting their hair down. Out in the plaza, every sector of the oppressed was present, and while we gave the cops our worst, we tried to be on our best behavior with each other because survival depended on our collective bonds. For example, a fragile truce existed during those months between the different soccer hooligan barras bravas so that they could fight the police together. On the rare occasions that fights did break out between demonstrators, everyone would chant “If you fight, you’re a cop! If you fight, you’re a cop!” Wild anarchist idealists went to the plaza with their most polished pitches to promote the values we believed would deepen the revolt.

Inside that stadium, however, the pressure was off. The plaza always had an element of carnival, but the La Polla Records show felt much more like a celebration of how far the anarchy had gone. If you know, you know, and everyone there got it—all punks—and we could just be bad because being bad together was so good. We didn’t need justifications or explanations, we could just enjoy the environment of collective, chaotic rebellion. While we had to mind our interactions on the frontline (“If you recognize me behind my mask, no you didn’t”), lest buchón sapo [Argentine, then Chilean, for “snitch”] plainclothes track our social connections, here in the stadium, those of us who had maintained a professional candor with each other in the streets could embrace and see the whole of each other’s faces erupting in radiant laughter.

Demonstrators snap a photo of the declaration of intra-hooligan, anti-police unity. It reads, “We lost too much time fighting among ourselves,” with each word atop the colors of a different team.

Everyone was sharing alcohol and weed and whatever else they had. A skinhead hooligan had hacked the stadium’s sprinkler system and was spraying mist over his section of the crowd under the hot summer sun. People climbed onto the sound tower and the roof of the stadium to hang banners in solidarity with the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche struggle or to dance silhouetted against the setting sun.

Here, the audience was in control—except the audience was totally out of control. Just a few songs into La Polla Records’ set, they had to stop in the middle of a song because too many enthusiastic hooligans had gotten on the stage and one had fallen into the drumset. They weren’t trying to stop the show, really. They were just excited.

A few more songs of the same, and one fateful fight between a bouncer who tried to suggest to a fan that he shouldn’t grab the singer’s neck in order to sing along, and the whole thing fell apart. Altogether, La Polla Records played something like five songs before abandoning the stage. As dusk came on, the atmosphere shifted from enthusiasm to anger.

15,000 punks rule! La Polla Records in Chile, February 2020.

15,000 grumbling punks and anarchists and hooligans and skinheads filed out of the stadium. Honestly, the amount of inward-facing frustration was so high that the most strategic choice the police could have made that evening would have been to allow the infighting to take its natural course. However, when there are thousands of punks occupying the road outside the stadium drinking and destroying traffic infrastructure, the pigs just can’t help themselves.

And neither could we. The most beautiful, glorious street battle of those six months unfolded before my eyes. We could see the police descending from up in the hills, so their arrival was anticipated. There was an air of “Here we go…”

Brightly colored mohawks bounced in and out of visibility amid clouds of tear gas. The most wildly dressed peacock punks engaged in feral smashing of beer bottles against police, while boom boxes provided a fast-paced tupa-tupa-tupa soundtrack to the riot. We didn’t see the best practices of gas masks, goggles, and gloves that the frontline used in the plaza. This was pure fuck you energy.

I had made a friend earlier that night while standing around selling cigarettes—but our befriending quickly accelerated when we realized we needed to rely on each other to get out of there safely. Even though they had, let’s say, much more reason to avoid capture by the police, on our first attempt to extract ourselves, they grabbed my arm and said, “Can we just watch it though?”

Yeah… except no! They were shooting shit at us! Dozens of punks rushed past us and, behind them, mechanical faceless stormtroopers advanced out of the gas clouds, arms drawn. We turned and ran.

In those six months, I mastered a whole audio taxonomy of booms—deep ones for the spent spray paint cans thrown into street fires, three different mid-level frequencies for different police projectiles, and the most piercing booms, fireworks. With the cops at our heels, we heard—BOOM—and instinctively I told my friend, “Jump!” No shit, a smoking canister hurtled under our feet. BOOM BOOM! Instinctively, again, “Duck!” This time, they went right over our heads.

“We absolutely have to get out of here.” We turned down a side street and wandered to the home of a friendly but ribbing communist who was excited to share his plan to subvert either the anarchist circle-A, or the constitutional process—I couldn’t tell which—by making a circle-A logo for the “Apruebo” (Approve) campaign for the constitution.

“Stop prohibiting so many things, I can’t keep up with disobeying them all.”

Over the last five years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing the material from this documentary in live presentations. In the days that this film depicts, every time I organized a talk, it was interrupted by the fiercest street confrontations in decades, or a people’s insurrection just across the border, or an uncontrollable wave of rioting punks. I wish that was still happening today. It’s better to do than to watch.

Since those days, I’ve presented the live version of Fell In Love With Fire within autonomous territory held in defiance of state power—in Weelaunee Forest, at a Los Panchos community in Mexico City, in People’s Park, where the audience sat on a trashed excavator left from the last riots to retake the park in 2022. It is my hope that this videozine, this documentalgo, can serve as tool to bring those kinds of spaces onto the map of other projects of rebellious self-determination across the globe and across time.

Please, don’t limit your use of this video to isolated viewing, nor to sterile, polite, seated events to raise funds. Use it to raise hell.

Their side.

Our side.

You can download the English .srt subtitles file here to translate the subtitles into another language for us.

Los Héroes is not far from La Moneda, the metro stetion where kids dropped a televisión onto the tracks—shutting down the metro and setting off the chain reaction of revolt. ↩

Ya Ghazze Habibti—Gaza, My Love : Understanding the Genocide in Palestine

2024-10-03T10:58:27Z

After slaughtering more than 42,000 Palestinians, including 16,500 children, the Israeli military is now invading Lebanon and threatening to go to war with Iran. In the following in-depth account, an anarchist from occupied Palestine reviews the history of Zionist colonialism and Palestinian resistance, makes the case for an anti-colonial understanding of the situation, and explores what it means to act in solidarity with Palestinians.

Ya Ghazze Habibti

Ya Ghazze habibti, oh Gaza my love. Gaza, which Napoleon, one of its many occupiers, called the outpost of Africa, the door to Asia. This is because he passed through it on his way north and, upon defeat, passed though it again on his way back to Africa.

Gaza, which has always been a central point for passing empires, trade routes, occupations, and cultures, owing to its geographic location along the coast line of the Mediterranean. Gaza, through which passed the Via Maris, connecting Egypt to Turkey and Europe. Gaza, through which the Greeks, the Romans, the Rashidun Caliphate, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British, the Egyptians, and Zionist forces pressed their claims—writing its story as a history of occupations, wars, atrocities, and resistance.

Gaza my love, which was always a battleground, yet always stood still. Gaza, which buries 41,000¹ of its inhabitants, commemorating a year of an ongoing war of annihilation, facing a scale of destruction that has already exceeded the bombing of Dresden by the allied forces during the Second World War, and a daily death rate that is higher than any other conflict in the 21^st century.

Almost a year into the genocide, some things should be clear. The destruction of Hamas is incidental damage. The chief goal is the mass slaughter of children, targeting Gaza’s future. Of the 41,000 deaths reported thus far, about 16,500 are children.

But Gaza is not helpless. The people of Gaza fight, and their courage and resilience are an inspiration for the entire world and generations to come.

Before we discuss the present situation, it is important to review the history. For those of us who grew up and live in the entity, the belly of the colonial beast, it feels like history began in October 7. This is the only narrative Israelis are getting. But things don’t just happen in a vacuum—and similar things have happened before, in similar wars of decolonization and liberation. A little historical background will enable us to zoom out and understand these events as part of long-term processes.

Then we can talk about possible futures.

A History of Conquest, a History of Resistance

Gaza has a long history of occupations and resistance, but our current understanding of the “Gaza Strip” as a rectangle on the map in the south of Palestine does not derive from the natural features of the land—it is an artificial, modern creation. The Mamluks in the 13th century were the first to use the term Quta’a Ghazze (Gaza Strip), but they were referring to the entire south of Palestine, all the way to the modern-day West Bank. The Gaza Strip as we know it was created in 1948.

We cannot understand what is known as the Gaza Strip without discussing the Zionist attack on Palestine in 1948, the massive ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba. Without this context, it’s impossible to understand why most Gazans are not originally from Gaza, and why 80% of the population are refugees. Gaza is an artificial strip of land that became a vast refugee camp after the massive ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Zionist militias. Out of the nearly 800,000 refugees expelled from their villages, many escaped to nearby countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. Those who tried to cross into Egypt found a closed border; unlike other neighboring countries, Egypt did not accept refugees, similar to what the Egyptian government does today. This is how the Gaza Strip emerged: as a Zionist means to control demographics and population.

Many of the Kibbutzim and towns that were attacked on October 7 were built on the ruins of communities that existed there before. Bedouin tribes and other residents from 11 villages around Gaza were expelled to the Gaza Strip, and their lands, which were classified as “abandoned,” were expropriated by the state and turned into military training grounds and settlements. Towns and kibbutzim were built on them to prevent attempts to return. The deportation order, documented by historians as Order Number 40, included an order to burn the villages and leave no remains. We can assume that some of the fighters who attacked these settlements on October 7, 2023 were second- or third-generation refugees who were seeing the ancestral lands of their parents or grandparents on the other side of the blockade for the first time.

By the end of these expulsions, in 1950, the population of Gaza had tripled as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees. There was no infrastructure to receive so many refugees, and until 1950, there was no aid organization like UNRWA in place to assist refugees. Despite that, historians tell of incredible solidarity from Gaza’s locals, who in time of crisis chose to share what little resources they had with the refugees, keeping them alive. By the decision of the United Nations, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was established in 1950 and began the task of building refugee camps and schools and organizing aid for the huge number of refugees who, until then, had slept in local schools, mosques, fields, and private homes of locals that opened their doors for them.

The newly-arrived refugees in what would become the Gaza Strip created a looming threat for the Zionist colonial project. Some claim that Gaza has been under siege since 2007—but in reality, Gaza was under siege from the very beginning, passing through various stages of siege over time. The establishment of the Gaza Strip was a calculated decision by David Ben Gurion, the architect of the Nakba and Israel’s first Prime Minister, to give up a piece of Palestine in order to build a huge refugee camp for expelled people fleeing south. In addition to controlling the demographics of the rest of Palestine, the isolation of the strip served another purpose. Its geographical distance from the West Bank, from the Palestinians that remained in the territories occupied in 1948, and from the rest of the Arab world helped to fragment the fabric of Palestinian society. This was a calculated colonial strategy to carve up the land into isolated ghettos—into what were called Bantustans in South Africa—in order to drive a wedge between different classes of occupied people.

By 1967, Israel had solved its original demographic issues but created new geographic ones. The expansionist appetite had risen again and the Gaza Strip was occupied along with the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula. Israel later returned the Sinai to Egypt, but the rest of the newly occupied territories posed a significant challenge for the Jewish state, as it was not clear that a simple repeat of 1948 was possible. A new model of ethnic cleansing was called for. The conditions had changed, rendering it more difficult to justify physically expelling people from their land; the next best thing was simply to lock them in place.

The top priority was to prevent by all means the emergence of a situation in which settlers would mix with the natives, so Israel constructed two open-air prisons: one in the West Bank and a more tightly controlled one in the Gaza Strip. Unlike the territories occupied in 1948, these new territories were never officially annexed to Israel. The population never received citizenship. They were denied any rights; their villages were surrounded with checkpoints, walls, and settlements; and military rule was put in place. Indeed, ethnic cleansing and military rule have often gone together throughout history.

Another thing that goes together historically with ethnic cleansing and military rule is resistance. The outbreak of the first intifada from the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza in 1987 set off revolutionary waves throughout the region. This was not solely due to the intensity of the insurrection, but also because it signaled a turning point at which Palestinians took matters into their hands and fought for their own liberation.

In many ways, the Palestinian Liberation Organization had already been doing this starting in the 1960s, taking away the Arab states’ role as “liberators” and shifting the focus to revolutionary Arab guerrillas and Palestinian diaspora communities, mainly in Jordan and later in Lebanon. But the first intifada in Palestine broke out spontaneously. It was not under the control of any particular militarized party or organization; it was led by a network of grassroots groups and organizations that came together under the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), a network of coordination between the various regional committees, organizations, and parties involved in the uprising.

The fact that the uprising broke out in Gaza is significant. It is not surprising that it began in a refugee camp. Among Palestinians, the camp is the lowest class; it is also the most revolutionary, always the front line of both popular resistance and armed struggle. It is where guerrillas traditionally organized and strongholds of resistance were formed. Due to its centrality in the struggle, it is also where many of the most horrifying atrocities have been committed and the harshest repression inflicted. Refugee camps in Lebanon were hotbeds for revolutionaries during the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and ’80s; that was also where Lebanese fascists perpetrated the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, under the watchful eyes of the IDF.

To this day, refugee camps such as those in Jenin and Balata in the West Bank remain a hotspot for armed resistance, with many factions, such as the Lion’s Den and Balata Brigade, that insist on remaining unaffiliated with any major faction of Palestinian politics, beyond the control of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The youth in these camps have defended their homes against Israeli raids time and time again, and have paid dearly for doing so. Since October 7, 2023, the refugee camps in Gaza have been a central target for the genocidal forces.

The first intifada articulated the refugee camp as the leading force in the Palestinian revolution. It also showed how explosive the situation was.

The outbreak of the intifada came as a complete surprise to both Israel and the PLO. Israel never imagined the Palestinians would revolt, and the PLO never imagined they would do it outside of their control. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO and its biggest political party, Fatah, saw the uncontrollable and horizontal nature of the intifada as a threat and sought a way to bring it under the control of his organization. This, alongside Israeli and US interference, led Fatah to compromise on their positions and seek peace negotiations with Israel.

This sequence of events, the details of which are beyond the scope of this article, led to the signing of the Oslo Accords, the migration of the PLO to Palestine, the creation of the Palestinian Authority, and the subsequent management of the occupation by Israel’s loyal subcontractor. Among other things, the Oslo Accords involved giving up of 80% of the land in return for the promise of a “two-state solution” and the recognition of Israel. It also meant the division of the West Bank into three areas: area A, comprising 18% of the West Bank, which would be under the control of the PA; area B, 22% of the West Bank, which would be under the civil government of the PA and the security control of Israel; and area C, 60% of the West Bank, which was placed under “temporary” Israeli control.

This also led to security coordination between the newly-formed PA and Israel, which meant that Palestinians were suppressed, jailed, beaten, and executed by Palestinian cops and jailers rather than Israelis. At the same time, the PLO “abandoned terrorism” and armed resistance, dedicating itself to peace negotiations and “nonviolent solutions.” The last part of the agreement, the creation of a Palestinian state, was never implemented.

The accords served as a textbook counterinsurgency tactic. The goal was to crush the uprising, domesticate or isolate the revolutionary wings within the PLO, remove troublesome areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Israeli management, and at the same time, impose the role of cop on the PA while giving the rising masses false hope.

But not everyone was duped. The Oslo Accords did manage to end the first intifada, but they also signaled a fragmentation within Palestinian society, including within the PLO itself, dividing those who favored peace agreements against those who remained committed to the original goals of the Palestinian revolution—refusal to acknowledge the Israeli state, liberation from the river to the sea, and commitment to armed and popular resistance. These two camps were to define Palestinian society and struggle for years to come.

In the midst of the uprising, a few men from the local Gaza chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based religious social movement, met in a house in Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on December 9, 1988. This was to have significant implications for the future of the Palestinian resistance. Under the spiritual leadership of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a refugee from the village Al-Jura, near Majdal Askalan (known today as the Israeli city Ashkelon), the group decided to split off and start a new movement, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat alMuqawama alIslamiya)—as an acronym, HAMAS. A few months later, the nascent organization released its charter, in which it presents Islamic revival and jihad as a form of anti-colonialism and lays out its political and religious philosophy regarding the connection it sees between Islam and Palestinian liberation. Despite affirming that Islamic rule would allow “Muslims, Jews, and Christians to live together in peace and harmony,” the rest of the text is full of antisemitism and conspiracy theories, articulating the movement’s understanding of Zionism, Israel, and Judaism at that time.

A decade earlier, in 1976, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin had applied for a permit from the Israeli authorities to establish the Islamic Association, which was to be an umbrella organization that would provide legal and administrative cover for the Muslim Brotherhood’s social, religious, educational, and medical services within the Gaza Strip. Israel approved the license. This is one of the sources of the myth that Israel “founded” Hamas. In fact, Israel had nothing to do with “inventing” Hamas; as an occupying authority, it merely granted a permit to one of the institutions of the Muslim Brotherhood about a decade before Hamas existed. There are couple of ways to explain why this happened.

Israel had a policy of noninterference with social Islamic organizations. But it is also helpful to understand the social dynamics at that time. The 1970s were the height of Palestinian revolutionary leftism; secular and Marxist-Leninist organizations were the dominant forces in the armed resistance. Religion, on the other hand, was seen as a private matter, and Israel had an interest in enabling the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic movements that could function as a counterforce to weaken the nationalist movement and create social division.

The creation of Hamas, a decade later, while building on the charitable and social infrastructure of the Brotherhood, redefined Islam as a political movement tied with anti-colonial resistance, taking inspiration from many political parties in the Arab world that combined Islam with nationalism. They drew on the legacies of legendary figures such as Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam, a spiritual leader and militant active in Palestine in the 1920s and ’30s, who pioneered defining Islamic Jihad as anti-colonialism and organized guerrilla fighting against the French, the British and the Zionists. Hamas’s armed wing, the Al-Qassam brigade, bears his name.

Hamas was active in the uprising from the start, clashing with Israeli forces but also with other Palestinian factions that they perceived to be collaborationist. Several factors enabled Hamas to position itself as the leader of the resistance camp, including the PLO’s implicit acceptance of partitioning the land of historic Palestine into two states and abandonment of the revolutionary path, which caused the Palestinian national movement to fragment into the “resistance camp” and the “negotiation camp.” At the same time, geopolitical processes including the fall of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the Palestinian left in Lebanon were shifting the context. The intifada first erupted out of the refugee camps of Gaza, Hamas’s home territory and main base of support.

Fast forward to the year 2000. After negotiations failed to deliver and the Palestinian state that was promised in 1999 never came, a second, bitterer, and more militarized intifada erupted, triggered by a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon—then-leader of the opposition Likud party—to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. While the first intifada was popular and decentralized, the second intifada began similarly but quickly fell under the leadership of armed militarized factions, popularizing practices such as suicide bombings and other kinds of deadly armed attacks against Israeli forces and citizens.

Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO and the president of the Palestinian Authority, proved to be quite a pragmatist. To the dismay of Israel and international patrons, he refused to denounce armed attacks, often even encouraged them, and more than once, the police forces of the PA found themselves exchanging gunfire with Israeli forces. He appeared to view the “peace process” and the state-building project merely as tools for Palestinian liberation, worth pursuing as long as they worked, but was prepared to abandon them and change course as needed. In response, in 2002, Israel laid siege to the Mukataa, the Palestinian parliament building in Ramallah, trapping him until his eventual death two years later in 2004.

In his place, Mahmoud Abbas came to power—a Fatah party member with US support. To ensure that Arafat’s pragmatism would not recur, the US and other international donors initiated efforts to “professionalize” the PA. These led to a significant structural shift, resulting in an extensive security sector reform with US support and training, the tightening of security coordination with Israel, the de-politicization of the PA and a large part of the Palestinian public, and the appointment of Salam Fayyad as Prime Minister—a neoliberal American-educated economist accused of purging the PA’s institutions of overly critical voices.

In her book Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, Palestinian anti-authoritarian author Dana El-Kurd details how such aggressive methods of international intervention are used to insulate the PA from its constituency, the Palestinian public, making it answer to international donors instead—especially the US and European Union. They make threats of sanctions and cuts in aid whenever the PA strays from path laid by its masters, the global Western powers. The creation of the PA and involvement in its management were crucial for the US in order to impose its priorities in the region. Palestinians have never been permitted to manage their own affairs in a way that isn’t approved by the United States.

This was visible following Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006. Hamas managed to capitalize on the discontent that followed the failure of the Oslo Accords, the PA’s policies, and corruption and feelings of frustration, gaining 76 of the 132 seats of the legislative council and winning the right to form a government. The resistance camp was at the height of its popularity, as one year before, in 2005, Israel had initiated the Disengagement Plan, evicting all 21 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip along with the Israeli military, following five straight years of armed uprising. Although Israel continued to control Gaza’s border, airspace, and maritime space, this was still seen as a significant achievement of the armed struggle, which managed to force land capitulations from Israel while the “negotiations” and the “peace process” remained stuck.

In fact, few voted for Hamas for religious or ideological reasons. By building guerrilla infrastructure during the 1990s and the second intifada, Hamas had simply managed to position themselves as a leading force for the national cause, the most significant alternative to Fatah.

Shocked by Hamas’s victory, the United States and Israel quickly moved to initiate what amounted to a coup. They put intense pressure on the new government to “moderate” its views—for example, to accept the US-led “peace process,” the two-state “solution,” and not to threaten Western influence in the region. The “Quartet on the Middle East,” an international body composed of the US, the EU, the UN, and Russia, which was assigned to manage the “solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” according to the “peace process,” conditioned aid to the Hamas government on three demands: acknowledging the accords signed between the PLO and Israel, denouncing “terror,” and officially recognizing Israel. Following Hamas’s refusal, the government was isolated, all aid stopped, and economic sanctions imposed.

The Gaza civil war of 2007 saw armed street fighting over the Gaza Strip between the armed wings of Hamas and Fatah. The battle resulted in a victory for Hamas and the subsequent taking over of the Gaza Strip. In defeat, Mahmoud Abbas declared the dissolution of the government, fired Ismail Haniyeh (the Hamas prime minister), and declared a state of emergency. Instead, Salam Fayyad, a more “moderate” Fatah politician approved by the US and Israel, was appointed PM. Abbas also outlawed Hamas’s armed wing. No elections have been held since.

The events of 2007 created a new situation in Palestinian governance, in which Palestinians were under two Palestinian Authorities—the PA under Fatah rule in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza. This benefited Israel, further fragmenting Palestinian society and dividing Gaza from the West Bank and the rest of Palestine. Starting in 2007, Israel intensified its siege of Gaza as a collective punishment for electing Hamas, fully isolating it from the world—basically turning the world’s largest refugee camp into the world’s largest open-air prison. The strip was fully fenced from all sides (including the Egyptian border), tighter control was imposed on its maritime and air space, movement outside and inside was highly restricted, and Israel decided which goods were permitted to enter.

Those who equate Hamas with ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban would be surprised to hear that during sixteen years ruling Gaza, Hamas never implemented Sharia law. It was an authoritarian and conservative government; it was highly repressive, especially to women, queer people, and political dissidents; yet there were constant internal debates and arguments, elections, and representative bodies. The organizational structure has been detailed in depth; suffice it to say that while it was an hierarchical organization, the system of Majlis Al-Shura (General Consultative councils), composed of elected members from local council groups, with representatives from Gaza, the West Bank, leaders in exile, and prisoners in Israeli jails, does represent a somewhat democratic top-down model of governance.

Not only does Hamas not resemble Salafi jihadism, they were its mortal enemies. Salafi cells that tried to mobilize in Gaza were violently repressed. Hamas have no intention of establishing a pan-Islamic caliphate; they were always more nationalist than religious, limiting their activities to the geography of Palestine. All of this is not to vindicate them—we should remain critical—but I believe that we must be fair and accurate in our criticism, understanding nuance and context, so as to avoid spreading Islamophobic nonsense that throws all Islamist organizations into one basket.

Israel appeared to be fine with Hamas taking over. This served the purpose of further dividing the Palestinians, putting a governing body in control in Gaza to manage it, and providing a justification for Israeli attacks. It portrayed itself as fighting a jihadist Islamic-fundamentalist terror organization in the many airstrikes that followed.

Palestinian historian Tareq Baconi details in his book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance how Israel initiated the strategy of “mowing the lawn” in Gaza. It would bomb Gaza every once in a while, just enough to damage Hamas’s military capabilities and massacre hundreds or thousands of Palestinians—keeping Gaza in check, but leaving Hamas in power. Israel conducted five major military operations in Gaza up to 2023 and a few smaller ones. This strategy of keeping Gaza in a frozen state—always under crisis management, one step away from collapse, isolated from the world, and without a long term plan—was to explode in Israel’s face on October 7, 2023. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

From Hamas’s side, there are many ways to explain why they decided to take part in electoral politics. It seems that Hamas saw government something like how Arafat saw it—as a tool of resistance, one of many tools with which to pursue liberation. Like Arafat, they were to discover the tensions and contradictions within this approach. As the head of the resistance camp, the leaders of the revolutionary government, Hamas often found itself as a pacifying force. Several times, they had to restrict other militant factions in Gaza, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that were interfering with their ceasefires. They also didn’t participate in some military clashes with Israel, like the 2022 escalation with between Israel and the PIJ. Some now interpret this as a deceiving tactic, duping Israel to believe that they weren’t interested in escalation in order to surprise them on October 7, but I don’t buy it. It might be true to some extent, but there is no denying that many times, Hamas were in fact deterred, and had to walk a tightrope between maintaining a militant stance and restricting other armed factions in order to keep escalations from getting out of control.

The transition from social movement and guerrilla formation to governing body wasn’t so obvious. Al-Qassam, the armed wing, despite securing a great deal of autonomy from the governing bodies, still found itself having to deal with the growing tension between resistance and government. This is not new in the Palestinian movement. In his book The Palestine Question, Edward Said detailed this dilemma within the PLO in its revolutionary days, when revolution and the state-building project often clashed. When it finally came time to move forward to a state, they completely betrayed their people, sold out the revolution, and capitulated to the disciplining powers of the world order. But Hamas took a different approach.

After taking over Gaza in 2007, Hamas had the choice whether to repeat the PA’s path in the West Bank, selling out the resistance and becoming collaborators with the occupation, or to maintain their defiant stance. They chose the latter. Neither Israel nor the international powers were able to fully domesticate them, and they maintained their commitment to decolonization, resistance, and armed struggle—at least in principle, and sometimes in practice. We could see this during the 2021 escalation, the Unity Intifada. While Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem, was threatened with eviction, Jerusalem was burning and an uprising was spreading all over Palestine; Hamas declared an ultimatum for the Israeli forces to withdraw from Sheikh Jarrah and the Al-Aqsa compound, followed by a barrage of rockets fired into Israeli cities.

This was one of the few instances in which Hamas broke out of the cage that was built for them. The rocket attack against Israel was not used to ease the siege, negotiate about conditions in Gaza, respond to the assassination of one of its militants, or press any other matter within their immediate circle of concern as a governing or military body; rather, it was an act in solidarity with a neighborhood in Jerusalem and in response to Israeli raids on the Al-Aqsa compound. This positioned them once again as a leading front in the resistance, representing Gaza’s participation in the unity uprising and acting on issues that concern all Palestinians.

The contradictions between armed struggle and popular struggle are a constant subject of debate among Palestinians. Some critics accused Hamas of sidelining the popular struggle that erupted during the uprising by shifting the focus to armed struggle. The reality is more complicated. Hamas is much more than its armed wing; it is an entire movement that experiments with many different methods of struggle, evaluating each strategy according to the results. Hamas has a lot of experience with popular resistance—for example, during the 2018-2019 Marches of Return, in which Gaza residents marched unarmed toward the fence, inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the US, demanding an end to the siege and to be permitted to return to their homes on the other side. This was not a Hamas initiative—it was organized by grassroots activists and civilians in Gaza—but Hamas, as a governing body, had to permit the marches, participated in them, and was involved with some of the funding. Israel’s response was to massacre 223 protesters, including 46 children, by sniper fire. The world did nothing. By contrast, the events of 2021 proved that Palestine only becomes an international issue when Israeli citizens pay a price.

Palestinians are being killed whether armed or not, “violent” or “non-violent,” during peaceful marches as well as militant combat. Israel’s problem with the Palestinians is not this or that tactic, but their existence as a people. The March of Return, Gaza, 2018.

In view of this, I want to propose one way to see October 7. No one outside Hamas knows exactly what led them to decide to initiate such an attack. There are many theories, and I’ll add my own. Hamas might have reached the conclusion that the “resistance government” was no longer working, that it was in fact actually an obstacle, and decided to return to its origins as a guerrilla formation and social movement. They might have tried to do this many times before, as we can see from the many reconciliation attempts with Fatah; they showed a willingness to relinquish control over Gaza and work toward elections time and time again. Baconi’s Hamas Contained details many such attempts and how they were derailed by Israel and the US. Perhaps they thought it was time for something extreme to force them back to the path of resistance, a kind of a government suicide. They have made it clear since October that they are willing to give up governing Gaza, but won’t disarm—another indication that they are attempting to return to their origins.

For the revolution to live, the government must die.

Ghetto Uprising

Then October 7 happened.

A year has passed and it’s still not known exactly what happened that day. This is what we know for certain so far.

In the early hours of October 7, 2023, Hamas, alongside other militant factions in Gaza, launched Tufun Al-Aqsa, the Al-Aqsa flood operation, a coordinated surprise attack against Israel. Thousands of rockets were fired into Israel and thousands of militants breached the siege, broke the fence, occupied military bases, and infiltrated Israeli settlements.

The attack caught Israel off guard; it took hours for the army to respond. According to witnesses, there were three main waves breaching the Gaza fence, which was open for hours. The first wave to break the fence involved Hamas and the other chief armed formations in Gaza, including PIJ, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The second wave was comprised of smaller and less organized armed groups, including probably a few Salafi jihadists. The third wave included unarmed civilians, journalists, bloggers, and curious passersby.

There is no denying that some of the participants committed atrocities against Israelis. Plenty of evidence, in some cases from the GoPro cameras of Palestinian fighters themselves, shows them shooting indiscriminately into Israeli settlements, killing civilians, and taking hostages to the Gaza Strip. A massacre also took place at the (now infamous) Nova music festival.

At the same time, a barrage of lies, made-up atrocities, and propaganda circulated. Israeli rescue teams, military officials, Sara Netanyahu, and Joe Biden spread debunked stories about beheadings, killings of children, sexual violence, and other things that never happened. This inflamed the situation and served to justify the genocide.

Some Israelis were reportedly killed by Israeli fire. The Hannibal Directive is an Israeli army policy aimed to prevent kidnapping by any means, including striking Israeli civilians and forces. The reasoning is that the political price for releasing kidnapped Israeli soldiers or civilians via agreements is too high—as it has repeatedly resulted in the release of many Palestinian prisoners in exchange—so it’s better to attack even at the risk of harming the kidnapped. On October 7, Israeli forces deliberately shelled military bases, Israeli settlements, and cars presumed to be carrying Israeli hostages back to Gaza.

By the end of the day, about 1140 Israelis were killed, 3400 were wounded, and 251 were taken captive. Initially, corporate media reported much higher estimates.

Even a year later, Israelis seem unable to comprehend this attack. For them, it came out of nowhere. They perceive it as a “second Holocaust” (a very popular narrative in Israel), an inexplicable and irrational attack by barbaric jihadist forces seeking to kill Jews for no reason.

But it is a gross mischaracterization to think of October 7 as an isolated event that occurred in a vacuum. Practically all of those who are twenty years old or younger in Gaza have spent their entire lives in a reality of siege, bombings, and massacres, raised by relatives who still remember the events of 1948 and how they were expelled from where the Kibbutzim are now. From the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s slave rebellion to Oran massacre in Algeria, every decolonial war of liberation, every slave revolt, every ghetto uprising has always involved atrocities, often targeting civilians. We cannot demand of Palestinians a purity that we do not demand from any other historical struggle for liberation. We can grieve the atrocities, but we cannot condemn a ghetto uprising, we cannot condemn a slave revolt. We must always understand everything in context with an analysis of power relations.

The attack that took place on October 7, 2023 was followed by a genocide that has been ongoing for a year now. As of the end of September 2024, well over 41,000 people in Gaza are reported dead, although the real number is probably a lot higher. More than 95,000 have been injured. About 1.9 million people are internally displaced, some of whom have been uprooted more than ten times. More than half (60% according to Al-Jazeera) of Gaza’s residential buildings, 80% of commercial facilities, and 85% of school buildings have been damaged or destroyed; 17 of 36 hospitals remain partially functional; 65% of the arable land is damaged.

The current war of annihilation differs from the previous rounds of escalations and massacres—and not just in scale. Israel is no longer pursuing a policy of “mowing the lawn.” Gaza, the open-air prison, blew up. Consequently, the entire population had to pay. Indeed, the Israeli authorities made it clear from the beginning that their intention is genocide.

All those years, while Israel had thought it was damaging its military capacities, Hamas was digging a complex network of tunnels below Gaza, getting armed, and preparing for the ultimate fight. Gaza is unfit for guerrilla warfare in the traditional sense, as it is a mostly flat strip of land without mountains or forests that fighters can escape to. The narrow alleyways of the refugee camps could be useful in some stages of the fighting, and they were, but Israel made it clear that those would be the first places to be targeted, as in Lebanon and the West Bank. The network of tunnels, which stretches across the entire strip all the way to the Sinai Peninsula on the other side of the Egyptian border, was necessary to allow fighters to attack and escape, reappear in another place, hide, rest, store weapons, and hide captives. During the years of siege, the tunnels were also crucial for Gaza’s economy: in addition to weapons, they were also used to bypass the Israeli siege in order to smuggle in basic necessities.

Was Hamas not aware that the Israeli reaction would be so deadly? It’s impossible to say for certain what their calculations were. We can assume that they knew that the attack would result in a bloodbath—maybe not on this scale, but they must have known that Israel would respond severely. According to the equation that Israel created in 2014, for example, after Palestinian militants kidnapped and killed three Israeli settlers in the West Bank, Israel killed about 2200 people in Gaza, the worst massacre in Gaza until 2023. So what would be the price for 1140 Israeli casualties, then?

Should we conclude that Hamas doesn’t care about Gazans’ lives? The answer is more complicated.

We can begin by saying that blaming the resistance for the violence of the occupier makes as much sense as blaming the Kurdish fighters for the Dersim massacre or the occupation of Afrin, or blaming the rebels of the Warsaw ghetto for the Nazi repression. A settler colony’s drive is always to acquire more land while diminishing the number of natives. Throughout all the years of Zionist colonization, Zionists have always presented their atrocities as responses to previous attacks—but the actual goal was always ethnic cleansing. The Gaza Strip itself was built as a solution for ethnic cleansing, a locked ghetto to control demographics, and Israel has been killing people there and in Palestine as a whole ever since. To expect people not to fight, to be helpless victims, was never realistic.

According to Hamas themselves, in the document Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, published after October 7, they ask—what did the world expect Palestinians to do? After 75 years of suffering under a brutal occupation, after all initiatives for liberation failed, the disastrous results of the so-called “peace process” that Oslo promised, and the silence of the so-called international community, were they really supposed to die in peace? They note that the Palestinian battle for liberation from occupation and colonialism did not start on October 7, but 105 years ago, against 30 years of British colonial rule and 75 years of Zionist occupation. Ten of thousands of Palestinians were killed between 2000 and 2023; all of those deaths took place with American support, and every kind of protest, including peaceful initiatives such as the marches of return in 2018, has been brutally repressed. In light of murderous aggression with full impunity, the document asks,

“What was expected from the Palestinian people after all of that? To keep waiting and to keep counting on the helpless UN! Or to take the initiative in defending the Palestinian people, lands, rights and sanctities; knowing that the defense act is a right enshrined in international laws, norms, and conventions.”

A similar narrative was expressed by Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, speaking on October 7.

“If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the peaceful victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity. Standing, fighting, fighting back, and standing as dignified martyrs.”

We can also consult Palestinian revolutionary and martyr Bassel Al-Araj. Writing in 2014, just ahead of the Israeli military ground invasion of Gaza on July 17, he made several points²:

The Palestinian resistance consists of guerrilla formations whose strategies follow the logic of guerrilla warfare or hybrid warfare, which Arabs and Muslims have become masters of through our experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza. War is never based on the logic of conventional wars and the defense of fixed points and borders; on the contrary, you draw the enemy into an ambush. You do not stick to a fixed position to defend it; instead, you perform maneuvers, movement, withdrawal, and attack from the flanks and the rear. So, never measure it against conventional wars.

The enemy will spread photos and videos of their invasion into Gaza, occupation of residential buildings, or presence in public areas and well-known landmarks. This is part of the psychological warfare in guerrilla wars; you allow your enemy to move as they wish so that they fall into your trap and you strike them. You determine the location and timing of the battle. So, you may see photos from Al-Katiba Square, Al-Saraya, Al-Rimal, or Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, but do not let this weaken your resolve. The battle is judged by its overall results, and this is merely a show.

Never spread the occupation’s propaganda, and do not contribute to instilling a sense of defeat. This must be focused on, for soon, we will start talking about a massive invasion in Beit Lahia and Al-Nusseirat, for example. Never spread panic; be supportive of the resistance and do not spread any news broadcast by the occupation (forget about the ethics and impartiality of journalism; just as the zionist journalist is a fighter, so are you).

The enemy may broadcast images of prisoners, most likely civilians, but the goal is to suggest the rapid collapse of the resistance. Do not believe them.

The enemy will carry out tactical, qualitative operations to assassinate some symbols [of resistance], and all of this is part of psychological warfare. Those who have died and those who will die will never affect the resistance’s system and cohesion because the structure and formations of the resistance are not centralized but horizontal and widespread. Their goal is to influence the resistance’s support base and the families of the resistance fighters, as they are the only ones who can affect the men of the resistance.

Our direct human and material losses will be much greater than the enemy’s, which is natural in guerrilla wars that rely on willpower, the human element, and the extent of patience and endurance. We are far more capable of bearing the costs, so there is no need to compare or be alarmed by the magnitude of the numbers.

Today’s wars are no longer just wars and clashes between armies but rather are struggles between societies. Let us be like a solid structure and play a game of biting fingers with the enemy, our society against their society.

Finally, every Palestinian (in the broad sense, meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities), every Palestinian is on the front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your duty.

One last note before we move forward. In the book Blessed is the Flame, the author Serafinski reviews ghetto uprisings and concentration camp resistance under the Nazi occupation from an anarcho-nihilist perspective. The book shows that despite the repressive and paralyzing conditions in concentration camps, acts of resistance such as sabotage, mutual aid, and uprisings still occurred, often despite severe consequences and very low chances of success. The motivation behind many of these acts was the desire to rebel as an end in itself. Serafinski builds on the idea that jouissance, or enjoyment—the creativity and life of the act or rebellion itself—is worthwhile in its own right, independent of its consequences. Examples show that in the direst situations, people choose not to be passively led to the slaughter, but engage in desperate, wild acts of resistance, escaping established logic, morality, and fields of discourse. Against impossible conditions, they choose impossible action. This is reminiscent of Bassel’s understanding of romance as the reason for war.

And people often do what is within their range of capabilities, not what is the most “right.” This is something we have to accept.

“What really counts is the strength we feel every time we don’t bow our heads, every time we destroy the false idols of civilization, every time our eyes meet those of our comrades along illegal paths, every time that our hands set fire to the symbols of Power. In those moments we don’t ask ourselves: ‘Will we win? Will we lose?’ In those moments, we just fight.”

-“A Conversation Between Anarchists,” Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire

“Even your observations and criticism of the paradoxes of the 2014 war were that it made most of society a passive audience awaiting death. You objected to a death that is not surrounded by a romantic narrative. You know that the balance of power between nations is determined by the ‘potential energy’ and ‘kinetic energy’ (a crushing energy). And you know that potential energy—and its function in war—is to transform into a crushing force. I believe that the possibility of creating romantic narratives around martyrdom and heroism is one of the most important elements of potential energy, in which we outperform our enemy.”

“Why We Go to War,” Bassel Al-Araj

Breaking out of the ghetto.

The Fighting since, and Other Fronts

People in Gaza have not been helpless victims since October 7. Yes, Gaza is devastated by the genocide, but the resistance is fighting like hell, despite incredible odds. As of mid-September 2024, Israel has reported 789 of its soldiers and security forces dead. Other reports indicate at least 10,000 killed or wounded. About 1000 Israeli soldiers enter the Defense Ministry Rehabilitation Department every month, according to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Incredible footage circulated online by guerrilla forces shows them popping out of tunnels, blowing up tanks, sniping at and ambushing Israeli soldiers, and blowing up buildings with soldiers inside. The Israeli military admitted that many tanks have been damaged during fighting.

In the city of Khan Yunis, for example, which Israel has repeatedly invaded, so far, every attempt to defeat the guerrilla forces has failed. In many of the cities, refugee camps and stronghold of resistance where the IDF announcing that they “dismantled the local brigade,” guerrilla forces immediately reappear and regroup following their withdrawal.

The resistance continues.

In the West Bank, the IDF has conducted several incursions into towns and refugee camps, inflicting mass destruction on its infrastructure, killing at least 719 and injuring more than 5700 as of September 2024. Armed resistance, though nowhere near as intense as in Gaza, has claimed the lives of 12 Israeli soldiers and left 27 injured. Several militants in the West Bank have also conducted armed actions against Israeli settlers in the West Bank as well as inside Israeli borders.

Settler violence against Palestinians has intensified significantly since October, with more than 800 attacks and pogroms, killing at least 31 Palestinians, injuring more than 500, and damaging around 80 houses, almost 12,000 trees, and 450 vehicles, according to the UN. About 850 Palestinians were forced to leave their houses as a result of settler and military violence. Settlers also blocked humanitarian aid entering Gaza from Jordan, Egypt, and Israeli ports.

Inside the occupied Interior, also known as 1948 occupied Palestine, or “Israel,” Palestinian communities have found themselves facing a fascist dictatorship. Protesting the genocide was impossible during the first few months, as police violently repressed demonstrations, attacked activists, raided their homes, and jailed people, sometimes for months, for shouting slogans or holding signs. In October and November 2023 alone, Adallah, a legal center for Palestinian citizens in Israel, documented 251 arrests, interrogations, and “warning calls” in response to actions like participating in a demonstration, posting on social media, and expressing opinions in universities and workplaces. Many Palestinian students were expelled from universities; many workers were fired. In some places, this repression eased over time—but in others, especially “mixed” cities like Haifa, protesting the genocide is still impossible.

Protesting for Gaza under intense police repression, Haifa, May 30.

So far, despite isolated armed groups in the West Bank defending their communities from Israeli raids and conducting armed attacks on nearby settlements and checkpoints, not to mention some attempts in the Interior to organize protests, there is no popular uprising, like the Unity Intifada that broke out in 2021 during the previous major assault on Gaza. Israeli repression has proved to be effective in pushing many people into silence and paralyzing street movements. This might change, as repression can also lead to escalation, but for now, we can’t rely on an uprising inside Palestine to stop the genocide.

The situation inside prisons has become inhumane. Palestinian “security prisoners” face torture, violence, and sexual abuse from Israeli guards. The torture camp Sde Teiman rose to world infamy following leaks from whistleblowers and testimony from released prisoners revealing a routine of abuse, beatings, physical and psychological torture, sexual violence and rape, medical neglect, and amputations of body parts. Conditions in “security” prisons all across the country have deteriorated, with the far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir giving orders to reduce the rights of prisoners to the bare minimum. They are confined to dark, overcrowded cells, hand- and leg-cuffed to each other, sleeping on beds without mattresses or on the floor, on a bare-minimum diet. Thousands of new prisoners have been arrested over the past year; under the sadistic management of Ben-Gvir, repression, incarceration, and concentration and torture camps are set to expand. About 60 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.

The front of those in exile has been active. Palestinian refugees have managed to mobilize mass demonstrations in many places. In nearby countries, there has been a significant street movement of thousands in support of Palestine. In Amman, Jordan, people have clashed several times with police and security forces outside the Israeli embassy, demanding that their country drop its relationships with Israel and the United States. Mass mobilizations have also occurred in Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Bahrain, and all over the refugee camps and cities of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab and Muslim world, often despite repression from their reactionary governments, which fear that the mass mobilizations might turn against them.

Thousands in the streets of Amman, Jordan, celebrate resistance and solidarity.

Protesters clash with the Lebanese army near the US embassy in Beirut on October 18, 2023. No regime is “pro-resistance.”

In the “West,” a solidarity movement sprang up in the cities of Europe and North America. Much has been said about the inspiring mobilizations on campuses and the various blockades, marches, and acts of sabotage. Those in the imperial core have a particular responsibility to take action like this. We can only hope such movements will grow.

Germany, the country with the largest Palestinian diaspora community in Europe (around 300,000), became a unique battleground. The German state has been hostile toward Palestinian liberation for many years, cracking down on marches, censoring speech and slogans, banning solidarity events, and, in some cases, banning national symbols such as the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag. In Germany, anti-Palestinian racism and support for genocide is shared by the state, the police and repressive agencies, the far-right, and Islamophobic, anti-Arab, colonial, and pro-apartheid elements in the “anti-fascist” scene.

Nonetheless, Palestinians and their supporters are still resisting. Germany is fully complicit in the genocide, supporting it both materially and rhetorically, providing weapons to Israel and going as far as backing Israel in its genocide case at the International Court of Justice. We can only hope the movement there will continue to break the walls of fear and find ways to escalate.

