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The Anti-Deportation Collective : Fighting the Machinery of Deportation in France in the 1990s

2025-03-26T22:29:00Z

In the following account, the author recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places.

This is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, narrating experiences from the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. If you’re interested in reading the rest of the book, you can back it on Kickstarter now.

Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998

It’s early evening and Sophie and I are sitting in the long-distance-train waiting area of Paris’s Gare de Lyon, one of Europe’s busiest train stations. All around us are travelers scurrying to and fro. Stressed-out tourist families, a camera still flung around Dad’s neck, rushing their kids through the station mix with tired-looking businessmen waiting to get back home.

“You did a great job with your outfit,” she says to me as she looks me over from head to toe. I met Sophie at an action (or demonstration, or concert, or something of the sort) about a year ago, and we have been inseparable at political events since. She is my age, a student at Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School),¹ and if I didn’t know very well the context in which she’s making this comment, I might think she’s flirting with me.

“You’re looking pretty good yourself,” I respond in kind.

She has managed to transform herself into the spitting image of your perfectly forgettable average French teenage girl. Basically, she looks like a younger Sporty Spice in her Adidas tracksuit and sneakers. I, on the other hand, have gone with a significantly preppier look: khaki pants, polo shirt, nondescript jacket, and moccasins. She looks at me again, pauses, and slightly withdraws her compliment: “It’s not the most functional wardrobe, though. The khakis stand out and the moccasins probably aren’t great for running.”

I shrug. “I did what I could. I was mainly concerned with getting this far.”

While we are sitting among the tourists and businessmen, doing our best to look like a somewhat mismatched young teenage couple waiting for a train back to their city, we are in fact not travelers, and the correct term for our attire is not outfit but disguise. We are not here to take a train, but to stop one. A train that transports imprisoned human beings against their will every single night. The 21:03 to Marseille, otherwise known to us as the deportation train.

Our objective is to stop the Paris-to-Marseille overnight train, which the French National Railway Company, better known for its French initials SNCF, permits the French government to use to transport North African immigrants, usually of Algerian or Moroccan origin, by rail to Marseille. Once in the port city, they are expelled from French territory by boat. The attempt to block this train is an idea born of the Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective), and it was decided that if we were to have any chance of success, we should disguise ourselves as best as possible and infiltrate the station in small groups, since trying to march in there as a demonstration probably wouldn’t get us very far.

The Anti-Deportation Collective

The CAE, officially formed only a few weeks earlier in early April 1998, was an autonomous collective born in the heat of the movement of the sans-papiers of the mid-’90s, a French term meaning “without papers” that refers to the movement against the deportation of undocumented immigrants and in favor of their “legalization.” The collective’s broadly accepted guiding principles² were as simple as they were clearly steeped in anarchist modes of organization, thought, and action:

Practical opposition to deportations.
We are not “allies” to the sans-papiers, we struggle with them out of motivations and convictions that are our own.
These motivations vary among individuals, but are in all cases rooted in anti-capitalism.
The collective is autonomous and collaborates with sans-papiers collectives that are autonomous not merely in theory, but in practice.
Decisions are made by way of general assembly.

The plight of the sans-papiers had exploded into the public consciousness following a series of highly publicized church occupations in 1996 by undocumented immigrants themselves. This culminated on August 23, 1996 in a raid in which nearly two thousand police officers stormed the Saint-Bernard church, resulting in the detention of 210 undocumented immigrants.

After that, solidarity demonstrations with the sans-papiers in Paris regularly numbered in the tens of thousands, with the participants—and their demands and methods of action—representing the broad spectrum of the French center left and radical left. This included the Communist Party and the CGT union, but likewise the sizable anarchist blocs of the CNT, Anarchist Federation, Alternative Libertaire, SCALP, and everything in between. Importantly, the sans-papiers themselves were organized into several collectives and structures; they were active and leading participants in their own struggles. As with all communities, they were not a monolith. Within the sans-papiers organizations, one could find a similarly broad spectrum of ideas and strategies in regards to demands, objectives, and methods of action.

While the sans-papiers organizations, regardless of their politics, were limited in their methodology by the logical constraints of their situation—the fact that an arrest or identity control could quickly lead to a possible deportation with devastating, even deadly, potential consequences—the reformist organizations were unsurprisingly bound by the constraints of their respect for legality and their acceptance of the basic premises of states and borders and the idea that a human being should in some way or another be bound by the possession of a particular piece of paper, or lack thereof, based on their place of birth.

Or, even more absurdly, as is the case in France, their bloodline.

We anarchists, on the other hand, had no such constraints. Our solidarity with what were clearly some of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society—workers, people of color, many of them women, escaping from what were some of the most horrendous conflicts in the world at that time—was immediate and instinctive. But through our position of unconditional solidarity with the sans-papiers and the assertion that in the world we are fighting for, no human will ever be illegal and freedom of movement will be for people and not just for commodities, we articulated a position of necessary rupture with the concepts of states and borders. If our demands could not be granted by the state and our objective could not be realized within the framework of its existence, then it naturally followed that we would not look to the state to grant those things.

Consequently, we were embarking on a concrete struggle to prevent deportations and make it possible for people to live where they chose and how they chose. The same stance toward the state applied in this struggle as in our abstract analysis: the state was our enemy, and we were determined to wage war against it within the appropriate context of the time and situation we found ourselves in, in hopes of preventing it from carrying out its objectives. The greater our success, hand in hand with those sans-papiers who were open to our solidarity and methods, the greater our collective power would grow as a movement and the greater the degree of agency, autonomy, and freedom we would be able to realize.

We were not making demands, but seeking to force concessions and create realities. Concretely, that meant that deportations are for stopping. To do so, we would attack the state’s machinery of deportation, its infrastructure, and the enterprises that collaborated with it and benefited economically from assisting with the hunting, caging, and expelling of human beings.

We did so out of solidarity, out of conviction, but also with the explicit understanding that despite our privileges and different realities, our struggle was the same as theirs. In fighting alongside the sans-papiers, as accomplices rather than allies, we were also fighting for ourselves:

“Their situation makes us all more precarious in labor relations, the repression and control developed against them will affect us eventually as well, the hardening of borders is also a barrier to our freedom of movement, because we are also foreigners to this world and we will be pushed further and further into clandestinity (by choice but also by necessity if we are to live our desires) by the constant evolution of the law and the states.”³

The 21:03 to Marseille

So there we are, sitting under the elegant industrial-era steel and glass roof so typical of venerable European train stations—a fittingly dramatic setting for the impending confrontation. We are waiting anxiously for the moment when an unknown number of cops will appear, escorting what I expect will be a handcuffed individual through the hall, at which point we are to spring into action and form a human chain to prevent them from loading him onto the train. Failing that, we are to do everything we can to prevent the train from departing. We are not pacifists, and while there is a general consensus that our side will avoid unnecessary escalations, there is an equally clear agreement that the priority is not optics, but accomplishing a concrete and tangible objective.

Nonetheless, I’m anxious about our chances of success. “Do you see any familiar-looking faces?” I ask worriedly. I’m scanning the hall as best I can and I don’t like what I see.

“No, I can’t even see Alan or Mary. I wonder if they made it in.” Mary is another Lycée Autogéré student and Sophie’s best friend, while Alan is slightly older and the token cliché-looking punk—complete with mohawk and faux leather jacket—in our little youth affinity group.

Not one of us is old enough to be a legal adult, yet the four of us already have a fair amount of experience getting into trouble with the state. We met at a Comité d’Action Lycéen (CAL, or “High School Action Committee”) meeting, a place that can only be described as a breeding ground for high-school-age anarchists.

We’re young, fanatical, and unencumbered by wage slavery enough to enjoy ample free time, which we use to be regulars at every demonstration, action, occupation, political squat, concert, debate, and confrontation within the greater Paris area. When we’re not doing that, we’re spending our nights together drinking, getting stoned, and listening to Ska-P’s “El vals del obrero” in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Or at least the others are—myself, I’ve discovered Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionist and concluded that my mind and body are weapons for revolutionary struggle, so I should keep them free of drugs and alcohol. This makes me lots of fun at parties.

Still, no matter how combative we may be, no matter how sharp I keep my proverbial weapons, if there are only twenty of us when the cops show up, this is probably not going to go well. “Fucking unions,” Sophie mutters under her breath. “What are they good for if they can’t even bring out fifty people for something like this?” Her complaint is directed at SUD, short for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique (“In Solidarity, United, Democratic”), a small leftist union born in the aftermath of the 1995 general strike, whose railway branch had promised to mobilize for this action.

I shrug. “Who knows, it’s not like we know what they look like. Maybe it’ll work out.”

I’m trying to be positive, because this is the route we have chosen; if we’re at the ball, we might as well dance. It doesn’t seem like there are many alternatives available, anyway. A couple of weeks earlier, we were able to occupy the tracks, successfully delaying the train for a few hours. The cops eventually cleared the tracks via a liberal use of batons and CS gas, and when we returned a few days later, we found an army of police guarding the tracks.

“Look, look, right there!” Sophie points to one of the entrances to the hall, her voice trembling with a mix of excitement and anger. I’m just spotting what she is pointing at, a young man probably in his twenties being led by an escort of seven or eight cops, when immediately my concerns about our numbers today are erased. From every corner of the hall comes a loud burst of disapproving whistling, followed immediately by what seems like the entire crowded hall erupting in thunderous chants of “Non, non, non… aux expulsions!” amplified and rendered even more urgent by the echoes generated by the closed space in which we find ourselves.

The first few people rise from their seats, sprint over to where the line of CRS riot police are guarding access to the platform and the train, and link arms. A few more join them. Then dozens more. Friends and comrades appear from everywhere among the crowd. The chants declaring that no human being is illegal ring loud and constant as we too join the human chain. There are hundreds of us! There are so many of us that we form two lines across the opening to the platform—one facing the cops who were already stationed there to prevent us from attempting to get access to the tracks, and another facing back toward the hall, preventing the cops who are escorting a captive from reaching the train. Sophie and I find ourselves in the first of those two lines.

The next few minutes pass in an adrenaline-fueled blur. The sight of the person we are trying to protect from deportation right in front of us illustrates poignantly what is at stake, and the disconcerted looks of his police escort only embolden us. Clearly, they aren’t sure whether to push through or abort.

The police are familiar with resistance to deportations. We regularly show up at airports, informing passengers as well as airline workers about what is happening on their flights and what their employers are making them unwilling accomplices to, urging passengers to refuse to fly on flights that are simultaneously prisoner transports. We have had varying degrees of success. We’ve tried to disrupt and prevent deportations too, as we did a few weeks earlier at this same spot.

But we’ve never done this.

At least, never by the hundreds, never with the palpable feeling that we might actually succeed. I think the cops sense that, too.

The next scene is of an extreme and almost intimate violence. Clearly, the order has been given to clear access to the train. CS gas and batons fly all around us. We are not armed. We have no flagpoles, no helmets, not even the cloth of a banner to protect ourselves with. Masks cover our faces while linked arms keep us together, but this leaves us practically defenseless against the baton blows. With neither word nor warning, the riot cop directly to my right pulls out a metal retractable baton from the inside pocket of his jacket, and in one swift motion he extends it and brings it down with a thud against the head of a comrade next to me. I hear the crack and immediately see blood gushing from the wound at the top of his forehead. His arms go limp, and the best I can do is kind of release my arm, which I have linked around his, and push him backward as he slumps, so that he falls toward the line of comrades facing the station and not at the feet of these unhinged cops.

Before I can assess the wisdom of this course of action, I am already instinctively launching a kick at the stomach of the cop who has injured my neighbor. This cop has been sneering at us since we stood up, waiting for his moment to injure a “gauchiste de merde,” the French for “piece-of-shit leftist,” which is exactly what nationalists and fascists like to call us in Argentina, as well. Sophie yells for me to get back, but her voice barely registers on my radar. Comrades break the line to carry away the injured friend just as I broke ranks with my kick. Still others, blinded or unable to breathe due to the CS gas, also break ranks and retreat.

The young Algerian is forced onto the train. The following week’s edition of Le Monde Libertaire, the weekly newspaper of the francophone Anarchist Federation, later reported⁴ that the train

“departed with a delay of thirty minutes. […] The train would stop several kilometers farther, in Melun, waiting for another train transporting approximately half of its original passengers.”

The missing passengers had been unable to board due to the clashes between demonstrators and police.

“The train was again stopped at the Lyon-Perrache station around 2:30 am by activists there, but not before having made an unscheduled stop at L’Estaque station to disembark the prisoners and place them in the detention center at Arenc, as the cops were concerned about the possible actions of further demonstrators in Marseille.”

There are still two clearly defined fronts inside the waiting area. We are standing on one side, now about twenty meters or so away from the trains.

A small group of people start to leave—about twenty people, all wearing high-visibility vests. They are the SUD railway trade unionists, who had shown up to the action after all, but decided that with the departure of the train, their participation was over.

The rest of us still number solidly in the hundreds. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. It’s poor attendance even at a third-division football match, barely enough people to fill a subway car. Even a strictly anarchist demonstration in Paris could number into the thousands. But in my eyes at that moment, these people are the whole world. Who cares about numbers, optics, or the opinion of sheep? I feel at home among these two hundred who have put their bodies behind the conviction that no human being is illegal, who have shown with their actions that the state and its agents are to be confronted head-on.

Rather two hundred ultra-leftists, adventurists, extremists, or whatever else they may call us than two thousand who will stand idly by because party or union discipline says now is not the moment and this is not the way—or twenty thousand who will march down the street with us proclaiming that no human being is illegal, only to placidly continue with their day while others are dragged, often drugged and bound, to prisoner transports. I’m grateful for the participation of the sympathizer, the unionist, the party member, the reformist. I understand we need them to exert political pressure. But I feel now that my place is with the militants and the fighters, no matter the numbers.

In front of us is a wall of riot cops, now too far to reach us with their gas and truncheons. The idea of police as the armed guards that enforce the dictatorship of capital through the state-sanctioned monopoly of violence gave way to a much more urgent feeling—a burning hatred of those who hurt my friends in order to perpetrate injustice. Whoever wears that uniform is the immediate means of our oppression and therefore my enemy.

Somebody has come back from another track with a backpack full of stones. As the chants against deportation continue to roar, a few dozen of us attack the cops. There’s sadness and frustration still, because we failed, but there is also joy. There is a feeling of collective refusal and liberation.

Too Much and Never Enough

As we finally make our retreat from the station, smashing security cameras, advertisement panels, and automated ticket counters along the way, I am already thinking about the young Algerian whose deportation we were trying to stop. Tonight wasn’t about making an abstract political statement against deportations. It wasn’t a militant yet still symbolic action against the machinery of expulsion and the barbarism that categorizes human beings based on where they happen to have been born. The objective was to stop the kidnapping of a specific human being. And while there is still some distant hope that comrades farther down the line, in Lyon or in Marseille, might still succeed, we, at least, have failed, and my mind is already focused on how I, or we collectively, can do more.

Despite my concerns that we didn’t do enough, the very next day, I am confronted with the press and the good citizens of Paris howling that we did too much. I pick up a newspaper on the way to school and find articles pontificating about the extremists at the train station, outraged at the disorder, condemning the supposed outbreak of violence. Too much disorder, too much violence—words coming from exasperated good citizens of Paris as they walk past me at the very same train station and see the smashed ticket-vending machines. The constant hand-wringing about “the extreme left, emboldened, becoming increasingly aggressive, violent, and dangerous” has only intensified since the election of the socialist and communist center-left government coalition.

What was damaged? As I make my way through the station, I take note of the “damage.” The only damage to the station is to the machines that hinder our freedom of movement and convert the need to get from one place to another into an economic consideration. To the advertising panels that pollute public space and turn any place where the human eye might rest its gaze into propaganda for the constant consumption of goods we don’t need. And finally, to the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras, ensuring that anyone who rejects this system of consumption and control can be more efficiently surveilled and criminalized.

What precious order did we disrupt? If the order they are referring to is this superficial peace and tranquility that has nothing to do with justice, then the problem is not that we were violent or disorderly but that we effectively disrupted the orderly procedures of oppression. The order of those who prefer the continuation of oppression as long as they can turn a blind eye to it—or worse, celebrate it in the name of nationalism or racism—to the turbulence of the struggle to end it.

Violence? We threw some stones, probably injured nobody. The injured were on our side, those who faced the armed forces of the state with not much more than our bodies and the occasional flying object. What is a few smashed ticketing machines and advertisements compared to the violence we witnessed? The violence that takes place constantly, unceasingly, in every immigrant neighborhood swept by kidnappers working for the state—during every ticket control in the subway that triggers a domino effect that ends in deportation—on flights leaving constantly with prisoners, often drugged and handcuffed, transported as human cargo against their will.

In regards to the life of this man, I don’t intend to shock or traumatize with speculations about what his fate might be, what his circumstances were, whether he was torn from a family, a partner, a project, his dreams. It doesn’t matter. I assert his freedom to live as he chooses and where he chooses because my anarchism demands this as a minimum condition of human dignity and a rejection of the system of states and borders that I seek to destroy. This violence, this war on individuals in the name of states and nations, is the only relevant violence here, the violence that is carried out in the defense of oppression.

It is a machine of violence built to protect and perpetuate the system of exploitation and human suffering that pits human against human in a needless struggle for survival. A machine that has colonized the minds of people to such an extent that they can only recognize violence at the point of impact—the fist striking a face, the rock striking the policeman’s shield—and only when it interrupts the order that ordinarily inflicts it.

This renders invisible the ceaseless unspeakable violence that flows from the system of nations, capital, and class society: death due to lack of access to health care, famine and hunger created by artificial scarcity, workplace accidents and deaths caused by the drive to skimp on safety measures in order to maximize profits, endless religious and nationalist wars. Immigrants drown in the seas around Fortress Europe or die of dehydration in the heat of the Arizona desert in desperate attempts to escape poverty and improve their lives. This systemic violence, the violence of oppression, barely even registers to most as such.

I make my way through the city, still lost in my thoughts as I exit the subway into the largely immigrant neighborhood where the CNT offices are. Two cops are parked outside the subway, nonchalantly checking people’s identification at random. “Papers, please.” The normality of everyday violence.

Faced with this reality, who cares about legality? Who cares about popular opinion? When there were few of us and we occupied the tracks, our action was completely peaceful. Yet the mercenaries of the state came and beat us without hesitation in order to achieve its objectives. Although they were able to accomplish this in a relatively “orderly” manner, due to our small numbers and tactical avoidance of violence, was that not the victory of an immeasurably greater violence? Would a greater violence on our end, for the purposes of liberation, not be justified? In what thought process does it follow that nonviolence represents the moral high ground, when adherence to nonviolence makes the perpetuation of human suffering and oppression possible?

There is a moment that I will never forget from the day we were beaten off the tracks a few weeks prior to the story I have recounted.

I can barely see him through the glass, his complexion and the reflection of the station lights against the train’s windows making it difficult to distinguish his features and facial expressions. Two cops are moving him through the train, one holding each arm behind him, his hands cuffed together in front. Suddenly, as they pass an open window we can clearly see as he turns to us. He lifts his hands and displays a victory sign with each, as he mouths “thank you” to us. There is sadness, dignity, and gratitude in his face. I don’t know anything about him, who he is, where he is from, what brought him here, what he is being sent back to. But I know that violence—life-changing and potentially fatal violence—is not taking place in the delaying of the train. Violence is what is being done to him inside it.

It’s not that we are too violent, but exactly the opposite. If we don’t employ the full arsenal of our capacity for collective revolutionary action, to be a force against the system of control that oppresses all of us, are we not as complicit as those who see it but choose to turn away?

What we are doing is not too much.

It’s not nearly enough.

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. ↩

The Day the Émigrés Struck Back : Remembering the General Strike of May Day 2006

2025-02-05T19:53:23Z

In 2006, students around the United States engaged in spontaneous walkouts protesting the repression of undocumented people, culminating on May Day in the first great general strike to take place in the US in the 21st century. Today, as students are once again staging walkouts and people around the country are taking to the streets against the immigration policies of the second Trump administration, it is a good time to revisit this earlier high point of resistance.

The following report originally appeared in issue three of Rolling Thunder, our Anarchist Journal of Dangerous Living.

You can order these stickers here.

May 1, 2006

May Day 2006 saw the first nationwide general strike in the United States in several decades. The immigrant rights movement had declared that fine spring day “A Day without Immigrants,” in response to right-wing rhetoric to the effect that “we don’t need immigrants.” They replied “Ok gringo, if you don’t need us, we’re not going to go to work or school, nor buy or sell anything on this day. Let’s see how well this country runs.”

The strike was a stunning success, despite a number of spineless Latino “leaders” condemning the strike, saying that it would create a backlash and send the wrong message. As if the bill in Congress that would deport twelve million people and militarize the US-Mexico border wasn’t a backlash!

Across the country, immigrants and their allies walked off the job, skipped school, shuttered the windows of their shops, and refused to spend any money. In Phoenix, thousands of workers took the day off and blockaded the entrances to various Walmart and Home Depot stores. Nearly all the chain restaurants in the city had to close or slash their hours due to the strike. Dozens of meatpacking plants, employing thousands of workers, were closed down nationwide due to that industry’s reliance on immigrant labor.

Los Angeles was possibly hardest hit, with a good portion of the city completely shut down. The port of LA, one of the country’s largest, was ninety percent inactive thanks to the overwhelming majority of truckers refusing to haul goods that day. A small but rowdy portion of the more than one million people who marched for immigrant rights in LA chose to round off the day in running battles with the police, throwing rocks and bottles, dragging debris into the streets, and vandalizing outdoor advertisements. California’s state legislature was forced to close when janitors, cafeteria workers, and maintenance people did not show up to work at the capitol building. Meanwhile, across the country, the New York state legislature shut down mid-session when Black and Latino legislators walked out in solidarity with the protest. Back in California, the agricultural counties were hit particularly hard, with major corporate farms such as Gallo Wines being forced to halt production for the day.

A riot broke out in Santa Ana, CA when police tried to disperse a crowd of fifteen hundred that had taken over a major boulevard. The crowd responded by raining bottles and rocks on the cops, who were forced to retreat until a riot squad was brought in to quell the revolt. In New York City, scuffles broke out with police when a crowd thousands strong attempted to take the Brooklyn Bridge.

Nearly half a million people marched through the streets of Chicago, and another one hundred thousand marched in Denver, where it was reported that scuffles broke out between protestors and Minutemen counter-protestors. Several hundred cities and small towns across the country experienced demonstrations, many of them the largest those cities had ever seen.

In a sign that the immigrant rights movement may be diversifying, the windows of a Department of Homeland Security office in Santa Cruz responsible for deporting immigrants were shattered overnight. According to a message posted on the internet, dozens of banks and “financial institutions” saw their locks glued and ATM machines sabotaged in western North Carolina, in an apparent move to support the general strike.

South of the border, throughout Mexico, hundreds of thousands of people observed a sister day of protest labeled “A Day without a Gringo,” in which Mexicans boycotted all US business interests. Mexico City saw a crowd of several thousand gather to listen to Zapatista leader Marcos speak and to show their solidarity with their brothers and sisters struggling north of the border. Afterwards, several hundred demonstrators took a tour of the business district, smashing the windows of US-owned banks and restaurants. In Monterey, a group of women gave out free tacos in front of a McDonald’s in an effort to support the boycott. Meanwhile, every major border crossing from El Paso to San Diego was shut down by groups of angry Mexican citizens on their side of the border, preventing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of goods from crossing the border that day.

All in all, May Day 2006 was one of the largest days of protest the United States had ever seen. Counting Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, DC alone, there were nearly two million people in the streets, with an equal or greater number joining in smaller demonstrations elsewhere across the US. It was a day of protest based on the principles of direct action, the centerpiece of which was a general strike. In many places, demonstrators went further, blockading businesses that exploit immigrants and engaging the police in battles when push came to shove.

It was fitting that it was immigrants who brought May Day back to its former splendor. It was here in the United States, in Chicago, that this international day of workers’ solidarity was born in the struggle for the eight-hour day. Radical immigrant workers, the majority of them anarchists, were at the front of the struggles that made May Day what it is, offering their tears, sweat, and blood in the fight for a better way of life.

Appendix: How It Began

This contemporary account by an outside sympathizer offers a snapshot of the momentum that led to the general strike of May Day 2006 and a glimpse of political discourse about immigrants’ struggles at that time.

Early in 2006, I was riding my bike through downtown Tucson on my way to write a story about recent Indigenous uprisings on a faraway island in Indonesia. My mind was occupied by mundane worries: low air pressure on the rear tire, cars driving too close to me, wondering if I was getting skin cancer from so much sun.

I had nearly completed my daily pilgrimage to the office when these trivial thoughts were interrupted by a sea of people moving steadily in my direction from several blocks away. There was joyful shouting, people carrying indistinguishable flags and banners. “Wasn’t Saint Patrick’s day last week?” I thought to myself. As I neared the energetic crowd, I soon realized this was no state-sanctioned holiday, and it sure as hell had nothing to do with the Irish.

Instead, I saw two or three hundred mostly Latino youth marching defiantly down the street. Recalling the numerous record-breaking protests against racist anti-immigrant laws of the past week, I realized I had run into a student walkout.

As I neared the next block, I was amazed to find a group of three hundred students already rallying in front of the federal building. Over the next half hour, the crowd swelled to over a thousand as more and more fugitive students arrived in groups of ten, fifty, a hundred. The energy and excitement of these youthful rebels nearly overwhelmed me as their chants of “¡Si se puede!” (“Yes, it can be done!”) rang through the air, at times drowned out by the constant honking of supportive passersby. Others chanted “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” in reference to the United States’ arbitrary heist of the northern portion of Mexico over a century ago. Still more carried signs reading “No human being is illegal.”

The following day, I was again riding my bike through downtown, somewhat more prepared to run into a protest, because I had heard that students were planning another walkout. I was disappointed when I encountered a small crowd of fifty kids walking on the sidewalk. “I guess they let their steam out yesterday,” I thought pessimistically to myself. As I rounded the corner onto Congress Avenue, I was forced to eat my words. The crowd was nearly double the size of the previous day’s, overflowing the small plaza in front of the federal building into the streets. The initial fifty were just stragglers. Soon, the massive crowd surged towards the federal courthouse, where thousands of immigrants are deported every year, and proceeded to block the entrance to this institution of oppression for half an hour. Meanwhile, hundreds of other students cruised the streets of downtown in perilously overloaded vehicles, blasting the music of their home countries, waving Mexican flags, and carrying posters of Cesar Chavez. Whether or not it was intentional, these cruisers, in conjunction with the sea of protestors swarming downtown from all directions, brought Tucson’s business district to a standstill.

The energy, defiance, and sheer power of these demonstrations stands in stark contrast to the dreary, well-behaved, state-approved parades put on by our country’s numerous leftist organizations. “These are no mere protests,” I thought to myself, “this is an uprising.” This initial speculation was confirmed when I got back home and looked at the news reports. Even the corporate media acknowledged that well over a thousand Tucson middle- and high-school students had dropped their pens and paper and taken to the streets to protest the government’s attempted crackdown on immigration. At one school, someone pulled a fire alarm after the principle attempted to direct students into the gymnasium, ensuring their escape to the streets. At another school, several dozen students scaled a barbed wire fence after administrators locked the only exit shut. Other students took their anger out on the Border Patrol, notorious for its rampant racism and sadistic abuse of detainees, by throwing rocks at its Tucson headquarters.

What I saw in Tucson was no isolated incident. In Los Angeles, thirty-six thousand students walked out three days in a row, shut down four freeways, and repeatedly clashed with the LAPD when the latter attempted to break up this spontaneous outbreak of rebellion. In Fort Worth, Texas, not exactly a hotbed of radicalism, several hundred students walked out and proceeded to take over the city hall. Police responded by injuring several students, one of whom required hospitalization. There’s nothing like a group of grown-up armed men beating school children! In Pasadena, California, police opened up on a crowd of one hundred and fifty students with pepper balls in an attempt to disperse them. The students responded to this unprovoked attack by throwing rocks and bottles at the police.

In San Diego, six thousand students took to the streets in five days of class disruptions. On the final day, they attempted to take over the Coronado bridge that spans San Diego Bay, but were stopped by a wall of California Highway Patrolmen. In Santa Ana, student occupations shut down several government offices, including the tax collector’s office.

“No human being is illegal.”

This massive wave of civil disobedience on the heels of the previous week’s pro-immigrant demonstrations is no doubt a sign of a healthy and rapidly growing national rebellion. Where do predominately white anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial movements in this country fit into the picture?

First off, gringos need to understand that immigrants to the US are for the most part fleeing the poverty, hunger, and violent repression manufactured abroad by our country’s government in order to ensure the relative comfort of our lives here at home. It is no coincidence that the “flood” of illegal immigrants from Mexico skyrocketed after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The human beings who are risking their lives (several hundred die every year) traversing the arid borderlands are not doing so to steal people’s jobs. They are trying to ensure the survival of their families by earning slightly more than the starvation wages they find, if they are lucky, south of the border.¹

Radicals in the US should extend solidarity to the immigrant rights movement in every way possible. This is not the time for professional activists to step up and “show the masses the way.” The folks fueling the fire of this uprising seem to have a pretty clear analysis of the situation and an equally clear vision of how to win. The last thing they need is some know-it-all honkies to come in and tell them what to do. If you need further convincing of this fact, consider that the immigrant rights movement has managed in a matter of weeks to mobilize an enormous and militant movement that is already beginning to surpass what the anti-war movement, with the “help” of all those well-paid professional activists, has accomplished in the past three years.

Sympathetic gringos can offer direct assistance by cooking food for demonstrators, hanging posters, organizing solidarity actions, offering rides to demonstrations and meetings, acting as legal observers, raising funds for legal expenses (hundreds have already been arrested for acts of civil disobedience), and showing up to demonstrations.

One role I believe we have a particular responsibility to play is confronting racist boneheads such as the Minutemen who have spearheaded the massive anti-immigrant backlash. The sheer idiocy of anyone of European descent in North America complaining about illegal immigrants is maddening enough—but when these bigots start walking around with guns to “protect the borders of the US” as a code for promoting their racist ideals, and receive significant backing from prominent Republicans and the media in return, we have a duty to stop them. Wherever these racist thugs hold a rally, we should organize a larger counter-rally. Whenever they organize a meeting, we should be there to disrupt it. Those of us who live near the border can interfere with their “civilian border patrols” by warning would-be crossers of their presence. (A megaphone and a spotlight will help.)

We can show our solidarity by continuing to fight the colonialist policies that have impoverished other countries and created this whole immigration “problem” in the first place. Shutting down the World Trade Organization in Seattle was a good start, but we totally dropped the ball on NAFTA and CAFTA (the equivalent agreement for Central America). However, it is not too late to defeat the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and resistance to it throughout the rest of the continent is still fierce. I reckon it’s never too late to get the other two repealed either. While welcoming economic and political refugees into our country is a good start, if we want to create a truly just world for everyone, we must destroy the policies that force people to make the trek in the first place.

You can obtain these posters here.

Radicals must address the anti-immigrant sentiment that sometimes boils up within our own ranks—for example, in certain sectors of the environmental movement. Groups such as the Sierra Club have flirted for years with the asinine notion that poor immigrants are somehow a major source of ecological destruction in the US. The line of logic proceeds thus: the increase in population is causing major sprawl, and by moving to the US—hold your breath for this one—immigrants start to consume at the rate that US citizens do. If I understand this right, it’s OK for us to continue consuming the world’s resources at a suicidal rate, but not for anyone else to? Talk about blaming the victim! Instead of scapegoating immigrants, we should be working first and foremost to reduce our own consumption of resources.

It is equally ridiculous to allege that immigrants cause sprawl. They are not the ones building the second and third trophy homes that are eating up wilderness across the country. Come to think of it, they often are the ones building these homes—not for themselves, but for the exorbitant lifestyles of middle- and upper-class US citizens. Don’t even get me started on the devastation that the massive border wall that some are calling for would have on the ecological integrity of the Sonoran desert ecosystem.

Radical immigrant groups that are fighting for better wages and work conditions in the US also deserve support. Groups such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) have both launched numerous protests, boycotts, and speaking tours to achieve better pay in the fields. During FLOC’s boycott of Mt. Olive pickles, anarchists in North Carolina helped by protesting at grocery stores (including trashing Mt. Olive products in the store), painting banners, and offering rides to FLOC organizers who did not have documentation or driver’s licenses. The CIW recently won in a boycott against Taco Bell demanding that they pay tomato pickers more per pound, and have just launched a fresh boycott against McDonalds hoping to achieve the same goal. I’m sure you can think of a number of ways to help compel McDonalds to meet their demands.

Comida no Migra—“food, not border patrol”—is a new take on the Food Not Bombs model that is catching on in many communities across the US. Instead of serving lunch or dinner in the park, participants get up early in the morning to bring food to immigrant day laborers at the places where they wait for work. Not only does this provide folks with a little sustenance and good cheer, it also puts observers on site to make sure no one messes with them. This is important because the Minutemen, not knowing what else to do with their pathetic lives, have started protesting at day labor sites to intimidate immigrants. Similarly, it’s not unheard of for immigrants to get picked up by some asshole, work all day, and then not get paid; even worse, there have been incidents in which racists have picked up day laborers and beaten or killed them.

There is a lot of work to be done in the fight for immigrant rights. Whether that means offering childcare to families so that they can attend meetings, translating information on workers’ rights into Spanish, or blockading immigration detention centers, there are many fronts in this battle and all of them are important.

It would behoove radicals in the US to study the solidarity work people in Europe and Australia have done around immigration and asylum seeking. Check out the No Border network—a massive European immigrants’ rights coalition. In Australia, activists have repeatedly broken political asylum-seekers out of detention centers and provided them refuge.

There is much we can offer. The fight for immigrant rights is not about us and how radical our politics are. It is about lending our solidarity to people in struggle.

Click on the image to download the poster.

Even if they were just “here for a free ride,” as the right wing asserts, I’d say good for them. After all we’ve stolen from them and the places they came from, it’s merely a matter of them coming and getting a little piece of the pie back—in other words, reparations. ↩

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. ↩

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. ↩

Anarchists on the Wave of Protest in Indonesia

2024-09-23T00:03:59Z

In August 2024, a wave of protests rocked Indonesia, ostensibly in response to political machinations aimed at anointing a successor to President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi. Very little information has circulated about these protests in the English-speaking world. To get a sense of the deeper issues at play, we reached out to anarchist participants in different parts of Indonesia.

We interviewed Frans Ari Prasetyo, an independent researcher and photographer in Bandung, and M, a participant in an anarchist collective in Jogjakarta. The photographs are also by Frans Ari Prasetyo.

If you want to help foster more connection between anarchists in Indonesia and elsewhere in the world, you could support Page Against the Machine, an initiative to translate books by Indonesian anarchists into English.

“Never trust government.” A protest in Bandung on August 22, 2024.

According to the news that reaches us in the United States, the ongoing protests are reportedly a response to a change in election law, and more generally, a corrupt political dynasty. Is there more to the story?

Frans Ari Prasetyo: This recent revolt highlights the peak of popular discontent with Jokowi’s two-term presidency, especially among younger Indonesians. Although this protest will not lead to President Jokowi’s removal, as he will retire in October 2024, it shows that social movements in Indonesia, particularly in Bandung, have become more dynamic and diverse since the end of the authoritarian era with the 1998 reforms. These protests emerged in response to Jokowi’s attempts to alter the law regarding the regional executive elections that were established by the 1998 reforms.

The Constitutional Court issued two rulings concerning the age limit for regional executive positions. First, it ruled that candidates must be at least 30 years old when they register. This decision could prevent President Jokowi’s youngest son, who is only 29, from running for a regional executive position. The second ruling annulled the 25% quorum required for political parties to nominate regional head candidates. The Court lowered the threshold to 6.5-10% of the valid votes in each region. This change allows smaller and medium-sized parties to nominate their own candidates, giving voters more options for leadership. Previously, only larger parties could nominate candidates due to the 25% benchmark. However, this ruling also opens the door for the former Jakarta governor, who is popular with the opposition and has high electability, as well as other opposition-backed candidates.

Jokowi’s actions might be seen as undermining democratic principles. This could be driven by a desire to maintain power and protect himself while retaining a strong political influence even after his presidency ends in October 2024. There is still much work needed to advance democratic inclusiveness, accountability, and quality of life, both in Indonesia and globally. However, progress seems to be slowing rather than advancing. Many Indonesians fear a potential collapse of representative government. Additionally, there are other laws under consideration, notably the Military and Police Laws, which could have significant implications.

A protest in Bandung on August 22, 2024.

M: The protests in Indonesia are driven by a combination of factors including changes to election laws, widespread corruption, economic grievances, and dissatisfaction with political leadership and police brutality. While the changes to election laws and the influence of corrupt political dynasties are central to the current unrest, they are part of a broader context.

The Core Issues Driving the Protests

Election Law Changes: The protests have been significantly fueled by recent amendments to Indonesia’s election laws. Many Indonesians view these changes as undermining democratic principles and increasing the influence of entrenched political elites. Some see the amendments as facilitating the manipulation of electoral outcomes, which has raised concerns about fairness and transparency in the democratic process.
Political Corruption: Corruption remains a longstanding issue in Indonesian politics. The perception of widespread corruption among political elites, including members of powerful political dynasties, has contributed to popular frustration. Many protesters are demanding a fair trial and punishment for the offenders, as well as greater accountability and transparency from relevant institutions such as the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).

Additional Factors

Historical Grievances: Indonesia has a history of political turbulence, and recent protests are influenced by historical grievances, including previous movements against authoritarian rule and corruption. The legacy of the Suharto era and the 1998 Reformasi (“Reformation”) movement continues to impact people sentiment and activism to this day.
Economic Discontent: Economic issues also play a significant role. Rising inequality, unemployment, and dissatisfaction with economic policies have fueled discontent. Many Indonesians feel that the benefits of economic growth have not been evenly distributed, exacerbating social and economic tensions.
Social Media and Activism: The role of social media in organizing and amplifying dissent cannot be overlooked. Social media platforms have enabled activists to mobilize and spread information rapidly, contributing to the scale and intensity of the protests. This led to increased popular oversight of their performance and any crimes they commit. Hashtag movements have also expanded, with the term “no viral, no justice” emerging in response to ongoing issues.
Current Leadership: President Jokowi has faced criticism for failures in handling corruption and political reforms and issuing unpopular draft laws. Over the ten years he has been in power, Jokowi’s administration has been accused of not doing enough to address the systemic issues that contribute to popular disillusionment. Jokowi’s focus during his presidency has been to promote forms of development that have been detrimental to society and the environment. This has generated significant criticism and conflict at the grassroots level, where communities are directly affected by his policies.
Police Brutality: There is anger about police violence against protesters, arbitrary arrests, mistreatment of detainees, abuse of power, corruption, the increase in the national budget for armaments, the use of tear gas in demonstrations, professional misconduct, and police involvement in the “protection” of illegal online gambling, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and the “security” of mining and palm oil plantation areas in conflict with local communities. Critics argue that this reflects systemic issues within the police force, such as lack of accountability, inadequate oversight, and a tendency toward authoritarian practices. Human rights organizations, activists, and other people often call for reforms to improve policing practices, ensure greater transparency, and protect civil liberties. Anarchists call to end the institution and fight them.

A protest in Bandung on August 22, 2024.

Offer a brief overview of previous powerful social movements in Indonesia that set a precedent for the current wave of activity, and give us a chronology of the significant events leading up to the current unrest.

Frans Ari Prasetyo: Before this protest, there was another demonstration against the appointment of a controversial police chief as the chairman of the KPK (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, “Corruption Eradication Commission”). Many feared this appointment would diminish the KPK’s neutrality and hinder its ability to effectively combat corruption. In 2019, people held the largest protest since the 1998 reforms, known as #reformasidikorupsi. These demonstrations, and the state’s response to them, caused a dramatic drop in public trust in the Jokowi government.

The #reformasidikorupsi protests lasted almost two weeks and took place in several cities. Tragically, police killed several protesters. Many hoped this resistance would lead to a second Reform, similar to the first Reform that overthrew the New Order (Suharto) regime. However, Jokowi managed to calm the situation by reaching out to opposition parties and offering them a role within the governing bloc. Notably, Jokowi also succeeded in fostering cooperation between the military and police, which worked together extensively during the protests.

On May 1, 2019, autonomous groups took to the streets. Most of them joined the black bloc. Although this was not the first black bloc protest, it was the largest to date, surprising many. Given the context of the ongoing demonstrations, perhaps we should not have been so surprised.

In 2022, large protests erupted after the passage of a controversial Criminal Code (KUDP), which many compared to colonial-era laws. Prior to the approval of the Criminal Code and the subsequent protests, in October 2020, the House of Representatives (DPR) and the Indonesian government passed the neoliberal “omnibus law.” This law aimed to boost employment during the pandemic and accelerate changes to laws perceived as hindering economic growth, development, and investment.

Facing constitutional limits that prevented him from seeking a third term, Jokowi appointed his brother-in-law as Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court. He also considered relaxing the age requirements for vice presidential candidates, which could allow Jokowi’s eldest son to run alongside Prabowo in the 2024 presidential election. Prabowo, a former New Order general with a history of human rights violations, including the kidnapping of activists during the 1998 reforms and military operations in Papua, sought refuge in Jordan after the reforms. He returned to Indonesia during President Abdurahman Wahid’s (Gusdur) administration and engaged in political activities, leading to the founding of the Gerindra Party (Gerakan Indonesia Raya) and his appointment as its chairman.

Prabowo and Gibran, Jokowi’s son, won the 2024 election, marking a step backward toward the New Order.

A protest in Bandung on August 22, 2024.

M: Here, I will offer you a short chronology.

A Chronology of Events

2017: The Jakarta gubernatorial election saw significant unrest and large-scale protests against incumbent Governor Ahok, primarily fueled by allegations of religious blasphemy with strong racist tendencies (he is of Chinese ethnicity). Ahok’s defeat marked a rise in political and social polarization.

2018-2019: Indonesia experienced several high-profile corruption scandals involving high-ranking officials and ministries; these exacerbated popular frustration with the political elite.

2019: The re-election of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) catalyzed protests by opposition groups alleging electoral fraud and criticizing Jokowi’s policies. This period also increased popular scrutiny of the influence of Jokowi’s political dynasties and nepotism.

2020-2021: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing issues including economic instability. People’s dissatisfaction grew over the handling of the pandemic and perceived corruption in relief efforts.

2022: Demonstrations erupted in response to new Job Creation Laws (the “Omnibus Law”) perceived to favor capitalist interests over workers’ rights. These protests highlighted ongoing concerns about labor rights and economic inequality. 2022 also saw an extraordinary case involving a senior member of the National Police, Ferdy Sambo, who was serving as the head of the Propam Division. (“Kadiv Propam” stands for the Head of the Division of Profession and Security, who has the authority to perform the duties of the Propam Division, which relate to the development of professional standards and security within the internal environment of the National Police organization.) He was implicated in the premeditated murder of Brigadier Joshua Hutabarat. Although Sambo was initially sentenced to death, the final verdict was life imprisonment. This incident drew significant attention nationally and internationally. It marked the first time that a General of the National Police was sentenced to life imprisonment in Indonesia.

2023-2024: Recent unrest has been fueled by a combination of dissatisfaction with electoral laws, allegations of corruption, high unemployment, and growing frustration with entrenched political dynasties. The ongoing protests reflect a continuation of the struggle for political change that has characterized Indonesia’s recent history.

A protest in Bandung on August 22, 2024.

Every movement involves different factions and currents with different ways of seeing the world and different goals. Can you describe the different groups on both sides of this conflict?

Frans Ari Prasetyo: In Indonesia’s relatively weak political culture, declining labor movement, and fragmented left, it is not uncommon for individuals to identify as anarchists or align with anarchist principles. This flexible and inclusive interpretation of anarchism seems to be the most widespread form of anarchist thought. The trend of social movement anarchism is particularly appealing to many young people in Indonesia, especially in Bandung, which has a long history of anarchism dating back to 2014. In Bandung, the autonomous movement released a compilation album titled “Mobilisasi Kemuakan” (“Mobilization of Disgust”), featuring twelve bands across various music subgenres, including punk, metal, and hip-hop. The album’s lyrics rejected the elections, and it included a special booklet critiquing representative democracy and contrasting it with popular mobilizations in the streets and “direct democracy.”

The “Mobilisasi Kemuakan” (“Mobilization of Disgust”) compilation, an assault on representative democracy.

Conversely, a prominent Marxist intellectual group in Indonesia supported Jokowi by mobilizing leftist activists, youth groups, and new voters through a flashy newspaper campaign before the 2014 presidential election. They justified this support by highlighting Jokowi’s opposition to Prabowo, a New Order military general with a history of human rights abuses. Ironically, Jokowi became a key advocate for Prabowo’s presidency in 2024, with Prabowo’s deputy being Jokowi’s eldest son.

The current protest movement appears to have fragmented into three main groups: university students; labor and mass organizations, including nationalist and religious groups; and informal groups focused on specific identity-based issues, such as women’s groups, artists, journalists, gender nonconformists, and religious minorities. Some of these groups are labeled by society, the police, and the state as “black-on-black” or “anarcho” groups.

These “anarchist” groups express themselves through various means, including shouting, singing, graffiti, and carrying flags, posters, and banners while lighting flares in the streets. They aim to raise awareness. Unfortunately, the current democratic system does not offer an effective means for waging a street-based struggle against the state or the police and military. This anarchist activity has left the public, the democratic process, and even the police somewhat unsettled. It is unfortunate that the police’s determination to win all public battles, particularly against anarchists, has led to a diminished public understanding and support for anarchists as part of civil society.

Student groups often play a crucial role in initiating protests and remain a prominent feature in mainstream media coverage as agents of change. They are widely regarded as intellectual and critical voices on government policies. As educated citizens, they have the potential to influence government decisions.

Student participation in strikes across Indonesia has fueled a new social movement, leading to increased political awareness. Students have become a powerful force in protests, with many identifying with the anarchist movement, which channels the energy and passion of the subversive youth.

A protest in Bandung on August 22, 2024.

M: The current resistance movement is generally divided into two groups: the elite within the government and political parties, and the community outside of the government. Those within the government who position themselves as “opposition” have their own political and party agendas; they also seek to secure their interests, which we don’t give a shit about at all. On the other hand, the recent extra-parliamentary movements include a diverse array of groups including veterans from the 1998 protests, human rights organizations and activists, women’s groups, environmentalists, journalists, Indigenous communities, farmers, fishermen, informal workers, academics, religious student organizations, Papua students, university professors, online transport drivers, political and popular figures, artists, comedians, mothers, high school students, punks, and, of course, anarchists, who are frequently scapegoated as instigators of unrest and “provocateurs.”

These extra-parliamentary groups have reached a point of exasperation with the increasingly reckless actions of Jokowi dynasty, especially as his presidency nears its end. Civil society is also expressing concern over the president-elect and vice-president-elect of the next administration, both of whom have very bad track records; they are set to be inaugurated in October 2024. The president-elect, Prabowo Subianto, is the son-in-law of former President Suharto; he was a high-ranking general under the Suharto regime and currently serves as Minister of Defense. He was involved in the abduction and disappearance of student activists in 1998, as well as a series of military operations during the Suharto era. He is also a very wealthy businessman. Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the vice-president-elect and Jokowi’s eldest son, has faced significant criticism due to nepotism and violations of the presidential age limit policy, as addressed by the Constitutional Court earlier this year.

A protest in Bandung on August 22, 2024.

We have seen “ACAB” scrawled on expropriated police shields and police vehicles during the unrest. What is the role of anti-authoritarians and anarchists in these protests? And how prevalent are broadly anti-authoritarian sentiments in Indonesian movements today?

Frans Ari Prasetyo: Since the rise of the global justice movement in the 1990s, anarchist ideas have seen a resurgence and continue to attract more adherents. Despite police repression and ongoing criticism from mainstream media, the movement has gained traction. Bandung, historically a hub for anarchist activity in Indonesia during the 1990s, remains home to a vibrant anarchist collective. The movement grew significantly in the mid-2000s through various efforts, including labor strikes, football hooliganism, protests against evictions, mutual aid efforts, and the distribution of books and pamphlets. Contributing factors including systemic economic inequality, gentrification, housing and land access issues, labor restructuring, and government repression have fueled widespread anger and confrontations with the police.

Anarchists have been dedicated to creating spaces aligned with their beliefs, exploring alternative forms of resistance and defining the boundaries of freedom, local protest, and transnational social movements.

Authoritarianism and militarism have been deeply ingrained in Indonesia’s experience since the New Order, and this militarization has expanded under Jokowi. The anarchist resistance to Jokowi’s government has been strong. The executive branch has consolidated power over police and military budgets to control protest movements. Although the police did not overtly campaign for Jokowi, their support contributed to his electoral success in various regions, reminiscent of their role during the New Order era.

Following the 2019 May Day Black Bloc, which led to the arrest of over 700 individuals in Bandung, it is clear that the police are increasingly determined to win all public confrontations, especially those involving anarchists. As a result, anarchists risk becoming isolated from some communities. In certain residential areas of Bandung, residents display banners reading “Anti-Anarcho,” “Anarko Dilarang!” (“Anarcho Forbidden!”), or “Daerah Ini Bebas Anarko” (“This Area is Anarcho-Free”). At the time, no one wanted to be associated with the subversive resistance movement.

In 2020, during the Omnibus protests, these banners began to disappear. However, the police continued to sweep through protests, arresting and committing acts of violence against civilians simply for wearing black. This targeting of anyone in black at protests, intended to isolate the anarchist movement, is having the opposite effect, driving many angry young people toward anarchism.

In 2022, fierce demonstrations and clashes with the police erupted following a deadly incident at a football stadium. As a result, “ACAB” and other innovative anti-police slogans and graffiti became increasingly popular.

A protest in Bandung on August 28, 2024.

M: The anarchist movement in Indonesia is growing. We are not only introducing anti-authoritarian ideas through discussions, publications, translation, social media, art, and music, but also actively participating in grassroots movements, particularly those opposing evictions and environmental destruction, as well as movements against police and the state. We advocate for decentralized movements employing direct action, build mutual aid networks around the archipelago, occupy land in conflict with the state and corporations, and address daily issues faced by the community at large, including our own issues. We achieve these things via organizing based on anarchist principles and fostering critical awareness within society.

We seek to raise awareness, exposing how manipulative and exploitative the state and corporations are towards society. We provide information about their misdeeds. As people get more informed, they also become more critical, losing faith in the mechanisms or strategies of the state, and in the police as well.

We are not alone in this effort. We have begun to build relationships with student groups, punks, artists, musicians, academics, queer communities, unemployed individuals, lawyers, informal workers, and others. The organic anarchist movement has been fulfilling its role while amplifying the growth of anti-authoritarian movements across various regions.

However, this is not without challenges. Some friction has occurred between the student groups and us anarchists. Indonesian students often wear their campus jackets during demonstrations and use ropes to create barriers, claiming this is to avoid the infiltration of police agents or provocateurs. They also tend to act as if they are the leaders of the protests, a form of vanguardism. Ironically, their slogans like “The People, United, Cannot Be Defeated” and “Beware of Provocation, Do Not Let Us Be Divided” contradict the reality on the ground when they separate themselves, claiming to represent the people. When tensions rise, it is usually anarchists who step forward, sparking the enthusiasm of other demonstrators and leading to clashes.

For example, in Bandung, when the situation became chaotic, with tear gas and stones flying, demonstrators scrambled to seek refuge on a campus, but students there blocked us, shouting, “Don’t let them in! They are not part of us!” A more distressing incident occurred in Sukabumi, where some demonstrators identified as “black bloc” were beaten by many students.

Students often fail to understand that the diversity of demonstrators is a reality they cannot avoid, which shows that the movement includes different social strata. Greater involvement of different groups fighting the same enemy is tactically important. The students also forget that anonymity is crucial for the safety of demonstrators, as police often target “black bloc” groups.

A protest in Bandung on August 28, 2024.

How does the movement vary in different parts of the country?

M: Indonesia, being a vast archipelago country, has regions with distinct resistance cultures influenced by local customs and issues. Java, as the center of finance, business, information, technology, and power, exhibits significant social, economic, and educational disparities. Resistance in each region often highlights local issues.

For instance, Kalimantan faces severe ecological threats from massive mining and palm oil expansions and the displacement of Indigenous communities. The controversial National Capital City (IKN) project, which aims to relocate the capital from Jakarta to Penajam Paser Utara in East Kalimantan, will devastate 256,142 hectares of natural forest and 68,189 hectares of sea. According to the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas), the IKN project budget is IDR 466.9 trillion, to be funded by the state and foreign investors. The IKN project also involves high-ranking officials with significant investments in the project, including Prabowo Subianto, the Minister of Defense, and Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment—and previously, a high-ranking general during the Suharto era.

