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A guest column by PG

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How should we understand the impending presidency of Donald Trump? What should we be prepared for? While some have framed Trump’s victory as a sign of resurgent fascism, our guest contributor argues that we should see it as the latest development in a much older phenomenon, which is not an interruption of democracy but intimately interlinked with it.

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There are many ways to conceptualize the relationship between democracy and fascism, and this is a dangerous time to take anything for granted; we will be publishing more on this subject shortly. In the meantime, this is a useful contribution towards analyzing the dangers ahead and how to ready ourselves for them.

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Fascism is Obsolete, Whiteness is Here to Stay

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Long before Donald Trump’s recent electoral victory, but in a chorus that has grown deafening in the last month, people have been talking about the possible return of fascism. As terrifying as Donald Trump is, it is nonetheless important not to level just any criticism against the president-elect. And though the misogynist mogul’s favorite epithet, “just disgusting,” fits him like a glove, the charge of fascist is inaccurate.

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Since we’re interested in an analysis that enables more effective resistance, and not simply in spewing, Twitter-like, any insult with a chance of sticking, it behooves us to examine just which right-wing model Trump is following.

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I would argue that fascism was made definitively irrelevant by the Second World War and its aftermath, during which it was conclusively absorbed by democratic capitalism. Since 1945, when the victorious allies dismantled the Nazi state and recruited the elements they found most useful, fascism has been nothing more than a second-string linebacker in a game that is democratic to its very core. The future, of course, is full of surprises, but it would take much more than a Trump victory for fascism to be tenable or necessary again in a central capitalist country like the United States.

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One of the very few actual neo-fascist parties to appear on the political scene in the last decade is Golden Dawn in Greece. True to the original model, they combined a political party and a terroristic street movement, recruiting within the police and military to create party-specific loyalty, and forging connections with national capitalists and the mafia, in order to create a dual power capable of intimidating or overriding the checks and balances of democratic institutions and non-partisan media. Many people predicted Golden Dawn might seize power, and imagined a return to fascism. Golden Dawn imagined the same thing, and this utter naïveté, their ignorance about the historical moment and their role within democracy, proved to be their demise. As long as Golden Dawn acted to push public debates to the right, to create scapegoats for Greece’s social woes, to kill immigrants and attack anarchists or other social radicals, they were tolerated. But once they revealed that their designs on power were actually sincere and that they were willing to use violence against non-marginal elements in society, the democratic powers stepped in and cut them short, arresting the leadership and excluding the party, at least partially, from the public debates that shape acceptable opinion. Nowadays, fascism doesn’t stand a chance against democracy, and any gang of neo-fascists who fail to grasp that their role is simply to be a tool within the democratic toolbox is in for a rude shock.

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In Spain, one of the other European countries hardest hit by the crisis, the neo-fascist or crypto-fascist parties have collapsed in recent years, and from Italy to the UK, the extreme right has followed a model that actually relies on and encourages democratic mechanisms. Structurally speaking, the progressive populist party SYRIZA in Greece actually has more in common with the fascist model than the Republicans under Trump (organic connections with extraparliamentary groups that have a powerful capacity for street mobilization, a unification of extreme left and extreme right discourses, a national vision of socialism, intense patriotism and militarism).

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Fascism is not just any extreme right-wing position. It is a complex phenomenon that mobilizes a popular movement under the hierarchical direction of a political party and cultivates parallel loyalty structures in the police and military, to conquer power either through democratic or military means; subsequently abolishes electoral procedures to guarantee a single party continuity; creates a new social contract with the domestic working class, on the one hand ushering in a higher standard of living than what could be achieved under liberal capitalism and on the other hand protecting the capitalists with a new social peace; and eliminates the internal enemies whom it had blamed for the destabilization of the prior regime.

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Trump showed contempt for democratic convention by threatening to intimidate voters and hinting that he might not concede a lost election, but his model of conservatism in no way abolishes the mechanisms that are fundamental to democracy. In another four years, we’ll be subjected to the electoral circus all over again. Trump did appeal especially to cops and border guards, but in no way began inducting the police into a para-state organization designed to cement his hold on power. He gave shout-outs to the militia movement and tickled the fancy of the Ku Klux Klan, but has done nothing to centralize those groups into a paramilitary force under his command. He promised a new deal for the working class, but will not even take the first steps towards instituting it, and whatever his intentions he will prove utterly unable to reward the owning class with social peace. He will make life harder for those he identifies as the enemies of society (Muslims and immigrants, especially), but he will not eliminate them.

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There is, in fact, nothing fascist about Trump.

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Trump’s rise to power is entwined with a social force that predates fascism and that has outlasted it. Though it remains to be seen exactly what model of conservatism the brash egomaniac will implement, his encouragement of whiteness, as a reactionary mechanism for social control, is abundantly clear.

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In the centuries between Christopher Columbus and George Washington, and in laboratories as far flung as the plantations of Ireland and Brazil, in the mass deportations from Spain and in the mass enslavement in Africa, the white race was created to categorize and control the subjects of a globalizing world order. In the face of insurrections that saw kidnapped Africans, poor Europeans, and besieged indigenous people fighting together against their common enemy, the colonial powers passed laws and erected concentric layers of religious, cultural, economic, judicial, institutional, and biological barriers to break the solidarity of the oppressed. Whiteness became the projection of European Enlightenment values, the new normal, and the peoples who did not fit into it were racialized and forced to occupy lower orders on the social hierarchy. Those who did not accept their place were disappeared, one way or another.

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Historically, racism is a globally unified phenomenon, but it has played out differently in different corners of the world. In the colonies that would become the United States, whiteness took on a vital paramilitary role from an early date. A small minority of major landowners, who brutalized their workforce and carried out constant genocidal warfare against the native populations, had to deputize a poor but privileged middle stratum, convincing these armed citizens to fight their wars for them and remain ever vigilant against uprisings or border raids.

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The privileges, depending on your point of view, were either paltry or game-changing. They included the psycho-social privilege of being considered human, which was a pretty big deal for commoners coming from Europe, where the aristocrats hadn’t really ever had use for the category of “human” and had rarely if ever sought the common ground with their subjects that whiteness provided. Another principal privilege was the right to own property. For the majority of whites, this meant one of two things. Being entitled to sell their lives one back-breaking day after another for money, in the employ of the rich, or being entitled to win access to stolen native lands, which they would clear-cut, plow, and farm for a few years before falling into debt, being bought out by the big landowners, and moving farther west to repeat the process. The point of this story is not to generate sympathy for whites, but to illustrate how easily people, then as now, can be duped.

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Economically, it wasn’t a great bargain for most whites, unless you compare it with the forms of exploitation or dispossession reserved for Africans and Native Americans. The abstract right to own property rarely translated into personal enrichment, but it guaranteed not becoming someone else’s property and not having your entire community obliterated and dispersed in an act of conquest. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documents the key role white paramilitary rangers played in the constant and total warfare against native peoples in her Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, and the role of poor whites in the patrols that surveilled enslaved Africans and hunted down fugitives—patrols that eventually evolved into modern police forces—is exposed in books like Our Enemies in Blue. Simultaneously, poor people of European origin who broke with whiteness to fight in solidarity with other oppressed peoples were punished with the full force of the law, and any kind of fraternity or mixing between whites and other peoples was discouraged and even criminalized.

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Whiteness today continues to fulfill its paramilitary role in a diffuse, informal way, completely different from how fascist movements manifest. The ideological diversity—some would say confusion—and the many contradictions of the militia movement reflect this lack of central organization. What is most clear from these armed citizens’ groups—who alternately identify Latino immigrants, Muslims, or the federal government as their chief enemy—is that a great many low- and middle-class citizens feel called to protect and serve. Who exactly has deputized them is unclear, but they overwhelmingly identify with their whiteness, or, in the case of the few blacks and Latinos in the movement, with their Americanness, which from the beginning has been another, seemingly more inclusive iteration of whiteness.

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Race also played a big role in Trump’s victory. Beyond the fact that a disproportionate number of whites voted Republican, studies showed that identifying with their whiteness or feeling racially threatened by other groups was a marked factor that made people of European origin more likely to support Trump.

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Although the billionaire’s narrative of victimization—which the media has compliantly disseminated—is frankly pathetic, whiteness in the United States is indeed facing a crisis. Not because “whites are becoming a minority” or any other paranoid supremacist fantasy, but because in the last few decades, the paramilitary functions of whiteness have largely been absorbed by an increasingly powerful government that can do with judges, prisons, and urban redevelopment bureaucracies what yesteryear it had to do with lynch mobs—to such an extent that, paradoxically, even a black man can be put in charge of the whole apparatus. While I don’t think that Obama’s presidency changed the situation for people of color in the US, except in a psychological way that I, as a white person, cannot appreciate, it is clear that racists across the country have come out of the closet since Obama’s entry into the White House.

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The media in general have suggested that Trump’s appeals to whites were so effective because of the economic situation: working-class whites have felt threatened as their privileges and their social standing decline, so the story goes. Yet the racial gaps in wealth and standard of living have grown since the crisis. If economics were the bottom line, white Americans would feel more secure, not less secure, after Obama’s presidency. White privilege, in this sense, continues to pay its dividends. I would argue that it is actually the paramilitary function that is an ingrained part of whiteness which is in crisis, and which mobilized large numbers of whites for Trump. (Conversely, the fact that blacks became poorer under Obama probably kept some of them away from the polls).

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The border militias represent one expression of the paramilitary mentality. Another expression, the pro-cop movement that has sprung up as a reaction to Ferguson, contains an instructive paradox. The resistance that gained attention with the Ferguson uprising has been a major source of instability for the US government, and has also called into question the historically sacred right of the police to kill people of color. White reactionaries have answered the call of duty to defend an oppressive system, and in general these pro-cop activists have been associated with the Trump camp. They have attacked Black Lives Matter protestors and tried to restore the police’s tarnished image. But they have also entered into conflict with law enforcement.

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Contrary to the pacifist white-washing of would-be Black Lives Matter leaders, shooting cops has been a part of urban black resistance before, during, and after Ferguson. Though the media will only talk about the Martin Luther Kings and not the Robert Williams, African American resistance has more frequently tended towards the strategy of self-defense and autonomy than democratic integration over the last three hundred years, and the tension can be seen today between different strata of black communities. However, it is also true that more cops are shot by white people, and that there has been an explosion in anti-police ambushes by white right-wingers. Often, these shooters express a desire to protect America or to defend traditional values with their attacks. Some of the most reactionary defenders of whiteness, it seems, believe that an increasingly authoritarian government is not allowing them to play their historic role.

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When American society seemed stable and “American values” globally triumphant at the end of the Cold War, the apparent obsolescence of whiteness provoked little concern. But with economic precarity on the rise, forceful protests by black, Latino, and indigenous people spreading across the country, and systemic instability causing growing anxiety, white people are waiting for a call to arms that isn’t coming. Their traditional spokespeople on both wings of the political elite—the old-school reactionaries who reminisce about segregation as well as the enlightened progressives and their flocks of white knights—have not been speaking to their crisis. In fact, the liberals in government can even contemplate disarming them, so obsolete have they become. Though the conservatives still speak in favor of gun rights, it has been a long time since they have mobilized the citizens to confront the latest threat, internal or external. Whites are in crisis not because they are losing economic privileges but because the growing power of the State usurps their paramilitary prerogatives. And for the outright reactionaries who see through the lens of delusional race fantasies, it does not help that the symbol for all this state power, Obama, was perhaps the most authoritarian president in recent memory, measured in terms of surveillance programs, drone killings, deportations, prosecution of whistleblowers under the 1917 Espionage Act, number of FBI informants, giving insider support to Hollywood films that portray torture as necessary in the so-called War on Terror, protecting secret CIA prisons from judicial oversight, and so on.

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Though the State does not actually maintain a monopoly on violent force, as a rule it aspires to. In a government ruling over a volatile society in which the gravest contradictions are internal (for example, having internal colonies rather than external colonies), those in power will not hesitate to mobilize a part of the population as paramilitaries. But as its institutions grow in strength and resolve the contradictions that previously threatened it, the State will tend to disarm the population, to turn lynching into a bureaucratic affair, and genocide into a dry policy question. Citizens will have fewer chances to participate in their democracy, and as cynical as it might seem to speak of murder and vigilantism as forms of civic duty, the history of democracy from Socrates to Birmingham bears this view out. Military service, which means killing enemies of the State, all euphemisms aside, has always been the foremost mark of the citizen.

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Just as corporations have adopted methods from the cooperative movement in order to create happier workers, governments sometimes let their citizens play at being cops and hangmen, if it makes them feel a little more invested in power. But the more power rationalizes, the harder it is to manage the participation of non-specialists who have not received the proper bureaucratic training, and for patriotic whites facing the Twilight of America and imagining themselves the heirs of the pioneers, ride-alongs with the local police fall a little short. This is the nature of the crisis of whiteness.

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Before Trump, the Tea Party movement began speaking to the crisis of whiteness, and was rewarded with an outpouring of support. The Donald simply named the anxiety more explicitly, and spoke from a larger platform.

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Whether the Republicans or others will try to organize these paramilitary citizens to help the State overcome its present instability remains to be seen, though the cynicism of democratic politics would lead us to predict than the president-elect wasn’t even sincere in his hate-mongering; he will continue to fan bigotry but will probably not encourage or allow white supremacists to coalesce into a dual power. Hate crimes will increase, but those who carry them out will probably remain disorganized.

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If there is a growth or a centralization of paramilitary groups, people in the US who don’t want to live in a vigilante, racist society will have to seriously address the question of self-defense. The Democratic solution—avoid direct conflict, call the cops for help, and hope for an electoral shift in four years—is no solution at all. It falls short because four years is a long time to delay questions of survival and dignity, because the prospects of a Democratic party administration making things better is questionable, and because the very cops who are supposed to protect us are overwhelmingly supporters of Trump and often have ties to the militia movement.

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However, even if the Republicans had lost the elections, Ferguson made it evident that the question of self-defense is still fundamental, especially for black people but also for all other people of color, all poor people, and all people who resist state power. A white supremacist could easily ask, “Who needs lynch mobs when you have the cops?” This is not to trivialize the terror that paramilitaries and vigilantes are sowing with growing frequency and boldness, but to illustrate that racism does not come from the extreme fringes of society. It is in fact the cement of the very institutions that police us.

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Self-defense is the crucial consideration that the media and the politicians refuse to address, and that we urgently need to turn into a mature practice.

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A popular response to Trump’s victory also needs to address the role of whiteness. It should be clear by now, fifty years after the supposed victory of the Civil Rights movement, that the progressive proposal of a culturally sensitive, tolerant whiteness is no solution, only a deferment of the problem. Whiteness needs to be unmasked for what it is, and extirpated. And this is something that no political party can do. What politician could institutionally and culturally take up George Washington’s mantle while also acknowledging that Washington was the greatest slave-owner of his day and the architect of a genocidal campaign against the Six Nations, who dubbed him “Town Destroyer”?

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Whiteness was created to destroy solidarity among the oppressed and to encourage loyalty to the rulers. In the struggles a half century ago, whiteness operated on the Right and on the Left. Among conservatives this meant donning white robes and among progressives it meant controlling the agendas of the reformists in the movement via selective funding and media coverage. With the wave of uprisings that ignited in Ferguson, the costumes have changed but the roles are the same. The cottage industry of white guilt counseling, with its army of passive allies, reinforces a white identity. On the streets of Ferguson and other cities, we saw how it also completes the paramilitary function of disarming people of color and preventing white people from directly taking part in the rebellions where racial divisions start to finally melt down.

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In the days before the election, many people carried out a frenetic activity on social media, guilting whites into voting for Clinton on the grounds that not voting was a privileged position since the election results would hurt people of color more. That this was nothing more than shameless manipulation on behalf of the Democratic Party was revealed by the election results: people of color themselves were not motivated by the potential benefits of a Clinton victory to turn out and vote in large numbers. The online activists—large numbers of whom are educated whites who access power by claiming to be allies to supposedly homogenous oppressed groups—clearly do not speak for communities of color. Just like everyone else, they speak for themselves, in line with their own particular interests, and the election results show that guilt-ridden whites constitute their primary constituency. People who shared a preference for guilt-based, identity-reinforcing, passive politics were in the streets of Ferguson working side by side with the cops to restore order, and they were on the social media before the elections canvassing for an elitist Democratic Party. The nature of their participation in social conflict should be expressed widely and clearly before the next time they mobilize their powerful, paralyzing rhetoric.

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Whites can fulfill their historical role without using racist language, and when a white supremacist society speaks through a black police chief or a black mayor, telling people to go back home, to get off the streets, it is still reproducing the same racialized system.

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Whiteness is a war measure. There are a thousand forms of mutiny, but all of them require the recognition that a war is going on.

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Different Global Futures

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We should all consider the possibility that a Trump presidency will be nothing more and nothing less than a Republican presidency. It is never one man who rules, but rather a sprawling bureaucracy. There is more institutional continuity than change between one administration and another. Even in a coup d’etat, that replaces a democracy with a dictatorship, there is a surprising amount of institutional continuity. Trump is a bombastic figure, but he cannot rule alone. Even if he has the intention of completing his electoral promises, he cannot do anything that the existing institutions are not designed to do, and he can do very little without the support of the Republican Party.

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Of course, these are not meant to be comforting words. As Adolf Eichmann’s trial revealed, a bureaucracy is a thoroughly monstrous thing, and the same bureaucracy can give out identity cards or pack whole populations into cattle cars, practice euthanasia on the infirm or operate gas chambers. To cut through the hypnosis of shock politics a moment, it is worth noting that the US already has built a wall on the border with Mexico, and that for Muslim immigrants without money, it is already extremely difficult to get into the United States.

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In his first weeks as president-elect, Donald Trump has already begun backsliding on his key promises, as he shifts from winning an election to constructing a government. He is taking part in the exact same process that Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Jill Stein would have had they won. My argument is merely that, in preparing for a Trump presidency, we should distinguish between the garish horrors of a racist, misogynist showman on the campaign trail, and the silent horrors of a state churning out policy decisions.

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As such, predicting the results of a Trump presidency based on the proclamations of a Trump candidacy is a dodgy affair, but elections are one of the few times the State gives us a sneak preview of its evolving strategies, and the gap between election and inauguration in the US is particularly long. So, if there’s any chance that speculation can help us prepare, it’s worth a shot.

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Having already touched on whiteness, I want to address the following issues: democracy, geopolitics, economic exploitation, and ecocide.

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I would argue that, in the last decade, many of the most important social movements were co-opted and defeated by democratic means, and that this will not decrease in a world where the US is governed by Trump.

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It is understandable why many people would want to claim the word “democracy,” despite the historical inaccuracies or outright amnesia such claims entail (especially when they are phrased as “reclaiming,” as though democracy were ever something other than what it is today). People power can be an enticing concept, especially if you don’t unpack the meanings of either of those two terms, and in general, it can be easier to communicate with folks if you rely on mainstream vocabulary. To most people, democracy is simply a synonym for freedom.

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However, critiques of democracy are being voiced with increasing frequency, while the populist communication tactics of grassroots democratic movements have backfired time and again. Huge, horizontal movements were re-institutionalized in Greece, Spain, Egypt, and elsewhere, as progressive or just plain clever politicians rerouted calls for change and better democracy to the ballot box. Claims to democracy function as a lever or sometimes even an assembly line whereby extra-parliamentary, horizontal movements can be bundled along straight back into the furnace of institutional, representative democracy.

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Nor is this a left-wing phenomenon. Right-wingers in the UK and Italy have been using popular referendums, an even more directly democratic tool than the vote, to push their agendas. In the US, ultra-conservatives in a number of states have used referendums to discriminate against queer and trans people, or to restrict access to abortion. In fact, the very Tea Party movement whose remnants Trump mobilized to ride to power was in many ways a democratic protest movement that appealed to the founding values of the US government and raised their cry against the corruption of the political establishment. The amphibious nature of this concept and the fact that both the far left and the far right are clamoring for it should be a cause for concern. It’s probably the reason why they try to paint the Trump candidacy as a fascist phenomenon.

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In the context of the transition from a black to an openly racist president, it seems pertinent to ask, why do people have such a big crush on a governmental system that arose in a slavery-based society? It makes sense why right-wingers would love democracy so much, but what about people who claim to oppose capitalism, white supremacy, and ecocide?

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In the immediate future, claims to democracy will continue to erupt, motivating and then institutionalizing social movements. But the shock felt by establishment figures at Trump’s surprise victory opened a window onto an alternative future. Just because democracy is currently the dominant strategy for maintaining power and keeping people down doesn’t mean it always will be.

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When investor insecurity caused markets to tumble the morning after Trump’s victory, multiple Western media outlets remarked, without a trace of condescension or judgment, the pronouncement by the Chinese state Xinhua news agency: that the Trump victory showed how democracy was broken. During the electoral campaign, more than a few of the middle-tier newspapers in the US highlighted the absurdity of at least parts of the electoral system and suggested that a technocracy would be more rational. So much of our lives is organized by technocratic institutions already, why not get rid of the spectacle of a bunch of politicians who might not be in the least qualified to run anything?

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Parallel to such growing skepticism, investors around the world have surely noticed how the centralized Chinese state has been much more able to weather the crisis and prevent the bursting of its gargantuan real estate bubble than democratic Western states. For now, with Trump abandoning his more extreme positions and investors starting to settle back down, bold talk of unmediated authoritarianism has subsided, but it is a possible future to consider. As long as investors can make their money in the current system, they will reject extreme changes, but if the American-backed model of liberal democracy fails to make the world safe for capitalism in the next round of crises, claims to democracy might become anachronistic as well as self-defeating.

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This brings us to the question of geopolitics, where a Trump presidency is already bearing fruit. It is unlikely that Trump will be able to abolish NAFTA; for that he would need the cooperation of the entire Republican Party, which on the whole is solidly neoliberal, just like basically every other political party in the world with more than 10% support. It seems that the TPP has already perished in the face of the upcoming Trump presidency, but there are good odds he will renege on his promises and resuscitate a Pacific free trade area before China absorbs the entire region with its own deal, the RCEP. Protectionists cannot carry out more than a few token measures before they risk destroying the economies they command. More than ever under capitalism, the larger an economy is the more it is integrated on a global level. If Trump attempted a trade war with China, he would ruin the US economy. The only solution under the existing system is to run the rat race even faster, lowering trade barriers (things like environmental protections), cutting labor costs, increasing production. It is far more realistic, today, to propose abolishing the entire industrial system and currency-based economies altogether than to propose reforming or limiting capitalism. Trump, therefore, doesn’t have many options. He will either go with the program, or ruin the US economy and cause unemployment to skyrocket if he manages to break with the political establishment out of sheer stubbornness. We can predict that he will be another free-trade president, who at most implements a system of incentives to mildly increase the number of domestic manufacturing jobs.

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Most acutely, if Trump succeeds in delivering on his racist promise to deport even larger numbers of Latino immigrants (and this will be a huge challenge, because Obama was the deporter-in-chief, breaking all previous records and deporting 2.5 million people at rates nine times higher than deportations twenty years ago), this would likely cause economic hardship in their countries of origin to skyrocket.

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Trump’s approach to Russia and China also bears scrutiny. In one of his few points of consistency, he has foreshadowed a thawing out of relations with the Kremlin. As for China, he has used bullish language in describing his plans to confront the main competitor of the United States economically, labelling them a currency manipulator, but he has also been erratic in his support of key US allies in the region, originally suggesting Japan and South Korea should be left to fend for themselves. His blunt support for Taiwan is probably a reflection of his total ignorance of the nature of diplomatic relations with that country. Trump is a hawkish isolationist, so his foreign policy is hard to predict, but the US military would need to be able to project more force and more effectively in areas like the South China Sea, a zone of primary importance to the world’s new largest economy, in order to thwart the expansion of the Chinese state. Anything less than total commitment to this priority, which a Clinton presidency would have inherited without question, will not be enough to prevent the regional balance of powers from changing.

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We can accept it as a given that two countries cannot end their antagonism if their geopolitical interests remain in conflict. At most, they can improve diplomatic communication. The US and Russia have been in a bitter conflict for regional dominance ever since the EU and NATO grew to a point where they could attract countries that Russia might reasonably expect to remain within its orbit, like Ukraine or Georgia (in the latter case, establishing closer economic and political relations with Washington rather than joining any Western territorial organization). The only way for this conflict to end is if Moscow or Washington decides not to pursue dominance in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And Moscow is actually in the stronger position, with no reason to step down. Since the end of the Cold War, governments throughout the world have not been forced to align with one of two superpowers. They can do like Egypt does, and court both Russia and the US, receiving massive amounts of military funding, and, with less dependence on a single power, more autonomy to pursue their own regional interests. Turkey provides an excellent example of how a country that could once be described as a client state can now play alliances and redraw a regional map, destabilizing the situation from a US perspective and thwarting US pretensions of being the sole global architect. In this competition, Russia and (in other parts of the world) China have a huge advantage, because at no point do they have to be more powerful than the US—they simply have to keep growing and extending their influence, as it becomes exponentially more costly for the US to maintain control.

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If Trump’s plan for Syria is any indication, he would be willing to reduce US pretensions in the Middle East, allowing Russia’s preferred leader to remain in place and settling on the less ambitious plan of rooting out ISIS. A similar approach in Asia would see him maintaining US guarantees on the territorial integrity of Japan and South Korea, but not trying to check Chinese expansionism or uphold the Exclusive Economic Zones that favor Western allies. In other words, Trump might be smart enough (from a chauvinistic perspective) to ease off on the increasingly expensive, increasingly ineffective Cold Warrior strategy of militarily projecting US global predominance that both Republicans and Democrats—including Hillary Clinton—have preached like the gospel.

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The thought of an immature, foul-tempered real estate mogul having access to nuclear weapons is terrifying, but a Hillary Clinton presidency in which the US tried to maintain its military dominance in a world which made those pretensions increasingly impossible might very well have been more likely to spark a nuclear war. In the end, it shouldn’t be a surprise that in an insane society, a person reckoned as sane can do the most harm.

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Of course, we have no reason to believe that Trump will stick to his guns, or that the Republican establishment won’t succeed in reining in their candidate and securing the continuity of American foreign policy. At the least, the possible implications of Trump’s proposals should be considered, but if he continues to recruit neocon warriors into his Administration, his presidency will resemble that of George W. Bush in foreign policy matters, engaging in ill-advised ventures to expand US dominance that actually result in increasing instability. His final decision for Secretary of State may give some indication of what path he plans to take, or he might continue to break the mold. It is also likely that a Trump cabinet will be less stable than the average.

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The theme of economic exploitation is important to address precisely because there is nothing surprising to say about it. Trump’s protectionist rhetoric aside, neither candidate was ever going to put a stop to the endless roulette of hyper-exploitation and hyper-precarity that most people on this planet are subjected to. And no one outside the political mainstream has been effective at communicating an engaged critique of this state of affairs. Until we do so, a nauseating procession of Tsiprases and Trumps will ride economic insecurities to victory, changing nothing.

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Ecocide, under Trump, will proceed a little more quickly than under Clinton, though I have a hard time seeing the importance of setting the Doomsday clock to start the countdown from 10 instead of from 9. We can safely consider a whole slew of international climate change agreements stillborn, which is a good thing, since they were a joke from the moment they were conceived. When the problem, in the crudest terms, is reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (leaving aside all the equally important matters of preserving as much wild space as possible so species have buffer zones), the world’s attention was redirected towards efforts to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a slower pace. How so many intelligent people could have dedicated themselves to such a farce, I do not know, though the CEOs of all the environmentalist NGOs made a bundle in the process. No institution of the existing world system has shown itself capable of even taking the first steps towards stopping climate change and mass extinction, and with a Republican victory in the country that is most responsible for climate change, they won’t even pretend to try. But now the farce is dead, and the choice is clear: governments and capitalism versus the planet and all living things.

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Why the Left Shares the Blame

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The left-wing supporters of Bernie Sanders were livid: Clinton manipulated her way to the Democratic candidacy, only to fumble the election, when polls showed all along that Sanders had a better chance of beating Trump. However, they should be happy their idol won’t have to go to bat, because he would have been an even bigger disappointment than Obama was. There is currently no compromise that capitalism is capable of making that will better the lot of the working poor. SYRIZA collided with this cold reality in Greece, and though the US has an easier time of getting creditors than the small Mediterranean nation, in the long run the equations are all the same. Specific policies can make a small but important difference in individual lives, without a doubt, but the bulk of the problem will remain unchanged or only get worse no matter who is president.

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The validity of this judgment has been recognized across the world. After progressive governments in Greece and in France became the executors of major austerity programs, the prospects of far-left parties tanked. Many of these parties were connected to recent social movements like Podemos in Spain; they had been predicted to make sweeping gains, and then suddenly the dream was over. In the US, people of color and poor people were so underwhelmed by the results of Obama’s mildly progressive agenda that they did not come out in large numbers to defend the continuity of his programs. Low voter turnout among those exact demographics cost Clinton the election.

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It was every bit as much the false promises of the Left as the racist populism of the Right that got Trump elected. The Left is moribund, organized labor is dead, single-issue politics and identity politics are mere adjuncts to neoliberal parties with a progressive veneer. The Left can do nothing to significantly mitigate the rampages of capitalism, improve the lots of immigrants and people of color, or stop the normalization of right-wing policies.

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Historically, the term Left referred to the left wing of government, where the populist, anti-monarchist bourgeois delegates sat in the National Assembly during the government of the French Revolution. To this day, the Left and the Right are both governmental forces. They have no place within a truly anti-authoritarian movement that believes in the self-organization of society rather than the conquest of central power. If there is such a thing as an extra-parliamentary Left, it is merely an adjunct that operates from the margins on party politics, eventually rerouting street movements back into the halls of government.

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It is true that terms change their meaning over time, but there is plenty of reason to believe that the Left still plays this exact same role, despite the horizontalist intentions of its more radical partisans. This is not at all to say that this is the only role of people who participate in radical left politics. Rather, I would say it is a key element that holds them back. An analysis with a critical view of the Left, that recognizes the importance of recuperation in the process of social control, is necessary if we are to make sense of the missed opportunities, the vanishing victories, the demoralizing slumps, and the loss of momentum of the past few years—defeats that belong to all of us. In the face of an aggressive right-wing onslaught, new ideas are worth more than familiar mistakes. The time of pragmatism is long past. In the far-flung camps of anti-austerity movements, environmental movements, no borders movements, and anti-police brutality movements, the pragmatists have little or nothing to show for their attempts to meet the institutions halfway or to seek change within the existing power structure.

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One of the reasons to reject the Left that transcends semantics is the urgent necessity for a total rupture with the existing power structure. We need to understand that the businesses, the governments, and the institutions that are responsible for policing, climate change, wars, borders, wage slavery, debt, evictions, and so forth are the enemies of the planet and all who live here. If bargaining with the devil is a risky proposition, bargaining with an institution of power is a tragic waste of time. In a world where the rich and powerful systematically piss on us and say it’s raining, we desperately need a consciousness of antagonism. Even more than a class consciousness, we need a consciousness of living beings—seeing as the proletariat, the bastard child of capitalism, tends to reproduce the very values that brought it into being. The history of the 20th century shows class to be more of a unifying mechanism than the motor of a revolutionary dialectic. By basing the very identity of the exploited on industrial production, employment and thus economic growth, and inclusion within Western civilization, class politics provided sufficient common ground between workers and rulers for forward thinking capitalists and statesmen to disarm anti-capitalist rebellion through labor unions, the complexification of ownership and management structures, and the identity and duties of the citizen. The ecological crisis, the continuing legacy of colonialism and slavery, and the extremes of alienation produced by social technologies all converge to signal that the problem of exploitation cannot be addressed merely by changing our relationship to the means of production, since the problem arises from the logic of production itself.

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In the first section, I argued that whiteness creates an identification with democracy, with Western civilization, with the project of colonization and domination, and that we must reject this. Just as we cannot reform whiteness but must break with it definitively, a rupture with the Left would create a protective distance from the loyalty to the existing institutions that has defeated our struggles time and time again.

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Exactly at the moment when radical, self-organized social movements are at a loss for how to go forward, previously rejected left-wing formulations reemerge to draw people’s energies back into another doomed attempt at reform. It is often after people have conquered the streets or won some victory that was previously unimaginable that the reformist setback occurs. These moments of stagnation, of strategic uncertainty, are of vital importance for movements against capitalism: when we discover that occupying factories or plazas, creating assemblies in every neighborhood, and burning the police stations and banks in every city is not enough to put the power over our lives back in our own hands, this is the only time that we can collectively discover what revolution really demands. We actually are capable of organizing our own lives free of all coercive authority, but we need the patience and persistence to transform our rudimentary models of self-organization into the complex networks in which all the needs of everyday life can be satisfied. And we need to defend these initiatives every step of the way from efforts of repression or co-optation.

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The plateaus that follow our initial victories could be the moments that truly revolutionary movements emerge, but instead they have become turning points where people give up on self-organization, hold their noses, and once more deposit their hopes with the latest progressive political party. And when those parties don’t deliver, the right wing sweeps in.

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In both Spain and Greece, large numbers of people who had rejected party politics but still saw themselves as part of the Left were seduced into supporting SYRIZA, Podemos, or municipal politicians like Ada Colau. And this tended to happen at the moment when they saw no other easy way forward, when prior explosions of social strength had still not toppled an oppressive power structure. In Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia, progressive governments absorbed and subsequently institutionalized what had been incredibly active, combative, and fecund social movements, paving the way for a redoubling of neoliberal policies and capitalist development projects.

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In the US, where voter turnout is lower, party loyalty less common, and the Left is represented more by NGOs than by any political party, the dynamic takes on a different form. Under a conservative presidency, the diffuse Left focuses on single-issue harm reduction projects, like trying to minimize the number of immigrants dying on a border that was designed to kill. As an election nears, the NGOs and Democratic operatives present in all of these movements swiftly revise the agenda and mobilize activists for an electoral victory, which, after the years of a Republican administration, seems like a necessary evil. Under a centrist presidency (e.g., Democratic), the conflicts between self-organizing elements (from anarchists to unaffiliated locals) and power-holders (NGOs, party operatives, self-appointed community leaders) rise to the surface as the former try to address the problem using direct methods and the latter counsel patience, impose an exclusively symbolic template for protest, and use the media and police to divide their opponents, separating a silenced but legitimate mass of constituents from the “outside agitators.”

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The model really has more in common with the crude party machines of the 19th century than with the refined methods of social democratic recuperation honed in Europe, but it is nonetheless highly effective, and will continue to be so as long as people on the ground have no means of distinguishing sincere social rebels from the professional activists and party operatives who inhabit the Left. The North American situation shows that a firm rejection of party politics is not enough. The most active players in pacifying the social conflicts that are so close to boiling over belong to the extra-parliamentary Left and do not coalesce into new political parties like MAS, Podemos, or SYRIZA. It is enough that they prevent frontal assaults on the Democratic Party and its various reform efforts to keep these social movements from generating the autonomy they need, and with the nonprofit-industrial complex raining down money and constantly defining the landscape of the conflict, groups that are two or three organizations removed from the Democratic Party or any mainstream NGO can unwittingly become the mouthpieces for the latest strategy of pacification.

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The Left and the Right are the two hands of the State, but they are by no means equal. In Spanish, tener mano izquierda, using the left hand, means being subtle, clever, avoiding direct conflict. The purpose of the Left, from the State’s point of view, is to co-opt and institutionalize rebellious popular movements. This is why the right wing can make secret deals with Iran, flirt with Russia, or out the identities of government spies with no lasting consequences, whereas the Left is always being scrutinized for signs of treason. The loyalty of the Left is always in question, in the mainstream, and they have to constantly prove their loyalty and their effectiveness by bringing more captives to the bargaining table. The extreme right in the US is responsible for far more domestic killings than all the leftist and jihadist groups combined, but they will not be treated as terrorists. Instead, the media and police will present them to us as extremists who got carried away, and keep the problem from being spoken about in a systematic way. People who actually rebel against the social order or criticize the pillars of state power will be prosecuted as terrorists and locked away for decades—even if, like Marius Mason, they’ve never hurt anybody.

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The Left exists to harness the anger of the oppressed. When they went too far in the French Revolution, heads rolled, and the Jacobins who had tried to conduct rather than suppress popular rage were sent to the guillotines for their excesses. Those in power are all too aware of the danger of promising justice to the plebes. The labor union movement worked wonders in drafting a new peace treaty between Capital and Labor—many of the very first laws legalizing labor organizations specifically mentioned the need for an instrument that would allow the peaceful resolution of labor conflicts. That peace treaty has become obsolete, and soon the ruling powers will need a new one.

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In the US, desegregation plus the destruction of black communities through federal urban development policy and the so-called War on Crime created a new peace treaty for race relations, held together by a discourse of tolerance and color blindness on the part of whites (amounting to a belief that if you close your eyes, racism will go away), and on the other hand the ascendance of a small minority of blacks into managerial positions in government (whereas before they had been excluded from government but enjoyed a high degree of economic autonomy in many cities). This peace treaty is also starting to fall apart, but thanks to the long period of liberal color blindness, historical continuity has been broken, and today only radicals can trace how slavery directly morphed into the present system (people at the center typically respond, What, you’re still talking about that?).

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Key figures in the Democratic Party, currently facing an internal shakeup, are drawing a lesson from the electoral loss: they have gone too far to the left, and need to concentrate on appealing to “the working class,” a shameless euphemism for non-college-educated whites. Any other party in their situation would be doing the same thing. Due to the paramount democratic pressure to achieve electoral victory, only an outside party with no chance at immediate dominance could break with this dynamic to provide an independent voice, and their critique would be predicated on their continuing minority status. Instead of building up a new momentum only to see it institutionalized again, or worse yet, drafting a new peace treaty between a white supremacist system and its various subjects—between owners and owned—we should be thinking in terms of survival, self-defense, rupture, and revolution. It is hard to think of a historical moment when the psychological pressures of moderation were more counterproductive. The existing institutional channels for reform can give us nothing.