Globalizing the intifada.

As for the so-called Axis of Resistance—some armed militant groups in the Middle East declared a solidarity front with Gaza. In Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, American bases were targeted. For months, Iran, despite attempting to monopolize “resistance,” chiefly acted as a pacifying force, repeatedly ordering groups to reduce attacks in order to avoid entering into direct confrontation with Israel and the US. Iran attacked Israel with a major missile attack on April 2024, but this was mainly symbolic, as it was announced in advance and caused no significant damage.

Shortly before the publication of this article, in response to the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iran initiated a second direct attack on Israel. On October 2, 2024, 180 rockets fell on Israel. Again, most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel, the US, and allied regimes such as Jordan. Some mild damage was caused to military bases and a Mossad facility. At this time, the only known victim of this attack is a Palestinian from Gaza staying in the West Bank city of Jericho.

The Houthi movement, a Shia Islamist organization in control of a large part of Yemen as part of the ongoing Yemeni civil war, which some describe as an Iranian “proxy” and part of the “Axis” although quite independent, have been firing missiles at Israel and attacking commercial ships at the Red Sea, considering any Israel-linked ship as a target. They have reportedly caused a huge impact on the global economy and a a significant damage to international trade, damaging commercial vessels and forcing many more to reroute around South Africa, greatly extending their journey.

In south Lebanon, Hezbollah engaged in daily rocket and UAV clashes with Israel, though initially, these were largely restricted to military bases close to the border and a few northern Israeli communities. In response, Israel bombed villages and communities in south Lebanon and attacked Dahieh, a suburb of Beirut where some Hezbollah operatives live, killing civilians as well. The situation has been escalating; as of the beginning of October 2024, Israel has invaded south Lebanon, following many escalations.³

In the fog of war, the world order is marching forward. The US sees the genocide and escalation in the Middle East as an opportunity to enhance its power in the region. Israel Channel 12 reported on October 2023 that “two hundred and forty-four US transport planes and 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war [sic].” That month also saw special US military aid to Israel reaching 14.3 billion dollars.

In the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean Sea, and the many US bases in surrounding countries including Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, the US has deployed several fighter squadrons as well as a THAAD battery and several Patriot anti-missile batteries. They seek to deter any attack on Israel by regional powers, but they are also actively participating in the fighting—like the US-led international coalition to strike the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea and the militias in Iraq and Syria.

The US has also directly intervened in Israeli decision-making in order to influence the course of war. President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin participated in Israeli government and war cabinet meetings, exerting significant pressure to implement their post-war vision. After realizing the American vision might be harder to initiate as long as Netanyahu is in charge, Americans also met with opposition leaders and Israeli civil society organizations.

In that vision, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are united under a “reformed” (meaning American-controlled) Palestinian Authority, and a “two-state solution” is implemented, following a series of normalization agreements with local regimes, in order to “integrate Israel into the region,” ensure its safety, and build a strong pro-American bloc to increase American influence and isolate competing quasi-imperialist regional powers such as Iran and Russia.

This is nothing new. The US has been interfering in this region to maintain its hegemony for decades now. A neocolonial policy of supporting corrupt and reactionary puppet regimes that serve as local proxies in order to guarantee American control over resources is a long US tradition. Ilan Pappe tells us how, following the British withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, the US was in a dire need of a pro-Western regional power. The US decided to invest further in Israel following its military victory in 1967, a major blow to secular nationalist movements in the region.

The Oslo Accords constituted an international intervention in local Palestinian politics. Not only did they serve to break a popular uprising led by decentralized and horizontal networks of grassroots activist groups and parties—they established an authoritarian, collaborationist puppet regime for the colonized to govern themselves according to US, EU, and Israeli incentives. When that regime failed to serve its global sponsors, with Arafat thinking he had more room to maneuver than he was allowed, it was quickly abolished and replaced by more obedient actors. In 2006, when Palestinians voted for the wrong candidate in democratic elections, a coup was initiated and the entire population punished. Palestinians are not allowed to make decisions regarding their own destiny. They must be kept under tight control, as they tend to reveal unruly elements unfavorable for US hegemony.

In recent years, in what Noam Chomsky dubbed “the Reactionary International,” Israel has signed a series of agreements and normalization pacts—known as the Abraham Accords—with local dictatorships, monarchies, and repressive regimes. This took place under US mediation, in opposition to the will of the populations of those countries. The states to join the normalization treaty so far include the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Saudi Arabia was reportedly also on its way to normalization with Israel, but the process froze following October 7.

The economic impact of these agreements includes formal investments and business relations between the countries, especially regarding hi-tech industries, and also military relations and weapons trade. According to Israel’s Ministry of Defense, the value of Israeli defense exports to the countries with which it normalized relations in 2020 reached $791 million. Oil deals between the UAE and Israel threaten to inflict ecological disaster in the Red Sea and exacerbate concerns regarding climate change.

A utopia for reactionaries and weapon manufacturers, a nightmare for the peoples of the region.

This entire trajectory, coupled with the “two-state solution” as an aftermath to the “conflict,” represents a pattern in the US involvement in the region. A proposal was even made to have “moderate” (meaning US-controlled) regimes from the region take control of Gaza in the aftermath of the genocide until a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (domesticated enough not to cause its international patrons any further troubles) could take their place as the sovereign.

The regional theater of conflict between the American reactionary authoritarian alliance and the Iranian reactionary authoritarian alliance resembles Cold War campist politics. If back then, people were limited to choosing between the American bourgeois model and the Soviet bourgeois model, today it appears that the choices for the peoples of the region are once again between American imperialism and reactionary, tyrannical, expansionist, and quasi-imperialist powers like Iran, Russia, Turkey, and to some extent China. These countries have their own visions for the region and their own alliances with other repressive regimes, all of which brutally crack down on revolutionary movements that interfere with their plans or steer away from their monopoly on “resistance.™”

It won’t be easy to escape the trap of being caught between these two camps and the dark future both of them represent for the region. But we could start by focusing on grassroots struggles on the ground, instead of on states and their proxies. No government is going to save us from this hell.

Authoritarians and petty tyrants compete for our obedience, but no world order they can offer us will fulfill our aspirations for freedom and dignity.

Palestinians have been betrayed by their leadership over and over. The PLO sought to be the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” only to crush the first intifada—which had broken out beyond its control and against its wishes—and plunge into the disaster of the Oslo Accords. They went on to become fully entangled with the US regional order, making it one of the most successful examples in the history of the domestication and neutralization of revolutionary movements. The Palestinian resistance as an uncontrollable and ungovernable force, beyond the control of various waves of “representation,” authorities, and mechanisms of pacification and manipulation, remains threatening to all those who compete to impose their preferred world orders and whatever forces seek to bind it to their own interests.

For years, regimes in the Arab world used the Palestinian cause as the only issue around which people were allowed to mobilize and protest; this enabled them to allow people to let off steam while silencing criticism of their own policies. They also used this issue to claim legitimacy, as it was always widely supported by the peoples of the region. Dana El-Kurd shows how the movements organizing around Palestine in those states became schools for activism for the participants, enabling them to eventually oppose their own governments as well. Many of the movements that went on to participate in the Arab Spring started with Palestine solidarity organizing.

Even so-called “radical” regimes masquerading as supporters of the resistance, such as the Syrian government, turned to impose siege and slaughter Palestinians as soon as the latter were perceived to threaten their interests or to join freedom movements, as in Yarmouk refugee camp in 2014. Whether “normalizing” regimes or “resistance” regimes, authoritarians have always treated the Palestinian cause as a tool of legitimacy, empty rhetoric to be thrown around to ensure stability, even though their policies were anti-Palestinian in practice. In moments of truth, whenever the situation is getting out of control, they reveal their true faces.

Today, many governments in the region are actively suppressing Palestine solidarity movements and opposition to the genocide, as they see that these movements might “get out of control” or threaten normalization efforts that they hope will boost their economies, militaries, and repressive capabilities. Our best way out of this mess might be a revolutionary alliance of freedom movements throughout the region, and hopefully the world—a Liberation International that would stand proudly against the reactionary international led by the US and the authoritarian international involving Iran.

Palestine is deeply connected to the Syrian revolution, the tragedy of Sudan, the revolutionary feminists of Iran, the Rojava revolution, the uprising in Lebanon, the many movements in the Middle East since the Arab Spring, and—more globally—the Stop Cop City and Black Lives Matter movements in the US, the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous peoples everywhere, the anti-junta resistance in Myanmar, Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, and all struggles for freedom and liberation. We draw inspiration, strength, and lessons from each other. A Palestinian victory in Gaza would send waves of freedom to the farthest corners of the earth, while an Israeli victory will embolden those pursuing violent and genocidal strategies everywhere, strengthen the grip of reactionary and authoritarian alliances over entire populations, and enable them to further crush movements of liberation, whether in the name of “stability” or of “resistance.” If we depend on each other, we had better start acting accordingly. Who knows how much time we have left.

“It is true that we go to war to seek romance, and perhaps I was ashamed of admitting this to myself. You know how much of a cliché this term has turned into. I used to run away from this romance whenever it tried to sweep me away, and I used to try and make sense of all those motives. We’re too arrogant to admit this reason but we all know that what draws us towards heroism and martyrdom is the same thing that we are so ashamed to admit: romance.” -Bassel Al-Araj.

Attempting to Clear the Fog

Anarchists have reacted to the genocide and the solidarity movement with several layers of cognitive dissonance. Some positions were confused or naïve, lacking nuance and understanding of the material conditions prevailing in different geographies and political contexts—for example, sloganeering “No war but class war” arguments calling for the “Israeli and Palestinian proletariat” to “unite” against “their common oppressors” and other class-reductionist nonsense. Other positions went all the way to Islamophobia and conspiracy theories: “Israel created Hamas,” “Hamas are just like ISIS.”

Hamas is the subject of the most significant cognitive dissonance. Anti-authoritarians want to support the Palestinian movement, like any other movement for freedom and liberation, but they can’t comprehend that Hamas is an organic and integral part of that movement, so they make up stories to the effect that Hamas is the invention of the occupier, that Palestinians don’t really support them, that we can somehow tell the story of the resistance without them. They wish to somehow separate Hamas from the broader cause. How much easier things would be if that were possible!

Hamas are in fact a national liberation movement dedicated to the liberation of Palestine. The idea of using the religious concept of jihad as anti-colonialist resistance and self-defense is not new; it goes all the way back to the struggle against the French in Syria in the 1920s, if not further. It has appeared in Algeria and many struggles since. It has nothing to do with the Salafi-jihadist brand, and a pan-Islamic transnational caliphate is not on the table. The Palestinian liberation movement is heterogeneous and diverse; it includes many ideologies and ideas we might disagree with. Hamas deserves criticism for its patriarchy, its homophobia, its reliance on reactionary forces such as Iran and the Assad regime, its brutal repression. Brave anti-authoritarian Palestinian groups have already offered this, like Gaza Youth Breaks Out back in 2011. But our criticism should be fair and grounded in reality, not simply a litany of preconceived notions.

We also need to talk about the settlers. There any many different ways to analyze Israeli society. We can use the useful distinction that historian Ilan Pappe makes between the State of Israel and the State of Judea. In short, on one side, the liberal, secular, and “democratic” (Jewish democracy, for Jews only) wing of Jewish supremacy, apartheid, and settler colonialism, the one leading the anti-Netanyahu protests in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities; on the other side, the more far-right, theocratic, and openly fascist wing, composed chiefly of West Bank Jewish pogromists and their allies. The anti-fascist author and journalist, David Sheen, offers another useful schema, dividing Israeli society into supremacist, opportunist, reformist, and humanist camps.

All of these analyses explore the internal debate within settler society over the best way to manage apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. These social rifts are not new, but they have been exacerbated over the last few months. If we do not understand them, we might reach the wrong conclusions.

For example, some comrades cite the Anti-Netanyahu protests to pressure him to accept a ceasefire in order to strike a deal with the resistance to release hostages as evidence that many Israelis oppose the regime. Some people even present it as a mass anti-war movement. This is inaccurate. It fits the anarchist narrative because we are used to insisting on the distinction between people and states, and many Israelis really do oppose Netanyahu. But support for genocide is overwhelming across various political camps.

A huge sign in neon lights over protesters in Tel Aviv tells the whole story—bring back (the hostages), and go back (to Gaza). This is a brazen proposal to resume fighting as soon as the Israeli captives are released. This does not necessarily represent all the thousands of participants, but it does indicate the Zionist logic of these demonstrations—another manifestation of Jewish supremacy, maybe its liberal camp, but nonetheless, there is no concern for Palestinian lives there. Honest, genuine, anti-Zionist voices calling to end the genocide do exist in Israel, and they hold small demonstrations every once in a while, which are often repressed by police and attacked by fascists. They are a tiny, hated, and insignificant minority, with no hope of becoming a mass political power any time in the near future.

The inconvenient truth is that when it’s time to commit a massacre, Israeli society puts aside all petty arguments, stops pretending to be a civil society in a “democratic state,” and unites for the task. Then it is revealed what Israel is in reality: a huge military base. There is no mass opposition to genocide. The mass protests against the judicial overhaul stopped for a few months following the shock of October 7, then reappeared in the form of protests for the release of hostages, renewing the discussion about genocide management. All the reservists’ threats to refuse to serve came to an end after October 7, 2023; they never really intended to follow through. Rebellion and protest in Israel are always limited to narrow Zionist narratives that explicitly delineate what is acceptable and what’s not. The fascist and liberal wings of Zionism might express it differently, but Jewish supremacy and the complete dehumanization of Palestinians are the common threads.

The situation was bad already, but the radical left has shrunk significantly since October 7, with the attacks shocking the Israeli society to its core, awakening settler anxieties and pushing many “leftists” into the warm hug of Jewish supremacy. We can expect this to continue. The reason for this is that the “Israeli left” is overwhelmingly predicated on the notion that “the end of occupation” (decolonization) would mean that they could continue their convenient settler lifestyle minus the guilt. For example, one of the main messages of the anti-occupation bloc during the mass movement against the judicial overhaul that existed up until October 7 was that “the occupation” (which typically means the 1967 occupation) is an “obstacle to Israeli democracy,” and if only we could take care of that, the rest would be fine. It is not easy to find anyone who sees that the entire Israeli regime is illegitimate, that the occupation began in 1948 not 1967, that the land is stolen from the river to sea and decolonization means the radical transformation of power relations.

Alfredo Bonanno said, “The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalized insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them.” I like Bonanno and think that most of his observations are brilliant, but this particular analysis does not fit the reality on the ground. It’s part of a long tradition of Western thinkers who focus on settler society, as if it could be a meaningful vehicle for change. I strongly disagree. There is no historical precedent for societies of settlers or slave masters rebelling against their own privileges, and I don’t think Palestine would be the first to break from this trajectory.

There are settler-colonial societies, like the US, that managed to develop a proud tradition of race traitors after a long development. We saw this during the George Floyd uprising; French Algeria offers another example. I believe that this is theoretically possible for the settler society in Palestine, maybe in some point in the future, but probably not right now. Some Israelis went far beyond the “Israeli left” and fully betrayed “their” society, switched sides, and joined the Palestinian popular struggle, under Palestinian terms and leadership. Some even joined the armed struggle. These are very few, far from representing a significant phenomenon in Israeli society.

Those who want to express solidarity with the very few anti-Zionist Israelis should do so. It’s a good cause and they would appreciate it. But honestly, support for the Palestinian resistance is much more important right now. We should stand with the resistance against the violence of settler colonialism and genocide.

This might be inconvenient, but we must have this conversation. No one has to agree with me, I’m speaking from my own perspective and conditions, and this can be seen as my attempt to appeal to my camp of origin, the anti-Zionist Israeli radical left. In my opinion, the “Israeli Left” is a dead end. I have no reason to doubt the intentions of many of my former and current comrades in the “anti-occupation bloc” and “radical bloc” in Tel Aviv and other cities. They are honest, brave, rebellious souls; many of them really are in it for Palestinian lives, fighting to end the genocide.

But those who have managed to escape the cult of Zionism must now take another step forward. To them, I want to say that we must stop seeing ourselves as actors within Israeli society, trying to improve or reform it in order to save it from itself. It would be better to adopt Al-Araj’s framework of the liberation camp vs. the colonial camp,⁴ and Fanon’s understanding of the adoption of the resistance identity as a political choice rather than an issue of race or origin, and work to shed the settler identity completely.

This is what Palestinians have been calling on us to do for years. There is no reforming a sick society; it will not work to appeal to the interests of a system that is rotten to its core. There hasn’t been a single second in the history of this state since its inception that wasn’t predicated on intense violence and complete dehumanization. This is a call for desertion, full race treason and betrayal, switching sides, with all the risks, repression, torture, and death it might entail. This is not easy, but we have a rich global history to draw from. We can recall John Brown and his militia, or the French in Algeria switching sides and joining the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale, “National Liberation Front”). What those people understood, at crucial historical junctures, was that despite what liberal interpretations of “identity politics” tell us, when revolution calls, it’s not about being a passive “ally” or checking your privileges, but throwing yourself into the struggle. Identity becomes a political choice, based on actions, rather than origins.

“The settler is not simply the man who must be killed. Many members of the mass of colonialists reveal themselves to be much, much nearer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation.”

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Anxieties about decolonization are not coming out of nowhere. Nothing is promised to us. Not even liberation itself, to be honest. Some colonial projects have ended somewhat peacefully, with regime transition and reconciliation committees, as in South Africa; others have ended in a bloodbath, like in Algeria. Even the libertarian, confederalist example of Rojava hasn’t been a smooth process. In none of these cases was it perfect. Liberation is always a messy and bloody process in real life.

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in their essay Decolonization is not a metaphor, explain that decolonization is incommensurable with other social justice struggles—it is meant to be unsettling, as it would undoubtedly relieve the settlers—including workers—of their stolen resources. We must be honest about what we’re saying. For example, in the debate about the phrase “from the river to sea,” about whether it means democracy or the abolition of Israel—the simple answer is that it means both. Decolonization on Palestinian conditions—the abolition of Zionism, the return of the refugees, the end of military rule, and equal civil rights—will mean that Palestine goes back to what it was before Zionist colonization, a majority Arab land. I believe Jewish people would be welcome to stay—those who are willing to live equally with the rest of the people on the land, without a racist system of segregation and privilege based on ethnicity.

The Radical Bloc in Tel Aviv.

As for class reductionism, there’s no material basis for “class solidarity” between “Palestinians and Israelis.” Under settler colonialism, this is not the same class. Jews and Arabs are not equal, not even when they work in the same workplaces. As Frantz Fanon noted, in a colonial context, national oppression is primary and class oppression is secondary. Settler colonies do not simply exploit the labor power of the colonized or the land resources of the colony, like other kinds of colonialism; they are predicated on the complete erasure of the colonized through ethnic cleansing, genocide, or both.

According to historian Ilan Pappe, Zionism, like any other settler-colonial movement, requires the annihilation or expulsion of the native population in order to succeed. Many such movements were composed of European refugees escaping exclusion and persecution, looking for a place to build their own new Europe. Indigenous populations are always an obstacle to such utopian visions, and so the solution is typically a massive campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Similar settler-colonial projects, such as the US, Australia, South Africa, and Canada, also often found a religious justification for settling, used a superpower to gain a foothold in a foreign land, then looked for ways to get rid of both the empire that aided them and the majority of the Indigenous population.

Israel has made it pretty clear that wherever it engaged in massive ethnic cleansing camping, such as 1948, or during the current genocide in Gaza, its targets are not the Palestinian proletariat, but the Palestinians as a people. All classes and social groups are a target.

If even Marx recognized that the struggle for the eight-hour workday in the US couldn’t really begin before the abolition of slavery, today’s Western leftists should be able to reach the same conclusions regarding settler colonialism and apartheid. If we want to have a meaningful footing in the solidarity movement, we must acknowledge that some issues cannot be reduced to class.

Revolutionaries have already made this mistake before. Many male anarchists in the CNT (Federación Anarquista Ibérica, “National Confederation of Labor”) during the Spanish revolution were dismissive of the women’s organization Mujeres Libres (“Free Women”), proclaiming that gender repression was secondary to the class struggle, and that in any case the revolution would solve it. Today, we know that overthrowing capitalism won’t simply abolish patriarchy. We could create a classless society that would still be sexist and oppressive to women and other genders. Some leftists see the Kibbutz movement as an example of libertarian socialist societies, ignoring the fact that the Kibbutzim are a racist and colonialist project for Jews only, built in the context of the Zionist land theft, often on the physical ruins of villages that were ethnically cleansed. Without a proper analysis of settler colonialism and an understanding of national oppression as a primary issue unto itself, any understanding of the situation in Palestine will remain an awkward attempt to import foreign worldviews and solutions into geographies with radically different problems.

Along with the commitment to free Palestine, I would like to suggest to comrades to allow Palestine to free them as well. It can work both ways. Don’t participate in the movement just to preach, but also to listen. We should not give up our perspectives and critiques, but we must use this this opportunity to enrich ourselves and broaden our horizons by learning from other liberation struggles, instead of simply trying to impose our preconceived notions on them. I would love to discuss sensitive subjects with my Palestinian comrades, such as the dependence of the armed resistance on reactionary elements like Iran and Assad’s Syria⁵. But I must be able to do this as a comrade, from inside the struggle, after developing trusting relationships and accepting a Palestinian worldview, not as an annoying leftist critiquing from the outside. If all we do is spend time with those like ourselves, it will show, and it will reflect badly on us. People notice this, and it will sabotage the relations of trust that we are trying to build within the movement.

Facing the Age of Genocide

The colonial world order has divided the world into the “civilized” part, the impenetrable Global North where liberal democracy prevails, and vast genocide fields filled with a surplus population to be exterminated, enslaved, robbed of resources, and forgotten. In a settler-colonial context, this process happens in the same territory, without the geographic distance between the colony and the metropolis. Ghettos, besieged cities, military rule, and a system of ethnic segregation are constructed, dividing the colonized into several classes of oppressed people, building mental barriers where physical ones are absent, and making sure to prevent any mingling of natives and settlers.

There are several ways in which the colonial order can get out of balance. One way is fascism, in which the colonial practices are brought inside, into the metropolis. In this case, genocidal and racializing practices that were previously reserved for the surplus population in the colonies are utilized against unwanted populations at home. But the colonial order can also go out of balance during uprisings. The natives, refusing to be confined to their place, break the supposedly impenetrable fortress of the colony—which turns out to be very much penetrable—and, as Fanon put it, they flood the forbidden cities, taking everything in their path.

Israel sought for decades to maintain a population of Westernized, liberal democratic settlers, experiencing home (Europe) away from home, after their original home became too dangerous for them. Other, non-European Jews were welcome to join, as long as they were Jewish and accepted Western hegemony. Concrete walls, isolated ghettos, and mental barriers were instilled in order to separate the settler society from the brutal daily violence necessary to maintain this order. There is no one way to do this. Strategies include cultural erasure (for example, Palestinians with citizenship become “Israeli Arabs”); massive ethnic cleansing campaigns when possible (like in 1948) and when not—small ones, like the Judaization⁶ of the Galilee, the Naqab, and neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa⁷; military rule⁸; conflict management, strict racial segregation, and counterinsurgency, as seen in the Oslo Accords, the separation wall in the West Bank, and the siege of Gaza; and genocide. Today it seems that conflict management, at least, has failed to deliver.

Israel has been humiliated more than once in the last few years. The state lost control during the uprising of 2021 and again on October 7, 2023. The Palestinians have proven time and time again to be an uncontrollable force, capable of threatening a nuclear superpower supported by the strongest empire in the world, despite that empire pouring billions of dollars into security apparatus, counterinsurgency, and advanced technology. Israelis have noticed that the state is incapable of delivering security despite its mighty power, and they are starting to panic. We can only expect that the punishment for rebelling will be crueler each time as pressure grows from shocked Israelis and the international powers to keep rebellious Palestinians under control.

It is entirely possible that as time passes, the genocide fields will expand, and more people will be treated as surplus population. There is no guarantee that we, the privileged citizens of civilization, will not eventually find ourselves on the wrong side of that wall. Racialized minorities know that already, and as for the rest of us—we shouldn’t count on our whiteness, as Jews found out during the Second World War, Irish people experienced under British occupation, and Ukrainians are finding out today. Just as whiteness can be ascribed, it can also be taken away.

Whenever an empire brands a new demographic as surplus population, the borders around “civilization” shift. The more they succeed in trapping a growing part of the earth’s population in a living hell, the bleaker and more uncertain our own future becomes. The more they succeed in crushing the rebellion of the undesirables, the more their success will inform other empires and competing world orders. Just as we are inspired by every slave revolt and ghetto uprising, regimes also take notes and inspiration from each other when it comes to repression. We are all deeply connected.

Haifa, May 2021.

What should we do, those of us situated in this or that entity, citizens of the Global North, whether as settlers in the colony or the imperial core? It’s hard for me to say. Situated in the occupied Interior, which, as I said, does not openly rebel at the moment, is it fair for me to advocate for things I don’t do myself? We feel the need for an insurrection, but our communities are devastated and broken, people are paralyzed, and the wounds are still open from the last round of repression. I can’t tell anyone what to do. All I can do is share my perspective. It’s for you to analyze your conditions and see what fits.

Comrades in the imperial core of so-called North America have showed some amazing and inspiring resistance. Comrades in Europe have too. Sabotage, port blockades, marches, campus occupations—all of these are meaningful, and some have won significant achievements. I don’t want to claim, as some do, that these actions have accomplished nothing so far. We don’t know what the state of Gaza would be right now if not for these courageous actions. Movement building is important in itself. A whole new generation has been politicized and radicalized, and they will carry the struggles forward.

But one thing is certain. We didn’t stop the genocide.

We need to focus. The genocide has been in progress for a year, and at this point, it shows no sign of slowing down or remaining confined to Gaza. I believe the time to escalate is now. The implications are enormous. Right now, Israel is committed to go to war with Lebanon and perhaps also with Iran. The worst-case scenario seems to be unfolding. This is going to make the situation spiral out of control even more; it could cause a full-blown regional war involving an unimaginable amount of death and destruction. We are facing a completely psychotic world order intent on causing the maximum amount of devastation to everything that stands in its way. We cannot remain passive spectators. We are involved and what happens will reflect on us.

From the looks of it, throughout the course of the occupations last semester, comrades in the US developed many insurrectionary elements to develop and expand. They also faced many cops—some in uniform, others concealed within the movement, like liberals, pacifists, professional “activists,” and reformists. People need to find ways to deal with them. Don’t fall for counterinsurgency tactics intended to pacify you, divide and fragment the movement, define for you what is “acceptable” and “legitimate,” or delimit the boundaries of the protest. Be brave, uncontrollable, and ungovernable. The rest is up to you to analyze, as far as tactics go, but don’t let anyone confine you.

Also—ignore smear campaigns. They might become louder if the movement becomes more successful. I already saw Zionist media and propaganda depicting the protests as “antisemitic pogroms.” I shouldn’t have to spend a single moment explaining how ridiculous this is.

We all know that the repressive agencies of Israel and the US are training together, and share tips, tools and tactics on how to repress populations and movements of freedom. This should concern anyone involved in local struggles, such as Stop Cop City, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous solidarity, and support for migrants and refugees. We also know that Israel is exporting weapons and repressive technology everywhere. AI tools are being developed and used to automate identifying and killing “suspects.” And we know it goes the other way around—Israel is bombing Gaza (and now also Lebanon) with US weapons and full support. This is an American (and European) war as much as it is Israeli. The imperial core of the Global North is absolutely involved and is a belligerent part of the aggression, and this makes its citizens an active part as well.

It’s not entirely possible to physically join the armed struggle on the ground the way one can in Rojava or Ukraine, but there is no need to. People can come to Palestine to participate in the popular struggle, as brave American and European citizens already have; some of them have become martyrs themselves. This helps, but the resistance is asking for something else: turn your own cities in the imperial core into a battleground. Bring the war home. Open another front. Join the liberation camp, as Al-Araj puts it, and raise hell against the world order that allowed this to happen. They must feel consequences. I believe an uprising is still possible, here in the Interior as well, but it will require us to be brave, like Gazans are.

One last thing I want to ask—as I was writing this piece, the fighting on the fronts in Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere escalated significantly. If a full-blown war erupts elsewhere, the attention of the world will shift and Gaza could be forgotten. People should fight for the lives of Lebanese people as well, but don’t stop talking about Gaza and acting for the sake of people there. The genocide there isn’t over. It might even accelerate once attention shifts away from it.

Raise your voice, raise the flag of revolution.

No voice is louder than the voice of the uprising.

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh

not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.”

-Refaat Alareer, (1979-2023), writer and poet. On December 6, 2023, he was murdered by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza along with his brother, his sister, and their children.

Bibliography

Rev & Reve, The Gaza ghetto uprising [YouTube]
From the Periphery, Understanding Hamas: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives [YouTube]
Anonymous, “Hamas, Anarchists in the West, and Palestine solidarity”
Bassel Al-Araj, “Why do we go to War?”
Bassel Al-Araj, Live Like a Porcupine, Fight Like a Flea
Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”
Ilan Pappe, “The Collapse of Zionism”
Aufheben, “Behind the 21st century intifada”
Budour Hassan, “The Colour Brown: De-Colonizing Anarchism and Challenging White Hegemony”
Serafinski, Blessed is the Flame
Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Edward Said, The Palestine Question
Edward Said, Orientalism
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
Dana El-Kurd, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine

According to official statics from Gaza’s Ministry of Health. In addition to that number, more than 10,000 are missing, and it is unknown how many more are still buried under the rubble. It’s important to remember that Israel systematically destroyed Gaza’s health care system, bringing it to near collapse, and since then, the numbers are stuck at around 40,000. Other estimates state a much higher number. ↩
Translated by Resistance News Network. ↩
This front has escalated and currently the future for people in Lebanon is uncertain. On September 23, an IDF attack on Lebanon killed at least 570 people. On September 27, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, was assassinated, and millions in Lebanon are uprooted from their homes. Now Israel is invading south Lebanon. ↩
“I no longer see this as a conflict between Arabs and Jews, between Israeli and Palestinian. I have abandoned this duality, this naïve oversimplification of the conflict. I have become convinced of Ali Shariati and Frantz Fanon’s divisions of the world (into a colonial camp and a liberation camp). In each of the two camps, you will find people of all religions, languages, races, ethnicities, colors, and classes. In this conflict, for example, you will find people of our own skin standing rudely in the other camp, and at the same time you will find Jews standing in our camp.” -Bassel Al-Araj ↩
This is a touchy subject. Hamas initially supported the Syrian revolution back in 2012 and broke ties with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. This move severed the financial support that the movement received from Iran. A decade later, in a controversial statement, Hamas restored relations with Assad. The political chaos and shifting of alliances in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, the military coup against Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and the closing of Gaza’s tunnels on the Egyptian side, and the normalization pacts between various local regimes with Israel all served to isolate Hamas and force it to “pick a side.” In either case, I believe that, just as anarchists and anti-authoritarians in the West were able to understand the decision made by people in Rojava to accept American aid while facing the genocidal army of ISIS in Kobane, they can also understand the decisions made by Palestinians under difficult conditions. Until we have built a Liberation International that can offer actual material support to struggles on the ground, there will be a limit to how much we can criticize decisions made by those facing the threat of annihilation, caught between competing empires and regional orders. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize at all, but we should at least do so with nuance and context. ↩
This is the official Israeli term. ↩
Under neoliberal global capitalism, ethnic cleansing can be privatized as well. Judaization attempts can be under the management of settler organizations or real estate agents, thus allowing the issue to be presented as a simple real estate dispute. The involvement of American settler organizations in the attempts to evict Palestinian residents in east Jerusalem, and gentrification in Jaffa and certain neighborhoods in Haifa, is intrinsically linked to decades-long ethnic cleansing campaigns, under different faces, as colonial systems adapt to new opportunities and circumstances. ↩
There was only half a year, in 1966, when Israel wasn’t imposing military rule on Palestinians. Internal communities of uprooted people inside what became Israel were under military rule until 1966; then Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza a year later and imposed military rule there. ↩

Why Stop at Removing Biden? : The Center Cannot Hold

2024-07-11T11:12:22Z

A week and a half after we published this text, the Democrats finally compelled Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. But our argument stands—not just because it took almost a month for Biden to withdraw, and not only because he simply passed the torch to Kamala Harris, who represents the same policies and the same ossified bureaucracy, but because all the problems we face remain as intractable as they were before he dropped out. A real solution would not change who the Democratic candidate for president is—it would render it irrelevant.

It would seem like a heavy-handed metaphor if it weren’t our actual reality. A doddering patriarch, representing a collapsing centrist political project, refuses to step aside even as it becomes certain that he faces defeat at the hands of an aspiring autocrat. This encapsulates the global prospects for democracy today.

It’s not a particular politician that has grown senile, but an entire political system.

In 2018, when we described centrist politics as a race to the bottom dooming its adherents to advocate for “the second worst of all possible evils,” it seemed like hyperbole. Now even the most faithful centrist journalists acknowledge that this is indeed occurring.

Joe Biden, admiral of a fleet of sinking ships.

A sclerotic power structure has made social change impossible, rendering disaster inevitable. By imposing unendurable disparities in wealth and power while crushing every response from grassroots movements, the centrists have created a situation in which fascists can masquerade as the only alternative.

Remember, it was Democratic politicians under Obama who coordinated the eviction of the Occupy camps around the United States to prevent anti-capitalism from gaining traction. It was Democrats who increased police funding in Minneapolis, New York, and elsewhere around the country after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, even as millions called for police abolition. It has largely been Democrats evicting the encampments that students at Columbia and other universities established in solidarity with Palestinians.

In 2016 and again in 2020, the Democratic Party machine forced Bernie Sanders aside in favor of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. A Sanders administration would surely have been just as disappointing as the leftist administrations in Spain and Greece proved to be; but the point is that the machinery of the Democratic Party has systematically suppressed every alternative, ultimately contributing to its own undoing. Donald Trump intentionally copied Bernie Sanders to formulate his deceitful rhetoric about “elites” and “globalism.” For a decade now, all around the world, the far right have won all of their gains by pretending to be rebels against the very same elite that they represent.

At the same time, centrist governments have focused on repressing the movements that would form the first line of defense against a fascist takeover, while strengthening the institutions that the fascists will use to impose their rule.

For years now, the entire Democratic establishment has supported Biden even as he doubled down on militarizing police departments, copied Trump’s border policies, and presided over genocide in Palestine. The question of Biden’s age should be beside the point—a politician like him is most dangerous when he is hale and hearty. His supporters have always argued that if Biden weren’t doing all those things, Trump would be the one doing them. Any criticism of Biden was rejected in favor of what his supporters considered a hard-nosed pragmatism.

Suddenly, in the midst of Biden’s debate with Trump on June 27, it became inescapably obvious that their pragmatism was about to lose them the 2024 election, their only alibi for all the atrocities they have endorsed up to this point. But although a chorus of pundits immediately began clamoring to replace Biden by any means, the vast majority of Democratic politicians have somehow remained united behind the president as he insists that he deserves to hold on to power into his late eighties. Every head of state always does this, no matter what the circumstances are, as Mikhail Bakunin pointed out a century and a half ago.

“Nothing is more dangerous for man’s [sic] private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade.” -Mikhail Bakunin

How can the Democrats blithely set about losing what they have vociferously insisted could be the last democratic election in the history of the United States? The party machinery must be so riddled with petty ambition, patronage systems, and clientelism that they can’t change course at any price. Having betrayed what passed as the “left” within the Democratic Party, the machine is now betraying the center—the one group it ostensibly exists to serve. It turns out that if your goal is to force inequality and oppression on people, eventually fascism becomes a more efficient contender for the contract than democracy.

Yes, it’s painful to watch, it’s embarrassing for everyone involved, the implications for the future are terrifying, but it should also be interesting to us that democracy, long touted as the political equivalent of the free market—which supposedly represents the most efficient model for producing solutions to human needs—has brought us to this. This situation should give pause to everyone who has defended electoral strategies on the grounds of pragmatism.

The arguments that many Democrats are advancing for replacing Biden now—in violation of party protocol, when the primaries have already conclusively delivered the nomination to him—have implications that they are not thinking through. If they are prepared to throw out their duly appointed candidate, why stop there? Why not throw out the party machine and party politics itself for good measure? Admitting that they have been living in a fool’s paradise until now should call into question the entire political system that made this fiasco possible.

The problem is not that a single elderly man has his wizened hands on the steering wheel and refuses to release it. Nor is it that a particular cadre within the Democratic Party has monopolized control. The problem is bigger than the loyal functionaries who were prepared to go along with whatever the Democratic leadership decided until two weeks ago. It’s bigger than the entire Democratic Party. It implicates every rank-and-file voter who has been hoping that it would be enough to cast a ballot every year or two and hope for the best, everyone who is looking for a leader to solve the problems of the world on our behalf.

The problem with Biden’s decrepit but apparently intractable grip on power is the same problem that is preventing us from addressing the causes of the heat waves and hurricanes that are buffeting North America right now. It’s the same problem that is preventing us from addressing the catastrophes wrought by capitalism and colonialism. Ultimately, it’s the problem with the state, with hierarchy itself.

Biden’s refusal to step aside is a microcosm of an entire civilization at an impasse. We all know that industrial capitalism is accelerating climate change along with mass extinctions and ecological collapse, but we keep delegating our agency to representatives who answer to the corporations and don’t give a damn about us. We know that entrusting our future to a ruling class that consists of some of the most self-serving people on the planet is not going to make us safe, but we keep voting for them and working for them and buying their wares. We know that burying our heads in the sand is not going to work out for us, but we’re terrified by the prospect of having to recognize ourselves as the ones who must bring about change through our own actions.

All of these are losing strategies that have been sold to us as pragmatism, as the only possible option. Now we are entering the late stages of disaster capitalism, in which wars, economic crises, and environmental disasters are displacing people by the million all around the planet—and it’s no longer possible to avoid recognizing the consequences of this approach, any more than it is possible to deny the fact of Biden’s age and dim prospects of beating Trump.

So don’t stop at pushing out Biden. They all must go. Either we are obliged to respect protocol and the authority of those that protocol raises to power, be they aspiring autocrats or senescent artichokes, or else our freedom and well-being are more important than any set of rules—in which case we could do a lot better than replacing Biden with some other unaccountable politician.

Democratic politics is part of what got us here. If democracy is so fragile that it could be abolished as the consequence of a single election, then it was already bankrupt—it was never a means by which to secure and defend the self-determination that everyone deserves. We need something more ambitious, something capable of facing down fascism as well as forcing out anyone else who tries to hold power. We need a set of values, organizing principles, and strategies that can keep us oriented through the nightmare that is undoubtedly ahead.

Ship of fools.

It’s still possible that the Democratic Party leadership will pull themselves together and change course. Even if they do, the fact that it has taken so long already shows how dangerous it is to depend on them—or on any politicians. A public process to pick a candidate to replace Biden, such as some of the shrewder Democrats have proposed, could re-energize the party, drawing back in some of those who have become alienated. That would just kick the can down the road a bit, ensuring that something like this will recur again. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic will not stop it from sinking, not even if more passengers participate in doing so. Ahead of either outright fascism or a renewal of cosmetic reformism, we have to understand this as a window of opportunity, a teachable moment.

It’s eminently possible that, regardless of what the Democrats do over the next four months, Donald Trump will win the election. Then all the institutions that centrists have counted on to protect them—electoral politics, the court system, the police, ordinary citizens’ inclination to obey the law and respect the authorities—will become weapons in the hands of their enemies. Of course, many of us already experience these institutions as our adversaries. Biden’s supporters will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to work alongside us against them, or if, in fact, they prefer fascism to freedom.

Over the past two decades, it has proved easier to burn down police stations and overthrow governments than to achieve modest reforms. That should be instructive. If there is any hope for real change, it will not come of pragmatism, nor efforts at incremental improvements. In the words of Heraclitus, “The known way is an impasse.”

When Trump came to power in 2016, a relatively small number of anarchists immediately set out to demonstrate the sort of tactics via which grassroots movements could engage in decentralized resistance. What started out as a few hundred people on the first day of the Trump administration became millions by May 2020. Heading into another tumultuous period, we should think about what our strategic proposals are today, how they can address and empower the millions of people who will soon be forced to seek solutions outside electoral politics whether they wish to or not.

The centrists don’t deserve to remain in power—and we don’t deserve to live under fascism. It’s up to us to chart another course.

Stormy seas ahead.

Against Apartheid and Tyranny : For the Liberation of Palestine and All the Peoples of the Middle East—A Statement from Iranian Exiles

2024-06-03T22:23:00Z

In the following statement, Iranian feminists explain why it is both possible and necessary to support the Palestinian struggle for liberation without endorsing the Iranian government.

While we are situated far from Iran, we believe that in order to understand the dynamics in any situation, it is necessary to consult committed anti-authoritarians from the region. Likewise, it is important not to make the mistake of imagining that the best way to support oppressed people in one context is to support oppressors in another. All struggles for freedom and dignity are fundamentally interconnected.

“Against Israeli occupation, apartheid, and colonialism—from Israel to Iran, fight the tyrants!”

The collective Roja originally published this statement here in Farsi, and subsequently in French. By their own account,

Roja is an independent leftist-feminist collective based in Paris, comprised of comrades from Iran. Roja formed in response to the state femicide of Jina (Mahsa) Amini and the rise of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in September 2022. In addition to addressing social struggles in Iran and the Middle East, Roja actively participates in local and internationalist movements in Paris, including solidarity efforts with Palestine. The name “Roja” draws inspiration from various languages: in Spanish, it means “red”; in Kurdish, روژ signifies “daylight” or “lightness”; and in Mazandarani, روجا translates to “morning star.”

We invite readers to understand this statement in the context of our previous coverage of anti-authoritarian movements in Iran, including the revolt sparked by the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, under the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi.” Likewise, we should always center the voices of Palestinians in regards to anything concerning their liberation.

Tahya Falestine: For the Liberation of Palestine and All the Peoples of the Middle East

On the morning of April 14, 2024, the unprecedented attack by the Islamic Republic of Iran on Israel captured the attention of media outlets worldwide. Although the Iron Dome defense system erected by Imperialist powers protected the settler-colonial state of Israel, some seeking to avenge Palestinians lauded the Iranian government’s “courage” and expressed admiration for the “sole power” in the region willing to confront imperialist powers.

In this war, in which Israel and Iran are baring their teeth at each other, some have adopted a fascist position and unashamedly sided with the genocidal state of Israel. Others, assuming a campist position, have sided with Iran, turning a blind eye to the Iranian government’s brutal repression of its opponents and others inside the country. Here we are not addressing the first position, but the second one, those who accept the logic that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This mode of reasoning oversimplifies the intricate relationship between the Islamic Republic and Israel, reducing it to a binary struggle of good versus evil and implying that anyone opposing the state of Israel automatically falls into the “good” camp.

For us, defending the Palestinian cause and international solidarity can know no other path than opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not really opposed to the state of Israel but rather to the peoples of Iran and the entire region, to anyone who believes that the task of liberation depends on the peoples themselves, not states. Defending the Palestinian cause necessarily involves distancing ourselves from everything that reinforces Israel’s domination over Palestinian lands. Since its creation in 1979, despite all the noise it produces, the Islamic Republic of Iran has done nothing but pour water into the mills of the Israel state, as we will outline below.

1.) Those who evoke the Islamic Republic of Iran’s right to “self-defense” are simply echoing the arguments that the state of Israel uses to justify the annihilation of Gaza and the genocide it is perpetuating there. They reason within a framework according to which the lives of millions of people in the Middle East are deemed worthless. What is the value of the Iranian government’s “right to defend itself,” even according to the standards of international law, if this “right” translates to two weeks of fear in Iran and from Iraq to Lebanon in the face of the prospect of all-out war? Why should the impoverished peoples of the region pay the price of the scorned “honor” of a power that warns its enemy in advance about when its missiles will arrive?

2.) Despite their opposition, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the state of Israel and its Western backers are all cogs in the same machine of global capitalism, pushing the Middle East towards the precipice at every turn. For those who overlook the role of the Iranian government in the bloody suppression of the Syrian revolution against the Assad dictatorship, we recall Iran’s clandestine bartering during the war with Iraq. Amid the war, the Islamic Republic chanted that “the road to Al-Quds passes through Karbala” while simultaneously buying weapons from the state of Israel to fight Iraq—a bitter irony that cost the lives of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis. The Iranian government’s double game is evident: while it claims to exclude all commercial exchanges with Israel, it does not even respect the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign.

3.) This is not say that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the state of Israel are equal powers or receive the same level of international-geopolitical support. But they are useful enemies to each other. Wherever emancipatory struggles are waged, both respond with repression. They both rely on the existence of the other to obscure their internal contradictions and justify their own crimes. The current state of “neither peace nor war” enables them to guarantee their own survival.