The level of police repression varies by region, with actions in the eastern regions generally facing a harsher response from law enforcement.

A protest in Bandung on August 28, 2024.

What parts of society are in the streets? Have those who have been targeted by police before—such as organized labor, punks, soccer ultras, or West Papua independence protesters—taken part in these protests?

M: The soccer ultras have their own resentments due to the Kanjuruhan tragedy—a tragic event that occurred on October 1, 2022 at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, Indonesia. A riot erupted after a football match between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya. Police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, leading to chaos as thousands of supporters rushed to the exits. The resulting crush and suffocation led to the deaths of over 135 people and many more injuries. This also highlighted issues related to crowd control and stadium safety.

The parents of the victims joined football associations in condemning the tragedy, demanding justice for those affected. A trial took place, resulting in the conviction of three low-ranking police officers and two match organizers, each of whom received a maximum sentence of only two and a half years. In the verdict, the judge stated that the tear gas affected hundreds of people due to wind direction towards the stands. The Kanjuruhan incident is recognized as the second-worst football disaster in history, following the 1964 tragedy at Estadio Nacional in Lima, Peru, which claimed the lives of over 300 people. To this day, the families of the deceased continue to demand accountability, justice, and transparency.

Meanwhile, people in Papua continue to fight for independence despite being negatively framed as an Armed Criminal Group by the state. This terminology, intensified during Jokowi’s presidency with covert support from Defense Minister Prabowo, is used to malign the Papuan independence movement. Unfortunately, corporate media often employs this label.

All of the groups you mentioned are direct victims of Jokowi’s government policies. Naturally, they are using this moment to unite and express their anger alongside other affected communities.

A protest in Bandung on August 28, 2024.

Frans Ari Prasetyo: Indonesia has undergone significant changes since the 1998 Reforms, including rapid growth in civil institutions, an expanding middle class, and the rise of a vibrant culture and metropolitan lifestyle. However, these changes have also raised concerns about media influence on public opinion, the rise of populist movements, and attempts to return to authoritarianism under the guise of development. During the politically-charged Reformasi era, anarchists protested against the dictatorship. This response was not surprising, as Indonesian anarchists have historically aligned with the working class and class struggle. However, the decline of the political left after the 1998 Reforms also led to a decline in anarchism.

Despite this, anarchists remain active in ongoing protests. Anarchism and the black bloc have become significant cultural identities for participants in youth protests in Bandung. Young people involved in music subcultures, football hooliganism, anti-colonial resistance in West Papua, and other movements often engage with anarchism, particularly through the black bloc. Labor organizations have also been involved, especially in opposition to the Omnibus Law, which directly affects their interests. This involvement is notable given the ruling party’s influence over unions through their main coalition, which maintains a broad clientelist structure within civil society groups, including organized labor.

A protest in Bandung on August 28, 2024.

To what extent is this movement in dialogue with or influenced by the recent uprisings in other parts of the world such as those in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh, or elsewhere?

M: I don’t have the capacity to answer this question. However, we are quite inspired by the movement in Hong Kong and adapted some of their strategies.

Frans Ari Prasetyo: Countries such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and many in Africa and Latin America face significant governance challenges. These challenges often include low GDP per capita, high levels of armed conflict, and low political stability. These nations have been trapped in a cycle of internal conflict and poor governance for decades, and it seems likely that they will continue to experience volatility across all levels of society. The current insurgency in some of these countries exemplifies the turmoil that can arise as a consequence.

When societies develop a robust state apparatus without a strong and productive domestic economy, large sectors of the population may be more susceptible to the autocratic narrative that state capacity is the key to development. Over the past decade, Indonesia has navigated a complex landscape, shifting between democracy and autocracy.

Indonesia may represent a failure of the “democratic sufficiency thesis,” which posits that democracy is essential for achieving a higher quality of life in the medium to long term. This appeared to be the case in post-1998 reform Indonesia, which emerged from 32 years of authoritarian and militaristic rule and celebrated its transition to democracy. However, it continues to face challenges in delivering a quality of life that matches its democratic standards and state capabilities. While Indonesia has been more fortunate than Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and other countries in Africa and Latin America, there are concerns that the Jokowi administration may have inadvertently veered back toward militaristic authoritarianism over the past decade.

Western-style democracy is not inevitable, as history lacks a predetermined goal or purpose. Instead, history is shaped by human agency, ideological struggles, and political conflicts, with the future remaining always unwritten.

A protest in Bandung on August 28, 2024.

Can you direct us to some resources to understand the history of anarchist activity in Indonesia, and tell us concrete ways that people can support anarchists organizing there?

M: Right now, we clearly need international support to highlight the legacy of oligarchy and nepotism under Jokowi, as well as the police brutality. We urge you to condemn the Indonesian police and military for their brutal actions.

Furthermore, after reflecting on several incidents involving clashes with the police or with right-wing nationalist and conservative religious mass organizations during demonstrations or land occupations, we feel it is necessary to put more effort towards tactics during demonstrations. We plan to equip ourselves better with protective gear and to hold “trainings” to deepen our knowledge of safety, as well as field tactics for defense and attack. We also need support to sustain the street paramedics.

A protest in Bandung on August 28, 2024.

Frans Ari Prasetyo: Anarchistic groups are present throughout Indonesia. Some of these groups identify explicitly as anarchist, while others do not. Regardless of their labels, their actions align strongly with anarchist principles. As long as we share similar ideological ties and diverse strategic and practical approaches, it seems reasonable to collaborate, even if not everyone identifies as an ideological anarchist.

Anarchism offers a framework for understanding the complexities of youth activism. It provides a lens through which to examine the interconnected challenges of systemic economic inequalities, resource distribution, access to public goods, labor systems, state repression, and police-military actions. The ongoing anger towards the police and military has led to numerous confrontations and riots.

Despite its challenges, the anarchist movement has played a significant role in reshaping anti-capitalist struggles during a period marked by fragmentation and decline due to aggressive neoliberalism and resurgent authoritarianism.

Collaboration can help build a stronger movement and society. The COVID-19 crisis has established a new pattern of activism in Bandung. Civil society has adapted by forming networks that operate rhizomatically, enabling survival and resilience. I have observed and directly experienced the impact of this pattern. Since the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, this approach has proven to be effective, flexible, and dynamic, particularly within youth movements.

In Bandung, we use the term lintas tongkrongan (cross-hangout) to describe collaboration without hierarchy. Many young people, as elsewhere, spend significant time together, or nongkrong (hanging out). This can be a valuable source of energy and passion for civil activism, including anarchist activities.

A protest in Bandung on August 28, 2024.

What would it mean to win?

M: We’re not looking for “victory.” What we really want is for more people to realize the evils of the state, capitalism, and their instruments. We want to keep organizing autonomously, to fight injustice with direct action, and to put down roots like wild plants that can’t be stopped, not even by concrete.

Frans Ari Prasetyo: We may be approaching the issue from the wrong angle if we view victory as the ultimate goal of a struggle. We are engaged in a conflict that may not have a clear-cut resolution. If we achieve victory, it will be worth considering what happens next. There is a risk of a “false victory,” where we end up becoming something new that reflects what we fought against or defeated.

If we regard this victory as charity activism, it could lead to a change in position rather than a genuine shift. Not everyone who loses will disappear; some may adapt their methods to appear progressive, potentially turning charity into another manifestation of the class structure and inadvertently perpetuating the status quo.

In Indonesia, the 1998 Reformasi victory, which ended the 32-year militaristic-authoritarian regime of the New Order, led to the establishment of a democratic government. Could the state have done more to ensure consistent improvements in the quality of life, even with strong democratic accountability? Or was the victory simply about thwarting the election law?

We are dealing with a government, oligarchs, and predatory business and party elites who have appropriated everything belonging to the people. Therefore, we must fight as hard as we can. The current social order, post-reforms, has been built on the victory over the New Order. The transition to civilian rule has been managed by individuals—and characterized by policies—that were part of the dictatorship.

In the past decade under President Jokowi (2014-2024), Indonesia has shifted back to an authoritarian, militaristic state known as Neo-Orba. Jokowi was initially portrayed as a populist president defending ordinary people; many former reform activists who overthrew Suharto’s New Order now support Jokowi’s Neo-Orba regime. As Jokowi’s term ends in 2024, many of these activists will switch their support to a New Order military general who once kidnapped them and was twice defeated by Jokowi in presidential elections. This general will become the next president of Indonesia, with Jokowi’s son as his vice president. This continuity of power and wealth mocks the quest for greater equality, perpetuating a cycle of inequality and exclusion.

Why should a great victory be followed by even greater demonstrations, only for those victories to justify new and more extreme forms of inequality? This reflects a trauma from the 1998 demonstrations, where the results are still unfolding today. Protests are important, and victory is a bonus, but it is crucial to build political consciousness in everyday life amid the combined hegemony of the state, capitalism, and neoliberalism. We should create grassroots alternatives, even if they start out small, and spread them across many areas in order to empower people with the freedom and justice they need daily. Building politics involves more than just engaging in spontaneous protests; it means addressing real everyday problems and developing political organs for the movement beyond merely empowering the recipients of aid.

Civil disobedience can be a powerful tool for achieving equality and signaling victory. The working class, the youth, and other civilian groups have the right to self-determination. We do not seek mere redistribution of poverty or a return to old colonial, capitalist, or neoliberal laws. Instead, we use civil disobedience to build civil and political power through education, advocacy, direct action, and solidarity. Acts of disobedience demonstrate that resistance and alternatives are possible, even as we navigate repressive laws, suffocating capitalism, and rampant neoliberalism.

Who can extinguish the fire once it has started? This regime has been playing with fire from the beginning. They can blame the protesters as much as they like, but they cannot blame the fire. I want us to stay angry, and I want the state to panic once more. See you at the next protest, and the next, and the next. Long live resistance, long live solidarity!

A protest in Bandung on August 22, 2024.

Appendix: Demonstrations around Indonesia

Courtesy of M, here follows a brief summary of the demonstrations that took place on various major islands in Indonesia August 22-27.

Jawa

Jakarta: On August 22, 2024, thousands of demonstrators gathered in front of the Indonesian Parliament (DPR RI), prompting the deployment of 3200 security personnel. Similar demonstrations took place in front of the Constitutional Court. Coinciding with this, the 828th Kamisan Action¹ in front of the Presidential Palace also drew large crowds. Protesters carried a replica of a guillotine as a symbol of resistance against monarchy.

In the afternoon, at 14:20 Western Indonesian Time, protesters demolished the right gate of the DPR RI building. DPR member Habiburokhman was struck by a bottle thrown by demonstrators. The protest continued into the evening, with police using beatings, tear gas, and water cannons to disperse the crowd. Journalists were assaulted for attempting to cover police attacks and were forced to delete their footage.

Bandung: At 5:30 pm, protesters demolished the fence around the West Java Regional House of Representatives (DPRD) building, leading to clashes. Intelligence agents assaulted a journalist, while a student lost an eye due to a stone thrown by police.

Tasikmalaya: The protest involved the burning of several facilities at the Tasikmalaya DPRD building.

Bogor: Protests took place at Tugu Kujang.

Cirebon: A student and a police officer were injured during the demonstration in front of the Cirebon DPRD building.

Yogyakarta: Thousands gathered, starting at Abu Bakar Ali parking lot, marching to Zero Kilometer Point, and ending in front of the Special Region of Yogyakarta DPRD building.

Semarang: The protest in front of the Central Java DPRD building turned violent when protesters forced their way in, causing the fence to nearly collapse. Police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, resulting in 26 injuries, with 18 requiring hospital treatment. Protests continued until August 26, 2024, with the breach of the fence around Semarang City Hall.

Surabaya: Demonstrations took place in front of Tugu Pahlawan.

Solo: Protests occurred in front of the City Hall.

Malang: Thousands protested around the Bundaran Tugu Malang area.

Sumatera

Padang: Protests took place in front of the West Sumatra DPRD building.

Bukittinggi: On August 23, 2024, hundreds protested in front of the Bukittinggi DPRD building in heavy rain.

Lampung: The protest on the night of August 21 featured participants in Money Heist costumes.

South Sumatra: Protesters at Simpang Lima wore masks of politicians including Joko Widodo, Bahlil Lahadalia, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, Prabowo Subianto, and Bobby Nasution. They displayed a coffin in their demonstration.

Jambi: Thousands of students marched from Simpang Bank Indonesia to the parliament building in Telanai. The protest turned violent with police beatings, resulting in three people losing consciousness and four injured.

Aceh: Protests in front of the Lhokseumawe DPRK led to clashes between thousands of students and security forces. A similar protest occurred at the Aceh House of Representatives in Banda Aceh, ending in violence and five arrests.

Bengkulu: In response to protests, the security staff of the DPRD assaulted students in an effort to disperse the crowd.

Sulawesi

Makassar: Thousands protested the passage of the Regional Election Bill (RUU Pilkada), with some burning tires. The protest was dispersed when First Lady Iriana Joko Widodo was scheduled to pass by.

Kendari: Thousands of students and journalists protested in front of the Southeast Sulawesi DPRD building.

Palu: Protests occurred on August 23, 2024 in front of the Central Sulawesi DPRD building.

Nusa Tenggara

Kupang: A sit-in protest took place in front of the office of the NTT KPU (Nusa Tenggara Timur Komisi Pemilihan Umum, the General Elections Commission in East Nusa Tenggara province, the capital of which is Kupang City).

Mataram: The protest in front of the West Nusa Tenggara DPRD building turned violent after police attempted to disperse the crowd with tear gas and water cannons.

*Denpasar (Bali) **: On August 23, 2024, students from various universities, public student organizations, NGOs, LBH Bali (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum,* Community Legal Aid Institute—a frontline organization that provides legal assistance to those in need, free of charge), and others participated in a protest.

Maluku dan Papua

Ambon: The protest ended in violence with broken windows at the DPRD building after the request of the Aliansi Mahasiswa Pattimura (the Student Alliance of Pattimura University in Ambon City, in the Maluku province) to meet with coalition party members was denied due to their absence.

Manokwari: Protests were held in front of the Papua Barat DPRD building.

Sorong: A silent protest took place at Taman Sorong Park.

Kalimantan

Banjarmasin: Thousands of students from various campuses occupied the South Kalimantan DPRD building.

Samarinda: Thousands protested in front of the East Kalimantan DPRD building, demanding the cancellation of the Regional Election Bill and expedited approval of the Asset Forfeiture Bill.

Balikpapan: The protest at the Balikpapan DPRD building turned violent with clashes between students and police.

Pontianak: Students participated in an emergency democracy action at the West Kalimantan DPRD.

Palangkaraya: Hundreds of students protested, but the action ended in chaos after demands to meet with the Chairman of the Central Kalimantan DPRD were not met. The crowd rejected the conditions that only representatives could enter the DPR building to express their demands.

People in many cities continued to demonstrate after August 22, 2024.

The Aksi Kamisan (“Kamisan Protest”) is a weekly protest in Jakarta initiated by the families of the victims of the Semanggi tragedy, in which activists were shot dead at Jakarta’s Semanggi intersection in late 1998. Every Thursday afternoon since 2007, the families and their supporters stand in protest in front of the Indonesian Presidential Palace carrying black umbrellas, wearing black clothes, and bearing banners and photographs of the victims. This protest spread to many cities in Indonesia; it has taken place in Bandung since 2013. The Semanggi tragedy took place under the authority of Prabowo Subianto, a former New Order general; now Prabowo and Gibran, Jokowi’s son, have won the 2024 election. Protesters in the Aksi Kamisan call attention to unresolved human rights violations from various periods, including the 1965-66 anti-communist purge and the 1998 riots, in regards to which Prabowo was once brought to trial but was not found guilty. Aksi Kamisan was actually inspired by the movement of the mothers of those disappeared in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, who protested by unfurling cloths with the names of their disappeared family members in the Plaza de Mayo, opposite the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. ↩

Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street, Thirteen Years Later

2024-09-17T21:07:57Z

Thirteen years ago, a thousand demonstrators descended on Wall Street, occupying Zuccotti Park and kicking off what came to be known as the Occupy movement. Revisiting that moment today, we can see how dramatically the terrain of social movements has changed as our society has polarized. The organizers of Occupy Wall Street proposed to create a movement that could bring all society together against the ruling order and the few who profit from it, mobilizing under the slogan “We are the 99%.” Today, the divisions that cut through our society have only deepened, rendering it more difficult to imagine social change. Yet this only renders the legacy of the Occupy movement more important.

At the invitation of Marisa Holmes, one of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, we present here the conclusion to her book, Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice. Holmes sets the Occupy movement in the context of the movement against capitalist globalization that preceded it and the wave of similar movements from Egypt and Tunisia to Spain and Greece.

At its peak—arguably, the general strike in Oakland on November 2—the movement that spread around the country from Zuccotti Park was, in the words of one participant, “a collective force with the ambition and capacity to transform the whole city.” In reinventing the general strike, the participants opened a new horizon for 21st-century movements that has yet to be properly explored.

Although anarchists like Marisa Holmes were central to the origins of the Occupy movement, there was considerable debate among anarchists regarding how best to engage within the context that it created. Participants in our collective were critical of what we regarded as a tendency to conceal real conflicts and differences within society as a whole. Reflecting on the Occupy movement from the vantage point of 2014, we argued that the Occupy movement was limited by structural factors:

What limits did the Occupy movement reach? Why did it subside without achieving its object of transforming society? First, it offered almost no analysis of racialized power, despite the central role of race in dividing labor struggles and poor people’s resistance in the US. Second, perhaps not coincidentally, its discourse was largely legalistic and reformist—it was premised on the assumption that the laws and institutions of the state are fundamentally beneficial, or at least legitimate. Finally, it began as a political rather than social movement—hence the decision to occupy Wall Street instead of acting on a terrain closer to most people’s everyday lives, as if capitalism were not a ubiquitous relation but something emanating from the stock market. As a result of these three factors, the majority of the participants in Occupy were activists, newly precarious exiles from the middle class, and members of the underclass, in roughly that order; the working poor were notably absent. The simplistic sloganeering of Occupy obscured the lines of conflict that run through our society from top to bottom: “police are part of the 99%” is technically true, economically speaking, but so are most rapists and white supremacists. All of this meant that when the police came to evict the encampments and kill the movement, Occupy had neither the numbers, nor the fierceness, nor the analysis it would have needed to defend itself.

When a movement reaches its limits and subsides, it illustrates the obstacles future movements will have to surpass—and indeed, from the Ferguson uprising to the Standing Rock occupation to the George Floyd rebellion, the movements that followed Occupy all served to illuminate the fault lines within the social body to which the Occupy movement had addressed itself.

From the vantage point of 2024, however, the idea of a movement that aspired to encompass 99% of society seems not only naïvely utopian but arguably preferable to the intractable situation we face. Today, everyone in all walks of life is all too aware of the lines of conflict that run through our society, and various political factions from the center to the extreme right have positioned themselves to benefit from those conflicts, capturing energy from them as if from a dynamo. Now, the capitalist order is not stabilized by the illusion of general consent, but rather by the looming threat of violent conflict. If we could somehow initiate a movement that could draw people together from all walks of life to take on the ruling class and capitalism, that would enable us to transcend the deeply engrained antagonism that has trapped the social movements of the past decade at an impasse.

To accomplish that, we will need to find ways to enable those who benefit from a modicum of privilege in this society to see what they stand to gain from acting in solidarity with those worse off than them. This is one of the most important challenges before us today.

Although most participants in the Occupy movement used the language of democracy to describe the aspiration to establish solidarity on the basis of participatory decision-making, real existing democracy has always been characterized by pitched conflicts between rival power blocs. As we suggested ahead of the 2020 election,

Democracy is often framed as the alternative to civil war. The idea is that we have democratic institutions so everyone won’t just kill each other in direct pursuit of power. This is the social contract that liberals accuse Trump of violating.

But if, as Carl von Clausewitz said, war is simply politics by other means, we should consider what representative democracy and civil war have in common. Both are essentially winner-takes-all struggles in which adversaries compete to control the state.

The Occupy movement sought to challenge representative democracy via grassroots direct democracy, attempting to remove the state from the equation. We might argue that the best elements of the Occupy experiment were not the ways that it sought to move democratic decision-making processes from congresses and parliament buildings to parks and squares, but rather the ways that it decentralized agency, establishing new relations on a more or less horizontal and voluntary basis. Calling this “democratic” created an ambiguity that enabled politicians from Syriza to Bernie Sanders to draw participants in the movements of 2011 back into state politics. This is why we use the word “anarchist” to describe what we are trying to do—and why it matters that anarchists were some of the most influential participants in getting the Occupy movement off the ground in the first place.

Those who became politically conscious after the Occupy movement, who never experienced the moment of hope and possibility that it represented, stand to benefit from learning about it and drawing on its example in contemporary political experimentation. Without further ado, here are Marisa Holmes’s conclusions on the basis of her experience in and research into the movement.

A glimpse of a more innocent time.

Building the New Society

An excerpt of a book by Marisa Holmes.

The square both physically embodies and symbolizes the society as a whole. Occupying the square calls into question how the existing society functions and opens the possibility for a new one to take its place. Whoever controls the square controls the future. The question is: What kind of society do we, the 99%, want to live in?

At the moment, the status quo of neoliberalism is holding on by a very thin thread. It nearly escaped a fascist coup on January 6, 2021 in the US. Elsewhere, there are also increasingly violent counterrevolutionary and fascist movements. The radical left finds itself in a three-way fight with the state on one side and fascists on the other. The two often collaborate against us. As history has shown, reform will not get us out of this situation. We cannot continue as if these are normal times, with politics as usual. There must be a true revolutionary path forward against and beyond the state and capitalism, as well as all forms of domination. Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the 2011 movements can inform the direction of this path: as a common chant in OWS went, “This—is—just—practice.”

In different contexts, the 2011 movements used the terms autonomous, horizontal, and democratic to describe both their practices and ultimate goals. The revolutionary youth of Egypt and Tunisia were independent, decentralized, and horizontal, and had the goal of creating regional democratic councils. Common chants across The Arab Spring were about bread, freedom, and, above all, dignity. In Spain, at Puerta del Sol, and in 15M after, they were against all forms of representation and practiced what they called “real democracy.” They engaged in an intentional constituent process against and beyond the state and made the strategic decision to go into the neighborhoods where they squatted new social centers and defended people from evictions. At Syntagma in Greece, they insisted on “direct democracy,” created mutual aid projects, and defended the semi-autonomous neighborhood of Exarchia.

The New York City General Assembly (NYCGA), which organized OWS, defined itself as a “an open, participatory, and horizontally organized process.” During the occupation, The Declaration of the Occupation called for direct democracy, and the Statement of Autonomy asserted our autonomy from existing political structures. In one meeting of the 2011 movements in Tunis in 2013, we occupied the World Social Forum, and established an autonomous, horizontal, and democratic space. What were shared most across the new movements of 2011 were our practices of organization.

From The Global Justice Movement to Occupy Wall Street

One important precursor to OWS and other 2011 movements was the Global Justice Movement (GJM), sometimes called the alter-globalization movement. There were many direct connections and intergenerational conversations between the two. Action frameworks, agreements, and tactical plans were informed directly from the GJM. Even the people’s mic was adapted from the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. A genealogy can be traced from the GJM to OWS.

The Global Justice Movement was primarily organized around summits of major financial organizations like the WTO. There were many months in between summits, and time for trainings and organizational development. Then, those who could afford to go, or were in some way subsidized to go, would descend on the summits to engage in a variety of creative and direct-action antics. When a summit was over, the attendees would return home. The squares were convergences around physical spaces, in opposition to a shared corporate target, where alternatives were created. However, they were not counter summits. First, they were not intended to be temporary, but permanent. Even if they were all eventually cleared, there was an initial intention to stay and hold space indefinitely.

Second, during the GJM summits, there would be convergence spaces for collectives and working groups to coordinate. Food, legal support, medical care, shelter, art making, and action-planning happened in these convergences. However, they were not very open. During OWS and other squares, those who participated generated organization in the course of the occupation. The practice of engaging in direct democracy was extended to the society as a whole. There was an invitation to participate on social media, and in person, in the co-creation of another world. This world was possible, because it was unfolding in real time before our eyes.

Third, in the GJM, there were more formal coalitions among institutional partners such as non-profits, community-based organizations, and unions. In contrast, the squares were organized largely around individual participation rather than group affiliation. Jeffery Juris calls this “a logic of aggregation” (2012). This allowed for people who were not already organized to plug in, as well as individuals to challenge the more hierarchical organizations they may have been part of. For example, there were rank-and-file workers, who were organized, but stifled by the bureaucracy and hypocrisy of their labor unions. There were organizers who had day jobs in non-profits, who held more radical politics. They could find an outlet for their real interests and talents at OWS. Organizing people as individuals into a collective created a dynamic space, where participation in our own structures grew, while the more institutional left was pressured to respond.

Fourth, during the GJM, people used participatory and democratic structures with consensus decision-making processes. This primarily took the form of councils, working groups, and affinity groups. Consensus was built in smaller groups, and then confederated to accommodate for scale. During the squares, consensus was also used, but started in assemblies and then later moved into councils. Members often rotated between groups, and the boundaries were fluid. This allowed for more flexible organization and guarded against too much specialization or bureaucracy.

Overall, OWS and the squares could be read as a next step after the GJM. Much of what was developed in the GJM was adapted and expanded upon. The biggest shift was operating in the open, in public. This generated a movement that was not only internally participatory or democratic, but outward facing and inviting for anyone who wanted to join. The 2011 movements were what I call participatory movements.

Internal Challenges

Walking down Wall Street in the financial district, one will notice a series of wooden squares in the ground. They mark the original wall constructed by Dutch colonial settlers in the seventeenth century to keep out potential invaders whether pirates, natives, or the English. It was along this wall that slaves were bought and sold. It was here that women were subjugated and trafficked. Here, JP Morgan Chase privatized the New York water system, and built his first headquarters. Here the US customs house was established, and the Bill of Rights was signed into law.

During Occupy Wall Street, we practiced a coalitional politics that wove together individual identities into a collective one—the 99%. We, the 99%, were those who had lost homes to foreclosures, those who faced long-term unemployment, or were buried under student debt. We, the 99%, were day laborers, prison workers, domestic workers, and sex workers. We, the 99% were brutalized and killed by police and stopped at borders. We, the 99% were disciplined along gender binaries and roles. We, the 99% were denied healthcare. We, the 99% were all of those long oppressed and exploited, who had simply had enough. There was a common enemy, and it was right there in front of us—Wall Street. It was the solidarity between us that was powerful. It was multi-racial, multi-national, and multi-gender. It had a lot of potential, but it fell apart.

The GJM and OWS faced many of the same internal challenges around race and gender. Elizabeth Betita Martinez reflected on the racial composition of the convergence against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, 1999. In her widely cited article, “Where was the color in Seattle? Looking for reasons the Great Battle was so white” (2000) she argued there were multiple factors that led to a lack of people of color participating in the event. The solution Betita Martinez proposed for addressing the demographic problem of Seattle, and the GJM more broadly, was for POC to get more organized themselves. She wrote, “There must be effective follow-up and increased communication between people of color across the nation: grassroots organizers, activists, cultural workers, and educators. We need to build on the contacts made (or that need to be made) from Seattle.” Manissa McCleave Maharawal reached a similar conclusion.

After the GJM there was more of a commitment on the radical left to address oppression more seriously. Some of this work was specifically centered around accountability.

Much of the work done in OWS around community accountability by the Safer Spaces Committee (SSC) was inspired by INCITE! (2006) and driven by members of Support New York (2016). The SSC consistently took a survivor-centered and intersectional approach that acknowledged the many ways power operates. It’s not as if this work wasn’t happening. It was. It just wasn’t priori- tized or valued by everyone in OWS. If more people had listened to the Safer Spaces Committee, and they had been more influential, then our spaces would have been better equipped to deal with harm and conflict.

During the park, the Safer Spaces Committee, the People of Color Caucus, Women Occupying Wall Street, the OWS Queer Caucus, and OWS Disability Caucus insisted on an intersectional framework for our work and pushed us all to do better. They called on OWS to be inclusive rather than open, and to engage more seriously with power. While we did not solve all problems, and were not perfect, there were lessons learned from the caucuses in real time, which shaped how OWS continued. During the May Day planning process, there was an intersectional analysis and a coalitional approach that were made explicit with the phrase, “All Our Grievances Are Connected.” The definition of work was broadened to include domestic work, reproductive work, sex work, prison labor, and unskilled labor—forms of labor generally excluded from the mainstream labor movement that have more oppressed people doing them. During the one-year anniversary, we used the phrase “All Roads Lead to Wall Street” and built an action framework to accommodate multiple areas of organizing and tactics. This was just not enough.

External Challenges

Occupy Wall Street and the other 2011 movements were hit on all sides by those who wanted to tear us down. This cannot be overstated. Institutionalization, cooptation, repression, and counter-revolution were strong forces working to prevent a true social revolution from taking place. Part of the current struggle against these forces involves the writing of analytical work from within our movements. If this work is not done, then our enemies will drive the narratives that current and future generations take for granted.

In OWS, there were attempts at particular forms of institutionalization. Some early examples were the Occupy Office and the Movement Resource Group. These projects consolidated access to physical and financial resources without any accountability, transparency, or oversight, and attempted to steer OWS and the broader movement toward more acceptable, “reasonable” forms of political engagement. Those involved utilized the language of affinity to justify themselves, distorting it beyond recognition.

There were informal elites throughout OWS, but they became most prominent in the later stages of offshoots. Strike Debt faced multiple power plays by political blocs who, again used the language of horizontal, autonomous, or democratic politics, but prevented these ideas from being put into practice. Instead, they worked to create formalized hierarchies with themselves at the top. Those in Occupy Sandy talked about mutual aid, not charity, but coordinators were in fact doing charity. Hierarchies were again created around resources. Similar processes played out in other squares. Given the centrality of social media, there were brutal battles for control over accounts by informal elites.

In parallel to institutionalization, there was a more overt process of cooption from political parties. The Working Families Party (WFP), a “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, infiltrated OWS, and sought to redirect some of its energy into an electoral process. Bill de Blasio, for instance, visited the park, as NYC Public Advocate, and later ran for office using the rhetoric of the 99% and the “tale of two cities.” The Bernie Sanders campaign was even more explicit about its strategy and made constant conflations of the movement and the campaign. This happened in parallel to SYRIZA and Podemos, which considered itself a “party-movement.”

The repression was shaped by the context of the War [on] Terror. The Global Justice Movement (GJM) had reached its peak before 9/11, before the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The GJM, was, in part, disbanded, due to escalating repression and creation of counter- terrorism campaigns. OWS came along at a time when the War on Terror was much more entrenched with drone campaigns striking the very countries in North Africa and the Middle East that were rising up in 2011. The Department of Homeland Security had developed much more widespread and integrated methods of surveillance and data collection, alongside old-fashioned in-person infiltration. The GJM could not withstand the repression, and neither could OWS.

The counterrevolution that took hold after OWS and Black Lives Matter was much more intense than anything experienced during the GJM. Actual white supremacists and neo-Nazis emerged, using many of the same digital and social media tools, to integrate and broaden their reach. They also sought to control in person public spaces. Charlottesville is one key example. Neo-fascism developed as an international movement in reaction to the potential for a real revolution to break out. It was already underway before Donald Trump ever considered running for office, although his campaign and victory definitely added fuel to the fascist fire.

Lessons Learned

Horizontal, autonomous, and directly democratic practices were shared across contexts; they made the 2011 movements happen. People had a voice, many for the first time in their lives. The energy and excitement of this was palpable and made new worlds possible. Unfortunately, the squares and OWS were met with many internal and external challenges and they could not address them all effectively. This brings us to a contemporary aim—building more intentional, intersectional, accountable, equitable, and resilient movements.

Setting Intentions

There was not strong enough organization in OWS or the squares over the long run. Being in public and open to new people meant exposing ourselves to many different experiences and understandings of the world. At the beginning, this was essential and helped fuel our growth. However, not everyone who came through the squares or other organizing spaces understood why these practices were important. They were gaining some hands-on experiences and were becoming highly skilled, but lacked a sense of movement history or ideological cohesion. Without a consistent commitment to political education and collective defense of principles, it was much easier for other political tendencies, with hierarchical practices, to swoop in and take control. Future movements must be prepared to move from the initial moment of growth into a more sustained horizontal, autonomous, and democratic organization.

Working at the Intersections

Race, gender, class, and ability were not central enough to our work. They should have been baked into the work from the very beginning. Learning from this, future movements must start with an intersectional analysis, and practice. This would include centering those who are oppressed in decision-making, action-planning, and more public-facing visible roles. It would mean listening to those who are oppressed and taking their concerns seriously. Most of all, this would mean acknowledging that while the new world is being built, we tend to replicate patterns of the old one. None of us are immune from doing things that are harmful. There is also no immediate answer or way to fix systems and structures that are so ingrained without struggle. Undoing racism, undoing sexism, undoing classism, and undoing ableism will be a constant process of abolishing what is and creating what we want.

Being Accountable

There was not enough emphasis on harm reduction or addressing conflict. We all went in a bit blind to the many possible ways that people could get hurt. There was the naive belief that everyone who participated would be well-intentioned, and there for all the right reasons. Most people were, but it doesn’t take many—only a handful really—to totally derail the work of building relationships. Future movements must have processes of accountability for all instances of harm and conflict. There must be shared expectations of all those involved to be accountable to others, and share in the work of doing accountability. There must be consequences when people refuse to be accountable and perpetuate harmful behavior. Excluding some people so that other people can keep participating must be an option.

Distributing Resources

It is essential to think carefully about who has access to resources, when, where, and why. Much like the current society, resources become sites of informal and formal concentrations of power-over others. These could include financial, cultural, social, or other resources. Given the reliance on social media in the squares and OWS, the accounts were resources. I hope that future movements take the use of social media very seriously, and how it can facilitate both horizontal and hierarchical structures. A movement is not a marketing campaign. It cannot be reduced to brands, memes, and hashtags. It is not about individual celebrities or fundraising. It is about our relationships.

Becoming Resilient

Going about making a social revolution inevitably put us at odds with the forces of institutions, political parties, the state, and counterrevolutionary movements. It is an essential step to come to terms with this fact. If there is no conflict with opposing political forces, then there is no struggle. The question really is when and where to draw a line between one’s friends and enemies. After establishing this, the follow-up question is how to be participatory and open enough to new people while protecting a project against attacks. There is no easy answer here that works in all cases. There may be different strategies and tactics given the context. Overall, though, the goal must be to minimize the influence of those seeking to institutionalize, co-opt, repress, or redirect for the counterrevolution. At the same time, there must be increasing influence of those seeking a horizontal, autonomous, and democratic revolution.

Facing our enemies was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting during the squares. To guard against this in the future there is a need for pacing and taking things slow when needed. There must be a conscious effort to build capacity with regular people who are sympathetic, but not professional organizers. There must be a holistic way of approaching the work and integrating healing practices. We must build a culture of care if we are to outlive fascism.

Occupy Everywhere

Wherever there are people who insist on acting as if they’re already free, the spirit of OWS is present. OWS lives in occupations of public space and in squats. It lives in rank and file independent labor actions such as work stoppages, strikes, and sabotage. It lives in direct actions during pipeline campaigns to protect water. It lives in the refusal to pay all unjust debts, whether student, medical, housing, or personal credit debts. It lives in prisoners struggling inside, and supporters outside. It lives in immigrants and refugees breaking down borders. It lives in actions against police murders, abolition, and Black liberation. It lives in Indigenous struggles to defend and reclaim land. It lives in those reclaiming Pride from corporations and police. It lives in LGBTQI+ liberation. It lives in feminists challenging all concentrations of dominating power, like the Supreme Court of the United States. It lives in disabled people asserting autonomy and fighting for healthcare. It lives in neurodivergent folks fighting for mental health support. It lives, perhaps most of all, in the ever-expanding networks of mutual aid providing material assistance and care to one another. OWS lives on, if not always in name, in practice.

The question now is how to weave together all these struggles. How can we emulate what was effective from OWS and the squares? How can we overcome all the challenges we faced? What began in 2011 at OWS is still possible, now, in the present. Let’s stop thinking of the world as it is and imagine what it could be. Then, we can really occupy everywhere.

Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld : An Invocation

2024-08-19T18:41:04Z

The laws targeting queer and trans people that are proliferating across the United States are a symptom of a much deeper and more insidious reaction, the inevitable outgrowth of a deeply repressive and hierarchical society confronting the possibility of collapse. Today’s gender fascism is not confined to the policies of a single political party. It takes different forms across the political spectrum, bringing together essentialist narratives about identity, a resurgent patriarchal mythos, and the persisting power of the state.

This is not the first time that a reactionary society has sought scapegoats. Like our predecessors in the early twentieth century, if we hope to survive, we have to combat these forces on every level, using a wide range of strategies and tools.

In the following ecstatic history, our comrades revisit queer resistance to the Nazis, seeking tactics and inspiration for our own troubled times.

Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld

“They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”

-Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

The following stories were first presented at a private memorial in honor of Heather Heyer, a year after she was murdered by a Nazi in Charlottesville in Black August 2017. Versions of this text have been presented twice since, in Seattle and Montreal. We present it here to continue that work of memory.

A collage by Claude Cahun.

A thriving homosexual underground existed before the rise of the Third Reich and survived during it—just as complex and fecund as the underground that blossomed before AIDS and was all but exterminated by the crisis around the virus. In both cases, most of the traces that are available to us were lovingly preserved by insurgent faggot scholars and mystics.¹

In the genocides inflicted on the gay underworlds of Weimar Germany and the decade of Gay Liberation activity that existed between the Stonewall uprising and the onset of the AIDS crisis, the revolutionaries died first, swept up in the death machines of the state. Fredy Perlman called those machines Leviathan. In the process of studying Leviathan, Perlman developed an analysis of nationalism illustrating how the drive to sacrifice entire populations serves as the basis on which to forge a nation. This sacrifice—holocaust—sanctifies and upholds the power of the state.

The Nazi movement inherited the most advanced techniques of repression developed by the inquisitors, witch hunters, colonialists, slave-masters, industrialists, authoritarian revolutionaries, racial mystics, and other stewards of Leviathan. They drew on these sources to establish new regimes of consensus reality shaped through ritual and aesthetics and fed on blood. Inspired by the racism of chattel slavery, Nazism emulated the example set by Lenin and Stalin, turning the machinery of the state against the population in order to forge a nation by liquidating its internal colonies. Though the Nazi regime was apparently defeated in the Second World War, the victors continued its Leviathanic project, inheriting the same legacy of colonialism and genocidal nation-building. It should be no surprise, then, that the Nazi spirit has persisted in various permutations ever since. We see it in high definition, inflicted upon Gaza every day.

Like the gods, worlds—in the plural—die and are reborn in an unending dance. Some of the worlds forced underground by the progressive march of Leviathan are blossoming again. Over the last decade, the United States has been rocked by unprecedented Black insurrection and prison strikes, struggles to defend the sacred earth from resource extraction, and revolt in island colonies like Puerto Rico. At the same time, yet another wave of white supremacist terror has arisen in response. Whiteness, which constitutes itself through the exclusion and destruction of the Other just as the state does, has reasserted its access to the terror by which it originally came to be.

Through the open door of this inquiry, we seek to glimpse one of the many worlds destroyed by the machinery of Leviathan. We will be traveling into a queer underworld that reached its zenith just before the Nazi Party seized state power, a gay resistance that fought a life-and-death struggle against the Third Reich. Very few of the queer insurgents of that time survived; most remain unknown to us today. To proceed, we must call the dead to the amphitheater and let them speak.

Purgatorio

Our sources have left us precious few written traces. We begin our inquiry by consulting the revolutionaries of the Gay Liberation era.

In an interview for Christopher Street Magazine in 1980, on the cusp of the AIDS crisis, Guy Hocquenghem and Mark Blasius discussed the challenges of cobbling together a history for the gay community in the process of coming out.

Guy: You know, there was a gay community in Germany before the Nazi period which had all the characteristics of the community we have now—including community centers, balls, newspapers, a scientific research institute—everything. I am struck by the ignorance among gay people about the past—no, more even than ignorance: the “will to forget” the German gay holocaust. That we forgot about these hundreds of thousands of people and about the fact that out of one hundred years of gay life, in thirty of them we had a virtual vacuum—that we forgot in such a radical way is, I think, something of a warning. This has happened to no other minority. Even the Armenian genocide was remembered at least by the Armenians. But we aren’t even the only ones who remember, we don’t remember! So we find ourselves beginning at zero in each generation. Our lesson from history, then, is that we can’t be sure we won’t be suppressed. […]

Mark: We know from experience that it is possible to completely destroy a sexual minority: it is not even a question of being hidden, but of continuing to exist. When we become invisible and act just like heterosexuals, we cease to exist: we lose any historical significance as well as any real expression in the daily life of society.

Guy: As long as gay genocide is not officially acknowledged, it could happen again. This is not to say that it will happen, but that somehow the political forces against us can keep it in mind. Perhaps I sound like a doomsayer. But if you put these two ideas together—gays having become “visible” in American society without having acquired significant political protection or status, and this new role of “scapegoat,” replacing the traditional scapegoats. […]

Mark: As though gay liberation of the past ten years is a dream from which we will soon awaken. Underlying our professed self-confidence, there is a deep feeling of frailty—that we are living on borrowed time.

This exchange strikes us as particularly haunting. In the twilight of the gay liberation period, when the AIDS genocide was poised to “come out” in turn, Hocquenghem prophesied the catastrophe waiting to be unveiled. At the time, Hocquenghem was engaged in a sustained reading of Walter Benjamin; a reproduction of Klee’s Angelus Novus, the Angel of History, hung on the wall of his Paris apartment. His book L’Âme atomique shows Benjamin’s continued Messianic influence on his thinking. Thanks to the publication of Max Fox’s translation of Hocquenghem’s final book, The Amphitheater of the Dead, we can read Hocquenghem’s deathbed recollections of his own initiation into the homosexual and revolutionary undergrounds that preceded the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR), his invocation of his dead, and a fleeting fantasy of a suspended life that never arrived.

Guy Hocquenghem.

Guy was a youthful star in the FHAR constellation, but we’ll need to shine others’ light on this mystery to see further into the past. Undoubtedly, what Guy knew about the gay counterculture of pre-Nazi Germany was transmitted to him by the eldest member of the movement, Daniel Guérin.

Guérin was a gay anarchist who produced a number of important anarchist historical works. His final book, Homosexualité et révolution, offers theoretical proposals derived from a lifetime’s travels through the revolutionary and homosexual undergrounds. For now, we pass by his theoretical and historical work to consult the memoirs he wrote in the final year of the Weimar Republic and first year of the Third Reich. Due to obstacles to publishing homoerotic material, these records were nearly lost, but they have been recovered and translated by Robert Schwartzwald as The Brown Plague: Travels in late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany. Schwartzwald’s work offers context, showing that while Guérin was initiated politically by attending a riot in solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti, it was his first trip to Germany that really offered him entry into the homosexual underworld.

As a teenager, like many other homosexuals from around the world, Guérin traveled to Germany to participate in its unique queer subculture. He returned to Germany in 1932 and 1933 following that same erotic impulse, sublimating it into his interest in “the most organized working class in the world.” In the documents, Schwartzwald presents Guérin as a Virgil guiding us through the underworld before and after what he calls the Catastrophe.

In the following exploration, we also owe thanks to the gay anarchist poet Ian Young, who published an article titled “Gay Resistance: Homosexuals in the Anti-Nazi Underground” in Gay Sunshine Magazine in winter 1977. That article was revised in 1986 and published in the Gay Sunshine anthology, Gay Roots. Taken together, these inquiries paint a living, breathing picture of queer life at the cusp of this catastrophe.

The Wanderers

Guérin unpacks the draw that Germany held for a young revolutionary homosexual. He wanted to see the organized and virile workers’ movement that had emerged in that country, anticipating a revolutionary clash with the fascists on an epic scale. “The old world was disintegrating and the time had come to risk everything,” he writes.

What he found was much more complicated. The leftist Parties—both Social Democrats and Communists—were unable to halt the spread of what he came to term the brown plague. He documents the sectarian and ideological operations of the respective parties, showing how the Communists acquiesced to the rise of the Nazi Party because they foolishly imagined that Nazi repression would mobilize the working class toward proletarian revolution. Many considered a Nazi regime a necessary step toward a socialist state, itself allegedly a step toward a stateless society.

At the same time, Guérin records encounter after encounter with vagabond youth excluded from employment or adventurously dropping out of a society they regarded with enmity. Guérin claimed that in 1932, half a million vagabond youth wandered the German countryside. Before the Catastrophe, this was known as the Wandervogel movement, a ferment of free love, communal living, ecological consciousness, nudity, vegetarianism, and mysticism that prefigured the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s.

Participants in the Wandervogel movement.

In “The Undying Appeal of White Nationalism,” first published in the journal Black Seed (described successively as a journal of Green and then Indigenous Anarchism), James Joshua argues that this movement gave rise to many racist and nationalist thinkers inspired by the image of Aryan youth returning to inhabit the so-called natural world, and, in so doing, set the foundations for a new form of life that Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt would call a new “Nomos (order) of the Earth.” Joshua identifies this youth movement as a crucial ancestor of the Nazi doctrine of blood and soil and the template Hitler used to create the Hitler Youth.

Immediately preceding Ian Young’s account of gay resistance in the Gay Roots anthology is a text about the nationalist thinker Hans Blüher, who wrote The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon at age 24. In contradiction to Magnus Hirschfeld, the Social Democrat and sexuality researcher who proposed that homosexuals and street queens constitute a third gender (urnings), Blüher proposed that homosexual masculinity and male bonding could form a new Männerbund—a secret society of men—that could constitute a new world order from the ashes of a decadent Weimar. Blüher himself went on to support the Nazi party, believing he had found exactly such a masculine assemblage in the Sturmabteilung (SA), and only withdrew his support after the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, the purge of SA leadership that was retroactively justified on homophobic grounds. Prior to that night, an uneasy and ambiguous relationship existed between right-wing segments of the homosexual movement and the Nazi party. Hitler himself initially responded to an emerging scandal around the sexuality of Ernst Röhm, the SA chief, by saying that what he did in his bedroom was a private manner. This ambiguity was settled with the bloody spilt in 1934 and the shift to a more draconian enforcement of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code—the statute prohibiting “lewd and lascivious” acts between men—in 1935.

As a Jewish leftist and a proponent of a non-masculinist conception of homosexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld could read the writing on the wall. He fled Germany in 1930, three years before the Nazis looted and burned his Institute for Sexual Research and its acclaimed archive. Others were more ambivalent. While Hirschfeld’s scientific and rights-oriented approach was a major current, Adolf Brand and his Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, “Community of the Unique,” exemplified another approach. From 1896 to 1931, Brand was the publisher of Der Eigene, the first gay newspaper in the world and the first publication to revisit the thinking of the godfather of individualist anarchism, Max Stirner, half a century after the publication of his book The Unique and its Property.

The Gemeinschaft was Brand’s attempt to forge what Stirner called a Union of Egoists. Brand’s union was a milieu of writers and a private readership numbering in the thousands. Over the decades, the anarchism of der Eigene became less pronounced as Brand shifted focus toward homoerotic art and culture. The newspaper published erotic photographs and poems, as well as treatises on pagan classicism, romanticism, friendship, and intimate comradeship. Its pages gave space to an ideologically idiosyncratic array of anarchists, nationalists, racists, and anti-racists, including proponents of the liberating potential of masculinity or androgyny. Besides complaining about the dwindling membership in the Gemeinschaft, a consequence of economic turmoil but also of defection to the Nazi Party, Brand largely avoided taking a stance on the Nazis until the controversy around Röhm compelled him to denounce the Party for its hypocritical stance on homosexuality and enforcement of Paragraph 175. While some from the Gemeinschaft joined the Third Reich and others resisted it, Brand retreated from politics and avoided repression, with the exception of a handful of police raids on his office.

He died with his wife when their house was destroyed in an Allied bombing in 1945. Many in his milieu didn’t see a contradiction between homosexual interests and heterosexual marriage.

Der Eigene, arguably the first gay newspaper.

Insurrection against Time

The Catastrophe forced every living person to make a choice. Brand, like countless others, chose the path of quiet submission. But this submission was not universal. The dominant historical narrative, which teaches us that obedience was total, threatens to bury the stories of those who fought back. As Benjamin wrote,

Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.

Ian Young starts his account by discussing another homosexual thinker who was prominent before the catastrophe, the poet Stefan George. Today, George is scarcely remembered in the gay canon, but in his time, he was immensely popular. His contemporaries understood him as an authoritarian, an elitist, and a mystic. The reality was much weirder. Born to a winemaker of peasant stock, Stefan demonstrated a propensity for poetry from a very young age. At nine years old, he invented his own language, much richer than his native German, with which to write his poetry. In his twenties, he travelled throughout Europe studying language and translating Baudelaire. Between 1886 and 1899, he wrote his first book of poetry in yet another language he constructed in order to avoid writing in the vulgar German on offer. Though living in Berlin at the time, he rarely even spoke his native language. He almost exclusively socialized with a small scene of Mexican poets he had met abroad; his second new language resembled Spanish more than any other argot. He was never at home, save for in the words written in his own script.

In his introduction to a book of George’s poems translated into both German and English, Stefan’s student Ernst Morwitz wrote,

George was always proud of never having a permanent home, of not depending upon worldly possessions, and of leading a wandering life with only one aim: the search for men to share his views and his form of being.

He wandered for decades through the city and countryside, among the working class and the estates of nobility, seeking talented young men to take on as students. Outsiders referred to the scene around him as the George Circle; by the late Weimar era, prestigious offices throughout the German Academy and publishing world were held by members of the circle. We don’t know much about the inner activity of the circle, but we know that they put a strong emphasis on beauty, mysticism, rigorous self-discipline, heroic vitalism, the Nietzschean transvaluation of prevailing values, and the aestheticism of the male body and homosexual idealism that were newly emerging with reference to Classical Greece. Though we know relatively little, many have inferred that much of the ritual performed by the group was devotional cultus to a youth known as Maximin who had died tragically. George imagined Maximin as a reincarnated Antinous—the beloved boyfriend of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, deified in the imperial religion after he mysteriously drowned in the Nile.

In sharp contrast to the ambiguity of Brand and others—and surprisingly, considering his seemingly reactionary views—George was firmly opposed to the Nazis from the start. He dreamed of a new civilization, but one distinctly Greek rather than German. He supported the elitism of a spiritual and artistic aristocracy, but considered racial elitism vulgar. Though his poetry specifically prophesied the rise of a new Reich and popularized the term Führer long before Hitler’s rise, he was staunchly resolved that Hitler and his Party were absolutely not the ones. Half of the George Circle was Jewish, and Stefan purged anyone who expressed racist ideas or Nazi sympathies. He did not keep his criticism secret, either.

This didn’t stop the Nazis from offering him a position as Poet Laureate of the Third Reich—or any other position he wanted—in 1933. They were convinced that his poetry would lend a seal of prophetic approval to their new order. Not only did George refuse, but he sent Morwitz, a Jew, to deliver his letter of refusal. Fearing a fate similar to that of Nietzsche—who was utilized posthumously by the Nazis—George fled to Switzerland with his closest supporters, vowing that he refused to be buried in German soil while Hitler was still in power. As Morwitz recounts,

In December 1933, Stefan George died in voluntary exile in the Lago Maggiore. The Swiss sculptor Uehlinger made a cast of his hands and two death masks, which have not been released to the public. The Nazi government wished to take his body to his native land and to inter him with great solemnity in one of the famous medieval cathedrals, but this was refused by the friends who had been called to Locarno. They carried his body to a small chapel where the peasants gather for funerals, and without any publicity, buried him in the early morning. He lies in the Cemetery of Minusio. The grey slab of alpine granite bears only his name in the script he himself evolved and used for his works.

Ian Young tells us that George’s disciples stood vigil so that Nazi grave robbers couldn’t disinter his corpse and return him to Germany. During their vigil, they swore an oath to avenge their master, who they understood had died prematurely as a consequence of the stress caused by exile.