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The struggles of the future cannot be about scaring white supremacists back into the closet, promoting technologies that—taken out of context—cause less pollution, bringing political correctness and superficial equality to long-standing patriarchal institutions, or seeking to balance the needs of Capital and Labor. The problems that Trump makes terrifyingly visible were already there. We need to abandon any identification or illusion of shared interests with the dominant system, attack oppression and exploitation at their very foundations, and start building the world we want, making no compromises with the system that never saw us as anything more than resources or means to an end.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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For months, hundreds of people, including members of nearly a hundred different indigenous peoples, have mobilized to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. On October 27, police raiding the Sacred Ground camp encountered stiff resistance. We’ve just received the following \u0010firsthand report from comrades who participated in the defense of the camp. Describing some of the fiercest clashes indigenous and environmental movements in the region have seen in many years, they pose important questions about solidarity struggles.

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The Battle

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When we arrive on Wednesday, October 26, we can’t find our contacts, the friends and friends of friends who have been vouched into the secretive Red Warrior camp. Word around the camp is that eviction is imminent for Sacred Ground, the only camp in the direct path of the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline. The tribe claims this land is territory granted to them in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, and that they were using their own “eminent domain” to take it back when they set up the camp. We decide to set up at Sacred Ground and to figure out how to make ourselves useful in stopping its eviction.

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The Sacred Ground camp is located about two miles north of the main camp on highway 1806. The main camp itself is just north of the Standing Rock Reservation, where two more NoDAPL camps, Rosebud and Sacred Stone, are located. Before arriving, we had seen images of barricades blocking Highway 1806 to the north of the Sacred Ground camp.

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When we walk to that site, however, we find those barricades have been pushed to the sides of the road, the northernmost one turned into a kind of checkpoint. According to the people at the checkpoint, they were ordered to remove the blockade by the camp leaders, who plan on allowing the police to enter and evict the camp.

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The “camp leaders” are hired Nonviolent Direct Action consultants. They are utilizing a classic strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience: they hope that the images of police evicting people in prayer will win them the sympathy of the public. The people we speak with at the checkpoint are clearly not buying this. But what can they do? Their elders have hired these people to stage-manage the moment.

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After some conversation with the folks on the barricades and with the “camp leaders,” it is decided that we’ll leave the road open until the police actually arrive, and then we’ll build up the barricades quickly in order to slow their progress. This will hopefully buy time to allow the people who want to get arrested while in prayer to assemble and prepare themselves. For what its worth, this plan was crafted with the approval of the “proper channels.”

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As soon as this course of action is proposed, some new organism bursts into life, and thirty people we’ve never met are loading logs and tires and barbed wire onto trucks in the middle of the night. A plan comes together for when and how to start blocking the road. The energy is electric; the possibility of a real physical defense of this strategically decisive camp is in the air and in people’s conversations.

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“I don’t know who those ‘leaders’ are,” a Native guy tells us as we throw tires on the side of the road. “They’re not my elders. I came here to defend this camp, and I’m going to do what I have to.” We still don’t know where the fabled Red Warrior folks are, but we feel that we’ve found people we want to support in this battle.

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This is the plan: the folks up the hill at the checkpoint are the first line of defense. When the cops come, they will get in the road and begin a prayer ceremony. They inform us they have no intention of moving until they are arrested or worse. While they block the road, it will be our job to build up the next barricade about a quarter mile down the road to buy time for the prayer circle to assemble in the camp. To us, this is not ideal, because it still means that the eviction will go through. But we also feel that we have very little agency in this situation. We’re white. We just showed up. At least we’ll be a part of putting up a fight, we tell ourselves. At least the police won’t just be invited in.

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We take shifts all night, trying to decode the flying objects in the sky. Is that a drone or a satellite? Is that the moon behind the clouds? Then why is it moving? Why is that surveillance plane flashing those lights over there? For hours, I have the feeling that we’ve stepped into some deep historical current, that this moment is connected to every other moment in which people waited to defend barricades against overwhelming adversaries. We joke and tell stories, we snap our attention to any movement on the hillside, we speculate and scheme. We receive new names based on stupid things we do or say. The night is long and cold and at dawn the sun is welcome.

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The next morning, we learn that there has been another barricade all along, located on a bridge on Route 134, the only other entrance by which the police can access the Sacred Ground camp since all other entrances go through the Standing Rock reservation. Apparently this is what Red Warrior has been up to, and they have no intention of letting the police through. While that is exciting to hear, we can’t understand why the same commitment to physically defend the space is absent here on Highway 1806.

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Around midday, a line of police vehicles shows up blaring their sirens—but not on the highway. They are taking the access road beside the pipeline construction, where we have no defenses. People start parking their cars to block the access road and crowds start to gather. Word comes that the police are bringing in armored vehicles on the highway. We run to our posts at the second blockade and begin loading tires into the street. Just then, a truck pulls up and out steps a paid nonviolent consultant who is on his way to negotiate a mass arrest. He gathers the barricade crew in a circle and makes an impassioned plea for us to leave the road clear. “When people see the images of them arresting us and storming our teepees with guns, they will know our struggle is right.”

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Some people are convinced and begin removing the barbed wire. Our crew has a quick conversation. We aren’t convinced by this guy, but we don’t want to be the ones to disobey his orders—we don’t want to make it easy for the police or media to deploy a narrative about “outside agitators,” and we don’t want to sabotage the possibility of other anarchists like us participating in this struggle. We decide we will check in with the Native guys we spent the night on the barricade with. When we ask about their reaction to the speech, we get a blunt response: “Fuck that guy.” Our thoughts exactly.

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As we’re building the barricade, our new friends give us one rule: build it up as much as we want, but their elders say no fire. We agree to this. At this point, people are crowded up the hill at the first checkpoint; we begin to load our barricade materials into the street, leaving one lane open to enable our people to make it to the other side before the cops. We watch from a distance as the armored vehicles approach the crowd up ahead.

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Then a blue car that had been up near the first checkpoint speeds down the hill toward us. It parks, blocking half the road. A Native woman gets out and stabs her own tires with a knife. A team removes her license plates, and soon another car blocks the other side of the road in similar fashion. The cops are heading toward us, and word spreads that the other barricade is already on fire. People and horses are herded to our side of the blockade. Just then, the paid nonviolence consultant gets on top of one of the cars and attempts to deliver a speech to calm everyone down. He can barely get a word out before a Native kid gets up on the other car and starts chanting:

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“BLACK SNAKE KILLAZ! BLACK SNAKE KILLAZ!”

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As the crowd chants this over the guy who just negotiated a carefully orchestrated mass arrest with the cops, the barricade is lit and the fight is on. Bottles and stones are thrown at the police vehicles. But this only lasts for a moment before a line of elders and camp security forms to start pushing the combatants back from the barricade. Shouting matches and fistfights break out. There are Native folks of all ages on both sides of the long and disappointing struggle. Those opposing the physical confrontation succeed in pushing us back, enabling the police to form a line around the north side of the camp where the large crowds are gathered.

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At this point, a truck is parked in the road with two people locked to the underside. Logs are piled up around the truck and two teepees are erected on either side of it. Some try to hold a line against the police, stretching teepee poles across a dozen people. Others hurl stones and logs at the cops and their vehicles. The chaos is overwhelming. A young warrior on horseback is tazed and falls to the ground. All around us, people are screaming from the effects of pepper spray. Flash-bang grenades are bursting in the air, mingling with rubber bullets and beanbag rounds. The screaming matches continue between those who want to fight back and those who want to be arrested while praying. The cops are already in the camp.

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Over a painful hour, we are all pushed south of the only camp that blocked the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Over a hundred people are arrested, many of them charged with “conspiracy to endanger with fire” regardless of whether they were in any proximity to the flaming barricade. This seems calculated to drain our legal fund, since the bail is set at $1500 each. Sacred Ground is lost.

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Riot on the Prairie

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As we ride south, smoke rises from a hill in the east. Some clever folks have taken advantage of the chaos to burn construction equipment. This gesture is greeted with cheers. In the other direction, smoke rises from a truck set aflame on the 134 Bridge. People are running to the top of a hill to the east. There we witness a chase: police in military gear pursuing two warriors on horses, who have apparently rallied a herd of buffalo at the police line back at camp. The cops shoot at the horses while trying to cut them off, as people scramble to remove a barbed wire fence for the horses to escape. They succeed with seconds to spare; the police ATVs turn back amid our curses.

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Another barricade goes up where Route 134 meets Highway 1806. A crowd gathers at that intersection. It’s clear that this is the new front. As people are eating and planning their stand, shouts ring out: “STOP THE WHITE TRUCK!” We all run into the road to block a white pickup that is coming from the north. It turns off the road and tries to speed around us. Trucks from our side give chase, and the white truck is eventually rammed off the side of the road. The driver, a DAPL security guard who had pointed a gun at demonstrators up the hill, runs out of the truck carrying an AR–15 rifle. He is chased into a pond where an hour-long standoff ensues. Meanwhile, his truck is looted, driven up the hill, and flipped onto the new barricade. It is set on fire, along with another car donated for the cause.

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The Bureau of Indian Affairs police arrive from the south, disarm the DAPL security guard, and arrest him. They leave everyone else untouched and head back south. For us anarchists, this is a mind-boggling event. We’d heard the BIA police were “in support” of the protests, but we never expected them to treat the movement with such respect. Later, we hear a rumor that they actually turned away State Police from entering the reservation from the south, effectively preventing the police from kettling all of us.

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As a cavalcade of armored vehicles and Hummers approach from the north, everyone falls back to a bridge on Highway 1806. This bridge is not on the reservation, but it is the only entrance from the north. Entire tree trunks are unloaded from trucks, constructing a substantial barricade. It includes a twelve-foot-tall solar-powered highway sign, the batteries from which are skillfully expropriated. The barricade catches fire. The police approach and hold a line.

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For the following eight hours, America is over. Rocks and Molotov cocktails defend the barricade; a wall of plywood shields deflects rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. The partisans of nonviolence are gone, and the kind of combative energy that could have held Sacred Ground emerges in full force. The fight lasts into the early hours of the morning, when the police fire a large number of smoke grenades and use the cover to withdraw and retreat, leaving two military supply trucks blocking the road north of the bridge.

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Those trucks too are set on fire, and the battle for the bridge is won.

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Aftermath

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After some sleep, we arrived at the bridge the next morning to find people holding a line north of the burnt military vehicles. The police and the National Guard were erecting concrete highway barriers about 50 feet north of the line—surrendering Highway 1806 as a functioning road, but also blocking those opposed to the pipeline from driving vehicles back toward the former site of the Sacred Ground camp.

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It was just a couple dozen people holding the line with plywood shields; most of them were quite young. News media and other rubberneckers were milling about on the bridge, examining the burnt wreckage from the night before. After a while, an older Native man showed up, stepped out in front of the line, and spoke to us all: “I’m 78 years old. I’m an elder. I’m going to make a deal with the police to get you all off this bridge.” Another older Native man, who had been holding a shield, shouted him down: “I’m 73 years old, and I am also an elder. And I’m saying we fight back! We hold our position!”

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Soon camp “security” showed up with orders from their elders to clear the bridge and push us all back. They locked arms and formed a line to force us off the bridge. Tensions grew as those who wanted to hold it, both Native and non-Native, argued with each other. Once again, people who were “on our side,” acting in the name of “the elders,” did the work of the police for them.

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“This is what they have always done to us!” the ones trying to hold the bridge told us. “They turn us against one another to pacify us!”

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The people clearing us from the bridge didn’t have arguments, just their bodies acting on behalf of “the elders,” ignoring the contradiction that they were clearing elders, among others, from the bridge.

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By the end of the day, not only was the bridge cleared, but the camp security had set up a line about a quarter of a mile up the road and wouldn’t let anyone close to it. Tensions are high within the camp, as the partisans of physical resistance to the pipeline clash with those who believe that symbolic arrests will somehow stop it, and those who are solely focused on the historic gathering of Native tribes split by centuries of hostility.

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When we return to our camp, we are pulled aside by a Native woman. She explains that she hears there are “agitators” in the camp and she’s going to keep her eye on us. She is convinced that it wasn’t Native folks who were fighting back the day before, but outsiders. A white comrade who has been here for months tells us that he was surrounded and threatened by four Native men, and was only saved by the fact that he knew all their names and could find Native warriors to vouch for him. Other contacts in Red Warrior communicate how delicate the situation is, explaining that the significance of the conversations taking place extends far beyond anything we can grasp as non-Native people. Any action we take autonomously could mess things up for everyone. We feel paralyzed, not knowing how to contribute to the efforts of those with whom we felt such intense affinity the night before.

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Late that night, from the top of a hill in Sacred Stone camp, we watch as a two-mile-wide fire burns up the hillside from the main camp in the direction of the construction. We have no idea whether folks on our side set the fire as a sublime gesture of intimidation, or whether the forces of order have set it to scare people in the camp. We decide to believe the former, because we assume we’ll never know the truth.

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Considerations for Solidarity

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The situation here is delicate. While the battle for Sacred Ground revealed that people involved in this struggle are willing and able to fight outside the restrictions of stage-managed civil disobedience, it is not clear how this could take place now that the strategic position blocking the path of the pipeline has been lost. Further, tensions are so high in the camps that it feels dangerous to reveal oneself as a partisan of the combatant energy expressed on Thursday.

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Serious dilemmas confront non-Native anarchists who want to come to support the NoDAPL movement. On the one hand, this is a movement framed around indigenous rights and decolonial struggle. We can understand ourselves as allies or accomplices within this movement; if we assume that role, that means supporting the Native folks whose actions resonate with us while trying not to exacerbate conflicts within Native communities. While this approach may feel daunting in the current situation, more opportunities for support may open up soon.

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On the other hand, this is a struggle against a pipeline and, like all struggles of our time, against the police who protect it. From this perspective, everyone who drinks water, understands the threat of climate change, and opposes the police has a stake in participating. From this perspective, carrying out autonomous actions seems justified. However, if we take that route, we should be careful not to ignore the decolonial significance of the movement, and not to burn bridges with indigenous people who might be our comrades in the movements to come.

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Moreover, this struggle has received global attention thanks to the work done by people who have been here for months, including indigenous and non-indigenous warriors, some of whom are anarchist comrades. Anyone acting autonomously should consider the impact they will have on the plans and relationships these people have worked so hard to create.

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For now, our plan is to inhabit this space, build relationships, and try to make ourselves useful to those who have chosen to struggle to stop this pipeline by means other than the law. We don’t want to fully embrace the limitations of the “ally” role, nor do we want to act carelessly without an intimate knowledge of the situation in which we find ourselves, a situation we recognize that others have opened up.

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For those who can come, particularly those with relevant skills: come. It is not clear what the next move is, but we will need all the help we can get when it occurs. If you do come, be prepared to spend time learning about the power dynamics at work in this space, and to have less agency than you might want until you have earned people’s trust.

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For those who cannot come, or who feel they would not be able to act with proper sensitivity to the significance of this moment for indigenous people: now is the time to spread the fight to other locations. We hope to see the whole range of tactics from the anti-police movements of recent years deployed against the infrastructure of extraction and the flows of capital in general. Actions of all sorts are encouraged, though not all of them will be helpful in this specific location.

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This is a strategically crucial struggle in a pivotal moment. As our comrades have argued, if we don’t act fast, we risk ceding the popular idea of resistance to the state to right wing forces that will recuperate our tactics and arguments to serve their own agenda. What has taken hold here in the struggle against the pipeline, and what burst into reality in the hours after the battle for Sacred Ground, has the potential to spread into a much wider resistance to extraction industries and ecocide. Let’s make it spread—but let’s do so with a sensitivity to the indigenous warriors and anarchist comrades who have thrown their lives into this struggle for months, who have shown the ability to organize and fight that has built the NoDAPL movement to this point.

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To Learn More

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#NoDAPL: Riot Police Raid Sacred Ground Camp
Sacred Stone Camp: webpage | Legal Defense Fund
Red Warrior Camp: Facebook page | Fundraiser
Oceti Sakowin Camp: website | Fundraiser

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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Trump le Monde

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The final Presidential debate of 2016 was a gala event in Las Vegas pitting a reality TV star against the latest representative of a political dynasty. It was set up as a symbolic clash between business and politics, with the roles cast so convincingly that it was really possible to imagine the two categories to be at odds. The antagonism of the candidates was still more believable because everyone shares it: these are the most unpopular Presidential candidates in history, at a time when both business and politics have lost their credibility. But these are our choices—right?

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“Just remember, you are not a participant here,” the Fox News anchor reminded us. “At the end of the debate, you can applaud all you want, but in the meantime, silence, please—blessed silence.”

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A cursory reading of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is enough to decipher this scene. Trump is the harbinger of the apocalypse, yes, but the apocalypse is not on the horizon. It’s here.

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“Armageddon has been in effect,” as Public Enemy put it in 1988. “Go get a late pass.”

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The Trump threat serves to distract us from what is already happening. “I don’t want to rip families apart,” Clinton insists, in reference to immigration policy, when the administration she serves under Obama has deported over 2.5 million people—as many as all the US presidents of the 20th century put together. Mothers of the Movement promote Clinton as the candidate to curb racist policing—when police murders of black and brown people have only escalated since she got into office, and the most liberal politicians and prosecutors have failed to challenge the impunity of the police. Trump is dubbed the first demagogue of the Anthropocene—but does any candidate in the election have a realistic proposal to halt catastrophic climate change?

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The same good cop/bad cop routine is playing out all around the globe. Explicitly leftist parties like Syriza and Brazil’s Workers Party have implemented the same policies they accused their right-wing counterparts of pursuing. Today, the only remaining justification for continuing to support Syriza, the Workers Party, or Clinton goes something like this: “If the left doesn’t screw us, the right will!” If the left doesn’t privatize water—if the left doesn’t militarize the police—if the left doesn’t expand the prison-industrial complex—if the left doesn’t silence dissent…

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This strategy has served to cover a steady bipartisan drift to the right for at least half a century. If Clinton now has a shot of winning even Texas, that just shows how Republican her platform is.

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There’s a flip side to this, too: if the left doesn’t rise in revolt, the right will. Outraged at the prevailing political class, Donald Trump’s constituency seems primed to reject the legitimacy of the electoral process. Mind you, they’re not calling for a black bloc at the inauguration or marching around with a banner reading “WHOEVER THEY VOTE FOR, WE ARE UNGOVERNABLE” yet, but if things continue in this direction, renegade Republicans will be understood as the chief adversaries of the ruling order.

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The Price of Defeat

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When revolutionary movements fail, reactionaries adapt their tactical and rhetorical innovations. This should come as no surprise: practically every aspect of our lives, from the buildings we live in to the music we listen to, represents the appropriation of ordinary people’s efforts and innovations.

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The social movements of 2011—the Arab Spring, the movement of the squares in Spain and Greece, Occupy, and subsequent uprisings from the Balkans to Hong Kong—ran aground as a consequence of violent state repression and their own built-in limits before they could pose a significant threat to globalized capitalism and the governments that oversee it. Since the end of 2013, we’ve seen right-wing efforts seizing the initiative where these movements failed, reframing the causes of popular suffering and the objectives of revolt in their own terms.

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First, nationalists and fascists used the Occupy model to topple the Ukrainian government. Then, in Brazil, some of the momentum of an autonomist movement against a neoliberal leftist government carried over into reactionary unrest that brought millions to the streets. Rather than a left social movement like Occupy, Germany produced Pegida. Meanwhile, racists around Europe attempted to appropriate feminist themes to smear migrants and Muslims. Others are doing the same thing with gay rights, while atheist discourse has become a breeding ground for Islamophobia. Nationalists are hailing the Brexit vote as a triumph of direct democracy, with the German and Dutch far-right parties Alternative für Deutschland and Partij voor de Vrijheid promising regular referendums as a plank in their platforms.

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This trend reached the United States with the runaway candidacy of Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign appropriated the language of the anti-globalization movement, right down to the rhetoric of “fair trade” rather than “free trade” and the allegation that a global financial elite is benefitting at the expense of working people.

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It is instructive that the narratives of a movement founded by radicals and anarchists could serve a nationalist billionaire in his Presidential bid: at the least, it reveals the ways that those narratives were vulnerable to cooptation all along. Indeed, there has long been a far-right opposition to globalized capitalism, which Trump embraced more and more openly as his campaign proceeded. Fascism was originally modeled on left-wing movements: it was a way to channel rightful indignation about class inequalities into violence directed down the social hierarchy, rather than revolt that could threaten it. As in the 1920s, so today: the price of revolutionary failure is reactionary momentum.

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The neoliberal state versus populist nationalism at a Pegida rally.

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The Reaction to Come

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Clinton protests too much when she claims that Trump is besmirching the legacy of democracy in the United States by threatening to reject the results of the upcoming election. Didn’t the US actively orchestrate coups to overthrow democratically elected governments in Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Iran, and the Congo, to name a few? The interplay between elections and states of exception in which ordinary political processes are suspended has always been central to democratic governance. It’s the exception that proves the rule.

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In any case, Trump is not going to lead an insurrection. He’s more of a weathervane than a whirlwind; his genius, such as it is, consists of giving all the other bigoted narcissists in Middle America someone to identify with. He doesn’t have what it takes to seize power.

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So Clinton will be President. And then what?

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This is not a good time to stand at the helm of the state. It didn’t work out for Morsi or most of the other politicians who came to power in the revolutions of 2011. Syriza was exalted throughout Europe when they won the elections of 2015, but they burned up all their credibility as soon as they took the reins. Only apathy, despair, and the threat of even worse rulers—like Trump—currently shore up the positions of unpopular leaders like Clinton.

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In a nutshell, the double bind facing governments in globalized capitalism is that open markets and austerity measures accelerate the processes by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but closed markets and state spending drive away investors and drain resources. Consequently, people tend to blame individual governments for economic woes that state structures can do precious little to solve. In this context, the election cycle will likely produce alternating waves of hope and disillusionment as long as the anarchist proposal to abolish government and property remains unthinkable.

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But if this is a bad time to hold power, it is a great time to be in the opposition. For a burgeoning far right nationalist movement, a Clinton presidency is good fortune: that’s four more years of the liberal left taking the heat for whatever happens, four more years during which the far right can claim to have a political program that would work if only they could implement it. After the initial post-election disappointment dissipates, this will be an ideal context for far-right recruiting.

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Clinton looks unstoppable now, but that will change once Trump is out of the picture. Who knows what other scandals have yet to break? The next wave of right-wing momentum is bound to look rational and well mannered by comparison with Donald Trump; while he has brought opprobrium on himself, his strong personality has offered cover for others who share his agenda. The next demagogues will have no trouble proclaiming all manner of reactionary ideas, because Trump has shifted the window of legitimate political discourse so far. Right-wing strategists are doubtless discussing how to cast a slightly wider net; if they have any sense, they will shift from old-fashioned white supremacist narratives towards a nationalist discourse of law and order that could mobilize a large number of people even in a demographically diverse US. And although Trump isn’t prepared to orchestrate an uprising, he certainly has helped set the stage for autonomous nationalist movements to come.

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If all these pieces fall into place, then when Clinton inevitably fails to solve the problems that originally drove people to support Trump and Sanders, the far right will be in a much stronger position to build street-level power and perhaps even make a grab for the state.

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Don’t believe it? Consider what happened to Dilma Rousseff and the Workers Party in Brazil.

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Rousseff rode to office in 2011 on the coattails of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, one of the most popular politicians in Brazilian history—a left icon who spent his time in office advancing a neoliberal agenda, taking advantage of an influx of investment dollars to dampen the immediate consequences on poor Brazilians. Powerful autonomous protest movements erupted against Rousseff and the Workers Party in 2013, drawing mass participation and achieving some temporary victories. At the peak of these movements, many people with no previous protest experience or radical politics poured into them; when the Brazilian government outmaneuvered the autonomists by the usual combination of state repression and cooptation, many of these new participants moved on to right-wing mobilizations.

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Like countless politicians, Rousseff was vulnerable to charges of corruption. At first, the right-wing populist movement calling for her impeachment—and in some cases the return of the military dictatorship—seemed laughable enough, as reactionaries from the middle class clumsily attempted to appropriate the organizational methods and tactics of the autonomous movements. Then the movement gained momentum in the streets, plunging Brazil into massive right-on-left violence. In the end, Rousseff was impeached. Today, Brazil’s government is controlled by the right wing.

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For those who consider horizontal grassroots efforts the best hope for social change, the most dismaying part of this story is that the autonomous movements that seemed so strong in Brazil in 2013 have been completely marginalized. The participants have been forced to choose between sitting on the sidelines or mobilizing behind the Workers Party they opposed three years ago.

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The reactionary popular movement that toppled Dilma in Brazil.

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To recap: a controversial female candidate inherits the Presidency from a popular left leader amid charges of corruption, as reactionary momentum gains steam in the wake of defeated autonomous movements. Sound familiar?

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In the context of a Clinton victory, the most significant danger is that the entire political spectrum will be divided up between a statist neoliberal left and an opportunistically antigovernment nationalist right. Each of these adversaries needs the other; each will seek to absorb those who fall outside this dichotomy or else push them into the opposing camp.

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If we don’t want to be marginalized the way our comrades in Brazil have been, we have to debunk the idea that either nationalism or the state could solve any of our problems, and organize to take on both the authorities and their reactionary opposition. This means breaking with the narratives of the left as well as the right. Otherwise, as the Clinton administration inevitably fails to resolve the economic crises of everyday life, more and more ordinary people will run into the arms of the reactionaries—and as these reactionary movements gain steam, the people who should be our comrades will respond in ways that shore up neoliberal democracy. There has to be another way.

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If it becomes impossible to talk about how the system is rigged or how the corporate media is implicated without advancing the discourse of the far-right—if NSA surveillance, drones, international finance, corporate profiteering, and the subtle control exercised by social media algorithms become understood as right-wing issues—then all prospects of real liberation will be off the table for another generation or more. Today, even Wikileaks is bolstering right-wing narratives; grassroots outrage is assuming the form of reactionary populism. Anarchists and other partisans of liberation will be sidelined by the popular appropriation of our own tactics and slogans unless we get our bearings quickly.

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We have our work cut out for us.

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Getting Started

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When you resolve to take your destiny into your own hands, it’s hard to know where to start. Ceding responsibility to others is easy: you vote for a political party, you donate to a nonprofit group, you pay taxes to a government, you enlist in an army, you enroll in a school, you work for a corporation, you convert to a religion. Practically our whole society is arranged that way. It can be daunting to come up with your own agenda, to start over with yourself as the agent of history.

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But you’re not starting from scratch. You have talents, longings, and dreams that you have given up on pursuing because there seems to be no space for them in this world. The first step is to rediscover them. We aren’t just talking a negative struggle against external constraints, but the positive project of realizing our potential on our own terms. Anything you wish you could do—anything you think someone should do—begin it now.

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Ready or not, you are already engaged in the struggles of our time. We were all born into them. It’s not a question of whether to fight, but how. Do we seek individual solutions or make common cause? Do we address one problem after another, or strike at their roots? Do we keep investing resources in the institutions that are failing us, or stake our lives on something else?

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The ruling order may appear unshakable, but change is the only constant in this world. Windows of opportunity are going to open when things will be possible that seem impossible now. The best way to prepare for such moments is to already be in the habit of acting on your own terms, outside the logic of the prevailing regime. When you know your own strength, you may be able to open those windows yourself.

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Get in position. Find people who bring out the best in you. Learn to take care of each other and act powerfully together. Share things. Discuss struggles elsewhere around the world; draw your own strategic conclusions to test when the opportunity arises. Build networks, resources, and skills that will be useful in those moments of possibility. Dedicate yourself to a long-term project that challenges some aspect of the power structure. Wherever you can, open up the fault lines between those who prefer the world the way it is and those who want something different. Don’t seek to concentrate power, but to diffuse it—a part of your potential is locked in everyone else, and you won’t be able to access it without them. The outcome of a revolution is not determined by revolutionaries, but by which side the people on the fence ultimately join.

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Take heart. The hardest part of taking your destiny in your hands is the fear of the unknown. There are no guarantees, and the stakes are the things you prize most in all the world. This is why it’s a relief to consign yourself to others’ projects and values, giving up on your own in advance so you don’t risk failing yourself. Yet that means accepting the worst-case scenario as a foregone conclusion. If that’s the alternative, you might as well hazard the leap into the unknown. On the other side, you will find us—the companions you deserve.

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Further Resources

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For regular reporting from an anarchist perspective, tune in to Submedia.TV or the Ex-Worker podcast.

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To connect with real live anarchists, visit an infoshop or anarchist book fair. To invite a speaker to discuss anarchist ideas and strategy at your community center, university, or any other venue, contact us.

General Inquiry

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An Anarchist FAQ—Meticulously documented answers to frequently asked questions about anarchism
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The Anarchist Library—An archive of anarchist texts spanning the past two centuries
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Anarchy Works—A compendium of historical examples answering frequently asked questions about how anarchists make decisions and solve social, economic, and strategic problems
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Fighting for Our Lives—An anarchist primer
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You can also read introductions to anarchism from contemporary authors like David Graeber and Bob Black, not to mention the classics by Errico Malatesta and Emma Goldman.
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Critique

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Borders
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Capitalism
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Care
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Climate Change
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Computing
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Democracy
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Gender
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Insurrection
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Intersectionality
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Peace
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Police
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Prisons
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Privilege
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Rights
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Solidarity
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Suicide
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Surveillance
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Terrorism
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Violence
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White Supremacy
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Work
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Celebration

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Autonomy
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Insurrection
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Joy
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Life
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Love
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Momentum
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Mutual Aid
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Revolt
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Transformation
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Action

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Affinity Groups
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Black Blocs
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Direct Action
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Insurrection
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Occupations
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Prisoner Support
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Really Really Free Markets
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Security Culture
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Solidarity Networks
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You can learn about other tactics associated with anarchists in the books Recipes for Disaster and the Earth First! Direct Action Manual.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Anarchism

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What about human nature? Don’t we need laws and police and other authoritarian institutions to protect us from people with ill intent?

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If human beings are not good enough to do without authority, why should they be trusted with it?

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Or, if human nature is changeable, why should we seek to make people obedient rather than responsible, servile rather than independent, craven rather than courageous?

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Or, if the idea is that some people will always need to be ruled, how can we be sure that it will be the right ones ruling, since the best people are the most hesitant to hold power and the worst people are the most eager for it?

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The existence of government and other hierarchies does not protect us; it enables those of ill intent to do more damage than they could otherwise. The question itself is ahistorical: hierarchies were not invented by egalitarian societies seeking to protect themselves against evildoers. Rather, hierarchies are the result of evildoers seizing power and formalizing it. (Where did you think kings came from?) Any generalization we could make about “human nature” in the resulting conditions is sure to be skewed.

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So what would you do about people who only care about themselves, who are willing to do anything to others for their own benefit?

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What do we do with such people today? We offer them jobs as police, executives, politicians. We reward the bribable, the greedy, and the self-serving with positions of power and responsibility. Take away the rewards for such behavior, and the few who persist in it will pose considerably less harm.

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If there were no government, what would you do if a gang were terrorizing your community?

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Some people insist that they need a gang to be safe from gangs. That’s the logic of the protection racket. In fact, no one will be safe until we are able to defend ourselves against gangs without forming them ourselves. What we need instead are networks of mutual aid and self-defense that do not concentrate power, but disperse it.

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But in spaces where government has broken down, like Somalia or Camden, New Jersey, we often see incredible violence.

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The state is not the only hierarchical force. When it collapses, all the other hierarchies that developed under its protection erupt into conflict, along with all the hierarchical groups that developed in the conditions of competition and artificial scarcity that it imposed. Without the state, you can still have sexism, racial privilege, local warlords. And if there’s anything worse than being ruled by a single government, it’s when multiple authoritarian organizations are contending to dominate you.

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Anarchists oppose all hierarchies, not just the state. Where statists seek to suppress conflict by imposing a monopoly on violence, anarchists seek to resolve conflict by undoing all monopolies in order that a horizontal balance of power can emerge. The problem in the world’s warzones is not too much anarchy, but too little.

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What about the tragedy of the commons?

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Supposedly, the tragedy of the commons is that when things are shared, selfish people destroy them or take them for themselves. That certainly describes the behavior of colonizers and corporations! The question for everyone else is not how to do away with commons, but how to defend them. Privatization does not protect against the tragedy of losing the things we share—it imposes it. The solution is not more individualization, but better collectivity.

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Isn’t equality impossible, except equality before the law?

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Abolishing hierarchy does not mean forcing uniformity on people. Only a truly invasive state could compel everyone to be perfectly equal, as in the story of Harrison Bergeron. Rather, the point is to do away with all the artificial mechanisms that impose power imbalances. If power were dispersed in many different forms, rather than concentrated in a few universal currencies, a single asymmetry in abilities would not give anyone a systematic advantage over anyone else.

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As for equality before the law—so long as there are law books, courts, and police officers, there will be no equality. All these institutions create power imbalances: between the legislators and the governed, between the judges and the judged, between the enforcers and their victims. Giving some people power over other people is no way to make anyone equal. Only voluntary relations between free beings can produce anything like equality.

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But if we overthrow the government without offering something to take its place, what’s to stop something really nasty from filling the power vacuum?

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That’s the mantra of those who are working up the nerve to be really nasty themselves. The really ruthless usually tell you that they are there to protect you from other ruthless people; often, they are telling themselves the same thing.

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If we were powerful enough to overthrow one government, we would be powerful enough to prevent the ascendance of another, provided we weren’t tricked into rallying around some new authority. What should take the place of the government is not another formalized power structure, but cooperative relationships that can meet our needs while keeping new would-be rulers at bay.

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From the vantage point of the present, no one can imagine creating a stateless society, though many of the problems we face will not be solved any other way. In the meantime, we can at least open spaces and times and relations outside the control of the authorities.

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A society without government might work on a small scale, but we live in a globalized world with a population of billions.

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Let no one speak of a problem of scale without attempting to expand the autonomous spaces and struggles that exist today. We will find out what is possible in practice, not in idle speculation. There are horizontal networks, such as peer-to-peer sharing, that span the whole globe; if there are not more, it is because most of them have been deliberately stamped out. The problem of scale is not that anarchy is impossible outside small groups, but that we are taking on the most powerful regimes in the history of the solar system.

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But why call yourself an anarchist? Doesn’t that just alienate people?

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It is not enough just to say you are in favor of freedom. Even dictators say as much. The same goes for saying you are against the state; there are “libertarians” who claim they want to abolish government but preserve the economic inequalities it imposes. Using the same language as those who have a completely different agenda can reinforce the effectiveness of their rhetoric while obscuring what sets your ideas apart.

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Words pose questions. We shouldn’t shrink from spelling out the questions we most want to ask. The word “anarchist” makes certain questions inescapable: What does it mean to live without rule? Which kinds of power are liberating, and which are oppressive? How do we take on the hierarchies of our day?

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If we hesitate to use the word “anarchist,” the authorities will use it as an accusation to delegitimize anyone who makes headway against them, and we will have no answer except to distance ourselves from the very things we want. It is better to legitimize the concept in advance, so other people can understand what we want and what the stakes are. As anathema as it may be to some, there is no shortcut when it comes to challenging the values of a society.

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At this point in history, anarchism is practically the only value system without a genocide on its record. As obedience and competition produce diminishing returns, many people are looking for another way to understand the world and express what they want. Indeed, as previously distinct power structures consolidate into a global web, resistance will have to be anarchist if it is to exist at all.

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It’s all right to protest peacefully, as long as you don’t do anything violent.

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From the perspective of a statist society, violence is simply illegal force. Inside this framework, most actions that perpetuate the prevailing hierarchies are not considered violent, while a wide range of actions that threaten those in power qualify as violence. This explains why it isn’t called violence when factories pump carcinogens into rivers or prisons incarcerate millions of people, while sabotaging a factory or resisting arrest are deemed violent. From this perspective, practically anything that endangers the ruling order is sure to be seen as violent.

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If the real problem with violence is that it is destructive, then what about destructive acts that prevent greater destruction from taking place? Or, if the problem with violence is that it is not consensual, what about nonconsensual actions that prevent coercion from occurring? Defending oneself against tyrants necessarily means violating their wishes—we can’t wait for the entire human race to reach consensus before we are entitled to act. Rather than letting the laws determine what forms of action are legitimate, we have to make these decisions for ourselves, using whatever power is at our disposal to maximize the freedom and wellbeing of all who share this world.

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It follows that the most important ethical and strategic question about any action is not whether it is violent, or legal, or coercive, but rather, how does it distribute power?

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Do you really think you can make a difference?

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We can’t know in advance what effect our actions will have. We can only find out by trying. That means we owe it to ourselves to hazard the experiment.

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Perhaps it appears that everyone around you is satisfied with the status quo, or at least that they have decided it is not worth trying to change it. But when you act, even if you act alone, you change the context in which others make decisions. This is why individual actions can sometimes set off massive chain reactions.

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It’s true that the revolutionaries of previous generations did not succeed in establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth, but imagine what kind of world we would live in if not for them. (Shoplifting doesn’t abolish property, either, but think how much poorer the poor of all times would have been if not for it.) Spaces of freedom aren’t just created by successful revolutions—they appear in every struggle against tyranny. Freedom is not something that waits beyond the horizon of the future; it is made up of all the moments throughout history when people have acted according to their consciences.

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But isn’t this utopian? Isn’t it better to be practical?