4.) There is another reason why some people are excited about the attack that the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out: the Iranian state is hemmed in by sanctions imposed by imperialist states, purportedly standing in solitary opposition against them. But for Iran’s working classes, the only consequence of this attack is a fall in the value of the national currency and further impoverishment. While prices rise with the value of the dollar—except, of course, for those who draw directly on oil revenues—the minimum daily wage has fallen to $3. Do those who are seduced by the power of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the face of dominant powers know anything about the lives of those in Iran—from ethnic minorities—who survive only by transporting contraband (like the Kulbars in Kurdistan) or fuel (like the Sukhtbars in Baluchistan)? Do they know that while the Islamic Republic sent over 300 drones and missiles that didn’t even graze the butchers of Gaza, it was incapable of sending the slightest aid to save dozens of Baluch people from flooding?

5.) The most concrete achievement of the Islamic Republic of Iran from this attack is immediately visible on the streets of Iran’s major cities. The dramatic spectacle of the highly controlled military attack on the state of Israel has strengthened the foundations of another war, the war that the Islamic Republic has waged on women since its inception. The streets of Tehran and other cities have witnessed the unfolding of this terrible war—a war that targets women’s bodies and their rebellious souls, a war that serves the domestication and stifling of women. How could such a regime emancipate the oppressed peoples of Palestine and the region? Does not the logic that rightly demands fighting the apartheid imposed by the state of Israel also demand standing up to sexual and gender apartheid in Iran?

6.) The Islamic Republic’s attack on the state of Israel also achieved something else: in addition to wounding an Arab child, it succeeded, for at least a few days and all over the world, in diverting public attention from Gaza, which facilitated the Israeli operation against Rafah. In the background during these events, the United States once again vetoed UN recognition of Palestine as a state. In reality, it is Israel’s supporters who should be thanking the Islamic Republic of Iran.

7.) Another significant “achievement” of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the course of its history has been the marginalization of the Palestinian cause within Iranian society. Although the cause of Palestine was once genuinely popular, 45 years of those in power instrumentalizing it have led to a certain indifference within Iranian society, and at times even a rejection of the Palestinian cause. Meanwhile, the state of Israel has chosen to support the fascist, monarchist right within the Iranian opposition, presenting it as the only possible successor to the Islamic Republic. This binary and exclusive opposition—the Islamic Republic or a puppet regime installed by the imperialist powers—is the same narrative the Iranian authorities use to repress popular mobilizations within the borders of Iran.

8.) In order to increase its own international popularity, the Islamic Republic of Iran has stubbornly sought to exploit the rise of Islamophobia—one of the forms that racism assumes today—in Europe and North America in order to present itself as the “supporter” of the rights of Muslims in the West. Those who view the Islamic Republic of Iran as a shield against Islamophobia and support it for this reason should ask themselves: why, in Iran’s most populous administrative region, Tehran, which has nearly 20 million inhabitants, are Sunnis not allowed a single mosque to worship in? Why are Iran’s Sunnis, whether Baluch, Kurd, or Arab, among the most impoverished populations? Why are their lives the least valuable in Iran? Why are Afghan immigrants, particularly Hazaras, deprived of the most basic rights? They must also ask how a state whose official and unofficial media disseminate anti-Semitic ideas can genuinely support anti-racism throughout the world.

For us, members of Roja, the Islamic Republic of Iran does not weaken the apartheid imposed by the colonial state of Israel but reinforces the conditions that reproduce it. The path to the liberation of all the peoples of the region requires a dual struggle: one against the Israeli apartheid regime and its supporters, and another against states like the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Ahead of Another Summer of Climate Disasters, Let's Talk about Real Solutions

2024-05-08T04:28:54Z

In cooperation with Freedom, we present a short text from Peter Gelderloos exploring why the strategies that mainstream environmental movements are currently employing to halt industrially-produced climate change are failing—and what we could be doing instead. For a more detailed engagement with these questions, we recommend Peter’s new book, The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below.

Ahead of Another Summer of Climate Disasters, Let’s Talk about Real Solutions

The mainstream climate movement begins from a premise that guarantees failure.

Not just failure. Catastrophe. And the more effective it is, the more harm it will cause.

Let’s explore why.

Climate Reductionism

When people think of environmentalism these days, they are likely to picture civil disobedience in the streets, media activism, enthusiastic lobbying, and conferences aiming to set global goals for carbon emissions—all under the leadership of non-governmental organizations, academics, and progressive politicians. Ecological struggle, however, has always also included anti-capitalist and anti-colonial currents, and these currents have been getting stronger, more dynamic, and better connected over the past couple decades.

That growth, however, has not been without setbacks, often caused by intense targeted repression that leaves movements exhausted and traumatized, like the Green Scare that began in 2005 and the repression of Standing Rock and other Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movements a decade later. Systematically, at precisely the moments when radical currents are licking their wounds, the predominantly white, middle-class vision of environmentalism takes the stage and pushes the entire conversation in reformist directions.¹

The actual crisis we are facing is a complex ecological crisis, in which police killings, repressive laws, ongoing histories of colonialism and white supremacy, habitat loss, land grabs, food cultures, human health, urbanism, borders, and wars are all entangled. The leadership of the environmental movement has made the strategic decision to reduce all of this to a question of climate—the climate crisis—and to recenter the state as the protagonist, as our potential savior. This means centering the Paris Agreement and the COP summits as the solution to the problem, and using performative activism and civil disobedience to demand policy shifts and investment in support of green energy.

The climate is heating up, regardless of international climate summits.

A Predictable Failure

The two pillars of their strategy for fixing the climate crisis are, first, to increase the production of green energy and, second, to decrease carbon emissions.

They have been highly effective at the first goal, and completely ineffective at the second. This was completely predictable.

Anyone who understands how our society works—which is to say, how capitalism works—knows that the probable result of an increase in green energy investment will be an increase in fossil fuel production. The primary reason for this is that the hundreds of billions of dollars that have already been sunk into pipelines and coal mines and oil refineries and fracking rigs are fixed capital. They’re worth a lot of money, but it’s not money in a bank account that can be quickly invested somewhere else, turned into stocks or real estate or converted into a different currency.

A 14,000-tonne coal excavator, an offshore oil platform: these aren’t ever going to become something else of similar financial value. This is money that has been spent, an investment that is only useful to capitalists if they can continue to use it to extract coal or drill for oil. That economic rule holds true whether the capitalist enterprise in question is ExxonMobil, the Saudi state oil company, or the Communist Party-owned China Petrochemical Corporation (which was listed as the largest energy company in the world in 2021).

Capitalism (including the kind practiced by every socialist government in the world) is based on growth. If green energy investment grows, leading to an increase in total energy production, the price of energy will decrease, which means that large manufacturers will make more of whatever commodities they are producing, rendering their products cheaper in hopes that consumers will buy more of them. Consequently, total energy usage will increase. This applies to energy from all available sources, especially the most established ones—fossil fuels.

After decades of investment, green energy will finally become cost-competitive with or cheaper than energy from fossil fuels. This has only started to occur in the last few years, though prices still fluctuate depending on the region and the type of energy production. The fossil fuel industry has neither abandoned their operations nor decreased production. Many companies won’t even hedge their investments between fossil fuels and green energy. What they will do, however, is invest more in new fossil fuel projects. This is basic capitalist economics: if the price margin on a product decreases, the only way to maintain or increase your profits is to increase total production. That explains why 2023 was a banner year for new fossil fuel projects.

There is another way to increase the profits: by decreasing the cost of production. For the fossil fuel industry, that means reducing safety and environmental standards, which means more accidents, more pollution, more deaths.

We saw this coming. We said this was happening. And we were excluded from the conversation, in many cases killed or imprisoned, because the desperate need to believe that government can save us is even greater than the addiction to fossil fuels.

But capitalism has no future on this planet. We will need a far-reaching revolution to address this crisis.

For each bar, the light blue bar on the left represents “clean” energy; the dark blue bar on the right represents fossil fuels. Source: The World Energy Investment 2023 report.

Despite yearly investment in “green” energy increasing significantly, fossil fuel production and consumption are also continuing to increase. Source: Statistical Review of World Energy 2023.

So What Do We Do?

We need to shift the conversation. We need to position ourselves to be prepared for the long haul. We need to support struggles that can bring small victories and increase our collective power, and deepen our relationship with the territory that can sustain us. Above all, we need to imagine better futures than the one they have in store for us.

Talk

The kind of social transformation—of global revolution—that can heal the wounds we have inflicted upon the planet itself and all its living systems will have to be bigger than anything we’ve ever experienced. This crisis ensnares and harms all of us; the response is going to require as many of us as possible.

Imagine all of the people in your life that you don’t want to die of starvation, of cancer, in extreme weather events, or shot down by police or other white supremacists.

You don’t need to convince all of those people to become anarchist revolutionaries. It would be enough to convince some of them to withdraw their loyalty from dominant institutions and mainstream reform movements and to sympathize with a revolutionary approach, or at least to understand why such an approach makes sense.

One way you can approach this is by posing a question with an indisputable answer, a question that has direct bearing on an issue that affects them or motivates them. For example:

How many people die every year from lack of clean water, famine, extreme weather, air pollution, and other causes related to the ecological crisis? At least 10-20 million people every year, and the number is growing.
Since 2017, investment in renewable energy increased every year. In 2022, there was over 15 times as much renewable energy investment as there was in 2004. Has this been profitable for investors? Yes. Yearly investment is over a trillion dollars, and profits are over a hundred billion, though investors have shown that they will quickly pull their money out of green energy when profit margins go down. What has happened to global CO2 emissions in this same time period? They have shot up by a third. And fossil fuel production in the same time period? It has increased by 40%. Are these roughly the same as the rates of increase in carbon emissions and fossil fuel production over the prior decades? Yes. And what does that mean? Booming investment in green energy has not slowed down fossil fuel production and carbon emissions in any way, even as new fossil fuel extraction projects become more difficult and higher cost.
Our water, air, and food are filled with poisonous chemicals. Many of these are related to plastics production, pesticides, forever chemicals (PFAS), mining, and the burning of fossil fuels. We have known about the dangers of most of these compounds for decades, and several of them are banned or regulated by various governments. On the whole, are the amounts of these toxins in our environment increasing or decreasing? They are increasing. What have many major chemical companies done in response to the banning of PFOA, a toxic “forever chemical”? They have switched to the production of other PFAS also known or believed to be toxic. Do we know how effectively these bans are enforced? Five years after they agreed to phase out PFOA in response to government pressure, DuPont chemical factories were still discharging PFOA into the groundwater. They probably still are now, but affected communities don’t have the resources to find out and the government doesn’t monitor it.
Let’s look at a parallel issue, to see if such reformism has delivered results in other contexts. In 2020, cities and states across the US sought to pacify the movement against police killings by passing measures to ensure police accountability, from racial sensitivity trainings to citizen review boards to stricter guidelines on the use of force to obligatory body cameras. Has the number of killings by police decreased since then? No. It has increased.

After sharing the answers to these questions, you can emphasize that reforming the existing system is a failed strategy, and ask them if they are committed to trying the same strategy over and over again, hoping for different results.

This should enable you to determine which of the people around you are able to question the paradigm they live in, and which ones are committed to the false beliefs that undergird that paradigm. Do not waste your time on the latter group. Whatever redeeming and beautiful qualities they may have, trying to engage with them via reason, ethics, and logic is missing the point. When people insist on believing things that are demonstrably false, it is either because those beliefs give them comfort or because they bring them power and profit. Debate is unlikely to change that.

We need to change the conversation on the level of society at large. We need people to understand our arguments; we need to make sure that the mainstream orthodoxies will be seen as controversial rather than acceptable.

This means discrediting the Paris Agreement, the United Nations, Extinction Rebellion, and the big NGOs, as well as the entire strategy of replacing fossil fuels with green energy while leaving the global economic system unchanged. The only thing they were ever going to succeed at was making a lot of money. Likewise, we need to popularize a clearer understanding of the function of police in historical context, and of the impact of growth-based economic production on our health, and the fact that no government is to likely to take steps mitigate any of these harms.

Let’s focus on the people who are able to change. When people start to change their minds, it helps if they can connect this with an immediate change in their actions. Help them identify something small that they can do. For example:

Redirect donations from the big NGOs to legal defense funds for land defenders, fundraisers for land defense projects, and alternative media and publishers that present a realistic view of the crisis;
Write a letter to someone imprisoned for ecologically-minded sabotage or defending against police, or to someone who is organizing for better treatment and survival resources inside the prison system;
Spread news on social media about Indigenous land defense struggles around the world;
Respond to mainstream environmental campaigns or the UN Climate Change framework, pointing out it’s a fraud and linking to made-for-mass-circulation articles like this one;
Ask local libraries and bookstores to order books with a realistic take on the ecological crisis;
Start a reading group with friends;
Attend a protest;
Support a local community garden, a distribution point for free food or clothes, a harm reduction group, or a transformative justice initiative;
Turn a lawn into a garden for native wildflowers and edibles;
Experiment with guerrilla gardening.

South Central Farm. Discussed in Rolling Thunder #4, this garden in Los Angeles fed hundreds of families, defending a green space in the urban wasteland.

Get Honest

The apocalypse has already begun. For decades, millions of humans—and now tens of millions of humans—have been dying every year because of the effects of this ecological crisis. We have surpassed the death rates of the worst years of World War II and the Holocaust, even if we don’t count the casualty figures from the hot wars that white supremacist powers are waging from Niger to Palestine—though those wars are also wrapped up with this crisis.

What’s more, an unknown number of species—probably in the thousands—are being driven to extinction every single year. Numerous habitats and ecosystems are being lost forever. The global biomass, the total mass of all the living beings on the planet, is decreasing substantially. The water, air, and soil are filled with poisons. The climate goals for carbon reduction are probably too optimistic; we are already crossing numerous tipping points 26 years out from 2050 (the UN’s goal for reaching “net zero” emissions), and the projections of the most powerful states and biggest corporations indicate that we will fail to meet the wishful 2050 deadline. The end of a world is already underway.

In order to do what we need to do, we need to accept that and get on with it. Suffering is already here. Mass death is already here. But after every death, there is new life, and there will continue to be life on this planet until the sun expands in a few billion years. This is a question of life and death for us, so we need to take it seriously and make sacrifices, but since it’s already “too late,” we can focus on quality and long-term framings, rather than being driven by a superficial and exhausting urgency.

At least one thing is certain: the living communities on this planet will be in much better shape if we abolish the state and capitalism. If we don’t succeed in our lifetimes, they will still be better off—we will be better off—if we have eroded their hegemony, if most people can see that the dominant institutions are responsible for what is happening, if we have increased our capacity for collective healing and survival.

Get Started

There are many ways to support a struggle. Although it is easy to get demoralized when most of the pipelines, military bases, mines, and other mega-projects we oppose are built nonetheless, it is vital to engage. Revolution is not a linear progression—it is not a thousand little victories that accumulate into one big victory. Yes, it is necessary to show that sometimes we can win, but it’s also about the joy and the experience that we take away with us, the tactical and strategic instincts we develop, the technical know-how, the relationships we build, the elation of forcing the police to turn tail and run, the realization that authority figures inside and outside the movement only hold us back, the way that in struggle it becomes clear that all the different siloed issues, all the different forms of oppression, are connected.

We need to engage in intermediate struggles in a way that will help people discover and practice the sorts of tactics and strategies that will be necessary for long-term change.

Many struggles over the past decades have energized us and taught us lessons we should never forget—the insurrections in Oaxaca, Greece, France, Hong Kong, and Chile, the decentralized assemblies of the plaza occupation movement, the uncompromising antiracism of the anti-police rebellions, the joyful reclamation of public space expressed by Reclaim the Streets, forest occupations from Hambach to Khimki, the strategic stand of Stop Cop City, and more.

Dig in

Survival started yesterday. People in countries that have already experienced collapse, as well as Indigenous and underclass Black communities around the world, are already ahead of the curve. Learn from those who come from those experiences. Then get to know your territory intimately. Learn where food could come from and what modifications the housing will need during the most extreme seasons if the power grid goes off. Establish methods of communication and coordination for when phones and internet connections are no longer working. Learn how you can access clean drinking water. Learn where the soil is most contaminated so no one grows food in it. Learn how coordinated the white supremacists are.

And then get to work creating more community food resources, stabler access to housing, and more collective self-defense networks. Support any project that inspires you and makes us all stronger both right now and in any likely future, whether collapse, increasing authoritarianism, or revolutionary civil war.

Connecting with our specific territories will probably mean breaking with homogenizing ideologies that insist we are all the same, that cannot account for the fact that we all have different histories and needs and that those histories put some of us in conflict, or that base their idea of social transformation on a predetermined program or some idea of obligatory unity. The future we need to be creating is an ecosystem with no center.

Dream Big

Revolution is still possible. We can say this confidently because history shows us certain patterns as it cycles through the centuries, and also because we are entering a time that is unprecedented, in which the dominant institutions are using plans and models that are already obsolete.

All of our revolutions in the last few centuries have ultimately been failures. That means that we can learn from them without shutting down our imaginations or assuming that we know what a successful transformation of all society will look like.

It will not come from a blueprint. It will not be the result of the triumph of any party. It will be the outcome of countless dreams, plans, conspiracies, mad hopes, and battles we cannot yet foresee. We will make it together, constantly dreaming, constantly weaving, because that is what free life is.

I discuss global examples of this repression—and how it is systematically linked to the replacement of radical movements by reformist currents—in The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below and They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements. ↩

Why the State Can't Compromise with the Gaza Solidarity Movement : And What That Means for Us

2024-05-03T13:14:11Z

On April 17, students at Columbia University initiated an on-campus encampment in solidarity with Gaza. After the administration called in the New York City police department in a failed attempt to evict the encampment, students across the country established encampments and occupations of their own. In the following analysis, participants in the movement explore the strategic questions it confronts today.

Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Movement in Solidarity with Gaza

After students began occupying Columbia in solidarity with Palestinians, student occupations and encampments spread like wildfire, occupying over one hundred universities around the world. Well over two thousand students have been arrested. Each day has seen new occupations and new tactics. Again and again, police repression has outraged students, professors, and community members, drawing larger numbers to more and more militant demonstrations. The movement for Palestinian liberation is growing by leaps and bounds in the United States as a consequence of the bravery of demonstrators and blockaders over the past six months—most recently, thanks to occupiers who have been willing to risk arrest, police brutality, defamation, doxxing, and expulsion.

On April 30, police staged a militarized raid on Columbia University, locking other students and faculty members inside dormitories and campus housing and holding them hostage while they brutalized and arrested demonstrators. Similar scenes played out at the City University of New York (CUNY). Police have launched tear gas at students at the University of South Florida in Tampa, allowed fascists and Zionists to attack an encampment at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) with pepper spray and fireworks, and engaged in skirmishes with students across the country.

Yet as repression has escalated, so has resistance. The movement gained its initial momentum when students at Columbia immediately reestablished an encampment after police evicted the first one. Similar stories have played out from Texas to California and Illinois. When the Los Angeles Police Department joined fascists in attempting to evict the Gaza solidarity encampment at UCLA, protesters with helmets and shields held them at bay for eight hours.

Why are the police being so heavy-handed? Why are the media contorting themselves into increasingly bizarre contradictions to condemn the protests? Why are the Democrats and the Republicans united in opposing these protests? And how is it that, in their haste to crack down, university administrations, politicians, and police appear to have forgotten the basic principles of protest management?

Demonstrators face off with the police from behind a barricade on UCLA campus on May 1, 2024.

Where We Are

What follows is a brief attempt to address those questions, in hopes of getting oriented in the new terrain that is opening up before us.

The basic demand to see Palestinians as human beings is incompatible with the agendas of the United States government and universities.

The US needs Israel as a strategic partner to maintain a foothold in the Middle East; universities rely on funding from and research relationships with the military, arms manufacturers, and Zionists.¹ It is impossible to acknowledge that Palestinians are entitled to the universal human rights that form the basis of the US empire’s claim to moral legitimacy while continuing to supply the weaponry, funding, and diplomatic cover necessary for the Israeli military to continue killing civilians and destroying their homes. These protests reveal deep-seated contradictions between discourse and practice that the government, corporate media platforms, and universities are determined to conceal.

They know full well that they are complicit in genocide—yet, like any bully, they double down on their lies when confronted. There is simply no space in the US government or media to acknowledge opposition to Israeli settler-colonialism as a morally defensible position. This explains the unification of Democrats and Republicans in opposition to the protests as well as the intense repression that the authorities immediately meted out. It also explains the incredible rhetorical acrobatics on display from media outlets as they excuse police for beating large numbers of demonstrators—many of whom are Jewish—in the name of combatting anti-Semitism. This is especially egregious as mass graves are uncovered in Gaza, Israeli bombardments continue, and Netanyahu continues to promise a ground invasion of Rafah, even after slaughtering over 35,000 Palestinians, over two thirds of whom were women and children.

University administrations are caught in an impossible position.

From one side, despite their inherent institutional conservatism, the universities face an escalating frontal assault by right-wing politicians on both the state and federal levels, not to mention the threat of capital flight leveraged by billionaire donors. On the other side, the universities are experiencing a mass revolt from students and faculty mobilizing around the seemingly reasonable demand that they stop supporting the mass murder of children and the attempt to erase an entire people. The only way the administrations can imagine that they might survive the former is by cracking down on the latter as hard as possible.

They are forced to justify this in the name of free speech and safety, even as the police they bring in shoot live rounds at random inside campus buildings. Likewise, although many of the protest encampments represent the most successful voluntary collaboration between Muslim and Jewish students taking place anywhere in the world today, the administrations have claimed that it was necessary to destroy them in order to keep the peace.

Police carrying out a militarized raid of a Gaza solidarity encampment to “keep the peace” and protect student “safety.”

Accusations of anti-Semitism are cynical lies coming from administrators and politicians who have already showed that they could not care less about protecting students from actual white nationalists.

The same university administrators who used “free speech” as an excuse to vilify and arrest students for protesting against white nationalists speaking on campus are now attacking and brutalizing anti-Zionist Jewish and Palestinian protestors in the name of protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Free speech and student safety are both false pretenses: the truth is that university administrations and police will seek to destroy any force that actively challenges their power. This explains the previously unthinkable alliance between Republicans who refuse to disavow white nationalists in their own party, Democrats who champion genocide in the name of resisting anti-Semitism, and university administrators.

The Democrats are attacking these struggles because it is impossible to incorporate them into the left wing of the Democratic Party.

There is no way for Democrats to give the Israeli government carte blanche to carry out genocide while buying the votes of those who believe that the lives of Palestinians have inherent value. This makes for a situation that may be unique among all the mass struggles in recent history.

Centrist media outlets and Democratic politicians were prepared to countenance the George Floyd Uprising of 2020 in hopes of drawing activists back into the fold of policy negotiations. They thought that they could exploit those protests to build an electoral base against Trump during an election year.

This moment is different. It is impossible for the Democrats to budge at all now because both parties have hinged their political platforms on unequivocal support of the Israeli government, condemning any opposition as anti-Semitic. Democratic politicians have continued doubling down on that position even as it has become more and more preposterous. The fact that the Democrats now control the federal government prevents them from benefiting from outrage against what is effectively a bipartisan policy.

In that sense, there is a sort of symmetry here. While the (first?) Trump era ended with the George Floyd Uprising, cementing the ascendancy of direct action tactics at the culmination of four years of resistance to Trump, the Biden era appears to be ending with a conflagration of its own, signifying an irreparable break between the centrists and the autonomous movements they have long sought to co-opt.

The barricades around the Gaza solidarity encampment at UCLA.

We should read the violent repression and media slander as a sign of the rigidity and vulnerability of those in power.

They are defending a fundamentally untenable position with an apparently irrational amount of violence. Likewise, corporate media pundits are decrying us despite the fact that the demand to stop the genocide is more popular than either presidential candidate—according to one recent poll, 55% of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions, while only 36% approve. The fact that the movement has grown in numbers and ferocity despite so much repression is a sign of its vitality and strength.

This situation is somewhat reminiscent of the circumstances in which the movement for Black Lives originally got off the ground. A decade ago, when the revolt in Ferguson broke out in response to the murder of Michael Brown, it was difficult even to obtain information about how many people police killed every year; abolitionists were among the only people addressing the issue. As a consequence, the movement gained momentum as that question gained traction among the general public, because practically no one else was offering a persuasive account of what was occurring or why. Similarly, the fact that neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to acknowledge the truth about what is happening in Gaza, who opposes the genocide, and why they oppose it constitutes a tremendous vulnerability for them.

Politicians are terrified of the protests, but they are even more terrified by the prospect that the protests could continue past the end of the school year, spilling over the bounds of the campus and into a long, hot, summer.

It is the responsibility of anyone trying to stop this genocide to ensure that their nightmare becomes a reality. And it could: the George Floyd Uprising is still alive in the memories of the millions of people who participated.

The state wants to smash these protests before they expand. Anyone who truly aims to end the genocide in Gaza should want this political crisis to expand and deepen. In the long run, the only way to end the genocide in Gaza will be to the dismantle the American war machine and the corporate board rooms that drive it.

Potential Pitfalls

If the foregoing hypotheses are correct, then there are several pitfalls that participants in this movement should be careful to avoid.

Every occupation that disbands after winning minor concessions will only pave the way for genocide.

The original Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University began by rejecting empty promises:

The administration sent representatives to negotiate. In the first round, they offered a “non-binding, university-wide divestment referendum”—an unimpressive offer, since the university had refused to take any action after a similar referendum passed at Columbia College in 2020 with 61% of the vote.

The wave of encampments around the country was only possible because the students at Columbia refused to fall into that trap again.

Abandoning the encampments and the spirit of confrontation that has made them possible means closing the space of political possibility that we desperately need right now. It means shutting down the zone of potential encounters, where participants can experience the sort of political and tactical development that will be necessary to build a post-imperial, anti-colonial form of life.

At the same time, the only way that these occupations can actually stop the genocide will be by catalyzing a much larger social explosion and political crisis. The terrain at stake here is much larger than the university—and the participants in every occupation should operate with that in mind. Our objective should not be to obtain promises, or committees, or even divestment, per se; our goal should be to bring about Palestinian liberation as an aspect of total liberation. We should evaluate every tactic according to whether it can enable us to advance towards those goals, understanding that Palestinian liberation will only come about as the result of a full-scale political crisis in the United States.

Do not let “centering Palestine” serve as a rationale to become less disruptive.

The war machine killing Palestinians is an essential part of the war-making institutions of the US empire, which includes not only universities and weapons contractors, but the economy itself. All of these are interconnected with other governments and colonial projects around the world. Stopping the genocide of the Palestinians means challenging every aspect of the prevailing world order.

The voices of most of those who suffer as a consequence of that order are rarely heard within the walls of universities.

This is about you, too.

As the struggle against Cop City in Atlanta has made clear, the oppression of the Palestinian people represents a blueprint for a possible future for all of us. In fighting for a free Palestine, we are fighting for our own future, as well. Acknowledging this should strengthen our resolve to put an immediate stop to the genocide.

Palestinians have been steadfast in their solidarity with struggles in America, from Ferguson to the uprising of 2020 and beyond. Students at Columbia University articulated these connections when they began chanting “Stop Cop City” during the police raid on April 30. Cop City is everywhere, the roots of the genocide in Gaza are everywhere, resistance is everywhere.

Those concerned with their personal safety should not deny others the freedom to take risks that they are willing to accept.

There is no shame in being afraid for your safety. This is an increasingly frightening situation. The question is how we can build the collective capacity to take the risks—and endure the consequences—necessary to create a world without state terror. One of the minimum conditions for this undertaking is that we must not attempt to dictate to others what actions should be possible or acceptable.

If you are not prepared for the risks that you perceive to be associated with a particular tactic or strategy, do not attempt to prevent others from employing or pursuing it. Simply look for another role you could play or a complementary strategy you could pursue.

“What I mean by ‘daring’ is a readiness to walk into terrain which none of us explored before. What I mean by ‘caution’ is the perception that our ability to approach this terrain grows only to the extent that all those like us approach it with equal daring. We’re reaching for a field of possibilities that can be reached only if we move together as we’ve never moved before; we proceed with caution because those who move too far ahead will be caught without a lifeline to the rest. What I think is taking place around me is an advance consisting of small steps taken by all simultaneously. Each small step creates the conditions for taking the next. Any move that prevents the continued advance of all cuts off the possibility of further advance by any.”

-Fredy Perlman

This risk assessment matrix might assist you in making decisions about risk and consequence.

Moving Forward

Since the end of the Second World War, genocide has been understood as the clearest example of absolute evil. “Never again!” has been held up as a moral imperative. Although the United States has used this narrative cynically on numerous occasions to justify military intervention, it nonetheless expressed the laudable judgment of people of conscience everywhere.

The current conflict amounts to this: either the United States empire must be dismantled or the conscience of a whole generation will be destroyed.

In view of these stakes, the participants in every encampment and occupation—including the ones that have been forcibly evicted—should consider the following strategic questions.

What is the next step in escalation? How will you respond to a raid, an eviction, or slow death by committee? What is your plan if Israel begins a ground invasion of Rafah? Will you take a building, march downtown and impose economic consequences, blockade highways and ports, or something entirely new? If the encampments become impossible to defend, what is the next step that allows people to continue struggling together?

How do we keep growing after the semester ends? How can on-campus struggles benefit from non-student support? Can the power built on campuses overflow into the communities that surround them?

How do we shift antagonism away from university administrators, whom politicians are currently using as sacrificial shields, towards the adversaries whose defeat would actually impede the war machine? Divesting from war profiteers is a good first step; occupying factories and blockading ports would be a logical escalation. Who are the billionaires and vested money interests forcing the crackdown on campuses? Who has the most to lose from putting an end to unconditional US support for the Israeli military’s colonial violence?

How can we act now in ways that will prepare us to confront the likely return of Donald Trump to power in January 2025? We will need every tactical innovation, every new relationship, every network and form of infrastructure that we can build to confront the full force of right-wing fascism that looms in our future. We are in a moment when history cracks open and countless new possibilities and dangers emerge as the old order crumbles.

What comes next could be terrifying. But our part in the story is up to us.

While anti-Semitic fascists have sought to spread the narrative that Israel controls the United States, it is the other way around: Israel is the junior partner in the relationship, serving a purpose for the United States government, just as Christian nationalists in the US treat Israelis as pawns within their agenda. ↩

Steal Something from Work Day 2024 : It's Time to Even the Score!

2024-04-15T11:53:28Z

Once again, it’s April 15—Steal Something from Work Day! Every April, millions of workers around the world observe this day as a chance to settle accounts with those who are profiting off their labor. For us, it represents an opportunity to reflect on why so many people steal from their workplaces and what it would take to create a world in which that was unnecessary.

Feared by right-wing hacks like Glen Beck, Steal Something from Work Day is celebrated from Bulgaria to Greece, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. You can learn about Steal Something from Work Day on the official site, or listen to this podcast about it, or watch this charming video.

Or just, you know, participate.

A dishwasher uses a sink as a shield during clashes with police in Santiago, Chile on November 8, 2019. Let’s turn the roles that capitalism forces upon us into weapons against the system itself.

The United States Department of Commerce estimates that every year, “businesses lose $50 billion as a result of employee theft.” Let’s zoom in on that word, “lose.” They aren’t saying that $50 billion just disappears; it isn’t simply mislaid, nor willfully destroyed. They mean that $50 billion ends up in the pockets of the workers, rather than in the bank accounts of corporate executives. In other words, the problem is that the money ends up in the hands of the people who are doing the work that produces it.

Is this a problem, really? Even if you are an avowed proponent of capitalism, the market needs people spending money to function. Workers who are struggling just to pay their rent and put food on the table are going to put that money right back into the economy. Corporate executives would more likely sit on it, or use it to buy up more real estate, making it even harder for the rest of us to afford rent.

Of course, if you’re not invested in capitalism as a good in and of itself, if you value equality and human life above the “health” of the market, there are even stronger arguments as to why the workers should be the ones to go home with this money, not executives and investors.

Let’s be clear that when we talk about workplace theft, we’re not talking about a self-seeking criminal minority enriching itself at everyone’s expense. Apparently, three quarters of all employees have stolen from their employer at least once. Workplace theft is arguably the most widely practiced form of wealth redistribution. It might also be the most effective—though we can aspire to come up with even more effective models.

What if workers in the United States took home $50 billion less every year? The richest 1% of United States citizens now own more wealth than the entire middle class. The top 10% control more wealth than everyone else added together. The combined wealth of the billionaires in the United States has almost doubled over the past half decade, reaching $5.529 trillion—that’s all money that they have accumulated from other people’s labor.

This chart from 2017 tells a different story about who is committing the most theft in the workplace. Even according to the laws that are currently on the books, which overwhelmingly favor employers over employees, it is employers who commit the majority of theft in this society, both in the workplace and outside of it.

Now imagine taking another $50 billion away from workers in the United States every year. Imagine plunging families further into poverty, making it even harder to afford groceries, rent, utilities bills, car insurance, tuition. In fact, employers aim to do precisely that—that’s why they are investing in surveillance technology, security guards, and new inventory systems rather than paying the people whose labor enriches them. If there is a self-seeking villainous minority out there, it is not those who steal from their employers, but the capitalists who want to hoard even more of the wealth of our society in their hands.

This is why a growing anti-work movement has begun to question the foundational premises of capitalism and exchange economics. Labor unrest is ramping up, but the majority of workers in North America lack labor organizations that are capable of asserting their interests with the firmness that they deserve. It’s time to reimagine what the tactics of a previous era, such as the general strike, could look like today in our current conditions. At the same time, we can look at the activities that the vast majority of workers already engage in—including workplace theft and other informal or clandestine forms of resistance—as points of departure for new strategies.

In the following narratives, two authors from different parts of the Midwest recount their experiments with stealing from their employers—one individual, one collective.

(Yes, the header photograph at the top of this page is a real stock photograph about workplace theft. The horror!)

From 1830 to today, we must weaponize the ordinary conditions of our daily lives if we are to defend ourselves against our oppressors.

Attack the Gas Station

During the last few months of my senior year of high school, when I stopped attending class, a friend got me a job at a gas station convenience store after my car went on strike and refused to deliver any more pizzas. The morning after graduation day, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a couple of friends.

A two-bedroom apartment with a couple of friends. In other words, I was staying on the couch in the living room.

At the time, I cared about very little besides hanging out with my friends, riding bikes, reading fantasy novels, and drinking beer. I needed money to pay my rent, pay for food and beer, pay for gas and car insurance, and so on, but it was possible to squeeze by with a terrible minimum wage job.

The gas station was owned by a typical franchise owner. He was mostly hands off, except when he was hands on. We all worked five ten-hour shifts by ourselves every week. Working alone meant that we had to take bathroom breaks as fast as possible, between customers. At that time, it was possible to pump gas without paying for it, so we had to hope that someone didn’t pull up and pump gas while we were in the bathroom. It wasn’t as if I cared if someone stole gas, but gas was one of the few items that was actually tracked by the inventory system, and we would catch hell if the gas numbers were off.

The upside to this situation was that tons of other merchandise was not tracked in the inventory, and the CCTV surveillance system didn’t work. I’ve worked dozens of jobs in my life, and I don’t think a single job I’ve ever worked has succeeded in preventing me from stealing something from them while I was on the clock. But this job failed to prevent me from stealing a whole lot of shit while I was on the clock.

For most of each of my ten-hour shifts, I had nothing to do. There is only so much time you can spend stocking and straightening the shelves, making pots of foul coffee, and staring out the window at gas pumps. I started eating and drinking the stock solely in order to pass the time. Pretty soon, every shift, I was drinking several bottles of juice and eating countless snack cakes, bags of chips, packs of cookies, candy bars, and terrible deli sandwiches.

Then I started taking food and beer home to share with my roommates. It wasn’t like there was good food available at a Midwest gas station, but we were in a thieves-can’t-be-choosers kind of situation. While one of my roommates had a regular manual labor job, the other had no job at all; he was surviving off of small-scale weed dealing and the kindness and generosity of his roommates. At the end of pretty much every shift, I would load up my car with a grocery bag or two of food and a couple boxes of beer. I tried to take a variety of stuff in the course of each week in order to make it less obvious what was being stolen, but ultimately, I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was.

All of my underage friends and acquaintances started coming in, hoping to get beer without being carded. I saw another opportunity here. Beer was another item that wasn’t easily tracked by the primitive inventory system, so it was easy to avoid ringing the beer up in the register and just let people hand me cash for the beer at a steep discount. After I realized this, I put it together that pretty much any item that was likely to be paid for in exact change (like a 50 cent newspaper) didn’t need to be entered in the cash register. I would wait to ring them up until I could see whether the customer had exact change. Soon, I was taking home between $50 and $100 at the end of every shift, at a time when I paid $125 a month for rent.

One day, the friend and co-worker who had gotten me the job told me that the manager had asked him if he knew whether I was stealing from them. Apparently, they didn’t realize that he was my close friend. He told them that he was positive that I would never do such a thing, and they left it alone. Looking back, I’m sure that the vague inventory numbers must have looked incredibly suspicious, but they had no way to confirm what was happening.

Eventually, I wound up quitting that job to take another job that was less horrible in some ways but nowhere near as lucrative—aside from the free late-night access to the office photocopier. A couple weeks later, that gas station went out of business. I was sure that my efforts had something to do with it. If a full accounting were to be done, the owner of that place probably stole more hours of my life than I stole from him, but I did my best to even the score.

In the years since then, my politics have become more sophisticated, and so have my ways of striking back at the employing class. You could say I’ve become more ambitious. But just as every prisoner is a political prisoner, every cashier in every gas station is a fighter in the class war. People steal from work because it is demeaning, because their workplaces don’t engage their creativity, because they want to share things with others, because it’s bullshit to have to waste time just to turn a profit for a boss.

And lots of people steal from work because they need to. If more advanced inventory systems have made it more difficult for cashiers to steal from their employers, that only means that life is even harder for workers and those who depend on them. Better anti-theft technology is one of the factors that are contributing to escalating inequality, as capitalists concentrate more and more wealth in their hands relative to the rest of us. Stealing from our employers is the very least we ought to do in this situation. Attack every gas station.

The Team

I live in a second-tier Midwestern rust belt city with a deep legacy of poverty and segregation. Historically, there has been a lot of lawlessness and social rebellion here. This city is busted, broke, and broken.

Despite the challenges, we built a network of anarchists here, an informal community cultivating an ethos of rebellion. A gang of aspirational dreamers, scrappy squatters, and profound thinkers who took the question of how to create and push social struggles seriously. One advantage of this city is that it is possible to live very cheaply here, compared to other parts of the country. This afforded us the chance to experiment with different forms of daily life.

At the time this story took place, most of us were service industry workers: cooks, servers, bakers, bartenders, cab drivers, baristas, home care workers, grocery store clerks, things like that. We often found ourselves on the lower rungs of the job ladder. We would work the tedious and unpleasant jobs that offered us some degree of flexibility and the freedom to live our weird lives.

We set out to make the road by walking. We believed that we could build with those around us, drawing on our shared interests and common anguish to create the conditions for rebellion on a broader scale. Many of us shoplifted and stole from our workplaces. Someone in our community had the idea to try to make these secret individual acts into a point of connection.

I don’t remember exactly how it first started. A photocopied flier titled “The Team is Real” circulated, presenting a proposal. A small button accompanied each flier, like the buttons you get at punk shows. Someone in the punk scene had a button maker and was putting it to use.

The flier set out the proposal:

Step one: Wear the button when you’re at work. Hook people up (discounts, freebies, extras, etc.).

Step two: Wear the button when you go out. Get hooked up. Remember to ask your teammates where they work.

Step three: Build the team. Talk to your friends and trusted co-workers. The more people on the team, the better.

You can read the whole manifesto here.

The proposal was basically to make a union of thieves that could expand beyond the limits of camaraderie, political alliance, and friendship, as a way to widen our connections with others based on our mutual material conditions and needs. It was a very simple system. If you don’t have access to the kind of button maker we used, you could use other types of pins, patches, shirts, hats—any type of common identifier. Of course, you have to be careful that word does not get out to anyone who can’t be trusted.

The idea spread through our subcultural community and across the lines that separated us from other scenes. It reached our peers and co-workers.

At the high point of our experiment, I could go out and visit a variety of establishments without ever spending money. I could get sandwiches, coffee, ice cream and gelato, and sometimes groceries from one of the fancy local grocery stores. Sometimes the people hooking me up were people I didn’t even know.

That was good. But the flier described bigger ambitions:

In our fantastical visions of the near future, we see ourselves reclining on patio furniture while savoring lattes, stocking our larders with the finest of produce from local markets. We are enveloped in sensations of pleasure foreign to our proletarian tongues as we drink freely of the bourgeoisie’s wine. When we travel, we are greeted by friends and strangers with gifts of bounty and luxury. And when guests are received by us in turn, we show them a night on the town like no other. A cornucopia of goods, freely taken and given, all at the expense of those who would exploit our lives, all in the spirit of the negation of capitalist relations.

Our experiment could have gone further. It didn’t end up reaching far enough or lasting long enough to make a really deep impact on the tangible conditions of our daily lives. It did generate some conversations among coworkers, and that fostered a spirit of solidarity, or least insubordination. But materially, it was limited by what each of us was able to get away with in the workplace; we only had access to small quantities of what was available to us in our immediate environments. The real stockpiles of wealth are stored far from the outlets of the service economy.

I think this model could be more effective in a geographically smaller place—for example, a college town where there is a central concentration of cafés and stores. It also could be interesting to try it out in a place that is experiencing active rebellion, or in a time of widespread unrest like during the George Floyd uprising. In a situation like that, it could be way to extend the energy in the streets into other forms of experimental resistance. When we’ve experienced rebellions like that here, we’ve often wondered how we could expand and extend them into ongoing social and class war. The “great resignation” that followed the COVID-19 pandemic saw anti-work sentiment reach new heights; some people interpreted that as a continuation of the uprising. Maybe something like “the team” could have opened up a new front then.

We are all fundamentally exploited in our daily experiences as workers under capitalism. We need new ways to experiment and spread class struggle outside of formal structures like unions, which aren’t available to some of us. Any gift shared freely heartens and encourages us, but if it is stolen back, it’s all the sweeter. Everything for everyone!

“The routine of robbing banks is no replacement for the carnival of storming them en masse. Something that holds true for many “survival” acts: better to loot than shoplift, to ambush than to snipe, to walk out than to phone in a bomb threat, to strike than to call in sick, to riot than to vandalize… Increasingly collective and coordinated acts against this world of coercion and isolation aren’t solely a matter of effectivity, but equally a matter of sociality—of community and fun.”

-War on Misery #3, summer 2008

2023 in Chile: 50 Years of the Military Coup : Neoliberal Consolidation after the Revolt of 2019

2024-03-07T20:10:36Z

In 2019, an uprising broke out in Chile, wresting control of the streets from police and politicians. Eventually, the authorities managed to redirect this momentum into an effort to replace the constitution, itself a relic of the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The attempt to ratify a constitution more aligned with the values of the demonstrators failed, however, illustrating the risks of channeling grassroots movements into seeking change through institutional means.

As a result, a resurgent right wing has regained the initiative in Chile, while the left politicians who came to power have subordinated themselves to the market and the police. To this day, Chile is governed according to the constitution that was introduced as a consequence of the military coup. In the following account, members of the Anarchist Assembly of Biobío trace this story through the end of the year 2023, chronicling the consequences of the cooptation of the uprising of 2019.

Perhaps the moral of this story is that, rather than simply attempting to reform the ruling institutions, the participants in movements for liberation must understand themselves as the ones who must directly implement the changes they desire.

You can listen to an interview with two members of the Anarchist Assembly of Biobío in the last episode of our Radio Evasión podcast series about the Chilean uprising of 2019. We note that former Chilean president Sebastián Piñera died in a helicopter accident after the events reviewed below—a case of poetic justice if ever there were one.

The river Biobío.

2023 in Chile

In 2023, Chile observed the fifty-year anniversary of the military coup that changed the history of the country in September 1973, establishing a neoliberal laboratory which has served as a model that is still expanding in various corners of the planet. After half a century, the wounds of the past have not yet healed, as the impunity of many human rights violators continues, the Constitution that was drafted during the dictatorship is still in force, and, consequently, there is no official condemnation of the apologies for state terrorism.

In the years preceding the commemoration, the political climate was shaped by the process that opened in 2019 with the popular revolt that shook the country for several weeks—a powerful rejection of the decades of precarization that the neoliberal experiment imposed on the lives of ordinary people. Disenchantment with a political class that has been dedicated to deepening this model since the end of the dictatorship and the return of democracy in 1990 turned into anger that flooded the streets with street violence and clashes with the police and military as never seen before. At the same time, spontaneous assemblies emerged in neighborhoods and communities, discussing the possibilities and experiencing politics and social organization in ways that democracy had never offered.