Walter Benjamin wrote a great deal about George, both during George’s lifetime and after his death. In 1933, Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem, saying, “If ever God has smitten a prophet by fulfilling his prophesies, then this is the case with George.” The prophet had foreseen the wrath of God, the dark days that began in 1914 and had not yet reached their end. Following his death, the rising sun of the Nazi regime had “cast new lights and shadows ingrained into his deeply furrowed features. But we do not yet know the aura with which history will illuminate those features on the day they receive their expression in eternity.” For Benjamin, George and his circle, in their classicism, were engaged in a “canonical insurrection against time—a holy war against the century that George himself proclaimed,” but this classicism remained a late and statesmanlike discovery. Benjamin accuses George of having failed to produce any meaningful propositions to sweep away the order he saw dying. The disposition of the George circle was purely critical:

George, whose foreknowledge of the catastrophe sprang from his strict discipline and innate sense of the powers of darkness, was, as leader and teacher, able to prescribe only feeble courses of action, remote from the realities of life. In his eyes, art was that seventh ring with which an order that was collapsing on all fronts was to be bound together one more time.

The products of that seventh ring were enough to hold Benjamin’s attention, if not to gain his endorsement. In an earlier letter to Scholem, Benjamin reports, “My hands were flayed by the thorns of a rose bush in George’s garden that was in surprisingly beautiful, partial bloom.” That bloom was Max Kommerell, who had written a treatise on German classicism. Benjamin himself published a critical review of this work under the title “Against a Masterpiece.” In direct response to Komerell’s claim to be able to see in the heavens over their circle, “a sun, a dawn, and the eternal stars,” Benjamin replied:

If images are timeless, theories certainly are not. It is not tradition but their vitality that determines their worth. The authentic image may be old, but the authentic idea is new. It is of today. Admittedly, this “today” may be paltry. But whatever form it takes, our task is to seize it by the horns so that we can interrogate the past. It is the bull whose blood must fill the grave if the spirits of the departed are to appear at its edge. It is this deadly thrust of ideas that is absent from the work of the George Circle. Instead of offering up sacrifices to the present, they avoid it. Every critique must contain some militant element; it, too, knows the daemon of battle.

Benjamin saw many spirits among George and his Circle—satyrs, centaurs, genius and virtus, kairos, Pan, Fortuna, and Psyche, and other daemons—but it was specifically the spirit of battle that was missing, leaving the heroic ambitions of the circle mere fantasy. Their oath of vengeance was not yet known, and would not be fulfilled until after Benjamin died while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. Before his death, Benjamin wrote in one of his final letters to Theodor Adorno that Adorno’s recent book on George and George’s early student Hoffsmanthal was his greatest work. He cited a passage from Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah comparing the complicity among homosexuals to the complicity among Jewish people and described his old friend as coming to George’s rescue, having recognized defiance as the poetic and political foundation of his work.

Walter Benjamin hitting the books.

Adorno dedicated the finished version of his book to Benjamin, whose suicide was still fresh when the ink was laid. What he had seized on in George was

The passionate effort to express oneself in language, keeping banality at a distance, the attempt, however hopeless, to extricate experience from its mortal enemy, which engulfs it in late bourgeois society—oblivion. The banal is consecrated to oblivion; that which is given form is to endure as a secret historiography. […] No power on earth can resist transience that is not itself a transient power. Defiance of society includes a defiance of its language. […] As faithful pupils of Baudelaire, George and Hoffsmanthal established happiness where it was defamed. What is allowed withers and vanishes for him, the unnatural is charged with the task of recreating the multitude of visions that were distorted by the primacy of procreation, irresponsible play seeks to overcome the ruinous seriousness of whatever happens to be. Both shake personal identity to the roots with a silent roar, identity, the walls, of which comprise the innermost prison cell of the existing order.

In the final words of his lengthy treatment, Adorno names what survives of the defiance of the George Circle as “determinate negation”—constitution through destruction.

We will return to the remainder of this secret history shortly. First, we must consult the latter half of Daniel Guérin’s travelogue to set the stage for the events that were to elevate the George Circle and other homosexual guerillas to their place in eternity.

The Army Reserve of the Underworld

When Daniel Guérin returned to Germany in 1933, he was shocked by how radically the country had changed in just one year. Gone were the leftist parties and labor unions that had held so much power, along with the notion that repression would foment proletarian revolution. The parties had underestimated how rapidly and ruthlessly Hitler would destroy their infrastructure and assimilate the useful elements into his own apparatus. The Nazis transformed the former headquarters of their enemies into offices for the SS. They changed the lyrics of old communist songs such as “Brüder zur Sonne, zur Freiheit” (“Brother, toward the Sun, toward Freedom”):

Break the yoke of the tyrants who so cruelly oppress you
And brandish the blood-red flag
Above the workers’ world

The red flag became the swastika flag and the workers’ world became the workers’ state. Buildings, songs, propaganda aesthetics, even May Day were gleichgeschaltet—brought into conformity with the new regime. Guérin writes of Nazi youth training in what had previously been a communist neighborhood:

Were it not for the brown uniforms, one could believe that these were the proud Red Front fighters, the former masters of the streets. In the windows and despite the swastikas, the flags, like yesterday, are the color of blood.

Former comrades, too, were brought into conformity. Guérin “saw the uncommitted drift from one camp to another with disconcerting ease.” The seeds of these betrayals had already been germinating the previous year. Guérin recounts spending the night in a youth hostel at which fascists, communists, and uncommitted youths all shared space. At night, they would join in song together, even if at the end they competed to drown each other out in a cacophony of “Rotfront!” and “Heil Hitler!” and other competing slogans. Yet until that moment, all the voices rang out in unison:

As we walk along side by side,
And sing the ancient air,
Which the forests echo back,
Then, we feel it has to happen:
With us will come new times,
With us will come new times.

One of the youths confessed to Guérin that below the thin veneer of ideology, they all wanted the same thing: Revolution, a new way of life.

Not all of the youth were waiting for the politicians to give them that life. In Weimar, Guérin had encountered a small clique of what were referred to as wild-frei (wild and free), vagabonds whom he describes as “a bizarre mixture of virility and effeminacy.” When he sought more information about this enchanting gang, a comrade encouraged him to contact Christine Fournier, a comradely sociologist who had studied them. She divulged what she could when they met at her office:

Wild-clique—a wild gang, a band of adolescents, gone astray, asocials, a community of youths rejected by the larger community.

They lived communally, Fournier explained, with a strong sense of camaraderie and criminal intimacy. They traveled seeking danger and adventure. They wandered

to escape the temptation of suicide. They create a fantasy world for themselves, a world that rests upon precepts that are completely different from those of accepted morality, a world given over to the most unbridled instinct, a world of hatred toward the society which has abandoned them.

They cross-dressed like pirates, bearing crude tattoos and piercings. They took shelter in caves, forests, and abandoned buildings, furnishing their dwellings with only a single central and communal mattress—Stoszsofas—literally “fucking sofas.” Most shockingly, Fournier related, they practiced secret rites of initiation, sometimes in a deserted forest or along a scenic lake outside Berlin. Variants on these rites involved knife fights, submersion in water, fire, or depraved sex acts. To be initiated into some of the gangs, one had to be fucked by every member or to ejaculate on command.

Fournier blushed and went to the restroom. Guérin opened her files and saw the photographic evidence: wild gangs assembled in their queer garb, performing their rites, displaying phallic talismans. When she returned, she told him:

The initiation celebration always degenerates into a drunken binge, a mad orgy. What these youths have read, of course, may have played a certain role: perhaps they are imitating primitive rites. But I rather believe that is really a matter of a spontaneous return to barbarism. Civilization, after all, is but a very thin, recent, and fragile veneer.

Her 1931 account “Ring Youth Gangs” is included in the English edition of Guérin’s book. In it, she tries to document “a ghost that can be neither grasped nor unmasked, the ghost of the wild gangs.” She calls them gemeinshafts-unguhige, a community of those incapable of living in community. Her social worker colleagues estimated that as many as 14,000 youths belonged to these gangs. She contrasted the wild-frei to the Wandervogel, arguing that whereas the latter

aspired toward a better future, for which their adherents were willing to work, inversely, the gangs, whether deliberately or not, mainly thought about destroying what existed […] They never mastered the vital ability to adapt to social reality. In order to avoid depression and suicide, these gravely mistreated boys & girls create their own fantasy world as compensation for the deprived existence they are force to lead.

Their contempt, she claimed, was evidenced by the names of the gangs themselves: Black Love, Red Oath, Fear not Death, Bloody Bones, Dirty Guys, Forest and Field Sleepers, Tortoises, Brandy Thrush, Black Flag, Forest Pirates, Northern Lights. There were many named after Native American tribes. They carried on criminal activities, including prostitution, out of homosexual bars like the Adonis. Their “bulls” were chosen on the basis of “a record of achievement and a diploma of success in diverse criminal activities and a proven mastery of the whole range of sexual activity.” Each bull had a queen, but all gangs had a beloved, available to all. The gangs provided comradeship, recognition, sexual experience, and adventure. They were the “army reserve of the underworld,” each wearing an edelweiss to identify.

Fournier worried about these youth. As a pious reformer, she knew that only a proper socialist education could save them. Guérin was left with a different anxiety to keep him up at night: he knew that any force that could discipline them would be a terrifying one indeed. He too was cursed with prophecy. When he returned, Fournier told him that one day, a particularly vicious SA captain had called out to her in the streets. She was shocked to recognize that this Nazi was a former bull from one of the gangs she had studied.

Despite this, Guérin assures us:

Not all the wild-frei wound up in the service of the Nazis. On the contrary, groups of youth continued to “wander” and hide in the forests through Nazi rule, including the war years. Some of these groups actively harassed the Hitler Youth and engaged in other anti-government activities.

Slim pamphlets have circulated in the anarchist underground in recent decades detailing some of the exploits of these gangs. In one such text, named for the common slogan “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth,” Wolfi Landstreicher celebrates the non-conformity and resistance of these

youth largely from the exploited classes, attacking the domination under which they lived with audacity even when it took the form of a genocidal totalitarian police state of the most extreme form.

Other accounts have been published on libcom.org and by the Anarchist Federation. All the sources agree that starting in 1938, the Nazi authorities (especially the Hitler Youth and Gestapo) were increasingly concerned with working-class gangs, which they referred to collectively as Edelweiss pirates. Their little revolts included absenteeism, graffiti, illegal leafleting, industrial sabotage, and physical violence against Nazi targets. Surprise attacks on Hitler Youth camping and hiking groups were carried out in the countryside and in the cities. These groups had no apparent ideology and only informal structures. Songs stolen by the Nazis were stolen in turn, adjusted once more to extol freedom and the joy of the attack. The pirates sheltered escapees and deserters and carried out armed raids on military depots. In 1944, they killed a Gestapo chief. By that year, Himmler himself had issued orders for the SS to combat the youth cliques. Some were captured and hanged, but countless more stayed free. After the war, many of the Edelweiss pirates continued their revolt against the new masters: the allied powers.

A collage by Claude Cahun.

The anarchist pamphlets celebrate the resistance of the wild ones who continued to wander, but omit all mention of their queer rituals and form of life. These rites and hustles afforded them the freedom to be the destroyers and creators of their own cosmology. When Fournier tells us that they lived in their own world, she is not referring to the individual delusions of one wild-frei or another, she is speaking to the sensibilities and consensus reality that they shared—an Other Germany below and at war with the Third Reich.

After the Catastrophe, Guérin referred again and again to this Other Germany that existed in the resistance. He sought to take us on a journey to

search out our friends of the Other Germany—a small group of staunch militants who have put the fratricidal quarrels of the past behind them and who continue the struggle under conditions of illegality and terror. They will greet us with this simple sentence: we have remained true to what we were.

Guérin tells us that “the international today is but a tiny flame against the worldwide onslaught. But it still burns, and that is already something, enough so that humankind does not despair […] despite all the determined efforts to extinguish it, that flame still burns, but in the shadows and in the silence.”

In his memoires, he traces a sequence of little fires carried by militant individuals and tended in the hearths of safe houses. These little fires spread across the country, forming constellations. Guérin would ride his bike from rendezvous to rendezvous, carrying contraband handmade newsletters and ephemera between comrades.

Deprived of leaders or having only rare contact with them, these small groups have learned to fend for themselves, taking initiatives and improvising under conditions of illegality. For proletarians once pressed into activity like cogs in a machine, this has been a fruitful test of their sound common sense.

Guérin doesn’t reveal too much. Likewise, he offers few conclusions. The ones he spells out can be summarized by saying that perhaps shared reverence for our martyrs could inspire solidarity and cohesion—that for a decade, the left had failed to give adequate attention to the fascist phenomenon—that all revolutionaries must purge their movements of nationalism or risk paving the way for National Socialism—and that the only way to defeat fascism is with a living example, “a flesh and blood ideal.” He ends his account in the cemetery where the dead of a past generation’s revolution are buried: “This is the only corner of Germany that still belongs to us. Wilted flowers.” He calls his testimony but a minute of a fugitive reality.

A collage by Claude Cahun.

The Secret Germany

Ian Young’s hagiography preserves several accounts of queer participation in that fugitive reality.

Starting in 1940, an aristocrat named Count Albrecht von Bernstorff set out to undermine the regime from the inside. For years, he maintained a reputation as an effete, a useless effeminate and socialite. This served to conceal the fact that he was using his social web to operate an underground railroad smuggling Jews and dissidents out of Germany.

Eventually, he was caught and sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. There, some witnesses report, he was treated horrendously and tortured by the guards, yet still endeavored to keep other prisoners’ spirits up. He promised to throw a big party at his estate for everyone when it was all over. He didn’t survive to host the party, but hundreds remained free because of his efforts.

Count Albrecht had warned his contacts in Holland about the Nazi invasion before it began. Afterwards, the Nazi leadership in Holland consistently reported the persistence of the homosexual weeds in their garden.

In one instance, members of a gay society took measures ahead of the German invasion in preparation for the Catastrophe. The editor of their paper, Levensrecht, burned the entire mailing list of the organization. Another comrade, Arent van Santhorst, committed the entire list to memory.

Willem Arondaus and Sjoerd Baaker joined a very gay resistance group in Amsterdam, associated with Gerrit van der Veen. They carried out a number of attacks, including the dynamiting of a records office that destroyed Gestapo case files on thousands of suspected deviants. The group also forged 80,000 fake IDs for others. This tip gave many the headstart they needed to withstand catastrophe.

Jean Desbordes was an old protégé of Jean Cocteau, who described being disturbed by his “starry gaze.” They spent a summer together traveling and visiting Gertrude Stein and Coco Chanel. At the time, Cocteau was writing Le livre blanc, while Desbordes wrote his pantheistic book, J’adore. His later works included a play and a study of the Marquis de Sade. After the Nazis invaded France, Desbordes joined the resistance, acting as a messenger between the French resistance and members of the Polish resistance who were operating out of London. In 1944, he was arrested in Paris by the pro-Nazi French militia and taken to a Gestapo torture center; another detainee reports having seen his corpse there in a blood-spattered bathroom, disfigured by violence. He kept silent unto death. None of his associates were arrested.

Another resistance fighter, Robert Desnos, whom Ian Young describes as a “gay Surrealist poet,” wrote resistance poems and died in a concentration camp. Before his death, he comforted others by using astrology and palmistry to tell their fortunes. Susan Griffin recounts a story wherein he read the palm of a man waiting in line for the gas chamber. He ecstatically proclaimed long life for the man, leading to a wave of jubilation to spread through the line. The disruption was so bewildering that the guards sent everyone back to their beds.

A portrait of Robert Desnos taken by Claude Cahun.

In his poem, “If You Only Knew,” Desnos wrote,

If you only knew how I love you and, though you do not love me, how happy I am, how strong and proud I am, with your image in my mind,
to leave the universe.
How happy I am to die for it.

A British secret agent named Denis Rake joined the French resistance. Asked about his many acts in the underground during an interview for the film The Sorrow and the Pity, Rake replied,

“I think deep down what I wanted to do was to be able to display the same kind of courage my friends who had become flyers had. Being a homosexual, one of my strongest fears was lacking the courage to do certain things.”

Rake claimed that his previous career as a drag performer helped him as a secret agent. At one point, he had an affair with a German officer who was subsequently transferred to the front and killed.

Most spectacularly, in 1944, a disabled veteran of the German armed forces named Claus von Stauffenberg carried a suitcase with a bomb into a meeting at Hitler’s East Prussian office and hid it under a table. A network of conspirators was positioned to seize power once the Führer was dead. The bomb almost killed everyone in the room, including the Führer himself—it would have succeeded if someone had not moved it behind a marble pillar just before it exploded. Hitler was only slightly wounded, but in the aftermath, 12,000 suspected dissidents were rounded up on suspicion of conspiracy.

Many have heard the story of von Stauffenberg’s attentat, but few know of his background in the George Circle. Von Stauffenberg had been one of the twelve students who accompanied Stefan George to Switzerland and stood vigil over his grave.

Stefan George and the von Stauffenberg brothers.

Ian Young calls von Stauffenberg “a spirit of fire,” contending that he was driven by his spiritual background with Stefan George. He emphasizes the circle’s

heroic vitalism with its reverence for culture and the Greek tradition, its homoerotic mysticism, and its belief that the teaching could save the world if transformed into heroic action by the courage and integrity of the initiate.

Von Stauffenberg inspired his comrades to conspiracy by reciting George’s poem “Antichrist”:

The Lord of the Flies is expanding his Reich;
All treasures, all blessings are swelling his might…
Down, down with the handful who doubt him!
Cheer louder, you dupes of the ambush of hell;
What’s left of life-essence, you squander its spells
And only on doomsday feel paupered.
You’ll hang out your tongues, but the trough has been drained;
You’ll panic like cattle whose farm is ablaze…
And dreadful the blast of the trumpet.

Von Stauffenberg named the conspiracy the Hidden or Secret Germany. Members of the George circle spent a decade infiltrating the Nazi Party and the German military to put themselves in proximity to Hitler in order to fulfill their heroic oath. With George gone, they were left to meet Benjamin’s challenge—to ensure that their dead would be safe from the enemy.

Young argues:

“George’s concept of a semi-secret society, an aristocratic elite of initiates, in love with an idealized version of Attic Greece and employing the tenets of the Master’s crypto-religious Maximin cult in the modern world, must seem to our contemporary standards arrogant, naïve, and at least a little ridiculous. But Claus von Staufenberg’s life proves that, for all its theatricality, the Circle was not so ridiculous after all. For of all its members, Stauffenberg felt most deeply the significance of George’s ideas, and took them most seriously. And when the time came, he acted on them, and gave his life for them.”

Spiritual Warfare

A simultaneous outbreak of subversion within the German military on the occupied island of Jersey can be attributed to a pair of queer surrealist stepsisters and lovers, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe. Ryan Helterbrand’s “Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise” offers the most extensive English-language treatment of Cahun’s background and resistance since scholars rediscovered her in the 1980s. While a good deal of attention has been paid to her art since the 1990s, Helterbrand looks to the revolutionary anti-fascist praxis of the “other Cahun.”

In Paris, in 1935, Cahun joined Andre Breton and Georges Bataille in forming the group Contre-Attaque, “the combat union of revolutionary intellectuals,” to fight fascists through art and in the street. They wanted to form an organization that would operate outside Stalinist ideology and the structures of bureaucratic communism. Dissatisfied with the popular front, which would soon fail to prevent invasion while practically abandoning the revolution, they vowed to fight fascists and capitalism simultaneously. They wanted to break with all notions of community based on nation or ideology to make way for new communities grounded in elective affinities. In their time together, Breton described Cahun as “possessed of a very extensive magical power.”

Claude Cahun.

By 1937, she was disillusioned with street fighting and moved to the island of Jersey, which the Nazis invaded in 1940. The initial Nazi bombing of the island was horrifying, killing many residents. Enraged, Cahun found a pair of revolvers given her by her uncle and began practicing her marksmanship. She prepared to carry out an attack on a gathering of Nazi officers, but Suzanne inspired her to take a different approach.

Rather than die in a shootout, they formed an underground cell: “the Nameless Soldiers and their Comrades.” They published thousands of leaflets aimed at using Surrealism to foment revolt in the ranks of the occupying German soldiers. Their warfare was informed by Cahun’s time in Contra-Attaque and the theory of perpetual insurrection she had developed there. When the couple was arrested in 1944, prosecutors referred to them as “spiritual sharpshooters.” Cahun was found guilty of having waged spiritual warfare against the Nazis.

Helterbrand writes:

What was necessary for true insurrection was neither blind faith nor submission to a particular party or political form, but instead the presence and encouragement of psychic contradiction and complexities. Not ideological certainties, but psychological ambiguities. The true revolutionary embracing their aggressive drives, their own inner alterity, could instantiate a new consciousness.

She believed in writing as a vehicle via which the writer and reader could both transform themselves in the encounter. She understood this transformation as reconfiguring the communal distribution of the sensible. Taking her cues from Bataille’s Acéphale society, she determined that

the organization of the movement had to be formless, headless, no meetings, no leaders. And anyone who felt moved by a particular piece of propaganda could join the resistance simply by performing their own act of rebellion and signing it as nameless soldiers.

This insurrection in sensibility aimed to destabilize the occupation by sowing confusion and paranoia within Nazi leadership and inspiring internal acts of sabotage. The nameless soldiers achieved this by exalting defeatism and encouraging introspection and internal revolt among the soldiers. She encouraged them to become otherwise.

Helterbrand proposes that we see

Cahun’s anarchistic and resolutely individualist program of anti-Nazi resistance on Jersey […] as her own instantiation of a headless, acephalic community, one dedicated to rescuing from the trenches of ideology all those who had been “brainwashed” by the unilateral sensibilities and moralities of fascism, National Socialism, Communism, or capitalism.

One of their earliest tracts reads

FIGHTINGFIGHTINGFIGHTING WITHOUT END
HORRIFIC FIGHTING WITHOUT END

Other tracts simply repeat the phrase ohne Ende, without end. Theirs was a conspiracy without names or ends. Because they were not aiming for a revolution in the power-holders of the state, but rather “perpetual insurrection in the sensibilities of all,” they equipped themselves with new weapons charged with the contradiction, ambivalence, and uncertainly of the without. Weapons without name. Weapons aligned to produce inner and outer alterity. These nameless weapons included reports from the war, tips for psychic self-defense, instructions for casual sabotage, encouragements for desertion (“with violence if necessary”), and aphorisms from Nietzsche ridiculing nationalism and the state. They were composed in German in order to appear to be coming from the soldiers themselves, written on rolling papers and slipped into pockets and through fences around town.

Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe were prepared to be arrested at any moment, so when the day finally came, they swallowed poison en route to the prison. Their suicide attempt failed, but fortuitously delayed them long enough that they missed the last transport headed for the concentration camps. They remained imprisoned on Jersey, where they discovered why they were considered such a threat by their enemies. The prison was filled with German soldiers who had revolted or attempted to desert. They all seemed to be aware of who the women were and showed them care and solidarity. The theory of writing as a means to engage others in a process of becoming had proved itself: Cahun’s and Malherbe’s efforts had succeeded in attuning at least some of the soldiers to the Hidden Germany beneath all the Nazi spectacle.

The courts sentenced them to death. Their executions were to be the ultimate act in their spiritual war, a sacrifice they were prepared to make—but that never came to pass. The war ended before they too became martyrs of the underworld. On the day the Nazis on the island surrendered, they were the very last prisoners to be released, considered the most dangerous.

Claude Cahun.

Epitaph

I lived in those times. For a thousand years
I have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted;
When all human decency was imprisoned,
I was free among the masked slaves.

-Robert Desnos, “Epitaph”

“Stauffenberg, von Bernstorff, Arondaus, Bakker, Desbordes, Desnos, Rake… diverse kinds of people, but all brought together in spirit by a cruel time that demanded heroic action from those who could find the courage within themselves. At least in the cases of Jean Desbordes, the two Dutchmen and the two Germans, their work in the resistance seems intimately linked to an idealism rooted in homosexuality or homosexual ideology. For Rake, an effort to prove himself as brave as the ‘normal’ man resulted in his proving himself braver than anyone could have expected or hoped.

There is something of a common pattern here; the precocious writer of erotic poetry; the amusing drag queen. The kind of people Americans call ‘sissies.’ Beneath the pallid and perhaps limp-wristed exteriors, often lies a character of great strength—strong enough to survive adversity and to flourish. Strong enough, even, to survive the rigors and neglect of what is called History.”

-Ian Young

We need hardly say more. This has been a long time coming and these stories and spirits will take time to assert themselves in the present. For now, we can conclude with a few gestures toward further lines of inquiry.

The Wild-Frei constituted their own underworld. The George Circle conspired in the name of a secret Germany, while Guérin and Cahun devoted their efforts to communicating that Germany’s existence. This space of alterity was created through an insurrection against time in the realm of the sensible; it was built with poetry, ritual, sexuality, and gunpowder. All the ancestors we have invoked here were empowered by and through the ways that their resistance formed a world—secret, hidden, other—in defiance of the world in which the Nazis sought total power.

This project of totality existed in unbroken continuity with the terror inflicted by the forces that constructed Whiteness throughout the world, a terror that returned the apparatuses and techniques of extraction and extermination to the European soil from which they first set sail. This is why there is no “before” or “after” the Catastrophe. As Benjamin puts it, where we see a chain of events, the Angel of History sees a single pile of wreckage mounting toward the sky. The perceived moment of catastrophe was simply an apocalypse in the most ancient sense of the word: an unveiling of what already was, of who we already were.

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” -Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

Guérin’s message from the underground—we’ve remained what we were—applies to the Nazis as well. The terror of fascism is woven into the very fabric of the norm. The Nazis foresaw a thousand-year Reich, envisioning themselves eternal. They are, but not because of the future they promised. Rather, they are the inheritors of millennia of development in the techniques of domination and order. Hocquenghem was prophetic in 1980 to insist that the Gay Liberation of the time was neither unprecedented nor irreversible; we’d be wise to remember his warning today. All states are formed through the sacrifice of the Other. “Faggot” shares a signifier with fasces, a bundle of sticks burned for the coherence of the community. We have been that Other many times—but we will not go easily again. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes once more.

Our enemies are fighting for eternity and so are we. The Wild-Frei declared “Eternal War,” and Cahun called it “Perpetual Insurrection.” Our ghosts restore for us the potential of a revolt without end. The right- and left-wing revolutionaries of the preceding century were animated by a masculinist idea of virility, attempting to repeat the mythical final act of the crucified by vanquishing death itself. The fantasy of the triumph of life over death has already born its rotten fruit. In death, we can access an eternity still denied to the transhumanists of our time. Among the dead, we find our greatest co-conspirators. The fact that their worlds have such purchase on the present leaves us the task of redeeming their efforts. Edvard Munch elaborated a vitalism intertwined with death when he wrote, “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

In the rapid escalation of armed attacks by spree shooters, today’s Nazis reclaim their capacity for sacrifice. Our only hope is, in turn, to sacrifice that sacrificial impulse of fascism in the name of non-fascist life, anarchy. Determinate negation: to be bound together through our proximity to death, our personal relationships to our shared dead establishing the ground for a world held in common. In this project, we cannot limit our critique of fascism, neither for ideological nor social comfort. Our hostility to the terror of the norm must be expansive, it must cut to the very core of our being.

The history traced above illustrates how the parties and their leaders have failed to turn back the tide of catastrophe. It is no wonder that Guérin turned to anarchism after living through this mess. Remember, it was the bull who turned Gestapo; George had to die for his circle to blossom; Claude and Suzanne were ready for martyrdom but survived all the same. Ryan Helterbrand proposed the Nameless Soldiers as a mirror of the Acéphale society, which spent the years after Contra-Attack preparing for the Catastrophe through bacchic worship of a headless figure. Reputedly, they desired to sacrifice one of their own. They disbanded because each wanted to be the sacrifice, but none to hold the knife. Cahun succeeded where Acéphale failed: she sacrificed herself and her enemies by choosing the initiating ego death of metamorphosis. Initiation, ego death, opens the door to the immanence of another reality through newfound sensibilities. The Fool’s journey ends by accessing the World. We must be willing to lose our own heads.

Hitler lost his head, too. And despite the decades-long antifascist exhortation for neo-Nazis to follow their leader, their world persists. It went underground following the death of the Führer, that figure invested with so much psychic and political power. It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to trace the survival of Nazism, but the apoliteic proposals of Julius Evola—to preserve the world of fascist sensibility through art and mysticism—have surely played a key role. Fascism, too, is an underworld vying for hegemony in the apocalypse of Liberal Democracy. Now, as then, there is a drifting between worlds. Fascists have appropriated the position of outsider and the promise of fraternity in order to swell their ranks with disaffected young men. Now, as then, queers like Milo or the pick-me faggots of X make the mistake of ambiguity in light of catastrophe.

More troubling are those comrades brought into conformity, either with Nazi militias or with the delusion of “Saving Democracy,” or, worse, the West. We wish there were simple answers to the dilemma of friends turning into enemies while others remain steadfastly what they were. Would that we could reduce it to a matter of strength of will or anti-racist commitments. But eternity demands our discernment. All we can do is honor our friends among the dead, and let their memory nourish the lifeways—queer, anarchic, other—they lived and died for.

Before joining the ranks of the blessed dead, another Willem, wrote:

My trans comrades have transformed me, solidifying my conviction that we will be guided to a dreamed-of future by those most marginalized among us today. I have dreamed it so clearly that I have no regret for not seeing how it turns out. Thank you for bringing me so far along.

In the years since then, we’ve seen an international trans panic surrounding the all too predicable figure of the Child, this time the trans child. We warned over a decade ago that the Child was the black hole of all queer politics. With no viable political response, this seemingly inevitable and uninterrupted path toward catastrophe demands we imagine ways out, sidestepping the dead ends and honeypots of representation and identity. We need methods that anticipate the coming dilemmas. If we consolidate these lifeways, we might imagine another map. Invoking these stories, we pray for the ludic efficacy of their underground forms: the George circle came closest to killing Hitler, the wild boys continued their war when all else acquiesced, and two lesbian poets calling themselves nameless soldiers inspired mass insubordination among the enemy ranks.

Idris saw in Michael Reinoehl the spirit of John Brown reborn.² In writing his letter to the former, he calls to presence the eternal war they both waged. Let’s append a few more names to the unending litany of the fallen in that war. What transmigrations of the soul are demanded now?

I place these names, images and sacred texts upon an altar. At the center, a mirror in which we ourselves are revealed. Before the mirror, a candle for the tiny eternal flame of the international underground. It is a black flame, burning from the sun in the underworld. Before the candle, a knife. I offer the waters of memory and the flowers that, by nature of their secret heliotropism, turn toward the sun.

Down with the Party form!
Long live the revolt of the liminal!
The dead walk among us!

Şehîd namirin!
Bella ciao!

“The Anarchist” by Sascha Schneider, a gay artist who contributed to Brand’s Der Eigene. The illustration at the top of this article is also by Schneider.

Charlottesville, Revisited—2017 to 2024 : What Can a Moment of Peril Tell Us about Our Own Dangerous Times?

2024-08-11T10:33:02Z

Seven years ago, anarchists and other anti-fascists converged in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally. The organizers of the rally intended to bring together Klansmen, neo-Nazis, far-right militias, and fascists from the so-called “alt-right” to build a unified white supremacist street movement.

Fascists had already been building momentum in the streets for a year. The rally was poised to establish them as a legitimate pole in United States politics. If that succeeded, millions of Donald Trump’s supporters might join them. All that the organizers of “Unite the Right” had to do was get through the weekend without incident.

A few hundred brave people set out to stop them. The anti-fascists were outnumbered, underprepared, and terrified.

It’s important to remember this today—first, because the Trump era is not over. As exhausting and demoralizing as it is, we still face the same threats and challenges we confronted seven years ago, and the outcome remains as uncertain today as it was then. Revisiting the events in Charlottesville illuminates the stakes of our current struggles—when fascists are less active in the streets, but are seeking to take control of the entire country through the apparatus of the state. At the same time, the outcome of the events in Charlottesville shows how much a small number of courageous people can accomplish by putting their lives on the line when it counts, even when victory seems impossible.

We present here a review of the events, drawing on the recollections of some of those who were on the front lines.

Anti-fascists in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.

The Gathering Storm

The 2016 Trump campaign had emboldened fascists of all stripes. Coming out of Trump’s electoral victory, many fascists adopted a strategy in which they targeted locations they considered to be liberal hotspots, such as Berkeley, California and Portland, Oregon.¹ In some ways, this approach was savvy: in a polarizing political context, in which hatred of the other was among the chief motivations of their potential supporters, it enabled them to seek recruits by provoking and caricaturing their opposition.

At first, the strategy bore fruit for them. On April 15, 2017, fascists rampaged through Berkeley, recording video footage of themselves beating people to use for recruiting purposes. In retrospect, we can identify that day as the high point of their campaign targeting the Bay Area.

Charlottesville is a liberal college town in Virginia. Pursuing the same strategy his colleagues had employed in Berkeley, the suit-and-tie fascist Richard Spencer led a torch-lit rally in Charlottesville on May 13, 2017 protesting the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Seeking to forge ties between various brands of Nazis and white nationalists, Spencer’s supporters organized another rally for August 12.

Friday, August 11

On the night of August 11, hundreds of fascists who had arrived early participated in a surprise torch-lit march through the streets of Charlottesville. At the conclusion of the march, they attacked a small number of counterdemonstrators at the foot of the statue of Thomas Jefferson while the authorities looked on passively.

Watching footage of the march and the attacks with which it concluded, many people around the United States suddenly understood the threat. The situation was even more frightening for people in Charlottesville itself.

I am one of the people who went to Charlottesville to shut down the “Unite the Right” rally.

On the night of the 11th, many of us went to UVA [University of Virginia at Charlottesville] campus to see if there was something we could do and independently arrived at the conclusion that it was not the night to engage with those fuckers in the way that they deserved. We decided that we just had to take the loss for twelve hours and pin our hopes on the next day. Later that night, there were arguments, accusations of cowardice, recriminations, second-guessing. Personally, I felt that all that would have happened would have been that we would have gotten completely fucked up and possibly worse, making it even less likely that there would be enough people on hand for the day of the rally itself.

I remember somebody saying that some UVA employee in a uniform told them, “You all should get out of here. If they go after you, we’re not going to be able to do anything about it.” That was a classic cowardly law-enforcement thing to say. At the same time, it was not factually untrue.

On the other hand, the night of the 11th, someone I didn’t know at a meeting I participated in said that his best advice for the next day was to “Fake it till you make it.”

That was basically what we did.

I did not sleep on the night of August 11, 2017. I was certain that some of us were going to die the next day.

My friends and I had traveled to Charlottesville in order to put a stop to the “Unite the Right” gathering. We had just returned from the campus of the University of Virginia, and based on what we had seen, I felt that there was no chance that the next day was going to end without bloodshed.

On that night, if a necromancer had presented me with the following prophecy, I am sad to say that I would have accepted it with relief:

“One of you will die tomorrow, but your opponents will leave town in disarray. Public opinion will turn sharply against them both locally and nationally. They will cannibalize each other and this event will be remembered as the nadir of the Trump administration. In three years’ time, young people will topple the government that these murderers serve.”

The truth is, I was certain that we were in for something much worse than that. I lay awake until dawn, running through scenarios in my mind. Then I got up and prepared to go confront the fascists.

Looking back afterwards, one anarchist who was in Charlottesville recounted,

Friday night seriously shook people, but it probably made us more determined and smarter on Saturday. I almost want to say wiser. We knew exactly what kind of victory we needed to deny them, and we knew we would have to do it without the advantage of physical superiority.

Saturday, August 12

On August 12, angry locals, religious leaders, and other opponents of fascism squared off against the fascists amassing in downtown Charlottesville. Police looked on, permitting intense confrontations to take place between the two groups without doing anything. Anti-fascists found themselves in a volatile and perilous situation.

State troopers guarding the fence around the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.

I had no interest in dealing with an out-of-state gun charge or getting into a situation in which I might be tussling with police with a gun in my pants. Those are two things I prefer to avoid under any circumstances. For that reason, I left my gun in my vehicle on the morning of the 12th. But later that morning, as it became inescapably clear what sort of situation we were dealing with, I went back and got it. At that point, I was less concerned about an out-of-state gun charge than I was about being unprepared for something worse.

Never before or since have I been involved in a day so fucked up that I sincerely felt that the least-bad option was to be messing around with a gun in a chaotic situation involving United States police officers. Not only did it feel certain that some of us were going to die, I also feared that it was entirely possible that one of us might have no choice other than to employ lethal force.

There were quite a few anti-fascists with guns that day, not all of them open-carrying. One of the under-reported aspects of the day was that a large number of anti-fascists exhibited a fair degree of restraint and decent situational awareness in regards to gun safety. Many of us will always regret not managing to be in the right place at the right time to stop the fascist who killed Heather Heyer, but it’s easier to perpetrate a mass casualty incident than it is to prevent one. Despite the considerable stress and uncertainty of the situation, no one on our side has anything to regret in that department.

By contrast, there was one neo-Confederate guy who fired his gun in the immediate vicinity of the crowd. That did not speak highly of his judgment. If we did not kill anyone, it was because we decided not to, despite having been directly provoked.

Ultimately, the street confrontations forced public officials to rescind the permit for the “Unite the Right” rally, and the same police officers that the fascists had been courting were forced to drive them out of the park in which they were gathered. This aroused consideration agitation and dismay among the participants in the rally, who had hoped to hold an orderly event while projecting an image of strength.

In a subsequent interview, one anarchist who fought in Charlottesville argued that the rally was defeated by the diversity of tactics that anti-fascists employed and by the contradictory goals of the participants:

Unite the Right was all about image. They wanted three things: to look like victims of antifa/”SJW” aggression, look like friends of the police, and look like they were winning the physical battle in the streets. I think all those wires got crossed in Charlottesville because of the diversity of their opposition…

A lot of these alt-right people are scared of confrontation, even though they fantasize about power. You could tell that made it hard for them to psychologically switch gears; by the time they figured out how to deal with one kind of counter-protestor, the situation had changed and they had to go back to square one. They had to think too hard. They didn’t know if they were going to get punched or prayed at. And the whole time, they’re getting pelted with paint balloons, and they just look silly.

Then you had macho types who reacted to that paralysis by just going ham, charging in swinging by themselves. That was scary, because these were big dudes who understood violence, but it didn’t really serve their larger goals, and they lost fights because we would surround them and beat them back. It didn’t help those guys that their official rally was up a hill behind barricades.

Finally, there were the guys in full-on riot gear, plexiglass shields and clubs and face-shields, stuff like that. They had a hard time early in the day, marching into the park, because they couldn’t figure out what kind of confrontation they were in; they wanted to beat us up but they wanted it to look like our fault, and they came out worse on both counts. Later, they regrouped, and it seemed like they were ready to crack some skulls in a more paramilitary style—charge out of the park in formation and just trample whoever was in their way. I think that would have happened more if the rally had gone on longer, because they were starting to give up on the whole image thing. We should have had more tools to obscure their vision and keep them at a distance. But the cops dispersed the rally before it went there. I think we can take some credit for that.

This sounds weird, but I think anarchists might have better discipline than Nazis, at least in this kind of situation. Fascists had the advantage when things were really scripted, and a lot of them would have had the advantage in a one-on-one fight, but they were just clumsy when it came to navigating a complex situation. I guess I mean self-discipline. But it has this real communal aspect to it, because we actually care about each other and pay attention to each other, like not just our cliques and affinity groups, but also strangers. You can’t fake that. You can’t squeeze that out of an authoritarian ideology.

Anti-fascists tore down the fences protecting the “Unite the Right” rally, ultimately compelling officials to cancel the permit for the event.

The urgency of the situation drove many people to take risks that they would not ordinarily have taken.

The standard liberal narratives—”Don’t feed a cycle of violence” and “Leave the police to handle public safety”—strike me as particularly out of touch with reality in relation to what happened in Charlottesville. First, the police told us on Friday night that when push came to shove, they were not going to be protecting anyone if doing so actually meant putting themselves in harm’s way. We’ve seen the same thing in Uvalde since then. Second, it seemed very clear to me that if the fascists got away with doing this in Charlottesville, they would be doing the very same thing in my own town soon thereafter. I felt like, Well, I guess it’s better that we do this now in Virginia, or we’re just going to be even more screwed when we have to do it at home a month from now.

From my perspective, throughout the weekend, everyone who took on the rally sort of shared a sense that we had not voluntarily picked that fight. It wasn’t easy to tell either by appearance or by people’s actions who was from Charlottesville and who was from somewhere else.

Bullies and sadists frequently get themselves into trouble by underestimating their opponent and overestimating their own strength, whereas people who—for whatever reason—become psychologically accustomed to being bullied or dominated can get themselves into trouble by overestimating their opponent and underestimating themselves. In Charlottesville, the fascists took us lightly, and it didn’t work out for them.

In a subsequent retrospective, participants in the events in Charlottesville argued that the police only took action after it became clear that the fascists could not win on their own:

During the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the police largely stood back and let the confrontations play out. They only interceded to declare an unlawful assembly and clear the park when anti-fascists forced their hand, after the city and state authorities had announced a State of Emergency. This is consistent with a pattern that goes back at least a century. When white supremacists have the upper hand, police tend to give them free rein; when anti-fascists gain the advantage, police step in aggressively.

After Unite the Right, Charlottesville police faced a great deal of criticism for their hands-off handling of the demonstration. The response of police departments around the United States has been to shift to a more aggressive strategy involving massive multi-agency mobilizations and preemptive crackdowns.

Had the police been sufficiently prepared for the situation in Charlottesville, the rally would have gone through as planned—and as a consequence, a great deal more violence might ultimately have taken place.

A tragedy took place in Charlottesville that day, nonetheless. That afternoon, as angry neo-Nazis and Klansmen fanned out from the park, James Alex Fields, a participant in the fascist mobilization, drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer and grievously injuring nineteen other people.

Nothing could make up for the loss of Heather’s life. Many more people could easily have died in that attack; as it is, its consequences linger in the lives of hundreds of people. We honor Heather’s courage and the courage of all the others who knowingly put themselves in harm’s way that day for the sake of protecting others.

In 2024, the place where Heather Heyer lost her life remains a place of memory, mourning, and calls to resist.

Afterwards

In response to the rally and the attack, people immediately organized solidarity actions around the world. At least twenty took place on August 12, and well over sixty the following day. These brought a new energy to the movement against fascism.

For example, anarchists in Chapel Hill, North Carolina organized a report-back from participants in the events in Charlottesville at the Confederate monument in the center of downtown. The next day, activists in the neighboring city of Durham pulled down the Confederate monument there, then faced down a threatened response from the Ku Klux Klan. A year later, people tore down the monument in Chapel Hill, setting a template for the wave of statue topplings throughout the country in 2020.

Meanwhile, corporate media outlets were caught flat-footed by the tragedy in Charlottesville. Their previous narratives about clashes between “extremists” had not prepared their audiences for the murder of Heather Heyer. For a few days, while corporate editors scrambled to reformulate their narratives, journalists had their hands free to simply tell the truth about what had happened in Charlottesville—and this drove some people to participate in their first anti-fascist mobilizations. These events brought Trump’s approval rating to its lowest point in the first years of his presidency, compelling him to fire his white nationalist advisor, Steve Bannon.

On Saturday, August 19, many thousands of people converged in Boston to respond to a fascist rally. A week later, on Sunday, August 27, thousands of people converged in Berkeley to make a planned fascist demonstration impossible.

Anarchists mobilize in a black bloc to prevent fascists from recruiting or murdering people in Berkeley on August 27, 2017.

Joseph Biden announced his 2020 presidential campaign with a video about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. This underscores the importance of that day’s events in United States history. But neither Biden nor his supporters were there. The people who made the difference that day were not politicians or centrist Democrats—they were ordinary locals, many of them poor people of color, and partisans of liberation.

I already faced several felony charges from an anti-fascist march—but that was against Trump, not street Nazis. I wanted to play it cool in Charlottesville and help out however I could without making my legal situation significantly worse. I handed out earplugs to my friends as I watched them march towards the Lee monument. I felt certain that at least one of them was going to die.

Later, I helped report on police movements—which turned out to be useless, as the police were hands off that day. There were fascists in the park, anti-fascists in the street, and police in the parking lot. In other words, anti-fascists sandwiched between uniformed thugs on either side.

I helped take down the license plates of the cars that the Nazis were driving, in hopes of identifying them. I also spent some time outside the jail, in case any anti-fascists were arrested.

After the car attack, I moved to a local church that had opened its doors as a safe space for anti-fascists. Courageous teens from the youth group ran security outside it to make sure no far-right infiltrators made it into the sanctuary.

Inside, I saw one masked-up anti-fascist lower her face covering. It was one of my codefendants. I had been mass-arrested, so I had quite a few codefendants, but this was someone from my trial group. At first, I panicked: “If anything happens to you,” I thought, “it could jeopardize our case.” But that thought didn’t make it all the way to my lips before my heart swelled for my comrade.

Earplugs, notes, radio communication about police movement. That’s not nothing, but—I wish I had fought. Not for the glory. Not to have a good story. There are just moments when it’s time to fight with everything you have before it’s too late.

Going Forward

If we compare their activity under the Trump administration to what they have done under Biden, it is clear that, whatever their pretensions to being “anti-government,” none of these fascists and militia members are particularly motivated when it comes to taking on the state. They are much more interested in serving as the street-level supporters of an authoritarian government. We cannot understand the threat that they pose apart from the threat that state power itself represents.

As we argued in August 2017,

Ultimately, a thoroughgoing anti-fascist movement should not focus on targeting fascist groups that are so marginal that they stick out from the rest of the political spectrum, but take on the infrastructure through which any authoritarian program will be enacted. That is to say, it should focus on the state itself. If we simply fight defensive battles, the fascists will eventually gain the initiative. We should take the experiences of fighting together that we can experience in anti-fascist struggle and use those as points of departure to work together to solve all of the problems that we have.

This applies regardless of whoever is in the White House come January 2025. While Trump promises to deport millions of people—a threat we should take seriously and prepare to confront—we must not forget that, thus far, both the Obama and Biden administrations have deported many more people than the Trump administration did. Rather than letting Trump and his foot soldiers terrorize us into the arms of centrist politicians while they slowly ratchet political discourse further and further to the right, we have to continue to move towards a horizon of real liberation.

Fascists are not the only force standing between us and our freedom.

Anarchist Techno Attacks : Remembering Reclaim the Streets

2024-06-18T22:26:00Z

To celebrate June 18, the anniversary of the historic Carnival against Capitalism that kicked off the movement against capitalist globalization some twenty-five years ago, we revisit Reclaim the Streets, a viral model for the joyous transformation of urban space.

Party as Protest <—> Protest as Party

“I will dance!” I declared; “I will dance myself to death!” My flesh felt hot, my heart beat violently… To dance to death—what more glorious end!

-Emma Goldman, Living My Life

“Mom, can I go to a protest?”

“No… I’m sorry, but no.”

She was worried. A month earlier, a plane had slammed into the side of a pentagon-shaped building just down the road from our house.

“OK. Uh, can I go to the homecoming game?”

“Well, sure!”

“But like, I’m new at school so… can I just go by myself? So I can make friends?”

“Of course, honey.”

I couldn’t believe it worked. My high school was right next to a metro station—I was obviously just going to hop on the train and go to the protest.

“I hope we win.”

“Me too! I’ll pick you up at 8.”

When I got off at the Dupont Circle stop, my punk rock role model older-sister-figure who always tempted me to skip school for cool shit was already waiting for me.

“So…what are we protesting? Bush? The World Bank? The war?” I asked, not caring too much as long as we got to fuck shit up.

“Cars.”

“Cars?”

“Yeah, we’re taking over a street.”

“What do you mean ‘taking over’?”

“Like, with couches and DJs and stuff.”

“DJs?!”

That did not clarify things for me, especially because people in the march that scooped us up were carrying placards decrying all the evil institutions and people I had mentioned. But once we hit 21st and P, a black-masked affinity group, moving with purpose and apparent planning, ran out of the crowd to a nearby alleyway and pulled out orange cones stenciled with an image of bellbottomed dancers inside a diamond-shaped traffic symbol. They lined up the orange cones on either end of the block. Unlike other marches I had been on—in which the point was to keep moving so that an affinity group could break out, quickly destroy the windows of a bank or Starbucks, then disappear among the mass again—the point of this demo seemed to be just to be here.

Someone handed out flyers with the same bellbottomed dancers traffic symbol, saying something about streets not belonging exclusively to cars, about reinventing public space as a wonderland of joyous community instead of an artery for capital.

Another affinity group quickly established good relations with the workers at a local café, who let us use the bathroom and get water throughout the afternoon. This happened so quickly that there must have been some prior, behind-the-scenes organizing with the workers. A bunch of them did have piercings and funny hair.

As I stared at the café, marveling at all the moving parts in this troublemakers’ Rube Goldberg machine, a cheer erupted behind me, drawing my attention back to the crowd. A junker car—presumably acquired especially for the occasion—was rolled out of its parking spot, tagged up with “Reclaim the Streets!” and a circle A, and flipped over. Some genius found a pole to lay inside its wheel well and people pulled couches all around it so that anyone could chill and watch the skaters grind the spectacle of destruction.

The Reclaim the Streets action in Washington, DC in October 2001. A photograph by the author, aged 14 at the time, digitally restored for this publication. Note the white van to the right.

That’s when the final party favor opened its doors: in the middle of the block, a white work van in an alley became a DJ booth playing techno. BOOM BOOM. And loud! Vibing my body down to its core. I live chasing that feeling: the loss of control, the impossibility of remaining unmoved, the need to get down. I had a Fatboy Slim CD at home, but I had never heard techno this loud, or around this many other people. I scanned the crowd once more—it wasn’t just bigger now, it was transformed. The protestors with their placards and the anarchists with their black masks were still there, but out of nowhere there were way more party freaks: JNCOs, goggles, candy necklaces, frost-tipped hair.

I overheard a couple of the ravers talking.

“Yo, I’ve never been to something like this.”

“I know bro. I’ve heard of outlaw parties before, but this is wild.”

Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.

Just as this departure from traditional protest tenor mesmerized me, it was also a captivating deviation from the routine techno party. The alchemy of underground scenes kept cooking gold—the sun was setting and the party was just getting bigger and bigger.

“What are the party people going to do if the cops come break this up?” I thought to myself. Before long, I had my answer. The familiar sight of faceless stormtroopers lined one end of the block, preparing their assault. People pulled the gear inside the DJ van, shut its doors, and escaped down the alley in it. Of course, the black bloc rushed towards the police, eager for confrontation—but to my surprise, so did much of the candy crowd. Did they learn this from defending their illegal warehouse parties? Were they just excited to add a new kind of rush to their rave repertoire?

“I hope those goggles are rated for tear gas.”

As I scurried out of the conflict zone, so as not to miss my 8 PM pick-up, I wondered who got the word to all of those ravers, and how? I knew how the anarchists got there—the night prior, Positive Force punks had handed us flyers for the march at the Wilson Center’s last show, an enormous DIY punk occasion. Had there been a rave somewhere in the city the previous night, too, simultaneously promoting the protest? On the subway, I reflected on the hidden size and strength of the underground. Punk rock was my own niche, but I had realized that ravers could also throw down and defend their temporary autonomous zones. How many more rebel communities were out there, each with its own style and soundtrack, ready to crew up and take down the imposed boredom of capitalism?

Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.

Music for the Jilted Generation

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Reclaim the Streets was founded in the UK in 1991 to combat car culture. The group was just one current in the wave of anti-roads protests that kicked off all over the UK after Margaret Thatcher’s government approved an infrastructure project to build hundreds of new roads. In response, a constellation of occupations and campaigns sprang up throughout the 1990s, blocking construction sites and organizing under monikers like “Earth First!”

One of the largest nodes in the anti-roads movement was the “No M11 Link” campaign in the suburbs of northeast London. For a year and a half, anti-roads activists used barricades, phone trees, tripods, treehouses, lockdowns, and building occupations to defend thousands of trees and hundreds of homes from destruction. The campaign culminated in December 1994, when over a thousand police were sent in to evict Claremont Road, the entirety of which had been squatted. The 500 residents and defenders fought back for five days as techno music blared in the background.

Claremont Road.

In its first year, Reclaim the Streets only organized small-scale stunts, like painting bike lanes on roads without permission. In 1992, Reclaim the Streets brought London traffic to a halt with its first street party, which was broken up when police arrested several participants. After that, the organization laid dormant until the British government proposed the 1994 Criminal Justice Act.

In addition to curtailing traditional civil liberties—for example, the right to remain silent was altered so that judges could draw certain inferences from a defendant’s silence—the Criminal Justice Act was a direct assault on rave culture. In clumsy language, the bill specifically criminalized gatherings of ten or more people enjoying “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” In addition, one of the bill’s twelve parts was entirely dedicated to criminalizing collective trespass. In one fell swoop, the British government formed common cause between squatters, new age caravan travelers, ravers, anti-road activists, hunt saboteurs, and football hooligans—all of whom enjoyed lifestyles and strategies of resistance based on collective trespass.