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We may never arrive at a condition of pure anarchy. But the real significance of any utopia is in the way it enables us to act in the present. Utopias take on flesh as the social currents they mobilize and steer. The purpose of a vision of the future is to anchor and orient you here and now. It is like a sextant you point towards the stars on the horizon in order to navigate by them. You may never leave the surface of the earth, but at least you know where you’re going.

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As for what is practical, that depends on what you want. If you want the current order to persist forever, or at least until it renders the planet uninhabitable, you should meekly propose minor reforms that might stabilize it. If you want to see fundamental changes, the only practical approach is to be clear about what you want from the outset. Often, the only way to make even a small change is to begin by aiming at a big one.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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Empezando

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Cuando decides tomar el destino en tus propias manos, es difícil saber por dónde empezar. Dejar tus responsabilidades en manos de otrxs es fácil: votar por un partido político, donar a organizaciones sin fines de lucro, pagar impuestos al gobierno, inscribirte en el ejército, matricularte en un colegio o una universidad, trabajar en una empresa, convertirte de una religión a otra. Prácticamente toda nuestra sociedad está dispuesta así. Puede ser abrumador intentar seguir tu propia agenda, y empezar nuevamente siendo un agente de la historia.

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Pero no estás empezando desde cero. Tienes talentos, anhelos y sueños a los que has renunciado porque pensabas que no había espacio para ellos en este mundo. El primer paso consiste en redescubrirlos. No estamos hablando sólo de una lucha negativa contra las restricciones externas, sino del proyecto positivo de materializar nuestro potencial en los términos que nosotrxs determinemos. Cualquier cosa que quieras hacer, cualquier cosa que pienses que debería hacerse, empiézala ahora.

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Lo quieras o no, ya estás involucradx en las luchas de nuestro tiempo. Todxs hemos nacido dentro de ellas. La cuestión no es si luchamos o no, la cuestión es cómo hacerlo. ¿Buscamos soluciones individuales o queremos encontrar una causa común? ¿Abordamos los problemas uno por uno, o los cortamos directamente de raíz? ¿Seguiremos invirtiendo recursos en las instituciones que nos traicionan, o apostaremos nuestra vida en algo diferente?

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El orden dominante puede parecer inamovible, pero el cambio es la única constante en el mundo. Se abrirán grietas de oportunidad cuando se hagan posibles las cosas que hoy no lo parecen. La mejor manera de prepararse para esos momentos es tener el hábito de actuar según tus propios términos, fuera de la lógica del régimen imperante. Cuando conozcas tu propia fuerza, podrás abrir esas grietas por ti mismx.

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Prepárate. Encuentra a las personas que te alienten a dar lo mejor de ti. Aprendan a cuidarse entre sí y a actuar juntxs con la mayor fuerza posible. Comparte. Discute sobre luchas en otras partes del mundo; saca tus propias conclusiones estratégicas para probarlas cuando surja la oportunidad. Construye redes, recursos y habilidades que puedan ser de ayuda en esos momentos de posibilidad. Dedícate a un proyecto a largo plazo que desafíe algún aspecto de la estructura del Poder. Donde sea posible, abre las líneas de fractura entre quienes prefieren el mundo tal como es y quienes quieren algo diferente. No trates de centralizar el poder, distribúyelo: una parte de tu potencial se encuentra dentro de cada una de las demás personas, y no podrás acceder a él sin su ayuda. El resultado de una revolución no está determinado por lxs revolucionarixs sino por el resto de las personas, cuando finalmente deciden de que lado estar y actúan en consecuencia.

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¡Ánimo! La parte más difícil de tomar tu destino en tus propias manos es el miedo a lo desconocido. No hay ninguna garantía, y lo que está en juego son las cosas que más aprecias en el mundo. Por eso es un alivio entregarte a los proyectos y valores de lxs demás, renunciando a los tuyos por adelantado para no arriesgarte a tu propio fracaso. Sin embargo, sería aceptar la derrota como algo inevitable. Si esa es la alternativa, quizás tenga sentido arriesgarse a saltar hacia lo desconocido. Del otro lado nos encontrarás a nosotrxs, lxs compas que tú mereces.

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Preguntas comunes sobre el anarquismo

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¿Pero, y la naturaleza humana? ¿No necesitamos leyes, policía, y otras instituciones y autoridades que nos protejan de las personas con malas intenciones?

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Si los seres humanos no son lo suficientemente “buenos” como para prescindir de la autoridad, ¿por qué deberíamos dársela?

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O, si la naturaleza humana es algo variable, ¿por qué tratamos de hacer que la gente sea obediente antes que responsable, servil antes que independiente, y cobarde en lugar de valiente?

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O, si la idea es que algunas personas siempre necesitarán estar bajo control, ¿cómo podemos estar segurxs de que lxs que gobiernan son las personas correctas? Sin olvidar que las mejores son las que más se resisten a mantener el poder y las peores, las más lo desean?

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La existencia del gobierno y otras jerarquías no nos protege; permite a la gente con malas intenciones hacer más daño del que podrían hacer sin ellas. La cuestión en sí es ahistórica: Las jerarquías no fueron inventadas por sociedades igualitarias que buscaban protegerse de los malhechores. Por el contrario, las jerarquías son el resultado de los malhechores ejerciendo y formalizando el poder (¿de dónde crees que vienen los reyes y la monarquía?). Cualquier generalización que podamos hacer sobre la “naturaleza humana” bajo esas condiciones seguramente será equivocada.

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Entonces, ¿qué harías con las personas que sólo se preocupan por sí mismxs, con aquellxs que están dispuestxs a hacerle cualquier cosa a lxs demás con tal de obtener un beneficio personal?

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¿Qué hacemos actualmente con esa gente? Se les emplea como policías, ejecutivxs, políticxs. Recompensamos su corrupción, su codicia y su egoísmo dándoles puestos de poder y gran responsabilidad. Rompamos con las recompensas por esos comportamientos y así lxs pocxs que persistan con estas actitudes podrán hacernos menos daño.

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Si no hubiera ningún gobierno, ¿qué harías si algún grupo aterrorizara a tu comunidad?

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Algunas personas insisten en que necesitan una pandilla para defenderse de otras pandillas. Esa es la lógica fraudulenta de las instituciones de seguridad. De hecho, nadie estará a salvo hasta que seamos capaces de defendernos de quien sea, sin tener que crear más grupos, pandillas o policías que concentren el poder.. Lo que necesitamos son redes de apoyo mutuo y auto-defensa que distribuyan el poder en lugar de concentrarlo.

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Pero en lugares donde el gobierno ha caído, como en Somalia o Camden, New Jersey a menudo vemos una violencia increíble.

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El Estado no es la única fuerza jerárquica. Cuando se derrumba, el resto de jerarquías que se desarrollaron bajo su protección entran en conflicto, junto con todos los grupos autoritarios que se desarrollaron en las condiciones de competencia y de escasez artificial que imponía el Estado. Sin él, todavía puede encontrarse sexismo, privilegios raciales, caudillos militares, etc. Y si hay algo peor que ser gobernadx por un único gobierno, es que varias organizaciones estén compitiendo por dominarte.

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Lxs anarquistas se oponen a todas las jerarquías, no sólo al Estado. Donde lxs estatistas buscan suprimir el conflicto imponiendo un monopolio de la violencia, lxs anarquistas buscan resolver esos conflictos deshaciendo todos los monopolios, con el fin de que haya un equilibrio horizontal. El problema en los territorios en conflicto no es que haya mucha anarquía, sino que hay muy poca.

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Qué pasa con la tragedia de los comunes?

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Supuestamente, la tragedia de los comunes consiste en que cuando se comparten cosas, hay personas egoístas que las destruyen o las toman para sí. ¡Eso describe con precisión el comportamiento de lxs colonizadorxs y las empresas! La pregunta —para todxs lxs demás— no es cómo deshacerse de los comunes, sino cómo defenderlos. La privatización no nos protege de la tragedia de perder las cosas que compartimos. Al contrario, la impone. La solución no es más egoísmo, sino una mejor colectivización.

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¿No es la igualdad algo imposible, exceptuando la igualdad ante la ley?

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Abolir las jerarquías no implica forzar la uniformidad en las personas. Sólo un Estado verdaderamente invasivo podría obligar a todxs a ser exactamente iguales, como en la historia de Harrison Bergeron. Al contrario, el punto es acabar con todos los mecanismos artificiales que imponen desbalances de poder. Si el poder se dispersara en muchas formas diferentes, en lugar de concentrarse en unas pocas formas “universales”, cualquier asimetría en las capacidades no le daría a nadie una ventaja sistemática sobre lxs demás.

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En cuanto a la igualdad ante la ley, mientras haya libros de leyes, cortes de justicia y oficiales de policía, no habrá igualdad. Todas estas instituciones crean desequilibrios de poder: entre quienes legislan y quienes son gobernadxs, entre lxs jueces y lxs juzgadxs, entre lxs ejecutorxs de la ley y sus víctimas. Dar a ciertas personas el poder sobre otras no contribuye en nada a la igualdad. Sólo las relaciones voluntarias entre seres libres pueden generar algo como la igualdad.

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Pero si derrocamos al gobierno sin ofrecer ninguna alternativa para sustituirlo, ¿qué podríamos hacer para impedir que algo realmente malo trate de llenar ese vacío de poder?

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Ese es el mantra de quienes están juntando coraje para ser realmente malos también. Nos dicen que están allí para protegernos de otros más despiadados, los cuales a menudo nos dicen exactamente lo mismo.

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Si fuéramos lo suficientemente fuertes como para derrocar un gobierno, tendríamos la fuerza necesaria para evitar el ascenso de otro –siempre y cuando no seamos engañadxs para seguir a una nueva autoridad–. Lo que debería desplazar al gobierno no es otra estructura de poder formal, sino relaciones cooperativas que puedan solventar nuestras necesidades, manteniendo a raya a los nuevos aspirantes a gobernar.

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Desde el punto de vista del presente, nadie puede imaginar la creación de una sociedad sin Estado, a pesar de que muchos de los problemas que enfrentamos no pueden ser resueltos de ninguna otra forma. Mientras tanto, podemos al menos crear espacios, momentos y relaciones fuera del control de las autoridades.

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Una sociedad sin gobierno podría funcionar a pequeña escala. El problema es que vivimos en un mundo globalizado con una población de miles de millones.

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Que nadie hable de un problema de escalas sin intentar ampliar los espacios autónomos y las luchas que existen en la actualidad.

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Descubrimos lo que es posible en la práctica, no en la especulación ociosa. Hay redes horizontales, como las redes peer-to-peer, que abarcan todo el planeta; si no hay más, es porque la mayoría han sido aniquiladas deliberadamente. El verdadero problema de escala no es que la anarquía sea imposible fuera de grupos pequeños, sino que estamos compitiendo contra los regímenes más poderosos en la historia del sistema solar.

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¿Porque te autodenominas anarquista? ¿Con eso no logras sólo alejar a las personas?

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No es suficiente tan sólo decir que estás a favor de la libertad. Incluso los dictadores lo dicen. Tampoco es suficiente decir que estás en contra del Estado; hay “libertarixs” que afirman querer abolir el gobierno, pero preservando las desigualdades económicas que éste impone. Utilizar el mismo lenguaje que quienes tienen agendas e intereses completamente diferentes puede reforzar la eficacia de su retórica, y a la vez ocultar lo que diferencia sus ideas de las nuestras.

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Las palabras plantean preguntas. No debemos tener miedo de exponer las preguntas que más nos interesa plantear. La palabra “anarquista” genera ciertas preguntas inevitables, ¿qué significa vivir sin reglas? ¿qué te empodera, qué te oprime? ¿qué tipos de poder son liberadores y cuáles opresivos? ¿cómo actuar ante las jerarquías que nos oprimen hoy?

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Si dudamos en usar la palabra “anarquista”, las autoridades la utilizarán como una forma de deslegitimar a cualquiera que esté en su contra, y no tendremos otra respuesta que la de distanciarnos de las cosas que más queremos. Es mejor legitimar el concepto de antemano, para que otras personas puedan entender lo que queremos y qué es lo que está en juego. Por más reprobable que sea para algunxs, no hay ningún atajo cuando se trata de desafiar los valores de una sociedad.

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En este punto de la historia, el anarquismo es prácticamente el único sistema de valores que no registra genocidios en su haber. Al mismo tiempo que la obediencia y la competencia demuestran cada vez más su ineficacia e insuficiencia, muchxs están buscando otras formas de entender el mundo y expresar lo que quieren. De hecho, mientras las estructuras de poder que antes estaban separadas ahora se están consolidando en una red mundial, la resistencia deberá ser anarquista para poder mantenerse.

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No hay problema con protestar pacíficamente, siempre y cuando no hagas nada violento.

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Desde la perspectiva de una sociedad estatista, violencia no es más que fuerza ilegal. Dentro de este marco, la mayoría de acciones que perpetúan las jerarquías en el Poder no son consideradas violentas, mientras que una amplia gama de acciones que son una amenaza para quienes pertenecen a ellas sí son clasificadas como violencia. Esto explica por qué no se le llama violencia a cuando las fábricas vierten sustancias cancerígenas en los ríos o al encarcelamiento de millones de personas en prisiones, mientras que el sabotaje a una fábrica, o resistirse a un arresto, sí se consideran acciones violentas. Desde esta perspectiva, prácticamente cualquier cosa que ponga en peligro el orden dominante, con seguridad será vista como violenta.

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Si el verdadero problema de la violencia es que es destructiva, entonces ¿qué pasa con los actos destructivos que puedan prevenir una destrucción mayor? O si el problema con la violencia es que no es consensuada ¿qué pasa con las acciones no consensuadas que impiden la coerción? Defenderse contra los tiranos implica necesariamente violar sus deseos. No podemos esperar a que toda la humanidad llegue a un consenso para tener el derecho de actuar. En lugar de dejar que las leyes determinen qué formas de acción son legítimas, debemos determinarlo nosotrxs mismxs utilizando cualquier medio a nuestra disposición para maximizar la libertad y el buenvivir de todos los seres que compartimos este mundo.

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En definitiva, la cuestión ética y estratégica más importante para cualquier acción no es si esta es violenta o legal, lo importante es en qué medida estas acciónes distribuyen el poder.

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¿De verdad crees que puedes hacer la diferencia?

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No podemos saber de antemano qué efecto tendrán nuestras acciones. Sólo podremos averiguarlo llevándolas a cabo. Eso significa que tenemos el deber de arriesgarnos a experimentar.

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Quizás parezca que todxs a tu alrededor están satisfechxs con el status quo, o al menos que han decidido que no vale la pena tratar de cambiarlo. Pero cuando actúas, incluso si lo haces solx, cambias el contexto en el cual otrxs toman decisiones. Es por eso que a veces las acciones individuales pueden provocar enormes reacciones en cadena.

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Es cierto que lxs revolucionarixs de las generaciones pasadas no tuvieron éxito construyendo el reino de los cielos en la tierra, ¿pero te imaginas en qué clase de mundo viviríamos de no ser por ellxs? (Si bien expropiar en supermercados no va a abolir la propiedad privada, piensa cuánto más pobres estarían lxs pobres de no ser por prácticas como esta.)

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Los espacios libres no sólo son creados tras revoluciones exitosas: aparecen en cada lucha contra el Poder. La libertad no es algo que espera más allá de los horizontes del futuro; se compone de todos los momentos a lo largo de la historia en que la gente ha actuado acorde a su conciencia.

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¿Pero no es eso utópico? ¿No es mejor ser prácticxs?

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Quizás nunca lleguemos a una condición de anarquía pura. Pero la importancia real de cualquier utopía está en la forma en que nos permite actuar en el presente. Las utopías se vuelven carne en las corrientes sociales que éstas guían y movilizan. El propósito de una visión del futuro es que pueda anclarte y orientarte en el aquí y ahora.

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Al igual que un astrolabio, la utopía apunta hacia las estrellas en el horizonte con el fin de navegar a través de ellas. Quizás nunca puedas dejar la superficie de la tierra, pero al menos sabes adónde vas.

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En cuanto a lo que es práctico o no, eso depende de lo que quieras lograr. Si lo que quieres es que el orden actual persista para siempre, o al menos hasta que el planeta sea inhabitable, podrías proponer dócilmente algunas reformas para estabilizarlo. Si lo que quieres es un cambio radical, el único enfoque práctico posible es ser claro con lo que quieres desde el principio. A menudo, la única manera de producir incluso el cambio más pequeño, es apuntar a uno más grande.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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Composed by comrades nearby in the Balkans, through repeated visits to Bosnia and ongoing dialogue with participants in the 2014 uprising, this text is part of a series exploring an anarchist analysis of democracy. It picks up where our previous coverage of the Bosnian uprising left off.

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In February 2014, two decades after the war that left Bosnia devastated and divided into three ethnic regions, the country erupted in flames again. This time, it was not ethnic strife, but the rage of people uniting against politicians. For years, these politicians had stirred up ethnic divisions to distract them while systematically looting the country. The result was intense poverty: unemployment was at 44 percent in 2014, and up to 60 percent among the young.

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People flooded into the streets. Beating back the police, they burned the parliament and municipal buildings. In the turmoil of the protests, panicked politicians stole money from the national treasury. In Mostar, a city divided between Muslims and Catholics, several politicians sent their families into Croatia through the nearby border. Protests under the slogans “Freedom is my nation” and “Let’s fire all the politicians” drew crowds in 33 cities. People gathered to experiment with direct democracy in assemblies of up to a thousand—something that had not been seen on such a scale in any ex-Yugoslavian country since the last Balkan wars.¹¹1. The 2014 uprising didn’t appear out of thin air. In 2006, a movement called Dosta (Enough) grew from a small internet forum into weekly meetings in the central square in Sarajevo, getting bigger every week and addressing economic and social issues through discussions that eventually gave rise to protests. As the organizational structure of Dosta spread into different cities, it remained politically diverse. Several of the most active participants in the plenums in Sarajevo had been radicalized in the Dosta movement. Outside Bosnia, partisans of direct democracy expressed considerable enthusiasm about what some of them called the Bosnian Spring.

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There were many inspiring things about the 2014 uprising—the rejection of nationalism and representative de\u0010mocracy, the visibility of women protesting in what was otherwise still a traditional society, the focus on social and economic struggles rather than ethnic hatred. Many people from all sectors of society were radicalized through the protests.

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However, the uprising abated just as the plenums were getting off the ground. At the time, many saw the plenums as the next step after the riots: once the police had been defeated and the politicians put on the defensive, it was time for people to get together and figure out what they wanted instead. Yet a few months later, the government had reasserted control, the plenums had lost all their leverage, and it was back to business as usual.

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What defeated the uprising? Was it repression in the streets, or pacification in the plenums? Was it the division between riot and plenum? Or would it have died anyway?

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“Where were you when we were fighting on the streets?” the old worker demanded of the young people who had facilitated the plenums six months prior. He was still protesting in front of the parliament in Sarajevo every day—only now, just like before the uprising, he and his friends were on their own.

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Angry and disillusioned in Bosnia.

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February 7, 2014: Protesters burning documents in front of a burning government building in Tuzla. The graffiti reads “death to nationalism” and “all politicians must go.”

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The Plenum vs. the Street

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At the beginning, the plenums were an organic expression of the struggle on the streets. Like the protests, they drew people who had never participated in such struggles before. Some people did not feel comfortable in the clashes, yet wanted to speak out about their anger, or to articulate their desires for the future. They came together with demonstrators to form directly democratic assemblies, dubbed plenums.

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The plenums served many as a kind of collective therapy. They offered a common space in which people could be heard: for the first time in their lives, they felt that their opinions mattered. They spoke about the war, about post-traumatic stress, about their living conditions, about their hatred of the system that had humiliated them to such an extent that they no longer felt like human beings. “Struggle gave us our dignity back,” many people said.

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The procedures of the plenums were intended to keep power horizontal: roles rotated between participants, speakers were limited to a few minutes each, the facilitation was intended to foster inclusiveness and egalitarianism. In some cases, this served to keep the plenums a diverse space. Elsewhere, those who had more formal education were more comfortable in the discussions, as they were used to articulating themselves in a certain public discourse; in some of the plenums, influence accrued in the hands of intellectuals like Asim Mujkić, a professor of political science who repeatedly represented the Sarajevo plenum in the media. Meanwhile, some people who had participated in the demonstrations did not come to the plenums; others came at first, then stopped coming. Some apparently trusted the plenums to represent their needs, whether they attended or not. Others likely resented the idea that anyone was speaking in their name.

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Just as attendance at the plenums was dying down, the police were quietly reestablishing control of the streets. The city governments set back up in smaller offices outside the burned buildings.

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“What about the people who burned the buildings?” I asked. “Did they participate in the plenums here in Tuzla?”

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“No,” she answered, “They didn’t. They sent a representative to the first plenum, before things really got going. He said that if the government didn’t change its tune, they were going to burn the buildings. But after that, none of them came to the plenums.”

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I could understand why people who had just burnt down the headquarters of the government would be hesitant to show up to public meetings. Indeed, not long after everything died down, the police began doling out terrorism charges. At the same time, what kind of sense does it make to burn down the offices of the government, and then present petitions to them? It seemed to me that the revolt was doomed from the moment that a separation appeared between fighting the old order and seeking a new one.

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February, 2014: The authorities lose control.

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Institutions vs. Tools

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The plenum facilitators and the most active organizers of working groups, who had started their work in an honest attempt to spread the struggle into other spheres of life, found themselves in a position of de facto authority. They were the ones setting the agenda and determining the course of discussions; they became the names and faces of the uprising. It was up to them, it seemed, to identify, express, and prioritize the demands that had driven people to rise up. Most of these organizers never wanted that kind of power—but they wanted the uprising to succeed in changing Bosnian society, and they believed that the plenums were essential to this.

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Many of the facilitators were committed to the principles of direct democracy. They trusted that adhering to directly democratic procedures in the assemblies would stave off power imbalances and bureaucracy. But already, in this hope, a subtle shift had taken place: rather than vesting legitimacy in the needs and desires of the participants in the uprising, they were beginning to vest it in the plenums as institutions. Instead of serving as one tool among many with which to solve problems and meet needs, the plenums were becoming an end unto themselves.

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As the demonstrations came to an end, the plenums ceased serving as a tool to reinforce the actions people took in the streets. More and more, they took on the role of a traditional protest organization, a sort of watchdog monitoring the government. Only without teeth.

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“We didn’t mean to end up in that situation,” said one of the former facilitators of the Sarajevo plenums. “We wanted to help, but not to have so much control over the process. It wasn’t clear to us at the time that it was happening that way.”

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February 14, 2014: A plenum in Sarajevo demands the establishment of a “nonparty expert government.”

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Presenting Demands vs. Building a Common Language of Struggle

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The riots of spring 2014 gave Bosnian politicians a scare for the first time in many years. As soon as they felt safe again, they retaliated on several fronts. Hoping to discredit protesters in the media, they compared burning the parliament in Sarajevo to Serbian aggression during the siege; this set the stage for them to press terrorism charges later. At the same time, they attempted to channel the movement back into conventional politics, making it less radical, less unpredictable, less uncontrollable. Unfortunately, the plenums turned out to be conducive to this effort.

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The Bosnian uprising gave voice to thousands of individual desires, ideas, and needs. But rather than connecting these in a common language of struggle that could preserve what was unique in each while creating a platform for people to act in concert, the consensus-building process of the plenums served to reduce this diversity of voices to a few basic demands.

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In an attempt to strengthen the leverage of the plenums, the plenums of various cities made contact and undertook to formulate a list of common demands. Working groups that consisted of fewer and fewer people worked through thousands of demands, joining some together, interpreting and adjusting others, discarding some altogether. It took them until April 9, two months after the riots, to present the common demands of all the plenums to the government at a symbolic protest in Sarajevo.

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They received no response. By the time the plenums had reduced everyone’s rage to a few demands, the government did not need to care anymore. This was the last nail in the coffin of the uprising.

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“When you came here from Slovenia and told us that the movement would die in the assemblies,” he said, “I didn’t believe you. But it happened just the way you said it would.”

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February 21, 2014: Participants in the Sarajevo plenum listen to spokespeople from the Fojnica, Konjic, and Mostar plenums.

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March, 2014: The plenum continues meeting in Sarajevo.

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Government vs. Self-Organization

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In Tuzla, where the uprising started, the riots had forced the prime minister of the canton to resign. The plenum then demanded that a non-affiliated provisional government be formed until the regular elections. They expected this government to report to the plenum every week. Indeed, they got a provisional government with a professor for prime minister, accompanied by a few ministers who had not been much involved in politics before. Yet it soon turned out that not only were many of these new politicians connected to the established political parties, they were also involved in corruption, which had been one of the immediate causes of the uprising in the first place. It didn’t take long for the newly elected politicians to stop communicating with the plenum and its committees. There were new faces in the government, but the elite had preserved its power.

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The second-to-last entry on plenumsa.org, the website of the Sarajevo plenum, is about responding to the floods that ravaged Bosnia in May 2014.²²2. The very last post on plenumsa.org (June 12, 2014) is an interview with a US-based academic about Occupy and direct democracy. Self-organized relief efforts by the participants of plenums were essential to helping many people to weather this disaster, while the government did precious little to help. Yet after that, these sites of self-organization were abandoned. The following October, the elections brought one of the conservative parties back to power in Tuzla—the party rumored to have been pulling the strings of the provisional government all along.

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And the leader of this new government? A former minister of the interior, who had been in charge of the police.

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“I have one enemy. You are not my enemy, the government is my enemy,” the old man said, addressing his old comrades from the plenums. “We said everything we had to say to the enemy when we burned the parliament.”

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The floods that ravaged Bosnia in May 2014.

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Democracy vs. Freedom

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Over the past few years, there have been several movements in Bosnia, each of them going a bit further than the last. Each of these movements has brought new people into the streets and then subsided—but the question is what happens next. Do these people continue to develop their capacity to act autonomously, building strength from uprising to uprising? Or do they end up joining the ranks of the political parties?

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Basing social struggles on the demand for more democracy—whether representative or direct—is especially seductive in Bosnia, where people feel that the Dayton agreement paralyzed the country by enforcing divisions along ethnic lines throughout the administration and daily life. Many people in Bosnia think that the solution to all their problems would be to create a functional, unified state no longer divided according to the Dayton treaty, incorporating everyone from the three “nations” as fellow citizens. They look approvingly to the countries of northern and western Europe as a model for their own. Even many who consider themselves radicals understand direct democracy as a means to this end, rather than a way of restructuring society from the ground up. This may explain why it was such a short step from the direct democracy of the plenums back to the (barely) representative democracy of the government. When we legitimize our struggles by means of the rhetoric of democracy, it opens the door for the partisans of the status quo to justify the return to normal on the same grounds. Order must be restored so there can be proper elections!

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In fact, the same unemployment, poverty, and ethnic strife that have inflicted so much suffering in Bosnia are spreading all around Europe, from Greece to Finland. Modernizing the government and purging it of “corruption” is not enough to turn a country into a wealthy social democracy; in a capitalist world, there will never be enough wealth to go around. If we limit ourselves to attempting to reform governments—even if that means replacing them with networks of plenums intended to fulfill the same functions of governing—we will never get to the root of the problem. What would it mean to look at the uprising and the plenums as steps towards a totally different social order, rather than a means to revitalize this one?

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Perhaps if the plenums had served as spaces for coordinating ongoing action, they could have propelled the uprising further, organizing new attacks to keep the authorities at bay and generating new forms of life outside the capitalist economy. Once the discussions in the plenums became abstract, it was inevitable that regardless of the participants’ and facilitators’ intentions they would be reduced to delegating, to representing, to petitioning. As “direct” as the plenums aspired to be, they ended up treating the uprising as an expression of desires that had to be represented, not as a space where those desires could be fulfilled. Once the participants understood the uprising that way, it was only natural to address those desires to the government—the proper representational body—in the form of demands. Those demands could only strengthen the government, fatally weakening the plenums.

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The Bosnian uprising of 2014 is just one example out of a long line of experiments with assemblies as a tool of revolt. It appears that the assembly cannot serve as a place for envisioning the future and then looking around for some other political body to institute it. That political body will always be the state, which has no need of the assembly. Likewise, the assembly must not become an institution with its own procedures that are regarded as legitimate in and of themselves—if it does, then at best, it will become the state. To play a part in liberation, the assembly has to be a tool via which power is exercised directly according to a different logic, a logic that does not concentrate it but disperses it, promoting the autonomy and freedom of the participants.

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“This had to happen,” emphasized the young mother in hijab, her voice trembling with emotion, as she gestured at the burnt-out shell of the government headquarters in Tuzla. “The buildings had to burn. The uprising was the best thing that ever happened in my life. I hope it will happen again. It has to.”

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Graffiti in Bosnia.

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Don’t turn back: the burnt government building in Tuzla after the uprising.

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Occupations and the Democracy of Direct Action

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“I am a part of this because I think direct democracy is better than the order we know now. With direct democracy, if you want something, you say it, find friends to help you, and you do it.”

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In 2011, new, localized movements of occupation were seizing the squares all across the world. In Spain, people came out to the streets in the movement later known as 15M; in the US, it was known as Occupy. In Slovenia, as in many other parts of Europe, the first occupation started out as a protest against financial capitalism on October 15, 2011. Consequently, in Ljubljana, the movement came to be known as 15O. The occupation of the square in front of the stock exchange lasted for six months.

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This occupation brought out into the open all the divisions in society that are otherwise hidden. Poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, mental health problems, the misery of everyday life under capitalism—all of these became visible to everyone, so they could not be ignored as a matter of personal failure any longer. Unlike in some other places, where the central question of the Occupy movement was a demand for real democracy, 15O was not centered (merely) on that; rather, it attacked financialization, capitalism, precarity, austerity, total institutions, and representational politics. No topic was too small to discuss; for many, the camp and the assemblies became a platform to discuss if not organize for every political activity in the city. Particularly in the first weeks of the occupation, the camping was just one of many playful direct actions taking place all around the city.

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The assembly was the center of the occupied camp. In response to the burden of being talked at about what ought to be done, a problem that correlated with a lack of responsibility, participants in the movement developed the concept of “democracy of direct action” (DDA). DDA basically meant that whoever proposed something should also participate in it. In that sense, DDA also contributed to an increase in autonomous action rather than focusing on democratic decision-making processes within the assembly. As a result, the culture that developed in the movement was oriented towards action, mostly in the form of efforts to communicate with the general public through various kinds of performance.

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DDA had disadvantages as well. As often happens in a variety of structures, it (unreflectively) favored those who were articulate enough to attract more people to their initiatives. The multiplicity of actions carried out by a relatively small number of participants in the movement also meant that energy was widely dispersed, efforts were often not interlinked, and overextended comrades often struggled with burnout. Along with the distribution of political projects among a variety of working groups, DDA helped to create several different sites of decision-making; yet it did not generate a space of encounter in which people came together for mutual learning to create a meaningful force beyond direct democracy.

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The daily assemblies became focused on camp issues, and there were fewer and fewer participants, while the monthly assemblies focused more on the political content of the movement. Those who were involved in the working groups but not sleeping in the camp eventually felt alienated by it. In the end, 15O ended in exhaustion and frustration. Many were driven into isolation and depression.

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However, 15O taught us several important lessons. First, despite all the talk about direct democracy as a positive aspect of the Occupy movements, some participants in 15O realized very soon—from practical experience—that the concentration of legitimacy in a single site of decision-making was not productive. Does it make sense to understand what was happening in the occupation in front of the stock exchange as a directly democratic movement, when all the groundbreaking and exciting things developed outside of consensus-based directly democratic procedures? Perhaps if we had set out to make the question of decentralized action central to our thinking, we could have circumvented all the problems that resulted from focusing on the assembly as the central space for coming together. If we hadn’t informally institutionalized the practice of assemblies, perhaps people would have been more capable of identifying the moment when the movement had the potential to make a big impact, and, later, identifying that it had been successfully marginalized. Perhaps we would have been more capable of asking ourselves which tactics were advancing our radical agendas, and which were contributing to self-neutralization because we were maintaining them when we should have already shifted to another approach.

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The occupation in front of the Stock Exchange at the beginning of the 15O movement in October 2011. Borza, “Stock Exchange,” has been changed to Bojza, “struggle for.”

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The Limitations of Assemblies in the Student Movement

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“If they don’t meet our demands, we can always be more radical and occupy more space in the university later. For now, let’s just show our strength.”

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Ljubljana, November 2011. On one side of town, tents have occupied the square in front of the stock exchange for a month and a half. On the other side of town, students are packed into one of the biggest lecture rooms in the Faculty of Arts. The assembly has only one item on the agenda: whether to occupy the faculty to prevent the privatization of higher education.

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Some of us arrived ready to block the production of knowledge in the entire building, in hopes that such a radical act would open up the space and shake up the power relations in the university. We thought it would be better for the movement to be evicted after three days, still ready to keep fighting, than to exhaust itself in a limited occupation that did not disrupt the status quo of the university, let alone society at large. Others assumed that it would be enough to occupy a few classrooms and open negotiations with the authorities. After hours of discussion, a few professors and student leaders persuaded the majority of people to vote against a full blockade.

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For those of us who were left in the minority—whether or not we wanted to vote in first place—the choice was tough. We thought about whether to go against the decision of the assembly and occupy the entire building on our own, at the risk of alienating ourselves from the others. In the end, we went along with the decision of the assembly. Looking back, we should probably have acted differently.

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The partial occupation lasted for a few months. At first, the university administration was still trying to negotiate, not knowing how far the protests might go. But they soon realized they did not need to comply with any of the demands. The occupiers even gave up some of the classrooms themselves, feeling that they were not capable of filling them with their own self-organized study projects. Instead of the end of the occupation opening a wider conflict in society or drawing more people into the struggle, it left the student movement exhausted and scattered, limited to negotiating with the school authorities through the existing system of representation. There has not been any occupation in any university in Slovenia since.

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And anarchists? We tried to participate in a self-organized study process, but mostly it felt like we were talking to ourselves. It took months of frustration to realize that in accepting the norms of democratic decision-making, we had failed to push the moment further, missing the chance to open up productive conflicts—within the movement, inside the university, and in society as a whole. At the least, we could have started a much-needed discussion about which tactics the movement should be using, and how to decide which tactics were legitimate. But instead of setting our own agenda, we had accepted others’ priorities and lost ourselves in the process. The problem was not the assembly itself, but rather that this body was understood as the only place of decision-making, so no action outside of it seemed legitimate—even to us.

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The meeting at the beginning of the occupation of the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana in November 2011

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Building Institutions or Opening up Space?

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“By organizing assemblies, we wish to open new spaces of articulation of common power, that will be growing as we exchange experiences, knowledge, and opinions in order to build a common space of equality, freedom, and solidarity.” -invitation to the first “Open Uprising Assembly” in Ljubljana, late December 2012.

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A few months after the end of 15O, the uprising started. But no one hurried to convene assemblies. The first few weeks of activity in Ljubljana saw a variety of decentralized actions, protests, discussions, and meetings. When it became clear that certain organized groups within the uprising were trying to determine and represent the movement’s demands in order to steer the movement in a centralized and predictable direction, other participants introduced assemblies as a tool to prevent centralization and unification, rather than as a method for being “directly democratic.” By gathering many different participants into one place, the assembly created an infrastructure in which every attempt to establish hierarchies would be visible to everyone and therefore questioned and rejected.

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From the beginning, the “Uprising Open Assembly” was positioned as only one of several different ways of coordinating, communicating, and building common power by exchanging experience and knowledge. The aim was to create a space of convergence and encounter, but never to let it become the sole place for making decisions for the uprising as a whole. This was a space for people who wanted to do similar things to find each other, and to discuss problematic occurrences—for instance, it was the platform in which people attacked nationalism.

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One of the biggest achievements of those assemblies was that they served to communicate radical approaches to people who were not yet using them. The value of a diversity of tactics gained recognition in the assemblies; as a result of the discussions, many participants committed themselves to solidarity with all forms of protest. During the first few protests, some people had actively turned over demonstrators dressed in black to the police; towards the end of the uprising, when a few protesters were arrested, hundreds of people ran to the police station and blocked it until they were released.

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Although the uprising maintained its intensity for half a year, only a few assemblies took place in Ljubljana during that period. Based on our negative experiences from the two preceding movements, we felt that if the idea was for the assembly to be a tool for the movement rather than an end in itself, it was important to know when to drop it. When fewer people were showing up on the streets, it became obvious that we needed to move on, not to try to recreate a situation that had already passed. At the point when the assemblies could have become just a space of nostalgic behavior, we refused to call for another; instead, we started thinking about where a new point of conflict might emerge, and how to organize around it.

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Maribor had a different experience. Neighborhood assemblies covering roughly half of the city are still happening there today, in 2016, more than three years after the end of uprising. They mostly focus on self-organizing daily life in different city neighborhoods. Some speculate that the assemblies continued in Maribor but not in Ljubljana because there was a greater need for practical self-organization in a city laid waste by de-industrialization. Others have argued that the assemblies have continued in Maribor because one of the groups there made it a priority to maintain them as their primary project. The open question here is whether such assemblies can produce radical content—or is it enough that they are using a supposedly radical form? What if the people participating in the neighborhood assemblies use them to pursue reactionary goals? Does it make sense to promote radical values along with the tactic of assembly? Is it enough to open up space?

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In the uprising, despite going against and beyond the concepts of direct democracy in our practices, we were still using that term to describe many of our actions. This became a problem—not so much in the assemblies themselves, but in connection with other outcomes of the uprising. While it seemed that anarchists and anti-authoritarian ideas were at the forefront of the diverse actions on the ground, the representation of the uprising to the public fell to people who later formed a political party along the lines of Syriza, promising more direct democracy in the parliament and a productive relationship with social movements. Would they have been able to pull this off if we had not helped promote the language of direct democracy?