Almost a month after the demonstrations began, the entire political class closed ranks against the insurrection and the political parties signed the Acuerdo por la Paz [“Peace Accord”], which included the participation of the new institutional left represented by Gabriel Boric—a showcase that enabled him to raise his media profile, to make a pact with the elite, and eventually, to be elected president. The Acuerdo committed the state to a process of coming up with a new constitution, which was trumpeted by the political class but simply served to rebuild popular trust in the elite, in the state, and in their institutions, which had been discredited since the beginning of the revolt. At the same time, the population once again suffered massive human rights violations at the hands of the police and military, which inflicted 31 deaths and 11,000 injuries, including eye trauma to 460 people as a result of being attacked by uniformed personnel.

A feminist demonstration in Chile on November 2, 2019, after the first cases during the uprising in which carabineros intentionally inflicted damage on demonstrators’ eyes.

The institutionalization of popular struggles as a consequence of the Peace Accord exacerbated the natural attrition resulting from weeks of street protests and the isolation and containment measures taken against the most radical participants in the revolt. This lowered the temperature of the streets, so that the movement was ultimately buried during the COVID-19 pandemic via state-imposed mobility restrictions.

With the military back in control of the streets, the focus of attention shifted back to traditional politics and the elite skillfully channeled the energy of the revolt into the process of drafting a new Constitution as a way out of the crisis. This has made for a turbulent cycle that has involved constitutional plebiscites, electoral campaigns, and presidential elections in less than three years, with two consequences. On the one hand, it has given new life to the political institutions that the revolt called into question. On the other hand, it has generated a deep exhaustion and even boredom with politics and social struggles among the general population.

The latter is the consequence of the past three years. In the constitutional plebiscite of October 2020, a majority of 78% voted in favor of drafting a new Constitution. The drafting of a new Constitution was entrusted to a series of constitutional conventions, comprised of representatives elected in May 2021, most of whom were independent of political parties and more or less aligned with the demands expressed in the street. This convention went to work during a presidential campaign in which the left was in favor of the work of the convention and the right was against it. Gabriel Boric won the presidential elections of November 2021. Yet despite campaigning under the banners of revolt and against the traditional political class, it only took a few months in power for him to show his true face, governing alongside the neoliberal parties and continuing the neoliberal model.

Sebastián Piñera addressing Chile in 2019, flanked by military officers. From 1973 to today, both the force of the military and the stratagems of democracy have played a role in imposing neoliberal capitalism on the population.

At the same time, the constitutional convention’s work was hampered by media scandals revolving around some of the drafters. The right wing took full advantage of this with a smear campaign, alongside other misreporting and false information, all aimed at infecting the public opinion with fear of the changes proposed by the constitutional convention. Given that lay of the land, the plebiscite vote to decide whether to approve the new constitution was made obligatory for all eligible Chilean voters. This completely changed the scenario and the projected electoral outcomes, resulting in a surprising and overwhelming rejection of the drafted constitution in September 2022.

Nevertheless, the process had to continue in order to respect the results of the first plebiscite, which had demanded that Chile must have a new Constitution. That meant that it was necessary to elect a second constitutional convention, but this time in a political climate of resignation and popular exhaustion, manifested by less excitement for independent candidacies among the drafters. This diminished enthusiasm for new political voices enabled the political class to safeguard the participation of traditional parties by fixing certain seats in the constitutional convention for members of congress—previously excluded by voters from the first constitutional convention—to join the drafting process. Consequently, the pro-Pinochet right wing won the elections of May 2023 by a wide margin and began drafting the new constitutional proposal in a situation in which most the population was completely disaffected with the process.

September 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the military coup, in an atmosphere of polarization fostered by the press and, at the same time, widespread popular indifference to the subject as a result of exhaustion with politics in general. In spite of everything, there are still organized groups among the people who held commemorations of the 50th anniversary throughout the country, in a political scenario that still does not close the wounds of the past and in which the worst legacy of the dictatorship—neoliberalism—is still in force.

In this environment, the right wing tried to introduce a kind of historical revisionism to whitewash the dictatorship, exemplified by false equivalence that former President Sebastián Piñera made between the military coup of 1973 and the revolt of 2019 on the grounds that they were both moments of democratic breakdown. This explains the reaction of the political class after the revolt and the effort to prevent future revolts by strengthening repressive laws that give more powers to the police. One of these laws is the so-called Easy Trigger Law, which was approved in April and establishes “privileged self-defense”—that is, if a police or military officer uses his service weapon, it will be presumed that it has been “correctly used” when acting in self-defense.

This law was followed by the Anti-Tomas Law, which facilitates the evictions of occupied properties and land. It affects thousands of people who must resort to occupying land in order to live, in addition to accentuating the conflict between the state and the Mapuche people seeking to reclaim ancestral lands that have been usurped by landowners and forestry companies. On November 27, three days after the enactment of the Anti-Tomas Law, the Mapuche community Aylla Varela became the first to be evicted after occupying a farm in the commune of Collipulli as part of their claim to these lands.

“Solidarity with the Mapuche people.” A poster from the Anarchist Assembly of Biobío.

On the level of symbolism, the new “progressive” government’s support for the forces of repression was already made clear for all to see when Boric took office and kept on Ricardo Yáñez, who had headed the police responsible for repressing the revolt. Once elected, Boric also shifted his rhetoric: in his electoral campaign, he had harshly targeted former President Piñera, blaming him for his responsibility in the repression during the revolt, but as the months went by, he described him as a “democrat.”

The model of neoliberal governance has been updated to become more sophisticated in the field of repression; but this is also accompanied by a modernizing of neoliberal extractivism. Under the new government, extractivism has taken on an apparently more environmentalist aspect, but in reality, the capitalist plundering of the country continues, with new forestry projects, lithium extraction, and green hydrogen plants.

The year 2023 concluded with the plebiscite of December 17, in which voters rejected the proposal from the second constitutional convention, the one with a right-wing majority—a proposal at least as bad as the Constitution that has been in force since the dictatorship. This is how the constituent process that the political class had opened in response to the revolt has closed—leaving the impression that here, in the cradle of neoliberalism, everything changed so that everything might remain the same.

Anarchist Assembly of Biobío, Chilean region.
January 2024.

“This Is What Our Ruling Class Has Decided Will Be Normal” : On Aaron Bushnell’s Action in Solidarity with Gaza

2024-02-26T09:05:40Z

On Sunday, February 25, we received an email from a person who signed himself¹ Aaron Bushnell.

It read,

Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people. The below links should take you to a livestream and recorded footage of the event, which will be highly disturbing. I ask that you make sure that the footage is preserved and reported on.

We consulted the Twitch account. The username displayed was “LillyAnarKitty,” and the user icon was a circle A, the universal signifier for anarchism—the movement against all forms of domination and oppression.

In the video, Aaron begins by introducing himself. “My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the US Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest—but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

The video shows Aaron continuing to film as he walks to the gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, puts down the phone, douses himself in a flammable liquid, and sets himself alight, shouting “Free Palestine” several times. After he collapses, police officers who had been watching the situation unfold run into the frame—one with a fire extinguisher, another² with a gun. The officer continues pointing the gun at Aaron for over thirty seconds as Aaron lies on the ground, burning.

Afterwards, police announced that they had called in their Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit, though there were no explosives on site.

We have since confirmed the identity of Aaron Bushnell. He served in the United States Air Force for almost four years. One of his loved ones described Aaron to us as “a force of joy in our community.” An online post described him as “an amazingly gentle, kind, compassionate person who spends every minute and penny he has helping others. He is silly, makes anyone laugh, and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He is a principled anarchist who lives out his values in everything he does.”

Aaron’s friends tell us that he has passed away as a consequence of his injuries.

All afternoon, while other journalists were breaking the news, we discussed how we should speak about this. Some subjects are too complex to address in a hasty social media post.

The scale of the tragedy that is taking place in Gaza is heartrending. It exceeds anything we can understand from the vantage point of the United States. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 12,000 children. More than half of all inhabitable buildings in all of Gaza have been destroyed, along with the majority of hospitals. The vast majority of the population are living as refugees with little access to water, food, or shelter.

The Israeli military is now planning a ground invasion of Rafah that will add untold numbers of casualties to this toll. It is not hyperbole to say that we are witnessing the deliberate commission of genocide. All available evidence indicates that the Israeli military will continue killing Palestinians by the thousand until they are forced to stop. And the longer this bloodshed goes on, the more people will die in the future, as other governments and groups imitate the precedent set by the Israeli government.

The United States government bears equal responsibility in this tragedy, having armed and financed Israel and provided it with impunity in the sphere of international relations. Within Israel, the authorities have effectively suppressed protest movements in solidarity with Gaza. If protests are going to exert leverage towards stopping the genocide, it is up to people in the United States to figure out how to accomplish that.

But what will it take? Thousands across the country have engaged in brave acts of protest without yet succeeding in putting a halt to Israel’s assault.

Aaron Bushnell was one of those who empathized with the Palestinians suffering and dying in Gaza, one of those haunted by the question of what our responsibilities are when we are confronted with such a tragedy. In this regard, he was exemplary. We honor his desire not to stand by passively in the face of atrocity.

The death of a person in the United States should not be considered any more tragic—or more newsworthy—than the death of a single Palestinian. Still, there is more to say about his decision.

Aaron was the second person to self-immolate at an Israeli diplomatic institution in the United States. Another demonstrator did the same thing at the Israeli consulate in Atlanta on December 1, 2023. It is not easy for us to know how to speak about their deaths.

Some journalists see themselves as engaged in the neutral activity of spreading information as an end in itself—as if the process of selecting what to spread and how to frame it could ever be neutral. For our part, when we speak, we presume that we are speaking to people of action, people like ourselves who are aware of their agency and are in the process of deciding what to do, people who may be wrestling with heartache and despair.

Human beings influence each other both through rational argument and through the infectiousness of action. As Peter Kropotkin put it, “Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.”

Just as we have a responsibility not to show cowardice, we also have a responsibility not to promote sacrifice casually. We must not speak carelessly about taking risks, even risks that we have taken ourselves. It is one thing to expose oneself to risk; it is another thing to invite others to run risks, not knowing what the consequences might be for them.

And here, we are not speaking about a risk, but about the worst of all certainties.

Let’s not glamorize the decision to end one’s life, nor celebrate anything with such permanent repercussions. Rather than exalting Aaron as a martyr and encouraging others to emulate him, we honor his memory, but we exhort you to take a different path.

“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

These words of Aaron’s haunt us.

He is right. We are rapidly entering an era in which human life is treated as worthless. This is obvious in Gaza, but we can see it elsewhere around the world, as well. With wars proliferating around the Mideast and North Africa, we are poised on the threshold of a new age of genocides. Even inside the United States, mass casualty incidents have become routine, while an entire segment of the underclass is consigned to addiction, homelessness, and death.

As a tactic, self-immolation expresses a logic similar to the premise of the hunger strike. The protester treats himself or herself as a hostage, attempting to use his or her willingness to die to pressure the authorities. This strategy presumes that the authorities are concerned with the protester’s well-being in the first place. Today, however, as we wrote in regards to the hunger strike of Alfredo Cospito,

No one should have any illusions about how governments view the sanctity of life in the age of COVID-19, when the United States government can countenance the deaths of a million people without blushing while the Russian government explicitly employs convicts as cannon fodder. The newly-elected fascist politicians who govern Italy have no scruples about consigning whole populations to death, let alone permitting a single anarchist to die.

In this case, Aaron was not an imprisoned anarchist, but an active-duty member of the US military. His linkedin profile specifies that he graduated from basic training “top of flight and top of class.” Will this make any difference to the US government?

If nothing else, Aaron’s action shows that genocide cannot take place overseas without collateral damage on this side of the ocean. Unfortunately, the authorities have never been especially moved by the deaths of US military personnel. Countless US veterans have struggled with addiction and homelessness since returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans commit suicide at a much higher rate than all other adults. The US military continues to use weapons that expose US troops to permanent brain injuries.

Members of the military are taught to understand their willingness to die as the chief resource they have to put at the service of the things they believe in. In many cases, this way of thinking is passed down intergenerationally. At the same time, the ruling class takes the deaths of soldiers in stride. This is what they have decided will be normal.

It is not willingness to die that will sway our rulers. They really fear our lives, not our deaths—they fear our willingness to act collectively according to a different logic, actively interrupting their order.

Many things that are worth doing entail risks, but choosing to intentionally end your life means foreclosing years or decades of possibility, denying the rest of us a future with you. If such a decision is ever appropriate, it is only when every other possible course of action has been exhausted.

Uncertainty is one of the most difficult things for human beings to bear. There is a tendency to seek to resolve it as quickly as possible, even by imposing the worst-case scenario in advance—even if that means choosing death. There is a sort of relief in knowing how things will turn out. Too often, despair and self-sacrifice mingle and blur together, offering an all-too-simple escape from tragedies that appear unsolvable.

If your heart is broken by the horrors in Gaza and you are prepared to bear significant consequences to try to stop them, we urge you to do everything in your power to find comrades and make plans collectively. Lay the foundations for a full life of resistance to colonialism and all forms of oppression. Prepare to take risks as your conscience demands, but don’t hurry towards self-destruction. We desperately need you alive, at our side, for all that is to come.

As we wrote in 2011 in reference to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi,

Nothing is more terrifying than departing from what we know. It may take more courage to do this without killing oneself than it does to light oneself on fire. Such courage is easier to find in company; there is so much we can do together that we cannot do as individuals. If he had been able to participate in a powerful social movement, perhaps Bouazizi would never have committed suicide; but paradoxically, for such a thing to be possible, each of us has to take a step analogous to the one he took into the void.

Let’s admit that the kind of protest activity that has taken place thus far in the United States has not served to compel the US government to compel a halt to the genocide in Gaza. It is an open question what could accomplish that. Aaron’s action challenges us to answer this question—and to answer it differently than he did.

We mourn his passing.

If you or your family members are currently serving in the US military, please contact the GI Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487.

In the email, Aaron specified his pronouns as he/him. ↩
It has subsequently been reported that the officer with the gun is a security officer associated with the embassy. We haven’t been able to independently confirm this. ↩

Human Rights Discourse Has Failed to Stop the Genocide in Gaza : An Anarchist from Jaffa on the Necessity of Anti-Colonial Strategies for Liberation

2024-02-13T03:34:42Z

Four months into the assault on Gaza, the Israeli military has forced over a million refugees to the edge of the Egyptian border and is now bombing them while threatening to mount a ground assault against them. In the following text, Jonathan Pollak, a longtime participant in Anarchists Against the Wall and other anti-colonial solidarity efforts, explains why we should not look to international institutions or protest movements within Israeli society to put a stop to the genocide in Gaza and calls on ordinary people to take action.

A shorter version of this text was rejected by the liberal Israeli platform Haaretz—an indication of the diminishing space for dissent in Palestine and within Israeli society.

Human Rights Discourse Has Failed to Stop the Genocide in Gaza

We are now more than 120 days into the unprecedented Israeli assault on Gaza. Its horrific repercussions and our inability to bring it to an end should compel us to reevaluate our perspective on power, our understanding of it, and, most significantly, what we have to do to fight it.

Amid the spilled blood, the endless days of death and destruction, excruciating dearth, starvation, thirst, and despair, the ceaseless nights of fire and brimstone and white phosphors raining indiscriminately from the sky, we must grapple with the bare ugly facts of reality and reshape our strategies.

The officially reported fatalities—in addition to the many Palestinians who remain buried under the rubble and aren’t yet included in the official count—already amount to the annihilation of nearly 1.5% of all human life in the Gaza Strip. As Israel escalates its attacks on Rafah, it seems that there is no end in sight. Soon, the lives of one in every fifty people in Gaza will have been extinguished.

The consequences of Israeli airstrikes on Rafah this week.

The Israeli military is inflicting an unprecedented toll of suffering and death on the 2.3 million people of Gaza, surpassing anything ever witnessed in Palestine—or elsewhere during the 21st century. Yet these staggering figures have not penetrated the thick layers of dissociation and disconnect that characterize Israeli society as well as Israel’s Western allies. If anything, the reduction of this tragedy to statistics seems to hinder rather than enhance our understanding. It presents a whole that obscures the specifics: the figures conceal the personhood of the countless individuals who have died painful, particular deaths.

At the same time, the unfathomable scale of the massacre in Gaza makes it impossible to comprehend through the stories of individual victims. Journalists, street cleaners, poets, homemakers, construction workers, mothers, doctors, and children, a multitude too vast to be narrated. We are left with faceless anonymous figures. Among them are more than 12,000 children. Probably a lot more.

Please pause and say this aloud, word by word: over twelve thousand children. Killed. Is there a way for us to take this in and move beyond the realm of statistics to grasp the horrific reality?

The cold blunt numbers also veil hundreds of obliterated families, many of them completely erased—sometimes three, even four generations, wiped off the face of the earth.

Overshadowed by these figures are more than 67,000 people who have been injured, thousands of whom will remain paralyzed for the rest of their lives. The medical system in Gaza has been almost completely destroyed; life-saving amputations are being carried out without anesthetics. The extent to which infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed surpasses the Dresden bombings at the end of the Second World War. Nearly two million people—roughly 85% of the population of the Gaza Strip—have been displaced, their lives shattered by Israeli bombings as they shelter in the dangerously overcrowded south of the Strip, which the Israeli government falsely pronounced “safe,” yet continues to pummel with hundreds of 2000-pound bombs. The hunger in Gaza, which was created by Israeli state policy even before the war, is so severe that it amounts to famine. In their despair, people have resorted to eating fodder, but now even that is running out.

About a month ago, an acquaintance of mine who fled to Rafah from Gaza City after his home there was bombed told me that he and his family had already been forced to move from one temporary refuge to another six different times in their attempts to escape from the bombs. In despair, he said, “There is no food, no water, nowhere to sleep. We are constantly thirsty, hungry, and wet. I’ve already had to dig my children out from under the rubble twice—once in Gaza and once here in Rafah.”

In December 2023, the Israeli military designated Al-Mawasi as one of the only “safe zones” in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled there, finding only a strip of barren land without food, water, or sanitation. Now the Israeli military is attacking the so-called “safe zones,” too. This photograph shows the refugee camp on February 9, 2024.

These rivers of blood must breach the walls of our apathy. If only time could stop long enough for all of us to process our grief. But it will not. It continues passing as more bombs fall on Gaza.

Decades of injustice have paved the way for this. Some 75 years have passed since the Nakba—75 years of Israel’s settler-colonialism—yet its defenders continue to deny the facts. Even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asserted that there is indeed cause to fear that genocide is being committed in Gaza, the US and many of Israel’s other Western allies have effectively remained silent.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the court’s mere willingness to discuss the case “a disgrace that will not be erased for generations.” Indeed, the ruling is a disgrace. Despite everything being laid bare in plain sight, the court did not order Israel to cease fire. This is a disgrace to the court itself and to the very idea that international law is supposed to protect the lives and rights of those being crushed by the military force of nations.

It will undoubtedly be said that the law, by nature, is meticulous and that it considers the forest not as a whole but as individual trees. To that, we must answer that reality, facts, common sense must be above the law, not beneath it. Israel dedicates considerable resources to a legalism of the battlefield, intended to give cover to its murderous acts. This approach involves carving reality into thin slices of independently legally-approved observations and actions. A military target was present in high-rise X, justifying the deaths of over two dozen uninvolved civilians; apartment tower Y was the home of a Hamas-employed firefighter, legitimizing, according to the principle of proportionality, the decision to wipe out three neighboring families. But this practice cannot turn genocidal water into legitimate wine. This is legal gaslighting that shreds reality to pieces in order to conceal a pattern of indiscriminate mass murder.

If the slaughter of 1.5% of the population in four months is not genocide; if Israel’s acts are not deemed grievous enough for the court to order it to immediately stop the killing, not even in light of open incitement to exterminate Palestinians by prominent Israeli politicians and members of the press, not to mention Israel’s president and Prime Minister; when lack of punishment for such incitements and such acts is accepted rather than branded as genocide in the simplest of terms—then the words we use to describe reality have lost all meaning and we are in dire need of new language beyond the confines of legalese.

Leaving the butcher’s knife in the butcher’s hand—leaving Israel unhindered, unimpeded—means letting the slaughter in Gaza continue. This is the absolute ongoing failure of international law and the institutions entrusted with keeping it.

This failure passes on the responsibility of forcing an end to the ongoing catastrophe, so that it falls on the shoulders of civil society. This ought to compel us to move beyond the empty liberal paradigms of human rights, which have replaced liberation as the dominant discourse in leftist politics.

The consequences of an Israeli attack on al-Zawaida refugee camp on February 7, 2023.

The Path Forward

The human rights discourse that has hijacked the political left in recent decades has drawn us away from a framework of liberation and effective action. It is now clear that we must track back from liberal thinking in order to reestablish strategies that disarm and deconstruct power. The moral complicity with Israel’s crimes that is represented by the ICJ’s refusal to order an immediate cease fire forces us to do this. It offers a convincing argument that we all need to break with the current failed system.

On the other hand, reality will not wait for us to figure things out. We cannot simply take our time and wait to take action until we have developed and popularized new narratives and conceptual frameworks. We have to use whatever means are available to us to act right now.

Does the ICJ offer us any tools we can use? the ICJ is considered the highest instance of international law. Although it has no independent enforcement mechanisms aside from the United Nations Security Council, its rulings and case law are considered the bedrock of international law jurisprudence, and they are often incorporated into the rulings of national courts on these matters. Despite having ordered very few measures against Israel or the ongoing genocide being carried out, the court did determine that there is considerable cause to believe that genocide is taking place.

Because the court did not take any real measures against Israel, it should be evident that the responsibility to act falls upon us and our movements. Fortunately, the ruling might also give us some tools to use in the here and now while we are developing new frameworks of liberation. One such example is a recent lawsuit at a California federal court aimed at ordering the US administration to halt military support to Israel. The case was dismissed on the grounds that US foreign policy is outside the court’s jurisdiction, but it did determine that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza on the basis of the ICJ ruling.

The legal case that governments must refrain from complicity in genocide is not unsubstantiated in US law, as well as in many other countries. A Dutch court recently ordered the government of the Netherlands to halt the delivery of parts for F-35 fighter jets that Israel is using to bombard the Gaza Strip. It might be plausible now to force more governments to impose arms embargos, sanctions, or other measures through national courts.

However, such strategies still reduce us to relying on so-called experts; they will not help us build movements. The genocide will not be stopped from within Israeli society. Pressure to do so must come from outside. It is now time for direct action and bottom-up efforts, like community-driven boycotts on Israeli goods, vendors who trade in them, Israeli cultural and propaganda exports, and anything else that feeds into the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. The blockading of the port of Tacoma or the actions of dock workers around the world who refuse to load Israeli ships and cargo and transport arms to Israel are examples of how we might be able to move forward, building towards a proactive grassroots movement.

Demonstrators blockading a factory that makes parts for the F-35s that the Israeli military has been using in its assault on Gaza.

We must do everything within our power to stop the genocide that is taking place now, but it is important that we approach doing so as a step towards promoting Palestinian liberation and the dismantling of Israeli settler-colonialism. The portrayal of Palestinians as little more than victims at the mercy of Israeli repression is sometimes well intentioned, but it erases their personhood and agency. While we strive to bring Israel’s war machine to a halt, we must articulate that this is part of the struggle to end Israeli colonialism, and center Palestinians as the protagonists of that story.

The Roots of the Problem

Since before the establishment of the Israeli state, Israel has been a racist, colonialist society, premised on the notion that Israelis are fundamentally superior to Palestinians. This is the mainstream of Israeli political thought on both its right and so-called left wings. This is the thinking that motivated the mass dispossession of Palestinians that preceded the formation of the state, the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba in 1948, and various forms of apartheid and military rule ever since. In fact, there has only been one year in the history of Israel—1966—in which it did not impose a regime of military dictatorship over at least some of its Palestinian population.

Since long before the current assault on Gaza, the day-to-day reality of Palestinian existence under Israeli rule has been a continuous, ongoing terror in the midst of violence and uncertainty. Being Palestinian means passing through a checkpoint not knowing if you’ll be pulled out and arrested; it means settler mob violence; it means being thrown in jail under administrative detention, not knowing what for or for how long; it means a military raid in the middle of the night. It is all these things and worse, day after day, across a lifetime, across generations. One of the many things that happened on October 7 was that for a brief time, Israelis, too, as a society, experienced that kind of existential terror, that unsettling uncertainty and lack of security.

The events of October 7 have had such an impact in Israeli society that even today, most Israelis continue to center themselves as the chief victims in the narrative. One effect of this is the Israeli obsession with contextualizing the genocide in Gaza in relation to the violence on October 7. A common complaint about the ICJ decision among Israelis is that the court did not mention October 7 in its decision (in fact, it did mention it). At the same time, this demand for context is intended to suppress the larger context. Many people, including on the so-called left, express outrage when the current situation is put in the context of the Nakba, the 1967 occupation, or the ongoing siege. According to this upside-down logic, providing that context is perceived as genocidal against Israelis.

Palestinian doctors desperately attempting to save the lives of Palestinians, including children, injured in an Israeli attack.

Israeli racism was prevalent before, but since October 7, undisguised genocidal discourse and open calls for actual genocide have become the norm. Within Israeli society, there is no movement of any real significance against the genocide. The protest movements that do exist are of negligible size and influence, or are concerned mostly with demanding a hostage swap deal, or are focused on internal Israeli issues—remnants of the pro-judiciary movement from before October 7.

The tiny isolated islands of resistance to the assault on Gaza and to the broader aspects of Israeli rule are so small that they should be understood as a rounding error, not a real force. The idea that a movement against colonialism and for Palestinian liberation exists within Israeli society is an illusion. To play a role in carving a path towards a future of real freedom, those who come from within this settler society will have to reject Israeli colonialism root and branch. We must bear in mind that as much as we might wish to be part of the solution, we will inherently remain part of the problem, as well.

In approaching the post-genocide future, we must ask how egalitarian ideas will survive in a reality ravaged by war, death, and destruction. It is not clear how we can envision and create a future that can transcend the trauma of the recent past, especially considering that though ruin and violence might decrease once the assault has stopped, Israeli repression will continue.

Nothing about the post-genocide future is clear yet, including what turns the Palestinian movement for liberation will take. That is for Palestinians alone to decide. What is obvious—and should have been clear long before this—is that those who oppose colonialism must not bask in the privileges that it bestows. The exact details of the path towards liberation are uncertain, but it is undeniable that those who want to help pave it can only play a part in doing so within the Palestinian movement. The responsibility of finding ways to do so, to transgress the boundaries of forced national identity that are in place precisely to prevent that, falls upon those who wish to support Palestinians and break out of the confines of colonialism.

2023: The Year in Review : A World on the Brink

2023-12-29T21:41:00Z

Happy new year! Congratulations on surviving. Let’s take stock of where we are.

In our 2022 year in review report, we documented the ebb phase of social movements that followed the upheavals of 2019 and 2020, as the strategies that had previously been successful produced diminishing returns and the authorities learned from their defeats. It remains a defining feature of our era that even the fiercest struggles have largely failed to achieve their intermediate demands. Apparently, those who administer the increasingly fragile social order some call late capitalism are not in a position to give ground. Rather than offering concessions to the desperate and unruly, governments across the political spectrum are investing in repressive technologies and doubling down on their dependence on the police.

Overseas, the consequences of this were already clear a year ago:

The invasion of Ukraine continued a process of militarization and displacement that had already gotten underway in Syria. Amid ecological collapse and war—the side effects of capital accumulation and its consequences—more and more people are being forced into exile around the world.

The invasion of Ukraine is likely an indication of things to come. Over the past several decades, governments worldwide have invested billions of dollars in crowd control technology and military equipment while taking precious few steps to address mounting inequalities or the destruction of the natural world. As economic and ecological crises intensify, more governments will seek to solve their domestic problems by initiating hostilities with their neighbors.

Unfortunately, the events of 2023 have borne out our fears. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given way to a grinding war of attrition, civil war broke out in Sudan, Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, and now the Israeli government is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. These are not aberrations, but glimpses of the future if we do not manage to change course.

This shows what is at stake in our awkward efforts to change the world. In these circumstances, if it is not possible to win intermediate demands, it may be easier to pursue revolutionary transformation outright.

Fortunately, we are not the only ones concerned with these questions. This year, we have been inspired by the tenacity of participants in ongoing struggles such as the fight to stop Cop City—by the empathy that has moved people around the world to act in solidarity with the residents of Gaza—by the bravery of rebels from Ecuador to France. Our experiences coming together in demonstrations, mutual aid projects, concerts, book fairs, and passionate discussions have sustained our faith in the potential of humanity. This story is far from over.

2024 will probably be a roller coaster ride. In the United States, the election season is shaping up to be chaotic indeed, and that will spill over into social conflict on the streets. It’s up to us to show that, rather than choosing between fascists and centrists determined to preserve a self-destructing system, people can come together in networks based in solidarity, mutual aid, and a more ambitious vision of what our lives could be.

This is the best way to prepare for whatever is ahead.

Here, we’ll review our own efforts over the past year—the coverage we have provided from within social movements and the projects we have contributed.

The Ongoing Tragedy in Palestine

On October 7, militants from Hamas and other Palestinian groups breached the Gaza border fence and carried out a series of attacks, killing 1139 people. The Israeli government seized the opportunity to pursue ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. They had massacred well over 21,000 Palestinians by the end of 2023, two thirds of whom were women and children.

In response, the United States has seen a surge of protest and direct action. At the beginning of November, we published a text from the Fayer collective, a Jewish collective that has participated in the struggle to Stop Cop City in Atlanta, explaining why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what they believe it will take to halt the assault of the Israeli military. Over the following weeks, we published reports from anarchists who participated in blockading the Port of Tacoma, a Raytheon facility, and various Amazon locations in order to interrupt the flow of weapons and money to the Israeli military.

As we enter 2024, stopping the ethnic cleansing in Gaza remains one of the most urgent challenges before us.

A demonstration at the Port of Tacoma in Washington on November 6, 2023.

Stop Cop City, Defend the Forest

Over the past two years, the movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest has become one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Utilizing a variety of strategies, opponents of the proposed police militarization facility have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction. In retaliation, the authorities have set new precedents in repression, murdering one forest defender and pressing outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective. The first of those defendants is scheduled to stand trial beginning in early January 2024.

We have published an array of perspectives from various participants in the movement, including material about the values that inspire them to keep fighting. In the latest installment of our comprehensive history of the movement, we trace its trajectory across the second half of 2023, exploring how the movement has sought to maintain a participatory and confrontational character even under tremendous pressure.

We understand the fight against Cop City as a bridge between the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the movements of the future. In seeking to overcome the limits that the uprising of 2020 reached, the participants have set an example that will be of use next time large numbers of people are catalyzed into action.

The Cop City construction site on March 5, 2023.

Europe

In January, we published a photoessay documenting the showdown between thousands of police and protesters in Lützerath, where the German government set out to evict an ecological encampment.

In February, we published an article about the imprisoned Italian anarchist Alfredo Cospito. By then, he had been on hunger strike for over 100 days, demanding to be released from solitary confinement. We argued that Alfredo’s strike was a warning—a message about the conditions being prepared for all of us in a society that increasingly treats human life as cheap.

In March, we covered the movement in France against the pension reform as it escalated into a major conflict. In June, the streets of France exploded once more after the police murdered 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk. Unfortunately, as one of our contributors observed afterwards, over the past few years, different segments of the population of France have revolted successively, rather than all at once, enabling the authorities to weather the storm.

Further east, we covered the mutiny of the Wagner private military company against the government of Vladimir Putin from the perspective of Russian anarchists. As we see it, such internal conflicts are the inevitable consequence of the militarization of society and the increasing centrality of armed force in the pursuit of state policy. In Russia, as in Sudan, the government armed mercenaries to do their dirty work, setting the stage for an armed conflict. In Sudan, the resulting civil war has been catastrophic for civilians.

Elsewhere, we reported an inspiring story about solidarity between refugees and exiles, in which Russian anarchists living in exile in Armenia sought to support Armenian squatters. When Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh, we published the perspectives of Armenian anarchists on the events.

Finally, we explored how the Greek government’s decision to evict the self-organized refugee camp at Lavrio represents the intersection of the Turkish government’s war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants.

What goes up most come down. France in spring 2023.

The Mideast

In honor of March 8, International Women’s Day, we published an account of the genealogy of the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) showing how it spread from the part of Kurdistan that is ruled by the Turkish government to Iran and elsewhere around the world. Shortly afterwards, in response to the earthquake that wracked Syria and Turkey in February, we published statements from supporters of liberation movements in those regions showing how the Turkish and Syrian governments not only failed to protect their subjects but took advantage of the catastrophe to blockade and even bomb them.

Later that month, we published a report from an Israeli anarchist exploring how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to consolidate power and the protest movement that emerged in response to it represented a conflict between competing elites and their respective colonial models, neither of which offered any real proposal to address the oppression and displacement of Palestinians. In October, the day after the October 7 attacks, we published a widely read interview with another Israeli anarchist, Jonathan Pollak, discussing the escalation of violence in Palestine and the repression the Israeli government metes out to those who act in solidarity with Palestinians.

We followed that up with a perspective from a Palestinian in the part of Palestine occupied in 1948, describing life under colonial rule and emphasizing the importance of grassroots organizing and solidarity in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Latin America

In Brazil, 2023 began with a clumsy repeat performance of the incident on January 6, 2021 when Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in hopes of keeping him in office. At the same time, in Peru, a tumultuous protest movement culminated in a march on the capital city of Lima. We spoke with Peruvian anarchists to get insight into those events.

The year ended with Javier Milei taking power in Argentina. We conducted an interview with anarchists from Rosario in order to understand the decades of social struggle and economic restructuring that created the conditions in which Javier Milei came to power.

Barricades surround the presidential palace on December 20, 2001 immediately before President Fernando De la Rua fled from the rooftop in a helicopter. The last time a government tried to impose unbridled capitalism on the population of Argentina, it ended like this.

History

Our history publishing this year focused mostly on the early 21st century. We chronicled how anti-fascists won the “battle of York” in Pennsylvania in 2002, comparing that pitched struggle with the much grimmer situation two decades later. We explored the history of the queer anarchist organizing umbrella Bash Back! ahead of a new Bash Back! convergence. Finally, to offer a historical reference point to those seeking to take action against arms traffickers today, we revisited the Smash EDO campaign in Britain a decade ago.

This coming year, we hope to publish more work about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The vantage point of a police officer in Sainte-Soline in spring 2023.

In Memory

In January, police murdered Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita to their fellow forest defenders. Tortuguita had been occupying Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta for months, and bravely chose to reoccupy it after a police raid the previous December. The thousands of people who have participated in the movement to Stop Cop City have kept Tortuguita’s memory alive in defiance of the forces of repression and erasure.

Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita.

In February, our longtime friend Jen Angel was killed in Oakland, California. Jen spent her life building infrastructure for anarchist organizing, publishing, and relationships.

Jen Angel.

On April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov. We published a biography of Dmitry. Over the course of a decade and a half, he had participated in revolutionary struggle in Russia, Belarus, Rojava, and Ukraine against a backdrop of intensifying tyranny. The story of his life offers insight into the recent history of the former Soviet Union. It is also an inspiring example of all the things an anarchist can accomplish, even in adverse conditions.

Dmitry Petrov.

Active Distribution has published a small book collecting our biography alongside some of his writings and those of his comrades. PM Press is distributing these books in the United States now.

On December 6,¹ anarchist insurrectionist and author Alfredo Bonanno passed away. Bonanno proposed the refusal of work and the pursuit of joyous revolt as revolutionary measures in the struggle against all forms of domination and despair; his ideas played an influential role in the development of our own collective projects. We prepared a short history of his life.

Finally, we want to give thanks for those we feared we might lose in 2023 who are still with us today. It was easy to imagine that Alfredo Cospito might not survive his hunger strike, but he did. Likewise, a participant in the confrontational demonstration in Sainte-Soline, France remained in a coma for many days because a police officer had attempted to kill him by firing a grenade at his head. Thankfully, Serge recovered.

“Tortuguita lives; the struggle continues.” A banner displayed at a memorial march in January 2023 during which a police car caught fire.

Public Events

In 2023, we participated in book fairs and presentations in the United States from Boston and New York to Sacramento and Oakland, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, and elsewhere.

One of the most exciting events of the year was the worldwide anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. This festival celebrated the 151-year anniversary of the founding congress of the federation known as the Anti-Authoritarian International—the continuation of the International Workingmen’s [sic] Association, one of the most important European labor organizations of the 19th century. Drawing a reputed 5000 people—mostly from central Europe, but also from as far away as Chile and Australia—the gathering in Saint-Imier may have been the largest exclusively anarchist event of the year.

With the assistance of participants from Germany, Russia, Belarus, Finland, the United States, and elsewhere around the world, we published a thorough report on the gathering, and followed it up with a memoir reflecting specifically on dynamics and discourse around gender and sexuality at the gathering.

A sticker seen during the gathering in Saint-Imier.

Posters

This year, to celebrate the umpteenth reprinting of our classic gender poster, we released a 2023 remix of that poster addressing the current threats to gender self-determination and the countervailing forms of solidarity and collective self-defense. Alongside those, we published a discussion of the ways that the battle lines in discourse about gender have shifted over the two decades since we debuted the original. It’s one of the more thoughtful and reflective texts we have completed this year.

Our new “gender remix” poster in action.

In addition to those, we prepared posters in solidarity with Palestinians and with those who seek to defend the forest in Atlanta and elsewhere around the world. All of these are available to download, print out, and paste up on the walls of your community.

Another of our posters in the wild.

Zines

This year, we released fully five zines about the movement to Stop Cop City, covering the history of the movement in detail, the various strategies that participants have employed, the RICO charges, and more. These have been distributed in Atlanta and at support events all around the United States.

We also published zines offering a perspective from Palestine, discussing the fight for gender self-determination, describing how to survive a felony trial, and recounting the lessons of the “green scare,” the federal operation targeting ecological activists.

To make printing easier, we introduced a new “ink lite” option for printing our zines when you are short on toner.

A street in Atlanta following a clash between police and Stop Cop City demonstrators in November 2023.

Audio

After a lull in our audio efforts, we pulled together a new team to prepare audio versions of our articles. This year, we released 20 such “audio zines,” including five about efforts towards Palestinian solidarity and five about the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.

You can listen to all of them here.

Languages

Over the course of 2023, we published dozens of articles in Spanish; over a dozen in French, Italian, and Polish; and several articles each in Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, German, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. We also added texts in Danish, Dutch, Japanese, and Kurdish. We’ve published posters and zines in many of those languages, as well. You can find a comprehensive guide to our non-English content here.

We’ve recently added a Turkish version of our introduction to anarchism, To Change Everything. It’s now available in a total of 34 languages.

We are grateful to all the translators around the world who have worked with us to help us make our work accessible to more people. If you can help us translate anything we have published into any language, please contact us!

Police and protesters face off in Lützerath, Germany in January 2023.

Motion Pictures

In honor of the life of Alfredo Bonanno, we made a short film dramatizing the final section of one of his best-known works, Armed Joy.

We also published a short video to celebrate Steal Something from Work Day, drawing on the work of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev.

Finally, we invite you to participate in a holiday tradition by watching the 2023 edition of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, 2023 edition.

And More!

That hardly scratches the surface of everything we’ve accomplished this year—the adventures we’ve embarked on, the relationships we’ve nourished, the art forms we’ve shared. The most exciting parts rarely enter the public record!

As always, all of our efforts are copyright free, produced and distributed by volunteer labor. We’re not trying to concentrate power in our own hands, but to establish reproducible models and put resources at the disposal of horizontal movements. This explains why we rarely pester you with fundraising requests. If you wish to support us financially, you can do so here—but the very best thing you could do for us is to undertake your own projects in the same spirit, or participate in our efforts.

Thank you for sticking with us through another year. We look forward to what is ahead.

December 6 happened to be the anniversary of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, which set off the Greek uprising of 2008. The way that the uprising in Greece unfolded arguably vindicates some of Bonanno’s arguments in favor of confrontational organizing and autonomous structures. ↩

Argentina: "So-Called Neoliberalism and Its False Critics" : Argentine Anarchists on the Election of Javier Milei

2023-12-15T04:38:01Z

On December 10, the self-described “anarcho”-capitalist Javier Milei took office as president of Argentina, having campaigned on a promise to eliminate the Central Bank of Argentina and overturn the political establishment. What happens when an “anarcho”-capitalist takes power?

As we have long emphasized, there is no such thing as “anarcho”-capitalism. The idea that the hierarchies that capitalism creates could be compatible with the anarchist aspiration to abolish imposed power disparities is just as contradictory as the idea that an anarchist could become the head of a government. There are capitalists and there are presidents—and practically all presidents are both—but no anarchist would stoop so low as to be a president or a supporter of capitalism.

Since the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, far-right politicians have won a series of electoral victories by falsely portraying themselves as rebels against the ruling elite, taking advantage of simmering discontent and the ways that liberals and leftists have associated themselves with the prevailing institutions. It would be impossible for far-right politicians to portray themselves as rebels if not for the fact that the right and the left have colluded to crush anarchists and other social movements that would otherwise provide an example of what real rebellion looks like. The electoral victory of an “anarcho”-capitalist is the latest chapter in this story.

Not surprisingly, in practice, “anarcho”-capitalism involves no anarchism, but plenty of capitalism. Rather than abolishing the Central Bank, Milei’s first act was to make the former president of the Central Bank his minister of the economy. In Milei’s first days in office, he did announce some cutbacks within the government: he will halt new infrastructure projects, fire state employees, cut energy and transportation subsidies to consumers, abolish half of the federal ministries, and devalue the Argentine peso—intensifying inflation and almost certainly producing a recession. Under the new government exchange rate, the average Argentine annual income will be just $6300.

But this is not a matter of getting rid of government—just doing away with any aspects of it that could ease the ways that capitalism impacts ordinary people. Milei’s government will not be reducing the repressive apparatus of the state. His security minister, Patricia Bullrich, another longtime member of the political elite, has pledged to mobilize the police to crack down on protesters. Bullrich has announced her intention to charge organizers and individual protesters for the cost of policing demonstrations. As the authorities will be the ones deciding how much policing each demonstration requires, this policy will enable police to shake down ordinary people in precisely the way that “anarcho”-capitalists accuse socialists of doing. She also intends to introduce new forms of repression, weaponizing migration authorities and child protection services against those who participate in protests.

For more perspective on how real anarchists see the situation in Argentina, we interviewed comrades from La Oveja Negra and Cuadernos de Negación, two projects associated with the Alberto Ghiraldo Library and Archive in the city of Rosario. Here, they discuss the decades of social struggle and economic restructuring that created the conditions in which Javier Milei came to power. For more background, you can read “Back to the Future,” the first article we published about Milei’s victory, or this interview with the anarchist publishing project Expandiendo la Revuelta.

“Neither dictatorship nor democracy. Long live anarchy!” A banner at a demonstration in 2008.

How is Milei a continuation of old extreme-right tendencies—and how is he different? Why did he win the elections?

We recently published a book titled “Against Liberalism and Its False Critics.” We started working on it a little over a year ago and by the time we finished it, Milei was already about to win the presidential elections. It was all very fast—he became president with only two years of campaigning and rhetoric about “burning the central bank” or “ending gender ideology.”

Our intention in the book was to address the emergence of the liberal-libertarian phenomenon in Argentina as well as other expressions of the “alternative right” (alt-right), and we in the end, we published it in the middle of the election campaign. We have traveled and presented it in some cities in Argentina, as well as in Santiago de Chile. It is a current issue and a priority for us and for the people we met, so we had many discussions going into detail. Evidently, something is changing, not only in the old “workers’ movement” and with respect to the forms of struggle, but in how social discontent is expressed and in the exhaustion of a certain progressivism as a guarantor of capitalist reproduction in this region.

We do not see Milei as a continuation of the Argentine ultra-right, but as an ultra-capitalist. We began to pay attention to him years ago, mainly for that reason, because of his defense of capitalism as a liberal economist, and then because of his criticisms of reactionary progressivism, which make him quite similar to other “alternative right” people around the world. In general, we believe that it is not particularly useful to compare with the past when trying to understand something new.

In contrast to protectionists like Donald Trump, Javier Milei is a proponent of international trade.

Although there are old right-wingers in the ranks of this new phenomenon, that is not the ideological trait that constitutes it. An important element in this regard is Vice President Victoria Villaruel, a lawyer who has not only defended the military of the last dictatorship, but also comes from a military family and used to organize prison visits to imprisoned participants in genocide, such as murderers of the stature of [Argentina military officer Jorge Rafael] Videla. She still denies the figure of 30,000 disappeared, which is a significant gesture.

It is not that these people did not exist before the “Milei phenomenon,” but this is the first time that people like these have reached the government through democratic channels. As we write this, they have not yet assumed their governmental functions and a distance between them is already noticeable. Instead of giving the ministries of security and defense to this pro-military sector of his government, as was supposedly agreed, Milei ended up appointing the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of Juntos por el Cambio to these ministries. They are, respectively, Patricia Bullrich and Luis Petri. The former was already in that position in 2017, during the presidency of Mauricio Macri, when the National Gendarmerie murdered the anarchist comrade Santiago Maldonado.

A mural in honor of Santiago Maldonado, who was disappeared by the police when the Argentine National Gendarmerie attacked a demonstration against the Benetton Group. His drowned body was found many weeks later.