The Prodigy song “Their Law” was written in direct opposition to the bill.

Formal coalitions of civil liberties groups and sound systems¹ organized three mass demonstrations ahead of the vote on the bill in London. The first was on May Day 1994 and drew 20,000 people. Two months later, nearly twice as many people attended the second demonstration. In October, over 100,000 people fought and overpowered police in order to move two large sound systems into Hyde Park and dance in joyous defiance of the law.

In the end, the Criminal Justice Act was passed, but the alliances built around opposing it did not disappear or slow down.

Police threatening a demonstration in Hyde Park against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, October 1994.

“On 14 May 1995, two automobiles collide in the city of London. Their drivers, overcome by histrionic rage, get out of their vehicles and start to destroy them. In reality, it is all theatre. The cars, which are second-hand, have been bought especially for the occasion by members of Reclaim the Streets. Stuck in the middle of the road, their debris blocks motorized traffic, leaving crowded Camden High Street free of cars. The street fills with people and sound systems start to work, using electricity generated by the constant pedaling of bicycles. The ‘repetitive rhythms’ of rave can be heard and some three hundred people throw themselves into dancing in the first party [of the reborn Reclaim the Streets movement].”

-Julia Ramírez Blanco, Reclaim the Streets! From Local to Global Party Protest

Reclaim the Streets takes the M41 motorway with stilt-walkers and jackhammers on July 13, 1996.

Whereas around 300 people attended the May 1995 Reclaim the Streets party, by the July party two months later, attendance had increased tenfold, with nearly 3000 people reclaiming the London neighborhood of Islington to rave and revel. The following year, Reclaim the Streets launched what was probably its most glorious offensive, when over 8000 people broke through police lines to dance for nine hours on London’s M41 highway.

“The sight of thousands of people running onto an empty motorway shut off by large tripods is an image that stays with you… Thirty foot ‘pantomime dames’ [stilt-walkers] glided through the party throwing confetti. Food stalls gave away free stew and sandwiches; graffiti artists added color to the tarmac; poets ranted from the railings; acoustic bands played and strolling players performed. At the height of the festivities, beneath the tall panto dame figures dressed in huge farthingale Marie Antoinette skirts, people were at work with jackhammers, hacking in time to the techno, to mask the sound from the officers standing inches away, digging up the surface of the road until large craters littered the fast lane… to plant seedlings from the gardens smashed by the bulldozers at Claremont Road.”

-“Reclaim the Streets Rewild the M41 Motorway, Shepherds Bush

Never mind the ballots—reclaim the streets.

In 1997, an anti-election rave in Trafalgar Square—“Never Mind the Ballots, Reclaim the Streets”—transformed the exterior of the National Gallery into a bombed-up graffiti wall. Prosecutors charged a group of DJs from the event with attempted murder for driving their van too close to police lines, indicating the state’s impatience to suppress the growing movement.

In early 1998, Reclaim the Streets activists went to Geneva for the first-ever meeting of People’s Global Action, an international coalition of radicals and revolutionaries responding to the Zapatista’s call for a different kind of globalization: global resistance to capitalism. People’s Global Action’s first International Day of Action included a 200,000-strong demonstration in India against the World Trade Organization, a 50,000-person march led by landless peasants in Brazil’s capital city, and over thirty Reclaim the Streets parties from San Francisco to Sydney to Toronto to Lyon to Berlin. In Birmingham, England, 5000 Reclaim the Streets partiers contributed to the Day of Action by paralyzing the city center in opposition to the annual G8 meeting.

“There were some great comic scenes of police incompetence, including them surrounding the small sound system (disguised as a family car) and escorting it into the middle of the party. They never once asked why the ‘frightened family’ inside wanted to escape by deliberately driving the wrong way around the roundabout towards the crowd. By the time they realized their mistake, it was all too late… the decks were under the travel blankets, boys. What threw you off the scent? The baby seat, or the toys?”

-Do or Die, “Down with Empire, Up with Spring!”

With the success of People’s Global Action’s first worldwide day of protest, the so-called anti-globalization movement stepped into the ring like an underdog boxer with an untz untz untz entrance song, ready to knock out the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—putting global capitalism on its heels.

As word of the successful actions in Britain spread across the Atlantic, punks and anarchists in North America began organizing Reclaim the Streets actions—not only in urban centers like Washington, DC, but also in rust belt cities like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and smaller towns like Greensboro, North Carolina. For young people who had been chiefly active in subcultural contexts, the model offered a way to leverage subcultural connections to immediately enter the field of disruptive public action. Cutting their teeth with such events, the participants quickly moved on to confronting global capitalist summits. The movement gained momentum steadily until the attacks of September 11, 2001 shifted the discourse, though Reclaim the Streets actions continued around the world for years afterwards.

Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.

A 1998 Reclaim the Streets pamphlet offers a glimpse into the era:

Single issue? Just against the car?

For all of the mainstream media’s attempt to define [us] as such, for those involved it expresses much more. The street party, itself reclaimed from the inanities of royal jubilees and state “celebrations,” is just one recent initiative in a vibrant history of struggle, both to defend and to take back collective space. From the Peasants’ Revolt to the resistance to the enclosures, from the land occupations of the Diggers to the post-war squatters, on to the recent free festivals, peace camps, land squats and anti-roads movement. Everywhere, extra-ordinary people have continually asserted not only the need to liberate the commons but the ability to think and organize for themselves.

For the city, the streets are the commons, but in the hands of industry and power brokers the streets have become mere conduits for commerce and consumption—the economic hero of which is, of course, the car. A symbol and a symptom of the social and ecological nightmare that state and capitalism create, the car which promises individual freedom ends up guaranteeing noise, destruction and pollution for all. For Reclaim the Streets, the car is a focus—the insanity of its system clearly visible—that leads to questioning both the myth of “the market” and its corporate and institutional enforcers.

With a metal river on one side and endless windows of consumerism on the other, the streets’ true purpose, social interaction, becomes an uneconomic diversion. In its place, the corporate-controlled one-way media of newspapers, radio, and television become “the community.” Their interpretation [of] reality. In this sense, the streets are the alternative and subversive form of the mass media. Where authentic communication, immediate and reciprocal, takes place.

To “reclaim the streets” is to act in defense of and for common ground. To tear down the fence of enclosure that profit-making demands. And the street party—far from being just anti-car—is an explosion of our suppressed potential, a celebration of our diversity and a chorus of voices in solidarity. A festival of resistance!

Time Keeps on Slipping…

“Insurrection is a party. We take joy in the din of their defeat.”

-Communique #13: We Attacked the British Embassy (Fuerzas Autónomas y Destructivas León Czolgosz)

In America in the year 2024, the closest thing we have to street reclamation in the spirit of the history recounted above is the takeovers and sideshows model—celebrations of cars that seem to run counter to the values of the 1990s Reclaim the Streets movement. However, beyond superficial aesthetic preferences regarding motor noise, there is a deeper contrast between these two models of temporary autonomous spatial reclamation: for a full decade now, anarchists have celebrated, analyzed, and (to some degree) participated in sideshows without infusing those efforts with broader militant politics or harnessing their power to spread instances of ungovernability beyond their dedicated subculture. What would it look like if the anarchist fascination with drifting cars charted a course like the one of rave music in the UK, in which the networks and sound systems behind the scene decided to utilize their resources to catalyze massive and widespread combat with the state?

The history of Reclaim the Streets shows not only that militant, revolutionary struggle can also be joyous—something that anyone who hit the streets during the summer of 2020 knows—but also that the skills and bonds developed through underground subculture (how to scope out a spot, set up a generator, get the word out without blowing up the scene) are powerful tools for crafting other kinds of temporary autonomy that are not just clandestine, but openly confrontational.

Good music doesn’t make the party. Good drugs don’t make the party. People make the party. When the party draws together people who seek to break with the imposed limits of their society, a clever mix of songs or an ecstatic experience can suggest other creative possibilities, liberation of a larger scope. In contrast to the way a conqueror plants his flag in the ground to claim territory, loud dance music can fill an area with freedom, making it a blank canvas for the expression of forbidden desire. Illegal desires.

If most techno music takes place in licensed clubs with admission costs and pricey drinks—or worse, in isolation through streaming platforms—this says more about how capitalism homogenizes the way art is consumed than about the essential character of the music and subculture.

Techno’s history is one of…

underground innovation: it developed and evolved in squats and illegal parties;
collective endeavor: the management of sound systems involved collective decision-making, while organizing raves required cooperation and federation between sound systems and party crews;
direct action: not only was techno music the soundtrack to the British anti-roads movement, it was also essential to 1990s German anti-fascism, the powerful Dutch squatting scene in the 1980s and 1990s, and countless other combative movements for autonomy and freedom.

Techno’s future is…

up to you.

A Virtual Tour of Priamukhino, the Bakunin Family Estate and Museum

2024-05-30T23:43:25Z

To observe the 210th birthday of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, we present a photoessay and virtual tour of his birthplace and family home, Priamukhino, including the museum documenting his life and the lives of his relatives and friends. Owing to the unfortunate conditions prevailing in Russia today, it is not easy for many of us—including many Russians—to visit. This is a misfortune, because Priamukhino has served as a gathering place for anarchists since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An old photograph of the Bakunin family house.

Mikhail Bakunin’s revolutionary ideas did not spring forth fully-formed like Athena from the skull of Zeus. They emerged from an environment of participatory dialogue and collective education. His sisters were among his earliest and most passionate interlocutors; later, Russian writers including Vissarion Belinsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoy spent time at Priamukhino with his siblings. This makes it an important focus of study for researchers in a variety of historical, philosophical, and literary fields. We hope that this photoessay will be of use to those who cannot themselves visit—and that the political situation in Russia will change soon.

Mikhail Bakunin.

Mikhail’s equally fierce sister, Varvara Bakunin.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, anarchists began gathering at Priamukhino—some to participate in the Priamukhino Free Artel,¹ tending to the land and buildings, others for annual conferences. Some came from as far away as Italy, the United States, and Brazil.

For those who wish to learn the history of the Bakunin family, John Randolph’s The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism offers a good starting place. To provide more context for this photoessay, we present a short preface by the photographer.

Plan of the Pryamukhino estate, created on the basis of the “Geometric Special Plan” of the estate from 1797; the buildings that have survived into the present day are highlighted in black. 1 - Manor house; 2 - Church; 3 - Bell tower; 4 - Factory; 5 - Barn; 6 - Gardener’s house; 7 - Consumer co-operative; 8 - Library; 9 - Crypt; 10 - Rotunda; 11 - Gatehouse; 12 - Chapel at the holy spring; 13 - Dam (XIX century); 14 - Hospital; 15 - Dam (XVIII century); 16 - Bolshaya Street; 17 - Sadovaya Street; 18 - Grandfather’s Hill; 19 - Children’s Alley; 20 - Decembrist Oak; 21 - Stable; 22 - Animal Farm; 23 - Cemetery; 24 - Chapel; 25 - Riga (Turkish bath); 26 - Hill named for A.A. Bakunin; 27 - Parterre glade; 28 - Bathhouse; 29 - A gazebo designed by Lvov: 30 - Kutuzovskaya Hill; 31 - Elm Hill; 32 - School; 33 - Spring named for I.M. Bakunin; 34 - Upper new pond; 35 - Batyushkin (sterlet) pond; 36 - Lower new pond; 37 - Artificial pond; 38 - Swimming pool; 39 - Mother’s Pond; 40 - Pond under the garden; 41 - Bath; 42 - Church slope; 43 - Beautiful hill; 44 - Little Grove; 45 - Circle of larches; 46 - Greenhouse; 47 - Greenhouse; 48 - Main village street; 49 - Road to Korostkovo; 50 - Brick factory road.

Weekend at Priamukhino

Finally, I got to see the legendary Priamukhino!

I have been hearing about the “Priamukhino readings” for many years since I became an anarchist. Anarchists have been coming here since the moment that the Soviet Union loosened its grip on political dissent. People used to come to Priamukhino for a few days every year to live collectively, working together to renovate what remains of the Bakunin family mansion and forest, and also to read and discuss anarchist texts outside the distractions of urban life. The Priamukhino readings had been interconnected with the artel work since the 1990s, but they ceased in 2018 due to differences within the Priamukhino Free Artel.

The work of the artel continues, however. The forest around the village beside the Bakunin family mansion needs regular maintenance, and the mansion itself needs renovating.

No active anarchists live in Priamukhino itself, but at least one used to live close by. In addition, there are people in Priamukhino who sympathize with anarchists; since the 1990s, they have undertaken a tremendous effort to preserve the village’s historical heritage and affirm the anarchists’ agenda. Relations with the other villagers are generally good, as well. The only strained relation in the village is with the priest, who openly denounces anarchists. Many villagers prefer to attend church services elsewhere.

What I found in Priamukhino this year was quite different from what I expected. Likely owing to the situation in Russia, only a few people came to join artel work, none of whom I knew from before. Nonetheless, I received a very warm welcome.

We spent the next two days cutting fallen trees, carrying wood, washing monuments, taking out trash, and digging out hogweed, which was invading the whole forest. We also cut the grass to clear paths in the forest around the mansion and the Decembrists’ Oak—an oak that two Decembrists, the brothers Muravyov, planted there in 1816, which was destroyed by lightning in the 1970s. Another oak has been planted there in its place, and nearby, there is another small oak tree planted by anarchists. We worked up to four hours each day and spent the rest cooking food, talking, watching movies (among them, W. Allen’s Love and Death), swimming in Osuga river, and taking walks around Priamukhino’s beautiful scenery of forests, village roads, and river banks. We also took a trip to Kuvshinovo, a nearby town named after the capitalist Julia Kuvshinova, to see its architectural features.

It was interesting to walk the little roads and paths through the forest, to touch the mighty old trees that witnessed the childhoods of all eleven of the Bakunin siblings in the 19th century, to imagine young Mikhail walking here as well, conversing with his sisters and friends. It makes one reflect on how environments and circumstances can influence our lives. Who would imagine that the son of a family that lived in a mansion maintained by more than a hundred serfs could become a world-famous revolutionary, hated and feared by those who own mansions? The mosaic of life’s circumstances can give rise to the most surprising results.

I am honored to visit a place that holds a part of this legacy, where so much love and work has been put into it, connecting anarchist history to one more place on Earth.

A map of Priamukhino in a booklet about the estate.

We attended the Bakunin family museum located on the edge of Priamukhino. The museum is run by a kind old woman who gave us a tour. It documents the history of the family, focusing on each Bakunin starting with Mikhail Bakunin’s father. A significant part of the museum is given over to Mikhail Bakunin himself, exploring his involvement in revolutionary history.

I also encountered some publications about Bakunin that I hadn’t seen before: N. Pirumova’s Bakunin, published in 1970; M.P. Dragomanova’s Critical-Biographical Note on Bakunin, published in 1906, a copy of which was given to the museum by a descendant of the Bakunins; Memories of Bakunin by M.P. Sazhin (Arman Ross), published in 1926 by the publishing house of the All-Union Society of Political Convicts and Exiles, section Library of Exile and Hard Labor. I took the opportunity of being alone in the museum to take some of them out from under the glass and take pictures of them.

I also looked through the samizdat publications of “Priamukhino Harmony,” a zine that anarchists have been producing during the Priamukhino Free Artel and Priamukhino readings. Apparently, in all the years since it first began to appear in the 1990s, this paper has not been photocopied or digitalized, and the only originals were kept in the village. That worries me, because at any time something could happen to them and they would be lost to anarchist history. I hurriedly photographed all of them.

In addition, I recorded a sort of virtual tour of the museum.

A video walkthrough of the museum at Priamukhino. The music is Alessio Lega’s “La tomba di Bakunin.”

The Frogs of Priamukhino

I took this picture of a frog near the Bakunin family house. The frogs at Priamukhino have been part of the legend of the place since at least 1995, when anarchists renovated the ponds that they inhabit. Subsequently, in place of a red star, anarchists put a red frog on a black banner, which has become a symbol of the anarchist project in Priamukhino.

Russian anarchists in 1995 displaying the “kvakanya” red frog banner associated with Priamukhino.

This picture shows volunteers and locals just a couple years ago, displaying the same banner.

Museum

Museum of the Bakunin family.

A map showing some of the places Mikhail Bakunin was active.

A bust of Mikhail Bakunin with books and a torch behind him.

A bust of Mikhail Bakunin.

Another bust of Mikhail Bakunin, showing books and a torch behind him.

The back of the second bust of Mikhail Bakunin, showing books and a torch behind him.

A desk in memorial to Natalia Mikhailovna Pirumova, who contributed a lot to the preservation of Priamukhino and supported the activities of anarchists in the village.

Certificates from descendants of the Bakunin family and various civil institutions expressing gratitude to the Bakunin museum for its cultural and educational work.

Some people who contributed to creating the museum.

A plaque in memorial to Vladimir Ivanovich Sisoyev, a writer, local historian, and activist for the preservation of the Priamukhino estate’s cultural heritage.

A desk observing the 70th birthday of Vladimir Ivanovich Sisoyev.

Mikhail Bakunin as a young man.

The picture in the upper right shows Mikhail Bakunin at the close of the 1840s.

An image of Mikhail Bakunin and depictions of the Dresden uprising of 1849, for which he was condemned to death before being handed over to another country that was also seeking to execute him.

More photographs of Bakunin’s family.

Mikhail Bakunin in 1869.

An invitation to the event in Paris in 1847 at which Mikhail Bakunin made a famous speech in solidarity with Polish people resisting Russian rule, for which he was exiled from France.

A map of the Priamukhino estate and its environs.

The Bakunin family house.

The Bakunin family tree.

Mikhail Bakunin and his sisters Tatiana and Lyubov.

Portraits of Mikhail Bakunin as a young man, his parents, and others.

Portraits of Mikhail Bakunin and the thinkers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose philosophy influenced his.

Portraits of two of Mikhail Bakunin’s sisters.

Another model of the Bakunin house.

Mikhail Bakunin in his youth.

Mikhail’s sister Varvara Bakunin, among others.

A photograph of the Decembrists’ oak in 1967.

A bust of the French author Voltaire. When she lived in Berlin, Varvara Bakunin displayed busts of Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Voltaire in her apartment—German romanticism interrogating French rationalism.

“Penal Servitude and Exile”: Memories about Mikhail Bakunin, by M. P. Sazhin (Arman Ross). Edition by the All-Union Association of Political Convicts and Exiles, Moscow, 1926.

Tatiana Bakunin.

A book written by N. Pirumova about Mikhail Bakunin and his family.

A small concert hall in the museum.

Another room in the museum.

Bakunin, a biography by N. Pirumova.

A part of the room with literature and other items related to Bakunin family.

Editions of Mikhail Bakunin’s works and brochures and books about him.

In the bottom right, a photograph of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italian revolutionary Republican and socialist and colleague of Mikhail Bakunin.

A portrait of Yekaterina Mikhailovna Bakunina (1810-1894), a Russian nurse during the Crimean War, who contributed to the establishment of nursing in Russia.

Memories of Mikhail Bakunin by M. P. Sazhin (Arman Ross). Edition by All-Union Association of Political Convicts and Exiles, Moscow, 1926

Photos of an Italian delegation to the Bakunin museum. Alexander Bakunin, Mikhail’s brother, fought in Italy in the army of Garibaldi for three years.

A gift to the Bakunin museum from a Bakunin family descendant. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. A Critical Biographical Essay, by M. P. Dragomanova. Printing house of D. M. Gran, Gostinodvorskaya Street. Kazan, 1905.

One part of the museum documents the friendship of Mikhail’s brother, Alexander Bakunin, and Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace.

An exhibit showing the connections between the Bakunin family and Leo Tolstoy, who visited the family estate.

A part of the museum dedicated to Leon Tolstoy and his relationship with the Bakunin family.

A couch from the Bakunin house on which Leon Tolstoy and Aleksandr Bakunin, both veterans of the defense of Sevastopol, once sat together.

A black flag with Kvakunya, a frog that inhabits the ponds in Priamukhino that anarchists cleaned in 1995. The flag rests on the couch on which Leo Tolstoy once sat while visiting the house.

A picture of a painting made in 1883, hung a church in a Tazovo village in the region of Kursk. The painting is titled “Tolstoy in Hell,” apparently in response to the decision of the Church to exclude Leo Tolstoy.

Kutuzov Hill

The former Beautiful Hill, now Kutuzov Hill, is named after the Russian military leader who defeated Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century. The legend goes that Aleksandr Bakunin, Mikhail Bakunin’s father, was friends with Mikhail Kutuzov and the latter stopped at Priamukhino for a day. There is no official evidence confirming this besides the fact that Kutuzov’s regiment once stayed very close to Priamukhino for a day or two for no apparent reason. Aleksandr Bakunin renamed the hill after the defeat of Napoleon.

“Larches grown by Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin from seeds donated by N.A. Lvov in 1793. A group of trees was planted around the so-called ‘beautiful hill,’ later named ‘Kutuzovskaya Gorka’ [Kutuzov Hill], as well as in the park area behind the Osuga River.”

A monument to Mikhail Kutuzov.

This stone is a memorial stone for Kutuzov. During the Second World War, if I’m not mistaken, there was a military hospital in Priamukhino. The story goes that while Soviet soldiers were making a campfire under the stone, the stone cracked and part of it rolled down the hill and either stayed there or was taken elsewhere. What remains of the stone is still on the hill, as you can see.

The South Wing of the Bakunin House, the Barn, and the Forest

These photos include the Decembrists’ Oak and the ruins of one of the wings of the original Bakunin house.

A map of the area.

“Oak of the Decembrists: At this place in 1815, in memory of their stay at the estate, the Bakunin relatives, the Muravyov brothers (A.N. Muravyov, N.N. Muravyov-Karsky, and M.N. Muravyov-Vilensky) planted an oak tree. At the end of the 1970s, during a thunderstorm, the tree was damaged and collapsed. In 1989, the descendants of the Bakunins planted a new oak tree on this site.”

The sign reads, roughly, “Do not enter! Dangerous to life—collapse!”

A depiction of the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno.

A depiction of an anarchist sailor, perhaps associated with the Kronstadt uprising.

A depiction of Leo Tolstoy having tea with Alexander Bakunin in 1891. Alexander is depicted in a red Garibaldi shirt on account of his participating in Garibaldi’s campaign in Italy. Tolstoy and Alexander Bakunin both fought in the Battle for Sevastopol in 1885; they met at the Bakunin estate for tea in 1891.

“Manor house (second half of the 18th century to first half of the 19th century). The Pryamukhino estate was purchased in 1779 from the Shishkov nobles by Mikhail Vasilyevich Bakunin (1730-1803) in the name of his wife Lyubov Petrovna. The middle wooden part of the house has been preserved from the previous owners. The Bakunins’ son, Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1765/68-1854), made extensions on both sides and built a two-story outbuilding on the south, in one of the rooms where there was a chapel. On the north side, the outbuilding was one story, and the outbuildings, connected to the main house by brick one-story passages, were decorated with four-column Doric porticoes. There was a ground clearing in front of the house in the park.”

This memorial plaque reads “In this house, Mikhail A. Bakunin was born and spent his childhood and teenage years—a famous militant of the international revolutionary movement, one of the founders of and a theorist of anarchism, a Russian thinker. 1814-1876,” then lists some of the many historical figures who visited the estate.

19th-Century Church

When you enter Priamukhino via the bridge over the river Osuga river, one of the first things you encounter is the old Bakunin church, where you can also find the Bakunin family memorial.

“Bell tower built by Alexander Alexandrovich Bakunin (1821-1908, a famous Tver zemstvo participant and lawyer, and a participant in the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War and the famous ‘Expedition of the Thousand’ with Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1861. Built according to the design of the Tver provincial architect V.I. Nazarin in 1903-1907. In place of the old wooden one, the bell tower became the last building built on the estate by the Bakunins. In 1996, a descendant of the Bakunins installed new bells in the bell tower.” Coincidentally, the underground paper that Mikhail Bakunin’s comrades Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev published was called Kolokol, “the Bell.”

Cascade of Ponds

This cascade of ponds was made in the 19th century. By the 1990s, it was in a horrible state, until anarchists renovated it.

“Cascade of Ponds: A cascade of three ponds was built by the owner of the estate A.M. Bakunin in the first half of the 19th century. Upper pond (containing underground springs and springs that provide water), Sterlyazhiy or Batyushkin pond (in memory of A.M. Bakunin’s father, Mikhail Vasilyevich Bakunin) and Lower pond. Near Father’s Pond, there was a bathhouse and a swimming pool.”

Priamukhino Village and Administration

The Environs of Priamukhino and Lopatino

Walking in the village of Priamukhino and its surroundings.

The road sign for Lopatino. The village of Lopatino is right across the bridge over the Osuga River, a fifteen-minute walk from Priamukhino.

A bridge over the Osuga river.

The Osuga River.

The road sign for Priamukhino.

A Soviet memorial for Priamukhino villagers who went to the front in WWII and didn’t come back.

For More Information

There is a Telegram channel for the Priamukhino artel.

A movie about Priamukhino made by a Swedish visitor.

In prerevolutionary Russia, an artel was a cooperative association of craftsmen living and working together. ↩

Louise Michel in New Caledonia

2024-05-29T22:00:29Z

In honor of Louise Michel’s birthday and the ongoing anticolonial resistance in New Caledonia, we offer an account of her time in exile there, beginning from her arrival in November 1873. This story illustrates how regimes force their own subjects into service in colonial projects, as well as the prisoners they capture in other colonial endeavors. It is also worth remarking that, like Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and many other 19th-century anarchists, Louise Michel only came to formally identify as an anarchist after spending time with Indigenous people. While many of her colleagues nonetheless retained Eurocentric notions about “progress” and “civilization,” Louise Michel wholeheartedly sided with Indigenous resistance to French colonialism. She is remembered more warmly today than most French settlers in New Caledonia.

A work of literary nonfiction, this narrative draws on Michel’s memoirs, her book Légendes et chansons de gestes Canaques, and several other sources. For more background on Louise Michel’s time in New Caledonia, consult the reading list below.

Louise Michel in exile in New Caledonia.

Louise Michel in New Caledonia

At last, their destination comes into view on the horizon. The warship coasts through a double rampart of coral reefs and approaches the shore. Hills flank the harbor like sphinxes, silently interrogating them.

For four months, Louise Michel has been caged on this prison vessel. She and her fellow deportees have traversed the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the Cape of Good Hope, and the southern Indian Ocean, finally rounding the continent of Australia. They are sentenced to exile in this prison colony—exile in perpetuity.

The male prisoners are made to disembark while the women are kept on the ship. They are to be transported up the coast to a different prison camp, supposedly under milder conditions.

Louise Michel and her comrades strenuously object. Are they not enemies of the state, no less than the men? Louise herself has shot police officers, defended barricades, and worn a man’s uniform in defense of the Paris Commune.

For several days, the women remain at limbo, held on the ship within view of the island. In the end, the captain takes their side. The prisoners file into a rowboat and are ferried to the same shore where the men landed.

This is the first time Louise has set foot on solid earth in well over a hundred days. After the continuous rolling motion of the vessel, the sand seems to pitch and heave beneath her.

The male prisoners have gathered on the beach to welcome them. They have already built huts of earth and grass. This is the prison colony where they are to spend the rest of their lives.

That evening, Louise Michel cooks with other exiled Communards. She knows some of them from Paris. Before the Commune, she attended a demonstration at City Hall with the man who is hosting dinner at his newly-erected hut. When the soldiers began shooting at them that day, he and Louise were among the only ones who returned fire. To Louise, it is a wonder that he is still alive.

The chef, too, is a fellow Communard. He is trying to roast their dinner in a hole, in clumsy imitation of the natives. He and Louise defended a barricade together when the French army invaded the poor neighborhood at the northern edge of Paris. He teases her about how, when she was ordered to take a rest from the fighting, he and his comrades heard organ music coming from the nearby church, and broke into it to tell whoever was playing the organ to stop attracting fire to their barricade.

It was Louise playing the organ, of course, accompanying the explosions of the bombs with her own macabre refrain.

A drawing by Léon Jacque of the barricade on the rue Peyronnet in the neighborhood of Neuilly.

A photograph of rue Peyronnet after the clearing of the barricade.

Here in the South Pacific, at the furthest point across the globe from Paris, crabs wrestle among the leathery fronds of beached seaweed. Sea foam collects under the mangroves at the foot of cloud-wreathed peaks. On moonless nights, the trunks of the trees glimmer silver in the starlight; under the full moon, they hold their crooked branches aloft like the arms of weeping giants.

Thus the weeks pass.

The deportees are confined to this peninsula, a thousand miles east of Australia. They have to scavenge their own food, fashion their own tools and dwellings. Under the vacant gaze of the guards, they labor to establish the minimum conditions of life.

A panorama of the coast of New Caledonia, taken in 1877.

The French call this island New Caledonia, recycling the name that the Romans gave to the part of Britain beyond the wall of the Roman Empire.

The colonizers call the native inhabitants of the island Kanaks, a Hawaiian word.

But what do the native people call themselves? Louise Michel has no idea. She sometimes hears them singing as they walk through the brush, counting off the quarter-tones like raindrops on the leaves. They use a more complex musical scale than the Europeans.

The first local she meets properly is named Daoumi. Louise Michel meets him at a dinner hosted by another of her fellow French exiles.

Daoumi arrives at the dinner in a top hat and kid gloves—a sendup of French formal wear that enables him to excuse himself from assisting the white people with cooking and serving.

The fact that he is not helping them makes him available for conversation. Louise introduces herself. They converse while she feeds leaves to a goat tied to a castor oil plant. She has so many questions.

Daoumi’s French is impeccable. By contrast, she can’t speak a word of his language.

Later, talking with Daoumi around a fire of sandalwood, Louise Michel begins to compile a phrasebook of the pidgin dialect the islanders use to communicate with outsiders. Among themselves, the natives speak some thirty different languages. Daoumi can read and write French, but Louise is the first French person to try to record the other languages he speaks.

Tayo means “friend.” Maté means “ill”—maté maté, dead. They call the Milky Way the diahot, the river of the heavens. To Louise’s dismay, they refer to a woman as nemo, “nothing,” or popinée, “useful object”—though it seems to her that both of these words have arrived from Europe.

Michel is tireless in her inquiries. “And what do you call the white man’s coin?” she asks.

“Money,” answers Daoumi, deadpan.

“Before her, the earth has split,” Daoumi narrates. “Torrents pour in without end. Behind her, the mountain is torn; abysses open to the right and to the left.”

Around a fire of rosewood—peuhaou—he recites as Louise Michel transcribes. He is telling the stories of those who came first, of those who call this island home.

“And the water rises, rises; it reaches as high as the clouds, and the heavy clouds merge with the wave. The clouds and the sea embrace, the clouds pouring in torrents, the water rising in columns, higher than the tallest trees, the trees the white men use as masts for their ships—there they are, like mountains of night…”

At night, out on the still water of the lake, the voice of a single frog rings out above the distant breakers. All the other frogs answer in chorus.

By day, fuzzy black bees busy themselves in the pink flowers of wild plum trees hung with enormous vines, from which fruit bats dangle, dozing, wrapped up in their wings so that from a distance, one might mistake them for outsize pears.

Insulated from European colonization until just twenty years ago, New Caledonia preserves the greatest ecological diversity anywhere on the surface of the earth. Louise Michel makes notes about the flora and fauna alongside the Kanak words in her lexicon.

This is the bounty France has arrived to plunder—exporting the sandalwood, exploiting the natives, mining the nickel and copper. The government has sent prisoners like her here as a wedge to open the way for the next phase of colonization.

One morning, another French vessel appears in the harbor and a new round of captives are ferried to the shore. They are Algerians. To Louise Michel, they look distinguished in their white burnouses.

They too have been exiled for revolting against the French authorities. Their uprising broke out on March 16, 1871, two days before the outbreak of the Paris Commune. Their families have been fighting France since before the oldest of the Communards was born.

Just as the decades-running occupation of Algeria prepared the French army to crush the revolt in Paris, the resources that are extracted here on the colonial periphery in New Caledonia power the war machine that overran Algeria and the Commune. Colonialism interlinks the entire surface of the earth in a great circuitry of oppression.

Louise Michel has been exiled on the island for five years when a native leader named Ataï confronts the French governor of New Caledonia about the encroachment of the European colony. The French settlers have been snatching up more and more territory while their cattle gobble up the crops that the natives depend on.

“This is what we had,” Ataï says, pouring out a bag of soil to make the point absolutely clear to the governor. “And this is what you left us,” he says, pouring out a bag of stones.

The governor suggests that the Kanaks build fences around their lands the way the Europeans do. “When my vegetables eat your animals, I’ll build fences,” Ataï answers.

There is only one option: guerrilla war. Soon, there are reports of raids in the bush.

The French authorities arm the deportees to suppress the rebel Kanaks. Many of the Communards side with their jailers—with the civilization that killed their comrades and exiled them here, against the barbarism of those whose lands they are occupying. Even some of the Algerian rebels join the French side.

Colonialism pits the uprooted against the colonized in a cycle that begets ever more violence, generating strange alliances along the way.

Louise Michel argues fiercely with the other deportees about the rebellion. What distinguishes the Kanak rebels from the Communards? Shouldn’t they unite against their common enemy?

One discussion becomes so heated that a guard races over, thinking that a riot is breaking out. He withdraws in dismay when he sees that it is only Louise, shouting at a single Frenchman.

One night, in the midst of a storm, Michel hears a knock at the door of her hut. “Who’s there?”

“Taïau,” comes the answer. Friends. She recognizes the voices of two natives she knows well. They’ve come to bid her farewell. Though their people, the Manongoes, have stood aside from the uprising, the two of them are leaving to cross the bay to join the insurrection themselves. Revolt, too, can give rise to new solidarities.

Michel invites them in. She takes out the thin red scarf she has saved since the days of the Commune. She has concealed it during every search. Now she cuts the scarf in two and gives each of them a strip of it—a red thread of freedom running from one uprising to another, across oceans, decades, peoples.

They disappear into the night.

A thousand native people die in the fighting. In the end, Ataï’s severed head arrives in France preserved in formaldehyde—a trophy of the victory of civilization over the headhunters.

In mourning, Louise Michel translates the war song of Andia, the long-haired Kanak bard who was killed alongside Ataï.

The spirits
Of their fathers
Make a storm.
They are waiting
For the brave.
The brave

Are welcome.
Friends or enemies,
They are welcome
Beyond this life.
Those who wish to live
Go back.

War is come.
Blood will flow
Over the earth
Like water.

The old Communard walks beside Louise Michel, leaning heavily on her arm. Life in exile here has just about killed him. Everyone knows he has only a few weeks to live.

When they reach the heights between the two bays, from which they can see the buildings of the convict prison out on the island like a smear of blood on the horizon, her companion draws himself up to his full height. Stretching out his long, gaunt arm toward the prison, he addresses Louise, biting off each syllable in a guttural voice.

“Proudhon was right. Every reform we’ve ever tried to make keeps the same causes for disasters, the same inequalities, the same antagonisms. Proudhon said it: ‘The men who produce everything get only poverty and death in return.’ The best commercial treaties of a nation only protect exploiters. People will end all that. But how much pain, how much evil…”

Louise knows Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as a misogynist, a hypocritical anarchist who wished to keep women in the home under the governance of men. But listening to her old comrade speak, she can imagine an anarchism that rejects all forms of oppression—sexism and racism and colonialism as well as capitalism and the state.

From the South Pacific to Paris, it is the same fight.

Louise Michel arrives in Paris at Gare Saint-Lazare on November 9, 1880 after nine years in prison and exile, resuming her struggle against the French government where she left off.

Ataï’s countrymen are still seeking the return of his skull in 2014.

In 2024, they are still fighting for their freedom.

The struggle continues.

We, Too, Remember Aleksei Sutuga : The Life of a Russian Anarchist and Anti-Fascist

2024-04-24T23:54:19Z

Aleksei Sutuga grew up deep in Siberia, in Irkutsk—the city to which Mikhail Bakunin was once exiled, not to mention many other Russian rebels. Known to his friends as Socrates, Aleksei became involved in the Russian anarchist and anti-fascist movements. He is the subject of a new book, Socrates the Skinhead: The Life of a Russian Anti-Fascist.

In tracing the story of his life, this book documents a vanished era of Russian history. Comprised of dozens of interviews with participants in the anarchist and anti-fascist movements across the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it offers one of the most detailed pictures of those struggles yet available in English. It is important for us to learn about that period today, because it was a time when history was still up for grabs—when the horrific tragedies that have since played out in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine were not yet inevitable.

The interviewees recount how anarchism reemerged in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sharing their memories of Socrates, they explore the relationship between hardcore punk, straight edge, veganism, anarchism, anti-fascism, and a variety of other forms of activism. They describe how Socrates and his comrades became locked in a brutal conflict—first with neo-Nazis, then with the Russian authorities. As a consequence, he spent years in Russian prisons.

Socrates was not just a fighter. He sang in hardcore bands, organized with Autonomous Action, and contributed to a range of other cultural activities. He also participated in theater, performing in plays such as Tvoi kalendar’/Pytki, which was based on monologues by participants in the Network case—a court case in which the Russian police used torture to force arrestees to sign false confessions in order to frame them as part of a fabricated terrorist conspiracy.

Aleksei Sutuga passed away on September 1, 2020 in a tragic accident that occurred as a result of his choosing, once again, to stand up for others.

At the invitation of our Russian comrades, we have provided an introduction to the book, exploring why Aleksei Sutuga’s story should be of interest outside Russia. The text appears below.

A protest in Irkutsk in 2005. Fourth from the right is Aleksei Sutuga, known as Socrates.

We, Too, Remember Aleksei Sutuga

In Russia, the first decade of the 21st century was a time of possibility and danger.

Possibility. Because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became possible to propose new ideas and carry out new experiments. There were new problems—and new horizons, too. For young people, subculture served as a laboratory for new ways of living: punk, hardcore, veganism, straight edge, anarchism. The first generation of anarchists to find each other after the end of the Soviet Union had to rediscover how to articulate their dream of a better world. The second generation picked up where the first had left off, creating organizations, articulating ambitions, acting together to see if they could make that world a reality. Aleksei Sutuga was part of this second generation.

And danger. Because the anarchists were not the only ones with a vision to propose. At the same time, neo-Nazis and other nationalists were taking advantage of the bedlam and anomie in Russia to carry out attacks and spread their noxious ideology. Aleksei and a few other brave individuals set out to stop them.

Socrates appearing via video link from Butyrka prison at a hearing, 2012.

In fighting the far right while it was still a ragged street movement, they sought to prevent it from becoming the next ruling order. For a short time, Aleksei and his comrades succeeded. They won control of the streets from the fascists, only to lose it to the state. Having used the far right as shock troops and appropriated its ideology, the government of Vladimir Putin set about crushing both fascists and antifascists, suppressing the sense of possibility that had prevailed in Russia.

We followed all this distantly from the United States. While we were organizing Food Not Bombs and Really Really Free Markets, our Russian counterparts were fighting fascists in concert venues and train carriages. While we were vandalizing army recruiting offices, they were mourning comrades murdered by neo-Nazis. After we gathered in parks and plazas for Occupy Wall Street, they assembled in Bolotnaya Square in 2011 in a desperate bid to keep Putin from cementing control. By the time we were participating in the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, many Russian anarchists had already been killed or forced into exile, and Aleksei was in prison.

Socrates in 2017, after his release from the penal colony in Angarsk.

And then, in the United States, we were the ones mourning comrades murdered by neo-Nazis and scrambling to thwart an aspiring despot. The Russian context that had seemed distant to us was not so far away after all.

So this is not simply a story about the Wild Wild East, a faraway exotic land. The same geopolitical forces and processes at work in Russia are also at work where we live, and we exoticize them at our peril. Like Aleksei and those who remember him, we too face a fascist movement driven by rising inequality and desperation, we too confront rising authoritarianism. We should understand the conditions in Russia and our own conditions as different facets of the same thing.

This is especially pressing because this story is not over yet—neither in Russia, nor the United States.

Police harass protesters supporting the defendants in the Network case after they were sentenced to between six and eighteen years in a penal colony apiece. February 2, 2020.

Looking at Russia in 2024, we can see that state violence does not come to an end once a single autocrat succeeds in consolidating power. On the contrary, once internal dissent has been crushed, the ruling class looks around for other enemies, other frontiers for conquest. Authoritarianism is not a static order, but a volatile system. It is a fire that must consume more and more fuel to persist. When authoritarians secure control over a society, war is the inevitable next step.

Today, we are living in the future that Aleksei and his comrades tried to stave off. As difficult as their times were, what has come since has been worse. We fight against fascism and totalitarianism because we know that every time we lose a battle against them, we will have to fight it again, only on worse terms, under even worse conditions.

This book is a valuable work of historical memory, a gesture of defiance against death and autocracy. Over the course of a century and a half, there have only been a few years during which anarchists could organize openly in Russia. Some people still remember Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, the Makhnovschina, the Kronstadt uprising, the battle for Khimki forest—but who knows how many courageous people like Aleksei have been forcibly erased from the historical record? Remembering his life and learning from the situation he confronted is a way to resist totalitarianism. It is also a way to learn more about ourselves and how we might act today.

For we, too, confront a time of possibility and danger.

You can order the book here.

Olga Sutuga: I’ve known about, and indeed shared, my son’s political inclinations for a long time. I can’t say that I’m any kind of anarchist, I’m only starting to read Mikhail Bakunin and Nestor Makhno. But I do observe the principles of anarchism.

Socrates: It’s simple, everything is very simple. The most important thing is that people don’t aim to gain power. If they want power, then by definition they are not one of us.

Voice from the audience: What should we aim for then?

Socrates: What should we aim for? For life. For a free life, for self-realization, for knowledge, for the stars for goodness’ sake. But definitely not for power.

Campus Building Occupations, 2008-2010 and Today

2024-04-22T22:39:28Z

A wave of campus building occupations took place in response to austerity measures following the recession of 2008. As today’s Gaza solidarity movement begins to experiment with encampments and building occupations, it could be instructive to learn from the previous generation of student activists.

On April 22, 2024, inspired by the resilience of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University and other demonstrators around the country, students at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California occupied Siemens Hall. This represented the first confrontational building occupation of a wave of student demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine.

Police attempted to storm Siemens Hall in order to evict it; they inflicted severe injuries on some students, but failed to gain entry. The officers established a perimeter around the building, but students and university faculty gathered around them, surrounding them and chanting “De-escalate by leaving!” In the end, local media reported that the police were forced to withdraw:

10:50 pm: All law enforcement have left from in front of the building and appear to be leaving the campus. Scanner traffic appears to confirm that law enforcement has left the scene. One officer said that law enforcement is being “disbanded.” Students are currently pouring in and out of the occupied building.

“Cops go home!” the students chanted victoriously. “People power! We are stronger!”

Taking over a building and forcing the police off campus is no mean feat in the age of police militarization. Yet this is not the first time this century that student movements have employed these tactics. From December 2008 to March 2010, a wave of student building occupations helped to spark a new era of combative grassroots struggle. Starting with only a few participants, these building occupations eventually helped to inspire the Occupy movement, which catalyzed tens of thousands of people into action.

The following text chronicles the emergence of this wave of building occupations from the perspective of those who helped start it, first in New York and then in California. This article originally appeared in issue 9 of Rolling Thunder, our Anarchist Journal of Dangerous Living. It appears here with a handful of modifications reflecting the decade and a half that has passed since.

Students occupied the New School in New York City in December 2008 and again in 2009.

Coast to Coast Occupations

“The coming occupations will have no end in sight, and no means to resolve them. When that happens, we will finally be ready to abandon them.”

–Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation

This is How We Learn, This is How We Fight

By a participant in the occupations in New York City of 2008-2009.

In December 2008, the month of the Greek rebellion, the widely hated president of New York City’s New School for Social Research fired the Provost and appointed himself. He also cut the library in half, shut down a building where students gathered, and raised tuition. When the Faculty came out with a vote of no confidence in him on December 10, previously apathetic students joined those trained by summit battles to take action. Standard campus activist SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] groups wanted to wait for the right time—”the movement is not ready,” “we need more numbers.” We thought otherwise.

After two grueling meetings, on December 16 at 8 pm, thirty students and non-students took the first floor of 65 5th Avenue, in the middle of Manhattan, blocking the exits with chairs, tables, and trash cans from the cafeteria. Within hours, hundreds of people came out in support, and students who until then had only read Hegel were fighting security guards with tables and blocking the streets outside. This lasted from Wednesday night to Friday morning. Authoritarian groups issued demands while autonomous groups conspired to bring in more people and expand the occupation. At key moments, against the formal consensus of some, friends outside were broken in with spectacular actions. A Greek solidarity march came by and livened up the party with a hundred more anarchists. The president was chased down the street to his home, and conceded to some of the demands soon after. We left with no repercussions, but bitter that the university still functioned at all.

After winter break, a plan was hatched to continue the struggle with a more daring action. With dozens of new people radicalized and hundreds of new supporters, we set our sights high: we wanted the whole fucking building. We announced our threat early: April 1 we shut the school down unless the president resigns. We distributed our analyses everywhere and continued minor escalations: illegal teach-ins, graffiti, vandalism, “open” occupations.

New York University [NYU] joined the wave and occupied their student building in February, and we joined in with pleasure. After a massive street conflict outside and three days barricaded inside, we left with no charges. April 1 came and our plan was snitched, so we held off for another week until the NYC anarchist book fair. They thought we’d given up, but we came in like thieves in the night and seized the whole building, all with only 19 people, students and non-students. This time the university wasn’t playing around.

A barricade of chairs at NYU in 2009.

More than two hundred police vehicles responded, along with helicopters, emergency units, and hordes of SWAT, JTTE, and other teams; they closed down three streets and shut down Union Square. It took them seven hours to chainsaw their way in. Our friends caused a conflict outside as a distraction, but those inside couldn’t escape. The occupation ended before our supporters could start a riot, but the action sent shockwaves across the nation.

The New School, occupied.

The following September, people at UC Santa Cruz took things up a notch, occupying a student center for a week with no demands and then seizing two massive buildings for over a week in November. UC Davis, UCLA, SFSU, and Berkeley were all occupied after that, raising the bar each time, and afterwards it seemed that there were only two options left: shut down more universities with multiple occupations, or extend the struggle to the city and continue it there.

[The foregoing text was written at the beginning of 2010; indeed, although the student occupation movement died down after that, the occupation movement itself exploded into public space in 2011 with the Occupy movement.]

A banner reading “Everything,” as in “Occupy everything,” which became a popular watchword coming out of the student occupation movement of 2008-2010, helping to give rise to the Occupy movement that broke out in 2011.

Thoughts for Future Occupiers

Conclusions from the New School Occupations of 2008-2009 in New York City.

You don’t need to convince everyone before the occupation. Everyone knows the situation. You just need to start the party.
You don’t need a lot of people to start an occupation—at least ten, maybe less. All you need to do is hold it until people come. What goes on outside is more important than what goes on inside.
You don’t need a lot of time to prepare. We planned our first one in two days with twelve people. Just bring some locks and chains and take advantage of materials in the building.
When you take a building, don’t immediately hold a meeting. That’s a mistake. Start changing the space, preparing it, remolding it to your desires.
An occupation must expand; otherwise, it dies.
There are hard, soft, open, and closed occupations. There are one-room, floor, building, and multiple-site occupations. Every occupation demands its own style.
Demands are unnecessary; it’s the action that counts.
If you know the occupation is going to end, escape early or end it with a riot. Anything else will wreck future possibilities.
Occupations are not enough—they must combine with other forms of action if they are to be meaningful in the future.

The occupation of the New School in New York City in 2009.

The Berkeley Rebellion: A Semester at Siege

By Josh Wolf.

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Forty-five years after Mario Savio¹ spoke those words on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California at Berkeley, a new student uprising broke out on the campus.

With the California state budget barely coming together, cuts to public education and fee increases for the state’s public college systems became almost certain. State workers lost wages in the form of furloughs, or unpaid leave; others were laid off. The Regents of the University of California, a board consisting mostly of wealthy tycoons appointed by the governor, proposed raising student fees to help offset the budget cuts.

All this ignited strikes and protests throughout the state’s public universities and community colleges in late September. At UC Berkeley, workers, professors, and students called for a strike on September 24, 2009. Organizers from the Associated Students, the American Association of University Professors, and a wide variety of other groups endorsed the one-day strike. On the appointed day, about 5000 people gathered on campus for a rally that transformed into a march though downtown Berkeley.

A poster for the walkout and strike on September 24, 2009.

Not surprisingly, neither this nor numerous other demonstrations changed the minds of the UC Regents, who were scheduled to approve a massive fee hike on November 19. In anticipation of this, students and workers began striking on several campuses the preceding day. In addition to the tuition hike, they were protesting the privatization of the public education system through increasing reliance on corporate money, rampant layoffs, and the ongoing worker furloughs.

Two days later, after the regents approved the fee increases, about forty people slipped into UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall before dawn and locked all the doors. Some of the occupiers knew each other and had been organizing together for months; others had essentially stumbled into the occupation after joining a march the day before. Most were university students. All expected the police would break down the doors early the next morning.

A flier for the protests of November 18-20, 2009, at the University of California at Berkeley.

The First Occupation of Wheeler Hall

The UC police discovered our occupation around 6 am; it wasn’t long before they figured out how to break in. Most of us were gathered on the second floor, but a few were securing the basement when we heard the commotion.

“They’re inside!” gasped a student who had just sprinted up the stairs, barely escaping arrest. Three behind him were not so lucky; we would soon learn that they had been charged with felony burglary.

He pulled back his shirt to reveal red marks from an officer’s baton. Someone slammed the door shut behind him and secured it.

While some participants had been planning to occupy a building before the semester started, others had only had a few minutes to prepare. The first and only meeting had taken place less than twelve hours earlier. It quickly became apparent the locks and chains people had brought wouldn’t be enough to adequately secure the doors. Searching the building, students found a stash of tables and wooden chairs with small desks attached. These seemed to wedge perfectly between the doors, which they then cinched shut with packing straps.

But the same setup hadn’t held for more than a few minutes downstairs. We were certain that police would come storming through any minute. People pressed their bodies against the doors and held fast to the handles at each of the floor’s four entrances.

As a journalist, I tried at first to act as an “objective observer,” staying out of the action while my fellow students literally put their bodies between me and riot police. Later, a girl asked me to help her take a break; realizing how ridiculous it was to think I could remain an impartial observer in such a situation, I accepted a shift holding the door. I’m glad I did; when it came time to arrest the people inside, it made no difference to the police that I was there as a journalist with a police-issued press pass around my neck.

With the police separated from us by only a wooden door held by a handful of people, we realized that we were about to be hauled off to jail without even briefly interrupting the machine.

“Did anybody call the media?” A handful of laptops appeared from book bags and people raced to find the phone numbers of local TV stations. Another person began posting to indymedia, while others called their friends to tell them we were inside. One student copied down all our names and emergency contacts and emailed them to the National Lawyers Guild. Other students sat down to write up a list of demands.

We had all agreed before the occupation that one of the goals of our action would be to force the university to rehire thirty-eight janitors from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), who had been laid off. Someone suggested we should demand amnesty for our friends who had been arrested earlier and were now facing felony charges. Why not ourselves, too? We stipulated that no one should be charged or face student disciplinary action for participating in the protest.

Occupiers address supporters from the second floor of Wheeler Hall on November 20.

The small group added two more demands: that the university renew its lease with the Rochdale Co-op—it had been threatening to use the building for market-rate student housing—and that it enter negotiations in good faith to renew the leases of the predominantly minority-owned local businesses at the Bear’s Lair food court. While it was impossible to meet to reach consensus with the students spread out guarding the entrances, news of these demands quickly circulated and no one seemed to have any objections.

Later, many outsiders would ask why we didn’t demand that the administration roll back the fee hike. One of the occupiers responded that we had limited ourselves to making demands the Berkeley administration actually had the power to grant. This was a tactically sound decision, but not one we had made together. After months of meetings and protests, the participants were suddenly forced to make decisions quickly—sometimes independently—while fighting to keep the occupation alive.

As minutes turned to hours, spectators began to arrive outside Wheeler Hall. At first, it was just a lone student here and a news camera there; but soon a crowd coalesced and began to grow. A student picket line formed blocking the path to class. The AFSCME union reinforced the student picket; it eventually became a sit-down barricade, before being enveloped by the crowd. Inside, we could hear the police banging away and pulling at the handles, but the doors held.

“Whose university?” one person would yell.

And the halls would reverberate with the sound of forty determined voices: “Our university!”

Supporters outside the occupation of Wheeler Hall.