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The uprising in Maribor, December 3, 2012.

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Against and Beyond (Direct) Democracy

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When the uprising was dying, people wondered how to transmit the connections we’d built in the streets into our everyday lives. In one of the assemblies in Ljubljana, people formed a working group to organize in the neighborhoods, hoping to radicalize people there by setting up a structure in which people could self-organize.

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We never wanted to be the professional organizers of the resistance, so we only organized in the neighborhoods where we lived; likewise, we intended to rotate roles as much as possible. During the peak of the uprising, when the frequency of actions was so overwhelming that it was hard to keep track of them all, it had been easy enough to utilize the assembly as a tool without it becoming an end in itself. This became much harder when there was no one on the streets and the assemblies were the only form of action in the neighborhoods. Despite good turnouts at the neighborhood assemblies, we soon realized that people were relying on us to organize and facilitate the meetings. All of the working groups wanted us to be involved, to such an extent that we felt that it was no longer a self-organized process. We realized that it was better not to have assemblies at all than to have them organized by a few. We didn’t want to accept a position of authority in this way.

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For the city government, however, this was not an obstacle. When we heard that a neighborhood where we were not organizing had also started to hold assemblies, at first we thought that we were finally seeing authentic self-organization. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an intervention orchestrated by the city government through an NGO. They were financing people to work on the project of “self-organization.” The city government had coopted the framework of direct democracy, using it as a tool to neutralize any potential for dissent that might emerge from that neighborhood.

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When the state is sponsoring direct democracy, we have to ask ourselves how we could prevent this kind of cooptation. Is it a good idea to make movements depend on a tool that is so easily turned against them? What if the problem is not that our assemblies need to be improved, but that there is nothing inherent in direct democracy that differentiates it from the state? When people began to succeed in overthrowing monarchies, the state persisted through the introduction of representative democracy. All its institutions and functions remain intact, with the sole difference that now they are administered by elected representatives rather than hereditary sovereigns. Could direct democracy be a new version of this compromise, once again preserving the uneven distribution of power while giving us the illusion of self-determination?

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And in this situation, where we still need to create spaces of encounter, opportunities to engage in open discussion and realize our full potential through our intersections with one another—will the assembly continue to play a part in this process? Probably. But we may have to approach it differently, not understanding it as a tool of direct democracy but rather as a platform for connecting and coordinating autonomous actions and groups. The most recent example of this as of mid–2016 is the Anti-Racist Front, a space for individuals and groups active in migrant struggles.

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This is our conclusion coming out of several years of experimentation with direct democracy in Slovenia: we are tentatively retaining the forms, but we need to ditch the discourse.

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March in Ljubljana during the uprising, December 2012.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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This is part of a series expressing an anarchist critique of democracy.

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Democracy is the most universal political ideal of our day. George Bush invoked it to justify invading Iraq; Obama congratulated the rebels of Tahrir Square for bringing it to Egypt; Occupy Wall Street claimed to have distilled its pure form. From the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea to the autonomous region of Rojava, practically every government and popular movement calls itself democratic.

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And what’s the cure for the problems with democracy? Everyone agrees: more democracy. Since the turn of the century, we’ve seen a spate of new movements promising to deliver real democracy, in contrast to ostensibly democratic institutions that they describe as exclusive, coercive, and alienating.

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Is there a common thread that links all these different kinds of democracy? Which of them is the real one? Can any of them deliver the inclusivity and freedom we associate with the word?

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Impelled by our own experiences in directly democratic movements, we’ve returned to these questions. Our conclusion is that the dramatic imbalances in economic and political power that have driven people into the streets from New York City to Sarajevo are not incidental defects in specific democracies, but structural features dating back to the origins of democracy itself; they appear in practically every example of democratic government through the ages. Representative democracy preserved all the bureaucratic apparatus that was originally invented to serve kings; direct democracy tends to recreate it on a smaller scale, even outside the formal structures of the state. Democracy is not the same as self-determination.

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To be sure, many good things are regularly described as democratic. This is not an argument against discussions, collectives, assemblies, networks, federations, or working with people you don’t always agree with. The argument, rather, is that when we engage in those practices, if we understand what we are doing as democracy—as a form of participatory government rather than a collective practice of freedom—then sooner or later, we will recreate all the problems associated with less democratic forms of government. This goes for representative democracy and direct democracy alike, and even for consensus process.

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Rather than championing democratic procedures as an end in themselves, then, let’s return to the values that drew us to democracy in the first place: egalitarianism, inclusivity, the idea that each person should control her own destiny. If democracy is not the most effective way to actualize these, what is?

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As fiercer and fiercer struggles rock today’s democracies, the stakes of this discussion keep getting higher. If we go on trying to replace the prevailing order with a more participatory version of the same thing, we’ll keep ending up right back where we started, and others who share our disillusionment will gravitate towards more authoritarian alternatives. We need a framework that can fulfill the promises democracy has betrayed.

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In the following text, we examine the common threads that connect different forms of democracy, trace the development of democracy from its classical origins to its contemporary representative, direct, and consensus-based variants, and evaluate how democratic discourse and procedures serve the social movements that adopt them. Along the way, we outline what it would mean to seek freedom directly rather than through democratic rule.

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This project is the result of years of transcontinental dialogue. To complement it, we are publishing case studies from participants in movements that have been promoted as models of direct democracy: 15M in Spain (2011), the occupation of Syntagma Square in Greece (2011), Occupy in the United States (2011–2012), the Slovenian uprising (2012–2013), the plenums in Bosnia (2014), and the Rojava revolution (2012–2016).

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What Is Democracy?

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What is democracy, exactly? Most of the textbook definitions have to do with majority rule or government by elected representatives. On the other hand, a few radicals have argued that “real” democracy only takes place outside and against the state’s monopoly on power. Should we understand democracy as a set of decision-making procedures with a specific history, or as a general aspiration to egalitarian, inclusive, and participatory politics?

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To pin down the object of our critique, let’s start with the term itself. The word democracy derives from the ancient Greek dēmokratía, from dêmos “people” and krátos “power.” This formulation of rule by the people, which has resurfaced in Latin America as poder popular, begs the question: which people? And what kind of power?

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These root words, demos and kratos, suggest two common denominators of all democracy: a way of determining who participates in the decision-making, and a way of enforcing decisions. Citizenship, in other words, and policing. These are the essentials of democracy; they are what make it a form of government. Anything short of that is more properly described as anarchy—the absence of government, from the Greek an- “without” and arkhos “ruler.”

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Common denominators of democracy:

a way of determining who participates in making decisions
(demos)

a way of enforcing decisions
(kratos)

a space of legitimate decision-making
(polis)

and the resources that sustain it
(oikos)

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Who qualifies as demos? Some have argued that etymologically, demos never meant all people, but only particular social classes. Even as its partisans have trumpeted its supposed inclusivity, in practice democracy has always demanded a way of distinguishing between included and excluded. That could be status in the legislature, voting rights, citizenship, membership, race, gender, age, or participation in street assemblies; but in every form of democracy, for there to be legitimate decisions, there have to be formal conditions of legitimacy, and a defined group of people who meet them.

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In this regard, democracy institutionalizes the provincial, chauvinist character of its Greek origins, at the same time as it seemingly offers a model that could involve all the world. This is why democracy has proven so compatible with nationalism and the state; it presupposes the Other, who is not accorded the same rights or political agency.

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The focus on inclusion and exclusion is clear enough at the dawn of modern democracy in Rousseau’s influential Of the Social Contract, in which he emphasizes that there is no contradiction between democracy and slavery. The more “evildoers” are in chains, he suggests, the more perfect the freedom of the citizens. Freedom for the wolf is death for the lamb, as Isaiah Berlin later put it. The zero-sum conception of freedom expressed in this metaphor is the foundation of the discourse of rights granted and protected by the state. In other words: for citizens to be free, the state must possess ultimate authority and the capacity to exercise total control. The state seeks to produce sheep, reserving the position of wolf for itself.

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By contrast, if we understand freedom as cumulative, the freedom of one person becomes the freedom of all: it is not simply a question of being protected by the authorities, but of intersecting with each other in a way that maximizes the possibilities for everyone. In this framework, the more that coercive force is centralized, the less freedom there can be. This way of conceiving freedom is social rather than individualistic: it approaches liberty as a collectively produced relationship to our potential, not a static bubble of private rights.¹¹1. “I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of others, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.” –Mikhail Bakunin

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Let’s turn to the other root, kratos. Democracy shares this suffix with aristocracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, plutocracy, and technocracy. Each of these terms describes government by some subset of society, but they all share a common logic. That common thread is kratos, power.

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What kind of power? Let’s consult the ancient Greeks once more.

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In classical Greece, every abstract concept was personified by a divine being. Kratos was an implacable Titan embodying the kind of coercive force associated with state power. One of the oldest sources in which Kratos appears is the play Prometheus Bound, composed by Aeschylus in the early days of Athenian democracy. The play opens with Kratos forcibly escorting the shackled Prometheus, who is being punished for stealing fire from the gods to give to humanity. Kratos appears as a jailer unthinkingly carrying out Zeus’s orders—a brute “made for any tyrant’s acts.”

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The sort of force personified by Kratos is what democracy has in common with autocracy and every other form of rule. They share the institutions of coercion: the legal apparatus, the police, and the military, all of which preceded democracy and have repeatedly outlived it. These are the tools “made for any tyrant’s acts,” whether the tyrant at the helm is a king, a class of bureaucrats, or “the people” themselves. “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people,” as Oscar Wilde put it. Mu’ammer al Gaddafi echoed this approvingly a century later, without irony: “Democracy is the supervision of the people by the people.”

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In modern-day Greek, kratos is simply the word for state. To understand democracy, we have to look closer at government itself.

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Monopolizing Legitimacy

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As a form of government, democracy offers a way to produce a single order out of a cacophony of desires, absorbing the resources and activities of the minority into policies dictated by the majority. In any democracy, there is a legitimate space of decision-making, distinct from the rest of life. It could be a congress in a parliament building, or a general assembly on a sidewalk, or an app soliciting votes via iPhone. In every case, it is not our immediate needs and desires that are the ultimate source of legitimacy, but a particular decision-making process and protocol. In a state, this is called “the rule of law,” though the principle does not necessarily require a formal legal system.

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This is the essence of government: decisions made in one space determine what can take place in all other spaces. The result is alienation—the friction between what is decided and what is lived.

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Democracy promises to solve this problem by incorporating everyone into the space of decision-making: the rule of all by all. “The citizens of a democracy submit to the law because they recognize that, however indirectly, they are submitting to themselves as makers of the law.” But if all those decisions were actually made by the people they impact, there would be no need for a means of enforcing them.

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What protects the minorities in this winner-take-all system? Advocates of democracy explain that minorities will be protected by institutional provisions—“checks and balances.” In other words, the same structure that holds power over them is supposed to protect them from itself.²²2. This seeming paradox didn’t trouble the framers of the US Constitution because the minority whose rights they were chiefly concerned with protecting was the class of property owners—who already had plenty of leverage on state institutions. As James Madison said in 1787, “Our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” In this approach, democracy and personal freedom are conceived as fundamentally at odds: to preserve freedom for individuals, a government must be able to take freedom away from everyone. Yet it is optimistic indeed to trust that institutions will always be better than the people who maintain them. The more power we vest in government in hopes of protecting the marginalized, the more dangerous it can be when it is turned against them.

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

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

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“This is a democracy not an anarchy. We have a system in the country to change rules. When you are on the Supreme Court, you can make that decision.” –Robert Stutman

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The Original Democracy

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In ancient Athens, the much-touted “birthplace of democracy,” we already see the exclusion and coercion that have been essential features of democratic government ever since. Only adult male citizens with military training could vote; women, slaves, debtors, and all who lacked Athenian blood were excluded. At the very most, democracy involved less than a fifth of the population.

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Indeed, slavery was more prevalent in ancient Athens than in other Greek city states, and women had fewer rights relative to men. Greater equality among male citizens apparently meant greater solidarity against women and foreigners. The space of participatory politics was a gated community.

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We can map the boundaries of this gated community in the Athenian opposition between public and private—between polis and oikos. The polis, the Greek city-state, was a space of public discourse where citizens interacted as equals. By contrast, the oikos, the household, was a hierarchical space in which male property owners ruled supreme—a zone outside the purview of the political, yet serving as its foundation. In this dichotomy, the oikos represents everything that provides the resources that sustain politics, yet is taken for granted as preceding and therefore outside it.

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These categories remain with us today. The words “politics” (“the affairs of the city”) and “police” (“the administration of the city”) come from polis, while “economy” (“the management of the household”) and “ecology” (“the study of the household”) derive from oikos.

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Democracy is still premised on this division. As long as there is a political distinction between public and private, everything from the household (the gendered space of intimacy that sustains the prevailing order with invisible and unpaid labor³³3. In this context, arguing that “the personal is political” constitutes a feminist rejection of the dichotomy between oikos and polis. But if this argument is understood to mean that the personal, too, should be subject to democratic decision-making, it only extends the logic of government into additional aspects of life. The real alternative is to affirm multiple sites of power, arguing that legitimacy should not be confined to any one space, so decisions made in the household are not subordinated to those made in the sites of formal politics.) to entire continents and peoples (like Africa during the colonial period—or even blackness itself) may be relegated outside the sphere of politics. Likewise, the institution of property and the market economy it produces, which have served as the substructure of democracy since its origins, are placed beyond question at the same time as they are enforced and defended by the political apparatus.

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Fortunately, ancient Athens is not the only reference point for egalitarian decision-making. A cursory survey of other societies reveals plenty of other examples, many of which are not predicated on exclusivity or coercion. But should we understand these as democracies, too?

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In his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber takes his colleagues to task for identifying Athens as the origin of democracy; he surmises that the Iroquois, Berber, Sulawezi, or Tallensi models do not receive as much attention simply because none of them center around voting. On one hand, Graeber is right to direct our attention to societies that focus on building consensus rather than practicing coercion: many of these embody the best values associated with democracy much more than ancient Athens did. On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense for us to label these examples truly democratic while questioning the democratic credentials of the Greeks who invented the term. This is still ethnocentricism: affirming the value of non-Western examples by granting them honorary status in our own admittedly inferior Western paradigm. Instead, let’s concede that democracy, as a specific historical practice dating from Sparta and Athens and emulated worldwide, has not lived up to the standard set by many of these other societies, and it does not make sense to describe them as democratic. It would be more responsible, and more precise, to describe and honor them in their own terms.

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That leaves us with Athens as the original democracy, after all. What if Athens became so influential not because of how free it was, but because of how it harnessed participatory politics to the power of the state? At the time, most societies throughout human history had been stateless; some were hierarchical, others were horizontal, but no stateless society had the centralized power of kratos. The states that existed, by contrast, were hardly egalitarian. The Athenians innovated a hybrid format in which horizontality coincided with exclusion and coercion. If you take it for granted that the state is desirable or at least inevitable, this sounds appealing. But if the state is the root of the problem, then the slavery and patriarchy of ancient Athens were not early irregularities in the democratic model, but indications of the power imbalances coded into its DNA from the beginning.

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Democracy is a Trojan horse bearing the power imbalances inherent in the state into the polis in the guise of self-determination.

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Representative Democracy—A Market for Power

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The US government has more in common with the republic of ancient Rome than with Athens. Rather than governing directly, Roman citizens elected representatives to head up a complex bureaucracy. As Roman territory expanded and wealth flooded in, small farmers lost their footing and massive numbers of the dispossessed flooded the capital; unrest forced the Republic to extend voting rights to wider and wider segments of the population, yet political inclusion did little to counteract the economic stratification of Roman society. All this sounds eerily familiar.

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The Roman Republic came to an end when Julius Caesar seized power; from then on, Rome was ruled by emperors. Yet very little changed for the average Roman. The bureaucracy, the military, the economy, and the courts continued to function the same as before.

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Fast-forward eighteen centuries to the American Revolution. Outraged about “taxation without representation,” North American subjects of the British Empire rebelled and established a representative democracy of their own,⁴⁴4. This is a fundamental paradox of democratic governments: established by a crime, they sanctify law—legitimizing a new ruling order as the fulfillment and continuation of a revolt. soon complete with a Roman-style Senate. Yet once again, the function of the state remained unchanged. Those who had fought to throw off the king discovered that taxation with representation was little different. The result was a series of uprisings—Shay’s Rebellion, the Whisky Rebellion, Fries’s Rebellion, and more—all of which were brutally suppressed. The new democratic government succeeded in pacifying the population where the British Empire had failed, thanks to the loyalty of many who had revolted against the king: for didn’t this new government represent them?⁵⁵5. “Obedience to the law is true liberty,” reads one memorial to the soldiers who suppressed Shay’s Rebellion.

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This story has been repeated time and time again. In the French revolution of 1848, the provisional government’s prefect of police entered the office vacated by the king’s prefect of police and took up the same papers his predecessor had just set down. In the 20th century transitions from dictatorship to democracy in Greece, Spain, and Chile, and more recently in Tunisia and Egypt, social movements that overthrew dictators had to go on fighting against the very same police under the democratic regime. This is kratos, what some have called the Deep State, carrying over from one regime to the next.

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Laws, courts, prisons, intelligence agencies, tax collectors, armies, police—most of the instruments of coercive power that we consider oppressive in a monarchy or a dictatorship operate the same way in a democracy. Yet when we’re permitted to cast ballots about who supervises them, we’re supposed to regard them as ours, even when they’re used against us. This is the great achievement of two and a half centuries of democratic revolutions: instead of abolishing the means by which kings governed, they rendered those means popular.

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The transfer of power from rulers to assemblies has served to prematurely halt revolutionary movements ever since the American Revolution. Rather than making the changes they sought via direct action, the rebels entrusted that task to their new representatives at the helm of the state—only to see their dreams betrayed.

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The state is powerful indeed, but one thing it cannot do is deliver freedom to its subjects. It cannot, because it derives its very being from their subjection. It can subject others, it can commandeer and concentrate resources, it can impose dues and duties, it can dole out rights and concessions—the consolation prizes of the governed—but it cannot offer self-determination. Kratos can dominate, but it cannot liberate.

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Instead, representative democracy promises the opportunity to rule each other on a rotating basis: a distributed and temporary kingship as diffuse, dynamic, and yet hierarchical as the stock market. In practice, since this rule is delegated, there are still rulers who wield tremendous power relative to everyone else. Usually, like the Bushes and Clintons, they hail from a de facto ruling class. This ruling class tends to occupy the upper echelons of all the other hierarchies of our society, both formal and informal. Even if a politician grew up among the plebs, the more he exercises authority, the more his interests diverge from those of the governed. Yet the real problem is not the intentions of politicians; it is the apparatus of the state itself.

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Competing for the right to direct the coercive power of the state, the contestants never question the value of the state itself, even if in practice they only find themselves on the receiving end of its force. Representative democracy offers a pressure valve: when people are dissatisfied, they set their sights on the next elections, taking the state itself for granted. Indeed, if you want to put a stop to corporate profiteering or environmental devastation, isn’t the state the only instrument powerful enough to accomplish that? Never mind that it was state that established the conditions in which those are possible in the first place.

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So much for democracy and political inequality. What about the economic inequality that has attended democracy since the beginning? You would think that a system based on majority rule would tend to reduce the disparities between rich and poor, seeing as the poor constitute the majority. Yet, just as in ancient Rome, the current ascendancy of democracy is matched by enormous gulfs between the haves and the have-nots. How can this be?

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Just as capitalism succeeded feudalism in Europe, representative democracy proved more sustainable than monarchy because it offered mobility within the hierarchies of the state. The dollar and the ballot are both mechanisms for distributing power hierarchically in a way that takes pressure off the hierarchies themselves. In contrast to the political and economic stasis of the feudal era, capitalism and democracy ceaselessly reapportion power. Thanks to this dynamic flexibility, the potential rebel has better odds of improving his status within the prevailing order than of toppling it. Consequently, opposition tends to reenergize the political system from within rather than threatening it.

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Representative democracy is to politics what capitalism is to economics. The desires of the consumer and the voter are represented by currencies that promise individual empowerment yet relentlessly concentrate power at the top of the social pyramid. As long as power is concentrated there, it is easy enough to block, buy off, or destroy anyone who threatens the pyramid itself.

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This explains why, when the wealthy and powerful have seen their interests challenged through the institutions of democracy, they have been able to suspend the law to deal with the problem—witness the gruesome fates of the brothers Gracchi in ancient Rome and Salvador Allende in modern Chile. Within the framework of the state, property has always trumped democracy.⁶⁶6. Just as the “libertarian” capitalist suspects that the activities of even the most democratic government interfere with the pure functioning of the free market, the partisan of pure democracy can be sure that as long as there are economic inequalities, the wealthy will always wield disproportionate influence over even the most carefully constructed democratic process. Yet government and economy are inseparable. The market relies upon the state to enforce property rights, while at bottom, democracy is a means of transferring, amalgamating, and investing political power: it is a market for agency itself.

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\n“In representative democracy as in capitalist competition, everyone supposedly gets a chance but only a few come out on top. If you didn’t win, you must not have tried hard enough! This is the same rationalization used to justify the injustices of sexism and racism: look, you lazy bums, you could have been Bill Cosby or Hillary Clinton if you’d just worked harder. But there’s not enough space at the top for all of us, no matter how hard we work.

When reality is generated via the media and media access is determined by wealth, elections are simply advertising campaigns. Market competition dictates which lobbyists gain the resources to determine the grounds upon which voters make their decisions. Under these circumstances, a political party is essentially a business offering investment opportunities in legislation. It’s foolish to expect political representatives to oppose the interests of their clientele when they depend directly upon them for power.”

– Work
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“Democracy means 100% of the population cooperating to secure 51% of the electorate the right to choose who gets to tell everyone what to do. In practice, of course, that means—me.”

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Direct Democracy: Government without the State?

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That brings us to the present. Africa and Asia are witnessing new movements in favor of democracy; meanwhile, many people in Europe and the Americas who are disillusioned by the failures of representative democracy have pinned their hopes on direct democracy, shifting from the model of the Roman Republic back to its Athenian predecessor. If the problem is that government is unresponsive to our needs, isn’t the solution to make it more participatory, so we wield power directly rather than delegating it to politicians?

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But what does that mean, exactly? Does it mean voting on laws rather than legislators? Or toppling the prevailing government and instituting a government of federated assemblies in its place? Or something else?

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On one hand, if direct democracy is just a more participatory and time-consuming way to pilot the state, it might offer us more say in the details of government, but it will preserve the centralization of power that is inherent in it. There is a problem of scale here: can we imagine 219 million eligible voters directly conducting the activities of the US government? The conventional answer is that local assemblies would send representatives to regional assemblies, which in turn would send representatives to a national assembly—but there, already, we are speaking about representative democracy again. At best, in place of periodically electing representatives, we can picture a ceaseless series of referendums decreed from on high.

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One of the most robust versions of that vision is digital democracy, or e-democracy, promoted by groups like the Pirate Party. The Pirate Party has already been incorporated into the existing political system; but in theory, we can imagine a population linked through digital technology, making all the decisions regarding their society via majority vote in real time. In such an order, majoritarian government would gain a practically irresistible legitimacy; yet the greatest power would likely be concentrated in the hands of the technocrats who administered the system. Coding the algorithms that determined which information and which questions came to the fore, they would shape the conceptual frameworks of the participants a thousand times more invasively than election-year advertising does today.

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Electronic democracy.

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But even if such a system could be made to work perfectly—do we want to retain centralized majoritarian rule in the first place? The mere fact of being participatory does not make a political process any less coercive. As long as the majority has the capacity to force its decisions on the minority, we are talking about a system identical in spirit with the one that governs the US today—a system that would also require prisons, police, and tax collectors, or else other ways to perform the same functions.

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Real freedom is not a question of how participatory the process of answering questions is, but of the extent to which we can frame the questions ourselves—and whether we can stop others from imposing their answers on us. The institutions that operate under a dictatorship or an elected government are no less oppressive when they are employed directly by a majority without the mediation of representatives. In the final analysis, even the most directly democratic state is better at concentrating power than maximizing freedom.

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On the other hand, not everyone believes that democracy is a means of state governance. Some proponents of democracy have attempted to transform the discourse, arguing that true democracy only takes place outside the state and against its monopoly on power. For opponents of the state, this appears to be a strategic move, in that it appropriates all the legitimacy that has been invested in democracy across three centuries of popular movements and self-congratulatory state propaganda. Yet there are three fundamental problems with this approach.

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First, it’s ahistorical. Democracy originated as a form of state government; practically all the familiar historical examples of democracy were carried out via the state or at least by people who aspired to govern. The positive associations we have with democracy as a set of abstract aspirations came later.

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Second, it fosters confusion. Those who promote democracy as an alternative to the state rarely draw a meaningful distinction between the two. If you dispense with representation, coercive enforcement, and the rule of law, yet keep all the other hallmarks that make democracy a means of governing—citizenship, voting, and the centralization of legitimacy in a single decision-making structure—you end up retaining the procedures of government without the mechanisms that make them effective. This combines the worst of both worlds. It ensures that those who approach anti-state democracy expecting it to perform the same function as the state will inevitably be disappointed, while creating a situation in which anti-state democracy tends to reproduce the dynamics associated with state democracy on a smaller scale.

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Finally, it’s a losing battle. If what you mean to denote by the word democracy can only occur outside the framework of the state, it creates considerable ambiguity to use a term that has been associated with state politics for 2500 years.⁷⁷7. The objection that the democracies that govern the world today aren’t real democracies is a variant of the classic “No true Scotsman” fallacy. If, upon investigation, it turns out that not a single existing democracy lives up to what you mean by the word, you might need a different expression for what you are trying to describe. This is like communists who, confronted with all the repressive communist regimes of the 20th century, protest that not a single one of them was properly communist. When an idea is so difficult to implement that millions of people equipped with a considerable portion of the resources of humanity and doing their best across a period of centuries can’t produce a single working model, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Give anarchists a tenth of the opportunities Marxists and democrats have had, and then we may speak about whether anarchy works! Most people will assume that what you mean by democracy is reconcilable with the state after all. This sets the stage for statist parties and strategies to regain legitimacy in the public eye, even after having been completely discredited. The political parties Podemos and Syriza gained traction in the occupied squares of Barcelona and Athens thanks to their rhetoric about direct democracy, only to make their way into the halls of government where they are now behaving like any other political party. They’re still doing democracy, just more efficiently and effectively. Without a language that differentiates what they are doing in parliament from what people were doing in the squares, this process will recur again and again.

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\n“We must all be both rulers and ruled simultaneously, or a system of rulers and subjects is the only alternative… Freedom, in other words, can only be maintained through a sharing of political power, and this sharing happens through political institutions.”

– Cindy Milstein, “Democracy Is Direct”</blockquote> </aside>
When we identify what we are doing when we oppose the state as the practice of democracy, we set the stage for our efforts to be reabsorbed into larger representational structures. Democracy is not just a way of managing the apparatus of government, but also of regenerating and legitimizing it. Candidates, parties, regimes, and even the form of government can be swapped out from time to time when it becomes clear that they cannot solve the problems of their constituents. In this way, government itself—the source of at least some of those problems—is able to persist. Direct democracy is just the latest way to rebrand it.
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Even without the familiar trappings of the state, any form of government requires some way of determining who can participate in decision-making and on what terms—once again, who counts as the demos. Such stipulations may be vague at first, but they will get more concrete the older an institution grows and the higher the stakes get. And if there is no way of enforcing decisions—no kratos—the decision-making processes of government will have no more weight than decisions people make autonomously.⁸⁸8. Without formal institutions, democratic organizations often enforce decisions by delegitimizing actions initiated outside their structures and encouraging the use of force against them. Hence the classic scene in which protest marshals attack demonstrators for doing something that wasn’t agreed upon in advance via a centralized democratic process. This is the paradox of a project that seeks government without the state.
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These contradictions are stark enough in Murray Bookchin’s formulation of libertarian municipalism as an alternative to state governance. In libertarian municipalism, Bookchin explained, an exclusive and avowedly vanguardist organization governed by laws and a Constitution would make decisions by majority vote. They would run candidates in city council elections, with the long-term goal of establishing a confederation that could replace the state. Once such a confederation got underway, membership was to be binding even if participating municipalities wanted to withdraw. Those who try to retain government without the state are likely to end up with something like the state by another name.
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The important distinction is not between democracy and the state, then, but between government and self-determination. Government is the exercise of authority over a given space or polity: whether the process is dictatorial or participatory, the end result is the imposition of control. By contrast, self-determination means disposing of one’s potential on one’s own terms: when people engage in it together, they are not ruling each other, but fostering cumulative autonomy. Freely made agreements require no enforcement; systems that concentrate legitimacy in a single institution or decision-making process always do.
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It is strange to use the word democracy for the idea that the state is inherently undesirable. The proper word for that idea is anarchism. Anarchism opposes all exclusion and domination in favor of the radical decentralization of power structures, decision-making processes, and notions of legitimacy. It is not a matter of governing in a completely participatory manner, but of making it impossible to impose any form of rule.
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From the plaza to the parliament: democracy as crowd-sourced state power.
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Consensus and the Fantasy of Unanimous Rule
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If the common denominators of democratic government are citizenship and policing—demos and kratos—the most radical democracy would expand those categories to include the whole world: universal citizenship, community policing. In the ideal democratic society, every person would be a citizen,⁹⁹9. In theory, categories that are defined by exclusion, like citizenship, break down when we expand them to include the whole world. But if we wish to break them down, why not reject them outright, rather than promising to do so while further legitimizing them? When we use the word citizenship to describe something desirable, that can’t help but reinforce the legitimacy of that institution as it exists today.

10. In fact, the English word “police” is derived from polis by way of the ancient Greek word for citizen. and every citizen would be a policeman.¹⁰¹⁰
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At the furthest extreme of this logic, majority rule would mean rule by consensus: not the rule of the majority, but unanimous rule. The closer we get to unanimity, the more legitimate government is perceived to be—so wouldn’t rule by consensus be the most legitimate government of all? Then, finally, there would be no need for anyone to play the role of the police.
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\n“In the strict sense of the term, there has never been a true democracy, and there never will be… One can hardly imagine that all the people would sit permanently in an assembly to deal with public affairs.”

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract
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Obviously, this is impossible. But it’s worth reflecting on what sort of utopia is implied by idealizing direct democracy as a form of government. Imagine the kind of totalitarianism it would take to produce enough cohesion to govern a society via consensus process—to get everyone to agree. Talk about reducing things to the lowest common denominator! If the alternative to coercion is to abolish disagreement, surely there must be a third path.
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This problem came to the fore during the Occupy movement. Some participants understood the general assemblies as the governing bodies of the movement; from their perspective, it was undemocratic for people to act without unanimous authorization. Others approached the assemblies as spaces of encounter without prescriptive authority, in which people might exchange influence and ideas, forming fluid constellations around shared goals to take action. The former felt betrayed when their fellow Occupiers engaged in tactics that hadn’t been agreed on in the general assembly; the latter countered that it didn’t make sense to grant veto power to an arbitrarily convened mass including literally anyone who happened by on the street.
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A disagreement about the role of the general assembly during Occupy Oakland.
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Perhaps the answer is that the structures of decision-making must be decentralized as well as consensus-based, so that universal agreement is unnecessary. This is a step in the right direction, but it introduces new questions. How should people be divided into polities? What dictates the jurisdiction of an assembly or the scope of the decisions it can make? Who determines which assemblies a person may participate in, or who is most affected by a given decision? How are conflicts between assemblies resolved? The answers to these questions will either institutionalize a set of rules governing legitimacy, or prioritize voluntary forms of association. In the former case, the rules will likely ossify over time, as people refer to protocol to resolve disputes. In the latter case, the structures of decision-making will continuously shift, fracture, clash, and re-emerge in organic processes that can hardly be described as government. When the participants in a decision-making process are free to withdraw from it or engage in activity that contradicts the decisions, then what is taking place is not government—it is simply conversation.¹¹¹¹11. See Kant’s argument that a republic is “violence with freedom and law,” whereas anarchy is “freedom and law without violence”—so the law becomes a mere recommendation that cannot be enforced.
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\n“Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.”

– Clement Attlee, UK Prime Minister, 1957
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From one perspective, this is a question of emphasis. Is our goal to produce the ideal institutions, rendering them as horizontal and participatory as possible but deferring to them as the ultimate foundation of authority? Or is our goal to maximize freedom, in which case any particular institution we create is subordinate to liberty and therefore dispensable? Once more—what is legitimate, the institutions or our needs and desires?
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Even at their best, institutions are just a means to an end; they have no value in and of themselves. No one should be obliged to adhere to the protocol of any institution that suppresses her freedom or fails to meet her needs. If everyone were free to organize with others on a purely voluntary basis, that would be the best way to generate social forms that are truly in the interests of the participants: for as soon as a structure was not working for everyone involved, they would have to refine or replace it. This approach won’t bring all of society into consensus, but it is the only way to guarantee that consensus is meaningful and desirable when it does arise.
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“Decentralization? In theory, it’s a good idea, but I doubt we’ll reach consensus to implement it.”
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The Excluded: Race, Gender, and Democracy
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We often hear arguments for democracy on the grounds that, as the most inclusive form of government, it is the best suited to combat the racism and sexism of our society. Yet as long as the categories of rulers/ruled and included/excluded are built into the structure of politics, coded as “majorities” and “minorities” even when the minorities outnumber the majorities, imbalances of power along race and gender lines will always be reflected as disparities in political power. This is why women, black people, and other groups still lack political leverage proportionate to their numbers, despite having ostensibly possessed voting rights for a century or more.
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\n“We haven’t benefitted from America’s democracy. We’ve only suffered from America’s hypocrisy.”

– Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”
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In The Abolition of White Democracy, the late Joel Olson presents a compelling critique of what he calls “white democracy”—the concentration of democratic political power in white hands by means of a cross-class alliance among those granted white privilege. But he takes for granted that democracy is the most desirable system, assuming that white supremacy is an incidental obstacle to its functioning rather than a natural consequence thereof. If democracy is the ideal form of egalitarian relations, why has it been implicated in structural racism for practically its entire existence?
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Where politics is constructed as a zero-sum competition, those who hold power will be loath to share it with others. Consider the men who opposed universal suffrage and the white people who opposed the extension of voting rights to people of color: the structures of democracy did not discourage their bigotry, but gave them an incentive to institutionalize it.
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Olson traces the way that the ruling class fostered white supremacy in order to divide the working class, but he neglects the ways that democratic structures lent themselves to this process. He argues that we should promote class solidarity as a response to these divisions, but (as Bakunin argued contra Marx) the difference between the governing and the governed is itself a class difference—think of ancient Athens. Racialized exclusion has always been the flip side of citizenship.
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\n“By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy… America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.”

– Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”
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So the political dimension of white supremacy isn’t just a consequence of racial disparities in economic power—it also produces them. Ethnic and racial divisions were ingrained in our society long before the dawn of capitalism; the confiscation of Jewish property under the Inquisition financed the original colonization of the Americas, and the looting of the Americas and enslavement of Africans provided the original startup capital to jumpstart capitalism in Europe and later North America. It is possible that racial divisions could outlast the next massive economic and political shift, too—for example, as exclusive assemblies of predominantly white (or Jewish, or even Kurdish) citizens.
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There are no easy fixes for this problem. Reformers often speak about making our political system more “democratic,” by which they mean more inclusive and egalitarian. Yet when their reforms are realized in a way that legitimizes and strengthens the institutions of government, this only puts more weight behind those institutions when they strike at the targeted and marginalized—witness the mass incarceration of black people since the civil rights movement. Malcolm X and other advocates of black separatism were right that a white-founded democracy would never offer freedom to black people—not because white and black people can never coexist, but because in rendering politics a competition for centralized political power, democratic governance creates conflicts that preclude coexistence. If today’s racial conflicts can ever be resolved, it will be through the establishment of new relations on the basis of decentralization, not by integrating the excluded into the political order of the included.¹²¹²12. This far, at least, we can agree with Booker T. Washington when he said, “The Reconstruction experiment in racial democracy failed because it began at the wrong end, emphasizing political means and civil rights acts rather than economic means and self-determination.”
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\n“As long as there are police, who do you think they will harass? As long as there are prisons, who do you think will fill them? As long as there is poverty, who do you think will be poor? It is naïve to believe we could achieve equality in a society based on hierarchy. You can shuffle the cards, but it’s still the same deck.”

– To Change Everything
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As long as we understand what we are doing together politically as democracy—as government by a legitimate decision-making process—we will see that legitimacy invoked to justify programs that are functionally white supremacist, whether they are the policies of a state or the decisions of a spokescouncil. (Recall, for example, the tensions between the decision-making processes of the predominantly white general assemblies and the less white encampments within many Occupy groups.) Only when we dispense with the idea that any political process is inherently legitimate will we be able to strip away the final alibi of the racial disparities that have always characterized democratic governance.
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Turning to gender, this gives us a new perspective on why Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, and other women argued that the demand for women’s suffrage was missing the point. Why would anyone reject the option to participate in electoral politics, imperfect as it is? The short answer is that they wanted to abolish government entirely, not to make it more participatory. But looking closer, we can find some more specific reasons why people concerned with women’s liberation might be suspicious of the franchise.
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\n“The history of the political activities of men proves that they have given him absolutely nothing that he could not have achieved in a more direct, less costly, and more lasting manner. As a matter of fact, every inch of ground he has gained has been through a constant fight, a ceaseless struggle for self-assertion, and not through suffrage. There is no reason whatever to assume that woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot.”