For his part, Milei is an economist by profession and the national deputy for the City of Buenos Aires since 2021. He worked as a financial advisor, which is to say that his career is in business—he does not come from a military or necessarily right-wing sector. He became known in TV shows about politics back in 2015, showing off a provocative style and expressing a liberal ideology with a conservative tone (paleo-libertarianism). In economic matters, he identifies with the “Austrian school.” He was offered more and more appearances in the media because they received high ratings, and youtubers and influencers connected to liberalism and openly anti-feminist and reactionary ideas began to replicate his rhetoric.

He began gaining momentum as a political figure back in 2018-9. Reinforced by his sustained media appearances, his resounding rhetoric in the National Congress opposing official policies and the “political caste” (a characterization that Milei himself popularized in Argentina in reference to officials and career politicians) made him a political reference point and potential presidential candidate, directing towards the parliament much of the outrage against politicians and the painful social situation we are going through involving poverty, hunger, and misery.

So how did he manage to win the elections? By channeling that social malaise, since both he and his opponent, Sergio Massa, each received votes largely as a consequence of voters’ contempt for the other—a manifestation of rejection rather than hope in one government or the other. His campaign was conducted mainly through “social networks” and media appearances, rather than through the traditional channels of political propaganda. Few posters of Milei were seen on the streets compared to the number of videos circulating on the internet.

In Argentina, there seems to be an implicit democratic pact to the effect that “You get out of this by voting,” so that anger manifests itself at the ballot box. The Milei phenomenon derives from a contempt for traditional politics that is not itself recognized as politics, and from a high degree of conformism and confidence in representation and in the capitalist code of “every man for himself.”

All “progressive” politics in this country has focused on erasing the possibility of rupture as an alternative. This left (for lack of a better word) has become more and more nationalist, statist, and managerialist; it is no longer even reformist, if we understand reformism as a supposed strategy on the road to revolution.

As the year ends in Argentina, we are facing a brutal worsening of living conditions, with inflation projected at around 200% per year and half of the population living in poverty. There are those who wonder why it is the right that is channeling this malaise. We wonder, too, but that does not mean that we think that the rebellion should “go back to the left” as some have said.

The democratic order works by placing the responsibility for the social situation on the different governments that alternate in power according to the context. This makes it difficult to formulate an overall vision and a critique that goes beyond the errors of this or that president.

At the same time that progressivism is frightened by the aberrations pronounced by its adversaries, it exaggerates them with the intention of differentiating itself and holding onto power. Beyond the discursive differences, in practice, the difference does not seem to be so great when those who express a rejection of progressivism have come to power. At least, thus far, this is what the events in different countries suggest, where there has only been an alternation in power, without a profound change in state policies or a structural reform of the state and its link with the market. We can observe this, for example, in what has occurred in Bolivia, the United States, Argentina, and Brazil—with Morales-Áñez-Arce, Obama-Trump-Biden, Fernández de Kirchner-Macri-Fernández-Milei, and Da Silva-Rousseff-Temer-Bolsonaro-Da Silva, respectively. Latin American progressivism, while pointing to the right-wing threat, has only brought moderation—while the new or old rightists, despite their aggressiveness, have become more “progressive” upon coming to power.

For our part, we want to contribute to an anti-capitalist perspective by addressing the problems of this region such as poverty, job insecurity, inflation, the exploitation of natural resources, repression, and this democratic alternation that guarantees misery and a weak economic functioning.

In spite of the electoral triumph of [Milei’s party] La Libertad Avanza in the presidential elections, we do not seek to promote any kind of electoral common front against them, nor to be the street support for such political frentism.

“No name is forgotten, no face is forgotten.” A mural at a demonstration observing the anniversary of the military dictatorship, March 24, 2021.

What does Milei’s victory show about the continuities and discontinuities between dictatorship and democracy in Argentina?

It is difficult to offer an overview of the situation in Argentina over the past 50 years, but we can try. We will draw on the book we mentioned and an interview we did some years ago.

The late 1960s and early 1970s was an outstanding period of proletarian struggles in the region and in the world. Since the 1930s, Argentine politics has been characterized by the alternation between dictatorial and parliamentary governments. In this case, we are referring to the dictatorship of the self-styled “Argentine Revolution” (1966-1973), led by General Juan Carlos Onganía. Of course, to speak of military dictatorship is incomplete, and any Latin American knows that, since all these dictatorships are civil-military, but we believe that we can be understood. The chief days of action during that time were the “azos”: the tucumanazo of November 1970, the rosariazos of May and September 1969, and, most importantly, the cordobazo of May 1969. These were protests that escalated into a situation of urban insurrection, with barricades, control of buildings, and confrontations in the streets, not to mention the organization and coordination that all this required.

A barricade during the Cordobazo in May 1969.

As occurred in many other regions, that level of organization and fighting capacity of the class gradually gave way to its main weaknesses: the politicking and armed struggle that would characterize the region from 1973 onwards, the year of the return of democracy and of [former President Juan] Perón. In this context, armed struggle escalated as well as the state response, reaching a breaking point on March 24, 1976 when the armed forces took control of the state once again in what became known as the National Reorganization Process. We assume that it is common knowledge that this military dictatorship was characterized not only by brutal tortures and murders but also by the forced disappearances of thousands of people, mostly militants, and, in many cases, by the kidnapping of their children. At the same time, many people had to go into exile.

After the end of the dictatorship in 1983, the “return to democracy” with the government of Raúl Alfonsín continued a series of economic and social policies that had been rendering living conditions more difficult since the years before the military government. In 1989, in a context of hyperinflation, people looted the supermarkets in the main cities of the country and confronted the police. The 1990s began with Carlos Menem as president; another round of hyperinflation took place during his first year in power, which brought a new brutal attack on the proletariat and, at the same time, contributed to convincing a large part of the population of a need for “sacrifices” and “deep changes.”

In this context, there was a profound restructuring of capitalism in Argentina, involving far-reaching privatizations of public enterprises. This resulted in thousands of layoffs and an intensification of exploitation, while the labor market was modified, producing a growing precarity and making the labor force more and more heterogeneous in terms of its reproduction and living conditions.

During the 1990s, the level of conflict in different sectors of the workforce grew in the face of the adjustment and layoffs. While in the first half of that decade, struggles had maintained the same union strategy as in previous decades, in the second half of the decade the figure of the “unemployed” began to gain strength, in a situation with a high level of unemployment.

The unemployed have no work space or means of production to seize or sabotage, so they take to the streets and highways to disrupt the circulation of goods (including the commodity of labor power). The first pickets were organized outside of parties and unions; those were disruptive and stood firmly against the state. Later, the piquetero [picketer] groups, like the social movements as a whole, began a process of increasing institutionalization, channeling their entire perspective into make demands of the state. Their organizations could be compared to trade unions, which also negotiate with the state, control popular anger, and put a price on life, creating a dynamic of leaders and led. Today, all this is represented by a sector of Peronism headed by Juan Grabois, called “popular economy.”

It was not until 2001 that the crisis expanded from impacting the unemployed to affect the proletariat as a whole. Many proletarians who considered themselves middle class were also forced into the streets by the harsh situation. The government of Fernando de la Rúa, which had replaced [Carlos] Menem in power, could not present an intelligent bourgeois response to the pressures of the international organizations, the Peronist opposition, and this new and weak alliance between the unemployed, workers in struggle, and these self-proclaimed middle-class sectors. Throughout 2001, the government carried out a series of “shielding” measures, asking for massive loans to assure the continuity of banking activity. But this was not enough; at the beginning of December 2001, a new law was passed, the famous “corralito,” which placed severe restrictions on the withdrawal of money from banks and various limitations on the conversion of pesos to dollars and vice versa. This meant that many people lost their savings. The peso-dollar parity ended; today, one dollar is equivalent to more than one thousand Argentine pesos.

All of these conditions exploded in mid-December 2001. On December 19, in response to the generalized looting of supermarkets, the government finally decreed a state of siege, militarizing the whole country and prohibiting people from gathering in the streets. It is important to note that all of the protests took place in total defiance of this government decree. The police were able to arrest a few people, but not thousands. Towards the end of December 20, the president resigned; despite the repression and the murders of 39 people throughout the country, the people did not leave the streets.

The response was massive: pots and pans were banged at all hours, neighborhood assemblies were organized in the main cities of the country, banks and state institutions were attacked, and the unemployed movements saw an incredible growth in their organizations and strength, blocking roads and streets all over the country. It was at this moment when the slogan “they must all go” began to become generalized, in total repudiation of politicians of all stripes. The slogan “que se vayan todos” that Milei’s voters are now chanting was chanted throughout the region in those days, but in a climate of struggle and solidarity. When journalists or members of leftist parties, challenging the demonstrators, asked what would happen when they were all gone, the answer was resounding: “Let them keep going.”

Much of the current social anger has taken this strange channel. In 2001, anger against politicians was characterized by a diffuse and irrational perspective, but with a basic rejection of capitalism on a basis of solidarity, pickets, and assemblies; a good part of the current malaise against the “political caste” is expressed in completely capitalist terms. Despite their absurdity and impracticality, expressions such as “dynamiting the central bank” are more convenient for the maintenance of order than the “good riddance” of the social struggle.

In 2002, after the upheaval, the bourgeoisie tried to organize a response, albeit slowly and haphazardly, dismissing president after president until Eduardo Duhalde, a favorite son of the Peronist ranks popularly suspected of being a drug trafficker and murderer, took over. Nestor Kirchner’s government from 2003 to 2007 can be characterized as a masterpiece of Peronist and Latin American populism. Supported in an extremely favorable context by international commodity prices, and with wages completely destroyed, the government achieved economic stabilization. On the other hand, it took on the task of compelling all social organizations to position themselves in favor of or against its political project.

Popular schools, grassroots spaces in neighborhoods, and groups of young militants took the Kirchnerist line, encouraged by its supposed program of renewal, its promise of economic stimuli, and its image as the “government of human rights” after it resumed the court cases again the officers of the junta of 1976—another great operation on the field of public perception, since the repressive apparatus of the state remained intact. In Argentina, people were also disappeared under democracy, with thousands of people murdered in police stations or in cases of “gatillo fácil” [trigger-happy police] and thousands imprisoned and prosecuted for resistance. The government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner continued the policies of her husband. Some were surprised that her administration introduced the Anti-Terrorist Law while legalizing “egalitarian” marriage between people of the same sex, but these are not contradictory measures. Progressivism is the progress of capital, however much one would like it to be the progress of society against the capitalist offensive.

Police mass alongside a water cannon during a march in memory of Santiago Maldonado in 2017.

Let’s go back to so-called neoliberalism and capitalist restructuring in order to think about the continuities and discontinuities from dictatorship to democracy. The so-called neoliberal policies applied in Argentina and other Latin American countries were not just the consequence of the last civil-military dictatorships and the ferocious repression they carried out. Some of the features of what is mostly identified as neoliberalism—the intensification of precarity and the “flexibilization” of labor, the privatization of various industries and services, the growing financialization of the economy, the reduction of public spending—were a consequence of the previous phase of capitalism that many people long for today, which is represented by Peronism in Argentina and by the so-called welfare state elsewhere in the world. Here, we want to point out the continuities that are not military, but democratic and always capitalist, which we discuss in the book that we have just published.

Globalization and the relocation of production centers were among the other significant aspects of these worldwide transformations. The global restructuring process assumed different forms in different countries and took several decades to spread. Just like in Argentina, in many other countries, the unemployed population increased considerably as a result of the closure of various industries and sectors whose technologies were becoming obsolete in terms of productivity; precarity increased for huge portions of the population oriented mainly to the service sector, while the wages of a small number of workers employed in more technologically advanced and profitable sectors grew or remained stable.

The countries to which industries were relocated experienced something different, providing tremendous amounts of labor at a better price for the global bourgeoisie, as occurred in several Asian countries. The mass of goods at the global level has not stopped growing, although we cannot say the same for the aggregate of wages or employment levels if we look at the countries separately. In this way, the role of the state has been shifting; social assistance to the unemployed or precarious, who do not have access to a sufficient salary, has become widespread in much of the world. Today, in Argentina, there is no massive unemployment, but for thousands and thousands of people, a job is not enough to survive.

It is striking to see the acceptance of liberal economic discourse in Argentina; until less than a decade ago, it was a bad word for the majority of the population. The growth of the new liberal right must be understood in relation to the ways that progressives have failed to address social problems. The liberal right emphasizes these failures in its speeches, according to its own incantations: social inclusion, redistribution of wealth, expansion of rights. On the other hand, poverty, precarious work, inequality, and violence—repressive violence, criminal violence such as that linked to drug trafficking, and gender violence—are all increasing.

The measures commonly associated with neoliberalism were imposed worldwide during the capitalist restructuring initiated in the 1970s. In Argentina, global restructuring assumed a specific form, which was consolidated in the 1990s, with a reform of the state and of the local mode of accumulation. These occurred within the framework of an iron discipline of the market over workers, exercised mainly through “convertibility” [a fixed parity between the Argentine peso and the US dollar], trade liberalization, and privatization. This discipline was imposed, as we said, after two periods of hyperinflation in 1989 and 1991 that destroyed wages.

The mode of capitalist accumulation in Argentina is based on providing the world market with low-value-added commodities (including primary products such as soybeans and also their industrial derivatives, like oil, flour, and pellets). Although Argentina has historically been an agro-exporting country, during the 1990s, these sectors expanded and modernized significantly, increasing their productivity.

This process only consolidated in the following decade, after the 2001 crisis and the end of “convertibility.” The economic and political recovery during Kirchnerism derived from restructuring production, relaxing the market discipline that “convertibility” entailed, favorable conditions in the world market, and the fact that real wages were miserable at the beginning of the process; they grew progressively over the following years, though failing to reach the level of the previous economic cycle, then fell again a few years later to the current situation.

The Kirchner period differed from the previous one chiefly in terms of market discipline, which made it possible for the government to adapt to social demands and to the oscillation of international markets—intervening in the exchange rate and increasing tax collection and public spending through withholdings and the nationalization of the private segment of the retirement and pension system. One of the largest parts of this public spending was comprised of subsidies for fuel, energy, and transportation, which benefited both private users and companies. Milei has described the owners of these companies, who are dependent on the policies of state protection of the domestic market, as “prebendary [rent-seeking] businessmen,” “empresaurios” or “empresucios”.

From a revolutionary perspective, we criticize any industrialist vision or proposal linked to the development of the productive forces. But from the point of view of the national economy and the management of local capitalism, even on its own terms, it is clear that it is functioning poorly, considering the repeated recessions, adjustments, and crises. Kirchnerism was promoted as a supposed re-industrialization of the country, but in fact, the productive matrix did not undergo major changes and precarity persisted, growing considerably in the last decade. The situation has become unsustainable, and the managers of capital only speak of sacrifice, more or less gradual, but sacrifice in any case. This election year imposed an interruption of social conflict and critical reflection, but these changes demand that we rethink the underlying issues. It is time to insist on the necessity of a rupture.

Concretely, beyond the question of who won the elections, we are facing a deepening of the reduction of public spending in order to reduce the fiscal deficit, abrupt devaluations of the peso (as have already been taking place), changes in monetary policy, labor and social security reform, and other policies with an immediate impact on the proletariat. The last periods of change in the halls of government have also been moments of economic adjustment par excellence.

We will have to face it, whoever implements it—but the question to ask is what brought us here. We should not lose sight of the previous and ongoing adjustments, and not apply a selective memory that perpetuates the democratic logic of the “lesser evil.”

Armed motorcycle police during a march in memory of Santiago Maldonado in 2017.

How do you see Milei in relation to Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump?

If anything unites these three despicable characters, it is a populism that is not based on the traditional pillars of the left. But unlike Trump, Milei is not a protectionist: on the contrary, he proposes to “make Argentina great again” by opening the country to imports, while liberalizing the market and the exchange rate.

Milei’s ultra-liberalism is exceptional in relation to the new right-wingers around the world. If there is one thing that unites them, it is their reactionary anti-progressivism. In the Argentine case, economically liberal premises are combined with reactionary criticisms of current discussions, such as the issues of abortion access or sex education. Regarding the curious local economically liberal/socially reactionary amalgam, it is difficult to find a coherence beyond electoral opportunism, nourished by opposition to certain policies implemented after the social upheaval of 2001. After a short period of stabilization and growth, these polices have shown themselves to be useless—or worse—in the face of growing social problems. Everything that appears oppositional in some sense is used as a quantitative reinforcement: economic liberalism, constitutionalism, conspiracy theories, anti-communism, anti-corruption, anti-picketing, anti-feminism.

But beyond the ideology that Milei professes, it is important to think about why it has appeared at this moment and why it has become popular. What does its irruption represent, socially?

Those who vote for Milei don’t seem to care about what happened fifty years ago, nor do they seem to be real followers of the economists of the Austrian school. What they communicate in the streets or at work is that they are tired of everything. Another issue that these right-wing sectors instrumentalize very well is the demand for “security” in a Latin American context, where robberies and murders are common enough. This does not necessarily mean a demand for an iron fist; it expresses the malaise of a “war of the poor against the poor.” This desire can be translated into a demand for an iron fist, but it can also be interpreted as an instinct of self-preservation in the face of a grave situation and in the absence of other proposals.

If we are looking for the ways that these political figures intersect, we do so taking into account that they are simply the latest people who aspire to manage and administer the state, each in his own particular way.

It is important to point this out when forming a front “against the right,” “against fascism.” For those who are in a permanent electoral campaign, this “fascist threat” is just another talking point. This seems important to us in order not to serve movements that only aspire to govern and administer capital.

It may seem strange to all sorts of political flat-earthers to read about concepts that they have come to deny: class society, exploitation, the material conditions of existence, revolution… In this sense, some who are outraged about what they describe as the economically liberal right will find they have unpleasant things in common with what they reject. That is why we speak of the “false critics” of economic liberalism.

A photograph of anti-fascists outside the social and sporting club “La Cultura del Barrio” taken around 2018.

What are the likely negative consequences of Milei’s electoral victory? What exactly does it change?

Faced with the social situation of permanent adjustment that we are living through, with excessive inflation and devaluation, uncontrollable rent prices, plunging real wages, high unemployment, increasingly precarious jobs and growing poverty, new economic policies are presented as responsible and at the same time as possible saviors. [Milei’s political party] La Libertad Avanza has set the bar high, talking about a real adjustment, of abruptly reducing public spending. What is changing, then, is the way that the bourgeoisie is going to carry out the economic adjustment, which they were already going to carry out in any case—they were already doing it regardless of which government was in power.

“There is no money” is the warning and threat of Milei’s speech before his inauguration. Our main concern is on the economic level, since Milei takes office in a critical context and with a forceful discourse in favor of adjustment that seems to have enough legitimacy. At the same time, no adjustment can be made without repression, and all the political forces that make up the new government are fierce defenders of an iron fist and respect for the law. The forms of repression associated with the institutionalization of struggle may work to a certain extent, and a greater use of the state’s monopoly on violence seems to be opening the way—that is to say, baton, bullet, and jail.

As far as the “culture war” is concerned, there is a growth or emboldening of reactionary and conservative sectors, and some progressive policies on gender, human rights, environmental or Indigenous peoples’ issues, for example, will be curtailed. First of all, we note that, despite the belligerent discourse of the neo-right sectors, they are much more moderate when they come to power and in terms of concrete policies on these issues. We have found it striking, for example, to see the considerably higher number of annual deportations during the Obama administration compared to Trump. Second, these setbacks invite us to rethink the legalistic approach and the content of progressive policies on these issues. Not only do they fail to solve what they set out to address, but they limit the incipient ruptures that these struggles have proposed. “Citizenism” has penetrated deep into the social movements and instead of embracing statism, it is time to question it.

There is a fear in many people regarding the ways that the new government could embolden and give free rein to neo-Nazi groups, as well as evangelical and Catholic groups that have been present in the demonstrations against the legalization of abortion. In Argentina, we do not foresee this posing a considerable risk for the sectors in struggle, we do not anticipate a potential civil confrontation, although we do expect an increase in the state repression of protest.

Demonstrators face off with police during a march in memory of Santiago Maldonado in 2017.

What forces are prepared to oppose Milei? What are the prospects for anti-capitalist resistance?

The main political opposition is the outgoing government and its voters, so the challenge for anti-capitalists will be to oppose the new government without simply recruiting voters for the other faction of the state—without fostering false hopes that democratic political representation or economic measures could produce a “more humane” capitalism.

The ways that different sectors of society mobilize will depend on the concrete measures that are implemented and the organizations that lead them. That means the unemployed on the one hand, the state unions on the other, as well as the various parts of the private sector. The first obstacle in this sense is the division and leadership of the main organizations of all the sectors. We can bet on more massive mobilizations in the face of the ongoing inflationary adjustment, as well as increases in energy costs and services tariffs due to the removal of subsidies.

Mass protest could be triggered by several different things, from environmental issues, repression, gender oppression, or economic adjustment. The question is what the perspective of these struggles will be—whether a confrontation with the adjustments of the bourgeoisie, with the state and its measures, will be reduced to a conflict with a specific government.

We have already experienced enough examples of the ways that progressives redirect struggle that we know how they end. The example of Boric in Chile is instructive. This president, who brought together all the groups opposing the right wing (including many anarchists), is now imposing brutal measures in the economic, political, and legal spheres—giving more firepower to the carabineros [police], repressing student struggles, attacking Mapuche communities, approving the veto of the Law of Usurpations. And when all this happens, there is a sector of the social movement that remains silent and complicit because “It could be worse,” “the right could govern.” We believe that it does not matter how the oppressors and exploiters define themselves politically—what matters is the social role they play and what they do.

A fascism that reduces the state would be historically unprecedented; it remains to be seen. For the moment, Milei is not a fascist, he is liberal and democratic, like most, if not all, of those who govern the countries of this continent. A regime of exception, which we would call fascist, aims at restoring the state order and repressing the revolutionary emergency; that does not seem to be what we are seeing in Argentina yet.

Demonstrators face off with police during a march in memory of Santiago Maldonado in 2017.

What strategies are possible in this context? How can people from elsewhere support anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian resistance forces in the territory dominated by the Argentine state?

Starting from the existing struggles and the transformations of the last decades of capitalist dynamics on a global scale, we pay attention to their local manifestations and the possibilities that these imply. In the first place, the number of workers in conditions of absolute precarity, with high levels of unemployment and poverty. This is evidently a great difficulty for capital. For the time being, it manages to manage this through large networks of state assistance, undermining the autonomy that the unemployed movements had from the 1990s until the beginning of the 2000s.

Among the most impoverished part of the proletariat is the Indigenous population. A large part of this population lives in the suburban outreaches of the large cities. Of the Indigenous population that continues to live outside the cities, including the Mapuche in Patagonia and in the provinces of the northwest, important struggles have emerged for the recovery of land, the defense of their livelihoods, and against capitalist projects. While bearing in mind the particularities of these expressions of struggle and the cultural diversity of our class, at the moment of linking and analyzing them, we do not lose sight of the essential contradiction of the exploitation of wage labor and the imposition of private property.

Another fundamental aspect is the struggles of women and dissidents, paying attention to the changes in the sexual division in capitalism. Beyond policies focused on the recognition of identity, we point out that capitalism is unable to respond to many of the problems that have become evident, beginning with sexist violence.

From a reformist point of view, it is not possible to overcome the sexual division, which is necessary for the reproduction of the labor force. From a revolutionary perspective, it has become clear that it is not possible to abolish social classes without abolishing the gender division. We have been writing a series of issues of Cuadernos de Negación on these issues for some years now.

Finally, we are in solidarity with, participate in, and closely observe the so-called environmental struggles. The Argentine economy is strongly based on primary production, both agriculture and mining. The reproduction of a large part of the labor force through the state depends to a large extent on this. This type of production cannot be relocated when the population rejects it. This is what happened with several mining projects (as in the province of Chubut). Even today, there is resistance to the extraction of lithium in Jujuy. To stop this type of offensive is a strong blow to capitalist development in Argentina. We are committed to fostering the deep implications of these struggles, in opposition to some sort of “green” capitalism or citizen environmentalism.

In the city of Rosario, where we live, over the past few years, we have suffered the burning of wetlands a few kilometers away, intentionally carried out for the sake of animal agriculture. Towards the end of last year, we published a book titled Plomo y humo. El negocio del capital [Lead and Smoke: The Business of Capital*), in which we address this issue and the violence linked to drug trafficking, which has grown systematically over the last decade. Although there have been massive mobilizations against the fires, due to the destruction of wetlands and the associated health problems, the issue of violence linked to crime has been difficult for social movements to address. There is opposition to the iron fist and police participation in crime, but there have not been massive expressions of struggle in this regard that go beyond the request for “more security,” although there have been some specific cases.

In short, we refer to various planes of the current class struggle that go beyond the sphere of production and call capitalism itself into question. The possibility of a revolutionary rupture is latent in these struggles and offers a path we can take even if for the moment democratic pacification is strongly imposed.

We concluded this interview on December 10, 2023, the day Javier Milei assumed the presidency, expecting the announcement of economic adjustments tomorrow.

A demonstrator during a march in memory of Santiago Maldonado in 2017.

A photograph from the bakers’ strike of 1902 in Buenos Aires. Anarchism was prevalent in the bakers’ union.

Don't Stop: Continuing the Fight against Cop City : Six More Months in the Movement to Defend the Forest

2023-12-12T07:18:40Z

Starting in April 2021, people in Atlanta, Georgia set out to defend Weelaunee Forest, where politicians and profiteers are attempting to build a police training compound known as Cop City. Over the past two and a half years, this movement has given rise to one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Opponents of Cop City have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction project, while the authorities have killed one forest defender and pressed outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective.

In the previous chapter of our chronicle of the struggle against Cop City, we described the difficulties that the movement faced after the murder of Tortuguita on January 18, 2023 and the police raids on the South River Music Festival and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. In the following account, we trace the trajectory of the movement from the June 5 City Council vote in favor of Cop City through the November Block Cop City mobilization and its aftermath.

Comparing the movement that began in 2021 to the struggle as it exists at the close of 2023 feels nearly impossible. Many of the horizons that were open to the movement when it began have been definitively blocked. It has become impossible to defend the forest by occupying it; construction of the facility is underway, though it has been repeatedly delayed. Yet the movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest has continued to evolve despite the attacks of the Attorney General, federal agencies, and local police. In this chapter, we will explore how the movement has managed to maintain a participatory and confrontational character, even under tremendous pressure.

“Thought it would be over by now, but it won’t stop”

-Destiny’s Child, “Survivor”

For background on the first two and a half years of the movement:

“The City in the Forest,” chronicles the first year of the movement.
“The Forest in the City,” chronicles the second year of the movement.
“Beneath the Concrete, the Forest” collects first-person accounts from the occupation of Weelaunee forest through the first half of 2022.
“Balance Sheet,” explores and evaluates the strategies that different currents in the movement have employed.
“Living in an Earthquake” chronicles February through June of 2023, including the fifth week of action, the repression that followed, and the City Hall mobilizations.

The Hour Is Drawing Late

Three and a half years ago, twenty million people rose up to fight police and the structural white supremacy that they exist to impose. For a short time, it appeared that police abolition could become a realistic possibility in the United States; but politicians, universally dependent upon the police, ultimately blocked any attempts to so much as defund or reform police departments. Afterwards, people in Atlanta, Georgia set out to use direct action to block the flow of public resources to police by preventing the construction of Cop City.

A great deal has changed in those three and a half years.

On September 27, a Philadelphia judge dismissed all charges against the police officers who murdered Eddie Irizarry. In response, people organizing via social media began vandalizing businesses, looting stores, and setting fires in various part of the city. This mobilization built on social tensions that have been percolating since the protests in response to the murder of Walter Wallace by local police in 2020. Yet this time, the activist left largely stayed home. Those who are already on the receiving end of most of the violence of the police were left to go it alone, as they were in the days before the George Floyd rebellion.

The following month, protesters returned to the streets in response to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, blockading transportation infrastructure and stopping work at arms manufacturers like Raytheon. As early as October 19, a poll showed that most US voters (including 55% from the Republican party and 80% of Democrats) supported a ceasefire.

Undeterred, the United States government is sending tens of billions of dollars of military aid to the Israeli military. This is essentially a gift card, in that most of the aid must be spent on weapons supplied by US-based firms. This war stimulus to the US economy enables Washington to channel a secret budget into the pockets of arms manufacturers such as Elbit Systems, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin that is not included in the annual Congressional allocation. War is making a small number of people extremely wealthy.

Some large firms, including Wells Fargo, worry that the war is creating an atmosphere of “deglobalization” that could hurt their profits in the long run. But this has not shifted US foreign policy any more than the mass murder of thousands of Palestinian children has. It appears that some elements of the ruling class anticipate a future in which it will be more profitable to bank on war than on peace.

This has serious implications for us all. If we don’t organize accordingly now, our future may be bleak indeed.

Fall of 2023 was the first time since the beginning of the movement to stop Cop City that large numbers of protesters mobilized around any issue in the United States. The movement in Atlanta emerged after the 2020 George Floyd rebellion, during the period of social peace and political disorganization that typically follows large protest movements. If the echoes of the 2020 uprising were never entirely suppressed, we owe that to the initiative of the movement in Atlanta and those who acted in solidarity with it elsewhere, as well as the persistence of young Black and Brown people who continue to resist state terror in places like Philadelphia.

To overcome the obstacles confronting the movement in Atlanta will require long-term, large-scale mobilization. The actions of individuals and small dedicated groups have created a context in which a mass outbreak of revolt could have the most radical content currently imaginable, possibly paving the way for a more serious movement against carceral infrastructure all over the country. But such an outcome is by no means guaranteed. The movement has already experienced several flashpoints, including the murder of Tortuguita; these have given it greater visibility without mobilizing massive numbers of new participants.

Nonetheless, the story is not over, and the stakes are high. Now is not the time for backing down.

The authorities in Atlanta appear to be prepared to prioritize channeling millions of dollars to the police above all else, including their own democratic protocols—even if it leaves them standing atop a pile of ash. A photograph of the aftermath of the demonstration of March 5, 2023.

They Don’t Care About You

On June 6, 2023, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve an additional $67 million for Cop City after more than thirteen hours of public comment against the project—the largest participation in a City Hall meeting in Atlanta history. After the vote, the names and addresses of the councilmembers who voted “yes” appeared online. Various local outlets subsequently published articles platforming the councilmembers. Councilmembers Bakhtiari and Westmoreland, the former who voted “no” and the latter who voted “yes,” met at a local restaurant and posed for pictures together, reasserting their alliance as gay councilmembers, denouncing radical politics, and calling for “calm” in the face of angry responses to the charade that the City Council had choreographed on June 5 and 6. The next day, June 7, Mayor Andre Dickens was doxxed.

These doxxings appear to have been conducted by the same group that had published the names and addresses of the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Buckhead Coalition. The documents were signed by a group calling itself the “Free & Rowdy Party,” a reference to one of the early political organizations in Atlanta history, colloquially known as the “party of militant disorder.” The Rowdies frequently clashed with the other major party, known as the Moral Party.

The following Monday, on July 8, a group of protesters associated with the Stop Cop City Coalition announced the formation of a new organizing group called Cop City Vote. The idea was to collect signatures for a petition demanding a referendum. If successful, this would compel the City to place the land-lease contract between the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation on a popular ballot, enabling Atlanta voters to decide the future of the project.

The Referendum

The new group got to work with great haste, establishing online platforms, writing statements, and building an organizational model that would enable a large number of people to volunteer to canvass the public. The referendum process only allows for registered City of Atlanta voters to participate—excluding most of those who live closest to the forest, which is just outside city limits. The participants had to cover a large area in short time: according to Georgia law, from the day a petition is filed, the petitioner has only 60 days to turn in signatures in order to initiate a referendum. In this case, the petitioners would have to submit 70,330 signatures (15% of the city population), collected in less than two months. By comparison, only 97,000 voters altogether participated in the 2021 mayoral election. Collecting so many signatures was a bold ambition, and it faced illegal obstruction from the beginning.

On June 7, Cop City Vote delivered a referendum petition to City of Atlanta Clerk Vannessa Waldron. This legal document initiates the process of signature collection upon approval, thus starting the 60-day countdown. In order to place Cop City on the November ballot, organizers would have to submit the signatures they collected by no later than August 15. If the signatures were turned in after that date, the referendum would go on the March ballot. Clerk Waldron denied the petition, citing obscure legal technicalities. A week later, on July 14, Waldron denied the second petition, again on obscure clerical premises. This second denial prompted popular outcry.

By denying the petition on July 14, the city government hoped to make it impossible for the organizers to deliver the signatures by the August 15 deadline. This was a pre-emptive attack on the referendum—the first stage of a long campaign targeting the initiative. It’s worth noting that while in times of social peace, the authorities would presumably have welcomed the opportunity to channel a combative movement into electoral reformism, in this case, they were not prepared to make any compromises, not even permitting citizens to utilize their legal rights.

In response, organizers filed a lawsuit against the Clerk. Public figures such as Senator Raphael Warnock called on the city government to permit the process to move forward. On July 21, Waldron approved the petition. Signature collection could finally begin.

On July 27, a US District Court ruled in favor of the canvassers. This was one of the first legal rulings in favor of the movement since it began in April 2021. The court ruled that the illegal restrictions placed on the petition-collection process, specifically the clause that disqualifies non-residents from so much as knocking on doors to collect signatures, violates the First Amendment. Consequently, the judge gave organizers an additional 60 days to collect signatures.

Organizers petitioning for a referendum on Cop City established a presence across Atlanta, building offices and information points in community centers and places of worship.

What Mass Organizing Makes Possible

Organizing efforts around the City Hall protests and the referendum enabled the movement to overcome a few barriers. Nearly 800 people volunteered to collect signatures for the referendum process. Dozens of abolitionists and radical organizers composed a curriculum to train those volunteers and strategized about how to best distribute their energies across the city. From mid-June to mid-September, these volunteers could be seen everywhere. Posters, stickers, signs, and memorabilia filled coffee shops, bars, local grocery stores, tattoo parlors, bookshops, farmers markets, and art galleries. On busy avenues, volunteers walked up and down the sidewalks, speaking with all passersby. In just a few months, hundreds of thousands of residents spoke with canvassers; this gave them a chance to ask them questions, learn about Cop City, and discuss the resistance to it, generating a new level of mass sympathy with the movement.

In the canvasser trainings, aspiring canvassers were explicitly instructed not to denounce sabotage, vandalism, or clashes with law enforcement. If they did not feel comfortable explaining those phenomena, they could simply change the subject, or they could humbly listen, then find a way to reassert the purpose of the petition. The referendum organizers themselves asserted continuously that the strength of the movement derived in no small part from sabotage, vandalism, and other combative tactics. They published written statements affirming the validity of “all tactics.” Contrary to the anxieties of some internet commentators, the referendum campaign was not intended to suppress or compete with direct action. Most participants in the effort simply wanted to establish a path for the movement that could involve a large number of metro Atlanta residents.

The movement has had many strengths, but mass participation has never been among them. Despite continuous attempts to foster a creative and contagious movement, despite robust media coverage locally, nationally, and globally, no more than 2000 people have ever participated in any one event opposing Cop City. Despite the accessible action framework demonstrated by the groups targeting contractors and funders, only ideologically driven and risk-tolerant groups have participated in those actions, usually using a clandestine approach. The largest event by far was the South River Music Festival, which drew in a couple thousand people over two days in March 2023. Most protests, rallies, and marches have drawn between ten and two hundred people. When Tortuguita was killed, only 300 people showed up downtown in response, two thirds of them hooded militants in black masks. This has consequences for what those who do participate can actually do, because some kinds of action are only possible in large crowds.

The movement has made considerable headway nonetheless. It has found ways to turn its small size to its advantage. Centering a small, dedicated core has enabled the participants to advance revolutionary discourse throughout the movement and to conduct militant actions with greater tactical agility.

Yet countless historical examples suggest that this pattern cannot be maintained forever. If frontline fighters cannot keep supply lines open, take breaks, receive new assistance, and rely on the resources and security provided by sympathizers and newly radicalized people, they will eventually lose. This concern is not derived from abstract political concepts or folded-and-stapled booklets; it has been proven time and again across centuries and continents. For example, the legendary focoista campaigns of the 20th century drew together some of the most dedicated, audacious, and extreme sectors of the Latin American revolutionary left in clashes with the armies and paramilitaries of various CIA-backed dictatorships. Aside from exceptions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, and El Salvador, these campaigns resulted in the near-complete decimation of an entire generation of revolutionaries. An isolated vanguard—however dedicated or secretive—is doomed to defeat.

Counterinsurgency strategy explicitly seeks to create a gulf between dedicated militants and the rest of society in order to target the former and immobilize the latter. Acknowledging this does not oblige committed militants to pursue populist strategies to appeal to an imagined mass of people, but it does open the question of what the alternatives might be.

Some participants in the movement insist that all strategies oriented towards “society” in general are naïve and “liberal.” A few go further, asserting without any measurable criteria that only clandestine sabotage “works.”¹ But without widespread participation, even the fiercest vanguard cannot move beyond hit-and-run actions. They will never be able to advance to open confrontations (which the historic proponents of guerrilla warfare understood as a necessary step in their strategies). Without more participants, actions such as the march in downtown Atlanta on January 21 or the march to the construction site on March 5 will remain the high points of combativity from the movement. Those actions did not succeed in bringing about the cancellation of Cop City. In order to move from clandestine attacks to winnable confrontations, the movement needs a more robust way of understanding the relationship between the actions of anonymous saboteurs and more accessible, participatory forms of widespread self-organized activity.

If a few thousand more people dedicated themselves to the fight, that would increase the capacity of the fighters by an order of magnitude. There are worthwhile and necessary tasks to conduct in clandestinity, in public organizing, and in fundraising. The relatively small size and ferocity of the movement so far has contributed to a kind of mythologizing of the protagonists, so that the most dedicated participants are seen as heroes (or demons, depending on who you ask) while most of the supporters and public remain passive spectators. When a movement is structured as a small, sharp, edge passively observed by spectators, the latter, as a consequence of their inactivity, will tend to oscillate wildly between sympathy and skepticism. To succeed, movements must inspire the self-organized activity, theoretical development, and participation of as many people as possible. Real militancy is not showing people bold actions; it is enabling them to act for themselves.

Those who are skeptical of the value of mobilizing people to speak at City Hall or organizing people to petition for a referendum must accept that they will remain a marginal force in the movement unless they themselves take on the burden of organizing alternative strategies to engage large numbers of people. So far, the proponents of no other strategy have succeeded in doing so, and few have even tried.

Police intimidation of ordinary protest activity has become the norm in Atlanta.

The Sixth Week of Action

Not everyone pursued the referendum strategy, although everyone was affected by the shifting landscape of repression. On June 23, Dekalb County District Attorney Sherri Boston announced that her office would no longer participate in the terrorism cases against the movement. In a televised press conference, she referred to the “fundamentally different” philosophies of prosecution that distinguished her office from the office of Chris Carr, Attorney General of Georgia. She also cited pressure applied against her by the public in the form of incessant phone calls and letters as a factor in her decision. This shifted all legal responsibilities and initiative into the hands of the most reactionary forces in the state, signaling that the Dekalb County Government hoped to wash its hands of the ongoing public relations disaster that they have helped to create by participating in the lethal raid on January 18 and closing Intrenchment Creek Park (a part of the Weelaunee Forest).

The following day, June 24, the sixth Week of Action began. It shared almost no common features with the previous four, though it was somewhat reminiscent of the first such week, held in October 2021. Rather than Weelaunee Forest, workshops and talks took place in Brownwood Park, located in East Atlanta Village. Rather than centering the capacities of the movement to leverage nationwide support with concentrated militancy, the sixth Week of Action involved very few protests, no mass encampment, and few cultural events. It was so different from previous Weeks that it was as if an altogether different constellation of groups had organized it.

On the first day, over 100 people gathered in Brownwood Park. By late afternoon, they were surrounded by police vehicles and surveilled by drones and helicopters. At 8:30 pm, Belkis Teran, the mother of Tortuguita, gathered people in the park to host a vigil and ceremony for her deceased child. At that point, dozens of officers entered the area, barking orders and pointing at people, instructing those assembled that if they were not gone when the park closed (three hours later), they would be subject to arrest. The crowd did not hesitate to confront the officers, yelling at them and telling them to leave the premises. When a few people with tactical experience began encircling police and calling for others to do the same, the officers quickly withdrew. This brief confrontation was cathartic for participants, but nonetheless had the intended chilling effect. After the vigil, everyone left the park. Later in the evening, deep in the Weelaunee Forest, hundreds of people gathered for an illegal dance party. Music blared late into the night as forest defenders and ravers shared the comforting embrace of the trees. However, this was not the section of the forest slated for demolition. No encampment was established there, nor in the park, nor anywhere else.

The following day, June 25, over 100 people re-assembled in the park. The atmosphere was jubilant and friendly. Participants shared food and assembled beneath a gazebo for a presentation on the limits of referendum strategies, conducted in a comradely and good-faith tone. Elsewhere in town, activists passed out fliers for forthcoming events. For the most part, the day was uneventful—with one exception.

That night, anonymous activists ventured onto the headquarters of the Brent Scarborough Company. Brent Scarborough, located almost an hour south of Atlanta in the suburb of Newnan, is the subcontractor that Brasfield & Gorrie hired to cut down trees and grade the land at the Prison Farm. Their facility is surrounded by trees and barbed wire fencing. They hired on-site security to park overnight at the office. This did not stop a few dedicated people from sabotaging their machines. According to an online communiqué, the activists hiked through the woods and scaled the fences using a cut-out square of carpet, as seen in the Hollywood film Fight Club. Sneaking past the security guards, they poured muriatic acid into the engines of multiple trucks and machines before escaping into the night.

Aside from a few movie screenings and workshops, no events were planned for the following days. Several were planned for June 28.

The New Balance of Forces

At midday, a small crowd gathered outside of Cadence Bank in downtown Atlanta. The bank was slated to offer a multimillion-dollar loan to the Atlanta Police Foundation; activists wanted to give them cause to reconsider. After a few minutes, police chased and dispersed the crowd. In the skirmish, a few people were pulled free of the police, but two were arrested. One person was ultimately charged with Felony Obstruction. Between harassing the vigil for Tortuguita and this, police sought to establish a new balance of force in which they could control the streets, so that activists would be reduced to knocking on doors.

A few hours later, around 4 pm, two hundred people gathered in Gresham Park. Belkis Teran joined them. The crowd held reinforced banners. Scouts observed several dozen police vehicles in the parking lot of Intrenchment Creek Park and dozens of officers in riot gear. The crowd marched down the same bicycle path that another crowd had during the fifth Week of Action in order to re-occupy the park on March 4, 2023. Morale was high.

Approaching the wooden bridge passing over Snow Creek just east of Intrenchment Creek Park, the crowd encountered multiple police cruisers stationed next to the path, near Cottonwood Drive. Helicopters circled overhead. At the tunnel beneath Bouldercrest Road, which marks the true entrance to Intrenchment Creek Park, police had erected cement barriers and formed a skirmish line. The crowd stopped before encountering any of this directly. Belkis took a megaphone and delivered an impassioned speech to the crowd. Others spoke as well, including demonstrators wearing balaclavas and gloves. Had the crowd been a few hundred more, this demonstration might have confronted the police and retaken the forest.

The crowd turned back, without losing morale, soberly assessing the situation. There were nearly as many police as protesters, and it was better to only fight when success was plausible. Any further advance would likely have provoked a dramatic clash in which police would have had the upper hand. If the movement had been in a phase in which it was necessary to assert its militancy, this might have been worthwhile. On the contrary, however, the movement had already demonstrated its militancy; what was necessary at this point was to show that it could win confrontations while minimizing losses.

At that point, the preparedness of the police could still be ascribed to the proximity to the forest. The authorities were clearly committed to preventing new encampments from being established there. But the protests the following day showed that this was not simply a question of the securing the forest, but of seeking to crush the whole movement.

On June 29, a small number of people assembled on Ponce de Leon, intending to picket Home Depot, a sponsor of the APF. They met a massive police mobilization. Police cruisers filled the parking lot, perhaps 100 yards long. The construction and hardware retailer closed for the day pre-emptively. A few dozen people stood on the sidewalk chanting slogans and holding signs for passing traffic. This did not appear to be a militant group; they were ostensibly not prepared to engage in confrontations with the authorities or their corporate sponsors. That did not protect them, however. Abruptly, Atlanta Police grabbed an elderly protester and handcuffed her. The demonstration was aggressively dispersed by officers barking orders and grabbing signs.

Protesters march down the bike path between Gresham Park and Intrenchment Creek Park during the sixth Week of Action on June 28, 2023.

Escalating Tactics

The following day, June 30, over 100 people gathered again in Brownwood Park. Once again, the Weelaunee Coalition hosted a youth-led rally in defense of the forest and against Cop City. This may have been the only event of the week that was not harassed by law enforcement, including the movie screenings and talks. Thankfully, these children were not subjected to the direct intimidation that the rest of the movement experienced.