At 9:13 am, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau sent out an email to the entire campus urging students, staff, and faculty to avoid Wheeler Hall until further notice. Of course, the Chancellor’s communiqué only drew dozens more to the crowd, which had gathered outside the classroom window where some of us had congregated. Acting as police liaison, one of the occupiers called the police to deliver our demands and discuss possible negotiations. The officer told her she would call back later. After some time had passed, the officer called back just to repeat that she’d call back later again.

The crowd continued to grow throughout the day. The police force increased as well, as officers from the Berkeley Police Department and deputies from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office joined the UC Police in and around the building.

The police erected metal barricades around the perimeter of the building, and repeatedly attacked students who approached. An officer shattered the wrist of a student resting her hand on the barricade. Another officer shot a student in the stomach with a rubber bullet, and the police injured countless others with their batons. In response, students physically resisted attempts to bring more officers into the building and to control the crowds; some even fought off the police.

Occupiers address supporters from the second floor of Wheeler Hall on November 20, 2009.

Eventually, the administration announced that they wanted to negotiate. We offered to parley on the public lawn outside the window, over the local radio station, or even privately on the phone, but the police chief demanded that we take down our barricades and let them in first.

We smelled a rat, and rejected the offer. Everyone continued holding the barricades as the afternoon passed and the crowd continued to grow. As it grew dark, one of us called out to ask if people would stay through the night. The crowd cheered: they were there to stay. Shortly before 6 pm, a deafening banging erupted at all the blocked doors at once. Were the police breaking through the doors with battering rams? Fear and uncertainty gripped us.

Before long, the group defending one of the entrances abandoned its post and ran to the classroom facing the window over the crowd. We had discussed retreating to this room when the police finally penetrated our defenses, so the crowd outside would witness their behavior while our cameras captured it from the inside.

Everyone had already scrambled into the room and had been sitting there, hands over heads, for some time when the police finally broke through the barricades. We watched in silence as they ran past the door, then came back to unlock it and let us know we were all under arrest.

But by now the crowd had grown to more than a thousand angry students, and every news camera, mainstream and independent, was turned on Wheeler Hall. The university realized it couldn’t charge us with the felonies that the police had doled out earlier that day. With the volatile crowd surrounding the building. the police didn’t even take us to jail. Instead, they held us in the hallway and issued us a citation for misdemeanor trespassing, which the district attorney later dropped, We were then escorted out of Wheeler Hall into the glare of high-intensity spotlights and cheering crowds.

It was a bit uncomfortable—we knew that it wasn’t the forty-three of us who had made the occupation into such an important event, but the thousands outside.

This message was echoed by several others who had been inside the building, as we passed around a megaphone in front of an old tree at the edge of the crowd. There was revolution in the air, and we felt that we were making history.

“Occupy everything”: public artwork in support of the movement.

Growing Unrest

The next few weeks were punctuated by a series of actions.

The Associated Students hosted a forum with the police to discuss the behavior of the police outside Wheeler Hall during the occupation. Rather than participate in a process that would never yield results, a student climbed onto a chair and delivered a verbal assault on the police, after which about thirty of us—ninety percent of the people inside—marched out to hold our own meeting.

On December 3, the anniversary of Mario Savio’s famous Free Speech Movement address, the Associated Students once again attempted to diminish student power by holding a “non-political” commemoration of the speech. We set out to interrupt it, arguing that the Free Speech Movement was anything but apolitical and that there was still no free speech on campus. We arrived with fliers and banners. When people began taping banners to the wall of Sproul Hall, the police took them down and refused to give them back; this became less of a problem once the cameras arrived.

Veterans of the movement spoke alongside current students about past and present crises; everyone seemed to agree that the best way to commemorate the Free Speech Movement would be to have free speech. But at 1 pm, the university-sanctioned hour of free speech came to an abrupt halt when the PA system was turned off without warning. A UC professor who had been involved in the Free Speech Movement as a student was in the middle of his sentence.

From the steps of Sproul, the group of fifty or more people marched around campus, ending at the Bear’s Lair food court for a meeting. Unlike meetings earlier in the year, this one seemed to have a concrete direction and purpose.

When we’d barricaded the doors to Wheeler Hall on November 20, we had followed Savio’s lead and thrown our bodies upon the gears, demonstrating that we had the power to make the machine stop. Now it was time to demonstrate that we also had the power to bring it to life.

Supporters outside the occupation of Wheeler Hall.

Live Week: Wheeler Hall is Re-Occupied

At Berkeley, the last week before finals is known as “dead week” because there are no classes scheduled, although some teachers hold class anyway. As many classrooms stand empty during the week while limited study space is available for students, we decided to return to Wheeler and transform it into an open occupation: Live Week.

We modeled our plan after the European occupations earlier in the year. We would not seal the doors with locks and chains, but would simply occupy the space with our bodies, demonstrating an alternative to the university system.

During the preparations for Live Week, some of the organizers who had been active earlier in the semester were noticeably absent. Many of the groups involved in the movement had met at a conference in late October to begin planning a “day of action” for the following March, and it seemed these people, many of whom were involved with campus socialist groups, felt our energy would be better spent working toward this future event.

After only a few planning meetings, we arrived Monday around 2:30 pm and set up an infoshop in the foyer. Students stopped to pick up a zine or cup of coffee as they left the review session in the auditorium; meanwhile, as the class dispersed, we assembled inside.

Shortly before a UC professor began a lecture addressing the systemic problems in the public education system, we were told that we had to leave the auditorium unless we were willing to rent it from the school.

We refused, and the lecture continued as scheduled. We shared a communal vegetarian meal a few students had prepared at a student co-op using donated food. After dinner, we were told again that we had to leave. Eventually the police showed up, trained their cameras on us, and informed us that if we did not leave we could be arrested or face student conduct charges. It was about 8 pm, two hours before the building was scheduled to close.

We stayed and the police did nothing. Almost one hundred of us held the first general assembly of the occupation. Shortly before 11 pm the police returned with their cameras and repeated their formal order. There were more this time and it seemed possible that they would arrest us.

Officers took up posts at the doors to prevent more people from entering. Some people who didn’t want to risk arrest left, but most stayed, and efforts to prevent more people from coming in proved fruitless. Around midnight, the officers gave up trying to keep people out, and most of them left. We had won the battle.

Some people patrolled the space throughout the night in case the police returned. Others busied themselves cleaning up in preparation for classes to resume in the morning.

By the next morning, Live Week had become part of the university. The transformation extended beyond Wheeler Hall. It was subtle at first: students made eye contact with each other when they might not have before, exchanged a few more friendly hellos.

Yet by reclaiming a building from the administration, we had begun to realize our potential. The awakening was contagious: students began to flock to Wheeler from across the university.

They didn’t come for the movement-building meetings. They didn’t come for the dance parties, rock concerts, and hip-hop shows. They didn’t even come for the free food. No, left with nowhere else to study late at night, the classrooms became a vibrant study hall—in fact, someone painted a banner reading “study hall” to indicate where students could find a quiet place to prepare for their exams.

At the meetings that took place after the occupation got started, activists questioned why we hadn’t drawn a bigger turnout. We had successfully held the building for multiple days, and yet there were so few of us. On the first night there had been over one hundred people at the general assembly, but now there were perhaps twenty. An additional fifty or sixty students were studying in the classrooms at any point throughout the night—but with tens of thousands of students on campus, where was everyone? Someone suggested we throw a concert with a big-name act to bring in people. Maybe The Coup?

The next day, Boots Riley of The Coup was confirmed and fliers circulated promoting the show. Meanwhile, a debate developed over whether the occupation should continue after the Friday night show. Most people eventually agreed to clean up and clear out of the building before finals began on Saturday morning.

But early Friday, around 4:30 am, while all the occupiers were asleep or deep in their studies, the police raided the space. Officers handcuffed the doors shut to prevent anyone from leaving and woke everybody up to the news that they were under arrest.

At first, police told students that they didn’t need to get dressed and that they wouldn’t be hauled off to jail. But they changed their plans after marching the students, some in their boxers and bare feet, to a classroom in the basement.

After being charged with misdemeanor trespassing, the students were taken to Santa Rita, the main jail in Alameda County. Most weren’t released until late afternoon or early evening. Sixty-six people were arrested, forty-two of them students. Most of the non-students were people who live outdoors and had been invited inside Wheeler to escape the cold rain.

Building occupations can give teeth to mass movements—or even catalyze them.

Counterattack

Angered by the arrests and determined that the show must go on, a few organizers sent out an announcement that the concert was still happening and called for people to meet outside Wheeler Hall. After hours of trying unsuccessfully to find a venue, at the last minute someone convinced Casa Zimbabwe, an off-campus co-op north of campus, to host the show.

That night, dozens of activists from across the state converged outside Wheeler Hall in the pouring rain to show their support for the Berkeley rebellion. Some students came all the way from UCLA; others arrived from UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and San Francisco State. We marched across the dark campus to the co-op, where several bands performed in the underground garage, including Boots Riley with Roberto Miguel on guitar. After the concert, some of the attendees donned black masks and headed back to campus to respond to that morning’s assault.

About sixty people marched down Euclid Avenue, a street near the north side of campus, around 11 pm. A few people kicked over newspaper stands and dragged them into the street. Others dragged them out of the road and put them back on the sidewalk. The chanting crowd turned and headed down the edge of campus along Hearst Avenue.

Someone lit a half dozen or more torches and handed them out as the crowd turned onto the paved path to University House, the chancellor’s on-campus home. As the crowd approached, the energy increased. A few individuals emerged from the sea of black, smashing the street lamps along the entryway to his house and overturning the planters in front of it. According to later reports, incendiary objects were thrown at the house and the windows were smashed out.

A police car roared up, sirens blazing and lights flashing, and the crowd scattered. The participants dropped their bandanas and quickly blended into the scattered groups of students walking through the rain. Other squad cars arrived from all directions as some continued to run, while others tried to walk away calmly.

Eight people were arrested that night. Their charges included rioting, threatening an education official, attempted burglary, attempted arson of an occupied building, felony vandalism, and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer; UCPD alleged that when they reported to the scene, “things on fire” were thrown at their cars. The next day, governor Arnold Schwarzenegger described the march to the chancellor’s house as terrorism. The chancellor told the media that he and his wife had feared for their lives. Once again, the student movement at UC Berkeley was national news.

As it turned out, the police had only managed to capture the ones who decided not to run. The arrestees included a journalist who was documenting the events that night and several students and non-students who did not participate in the property destruction, according to witnesses. Held on over $130,000 bail, many of the arrestees spent the weekend in jail waiting for arraignment. But the district attorney dropped all the charges, and they were released after their day in court.

While many in the student movement criticized the attack on the chancellor’s home, others defended it as a legitimate response to the terror the police had inflicted on the students arrested earlier that morning at the Wheeler occupation. Some students feared the movement would lose support now that protestors had turned to violence; others questioned whether the property damage at the chancellor’s home should be considered violence. They argued that the response seemed appropriate in view of the violence administered by the university against its own students.

In still other circles, it seemed that the attack itself wasn’t as offensive as the fact that students had acted autonomously. “What makes those individuals think that they have the right to impose their political views on the entire group?” demanded a student in an email to a campus mailing list. “This hypocrisy must be intolerable to the ENTIRE group! We cannot allow that to happen again. If someone thinks that individuals taking unilateral action, without the consensus of the general assembly, is appropriate, then I place them in a category with (UC President Mark) Yudof.”

While this appeared to be a minority perspective, many questioned whether the action outside the chancellor’s home was tactically sound. They worried that if we wanted the administration to work with us to make the changes we demanded, this assault could hinder our goals. But others doubted we could win the war for public education without such skirmishes: unless we can threaten the status quo, what leverage do students have against the university?

These quarrels threatened to divide the movement, but students still came together for the court appearances and disciplinary hearings. About forty people gathered for an end-of-the-year picnic in People’s Park before the students all scattered for winter break.

“I believe that the university administration not only set the stage for a violent turn in protests by acts which have repeatedly raised tensions and undermined belief in its good will, but actually engaged in most of the violence that has occurred.”

-Education professor Daniel Peristein, after witnessing the events at the chancellor’s house from his office window

Wheeler Hall, occupied.

Afterwards

On January 6, 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a state constitutional amendment requiring the state budget to allocate at least ten percent of its funds to the state college system. He said the money should come from cuts to the state prisons.

Instead of scaling back draconian sentencing and setting nonviolent offenders free, however, Schwarzenegger suggested that the state could save money by privatizing the prisons. While students had demanded “books not bars” throughout the semester, no one was calling for privatization. The governor had hit upon a devious way to play students and prisoners against each other. Most student activists wrote off the governor’s announcement as hollow lip service.

Despite everything, there was a whiff of victory in the air. “Those protests on the UC campuses were the tipping point,” the governor’s chief of staff Susan Kennedy acknowledged in the New York Times. The Times neglected to mention that the previous time the governor had addressed the UC protests he had described them as terrorism. While Kennedy did not suggest that it was the march to the Chancellor’s home that prompted the governor to act, the combination of peaceful and confrontational organizing has historically proven to be a powerful recipe.

A mass mobilization was scheduled for March 4, 2010. Some have called for a general strike, and meetings are planned across the state’s college campuses. But with more than a month of vacation between the two semesters, momentum died down.

The march on March 4, 2010 did not revitalize the movement; its high point had passed. But it did bring together many of the people who would go on to participate in the Occupy movement in fall of 2011, under slogans—such as “Occupy everything”—that had originally been employed only by the most radical and risk-tolerant participants in the student movement.

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.

The Maidan Diary of Dmitry Petrov : An Eyewitness Account of the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014

2024-02-20T11:53:11Z

An unflinching and critical account from within the demonstrations that toppled the Ukrainian government in 2014.

In November 2013, protests broke out in Kyiv against the government of Viktor Yanukovych, then president of Ukraine, in response to Yanukovych prioritizing economic and diplomatic ties with Russia. Demonstrators occupied Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), employing tactics familiar from previous movements in Egypt, Spain, and Turkey. In response, Yanukovych ordered police attacks and the government introduced repressive anti-protest laws. This situation came to a head in February 2014 with clashes in which police killed over a hundred people.¹ Yanukovych lost control and fled to Russia; a new government took power in Ukraine, seeking to shift Ukrainian economic and diplomatic ties toward the European Union. In response, Vladimir Putin’s government ordered the seizure of Crimea, precipitated a civil war in eastern Ukraine, and ultimately launched a wholesale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The sequence of global uprisings that led up to the Ukrainian revolution had begun with the anarchist-initiated insurrection in Greece in December 2008. Over the following five years, this momentum had spread around the world, from the so-called “Arab Spring” and the Occupy movement to Brazil and Bosnia. The uprising in Ukraine drew on some of the same sources of discontent and used many of the same tactics. Yet in Kyiv, fascists established a foothold within the uprising, forcibly sidelining anarchists.

In retrospect, the Ukrainian revolution represented a turning point, introducing a new era in which some of the strategies that had previously been associated with anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian politics would be adopted by neoliberal, nationalist, and fascist groups with completely different agendas. As we argued at the time,

The model we have seen in Kyiv opens the way for fascists and other reactionaries to recreate the ruling order within resistance movements—not just by reinserting formal hierarchies and gender roles, but also by confining the substance of the struggle to a clash of armed organizations rather than spreading subversion into every aspect of social relations. Once nationalism is added to this equation, war is not far away.

It is not surprising that, once it became clear that these uprisings could overthrow governments, additional political actors got involved, bringing their agendas with them. The question is how anarchist visions of liberation can contend with much better-resourced political forces as the world enters a period of widespread instability.

One of the participants in the events of February 2014 was Dmitry Petrov, a twenty-four-year-old anarchist from Moscow. Dmitry had cut his teeth in various anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian, and ecological struggles, founding the Black Blog as a venue in which to report direct action and participating in the Russian protest movement of 2011-2012 in response to the rigged elections that kept Vladimir Putin in power. He traveled to Kyiv in early February, joining other Russian anarchists in supporting Ukrainians as they resisted a government that was aligned with the same autocracy that anarchists were fighting in Russia.² In the process of participating in the Ukrainian uprising, Dmitry hoped to promote an anarchist vision of liberation.

What Dmitry saw in Kyiv was by turns exhilarating and disheartening. In his reports, he documents how militarism, nationalism, and hierarchical organization channeled the movement away from the kinds of profound social change that he sought. At the same time, he retained his faith in the potential of all human beings to collectively self-organize their lives, passionately arguing for solidarity between Russians and Ukrainians in resistance to all forms of oppression. In the face of fascist threats, he did his best to make a space for anarchist proposals in the Maidan protests.

Dmitry’s involvement in Ukraine did not end with this diary. Four years after the 2014 revolution, having learned that the Russian secret police were interested in him, Dmitry returned to Kyiv to live in exile. Despite his precarious situation as an expatriate, he continued to put his politics into action: for example, in 2020, anarchists attacked the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kyiv in solidarity with the George Floyd Uprising. When Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022, Dmitry helped to form an “anti-authoritarian platoon” within the territorial defense forces around Kyiv; he was killed in battle in Bakhmut in April 2023. You can learn more about Dmitry’s life here.

We have translated and annotated Dmitry’s reports from Kyiv in February 2014 because they represent a valuable document offering insight into historic events, but also because the questions that Dmitry faced that month in Kyiv continue to confront us today. As we argued in 2014,

We are not simply in a conflict with the state in its present incarnation, but in a three-way fight against it and its authoritarian opponents. The present social order will regenerate itself indefinitely until a form of resistance emerges that is capable of overthrowing governments without replacing them. This is not just a contest of arms; it is a clash between different forms of relations. It is not just a struggle for physical territory, but also for tactics and narratives—for the territory of struggle itself.

The fact that these movements can be hijacked by nationalists does not mean that we should remain aloof from them. This was the initial reaction of many anarchists to the plaza occupations in Spain and Occupy in the US, and it could have been disastrous. Standing aside at a moment of popular confrontation with the state permits rival antagonists to seize the initiative, connecting with the general public and defining the stakes.

In the years since the Ukrainian Revolution, nationalists and fascists have gained momentum around the world, falsely presenting themselves as rebels against the ruling order even as they seek to impose an even more oppressive version of it. Anarchists and anti-authoritarians have not ceded the terrain of rebellion to them, but nationalists are becoming a dangerous force even in places that were previously associated with left-wing movements. In France, in 2018, the yellow vest movement became a battleground in which anti-authoritarians contended with fascists to represent the alternative to Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal policies.³ While Dmitry’s experience in the Maidan protests might have appeared to represent a worst-case scenario in 2014, today many of us elsewhere around the world could experience something similar in the not-too-distant future.

Thankfully, in the years following the 2014 revolution, fascists failed to secure state power in Ukraine. They did surprisingly badly in subsequent elections, considering the leverage they had wielded in the streets of Kyiv. But in the course of the war that Russia provoked in eastern Ukraine, fascists managed to associate themselves with the Ukrainian military, providing Putin with a facile excuse to order the wholesale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. War offers fascists on all sides fertile soil in which to recruit and promote their mythologies.

If the protest movement in Russia in 2012 had succeeded in toppling Putin, the revolution that took place in Ukraine in 2014 might have been part of a wave of real change throughout the region. Even the staunchest reactionary must acknowledge that that would have been preferable to the war that has killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of people. Instead, the movement was crushed in Russia, and only managed to achieve a change of governments in Ukraine, setting the stage for the war that continues today.

Anarchists continue to debate how best to conceptualize and engage with the war between Russia and Ukraine. There are still anarchist groups active in Ukraine, such as Solidarity Collectives and Assembly. Repression has silenced most forms of dissent in Russia; Solidarity Zone and the Moscow Anarchist Black Cross organize to support political prisoners there.

This translation is a joint project of English-speaking and Russian-speaking anarchists, a humble effort to promote mutual understanding and collective action on an international basis. We are up against a lot, but together, we can make a difference.

“There is a struggle going on inside everyone—on the one hand, the people here have come out to resist the coercion of those in power, but on the other hand, the weight of prejudice, the habit of hierarchical social attitudes, and the vertical structure of society are still very strong and they drag resistance down.”

-Dmitry Petrov, in the sixth installment of his Maidan Diary

The police are only one of many obstacles on the road to freedom.

I. Ukrainian Diary, Day 1: Kharkiv

Published February 7, 2014

In the early morning of February 7, Kharkiv greeted me with gloomy chill, thorough but futile police inspections, and other hustle. This metropolis of a million and a half people has become a staging post on the way to the capital’s Maidan, which, if all goes well tomorrow, we will report on shortly.

After sightseeing, dipping into a subway crowded just like in Moscow, we visited the local Maidan. Near the monument to [famous Ukrainian poet] Taras Shevchenko on a not too frosty but dank February evening, about 200 peaceful citizens had gathered with yellow and blue flags.

Having been here, I have to admit that I was surprised that some time ago, there were calls circulating among Moscow anarchists to go to Kharkiv, to local, supposedly promising protest actions. At the moment, things look rather dull and uneventful here, with all due respect to those who are there now, despite the bad weather and the clearly perceptible police pressure. In addition to the state flags, you can see the flag of the fascist party “Svoboda”⁴ and Tymoshenko’s “Batkivshchyna”⁵ and, of course, the flag of the European Union. The friendly “svobodites” [members of Svodoba] handed me an issue of their newspaper… They have their own tent in which they raise funds.

The speakers cannot be heard very well and speak rather softly, in stark contrast to the expressive revolutionary monument to Shevchenko. A banner reading “Down with bloody dictatorship,” in Ukrainian… One can sense the presence of the police; the city in general gives the feeling that the authorities are on guard, and it seems they’re quietly monitoring those who arrive.

The Kharkiv Maidan is at an excessively respectful distance from the administrative buildings. There does not seem to be any sign of occupations yet. When we approached the reception area, we could see a patrol of the legendary “titushkas” [mercenaries who supported the Ukrainian security forces during the Yanukovych administration, often posing as street hooligans]—simply stupid and arrogant paid thugs, who even turned their attention to our modest company, but then departed. The entrance to the building is guarded by police, but not a very reinforced squad.

Tonight, our pilgrimage is supposed to continue. Hopefully without unplanned complications.

D.Ch. MPST [“Д.Ч. МПСТ”—these initials stand for Dima Chascshin, one of Dmitry’s many pseudonyms, followed by the initials of the MPST union.]

II. Ukrainian Diary, Day 2: Getting to Know Maidan

Published February 9, 2014

So the jolting of the top bunk of the train from Kharkiv is behind us. At the exit from the central subway station, Khreshchatyk, we are greeted by massive barricades, stacked with bags of something heavy. Behind them are tents of protesters, bristling with posters and flags. I was reminded of the view outside our Moscow Teatralnaya station, a similar street with a sidewalk of paving stones, a block away from the Red Square… as if it were happening there.

The eye is struck by the abundance of black and red banners—but here, these don’t mean the anarcho-communist colors, but rather are meant to remind us of the activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [a far-right group influenced by fascism, involving Stepan Bandera, who worked with the Nazis] half a century ago.

The scale of the “rebellious town” on Maidan is staggering. The central street and the central square of Ukraine have in fact been freed from its central authority and are occupied by the protesters (or already rebels?), controlled by their self-defense units. The camp stretches for a kilometer in length. All around are the chimneys of the field kitchens and heated living tents. There is something of a Cossack camp in this picture.

There are blue and yellow flags everywhere, and party symbols as well: mainly “Batkivschyna,” “Svoboda,” “Spilna Pravda”… to put it tactfully, these guys are not close to us ideologically.

Everywhere, the sotni—or “hundreds,” the Maidan’s self-defense units—are marching around combatively. People with clubs, wearing masks and sometimes gas masks or military-style clothes, make a rather intimidating and repulsive impression, but at the same time, they are pleasing to the eye, in that they create a clear sense that the state’s monopoly on violence no longer applies here. Bravado and ostentatious militarism are juxtaposed here with the difficult but honorable need for direct confrontation with the repressive structures of the state.

The hustle and bustle of the “rebellious town” gives way to crowds of tourists and tense groups of volunteers closer to Grushevsky Street, where the slippery asphalt is covered with black ash and the air reeks of soot. Here stands the entrance to the Dynamo stadium, which in recent weeks has been all over the world in the news. It is covered with scorch marks.

All the passages between the barricades are blocked by vigilantes. Ordinary mortals are not allowed in, only the “certified” self-defense participants. Further on, there are two more forward barricades, and behind them, there are lines of Berkut [Ukrainian riot police]. On the front line, among Ukrainian and Bandera flags, the flags of [the separatist Chechen Republic of] Ichkeria and the European Union hang side by side—this scene brilliantly illustrates the ideological eclecticism of the Maidan.

Through our comrades, we get acquainted with local anarchists and sympathizers. We are slowly getting oriented. We fit into one of several tents occupied by anarchists.

There is now a lively discussion among our like-minded comrades about creating their own hundred as part of the self-defense of the Maidan, and about other anarchist initiatives on the Maidan. Many comrades are concerned that the creation of an “official” hundred could bind anarchists with obligations to the unelected bodies of the “Maidan government,” while others, on the contrary, emphasize that this government is nominal, collegial, and more or less horizontal.

We have not yet been able to formulate our own opinion about all these “people’s militias,” “tax police,” “ministries,” and “headquarters” on the Maidan. One thing is certain: there are quite a few people who want to gain power within the movement without burdening themselves with any democratic procedures. At the same time, the predominantly spontaneous nature of everything that is going on is preventing the implementation of these plans.

But spontaneity rarely lasts, so it seems to me that either everything will shift towards the vertical and the imperious lawless power of the Maidan “security officials” and “leaders,” or it will be possible to create a structured and well-ordered horizontal self-government.

Anarchists are represented on the Maidan, although much less visible than in the Moscow anti-Putin movement a year and a half ago (note that the Ukrainian protest movement is in all respects much more serious than the Russian movement; we must catch up to it and surpass it).

There are a number of problems. First, it is quite noticeable that the focus of many protesters is to “make things the way they are in Europe”; it is difficult to explain to such people anything about other ways of socio-economic organization. Second, there are a lot of nationalists here. This can be seen in everything: in the symbols, the graffiti, the costumes of many Maidan activists, and in the number of times that you will hear “Glory to Ukraine!” while walking along the Maidan.

At the same time, we must understand that apart from the aggressive supporters of the “strong hand” that is creating total Ukrainization, the broad conglomerate of Ukrainian nationalists includes people of more reasonable views, perhaps even those who do not fit the definition of a “nationalist.” As my comrade rightly noted, “the worst ones here are the respectable nationalists, like Svoboda.”

“On the front line, among Ukrainian and Bandera flags, the flags of [the separatist Chechen Republic of] Ichkeria and the European Union hang side by side—this scene brilliantly illustrates the ideological eclecticism of the Maidan.” By contrast, the second image shows the black flag of the anarchists over the “Vilniy Namet.”

Despite these problems, anarchists clearly have the opportunity to prove themselves as a worthwhile force, and the spontaneous and anti-authoritarian vector of the protest movement is also created by external conditions that are not favorable, but also far from hopeless for our libertarian cause.

D.Ch. MPST

III. Ukrainian Diary, Day 3: People’s Veche [Assembly] and Fascist Flexing on the Maidan

Published February 11, 2014

Yesterday (February 9) on Kiev’s Independence Square was marked first and foremost by the “People’s Assembly” [veche, council], which is held weekly on Sundays. At the appointed hour, the square was filled with a significant number of protesters: between 100,000 and 300,000 people. This was considerably more than the number that is constantly present on the Maidan. All of them were listening to what was happening on the big stage. Getting ahead of ourselves, we note that, in fact, the veche was not much different from the 100,000-strong anti-Putin rallies in Russia, where the public similarly swallowed the speeches of well-promoted “opposition leaders.”

I was surprised by the clerical introduction. The presenter of the rally, in a spiritual voice, said that the clerics were going to speak. Thus, the party was preceded by speeches by hierarchs of varying degrees of severity [the author is being ironic] from the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate), the Greek Catholic Church (Uniates), the Church of Evangelical Christian Baptists, and Muslims. The clerics spoke in roughly the above order.

The first three, representatives of traditional mass faiths, spoke decorously, reminding us of the approaching Lent, calling for peace, while at the same time blessing the protesters. The Pentecostalist preached a heated sermon, reminding us that sinful government had been given to the people for their sins, but now it was time, having been cleansed of their sins, to give it a reversal. The mullah even directly declared that the Muslims of Ukraine, represented primarily by the Crimean Tatars, had been standing with the Maidan since the first days of the protest.

This was followed by the chanting of the “spiritual anthem of Ukraine.” At the same time that one of the speeches was taking place, a line of people with open umbrellas marched through the crowd… some of the umbrellas were not the most puritanical: they were painted with pictures of people kissing or were black with pink ribbons. For a moment, I thought that this was an anti-clerical action, and that the umbrellas were intended as a way of shielding the minds of those present from the endless stream of divine grace. It turned out that it was more prosaic than that: a demonstration of solidarity with the Russian opposition TV channel Dozhd.

Without getting into long “analytical” arguments, I will only say that seeing such an accentuated interest in the opinion of the “spiritual authorities” left little pleasant emotion in my heart; on the other hand, it strongly suggests that despite the “course towards the EU,” Ukraine’s political culture is still quite distant from European culture. Still, it is impossible not to note the unity of representatives of such different religious branches in the face of this struggle against the authorities. On the other side of the spiritual barricade in Ukraine is the Moscow Patriarchate of Russian Orthodox Church.

Next came a speech by the opposition establishment. There were the “Napoleons” [heavyweight boxer Vitali] Klitschko, [Svoboda leader Oleh] Tyahnybok, and [politician Arseniy] Yatsenyuk [who became prime minister only a few days later, following the revolution], as well as a number of other “celebrities” who, unfortunately, are little known to the author of these lines.

In addition to purely rhetorical passages, the speeches contained a standard set of appeals. The audience was invited to strive towards Europe (as if “European integration” would be a great victory for the Ukrainian people, and not for European capital, which wants to use these people for its own profit). Everyone was urged to join the ranks of the Maidan self-defense fighters; apparently, the honorable candidates see this formation as a bargaining chip in the forthcoming political battles—I would like to see them disappointed.

They called for obedience to the leaders. They declared that a return to the constitution of 2004 would be the best solution of the current political crisis, and, of course, they villified the “Donetsk bandit.”⁶ The figures of the speech about Ukraine as “an outpost of Europe in the Third Cold War” and so on sometimes produced astonishment and a bitterly ironic state of mind. Almost every speaker began and ended his or her speech with the cry “Glory to Ukraine!” which prompted the unanimous response: “Glory to Heroes!”—a slogan that has traditionally been associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

An eclectic mix of nationalism (often not at all the “respectable and civil” kind) and Westernism is a characteristic feature of the Maidan. Against this sad background, I appreciated the speech of a representative of the “Automaidan” [a self-organized group using vehicles in the protests], Volodymyr Yavorski, who refrained from making eulogies to power-hungry opposition figures and from relishing European and constitutional illusions, but simply urged people to continue to persistently struggle for their rights and interests against those who oppress and humiliate them.

Among the juicy things, we should mention the rhetoric of the nationalist Tyahnybok about the alliance of Ukraine with the Western world and the forthcoming entry of the country into the IMF… What a marvel! What would Tyahnybok’s Western like-minded brothers, who burn EU flags at all their major events, have to say about this?

A Banderist flag; religious leaders addressing the mass assembly; helmets in the Maidan, one of which is adorned with a sticker depicting Nestor Makhno.

In general, the veche [assembly] left a rather depressing impression. First of all, because of the generally loyal attitude of the participants to all the bad things outlined above and to the elite figures of the opposition as such. But even more so because this is not a real “veche” at all, but the same “communist” rally akin to those at which people chanted “Glory to the CPSU!”—where only the elite can speak, and all the “pawns” are offered ready-made opinions and instructions on how to behave.

There is a clear need to organize a horizontal structure of protest self-government, a real veche. The well-known Moscow variant of Occupy Abay with one general assembly (involving, according to the most ambitious estimates, up to 4000 people) will not work here, among hundreds of thousands—obviously, we need a network of assemblies that coordinate their decisions and actions through delegates with instructions from the collective that nominated them. And the podium, of course, must be open to all, and obviously there should not be just one. Otherwise, we are inevitably dealing with an elitist and authoritarian way of organizing the protest movement, and the fruits of such a movement are unlikely to be sweet.

I have certain hopes associated with the fact that the “leaders” have already repeatedly proven themselves to be traitors, only now undertaking to be “uncompromising” to please the mood of the Maidan. Perhaps the situation with the permanent betrayal of the self-appointed spokesmen for the people’s will itself will prompt the Maidan fighters to seek other ways of fighting and fresh ideas. On the good news, the credibility of the loudmouths from the TV is not very high among the natives of Independence Square.

Svolota

[This is a world play on the name of the “Svoboda” party; svolota means “scum.”]

As it turned out later, this was not the most emotionally charged event of the day. In the evening, for the first time, we experienced the aggression of the fascists here. The youngsters of the odious Svolota tried to show the world the wonders of Aryan valor in an organized manner, with clubs, helmets, bulletproof vests and in numerical majority. Approaching the group of anarchists, the idiots started threatening and showing off.

It got no further than a verbal confrontation, but standing unarmed in front of the clubs was not very pleasant, to put it mildly. Also surprising is the inability/unwillingness of the Maidan “security office” to stop such actions on the part of the scum, as this is not the first time it has happened. In addition, this incident was a good illustration of the “truce” between forces participating in the Maidan revolution that are hostile to each other.

Д. Ch. MPST

IV. Ukrainian Diary, Day 3: Maidan Life

Published February 11, 2014

Having interrupted the daily chronicle, I want to write a few words about the everyday life of the protesters on the Maidan. Walking behind the barricades in the center of Kiev, you find yourself in a natural “rebel town.” Everywhere there are insulated military hiking tents, equipped with stoves and gasoline-powered generators. This is where the natives of Maidan live—those who are on the watch for the struggle around the clock. In addition, many people come here every day to gawk and/or protest…

Inside the camping tents, you can see crudely made bunks, tables for meals, various nooks with stacked things, in particular clothes collected by volunteers to help the Maidan fighters. There is a lot of firewood stacked inside and around the tents, as the wood stoves consume a lot of fuel. Outside, you can see smoke billowing from the chimneys of the protestors’ tents. Some of the tents are capacious, others are smaller, and sometimes there aren’t enough sleeping places, so we have to put polystyrene foam or jackets on the benches and floor, which is the asphalt of Khreshchatyk [the main street of Kyiv], sometimes covered with plywood or planks, and sometimes completely bare.

During the day, Maidan is filled with shops selling souvenirs or ice cream (or, alternatively, mulled wine). Smart businessmen have already started producing magnets and badges with Euromaidan symbols. There are also many “patriotic” cups and scarves on sale, and balaclavas for self-defense fighters or simply for showing off.

There are also field kitchens. There are quite a few of them. Several teams of volunteers prepare food and tea and distribute them free of charge to everyone. True, the food is mostly meat, which for us anarchists is a significant disadvantage. Medical aid stations have also been established.

A separate topic—the local toilets. Unfortunately, the relatively small number of public toilets on Independence Square and Khreshchatyk are clearly unable to serve so many people, so they are in a deplorable condition and using them is a torture, and every day more difficult. It is a pleasure to visit the restroom at one of the nearby cafés.

Another story is the Ukraine House. Nowadays it is a real cultural center—there is a library, a hall for film screenings and lectures, many of which are very interesting (they are organized by the “Free University,” and everyone can suggest their own topic of lecture or film). There is a free-of-charge buffet in the basement and an exhibition of paintings on captured Berkut [Ukrainian riot police] shields, perhaps the best thing in contemporary art at the moment. There is a phone recharging spot and much more.

In general, an atmosphere of permanent creative energy reigns in the House. Even the restroom is quite civilized here. And therefore, it’s no coincidence that yesterday (February 9), when there was a conflict between representatives of various self-defense groups, false information was spread on fascist platforms that “Somebody came to take out the anarchists”—these morons can sense that something is going on here that is the exact opposite of their entire existence.

A barricade; an exhibition at the Ukraine House displaying paintings on shields captured from the Berkut, the Ukrainian riot police; a banner reading “Putin—out [sic] bloody hands from Ukraine!”

In general, two paradoxical phenomena coexist in this “rebel town.” After a long period of inactivity, the Maidan camp is slowly stewing in its own juice, “rotting” in the incessant management of everyday affairs, and gradually getting bored. Conflicts arise on this basis, too. Besides, such places like a magnet attract all sorts of outsiders and weirdos, who spoil the picture, and in general do not contribute anything good to the atmosphere.

At the same time, something completely opposite is happening here as well. People around here show their initiative in the directions they like: some cook, some build, some educate, some fight—and this is a vibrant productive life activity, as Erich Fromm would probably characterize it.

I would hope that the second tendency will always prevail over the first. But for it to do so, one must surely continue to press forward and advance toward the true goal of it all: emancipation. We must admit that there are those who see their vocation here not as productive activity, but as commanding and ruling. Unfortunately, these people are also very active and are trying to accomplish their goals, at times with some success—by the way, they differ quite a lot from those who are engaged in genuine organizing and coordinating activities. As a result, the life of the Maidan has already become covered with a fair amount of bureaucratic mold, and the newly-minted “bosses” and “security” are at times creating significant hindrance to normal existence.

In conclusion, one cannot fail to mention the memorials to those killed in the battles with the Berkut. These symbols and monuments of tragedy and selflessness can be found near one of the front barricades on Grushevsky street, as well as on the Maidan itself.

D.Ch.MPST

V. Ukrainian Diary, Days 4 and 5: The Life of the Student Assembly and the Everyday Life of the Revolution

Published February 13, 2014

The day before yesterday (February 10) passed in some confusion and bustle. We addressed organizational issues, held a meeting of the anarchists active on the Maidan, and made organizational plans (out of superstition, I will tell you about the plans only as they come to fruition). Then we settled into our new place of residence and struggle—in the liberated Ukraine House—in the Student Assembly, an island of libertarian thought and activity on the Maidan.

The guys from the Assembly are active 24 hours a day; they maintain a cell phone charging station, and organize film screenings and discussions. It is the Assembly that organizes a very important and noble initiative of standing guard in hospitals, where victims of police violence on Grushevsky Street are treated and who, as participants in the popular uprising, face the risk of arrest and, at best, government bunk beds instead of a hospital bunk. These arrests and kidnappings are carried out secretly at night, in violation of all procedural norms and laws. That is why the presence of volunteers standing guard and the direct obstruction of the actions of the cops has already saved several people from the unpredictable consequences of an illegal arrest. Life in the Student Assembly is in full swing, and we must give credit for the hospitality and cordiality of our comrades toward us.

One sad thing—there are a lot of tough guys in balaclavas and armor constantly poking around the building of the Ukraine House, keeping the place in order, so to speak. On the one hand, it is important to keep this a sober space, to drive provocateurs and troublemakers away. But on the other hand, to periodically see two tough guys in masks dragging some crying girl or a sad young man by the arms is very unpleasant. The newly-minted cops (at least, many of them) are extremely rude and boorish, and anyone who inquires as to what the person being dragged away has done will be answered, at best: “No one asked you!” or “Shut up, or you’ll be next!”

These guys like to look menacing and wave around their “security” credentials, etc. It is curious and at the same time bitter to see how the long-established phenomenon “power corrupts” is playing out yet again without any noticeable resistance. It seems that many of these guys, the “people’s policemen,” who have a very big responsibility to keep order but not to turn into repressive beasts, are often committed to a profound sense of their own greatness and quickly get a taste for power. In the future, this will undoubtedly give rise to even greater problems.

All in all, thanks to such incidents, a rather aggressive atmosphere prevails in the House and on the Maidan as a whole. To say “the rule of force” would be an exaggeration, but it is true that force has a greater place than it should here when it comes to internal issues.

A painting on a shield captured from the Ukrainian riot police, displayed at the Ukraine House; scenes from the Student Assembly and the Ukraine House.

In addition to the “police,” there are many other working groups operating in the Ukraine House to keep things running smoothly here and to help people on the Maidan: a medical station and team, people on shift and cooks in the canteen, there is also a “chapel” made of cardboard strips with rather strange priests, one of whom has already been escorted out for not being who he claimed he was, and another had just tortured a puppy who entered the sacred territory, he was whining a lot—the power was taken away with a scandal—fortunately, the student assembly was just behind a cardboard ceiling. Electricians and plumbers also can be encountered here, since household malfunctions are common.

D.Ch. MPST

VI. Ukrainian Diary, Days 6 and 7: A Story from Moscow Anarchists about the Protests in Russia at the Vilna (Free) School in the Ukraine House, an Anarchist Section in the Maidan Library

Published February 13, 2014

Perhaps the most significant event for us on February 12 was our collective presentation as part of the Free School, which was set aside in the evening in the main hall of the Ukraine House. We told the audience (more than fifty people) about the mass protest campaign against United Russia (the ruling party) and Putin in 2011-2012 and the “Bolotnaya Square Case.”⁷

The main idea we wanted to convey to our listeners was that the protest should be organized on a horizontal basis. Ironically, despite the differences between the Russian movement and the Ukrainian insurgency, we too have something to share with our Slavic brothers. Even the notorious “coordination council” of the opposition was elected in our country, while here many executive (security and self-defense) posts are appointed from above: either by opposition parliamentary parties, or self-appointed, according to the principle of “he who dares, eats.” These quasi-officials are not accountable to the ordinary Maidan activists, including those who are constantly on the barricades, in the square, and in the Ukraine House. At the same time, their powers are much broader than those possessed by the Opposition Council in Russia. Needless to say, this situation undermines resistance to Yanukovich’s authoritarianism.

Our message was as follows: the people of Ukraine, who have already shown themselves to be staunch opponents of tyranny, must not be satisfied with simply putting the boots of new oppressors on their necks in place of the old ones. We spoke about our experience of holding people’s assemblies during the “standing” demonstrations on Chistye Prudy and Barrikadnaya in Moscow. We also drew attention to some curious differences in the political realities of Russia and Ukraine. In particular, there are no parties in the Russian parliament that even remotely resemble the real opposition to the party in power. Paradoxically, we are “more fortunate” in this respect, since representative institutions and political parties in Russia seem to inspire less trust. We received a warm welcome, and many fervently supported us, while others argued with our egalitarian position, voicing common misconceptions about the inevitability of social hierarchies and the “impossibility” of organizing society along different lines. There is a struggle going on inside everyone—on the one hand, the people here have come out to resist the coercion of those in power, but on the other hand, the weight of prejudice, the habit of hierarchical social attitudes, and the vertical structure of society are still very strong and they drag resistance down.

Dmitry speaking at the Ukraine House (UkrDom) during the Maidan, in February 2014. At this meeting, Dima spoke about the experiences of Russian protesters, drew parallels between the liberation struggle in both countries, and proposed the idea of people’s power as an alternative to vertically organized power represented by professional politicians.

After several days of negotiations with the Maidan library and with our comrades in Kyiv, on February 13, we managed to organize a “free shelf” in the library of the Ukraine House. There are anarchist periodicals and theoretical pamphlets, something on ecology, and works by such leftist philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Guy Debord, and others. We would welcome any infusion of libertarian literature into our library sector. So far, there has been very little…

Life in the “rebellious town” is still stagnating; no one has gone to block the Rada [the Ukrainian parliament] today, but the expiration of Yanukovich’s ultimatum on February 17 promises to bring a fresh wave.

D.Ch. MPST

Anarchist graffiti; the anarchist section in the library of the Ukraine House.

VII. Ukrainian Diary: Valentine’s Day on Maidan

Published February 15, 2014

Today (February 14) went by in a fairly ordinary mode: that is, it consisted of the same thousand little things as usual.

The “romantic” flair created around Valentine’s Day filled the Maidan, too, with a special sound: cute girls were seen handing out Valentine’s cards to boys, as well as dandies with bouquets of flowers. Valentine’s cards (see below) demand to keep up with expectations. Of course, the cohabitation of many representatives of both sexes over a long period of time inevitably leads to a variety of interactions, which isn’t without its anecdotes but also downright nasty stories… but then again, that’s just the cultural background of our fellow countrymen. Eastern Europe style, as they say…

However, the cupids were not fluttering everywhere. Yesterday, the freaks from Svolota showed themselves again: waiting for a moment when only one person was left standing watch at the anarchist section of the barricades, they arrived in a gang, waving knives… and began to paint over the anarchist graffiti. In all likelihood, this kindergarten shows the most we can expect of the Svolota “youth.”

D.Ch. MPST

VIII. Ukrainian Diary: Maidan kitchen

Published February 16, 2014

On the night of February 14-15, I decided to satisfy my civic sense and take a shift in the kitchen. It was probably one of the most interesting things I’ve done in my time here. The kitchen is always short of volunteers, and the vast majority of those who work there are women. During my shift, the gender ratio was about 4:1, which is more balanced than it usually is.

Feeding the awakened (in the political sense) people is, to put it bluntly, not easy. The kitchen functions on the account of ready-made food brought in as well as food allocated from the revolution’s reserves, which is obviously made up of donations and/or sponsorships. Even at night there are plenty of people who want something to eat, so the whole kitchen and buffet, with a total of fifteen to twenty people on shift, is in assembly line mode.

At the same time, many representatives of the awakened people do not burden themselves—neither with gratitude, nor with basic politeness. Moreover, many of the guys in the queue simply can’t think of anything better to do than to flirt insistently with the girls at the counter, which I soon got sick of, and that became an additional lesson that the revolution in consciousness should go hand in hand with the social revolution. Fortunately (or not?), the catering sorceresses themselves perceive this situation more simply. Generally speaking, as someone who has never really gone in for hyper-feminism, I can testify that the issue of discrimination against women here is real: there are problems involving rudeness, the redistribution of dirty work to women, their exclusion from participating in self-defense, and harassment.

Valentine’s Day on Maidan; pot washing.

Some time after we started our kitchen work, a disgruntled woman (some local low-ranking “boss”) showed up and started demanding to be told who was using a megaphone to invite volunteers to the kitchen from the residential floor. Not that anyone there was particularly asleep at that moment, but the folks at headquarters gave her a hard time, and now she was there to take her anger further down the hierarchical ladder. However, one of the guys gave her a worthy rebuke, saying that the principle “The boss punishes you, then you punish a subordinate” is somehow inappropriate in revolutionary territory.

Soon, they began to recruit a group to carry food to the front barricades. Only the self-defense squads on duty are allowed to be there; no ordinary protesters or bystanders are allowed. Women are not allowed on the front barricades. Those handing out food are escorted through the cordons by a security guard. When I was a “mere mortal” and did not have access to the front lines, I could not have imagined that there was such an extensive system of front barricades near Dynamo Stadium—we walked around seven, each guarded by a squad on duty.

In the darkness of the night, slowly going from post to post, there was indeed an atmosphere of wartime. The inhabitants here, in turn, are not at all soccer hooligans or rebellious students, but grown men, perhaps with war experience. I can’t help but appreciate that everything is organized so seriously.

However, this situation also has a drawback, perhaps more significant than its advantages. The presence of professional (or quasi-professional) military men inevitably means the collapse of any kind of democracy in the movement, since, by decision of their commanders, these people can impose this or that order on everyone else in an organized way by force. In addition, according to my subjective feelings, these people are unlike those who came here at the call of the idea, and even if I am wrong, their values and goals most likely have little in common with mine. A thick atmosphere of the right of force, the power of a man with a gun (or club) hung there. This is a problem that requires reflection and solution. The contradiction, the conflict between the “military” and “civilian” Maidan, is very clear.

D.Ch. MPST

IX. Ukrainian Diary, February 15 and 16: Is the Troubling Calm Nearing an End?

Published February 17, 2014

After the Maidan kitchen, I woke up late. It was February 15, the situation with available places to stay over for the night was bad and it was time to take a public shower in the Ukraine House… too bad there was no public laundry or public shoe deodorant. The wifi was no better than the hygiene situation, so I hurried off in search of a network, leaving my things, as usual, in the Student Assembly.

Imagine my surprise when, on my return, I found the entrance to the House blocked off by people in helmets and armor and with batons—“self-defense” men. Everyone was told that the building was being evacuated, but that they would soon let everyone in for half an hour to pack up. The situation got very uncomfortable. Then a tough man in camouflage ordered, through a megaphone, that everyone should form a column of four people at the foot of the stairs. And then… everyone was told that it was a drill, and that our preparedness for defense is shit, and that from now on everyone must obey the orders of the men in camouflage unquestioningly and in an organized manner.

In some ways, I was relieved. We were allowed to get our belongings, and the frantic question of where to spend the night was no longer an issue. In general, the actions of some especially quick and arrogant power-hungry politicians, as well as the aggressive men, create an oppressive feeling of powerlessness and alienation from the revolutionary movement. This situation has long been in need of resolution. Rumors have been circulating everywhere that soon the Svolota will come to evict the Ukraine House, and it will be necessary to hold the defense.

For the evening film screening, the choice was “The Dictator” [presumably the 2012 film by Sacha Baron Cohen]—we laughed heartily and the audience was delighted. It’s funny that the security office did not revoke the Student Assembly’s right to organize screenings.

February 16 came, and with it, the Sunday “veche”—hundreds of thousands of people and politicians sloganeering. Everything is the same as last Sunday. The “peaceful offensive” on the administrative buildings, which many had discussed, did not take place. The fascist Tyahnybok was calling for everyone to carry out what had been planned for Tuesday. But that same evening, Svolota once again demonstrated its traitorous nature. The authorities demanded the release of the building of the Kyiv City Hall (the city state administration) in exchange for the release of political prisoners. Contrary to the opinion of a significant number of protesters, the opposition establishment arbitrarily decided to hand over city hall to the authorities.

And at the moment, the Svolota scum, numbering several hundred people armed with batons and shields, are blocking the entrance to the Kyiv City State Administration to the rest of the protesters. In all likelihood, the fascist traitors intend to hand over the building, which was occupied in fierce clashes, to the oppressors in the morning.

The Syrian opposition flag on Maidan; Svolota does the work of the police at city hall.

D.Ch. MPST

X. Ukrainian Diary: Culmination

Published February 20, 2014

Actually, the diary is already over. I write these lines following the fading traces of memory, sitting in a soft armchair and sipping Borjomi in Moscow. I am ashamed that I am here, and many people who have already become significant to me are there. I can only justify myself with the fact that I did not leave there out of fear. Really.

The morning of February 18, the day for which Ukraine is now in mourning, was warm and sunny like spring. It was the second day after the end of the ultimatum demanding that the seized buildings be given up and the barricades dismantled. Yeah, sure. The truce was over.

It was also the day that parliament was supposed to begin its session. Therefore, in the morning, a column of protesters headed towards the Rada building from Maidan Nezalezhnosti along Institutskaya street. The approaches to it were blocked by the Berkut and the alleys were blocked by trucks (just like at similar marches in Moscow). We in the Ukraine House were taking a lot of time to get ready. In the meantime, it entered a state of siege.

The self-defense forces said that they would only let people out before lunch, but not let anyone in. The windows of the ground floor were taken out in order to make additional barricades. Rumors were spread that Berkut and domestic troops would go on the offensive. From the porch of the Ukraine House, we had a good view of the barricade on Grushevsky street, and we could see that clouds of black smoke were beginning to rise from burning tires. Surprisingly, this was in harmony with the mood of this bright spring day.

Finally, we went to Institutskaya street. We arrived at the very moment when the crowd of protesters was emerging from their stagnation and slowly starting to move. Berkut’s snipers had settled comfortably on the roof of one of the houses, and the main forces of cops, bristling with shields, formed a “turtle” [a defensive formation]. People broke up the pavement, prepared Grushevsky cocktails, pulled on their respirators and gauze bandages; those who had gas masks donned them. It has begun…

The sign reads “You are beautiful!!! I love you!”

Let’s try without great poetics, but in essence. This may be useful when you happen to be in a similar situation, dear reader.

It is important to use your fear: so that it helps you to avoid getting into certain troubles, but does not flow into panic and flight. Personally, I had an incessant fear that a bullet or a grenade would hit me. I have long known that I am far from being a daredevil, and I say that without a hint of coquetry. Now, for the first time, I became interested in the essence of such a feeling as courage. What is it, anyway? Fear forced me to stay closer to people, not to stick out too much, not to run out in front of the crowd. There was a petty feeling: there are a great number of us here, the chance that they will shoot at me is small. I had this childish feeling: “Wow, I am inside the riot! Just like I saw it on TV! I gotta do something crazy!”

But that was the least of it. Next to fear, there was a feeling similar to emptiness—a silent obligation to stay and act. It is almost never formulated verbally. It just is. Maybe courage is just about that? Further, it is important to begin to act meaningfully, and not just to stand or stupidly rush back and forth.