– Emma Goldman, “Women Suffrage”
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Let’s go back to polis and oikos—the city and the household. Democratic systems rely on a formal distinction between public and private spheres; the public sphere is the site of all legitimate decision-making, while the private sphere is excluded or discounted. Throughout a wide range of societies and eras, this division has been profoundly gendered, with men dominating public spheres—ownership, paid labor, government, management, and street corners—while women and those outside the gender binary have been relegated to private spheres: the household, the kitchen, the family, child-rearing, sex work, care work, other forms of invisible and unpaid labor.
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Insofar as democratic systems centralize decision-making power and authority in the public sphere, this reproduces patriarchal patterns of power. This is most obvious when women are formally excluded from voting and politics—but even where they are not, they often face informal obstacles in the public sphere while bearing disproportionate responsibility in the private sphere.
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The inclusion of more participants in the public sphere serves to further legitimize a space where women and those who do not conform to gender norms operate at a disadvantage. If “democratization” means a shift in decision-making power from informal and private sites towards more public political spaces, the result could even erode some forms of women’s power. Recall how grassroots women’s shelters founded in the 1970s were professionalized through state funding to such an extent that by the 1990s, the women who had founded them could never have qualified for entry-level positions in them.
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So we cannot rely on the degree of women’s formal participation in the public sphere as an index of liberation. Instead, we can deconstruct the gendered distinction between public and private, validating what takes place in relationships, families, households, neighborhoods, social networks, and other spaces that are not recognized as part of the political sphere. This wouldn’t mean formalizing these spaces or integrating them into a supposedly gender-neutral political practice, but rather legitimizing multiple ways of making decisions, recognizing multiple sites of power within society.
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There are two ways to respond to male domination of the political sphere. The first is to try to make the formal public space as accessible and inclusive as possible—for example, by registering women to vote, providing child care, setting quotas of who must participate in decisions, weighting who is permitted to speak in discussions, or even, as in Rojava, establishing women-only assemblies with veto power. This strategy seeks to implement equality, but it still assumes that all power should be vested in the public sphere. The alternative is to identify sites and practices of decision-making that already empower people who do not benefit from male privilege, and grant them greater influence. This approach draws on longstanding feminist traditions that prioritize people’s lives and experiences over formal structures and ideologies, recognizing the importance of diversity and valuing dimensions of life that are usually invisible.
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These two approaches can coincide and complement each other, but only if we dispense with the idea that all legitimacy should be concentrated in a single institutional structure.
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“Of all the modern delusions, the ballot has certainly been the greatest… The principle of rulership is in itself wrong: no man has any right to rule another.” –Lucy Parsons, “The Ballot Humbug”
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Arguments Against Autonomy
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There are several objections to the idea that decision-making structures should be voluntary rather than obligatory, decentralized rather than monolithic. We’re told that without a central mechanism for deciding conflicts, society will degrade into civil war; that it is impossible to defend against centralized aggressors without a central authority; that we need the apparatus of central government to deal with oppression and injustice.
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In fact, the centralization of power is as likely to provoke strife as to resolve it. When everyone has to gain leverage on the structures of the state to obtain any control over the conditions of her own life, this is bound to generate friction. In Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan, and other places where people of a variety of religions and ethnicities had coexisted autonomously in relative peace, the colonially imposed imperative to contend for political power within the framework of a single state produced protracted ethnic violence. Such conflicts were common in 19th century US politics, as well—consider the early gang warfare around elections in Washington and Baltimore, or the fight for Bleeding Kansas. If these struggles are no longer common in the US, that’s not evidence that the state has resolved all the conflicts it generated.
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Centralized government, touted as a way to conclude disputes, just consolidates power so the victors can maintain their position through force of arms. And when centralized structures collapse, as Yugoslavia did during the introduction of democracy in the 1990s, the consequences can be bloody indeed. At best, centralization only postpones strife—like a debt accumulating interest.
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But can decentralized networks stand a chance against centralized power structures? If they can’t, then the whole discussion is moot, as any attempt to experiment with decentralization will be crushed by more centralized rivals.
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The answer remains to be seen, but today’s centralized powers are by no means sure of their own invulnerability. Already, in 2001, the RAND Corporation was arguing that decentralized networks, rather than centralized hierarchies, will be the power players of the 21st century. Over the past two decades, from the so-called anti-globalization movement to Occupy and the Kurdish experiment with autonomy in Rojava, the initiatives that have succeeded in opening up space for new experiments (both democratic and anarchistic) have been decentralized, while more centralized efforts like Syriza have been co-opted almost immediately. A wide range of scholars are now theorizing the distinguishing features and advantages of network-based organizing.
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A diagram illustrating the advantages of decentralized and autonomous network-based organizing over both representative democracy and assembly-based direct democracy.
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Finally, there is the question of whether a society needs a centralized political apparatus to be able to put a stop to oppression and injustice. Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War, is one of the strongest expressions of this argument. It’s worth quoting at length:
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Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left…
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Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.
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This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
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Follow this logic far enough in today’s globalized world and you arrive at the idea of world government: majority rule on the scale of the entire planet. Lincoln is right, contra partisans of consensus, that unanimous rule is impossible and that those who do not wish to be ruled by majorities must choose between despotism and anarchy. His argument that aliens cannot make treaties more easily than friends make laws sounds convincing at first. But friends don’t enforce laws on each other—laws are made to be imposed on weaker parties, whereas treaties are made between equals. Government is not something that takes place between friends, any more than a free people need a sovereign. If we have to choose between despotism, majority rule, and anarchy, anarchy is the closest thing to freedom—what Lincoln calls our “revolutionary right” to overthrow governments.
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Yet, in associating anarchy with the secession of the Southern states, Lincoln was mounting a critique of autonomy that echoes to this day. If it weren’t for the Federal government, the argument goes, slavery would never have been abolished, nor would the South have desegregated or granted civil rights to people of color. These measures against injustice had to be introduced at gunpoint by the armies of the Union and, a century later, the National Guard. In this context, advocating decentralization seems to mean accepting slavery, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan. Without a legitimate central governing body, what mechanism could stop people from acting oppressively?
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There are several errors here. The first mistake is obvious: of Lincoln’s three options—despotism, majority rule, and anarchy—the secessionists represented despotism, not anarchy. Likewise, it is naïve to imagine that the apparatus of central government will be employed solely on the side of freedom. The same National Guard that oversaw integration in the South used live ammunition to put down black uprisings around the country; today, there are nearly as many black people in US prisons as there once were slaves in the US. Finally, one need not vest all legitimacy in a single governing body in order to act against oppression. One may still act—one must simply do so without the pretext of enforcing law.
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Opposing the centralization of power and legitimacy does not mean withdrawing into quietism. Some conflicts must take place; there is no getting around them. They follow from truly irreconcilable differences, and the imposition of a false unity only defers them. In his inaugural address, Lincoln was pleading in the name of the state to suspend the conflict between abolitionists and partisans of slavery—a conflict that was inevitable and necessary, which had already been delayed through decades of intolerable compromise. Meanwhile, abolitionists like Nat Turner and John Brown were able to act decisively without need of a central political authority—indeed, they were able to act thus only because they did not recognize one. Were it not for the pressure generated by autonomous actions like theirs, the federal government would never have intervened in the South; had more people taken the initiative the way they did, slavery would not have been possible and the Civil War would not have been necessary.
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In other words, the problem was not too much anarchy, but too little. It was autonomous action that forced the issue of slavery, not democratic deliberation. What’s more, had there been more partisans of anarchy, rather than majority rule, it would not have been possible for Southern whites to regain political supremacy in the South after Reconstruction.
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One more anecdote bears mention. A year after his inaugural speech, Lincoln addressed a committee of free men of color to argue that they should emigrate to found another colony like Liberia in hopes that the rest of black America would follow. Regarding the relation between emancipated black people and white American citizens, he argued,
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It is better for us both to be separated… There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.
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So, in Lincoln’s political cosmology, the polis of white citizens cannot separate, but as soon as the black slaves of the oikos no longer occupy their economic role, it is better that they depart. This dramatizes things clearly enough: the nation is indivisible, but the excluded are disposable. Had the slaves freed after the Civil War emigrated to Africa, they would have arrived just in time to experience the horrors of European colonization, with a death toll of ten million in Belgian Congo alone. The proper solution to such catastrophes is not to integrate all the world into a single republic governed by majority rule, but to combat all institutions that divide people into majorities and minorities—rulers and ruled—however democratic they might be.
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Democratic Obstacles to Liberation
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Barring war or miracle, the legitimacy of every constituted government is always eroding; it can only erode. Whatever the state promises, nothing can compensate for having to cede control of our lives. Every specific grievance underscores this systemic problem, though we rarely see the forest for the trees.
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This is where democracy comes in: another election, another government, another cycle of optimism and disappointment.
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\n“Democracy is a great way of assuring the legitimacy of the government, even when it does a bad job of delivering what the public wants. In a functioning democracy, mass protests challenge the rulers. They don’t challenge the fundamental nature of the state’s political system.”

– Noah Feldman, “Tunisia’s Protests Are Different This Time”
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But this does not always pacify the population. The past decade has seen movements and uprisings all around the world—from Oaxaca to Tunis, Istanbul to Rio de Janeiro, Kiev to Hong Kong—in which the disillusioned and disaffected attempt to take matters into their own hands. Most of these have rallied around the standard of more and better democracy, though that has hardly been unanimous.
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Considering how much power the market and the government wield over us, it’s tempting indeed to imagine that we could somehow turn the tables and govern them. Even those who do not believe that it is possible for the people to rule the government usually end up governing the one thing that is left to them—their resistance to it. Approaching protest movements as experiments in direct democracy, they set out to prefigure the structures of a more democratic world.
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But what if prefiguring democracy is part of the problem? That would explain why so few of these movements have been able to mount an irreconcilable opposition to the structures that they formed to oppose. With the arguable exceptions of Chiapas and Rojava, all of them have been defeated (Occupy), reintegrated into the functioning of the prevailing government (Syriza, Podemos), or, worse still, have overthrown and replaced that government without achieving any real change in society (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine).
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When a movement seeks to legitimize itself on the basis of the same principles as state democracy, it ends up trying to beat the state at its own game. Even if it succeeds, the reward for victory is to be coopted and institutionalized—whether within the existing structures of government or by reinventing them anew. Thus movements that begin as revolts against the state end up recreating it.
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\n“Occasionally you rebel, but it’s only ever just to start doing the same thing again from scratch.”

– Albert Libertad, “Voters: You Are the Real Criminals”
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This can play out in many different ways. There are movements that hamstring themselves by claiming to be more democratic, more transparent, or more representative than the authorities; movements that come to power through electoral politics, only to betray their original goals; movements that promote directly democratic tactics that turn out to be just as useful to those who seek state power; and movements that topple governments, only to replace them. Let’s consider each in turn.
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If we limit our movements to what the majority of participants can agree on in advance, we may not be able to get them off the ground in the first place. When much of the population has accepted the legitimacy of the government and its laws, most people don’t feel entitled to do anything that could challenge the existing power structure, no matter how badly it treats them. Consequently, a movement that makes decisions by majority vote or consensus may have difficulty agreeing to utilize any but the most symbolic tactics. Can you imagine the residents of Ferguson, Missouri holding a consensus meeting to decide whether to burn the QuikTrip store and fight off the police? And yet those were the actions that sparked what came to be known as the Black Lives Matter movement. People usually have to experience something new to be open to it; it is a mistake to confine an entire movement to what is already familiar to the majority of participants.
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By the same token, if we insist on our movements being completely transparent, that means letting the authorities dictate which tactics we can use. In conditions of widespread infiltration and surveillance, conducting all decision-making in public with complete transparency invites repression on anyone who is perceived as a threat to the status quo. The more public and transparent a decision-making body is, the more conservative its actions are likely to be, even when this contradicts its express reason for being—think of all the environmental coalitions that have never taken a single step to halt the activities that cause climate change. Within democratic logic, it makes sense to demand transparency from the government, as it is supposed to represent and answer to the people. But outside that logic, rather than demanding that participants in social movements represent and answer to each other, we should seek to maximize the autonomy with which they may act.
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If we claim legitimacy on the grounds that we represent the public, we offer the authorities an easy way to outmaneuver us, while opening the way for others to coopt our efforts. Before the introduction of universal suffrage, it was possible to maintain that a movement represented the will of the people; but nowadays an election can draw more people to the polls than even the most massive movement can mobilize into the streets. The winners of elections will always be able to claim to represent more people than can participate in movements.¹³¹³13. At the end of May 1968, the announcement of snap elections broke the wave of wildcat strikes and occupations that had swept across France; the spectacle of the majority of French citizens voting for President de Gaulle’s party was enough to dispel all hope of revolution. This illustrates how elections serve as a pageantry that represents citizens to each other as willing participants in the prevailing order. Likewise, movements purporting to represent the most oppressed sectors of society can be outflanked by the inclusion of token representatives of those sectors in the halls of power. And as long as we validate the idea of representation, some new politician or party can use our rhetoric to come to power. We should not claim that we represent the people—we should assert that no one has the right to rule us.
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What happens when a movement comes to power through electoral politics? The victory of Lula and his Workers’ Party in Brazil seemed to present a best-case scenario in which a party based in grassroots radical organizing took the helm of the state. At the time, Brazil hosted some of the world’s most powerful social movements, including the 1.5-million-strong land reform campaign MST (Landless Workers’ Movement); many of these were interconnected with the Workers’ Party. Yet after Lula took office in 2002, social movements entered a precipitous decline that lasted until 2013. Members of the Workers’ Party dropped out of local organizing to take positions in the government, while the necessities of realpolitik prevented Lula from granting concessions to the movements he had previously supported. The MST had forced the conservative government that preceded Lula to legalize many land occupations, but it made no headway whatsoever under Lula. This pattern recurred all around Latin America as supposedly radical politicians betrayed the social movements that had put them in office. Today, the most powerful social movements in Brazil are right-wing protests against the Workers’ Party. There are no electoral shortcuts to freedom.
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Hitler himself came to power in a democratic election.
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What if instead of seeking state power, we focus on promoting directly democratic models such as neighborhood assemblies? Unfortunately, such practices can be appropriated to serve a wide range of agendas. After the Slovenian uprising of 2012, while self-organized neighborhood assemblies continued to meet in Ljubljana, an NGO financed by the city authorities began organizing assemblies in a “neglected” neighborhood as a pilot project towards “revitalizing” the area, with the explicit intention of drawing disaffected citizens back into dialogue with the government. During the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, the fascist parties Svoboda and Right Sector came to prominence via the democratic assemblies in the occupied Maidan. In 2009, members of the Greek fascist party Golden Dawn joined locals in the Athenian neighborhood of Agios Panteleimonas in organizing an assembly that coordinated attacks on immigrants and anarchists. If we want to foster inclusivity and self-determination, it is not enough to propagate the rhetoric and procedures of participatory democracy.¹⁴¹⁴14. As economic crises intensify alongside widespread disillusionment with representational politics, we see governments offering more direct participation in decision-making to pacify the public. Just as the dictatorships in Greece, Spain, and Chile were forced to transition into democratic governments to neutralize protest movements, the state is opening up new roles for those who might otherwise lead the opposition to it. If we are directly responsible for making the political system work, we will blame ourselves when it fails—not the format itself. This explains the new experiments with “participatory” budgets from Pôrto Alegre to Poznań. In practice, the participants rarely have any leverage on town officials; at most, they can act as consultants, or vote on a measly 0.1% of city funds. The real purpose of participatory budgeting is to redirect popular attention from the failures of government to the project of making it more democratic.. We need to spread a framework that opposes the state and other forms of hierarchical power in and of themselves.
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Even explicitly revolutionary strategies can be turned to the advantage of world powers in the name of democracy. From Venezuela to Macedonia, we have seen state actors and vested interests channel genuine popular dissent into ersatz social movements in order to shorten the electoral cycle. Usually, the goal is to force the ruling party to resign in order to replace it with a more “democratic” government—i.e., a government more amenable to US or EU objectives. Such movements usually focus on “corruption,” implying that the system would work just fine if only the right people were in power. When we enter the streets, rather than risk being the dupes of some foreign policy initiative, we should not mobilize against any particular government, but against government per se.
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The Egyptian revolution dramatically illustrates the dead end of democratic revolution. After hundreds had given their lives to overthrow dictator Hosni Mubarak and institute democracy, popular elections brought another autocrat to power in the person of Mohamed Morsi. A year later, in 2013, nothing had improved, and the people who had initiated the revolution took to the streets once more to reject the results of democracy, forcing the Egyptian military to depose Morsi. Today, the military remains the de facto ruler of Egypt, and the same oppression and injustice that inspired two revolutions continues. The options represented by the military, Morsi, and the people in revolt are the same ones that Lincoln described in his inaugural speech: tyranny, majority rule, and anarchy.
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Here, at the furthest limit of the struggle against poverty and oppression, we always come up against the state itself. As long as we submit to being governed, the state will shift back and forth as needed between majority rule and tyranny—two expressions of the same basic principle. The state can assume many shapes; like vegetation, it can die back, then regrow from the roots. It can take the form of a monarchy or a parliamentary democracy, a revolutionary dictatorship or a provisional council; when the authorities have fled and the military has mutinied, the state can linger as a germ carried by the partisans of order and protocol in an apparently horizontal general assembly. All of these forms, however democratic, can regenerate into a regime capable of crushing freedom and self-determination.
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The one sure way to avoid cooptation, manipulation, and opportunism is to refuse to legitimize any form of rule. When people solve their problems and meet their needs directly through flexible, horizontal, decentralized structures, there are no leaders to corrupt, no formal structures to ossify, no single process to hijack. Do away with the concentrations of power and those who wish to seize power can get no purchase on society. An ungovernable people will likely have to defend itself against would-be tyrants, but it will never put its own strength behind their efforts to rule.
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If nominated,
I will not run;
if elected, I will not serve.

That goes if somebody else is elected, too.
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Towards Freedom:
Points of Departure
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The classic defense of democracy is that it is the worst form of government—except for all the others. But if government itself is the problem, we have to go back to the drawing board.
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Reimagining humanity without government is an ambitious project; two centuries of anarchist theory only scratch the surface. For the purposes of this analysis, we’ll conclude with a few basic values that could guide us beyond democracy, and a few general proposals for how to understand what we might do instead of governing. Most of the work remains to be done.
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\n“Anarchism represents not the most radical form of democracy, but an altogether different paradigm of collective action.”
– Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive!
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Horizontality, Decentralization, Autonomy, Anarchy
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Under scrutiny, democracy does not live up to the values that drew us to it in the first place—egalitarianism, inclusivity, self-determination. Alongside these values, we must add horizontality, decentralization, and autonomy as their indispensible counterparts.
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Horizontality has gained a lot of currency since the late 20th century. Starting with the Zapatista uprising and gaining momentum through the anti-globalization movement and the rebellion in Argentina, the idea of leaderless structures has spread even into the business world.
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But decentralization is just as important as horizontality if we do not wish to be trapped in a tyranny of equals, in which everyone has to be able to agree on something for anyone to be able to do it. Rather than a single process through which all agency must pass, decentralization means multiple sites of decision-making and multiple forms of legitimacy. That way, when power is distributed unevenly in one context, this can be counterbalanced elsewhere. Decentralization means preserving difference—strategic and ideological diversity is a source of strength for movements and communities, just as biodiversity is in the natural world. We should neither segregate ourselves into homogenous groups on the pretext of affinity nor reduce our politics to lowest common denominators.
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Decentralization implies autonomy—the ability to act freely on one’s own initiative. Autonomy can apply at any level of scale—a single person, a neighborhood, a movement, an entire region. To be free, you need control over your immediate surroundings and the details of your daily life; the more self-sufficient you are, the more secure your autonomy is. This needn’t mean meeting all your needs independently; it could also mean the kind of interdependence that gives you leverage on the people you depend on. No single institution should be able to monopolize access to resources or social relations. A society that promotes autonomy requires what an engineer would call redundancy: a wide range of options and possibilities in every aspect of life.
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If we wish to foster freedom, it’s not enough to affirm autonomy alone.¹⁵¹⁵15. “Autonomy” is derived from the ancient Greek prefix auto-, self, and nomos, law—giving oneself one’s own law. This suggests an understanding of personal freedom in which one aspect of the self—say, the superego—permanently controls the others and dictates all behavior. Kant defined autonomy as self-legislation, in which the individual compels himself to comply with the universal laws of objective morality rather than acting according his desires. By contrast, an anarchist might counter that we owe our freedom to the spontaneous interplay of myriad forces within us, not to our capacity to force a single order upon ourselves. Which of those conceptions of freedom we embrace will have repercussions on everything from how we picture freedom on a planetary scale to how we understand the movements of subatomic particles. A nation-state or political party can assert autonomy; so can nationalists and racists. The fact that a person or group is autonomous tells us little about whether the relations they cultivate with others are egalitarian or hierarchical, inclusive or exclusive. If we wish to maximize autonomy for everyone rather than simply seeking it for ourselves, we have to create a social context in which no one is able to accumulate institutional power over anyone else.
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We have to create anarchy.
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Demystifying Institutions
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Institutions exist to serve us, not the other way around. They have no inherent claim on our obedience. We should never invest them with more legitimacy than our own needs and desires. When our wishes conflict with others’ wishes, we can see if an institutional process can produce a solution that satisfies everyone; but as soon as we accord an institution the right to adjudicate our conflicts or dictate our decisions, we have abdicated our freedom.
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This is not a critique of a particular organizational model, or an argument for “informal” structures over “formal” ones. Rather, it demands that we treat all models as provisional—that we ceaselessly reappraise and reinvent them. Where Thomas Paine wanted to enthrone the law as king, where Rousseau theorized the social contract and more recent enthusiasts of capitalism über alles dream of a society based on contracts alone, we counter that when relations are truly in the best interests of all participants, there is no need for laws or contracts.
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Likewise, this is not an argument in favor of mere individualism, nor of treating relationships as expendable, nor of organizing only with those who share one’s preferences. In a crowded, interdependent world, we can’t afford to refuse to coexist or coordinate with others. The point is simply that we must not seek to legislate relations.
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Instead of deferring to a blueprint or protocol, we can evaluate institutions on an ongoing basis: Do they reward cooperation—or contention? Do they distribute agency—or create bottlenecks of power? Do they offer each participant the opportunity to fulfill her potential on her own terms—or impose external imperatives? Do they facilitate the resolution of conflict on mutually agreeable terms—or punish all who run afoul of a codified system?
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\n“He expressed himself to us that we should never allow ourselves to be tempted by any consideration to acknowledge laws and institutions to exist as of right if our conscience and reason condemned them. He admonished us not to care whether a majority, no matter how large, opposed our principles and opinions; the largest majorities were sometimes only organized mobs.”
– August Bondi, writing about John Brown
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Creating Spaces of Encounter
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In place of formal sites of centralized decision-making, we propose a variety of spaces of encounter where people may open themselves to each other’s influence and find others who share their priorities. Encounter means mutual transformation: establishing common points of reference, common concerns. The space of encounter is not a representative body vested with the authority to make decisions for others, nor a governing body employing majority rule or consensus. It is an opportunity for people to experiment with acting in different configurations on a voluntary basis.
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The spokescouncil immediately preceding the demonstrations against the 2001 Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City was a classic space of encounter. This meeting brought together a wide range of autonomous groups that had converged from around the world to protest the FTAA. Rather than attempting to make binding decisions, the participants introduced the initiatives that their groups had prepared and coordinated for mutual benefit wherever possible. Much of the decision-making occurred afterwards in informal intergroup discussions. By this means, thousands of people were able to synchronize their actions without need of central leadership, without giving the police much insight into the wide array of plans that were to unfold. Had the spokescouncil employed an organizational model intended to produce unity and centralization, the participants could have spent the entire night fruitlessly arguing about goals, strategy, and which tactics to allow.
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Most of the social movements of the past two decades have been hybrid models juxtaposing spaces of encounter with some form of democracy. In Occupy, for example, the encampments served as open-ended spaces of encounter, while the general assemblies were formally intended to function as directly democratic decision-making bodies. Most of those movements achieved their greatest effects because the encounters they facilitated opened up opportunities for autonomous action, not because they centralized group activity through direct democracy.¹⁶¹⁶16. Many of the decisions that gave Occupy Oakland a greater impact than other Occupy encampments, including the refusal to negotiate with the city government and the militant reaction to the first eviction, were the result of autonomous initiatives, not consensus process. Meanwhile, some occupiers interpreted consensus process as a sort of decentralized legal framework in which any action undertaken by any participant in the occupation should require the consent of every other participant. As one participant recalls, “One of the first times the police tried to enter the camp at Occupy Oakland, they were immediately surrounded and shouted at by a group of about twenty people. Some other people weren’t happy about this. The most vocal of these pacifists placed himself in front of those confronting the police, crossed his forearms in the X that symbolizes strong disagreement in the sign language of consensus process, and said ‘You can’t do this! I block you!’ For him, consensus was a tool of horizontal control, giving everyone the right to suppress whichever of others’ actions they found disagreeable.” If we approach the encounter as the driving force of these movements, rather than as a raw material to be shaped through democratic process, it might help us to prioritize what we do best.
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Anarchists frustrated by the contradictions of democratic discourse have sometimes withdrawn to organize themselves according to preexisting affinity alone. Yet segregation breeds stagnation and fractiousness. It is better to organize on the basis of our conditions and needs so we come into contact with all the others who share them. Only when we understand ourselves as nodes within dynamic collectivities, rather than discrete entities possessed of static interests, can we make sense of the rapid metamorphoses that people undergo in the course of experiences like the Occupy movement—and the tremendous power of the encounter to transform us if we open ourselves to it.
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Cultivating Collectivity, Preserving Difference
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If no institution, contract, or law should be able to dictate our decisions, how do we agree on what responsibilities we have towards each other?
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Some have suggested a distinction between “closed” groups, in which the participants agree to answer to each other for their actions, and “open” groups that need not reach consensus. But this begs the question: how do we draw a line between the two? If we are accountable to our fellows in a closed group only until we choose to leave it, and we may leave at any time, that is little different from participating in an open group. At the same time, we are all involved, like it or not, in one closed group sharing a single inescapable space: earth. So it is not a question of distinguishing the spaces in which we must be accountable to each other from the spaces in which we may act freely. The question is how to foster both responsibility and autonomy at every order of scale.
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Towards this end, we set out to create mutually fulfilling collectivities at each level of society—spaces in which people identify with each other and have cause to do right by each other. These can take many forms, from housing cooperatives and neighborhood assemblies to international networks. At the same time, we recognize that we will have to reconfigure them continuously according to how much intimacy and interdependence proves beneficial for the participants. When a configuration must change, this need not be a sign of failure: on the contrary, it shows that the participants are not competing for hegemony. Instead of treating group decision-making as a pursuit of unanimity, we can approach it as a space for differences to arise, conflicts to play out, and transformations to occur as different social constellations converge and diverge. Disagreeing and dissociating can be just as desirable as reaching agreement, provided they occur for the right reasons; the advantages of organizing in larger numbers should suffice to discourage people from fracturing gratuitously.
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Our institutions should help us to tease out differences, not suppress or submerge them. Some witnesses returning from Rojava report that when an assembly there cannot reach consensus, it splits into two bodies, dividing its resources between them. If this is true, it offers a model of voluntary association that is a vast improvement on the Procrustean unity of democracy.
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Resolving conflicts
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Sometimes dividing into separate groups isn’t enough to resolve conflicts. To dispense with centralized coercion, we have to come up with new ways of addressing strife. Conflicts between those who oppose the state are one of the chief assets that preserve its supremacy.¹⁷¹⁷17. Witness the Mexican autodefensas who set out to defend themselves against the cartels that are functionally identical with the government in some parts of Mexico, only to end up in gang warfare against each other. If we want to create spaces of freedom, we must not become so fractured that we can’t defend those spaces, and we must not resolve conflicts in a way that creates new power imbalances.
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One of the most basic functions of democracy is to offer a way of concluding disputes. Voting, courts, and police all serve to decide conflicts without necessarily resolving them; the rule of law effectively imposes a winner-take-all model for addressing differences. By centralizing force, a strong state is able to compel feuding parties to suspend hostilities even on mutually unacceptable terms. This enables it to suppress forms of strife that interfere with its control, such as class warfare, while fostering forms of conflict that undermine horizontal and autonomous resistance, such as gang warfare. We cannot understand the religious and ethnic violence of our time without factoring in the ways that state structures provoke and exacerbate it.
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When we accord institutions inherent legitimacy, this offers us an excuse not to resolve conflicts, relying instead on the intercession of the state. It gives us an alibi to conclude disputes by force and to exclude those who are structurally disadvantaged. Rather than taking the initiative to work things out directly, we end up jockeying for power.
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If we don’t recognize the authority of the state, we have no such excuses: we must find mutually satisfying resolutions or else suffer the consequences of ongoing strife. This gives us an incentive to take all parties’ needs and perceptions seriously, to develop skills with which to defuse tension. It isn’t necessary to get everyone to agree, but we have to find ways to differ that do not produce hierarchies, oppression, pointless antagonism. The first step down this road is to remove the incentives that the state offers not to resolve conflict.
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Unfortunately, many of the models of conflict resolution that once served human communities are now lost to us, forcibly replaced by the court systems of ancient Athens and Rome. We can look to experimental models of transformative justice for a glimpse of the alternatives we will have to develop.
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Refusing to Be Ruled
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Envisioning what a horizontal and decentralized society might look like, we can imagine overlapping networks of collectives and assemblies in which people organize to meet their daily needs—food, shelter, medical care, work, recreation, discussion, companionship. Being interdependent, they would have good reason to settle disputes amicably, but no one could force anyone else to remain in an arrangement that was unhealthy or unfulfilling. In response to threats, they would mobilize in larger ad hoc formations, drawing on connections with other communities around the world.
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In fact, a great many stateless societies have looked something like this in the course of human history. Today. models like this continue to appear at the intersections of indigenous, feminist, and anarchist traditions.
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\n“The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that—however bloody—can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.”
– Lysander Spooner, No Treason
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That brings us back to our starting place—to modern-day Athens, Greece. In the city where democracy first came of age, thousands of people now organize themselves under anarchist banners in horizontal, decentralized networks. In place of the exclusivity of ancient Athenian citizenship, their structures are extensive and open-ended; they welcome migrants fleeing the war in Syria, for they know that their experiment in freedom must grow or perish. In place of the coercive apparatus of government, they seek to maintain a decentralized distribution of power reinforced by a collective commitment to solidarity. Rather than uniting to impose majority rule, they cooperate to prevent the possibility of rule itself.
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This is not an outdated way of life, but the end of a long error.
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Anarchists assembling in 21st-century Athens, Greece.
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From Democracy to Freedom
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Let’s return to the high point of the uprisings. Thousands of us flood into the streets, finding each other in new formations that offer an unfamiliar and exhilarating sense of agency. Suddenly everything intersects: words and deeds, ideas and sensations, personal stories and world events. Certainty—finally, we feel at home—and uncertainty: finally, an open horizon. Together, we discover ourselves capable of things we never imagined.
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What is beautiful about such moments transcends any political system. The conflicts are as essential as the flashes of unexpected consensus. This is not the functioning of democracy, but the experience of freedom—of collectively taking our destinies in our hands. No set of procedures could institutionalize this. It is a prize we must wrest from the jaws of habit and history again and again.
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Next time a window of opportunity opens, rather than reinventing “real democracy” yet again, let our goal be freedom, freedom itself.
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1. “I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of others, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.” –Mikhail Bakunin ↩︎
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2. This seeming paradox didn’t trouble the framers of the US Constitution because the minority whose rights they were chiefly concerned with protecting was the class of property owners—who already had plenty of leverage on state institutions. As James Madison said in 1787, “Our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” ↩︎
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3. In this context, arguing that “the personal is political” constitutes a feminist rejection of the dichotomy between oikos and polis. But if this argument is understood to mean that the personal, too, should be subject to democratic decision-making, it only extends the logic of government into additional aspects of life. The real alternative is to affirm multiple sites of power, arguing that legitimacy should not be confined to any one space, so decisions made in the household are not subordinated to those made in the sites of formal politics. ↩︎
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4. This is a fundamental paradox of democratic governments: established by a crime, they sanctify law—legitimizing a new ruling order as the fulfillment and continuation of a revolt. ↩︎
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5. “Obedience to the law is true liberty,” reads one memorial to the soldiers who suppressed Shay’s Rebellion. ↩︎
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6. Just as the “libertarian” capitalist suspects that the activities of even the most democratic government interfere with the pure functioning of the free market, the partisan of pure democracy can be sure that as long as there are economic inequalities, the wealthy will always wield disproportionate influence over even the most carefully constructed democratic process. Yet government and economy are inseparable. The market relies upon the state to enforce property rights, while at bottom, democracy is a means of transferring, amalgamating, and investing political power: it is a market for agency itself. ↩︎
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7. The objection that the democracies that govern the world today aren’t real democracies is a variant of the classic “No true Scotsman” fallacy. If, upon investigation, it turns out that not a single existing democracy lives up to what you mean by the word, you might need a different expression for what you are trying to describe. This is like communists who, confronted with all the repressive communist regimes of the 20th century, protest that not a single one of them was properly communist. When an idea is so difficult to implement that millions of people equipped with a considerable portion of the resources of humanity and doing their best across a period of centuries can’t produce a single working model, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Give anarchists a tenth of the opportunities Marxists and democrats have had, and then we may speak about whether anarchy works! ↩︎
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8. Without formal institutions, democratic organizations often enforce decisions by delegitimizing actions initiated outside their structures and encouraging the use of force against them. Hence the classic scene in which protest marshals attack demonstrators for doing something that wasn’t agreed upon in advance via a centralized democratic process. ↩︎
\n

9. In theory, categories that are defined by exclusion, like citizenship, break down when we expand them to include the whole world. But if we wish to break them down, why not reject them outright, rather than promising to do so while further legitimizing them? When we use the word citizenship to describe something desirable, that can’t help but reinforce the legitimacy of that institution as it exists today. ↩︎
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10. In fact, the English word “police” is derived from polis by way of the ancient Greek word for citizen. ↩︎
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11. See Kant’s argument that a republic is “violence with freedom and law,” whereas anarchy is “freedom and law without violence”—so the law becomes a mere recommendation that cannot be enforced. ↩︎
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12. This far, at least, we can agree with Booker T. Washington when he said, “The Reconstruction experiment in racial democracy failed because it began at the wrong end, emphasizing political means and civil rights acts rather than economic means and self-determination.” ↩︎
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13. At the end of May 1968, the announcement of snap elections broke the wave of wildcat strikes and occupations that had swept across France; the spectacle of the majority of French citizens voting for President de Gaulle’s party was enough to dispel all hope of revolution. This illustrates how elections serve as a pageantry that represents citizens to each other as willing participants in the prevailing order. ↩︎
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14. As economic crises intensify alongside widespread disillusionment with representational politics, we see governments offering more direct participation in decision-making to pacify the public. Just as the dictatorships in Greece, Spain, and Chile were forced to transition into democratic governments to neutralize protest movements, the state is opening up new roles for those who might otherwise lead the opposition to it. If we are directly responsible for making the political system work, we will blame ourselves when it fails—not the format itself. This explains the new experiments with “participatory” budgets from Pôrto Alegre to Poznań. In practice, the participants rarely have any leverage on town officials; at most, they can act as consultants, or vote on a measly 0.1% of city funds. The real purpose of participatory budgeting is to redirect popular attention from the failures of government to the project of making it more democratic. ↩︎
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15. “Autonomy” is derived from the ancient Greek prefix auto-, self, and nomos, law—giving oneself one’s own law. This suggests an understanding of personal freedom in which one aspect of the self—say, the superego—permanently controls the others and dictates all behavior. Kant defined autonomy as self-legislation, in which the individual compels himself to comply with the universal laws of objective morality rather than acting according his desires. By contrast, an anarchist might counter that we owe our freedom to the spontaneous interplay of myriad forces within us, not to our capacity to force a single order upon ourselves. Which of those conceptions of freedom we embrace will have repercussions on everything from how we picture freedom on a planetary scale to how we understand the movements of subatomic particles. ↩︎
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16. Many of the decisions that gave Occupy Oakland a greater impact than other Occupy encampments, including the refusal to negotiate with the city government and the militant reaction to the first eviction, were the result of autonomous initiatives, not consensus process. Meanwhile, some occupiers interpreted consensus process as a sort of decentralized legal framework in which any action undertaken by any participant in the occupation should require the consent of every other participant. As one participant recalls, “One of the first times the police tried to enter the camp at Occupy Oakland, they were immediately surrounded and shouted at by a group of about twenty people. Some other people weren’t happy about this. The most vocal of these pacifists placed himself in front of those confronting the police, crossed his forearms in the X that symbolizes strong disagreement in the sign language of consensus process, and said ‘You can’t do this! I block you!’ For him, consensus was a tool of horizontal control, giving everyone the right to suppress whichever of others’ actions they found disagreeable.” ↩︎
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17. Witness the Mexican autodefensas who set out to defend themselves against the cartels that are functionally identical with the government in some parts of Mexico, only to end up in gang warfare against each other. ↩︎
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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.
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By Tasos Sagris of VOID NETWORK, this text is part of a series exploring the anarchist analysis of democracy.

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I find myself in the courtyard of the School of Fine Arts in Athens, Greece. It’s May 25, 2011, a hot summer day. A five-day anarchist and anti-authoritarian festival starts in six hours and I am scrambling to prepare all the small details I have in mind. I’m working alone.

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I walk across the campus to bring an electrician from one stage to the other. In Spain, people have been on the streets for ten days now, after 75 years of silence. They are sending us signals of revolt, bringing the flame of liberation from the Arab countries to European land. We are just setting up for our festival: sound systems for three stages and two areas for public discussions and lectures; there is a theater stage, a book fair area, and workshop areas. We are about 30 people from two affinity groups constructing an area for 12,000 people. We are acting like a Spartan army (totally paranoid ideas about the amazing abilities of a small group of determined fighters). The mind is a spaceship. People travel to other planets during the summer nights for thousands of years now. We are on our way to anarchy! Sometimes it seems far away; sometimes it is suddenly all around us.