In the three days following the sixth Week of Action, clandestine groups claimed responsibility for several attacks against Cop City.

The first took place in California. Activists released a statement claiming credit for smashing the windows of four banks and the screens of three ATMs in San Francisco, Oakland, and Concord. Over the preceding two and a half years, several dozen offices and institutions had suffered broken windows due to their support for the Atlanta Police Foundation, but this was the largest number of locations targeted simultaneously—implying that the saboteurs were scaling up their numbers and coordination.

Anonymous saboteurs struck multiple targets in Atlanta on July 1 as well. A clandestine group calling itself the March 5th Movement—a reference to the March 5, 2023 attack on the Cop City construction site—vandalized police infrastructure in two locations. Tagging “M5M” on the hood of a police cruiser, they smashed the windows out of three cop cars on Memorial Drive and unsuccessfully attempted to set them on fire. Simultaneously, improvised incendiary devices appeared in the parking garage beneath the current Atlanta Police training facility located in an industrial area at the southern boundary of Atlanta. This second action resulted in the burning of eight police motorcycles. According to government press conferences, an additional improvised device failed to detonate. Police claim that if it had, it would have assured the burning of 40 additional vehicles. The Chief of Police and the Atlanta Journal Constitution published photographs of the device. Officials claim that the entire facility could have been destroyed if an off-duty officer had not been randomly driving by at the time. Apparently, no one was inside the building at the time of the action.

On July 2, protesters visited the residence of Cop City architect Anthony Kenny, vandalizing it with paint and slashing the tires of his car. Ambrish Baisiwala, who sits on the Atlanta Police Foundation Board of Trustees, received the same treatment that night.

Atlas Technical Consultants Drops Out

The same day, July 2, protesters gathered outside the suburban home of a regional manager for Atlas Technical Consultants in Minnesota, chanting slogans and banging on drums in his yard. The regional manager stormed out his front door screaming and cursing at the demonstrators. He told those assembled that Atlas had already dropped the contract. When someone in the crowd asked him why, he answered “Because you guys are a fucking nightmare” and “You broke all of our fucking windows.”

After this news spread online, some people in Williston, Vermont visited the offices of Atlas on July 9, painting slogans on the work trucks and front doors of the facility. The next day, Atlas Technical confirmed with an independent journalist that they had backed out of the project. The following week, asked about Atlas’ decision at a press conference about Cop City, Atlanta Police chief Darin Shierbaum said “Well, if people were coming to your home, what would you do?”

Later, documents released on November 30 indicated that Atlas had apparently withdrawn from the project the preceding March. The company expressed the desire to withdraw from the project on March 4. By the 7, they were already off the contract. The document reveals much about the internal status of the project and its investigations into the movement, including the potentially illegal collusion of various agencies with Magnus Miller Gorrie over encrypted Signal chats. It also catalogues a number of actions for which no public claim of responsibility was ever made, such as February 21, 2023 burning of an Atlas Technical office and vehicle in Brecksville, Ohio.

The departure of Atlas represented a significant victory for the movement. In the winter of 2021, as detailed in The City in the Forest, 50 forest defenders had marched to the prison farm to resist the soil-boring and sampling conducted by Long Engineering, a subsidiary of Atlas Technical Consultants. Finally, after over two years of home visits, call-ins, letter writing, marches, rallies, vandalism, and clashes, a major Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractor had backed out of the project. Despite this success, the news did not catalyze a significant uptick in the pressure campaign against other subcontractors of Brasfield & Gorrie, other clients of the Atlanta Police Foundation, or the project itself. It did not give people the sense that greater resistance to Cop City was possible.

In view of this, it is worth reevaluating that campaign. More on that below.

Scooping the Mid-Range: Repressing Public Resistance

In audio engineering, “equalization” (EQ) means adjusting the frequencies to produce the ideal sound and tone. Broadly speaking, these frequencies are divided into bass, mid-range, and treble. Insofar as taste is completely subjective, there is no “correct” way to EQ a song. In general, however, it is agreed that any EQ that completely obscures a frequency is undesirable, because that means that a given instrument or sound will be covered up by other sounds. For instance, there are many high-end frequencies in the snare drum and cymbals; without proper equalization, high-end frequencies in vocals, guitar, or keyboard can be completely covered up by the drum sounds, or all of them can bleed together in an unintelligible cacophony.

In music parlance, to “scoop the mids” is to turn down the mid-range frequencies below the bass or treble frequencies. In heavy metal, people often “scoop the mids” to produce an aggressive guitar tone, imitating the recordings of Metallica or Pantera. Unfortunately, if the mid-range of the guitars is “scooped” too much, a live audience will not be able to hear them over the drums and bass. Experienced bands know that to deliver a crisp, hard-hitting, intelligible sound, you need to include a certain amount of mid-range frequencies in the guitar EQ.

Imagine that civic efforts such as canvassing for the referendum and speaking at City Hall represent the “treble” of resistance, while nocturnal sabotage, vandalism, fire-setting, and clandestine attacks represent the “bass.” In this metaphor, the “mid-range” is comprised of public demonstrations, marches, forest encampments, walk-outs, and riotous protests—actions that are both combative and participatory. The police strategy since December 13, 2022 has been to “scoop” the mid-range of the movement, pushing down the middle frequency as much as possible.

This has created a situation that intensifies the contrast between underground and civic actions. Those who imagine that some forms of resistance are more intrinsically worthy than others welcome this situation, because it makes it easier to center their preferred approaches while deriding the others. The forcible suppression of space for participatory action protects participants from testing the viability of their concepts in open dialogue with alternative viewpoints. Prosecutors and police like this situation for the same reason: it makes the line very clear between those engaging in legal protest activity and those engaging in clandestine direct action.

But it is precisely the middle frequencies of a movement that give it its punch—making its rhythms infectious, enabling it to move people and draw them into a process of transformation. Without these frequencies, the results will be muddy and indistinct.

If activists cannot re-assert their right to gather publicly for “mid-range” activities, nocturnal sabotage and civic actions will drift further and further apart, becoming mutually unintelligible and incapable of reaching those outside the movement. Regardless of individual preferences, everyone must recognize the importance of participatory, confrontational activity.

The Storm Before the Storm

On July 2, Governor Kemp released a statement describing the March 5th Movement attacks as “the tactics of organized criminals,” while avoiding using the name of the group. On July 3, activists visited the private residence of Keith Johnson, the pre-construction regional director for Brasfield & Gorrie. Protesters had visited his house repeatedly over the preceding two and a half years. As a result, his multi-house estate had hired full-time security to park in his driveway. This did not stop activists from climbing over the fence into his yard.

According to an online statement, saboteurs entered the Johnson estate and dumped paint on the main house, spray-painted slogans on his cars, and painted messages on his driveway next to the vehicle of the security guard. They also dumped motor oil into his swimming pool. Finally, they unloaded buckets of rotten fish into the pool and backyard. This may be among the most serious actions targeting an executive in recent US history.

The next day, on the Fourth of July, anonymous forest defenders torched two machines belonging to Brent Scarborough Company in broad daylight. This action took place at the same site where other machines belonging to the Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractor had been sabotaged after the fifth Week of Action in spring 2023. Since the action in the spring, the site had been guarded nearly around the clock by private security. Activists targeted the location on the holiday, correctly predicting a lapse in security coverage.

These actions sent the Atlanta and Georgia administrations into a panic.

A month later, on August 2, Atlanta Police, Georgia Bureau of Investigations, Department of Homeland Security, the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) department, and the Fire Marshal held a joint press conference in which they publicized technical details of the previous months’ actions, including how and why they took place. The Police Chief announced an increase in the cash reward for the parties behind these actions; this suggests that the authorities did not have adequate information to go on. That did not stop them from baselessly claiming that the saboteurs did not represent the broader movement opposed to Cop City or committed to the defense of Weelaunee, alleging that they were a “very small” group. More likely, the anonymous saboteurs were not a “group” at all.

As the actions in Atlanta slowed and canvassers continued fanning out to talk with residents and acquire signatures, bold actions continued elsewhere, including the burning of multiple Asheville police cruisers just after Atlanta police announced they would host recruitment events in that city. A week and a half later, a raucous crowd disrupted another Atlanta police recruitment event in New York City, blocking the doors of the event despite the efforts of the NYPD. At the end of the month, on August 30, the March 5th Movement claimed credit for placing an incendiary device on the truck of Vertiv Corporation in Milwaukie, Oregon. Vertiv is a logistics and technology company providing technical aid to the Atlanta Police Department.

Escalating Repression: RICO and the Furtherance of the Conspiracy

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the “tactics of organized criminals” language Governor Kemp used on July 2 was not just boilerplate copy drafted by an intern, nor was the August 2 press conference simply propaganda to assure backers that the state could still protect their investments. These phrases and statements were shaping operations, carefully crafted interventions designed to position the government for their next operation: the blanket criminalization of the entire movement.

Governor Brian Kemp sets the stage for the RICO charges, seeking to isolate the defendants targeted by the state from their supporters in August 2023.

On August 29, the Attorney General of Georgia, Christopher M. Carr, filed an indictment with the Fulton County Superior Court, bringing charges against 61 people under Georgia’s version of the Rackeeter-Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act O.C.G.A. § 16-14-4. The indictment became public on September 5. The document, which is over 100 pages long and very poorly written, claims that the “conspiracy” (which it names “Defend the Atlanta Forest”) was “founded” on May 25, 2020—the day that Minneapolis Police officers murdered George Floyd, precipitating a nationwide uprising.

This was a serious escalation. It did not catch everyone by surprise: the Atlanta Solidarity Fund has been braced for such charges since February. The authorities and their extreme-right proxies had been demanding a full-scale crackdown on the movement for over a year, spreading a conspiracy theory that the movement was a mafia controlled by a shadowy and well-connected group (a narrative some activists also reproduced, apparently with no sense of irony). According to one version of this conspiracy theory, circulated by far-right trolls, the Network for Stronger Communities (a Georgia-based nonprofit organization) operates a number of financial enterprises, including the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, that coordinate acts of terrorism in order to accumulate wealth and influence. Of the 61 accused, three were members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. The 42 people already facing Domestic Terrorism charges were also indicted, as well as a number of other people whose connection to the movement was unclear. The indictment alleged that some people had committed acts in “overt furtherance of the conspiracy” such as buying glue sticks for sign-making.

The RICO indictment was not a legal procedure but a political act. It was not a judicial intervention to suppress criminal activity but a government measure to crush what the text describes as “anarchism,” “collectivism,” “social solidarity,” “mutual aid.”

It is not simply 61 people who are on trial. By dating the case to the murder of George Floyd, the prosecution showed that their real target was the entire population of millions that participated in the consequent revolt. This is not an unusual court case, but a new chapter in the fight between those who seek to preserve the hierarchies of a structurally white supremacist society and those fighting to destroy it root and branch. The indictment does not present a list of crimes. It describes the contours and values of a rival society emerging within the movement to stop Cop City, aspiring to reinvent the world according to a different logic.

The Fulton County Judge assigned to the RICO case immediately recused himself. Until then, judges had not recused themselves from cases related to the movement even when they possessed obvious ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation.

RICO in Georgia

RICO cases are becoming a generic strategy of prosecution in Georgia. The local statutes are conveniently vague, allowing the government to bring conspiracy charges against people who do not even know one another, as in the case against the movement. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis uses RICO charges for a wide range of purposes, including sending teachers to prison for doctoring test answers in a low-income area.

In May 2022, Atlanta-based rapper Young Thug was indicted alongside 27 others under the Georgia RICO statute. In August 2023, former US President Donald Trump was indicted alongside 18 others on the same charges. Although the RICO cases currently in progress represent rival factions of the political class, the same grand jury that indicted Donald Trump is responsible for indicting those accused of “racketeering” for protesting Cop City.

The court system is the central infrastructure for directing state violence. Though naïve Democrats may imagine it to be a check on the aspirations of autocrats, it naturally lends itself to all forms of repression targeting the oppressed, and that is the chief role that it will always play.

You Can’t Break Us

The movement swiftly responded to the charges. The language of the indictment was specifically phrased to imply that any protest or action in the forest by nature of being in the forest constitutes an act of terrorism in “overt furtherance of the conspiracy,” i.e., racketeering. To challenge this framing, on September 8, clergy associated with the “Faith Coalition” rushed the construction site at the Old Atlanta Prison Farm and chained themselves to heavy machinery, stopping work for the day. Officers eventually arrived to arrest them, but only charged them with simple misdemeanors. Journalists captured this courageous action on video. In only three days, the movement had broken the state of shock that the charges had created. Nothing was finished.

In the following days, over 100 people marched to the Georgia State Capitol building, denouncing the charges. Sunrise Movement Ann Arbor marched in Michigan, demanding that Accident Fund drop its insurance coverage for the Police Foundation. In Kingston, New York, people held a vigil for those killed by state terrorism or charged with RICO. A crowd rallied outside the local “Safety Center” in Carbondale, Illinois. Graffiti denouncing the charges appeared throughout Minneapolis. In Phoenix, activists the blocked entrances to the offices of Nationwide Insurance, which provides coverage for the APF. Two activists in Elliston, Virginia locked down to construction equipment for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in solidarity with the lock-downs in Atlanta. On September 10, protesters in Chicago blocked streets and broke windows at a Chase Bank. The next day, anarchists in Olympia, Washington broke windows at an Arby’s, citing the connection that their parent company, Inspire Brands, had to the APF.

The RICO charges offered new clarity to the stakes of the struggle. The summer of 2023 had seen a lull for the combative part of the movement after the sixth Week of Action; the repression immediately catalyzed a response.

On September 11, the referendum organizers turned in 116,000 signatures demanding a popular vote on the future of Cop City—more than twice the number of votes Andre Dickens had received in the run-off election that made him Mayor.

Clergy chain themselves to machines belonging to Brent Scarborough company just days after the Attorney General indicts 61 people on RICO.

The Scope of Repression Broadens

The referendum initiative terrified the local administration and the Cop City funders. The specter of a popular vote unsettled the confidence of the pro-Cop City coalition because it called all the reassurances of the Police Foundation into question. If the contract was not a sure thing, what kind of institution would lend or donate millions of dollars to it? This question surely haunted the offices of the Police Foundation and Mayor’s office. They must have felt they needed to do something definitive to silence internal skepticism.

On September 29, 2023, Interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon published the full legal names, phone numbers, and home addresses of the 116,000 Atlanta residents who had signed the petition for a referendum, posting them on the website of the Atlanta government. Taking her cue, fascist groups began sharing this list online. Many on the list feared that stalkers and abusers would hunt them down.

In response, within 24 hours, the Free & Rowdy Party doxxed the members of the Atlanta Committee for Progress, using Vanessa Waldon’s act of repression as an opportunity to catalyze further actions against Cop City. The Atlanta Committee for Progress is a coalition of powerful industrial and bourgeois delegates who collude to maintain the clientelist system known as the Atlanta Way, described in The City in the Forest. These delegates include the CEOs of many international corporations, universities, and institutions. No previous doxxes had targeted figures of such stature and influence.

A few days later, on October 1, an excavator belonging to Brent Scarborough Company caught fire. This was the third attack against the company at the location of Sawtell and McDonough, near the Federal Penitentiary. While this action did not address the 116,000 people who had been doxxed by the government, perhaps missing a chance to communicate with a huge number of people, it did demonstrate that the fighting spirit of the movement had not been extinguished by the RICO charges, nor the repression of the referendum petitioning process.

The delivery of 116,000 signatures demanding a referendum. Later, City Clerk Vannessa Waldron would publish them unredacted on the city government website in a retaliatory gesture.

This is Not a Local Repression Strategy

On October 3, a Georgia Open Records Act (GORA) request revealed that the office of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens had been speaking with the White House since at least June 2023. City officials had been communicating with White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs representative Julie Rodriguez. Rodriguez believes, according to these notes, that Cop City is “exemplary” of what President Biden “would like to see other municipalities emulate.” Finally, the White House offered to send “an official of your choice” to visit the site.

Another document made available through the GORA request revealed that the Department of Homeland Security published an overview analysis of the movement on January 3, 2023, two weeks before the killing of Tortuguita. Their report included a map of specifically destructive actions across the country, arguing that the movement would continue to inspire acts of “domestic violent extremism” if it was able to persist.

A map of Stop Cop City actions across the country, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security.

The picture is becoming clearer. Local authorities, unable to mitigate the effects of the movement against their project, have been drawing in greater and greater forces to assist them. This began with the coordination of interdepartmental raids (“security sweeps,” in the official doublespeak) on the forest in May 2022. This interdepartmental coordination slowly pulled in more agencies from across the metropolitan area, eventually culminating in a statewide raid on the forest in December followed by the infamous lethal raid led by Georgia State Patrol in January 2023. In March, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security in interrogating music festival attendees detained in or near Intrenchment Creek Park. Statements from the Governor’s office have become increasingly common, while Congresspeople like Marjorie Taylor Green have denounced the movement and demanded a clampdown.

It is now clear that some attention is being given to the fight to stop Cop City from the highest echelons of official government. In order to defeat the awkward coalition being built against it, the movement will have to combine at least as many forces and strategies.

Attrition and Conflict

In the six months that have passed since the previous chapter of this story appeared, some of the forces described therein have disappeared. For instance, the “South River Forest Public Safety Training Center Task Force,” established by the Mayor’s office to rubberstamp Cop City blueprints and reforms, has either moved to illegal encrypted channels or vanished completely. The movement has paid no attention to Michael Thurmond, the CEO of Dekalb County, despite his decision to shut down Intrenchment Creek Park. Ryan Millsap, one of the movement’s chief antagonists in 2022, has also receded from view.

After the RICO charges became public, many participants stepped back from the movement, as well. As of October 2023, 108 people accused of participating in the struggle to stop Cop City faced charges of some kind. Presumably, the stress of awaiting trial and dealing with bond conditions has negatively impacted both the defendants and their various supporters. Hundreds of people were living with the stress of looming court cases and possible incarceration, not to mention those who did not know anyone facing charges but were emotionally impacted nonetheless. The challenges of constantly fighting, organizing, attending meetings, conducting research, deliberating, and thinking about the movement must have worn on the resolve of all participants.

One way to avoid burnout is to find a specific, concrete role to play, then change that role over time, taking breaks or periodically moving into less intensive roles before fatigue can take too much of a toll.

Not everyone who withdrew from the movement did so because of burnout. Some stepped back for other reasons. Some simply vanished, abandoning others in their time of need–neither engaging in public organizing, nor conducting clandestine activity, nor securing materials, resources, or funds for the movement or those facing charges.

At the same time, a small number of people strained the solidarity of the movement by launching public denunciations and political attacks on other participants, violating the movement’s longstanding principles of discretion and private debate. It’s interesting to note that the timeline of these denunciations roughly matches the timeline of police escalation. Public denunciations appeared online in January, in March, and then again shortly after the announcement of the RICO case.

This is not all that unusual. Internal conflict often emerges as a consequence of repression. Those who study counterinsurgency understand that the chief effect of repression is usually not the direct impact of the blow, but the fault lines it opens up.

Some of those who have published denunciations may have sought to give themselves political cover for withdrawing from the movement, falling back on a narrative of “betrayal,” the only persuasive justification for leaving the movement in what otherwise might itself be understood as a betrayal. In the end, it was neither liberals nor pacifists—neither ecologists nor lawyers, students, canvassers, academics, socialists, abolitionists, Black nationalists, Marxists, or musicians—who drafted public condemnations of other participants in the movement to stop Cop City. It was anarchists targeting other anarchists.

Some of the other critics were apparently never involved in the movement to defend the forest at all, or only peripherally connected to it. Some do not even live in the United States. Conflict among participants in the movement is one thing, but it is sheer opportunism for those who only experience the movement as a distant projection screen for their own fixations to seek to capitalize on friction within it.

When analyzing the end of the forest encampments and the heartbreaking death of Tortuguita, we could well blame the billions of people who were not living in the forest in the winter of 2022—including most of the people making public denunciations in the first place. We would also have cause to criticize those in the forest who drove others out with their polarizing attitudes, behavior, and words. But apportioning blame and name-calling are for those who have given up on changing the world. The rest of us have to find ways to resolve our differences if we are to continue fighting our chief adversaries.

Despite the tensions among a few anarchists and their friends, many people have continued to push ahead courageously. What comes next will be determined by those who persevere.

From Atlanta to Gaza, No Cop City Anywhere

On October 6, District Attorney George R. Christian of the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit ruled that it was “objectively reasonable” for police to kill Tortuguita. While disturbing, this news did not shock many people. Perhaps because of the widespread cynicism around the investigation, which many considered a mockery from the outset, nobody mobilized in response to the ruling. At the same time, students and organizers on Emory University Campus were hosting meetings about Cop City and the attacks on the Gaza strip that the Israeli military was preparing.

After threats and intimidation on Morehouse, Spelman, Carter, Georgia State, and Georgia Tech campuses, it seemed that the prospect of campus resistance to Cop City had receded. On October 26, around 150 students and faculty rallied on campus. The group listened to speeches and chanted slogans. After an hour, the crowd began marching toward the Quad, where Atlanta police had forcibly dispersed an encampment in April 2023. Outside the administration building, the group stopped and organizers read out a list of demands. Those demands included the renunciation of Cop City by the Emory administration, the cessation of membership in the Atlanta Police Foundation and Atlanta Committee for Progress, and a number of specific demands relevant to the student body and their ability to organize on campus.

After reading the demands aloud, the larger part of the assembled crowd marched into the administration building to deliver them to the campus authorities directly. As they filled the atrium and stairwell, administration staff locked the doors to the office and hid from view. Eventually, a representative of the university came out to meet the students. Having accomplished their goals, the crowd dispersed onto the Quad and established a temporary information point there, distributing t-shirts and literature about the movement as well as free food and conversation.

In the days following this action, Zionists doxxed campus organizers. Across the country, academics, journalists, and workers in many industries have faced reprisals for objecting to the bombing and ethnic cleansing targeting the Gaza strip. Emory University has been no different. The administration released a statement denouncing student action, likening it to “anti-Semitism.” Jewish activists have not been spared this slander or the accompanying harassment.

Emory students demand that the university administration break ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Black Self-Organization

In this context, a group of Black activists and organizers announced a Week of Action. Ostensibly, this was the first time an all-Black group had organized a series of events like this during the movement. Black activists felt that this was an important moment to mobilize Black residents and bring more into the struggle. Toward this end, they promoted a calendar of events.

Throughout this Week of Action, activists conducted workshops and presentations on a range of topics. Classes on herbalism and somatic care drew local participants. Students attended talks on Palestine solidarity and the colonial capitalism. Some of these events were ethnically mixed; many were intended to be majority-Black.

Canvassing took place every day of the week across the city. Outside of grocery stores and libraries, at shopping malls and low-income housing developments canvassers met up and passed out fliers, started conversations, and collected phone numbers. After months of canvassing for the referendum petition, some may have felt that it was urgent to continue reaching out to people, or that some communities had not been adequately canvassed. The results of this approach are seldom visible in the short term and require more durable and far-looking organizational structures to make use of the feedback and contacts arising from door-knocking and walking around with a clipboard. Some of the groups spearheading the Black Week of Action are organized into structures that are well-equipped to do this kind of outreach.

On November 9, a crowd assembled on Georgia State campus. After speeches denouncing the Israeli military and its US sponsors for the ongoing assault on civilians in the Gaza strip, the crowd marched to the location of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. The banners and signs of the procession connected the struggle against Cop City with the fight to end Israeli apartheid. The GILEE program, which is funded by GSU tuition, enables Georgia police to cross-train with military personnel in Tel Aviv, and to host them for counterinsurgency trainings in the United States as well. A delegation of Atlanta police was supposed to go to Tel Aviv on the week of October 10 to receive training from the apartheid regime, but the training was cancelled as a result of the unfolding crisis. This did not stop officers from conducting a “mock” raid on an abandoned hotel in downtown Atlanta, role-playing the invasion of a “Hamas stronghold,” according to police radio communications.

The next day, November 10, dozens of people gathered on Metropolitan Parkway, just southwest of downtown, for a “Black Family March.” The group included Black residents and activists as well as some whose family members had been killed by police. Protesters chanted slogans and listened to speeches. Police officers on motorcycles gathered on the road with their lights on, hoping to intimidate the assembly. It appeared that the authorities were still strongly invested in preserving the balance of forces that they had worked so hard to establish over the summer, denying crowds the ability to take the streets.

During the Black week of action, activists marched to the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) office on Georgia State campus. If Cop City is completed, Israeli soldiers will use it to train police from the United States. Activists left shoes at the doorstep of GILEE, representing the thousands of Palestinian children that soldiers in Gaza have murdered.

Block Cop City

The Black Week of Action ended just before another mobilization: Block Cop City.

Over the preceding summer, some participants in the movement had concluded that in order to prevent the forces of repression from reducing the movement to the segments focused on the referendum or clandestine sabotage, it was necessary to try a new approach. In hopes of reassuring those who were not prepared for the level of confrontation that the movement had engaged in on March 5 and building bridges with organizations that had remained aloof from the movement, they decided to employ a model of “nonviolent tactics,” a framework that had the movement had never previously utilized for mass actions.

A website was ready by early September. Across the following two months, organizers across the country conducted nearly 80 public speaking events promoting the mobilization and seeking feedback on the proposal. A total of thousands of people attended these talks.

The basic idea—coming out of the RICO case, the stagnation of the referendum process, and the sharp downturn in clandestine actions following the fifth Week of Action—was to bring together a large enough group to march onto the construction site to stop work. The larger goal was to carve out space for public demonstrations and challenge the state’s strategy of openly criminalizing out-of-state protesters.

Some opposed this proposal. The most vocal antagonists were in the City Government and police department. They claimed loudly and frequently that the event would not really be nonviolent, suggesting that a secretive group aimed to use the public mobilization to create chaos and violence.

Some activists agreed with them. We can divide these into two broad categories. On one side, there were people who did not believe in combative protests in the first place; some of them did not trust the anarchist and anti-authoritarian organizers behind Block Cop City. On the other side, there were people who did not believe in mass protests and did not trust the radical credentials of the Block Cop City organizers. The two forms of grassroots consensus with the government worked in tandem to obscure the details of the proposal. At some presentations, people passed out fliers attempting to dissuade others from attending the event, arguing that it was dangerous, ineffective, and disingenuous—the same arguments that the city government was making. They also challenged the right of groups to forms agreements about what kinds of actions they wanted to do, claiming that doing so would inhibit the freedom of individuals and was thus a form of “policing.”

Block Cop City organizers felt that with scores of people facing RICO charges, publicly coordinating a large event necessitated publicly arriving at a shared vision of the action. While critics claimed that it was “authoritarian” to propose action agreements, the organizers countered that it was specifically their anti-authoritarian politics that motivated them to take this approach. Below, we’ll return to the question of whether the framework of “nonviolence” served to achieve their objectives.

Building a Common Understanding

Hundreds of people arrived in Atlanta on November 10, gathering at parks and a local Quaker community center. They were received with food, literature, and sign-up sheets. On the first night, more than 500 people attended a kick-off party at a warehouse in East Point. Some people set up tables to distribute schedules and pamphlets about the coming days. Others distributed zines and posters on the history of the movement, instructional guides on direct action, and reflections drawn from various struggles around the world. Hardcore punk bands and rappers shared the stage while attendees crashed into one another and danced late into the night.

Such events play a role in cultivating the most fundamental factor in all movements and struggles: the will to fight. As long as movement protagonists feel that fighting Cop City is worthwhile, they stand a chance of winning. The more they can engender despair in their antagonists, the better off they will be.

The kick-off events prepared activists for the meetings scheduled for the next two days. Aside from direct action trainings, medic workshops, and legal aid assemblies, more than 400 people intended to gather two days in a row for a spokescouncil meeting involving representatives of affinity groups from around the country. The goal was to reconcile the concerns, aspirations, and capacities of the different participants in order that they could cooperate harmoniously during the march. Thanks to the venue hosts, the cooks, the dishwashers, the welcome tables, the facilitators, the drivers, those who cleaned up after, and everyone who provided emotional support for all of the aforementioned, the meetings were fairly focused and efficient.

At the beginning of the spokescouncil, facilitators reminded attendees that the movement began with a series of public meetings and the burning of machinery in the forest. The assembly cheered; many chanted “If you build it, we will burn it.” It was important to the organizers to emphasize that the nonviolence proposal for the Block Cop City action was intended to complement the other forms of action associated with the movement, including sabotage and combative protest tactics.

Puppets in the Orange cluster during the Block Cop City march.

Anatomy of a March

In the course of two days of deliberation, the spokescouncil agreed to form three “clusters” in the march. The clusters arranged themselves by color. Those colors were not intended to denote risk level, but to indicate relative position within the march; this was clearer than referring to “front, middle, and back,” since it was possible that the crowd would be compelled to change direction without being able to rearrange the locations of groups within the mass. The colors also represented different responsibilities.

The Blue cluster was to lead the march at the beginning. It would be responsible for setting the pace and direction. After much deliberation, the spokescouncil also agreed that the Blue cluster was responsible for maneuvering around or through the police and any other barriers to the site, concluding that the notion of nonviolence developed by the spokescouncil did not prevent the Blue cluster from attempting to push through lines of riot police using banners or inanimate objects. They also agreed that the nonviolence agreement did not prohibit the Blue cluster from cutting the perimeter fencing to the construction site, should the crowd get that far, provided that they did not throw objects or set things on fire. Item by item, the blue cluster reached consensus that they would not flee in response to non-lethal munitions including tear gas, flashbang grenades, pepper balls, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, water cannons, long-range acoustic devices, mace, police dogs, and baton charges. They would only stop moving forward if it became physically impossible.

The Purple cluster would start in the middle of the march. This was the largest cluster. The Purple cluster was responsible for filling whatever space the Blue cluster opened up. Some of them would carry saplings with the intention of planting them; others would bear puppets or musical instruments. A marching band chose to participate in this cluster. Many people joined this group because they were hesitant to be in the front or back, believing that the middle would be safest.

The Orange cluster was to begin at the back of the march. If retreat was called for, it would lead the march away. Towards this end, the Orange cluster was responsible for maintaining a strong rear section and making sure that the crowd was not caught unawares from behind. If the crowd was attacked or forced to turn around, the Orange cluster would bear responsibility for leading the march out of harm’s way. Many medics were in this cluster, prepared to treat injuries.

In all of the clusters, there were people prepared to push sound systems. Communications teams would also move between the clusters.

Participants in the mobilization distributed loose-fitting white coveralls dotted with paint. The idea was to enable protesters to blend in with one another, protecting vulnerable people and risk-takers from police harassment while fostering a sense of togetherness between the different sections. The front and back of the crowd were to be protected with banners framed with PVC pipe.

For the benefit of future demonstrators, it’s important to know that PVC pipe can break under the blows of police batons if it is not reinforced with spray insulation. Green bamboo can be both lighter and more resilient. Reinforced banners should have handles on the back, so that protesters don’t have to hold the edge of the frame, as this can result in broken hands and fingers if the police decide to hit them. To our knowledge, nobody suffered injuries of this nature during the Block Cop City march.

Forward, Arm in Arm

At 8 am on Monday, November 13, nearly 500 people gathered at Gresham Park. Helicopters and police drones were already circling overhead. Many of the assembled were journalists or support personnel who did not themselves intend to participate in the march. Cooks delivered hundreds of burritos. Organizers from different groups in the movement gave impassioned speeches and led chants. Speakers emphasized the intentions of the march and reiterated the action framework agreements. Nearly everyone present had attended the spokescouncil meetings at some point.

Neither the massive numbers nor the formal organizations that some had hoped would participate in the march had turned out. Few Atlanta residents were in attendance, and many participants in the previous two years of local activity did not attend. Much of the crowd was comprised of anarchists and radicals from around the country. Despite the dismayingly low numbers, the beautiful puppetry and marching band gave the gathering a festive appearance.

Livestream of the Block Cop City march courtesy of NDN Collective.

At 10 am, the crowd began marching down the bike path in the direction of Intrenchment Creek Park. This was the same route taken by a slightly larger crowd on March 4, at the beginning of the fifth Week of Action, and by a smaller crowd on June 28, during the sixth Week of Action.

People in the Blue cluster carried reinforced banners and a large number of umbrellas. Many of them wore balaclavas, gloves, helmets, respirators, goggles, or masks.

About fifteen minutes into the march, scouts reported a considerable number of riot police positioned at the tunnel beneath Bouldercrest Road, in the entrance to Intrenchment Creek Park. Lines of cops were assembled behind concrete barriers erected inside of the tunnel. They had taken the bait.

Reaching Cherry Valley Road, about halfway down the bicycle path, the crowd unexpectedly turned left, taking a route intended to outmaneuver the police checkpoints on the busy roads surrounding the forest. Every 500 meters or so, communications teams in the different clusters arranged for the procession to stop for two or three minutes in order to keep the march together. At the top of Cherry Valley Road, the crowd turned left onto Bouldercrest and then right onto Constitution Road. Finally, police vehicles appeared behind the march, blasting their sirens and attempting to intimidate the participants.

The crowd was now approaching the construction site. In the months leading up to the mobilization, some locals with experience in the forest and previous clashes with police had correctly predicted that a line of riot police would position themselves at the intersection of West Park Place and Constitution, just outside of the Fire station.

As the crowd approached West Park Place, police cruisers rushed ahead around the march. An armored vehicle was parked next to the fire station. Further ahead, multiple armored vehicles and a water cannon were parked inside the barbed-wire fencing of the construction site itself. When the Blue cluster was about 60 yards from the fire station, officers parked their vehicles in the middle of the road. They formed a solid line, wearing helmets and carrying shields.

The Blue cluster had already resolved to keep moving in the face of obstacles. If police blocked the path, they would advance through or around them. If they were physically incapable of moving forward, they would shift direction. As they drew within 20 yards of the police line, participants in the Blue cluster reminded themselves that they had already decided together what to do—they didn’t have to worry about improvising an individual response to the line of armored cops ahead.

When the Blue cluster drew within ten yards of the first row of police, they picked up their pace. Without pausing, the front of the march charged directly into the shields of the skirmish line, forming a V-shaped wedge with their reinforced banners and moving their umbrellas forward to block the view of the police as well as their pepper spray and other munitions. The first line of cops fell back and was reinforced by a second line. This line was also pushed back. Cops began striking protesters with their shields, and then with batons. They began shooting pepper balls and pepper spray at the front of the crowd.

Demonstrators clash with police on November 13, 2023.

As a third line of police formed, officers threw tear gas over the heads of the Blue cluster towards the Purple group, who were lagging a little behand. Most of the front of the Purple group withdrew down West Park Place and into the tree line. A bicyclist wearing heat-resistant gloves nonchalantly picked up a tear gas canister and lobbed it out of the crowd.

While the Purple and Orange groups drew back, the Blue cluster continued to rush ahead, now facing officers shooting tear gas, pepper balls, beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets directly at them. The police were apparently employing a graduated response, rapidly escalating their tactics as the Blue cluster pressed forward. However, the officers in the front were not wearing gas masks or goggles, so they were not prepared for the officers behind them to deploy tear gas. Consequently, the tear gas impacted them as badly as it affected the activists who were charging them. Abruptly, the two groups backed apart as protesters and police alike fell back coughing, vomiting, and calling for help.

Video footage shows the majority of police retreating with their backs to the crowd. This illustrates the extent to which order broke down on their side during the clash.

The demonstrators fell back a several yards down Constitution Road. Police fired a few flashbang grenades at them to preserve the gap between the two forces. Someone threw another tear gas canister back toward the riot police whence it had come. Technically, this was outside the agreed parameters of the action framework, but no one objected, then or afterwards.

Another angle on the clash of November 13, 2023.

The people from the front of the Purple cluster who had withdrawn down West Park Place and towards the tree line rejoined the rest of the march. Medics in the Orange cluster provided medical treatment to militants from Blue while other steadfast Orange participants held their ground.

The unity of the Blue cluster had provided the cool-headed courage they needed to defend and de-arrest each other throughout the clash. As a result, no one had been grievously harmed or arrested.

For a more detailed account of the events of the morning, we recommend “Don’t Panic, Stay Tight: Frontline Reflections on Block Cop City.” One account offers a lucid enough appraisal of the prospects of the march, given its numbers:

I knew that we stood no chance of making it into the construction site when I saw the crowd at the meet-up point. I was worried that all of these people would have come to Atlanta for nothing. The lines of police showed me my concerns were unfounded. While many people prefer to evade the clash, to move around the danger, to stick to the shadows, I have always preferred the front lines, the exploding canisters, the sour smell of the tear gas, the wild crush of the crowd. Real knowledge lives in the body, not the mind. The experience of the mob howling in unison, linking arms, rushing headlong into lines of police, is worth years of speculation and theorizing. If we were more numerous, we would have doubtlessly split into multiple corridors to spread the police response thin. […] To my left and right, my friends were shoving umbrellas upward, pushing ahead in the dense throng. For a few moments, it was dark and almost silent. The veil of the umbrellas, the silent heaving, and incredible pressure of the comrades packed together behind the banners is an experience you can’t describe easily for those who have never felt it. Eventually, I couldn’t breathe anymore and I grabbed someone as I retreated. Thankfully we didn’t make it past the fourth line of officers. We would have all been arrested.

A protester from the Blue cluster protects those behind them by kicking a tear gas canister back to the police who deployed it.

Re-Grouping

After a few minutes, Indigenous activists within the Purple cluster convened a drum circle in the middle of the road. This had a calming effect. Protesters took time to check in with their affinity groups and anyone else in distress. The crowd chanted “All of us or none of us,” expressing the determination to defend each another from police snatch squads and the targeting of vulnerable or risk-tolerant protesters. In the final spokescouncil meeting the day before, the assembly had agreed that risk-takers from Blue cluster or other clusters would be welcomed into the other sections of the crowd and that nobody would feel “used” by this kind of tactical retreat. Over a loudspeaker, police began issuing dispersal orders. Slowly, the crowd made their way back down Constitution, the way they had come.

After a long, slow procession, the group returned to the bicycle path near Gresham Park, far from the construction site and the lines of police. Helicopters and police drones continued to circle overhead. Still several hundred strong, the demonstrators broke into smaller breakout groups to process and deliberate. Medics set up a check-in station for anyone in need of assistance.

Eventually, people returned to the park and dispersed. That night, a vigil took place at Dekalb County Jail during which inmates broke windows and lowered plastic bags to ground level, which protesters filled with cigarettes, lighters, and pizza.

A Dekalb County Police officer retreats from the clash during the Block Cop City mobilization, turning her back to the crowd, after other officers deployed tear gas so carelessly as to impact the front line of police as well as demonstrators.

A Supporter of the Police?

At the very moment that the blue cluster was driving back the police line, one individual wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and reflective orange ski goggles physically assaulted the person who was pushing the sound system immediately behind the front of the march. As the individual in the orange ski goggles did so, they yelled epithets referencing an online post criticizing the mobilization. Then they ran away towards the back of the crowd, fleeing from the confrontation with police.

This individual may not have been working on police payroll, but by timing their attack to coincide with the clash, they were engaging in joint action with law enforcement. They could have performed this stunt at any time, but they timed it to maximize the effectiveness of the police attack.

It is very difficult to imagine that this was an earnest participant who suddenly panicked and, recalling an obscure online post, spontaneously threw a tantrum. Likewise, it seems unlikely that they were simply a police agent seeking to stoke internal tensions—for such a stunt would discredit critics of the mobilization, not the mobilization itself. Either they were carrying out the wishes of the authors of the screed, and their action turned out to be so contemptible that even the authors disclaimed it, or they hoped to impress the authors but failed. The fact that no one has claimed credit for the assault online—when the critics of the Block Cop City movement have been nothing if not extremely online—shows that the responsible party or parties understand how shamefully they behaved.

Whatever the case, both the authors of the aforementioned screed and those who have circulated it bear some responsibility for this farcical episode. It is the material consequence of their efforts; it expresses the spirit of their project. In the final analysis, they have not sought to contribute to the fight against the police so much as to hinder at least some of those in open struggle against Cop City.

Gauging Success and Failure

The march did not reach the construction site. It was not a “mass mobilization,” either, in that it didn’t bring together a larger number of people than had gathered for earlier mobilizations to defend the forest. Nor did it succeed in connecting the more radical sections of the movement with less risk-tolerant groups, formal organizations, or large numbers of locals.

It did shut down construction for the day, and for several days afterwards. It also brought together hundreds of people for a bold action in a context of unprecedented repression, including many who had never participated in protests and many more who had never faced tear gas or riot police. It took months of considerable effort to accomplish this, however.

But that effort may not have been wasted. In a debrief meeting afterwards, activists who had come from around the country to participate in the mobilization unanimously agreed that they would leave feeling more prepared to act boldly in their home communities. That, if nothing else, counts as a victory. In that regard, we can credit the Block Cop City organizers with giving the movement another lease on life.

If two thousand people had showed up to the departure point on November 13, multiple marches could have departed for the construction site, stretching police thinner and opening space for a wider array of tactics. Then, there might have been an open horizon of possibility. Rather than looking for minor technical improvements in what the participants could have done differently, it makes more sense to consider why more people did not come.

Did the nonviolence framework fulfill its express purpose of enabling more people to participate in the action? Again, let’s consult the authors of “Don’t Panic, Stay Tight”:

In general, we disagree with the setting of nonviolent parameters. Frankly, we disagree with tactical parameters in general and with the minutely “organized” coordination of events, although we recognize that this type of attention to detail makes some people feel more confident and brave. We believe that the march would have been more successful at breaking through police lines and potentially breaching the site had it been able to use projectiles. We also recognize that it is impossible to know if this crowd could have even materialized without the parameters. We do not believe that it is possible to know if the “nonviolence” language in the promotion helped or hindered attendance without conducting a thorough interview with attendees before the action occurred. It is our unprovable suspicion that it did not increase participation much, and that it only shifted it from one segment of the population to another.

It seems plausible that, remembering how “nonviolent” actions used to draw more participants than confrontational actions many years ago, the organizers hoped that defining the mobilization as “nonviolent” would serve as a shortcut to draw mass participation. Indeed, “nonviolent direct action” does seem to occupy an intermediate zone between canvassing and open confrontation. But a lot has changed since the turn of the century. Following the George Floyd rebellion, millions of people have participated in confrontational street activity that did not involve action agreements; likewise, millions have experienced firsthand that police tactics are not necessarily determined by how “violent” a demonstration is.²

Hundreds of people undoubtedly showed up for the Block Cop City mobilization who would not have showed up without the months of touring and promotion that preceded it. But it may not have been the action agreements that drew them so much as the care that was put into outreach and hospitality, spelling out to activists around the country that there were concrete roles they could fill even if they lacked experience in autonomous organizing models. In retrospect, it was a missed opportunity not to do this kind of outreach more systematically in 2022, when the movement had a foothold in the forest.

Likewise, imagining that a nonviolence agreement would enable formal organizations to participate, finally drawing out massive numbers, may get the causality backwards. More often, an initiative draws massive numbers and then formal organizations show up to take advantage of them. If the action agreement had succeeded in creating a situation in which dozens of student organizations, religious groups, and environmentalist groups had participated in the mobilization without trying to curtail its ambitions, that would have been a good thing, but from this vantage point, it is clear that that would have taken considerably more than an action agreement to make that possible.

It is possible that more people might have turned out for Block Cop City if demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians had not been taking place all around the country at the same time. On the other hand, these demonstrations may have galvanized some people who would otherwise have stayed home. The absent are the most difficult demographic to understand.

Arguably, if drawing massive numbers of people to the Block Cop City action had been the top priority, the most effective way to do so would have been to broadcast the time and place of the demonstration far and wide—rather than publicizing the spokescouncil meetings, as occurred, and only announcing the location and time of the action that weekend. The march was scheduled early in the morning on a work day in a location that was not otherwise thickly populated. This made sense if the mobilization was understood as a direct action determined above all by the necessities of interrupting work at the construction site, but not if the goal was to involve as many people as possible. The largest number of people have participated in the social and cultural events that the movement has hosted, such as the South River Music Festival.

Did the action agreement keep some people from attending the action? It definitely generated distracting controversy. But it’s not clear how many of those who criticized the nonviolence protocol stayed home only on account of it. The number of people in that category is probably dozens, not hundreds.

At best, action agreements can be understood as a way for people to get on the same page about what to expect from each other. Ideally, such agreements should be co-created on a horizontal basis, but there are always uneven dynamics around power, leverage, and initiative in group decision-making. The same goes for spontaneous crowd decision-making, in which there is less opportunity for group deliberation. Of course, different formats lend themselves to certain outcomes: a mobilization coordinated by a visible organizing group or planned in open public meetings is more likely to adopt conservative mutual expectations, whereas planning on an invitational basis or acting spontaneously can lend itself to a wider tactical repertoire.

Demonstrators clash with police on November 13, 2023.