Here, the first stones are flying, the first bullets of the cops and flash-bang grenades… Screams can be heard: the battle cry.

At that moment, the sound of bagpipes rings out: the rebel song “Ribbon by Ribbon”—one of the big hits here. At this moment, I truly understood the meaning of the war musicians of the past: the martial tune puts you in a state of warlike trance, imbues you with a sense of the greatness of the moment, the need to show courage. Isn’t that why we love walking around with a music player, because the endless beautiful soundtrack gives some meaning to the gray of everyday life and routine? When great things are happening, the soundtrack is even more appropriate.

Next, let’s take things point by point:

The stupidest thing to do is to stand there in a daze and wait for something to happen. At first, most protesters do just that. A sure way to just catch the cops’ “gifts” without doing any good. In addition, the crowds prevent the rapid movement of groups of active people. The only conditional benefit is the creation of a sense of mass participation. I think that a huge crowd will reduce the cops’ eagerness to go on the attack. I’m not 100% sure about that, though. So the harm from useless hanging around is concrete, and the benefit is ephemeral.
When throwing a rock, it’s important to look behind you. There have been cases of people swinging and hitting their own comrades standing nearby. It is even more important to understand that you should throw a stone only when you are in one of the front rows. There were emotional characters who threw stones in euphoria from the very thick of the crowd. As a result, the stones landed on their own front rows. I hope none of the guys got serious head injuries.
Shields can protect against rubber bullets and water cannon jets. Shields can be taken from the riot police or made at home out of plywood or sheet metal. They are held by the comrades in the first row, covering the others. Shields can also be used to make sorties when a group of comrades move forward, the first three or four people cover them with shields, while they throw rocks or cocktails or push tires into the fire.
Speaking of burning tires. Their role is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, piling up burning tires prevents the cops from charging, and the smoke prevents the cops’ snipers from aiming at precise targets. It is no coincidence that the water cannon was directed primarily against the tires. But they are not so easy to extinguish once they have burst into flames. On the other hand, the tires also prevent the demonstrators from moving forward if they have the opportunity to attack.

So the battle broke out. Soon several brave guys climbed onto the roof from which the Berkut officers were shooting and throwing grenades, and the cops had to retreat. This caused great excitement and was a major tactical victory.

Soon riot police swooped in from the opposite alley and temporarily split the crowd of protesters in two, but after a few moments they were driven away, so much so that several cops were pinned against the barricade and taken prisoner. They were taken toward Maidan, while the especially hot-headed guys who were trying to lynch them were kept away.

Several more times, the waves of the Berkut and the people crashed upon each other in turn. The first seriously wounded people appeared, and people from the volunteer medical squad helped them as much as they could.

At this point, the childishness faded away, giving way to the desire not to embarrass myself, but also not to get shot or hit by a grenade. I happened to escort one wounded man from the front line to the doctors, he turned to me: his eye was not visible and there was blood coming out of his eye socket, pouring over almost half of his face: “Oko tsilo?” (“Is the eye intact?”) he asked… I told him everything would be fine, we just needed to get to the doctors. I hope I was right. “Oko” is an archaic word for us, a poetic word, whereas in Ukrainian it just means eye, and this bloody eye made me sober up.

Then there were reports of dozens of people killed. It’s terrible, but I can’t feel the pain of these people and their loved ones to the full extent, because I only heard about it. But those men and boys with their heads bashed in and their eyes knocked out (irretrievably, I’m afraid)—I saw them myself, empathized with them, and in parallel was afraid for my own skin. So here’s to the question of safety:

The minimum gear you need to participate in such a confrontation is a construction helmet, gloves, and something to cover your face. Don’t even bother without this. In general, it’s a good idea to wear a military helmet, a bulletproof vest, and sports knee pads to protect the most vulnerable parts of the body as much as possible, while minimally restricting movement. My construction helmet was hit several times by unknown hostile things: either buckshot or fragments from flash-bang grenades. The impact wasn’t very bad, but I don’t want to know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been wearing that helmet.
As practice has shown—the eyes are very vulnerable and subject to trauma. Accordingly, you need protective goggles, obviously not the usual glass ones. Perhaps the airsoft ones would do, but more durable ones would be better. A direct hit from even a rubber bullet on an unprotected eye is a disaster.
Several times a grenade exploded very close by. Only on TV do stun grenades look almost harmless. In fact, when such a grenade explodes, you hear a very loud popping noise that hits your ears very hard. My ears still hurt to this day, and the ringing in them two days later has not fully subsided. Also, the grenades spray shrapnel that can burn and wound. Ear plugs are probably a bad idea, because they create a sense of vacuum, slow your reaction time, dull your ability to orient yourself, and interfere with your ability to communicate with associates. In my opinion, shooting headphones are better suited. I don’t know how long human ears can withstand such blows. But I think that two or three more would have been enough to give me health problems. That’s why it’s worth protecting your ears.
It’s important to stick together with your friends. Check in periodically to see how they’re doing, so that if anything happens, no one will be left behind or arrested without anyone noticing.
The police make extensive use of tear gas, which yours truly had the displeasure of inhaling on a couple of occasions. Accordingly, a simple gauze bandage is not the best option. A real respirator or, better yet, a gas mask would be more useful. In addition, volunteers walked through the crowd handing out lemon slices, advising people to rub them on the face and on masks. They said that this also helps with the gas.

Soon, an armored vehicle showed up, spraying some purple stuff that smelled like a cleaning liquid out of the unit that was mounted on it. Apparently, it was some kind of fancy gas.

After a while, we left Institutskaya street to get some food and change clothes. That was the moment at which the cops went on a general offensive. We were on Europe Square, a stone’s throw from what has now become legendary Grushevsky street. We were going to go to the Ukraine House, which is also located nearby.

There was rumbling and shouting. A motley crowd came running from the side of the Grushevsky barricade, followed by a large crowd of guys in camouflage and helmets—self-defense fighters—pursued by an innumerable swarm of Berkut cops, like the hordes of Batu Khan [a Mongol ruler from the early 13th century, the founder of the Golden Horde]. From the outside, it all looked epic, like something out of a war movie.

The Berkut began advancing toward Maidan, leaving the Ukraine House actually in their rear, slightly to the side. Although we were nervous and panicked, this gave us the opportunity to evacuate the wounded along with medicine and some other things from the Ukraine House. We had to break the windows on the first floor in order to exit out the back, not through the front door directly to the Berkut. The defense of the House, which had been prepared and fortified for at least two weeks, collapsed instantly, before a battle had even taken place.

The breakthrough at Grushevsky took us all by surprise. We took everything we could and together made for St. Michael’s Cathedral. The bells were ringing, just as they had rung a few months before during the first eviction of the Euromaidan.

And then the assault on Maidan began, but being left without a helmet, I stayed away from the first line. However, the heat of the blazing barricades and tents reached me as well. By that time, some of the tents on Maidan had already burned to the ground—Berkut had used some of the cocktails seized from the insurgents. You can read more about these events in the news.

After catching another police firework, which burned me and the people standing nearby with some crackling “Bengal fire” [pyrotechnics], I decided that it was time to go to the train station. One way or another, I had to leave that day.

There's No Such Thing as a Free Helicopter Ride : On the Death of Sebastián Piñera

2024-02-08T04:44:20Z

On February 6, 2024, the billionaire Sebastián Piñera died in a helicopter crash. His policies while president of Chile contributed to the desperation that ultimately provoked the uprising of 2019.

As Milton Friedman would have put it, “There’s no such thing as a free helicopter ride!”¹

Permit us to explore the significance of this historic reckoning.

“Adios, Sebastián—hell is yours.” People celebrate the death of Sebastián Piñera in in Plaza Dignidad on February 6, 2024.

That Sebastián Piñera should die in a helicopter is a case of unsurpassable poetic justice.

“Free helicopter rides” has long been a meme among fascists inspired by the extrajudicial murders of leftists that the Argentine and Chilean governments carried out. The personal helicopter pilot of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet openly admitted that he repeatedly murdered prisoners by throwing them into the ocean from his helicopter. As head of state, Piñera inherited and perpetuated Pinochet’s legacy, forcing capitalism on the Chilean population despite brave and widespread resistance.

This is not the first time that we have outlived our oppressors—and it will not be the last. Below, we share a statement from our dear comrades in Chile on this historic occasion.

You can learn about the Chilean uprising of 2019 here, or listen to our on-the-ground podcast series from the revolt starting here.

“The murderer Piñera died.”

On the Death of Sebastián Piñera

“We are at war with a powerful, implacable enemy, who bows to nothing and no one, who is ready to use violence and crime without limit.”

-Sebastian Piñera - October 21, 2019

“We aren’t at war, we’re united!”

-Masked rioters, pensioners, state orphanage escapees, students, nurses, looters, self-organized neighborhoods, everyone—every day after that until the onset of COVID-19.

On February 6, 2024, the ex-president of Chile, Sebastián Echenique Piñera, died in a helicopter accident. Beyond being a ruler of the territory dominated by the Chilean state, Piñera was also an economist and businessman. He was the owner of LAN airlines and a number of media channels and outlets.

Piñera was the first and only unabashedly right-wing head of state since the end of Pinochet’s military dictatorship, which was shown in the priorities of his economic and social policies: above all, the maintenance of the capitalist system, frequently by means of severe repression. During his first presidency (2010-2014), Piñera’s government adopted new policies that were intended to crush the growing wave of street demonstrations²—whether it was environmentalists or feminists or students in the streets. Piñera did not shy away from imprisoning subversive rebels, especially Mapuche and anarchist revolutionaries willing to act outside of the law that he swore to uphold.

Piñera’s second presidency (2018-2022) started much like the first, but was distinguished by the largest street conflicts Chile had seen in 50 years. At its apex, millions of people took to the streets in revolt, each against whichever manifestation of the general condition of exploitation and oppression under the ruling class and authoritarianism they considered most important. The protests began on October 18, 2019 and continued for months all across the country. The mercenaries at Piñera’s command reacted to the revolt by jailing thousands of people, damaging hundreds of eyes, and murdering demonstrators.

According to figures from organizations like Amnesty International, state security forces physically, psychologically, or sexually harmed more than 8000 people during the 2019-2020 period. Included among those figures are more than 400 cases of eye damage resulting from police projectiles. Some people lost both eyes.

As anti-authoritarians, we should not be surprised that the state uses such violence to defend the precious property of those in power, since the government—any government—exists primarily to maintain domination. This domination is imposed by flesh-and-blood human beings, human beings who command and other human beings who obey. Sebastián Piñera was one of these human beings. On October 18, 2019, he ordered troops to open fire against those who set the streets of Santiago alight. He declared war on all who joined the protest—whether by raising their voices, raising their fists, or raising barricades.

We will not forget or forgive. The death of someone whose life meant misery for millions simply makes us smile.

For the dead, the mutilated, the incarcerated, the raped, and the suicided of the revolt, we will stomp out one more Chinchinera on Piñera’s grave.

This poster from the 2019 revolt called on the oppressed to celebrate then-president Piñera’s birthday by rioting in the streets. Though the depiction of the president is admittedly juvenile, it may in fact be an accurate representation of Piñera in his last moments.

Milton Friedman was a zealous advocate of free-market capitalism who published a book titled There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. As soon as Augusto Pinochet established a US-backed dictatorship in Chile, several Chileans who had studied under him in Chicago—the so-called Chicago Boys—took influential positions within the dictatorship, imposing deleterious deregulation and privatization on the Chilean population at the end of a gun. ↩
While in many places around the world, the so-called Arab Spring and the various iterations of the Occupy movement dominate the popular memory of 2011 as a wild year for revolt, Chile also had a months-long period of rebellion, spilling over from university students who took over their institutions in protest of privatized education and generalizing into mass street action with participation from across society. ↩

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. ↩

Let's Be Done with Waiting : A Film in Memory of Alfredo Maria Bonanno

2023-12-19T23:07:41Z

On December 6, 2023, Alfredo Maria Bonanno passed away after more than half a century of anarchist activity. In his memory, we present the following short video, Let’s Be Done with Waiting, dramatizing the final section of one of his best-known works, Armed Joy.

Let’s Be Done with Waiting. Sound on to hear the voiceover.

We hope that this will help to introduce Bonanno’s work to a new generation of anarchists. When some of us read Armed Joy in the 1990s, it opened new vistas before us, proposing the refusal of work and the pursuit of joyous revolt as revolutionary measures in the struggle against all forms of domination and despair. Some of the material that later appeared in Days of War, Nights of Love emerged in the process of our efforts to extrapolate what those proposals could mean in our own lives.

Below, we offer a short overview of Bonanno’s life and works.

On January 26-27, the Ex-Worker Podcast will be hosting a film festival in Tijuana, Mexico at the first International Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders at which to present this film and others like it. Feel free to submit your work.

Text from a chapter of Armed Joy, as it appeared on a CrimethInc. flier more than twenty years ago.

Scenes from the Life of Alfredo Maria Bonanno

Alfredo Bonanno was born on March 4, 1937 and passed away on December 6, 2023. He was 86 years old.

Bonanno began his academic career by studying economics; in the mid-1950s, he began to study existentialist philosophy. In Turin, he contributed to the Corriere di Sicilia, an Italian periodical originally founded by the revolutionary Republican Giuseppe Garibaldi. Bonanno later gathered these essays in the collection Essays on Existentialism. He obtained his degree in philosophy with a thesis on the work of Max Stirner.

In the 1960s, he read Hegel and became more actively involved in the anarchist movement. According to one obituary, he worked for almost eleven years for the Banco di Sicilia and then for another seven as a manager at a pharmaceutical company, in the ophthalmology sector.

Later, he described how the political upheavals of the late 1960s drove him to shift course:

A great explosion of vitality and beauty occurred starting from the May 1968 uprising in France. In fact, even a person like me, who worked as an industrial manager in those years, was so shocked by that extraordinary event that I was quickly forced to abandon my job and see reality differently… At the time, I was over thirty years old and therefore I felt with greater difficulty the wind of diversity that was blowing everywhere.

He didn’t dwell on this decision in his later writing, but it must have informed his arguments that the rejection of work is an essential aspect of revolt.

In December 1969, police commissioner Luigi Calabresi and two other police officers were involved in the murder of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli during an interrogation. Bonanno had met Pinelli. He attended Pinelli’s funeral and later wrote poignantly about the experience:

If such an event happens, if you are there too, along with many others like you, who you know are living through the same traumatic experience, and you see them, big men with calloused hands, kids trying to be cool, mature women who remember the war years, their murdered sons, young people who see the love that they conceal like a sign of the purity of the world almost dirtied by so much arrogance, and you see them, all with tears in their eyes, impotent but with tensed muscles, if such an event happens with you in it, it is no longer just any event, a fact like so many others (millions of people die, killed barbarously, and are taken hurriedly to the cemetery), but that event has a different charge, it carries with it a tension that will not leave you be, it wakes you up in the night in a sweat and, sitting on the bed, you ask yourself what you are doing in bed, and if perhaps it is not you who is dead and turning in the grave, while it is precisely Pinelli who is alive.

In May 1972, police commissioner Luigi Calabresi was shot and killed outside his home.

In October 1972, the Italian police arrested Bonanno and charged him with subversive action on account of articles published in the journal Sinistra Libertaria. He was convicted and incarcerated in Catania prison.

Beginning in 1975, he edited the publication Anarchismo.

In 1977, he was arrested again, this time for writing Armed Joy, which presented a framework for understanding the refusal of work, the repudiation of calcified organizational structures, and the participation in insurrectionary rebellion as interrelated measures following from the rejection of the logic of capitalism.

The search for joy is therefore an act of will, a firm refusal of the fixed conditions of capital and its values. The first of these refusals is that of work as a value. The search for joy can only come about through the search for play.

The joy of the revolutionary act is contagious. It spreads like a spot of oil. Play becomes meaningful when it acts on reality.

Hurry to play. Hurry to arm yourself.

-Alfredo Bonanno, Armed Joy

In 1978, he faced charges for reprinting The Religious Menace, written by Johann Most in 1880, and at the same time drew the wrath of noted existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre for provocatively publishing a work by the nineteenth-century anarchist Joseph Déjacques under Sartre’s name. On November 30, 1979, Bonanno was finally sentenced to 18 months in prison for authoring Armed Joy.

In March 1980, prosecutors used the testimony of an informant to accuse Bonnano of participating in Azione Rivoluzionaria, an underground armed group active during the pitched social struggles in Italy during the late 1970s. The authorities used this opportunity to carry out a crackdown on Anarchismo and some of Bonanno’s other associates, including Jean Weir and others involved with the British publishing project Bratach Dubh. They were released a few months later and cleared of charges in April 1981.

In the early 1980s, Bonanno and his comrades participated in the struggle against a military base that was to house nuclear weapons in Comiso, Sicily. The decentralized and autonomous organizational structure of this movement served as a reference point for Bonanno’s advocacy of informal organization and what he called “autonomous base nuclei.”

In 1988, during the anti-militarist congress in the town of Forli, Bonnano and his comrades were expelled from the congress by adherents of the anarcho-syndicalist tendency within the Italian Anarchist Federation—a conflict that precipitated further such conflicts.

Arrested in February 1989 during a robbery at a jewelery shop, Bonanno spent two years in prison. As he recounted while under house arrest seventeen years later,

As soon as the inmates learned of my degree in philosophy, they immediately asked me if I could give them some lessons. It can be said that there was no prison, among the dozens where I served my many sentences, where I did not receive this request. Even though I also have a degree in economics, no one has ever asked me to give economics lessons.

On June 19, 1997, the police carried out raids on anarchist social centers and homes all around Italy, arresting Bonanno and many other anarchists. This was part of a government effort to fabricate an invented clandestine anarchist group, the “Insurrectional Anarchist Revolutionary Organization,” as a means of repression.

Undaunted, in July 1999, Bonanno testified as a witness for anarchist Nikos Maziotis, who was accused of placing a bomb at the ministry of industry and development in Greece. In 2001, anarchists participated in fierce unrest in Genoa in defiance of police efforts to protect the G8 summit.

The attempt to fabricate a conspiracy in which to implicate Bonanno and many other anarchists culminated in the Marini trial, which was later recognized as a farcical miscarriage of judicial procedure. Initially, however, Bonanno was sentenced to six years in prison on the grounds that he was the “ideological leader” of the invented organization.

Three months after the end of the Marini trial, the Italian authorities tried again, with operation “Cervantes,” carrying out dozens of raids and searches in houses and squats around the country. Once again, the arrestees were charged with “subversive organization with terrorist intentions,” this time accused of participating in the Federazione Anarchica Informale, an anonymous group that had claimed responsibility for a series of attacks.

In May 2005, the police carried out well over a hundred raids on houses and squats, arresting 22 people on a variety of charges including “constitution and participation in a subversive organization with terrorist intentions.” Throughout these tumultuous times, Bonanno continued to advocate for informal organization and for attacking the infrastructure of capitalism and the state.

In October 2009, at the age of 72, he was arrested on charges of participating in a bank robbery in Greece that almost netted 46,900 euros.

In December 2013, Bonanno spoke at the Jornadas Informales Anárquicas in Mexico City and in Argentina. He attempted to enter Chile, but was rejected on account of his police record.

As often occurs, Bonanno’s proposals possessed nuances and depths that were not always reflected in the ways that his adherents interpreted them. Although we published a critique of the ways that people in the United States mixed his ideas together with those of The Invisible Committee and other groups, his writings are worth reading on their own merits.

For example, while Bonanno came to be associated with a doctrinaire rejection of formal organization in favor of informal, affinity-based structures, he wrote eloquently in 1998 about his own experience of meaningful collectivity:

The essential thing, that exceptionally important strength that comes out of many people who feel the same emotional sensations, prompted by very similar feelings (none identical, for heaven’s sake, I know well), they feel attracted to each other to constitute a homogeneous whole that does not need written or spoken agreements or contracts to constitute itself. Suddenly, this collective force emerges and is there, tangible, I can touch it, I can hear its voice, I can let myself be taken by its suggestions, direct my gaze where it tells me to look, see with its eyes made of a thousand pupils what my poor shortsighted eyes cannot see, remember what my poor mind alone cannot remember.

Although dozens of his essays are available in English, a tremendous amount of his work—including monographs on early Christianity and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra—has yet to be translated. You can order a collection of some of his better-known works in English from Detritus books.

His last wish was for his ashes to be scattered in the Ionian Sea of his Sicilian birthplace, Catania.

It is not our intention to write an obituary, that dreadful word that reminds us of the inescapable mission that our dead often silently leave to us and which we have always failed to accomplish… We don’t want to remember, we want to live.

[…] This is our way to secure a memory, our way of respecting a will that sought to escape the limits that enclose humanity and its all-too-human vicissitudes of fortune, a revolutionary will that sought to transform the world.

-Alfredo Bonanno, Love and Death

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.

Revisiting the Smash EDO Campaign : A Pressure Campaign Targeting an Arms Manufacturer

2023-11-17T21:18:57Z

In response to the genocide unfolding in Gaza, some activists have set out to target weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems and Raytheon. Palestine Action has permanently shut down two of Elbit’s UK locations; in the United States, a similar campaign is underway to target Elbit facilities around the country. As these campaigns gain momentum, it may be instructive to look to previous such efforts for inspiration and ideas.

Two decades ago in the UK, a campaign known as Smash EDO set out to shut down an arms factory in Brighton. Over the course of a years-long struggle, they experimented with a range of strategies. In one case, activists broke into the facility and did hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage to it—and then were declared innocent by a jury at trial. Here, we review that movement from its inception to its high point in 2010.

An earlier version of the following text appeared in the ninth issue of our print journal, Rolling Thunder, in spring 2010. You can find an archive of the Smash EDO website here.

The campaign against EDO takes the street on May Day, 2009.

The Smash EDO Campaign

What started in 2004 as a dozen people banging pots and pans outside a local arms manufacturer mushroomed into the largest and most dynamic anti-militarist campaign in the United Kingdom. Over the following years, activists from Smash EDO maintained relentless pressure on the factory while surviving repeated attempts to suppress the movement. In 2009, they mobilized thousands for the May Day Carnival against War and Greed.

“Every bomb that is dropped, every bullet that is fired in the name of this war of terror has to be made somewhere… and wherever that is, it can be resisted.”

–Smash EDO, March 2004

“A crowd of 600, largely clad in red, many masked, surges uphill towards police lines, throwing crash barriers aside and using a sound system to batter their way through. Soon they’re inside the arms factory compound, and the windows start going in…”

–participant in the Smash EDO Carnival Against the Arms Trade, June 2008

Anti-war protesters mobilizing as part of the Smash EDO campaign clash with police in January, 2010.

Smash EDO was an anonymous, non-hierarchical, fluid campaign: as much a slogan as an organization. This amorphous nature, coupled with an complete rejection of negotiations with the authorities, made it very difficult to repress.

The goal was almost absurdly narrow—the closure of one weapons component factory in one town. But in the course of pursuing it, the campaign incorporated a diversity of tactics and approaches—from leafleting to lockdowns, from installation art to rioting—and sowing the seeds for a real challenge to the war machine.

Smash EDO never publicly identified itself as an anarchist campaign and never nailed its colors to any particular political mast. It was often compared—not least by the police and the weapons dealers themselves—to targeted animal rights campaigns such as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). In contrast to those campaigns, however, participants took great pains to keep a low profile, albeit with mixed results. There were organizing meetings for major actions, but the left hand did not always know what the right hand was doing—a person who had devoted years to the campaign might still find out about an action from Indymedia.

Other campaigns generally depend on a public organizing group that starts with a firm idea of what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it. SHAC’s assault on the share price of Huntingdon Life Sciences by any means necessary, including the deliberate cultivation of bad press, was extremely successful at first. They achieved some phenomenal results—but by the time we began our campaign against EDO, the state was passing new laws and taking advantage of the focus on one target to isolate and immobilize SHAC activists.

By contrast, unable to rely on the level of militancy common among animal rights activists, the Smash EDO campaign had to be more flexible. It took years for the animal rights movement to build up critical mass, starting from the struggle over live exports in the early 1990s. Half a decade later, SHAC’s predecessor, Save the Hillgrove Cats, could call monthly demonstrations in which thousands descended on a single cat farm near Oxford, pushing the policing costs into the millions. For reasons explained below, this was not an option for our campaign.

A participant in a Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty shirt keeps tabs on the coppers during a demonstration on May Day, 2009.

EDO

But who the hell was EDO and why was it necessary to smash them?

When the campaign began, EDO MBM was a subsidiary of the EDO Corporation—a United States company that was a major supplier of Raytheon as well as an arms manufacturer in its own right. In December 2007, EDO Corporation was purchased by the US arms conglomerate ITT. EDO MBM/ITT supplied vital parts for the Paveway series of laser-guided bombs, which were the most used guided munitions in the aerial bombardment of Iraq. They also designed a component for the bombing systems of F-15, F-16, and F-35 fighter aircraft; the US supplied some of these to Israel, where they were used against Palestinians. The Brighton factory also manufactured components for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), which were used in assassinations and raids by the US army in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Questioned by the local paper in 2004, David Jones, then the managing director of EDO, said that he was proud to support the war effort in Iraq. However, EDO repeatedly denied that they knowingly supplied equipment to Israel.

Finding out what EDO did was not always easy; research was an integral component of the campaign. After David Jones’ press statement fueled public anger, EDO refused to make public statements and removed pages from their website advertising that their weaponry was used by the Israeli air force. Several directors resigned after being forced to give evidence in court about what the company produced.

ITT Corporation is one of the most powerful transnational companies in the world. During the Second World War, it owned 25% of Germany’s Focke-Wulf, builder of fighter aircraft for the Nazis, and ITT subsidiaries made cash payments to SS leader Heinrich Himmler. ITT memos and declassified CIA documents suggest that ITT attempted to fund Salvador Allende’s opponents in Chile and helped prepare the military coup that occurred there in 1973. In response, the Weather Underground and others bombed ITT offices in New York, Rome, Zurich, and London. EDO’s factory in Brighton was only one part of this powerful corporation.

The Anti-War Movement in the UK

In 2003, the UK saw the largest anti-war movement in its history. On February 15, 2003, over a million people took to the streets to protest the relentless march towards the invasion of Iraq. Many were angry at the ease with which Britain had been signed on as a willing lieutenant in what was widely seen as blatant US imperialism. Across the country, large numbers of people who’d never taken a political stance got involved in the movement. The left, used to the muted response to previous wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Kosovo, was taken by surprise by this.

But the public mood was characterized by disapproval rather than resistance. The left-liberal classes that formed the mass of the movement were reluctant to take direct action, instead accepting the tone set by the biggest anti-war group, the Stop the War Coalition. For reasons too tedious to go into here but depressingly familiar to anyone who has worked with organizations dominated by Trotskyite vanguardist parties, this coalition opted to rely on predictable marches in London. Even after these (admittedly enormous) demonstrations failed to alter the plans for war, the Stop the War Coalition continued to repeat them with diminishing returns. The demonstration against the war in Afghanistan on October 24, 2009 brought out a mere 10,000 people.

Others took steps to resist the oncoming conflict more directly. Gloucestershire’s Fairford airbase was a launching pad for US stealth bombers and one of many parts of the UK that was effectively US sovereign territory. The mobilizations there drew participants intent on more forceful resistance; however, the state was able to muster thousands of police to keep them under control. In one instance, two men managed to enter the airfield and came within yards of damaging aircraft before they were caught. They were acquitted by a jury in 2007, demonstrating how anti-war sentiment pervaded the country.

Brighton

Brighton is a seaside resort on the south coast of the UK with a radical reputation and a faint whiff of patchouli in the air. It was one of a handful of UK towns where anti-war activism wasn’t the sole preserve of the Stop the War Coalition. Instead, a coalition evolved under the name Sussex Action for Peace, involving everyone from the Quakers and trade unionists to the anarchists and the just plain awkward. A non-critical atmosphere developed, opening space for a diversity of tactics: everything from “Pancakes for Peace” to fence-cutting at Fairford Airbase.

“For months, we had been preparing, organizing, arguing about how to take to the streets and show our anger once the bombing started in Baghdad. We made flags and called samba bands, we leafleted at colleges and to schoolchildren, we held meetings with over a hundred people and fended off bizarre suggestions for a workers’ and soldiers’ soviet. We talked about tactics and dug out our gas masks. But for all our planning, the day itself was a triumph of creativity and motivation from the people of Brighton.

“On the day the bombing started, a group of us hiked up to the local school expecting to stand outside the gates encouraging a few to brave the anger of their teachers. Instead, when we got there, hundreds of children streamed past and took over the main roads laughing and running into town, stopping traffic and hurling eggs at banks. All day, the streets stopped in the city. A group took on the symbols of capitalism, bringing down the American flag outside the American Express building and tearing it up.

“When the time for the mass assembly came, the ‘organizing collective’ gathered their flags and headed to the town center. However, a mass of 5000 people filled the streets, overflowing into the side roads. No one was leading this crowd anywhere; it had a chaotic dynamism. The band started and people swarmed through the city shutting down business as usual, anger palpable in the air.

“A group headed for the town hall with a ‘donated’ key card for entry. The plan was to occupy the town hall and start a ‘people’s council’ to plan future actions and resistance. When the crowd surged towards the doors, shoving the police and their pepper spray aside, high feelings took over and destruction and property damage followed. One man got into the debating chamber balcony and danced high above the crowd shouting ‘No blood for oil!’ It felt like a shout from the city of Brighton at those who were taking us to war against our will.”

–Brighton “Stop the City—Stop the War” participant, March 2003

Of course, the initial invasion was accomplished within weeks. Soon, UK forces were committed to the occupation of Iraq and the momentum behind the anti-war movement was starting to fade.

“We wanted to draw attention to the fact that this war was not an act of irrational aggression carried out by a particularly stupid president but something planned for, and for some corporations a real money-maker. In effect, we wanted to take the war back to the factory floor. We couldn’t directly affect the course of the conflict in Iraq, but we could target the spear-carriers.”

–Smash EDO, 2004

The discovery that one of those spear-carriers was EDO MBM, a company situated on a small industrial estate just a mile and a half from the city center, led to the formation of a new group. This was largely composed of the anarchist and direct-action-oriented wing of the rapidly shrinking Sussex Action for Peace.

“Our aim at the time was to take the fury at a war happening a thousand miles away and point out how the causes of that war were wrapped up in our everyday lives. The decision to target one factory has been controversial; we have been accused of diverting attention away from the real target, i.e., the government. Although EDO now has around 150 employees, they are a relatively minor link in the weapons supply chain. But we know this is how the arms trade functions. Weapons are not stand-alone devices; modern warfare is based on a series of weapons systems. The supply chain involves hundreds of small component manufacturers and EDO’s manufacture of bomb release mechanisms makes them vital accomplices in the mass aerial bombardments used by the powerful to cow uncooperative populations. It’s better to gain a small victory like this than suffer a series of magnificent defeats.”

–Smash EDO, 2004

Activists locking down to block access to the arms factory in 2004, near the beginning of the campaign.

We’ll Be Here until You’re Not

Actions kicked off in May 2004 with a rooftop occupation of the factory coordinated with a lockdown blocking access to the whole industrial estate. Regular and irregular noise demonstrations soon greeted the workers.

“Noise demos at the time consisted of a few people making noise outside the factory gates. We’d bang pots and pans, shout through megaphones, or slam the metal crash barrier that runs along the grass opposite the factory: anything to let the workers and their managers know what we thought of their business. At this stage [2004], we didn’t know how much the workforce knew about what EDO’s products were used for.”

–Smash EDO activist

The noise demos continued as the regular backbeat of the campaign, occurring at least once a week.

The first year saw a lot of nighttime sabotage, with the undefended factory coming under regular attack. Windows were smashed, doors superglued, paint bombs thrown. The cooling fan systems in the rear of the factory sustained £45,000 damage in one assault. The factory’s managing directors awoke to find their neighborhoods plastered with fliers accusing them of complicity in civilian deaths. More humorously, both horseshit and quick-drying concrete were dumped at the entrance. Nobody ever claimed responsibility for these actions, nor was anyone ever arrested; sporadic “pixie” actions like these continued for years. Eventually, the factory was fenced off with twenty-four-hour security, razor wire, and CCTV.

Various groups, including the local Quakers, organized vigils outside the factory. Others, dressed in white overalls and masks and calling themselves the “Blix Block,” attempted to march into the factory to conduct a citizens’ weapons inspection.

A Smash EDO protest in 2008.

Injunction and Crackdown

The stakes were raised in March 2005 with a combined effort from Sussex Police and EDO MBM to shut down protests outside the factory by means of an injunction under the Protection from Harassment Act. Under this act, which was originally designed to protect individuals from stalkers, companies were able to secure tailor-made injunctions on the basis of very little evidence, enabling police to make arrests for things that would not normally be crimes. In this case, they tried to limit protests outside the factory to two and a half hours a week, in groups of no more than ten people with no noise amplification.

Prior to this, such injunctions had only been aimed at animal right campaigners, notably the SHAC campaign. The process in these cases allowed the companies to use evidence of illegal activity—some genuine, some concocted—to place limits on legal activity such as gathering for demonstrations, waving placards, or using megaphones. Subsequent court cases revealed that the police had drafted the terms of the injunction, supplied intelligence to company lawyers, and manufactured arrests to provide sufficient evidence to shut down the protests.

“This demonstrated clearly that it was the police’s intention to shut down the public face of the campaign. Isolated illegal activity they feel they can deal with—but they’re frightened of movements that can function both above and underground.”

This attempt at repression showed how the War on Terror involved attacks on civil liberties at home alongside warfare abroad. Compulsory ID cards were introduced, as well as new laws clamping down on protest and dissent: for example, by an amendment to the Public Order Act, the number of people required to constitute an illegal gathering was reduced to two. But this backdrop of repression, along with the unpopularity of the war, enabled the campaign against EDO to gather publicity and public support. A central press number complete with a ready-to-go press spokesperson helped the campaign to compete with both the police and the corporation in the local media.

Ironically, the injunction provided the campaign with its first major publicity boost.

“First, it showed us that we were having an effect: an international arms company had been forced to spend thousands on lawyers simply to prevent us from standing outside the gates. We also looked like the underdogs.”

A demonstration dubbed “THE BIG ONE,” called May 2005 in the wake of the first injunction hearing, drew a hundred and fifty outside the factory. Fighting broke out as police moved to arrest an eighty-year-old man named John Catt. Eight people were arrested, targeted for being suspected organizers.

After a year of legal wrangling, EDO MBM was forced to drop the injunction case and pay all the legal costs, including a handout of £34,000 to those who had defended themselves. It’s estimated that the whole case cost them upwards of £1 million, tipping them over into a loss that quarter and directly impacting their share price.

Smash EDO demonstrators in 2008.

Street Mobilizations

During the court case, an interim injunction prevented filming at the factory and enabled EDO’s hired goons to intimidate demonstrators. Two campaigners were briefly remanded in Lewes prison. Despite this, the noise demonstrations and other actions continued.

“The decision was made to take our struggle into town. We were fed up with being pushed around up at the factory.”

On August 13, 2005, around fifty people met in Brighton’s main shopping precinct¹ and tried to march to the Level, about a half-hour walk.

“The police response was spectacular: 150 cops, dogs, and a helicopter. The message couldn’t have been clearer: you have no right to assemble without police permission.”

Thus began a standoff with the authorities over the right to demonstrate, fought not only in the streets but in the local media as well. Successive town center demonstrations—one of which marched on the police station, forcing officers to form lines around their own headquarters—became enough of a headache for the police that harassment at the factory itself decreased.

Participants in a Smash EDO protest discourage filming. 2008.

Smash EDO, the Media, and the Law

Can a small group of activists survive and get their message out without using the corporate media? Although huge advances had recently been made in alternative media, and Smash EDO was able to rely on coverage in Brighton’s SchNEWS as well as Indymedia, the fact remained that the vast majority of people got their news—and hence formed their opinions—from the mainstream press.

For the first nine months of the campaign, no one put out a press release at all. Like most of the anarchist movement, we regarded the press as part of the enemy. It was assumed that local press in particular would automatically parrot the police and corporate line.

“We knew that the press requires the names of spokespersons and that they would be depicted as organizers and leaders—that’s just how it works.”

But ignoring the media can be a dangerous gamble. A government-coordinated media onslaught against the animal rights movement had already led to their effective isolation as a political force. The equation “animal rights = extremism” was repeated whenever the subject came up, especially in left/liberal papers.

The state’s strategy, with the police “anti-extremism” task force planting stories in the media, was to isolate groups from the mainstream, then attack them with specially-crafted legislation. For example, demonstrations that would be legal in any other context could earn you a prison sentence if they were carried out against an “animal research establishment” as defined in the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act 2005. Sean Kirtley, whose conviction was later quashed, spent sixteen months in jail simply for organizing demonstrations and updating a website for the STOP SEQUANI campaign. Mainstream civil rights groups did nothing to protest this crackdown.

The SHAC strategy was to use the press as a tool with which to inspire fear in their targets. At one national animal rights gathering, the press were only invited into one workshop—a self-defense class; footage of activists learning how to poke out people’s eyes was duly broadcast. They paid for this outlaw image later. Meanwhile, campaigners against genetically modified crops were able to carry out “decontaminations” destroying crops worth tens of thousands of pounds, hitting the same pharmaceutical companies as the animal rights campaigners but without receiving the same level of repression. The crucial difference was that public opinion was more hostile to the forced introduction of GM foods.

The injunction forced the campaign’s hand, in terms of dealing with the media and the legal system. At that point, there were perhaps twenty people involved in various aspects of the campaign. The injunction named fourteen individuals—basically everyone who had been arrested at the factory. It was clear that if the factory got the interim injunction they wanted, then the noise demonstrations that served as the public face of the campaign would be shut down.

“We didn’t have huge numbers of militants to defy the injunction, the preferred option; neither was it practical to abandon the noise demos and rely on clandestine activity. If we wanted the campaign to continue, we were going to have to fight on the enemy’s terrain.”

The injunction cemented and centralized the campaign in unexpected ways. It was clear that a collective response was necessary—and a collective voice. The injunction, framed to deal with a centralized campaign like SHAC, referred to the defendants as Smash EDO, and the campaign took on that name. Bearing in mind that there was no Smash EDO party line, how were we to write a press release or frame a defense? Who could speak for the campaign? Andrew Beckett was appointed spokesperson, to avoid the trap of promoting individuals as “organizers.” One man had already found that a description of himself as an organizer, which had appeared in the local news source Argus, was being used against him in court.

We were criticized in the insurrectionist publication 325 for relying on “mainstream” arguments in propaganda and in press releases:

“The language used to ‘justify’ the decommissioning of EDO offers a legitimate face of the law to the general public. However, this face is misleading, this façade implies that there is a society worth reasoning with, that democratic legitimacy itself will bring about social change and ‘justice,’ that adhering to some laws while others are manipulated by the State will gain a [sic] eventual positive outcome. This is in compliance with State-imposed hierarchies that exist within a capitalist framework and it is flawed and foolishly misguided.”

It is true that success in those terms can come at a price. For example, as a group, we didn’t care whether the war in Iraq was technically illegal or not. If the US/UK alliance had succeeded in conducting a legal war by securing a UN resolution, we would still have opposed the attacks. But in our press releases and propaganda, we referred to “this illegal and immoral war.” Was that a cheap shot or common-sense PR?

Likewise, our efforts to produce lowest-common-denominator propaganda, in hopes of pushing what had been a broad anti-war consensus towards direct action, were criticized both in and outside the group as mawkish. Images of injured children can be arresting, but they can also reinforce the idea that the primary evil of war is the death of the “innocent.” The killing of conscripted Iraqi militiamen is just as tragic, but we didn’t put them on fliers.

Yet in order to appeal to an imagined Joe Public, it became necessary to go along with certain preconceptions. It’s all very well to believe, as some of us did, that EDO/ITT’s business would not have been possible if homo sapiens had not built patriarchal militarism on the foundation of an inherently oppressive system of symbolic thought—but it’s not easy to cram that into a two-minute radio interview. Sound bites are antithetical to political sophistication, but we needed to win the argument. “EDO kills kids for cash” was crude but effective tabloid sloganeering.

To win the legal battles, it was even more important to appear “mainstream,” at least in court. We had to fight the injunction case on grounds of civil liberties and human rights. For anarchists, this involved a degree of ideological contortion. The prospect of fighting the case on the grounds that atrocities were being committed in Iraq was ruled out by the judge early on, following an intervention by the Attorney General.

“We actually wanted to shut this factory down—we hadn’t physically attacked workers and management as the company alleged, but they were right in saying that we wanted to go beyond protest to action.”

To win the case, we had to take the “freedom to protest” angle. “Freedom of expression is a right jealously guarded in English law”—these were the words of Judge Gross after the first phase of the injunction trial. This phrase was emphasized dramatically in subsequent press releases declaring victory. Given that what had happened was actually a massive restriction of our rights—we were allowed to demonstrate when we liked, but were confined to a narrow strip of grass across the road from the factory—we ran the risk of looking as if we accepted the court’s jurisdiction. But a decision had to be made whether we wanted to proclaim a “victory” or a “defeat”—shades of grey don’t work in the media.

We also had to appeal to the general public in order to resist the crackdown on our town center demonstrations. Once again we fell back on the language of rights. In a letter to the local paper, Andrew Beckett argued that we had the “right to march peacefully through our town.” In that sentence alone, we circumscribed our action, asserting “peaceful” aims for everyone who might come to the demonstration without consulting them. And why should we have more right to march through “our” town than any other?

Yet arguably, it was a success: the struggle between the campaign and the police was framed in terms that didn’t require an extensive background in leftist theory, and the next demonstration, in December, drew 400 people. It was “peaceful,” and we won the battle of public opinion over whether or not we should negotiate with the police. But we had run the risk of painting ourselves into a corner. If the authorities had stood back at this point and allowed us free rein, what would we have done? We had ended up in the position of being anarchists defending liberalism.

A Smash EDO demonstrator in 2008.

Court in the Act

Once the campaign got going, the court cases came thick and fast. Different defendants chose to represent themselves in different ways. Some undertook “accountable” actions such as lockdowns in order to present a “war crimes” defense, arguing that they acted illegally “to prevent a greater crime.” This strategy implied that the court was a neutral arena, which it was not.

Despite this, activists scored an impressive set of victories in the courts. Chris Bluemel was acquitted after admitting to punching a policeman in the face during the Carnival Against the Arms Trade, for example. However, it’s worth considering how class privileges may have facilitated some of these victories. Chris, a music teacher, was able to call on his headmaster as a character witness; to prove his good faith and legitimacy, the latter mentioned that he had cancelled a meeting with a shadow government² minister to attend court. This appeal to middle-class solidarity worked, but other defendants did not have such credentials.

A Smash EDO protest in 2008.

Lebanon and Palestine

As US and UK forces settled into the slog of occupation, attention shifted away from the air power used in the initial invasion. But EDO’s equipment was still in use—for example, in the assault on Fallujah, and again in Somalia.

The Israeli air force was the next to embark on a major air strike campaign, using equipment supplied by US and UK arms companies including EDO. In summer 2006, war erupted in Lebanon and over a thousand civilians were killed in a matter of weeks. From the beginning, the Smash EDO campaign had overlapped with the International Solidarity Movement in occupied Palestine.

“We were determined to show that the UK government and domestic arms suppliers were directly profiting from this war. We had to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

Two men scaled the roof of the factory and unfurled a banner: “16 children killed in Qana Lebanon, EDO profits from murder.” A few weeks later, activists chained to concrete blocks blocked the entrances, forcing EDO employees to break into their own factory.

Cinemartyrdom

Following its early successes turning repression to advantage, the campaign received a new opportunity from Sussex Police. Local media collective SchNEWs produced a film entitled On the Verge charting the history of the struggle against EDO, and activists arranged a nationwide tour to raise awareness. The premiere was to be at Brighton’s art-house cinema, the Duke of York’s, on March 16, 2008.

Last-minute police intervention forced the cancellation of the film. The cinema was warned that violent activists might try to gain entry. The screening was hastily relocated to a nearby pub. The next day, the news came in that venues across the country had been visited by police and warned not to show the film on a variety of pretexts.

Police across the country attempted to force the cancellation of screenings of On the Verge.

The tour went ahead regardless, and what had been a relatively minor activist film produced on a budget of less than £500 became national news. “A misguided piece of official hysteria,” read the headline in The Guardian, the well-known left-liberal daily paper. Suddenly, the campaign had “the film they tried to ban,” and people flocked to see it. Over eighty screenings occurred in the UK. The film was also shown in Sydney, San Francisco, and Athens, and thousands downloaded it.

All this gave the campaign a national profile. The goal of the tour had been to build support for the forthcoming Carnival Against the Arms Trade—a strategic effort to move beyond the confines of affirming the right to rally and march. Up to then, the largest EDO demonstration had consisted of a few hundred people.

On the Wednesday afternoon designated for the Carnival, over 800 turned up. Many had traveled from around the country, having heard about Smash EDO thanks to the attempted suppression of On the Verge.

Preparing to march to the arms factory for the Carnival Against the Arms Trade, Wednesday, June 4, 2008.

The Carnival Against the Arms Trade

The crowd that turned up at the Carnival Against the Arms Trade was not a passive group of spectators. The police had planned to confine people in a control pen down the road from the factory, but the pen was dismantled as the crowd pushed through police lines and then, gloriously, into the factory compound. As the windows started to go in and the managing director’s SUV was trashed, the police responded with a baton charge and managed to clear the parking lot via a liberal use of pepper spray and dogs. The factory remained closed for the day.

It’s important to understand that at the time of this event, the UK activist movement had largely abandoned street confrontation as a consequence of successful police repression. After the successes of June 18, 1999, when large parts of London’s financial center were wrecked during the Carnival against Capitalism, police had devoted tremendous resources to cracking down on anarchic street gatherings. For many, this was their first experience of taking on the police and winning.

The next major demonstration, dubbed “Shut ITT” in reference to the fact that the company had recently changed hands, was attended by four different police forces. Despite this, the crowd of 400 charged the police lines at the base of Home Farm Road, and a large number headed up into the woods behind the factory. The back of the factory was paint-bombed as police and protestors engaged in running skirmishes in the trees.

Spokesperson Andrew Beckett reported,

“We didn’t let the police control events. We went where we wanted, when we wanted. All the police from four counties weren’t able to stop us making our stand against EDO/ITT.”

The Decommissioning

On January 17, 2009—the last day of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli attack on Gaza³—six activists broke into the arms manufacturers’ factory armed with hammers, determined to carry out a “citizens’ decommissioning” of the facility. They barricaded themselves inside and wreaked havoc for over an hour, causing up to £500,000 of damage before being arrested.

The trial, scheduled for May 2010, focused attention on UK and US complicity in the continued repression of the Palestinian people. Before entering the factory, Elijah Smith, one of the “decommissioners,” explained his motivations: “I don’t feel I’m going to do anything illegal tonight, but I’m going to go into an arms factory and smash it up to the best of my ability so that it cannot actually work or produce munitions… [which] have been provided to the Israeli army so that they can kill children.” He remained in jail for a year and a half awaiting trial.

On May Day 2009 in Brighton, traffic in the city was brought to a standstill as police and anti-war protesters clashed on the streets. At one point, protesters used a car welded out of sheets of metal to ram police officers intent on stopping the march from reaching the EDO MBM headquarters.

May Day, May Day!

The campaign’s next mobilization, on May Day 2009, was its largest yet. Thousands of leaflets had been distributed across the UK. Just a month earlier, London had hosted the G20 summit. As expected, protests around the summit had been brutalized by police and contained through “kettling,” in which lines of police surround and block a crowd from all sides. However, this time the police had murdered an innocent bystander, Ian Tomlinson. The authorities initially denied that officers had had any contact with him, then falsely claimed that they had been under a hail of bottles as they tried to resuscitate him. Days later, footage arrived at The Guardian that showed Metropolitan Police subjecting Tomlinson to a vicious and unprovoked attack. Suddenly, police behavior at demonstrations was under unprecedented public scrutiny.

Historically, May Day is a day of resistance to capitalism and this time, Smash EDO material was more explicit about the links between finance and the arms trade.

“This was really our most ambitious effort to date. We published an anti-militarist list of targets around town, showing how Barclays, McDonald’s, and the like were investors in ITT.”

By now, there were about thirty activists in Brighton working on the campaign and a network of supporters around the country. A larger group of activists was able to seize and hold a squatted church in town as a convergence space.⁴

“We also organized first aid, and arrestee and trauma support. It’s vital for people to know that if they get nicked or injured the support is there.”

Protesters take over the roundabout by the pier before the march breaks up during the May Day 2009 protest.

Following the lessons of earlier demonstrations, organizers decided not to publish the route or even the starting point of the May Day street party. Instead, demonstrators obtained updates by calling an information number or tuning to a pirate radio station set up for the day.

On May 1, over 1000 people turned out for the street party, creating a bizarre militant carnival atmosphere. A masked mob clad in black and red and armed with a dancing dragon made its way through town. As the mass marched through the town center, the army recruitment center was paint-bombed and a banner appeared high above Barclays, a major investor in the arms trade. Things came to a head as participants clashed with mounted police outside a McDonald’s, also an investor in ITT. The day ended with running skirmishes through the streets.

After May Day, the noise demonstrations and other direct actions continued. Smash EDO appealed for activists to take action against Barclays Bank, the New York Stock Exchange market maker for ITT. On the first day of action, there were seven different pickets across England and Wales; Barclays Bank ATMs were glued shut in Brighton, and a six-foot-high anti-arms-trade message appeared above a Barclays branch in Cambridge.

May Day 2009 in Brighton. Traffic in the city was brought to a standstill as police and anti-war protesters clashed on the streets. As the march passed a McDonald’s, the tension came to a head; police struggled to regain control of the situation as rocks were hurled and protesters used large banners to push closer to the restaurant.

How Did the SMASH EDO Campaign Sustain Momentum?

Some people stuck with the campaign from its inception on; others left, then returned. It was a relatively open movement; the weekly noise demonstrations offered a way to get involved and meet others. Gaining visibility made it easier to build numbers.

The movement against the Iraq war faded in terms of street marches, but there remained a mood of skepticism around British involvement in Afghanistan. Public opinion also hardened against Israeli use of air power.

Perhaps there was a danger in fixating on big spectaculars such as May Day at the expense of local and national outreach. As the campaign engaged in more radical actions, the police started a PR counter-offensive. Within the liberal framework of the “right to protest” that we had adopted in the media, we were stuck for an answer. Our inalienable right to smash windows didn’t quite ring true.

A riot van is vandalized and flares are set off as riot police and mounted police fight to split the march outside the McDonald’s. May Day, 2009.

“When people first started taking action against the factory, we were a bit of an ideological puzzle. The anarchist direct action mob seemed to file us under ‘ineffectual peaceniks,’ while the peace movement didn’t like our advocacy of a diversity of tactics rather than pacifism. The idea of taking on a single cog in the machine was borrowed from the UK’s high-profile animal rights campaigns, but it was combined with some of the old Reclaim the Streets carnival magic.”

“By concentrating on this one facility, we’ve managed to raise debate in the mainstream while maintaining a radical stance. Attacking a part of the system that is morally indefensible, we point out the rot than runs through the whole core. Time and again, the police have been forced to make public their role as boot boys for the corporations.”

“Victory is important to us… we’re going to shut this factory down. Since we started, they’ve already closed their smaller facility in Fishersgate and the number of employees has shrunk. But the development of an anti-militarist network around the country is equally important, rescuing the peace movement from obsolete, symbolic, and ineffective tactics. The Target Brimar campaign in Manchester and the Stop H&K protests in Nottingham are both welcome examples of this new mood of militancy.”

“There have been debates over whether what’s really needed is a victory over this one factory, which would ultimately give a whole movement something to celebrate, or the development of a network. That’s turned into a bit of a false dichotomy. The radicalization of the anti-war movement is what gives us the best chance of shutting down the factory.”

“It’s really what’s needed to revitalize the whole anti-war movement: a network of local but mobile anti-war groups that plug away week after week in their part of the country, against their arms factory, military facility, or whatever, but are able to rely on support from like-minded individuals and campaigns around the country. We’re not asking anyone to follow our model—what we’ve done has come out of specific set of circumstances. Our advice to anyone would be to stay flexible and seize opportunities when they appear.”

Anti-war protesters clash with police, leaving some officers injured. May Day, 2009.

The Fight Continues

On January 18, 2010, over three hundred black-clad protesters descended on the EDO/ITT factory to commemorate the previous year’s bombing of Gaza. Meeting at Wild Park, the crowd carried symbolic coffins and a banner with a thousand handprints representing those who died during Israel’s twenty-two-day assault. Most of the participants were fully masked up.