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This same afternoon, there is an assembly behind the Acropolis for people hoping to bring the flame from Spain to Greece. For a year now, a small weekly anarchist assembly has met in Syntagma Square in front of the Parliament to talk about the crises. At the new assembly this afternoon, people decide to go and camp in Syntagma following the calls for action coming from Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt. They publish a call for others to join them.

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May 26, 2011: The second day of protest in Syntagma Square.

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We can do an incredible amount of logistical work to prepare a space for people, but if the spirit of revolt draws them somewhere else, the important thing is to be there! We can spend our whole lives building a theoretical argument or an ideological position or an infrastructure for the movement—but when a revolt is taking place, we have to be ready to abandon what keeps us apart and find a way to meet each other, to spread beneficial ideas and revolutionary practices to those in rebellion.

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What appeared that day was a tropical storm, an ocean arising in front of our eyes, vast and wild. 100,000 people gathered suddenly around the parliament, shouting the classic anarchist slogan against democracy, “We Want to Burn, We Want to Burn the Parliament, this Bordello!” Nobody was at the festival for the afternoon lectures; everybody was at Syntagma. More than 8000 people arrived late at night for the concerts and the techno-trance stage. The crowd was in a frenzy, sharing an unfamiliar and wild enthusiasm.

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We went to camp at Syntagma with Void Network. We announced this in the weekly anarchist assembly “For the Self-Organization of the Society,” which we had been participating in for three years already. Some of the groups refused to come to Syntagma—they called it petit bourgeois, they kept a distance from it, just watching. Other anarchist, autonomous, and anti-authoritarian groups and individuals stayed at Syntagma all summer. We stayed there too, spreading anarchist ideas and practices among countless desperate people, participating in the organization of the Athens General Assembly to guarantee that everyone would have an equal opportunity to express himself or herself, to ensure that no political party or ultra-left group could manipulate the decisions, to keep leftists from taking over the movement.

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Other groups came only for the three days of riots. The riots were vast… In the middle of financial collapse, in the middle of inhuman austerity measures, unemployment, and unbelievable state repression… this was one of the best summers of my life.

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May 29, 2011: The encampment in Syntagma Square.

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When the Greek government signed a contract with the IMF and Central European Bank in 2010, agreeing to austerity measures, it gave everyone the chance to see how global economic interests control representative democracy. People felt betrayed by politicians they had believed in for 40 years, politicians they had put in parliament to represent their interests. Furious, they imagined burning down the Parliament; many of them even tried to. Metal bars and 24/7 riot police protected the Parliament for three years, representing the final obstacle between the people and the economic interests that govern our lives.

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The collapse of faith in representation was also a kind of emancipation. The obedient victims of superior logic and common sense shook free of the leadership of the politicians and the manipulation of the journalists. The unions and parties lost their influence. A new individual and collective intelligence and liberation arose in place of the old identities. Wild strikes took place after decades of apathy and obedience among what we call the general public, millions of people took part in wild riots—shouting first against themselves for believing in the politicians for so many years, and then against the politicians.

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The people took a step. This is what happened during the summer of 2011 in Greece and many other countries.

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June 5, 2011: The encampment in Syntagma Square.

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I find myself in my mother’s house. It is June 2011. A 65-year-old social democrat, she wonders why people didn’t succeed in storming the parliament yet during the days they have been encircling it. She is afraid to go out in the streets because of the tear gas, but she always asks me, “Maybe I could come also to the camp during the daytime?” My uncle and my aunt are also there, members of the Socialist Party (PASOK) since it was established in 1973; now it governs the country. My aunt is 62. With her eyes shining, she describes how last night the limousine of a famous minister of PASOK passed her outside the Parliament. She punched the back of the limousine, then ran behind it with other people to smash its windows and punch the minister. She feels liberation—she feels free! She took a step…

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June 15, 2011: Fighting against right-wing nationalist protesters at Syntagma Square.

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But were the assemblies that happened in Syntagma liberating, in the end? Or were they “directly democratic” in a way that led directly to the parties of Syriza and Golden Dawn gaining huge numbers of new adherents, for different but fundamentally similar reasons?

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People expressed themselves through the assemblies all around the country. Common people who had never taken part in any kind of public event spoke openly about their deepest fears and their most precious desires, in front of thousands upon thousands of people, with megaphones to guarantee that everyone could hear their voices clearly. It was like some kind of group therapy, a catharsis from the delusions of the past, a jump into public space, an expedition into the vast possibilities of social power. It was a wonderful summer when everyone was staying out in the streets talking with everyone about everything.

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And then democracy was re-established.

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Most of the anarchists were absent, anyway, committing their biggest political mistake so far this century. In any case, we—the anarchists of our times—do not yet have anarchist answers for most of the problems our societies face. We know very well how to deconstruct the ideas of our enemies, but our worst enemy is our own inability to bring our ideals from the clouds of anarchism down to the rough and dirty ground of anarchy.

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Under these circumstances, with no other concrete options, people felt obliged—or forced—to choose between the party of social control offering them a totalitarian leader for a father figure, or the social-democratic party promising them free schools, hospitals, and some amount of protection from the wild neoliberal sharks that govern this world.

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And so, after speaking in the assemblies, after participating in “direct” democracy, people got in line once again to vote, to reaffirm the democracy of the state. Every step you take towards freedom becomes an obstacle to going further. Democracy itself is an obstacle.

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June 15, 2011: Riot police line up behind a banner reading “DIRECT DEMOCRACY.”

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The democracy of our times, the highest achievement of bourgeois civilization, has built-in properties that go all the way back to its origins here in Athens thousands of years ago.

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The Founding Fathers of every nation imagined themselves as the governors of uneducated savages, perverted masses of poor people ready to commit all kinds of crimes as soon as they were not controlled. Democracy was constructed by people with a political and economic interest in keeping the masses under control by means of words rather than the sword (and with the sword whenever words are not enough). Representative democracy is a system of mind control offering a pseudo-reality of freedom in which you cannot have any serious influence over the fundamental decisions about your life.

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The Founding Fathers of democracy—like all fathers, perhaps—fear the critical thinking of their children. Democracy keeps people stupid: we are forced to remain in a childish state of mind, participating in obligatory social structures in which we cannot realize the totality of our capabilities and desires. There is no need to know the exact details of the decisions that determine your life: you have just to vote for who seems good enough to govern your life. Democracy spreads corruption: the leaders drain the resources of the community. Democracy keeps people apathetic. Nobody gives a damn about your opinion; you are just one statistic among millions. Democracy will never teach you to speak in public, just to remain silent and listen to your governors speak. You are there to applaud. Throughout your entire political life, you have been absent, represented.

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Democracy keeps you afraid, afraid of the enemies of democracy that have hidden within your tribe, your democratic community, your nation. Democracy created borders in your life and now you have to protect these borders with your own body. The borders are imaginary, social inventions, but your dead body on the battleground is real. Democracy excludes the rest of humanity from your community and it prepares an army, including you, to kill all the excluded ones. The moment you refuse to kill for the sake of democracy, you too are excluded.

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This system has an amazing ability to reproduce itself. It produces schools, hospitals, theaters, kindergartens, military camps, university campuses, galleries, museums, and amusement parks. You can spend your whole life inside those institutions, and if you try to escape from them, you will probably end up in an asylum for homeless people, a jail, or a psychiatric clinic (all of which are also democratic institutions). The flipside of this amazing ability to reproduce itself is that democracy is unable to surpass itself, to evolve into something different, in the same way that the Soviet Union never arrived at a communist paradise. Listen to what the democratic states say against those who revolt: “Nobody can blackmail democracy.”

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So democracy never changes. Statutes and politicians may be replaced, but it is always the same oligarchic system, aristocratic in its core. Democracy is always searching, through elections and business contracts and nepotism, for the best ones to perpetuate it.

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This should come as no surprise. Democracy is a conservative tribal method by which certain ancient Greek tribes reproduced themselves. It will never allow you to become different until you escape from the tribe. And today, when the control of the capitalist market and democratic state are absolute all around the world, there is no other way to escape democracy except to destroy it.

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Even knowing all of this, some people defend democracy. They want to find a form of democracy that doesn’t end up in oligarchy, just like the 21st century communists who are searching for communist systems that don’t lead to totalitarianism. But the Founding Fathers of all nations stand over democrats of all kinds, looking on approvingly as normality reasserts itself—the same conditions of exploitation, new faces in the same old positions of authority.

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This world will never change as long as we are afraid to cut the roots of this order. Democracy is the final alternative for all who are afraid to step into the unknown territory of their own desires, their own power. Likewise, the demand for “real” democracy is the last way for social movements to legitimize themselves in the supposed “social sphere” (and to avoid criminalization). Just as it is the final step, democracy is also the final obstacle to new possibilities arising in social movements.

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June 28, 2011: Nationalist flags replace the banner demanding direct democracy.

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Could any form of democracy save us from democracy?

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Direct democracy offers us an alternative way to govern our lives. But is this really what we need? Do we want to reproduce the limits of the old world on a smaller scale? Do we want the “general assembly” to decide about our lives? Or do we want to expand our lives into new forms of self-determination and open sharing of creativity, to offer our power freely for the benefit of all humanity, however we (and those with whom we share our lives) see fit?

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When I take part in the assembly of Void Network, I have to take into account the needs and interests of all my comrades, and our group has to take into account the needs and desires of the greatest possible number of people in this world. If we do not take care of each other, there can be no Void Network, and if we do not take care of the people outside our group, there will be no connection between us and the world. There is no general assembly that could know better than we do how we can make the most of our abilities to benefit the people around us. This is the difference between an affinity group, which produces a collective and expansive power, and a democratic assembly, which concentrates power outside our lives and relationships, alienating us from ourselves and each other.

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Direct democracy is supposed to get rid of the apathy produced by representation, since it appears as a “participatory” form of democracy. But is the idea that we will have an assembly of millions of people? Would such an assembly really be capable of offering us freedom and equality? Each of us would just feel like a statistic in it as we waited for days for our turn to speak. On the other hand, if we reduce that form to the miniscule level of a neighborhood assembly, don’t we trap ourselves in a microcosm like oversized ants?

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Any kind of “direct democracy” reproduces the same conditions as representative democracy, just on a smaller scale. The majority suppresses the minority, driving them into apathy. Often, you don’t even try to express your opinion, as you know you will have no chance to put it into practice. Often, you are afraid to speak, as you know that you will be humiliated by the majority. Homogeneity is the ultimate imperative of any democratic procedure, “direct” or representational—a homogeneity that ends up as two final opinions (the majority and minority), losing the vast richness of human intelligence and sensibility, erasing all the complexity and diversity of human needs and desires.

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This is why even directly democratic assemblies can end up deciding to carry out inhuman genocides, like the one ancient Athens inflicted upon Mylos in 416 BC. Excluded people have been enslaved and raped as a result of direct democratic decisions. Direct democracy is “members only.” Because it is smaller, it excludes even more people than representative democracy—producing isolated bubbles that fight each other like the city-states of ancient Greece. Everybody is an outsider, a foreigner, a possible enemy; that’s why the community has to build armies to defend itself and you have to die to protect the opinion of the majority even if you disagree with it. Whoever will not go along with the decision must be punished—like Socrates, the world-famous victim of democracy, and thousands of others. The charismatic leaders find the best possible direct connection with their followers, and the democratic mechanisms for manipulating public opinion work directly better than ever! Direct democracy will never liberate us from democracy.

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June 29, 2011: Greek riot police, the new hoplites imposing democracy on the exploited and excluded.

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Months later, I find myself at my mother’s house again. It is early in September 2011, a few days before Occupy Wall Street begins. I am sending out emails to comrades in the USA, urging them to expand the encampments all over the states, to spread anarchist ideas and methodologies in the Occupy movement assemblies.

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My uncle is also there. As I am looking at my screen, he says to me, “We decided now to move”—I look up at him—“away from PASOK, to try the European communist party of SYRIZA.” I feel terror, because I know that when he says, “We decided,” he speaks for about two million people. It’s as if he knows them all individually—they are the betrayed followers of PASOK, and he was in the social-democrat party from the first day to the last. Syriza had only 4% of the votes just one day ago. I am looking at him, seeing two million zombies walk just a few steps from one party to another. I want to shout, “YOU HAVE TO MOVE FURTHER! EVERY STEP IS A NEW OBSTACLE! YOU CAN’T STOP THERE…”

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Anarchists have a lot to do before we can speak to this kind of people. They are the realists, these people who understand politics as the management of reality.

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I imagine history as a beautiful girl: she smiles, and riots explode in Athens. I feel history going away from Athens after staying a long time in my city, now that the Parliament has found a new way to reestablish delusional hopes in people’s minds. Three and a half years later, in 2015, the streets are still silent and the Euro-communists of SYRIZA win the elections with just one word for a campaign slogan: HOPE. (The last thing left in Pandora’s box.) To me, it seems more like DESPERATION.

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One of the first decisions the new government of Syriza makes is to remove the protective metal bars and riot police from around the Parliament. The Parliament is safe again. Democracy never changes. It just reforms and reproduces itself.

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Defending a space of freedom in Syntagma Square.

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Every step is a new obstacle. 2600 years ago in Greece and two centuries ago in Europe the struggle for democracy liberated the poverty-stricken masses from their misery. They found themselves some years later in exactly the same conditions—in eternal war with all possible outsiders, plus the right to vote for it. Christianity and Islam attracted millions of poor people with promises of social justice and eternal love; some years later they became ideological tools for massive genocides all around the world, absolute enemies of human emancipation and obstacles to the arising of human spirituality. The Communist Party, proclaimed to be the voice of all those without voices, became the worst enemy of freedom of expression. Anarchists became ministers and governors in the Spanish revolution—and the CNT, the great organization for the liberation of the workers, organized them to work at the factories for their whole lives until their heroic deaths. It is very possible to sacrifice our lives to liberate ourselves from the old world’s prisons and find ourselves entrapped in a new high-quality jail.

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Anarcho-communism, an emancipatory vision that we all share in Void Network, is an old vision of a world without money and without borders. But it needs to be updated for the 21st century—otherwise, it will remain in our minds like a mythological ghost, another obstacle. If we want a world without money, this means we have to transform labor into open-source creativity, to turn workplaces into beautiful parks of voluntary creative participation in a global web that freely distributes all material and mental production. Life has to be organized around the production of desires and the enjoyment of needs. If we want a world without borders, that means a world without “foreigners”—so you will not be a “stranger” anywhere in the world at any moment of your life. We have to transform “societies” into open and inclusive communities that will be fully connected in a global network, so that everyone is welcome and useful anywhere and anytime on this planet, not divided into isolated, self-sufficient, xenophobic groups. We have to open “ourselves” to the difference of all the “others.”

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In the eight decades since the collapse of the Spanish Revolution, anarchists have avoided offering solid plans for anarchist revolution on this scale. Meanwhile, during those years, capitalism has evolved to levels that the revolutionaries of late 19th century could not have imagined. Global capitalism is here, global anarchism is not.

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The only possible way that an anarchist revolution could happen is on a planetary scale—not on a local scale, not on isolated islands. Even if it will take 200 years for an anarchist revolution to extend to every corner of this world, this has to be envisioned, planned, and realized.

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If we reduce the scale of our organizational structures to tiny neighborhood assemblies or miniscule eco-communities, we will find ourselves dealing with problems that pass through our small community like the huge ocean waves pass over a small, fragile fishing boat. Neo-totalitarianism will never leave us alone in alternative-lifestyle eco-paradisiacal bubbles (though neoliberalism might sell vacations there to the rich). We cannot close our eyes to the suffering of this world.

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On the other hand, if we permit old or new forms of authoritarian mass structures to oblige us to embrace their notions of efficiency and practicality, we will end up in the belly of a new bureaucratic monster. We need a global network of communities on struggle, a network of millions of flexible groups ready to fight against totalitarianism, to create public liberated zones, to defend them against their enemies and connect them in a revolutionary wave of global social emancipation—and to do all this without central control.

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In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man that

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The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of “common sense” that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred consciousness on man. Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a worldwide consensus. When we have achieved a worldwide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a worldwide integration. Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness.

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Could anarchy—total freedom, absolute social and economic equality, and global fellowship—offer an inclusive consciousness to fragmented humanity for the 21st century?

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It is not simple even to begin thinking about it. And if we want a vision of emancipation that is created socially and collectively, we have to avoid simplistic solutions and the leadership of specific individuals. For example, Karl Marx was a very smart man, but Marxism is an obstacle for free thinking.

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In any case, we are anarchists. We are fighting against the state and capitalism to open passages—practices, strategies, and methodologies—that lead to total freedom, social equality, mutual aid, and self-determination. We have to find a way to connect with the many, in order that together we may transform the conditions that produce our reality. Against homogeneity, we have to empower diversity; against certitude, we have to allow all truths to come true; against exclusion, we want to defend the stranger, the queer, the old, the young, the freak, the unknown; against borders, we want to live openheartedly; against atomization, to care for others, to learn from each other, to carry out our great plans and achieve our ultimate goals. Otherwise, established political authority and economic interests will reassert themselves in endless versions of the same conditions. This world will never change until we dare to live free, to share everything, to spread anarchy!

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Destination:
Anarchy.
Every
step
is
an
obstacle.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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This text is part of a series exploring an anarchist analysis of democracy. It is also a follow up to Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the #Spanish Revolution, which we published in June 2011 immediately after the 15M movement. For more context, read “The Rose of Fire Has Returned!” and the third part of our “After the Crest” series, “Barcelona Anarchists at Low Tide.”

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Thousands of people fill the Plaza del Sol in Madrid during the 15M mobilization in 2011.

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I. Emergence

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Spring 2011.

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“This is our revolution! No barricades, nothing romantic like that, but what do we expect? It’s a piece of shit, but we already knew this is the world we live in.”

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I was shoulder to shoulder with a friend, pushing through the swarming crowds, the tens of thousands that had coalesced out of the democratic desolation to fill Plaça Catalunya, Barcelona’s central plaza. We were on our way back from a copy shop whose employees, also taken up in the fervor, let us print another five hundred copies of the latest open letter with a huge discount, easily paid for with all the change people were leaving in the donations jar at the info table we anarchists had set up.

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In less than an hour, all the pamphlets had been snatched up, we’d met more people who shared some of our ideas, had another couple engaging debates, another brief argument. Decades of social isolation had suddenly been washed away in a sudden, unexpected outpouring of social angst, anger, hope, a desire to relate. A million individual needs for the expression of collective needs: Yes, I need that, too. A million solitary voices recognizing themselves in a cry they all took up together: Yes, I am here, too. A million stories of loneliness finding themselves in a shared alienation: Yes, I feel that, too. It was hard not to get carried away. We felt it too.

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But in that commune of alienation we also felt a certain cynicism. It was more than just arrogance, not merely looking down our noses at these people as they shouted every evening, “aqui comença la Revolució!”—the Revolution begins here. The truth is, we doubted the popular understanding of what a revolution would actually entail.

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And our doubts were not without reason. Being out alone in the streets for years, trying to spread critical ideas, trying to open small spaces of freedom, getting handcuffed or beaten, when no one else gives a crap, when everyone else seems content to stare into their TV screens while the world dies around them, can certainly make you arrogant. It can make you bitter, and cynical, and superior, and completely oblivious to unexpected changes that rock the system you’ve spent your whole life fighting. But it can also give you perspective. It can make you ask, Why are these people in the streets now, only when their own social benefits are threatened, while they didn’t lift a finger when it was other people on the chopping block? It can provoke the question, Why is the media giving so much attention to this phenomenon, even if it’s often negative attention, when they’ve been ignoring our struggles for years?

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When the plaza occupation movement broke out on the 15th of May (15M), 2011, throughout the Spanish state, we threw ourselves into it. A few anarchists dismissed it outright, unable to find traction in that chaotic, unseemly jumble of a movement, and others uncritically gave their stamp of approval to anything that appeared to have the support of a mass. But we refused to surrender the perspectives and experiences won through years of lonely struggle when few others were insisting that the system we lived in was unacceptable.

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We didn’t all interpret those experiences the same way, just as we did not develop the same strategies in the midst of the plaza occupation movement. I can only give one account of this story; nonetheless it is a story we helped build collectively, struggling side by side and also disputing one another’s positions. There is no consensus history of the movement, and not even of anarchist participation in it, but at the same time, no one arrived at their particular version of events alone.

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One element we all shared was a critique of democracy. There was a history to our position. In 1975, Francisco Franco died. A fascist dictator who was supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and more discreetly by the British, US, and French governments, his open acceptance by the West in 1949 revealed yet again the tolerance a democratic world system can have for dictatorships that succeed in preventing revolutions. In 1976, the Basque independence group ETA blew up Franco’s handpicked successor. The country was awash in wildcat strikes and protests. Armed actions were multiplying, but there was no vanguardist group with the hope of controlling or representing the whole movement. No figurehead that could be co-opted or destroyed. It was the beginning of the Transition.

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Perceiving the inevitability of democratic government, the fascists turned into conservatives, constituting the Popular Party, and in exchange for legalization and a chance at power, they enticed the communists and the socialists into negotiations, giving birth to a new legalized, institutionalized labor union, CCOO, and a new political party, the Socialist Workers Party of Spain (PSOE). The PSOE ruled the country from 1982 to 1996, and in 2010 they were again in power when European Union bureaucrats and bank financiers demanded austerity measures. They quickly complied.

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But back in the mid–70s, not everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Many people rejected negotiations with fascists, or rejected any kind of government and any form of capitalism altogether. As the years turned into decades, these holdouts became ever more isolated, until they had been consigned by institutional, judicial, and media marginalization into a reduced political ghetto. By this point, the “irreductibles” could mostly be found within an anarchist movement that was much weaker and more infirm than it had been before the Civil War that put Franco in power.

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These anarchists kept fighting, largely developing an antisocial character as a tool to help them resist the psychosocial effects of extreme marginalization, and to facilitate a critique of democratic society as a majoritarian, mediatic control structure. But as revolts started breaking out in neighboring countries several years before the onset of the economic crisis, some anarchists started becoming attentive to the possibilities of a widespread social revolt, and they began changing their methods and analyses to be able to encourage and participate in such revolts, in the seemingly unlikely chance that one should break out here. But in a few short years, coinciding with the beginning of the crisis, the revolts multiplied, coming closer—if not geographically, then ideologically.

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Before the 15M movement started, Barcelona had already witnessed a one-day general strike with majority participation, in which anticapitalist discourses were frequent if not predominant, and which resulted in large scale occupations, rioting, looting, and clashes with police, constituting an important step in the reappropriation of street tactics that would make other victories possible in the following years. A combative May Day protest had abandoned the typical route through the city center to snake through several rich neighborhoods, sowing destruction and a small measure of economic revenge.

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The 15M movement broke out just two weeks later, and its official discourses called for total pacifism and symbolic citizen protests to achieve a better, healthier democracy through constitutional reform. Almost no mention was made, within this official discourse, of the conditions of daily life, of collective self-defense against austerity and the direct self-organization of our survival. But where did this official discourse come from, and how was it produced in such a huge, heterogeneous crowd?

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15M wasn’t huge from the beginning. In fact, the first assembly in Barcelona, the first night on Plaça Catalunya, there were just a hundred people present. Some of these were adherents of “Real Democracy Now,” a new group based in Madrid that had produced the original call-out for the countrywide protests and occupations. Their discourse was extremely reformist and made no mention of the growing waves of real protest and social conflict that had been growing in Spain, building off a tradition of struggle that contained a great deal of collective knowledge. This history was absent from their perspective, which was perhaps the only way they could feasibly call for a movement based on pacifism and legal reform. They did mention the “Arab Spring,” above all the uprising in Egypt, but only in the most condescending, manipulative way. They described it as a nonviolent movement, and they portrayed it as having already won its objectives, when, as is clear now and was clear then for anyone with a radical perspective, the struggle had only begun.

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In that first assembly, they took up an old Trotskyist tactic. Distributing themselves throughout the circle, they tried to push the group to adopt a pre-ordained consensus that matched the directives that had come down from Madrid. But it was clear that these activists were not experienced in such tactics, for they were all wearing identical “Real Democracy Now” t-shirts. The minute someone from the leftwing Catalan independence movement said that the Barcelona occupation should set out on its own path rather than following Madrid, the crowd agreed. There were very few anarchists that first night, but those present also made sure that the reformist activists were not able to limit the movement from the outset.

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• • •

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“Who is in favor?” asks the person with the microphone, her voice booming out from concert-quality speakers. A few thousand people raise their hands.

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“Who is against?” Some fifty people raise their hands. Pro forma, a few people make a rapid count. It’s doubtful their numbers match up, but it doesn’t matter. It is clear that the “no” votes aren’t enough to be considered important. It takes a hundred to block a measure.

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“Who wants more debate?” A dozen hands go up. Again, short of minimum necessary to send the proposal back for more debate.

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“The proposal passes.” The moderators pause a moment before moving on to the next item. The crowd, perhaps ten thousand strong, waits, sitting with a tolerant but bored patience.

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“What did we just vote on?” I hear one young student ask another. Without exaggerating, I think it is one of the most common questions in that month of occupation.

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Just a week into this grand experiment in direct democracy, abstention had already carried the day. In most votes, abstention reached proportions that equaled or surpassed the percentage who opt out of voting in the elections and referendums of a typical representative democracy.

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It’s no surprise. Empowerment was little more than a slogan in the plaza. With even a hundred people in an assembly, not everyone can participate. Once the number of participants grew from the hundreds to the thousands, commissions and subcommissions started popping up like mushrooms after a rain. Experienced moderators began directing the assemblies, putting in practice techniques for a modified consensus process that had been developed during the anti-globalization movement. Proposals were developed and consensed on in commissions, then they had to be clearly read out to be ratified by the general assembly. A hundred people, if I recall correctly, could block a decision, and a smaller number could send it back to the commission for more debate.

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To truly have any meaningful influence on a decision, someone would have to spend two to four hours during the day at a commission meeting to draft the proposal, in addition to the several hours that the nighttime general assembly lasted. More difficult proposals were in commission for days or a whole week, and in any case you had to go to the commission meetings every day if you wanted to make sure that the old proposal wasn’t erased by a new one. Clearly, only a small number of people with a certain level of economic independence could participate fully in these directly democratic structures. Even if everyone enjoyed economic independence, the structures themselves necessarily function as funnels, limiting and concentrating participation so that a large, heterogeneous mass can produce unified, enumerated, homogeneous decisions. In any given assembly or commission, certain styles of communication and decision-making are favored, while others are disadvantaged.

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Direct democracy is just representative democracy on a smaller scale. It inevitably recreates the specialization, centralization, and exclusion we associate with existing democracies. Within four days, once the crowds exceeded 5000, the experiment in direct democracy was already rife with false and manipulated consensus, silenced minorities, increasing abstention from voting, and domination by specialists and internal politicians.

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In one example, anarchists in the Self-Organization and Direct Democracy Sub-Commission wanted to organize a simple debate about nonviolence. The initiative almost failed because the Sub-Commission needed days to debate and consense on exactly how they wanted to do it. In the end, two people decided to ignore the commission, and joining with another anarchist who was not participating in Self-Organization, the three of them self-organized a successful talk and debate in just a day, accomplishing what a group of fifty people had failed at over the course of a week.

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It was not that easy, however, because of the many obstacles that the democracy activists put in the way of any direct action that did not have their stamp of approval. Twice, we reserved the sound system and the central space in the plaza in order to debate the nonviolence policy that had been forcibly imposed on the whole movement. Each time, our reservation mysteriously disappeared, and after the second time, the sound system was reserved for another event at the same time we had scheduled our debate. Defeated, we decided to hold the debate with just a megaphone on the edge of the plaza. It would be smaller, effectively marginalized, but we were insistent on registering our disagreement with a position that really only a small minority of activists had successfully imposed.

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We went to the Activity Commission tent to again inform them of our plans. In a story worthy of Kafka, the kid at the table looked down at his form, a crappy little piece of paper written up in ballpoint pen, and told us we couldn’t have our event in the spot where we wanted. “Why?” I asked, getting ready to go ballistic. Was this yet another trick by the new specialists of direct democracy to protect their false consensus around nonviolence?

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The response was far more pathetic than I had expected.

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“Because our forms are divided into different columns, see, one column for each space in the plaza, but that space over by the staircase, well that’s not an official space.”

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“That’s okay, we don’t mind, just write it down.”

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“But, but, I can’t. There isn’t a column for it.”

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“Well, make a column.”

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“Um, I can’t.”

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“Oh Christ, look, which one’s open—look, here, ‘Pink Space,’ just write our event down for the ‘Pink Space’ and when the time comes we’ll just move it.”

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Within two weeks, without any prior training, the Spanish Revolution had created perfect bureaucrats!

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Map of the Plaza del Sol, May 20, 2011

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Map of the Plaza del Sol, end of May 2011

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Examples of the manipulation of process abound. In the very beginning, the assembly made the very anarchist decision to not release unitary manifestos speaking for everyone. Subsequently, people spoke their own minds in the assemblies and in informal spaces throughout the day. We anarchists set up a literature table where we distributed open letters and pamphlets, publishing new texts every day. We were content to express ourselves in dialogue with the rest, rather than trying to represent the whole movement. But the grassroots politicians in the mix craved some unitary manifesto, some list of demands with which they could pressure the politicians in power. They only saw the huge crowds as numbers, means to an end.

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Subsequently, they formed a Contents Commission in order to formulate the “contents” or the ideas of the movement, as though the whole plaza occupation was just an empty vessel, a mindless beast waiting for the assembly to ratify a list of common beliefs and positions. At the anarchist tent, we debated whether or not to participate in the commissions. Some of us were staunchly against, but as anarchists, we didn’t seek consensus. Those who wanted to participate did not need our permission. And at least one good thing came out of their participation: many more examples of the intrinsic corruption and authoritarianism of democracy at every level.

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When the anarchist participation prevented the Trotskyists, Real Democracy activists, and other grassroots politicians from producing the sort of unitary demands and manifestos that the general assembly had earlier vetoed, the Commission was broken up into a dozen sub-commissions. Every single day, in multiple sub-commissions, the grassroots politicians made the same proposals that had been defeated the day before, until one meeting when none of their opponents were present. The demands were passed through the commission and subsequently ratified by the general assembly, which ratified nearly every proposal passed before it.

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On the other hand, after a week of debate, anarchists in the Self-Organization and Direct Democracy Sub-Commission reached a hard-won consensus with the proponents of direct democracy for a proposal to decentralize the assembly, meaning that heterogeneity and differences would be respected, and the assembly would be turned into a space for sharing proposals and initiatives, but not for ratifying them, because, in the new system, everyone would be free to take whatever actions they saw fit, and wouldn’t need some bureaucratic permission. The proposal would have meant the utter defeat of the grassroots politicians, because the assembly would no longer be a mass they could control for their own ends. Everyone would be free to organize their own initiatives and make their own decisions. The funnel would be turned into an open field.

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The anarchist proposal to decentralize the assembly was voted on twice, and each time achieved overwhelming support, but curiously was defeated on technicalities both times. The moderators hemmed and hawed, delayed and threw up obstacles. When they could no longer prevent a vote, the proposal received a greater majority than perhaps any other item in those weeks. Their tactic of trying to scare people away from the proposal, insisting that it be read several times, that everyone made sure they understand its implications, and that an extra day be granted to reflect on it backfired. In the end, this was one of the few proposals that everyone in the assembly paid attention to, discussed, and voted on with total awareness.

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Only about fifty people voted against. The same fifty people voted for more debate, even though they had absolutely no intention of participating in the debate, and the proposal was effectively shelved. It has already achieved a consistent consensus in the Sub-Commission. More debate would change nothing. It would only come back before the general assembly where it would be blocked again. Thanks to direct democracy, fifty people could control twenty thousand.

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This action demonstrated that we were right, we had lots of support, and the assembly was a sham—that, in itself, was a victory. But direct democracy cannot be reformed from within. It has to be destroyed.

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Many people took the commissions and the general assembly more seriously than they warranted. True, fruitful debates in groups of fifty or a hundred people took place in the commissions, and the assembly partially served as a platform for strangers to air their grievances and construct a sense of collectivity. But the only worthwhile position was to subvert those structures of bureaucracy and centralization, to criticize the power dynamics they created and create something more vibrant and free in the shadow of the general assembly.

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There was a lot more to the plaza occupation than these frustratingly bureaucratic structures. The official center, in fact, was tiny compared to the chaotic margins. These margins were all the spaces in the plaza outside of the commission tents and the couple hours of general assembly every evening. All throughout the day, the plaza was an extensive, chaotic space of self-organization, where people met their logistical needs, sometimes going through the official channels, sometimes not. There was a library, a garden, an international translation center, a kitchen with big stoves and solar cookers, and at any time there were a couple concerts, workshops, debates, and massage parlors going on, along with innumerable smaller conversations, debates, and encounters. People drank, argued, celebrated, slept, made out, made friends.

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It was chaos, in the literal sense that patterns emerged and faded, and there was no central space from which everything could be perceived, much less controlled. Consider the officially recognized program: one only had to go to the Activities Commission tent to see the whole schedule. From that one point, a police detective could register all the events taking place, what was being talked about, what was being organized. A new person wishing to take part could come and learn where to get involved, their introduction taking the form of a piece of paper, a schedule, rather than a new friend. A grassroots politician could monopolize the more important spaces and times, giving priority to certain meetings or events and marginalizing others (or they could even make undesired events disappear, as happened with our nonviolence debate). It is absolutely no coincidence that the interests of state control from without, the interests of hierarchical control from within, and the interests of impersonal or rational efficiency all converge in the structures of direct democracy.

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In contrast, the unofficial margins were much livelier and more dynamic. Most new friendships and complicities, most meaningful, face-to-face conversations, and most of the satisfying communal experiences that kept people coming back occurred in the chaotic margins. A handful of people could organize a debate or a small concert without having to exhaust themselves going through commissions and subcommissions. Saving their energies for what really mattered—the actual activity—a few individuals could prepare a quality event on their own initiative, and a crowd of a hundred or even five hundred people might spontaneously gather and take part.

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Even during the general assemblies, the chaotic margins could not be extinguished. Many thousands of people boycotted the votes. Some of us refused on principal, as anarchists, to legitimate such farcical exercises of authority in the name of the people, a collective whole that was only effaced by the artificial imposition of unity. Many others didn’t vote because they found the assembly boring (much like the child in the classroom who daydreams, not because she is unintelligent, but because she is, in fact, more intelligent, because she is not engaged by the authoritarian, pacifying method of education). Others because, once the crowds had surpassed fifty thousand, they couldn’t get close enough to hear. The margins of the plaza became an unruly country of whispered conversations, criticisms, and occasional heckling.

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Weren’t all these other spaces also decision-making spaces? Don’t we make decisions in every moment of our lives? Why is the formalized, masculine space of an assembly more legitimate than the common kitchen, where many decisions and conversations also take place? Why is it more legitimate than the hundred clusters of small conversations and debates that take place during the day, on a small scale, allowing people to express themselves more intimately and more fully?

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Even if we participate in every formal decision, are these the same decisions we would arrive at in spaces of comfort, spaces of life rather than of politics? Is it possible that our formal selves become a mere representation, a manipulation produced during a few boring hours of meetings that is used to control us during all the other moments of our lives?

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“Don’t do that,” says the self-appointed leader to the person who has started to spray-paint a bank, “this is a peaceful protest.” The former speaks with all the legitimacy of a popular mandate. Supposedly, there is consensus on the question of nonviolence, for this protest was organized by the plaza assembly. Yet, what kind of consensus needs to be continually enforced? Why is it that people who took part in the assembly so frequently rebelled against the decisions that supposedly represented them?

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Needless to say, the proponents of direct democracy and its official structures did whatever they could to suppress the chaotic zones in the plaza. The anarchist tent, for example, never had official permission, and on the first day we set up, they tried to kick us out. We made it clear that they would have to use force to get us out, and then everyone would see what their democracy consisted of. They would have done it, if we hadn’t been numerous, and fierce, and honed by the years of streetfighting behind us. Instead, they set up some commission tents on our spot early the next morning. But we just found another spot.

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The “Convivencia” Commission (“Living Together,” a classist, often racist term that is systematically used by the city’s administrators) busied itself trying to eject people who were drinking in the plaza—but not the young white students, only the older, typically immigrant homeless men who were sleeping in the plaza. They also repeatedly tried kicking out the undocumented immigrants who had to work selling beers or purses in the streets, and who often had to run from the police. The Commission members tried to deny these immigrants access to the safe space we all had created in the plaza, until some of us got up in their faces, called them racists, and threatened them with physical violence.

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Calling the 15M movement imperfect doesn’t cut it. All the oppressive dynamics, all the habits of passivity and authoritarianism in our society followed us into the plaza. But there, in that collective space, we had the opportunity to confront them. The structures of direct democracy only masked or exacerbated those dynamics; they were feeble attempts to control the underlying chaos. Even some anarchists failed to see this. Like many others, they got distracted by the aura of officiality—the titles and processes, commissions, schedules, and diagrams. All that was a farce. The imposition of an official framework was intended to redirect our attention just the same as it sought to control our participation. Next time, hopefully, we will know not to take it seriously.

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In time, the 15M movement subsided, blending back into the social conflicts that gave birth to it, which continued unabated. For a while, many anarchists in Barcelona participated with thousands of other people in the neighborhood assemblies that replaced the Plaça Catalunya occupation. Home defense protests against foreclosures gained frequency. There were occupations of schools and hospitals against austerity measures. General strikes and riots. Protests against new repressive laws. Waves of arrests and counterprotests. The struggle continued.