As the authors of “Don’t Panic, Stay Tight” put it, “the organization of the weekend was gratuitously, painfully, democratic.” One way to interpret this quality of the mobilization is as a response to the events of March 5, 2023, when—without any formal decision-making whatsoever—hundreds of people marched to the construction site and engaged in confrontational action that had significant repercussions. By contrast, the Block Cop City mobilization centered two days of hours-long facilitated decision-making processes and a march that was almost performatively inclusive. Each of these approaches involves advantages and disadvantages.

We all have a responsibility to push back against agreements that we consider unacceptable, even if doing so could precipitate conflict. It is also our responsibility to deliver our critiques in a way that could change others’ minds, rather than simply establishing cliques. The action agreements for Block Cop City in themselves provide no justification for stepping away from the fight against Cop City, nor for sitting out the events of November 13. Hopefully, those who were critical of the mobilization simply focused their efforts elsewhere.

Surely all the repression in Atlanta played a central role in limiting attendance. Many participants were afraid to be close to the front of the march, and many potential participants surely stayed home on account of similar fears. But the old adage proved true once again: it’s safer in the front. The sole arrest on November 13 was of a person who opted for a support role; they were arrested in a vehicle the vicinity of Gresham Park. When the police deployed tear gas canisters, they threw them over the front line, targeting the people in the middle of the march. Those in the front line could count on the comrades at their sides to act boldly to defend them, whereas those behind them scattered when the clashes ensued. Counterintuitive as it seems, it can be safer in the front.

The same goes for the Block Cop City mobilization itself. Although organizing any kind of confrontational protest was a risky proposition with scores of people already facing RICO charges, it was actually safer than doing nothing would have been. Permitting the state to crush the movement would have set a precedent that would threaten other movements, emboldening the authorities to use the same tactics elsewhere. It would also have left over a hundred defendants facing charges in a movement without a public face. One way to ensure that there is energy for defendant and prisoner support is to keep a movement vibrant, drawing in new people and new energy.

As it turned out, the authorities had their own reasons not to escalate on November 13. If they had arrested more people, they would have had to decide whether to dole out even more RICO charges, stretching prosecutor resources even thinner, or to put prosecutors in the position of having to explain why some accused Stop Cop City protesters deserved RICO charges while others did not. Video footage shows officers brandishing zip ties with which to carry out arrests, but either they had their hands full dealing with the charge of the Blue cluster, or the preferred not to try to in the first place.

A drone’s-eye view of the clash on November 13 as the police and protesters drew apart.

Victory and Defeat: A Chimera

Victory and defeat always arrive together, mixed up in the same vessel. It is not possible to taste one without the other, even if on a given day it is the bitterness that overpowers the sweetness or vice versa.

This does not mean that there is no difference between the two. If you have clearly defined goals, it is possible to determine whether or not you have achieved them.

Some of the Block Cop City organizers feel that they achieved their goals of organizing a convergence to shut down construction in a context of unprecedented repression, and that it was a victory that they were able to do so without any arrests. They are correct about that. The Atlanta Police Foundation and its supporters presumably consider it a victory that they were able to stop the crowd from reaching the construction site and from damaging property. They, too, are correct in this regard. Some commentators who watched from the sidelines are pleased to declare that the march was a failure because it did not reach the job site. In a sense, they are also correct.

If all of these groups believe that their expectations have been confirmed and their decisions vindicated, what does that tell us? Probably, that they are all selectively recalling what their ambitions were before the mobilization, selectively interpreting the events of the day, and misunderstanding crucial elements of each other’s strategies. Participants in the movement should set concrete goals, in order to be able to evaluate their efforts critically. They should also think critically about what their adversaries unstated goals might be and how to thwart them.

No single set of tactics can be judged in isolation. The movement involves a diverse array of participants; debate about the alleged effectiveness of one strategy versus another is often just a coded form of sectarian competition for approval. The most important question is not which participants in the movement are right and which are wrong, but how the different participants can ensure that their combined efforts will inspire others to participate and expand the number of fronts on which the struggle takes place. Certainly, the proponents of Cop City already perceive every effort to stop them—be it legal or autonomous, violent or nonviolent, symbolic or direct, defensive or offensive, local or international—as part of a combined assault.

Mutual suspicion, destructive competition, scarcity thinking, paranoia, conformity, nostalgia—these are all pitfalls.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Repression during the Block Cop City march on November 13, 2023.

Fighting without Assurances

Soon after the Block Cop City march, an anonymous group burned sixteen large work trucks belonging to Ernst Concrete. This took place in Lawrenceville, Georgia, roughly half an hour northeast of Atlanta. In an online statement, the participants claimed to have placed incendiary devices and kindling beneath the hoods of the vehicles.

Ernst Concrete was seen in the Old Atlanta Prison Farm on November 3. They were contracted to pour concrete and to build sidewalks and roads inside of the perimeter fence. In the first week of November, activists from across the country launched a call-in campaign to their offices, urging them to boycott the Atlanta Police Foundation. After the stoppage of work for the Block Cop City action and the subsequent torching of their machinery, they dropped from the project. This was confirmed by dozens of people who called the company the days after the action, and was confirmed by the company itself in a statement sent to local news. Eventually, Ernst took down their website. The statement they released to the news was framed in the most confusing way imaginable, claiming that Ernst “is not involved in Cop City” in the headline, while clarifying that they had in fact been contracted for it, and were no longer going to continue working on it.

This was the quickest victory against a contractor the movement had sustained yet. Ernst Concrete is a large company that does far more than simple sidewalk paving. They also appeared to have very few previous contracts with Brasfield & Gorrie in Georgia, suggesting that Brasfield & Gorrie might be having difficulty securing the contractors they prefer to work with.

A participant in the Block Cop City march planting a tree along the march route on November 13, 2023.

Continuing Forward

An array of injunction hearings and court cases continue to play out in the background. The South River Watershed Alliance and others are in court against the Dekalb County Government for the illegal closure of Intrenchment Creek Park, and the contamination of the South River, which is occurring in quantities that violate the Clean Water Act. Lawyers assisting the Cop City Vote initiative to launch a referendum continue to file motions and lawsuits against the undemocratic denial of the process by the city government and the clerk’s office. Appearances and hearings will continue to drag the 100+ defendants of the movement into courtrooms for months or years to come.

But despite the proliferation of court cases, lawyers are not the only protagonists in this struggle. Here, we will spell out some of the paths that remain open to the movement.

- Targeting the Insurers

A new campaign called Uncover Cop City aims to draw attention to the insurance providers of the Atlanta Police Foundation: Accident Fund and Nationwide. This represents a refinement of a familiar strategy. Instead of targeting contractors and subcontractors, as previous campaigns have done, this effort takes aim at institutions with hundreds of offices across the country—institutions that represent a legal bottleneck for the project. Without coverage of their assets, the Atlanta Police Foundation is legally forbidden from maintaining contracts or holding assets in the state of Georgia.

Because of the effectiveness of campaigns like Stop Reeves Young, the Cop City project has been reduced to a hardcore group of contractors, nearly all of whom sit on the Board of Trustees for the Atlanta Police Foundation. This makes it more difficult to exert pressure on them, because they have an existential stake in the project. Some subcontractors, such as Ernst, remain vulnerable to direct pressure. But pressuring insurance providers could provide the movement with a set of achievable goals even as the stakes of the conflict escalate.

Uncover Cop City has already announced a “nationwide summit” in Arizona from February 23-26. This will be the first time that such an event has taken place outside of Georgia. Considering how much force has been brought to bear inside Atlanta itself, expanding the zone of conflict and experimenting with the strategy of convergence elsewhere in the country seems promising.

- Combatting Repression

The struggle against repression will also continue to provide opportunities to put action in a context in which it can be powerful. A number of acts of sabotage, including the coordinated vandalism of police cars and motorcycles over the summer, were ostensibly carried out in response to police attacks on protesters. The doxxing of the Atlanta City Council and the Atlanta Committee for Progress both occurred in retaliation for repression targeting the movement. With over a hundred people facing charges, there will be many chances to take action against the local authorities, to conduct fundraisers, to host rallies.

If anti-repression efforts continue to precipitate action rather than panic and paranoia, the movement could redirect the momentum of the prosecution to generate its own momentum.

The Block Cop City march, November 13, 2023.

- Evolving Protest Tactics

The Block Cop City event showed that some activists are learning to respond to police aggression. Moving forward, protesters will need to innovate technical and creative methods of dealing with police snatch squads, munitions, and intimidation. Reinforced banners and shields, masks, goggles, helmets, umbrellas, linking arms, carrying laser pointers, deploying bicycle scouts, car caravans, flash mobs, communications teams, and other yet-to-be developed innovations could enable crowds to assemble once again. With renewed confidence, these crowds could march in the streets, gather outside press conferences and fundraisers, and mobilize against insurance providers, construction companies, corporate executives, and their supporters.

Winning by Attrition

So far, the movement has not been able to reestablish an advantageous balance of force with law enforcement since the murder of Tortuguita and the destruction of the forest encampments. It has lost the element of surprise, while state and federal institutions have increasingly focused resources on attacking it.

At the same time, these institutions are gambling with their own legitimacy. As they pull out the stops to go after the movement, their thin veneer of democratic credibility is peeling away. In the long run, this could have consequences for them, provided that those who lose faith in them encounter practical options for how to enter into resistance against them.

In general, the offensive capacity of a movement tends to plateau or diminish over time, while defense becomes the principle method of fighting. At first, it might appear that the movement to defend Weelaunee and stop Cop City has ended up in a bind in which it has to invert this trend if it hopes to win. This is probably the wrong way to think about the situation. In fact, it is impressive that the movement has persisted this long already. Rather than pursuing “decisive” battles with authorities, which could result in incapacitating defeats, it may be wiser to seek sustainable levels of conflict on the existing fronts while attempting to open up new theaters of conflict where the authorities are not yet prepared.

If the movement can keep going, it will encounter new opportunities. Morale is essential to struggle; grassroots movements must maintain momentum while demoralizing their adversaries and eroding their will to fight. There are a few ways to do this.

1) Preserving a positive image of the movement. Any event, poster, sticker, film, article, coverage, or intervention that uplifts and celebrates the movement will hurt the morale of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the contractors, the Mayor’s office, and police officers. Sometimes this can take the form of justifying bold actions by putting them in their proper context. Even well-designed graphics can play a part; the movement has been very skilled in this regard already, but it can do more. Posters, graffiti, and stickers celebrating the movement should be everywhere, especially in areas highly trafficked by the proponents of Cop City.

2) Sowing doubt, confusion, anxiety. By continuously frustrating the progress of construction, disrupting public events, monopolizing the phone lines to offices, highlighting and exacerbating tensions between agencies, undermining state narratives, doxxing hostile forces, and inducing paranoia and uncertainty in the firms and agencies responsible for the project, activists undermine their will to fight. Civil disobedience, clandestine action, noise demonstrations, fliering campaigns, pranks, and creatively-timed actions can exhaust the resources of the institutions that support Cop City.

3) Diverting hostility. Wherever the authorities seek to direct their hostility—whether against a perceived group, a place, an institution, or an individual—they are compelled to build up morale and internal consensus in order to do so. If the movement can continuously redirect this frustration away from the stated targets of repression or control, this will compel the Atlanta Police Foundation to change discourses and strategies over and over again, disrupting their focus and unity. This strategy necessitates remaining flexible and creative while pulling in as many forces and discourses as possible. Everyone who is not mobilized by the movement will be tokenized by the state. The government should not know who they are fighting, why, where, when, or by what means. In compelling officials to drum up paranoia about “outside agitators,” the movement has already achieved a victory, in that this opens up space for locals to act with comparative legitimacy.

Over the coming months, the situation will continue changing. In the wake of the Black Week of Action and Block Cop City, it remains an open question how to continue to create participatory spaces for the struggle. Organization derives from action, not vice versa. Keep pushing.

Block Cop City, November 13, 2023.

Appendix: Timeline of Events

Assembled from publicly available reports.

June 7: Mayor Andre Dickens is doxxed. At the same time, people file a petition to initiate a popular referendum on the land-lease contract between City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation, effectively placing Cop City on the ballot.

June 8: The Executive Board of Atlas Technical Consultants, a subcontractor for Brasfield & Gorrie, is doxxed. A group of activists announce a public campaign to collect signatures for a popular referendum.

June 9: A March 5 arrestee presses charges against Charlotte NC Police Major Brad Koch for defamation of character in response to public statements alleging that the accused would “one million percent” commit another crime if given bail. Dekalb County Judge Anna Davis, spouse of an APF accountant, had denied the defendant bail after those statements.

June 10: An anonymous statement appears calling for more digital actions against Cop City.

June 14: City of Atlanta Clerk Vanessa Waldron refuses to approve the petition to referendum on legal technicality.

June 19: Graffiti appears in Minneapolis in solidarity with the movement.

June 20: City Clerk Waldron once again refuses to approve the petition for a referendum, prompting outrage.

June 21: Organizers sue City Clerk Waldron, forcing her to approve the petition.

June 22: The signature collection begins demanding a referendum.

June 23: Dekalb County District Attorney Sherri Boston announces that she is withdrawing her office and all of their resources from the 42 terrorism cases against the movement that are being pressed in Dekalb County (out of a total of 43 such cases associated with the movement). Boston cites “fundamentally different prosecution philosophies” with Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr in her statement. She also hints that pressure from the movement has influenced her decision.

June 24: The sixth Week of Action begins.

June 25: Protesters and community groups assemble at Brownwood Park. Police drones and helicopters circle overhead. Law enforcement drive around the area continuously. Belkis Terán, mother of Tortuguita, hosts a vigil for their slain child in the park around 8:30 pm. Dozens of Atlanta Police officers enter the park and threaten to arrest everyone if they aren’t gone by 11. Protesters yell at the cops and surround them. Elsewhere, hundreds of people gather deep in Weelaunee for an underground party. Meanwhile, an APD lieutenant who has been active in repressing the movement of forest encampments is doxxed. At the same time, the initiative Cop City Vote declares solidarity with the Week of Action, explicitly recognizing the value of “all tactics on this road to collective liberation.”

June 26: Over 100 people gather in Brownwood park to host presentations, talks, and community outreach events. Elsewhere, multiple machines belonging to Brent Scarborough Company are sabotaged with muriatic acid, apparently despite security protection.

June 27: Film screenings and cultural events continue daily in Brownwood Park, usually under police surveillance. At Intrenchment Creek Park and the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, dozens of police vehicles are stationed at every known entrance and exit.

June 28: Around 200 people gather in Gresham Park with a mobile altar. Many don masks. They march most of the way to Intrenchment Creek Park. Scouts report a massive police mobilization further ahead in the tunnel beneath Bouldercrest Road, possibly as many officers as demonstrators. The crowd holds a short ceremony for Tortuguita led by Belkis Terán, before returning to Gresham Park and dispersing without incident. Downtown, outside of Cadence Bank (which funds the Atlanta Police Foundation), a crowd gathers in an unannounced demonstration. After 20 minutes, protesters throw bacon at the facility and disperse. Cops attack people in the vicinity and arrest two people, charging one with Felony Obstruction.

June 29: Protesters assemble near a Home Depot on Ponce de Leon in Midtown; Home Depot has donated to the APF. The establishment closes early for the day as a consequence. A nearby Starbucks also closes because of the small protest. Several dozen Atlanta Police officers assemble in the strip mall parking lot. An elderly woman—a member of the National Lawyers Guild previously involved in the Gay liberation organization Act Up!—is arrested for holding a sign on the sidewalk. At the same time, in Columbus, Ohio, protesters storm the headquarters of Nationwide Insurance, demanding that they cut their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation. That same day, protesters confront Mayor Andre Dickens as he attempts to hold a press conference at Fire Station 10 in Grant Park. City Councilman Matt Westmoreland refuses to tell Belkis Terán that he condemns the killing of her child, Tortuguita.

Protesters confront Mayor Andre Dickens as he attempts to hold a press conference at Fire Station 10 in Grant Park.

June 30: The Weelaunee Coalition hosts a Youth Rally in Brownwood Park, bringing over 100 people together to participate in events and to chant for the forest and against Cop City. Four Bank of America offices have windows broken in the Bay Area, and four ATMs are vandalized. Three ATMs in Concord, California are broken. A single statement claims responsibility for these actions.

July 1: The windows of three Atlanta police cruisers on Memorial Drive are smashed and a time-delayed incendiary device burns eight APD motorcycles in the parking garage beneath the current police training center. A group calling itself the March 5th Movement takes responsibility for the actions and claims that they are in retaliation for violent suppression of peaceful protests at Cadence Bank and elsewhere.

July 2: Atlanta police officer Andrew Strutt is doxxed in retaliation for his actions at a protest outside of Cadence Bank during the sixth Week of Action. The private homes of Cop City architect Anthony Kenney and APF Board of Trustees member Ambrish Baisiwala are vandalized with paint and their car tires are slashed. Elsewhere, protesters gather outside the Minnesota home of the Atlas Technical Project Manager. He yells at the protesters to leave his property, claiming that Atlas has dropped the project. Asked why, he answers “you guys are fucking nightmares” and “you broke all of our fucking windows.” Apparently, two years of actions against that contract have had an effect.

July 3: A golf course in New Orleans is vandalized in solidarity with the movement against Cop City. The home of Keith Johnson, Brasfield & Gorrie Director of Preconstruction, is also vandalized. His driveway and house are painted, fake blood is dumped around his back door, and motor oil and fish heads are poured into his pool. On-site security apparently does not notice the saboteurs.

July 4: Two machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned in broad daylight at a location where machines have already been sabotaged before. A Chase Bank in southeast Michigan is vandalized.

July 9: Three Bank of America ATMs are smashed in Berkeley, California. At the same time, another group throws a brick through the front window of a UPS office. In Williston, Vermont, work trucks and an office of Atlas Technical Consultants are vandalized. Although the Project Manager had told activists that they had dropped the contract, no official statement had yet appeared. After this action, Atlas confirmed to an independent journalist that they were no longer involved in the project.

July 27: The July 14th injunction succeeds, giving the referendum organizers an additional 60 days to collect signatures on the premise that Clerk Waldron had illegally violated their first amendment rights.

July 28: Mongo Holdings LLC is exposed as an APF event sponsor for 2023. The Chief Investment Officer is doxxed.

July 29: A complete list of Atlanta Police Department officers as of July 21, 2023 is posted online, including their full names, social media accounts, wages, and positions.

August 3: The GBI, APD, ATF, and Mayor Dickens hold a joint press conference about the July 4th attacks. They post images of the alleged incendiary devices online and in televised statements.

August 9: Dr. Bernice King, the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., denounces Cop City.

August 15: Days after the Asheville Police Department advertises a recruiting event on behalf of the Atlanta Police Department, two Asheville PD cruisers are burned outside of a precinct.

August 26: In New York City, several dozen people march to the Hilton Hotel in midtown, where the Atlanta Police Department is hosting a police recruitment event. Protesters chant slogans and hold banners, blockading the event. New York Police push and shove protesters but fail to evict the crowd. Someone smuggles rotten shrimp into the building, filling the atrium with a putrid stench.

August 30: A time-delayed incendiary device burns a machine belonging to Vertiv Corporation in Milwaukie, Oregon. Vertiv is a technical supplier for the Atlanta Police Department. The “March 5th Movement” claims the action.

September 5: 61 people are indicted under the Racketeering-influenced Criminal Organization (RICO) Act of Georgia. The indictment includes dozens of pages on the history and theory of anarchism, mutual aid, and solidarity. It paints a broad and speculative picture of the ideology of the movement, referencing Kurdish and Zapatista liberation movements. According to the indictment, the “conspiracy” began on May 25, 2020—the day that Minneapolis Police murdered George Floyd. Meanwhile, the City of Atlanta hires a company called the Great Lakes Project Solution to begin counting signatures for the referendum.

September 6: In Savannah, Georgia, dozens of protesters visit the office of the Cop City architecture firm LS3P, dumping rotten food into their elevator.

September 8: This has been announced as a Day of Solidarity against the RICO charges. Local religious leaders and others invade the Cop City construction site and lock themselves to equipment, halting work and compelling the police to arrest them. They are not charged with terrorism. Other actions take place at the Georgia State Capitol and the University of Michigan, as well as in Kingston, New York; Carbondale, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Phoenix, Arizona; and Elliston, Virginia. An anonymous group claims responsibility for sabotaging multiple signal boxes belonging to Norfolk Southern during the sixth Week of Action.

September 10: In Chicago, streets are blocked and windows are broken at a Chase Bank. Elsewhere, a group rallies outside a Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina to denounce the RICO charges and demand that Bank of America drop their contract with APF.

September 11: The Inspire Brands subsidiary Arby’s is vandalized in Olympia, Washington. The Inspire Brands CEO sits on the board of the APF. Meanwhile, the referendum organizers present 116,000 signatures to the Clerk’s office.

September 12: A new organization named Block Cop City announces a mass demonstration in November targeting the Cop City construction site. Organizers visit over 70 cities and towns in a nationwide speaking tour to promote the event.

September 25: The Weelaunee Defense Society of New York City disrupts an event by the Korea Society honoring Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. The Korea Society was founded by former United States General James Van Fleet, who helped to coordinate US ground troops in the Korean War. He worked alongside the fascist “Republic of Korea” dictator Syngman Rhee before forming the Korean Society in the US to assist in ongoing support for the Rhee administration globally.

September 29: The Atlanta City Clerk uploads 116,000 signed petitions demanding a referendum to the Atlanta Government Website. Despite a legal order from the City Council to redact the names of the signatories, the City legal department argues they do not have to, and the government doxxes 116,000 civilians. Fascists immediately begin sharing the information online. In response, the board of the Atlanta Committee for Progress is doxxed.

October 1: For the third time, machines belonging to Brent Scarborough Company are burned at a construction site located at the corner of Sawtell and McDonough near the Federal Penitentiary.

October 2: Over 200 people gather at Atlanta City Hall to demand that the government release body camera footage showing the extrajudicial killing of Johnny Hollman during a traffic stop in late August. The government asserts its supposed “right” to not release the footage by citing its decision to withhold aerial footage of the January 18 killing of Tortuguita as precedent.

October 3: An Open Records Request reveals that Mayor Dickens has been communicating with the White House about Cop City.

October 6: District Attorney George R. Christian of the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit rules that it was “objectively reasonable” for the Georgia State Patrol to kill Tortuguita on January 18. No charges will be brought against officers for the killing. The names of the killers have still not been released by the government, although the movement has already published them: Bryland Myers, Jerry Parrish, Jonathan Salcedo, Mark Jonathan Lamb, Ronaldo Kegel, and Royce Zah. A new Open Records Request reveals extensive commentary about the movement from the Department of Homeland Security in the two weeks leading up to the murder of Tortuguita.

October 10: The Malaya Movement of Georgia denounces the repression of activists, likening it to state terrorism in the Phillipines. An army recruitment center in Daly City, California loses nine windows in an act of solidarity with Palestinian resistance, anti-colonial resistance in Haiti, and Weelaunee forest defenders.

October 26: Approximately 150 Emory University students gather on campus to denounce administration support for Cop City, membership in the Atlanta Police Foundation, and the Atlanta Committee for Progress. The students chant slogans connecting Cop City to the ongoing airstrikes and war crimes that the Israeli military is committing against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The crowd marches into the administration building chanting to deliver a demand letter.

October 27: A dozen protesters gather for a “People’s Stop Work Order” on Constitution Road outside of the Prison Farm.

October 31: Vandalism at LS3P, Cadence Bank, and Nationwide Insurance in Savannah, Georgia.

November 3: Another group gathers outside of the Prison Farm to picket construction.

November 4: A group called the “Bay Rage Brigade” breaks windows at HSBC bank, Starbucks, and a US military recruiting office and dumps paint on vehicles belonging to a subsidiary of General Motors. The action calls attention to each institution’s connection to the Israeli apartheid system. The saboteurs dedicate their action to the memory of Tortuguita. Elsewhere, 25 pounds of rotten fish viscera is dumped into the rootop HVAC access panel of the Buckhead Theater the night before the venue planned to host the annual Atlanta Police Foundation fundraiser. The home of Wendy Stewart, a member of the Buckhead Coalition, is vandalized with messages opposing Cop City.

November 6: A Week of Action begins, organized by Black Atlanta residents for the purpose of connecting with other Black Atlantans. Many of the events draw crowds of a variety of ethnicities, but the organizers are unambiguous about their aim of coordinating with and mobilizing Black people.

November 6: 57 of the 61 RICO defendants turn themselves in for arraignment while nearly 200 supporters gather outside the courthouse. Most of the defendants are quickly released from jail after booking.

November 9: As a part of the Week of Action, students march to the office of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program on Georgia State University campus. They demand an end to the bombing of Gaza and the suspension of the GILEE program, which could be expanded with the construction of Cop City.

November 10: The Black Family March brings together activists with the families of Black people who have been killed by police. Shamefully, at least a dozen Atlanta police officers riding motorcycles intimidate the march. At the same time, several hundred people are gathering across Atlanta for the Block Cop City weekend, meeting at Brownwood Park and at a warehouse in East Point where hardcore punk bands and rappers share the stage for a kick-off party.

November 11: An open letter entitled “Anarchism Must Not be Criminalized” appears online. It is said to come from an anonymous group of 12 of the 61 RICO defendants.

November 12: An herbalist clinic and workshop occurs in the context of the Week of Action.

November 13: Under the banner of “Block Cop City,” 400 people march from Gresham Park toward the Cop City construction site on Constitution Road. Carrying puppets, marching band instruments, reinforced banners, and umbrellas, the demonstrators push through three lines of riot police before police standing in the back tear gas their own officers as well as the demonstrators. In the confrontation, Dekalb Police employ tear gas, pepper spray, flashbang grenades, pepper balls, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, and body-length shields against self-described nonviolent protesters. No one is arrested during the action. Construction is halted, but the group does not make it onto the site. Afterwards, 150 people gather outside the Dekalb County Jail to support those inside, including one person who was arrested earlier in the day during a traffic stop, accused of being connected to the protest. Inmates break five windows of the jail and throw debris at the police below; they also drop a line and a bag to the ground level, which protesters on the ground fill with cigarettes, slices of pizza, and bottles of water. Twice, bags of goods are pulled into the jail this way from the street below. Meanwhile, in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, activists drop banners on campuses in solidarity with the protesters. Sixteen trucks belonging to Ernst Concrete are burned in Lawrenceville, Georgia, allegedly with the use of “incendiary devices and kindling.” Activists claim to have burned six, but authorities report that the fire spread to ten more vehicles.

November 17: Ernst Concrete confirms that they have dropped out of the project.

November 18: During a demonstration in New York City in solidarity with Palestine, someone adds graffiti reading “Chase funds Cop City” to a Chase bank and locks its doors shut.

November 19: Windows are smashed and trucks vandalized at Thomas Concrete work site in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thomas Concrete is a frequent subcontractor of Brasfield & Gorrie.

November 22: Seven windows are broken at a Nationwide Insurance subsidiary, PCF Insurance Services office in Walnut Creek, California. Back in Georgia, local news claims that 23 machines belonging to an unnamed Cop City contractor were vandalized somehow “just before Thanksgiving.” Some speculate that this was Brent Scarborough Company. The method of sabotage, the specific date, and the exact target of the action are all left out of the report.

November 27: Georgia deputy attorney general John Fowler files a motion to include Tortuguita’s 150-page personal diary as evidence in the RICO case. The motion is rejected, but not before right-wing outlets publish false and exaggerated narratives about the contents.

November 30: Communications between the Chief of Atlanta police, Brasfield & Gorrie executives, Department of Homeland Security, Georgia Bureau of Investigations, and police forces across the country are made public thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request on the movement. The document proves that authorities are colluding on legal matters with corporate backers in encrypted chats.

December 7: Another Nationwide subsidiary is vandalized. At the San Francisco office, “every window” is smashed. This communiqué references the November 22 Walnut Creek action as inspiration. Both statements drive attention to uncovercopcity.blackblogs.org, where Nationwide and Accident Fund locations are listed.

To accomplish what, when, where, for how long, and so on are all left vague, given the essentially metaphysical nature of the claim. ↩
The new lengths of repression that the authorities are prepared to go to in Atlanta are also a consequence of the George Floyd rebellion—witness the date listed in the RICO indictment as the beginning of the alleged conspiracy. The context in which “nonviolent civil disobedience” functioned in 1963 or even 2003 no longer exists. We have to understand the conditions that made nonviolent action effective for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in historical context. Rather than falling back on old solutions to the question of how to bring large numbers of people together in struggle, we will probably have to discover new ones. ↩

Strategizing for Palestinian Solidarity: Expanding the Toolkit : From Demands to Direct Action

2023-11-03T11:07:36Z

In Atlanta, Georgia, abolitionists and environmentalists have fought for three and a half years to stop the construction of a police militarization facility known as Cop City. The same police that are attempting to crush that movement have trained for decades with Israeli police, exchanging lethal counterinsurgency strategies. In the following text, a Jewish collective that has participated in the struggle to Stop Cop City explains why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what it will take to halt the assault of the Israeli military on Gaza.

The Fayer Collective, a collective of Jewish anarchists, has participated in the fight against Cop City from the beginning as well as confronting fascists throughout the region.

For us, the fight against fascism isn’t about “allyship”; it is a personal and direct fight for our lives. And that knowledge has put a fire in our hearts, as both anarchists and Jews.

-Fayer Collective, Finding Our Own Fire

Now, they are attempting to stop the bloodbath in Gaza. In their own words,

Fayer is a collective of artists, revolutionaries, workers, students, criminals, and free lovers fighting for the earth, the good life, and total liberation. Members of the collective have been participating in the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest since its inception, attending religious practices in the forest such as Shabbat dinners, Sukkot gatherings, purim parties, and other Jewish holidays, forging a spiritual bond between Atlanta’s radical Jewish community and the Weelaunee Forest it seeks to defend. With the renewed Zionist attacks on Gaza and the Palestinian people, which are supported by the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange Program based out of Atlanta, we have found ourselves in the unique situation of being near the inner workings of the machine and its local violence while simultaneously being far from its ruthless campaign for genocide. For this reason, we have decided it is imperative for us to lay out the situation from our perspective and what it means for the Atlanta Forest and Palestinian liberation.

Here, the Fayer Collective explores the protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, arguing that solidarity movements must shift from presenting demands to taking direct action and proposing some models for how to proceed.

The Ceasefire in Gaza Starts Here

In the weeks since Israel declared war on Palestine, people across the world have participated in protests against Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Many of the largest protests have taken place in Europe and the United States, with 70,000 people taking to the streets in London last Saturday to demand an end to Israeli air strikes and the provision of arms to Israel. Protestors in Berlin (where pro-Palestine protests are now banned) clashed with police, who deployed pepper spray, water cannons, and physical force against protestors. Protests in support of Palestine have taken place in most major cities in the United States as well. In Chicago, 25,000 people assembled on October 21. For three weekends in a row, the Palestinian Youth Movement has called demonstrations in Atlanta that brought over 1000 people into the streets to demand an end to the Israeli occupation and the genocidal bombing of Gaza.

As of Thursday, November 2, the Israeli military had killed a reported 9193 Palestinians and wounded at least 32,000. At least half of the dead are civilian non-combatants, including at least 3,760 Palestinian children.

Grassroots support for Palestinians is at an all-time high despite Western politicians’ and war profiteers’ attempts to weaponize Jewish identity against them, outlaw and repress solidarity protests, and rally around Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But to stop the genocide in Gaza, activists in the United States will have to move from demanding a ceasefire to imposing one. This will require a shift from demands that appeal to the consciences of elected officials to tactics that create a political crisis for politicians and disrupt corporations’ ability to profit from the oppression and genocide of Palestinian people.

Demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina shutting down Highway 147 at rush hour on November 2, 2023. At the same time, demonstrators in Philadelphia were shutting down 30th Street Station.

75 Years of War

As a result of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948, 78% of Palestinians’ historic homeland was declared a Jewish state. Approximately 500 Palestinian villages experienced ethnic cleansing and roughly 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. This is essential context for understanding subsequent events such as the Six Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, when a coalition of Arab states attempted to reclaim territory lost in the Six Day War.

On October 7, 2023, the fifty-year anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, Hamas militants and other Palestinian groups breached the Gaza border by land, sea, and air in a surprise offensive.¹ These attacks left approxiately 1200 Israelis dead and 5431 injured, including an unknown number of children.² Hamas besieged several settlements in the territory around Gaza, taking 242 hostages. The Israeli government evacuated the area to regain control from Hamas, then carried out a larger evacuation to create a buffer zone in preparation to for the military invasion that is underway now.

So far, Hamas has released four Israeli civilian hostages. They have announced that they are prepared to release all the hostages in exchange for the return of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, though they reported days ago that “almost 50” hostages had been killed by Israeli air raids.

Before October 7, there were 5200 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli custody, more than 25 times the number of hostages Hamas has taken. Some estimates claim that the total number of Palestinian prisoners has doubled since October 7.

Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza have targeted civilian infrastructure including schools, aid agencies, mosques, and civilian housing units. There has been considerable controversy over whose missile hit the Al-Ahli hospital, but the tragedy illustrates how difficult it is to get information on the suffering taking place in Palestine and how readily Israeli officials will justify any kind of atrocity: shortly after the explosion at the hospital, an aid to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on social media that Israel had bombed the hospital because Hamas combatants were inside, then quickly deleted the post.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have long used military strategies targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. In 2008, Israeli Defense Forces Colonel Gabi Siboni described Israel’s strategy of disproportionate force in the Second Lebanon War of 2006 as a policy of deploying “force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses,” force that “aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.” Part of the Dahiya Doctrine of asymmetric warfare, the strategy of disproportionate force predominantly targets civilian infrastructure rather than enemy combatants, seeking to deter future offensive attacks by tying up the economy and civilian population in lengthy, costly reconstruction processes.

This scorched-earth approach to war can be seen in Israel’s air strikes in Gaza. These attacks on civilian infrastructure appear to represent an intentional strategy in which civilians and the resources they depend on become the primary targets of war. This suggests that the strategy of disproportionate force Israel developed in Lebanon is implicated in the devastating loss of life and life-giving infrastructure in Palestine.

A photograph from Palestine Action showing a protester occupying the roof of Howmet Fastening Systems in Leicester, United Kingdom. Howmet makes components for Israeli F-35s.

“Ceasefire now!”

Protests for Palestinian liberation have taken place in most major cities in the United States, often with thousands of participants. Many of these protests draw a through-line connecting the struggle for Palestinian liberation with the struggle against United States colonialism. Protesters have highlighted the fact that the United States government is the single largest donor to Israel’s military and most of the weapons used to kill Palestinians are manufactured by companies based in the United States.

In Atlanta, protesters have pointed to GILEE (Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange) as a local link between Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and the police violence and repression facing Atlantans. Based out of Georgia State University, GILEE facilitates the international exchange of policing and repression tactics between Georgia police officers and Israeli police forces. Five Atlanta Police Department commanders were scheduled to visit Israel from October 13-21 as part of GILEE.

Activists in Atlanta are acutely aware of the global network of repression linking the Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest movement to the movement for Palestinian liberation. Many have noted that Israeli forces will train at Cop City if it is built. On October 12, 300 Georgia State University students walked out of class to protest GILEE, understanding it as part of a system of “Deadly Exchange.” On October 25, Emory University students organized a walkout of over 100 students to demand that the Emory administration divest from Cop City, the Atlanta Committee for Progress, and the GILEE Program.

The ties between the Atlanta Police Department, Cop City, and Israel’s military forces have become a topic of public scrutiny in Atlanta because of the movement to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest. But GILEE is just one of dozens of such deadly exchange programs in the United States. Eight years before Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, for example, officers in the Minneapolis Police Department received training from Israeli police forces at a conference in Chicago.

Jewish people living in the United States have also mobilized against the bombardment and invasion of Gaza, urging Biden to call for a ceasefire. The vast majority of these protesters reject Zionism (the movement born at the end of the 19th century to establish a Jewish state in the land of historic Palestine and to support that state by any means necessary) as a component of Jewish identity. Instead, many anti-Zionist Jews embrace the diasporic ethos that Jewish people have embodied for millennia.

One of the largest organizations in the United States calling for Palestinian liberation is Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a Palestine solidarity group founded in 1996. Jewish Voice for Peace sparked controversy in 2019 when the organization officially adopted an anti-Zionist position. On October 18, 2023, in Washington, D.C., Jewish Voice for Peace organized the largest known Jewish-led protest in solidarity with Palestinians. According to JVP, 10,000 people from across the country descended on the National Mall in a “Jews Against Genocide” rally. Nearly 500 Jews—including 25 rabbis—entered the Canon Building at the Capitol wearing shirts bearing the phrase “Not In Our Name” in bold letters. They held a sit-in for over three hours until they were arrested and dragged out in handcuffs.

Jewish Voice for Peace is not the only Jewish-led organization that has emerged in response to decades of violence against Palestinian people. In 2014, the Israeli military launched “Operation Protective Edge,” a military offensive in Gaza that killed more than 2200 Palestinians, over 65% of whom were civilians. In response to those attacks, a small group of Jewish youth who opposed the support American Jewish institutions for the invasion of Gaza founded IfNotNow, a Jewish youth organization based in the United States. The day before JVP demonstrated at the Capitol on October 18, members of IfNotNow blockaded all thirteen entrances of the White House while staff were inside and engaged in minor skirmishes with Secret Service police outside.

Though the number of Jews who have mobilized across the United States over the past four weeks is impressive, neither the demands they have presented nor the devastating civilian death toll in Palestine have swayed the decisions of elected officials.

The Cambridge facility of the arms dealer Elbit System sprayed in red paint on October 16, 2023 in solidarity with those suffering in Palestine.

How to Start a Ceasefire

Recent demonstrations against the genocide in Palestine demonstrate nationwide popular support for Palestinian liberation among Jews and non-Jews alike. If these demonstrations have failed to end the attacks on Palestinians, it is because they are intended to appeal to the consciences of politicians whose support for Israel is based not on moral evaluations, but on economic calculations. Elsewhere, groups fighting for Palestinian liberation have begun to create an economic crisis for war profiteers by targeting the corporations that benefit from the bombing and invasion of Gaza.

Active in both the United Kingdom and the United States, a group called Palestine Action has targeted the weapons manufacturing company Elbit Systems, which supplies 85% of Israel’s drone fleet. On October 12, activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts splattered red paint on the front of an Elbit office before locking themselves together to blockade the entrance. Palestine Action recently announced its United States launch with a Zoom webinar on October 24 to explain their strategy, targets, and tactics. Early that same morning, activists targeted Intercontinental Real Estate, which owns the office building rented to Elbit in Cambridge. According to one report, they “smashed Intercontinental’s intercom box clear off the wall, covered the front wall of Intercontinental Real Estate’s Brighton office in red paint, and spray-painted ‘Evict Elbit’ in large black letters.”

According to reporting by Globes, Elbit’s stock prices have dropped by nearly 10% since October 7, while other weapons manufacturers have seen a 5-17% increase in the same period.

Earlier this year, Palestine Action forced a factory belonging to Elbit subsidiary UAV Defence Systems to permanently close after activists besieged it for 60 days straight. The group also forced Elbit to sell their Oldham-based subsidiary Ferranti in January 2022 after 18 months of sustained direct action at the factory. Six months later, the company permanently closed their London headquarters after the fifteenth direct action at the site.

In addition to targeting Elbit Systems and their subsidiaries, Palestine Action has also carried out a strategy of tertiary targeting, organizing actions at the offices and warehouses of companies with economic links to Elbit. Tertiary targeting puts pressure on a project’s core contractors by pressuring businesses that have less of a stake in the project to sever ties with them. Tertiary targeting was also utilized by the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign of the early 2000s and the Stop Reeves Young campaign of the Stop Cop City movement.

Movements in the United States have long used tactics such as blockades, home and office demonstrations, sit-ins, vandalism, and sabotage to take action against wars abroad. In the last month, targeted actions against war profiteers such as Elbit Systems and their subsidiaries show that popular anti-colonial sentiment can be channeled into effective action by striking at the economic heart of the processes that make war possible, rather than the consciences of elected officials. Thousands of miles away from the genocide in Palestine, everyday people in the United States may feel powerless to end Israel’s devastating attacks. But in fact, activists living in the colonial core have the power to directly disrupt the functioning of the institutions and war profiteers who benefit from genocide in Gaza.

A map of potential protest targets from Palestine Action US. “If you’re east of the Mississippi, you live within three hours of an office or factory of Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons company, the target of our international direct action campaign.”

Publisher’s Afterword: The Uses and Limits of Tertiary Targeting

In the assessment of the SHAC campaign that we prepared with participants in that movement following a wave of repression that left many of the core organizers in both the United States and the United Kingdom serving prison terms, we argued that tertiary targeting strategies were more likely to succeed against smaller targets than Huntingdon Life Sciences, the animal testing corporation that the SHAC campaign set out to drive out of business. Before the SHAC campaign, an earlier movement using the same strategy had successfully shut down an individual fur store; but in attempting to close Huntingdon Life Sciences, which was then Europe’s largest animal testing corporation, activists picked a particularly high-profile target. Every time the campaign came close to shutting down HLS, government agencies stepped in to bail out the company.

Our conclusion was that

it would probably be wise for the next ones who experiment with the model to set smaller goals, rather than even more ambitious ones, since the SHAC campaign itself has yet to succeed. Perhaps some unexplored middle ground awaits between shutting down individual fur stores and attempting to close Europe’s largest animal testing corporation.

Despite this, most subsequent efforts to utilize the SHAC model have taken on larger adversaries, including transnational capitalist infrastructure projects and corporations working with the Atlanta city government to construct Cop City. When state infrastructure is at stake, government agencies will almost always intervene to protect corporations and other institutions from the consequences of tertiary targeting. To be capable of cutting off all resources to major players in the military-industrial complex, a movement would have to be powerful indeed.

This is not necessarily an argument against tertiary targeting. Rather, it is a reminder to set realistic expectations and formulate achievable goals. Even if it is not possible to run all the world’s weapons companies out of business one after another (at least—not without social change on an even larger scale), providing a horizon for more confrontational actions could offer additional leverage on the politicians and other decision-makers who are currently providing the Israeli military with carte blanche to carry out ethnic cleansing. Expanding the range of strategies that activists can participate in and the number of targets they can identify could open up new theaters of operation—giving new participants local points of intervention, escalating the intensity of ongoing protests, and increasing the pressure on those who hold the power to staunch the flows of weapons and blood.

Jewish demonstrators expressing solidarity with Palestinians by shutting down Highway 147 in Durham, North Carolina at rush hour on November 2, 2023. In Durham and elsewhere around the United States, the highway blockades carried out by the movement for Black lives that burst onto the national stage with the Ferguson uprising in 2014 set a precedent for actions that we now see other movements employing.

According to one source, the Israeli military estimates that at least “3000 militants” participated in the attack. ↩
Some reports suggest that some Israelis were killed by Israeli forces on October 7, whether as a consequence of “heavy crossfire” or of “shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.” Since this article first appeared, we have revised the number of Israeli dead to match the current estimate from the Israeli Foreign Ministry. ↩

Learning from the Flames : Reflections on the June 2023 Revolt in France

2023-08-09T23:10:12Z

On June 2023, in the city of Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, police brutally murdered a teenager named Nahel Merzouk, continuing a pattern of post-colonial violence directed at a sector of the French population that is treated as second-class citizens. In response, thousands of people in the outlying banlieues of Paris and other French cities engaged in several days of pitched revolt, attacking town halls and police stations, looting shops, and defending themselves against the police. In the following reflection, a participant in the movements of recent years looks back on the revolt of June 2023 and the movements that preceded it, exploring the limits they reached and considering what it would take for them to bring about revolutionary transformation.

For further reflections on the same events, you could begin here.

“How much longer will all of this go on?
It’s already been years since everything should have blown up
Too bad unity wasn’t on our side
But you know it’s all going to end badly
The war of the worlds you wanted, here it is
But what, what are we waiting for? What are we waiting for to start the fire?”

-Qu’est ce qu’on attend pour foutre le feu (What are we waiting for to start the fire?), A song by NTM, 1996

A protester in Nanterre, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

0. Riot or Revolt?

During the last mobilization against the pension reform in France (February-May 2023), comrades from the Chilean platform Vitrina Distópica asked whether we were witnessing a revolt in France. At the time, it appeared that, excepting a few hot nights in March following the authoritarian introduction of the pension reform, there was little evidence of a real revolt.

What was occurring seemed to be a French-style social movement, strong but classic—not a revolt that could truly threaten those in power like the Yellow Vests uprising, or the revolts of recent years in Chile, Iran, Lebanon, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

Nonetheless, it was legitimate to ask whether this mobilization, however it played out, was a sign that we were living through a pre-revolutionary period in France, in view of the succession of several massive and offensive movements across a short period of time (2016-2023).

If the events of this summer confirm the intensity of this period, the choice of the word revolt to describe them is significant. We can use this word not because it is more political than “riot” (which itself has a highly political content), but rather on account of the particular characteristics of this movement. It was dazzling, spontaneous, offensive, and entirely self-organized; the participants presented no limited demands, but articulated a clear desire to “take justice into their own hands” and, above all, to “hurt the state,” as some expressed in the suburbs of Paris.