The demonstration marched to the junction of Home Farm Road, where the factory was situated, and split into two groups. Hundreds broke through police lines to pour up the hill into the woods behind EDO/ITT; another bloc remained at the intersection, blocking access to Home Farm Road, to read out some of the names of the people killed in Gaza. The first bloc of protesters made it to the rear of the factory, where some people breached the fence into the industrial estate.

After word circulated that the factory had been closed for the rest of the day, protesters proceeded to central Brighton, managing to outflank several police cordons. Around one hundred people tried to go on to Barclays Bank, but got kettled as riot police and horses flooded into North Laine.

In July 2010, Elijah Smith and the other “decommissioners” who had inflicted up to £500,000 of damage on the facility in 2009 were all found not guilty. In court, they had demonstrated that by supplying weapons to the Israeli air force, the factory was implicated in violations of international law.

Regular demonstrations against the factory continued with a mobilization in October 2010, though police repression increased steadily, in the form of infiltration as well as arrests. The ITT Corporation Board of Directors eventually approved a plan to split the company, but the factory remained in use. In 2019, it came to light that it was implicated in a Saudi attack on a civilian target in Yemen. A new protest movement got underway to against the facility, building on the achievements of Smash EDO.

The Smash EDO campaign didn’t conclude with a clear-cut victory, but it struck several blows against EDO and against the arms industry in general, legitimizing direct action for a wide swath of the population. Such efforts are part of building a long-term struggle against militarism and expanding the scope of what participants can undertake together. Today, it offers us examples of how an anti-war movement can employ a broad tactical repertoire against a specific target. It should be instructive for those seeking to stop the genocide in Gaza and other manifestations of nationalist militarism around the world.

Anti-war protesters clash with police in January, 2010.

To convey a sense of scale for North American readers, this would probably fit into a single Wal-Mart. ↩
In the UK, “shadow government” simply refers to the party not currently in power—in this case, the Conservatives. ↩
To convey the asymmetrical character of this “conflict,” we’ll confine ourselves to reporting the number of casualties: Palestinian deaths numbered between 1166 and 1440, depending on whether you believe the killers or the mourners, while everyone agrees that 13 Israelis lost their lives—four of them killed by friendly fire. ↩
The building had been empty for some years. UK squatting law dictates that property possession cases are referred to a civil court, although cops regularly carry out illegal evictions. ↩

Memories from Saint-Imier, 1872 to 2023 : Accounts from a Worldwide Anarchist Gathering

2023-08-22T18:52:48Z

One month late, we are finally back from summer vacation with a report from Anarchy 2023, a 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. Here, we offer a variety of accounts and appraisals.

The gathering comprised five days of activities distributed between 12 venues scattered across the town, not counting improvised events in public spaces. There were over 412 workshop sessions, 48 concerts, 36 film screenings, 11 theater performances, and 7 exhibitions, as well as a book fair including almost 100 tables. Despite this dizzying array of programming, the majority of these activities were standing room only.

Photographs were discouraged throughout the whole of Saint-Imier, though corporate media photographers surreptitiously took some. You can see a short photoessay by Greek anarchists here.

A sticker on the streets of Saint-Imier in July 2023.

From 1872 to 2023

First, let’s set the record straight about the event that anarchists came to Saint-Imier to commemorate.

Before the Paris Commune revolt broke out in spring 1871, tensions had been brewing for years within the International Workingmen’s [sic] Association, Europe’s chief revolutionary labor federation. At that time, there were at least four currents within the International; we can roughly summarize them by association with the figures Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Karl Marx, and Mikhail Bakunin.¹ Proudhon’s adherents sought to change society by forming worker-owned labor cooperatives; Blanqui’s, by conspiring to seize dictatorial state power; Marx’s, by forming political parties to compete in elections. By contrast, Bakunin and his colleagues aimed to use revolutionary tactics to attack both capitalism and the state, aiming to mobilize the general population on a horizontal basis.

At that time, there was no anarchist movement, formally speaking. Some individuals identified as anarchists (Proudhon had famously done so in 1840), but there was no distinct organizing body advocating permanent opposition to all forms of the state and capitalism.

After the Paris Commune, when most of the participants in that uprising were in prison, in hiding, or buried in mass graves, Marx convened a closed meeting of the General Council, the central coordinating body of the International Workingmen’s Association. With the support of a recently added Blanquist member, and over the objections of representatives of rank-and-file sections of the International, the General Council declared that “the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party,” unilaterally imposing Marx’s preferred political strategy on the entire federation by fiat.

This was widely understood as an authoritarian power grab. Members of the International in Switzerland condemned this in a statement known as the Sonvillier Circular: “If there is one incontrovertible fact, borne out a thousand times by experience, it is that authority has a corrupting effect on those in whose hands it is placed.”

The next congress of the International took place in the Hague in September 1872. In order to ensure a majority, Marx and his colleagues used the authority of the General Council to manipulate the process via which delegates received their credentials; the Italian sections of the International boycotted the congress completely. Blanqui’s supporters joined Marx’s supporters in ratifying a controversial program of centralization and authoritarianism, expelling Bakunin in absentia and trying to do the same to his supporters. To everyone’s surprise, however, Marx then pushed through a decision to move the location of the General Council across the Atlantic to New York City—effectively attempting to kill the International rather than letting it escape his control.

On September 15, 1872, eight days later, delegates representing Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States² gathered in Saint-Imier to reorganize the International. Although the majority were anarchists, they established an inclusive structure, inviting all revolutionary socialists to organize on a horizontal basis rather than answering to a centralized, dictatorial cadre. (“The Congress denies in principle the legislative right of all Congresses,” reads the statement they drew up; “the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat.”) This is the event that the 2012 and 2023 gatherings in Saint-Imier commemorate.

A year later, in September 1873, delegates from England, France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland gathered in Geneva to continue the International, picking up where the 1872 Saint-Imier congress had left off. J.G. Eccarius, formerly Marx’s right-hand man, was among them. César De Paepe and many other longtime participants in the International also continued to participate.

Even anarchists are often unclear on this history. For example, in his coverage of the 2023 gathering for the Marxist paper Junge Welt, Gabriel Kuhn belittles the St. Imier congress, describing Saint-Imier as a “retreat for the anarchists who had been expelled from the First International at the Hague Congress” and claiming that

“the anti-authoritarian International was to be an anarchist alternative to the First International, which was classified as dictatorial. The success was modest.”

In truth, following Marx’s Pyrrhic power grab at the Hague Congress, the vast majority of the members of the International broke with Marx’s faction. The latter perished immediately. The Marxist historian G.M. Steklov emphasized this:

at best, its continued existence was barely perceptible to an outsider, and was nothing more than a long-drawn-out death agony… Attempts to revive the corpse were fruitless.

Meanwhile, a large number of the organizations that had comprised the original International Workingmen’s Association adhered to the reconstituted International that emerged from the meeting in Saint-Imier. They continued to work together, holding annual congresses over the following half decade despite intense state repression.³ Steklov, himself no friend to anarchists, documents all this in his History of the First International.

The narrative that the Saint-Imier International represented a minoritarian departure from the International Workingmen’s Association is historical revisionism, largely spread by Marxists who don’t read their own historians. What Steklov later called the “Anarchist International” was not, as Kuhn implies, an “alternative” to the International Workingmen’s Association—it was simply the continuation of it, liberated from a cadre of authoritarians who had unsuccessfully tried to hijack it. Anarchists were not a fractious sect within the labor movement of the 1870s and 1880s; they were a central current within it.

For more background on these events, you could start with Robert Graham’s We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement and Wolfgang Eckhardt’s The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association. Graham himself has published a short history of the Saint-Imier congress and the continuation of the International thereafter.

A painting on the side of a building in Saint-Imier celebrates the watchmaking heritage of the town and the local anarchist movement of the 19th century.

And in 2023?

A great deal has changed since 1872.

Anarchism, established in 1872 as a formal movement, has spread across the world, been completely destroyed by repression, and reemerged and spread once more, again and again. Elsewhere, we have explored how the economy has changed over the past century and how that should inform contemporary revolutionary strategy. Here, it is enough to say that although those who gathered in Saint-Imier in 2023 were mostly workers of one kind or another, in today’s volatile context, sharing a profession or workplace is no longer a reliable starting point for building a long-term practice of collective resistance.

Hence, in place of labor federations, we have looser networks based around communications infrastructure and held together by ideas.

It is characteristic of our era that more and more people are turning against capitalism, the state, and other forms of oppression at the same time that those forces are rendering the old models of organizing and solidarity unsustainable. It is not surprising that there were more attendees at this gathering in Saint-Imier than at the last such event in 2012; likewise, it is not surprising that there were fewer membership organizations with long-term programs and formal organizing processes. We should not view this as a failure of the organizers, nor of the movement as a whole; there are structural factors at work here that are bigger than any one organizing group, milieu, or ideology.

Likewise, we should not imagine that those who can easily travel across the world to participate in such a gathering are representative of the contemporary anarchist movement as a whole. The attendees were disproportionately younger and from comparatively privileged backgrounds; structural challenges prevented many anarchists from attending, especially from outside Europe.

Nonetheless—if we want the anarchist movement to shape history rather than simply being a product of our times, it is up to us to establish new long-term anarchist infrastructure projects and networks that can rise to the challenges ahead of us and to make sure that these transcend the boundaries of privilege and geography. The fact that thousands of people made the effort to come together in Saint-Imier last July indicates how urgent this work is.

It is encouraging that a small number of organizers without any financial backing succeeded in creating a robust event in which virtually everything was available for free. This shows that anarchist models can succeed on a larger scale. It only remains to expand them.

To offer a multifaceted account of the gathering in Saint-Imier, we’ve assembled a collection of impressions here, composed by anarchists from Germany, Russia, Belarus, Finland, the United States, and elsewhere around the world.

Local newspaper coverage of the gathering in Saint-Imier.

Anarchist Infrastructure

We spend the first morning in the book fair area, where we are responsible for adjacent literature tables. When mealtime approaches, we delegate N— and B— to look into the food situation. They go off to figure out where lunch is being served.

N— comes back a few minutes later, dispirited. “There’s no way. I’ve never seen so many people in a line.”

“Did B— stay?” I ask. “Is he in the line?” I’m starting to get quite hungry, myself.

“He’s a goner,” N— answers. “There’s a thousand people in that line. It stretches all the way past the building and up the hill. I don’t think we’ll ever see him again.”

Five minutes later, B— appears, cheerfully balancing several full plates of food in his arms. “What happened?” I demand. “Did they have food set aside for people tabling?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. It was just surprisingly quick.” He looks almost dazed.

I go out to get a look at the line myself. I have to walk quite a distance to get to the back of it. Several times, I think I’ve reached the end, and it turns out that I’m still somewhere in the middle. Finally, I get in the queue. I must be hundreds of feet from where food is being served. If this line moves as slowly as the lines at the toilets, I’ll still be standing in it at nightfall.

But the line is moving quickly indeed. I’m accustomed to standing in line, but in this line, we’re walking forward the whole time. Maybe people ahead of us are giving up and leaving? But no, we keep advancing in a steady pace.

After a couple minutes, I can make out two rows of tables ahead of us. The queue breaks in two and passes between them. On the other side of each table, there is a furious whirlwind of activity. I’m used to one volunteer languidly spooning potatoes onto a plate. What I see, instead, is a half dozen volunteers preparing plates of food in rapid fire, placing them in rows on the tables. The slowest part of the whole operation is the diners picking up the plates. You can take as many plates as you can carry and no one looks askance at you. It’s really an incredible operation.

After I eat, I take my dirty plate and go in search of a dishwashing station. I’m expecting to wash my own dish in a dirty tub of greywater that smells like bleach. Instead, there is a whole dishwashing operation going on involving what appears to be dozens of people. I can’t even fit inside the freestanding shelter they have set up—there’s too many of them. They insist that I deposit my dish in a pile and leave it to them.

The following night, I discover that my comrade has missed dinner. According to the schedule, it has been several hours since the kitchen team stopped serving food. All the same, just in case, I go over to the serving area to see if I can find anything she can eat. I’m picturing a leftover chunk of bread, or something.

There’s no one anywhere near the food serving area. At least, not on the receiving side of it. Things don’t look promising.

But when I get up to the tables, I see that there’s someone behind one of them, still piling food onto the dishes and lining them up on the table. It looks like a different menu than what was served for dinner. There are 5000 anarchists in this town, but here, no one else is around, just the two of us.

“Do you know if these are earmarked for some specific group or event, or something?” I ask, gesturing at the full plates of food he is putting out.

“I have no idea,” he answers without stopping his work. He has an embattled but determined air, the way I imagine the Kronstadt rebels. “They keep giving them to me, so I keep putting them out.”

“They who? Is there someone who can answer my question?”

He gestures behind him. Approaching from some distance behind the table is a kitchen worker, coming to replenish his supply of lentils.

“Is this food for some specific group or event, or something?” I ask, again.

“This food?” the kitchen worker answers, serenely, gesturing at the rows of full plates of food accumulating on the table. “No, this is for everyone.”

Anarchy works. Or at least—if the gathering in Saint-Imier was any indication, no one would go hungry in an anarchist society.

Local newspaper coverage of the gathering in Saint-Imier.

A Daring Experiment

Anarchy 2023 was a brave and risky experiment in self-organization. The gathering drew more than twice the number of inhabitants of the village. I was told that the initiative group of the gathering comprised around ten people, so most of the organization was left to the collectives and individuals invited, who were mostly completely strangers to each other. Nonetheless, the organizers all took a very idealist anarcho-communist approach to everything. No one was paid for their efforts; no one was charged anything more than a voluntary donation to participate and receive resources like food and accommodations; and no one was in charge. Anyone could announce a workshop and declare a space for it.

The organizers tolerated a very wide range of views, including some polar opposites. I noted that some discussions aimed solely at openly criticizing other existing anarchist projects were dropped from program, but there were still lots of events in the program that were doing that just a bit more subtly.

I do not know if the event was a financial disaster, but as for the daily functioning of the gathering, I would say it was a great success. Especially the organization of food was astonishing and completely scalable: I never had to wait in line for longer than 20 minutes, even though thousands of the people were flooding into the queue. Food was provided for those with specific dietary needs such as celiac disease; there was even a special section for people who still want to use masks and maintain social distancing.

Due to the huge number of topics and presentations, it was hardly possible to get a general picture of the events, and I was mostly kept busy pursuing my own field of interest—meeting activists from Eastern Europe and planning common projects with them. Probably most of the other attendees were busy in the same way. This means that it was not really Anarchy 2023 but rather Anarchies of 2023, not one movement but countless different movements that just happened to intersect in time and space but with little actual connection.

I never had a chance to meet any anarchists involved in the movement before the Second World War, so I was very happy to listen to Ben Morea, who has had a tremendous impact on the formation of the modern anarchist movement, for example by coining the English-language term affinity group.

A clock tower in Saint-Imier celebrates the city’s history as a watchmaking hub.

Anarchist Initiative

The first workshop I go to, it takes twenty minutes to walk to the building where it is scheduled to take place. When I arrive, it takes ten more minutes to push through the tight crowd thronging the entrance and make my way up to the second floor. There, I discover that two events have been double-booked for the same room. Looking online doesn’t help—in the official schedule, both events are listed with the same room number.

The attendees of both events are crowding into the room. It’s not big enough to accommodate all of them; many more people are trapped out in the hall, further congesting foot traffic.

I am not the one making this presentation. But I want to see it, and decades of anarchist organizing have given me a robust sense of my own agency. “We’re going to need one of the presentations to move to a different room,” I declare, hoping this will help me figure out who the presenters are.

“We can’t leave,” answers someone involved in the other workshop, the one I am not trying to attend. “We already put our visuals up on the walls.”

An industrious Finn who, like me, has only a tenuous connection to the presentation we are both trying to attend goes out to see if there are any empty rooms left. “Nobody leave, we are going to find another location!” I announce.

This gives one young person the mistaken impression that I am in a position of authority. “Can you tell me when it is going to start?” he says. “It’s already five minutes past the start time.”

“Listen,” I answer, “I’m not in charge of this event. I’m just trying to make sure that it can happen. This whole kerfuffle is not my idea.”

In the end, the Finn returns, having secured another room, and the event begins just a few minutes late.

The next day, I am scheduled to present a workshop myself. Drawing on my experience, I make sure to get to the room a full forty minutes early. To my surprise, it is almost empty.

I open up my computer and start trying to figure out how to connect it to the projector. I’m not what you might call technically inclined.

As I am struggling to find a cord, a very serious Latin American gentleman approaches me.

“I want to be clear,” he says. “I’m not in a position of responsibility here. I’m not in charge of the events in this room.”

“That’s fine—do you know who is?”

“No one is.”

“Oh, well, that’s great,” I say, despairingly.

“Now, do you have an HDMI port?” he continues, briskly. “If you want to appear on the livestream, we will have to set up the camera in this position, but if you prefer to remain anonymous, we’ll move it over here, so it only shows the screen, and it will be up to you to remember not to venture across this invisible line. Do you need access to a podium? How many of you are there, and when will your comrades arrive?”

This sign in one of the buildings hosting events during the anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier seems to imply that some of the discussions were announced as booby traps to force unsuspecting attendees to organize themselves.

What Gives Me Hope

A pair of giant skeleton puppets bobbing through a packed dance floor. An indoor ice-skating rink transformed into massive literature distribution hangar. A pop-up pizza tent where you can obtain vegan pizza made by comrades—provided you are willing to wait. People sprawled in the empty pastures around the village, talking and napping in the sun. The longest line I’ve ever seen for the kitchen, but also a surprisingly efficient and fast-moving one. All the bikes locked up outside the main show space, because we might not even trust each other. A hall packed full of hundreds chanting “Siamo Tutti Antifascisti!” and everyone meaning it wholeheartedly. Stumbling upon an art show on a rooftop patio, complete with bubbles and potato crisps in the shape of teddy bears, where prints made by some of the children are displayed. Holding hands and gazing at the Milky Way, making wishes on shooting stars until the dawn creeps blue on the horizon, beckoning the coming day.

I arrive late at night and the first thing I see is the countless little tents and caravans stretched out in vacant cow pastures. Walking through the night, I head to the main show space, embrace a dear love, and catch the last few songs of a Colombian punk band. I’ll return to this hall over the coming nights to talk with friends and revel to a hip-hop duo and witchtrap DJs, dancing myself back into my body, dancing myself home.

During the days, I scan the schedule, looking for the sweet spot: workshops I’m interested in in languages I understand. A presentation on Gustav Landauer, a 19th-century anarchist poet mystic, catches my eye—but unfortunately it is scheduled at the same time that I have a prior commitment. I go about my day and check the schedule again later, only to find the Gustav Landauer talk has been moved to the early evening. I make my way up the side of the mountain, intending to drop in on a somatic experiencing workshop on the way. I stop in and do some breathing and grounding exercises led by a presenter who alternates between English and French. Then I make my way across the packed square, where people have gathered to listen to a rousing presentation.

Giant skeleton puppets at a hip hop performance during the gathering in Saint-Imier, July 2023.

Above the din, I swear I can faintly hear singing. It draws me. Making my way back across the crowded square away from the location of the Gustav Landauer talk, I trace the sweet sound around the corner, where a group of anarchists are assembled in a church courtyard. A dear friend had alerted me to the fact that there would be an anarchist choir here—and now I have stumbled on them.

In delight and awe, I stand and listen. I chime in where I can, looking over the shoulder of someone with an anarchist songbook.

At length, I tear myself away, intent on catching at least a tiny bit of the Landauer presentation. I walk back through town and scale flights of stairs to catch the last few minutes. The punchline is that it turns out the talk was really about Spinoza, or rather, Gustav Landauer’s relationship to Spinoza’s work.

At one point, though, the presenter remarks that Landauer wrote that when someone becomes a comrade, you gain twice: first, by making a new friend, and second, by having one less enemy. This gem alone made it worth attending.

My time in St. Imier was heady and full. It felt like time stretched out, then concertinaed back in. A day felt like many days, two days like a week. Like many other people in this world, I consider myself a lost child, divorced from a fulfilling cultural heritage and stripped of a relationship to the land. I strive to rebuild the latter in my daily life; the former, I build and lose and build again. I went to St. Imier, in part, to connect to the anarchist lineage that binds me to history, linking me to both the past and the future, which has helped me make sense of my life for the past twenty-five years.

In a small Swiss village with a street named Rue Bakounine, I could feel the tug of belonging, the thread that keeps pulling me home. It’s not that these temporal spaces make me feel young so much as that they make me remember who I am. The thing that was most notable, in a tiny town filled with thousands of anarchists, was not who was there, but who was absent. Because despite the many, many anarchists who were there, I know there are so many more around the world who were not. And that—that gives me hope.

An anarchist songbook, used during choral singing at the gathering in Saint-Imier.

The Inspiration We Need

I came home from the gathering in Saint-Imier with a lot of new motivation and strength. Walking down the streets of Saint-Imier, passing self-organized workshops and discussions in different languages at almost every corner, showed me once again what becomes possible when people come together in self-organized spaces.

Exchanging ideas and experiences, discussing strategies, meeting old comrades and friends and making new ones, a book fair filling a whole ice arena (I mean, how crazy is that?)… Being surrounded by thousands of anarchists from all around the globe sharing similar ideas and connecting the different struggles we fight… all this inspired me a lot. The kind of inspiration that we desperately need to continue our struggle.

On the other hand, the gathering left me with a lot of open questions regarding how to deal with conflicts and contradictions within our movement. What is needed for us to be willing to listen to each other so that we can learn and grow together? At what point does solidarity become an empty phrase? How do we live up to our ideals across borders in times of war? How much formal or informal organization do we need? What do we consider victory to mean in the struggles we are engaged in?

Imagine the Authoritarian International

Corporate reporters discussing the gathering in Saint-Imier trotted out the usual clichés about anarchism. “Much of what is offered here is contradictory,” declared one journalist. Criticizing a sparsely attended talk at which an elderly German parroted some pro-Russian talking points about Ukraine, the same author crowed:

“This would be unthinkable in a curated, moderated programme. But that would also require more authority than most anarchists would like.”

Many people who have not previously been exposed to anarchism take it for granted that “more authority” is the solution for every problem. The question, of course, is how to decide who gets to wield that authority. In Russia, in which one can arguably find more authority than Switzerland, the authorities are the very ones pushing the talking points to which this journalist took exception.

For perspective, let’s imagine a comparable gathering for the opposing side. Picture the Authoritarian International, an event welcoming everyone who passionately believes in the importance of authority as a value unto itself. Would such a gathering be less contradictory, less disputatious?

What location and anniversary would the partisans of authority choose? Every nationalist would propose the capital of his own country; every monarchist would argue for the date of the founding of his favorite royal line. Perhaps the city of Rome could satisfy almost everyone: republicans for the Roman Republic, imperialists for the Roman Empire, autocrats for the coup that turned the former into the latter, Catholics for the Vatican, Nazis for the March on Rome that brought fascism to power. But which date would they pick?

Even if they could agree on a place and time, think how bitterly they would squabble, united only by faith in the importance of hierarchy, centralization, and domination. Proponents of religious theocracy, military dictatorship, corporate oligarchy, and constitutional republic would shout each other down, each striving to force the others to obey his preferred despot or legal code. Devotees of Ayn Rand would bicker with Stalinists; Trump-voting Klansmen would brawl with earnest Norwegian social democrats.

How would technocrats and militia leaders resolve their differences over how to apportion authority? Voting? A rigorous job application process? Brute force?

Capitalists would vie to fleece each other. Food, housing, and other necessities would be available only at market prices—or worse, if some magnate or state agency managed to establish a monopoly. (What is a monopoly, if not “more authority” in the realm of economics?)

Rather than disagreeing over how to end the war in Ukraine, attendees would contend to cash in on it or to emulate Putin’s strategies for suppressing protest movements. Rather than debating COVID-19 safety protocol, some would discuss how to create artificial scarcity in access to medical treatment as a means of increasing profits while others studied how to use lockdowns as a pretext to crush dissent. For a considerable fee, attendees could choose between workshops with titles like “Stage Your Own Coup” and “The Iron Rule of Law.”

Let’s stop here before we accidentally reinvent the League of Nations or the New York Stock Exchange. Looking through this lens, the various groups and discourses that converged in Saint-Imier look surprisingly coherent. Taking the simple idea that inequality and oppression are bad things as our point of departure will not resolve all the questions before us. But it will put us on the right track.

The CrimethInc. table in the book fair area in Saint-Imier—one of nearly one hundred anarchist publishing projects that were represented there.

Something Was Missing

It is hard to evaluate the festival in Saint-Imier. Thousands of anarchists from different parts of the world (mostly from western/southern Europe) created so many parallel worlds that no one could say something about most of them. From theater performances and concerts to the book fair and hundreds of workshops/presentations/meetings, the diversity of the anarchist movement was there, but at the same time something was missing…

For the event that celebrates one of the very important steps in the emergence of an organized anarchist movement, there was little space that could bring us further on the matter of international organizing. Talking about this with some comrades, I was told that those were the wrong expectations to bring to an event that presented itself as a festival and not as a congress or something like that.

As a festival, the event in Saint-Imier stands—there was enough entertainment and serious programming to keep you busy. The infrastructure was there to consume and participate in volunteer structures. But beyond consumption, the revolutionary ideas of the 19th century seem to have disappeared from parts of anarchist movement in the same way that they have disappeared from the heads of Swiss watchmakers.

With the decline of the anarchist movement in some parts of the world, the question remains: do we need more festivals with completely open programs, hoping that there is cooperation going on somewhere behind closed doors? (I’m quite sure there was some cooperation in St.Imier, at least on the level of individual groups.) Or is the internationalist anarchist movement missing something more important to keep the ideas alive and continue supporting each other across borders?

Street art in Saint-Imier featuring a quote by Hélène Cixous.

Village Life

The international anti-authoritarian gathering that took place in the little town of Saint-Imier built a sort of parallel village life.

This 5000-anarchist village displayed an intense rural life with its rumors, its intense conflicts and mutual aid, its patterns in which we would meet the same people at every corner every day yet fail to find some people even once in the course of five days. Some people were irritated by the format; they could not understand whether it was a gathering or a festival or something in between.

The veterans of earlier gatherings at Saint-Imier reported that such fierce debates have always taken place, but the topics change. In comparison to the last big meeting (in 2012), this year was much queerer and there were no debates about whether to eat meat—this time, everything was vegan with different kitchens for gluten-free food and an extra kitchen for people with allergies. Wonderful! Amazing supplying efforts. And no meat-eaters’ riots.

It was an amazing space where you could bring together people from Chile and Belarus to compare notes about their experiences participating in uprisings and enduring repression. On one day, at the same time, you could choose between the “DIY abortion” workshop and “happy birth giving” workshop.

Some of the points of controversy this year included:

There were some talks on the “corona dictatorship” and vaccination “obligation,” which irritated a lot of people due to the conspiracy theory direction. A few people brought up their anti-vaccine talking points even at workshops that had nothing to do with the subject.
Anti-racist critique (for example, a critique of a Sea Punks presentation to the effect that it reflected a “white savior” attitude).
There was a big brouhaha about an attack on one book table, where some books which the attackers considered Islamophobic were destroyed.

For us, the biggest clash was on the topic of the war in Ukraine. It exploded on the second day at a round table discussion about Ukrainian resistance to the invasion. The organizers were not interested in discussing “whether” to support Ukrainian resistance; they wanted to talk about “how.” Certain self-proclaimed anti-militarists did not accept this; in the end, they screamed about censorship, saying things like “You don’t know what anarchy is!”

Several so-called anti-militarist events took place during the week, as well, and those were not disrupted by those who support anti-authoritarian fighters on the front in Ukraine. But at the panel discussion about anti-authoritarian perspectives on support for the Ukrainian resistance, some calling themselves an anti-militarist group tried to sabotage the event. There was screaming and shoving, which retraumatized people from Ukraine who were on the podium to speak. They laughed aloud during a minute of silence for our comrades who died fighting against Putin. It was ugly and contrary to solidarity, or even human decency. But still, at the end of the day, there were many more people ready to listen the experiences of anarchists directly affected by the war and Putin’s imperialism. There were many voices of solidarity from all over the world, and that was empowering.

The nicest thing we heard about was a workshop on anti-fascist yodeling, where even people who resist singing opened their minds and mouths and found a mutual relaxation moment in voice pitching.

On the last night, we met on the street some local people who were talking about the gathering. One was telling the other that it was good that this event was taking place: finally, there was some activity in the village. This, despite all the graffiti, blocking of streets, and train cancellations.

The Saint-Imier gathering… it was diverse, emotional, vibrant, and loud.

P.S.: On Sunday evening, after the event was over and people were cleaning up and going home, a strong thunderstorm hit the town. The news reported that there was a meter and a half of water in the central square, but that no one was hurt. We hope that everyone stayed safe!

“Please don’t have political conflict.” A satirical sign in Saint-Imier.

Some Complaints

The DPA [Deutsche Presse-Agentur], the largest press agency in Germany, reported on the anarchist meeting with the remarkable conclusion that there was even a street named after Bakunin in St. Imier, but that it was a dead end.

Of course, this is not my assessment of anarchist ideas. Yet I too have to shake my head at some developments in the anarchist subculture. My feelings range from amused amazement to sad resignation.

For example, in the absence of any other communication infrastructure capable of reaching a comparable number of people, the organizing team tries to reach the participants by making megaphone announcements at the food lines. People should cross the tracks only at the official railroad crossings, we are told, or else the Orgateam will be charged enormous fines. And if the façades of the houses are painted, then the collective cashier will have to pay for the cleaning and, in addition, the lack of sympathy in the village will reduce the chance that such an event can take place here again.

Where should I start? Should I note that the death of Sébastien during the Castor transport in France in 2004 taught me to step on train tracks only in very well-planned actions? That I have absolutely no idea of the Swiss legal situation and therefore do not know whether the crossing of tracks by event participants can be charged financially to the organizers? That I would have been interested in this information? That the announcements are centrally about money and not about the sense and nonsense or dangers of crossing the tracks? That it seems to me out of place to carry out subcultural debates with lacquer paint on house walls in Saint-Imier?

But my first impulse is another one: disobedience. And I think it’s because of the form of communication.

I had the feeling of having been treated as condescendingly by some of the people who made these announcements as the authorities treat me elsewhere. Their appeals seemed to assume that “we” would want “the same” without question. What is this “same” conveyed in the subtext? A meeting that receives positive reports in the media? A municipality that is not opposed to hosting such an event again in ten years? Whether I personally share these goals is irrelevant to my discomfort. It is the matter-of-factness with which other views are branded as undesirable deviations that bothers me. Because the answers could be different and those positions deserve their space as well.

“Please don’t put up signs if you’re not an organisator.” An ironic sign.

A History of Criticism

People tend to view the past through rose-tinted lenses while focusing on the negative aspects of the present. Anarchists are no exception. Comparing the 2023 gathering with the one in 2012, for example, some participants complained that the 2012 gathering was a serious political organizing event, whereas the 2023 gathering was just a big party.

I wasn’t at the 2012 gathering, but I read the reports that appeared afterwards. Attendees charged that there was not enough meaningful political content, that the discussions were superficial, that there was insufficient engagement with race and gender and a lack of accommodations ensuring accessibility. There was controversy over the pieing of a politician who had apparently denounced militant anarchism. Vegans carried out an intervention against attendees who were cooking meat.

The organizers of the 2012 gathering also faced criticism for attempting to curate the program themselves. One critic grumbled, “If another international gathering is called in the future, it would be great to see anarchist principles of co-operation and shared responsibility at the forefront of the organizing.”

Arguably, the organizers of the 2023 gathering overcorrected, creating an almost entirely open process via which anyone could announce an event. And yet, surprisingly, this experiment was more or less successful on its own terms. Next time, we can anticipate that organizers will overcorrect again, reacting against the shortfalls and critiques of this year’s gathering.

Criticism is an essential part of organizing. But the proper role of criticism is to inform our own active efforts, not to marinate in negativity, nor to bully others into doing things the way we want them to. We should not be distracted from the tremendous things our comrades have accomplished by the fact that there is still room for improvement.

Likewise, let us not imagine that the anarchist movement can accomplish the things we desire it to without our own active involvement.

The ghosts of the past: a skeleton puppet at the gathering in Saint-Imier.

Accompanied by the Spirit of Mary Shelley

We found ourselves in the Jura mountains experiencing some sort of phantasmagoria brought on by jet lag and heat exhaustion. Upon reaching Saint-Imier, we employed the few French words that hadn’t evaporated from our minds as spells to summon espresso to lift us from the fog. With each espresso, we became more aware of what was actually happening. We were increasingly impressed by the food logistics and increasingly fascinated by the crowds. Every day, more people arrived from Latin America, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and, for whatever reason, so many from Leipzig, Germany in particular.

Although it was largely a linguistic sea of French and German with splashes of Italian or Spanish, our US accents cut through the currents and reached curious ears. In one instance, a UK anarchist began to chat us up at the stream beside the ice arena hosting the book fair. We compared notes about the currents of transphobia and recuperation of trans struggle in the name of consumer identities in our respective contexts. Bemoaning the climate nightmare, we explored the related possibility of dark horse wineries coming out on top. The we reviewed our respective regions’ anarchist book fair drama and commiserated about experiencing dire economic situations while also being located in the imperial core.

Another such encounter occurred behind Espace Noir. We sat in the thick smoke, alone in a crowd, discussing various things for a while, but when one of us mentioned Chicago and another mentioned the gorgons, an older Swiss woman interjected, “What’s this about gorgons?”

“Gorgons used to be guardian figures,” one of us answered. The conversation wandered from monsters as portents to Frankenstein’s monster as a depiction of “the abject” and “the excluded,” and from there to the revelation that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein while on a train in the Jura region, quoting her friends’ poetry throughout. We all got a big laugh at “Schützengarten” beer, which then opened the door for the gun conversation, with us being surprised by the sporting gun culture in Switzerland and the Swiss women being surprised that we routinely do a version of trap shooting that includes firing beer cans out of a legally augmented AR15 lower so we can shoot them out of the air with a sporting shotgun. This conversation left us thinking about generational gaps in US anarchism and what it would be like to pursue more affective encounters rather than more regimented ones.

This “pursuit of the affective” didn’t go so well in practice, with one of us getting their glasses broken in the pit the night before our talk, but on our second-to-last night in Saint-Imier, we successfully hunted down the source of the gabber and hardtek music that had been lulling us to sleep from far away each evening. We started from the fried snack stand (where the music wasn’t the right bpm) and passed by the cheese vending machine. Finally, we found a mini-rave in a clearing by a train bridge. As soon as we saw their sound system, the logistics were immediately intelligible to those of us with audio know-how, which gave us a myriad of ideas to bring back home.

Before we left the region, we headed to the lakeside city of Neuchâtel. Alongside the beautiful blue water of the lake and the colorful Prussian statues, the walls of the city were decorated with graffiti—the good ol’ three arrows covering up NS tags, “ZAD Partout!,” and “Nique la Police.” Fittingly, we saw some words by Mary Shelley written on the wall, a through line for our reverie.

Street art in Saint-Imier: selections from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Drunken Boat.”

The Choir

The last thing we experienced before leaving was a choral ensemble in the city square of Saint-Imier, comprised of various revolutionary choirs from around Europe singing century-old anarchist songs together. The voices of the past, addressing us in the present. It was deeply moving.

Trends, controversies, even individual anarchists come and go, but the spirit of what we are doing is greater than us, older than us, and it is an honor to witness its transmission from one century to the next.

An anarchist songbook open to a classic song in Saint-Imier, 2023.

Painting with a broad brush, we can characterize the politics associated with these currents thus: Proudhon (pro-market, anti-state, anti-feminist, anti-insurrection), Blanqui (anti-capitalist, pro-state, anti-feminist, pro-insurrection), Marx (anti-capitalist, pro-state, pro-feminist, anti-insurrection), and Bakunin (anti-capitalist, anti-state, pro-feminist, pro-insurrection). ↩
The two American sections of the International were represented at the Saint-Imier by Gustave Lefrançais—a participant in the Paris Commune and, incidentally, the person to whom the lyrics of the revolutionary anthem “The Internationale” were dedicated. ↩
Bearing in mind that the International had been founded in 1864, the five years of activity of the “Anti-Authoritarian International” between 1872 and 1877 compare favorably enough with the eight years during which Marx was involved before that. The latter part of the history is less known simply because the vast majority of the history of the International has been passed on by Marxists. ↩

In Memory of Dmitry Petrov : An Incomplete Biography and Translation of His Work

2023-05-03T20:01:26Z

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, known to us until then as Ilya Leshy. People in our networks have shared undertakings with all three of these comrades over the years.

You can read about Cooper’s motivations in his own words here and consult a eulogy from his comrades here. You can learn about Finbar’s lifelong activism here, read an interview with him here, and listen to a song of his here. In the following eulogy, we explore the life of Dmitry Petrov, who also went by the noms de guerre Ilya Leshy and Fil Kuznetsov. For background, you should start by reading the statements from his comrades in the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, the Resistance Committee, and Solidarity Collectives, as well as Dmitry’s statement from beyond the grave, all of which are available here.

A few weeks before the war began, Dmitry participated in an interview that we included in our coverage of the unfolding situation. On the first day of the Russian invasion, under what must have been challenging conditions, Dmitry took time to speak with us about how anarchists were responding. Throughout our exchanges over the following year, we were impressed by his humility, the earnestness with which he approached his efforts, and his sincere desire for critique.¹

When Dmitry was killed, his comrades revealed that he had been involved in some of the most significant anarchist initiatives in 21st-century Russia, including co-founding the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. Here, we will provide an overview of his efforts as a snapshot of the past two decades of struggle in the post-Soviet world, concluding with translations of two of his texts, “To Be a Revolutionary” and “The Mission of Anarchism in the Modern World,” and another text about him from the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization.

No one in our collective believes that state militarism can bring about the world we desire to live in. We are internally divided over the issue of anarchists participating in military resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some of us believe that serving in a state military formation can never advance the anarchist cause. Others believe that the decision to do so can only be understood in view of the brutal autocracy that prevails in Russia, in which committed anarchists like Dmitry had tried virtually every other approach. If we reject state militarism, it is an open question how else to respond to imperialist invasions—and we will be better equipped to approach that question if we understand the life trajectory of Russian anarchists like Dmitry. For a discussion of the complexities of formulating an anarchist anti-war strategy that does not effectively cede the field to state militarism, you could begin here.

Volodya Vagner writes, “I took this photo of Dmitry a spring day in 2018, as he showed me around the Moscow offices of the PKK’s representation in Russia. He’d been spending time there since the battle of Kobanê in 2014, studying Kurmanji and organizing events about the revolution in Rojava… he struck me as kind and modest, a sharp thinker committed to putting his convictions into action.”

A Life in Combat

One of our contacts in the Russian anarchist movement recalls that Dmitry was an active participant in anarchist activities in Moscow starting when he was a teenager, as early as 2004. According to a eulogy in Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry

became interested in anarchism at school. Together with comrades, they published the anarchist newspaper “Heretic.”

As a child, he was strongly influenced by his father’s stories about the Makhnovist movement during the civil war in Russia. For the first time, his father brought him to the Falanster store (the oldest independent bookstore in Moscow), where Dmitry discovered the [Russian anarchist] magazine Avtonom. “My first acquaintance with the movement was participation in the Bespartshkol, a rather interesting circle of lectures and discussions that took place many years ago in the Moscow Jerry Rubin Club.” From the age of fifteen, he began to actively interact with the organization of “revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists” and to “write articles for their samizdat.”

Dmitry became known to other comrades as Ekolog (“ecologist”) on account of his environmentalism, organizing against the construction of incinerators and for the defense of Bitsevski Park in Moscow. He also participated in Food Not Bombs, the anarchist MPST union (“Interprofessional Workers’ Union”), and a variety of other initiatives. You can read about his activities during this period here.

Like many Russian anarchists, he participated in the anti-fascist movement, fighting Nazis on the streets of Moscow and defending concerts and lectures against Nazi attacks. According to the Novaya Gazeta eulogy, Dmitry was a member of the affinity group of Ivan “Kostolom” Khutorsky, a well-known anti-fascist who was later murdered in his stairwell by a member of a neo-Nazi gang.

Indeed, while Dmitri was becoming more active in the anarchist movement, fascists and police were escalating their violence against it. They had begun maiming and killing activists and journalists and even their lawyers; Fedor Filatov, Ilya Borodayenko, Timur Kacharava, and Anna Politkovskaya were only a few of the many casualties. In January 2009, the lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the journalist and anarchist eco-activist Anastasia Baburova were murdered in downtown Moscow. The previous summer, Dmitry had fought alongside Anastasia Baburova to defend Georgian refugees from Abkhazia who were staying in Yasnyi proezd in Moscow.

The following month, Dmitry took part in a clandestine action claimed under the name People’s Retribution. According to one account, this was a landmark event in Russia:

The first anti-cop arson of a new generation of anarchist rebels took place on the night of February 19-20, 2009. The next day, a video was published on the internet on behalf of the group People’s Retribution, showing anonymous people throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars. “People’s Retribution” announced the destruction of two cars and called on “every self-respecting person… to stand up against the arbitrariness and despotism of the police, secret services, and bureaucracy.”

Afterwards, Dmitry participated in establishing an anonymous platform for reporting such clandestine actions, the Black Blog, which began publishing in May 2010. When the anonymous editors announced the end of the Black Blog in March 2019, they alluded to the burning of the police cars on February 19, 2009: “More than ten years have passed since we threw our first Molotov cocktail at the police.”

One of the flashpoints of conflict around Moscow at that time was the Khimki forest, which anarchists and ecological activists were defending against corrupt officials and loggers and the fascists in their employ. On July 28, 2010, the fight over Khimki came to a head when hundreds of anarchists and anti-fascists marched on the local municipal offices in response to a fascist attack. We don’t know what Dmitry’s precise involvement in these events was. The anonymous report we received from Russian anarchists seems to bear the work of a familiar hand; but in an interview, an anonymous representative of Black Blog denied that they had participated in the demonstration at the municipal offices.

According to the Novaya Gazeta eulogy, Dmitry distinguished himself as a particularly considerate comrade in the course of his participation in ecological sabotage around this time.

“Once, we wandered through the autumn forest at night, disabling construction equipment,” recalled Svyatoslav Rechkalov, a political refugee in the case of the anarchist organization Narodnaya Self-Defense. “And one girl lost her sneaker. She just stepped on the ground and it swallowed her leg. She pulled her leg out, but the shoe remained somewhere underground. Well, Dima took off his shoes, gave her his sneakers, put bags on his feet, and went on like that.

“People asked him, are you not cold? Do you want to change eventually? He said: if it becomes unbearable, then we will change. But he ended up walking around in the bags all night. That’s who he was.”

Over the months following the march on the municipal offices of Khimki, the authorities detained and tortured over 500 anarchists and anti-fascists. Several were forced to flee the country. Nonetheless, this was not enough to suppress what was at that time a powerful movement. According to the aforementioned account of the movement of that time,

“2009-2012 was the peak of anarchist resistance in the history of the post-Soviet region of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Something happened almost every day, especially in the Moscow region, day and night.”

By summer 2012, over a hundred arson attacks had taken place targeting police stations and vehicles, military enlistment offices, cars belonging to state officials, and construction equipment intended to destroy forests. The Black Blog reported many of these actions, including some claimed by additional groups that Dmitry reportedly participated in, such as Anti-Nashist Action (countering the pro-Putin youth group, Nashi) and ZaNurgaliyeva (likely an ironic reference to then-Minister of Interior Rashid Nurgaliyev, a former KGB functionary).

On June 7, 2011, for example, an improvised device exploded beside a traffic police post at kilometer 22 of the Moscow Ring Road. The Anarchist Guerilla group claimed responsibility with a video of the explosion on the Black Blog. According to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, Dmitry participated in this action.

In a subsequent interview, pseudonymous participants in the burning of the police post described the action in detail. Here is an excerpt:

DENIS: We are descending from the crossing over the Moscow Ring Road. It’s almost light now. Some pensioner is already here walking his dog. I must say, according to our experience of night outings, this category of citizens is one of the very first to appear on the city streets in the morning. They say that in old age people sleep very little. Although our faces are covered, I still feel anxiety—after all, a witness can remember something. Of course, this is complete madness—to return to a failed bomb, and even in the light, in full view of the whole neighborhood. But so much effort has been expended—it is impossible to leave with nothing.

Let’s return to the post. Everything is the same as we left: a basin with coal and a cylinder stands between the fence and the booth. Alexei goes to the edge of the concrete ditch, lights a phosphorus match, and throws it into the basin. Nothing happens. Has the gasoline burned away? Discouraged, we slowly walk back to the bridge. “Listen, did you definitely see the match fall into the basin?” I ask Alexei. “Yeah, it looked like it.” “But you can’t say for sure?” “No, I’m not sure.”

Last try. We return, I climb over the ditch, approach the fence, light a match, throw it right into the basin and… a bluish flame spreads over the coal. It happened! Now we are running, our hearts are beating—what if the explosion catches us in a conspicuous place? But the joy of success drowns out the anxiety.

BORIS: It was starting to get light. I noticed an incomprehensible movement behind the booth. I looked closely, I realized that it was the reflection of fire on the trees. It was burning!

But suddenly a car quickly drove into the parking lot, illuminating the booth with its headlights. A traffic cop ran out of the car, took out a fire extinguisher, and began to put out the flames. Unsuccessfully. On the contrary, it seemed that the fire flared up more and more. The traffic cop ran into the post and came out with another fire extinguisher, a larger one. Again, failure—the flame only blazed more and more. Apparently, having decided not to risk it, the traffic cop returned to his post. The flame, meanwhile, rose above the booth—but there was still no explosion. The camera I was using stopped recording for the second time; I pressed “record” again. Police cars began to arrive at the post.

And then there was an explosion.

Everything was lit up by a flash, a bright orange flame shot up about fifteen meters. We continued filming. Cars began to drive away from the traffic police post, and just then our comrades returned. Alexei nervously shouted: “What are you doing, they are coming after us!”

According to a post by the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, the one who returned to try again with one more match—the one called Denis in the above account, if it is to be credited—was Dmitry.

The account concluded with an admonition characteristic of Dmitry’s later writing:

You cannot seize power and impose anarchy on people from above. You cannot make a revolution for them and force them to live in a new society. Anarchist ideals will win only when people realize their strength, taking responsibility for their own lives and each other’s. Therefore, the main thing is to restore people’s faith in their own strength.

The same social tensions expressed in these clandestine actions eventually came to a boil in mass participatory events. Across Russia, hundreds of thousands of people participated in the opposition movement of 2011-2012. On May 6, 2012, the “March of Millions” ended in clashes with the police in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. Once again, according to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, Dmitry Petrov participated in the events in Bolotnaya Square, alongside the anarchist Alexei Polikhovich and others who were subsequently imprisoned for attempting to defend demonstrators from armored riot police.

That was arguably the high-water mark of political possibility in Russia. Over the years that followed, Putin’s government managed to establish a stranglehold on the country, systematically destroying or assimilating all forms of opposition. When we interviewed the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization last August, they traced the beginning of the process that eventually led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the defeat of that movement:

Perhaps, in theory, the political crisis of 2011-2012 could have ended Putin’s rule, if all the opposition forces had acted more cohesively and radically. The anarchists tried to radicalize the protest, but our forces were not enough, and the authorities decided to launch the first serious waves of repression.

After the clashes on Bolotnaya Square, Dmitry continued to participate in both clandestine action and public organizing. As the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization related to us in the aforementioned interview,

“We are aware of examples in which some comrades have managed to balance between public activity and the underground for quite a long time, and to be quite active in both.”

In 2013, a protest movement broke out against the pro-Putin government of Ukraine, culminating in the Ukrainian Revolution of February 2014. Although nationalists elbowed out anarchists and other anti-authoritarians to take a prominent place in these events, that outcome was not foreordained; things might have turned out differently if anarchists had been more numerous and better prepared. The Yellow Vest movement of 2018-2019 in France offers an example of a social movement in which nationalists initially had an advantage, but anarchists and anti-fascists managed to outflank them.

While the outcome of the Ukrainian uprising was still up in the air, Dmitry Petrov traveled to Kyiv to participate in the struggle on the Maidan, the central square of Ukraine’s capital city. According to Vladimir Platonenko,

In February 2014, Ekolog [Dmitry] spent about ten days on the Maidan, having come to Ukraine specifically for this. He took part in the arrangement of Ukrdom [the “Ukrainian house,” a staging point for anarchists and anti-fascists during the uprising, which was burned on February 18], delivering food to positions, and even in the battle on February 18. But at the same time, he constantly tried to develop an anarchist component in the general popular, complex, and heterogeneous Maidan protest movement. He participated in an attempt to create the “Left Hundred,” created an “anarchist regiment” (with anarchist literature) in the library of the Ukrdom, told the Maidan participants about the protests in favor of the uprising that had taken place in Moscow and about the reasons for the defeat of the protesters. He did not go with the flow; rather, he participated in determining the flow of events to the best of his ability.

In his reports from the Maidan protests, Dmitry describes his dismay about the militarization of the movement and the introduction of reactionary structures:

I can’t help but appreciate that everything is organized so seriously. However, this situation also has a drawback, perhaps more significant than its advantages. The presence of professional (or quasi-professional) military men inevitably means the collapse of any kind of democracy in the movement, since, by decision of their commanders, these people can impose this or that order on everyone else in an organized way by force. In addition, according to my subjective feelings, these people are unlike those who came here at the call of the idea, and even if I am wrong, their values and goals most likely have little in common with mine. A thick atmosphere of the right of force, the power of a man with a gun (or club) hung there. This is a problem that requires reflection and solution. The contradiction, the conflict between the “military” and “civilian” Maidan, is very clear.

In his last report, Dmitry described in detail his part in the battle of February 18, when many people were killed or severely injured:

Let’s try without great poetics, but in essence. This may be useful when you happen to be in a similar situation, dear reader. It is important to use your fear: so that it helps you to avoid getting into certain troubles, but does not flow into panic and flight. Personally, I had an incessant fear that a bullet or a grenade would hit me. I have long known that I am far from being a daredevil, and I say that without a hint of coquetry. Now, for the first time, I became interested in the essence of such a feeling as courage. What is it, anyway? Fear forced me to stay closer to people, not to stick out too much, not to run out in front of the crowd. There was a petty feeling: there are a great number of us here, the chance that they will shoot at me is small. There was a childish feeling: “Wow, I saw it on TV during the riots…” But that was the least of it. Next to fear, there was a feeling similar to emptiness—a silent obligation to stay and act. It is almost never formulated verbally. It just is. Maybe courage is just about that? Further, it is important to begin to act meaningfully, and not just to stand or stupidly rush back and forth. Here, the first stones are flying, the first bullets of the cops and flash-bang grenades…

The situation in Ukraine was never simple. In the final entry on the Black Blog, dated February 2015, the editors describe the debates among themselves regarding whether the arsons in Ukraine that were reported to their platform represented genuine anti-state activity or pro-Putin authoritarian activity. Rather than present a facile or sanitized narrative, the authors summarized both views so that readers could draw their own conclusions—but that was the last update to the Black Blog. This debate foreshadowed the later controversies about how anarchists should position themselves in the war between the Russian and Ukrainian governments.

In the years following his participation in the Ukrainian uprising, Dmitry maintained an online journal chronicling his travels to sites of natural beauty and historical interest, including parks, forests, and museums around Russia. In 2016, he obtained a PhD in history; his dissertation was titled “Sacred geography of the eastern parts of the Arkhangelsk region.” He engaged in anthropological studies as a researcher at the Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies of the African Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Inspired initially by an article written by David Graeber, Dmitry went to Rojava while the war against the Islamic State was at its fiercest. He spent six months there. Afterwards, in 2017, he discussed his experiences in this interview and participated in the research project Hevale: Revolution in Kurdistan, which published multiple books.

Later, he contributed articles to the Ukrainian leftist site Commons about the impact of COVID-19 in Rojava and the conflict between confederal and imperial models in Kurdistan.

According to Ukrainian anti-fascists, “He studied the revolutionary experience of the Kurds deeply, and while he was critical, he respected it and sincerely tried to convey its most valuable lessons.” By his own account, Dmitry aimed “not only to tell the Russian left about the social revolution in Kurdistan, but also to share the anti-authoritarian worldview with the Kurds themselves.”

Dmitry served as a link between the Russian anarchist movement and the social experiment in Rojava.

In 2018, Dmitry left Russia. By that time, Putin’s regime had tamed the violent fascist movement of the preceding decade and moved on to crushing all other social movements. It was becoming standard practice for the Russian Federal Security Service to round up suspected anarchists and anti-fascists and torture them via electrical shock and other horrific methods in order to force them to sign false confessions admitting to participating in invented “terror networks.”