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Neighborhood assembly, May 2011.

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The rise of these movements taught us a number of things. Their origins confirmed certain anarchist theories about social conflict. They were not mechanically triggered by material conditions, as they tended to precede the crisis or the worst economic effects of austerity. I would say that material conditions do not exist, only people’s interpretations of their conditions. (In fact, the whole category of the “material” seems more like a crude attempt to appear scientific, though it relies on a dichotomy that stems from the origins of Western, Christian civilization.) The true triggers of the movements and revolts were a collective empathy for or seduction by revolts happening in other countries, a collective sense of insecurity or evaluation that the State had become weak, a collective outrage in response to government measures seen as insulting to people’s dignity and threatening to their wellbeing, and a collective interpretation or prediction of worsening conditions.

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Institutional responses showed us that governments often react clumsily to emerging movements, provoking growth and radicalization, whereas reformist or power-hungry participants are the most effective and astute in establishing statist organization within the movements and preventing them from developing revolutionary perspectives.

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Additionally, a number of hypotheses regarding pacifism were confirmed: our society trains people to uncritically favor pacifism in social movements, and the predominant current of pacifism moves progressively away from a practice of social change to a practice of total pacification; that media, police, and would-be movement leaders conspire to enforce pacifism; and that the natural evolution of movements leads them to break with nonviolence and develop more forceful tactics. But events also gave us the opportunity to see how would-be leaders of social movements, if the crowd leaves them too far behind, will abandon their commitment to nonviolence and support or at least passively condone certain illegal or destructive tactics.

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In contrast, the leaders’ commitment to democracy runs deeper, and it was a shared esteem, a blind support for the values of democracy that best allowed them to assert their leadership over what had been an anarchic movement.

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Real Democracy Now did an excellent job of formulating a mediocre politics defined by its populism, victimism, reformism, and moralism. By using common, value-laden terms such as “democracy” (good) and “corruption” (bad), they created a discursive trap that garnered overwhelming support for all their proposals while deflecting or falsely including proposals that went further. Their stated minimums included revolutionary language and the highly popular sentiment that “we’re going to change everything,” while offering a ladder of demands that basically signaled the prices, from cheap to expensive, at which they would sell out. It started with reform of the electoral law, passed through laws for increased oversight of the bankers, and reached, at its most radical extreme, a refusal to pay back the bailout loans. Everything was structured around demands communicated to the existing government, but prettied up in populist language. Thus, the popular, anarchist slogan Ningú ens representa, “No one represents us,” was distorted within their program to mean, “None of the politicians currently in power represent us: we want better ones who will.”

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However, to carry out this balancing act, they did have to adopt vaguely antiauthoritarian organizing principles inherited from the antiglobalization movement, such as a commitment to open assemblies and a rejection of spokespersons and political parties. Proposals centered on direct action or sentiments containing a rejection of government and capitalism were easily neutralized within this ideological framework. The former would be paternalistically tolerated as cute little side projects eclipsed by the major projects of reformist demands, and the latter would be applauded, linked back to the popular rhetoric already in use, and corrupted to mean an opposition to current politicians or specific bankers.

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The only way to challenge this co-optation of popular rage was to focus critique on democracy itself. We quickly discovered that the idea of direct democracy was the major theoretical barrier that protected the existing representative democracy, and direct democracy activists, including anarchists, were the critical bridge between the parasitic grassroots politicians and their social host body.

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The experience in the plaza taught us in practice what we had already argued in theory: that direct democracy recreates representative democracy; that it is not the features that can be reformed (campaign finance, term limits, popular referendums), but the most central ideals of democracy that are inherently authoritarian. The beautiful thing about the encampment in the plaza was that it had multiple centers for taking initiative and creating. The central assembly functioned to suppress this; had it succeeded, the occupation would have died much sooner. It did not succeed, thanks in part to anarchist intervention.

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The central assembly did not give birth to a single initiative. What it did, rather, was to grant legitimacy to initiatives worked out in the commissions; but this process must not be portrayed in positive terms. This granting of legitimacy was in fact a robbing of the legitimacy of all the decisions made in the multiple spaces throughout the plaza not incorporated into an official commission. Multiple times, self-appointed representatives of this or that commission tried to suppress spontaneous initiatives that did not bear their stamp of legitimacy. At other times, commissions, moderators, and internal politicians specifically contravened decisions made in the central assembly, when doing so would favor further centralization. This is not a question of corruption or bad form; democracy always subverts its own mechanisms in the interests of power.

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Again and again in the plaza, we saw a correlation between democracy and the paranoia of control: the need for all decisions and initiatives to pass through a central point, the need to make the chaotic activity of a multitudinous occupation legible from a single vantage point—the control room, as it were. This is a statist impulse. The need to impose legibility on a social situation—and social situations are always chaotic—is shared by the democracy activist, who wishes to impose a brilliant new organizational structure; the tax collector, who needs all economic activity to be visible so it can be reappropriated; and the policeman, who desires a panopticon in order to control and punish. I also found that numerous anarchists of various ideological stripes were unable to see the crucial theoretical difference between the oppositions representational democracy vs. direct democracy/consensus and centralization vs. decentralization, because the first and second terms of both pairs have been turned into synonyms through misuse. For this reason, I have decided to rehabilitate the term “chaos” in my personal usage, as it is a frightening term no populist in the current context would use and abuse, and it relates directly to mathematical theories that express the kind of shifting, conflictual, constantly regenerating, acephalous organization anarchists are calling for.

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They call it democracy.

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II. Ossification

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Fall 2015.

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Junts pel Sí, the pro-independence coalition that combines the major right-wing and left-wing political parties in Catalunya, has won the regional elections. Together with the CUP—a grassroots activist platform that makes decisions in assemblies, and which emerged from the social movements to seize over 10% of the vote—they have a majority in the Catalan parliament, and they have announced that they will make a unilateral declaration of independence, turning the parliament into a constituent assembly for a new constitution, breaking away from Spain. Meanwhile, the Popular Party and Socialist Party, which until four years ago ruled the country in an unshakeable two-party system, threaten legal action from Madrid. Podemos, an activist political party modeled on Syriza, promises a referendum on the question of independence for Catalunya, the Basque country, Galicia, if only they are voted into power. They hint at the possibility of a new constitution, transforming Spain into a nation of nations. The newspapers and the TV are full of it every day. Everyone waits, expectantly.

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In the spring, activist platforms, some of them barely a year old, won the elections in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona. In Donostia, the newly legalized Basque independence party, Bildu, was already in power. These constitute four of Spain’s most important cities, including the two largest.

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The new mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, had been a housing activist who once got arrested in a highly publicized act of civil disobedience to stop an eviction. People everywhere talk about whether she will deliver on her promises and protect all the families who can no longer pay mortgages from getting kicked out their houses. Will she create dignified employment? Will she halt the ravages of tourism that are remaking the city? Everyone waits, expectantly.

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Madrid’s Plaza del Sol, once again filled with people, during a rally called by Podemos in 2015.

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A new anarchist text from Barcelona, “A Wager on the Future,” argues that these new political parties are the result of the death of the 15M movement. The would-be leaders did not succeed in directly turning the movement into a new political party, although they certainly tried. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of people gave self-organization in assemblies a chance. And on the face of it, they achieved exactly nothing. A couple years later, in a climate of general disappointment, passivity, and demobilization, Podemos and the other new political parties, like Barcelona en Comú, were formed. Preexisting activist platforms-turned-political-parties, like the CUP or Compromís in Valencia, geared up to seize a bigger slice of pie. The few remaining neighborhood assemblies or 15M assemblies, bare skeletons, became recruiting tools for one party or another.

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Spanish democracy has been regenerated. People, having failed themselves, are once again ready to place their trust in politicians, as long as they are new faces making new promises. Direct democracy has revealed how fully it transforms back into representative democracy as it scales up.

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At this juncture, we can see how direct democracy protected and revitalized representative democracy. Coherent with its emphasis on formal, superficial, and regulated participation in an alienated space of politics—the central assembly as the arbiter of all social decision-making—the direct democracy movement pushed for a set of demands based on institutional reform and social consensus.

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What does this mean in the details of everyday life and struggle? Like all other forms of government, direct democracy preserves and even celebrates politics as an alienated sphere of life; in fact, politics—the management of the *polis*—is in its origins directly democratic. In one of the original alienations, people are made spectators to the decisions that determine how they live.

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Assemblies are a great way to make certain decisions in specific situations, but direct democracy gives precedence to the general assembly over the affinity group, over the kitchen, over the study circle, over the workshop, and over a thousand other spaces in which we organize ourselves. This is an exact parallel to how all governments bestow an exclusive legitimacy on whatever form of decision-making they control within institutional channels. A government run by charismatic statesmen will give precedence to a congress or parliament, a government run by technocrats will give precedence to central banks and state commissions… and a government run by grassroots activists on their way to professionalization will give precedence to the assembly.

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In one of the genre-setting revolutions of the modern era, the Bolsheviks made use of the soviets—which functioned as democratic assemblies and which contemporary anarchists like Voline pointed out were ripe for co-optation—until they had consolidated their bureaucratic state enough to no longer need the earlier structure. The compatibility between what was a direct or at least a federated democracy and the “democratic centralism” that latched onto the former and took it over should not escape us. It’s not ancient history, but a pattern that keeps repeating.

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Direct democracy is differentiated from other forms of government through an emphasis on the principle of “self-government.” Anti-authoritarians who advocate direct democracy might avoid this term, but in fact it is quite accurate. Direct democracy involves people in their own government, which is to say their alienation from social decision-making. We can see this in how people in Plaça Catalunya ended up abstaining or going through the motions in the nightly assemblies. By being given an opportunity for self-government, they were being reeducated, in a very direct, accurate, and hands-on way, as to exactly what government means. It is no coincidence that in the aftermath, a huge proportion of these masses were once again ready to support a political party and reproduce all the same problems of disempowerment and alienation that had brought them out into the plazas in the first place.

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When we anarchists direct our anger and criticism at the proponents of direct democracy, it is not because we are so dogmatic, so infatuated with navel-gazing or with purifying our tiny spaces of dissidence that we would rather attack an ally than go up against the real bad guys in the banks, board rooms, and parliaments. On the contrary, it is because the movement for direct democracy constitutes the most effective appendage of the State within our struggles for liberation. After all, we are not victims. We live in an oppressive society because every day we help to reproduce that oppression. It is for this reason we criticize. Just as a limited “self-management” in the workplace turns you into your own boss, self-government turns you into your own ruler, and there is nothing sadder than being the active agent in your own alienation. In sum, self-government means being your own worst enemy.

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That is why it was logical for a movement based in direct democracy to advocate demands based on institutional reform and social consensus: the movement’s sights were already fixed on seizing centralized power—the power that stems from our alienation and powerlessness—rather than destroying it. Instead of proposing an end to the ruling institutions, direct democracy activists proposed ways to fix them. Rather than seeking the abolition of hierarchical society, rather than choosing sides in the antagonisms of class, colonialism, and patriarchy, they sought social unity. After all, society is the machine that politicians wish to drive, so it makes no sense for would-be politicians to try to dismantle it.

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This reformist bent diverted the movement from a collision course with authority. The values of direct democracy suppressed a more radical conflict that had been brewing, as seen in the riots during May Day, the general strikes, and so on. And it is that conflict which serves as a laboratory, as a cauldron for revolution. By limiting the conflict, the movement for democracy put a handicap on our collective learning process and robbed us of the experiences that might have offered a glimpse of a revolutionary horizon, one without rulers, without exploitation, without domination.

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The reformist promises of the would-be leaders achieved something else. By redirecting attention to the question of the bail-outs, public funds, government corruption, and so on, they distracted people from the vital possibility of responding to austerity on the terrain of daily life, with the collective self-organization of our needs. And because no reform was achieved through the assemblies, most people experienced them as failures. Interesting and inspiring, but failures nonetheless. Surely the pragmatists were right in saying that self-organization on the scale of society is an idealistic utopia.

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This bait-and-switch blinded many people to the advances that the assemblies did achieve. They constituted an important first step—meeting one another, starting the great social conversation—towards the self-organization of life. And they served as a tool to increase our power, our ability to take over public space and transform it into communal space. In the struggle for our lives, this is a huge victory. But the thinking behind direct democracy does not propose putting power back in our hands on any more than a symbolic, formalistic level, because for self-government to work, power must remain centralized, alienated.

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Careful what you wish for.

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We can blame democracy and its naïve proponents for selling out this stillborn revolution, for failing to realize, after so many similar failures before them, that revolution is never pragmatic or cautious, that it must carried beyond our horizons into the country of the unpredictable, the uncertain, the furthest bounds of our imagination, or it will die.

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But we were not passive spectators to this failure. I think that on the whole, we—here I simply refer to myself and the friends I was in closest contact with in those days—quickly learned how to keep would-be politicians from taking over or centralizing the new assemblies. Or in the case of the Plaça Catalunya assembly, which quickly became too massive to function in an empowering way, we learned how to make its failings evident and how to draw out the potential of other spaces of organization and encounter. Often, this meant opposing the model of the centralized assembly based on unitary decision-making with our own model based on difference, on plurality, on multiple pathways of decision-making, and on total freedom of action, meaning that anyone could do what they wanted without permission from an assembly, as long as we cultivated mutual respect so that the inevitable conflicts between the different currents of activity were constructive rather than fatal.

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What we did not learn how to do, I now see in hindsight, was to launch proposals that a large part of the assembly could get excited by and participate in; proposals arising from a radical analysis; proposals for solutions to austerity based in direct action and the immediate self-organization of our needs, outside and against the impositions of capitalism.

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As the aforementioned text argues, true, it is not our responsibility as anarchists to come up with solutions for the rest of society, but if we ourselves are not capable of figuring out how to use heterogeneous assemblies to advance anti-authoritarian projects based on mutual aid in response to people’s real needs, how can we expect anyone else to do so?

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It is in this sense that the assemblies ended up being useless. No one dared take the step of using them to fulfill our collective needs. Capitalism and democratic government were waiting, as always, to step in and offer their own solutions.

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May 21, 2011: Even if they gather to protest the elections, they will just be recruits for another party if they don’t immediately begin solving their problems directly.

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This failure could be the subject for an entire book, or more appropriately, for a collective learning process involving thousands of dreamers and revolutionaries and spanning generations. In conclusion, as a simple gesture to point out other ways forward from this impasse, I will mention two components I found lacking: imagination and skills.

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Imagination. The capacity to create imaginaries: visions of other worlds in which our desires and projections can reside, or even thrive, at times when capitalism permits no autonomous space in which communal relations might develop. It is no coincidence that today’s revolutionary movements lack imaginaries of other worlds, nor that a great part of capitalist production supplants imagination among its consumers, offering imaginaries that become more elaborate every day, more visually stimulating, more interactive, so that people no longer have to imagine anything for themselves because a thousand worlds and fantasies already come prepackaged. All the old fantasies that used to set us dreaming have now been fixed in Hollywood productions, with convincing actors, fully depicted terrains, and emotive soundtracks. Nothing is left for us to recreate, only to consume.

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In the current marketplace of ideas, it seems that the only imaginaries that describe our future are apocalypses or the science fiction colonization of outer space. Incidentally, the latter is the final frontier for capitalist expansion, now that this planet is rapidly getting used up, and the former is the only alternative capitalism is willing to concede outside of its dominion. We are being encouraged to imagine ourselves in the only worlds that can be conceived from within the capitalist perspective.

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The revolutionaries of a hundred years ago continuously dreamed and schemed of a world without the State and without capitalism. Some of them made the mistake of turning their dreams into blueprints, dogmatic guidelines that in practice functioned as yardsticks by which to measure deviance. But today we face a much greater problem: the absence of revolutionary imaginaries and the near total atrophy of the imagination in ourselves and in the rest of society. And the imagination is the most revolutionary organ in our body, because it is the only one capable of creating new worlds, of travelling outside capitalism and state authority, of enabling us to surpass the limits of insurrection that have become so evident in these last years.

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Today, I know very few people who can imagine what anarchy might look like. The uncertainty is not the problem. As I hinted earlier, uncertainty is one of the fundamentals of chaotic organization, and it is only the authoritarian neurosis of states that obliges us to impose certainty on an ever shifting reality. The problem is that this lack of imagination constitutes an absence from the world. A vital part of ourselves is no longer there, as it used to be, on the cusp of the horizon, on the threshold between dark and light, discerning, modulating, and greeting each new character that comes into our lives. The world of domination no longer has to contend with our Worlds Turned Upside Down, the various forms of heaven and reward promised by the authorities no longer have to bear the ridicule of our Big Rock Candy Mountains, and the great shadows cast by the structures of control no longer contain a thousand possibilities of all the things we could build upon their ruins; now they are only shadows, empty and obscure.

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Our prospects, however, are not irremediably bleak. Imagination can always be renewed and reinvigorated, though we must emphasize the radical importance of this work if people are once more to create, share, and discuss new possible worlds or profound transformations of this one. I would argue that this task is even more important than counter-information. Someone who desires revolution can always educate herself, but someone who cannot even conceive a transformation will be impervious to the best-documented arguments.

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Skills. Complementary to our lack of imagination is a lack of skills, though not so complete as the former. Since World War II, deskilling has been an essential feature of capitalism. The skills we need to survive in the capitalist marketplace are completely redundant, utterly useless for survival in any other mode. Without the skills to build, to heal, to fix, to transform, to feed, mutual aid and self-organization cannot be anything more than superficial, hollow slogans. What are we organizing? Just another meeting, another protest? What sort of aid are we mutualizing? Sharing our misery, sharing the garbage that capitalism hasn’t yet figured out how to commercialize?

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Fortunately, some people still know how to heal, how to tend, how to feed, how to build, and more people are starting to learn. Yet on the whole, these are not treated as revolutionary activities, nor are they deployed in a revolutionary way. Anyone can learn natural therapies or gardening and turn it into a business, and capitalism will happily oblige such a limited reskilling—as long as there are enough wealthy consumers to serve as patrons.

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It is only when these skills are put at the service of a revolutionary imagination and a collective antagonism towards the dominant institutions that the possibility of creating a new world arises. Simultaneously, we must let our imaginaries change and grow as they come in contact with our constructive skills and the antagonism we cultivate. And the practices of negation, sabotage, and collective self-defense that have been learned in that space of antagonism must be put at the service of our constructive projects and our imaginaries, rather than masquerading as the frontline or the only serious element of struggle.

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The roots of Podemos.

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The regeneration of democracy, here and elsewhere, has given a new lease on life to the structures of domination that so many people were losing faith in. Grim futures loom, and if anything we are only getting further away from any possibility of revolution. But the chaotic reality of the universe offers us a promise: nothing is predictable, no future is written, and the most rigid structures are broken, ridiculed, and forgotten in the wild, rushing river of time.

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Seemingly impervious orders crumble and new forms of life emerge. We have every reason to learn from our mistakes, renew our conviction in the theories that events have confirmed, and once again offer an invitation to any who would partake in this dreamer’s quest for total freedom. The easy solutions and false promises offered by the self-styled pragmatists—some of them sincere, others hungering for power— will only lead us into a defeat that we have suffered too many times before. People will learn to recognize this, if we don’t let the memory fade.

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Remember how it came to this.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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This is part of a series expressing an anarchist critique of democracy.

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Nowadays, democracy rules the world. Communism is long dead, elections are taking place even in Afghanistan and Iraq, and world leaders are meeting to plan the “global community” we hear so much about. So why isn’t everybody happy, finally? For that matter—why do so few of the eligible voters in the United States, the world’s flagship democracy, even bother to vote?

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Could it be that democracy, long the catchword of every revolution and rebellion, is simply not democratic enough? What could be the problem?

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Every little child can grow up to be President.

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No, they can’t. Being President means occupying a position of hierarchical power, just like being a billionaire: for every person who is President, there have to be millions who are not. It’s no coincidence that billionaires and Presidents tend to rub shoulders; both exist in a privileged world off limits to the rest of us. Speaking of billionaires, our economy isn’t exactly democratic—capitalism distributes resources in absurdly unequal proportions, and you have to start with resources if you’re ever going to get elected.

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Even if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that wouldn’t help the millions who inevitably don’t, who must still live in the shadow of that power. This imbalance is intrinsic to the structure of representative democracy, at the local level as much as at the top. The professional politicians of a town council discuss municipal affairs and pass ordinances all day without consulting the citizens of the town, who have to be at work; when one of those ordinances displeases citizens, they have to use what little leisure time they have to contest it, and then they’re back at work again the next time the town council meets. In theory, the citizens could elect a different town council from the available pool of politicians and would-be politicians, but the interests of politicians as a class always remain essentially at odds with their own—besides, voting fraud, gerrymandering, and inane party loyalty usually prevent them from going that far. Even in the unlikely scenario that a whole new government was elected consisting of firebrands intent on undoing the imbalance of power between politicians and citizens, they would inevitably perpetuate it simply by accepting roles in the system—for the political apparatus itself is the foundation of that imbalance. To succeed in their objective, they would have to dissolve the government and join the rest of the populace in restructuring society from the roots up.

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But even if there were no Presidents or town councils, democracy as we know it would still be an impediment to freedom. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, majority rule is not only inherently oppressive but also paradoxically divisive and homogenizing at the same time.

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A spectacle to distract

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The Tyranny of the Majority

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If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us—and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

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The average self-professed law-abiding citizen does not consider himself threatened by majority rule because, consciously or not, he conceives of himself as having the power and moral authority of the majority: if not in fact, by virtue of his being politically and socially “moderate,” then in theory, because he believes everyone would be convinced by his arguments if only he had the opportunity to present them. Majority-rule democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were known, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action—without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But even if “the” facts could be made equally clear to everyone, assuming such a thing were possible, people still would have their individual perspectives and motivations and needs. We need social and political structures that take this into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class.

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Living under democratic rule teaches people to think in terms of quantity, to focus more on public opinion than on what their consciences tell them, to see themselves as powerless unless they are immersed in a mass. The root of majority-rule democracy is competition: competition to persuade everyone else to your position whether or not it is in their best interest, competition to constitute a majority to wield power before others outmaneuver you to do the same—and the losers (that is to say, the minorities) be damned. At the same time, majority rule forces those who wish for power to appeal to the lowest common denominator, precipitating a race to the bottom that rewards the most bland, superficial, and demagogic; under democracy, power itself comes to be associated with conformity rather than individuality. And the more power is concentrated in the hands of the majority, the less any individual can do on her own, whether she is inside or outside that majority.

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In purporting to give everyone an opportunity to participate, majority-rule democracy offers a perfect justification for repressing those who don’t abide by its dictates: if they don’t like the government, why don’t they go into politics themselves? And if they don’t win at the game of building up a majority to wield power, didn’t they get their chance? This is the same blame-the-victim reasoning used to justify capitalism: if the dishwasher isn’t happy with his salary, he should work harder so he too can own a restaurant chain. Sure, everyone gets a chance to compete, however unequal—but what about those of us who don’t want to compete, who never wanted power to be centralized in the hands of a government in the first place? What if we don’t care to rule or be ruled?

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That’s what police are for—and courts and judges and prisons.

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You will never ascend to the stage

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The Rule of Law

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Even if you don’t believe their purpose is to grind out nonconformity wherever it appears, you have to acknowledge that legal institutions are no substitute for fairness, mutual respect, and good will. The rule of “just and equal law,” as fetishized by the stockholders and landlords whose interests it protects, offers no guarantees against injustice; it simply creates another arena of specialization, in which power and responsibility are ceded to expensive lawyers and pompous judges. Rather than serving to protect our communities and work out conflicts, this arrangement ensures that our communities’ skills for conflict resolution and self-defense atrophy—and that those whose profession it supposedly is to discourage crime have a stake in it proliferating, since their careers depend upon it.

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Ironically, we are told that we need these institutions to protect the rights of minorities—even though the implicit function of the courts is, at best, to impose the legislation of the majority on the minority. In actuality, a person is only able to use the courts to defend his rights when he can bring sufficient force to bear upon them in a currency they recognize; thanks to capitalism, only a minority can do this, so in a roundabout way it turns out that, indeed, the courts exist to protect the rights of at least a certain minority.

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Justice cannot be established through the mere drawing up and enforcement of laws; such laws can only institutionalize what is already the rule in a society. Common sense and compassion are always preferable to the enforcement of strict, impersonal regulations. Where the law is the private province of an elite invested in its own perpetuation, the sensible and compassionate are bound to end up as defendants; we need a social system that fosters and rewards those qualities rather than blind obedience and impassivity.

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You will never be one of them

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Who Loses?

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In contrast to forms of decision-making in which everyone’s needs matter, the disempowerment of losers and out-groups is central to democracy. It is well known that in ancient Athens, the “cradle of democracy,” scarcely an eighth of the population was permitted to vote, as women, foreigners, slaves, and others were excluded from citizenship. This is generally regarded as an early kink that time has ironed out, but one could also conclude that exclusion itself is the most essential and abiding characteristic of democracy: millions who live in the United States today are not permitted to vote either, and the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen have not eroded significantly in 2500 years. Every bourgeois property owner can come up with a thousand reasons why it isn’t practical to allow everyone who is affected to share in decision making, just as no boss or bureaucrat would dream of giving his employees an equal say in their workplace, but that doesn’t make it any less exclusive. What if democracy arose in Greece not as a step in Man’s Progress Towards Freedom, but as a way of keeping power out of certain hands?

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Democracy is the most sustainable way to maintain the division between powerful and powerless because it gives the greatest possible number of people incentive to defend that division.

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That’s why the high-water mark of democracy—its current ascendancy around the globe—corresponds with unprecedented inequalities in the distribution of resources and power. Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man the opportunity to be a dictator, to be able to force the “will of the majority” upon his fellows rather than work through disagreements like a mature adult, and you can build a common front of destructive self-interest against the cooperation and collectivity that make individual freedom possible. All the better if there are even more repressive dictatorships around to point to as “the” alternative, so you can glorify all this in the rhetoric of liberty.

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It’s not your votes but your dollars that elect us

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Capitalism and Democracy

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Now let’s suspend our misgivings about democracy long enough to consider whether, if it were an effective means for people to share power over their lives, it could be compatible with capitalism. In a democracy, informed citizens are supposed to vote according to their enlightened self-interest—but who controls the flow of information, if not wealthy executives? They can’t help but skew their coverage according to their class interests, and you can hardly blame them—the newspapers and networks that didn’t flinch at alienating corporate advertisers were run out of business long ago by competitors with fewer scruples.

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Likewise, voting means choosing between options, according to which possibilities seem most desirable—but who sets the options, who establishes what is considered possible, who constructs desire itself but the wealthy patriarchs of the political establishment, and their nephews in advertising and public relations firms? In the United States, the two-party system has reduced politics to choosing the lesser of two identical evils, both of which answer to their funders before anyone else. Sure, the parties differ over exactly how much to repress personal freedoms or spend on bombs—but do we ever get to vote on who controls “public” spaces such as shopping malls, or whether workers are entitled to the full product of their labor, or any other question that could seriously change the way we live? In such a state of affairs, the essential function of the democratic process is to limit the appearance of what is possible to the narrow spectrum debated by candidates for office. This demoralizes dissidents and contributes to the general impression that they are impotent utopians—when nothing is more utopian than trusting representatives from the owning class to solve the problems caused by their own dominance, and nothing more impotent than accepting their political system as the only possible system.

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Ultimately, the most transparent democratic political process will always be trumped by economic matters such as property ownership. Even if we could convene everyone, capitalists and convicts alike, in one vast general assembly, what would prevent the same dynamics that rule the marketplace from spilling over into that space? So long as resources are unevenly distributed, the rich can always buy others’ votes: either literally, or by promising them a piece of the pie, or else by means of propaganda and intimidation. Intimidation may be oblique—“Those radicals want to take away your hard-earned property”—or as overt as the bloody gang wars that accompanied electoral campaigns in nineteenth century America.

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Thus, even at best, democracy can only serve its purported purpose if it occurs among those who explicitly oppose capitalism and foreswear its prizes—and in those circles, there are alternatives that make a lot more sense than majority rule.

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Whoever you vote for, the government wins.

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It’s no coincidence freedom is not on the ballot.

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Freedom is a quality of activity, not a condition that exists in a vacuum: it is a prize to be won daily, not a possession that can be kept in the basement and taken out and polished up for parades. Freedom cannot be given—the most you can hope is to free others from the forces that prevent them from finding it themselves. Real freedom has nothing to do with voting; being free doesn’t mean simply being able to choose between options, but actively participating in establishing the options in the first place.

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If the freedom for which so many generations have fought and died is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth checking a box on a ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was before, then the heritage our emancipating forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is nothing but a sham substitute for the liberty they sought.

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For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they create a sonic and emotional environment, transforming the world that in turn transforms them. Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system—a harmony in human relationships and activity. To get there from here, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.

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“Look, a ballot box—democracy!”

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Representative democracy is a contradiction.

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No one can represent your power and interests for you—you can only have power by wielding it, you can only learn what your interests are by getting involved. Politicians make careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy; in fact, they are a priest class that answers only to itself, and their very existence is proof of our disenfranchisement.

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Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we have ceded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and control of our living environments to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.

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But we don’t have to simply choose between presidential candidates, soft drink brands, television shows, and political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and social structures and power, we can establish a new society on the basis of freedom and cooperation.

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Sometimes a candidate appears who says everything people have been saying to each other for a long time—he seems to have appeared from outside the world of politics, to really be one of us. By persuasively critiquing the system within its own logic, he subtly persuades people that the system can be reformed—that it could work, if only the right people were in power. Thus a lot of energy that would have gone into challenging the system itself is redirected into backing yet another candidate for office, who inevitably fails to deliver.

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But where do these candidates—and more importantly, their ideas and momentum—come from? How do they rise into the spotlight? They only receive so much attention because they are drawing on popular sentiments; often, they are explicitly trying to divert energy from existing grass-roots movements. So should we put our energy into supporting them, or into building on the momentum that forced them to take radical stances in the first place?

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More frequently, we are terrorized into focusing on the electoral spectacle by the prospect of being ruled by the worst possible candidates. “What if he gets into power?” To think that things could get even worse!

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But the problem is that the government has so much power in the first place—otherwise, it wouldn’t matter as much who held the reigns. So long as this is the case, there will always be tyrants. This is why it is all the more important that we put our energy into the lasting solution of opposing the power of the state.

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“Just be thankful you live in a democracy!”

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But what are the alternatives to democracy?

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Consensus

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Consensus-based decision-making is already practiced around the globe, from indigenous communities in Latin America and direct action groups in Europe to organic farming cooperatives in Australia. In contrast to representative democracy, the participants take part in the decision-making process on an ongoing basis and exercise real control over their daily lives. Unlike majority-rule democracy, consensus process values the needs and concerns of each individual equally; if one person is unhappy with a resolution, it is everyone’s responsibility to find a new solution that is acceptable to all. Consensus-based decision-making does not demand that any person accept others’ power over her, though it does require that everybody consider everyone else’s needs; what it loses in efficiency it makes up tenfold in freedom and accountability. Instead of asking that people accept leaders or find common cause by homogenizing themselves, proper consensus process integrates everyone into a working whole while allowing each to retain his or her own autonomy.

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Who needs democracy when we can agree?

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Autonomy

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To be free, you must have control over your immediate surroundings and the basic matters of your life. No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to. To claim these privileges for yourself and respect them in others is to cultivate autonomy.

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Autonomy is not to be confused with so-called independence: in actuality, no one is independent, since our lives all depend on each other.¹¹1. “Western man fills his closet with groceries and calls himself self-sufficient.” -Mohandas Gandhi The glamorization of self-sufficiency in competitive society is an underhanded way to accuse those who will not exploit others of being responsible for their own poverty; as such, it is one of the most significant obstacles to building community.²²2. The politicians’ myth of “welfare mothers” snatching hardworking citizens’ rightful earnings, for example, divides individuals who might otherwise form cooperative groups with no use for politicians. In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy offers a free interdependence between people who share consensus.

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Autonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. There is nothing more efficient than people acting on their own initiative as they see fit, and nothing more inefficient than attempting to dictate everyone’s actions from above—that is, unless your fundamental goal is to control other people. Top-down coordination is only necessary when people must be made to do something they would never do of their own accord; likewise, obligatory uniformity, however horizontally it is imposed, can only empower a group by disempowering the individuals who comprise it. Consensus can be as repressive as democracy unless the participants retain their autonomy.

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Autonomous individuals can cooperate without agreeing on a shared agenda, so long as everyone benefits from everyone else’s participation. Groups that cooperate thus can contain conflicts and contradictions, just as each of us does individually, and still empower the participants. Let’s leave marching under a single flag to the military.

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Finally, autonomy entails self-defense. Autonomous groups have a stake in defending themselves against the encroachments of those who do not recognize their right to self-determination, and in expanding the territory of autonomy and consensus by doing everything in their power to destroy coercive structures.

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Topless Federations

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Independent autonomous groups can work together in federations without any of them wielding authority. Such a structure sounds utopian, but it can actually be quite practical and efficient. International mail delivery and railway travel both work on this system, to name two examples: while individual postal and transportation systems are internally hierarchical, they all cooperate together to get mail or rail passengers from one nation to another without an ultimate authority being necessary at any point in the process. Similarly, individuals who cannot agree enough to work together within one collective can still coexist in separate groups. For this to work in the long run, of course, we need to instill values of cooperation, consideration, and tolerance in the coming generations—but that’s exactly what we are proposing, and we can hardly do worse at this task than the partisans of capitalism and hierarchy have.

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Direct Action

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Autonomy necessitates that you act for yourself: that rather than waiting for requests to pass through the established channels only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations, establish your own channels instead. This is called direct action. If you want hungry people to have food to eat, don’t just give money to a bureaucratic charity organization—find out where food is going to waste, collect it, and share. If you want affordable housing, don’t try to get the town council to pass a bill—that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings, open them up to the public, and organize groups to defend them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don’t petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters—take that power from them yourself. Don’t buy their products, don’t work for them, sabotage their billboards and offices, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered. They use similar tactics to exert their power over you, too—it only looks valid because they bought up the laws and values of your society long before you were born.

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Don’t wait for permission or leadership from some outside authority, don’t beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Take the initiative!

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How to Solve Disagreements without Calling the Authorities

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In a social arrangement that is truly in the best interest of each participating individual, the threat of exclusion should be enough to discourage most destructive or disrespectful behavior. Even when it is impossible to avoid, exclusion is certainly a more humanitarian approach than prisons and executions, which corrupt police and judges as much as they embitter criminals. Those who refuse to respect others’ needs, who will not integrate themselves into any community, may find themselves banished from social life—but that is still better than exile in the mental ward or on death row, two of the possibilities awaiting such people today. Violence should only be used by communities in self-defense, not with the smug sense of entitlement with which it is applied by our present injustice system. Unfortunately, in a world governed by force, autonomous consensus-based groups are likely to find themselves at odds with those who do not abide by cooperative or tolerant values; they must be careful not to lose those values themselves in the process of defending them.

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Serious disagreements within communities can be solved in many cases by reorganizing or subdividing groups. Often individuals who can’t get along in one social configuration have more success cooperating in another setting or as members of parallel communities. If consensus cannot be reached within a group, that group can split into smaller groups that can achieve it internally—such a thing may be inconvenient and frustrating, but it is better than group decisions ultimately being made by force by those who have the most power. As with individuals and society, so with different collectives: if the benefits of working together outweigh the frustrations, that should be incentive enough for people to sort out their differences. Even drastically dissimilar communities still have it in their best interest to coexist peacefully, and must somehow negotiate ways to achieve this…

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Living Without Permission

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…that’s the most difficult part, of course. But we’re not talking about just another social system here, we’re talking about a total transformation of human relations—for it will take nothing less to solve the problems our species faces today. Let’s not kid ourselves—until we can achieve this, the violence and strife inherent in conflict-based relations will continue to intensify, and no law or system will be able to protect us. In consensus-based structures, there are no fake solutions, no ways to suppress conflict without resolving it; those who participate in them must learn to coexist without coercion and submission.

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The first precious grains of this new world can be found in your friendships and love affairs whenever they are free from power dynamics, whenever cooperation occurs naturally. Imagine those moments expanded to the scale of our entire society—that’s the life that waits beyond democracy.

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It may feel like we are separated from that world by an uncrossable chasm, but the wonderful thing about consensus and autonomy is that you don’t have to wait for the government to vote for them—you can practice them right now with the people around you. Put into practice, the virtues of this way of living are clear. Form your own autonomous group, answering to no power but your own, and chase down freedom for yourselves, if your representatives will not do it for you—since they cannot do it for you.

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Appendix: A Fable

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Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: “We should put it to a vote!” The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside.

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“Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner,” they threaten. “Otherwise, vote or no vote, we’ll eat you.”

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The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: “Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!”

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The Early Days of the PKK

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The PKK is the product of two different historical processes. The first and more fundamental one is the formation of the Turkish nation-state, a project based upon the elimination of all non-Muslims and the assimilation of all non-Turkish ethnicities. The second and more immediate accelerant is the powerful youth and student movement of the late 1960s and ’70s in Turkey.

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To understand contemporary Turkish politics, be it the official denial of the Armenian Genocide or the repression of the Kurdish movement, we must recognize how deeply ultra-nationalism is woven into the fabric of society. It is analogous to the Baathist regimes elsewhere in the region, which are now meeting their expiration dates. All the ingredients are there: a formidable and charismatic leader, Mustafa Kemal;²²2. Known as Atatürk—the great Turk—after 1934. the creation of a national identity, Turkishness; and assimilation into a hegemonic yet constructed culture. In Turkey, the formal creation of the nation-state in 1923 was a modernizing project in its own right. Various vernacular languages (e.g., Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian, Greek) as well as the Arabic alphabet (modified and used in written Ottoman, Kurdish, and Persian in addition to Arabic) were scrapped in favor of the Latin alphabet; a language called Turkish was re-invented, by modernizing vernacular Turkish with a heavy dose of European influence. Forms of religious expression, from public gatherings to clothing, were repressed in the name of modern secularism. At the same time, Islam became regulated by the state, kept in reserve to mobilize against leftists or minorities. As a nation-building project, Kemalism essentially sowed the seeds of its own destruction; ironically, it is responsible for both the neoliberal Islam of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, and the Democratic Confederalism of Öcalan and the PKK.