Cars burning in France, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

I. Violence

The greater the humiliation and degradation of living conditions, the more violent revolt is likely to be. The use of violence by the oppressed against their oppressors is both a means of expression and a means of regaining their dignity. Revolutionary violence can be a way for dominated peoples to build a new dignity, as Elsa Dorlin, Frantz Fanon, and Miguel Enríquez have argued.

The intensity of the revolt in France—but also in Chile in 2019 and in Iran in 2019 and 2022—gives us an idea of the degree of rage and humiliation accumulated at the margins¹ of these nations.

The role of revolutionaries is not to contain this rage, but to help identify a strategic horizon, articulate objectives, and resist the counterattack of the state and ruling order. To build a force capable of converting rage into power.

“Vengeance for Nahel.” Graffiti in France in June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

II. Breakdown of Mediations

As in the Yellow Vest movement, the violence that the insurgents exercised also shows the weakness of the “mediations” (i.e., intermediary bodies) between these populations and the regime. Here, we mean mediations in the negative sense of institutions that maintain the prevailing social order (the town hall, the police, and sometimes social workers² and religious organizations) but also in the more positive sense of organized political spaces capable of sustaining righteous anger during the revolt and over time.³

Where local associations or organizations⁴ do exist, they often struggle to mobilize a broad base, especially when it comes to young people, and they rarely have political objectives beyond their immediate territory.⁵ This applies in working-class neighborhoods, but it also characterizes the majority of local organizations throughout France. As in other parts of the world, this demonstrates the absence of radical, autonomous organizations originating from or rooted in these neighborhoods with the capacity to act on everyday life and to formulate long-term political objectives and strategies.

Such organizations have existed in the past. Think of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Young Lords (an organization of Puerto Rican immigrants built on the BPP model), the Chilean MIR and its work in the poblaciónes (working-class neighborhoods in Chile), the PKK and its popular roots in Bakur (occupied Turkish Kurdistan). In France, the Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues (MIB) played a pioneering role in the 1990s, linking local struggles with nationwide efforts to combat police violence and to organize working-class neighborhoods on an autonomous basis.

However, since the 2005 revolt, it seems that, beyond some collectives supporting the Palestinian struggle at moments of aggression such as in 2014, the only political and social organizations that have managed to mobilize a popular base in the poor suburbs have been Islamist organizations in their various incarnations.⁶

In 2015-2016, following the jihadist attacks of the 2010s, an ideological offensive and campaign of state repression targeted Muslims indiscriminately, making no distinction between Muslims, Islamists, and jihadists. Ironically, this considerably weakened spaces in the poor suburbs that also functioned to play a role of mediation and appeasement. At the same time, this indiscriminate repression also increased the anger of many Muslims living in working-class neighborhoods, contributing to the feeling that they were second-class citizens.

III. The Centrality of the Police

Every movement in France in recent years has been suppressed, chiefly by outright repression. This puts the Macron administration in a situation of fear and dependence on the police.

The unbridled neoliberalism that Macron’s administration seeks to implement in France depends on the imposition of police force. Consequently, today, the French state is one of the regimes that most fears its police. This likely explains why the administration did not react to the threats of sedition from the trade-unions Alliance and Unsa police.⁷ For their part, the police are well aware of Macron’s dependence, and are taking advantage of the opportunity to increase their power and independence.

This situation—which is increasingly common, and inherent in the role that police play in society—suggests that, while it is not impossible that some adjustments to the police might take place at some point, we cannot expect any reforms that will really weaken the institution.

A protester in France takes on the police in June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

IV. By Comparison

Launched by Black people in working-class neighborhoods in the United States, the uprising in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd quickly drew the participation of a large section of society. The riots expanded into a broader multiracial revolt as anarchists, anti-racists, police abolitionists, and left-wing groups joined the movement en masse along with liberals and people who did not consider themselves “political.” Even the corporate media and various multinational corporations took a stand in response to the leverage that the movement exerted.

In contrast to the events in the United States, but consistent with what occurred in France in 2005, no other segment of French society joined young people in the revolt that broke out in French working-class neighborhoods in 2023.

Ironically, in France itself in June 2020, during the uprising in the United States, a powerful collective, the Truth Committee for Adama,⁸ organized an impressive and offensive march that brought together nearly 100,000 people in Paris in solidarity. By contrast, in 2023, in response to Nahel’s death, the marche blanche (“white march,” an expression of mourning) organized in his honor drew fewer than 20,000 people. A week after the uprising, excepting the riots, the demonstrations in the country’s major cities (including Paris, Lyon, and Marseille) never exceeded 2000 people.

On account of the spontaneous participation of many social classes and the action of many organized groups, the response to the murder of George Floyd was accepted as eminently political and “legitimate” in the United States and, consequently, around the world. Nahel’s death did not inspire the same reaction.⁹ The rest of the population didn’t join in, and in France,¹⁰ no one was able to give it the political significance that had been ascribed to George Floyd’s assassination.

V. Transnational Revolt

Social divisions prevented the revolt from spreading in France, but the insurgents found support in the working-class districts of Switzerland and Belgium. Similar riots erupted in Lausanne and Brussels without the support of any organization. In people’s consciousness, the boundaries of class and race within French society itself were stronger than the official national frontiers. Living conditions exerted more influence than the mirage of nations.

The success of the demonstration in Paris for George Floyd in 2020 and the riots that followed it, as well as the expressions of solidarity in Switzerland and Belgium for Nahel in 2023, demonstrate the existence of a transnational class consciousness among young people from working-class neighborhoods who are targeted by structural white supremacy.

A burning car in France, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

VI. Revolutionary Conditions—and Obstacles

The succession of high-intensity movements in France has showed that the conditions that could trigger a revolutionary movement are present. At the same time, it has also revealed the factors that are delaying the emergence of such a movement.

Generally speaking, when violent repression extinguishes a revolt, the consequent trauma stifles the rebellious desires of that generation for quite some time. Renewed agitation is only possible when it is not exactly the same people in the street.

In France, while repression has intensified in response to each movement—leaving people with mutilated hands, blinded, or even killed—it has not extinguished the social movements and riots that have followed one another since at least 2016.

This situation is reminiscent of the succession of revolts in Iran: 2009, 2017, 2019 (when something like 1500 people were killed), and the feminist revolution of 2022. What is taking place in France is on a smaller scale, but comparably consistent.

If in France as in Iran, these figures give an idea of the combativeness of the peoples in question (of their heroism, in the case of Iran), we can also explain this repetition by the fact that it was not the same parts of the population that were successively rising up.

In Iran, for example, the movement of 2009 chiefly involved the middle classes in the big cities, whereas in 2017 and 2019, the protagonists were largely from the working classes, and in 2022, they were women and non-“Persian” minorities.¹¹

In France, the movement of 2016 against the loi travail (“labor law”) involved students and politicized workers (the “left wing”). The gilets jaunes (“yellow vest”) movement that began in 2018 was initiated by white working-class people from the margins of France (especially geographically speaking). The movement against the neoliberal pension reform that peaked in March 2023 involved a mixture of those demographics, whereas the revolt that began in June 2023 consisted mostly of young people from the periphery who are on the receiving end of white supremacist violence from the state.

While people from the peripheral neighborhoods received little support in the revolt of summer 2023, conversely, they took little part in the movement against the pension reform or in the Yellow Vests uprising.¹²

The gulf between these movements does not mean that there is no relationship between them. The powerful social movement of spring 2006 came close on the heels of the suburban revolt of autumn 2005. Likewise, albeit in the opposite order, this summer’s revolt follows the mobilizations of spring 2023. In each case, less than three months passed between the two events. Nonetheless, the connections are not as strong as they could be.

This creates a situation that is volatile, but in which the waves of revolt are dispersed across time and space, preventing the eruption of a tsunami powerful enough to topple the regime.

Still, this multiplication of movements shows that the conditions likely exist for a powerful revolutionary movement to emerge.

“Struggles find their strength in their ability to weave together different fragments of the proletariat. The uprising was successful only because, all over the country, people from all walks of life and communities found their own way to participate.”

-Paper Planes, discussing the movement in Sri Lanka in 2022

In contrast to the situation in Iran or France, looking at uprisings in which one part of the social body takes the first step (be it Indian peasants, Indigenous people in Ecuador, high-school students in Chile, or Black people in the United States) and a large part of the population follows,¹³ we can see that these are more likely to achieve structural victories.

In the conditions of late capitalism, in which no compromise seems to be possible even in the face of widespread resistance, these victories are often temporary: the promised reorganization of several local police forces in the United States, the fall of the regime in Sudan, the constituent process in Chile, the fall of governments in Sri Lanka and Lebanon. No revolt has yet succeeded in preventing the return to normality.

Still, the revolts that go further offer a hint of what it could take to make permanent changes.

Protesters in France demand justice in response to the murder of Nahel Merzouk, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

VII. Building the People

With their call for unity, the gilets jaunes, like all the uprisings¹³ of our time, baffled political spaces accustomed to clear-cut divisions. During that movement, the omnipresence of French symbols was not a reason to stay away so much as a reminder that any popular insurrection today will be “impure” and confusing.

In popular uprisings, insurgents make use of the symbols and spaces available to them. Here, those used by the movement were more reminiscent of the iconography of the French Revolution (1789-93) within popular culture than the signature of the extreme right.

“If we say that “the people” are in the street, it’s not a people that would have existed beforehand, it’s on the contrary the one that was missing beforehand. It’s not ‘the people’ who produce the uprising, it’s the uprising that produces its people, by arousing the common experience and intelligence, the human fabric and language of real life that had disappeared.”.

-To Our Friends, the Invisible Committee

It’s only by accepting that the yellow vests themselves produced their own notion of “the people” that we can understand how, during the attack on the old Stock Exchange on December 1, 2018, we could witness a Le Pen-voting farmer alongside an autonomous activist from Morocco and, most importantly, a fifteen-year-old boy from the poor suburbs shouting: “We are the people… Wallah it’s us, the people!”¹⁴

Still, when we took part in the revolt at a roundabout in the Paris suburbs, our exchanges with residents of immigrant background (whether recent or longstanding) showed that many were attracted by the revolt but preferred to keep a certain distance from it. Some feared racist elements, while others explained that they couldn’t or didn’t know how to take part in a movement they defined as “for the French.”

Beyond the instrumentalization by the media and ruling class of the actual presence of racist groups and behaviors, the iconography and reference points of the movement remained almost exclusively Franco-French (flags, the guillotine, May ’68, the Paris Commune, the Council of the Resistance), however subversively people employed them. This was one of the limits that prevented the yellow vest movement from expanding. Calls for “everyone” to be yellow vests were rarely accompanied by the kind of actions that could enable the uprising to involve all the different communities that live on French territory.¹⁵

The national character of the majority of revolts in our time only makes it more important to fight against the nationalist tendencies and fascist groups that attempt to profit from unrest. In France, the anti-fascist movement did so physically and successfully within the yellow vest demonstrations, while several yellow vest groups did so politically by articulating egalitarian principles and employing transnational symbols.¹⁶

The revolt of June 2023, for its part, was short-lived and without means of addressing other sectors of society, and consequently not capable of experimenting with making new connections. In the end, neither of these movements was capable of building bridges that could close the gulf between the country’s rebels—not during the upheavals, and not afterwards, either.

Tear down the barriers between us. Protesters in Nanterre, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

In other eras, organizations have made it a central objective to establish connections across such gulfs. The Chicago Rainbow Coalition, launched by Fred Hampton in 1969, brought together Black Panthers, Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, poor white people recently arrived from Appalachia, and others.

The Wobblies of the Industrial Workers of the World, also in the United States, having built themselves up against the racism of American trade unions, founded a transnational union at the beginning of the 20th century that was capable of uniting Asian, Black, white, and Latino/Latina workers in a network that extended across the world. For its part, the MIR (again) succeeded, quite exceptionally in Chilean history, in creating an alliance between Mapuche and Chilean campesino workers.

More recently in France, spaces as varied as the Adama committee (which issued calls to join the gilets jaunes), Verdragon (a popular ecology space) in Bagnolet, and the Hangar (a squat fighting against gentrification) in Montreuil are trying to create connections between ecologists, working-class neighborhoods, and autonomous circles. The Cantine Syrienne and the internationalist network The Peoples Want, just like the Maison aux volets rouges and its festival, are trying to create common political spaces between exiled persons in France and local populations,¹⁷ attempting to extend the classic notion of “people” to all those who actually live in France.

Another relevant example is the gilets noirs (black vests), led by migrants and their French supporters, who responded to the gilets jaunes movement by launching an effort to achieve administrative regularization for all migrants in France, along with decent housing and living conditions. They built connections with groups like the Adama Committee, and with the Popular Solidarity Brigade during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s only by promoting, amplifying, and sometimes uniting experiences of this kind that we could create “the people” in a new sense, overcoming—without denying—the disparities, histories, and differences to build a revolutionary people.

“It’s time for this to stop, make way for joy
So that our youth with a vengeful hand
Burn down the police state first and
Send the republic to burn at the same stake, yeah
Now it’s our turn to throw the dice.”

NTM, Qu’est ce qu’on attend pour foutre le feu, 1996

Protesters in Nanterre, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

Thanks to friends and comrades whose feedback and reflections fed this text.

Glory to the insurgents.

-Lucas Amilcar

Protesters in Nanterre, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe

We use the word “margin” here in the sense that bell hooks uses it (for example, in her book From Margin to Center)—to describe an oppressed population that holds a unique radical potential. ↩
They themselves often refuse to take on this role: “And we’re between the young people and the police. We are the mediators of the false social peace that the government is trying to establish,” said one local educator. “What do we do?” asked another respected figure in a neighborhood. “Nothing at all. It’s over, we’re not firemen.” ↩
On the causes and strategies used by the French state in poor suburbs, we recommend Julien Talpin’s book Bâillonner les quartiers (“Gagging the Neighborhoods”). ↩
Let’s not forget, however, that since 2005 some groups have succeeded in creating political spaces or important and sometimes subversive forms of political expression. For example, the Echo-banlieue and Bondy Blog media, the Hangar in Montreuil or Verdragon in Bagnolet, Diaty Diallo and her powerful book deux secondes d’air qui brûle, the Adama Committee and the justice and truth network. ↩
There are exceptions, of course, such as the Réseau d’Entraide Vérité et Justice (Truth and Justice Mutual Aid Network), which brings together collectives against state violence throughout France. ↩
Just like the Marxists in the 1970s, Islamists are divided over trends, tactics, and various profound disagreements in France and elsewhere. For example, there are debates between non-violent public groups and jihadists practicing armed struggle, Salafists of various currents, Muslim Brotherhoods, and other groups. ↩
A threatening communiqué written at the start of the revolt to warn the government that the police were scrutinizing the state’s response and were ready to engage in unilateral “resistance” on their own. ↩
A collective created after the murder of Adama Traoré in 2016. ↩
For an analysis of this treatment, read this. ↩
Contrary to the approach of the international media or the United Nations, for example, which questioned the role of the state and police and their structural racism. ↩
See this text. ↩
This is not to say that it was non-existent. The Paris garbage collectors (most of whom live in the suburbs) spearheaded the pension movement. The gilets jaunes protests saw many residents of working-class neighborhoods and hundreds of young people take part in the insurrectionary nights of December 1 and 8, 2018. However, in both cases, there was little local, continuous presence, with the exception of Champigny, Montreuil, and Rungis in the case of the Paris suburbs. ↩
Think, for example, of the thawra in Lebanon, in which all denominations, usually opposed to each other, stood side by side; soccer fans from Istanbul (Besiktas, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray) and Santiago de Chile (Colo Colo and the UC) clashing with police during the Gezi uprising and the Revuelta Chilena; or the Aragalaya uprising in Sri Lanka in 2022, when Buddhist monks and queer rebels, Sinhaleses and Tamils, all rose up together. ↩ ↩²
The Arabic word “Wallah,” common among young people from emigrant and working-class backgrounds, means “I swear on Allah-God.” The author personally experienced this scene. ↩
In other revolts, we can think of the deliberate use of the term “azadi” (freedom) in the Syrian revolution as an appeal to Kurdish communities; in Iran, the use of the slogan “Kurdistan, the eyes and light of Iran” used by Turkmen communities; and the use of the Mapuche flag in Chile and the Kabyle flag in Algeria during the Hirak. ↩
We’re thinking, for example, of the yellow vests in Montreuil, Toulouse, and Commercy who, rather than denouncing the Marseillaise or the tricolor [the French national flag], decided to diversify the references present in the movement by organizing discussions on the lessons of the Syrian revolution, the Algerian hirak, and the struggle in Kurdistan; multiplying the Palestinian, black, and rainbow flags at demonstrations; and making banners and tags in Arabic and Spanish (“Que se Vayan todos” or “الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام”). Unfortunately, these gestures remained isolated. ↩
Most of the French examples are drawn from the Paris suburbs, where the author has lived for 30 years. ↩

Regarding the Eviction of the Self-Organized Refugee Camp in Lavrio, Greece : How Turkey’s War on Kurds and the European Union’s War on Migrants Intersect

2023-07-24T11:22:21Z

On July 5, 2023, the Greek government evicted a Kurdish refugee camp in Lavrio, Greece. The camp had existed for many decades, serving as an important center of organizing in southeastern Europe. The Turkish government’s war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants all intersected in this operation. In the following analysis, Beja Protner shows the connections between the various forms of systematic oppression involved here. For more information about ways to support movements for Kurdish liberation, you could consult Rise Up 4 Rojava and the Emergency Committee For Rojava.

On July 5, 2023, between 3 and 6 am, Greek state forces raided and violently evicted the self-organized Kurdish refugee camp in Lavrio, Greece. Located about 60 kilometers from Athens, the camp had been home to political refugees from Turkey and Kurdistan for decades. Without notice, more than 250 police officers, riot police (MAT), and heavily armed special police forces (EKAM) sent by the Ministry of Asylum and Migration evicted the residents of the camp—less than 60 people, a third of whom were young children. The refugees were forcefully transferred to the Oinofyta Refugee Camp, located in an abandoned factory in a deserted area far from any kind of urban settlement.

The eviction, which Greek officials called a “humanitarian intervention,” looked to the Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey and Kurdistan more like the sort of dawn raids that had forced many of them to flee from their homelands and seek refuge in Greece in the first place. The Greek forces broke the gate of the camp, stormed into people’s homes, pointed laser-sighted rifles at the people—including families and children—and dragged them outside.

“Even in Turkey [the state forces] don’t use that much technology in house raids,” commented Welat, a young political refugee from North Kurdistan (Turkey), who had lived in the Lavrio camp for five years after escaping persecution in Turkey. As Leyla, who had lived in the camp with her husband and three small children recounted, the residents were given only half an hour to collect their essential belongings before police forces occupied the camp and forbade entry. Some of those who resisted the eviction were violently restrained with their hands handcuffed behind their backs. Leyla tried to calm down her daughter by telling her it was toy guns being pointed at them. “But the child knew what they were, from back in Turkey,” Leyla said. “My children have seen many things that they never deserved.”

All 57 residents, including eight woman and nineteen children, were detained and transferred to the Oinofyta refugee camp, located in an abandoned factory far from any kind of urban settlement.

“Where are we? What is this place?” Layla asked when we met through the blue metal fence of the camp’s gate after the Greek guards denied me access to my friends. An elderly Kurdish refugee had just returned empty-handed from an hour-long search under the burning midday sun for a shop where he could purchase something to eat or drink. It was 2 pm, and the refugees had still not received any food since their forceful relocation at 6 am. “The children, hungry!” the elderly refugee tried to explain in a few Greek words to the security personnel sitting in a small cabin at the gate.

In stark contrast with the autonomous, self-sufficient, and centrally-located Lavrio camp, Oinofyta is a prison guarded by government-appointed security officials who control the entries and exits. Even when people are permitted to go out of the camp, the surrounding area is largely deserted, isolating them and rendering them dependent on the state’s notoriously poor provision of basic necessities.

“Why did they do this to us?” asked Diana, a teenage girl from Northeast Syria (Rojava), as she held my hands through the blue fence.

Oinofyta refugee camp, established in an abandoned factory in a deserted area, had been closed down on account of unlivable conditions. It was re-opened to accommodate the forcefully displaced residents of the Lavrio camp. After eight hours, a truck sent by the Greek state brought some food for them. Entry was denied to all visitors despite the objections of the refugees. Photo: Vedat Yeler, July 5, 2023.

The lives of the Lavrio camp residents were turned upside down in a single day, depriving them of liberty and autonomy. On July 4, they were living in a free and safe self-organized political community that had existed for over 40 years. The next day, they were spatially and socially marginalized refugees, imprisoned and dependent on the state—while the state destroyed their homes in the historic buildings of Europe’s oldest refugee camp, closing a chapter in the history of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement in Greece. The destruction of the Lavrio camp is a historic moment at which European anti-refugee policies and the Greek right-wing crackdown on autonomous political spaces intersect with Greek and Turkish international relations and the war on Kurds, revealing their interconnections.

An Attack on Refugees and on Free Collective Life

Over the past four years, the right-wing New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία, ND) government in Greece has placed two priorities at the top of its agenda: waging war on migrants and destroying autonomous political spaces. Since New Democracy came to power under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in 2019, police have evicted and sealed dozens of political squats in urban centers. Many of those were hosting refugees and other migrants who had no other access to dignified housing in Greece.

Since 2015, Greece has served Europe as a “container” for unwanted migrants and refugees. According to the Dublin Regulation, asylum seekers are required to apply for protection in the first European Union country of their entry; alongside the closing of the internal EU borders in 2016, this clogged the asylum systems in the countries on the margins of the EU like Greece. The slow, incomprehensible, and constantly changing Greek asylum system has made the process of acquiring legal status into a living hell for countless people.

Most people have to wait for several years for their asylum interview, during which they have limited or no access to housing, financial assistance, healthcare, or education. During that time, their temporary documents continuously expire and they are forced to live as sans papiers [undocumented people] due to delays at the Asylum Service. This administratively induced legal precarity renders people vulnerable to “sweep” operations in central Athens, in which police kidnap people without valid residency documents and take them to prison-like camps and detention centers where the living conditions are abominable.

The migration and asylum policies of the New Democracy government constitute a war on migrants. Doing the dirty work of European anti-migration racist hysteria as the “shield of Europe,” the Greek-Turkish land and sea border has become the site of illegal pushbacks—an unofficial but systematic strategy of returning incoming migrants to Turkey without any possibility of applying for asylum. This includes those fleeing from political persecution of the Turkish state.

The Greek police, Frontex, border guards, coast guards, collaborating gangs, and local vigilantes carry out such pushbacks every day on a massive scale, violating a number of international laws and conventions. In addition to violating the right to apply for asylum, they consistently inflict police brutality, enforced disappearance, torture, sexual abuse, and unofficial detention in overcrowded cells with no access to food, water, or toilets. In the Evros region of northeastern Greece, in addition to carrying out pushbacks near the border, they have also kidnapped people from the streets or from camps in areas as far inland as Thessaloniki. After being subjected to multiple forms of mistreatment and humiliation by masked border guards and collaborating gangs, migrants have been brought to the Evros river, forced into rubber dinghies at gunpoint, and transferred across the border to Turkey. In some cases, people have been abandoned on small river islets without food, water, or medicine, exposed to the elements.

In the Aegean and Ionian Sea, the Hellenic Coast Guard and Frontex have been responsible for countless pushbacks and deaths. Boats in distress are routinely refused rescue and left to sink or towed towards Turkey. In some cases, the coast guard has deliberately damaged the engines of boats before leaving them adrift in the open sea near the Turkish waters. In other cases, people have been abandoned at sea in rescue boats without engines. The Greek government seeks to legitimize these actions with a discourse about “security,” playing on racist anti-immigration sentiments in Greece and across Europe. Consequently, the Evros river and the Aegean Sea have become open graves for those fleeing from wars, persecution, economic devastation, and climate catastrophe.

Political refugees from Kurdistan and Turkey in Greece, together with local and international activists, protest pushbacks and violence on the Greek/EU borders at the Ministry of Migration and Asylum in Athens. Photo: Vedat Yeler, June 8, 2022.

In the context of the criminalization of migrants and migration, Greek refugee camps have become high-security prisons. While the living conditions in these places are notoriously horrific, they are also spatially and socially isolated, far from any urban centers. Most of the camps near urban centers that afforded residents some access to employment (even if precarious and exploitative), healthcare facilities, and education for children have been forcefully evicted. In the isolated camps like Oinofyta to which refugees are forcefully transferred, they are rendered dependent on the state’s inadequate provision of basic necessities.

The border and camp policies of the Greek state both follow a genocidal logic of “cleansing” that resembles the processes involved in the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and similar events in several ways. These include the idea of getting rid of an unwanted population by any means available; gradually escalating discourses and practices of dehumanization, which become normalized; the “banality of evil,”¹ apparent in the attitudes of police and border officers, bureaucrats, and camp employees; and finally, the choice of the vast majority of citizens to accept these practices so as not to see migrants around them or in their country. In effect, many citizens of Greece and other countries within the European Union have adopted the basically genocidal idea that these people should not be here, that they should be prevented from being here or made to disappear by any means. At the same time, these citizens refuse to acknowledge the means being used and the things being done to people subjected to a regime of annihilation.

The Kurdish refugee camp of Lavrio was one of the last places that resisted this system of incarceration and annihilation with the values and practices of “free life together”(hevjiyana azad/özgür eş yaşam) arising from the Kurdistan Freedom Movement. In Lavrio, revolutionary refugees from Kurdistan and Turkey lived for decades in the center of the coastal town alongside locals and tourists. In contrast to the state-run prison camps, the Lavrio camp has been entirely self-managed since the withdrawal of the state seven years ago, surviving with the support and donations of local and foreign charities, NGOs, solidarity groups, and philanthropists. International and local activists, researchers, journalists, and photographers frequently visited the camp and were warmly welcomed as guests.

The Lavrio camp was a lived utopia, a world-to-be put into practice. Life in the camp was organized according to the principles of Democratic Confederalism, a system of self-organization into communes, committees, and assemblies, described by the leader of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement Abdullah Öcalan as a way of collectively creating a peaceful, safe, and harmonious communal co-existence between humans and the environment as an alternative to the logic of the nation-state.² Relations of gender equality, comradeship, mutual aid, respect, and care for other people, animals, and the environment characterized everyday life in the Lavrio camp. It was a place where individuals, youth, families, and children from Turkey and all four parts of Kurdistan (occupied by Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria) found safe haven and a home after escaping from war, political persecution, torture, imprisonment, and the threat of life. As many of the residents noted, it was “like Kurdistan,” a piece of homeland abroad; a Kurdistan that was free from violence and patriarchy, where Kurdish and left-wing political exiles could recover from traumatic experiences of violence, express their culture and politics freely, and rebuild their community. Many residents chose to continue living in the Lavrio camp after gaining asylum in Greece, in order to continue taking part in this project of “free life together” and because they felt safe in the camp and in the town of Lavrio.

The Lavrio camp was a safe space for families. In the past years, the residents built a playground for children. Across four decades, thousands of children lived and grew up in the camp. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2023.

Erasing a History of Struggle and Solidarity

The Lavrio camp was one of the oldest refugee camps in Europe. It was established in 1947 with the official name of “Lavrio Center of Temporary Stay for Foreign Asylum Seekers” in order to host refugees of Greek origin (“expatriates”) fleeing from the Soviet Union.³ According to a research report from 1950, the camp hosted about 300 people, including families and individuals of different nationalities from the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania who fled persecution in their countries of origin. The needs of the refugees were addressed by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), the United Nations Mission in Greece, in collaboration with the Greek authorities. Over the following years, it was inhabited by asylum seekers from various countries, chiefly from the Balkans and the Middle East.³ Political refugees from Turkey became the most numerous residents of the camp in the 1980s after the military coup in Turkey on September 12, 1980, when Turkey came under the rule of a Sunni-nationalist military junta that tortured, imprisoned, killed, and forced into exile tens of thousands of Kurdish and left-wing people.

For four decades, Lavrio refugee camp was a self-organized space of free life together, struggle, and solidarity. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2023.

While the Greek state was technically in charge of the camp, leading asylum procedures and providing food, medical care, and basic necessities, the revolutionary refugees organized themselves via communes and assemblies. A political community of exiles was built, based on the collective experience of self-organization of collective life in the political prisons of Turkey. The Lavrio camp was not only a space of refuge but also one of the most important spaces of political organizing in exile in Europe.

It was also a space of international solidarity and comradeship. Since the 1980s, various Greek left-wing organizations, unions, and solidarity groups have visited the camp and publicly asserted the revolutionary refugees’ right to asylum, political work, employment, healthcare, and better living conditions. The refugees also built connections with Greek left-wing parties and organizations, and engaged with the wider population by producing and distributing leaflets and magazines in Greek explaining the situation of political oppression in Turkey and calling for a wider Turkish-Greek solidarity.

In the 1990s, large numbers of Kurdish refugees, especially families, arrived in the Lavrio camp due to the political violence in North Kurdistan (in Turkey). In the context of the growing popularity and mobilization of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Kurdistan in the 1990s, the Turkish state’s attacks in Kurdistan increasingly targeted civilians, with campaigns by the Turkish army and paramilitary organizations that included mass murder, enforced disappearances, torture, and mass imprisonment. It was during this period that the camp acquired its Kurdish-majority character and became centered around the PKK-led Kurdistan Freedom Movement. Thanks to the solidarity between the Kurdish and Turkish refugees and Greek left-wing groups, the refugees regularly organized cultural events across Greece, which were widely attended by locals. They also participated in local festivals, sharing music, food, and informative materials.

In the Lavrio camp, every aspect of daily life was organized according to Democratic Confederalism and the principles of “free life together.” The residents kept the spaces clean and tidy and decorated them with revolutionary symbols. Each room was a commune within which money and basic necessities were shared, and the cleaning and cooking responsibilities were distributed fairly among comrades. Photo: Beja Protner, January 2023.

After the civil war in Syria (2011), the Islamic State attack on Kurdish regions in Syria (2014) and genocide against Yazidi Kurds in Sinjar, Iraq (2014), and Turkey’s invasions of Kurdish-majority areas in North Syria (starting in 2018), large numbers of displaced Kurdish refugee families from Syria found refuge in the Lavrio camp. In 2016, owing to political pressure from Turkey, the Greek government wanted to close down the camp, but hundreds of residents resisted. Subsequently, the Greek state withdrew all services and abandoned the camp at the peak of humanitarian need. From then on, the camp was entirely autonomous. The residents collectively organized and shared responsibilities for cleaning, cooking, basic medical assistance, repairs, and distributing the donations such as food, cleaning and hygiene products, and clothes that were provided by the various charities, NGOs, philanthropists, and solidarity groups that frequently visited the camp.

In the last years, especially following the Rojava Revolution in North and East Syria after 2012, the Kurdish movement has enjoyed increasing attention and support of the international(ist) community in Greece and elsewhere. Like the refugee camp in Maxmûr in Iraq in the Middle East,⁴ the Lavrio camp became a center of Democratic Confederalism in Europe, implementing the model of self-organization centering women’s self-liberation, grassroots democracy, and ecology practiced in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava). Sometimes seen as a miniature of Rojava, the Lavrio camp gained its international significance as a center for new transnational connections and a place of political education and practice built on more than 40 years of revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan and political organizing in exile.

For four decades, the Lavrio camp was not only a space of refuge, but also a center of Kurdish and left-wing political organizing, international connections, comradeship, and intercultural encounter. Every year, the Lavrio camp hosted the celebrations of Newroz on March 21, the New Year for a number of West Asian peoples and the Kurdish holiday of resistance and renewal. The event was visited by a wide range of refugees, Greeks, and international youth, joining them—literally through govend, the traditional Kurdish circular dances—into a circle of mutual recognition and solidarity.

A Newroz celebration on March 21, 2022. Every year, hundreds of Kurdish and Turkish political refugees in Greece, Greek locals, and international visitors joined the Newroz celebration in the Lavrio camp and danced around the bonfire. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2022.

Just like the eviction of dozens of self-organized squats across Greece, the New Democracy government’s decision to destroy the Lavrio camp constitutes an attempt to eliminate the transnational solidarity that the camp hosted and facilitated. At the same time, it was an attack on the revolutionary history that the camp contained. The camp’s buildings were almost a century old; every inch of them bore traces of the revolutionary determination, communal labor, and comradeship of the tens of thousands of people who had passed through the camp, grown up in it, participated in repairing it, and made it home for themselves and for their successors. With the destruction of the Lavrio camp, a part of this collective history is deliberately erased.

Another NATO Gift to Erdoğan

The Kurdish refugee journalist Vedat Yeler has called the eviction and destruction of the Lavrio camp a “NATO gift to [Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan.” The eviction took place only a few days before the summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on July 11 in Vilnius, Lithuania, where both Greece and Turkey were to be present. The two NATO members have wrangled over the Cyprus conflict and territorial disputes in the Aegean Sea for many decades. In mutual populist slander, Turkish politicians have been accusing Greece of harboring “terrorists” in the Lavrio camp and pressuring the Greek state to close it down for years. However, since the re-election of both Erdoğan’s Sunni-nationalist regime in Turkey and Mitsotakis’ New Democracy government in Greece in May and June, 2023, respectively, there has been a shift in bilateral relations between the two countries. During a visit in Cyprus a few days before the eviction, the Greek Foreign Minister expressed a commitment to improve relations with Turkey. The attack on Kurdish political refugees in Greece can be understood as an attempt to showcase these efforts before the NATO summit.

After eviction, the Lavro camp was given over to the municipality of Lavrio, which immediately painted over the revolutionary political symbols that had decorated the camp for decades. This was a political gesture, sending the message that the revolutionary politics will not be tolerated under the New Democracy government. Photo: Beja Protner, 15 July, 2023.

This is not the first time that the Kurds have been used as a tool in regional geopolitics and in the management of the relations within NATO. One previous occasion in which the Greek state played a crucial role was the February 15, 1999 international conspiracy that led to the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Kurdish movement had enjoyed public support from the Greek mainstream and left-wing politicians and public. When Öcalan was exiled from Syria, he sought refuge in Europe and was harbored by the Greek intelligence service. However, under pressure from the EU and NATO, he was refused refuge in Greece and transferred to the Greek embassy in Kenya, where he was handed over to Turkish intelligence. As a result, with Greece’s direct complicity, Öcalan was imprisoned for life on the Turkish island of İmralı in complete isolation.

In 1999, Kurdish refugees and other revolutionary refugees in Greece joined thousands of local supporters in protesting what many older Greeks recall as one of the most shameful actions of the Greek state. Today, with the eviction of the Lavrio camp, the Kurdish movement has seen once again that they cannot trust any state, but must rely on the solidarity of people.

For many years, NATO has backed Turkey’s political violence and war crimes in the Middle East. With the second biggest army in NATO, the Turkish state has been waging an unequal war against the PKK guerrillas in Kurdistan, committing acts of political violence and war crimes against the guerrillas, the local population, and the environment, including ecologically devastating fires and chemical weapon attacks. Turkey has also materially and logistically supported ISIS and other jihadist gangs in Syria and Iraq in their fight against the Kurds. Moreover, Turkey has shelled, invaded, and occupied a number of Kurdish-majority areas in North and East Syria, where it has employed jihadist mercenaries to terrorize and abuse the local populations, causing thousands to flee. As things stand today, geopolitically, a member of NATO can do all this without any meaningful reaction from international institutions.

Recently, relations between Turkey and other members of NATO have resulted once again in violence against Kurdish refugees and other political refugees from Turkey abroad. In 2022, when Finland and Sweden decided to join NATO in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Turkey targeted Kurdish refugees as a bargaining chip in negotiations. Turkey vetoed Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership and was only willing to agree to it on the condition that they hand over political refugees residing in their countries to be imprisoned (or worse) in Turkey. This trafficking in humans indeed took place, with Sweden extraditing a number of political exiles to Turkey.

Political refugees from Kurdistan and Turkey regularly organize demonstrations in central Athens to protest political oppression in Turkey, the imprisonment of Abdullah Öcalan, military invasions and assassinations of activists in Rojava (Syria) and Başûr (Iraq), the use of chemical weapons against the PKK guerrillas in the mountains of Kurdistan, and to condemn the silence of the European and international institutions in face of Turkey’s crimes. Photo source, 20 November, 2022.

The European Union and NATO have continuously collaborated in the criminalization of the PKK and (pro-)Kurdish activists, adopting the “terrorism” discourse that Turkey uses to legitimize massacres, the use of chemical weapons, the mass persecution of political dissidents, journalists, and lawyers, and military invasions that have forced millions of people into exile. The discussions leading up to the NATO summit of July 11 have resulted in developments that further threaten the Kurdish political community at home and in exile. For example, Erdoğan met with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and agreed to forward Sweden’s accession protocol to the Grand National Assembly for ratification on the condition that NATO pledges to appoint a “special coordinator for counterterrorism” and that Sweden collaborates in addressing Turkey’s “security concerns” (in other words, the existence of politically organized Kurds) under a new bilateral Security Compact. This can only mean more persecution of Kurds in exile and more extraditions of political refugees who try to find safety in Europe.

It is not clear whether Erdoğan and Mitsotakis discussed the Kurdish and Turkish political community in Greece at their meeting during the NATO summit on July 12. However, the eviction and destruction of the Lavrio camp sent the message that the Greek state is siding with Turkey in its century-long project of annihilating Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere.

The Refugee Issue and the Kurds

When we consider the position of Kurds in NATO geopolitics alongside the European Union’s racist war on migrants, in both of which the Greek state sides with the oppressor, it becomes possible to see how the integrated systems that Öcalan and the Kurdish movement call the “forces of Capitalist Modernity”² are waging a war against free life.

While the Turkish government continues to displace millions of people from Turkey and Kurdistan, many of whom seek asylum in Europe, the EU guards its borders with genocidal methods and discourses, pouring billions of euros into Turkey in order to block migration from the Global South. According to the so-called EU-Turkey Deal of 2016, the EU paid the Turkish state 3 billion euros in order to accommodate and contain migrants and refugees from the Global South who try to reach safety by traveling through Turkey. As a continuation of this deal, Greece has in 2021 declared Turkey a “safe country” for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. However, people from these countries have no means to gain asylum in Turkey, due to its outdated asylum legislation. They have limited access to residence rights, housing, and legal employment, and are increasingly exposed to deportations and refoulement [the forcible return of refugees to a country where they are liable to be subjected to persecution], economic and sexual exploitation, and racist attacks and murders, legitimized and encouraged by racist anti-refugee discourse. Kurds from Turkey are familiar with these forms of systematic violence, which have been normalized through decades of discrimination against non-Turkish minorities.

Given the lack of transparency in the corrupt Turkish state, it is difficult to say how much EU money has been used to accommodate the 10 million refugees there, most of whom live in deplorable living conditions. At the same time, Turkey has exponentially expanded its stockpiles of weapons and military, repression, and surveillance technologies. Surely, the EU “refugee money” has been used to intensify the war against the Kurds both at home and abroad, driving millions more to seek refuge in Europe and the rest of the Global North.

In addition to money, the EU has also been supporting Turkey in its silence regarding the systematic mistreatment of refugees and political dissidents in Turkey, as well as Turkey’s political violence, sponsoring of jihadists, military interventions, and war crimes. Erdoğan has answered every tentative critique from EU officials with the threat of “releasing” refugees into Europe. Driven by systemic racist xenophobia, the EU remains complicit in face of Turkey’s violence against Kurds, left-wing revolutionaries, political dissidents, women and sexual minorities, and unwanted migrant and refugee populations, despite the fact that Turkey itself produces millions of refugees.

In short: wherever the European “issue” with migrants and Turkey’s “issue” with Kurds intersect, people are killed, displaced, violently deterred, incarcerated, stripped of rights and, as a final act of dehumanization, used as tokens in blackmail, bargaining, and human trade between states.

This mural picturing famous Kurdish and internationalist figures and martyrs of the Kurdistan freedom struggle covered the entrance into the Lavrio camp’s main building. In the star of the symbol of the PKK, the slogan in Kurdish says: “Our love for life is so great that we can sacrifice ourselves for it.” The Greek authorities painted over the mural after the eviction of the camp. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2023.

I undertook this essay to try to answer Diana’s question, “Why did they do this to us?” after she was evicted from her home with her family and the rest of the residents of the Lavrio camp. I have sought to show how NATO imperialism, the European war on migrants (including those fleeing from Turkey and Kurdistan), and Turkey’s war against Kurds and political dissidents have been intertwined in regional and global power relations. Those suffering oppression, political violence, and economic exploitation—and resisting them by seeking a freer life through migration, autonomous self-organization, and self-defense—are under attack at every step.

Today, the ruins of the Lavrio revolutionary refugee camp, which was a safe haven for political refugees and a cradle of internationalist solidarity for decades, attest to the violence of what the Kurdish Movement calls Capitalist Modernity—an integrated system in which life is devalued, exploited, and extinguished. In the face of such a massive force, which has impacted the residents of the Lavrio camp directly but threatens all of us, the only way to persist is by establishing international solidarity and a common struggle against all the borders and injustices of today’s world.

Those of us who hope to act in solidarity with Diana and with all who are oppressed and struggling must ask what are we going to do to defend the sort of “free life together” that we learned about in Lavrio. Without its inhabitants and their politics, it is just an old wrecked building. We must not let its ruins become an image of the future.

We can do this by speaking out and taking action in response to systematic state violence, and by organizing with oppressed populations against the criminalization of those who seek freedom and better life, whether at home or in exile. Let us honor the history of the Lavrio camp by building alternative spaces of “free life together” that connect revolutionaries, migrants and refugees, locals, and all the oppressed. Let the legacy of the Lavrio camp live on in many new self-organized spaces of comradeship, internationalist solidarity, and struggle.

The header image shows the self-organized camp for political refugees from Kurdistan and Turkey in Lavrio, Greece. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2023.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Hanna Arendt discussed the “banality of evil” in the Holocaust in regards to the case of the Nazi official Adolph Eichmann, who was responsible for transferring people to concentration camps. With the concept of “banality of evil,” Arendt argued that bureaucrats participating in atrocities are “normal people” working within an ordered system, disengaged from the consequences of their acts, rather than inherently evil sadists. ↩
Öcalan, Abdullah (2020). The Sociology of Freedom: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume III. Oakland, CA: PM Press. ↩ ↩²
Dirakis, Yannis (2019). “Claiming the right to the camp – An ethnography of the squatted Lavrio Center of Temporary Stay for Foreign Asylum Seekers” Unpublished master’s thesis. Maastricht: Maastricht University. ↩ ↩²
See Dirik, Dilar (2022). “Mexmûr: From displacement to self- determination (Ch. 23).” In The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice. London: Pluto Press. ↩

CrimethInc. : Categories : Analysis

Cop City Is Everywhere : Learning from the Movement to Defend the Forest

To Pick up Where We Left Off

The Day of the Forest Defender

The Stakes Keep Going Up

February 8: Coordinated Raids Across Southeast Atlanta

“Bless Them”

Trading Blows

From a Distance

Nationwide Summit against Cop City

Generations of Resistance

New Ambitions, Old Templates

From Scottsdale to New York City

Spring into Resistance

What Goes Up…

From Weelaunee to Gaza

No Confidence

Go Where They Go

Breaking and Exiting

Protest at GILEE

It’s Already Too Late

Rising Tension

The Presidential Debate

How Was the Movement Undermined?

How Did We Get Here?

Isolation

Urban Sprawl

“Spatial De-Concentration”

The Spiral of Repression

What If?

Infighting

Moving Ahead in a Cop Nation

Timeline: December 2023 to January 2025

Then They Came for the Palestinians : How to Respond to the Kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil

The Antisemitic Plan to Smear Palestine Solidarity as Antisemitic

What Will It Take?

Learning from Experience

We Are Made for Each Other

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

Tyranny Is the Opposite of Anarchism

A Three-Sided Conflict

No Law Will Give You Freedom

Remember How We Got Here

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

Further Reading

It's Safer in the Front : Taking the Offensive against Tyranny

Further Reading

Sacrificial Violence and Retribution

Sacrificial Violence

Retribution

Beyond Martyrdom

Appendix

Pacific Northwest

California

Southwest

Central

Midwest

Southeast

Northeast

Resisting Local Authoritarianism and Multipolar Imperialisms in Georgia : A Deeper Look into the Protests

Introduction

A National Protest Movement in the Context of Local Authoritarianism

The “Foreign Agent” Law

Energy Geopolitics

The Anti-LGBT Law

The Desire for the West?

For Internationalist Solidarity

Insurgent Survival : Reflections on the Fight Against Sweeps Targeting the Homeless in Austin, Texas

1000 Tents Bloom

A History of Displacement and Contestation

Surrounding the City from Below

Asymmetrical Conflict against the Infrastructure of Oppression

Movement Polarities

Using and Being Used: On Media and Communications Tools

Movement Money Problems

Recognizing and Transcending Limits

Conclusion: Partisans against the Coming Dispossession

The Case for Resistance : What We’re Up Against—and What It Could Look Like to Fight

The Balance of Forces

How Popular Is Trump?