As Dmitry later told the news site Doxa,

I avoided leaving the country as long as I could, but I left when I learned that the security forces were interested in my modest person.

He chose Ukraine as his point of destination, considering its government to be the least successfully authoritarian of the post-Soviet countries. In the Doxa interview, he described his activities upon arriving there:

In Ukraine, we had initiatives among anarchist emigrants from Russia and Belarus, a kind of diaspora. And so it was a lot of different things: from the cinema club and discussions to street actions. But the main thing was to establish ties and an attempt to form systematically operating structures.

As we have noted elsewhere, it is becoming more and more important to find ways to center the agency of refugees as wars, state repression, ecological catastrophes, and economic crises force millions into exile. Yet at the same time that he was getting situated in Ukraine, Dmitry continued organizing with anarchists in Russia from afar. The Telegram channel Anarchist Combatant appeared that same year, in 2018.

According to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization,

Dima [Dmitry] was a participant in all the processes of creating the BOAC [Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization]—its theoretical work, practical training, and the organization of training and combat actions. But his chief merit—and we think this will not surprise anyone who knew him—was his ability to establish ties with other people, with comrades both at home and abroad… He was always open to new people. He always believed in the best in them—he was mistaken more than once, but he continued to believe and seek.

In 2019, the editors of Black Blog announced the conclusion of the project. It had been four years since the last post had appeared. They emphasized that they remained convinced of the value of the strategy they had embraced in 2009:

We have sown our seeds and we are already seeing sprouts. Our enemies—the oppressors and their henchmen within the “power structures”—could not stop us, no matter how hard they tried.

We do not do these things to feed our egos. Everything we do, we do not for personal ambition, but to advance the struggle for freedom and justice. We are convinced that we have succeeded. And now, ten years later, we declare to you, as we did before, that we believe that our anti-authoritarian ideas are correct and the radical path we have chosen is correct. The fight continues.

On June 10, 2020, at the high point of the George Floyd uprising in the United States and in response to police violence in Ukraine, anarchists set fire to the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kyiv, sending a communiqué that appeared on the Anarchist Combatant website. This should address any lingering doubts about whether Dmitry sought to make peace with the Ukrainian authorities.

That summer, when an uprising broke out in Belarus, Dmitry illegally crossed the border to participate. According to Belarusian anarchists,

During his stay in Minsk, he took part in dozens of marches, helped organize an anarchist bloc at demonstrations, and even managed to pelt cops with their own stun grenades. At night, when many Belarusians were resting, Leshy [Dmitry] and other comrades took to the streets of Minsk and destroyed the surveillance cameras that played an important role in the infrastructure of repression… In the fall of 2020, he prepared several materials for our website. If you’ve ever marched through Minsk beside an anarchist column, chances are that you’ve walked shoulder to shoulder with this incredible man.

The uprising in Belarus was ultimately crushed; many of the anarchists who participated remain in prison today, underscoring the considerable risks of insurrectionary activity in the post-Soviet sphere. In September 2020, a blog post appeared from the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization: a communiqué from a clandestine partisan action in Belarus.

Surveying this trajectory, it is possible to interpret Dmitry’s path from the Black Blog through the uprisings of 2012, 2014, and 2020 to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization as the continuous development of a single strategy. Blending public activity and clandestine organizing, he sought to create a model suited to the volatile and dangerous conditions of the post-Soviet countries, a model that could serve both to take advantage of moments of possibility and to survive periods of intense repression. As state violence and surveillance intensify, activists in other parts of the world may find that they need something similar.

Starting before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Dmitry joined Ukrainian and Belarusian anarchists in attempting to put together an explicitly anarchist and anti-authoritarian military unit. One function of such a unit was to ensure that the participants would not have to fight side by side with fascists, who are indeed present in the Ukrainian military. In addition, Dmitry saw participating in the defense of Ukraine as an opportunity to gain credibility for anarchist ideas in the eyes of the general public in Ukraine, and to continue his own longstanding fight against Putin’s regime.

During the first phase of the Russian invasion, Dmitry and his comrades participated in the territorial defense of the region around Kyiv, becoming integrated as an independent unit in the Territorial Defense Forces. After this, their “anti-authoritarian platoon” became mired in military bureaucracy, putting the status of the non-Ukrainian members in limbo and keeping the entire unit away from the fighting.

In July 2022, Dmitry wrote an analysis of the first four months of the “anti-authoritarian platoon,” discussing its internal structure and evaluating its successes and failures. This is an important historical document for those who are curious about the extent to which the military model developed in Rojava can be reproduced in other circumstances. It will be instructive for anyone who wants to discuss anarchist involvement in military affairs, whether they seek to improve on it or to critique it.

Dmitry and others in the platoon were eager to get to the front. Eventually, the platoon disbanded, and they succeeded in going to the front in a different formation. When last we heard from him, he told us that he was about to leave that unit, in hopes of trying once more to establish some kind of explicitly anti-authoritarian unit.

We will leave it to others to debate whether Dmitry’s persistent attempts to establish an anarchist military unit represent the honorable continuation of his lifelong anarchist project, a misguided departure from it, an error arising from some preexisting flaw within it, or a courageous attempt to grapple with an almost impossible situation. Those who wish to hear his own thoughts on the matter may choose from an array of interviews. It must not be forgotten that in addition to fighting in Ukraine, he continued to support sabotage and other forms of subversive activity in Russia through the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, and he continued to emphasize the importance of autonomy, horizontality, and direct action to the anarchist struggle.

The sincerity of his effort, in any case, is beyond question.

My dear friends, comrades and relatives, I apologize to all those I hurt with my leaving. I appreciate your warmth very much. However, I firmly believe that the struggle for justice, against oppression and injustice is one of the most worthy meanings that humans can fill their life with. And this struggle requires sacrifices, up to the complete self-sacrifice.

The best memory for me is if you continue actively struggle, overcoming personal ambitions and unnecessary harmful strife. If you continue to fight actively to achieve a free society based on equality and solidarity. For you and for me and for all our comrades. Risk, deprivation and sacrifice on this path are our constant companions. But be sure – they are not in vain.

-Dmitri Petrov’s final statement

Dmitry Petrov (left), in Moscow at the presentation of the book Life Without a State: Revolution in Kurdistan, the second book he helped publish on the topic.

In an interview published in December 2017, Dmitry said “In general, almost everything that is created by human hands is the fruit of the labor of countless people.” In that spirit, we do not seek to hold Dmitry up as an exemplary figure. Rather, his life affords us a glimpse into the lives of many Russian anarchists, illuminating their courage and the challenges they have faced.

Above all, Dmitry’s life is a testament to how much is possible even in the most difficult conditions. Under a brutal dictatorship, faced with mounting adversity, he repeatedly found ways to continue organizing and fighting for the future he desired.

None of this is intended to glorify death in battle. As the 21st century progresses, life is becoming increasingly cheap—witness how the Wagner Group has intentionally used prisoners as cannon fodder. Anarchists should be in no special hurry to risk our lives—soon enough, there will be chances aplenty to die in the service of a variety of causes, or for no cause whatsoever. Rather than seeking to prove our commitment by our deaths, let’s express our passion for freedom in the way we live every moment of our lives.

Yet as authoritarianism rises around the world and war spreads from Syria to Ukraine, from Ukraine to Sudan, we too may have to answer the questions that Dmitry confronted when Russia invaded the country to which he had fled. If we are to be prepared for that situation—especially if we want to propose other answers to those questions—we need to study what has taken place in Russia. It may be that there is still time for things to turn out differently in other parts of the world, if we act boldly enough—but time is growing tight.

When an anarchist dies, it is up to those of us who survive to put that comrade’s experiences at the disposal of future generations. We can’t know for sure which perspectives those who come after us will need most. Seeking to do our part, we have translated the following two articles by Dmitry, and another article about him.

Appendix I: To Be a Revolutionary

This article appeared on the Anarchist Combatant website on May 29, 2018.

Being an anarchist is not at all as easy as it might seem. It is significant that among those who consider themselves anarchists, not everyone will call himself or herself a revolutionary, and even fewer anarchists seriously consider what it means to be a revolutionary. But it’s impossible to be an anarchist and not to be a revolutionary. We are talking about deep convictions, and not superficial sympathies and passion.

A revolutionary is a person whose desire for fundamental social change is embodied in the corresponding life path—revolutionary struggle. A serious approach to this struggle requires the development of a number of personal qualities. What are the characteristics of a revolutionary?

Belief in Victory

Perhaps this is where it all starts. In order to engage in any activity successfully, it is necessary to believe that it can result in success. Otherwise, a person simply has no reason to make a proper effort. Lack of faith in one’s ultimate success is tantamount to alienation from one’s activity.

I want to remind all pessimists that there are no “objective” reasons for considering the social revolution and the triumph of anti-authoritarian ideas to be reserved for an indefinitely distant future. The speed and unpredictability of social change in the modern world teaches us one important lesson: everything is possible. Including freedom and justice.

It is normal to have doubts. All thinking people doubt. And yet, lest doubts prevail in the end, resurrect in your soul the strength that your convictions were originally filled with. Feel the tremendous scale and significance of your goal, feel the dignity and fullness of the meaning of your chosen path—the path of the revolutionary. We are sure that faith will show the way to escape from the darkness of any doubt. And let’s go further. We talked more about faith in victory in the text “Make a Revolution!”

Revolutionary struggle is such a gigantic task that all who consider themselves to be a part of the revolutionary movement should perceive the fight as the chief occupation of their lives, their foremost task and vocation, whatever hardships and lures might pull them away from it.

Discipline and Responsibility

By discipline, we mean the readiness to take on tasks related to the pursuit of the struggle, and more importantly, the capacity to meticulously fulfill the tasks one commits to. Discipline begins with small things: do not be late for meetings, and fulfill the decisions made at those meetings according to the proposed timeframe. In fact, it begins even a bit earlier—it begins inside oneself, with the internal desire to work systematically and without sloppiness in order to develop the movement and the struggle.

Discipline is a very broad concept, intersecting with many different aspects of our lives. For example, it intersects with psychological restraint. The ability to remain calm in crucial moments while confronting the risk of repression, arrest, or physical confrontation with a political enemy or while participating in direct action is a manifestation of discipline.

It is also associated with ethics. Discipline is the understanding that “everything personal is political,” that each of us is the face of the movement we participate in. This, in addition to pure ethics, is an additional reason not to violate anarchist principles in your daily life. This is a discipline of life conduct.

Finally, discipline is manifested in devoting due time and energy to self-development, both individual and collective: acquiring knowledge and cultivating practical skills, physical training, thinking, and analysis.

We know that the word discipline is not always welcome in the anarchist community. And yet, we hope there are only few who will brand the understanding of discipline that we describe here as “authoritarian.”

Willingness to Endure Hardship

Participating in the fight against the oppressors draws the ire of the state machine, the capitalists, and their servants. Revolutionary activity involves problems and hardships. This is nothing new: it always happened thus for all who have fought against evil. We discussed self-sacrifice in the article “Giving One’s Life: What Did Zhlobitsky Remind Us?” —I don’t want to repeat myself. We can summarize that anarchists will most likely have to pay a price for their worldview and life choices—some less, some more.

And we should be ready to.

Loyalty and Devotion

One of the most important qualities that is often forgotten by current participants in the movement is loyalty, which could also be called devotion. Devotion to your comrades, to your affinity group, to your obligations, to your chosen path of struggle.

Today, in the anarchist milieu, one can often see how people easily change priorities and positions (and the reference to the “ideological search,” as a rule, is only a mask for changing superficial hobbies). Such activists don’t want to solve the problems that arise with colleagues, and prefer to make scandals in order to waive their obligations.

This behavior is often presented as part of an anarchist understanding of freedom, as if affection and loyalty are attributes of possessiveness. However, this is not the case. Inconstancy is a manifestation of the liberal ideology and liberal lifestyle of the era of consumer capitalism (in which people and ideas are beginning to be treated as disposable goods). Impermanence and lack of devotion correlate with egoism and the inability to feel or to deeply love the comrades and the cause one once identified with.

The anarchist understanding of freedom is different: anarchist freedom does not exist without brotherhood and sisterhood. Therefore, anarchist freedom cannot be the freedom to renounce your own comrades. Anarchist freedom involves the responsibility to make an active contribution to the common cause, to maintain equality, including within the collective, neither to submit nor to subjugate, and also not to abandon.

Finally, in a revolutionary struggle (and all my life experience confirms this), it is very important to be able to rely on a comrade, on the immutability of his or her basic values and life priorities and the readiness to make common cause. Without constancy and devotion, one cannot rely on anyone, just as one cannot fully trust anyone. As a result, without trust, it is impossible to fight. Consequently, freedom understood in a liberal way as the right to constant inconsistency makes resistance to the monster of the state and to capitalism impossible.

Even when discord and conflict arise with comrades, and you think that they are seriously mistaken or do not want to overcome their weaknesses, it is your duty as a comrade to make all possible efforts to help them by your criticism and, ultimately, to come to an agreement or at least to a compromise.

Here, it is appropriate to recall the lines of Alexander Nepomnyashchy:

And we’ll remain goats,
Broken on the doorstep
Of our faithful home
Of May’s peaceful silence,

If we don’t understand and don’t endure
The endless roads
From monstrous freedom
To saving love.

And also, Oleg Medvedev:

If you’ve chosen the ground, stand on it.
Don’t change colors if there’s no luck.
Let those who follow you change their place…

Checking the Results

It is sad to see people who have devoted dozens of years to stewing in a political subculture by performing ritual actions that imitate a political struggle (for example, internal scandals or “dialogue with the masses” via leaflets and publications written in a language that the latter obviously cannot understand).

A true revolutionary, as a person who sincerely wants to achieve victory over the system of injustice, always evaluates the results of his or her own actions, subjecting his or her tactics and strategy to sharp critique, constantly rethinking and correcting them without falling into inertia.

After carrying out a direct action, study how people react and how widely the information spreads. This will help you to evaluate the effectiveness of your action and what could have been done better. If you stay in a narrow circle for years, look for new ways to recruit people, make new connections with other groups and initiatives. These are specific examples of how to assess the results on your path towards making the revolution a reality.

The principle of monitoring results also applies to learning useful skills. Too often, we stop halfway, without having mastered a skill thoroughly. For example, sometimes we are ready to be satisfied with a hundred readers for our site, when a simple set of promotional activities could bring us a thousand. This attitude is deeply mistaken and too unambitious for a revolutionary. You need to master the technique of promotion and strive for greater success. This principle applies to every other area of anarchist activity.

And a Bit of Magic

A convinced revolutionary is bound to elicit a response in the hearts of those around him or her. This is because the convictions that have been hardened in the torments of doubt and searching fill the revolutionary personality and pour over the edge, outward.

Perhaps no one will agree with you at first. I’m sure many will argue with you. But the ideas that you have expressed, the ideas you sincerely believe in, as well as your life example, will make people think what they have not thought before and feel what they’ve never felt before. To be the spark that ignites a flame—this is truly a magical ability. If you have not experienced such a feeling yet, it undoubtedly awaits you ahead. This property is the revolutionary’s reward for enduring hardships that cannot be avoided.

We have described only some of the features that seem fundamental to the personality of our revolutionary comrade-in-arms. Of course, it is impossible to create step-by-step instructions regarding “how to become a perfect anarchist.” That requires a creative approach. Still, in this text, we have touched on problems that we all face.

Comrade, you can no longer live like cattle. A revolution cannot be an imitation, it cannot be a game of make-believe. The qualities of a revolutionary are not given to anyone at birth. They are fostered by like-minded people in themselves and in each other.

Our day has already come. Our duty is to achieve our declared goals in full. The road appears under the feet of those who walk.

Phil Kuznetsov [Dmitry Petrov]
Anarchist Combatant

Dmitry Petrov—or someone close to him—originally chose to illustrate this article with this classic drawing from a record by the Danish anarchist punk band Paragraf 119, which we colorized in 2021.

Appendix II: The Mission of Anarchism in the Modern World

Published on June 17, 2020 via the Anarchist Combatant Telegram channel.

It is not a new idea that today the great projects of rebuilding the world are in decline. In the twentieth century, mighty movements mobilized millions of people to storm the heavens, politically speaking, and carry out “great constructions” [in the sense of Soviet-era projects aimed at reinventing society]. But over the course of the last century, one after another, they went bankrupt both ethically and practically and soon lost relevance. Here, first of all, fascism and communism of the Leninist variety come to mind. Even the seemingly triumphant liberal project, in fact, simply dissolved into the global capitalist system and geopolitical game, in which the mechanics are hardly liberal.

Of the ambitious ideocrats who dare to rebuild the world in accordance with their convictions, perhaps the voice of the jihadists is the only one that rings out loudly today. Yet Islamic fundamentalism is obviously not the sort of project that a person with an anarchist worldview can get behind.

Ill-fated global plans at the end of the twentieth century gave rise to deep pessimism and paralysis in regards to the idea of transformation. However, the first decades of the new century have clearly shown that the “end of history” is cancelled. Growing instability, rebelliousness, and ungovernability have manifested themselves. The number of anti-government demonstrations under a variety of slogans and flags has increased by several orders of magnitude compared to the previous era.

At the same time, there is an acute need for fundamental change on the widest possible territorial scale. We still need a new world, just as we did before. Almost everything that exists in society is unacceptable and cannot serve as a framework for the present or the future.

But what will the transformed reality be like? There are unpromising prophecies of a “brave new world” ruled entirely by elites of post-humanity, or, conversely, of a new feudalism and a great schism accompanied by a surge of brutal cruelty. These pictures are accompanied by the prospect of a global ecological catastrophe. But in parallel with these varieties of gloom, a different trend is becoming more and more apparent: the desire for direct democracy, for egalitarian collectivity, for the eradication of inequality and oppression, for a harmonious coexistence with nature. This trend is still “sprinkled” across many different social currents, which have not yet formed into a united stream. Nevertheless, it brings the relevance of anarchism back to life.

At a time when all other missionaries have shown themselves to be deceivers or maniacs, the time has come for anarchists to remember their mission and reassert their global project. What might its common features be?

Dismantle the Megamachine

Modern mass society is crowded into gigantic urban agglomerations. The lion’s share of human life is controlled and directed by the laws of states, as well as by capitalist relations in the sphere of production, exchange, and consumption. As a result, modern man finds himself in the position of an object manipulated by gigantic machine-like forces. At the same time, we are immersed in constant turmoil. The modern world is characterized by the sleep of reason and the suppression of deep feelings, replaced by momentary, externally controlled desires. This state is repugnant to human nature; it causes dissatisfaction, followed by a longing for something different.

But the monstrous scale of the state fills us with fear and doubt: could we ever get out from under its iron heel? The endless buying and selling that fills our daily lives along a million different vectors aggravates our dependence and, even worse, corrupts and twists us as if from within.

Yet the very course of life pushes a person to rebel—and a wealth of historical evidence shows that even the most seemingly omnipotent social systems eventually collapse like a house of cards, sometimes quite unexpectedly. These are the starting points of our struggle against the prevailing order. To crush and dismantle the megamachine is the ambitious task before the anarchist movement.

New Community

Today we see a progressive atomization and weakening of collective ties. Neighbors know less and less about each other, and sometimes they completely avoid each other. Noisy family gatherings are becoming rarer and more forced.

The causes of this are complex and it is not easy to single out the main ones. There is the growing sphere of individual entertainment, the general trend towards individual comfort, which is always threatened by “excessive” intimacy, and the notorious egoism, organic to capitalist market society, which transforms any relationship into a temporary interaction between two consumers for mutual benefit. The word “partner” is becoming more and more conventional; in Russian, it suggests alienation, functioning as a kind of antonym to terms like beloved, friend, comrade…

We consider the crisis of collectivity, of the joint existence of people, to be one of the most catastrophic consequences of capitalism and state power. In addition to moralizing of a purely ethical nature, the anarchist revolution also has concrete institutional instruments for creating what we might call a “new communality.” These include popular assemblies, gatherings, collective self-governing bodies, and economic entities. When the parasite of the system, which has penetrated deep into the social fabric and separated us from each other, is ripped away from the body of society, we will be faced with the necessity to restore warm horizontal bonds and connect together in bonds of solidarity.

The collective creation of social life will stand in stark contrast to contemporary social practices. Just look at the current initiative of the Russian authorities to organize voting by mail—now even the imitation of choice will not draw together a crowd of strangers at the ballot box.

Yes, we plan to get together to make decisions, to prepare food in crowded and noisy kitchens instead of receiving it in sterile delivery bags, to introduce our children to their peers on the street instead of just sitting them down to watch a cartoon alone… The degradation of humanity that is unfolding before our eyes can stop. It must be stopped.

The Economy

Managing people for the purpose of personal gain, perceiving everything in the world—both living and inanimate—as raw material with which to make a profit, the pathological luxury of a tiny minority at the expense of the deprivation of the vast majority: these are just a few of the most striking illustrations that characterize the modern economic model. Its essence is diametrically opposed to what we consider just and right. All the reasons to reject capitalism can be boiled down to two main theses: 1) This economic system is unethical, unjust, and degrading; 2) It fails to provide a decent standard of living for all.

Cash and commodity relations, wage labor, investments, bank loans, and interest rates are so deeply rooted in our everyday life that sometimes it seems as if it would be impossible to get rid of them—as if without them, there would be immediate famine and decline.

But we do have something to oppose to them: it is the human labor force (many thousands of people today waste their labor on useless work, doing what are called “shit jobs”); it is the labor experience of workers, which will enable them to maintain a boss-free economy; it is technology, which will enable society to regulate its production and distribution system according to its needs and values… This should be enough to transfer the economy from the hands of the elite to the control of society as a whole, to ensure the equitable management of production by laboring people and realize the principle “From each according to ability, to each according to need.”

The mission of the anarchist movement is to root in society, by word, deed and example, an understanding of the principles of economic justice and, having overthrown the state and the capitalists, to “clear a space”—to create the social and political conditions for its realization.

The Elimination of Discrimination

Modern society is filled with discrimination on a variety of grounds. People experience discrimination on the basis of a wide range of attributes and characteristics. The reasons for this include prejudice, whether centuries-old or new; the principle of collective responsibility; and the way that people are alienated from each other in a world permeated by capitalist relations.

Prejudice and collective responsibility are skillfully manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.

Gender oppression is one of the oldest and most harmful forms of discrimination. Although in Eastern Europe, as well as the “Western World,” the situation has changed significantly compared to the openly patriarchal past, women remain oppressed. This is confirmed by data regarding domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence and by the difference in average incomes. Practices and patterns of behavior that denigrate woman retain their force. Take, for example, the attitude that “Politics is not a woman’s business.” There are many such invisible cultural obstacles in our social reality that obstruct women from exploring their full potential.

And there is another detail that often goes unnoticed, although it is one of the most important. Relationships between all people in general are poisoned by gender stereotypes and the mutual consumer attitude and selfishness rooted in them. Because of this, even the most seemingly intimate connections cause people pain and unhappiness. The capitalist and authoritarian worldview prevents true intimacy from emerging.

The mission of anarchism is to achieve genuine sisterhood/fraternity between people over and above any group identity. We have a variety of tools at our disposal to pursue this:

1) the collaborative practice of building and managing society, which requires equal cooperation and mutual warmth among all participants in the process;

2) a revolutionary political culture, which requires the conscious active involvement of representatives of all oppressed groups in social effort together;

3) finally, a program of education and developing literacy, which helps people to leave prejudice behind.

Thus, the ambition of the anarchist project is, in eliminating discrimination, to improve interpersonal relations and, however naïve this may sound, to bring the love of the neighbor back into our lives. Capitalism and authoritarianism stand in the way of this, but they are not insurmountable obstacles.

Resolving National Conflicts

Since time immemorial, human society has been shaken and terrorized by violent confrontations motivated by ethnic or national cultural differences. Additional criteria have been invented and added alongside those, including religious and racial differences. Inter-national and inter-ethnic conflicts reached a new intensity in the era of nation-states, which remain the chief form of political organization to this day. With their emergence, the question of which nation has legitimate right to rule a particular state began to be raised with extreme urgency. Which land “rightfully belongs” to which national group? The result has been the immeasurable suffering of millions of innocent people: forced assimilation, mass deportations and, finally, brutal acts of mass murder. Yet after all this, national conflicts still flare up all over the world.

Hardly any other imaginary contradictions in the history of mankind have had as horrific consequences as ethnic conflict. National conflicts are often based on the interests of national political and economic elites and state bureaucracies, as well as the most ignorant prejudices and distorted ideas about their own neighbors—the Other, representatives of other national groups.

At the root of the idea of national conflict lies the question, “Us or them?” Anarchism offers an alternative: “Both we and they, together and as equals.” By rejecting the nation-state, which is nothing more than an instrument of oppression and injustice, anarchists open the way to confederation: the equal cooperation of peoples in all territories. The same land can be both Serbian and Albanian, Armenian and Azerbaijani… the list is endless. Equality and self-government, the social pillars of anarchism, are the indispensable conditions for fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue between cultures. The need for this dialogue has not diminished—on the contrary, it has intensified in the twenty-first century.

Reharmonization with Nature

It has long been a commonplace that capitalism in particular and the ever-expanding economy and consumption in general have an extremely destructive effect on nature. Likewise the understanding that this vector of development threatens to destroy humanity and the planet we call home.

We would like to take a deeper look at the problem. The anthropocentric worldview that dominates today and the way of life conditioned by it is a particular case of a hierarchical attitude to the world and toward being as a whole. Nature is “the workshop of Man”… This view is not natural, ethical, or acceptable. The true emancipation of humanity cannot take place unless we overcome our alienation from nature and finding harmony with it.

What ecological measures can anarchism offer? Modern technology should be reoriented from maximizing profit to conserving and restoring nature, as well as providing decent material living conditions for all. Ideally, we should put an end to the extensive expansion of human destructive influence on nature. The knowledge and capabilities humanity has accumulated should make it possible to fulfill this task, or at least to advance toward its fulfillment.

It is of utmost importance to reorganize living space, getting rid of the monstrous megalopolis as a form of human dwelling. The settlement must be proportionate to the person, no matter how subjective this may sound. The lifeless anthropogenic landscape, which cuts people off from natural processes, must give way to the harmonious inclusion of the settlement in the natural landscape, the intertwining of the natural and the human.

Here and Now

The intolerable state of our present situation… and the outlines of a renewed world, like prophetic dreams, stir our minds and hearts. These are the points of mobilization that keep us from giving up and accepting. That is why we are ready to make efforts, to take risks, to make sacrifices in order to create a new society. An organized revolutionary struggle is the path by which we will reach the goal outlined in this text. Victory is possible—and therefore, we must win.

Phil Kuznetsov [Dmitry Petrov]
Anarchist Combatant

A book Dmitry Petrov participated in publishing about the experiment in Rojava.

Appendix III: “Dima Ecolog’s Partisan Path”

On May 8, 2023, after we published the above memorial, the following statement appeared on the Telegram channel of the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. We have translated it in full because it offers additional valuable context, especially on Dmitry’s youth.

It was his public activities which brought Dima to his first steps on the partisan path, when he was fighting against gentrification. In the process, he repeatedly ran into a situation in which the tenants were all trying to take the easy route of legalism (and there was no shortage of people calling on others to take this approach)—writing complaints to the administration that went directly to the trash cans. Tenants didn’t respond very enthusiastically to calls to block construction equipment and roads—and as a result, the police arrested the activists again and again while the construction continued.

Hence the natural impulse to stop the construction physically. Destroy the construction equipment. Destroy the building materials. Damage the lighting wiring and fencing of the construction site. And, most importantly, to do it in such a way as to stay free and continue to help people.

That’s where the partisan journey began.

His first action, if we’re not mistaken, was an attack on the gentrifying housing construction on the site of the radioactive waste dump in southern Moscow (which we then returned to several times to carry out additional actions).

Compared to the other actions that followed, this was a pretty easy action, with some anti-construction propaganda graffiti on the fence, a flare pistol fired at a sign describing the site, and a film of the fence enclosing the construction site set on fire.

But that morning, we were pleased to see some pictures of the fire extinguisher foam that was used to put out the fence. It was lying around like snow that had suddenly fallen in the warm time of the year.

That was just the beginning.

At first, we were inexperienced. Some recipes were suggested by other comrades; some we found on the Internet ourselves and tested on various construction sites that were contributing to gentrification.

And Dima always kept trying to expand our struggle—to bring in new people, to develop our methods and tactics.

The killing of our comrades Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova in the center of Moscow by neo-Nazis was a turning point. We felt strongly that it was not just neo-Nazi aggression, but a direct attack by the state, which was fostering and supporting our enemies.

Starting then, we decided to move on to more serious targets.

The first of these attacks was the attack on the police parking lot near the police security force building in the south of Moscow.

More precisely, we planned to attack the building—I remember going with Dima on a reconnaissance mission, and it seemed that it was very close. But when in the end we climbed the garages (from which the Molotovs was thrown), it turned out that it wasn’t so easy to throw all the way and hit the building. We took responsibility for this action as a group called “People’s Retribution.”

Dima came up with the idea of claiming different types of actions on behalf of different groups. For example, against the police—on behalf of the People’s Vengeance (and the group “ZaNurgalieva!”—referring to [Rashid] Nurgaliev’s statement, which became a meme, in which he said that people have the right to fight back if police officers break the law, so that the phrase “Nurgaliev allowed it!” became popular). Against pro-government movements—as “Anti-Nashist Action,” and so on. [Nashi was a state-backed pro-Putin youth organization somewhat reminiscent of the Hitler Youth.] The idea was that other groups should carry out actions under the same names to confuse the enemy.

And a lot of actions took place. Now, looking back, one can’t comprehend how we had time for everything. Literally, sometimes one or two weeks passed between actions—we did an attack, went on a reconnaissance trip, told our comrades about it, went to the next one.

On the dates when the military draft started, we attacked military registration and enlistment offices. In response to the persecution of [Soviet dissident Alexander] Podrabinek [who was targeted by Nashi in 2009], we visited the Nashists. For the elections, we attacked the offices and administration buildings of United Russia [the ruling party of Russia]. And we lost count of how many times we burned the police—on March 8 (the attack on the reception room of the Interior Ministry in the center of Moscow), after the arrests of comrades in other cities, and so on. In response to the abuse by the traffic cops, we burned their facilities.

And all of this under a new group name every time, covered through new sites and blogs.

Yet gradually, we concluded that it takes too much effort to disseminate the information on behalf of a new group every time. And other groups preferred to conduct actions under their own name instead using ours. Therefore, as the next step, the concept of the Black Blog was born. Not an organization, but an aggregator of actions carried out by all the anarchist partisan groups—including ours. Although with time, the Black Blog began to be seen precisely as the name of a group (and sometimes the subtitle of the site, “Anarchist Guerrilla news,” was used as such, and we began to be called the Anarchist Guerrilla group after it).

By the way, the site address (as well as the name in English) was deliberately chosen as blackblocg.info—both a reference to Black Bloc and a reference to the fact that we have a blog chronicling the guerrilla struggle (for the same reason we chose the .info domain).

Only some isolated, especially vivid episodes flash in memory. The arson of the reception room of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow region—in response to [police officer Denis] Yevsyukov’s shooting of people in a supermarket.

How the flames run beautifully through the car when the police cars caught fire near Ostankino and at that moment, from the loudspeaker in the parking lot, we heard a voice yelling “Fire! Fire!” (Later, we made a beautiful music video of the Electric Partisans’ song “R.A.F.” for this attack.)

How after the arson of the police cars near the Chechulin street police station (the attack in which we’d first used an IED made from acetone peroxide with ammonal—Dima played the leading role, pouring the mixture and then throwing the grenade while sitting on the fence—and the explosion threw him right to the ground), a man who introduced himself as a police officer from that very station posted a comment to our site complaining that the chief of that station, lieutenant colonel Telelyuev, was very good—and now he was in trouble because of us. Dima immediately wrote a song in response:

“It’s cold and dark in the burnt office…
Lieutenant Colonel Telelyuev is writing us a letter.”

How in honor of all partisan anarchists Vadim Kurylev (Electric Partisans) released the song “I am a Fighter of the Black Blog.” [See below.]

And, of course, the blowing up of a traffic police post on the Moscow Ring Road—organized as a protest against the numerous abuses of the law by the officers of that very agency.

We told about that action in detail in the past. We will only add that the comrade who returned to the failed IED, risking his life and freedom to complete the action despite the problems, was Dima.

Actions continued after that explosion, such as setting fire to the police department’s parking lot in Troitsk, attacks on [the political party] United Russia, and environmental actions like setting fire to the logging equipment in Khimki forest and to luxury cottage villages under construction near Yakhroma.

We know hardly anybody doubts it—but there was practically not a single action in which Dima did not actively participate.

However, a situation gradually developed in which, on the one hand, we no longer had any objects to attack (at least, that we could target with a high level of security with only a small group)—and at the same time, we realized that the hope to bring a revolution via disconnected affinity group actions did not seem to be justified.

And it was time to rethink things on the basis of experience—both our own experience and those of other successful revolutionary groups, not only anarchist ones. Dima gave us the idea of organizing a discussion club in which we studied the works of [anarchist Peter] Kropotkin and [authoritarian communist Vladimir] Lenin, works on the psychology of the masses, the works of [French revolutionary syndicalist Georges] Sorel on myth and its role in revolution, and conducted an analysis of the revolutions of the Arab Spring and [“nonviolent” democrat] Gene Sharp.

And this work led us eventually to what Dima rightfully calls our brainchild, the creation of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists.

This, of course, was a long undertaking—and the story is just beginning. But we can’t help noting that Dima was a participant in all the processes of creating the BOAC [Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization]—its theoretical work, practical training, and the organization of training and combat actions. But his chief merit—and we think this will not surprise anyone who knew him—was his ability to establish ties with other people, with comrades both at home and abroad. Finding new people for the organization—and organizing field camps in the Moscow region for foreign comrades. He was always open to new people. He always believed in the best in them—he was mistaken more than once, but he continued to believe and seek.

Among other things, this work took him to Kurdistan, where he participated in learning both the principles of a liberated society and in combat training.

And there’s another important detail about his character. Dima stayed in Northeast Syria for several long months, communicating with his family and us very irregularly and only by email.

But when it was time to return—practically when he was already on his way home, a few days before his flight—we learned that the FSB was seriously interested in him.

And in this situation—missing his family and home, having a science career in Russia that was waiting for him—he decided (albeit not without the agony of choice) not to return home, but to go to Ukraine. He did this partly because he understood that if he returned and was arrested, not only he but other people as well would be at risk, along with his life’s work. So he chose the path of a professional revolutionary—denying his personal desires for the sake of the common cause, for the sake of the ideas he believed in.

Ever since, Dima has been moving our common cause forward, developing our organization from abroad. And no distance has diminished his contribution and his assistance in this.

Appendix IV: “Black Blog Fighter” by Electric Partisans

“Black Blog Fighter” by Electric Partisans.

Russian musician Vadim Kurylev wrote this song, “Black Blog Fighter,” for his band Electric Partisans in 2012. The lyrics are as follows.

Tonight, when the city is quiet,
There’ll be an explosion and flames will burst out
My devices are flying through the broken window and the special forces are on alert
They’re making a big fuss, the minister’s on the phone
But I’m already gone in the city at night
I put up videos and links and fill new bottles with cocktails

I’ll let the cops’ lair burn, and let their souls be gnawed by anxiety,
Not to find a needle in the middle of a haystack,
Nor in the city a Black Blog fighter
I have a lot of work to do here, let the honest citizenry not judge me harshly
I have my own way to the truth, I’m a Black Blog fighter.

It’s convenient for you to make me out to be a bully,
But you’re pissed off, you’re living a life of deceit
I want you to learn this truth: you humiliate the people, you get a vendetta in return.
Better go dig in the dusty archives,
And you’ll understand how often you’ve been defeated.
Let historians argue about the ways of society’s development,
But my anarchism is stronger than your logic.

Appendix V: Archives

A memorial site for Dmitry
“Nine Lives of the Anarchist Petrov“—a biography (in Russian)
“Dmitry Petrov: The Path of an Anarchist“—Antti Rautiainen explores the details of Dmitry’s development as a young anarchist
A Collection of Dmitry’s Writings in English—Courtesy of the Anarchist Library
Here are some of Dmitry’s articles in Russian: “The Political Science of Violence,” “People of Russia: Two Roads to Nowhere and One Hope,” “To Be an Independent Force,” “An Active Minority…”
Dmitry speaking at May Day 2009 in Moscow (starting at 5:23)²
Dmitry speaking at the Ukrainian House (UkrDom) during the Maidan, in February 2014. (At this meeting, Dima spoke about the experiences of Russian protesters, drew parallels between the liberation struggle in both countries, and proposed the idea of people’s power as an alternative to vertically organized power represented by professional politicians.)
You can read Dmitry’s reports from the 2014 uprising in Ukraine in full here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X
“Social revolution in Kurdistan“—A lecture with N.L. Gadaeva on March 30, 2017
Red and Black Devils—A news article about anarchist arsons in Ukraine
Life without a State: Revolution in Rojava—A book Dmitry participated in, published in 2017
Kurdistan: Real Democracy in Conditions of War and Blockade—Another book Dmitry participated in
Sarah: My Whole Life Has Been a Struggle—Another book Dmitry helped with
“Anarchists in Ukraine Against War“—An interview Dmitry did with The Final Straw podcast under the pseudonym Ilya on February 24, 2022
“Conversation about Ukraine“—A sort of graphic novel depicting the artist’s correspondence with Dmitry in 2023.

One of Dmitry’s virtues, at least in our communication with him, was that he retained a humble, open-minded approach to strategy while nonetheless acting decisively. This stands in stark contrast to the strident voices on every side of the debate about the Russia-Ukraine war who lecture each other from a position of absolute certitude without ever having set foot in either country. In the interview we published at the beginning of 2022, asked how he might answer those who charged that participating in the military defense of Ukraine would make anarchists into accomplices of the Ukrainian government, Dmitry responded, “First of all, I would answer them—thanks, this is a valuable critique. We really need to evaluate how to intervene so as not to just become a tool in some state’s hands.” In the last message we received from him, in March 2023, he concluded, “If you have any questions, if you have any advice, any thoughts, any analysis to share, I would be super happy to hear it, and super interested.” This is a remarkable thing for a person who is risking his life daily to say to people far away in conditions of relative safety. ↩
Here is a transcription of the fragment of Dmitry’s speech that appears in this footage: “Just a few days ago, we all learned that a police major, the head of the Tsaritsyno police department, was drunk and shot several people dead and wounded several more. All the television channels talked about it, but no one said anything about the fact that this was no accident. That the authority, which is given to law enforcement officers, which is given to many other people, corrupts them, that it makes them real maniacs. And that’s why the cops, being completely crazy, can allow themselves to get shitfaced and shoot someone with a gun. This is not the only case. Serious crimes involving police officers…” ↩

Bash Back! Is Back : Reviving an Insurrectionary Queer Network: An Interview

2023-04-27T19:24:30Z

In 2007, in the course of preparations for actions against the 2008 Republican National Convention, an insurrectionary network of queer anarchists formed under the umbrella Bash Back! Over the following three years, this network participated in a vibrant array of confrontations, organizing efforts, and publications, expanding and intensifying the struggle against sex and gender normativity. Today, as fascists and other bigots renew their assault on queer and trans people and anarchists fight back, there is an urgent need for renewed coordination and innovation. In this context, participants in the original Bash Back! network have called for a new Bash Back! convergence in September 2023.

As they put it,

The intervening years have been marked by intensification—of crisis, alienation, loss, and struggle. The right wing no longer hides behind euphemisms: they want to exterminate trans and queer people. The left offers only false solutions: vote, donate, assimilate. A decade of representation, symbolic legal victories, social media activism, and mass-market saturation has left us worse off by all metrics. Our fair-weather friends won’t save us from the consequences of their strategy of empty visibility. The inescapable conclusion is that we must come together to protect ourselves.

History confirms the queer legacy of building connection in a world that hates us, the legacy of riotous joy—the legacy of bashing back. The attacks will continue on our nightclubs, forests, story hours, and siblings. To hold on, we need spaces—underground if necessary—to re-encounter each other, spaces to remember, build, share, and conspire.

To explore the legacy of Bash Back! and what it has to offer today, we conducted the following interview with previous participants in Bash Back! who are helping to organize the upcoming convergence.

Tell us about the gathering in September. What can people do to participate or contribute?

The 2023 Bash Back! Convergence will be taking place in Chicago from September 8-11. We’re inviting all of our queer comrades for a weekend of building connection, learning from each other, and developing new strategies and tactics to fight against the social order. We are organizing this because there have been so many inspiring examples of queer people bashing back against bigots—for example, the reactionaries who try to shut down drag shows. However, there is still a need for increased cohesion and strategizing, especially in light of the escalating attacks against queer and trans people across the country and across the world. Of course, these attacks come in the context of a deeply-rooted and escalating crisis of capital more generally and a climate crisis that deepens with every passing day.

More specifically, there is an obvious need to build anti-capitalist, anti-statist, and anti-assimilationist militant queer tendency. The liberals and leftists have pushed assimilation so that queer and trans people can be used as political pawns, to be sacrificed when electorally convenient. Any gains in the culture war have led only to the subsumption of queerness to the logic of capital and the false freedom of consumer politics.

In terms of what folks can do to participate or contribute, the main thing right now is that we are looking for folks to propose programming for the convergence. We’re accepting proposals until June 20. Beyond programming, the biggest thing that people can do is to start building relationships and affinities with people in their communities. That’s always been the essence of Bash Back!; it’s never been a centralized organization but rather a network to share ideas and camaraderie.

Bash Back! originated in the run-up to the 2008 Republican National Convention. Did the fact that it began largely in the Midwest rather than on the coasts influence its character and the way that it developed?

Bash Back!’s origins are rooted in a context that, a decade and a half later, seems worlds away. Two things, I think, were central to the political climate that gave rise to Bash Back!: the summit-hopping method of protest and a surge in the popularity of insurrectionary anarchism within the anarchist/radical milieu at the time. By summit-hopping, I mean the large demonstrations against the gatherings of capitalists, such as the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle in 1999 and the meetings of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, G8, and G20 throughout the 2000s. In hindsight, these protests were dramatic and high-profile, but largely symbolic. Then you had insurrectionary anarchism becoming more popular—especially, I think, with people who had been politicized or radicalized by the anti-war movement but also saw that movement for the utter failure that it was. In terms of tactics, the focus was on affinity groups and black blocs.

In that context, the original idea for Bash Back! came out of the organizing that was going on to disrupt the Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota) in 2008. A strategy session in Milwaukee in 2007 gave rise to the idea of a queer/trans blockade of the RNC, and Bash Back! grew from that initial idea.

One of the most significant things about the original iteration of Bash Back! is that it was largely a product of anarchists from the Midwest. At the time, a lot of the more visible “radical” or progressive queer activism was coming from the coasts, with established activist scenes that often stifled new ideas or were under the stranglehold of the ideology of non-violence. There was also a degree of cultural elitism, in which the assumption was that being a “radical queer” had to happen in the big, liberal, coastal cities. So Bash Back!, coming out of the Midwest and not beholden to any established “radical queer” scenes, opened up new possibilities for militance, especially in direct resistance to the extremely anti-queer churches, politicians, and other assorted gay-bashers of that time.

Recount some of the major events, struggles, and court cases in the first phase of Bash Back!

This is a tough question to answer, because there was so much that happened across the country because of Bash Back! But a few things that I think are important to highlight:

DNC/RNC 2008: the nascent Bash Back! network was involved in protests in Denver (for the Democratic National Convention) and the Twin Cities (for the Republican National Convention)
Pittsburgh 2009: Bash Back! held a rowdy march in Pittsburgh during the G20 Summit.
Mt. Hope Church: In November 2008, Bash Back! people disrupted a Sunday service at a notoriously anti-gay megachurch in Lansing, Michigan. This led to a lawsuit by the Alliance Defending Freedom against Bash Back! that, after a several-year legal fight, resulted in a permanent injunction against church disruptions.
Avenge Duanna campaign: In February 2008, Duanna Johnson, a black trans woman, was beaten by police officers in Memphis, Tennessee. She was murdered in November 2008, presumably by the cops that beat her months prior. This sparked a campaign in Memphis to avenge her death.

Participants in Bash Back! Lansing, interviewed in Details magazine after disrupting the service at a homophobic mega-church.

In addition, Bash Back! organized three convergences:

Chicago 2008: this focused on planning actions around the DNC/RNC in the summer of 2008.
Chicago 2009: this focused more on developing Bash Back! as a tendency, building connections, and sharpening our attacks on the social order. A street march in Boystown, the gay neighborhood in Chicago, was attacked by police. This caused a bunch of conflict within the convergence between those who fought back against the police and liberal/identity-politics types who pushed for non-violence in the face of police violence.
Denver 2010: this was the last convergence of the original iteration of Bash Back!; the same liberal/identity politics vs. queer insurrection divide was the elephant in the room for this entire convergence. These tensions were as palpable as they were insurmountable, and so Bash Back!, in its original iteration, was declared dead.

However, these highlights do not even scratch the surface of what Bash Back! did. Chapters across the country were involved in countless acts of vandalism, numerous street confrontations with police, protests against assimilationists and exterminationists, physically bashing bigots, and innumerable acts of propaganda. These things are the legacy of Bash Back!

Promotion for the 2010 Bash Back! convergence in Denver, Colorado.

Tell us how Bash Back! worked from existing identity politics frameworks in the late 2000s, but also pushed against them.

When Bash Back! was starting, the ideology of non-violence had a stranglehold on the activist milieu. In terms of identity politics, there was an assumption among many of these liberal/“radical” activists that any confrontation was inevitably pushed by macho, middle/upper class straight white men and thus was racist/sexist/homophobic because queer/trans people, women, and people of color would take the brunt of police repression and violence. Bash Back! pushed directly against that narrative; that was a big part of the drama around the Chicago 2009 convergence. Some people really could not believe that queer/trans people, poor people, women, and people of color had agency to fight cops or be more confrontational. Part of Bash Back!’s appeal was that marginalized people were unapologetically fighting back in a concrete way. In a very practical sense, Bash Back! was pro-violence, and people were not used to hearing this perspective from marginalized groups.

Further, Bash Back! always took a stance against assimilation and liberal identity politics that saw social/political/economic representation as an end goal. So back when issues like gay marriage and military service were the big issues for mainstream LGBT organizations, Bash Back! was firmly opposed to this, and even targeted groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the Stonewall Democrats for being assimilationists or for selling out trans people for political gain.

A Bash Back! poster opposing the assimilationist campaign to make the military more inclusive.

On a more abstract level, I think that competing approaches to identity were actually a central part of why the original iteration of Bash Back! dissolved. There was a spectrum of views about identity in Bash Back! On one hand, you had a tendency influenced heavily by queer nihilism and insurrectionary anarchism; for this camp, queer identity was an identity of opposition to the capitalist social order and its heteronormativity. Then, on the other hand, there was a more positive approach to queer identity; positive in the sense that it was not based on political opposition to the social order but instead more tied to an individual’s experience of gender/sexuality. Because Bash Back! was an identity-based organization, these competing understandings of queerness led to competing visions for Bash Back!, which ultimately dissolved the network.

What has changed since the heyday of the original network? What does the Bash Back! model have to offer today?

The original Bash Back! started just before the economic crisis in 2008. It feels like we have been moving from crisis to crisis since then—and on top of that, the crises are intensifying. I think that’s probably the biggest change since Bash Back! first started; the permanence of crisis and the sort of hopelessness about the future hadn’t really set in at that time. It used to be controversial to say that things were going to keep getting worse and that we effectively had no future; now, that’s the common understanding of the plight of millennials/Generation Z. Between the seemingly permanent crisis of capitalism and the ongoing climate disaster, things seem bleaker now than they did before.

Bash Back! participating in anti-fascist action at a time of lower social conflict.

But on the other hand, I think that many of the ideas that were being popularized not only in Bash Back! but also in the anarchist milieu more broadly in that era have gained traction in a way that opens up a lot of potential. For example, the concept of prison abolition and the idea of mutual aid have spread into the broader discourse. Labor organizing has also grown in sectors that seemed unreachable previously, and it seems like that has led to a rise in class consciousness as well. More along the focus of Bash Back!, the idea of people being non-binary or genderqueer has also moved into the mainstream in a way that I at least would not have anticipated, given the social climate that Bash Back! originally existed in.

Without diving too much into dry economic analysis, I think it’s indisputable that the contradictions of capitalism have become more glaringly obvious in recent years. And history pretty clearly shows us that crises in capitalism translate to an increase in reactionary politics and repression. Historically, we can look to the example of Magnus Hirschfeld, who was an early advocate for queer and trans people in Berlin in the 1930s. People know that Nazis burned books; what’s often lost is that they burned the library of Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which was perhaps the first organization specifically advocating for and supporting queer and trans people. So there is a clear history of queer and trans people being the first targets during reactionary moments in history.

A poster for the first Bash Back! convergence in 2008.

Ultimately, that’s what makes the current moment so important and where I think that we can draw on the lessons from the initial era of Bash Back! I think that the fundamental strength of the Bash Back! network was that it was focused on building power not only outside of but in staunch opposition to the state and capitalism. This is really important, because the selling point of the Democratic Party in recent years has been that things will be even worse if Republicans are in control. And that covers up the fact that the Democratic Party is ultimately a party of capitalism; they have no capacity or will to make things better for people. All they will offer is a sort of managed descent into fascism, and the price is assimilation. The alternative, of course, is the outright exterminationist approach of the Republicans.

Bash Back! rejected the assimilationist, statist, and capitalist politics of the mainstream LGBT organizations at that time and focused on queer people building community among comrades, practicing mutual aid and solidarity, and attacking the state, capitalists, and reactionaries. It’s the unapologetic and uncompromising militance that was, I think, the most important contribution of Bash Back! and should be the focus going forward.

How can people get involved? What are some tactics and strategies people can employ in their own communities on an ongoing basis, so this will not just be a convergence but the emergence of a new wave of momentum throughout the continent?

It’s hard to say exactly how to get involved with Bash Back!. Obviously, we want people to come to the convergence and share ideas, make connections, and build bonds of solidarity. But in terms of how to get involved, there is no really easy answer. Part of what made Bash Back! so important was that it was a fairly loose network with autonomous chapters doing what made sense for the people involved in those chapters to do locally.

But generally speaking, Bash Back! has focused on confronting bigots, mutual aid, self-defense, and propaganda. Fundamentally, there has to be an understanding that the state is not going to protect us, that politicians will not protect us, that we have to build solidarity within our communities as a matter of survival. For that reason, building trust and camaraderie is essential. Confronting those who would destroy us is essential. And in a world that seeks to keep us miserable, expressions and celebrations of queer joy are essential.

As for guidance, the old Bash Back! Points of Unity are a good starting point:

Fight for liberation. Nothing more, nothing less. State recognition in the form of oppressive institutions such as marriage and militarism are not steps toward liberation but rather towards heteronormative assimilation.
A rejection of capitalism, imperialism, and all forms of state power.
Actively oppose oppression both in and out of the “movement.” Racism, Patriarchy, Heterosexism, Sexism, Transphobia, and all oppressive behavior is not to be tolerated.
Respect a diversity of tactics in the struggle for liberation. Do not solely condemn an action on the grounds that the state deems it to be illegal.

You too can be Bash Back! Organize a chapter and take action in your community!

CrimethInc. : Categories : History

The Anti-Deportation Collective : Fighting the Machinery of Deportation in France in the 1990s

Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998

The Anti-Deportation Collective

The 21:03 to Marseille

Too Much and Never Enough

Further Reading

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

The Day the Émigrés Struck Back : Remembering the General Strike of May Day 2006

May 1, 2006

Appendix: How It Began

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

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

Stories from the Making of

Ya Ghazze Habibti—Gaza, My Love : Understanding the Genocide in Palestine

Ya Ghazze Habibti

A History of Conquest, a History of Resistance

Ghetto Uprising

The Fighting since, and Other Fronts

Attempting to Clear the Fog

Facing the Age of Genocide

Bibliography

Anarchists on the Wave of Protest in Indonesia

The Core Issues Driving the Protests

Additional Factors

A Chronology of Events

Appendix: Demonstrations around Indonesia

Jawa

Sumatera

Sulawesi

Nusa Tenggara

Maluku dan Papua

Kalimantan

Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street, Thirteen Years Later

Building the New Society

From The Global Justice Movement to Occupy Wall Street

Internal Challenges

External Challenges

Lessons Learned

Setting Intentions