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The degree to which this ultra-nationalism is hammered into those who live within the borders of Turkey is difficult for a Western audience to grasp. Every morning of her official schooling, a Kurdish schoolchild has to take an oath that begins “I am Turkish, I am right, I work hard,” only to file into a classroom with a portrait of Atatürk staring down from the wall, where she will hear teachers present the history of the Ottoman Empire and emphasize that Turkey is surrounded by enemies on all sides. She must go through the motions of patriotic holidays several times a year: the anniversary of the declaration of the republic (OK), the anniversary of the death of Atatürk (well … fine), the Youth and Sports holiday (seriously?), the Sovereignty and Children’s Holiday (give me a break). For men, compulsory military service³³3. Although Turkey has universal conscription, it also has laws which permit one to pay nearly $10,000 to be exempt from it. In addition, those with higher-level education are often able to land safer positions. Thus those who actually fight the wars are predominantly poor. is a rite of passage into manhood and a precondition of employment. It’s common to see rowdy street rituals in which young men are sent off to do their military service by crowds of their closest male friends.

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Nationalism comes not only from the Right but also from the Left, and the 1968 generation was no exception. In contrast to their counterparts in other countries, this generation resembled the old Left more than the new. Many of the most revered veterans and martyrs of the leftist student movement saw themselves as continuing Atatürk’s project of national liberation from imperialist powers. It’s telling that the most promising move on the part of the leftist student movement involved launching a failed coup of their own with dissident members of the military. This powerful youth movement occupied many universities and organized large marches, including an infamous march in which members of the US Navy’s 6th Fleet were “dumped in the sea”—playing on the mythical imagery of Atatürk’s national liberation army dumping the Greeks into the Aegean Sea, a fairytale often repeated to Turkish schoolchildren. Though it was eventually crushed by the military coup of March 12, 1971, this student movement left a legacy of armed groups, including Deniz Gezmiş’s THKO (Turkish People’s Liberation Army) and Mahir Çayan’s THKP (Turkish People’s Liberation Party).⁴⁴4. Mahir was killed in a military raid during the kidnapping of NATO technicians with the demand of freeing Deniz and two others who would also be executed, Hüseyin Inan and Yusuf Küpeli. Deniz was hung by military rule.

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One of the students active in the post-coup second wave of the student movement in Turkey was Abdullah Öcalan. Born in 1949 in the Kurdish territories of southeastern Turkey, Öcalan came to the Turkish capital of Ankara in 1971 to study. He was impressed by the student movement, which had gone as far as torching the vehicle of the American ambassador. Alongside the Turkish student movement, which left little space to talk about the Kurds, there was a new incarnation of Kurdish socialism on the rise, especially in the form of the Eastern Revolutionary Cultural Houses (DDKO). Other Kurdish groups had even started to organize guerillas in Kurdistan. Öcalan entered this milieu and advanced his idea of Kurdistan as an internal colony of Turkey, quickly gaining adherents. Comprising a nucleus of political militants, this dozen or so people came to be known as Apocular (Apoers), a term used for the followers of Öcalan’s thought to this day. Not all the members of this initial cadre were Kurds, but they all believed in Kurdish liberation from the Turkish state.

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This core group left Ankara to foment revolution in Kurdistan. The ideological flavor of the day, especially with Turkey in NATO, was Marxism-Leninism; founded in 1978 at a meeting in the village of Fis, the PKK (Partiye Karkerên Kurdistanê—Kurdish Workers Party) modeled itself on those principles. The first manifesto written by Öcalan that year closes by professing that the Kurdish Revolution was a part of the global proletarian revolution that started with the Russian October Revolution and was growing stronger through national liberation movements. The group acquired its first AK–47 from Syria and started carrying out small actions and agitating in towns in Northern Kurdistan. Öcalan traveled constantly, presenting lengthy lectures, sometimes day-long sessions, which were a major component of these initial efforts. This form is still seen in the political education sessions that all participants in the Kurdish movement are expected to complete, guerrillas and politicians alike.

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This initial phase was cut short by another military coup only ten years later, in 1980—much bloodier in its consequences, with at least 650,000 arrested, more than 10,000 tortured, and fifty people hanged by the state. Öcalan had fled the country shortly before, and many of the initial cadre followed in his footsteps. Their destination: Syria. In fact, Öcalan crossed from Suruç in Turkey into Kobanê in Syria—two towns that have become symbols of the Kurdish resistance, and a crossing hundreds if not thousands of Kurds have made this past year to join the fight against ISIS. From Syria, Öcalan started his project in earnest and began to make contact with the Kurdish leadership in the region, arranging meetings with Barzani and Talabani, tribal leaders with a bourgeois nationalist line. He arranged for the first trainings of Kurdish guerrillas in Palestinian camps, and later in more independently run camps in Lebanon. The trained members of the PKK crossed back into Turkey to begin the armed struggle announced by their first large-scale action in August of 1984, the raids on the towns of Eruh and Şemdinli.

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The PKK entered the 1990s with a guerrilla army of more than 10,000 and started launching attacks on Turkish military positions and other state interests such as government buildings and large-scale engineering projects. At the same time, what had begun as a concentrated effort by a core group of militants began to take hold within the entire Kurdish population in the region. Newroz 1992 was a turning point in popularizing the Kurdish liberation struggle.

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Newroz, celebrated until recently mostly across Iran and Northern Iraq, represents the new year and the welcoming of spring. Although this celebration was even observed in central Asian Turkic communities, Turkey rejected it; the PKK advanced the idea of Newroz as a national holiday of resistance for Northern Kurdistan. Since the late ’80s, March 21 has been a day of mass gatherings, often culminating in epic clashes with the police. Newroz of 1992 was especially brutal, as the ruthless police state that was to devastate Northern Kurdistan began to show its face; the killing of fifty people during Newroz 1992 in the town of Cizre was the opening act. The ’90s in Kurdistan saw the dirtiest of civil wars, with the state employing paramilitary groups culled from both ultra-nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists. To dry out “the sea in which the guerrilla swam,” 4500 villages were evacuated or burned to the ground. Most of the 40,000 who have died in the war in Northern Kurdistan perished in the 1990s.

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Children in Cizre.

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Öcalan’s Prison Years and the Peace Process

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Öcalan’s eventual capture on February 15, 1999 is a tale to be told, referred to by the Kurdish movement as “The Great Conspiracy.” Threatened by Turkish military action, the Syrian government finally told Öcalan that his welcome was over and he had to leave. The international cadre of the PKK scrambled to find him a new refuge, but no country would touch him. Shuttled between Greece and Russia, Öcalan finally found himself under house arrest in Italy. Since members of the European Union are not allowed to extradite prisoners to countries where capital punishment exists, one early morning Öcalan was shuttled to Kenya, where he was picked up by Turkish commandos. Drugged and tied up, Öcalan was flown back to Turkey; the video of this had a chilling effect across Kurdistan.

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A new phase of the Kurdish Struggle was at the door. The PKK had to reinvent itself with its leader behind bars and sentenced to death, the only prisoner in an island prison about 50 miles from Istanbul. In the end, Turkey abolished capital punishment in its quest to join the European Union, and Öcalan’s sentence was commuted to life in prison; this also meant that the Turkish state could utilize him in the future. Between 1999 and 2004, the PKK declared a ceasefire, although the Turkish state massacred closed to 800 fighters as they were attempting to leave the country to reach their main base in Iraq. This was the closest the PKK ever came to decomposition, and Öcalan’s supreme authority was challenged. But as he himself has pointed out, “The history of the PKK is a history of purges”—the PKK cadre centered around Öcalan survived its challengers, including his own brother.

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In prison, Öcalan found time to read and write as he immersed himself in a panoply of thinkers and subjects. Many have referenced how he studied Murray Bookchin;⁵⁵5. Although Western leftists are fascinated by the Bookchin-Öcalan connection, it is not as if Kurdish militants are walking around with Bookchin under their arms in the region. Sure, Democratic Confederalism resembles libertarian municipalities, but pointing to Bookchin as the ideological forefather reeks of Eurocentrism. he also studied Immanuel Wallerstein and his World Systems Analysis, as well as texts on the history of civilization and Mesopotamia. Under the guise of formulating his defense for the Turkish courts as well as to the European Human Rights Court and providing a roadmap for peace in Turkey, he penned several manifestos in which he broke with his traditional views on national liberation, with all its historical Marxist-Leninist baggage, and formulated more palatable ideas under his conditions of imprisonment. These ideas were Democratic Autonomy and Confederalism.

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A further development shifted the context of the Kurdish question. In late 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), headed to this day by the despotic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won the general elections and came to power, ending more than a decade of dysfunctional coalition governments. Modeling itself as what can be termed Islamic neoliberalism, the AKP set about integrating Turkey further into the global financial system by means of privatization, enclosure, and incurring debt. In effect, the debt once owed to the IMF is now held by the private sector. At the same time, Turkey was subjected to desecularization by a creeping fundamentalist morality⁶⁶6. There is no question that Muslims were subjected to a conservative secularism in Turkey prior to the AKP. Erdogan’s electoral successes capitalized on the resulting frustration. and the authoritarian rule of Erdoğan. Erdoğan presented this project as returning Turkey to its rightful historical place by reincarnating its Ottoman heritage and emphasizing economic growth for the nation.

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In May 2004, the PKK once again began a phase of armed struggle, ending the ceasefire that had held since 1999. Kurds endured increasing repression by the Turkish State and cross-border operations into PKK positions in Northern Iraq. As he consolidated power, Erdogan came to realize that peace with the Kurds would facilitate his plans for regional domination that included petroleum reserves in Northern Iraq and a number of oil pipelines running through the region. By allying himself with the large Kurdish population, he hoped to pass a number of constitutional changes cementing his power. To put the plans into place, in 2009, the Turkish Intelligence Agency started to act as an intermediary in negotiations between the AKP and PKK representatives in a meeting in Oslo.

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Despite the renewed dialogue and various other overtures, the Turkish State continued its repression against Kurds. Starting in April 2009, the KCK (Group of Communities in Kurdistan) trials sent thousands of people to jail. Militarily, one of the most horrific attacks was the bombing of 34 Kurdısh peasants on December 28, 2011 in Roboski, Şırnak. The Turkish state claimed they were members of the PKK crossing the border, but then had to admit that they were common villagers involved in cross-border commerce. To this day, no one has been brought in front of a judge for those murders, and the victims of Roboski remain fresh in many people’s minds.

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The ceasefires came and went with increasing frequency through those years; by the summer of 2012, the PKK had gained considerable territorial power. In this situation, compelled by his territorial ambitions, Erdoğan announced that meetings had been taking place with Öcalan. Three months later, during 2013’s Newroz, a letter from Öcalan was read in which he announced another ceasefire. This ceasefire was relatively long-lasting, remaining in place until July 24, 2015. But just when it seemed like stability was returning to Turkey, a chasm opened in Turkish reality on May 31, 2013. This was the Gezi Resistance.

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Graffiti on the streets of Cizre: “Barricades are our will! Take Hold of It! - YDGK-H” (The women’s faction of the PKK youth movement YDG-H.)

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Gezi

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The Gezi Resistance was the largest and fiercest social movement the Turkish Republic has seen enacted by its non-Kurdish population. A movement sparked by a struggle against the development of a park in central Istanbul grew to an all-out national revolt against Erdoğan and his neoliberal policies. Kurds were present in the Gezi Resistance, too, especially after it matured into a non-nationalist and pro-revolutionary event. But for the first time in Turkish history, the Kurds were not the main protagonists of an insurrection.

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The participation of the Kurdish movement in the Gezi Resistance is still a controversial topic. A subtle bitterness can be felt on both ends. Many in western Turkey felt like the Kurds were at best too late to join the uprising and at worst did not even want to, for fear of jeopardizing their negotiations and peace process. In response, Kurds in the region pointed to the lack of meaningful solidarity from ethnic Turks during massacre after massacre committed against them over the preceding decades. In reality, both of these positions are caricatures. Many Kurds participated in the clashes around Gezi from day one; shortly after the park was taken from the police, the Kurdish political party of that time (BDP) set up a large encampment at its entrance and flew flags with Öcalan’s face over Taksim Square—a surreal sight. Additionally, Kurds were already engaged in their own civil disobedience campaign against the construction of fortress-like military bases in their region.

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In the run-up to the Gezi rebellion, the aboveground wing of the Kurdish movement was in the process of forming the HDP (Peoples’ Democracy Party) after more than a year of consultations as the HDK (Peoples’ Democratic Congress). One of their MPs stood in front of a bulldozer along with only a dozen or so people to block the uprooting of the trees during the first protests in Gezi, well before it became a massive uprising. It is no coincidence then that when it was time to select a logo for the HDP, they chose an image of a tree.

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Regardless of grudges, Gezi forever transformed Turkey—and with it the Kurdish liberation movement’s relationship to Turkish society in general and towards the AKP and the peace process in particular. Many Turks who were on the receiving end of police brutality had the veil lifted from their eyes and were finally able to imagine the suffering taking place in southeastern Turkey. The media blackout of the Gezi Resistance made it clear to the participants that they must have been kept in the dark about what was actually transpiring in Kurdistan. At the tail end of the Gezi resistance, when a Kurdish youth named Medeni Yıldırım was killed protesting the construction of a fortress-like police station in Kurdistan, the movement saw him as one of its own and organized solidarity demonstrations with the Kurds.

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This furious yet joyous rebellion, initiated by a generation that came of age under successive unstable coalition governments only to become adults under Erdoğan’s decade-long iron rule, served to consolidate hatred against Erdoğan. This generation had been defined as apolitical or even anti-political, but in reality they were what Şükrü Argın has identified as counter-political.

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Kurdish activists take shade from the scorching heat under a stage during an encampment on the Turkish-Syrian Border, July 2014.

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The Wild Youth of Kurdistan

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Cizre is the epicenter of a region in Northern Kurdistan called Botan. The towering mountains in this region are the location of many PKK camps, and the towns at their base are some of the most rebellious. Cizre in particular continues to play an important role to this day. Cizre is where the 4th Strategic Struggle Period of the PKK materialized, shifting the point of conflict from mountainous landscapes dotted with guerrilla camps to urban epicenters in which cells of Kurdish militants organized.

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In June 2013, in the town of Cizre, a group of 100 youth standing ceremonially in formation announced the beginning of the Revolutionary Patriotic Youth Movement (YDG-H).⁷⁷7. The word for “Patriotic” in YDG-H is yurtsever, which means more accurately “one who loves his or her homeland.” With members ranging from their early teens to well into their twenties, this new organization coordinated urban guerrilla activity within every major metropolitan center inside Turkish borders. Kurdish youth began to employ Molotov cocktails instead of stones. The recent spike of urban combat in Kurdish towns and neighborhoods can be attributed to this new organization. Rebellious Kurdish youth were especially effective October 6–8, 2014, when it appeared that the city of Kobanê in Rojava was about to fall to ISIS. With the sanction of the official Kurdish leadership, Kurdish youth went on the offensive, devastating state forces. The implicit demand in the riots was for Turkey to stop providing logistical and material support to ISIS, and to allow Kurdish forces passage across its borders—for example, by allowing some heavier artillery to cross Turkey to reach Kobanê from Iraq. After the deaths of fifty people and the imposition of curfews in six different cities and martial law in the Kurdish capital of Amed, the Turkish government finally permitted the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga of the KDP to reach Kobanê with their weapons.

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Announcing the formation of the YDG-H in Cizre.

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There are great political differences between the PYD and by extension the PKK and the KDP, the current regime of Kurds in Northern Iraq who have had autonomy since the first Gulf War in 1991. The PKK/PYD are fighting for a social revolution based on self-governance, self-defense, autonomy, and women’s liberation, with an emphasis on ecology and a critique of all hierarchies, most notably state power. The KDP, on the other hand, is cultivating a national Kurdish bourgeoisie and acts as a close ally of Erdoğan. In the 1990s, the KDP fought together with Turkey against the PKK. Tensions remain high.

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The YDG-H is perhaps strongest in Cizre. After the uprising in defense of Kobanê, Cizre entered the national discourse again when youth rose up following the funeral of Ümit Kurt, taking control of the three neighborhoods of Sur, Cudi, and Nur. They were able to create an autonomous zone within these neighborhoods for two months by digging a total of 184 ditches around their neighborhoods. The Turkish state effectively lost control of this area as the youth took over, burning down at least five buildings belonging to the state or its associated interests—including a school where many of them were also students.

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On a tour of Cizre, I asked some of the members of YDG-H why they dug ditches rather than building barricades, the traditional revolutionary method of asserting autonomy since time immemorial. My host, Hapo, explained that since the youth are armed with AK–47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and small arms, the police cannot exit their armored vehicles, but they can still plow through barricades. But again, since they cannot exit their vehicles, they also cannot traverse the ditches. Hapo described how at first they used pickaxes and shovels to excavate these ditches, but then they commandeered construction vehicles. The construction vehicles of the municipal government, he said, sneaking a subtle smile. I realized he meant the municipal government belonging to the aboveground political party of the Kurdish Movement, the HDP.

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The wild youth of Cizre are organized into “teams” of around ten individuals. Hapo told me that once the number of a team grows to more than thirty, they split into smaller groups. The teams take their names form Kurdish martyrs, often recent ones and sometimes from Cizre itself—an eerie reproduction of martyrdom and militancy. Teams claim their territory by tagging their names on walls, much as graffiti crews do elsewhere around the world. During the high point of clashes, each neighborhood establishes a base where explosives, Molotov cocktails, and weapons are stockpiled during the day in preparation for the confrontations that occur at night. The younger children are sometimes on the front lines throwing rocks at armored police vehicles, but they are always the ones who sound the alarm by running through the neighborhood shouting: “The system is coming! The enemy is coming!”

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The division is clear for the Kurdish militants both in the personal and the political. There is the system, and there is struggle. Students leave the system (universities) in order to join the struggle. The system and capitalist social relations inevitably corrupt all forms of romantic love; hence, real love is love for your people, for whom you struggle. Young militants twenty years of age are not allowed to succumb to their carnal desires or fall in love. If they do, and they are honest about it, they will have to provide a self-criticism and hopefully get away with a punishment only involving a further, perhaps collective, self-criticism session on the platform, as they say in the PKK.

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It is clear that the PKK is at a turning point: a new generation of militants is hitting the streets, transforming the character of the movement. Perhaps the formation of the YDG-H was a way for the old guard to assert more control over the rebellious youth of the Kurdish slums. Even if such a strategy was at play, the youth are proving hard to control; the official leadership is acknowledging that there are groups acting outside of their directives. Only Öcalan himself could reign them in. The future of the PKK and the Kurdish movement will be determined by this rebellious youth: will they will follow the party line lockstep, or come up with their own ideas?

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Ultimately, Öcalan had to intervene for the ditches to be closed on March 2, 2015. When I brought this up to Hapo, who consistently expressed skepticism about the official leadership of the HDP and the peace process, he said that Apo is the line they don’t cross, and that their insurrection in Cizre has strengthened his negotiating hand within prison. I was left wondering how much of the leadership cult around Öcalan has to do with his imprisonment, and whether the democratic structures being put in place constitute an attempt to abolish himself as the leader.

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On September 4, the Turkish military and police invaded Cizre and declared a curfew which would last for nine days. They enforced this curfew by placing snipers on the minarettes of mosques to shoot anyone out on the streets. The siege was only broken under the pressure of a march organized by Kurds from surrounding towns, which was joined by the HDP's parliament members. When people finally entered the town, they found 21 civillians dead, 15 of whom died on the spot after being shot; the others died from their wounds or other illnesses because they could not get to the hospital. Among them was a 35-day-old baby and a 71-year-old man who had attempted to get bread during the curfew. The three rebellious neighborhoods of Nur, Sur and Cudi were riddled with bullets and larger ammunition. The state blamed the PKK for the deaths, although not one member of the state forces was injured—giving the lie to the pretense that the neighborhoods were filled with “terrorists.” This latest massacre in Cizre will be remembered for a long time and fuel the Kurdish movement.

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Cizre. The snow-capped mountains in the distance are the mountains of Cudi, where the PKK holds their positions.

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The Revolution in Kurdistan

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Like the movements that preceded it, Gezi took great inspiration from the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and the Arab Spring that were able to topple dictators swiftly. Although Erdoğan still sits on his throne in the palace he built for himself for over a billion dollars, Gezi was not a complete failure, as it opened a new space for joyful revolt in Turkey’s future. Syria, another country that rose up during the Arab Spring, seems to have experienced a similarly bittersweet outcome. Bashar Al Assad crushed the rebellion in the central cities of Syria, while the periphery was thrown into a brutal civil war that opened up the stage for jihadist groups from Iraq and elsewhere to arrive and eventually converge under the banner of ISIS.

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The silver lining in Syria was supplied by the Kurds in Rojava, who had been organizing clandestinely for decades to support the PKK in the north and to establish their own political and military structures. As in Turkey, the Assad regime did not permit the expression of the Kurdish identity or education in the mother tongue, underscoring the similarity between Kemalism and Baathism. A massacre in the city of Qamishlo, in which the Syrian regime killed 52 people after a soccer riot on March 12, 2004, is often cited as the forebear of the Rojava revolution. The main Kurdish political party, the PYD, is for all intents and purposes the sister organization of the PKK; Öcalan’s portrait is ubiquitous in Rojava.

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The PYD and others organized under the banner of Tev-Dem (Movement for a Democratic Society) took advantage of the approaching instability in Syria to declare autonomy on July 19, 2012. It was a relatively smooth operation, as preparatory meetings had already taken place in mosques throughout the region: more of a takeover than a battle. They organized themselves into three cantons running along the Turkish border, separated from each other by primarily Arab regions. These cantons are Afrin in the west, Kobanê in the center, and Cizire in the East. It was almost unbelievable that after decades of fighting, the Kurds—now in pursuit of Democratic Confederalism—had claimed their own territory.

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Öcalan’s Democratic Autonomy and Confederalism is the vision being implemented in Rojava. Autonomy, ecology, and women’s liberation are the three central points of emphasis. The most basic unit of this new society is the commune. Communes exist from the neighborhood level to workplaces including small petroleum refineries and agricultural cooperatives. There are communes specific to women, such as the Women’s Houses. All these communes are organized into assemblies that go up to the cantonal level. The current economic model in Rojava is mixed: there are private, state, and communal properties. In the Rojava Social Contract (something akin to their constitution), private property is not fully disqualified, but it is said that there will be limits imposed upon it. It is a society still in transition; so far, it is much more anti-state than anti-capitalist, but it is undeniable that there is a strong anti-capitalist push from within. Time will show how far the revolutionaries of Rojava are willing to take it.

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The revolution in Rojava is a women’s revolution; the Kurdish movement for liberation places women’s liberation above anything else. In addition to having their own army and autonomous women-only organizations, almost every organizational structure from the municipal governments to the armed PKK formations is run by co-chairmanship of a man and a woman. Quotas are imposed for memberships and other positions, so that equal participation from both genders is ensured. March 8, International Women’s Day, is taken very seriously by Kurdish women, and even more so now with the women’s resistance exemplified by the YPJ (Women’s division of the People’s Defense Units—the YPG). In his writings, Öcalan recognizes patriarchy and the separation of genders as the first social problem in history. Perhaps paradoxically, many Kurdish women militants attribute their liberation to Öcalan and his thought.

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YDG-H youth on the border between Turkey and Syria.

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The Fighters

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Even though the Kurdish seizure of power in Rojava went smoothly, the honeymoon was brief. After capturing a large amount of military machinery from Mosul on June 10, 2014, ISIS pushed north in Iraq and in Syria. With its advance came stories of massacres, enslavement, displacement, and rape. A month and a half later, in August, ISIS reached the Yazidi population, a non-Muslim Kurdish speaking community near the Sinjar Mountains, where they killed thousands and displaced near 290,000 people, 50,000 of whom were stranded on mountains without food or water. ISIS fighters seemed especially keen on wiping out this population belonging to a pre-Islamic faith with many animistic aspects, who had been persecuted for centuries as devil worshipers, withstanding more than seventy massacres in their history. The Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government lacked the agility to intervene with its peshmerga forces—in contrast to the PKK, who mobilized rapidly, traveling across the country from its main base on the Iraqi-Iranian border in Qandil. In coming to the rescue of the Yazidi and arming and training this population for self-defense, the PKK gained credibility in the region run by Barzani and his KDP. Despite the tensions between regional Kurdish forces, all the stories and images ISIS circulated through social media had the effect of unifying the once disparate Kurds, as the PKK/YPG joined with the KDP in an uneasy alliance.

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Of all of the Kurdish armed forces, the YPG is the newest. The people’s defense forces were formed shortly after the revolution, and their numbers quickly swelled with volunteers joining to defend Kurdish territories from ISIS. This wartime mobilization is also supported by conscription, which has started to create tension among young people who are not interested in fighting or who say they have already done their military service with the Assad Regime. But beyond this simmering point, in places such as Kobanê, the YPG and the YPJ are comprised of people defending their own towns and cities.

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Kobanê became ground zero in the resistance as ISIS closed in little by little, taking villages on the outskirts of the city thanks to their recently obtained military superiority. ISIS was especially keen to capture Kobanê, as it occupies the most direct route between the Turkish border and the de facto ISIS capital of Raqqa. In addition, Kobanê was also the launching point of the revolution in Rojava. The YPG and YPJ offered a heroic resistance with the little firepower they had, mostly small arms supported by rocket-propelled grenades and the higher-caliber Russian Dushkas mounted on the backs of pickup trucks. As they retreated further and further into the city proper of Kobanê, the YPG and YPJ reached near-celebrity status, thanks in part to the West’s romanticization and objectification of YPJ women fighting the bearded hordes of ISIS. Everyone from prominent leftist academics to Marie Claire magazine, who featured the YPJ (to the snickering of YPJ members in Kobanê), started singing the praises of the Kurdish fighters.

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One has to admit the neatness of the contrast on the Rojava battlefield: a feminist army courageously resisting misogynist bands of fundamentalists. Apparently, many fighters within ISIS believe that if a woman kills them, they will not enter heaven as glorious martyrs. This belief is known by the members of the YPJ and used in a form of psychological warfare on the front lines. The women of the YPJ make it a point to sound their shrill battle cry, a well-known Kurdish exclamation of rage or suffering called zılgıt, before they enter into battle with ISIS. They are making sure the jihadists know they are about to be sent to hell.

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Hundreds of Kurds from Turkey crossed the border to join the YPG forces defending Kobanê alongside PKK guerrilla units that moved into the region. Turkish leftists also started making the journey, becoming martyrs themselves. In one case, Suphi Nejat Ağırnaslı, a sociology student at one of the most prestigious universities in Istanbul, influenced in his own writings by the French journal Tiqqun, went to Rojava only to be martyred after a few weeks. The nom de guerre he had chosen was Paramaz Kızılbaş, a synthesis of the name of a well-known Armenian socialist revolutionary executed by the Ottomons and the Alevi faith, historically repressed in Turkey. This exemplifies the character of solidarity in the region: a Turkish revolutionary, assuming the name of an Armenian one, going to defend the Kurdish revolution.

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As reported in the Western media, many Americans and Europeans also made the journey to join the ranks of fighters in Rojava. Some integrated into the YPG or YPJ; others joined other units, such as the United Freedom Forces (BÖG), comprised of communists and anarchists. Apart from international revolutionaries arriving in solidarity with the Kurdish struggle for liberation, there are also ex-military or military wannabes from the UK or the US who believe that the war against Islamic extremists that they were tricked out of by corrupt British and American governments has finally arrived. Some of these internationals have started to warm to the political philosophy of Democratic Autonomy as practiced by their comrades-in-arms; others quickly got out, realizing they were among “a bunch of reds.”

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The international revolutionaries fighting alongside their Kurdish comrades will return to their homelands with strategic experience in the battlefield and a renewed sense of inspiration and perspective on what is possible when people commit themselves to liberation.

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In the middle of fall 2014, it appeared that Kobanê was about to fall. Solidarity demonstrations were held globally. Riots shook Turkey to pressure Erdoğan to stop supporting ISIS. In the meantime, meetings were held between the regional powers to figure out a response. YPG members in Kobanê recount that it appeared to be a matter of hours before the city would fall; they retreated to a central part of the city, gathering their ammunition to be destroyed rather than captured by ISIS. It was at that moment, rather than a month earlier when ISIS had not even entered the city, that the much-promised US and French airstrikes finally began in earnest.

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Beyond a doubt, without that aerial support, the minimally-armed YPG forces would not have emerged victorious. The fact that the bombardment came at the very last possible minute shows that, aside from whatever backroom negotiations and deals were taking place, NATO countries did not want an ISIS victory; but at the same time, they apparently wanted the Kurds to inherit a completely destroyed city.

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NATO assistance in the Kurdish self-defense is a touchy subject, to say the least—especially considering that the capture of Öcalan was understood as a NATO operation. When this reality is brought up among YPG members in Kobanê, they first joke about “Comrade Obama.” Pushed further, they point out that while the US and Israel are bad, they aren’t nearly as bad as the Arab Regimes. But really, at the end of the day, it is simply a matter of survival. Ideally, the YPG would be able to obtain the necessary weaponry to mount their own defense; but lacking that, if the question is between ideological purity and survival, the choice seems clear.

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YPG fighters look for things to salvage after capturing a tank from ISIS.

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Kobanê

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Immediately after its liberation from ISIS, Kobanê was a war-torn ruin in which most buildings had lost their upper floors to artillery fire. Aerial bombardment by coalition forces also did significant damage. Mahmud, a friend and comrade from Kobanê, showed me around the city he had never left in his life; his eyes filled with tears as he remembered all his friends who died in those streets. We were walking in a ghost town where the only people we saw were fighters or the small number of holdouts who had stayed behind or just returned from refugee camps in Turkey. They could be seen digging through the rubble, trying to salvage anything from the wreckage. Unexploded munitions and booby traps left behind by ISIS continued to kill even after their departure, with at least ten dead in the first two weeks following the city’s liberation. Despite the high toll paid by the Kurds—the number of fighters killed was above 2000—there was a sense of excitement and victory in the air, as news came in daily of ISIS units being pushed back further and further.

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Mahmud is one of three brothers, all of whom are members of the YPG in one role or another. Like practically all of the YPG who have been through the conflict, they have shrapnel in their bodies and hearing loss from explosions and gunfire. An experienced machinist by training, he found a role in the ranks as a gunsmith—not only fixing weapons, but also manufacturing new designs, especially long-range sniper rifles. Yet he was only able to play this part until ISIS entered the city limits of Kobanê. After that, everyone took up arms to fight, including his 13-year-old shop assistant.

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Stories of heroism are everywhere, from the sniper who blew up an ISIS tank by shooting his round into its muzzle to others who gallantly climbed on top of another tank to throw a grenade down its hatch. Stories pile upon stories as Mahmud takes me through the city streets, narrating the months-long battle of Kobanê. During one stretch, he didn’t sleep for five days straight—not only because they were under consistent attack, but also because he was so afraid. He said that at one point he wanted to die just so it would be over. From his platoon of about a hundred people, only four are still alive; we spend many hours looking at pictures of his fallen comrades on his phone. Many of the YPG have smartphones, including Mahmud and his brother Arif, who would be reprimanded by their commander for checking Facebook while they were engaged in trench warfare. His brother Arif was a sniper. But he left the YPG after the trauma of shooting a comrade by mistake.

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The stench of death was strong in some neighborhoods, with bodies still under the wreckage and the corpses of ISIS fighters rotting alongside roads littered with abandoned tanks destroyed by the YPG. To prevent the spread of disease, the bodies of ISIS fighters were usually burned; but the sheer number of corpses made it impossible to deal with all of them. Even surrounded by all this death and carnage, joyful moments were common, perhaps due to the news of advances arriving from the front. We spent our evenings hunting chickens with M16s for dinner, then smoking nargile after nargile, singing around a fire, waiting for the sun to rise over the Turkish border in the distance.

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National Liberation from Borders

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Surreal as it was for US planes to assist radical leftist fighters, the aerial bombardment started to shift the tide towards the YPG as they took back territory from ISIS bit by bit, eventually pushing them to the western bank of the Euphrates and coming within 40 km of Raqqa. On July 1, 2015, joint operations between the Free Syrian Army and the YPG liberated Tell Abyad from ISIS. The significance of this was multifold. First, this was the most coordination to occur yet between the FSA and the YPG, perhaps appeasing some of the concerns of Syrian revolutionaries who regard the Kurds as pro-Assad. Second, an important ISIS border access point into Turkey was captured, closing a corridor they had been maintaining into Syria and Raqqa. But perhaps most significantly of all, the taking of Tell Abyad connected the Eastern canton of Cizire with Kobanê, creating an uninterrupted stretch of Rojava and breaking the isolation of Kobanê for the first time.

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The Kurds are one of the many casualties of borders crossing the peoples of the world—in their case, the borders drawn by Sykes-Picot at the end of the First World War. These borders between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran are the ones the Kurds are attempting to remove, and it is this experience that informs their critique of borders everywhere. The Kurds are often mentioned as a people without a nation-state; the PKK led a national liberation struggle for decades, and the Kurdish liberation struggle can still be classified as such—but not in the classical sense. It is almost like national liberation updated for the 21st century. Both in Turkey and in Syria, the Kurdish movement is trying to provide a common fighting platform for all oppressed peoples, leftist revolutionaries, and others—a collective of peoples they often refer to as “the forces of democracy.” This platform resembles the intercommunalism of Huey Newton in that it promotes solidarity and common action while preserving the autonomy of each constituent.

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This is evident in the politics of the HDP and, more significantly, in the self-governance structures in Rojava—especially in the eastern canton of Cizire, where Kurds, Arabs, and Assyrians live together, participate in communal-self governance, and mobilize fighting forces within the YPG. For a region plagued by ethnic division, the Kurdish proposition is a third way. This is how they refer to their project to contrast it with the choice between ISIS and the Assad regime on one side of the border, and between the AKP and Turkish nationalism on the other.

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This proposition presents democratic modernity as an alternative to capitalist modernity and self-governance via confederalism as an alternative to the nation-state. The Kurds are not the only ones attempting to break the borders of the Middle East. In addition to ISIS who has successfully redrawn the map, Erdoğan also has his own ambitions under the rubric of the “Great Middle East Project,” in which Turkey would assume its rightful role (neo-Ottomanism) as the dominant regional power. Already today, most of the foreign business in Barzani’s Kurdish Region in Northern Iraq is Turkish capital. A strong PYD and PKK in the region would be an obstacle to this project.

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A member of the YPG scavenging the villages on the outskirts of Kobanê.

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Elections and a Massacre

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For thirteen years, the AKP has won overwhelming victories in Turkish national elections, holding power as a single party. The HDP was able to harness anti-Erdoğan sentiment with a clever political strategy during the run-up to the historic elections of June 7, 2015. The Turkish electoral system has a 10% threshold: unless a party receives 10% of the national vote or above, it cannot enter parliament, and votes cast for it are effectively void. To sidestep this, the Kurdish movement has usually run independent candidates who, after winning a seat, would become party members. While this run-around strategy helped to get about thirty-five representatives into parliament, receiving more than 10% of the vote would secure at least twice as many positions.

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The election of June 7 presented the possibility to displace the AKP and sabotage Erdoğan’s ambitions of increasing his powers by means of constitutional changes that would make him the ultimate patriarch of Turkey. Selahattin Demirtaş, the youthful and charismatic co-chairperson of the HDP, made “We won’t let him become president!” one of his main campaign slogans. The hatred of Erdoğan that had culminated in the Gezi uprising intersected with discontent over Erdoğan’s support of ISIS and enthusiasm inspired by the resistance of Kobanê. Consequently, the HDP secured 13% of the national vote and 80 MPs, creating a situation in which no single party could form a government by itself and necessitating that a coalition form to assume power.

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The relationship between the armed PKK and the electoral HDP is delicate yet complementary. The HDP must strike a difficult balance: they receive their legitimacy in the eyes of the Kurdish population as the aboveground wing of the armed struggle, but they also need to distance themselves occasionally in order to play the political game successfully on the national scale. Erdoğan and his cronies, who are shrewd and aware of this, stoke the fires wherever they can by pitting the HDP against the PKK and both of them against Öcalan, whom they portray as more levelheaded—an easy task, when communication with him is controlled by the state and no one has heard from him in five months. The HDP is in a precarious position as a legal and unarmed political party often subject to the same repression as PKK members.

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Following the election, no one could work out how to create a coalition government. As everyone’s attention was focused on the electoral stalemate, Erdoğan made it clear that he would push for early elections to give the population another opportunity to bring the AKP to power. Then came the massacre in Suruç.

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It was just another delegation of young leftists from Istanbul to Kurdistan. This one was organized by the Socialist Youth Associations Federation with the goal of giving a hand in the rebuilding of Kobanê, bringing toys to refugee children, and planting trees in the region. On the morning of July 20, 2015, SGDF organized a press conference at the Amara Cultural Center, the de facto convergence center for volunteers traveling to assist with the refugee camps. In the midst of this, a suicide bomber killed 34 people. This massacre shocked the whole country, setting in motion a downward spiral of events. Two days later, Erdoğan cut a deal with the US to allow them use of the Turkish Incirlik Air Base against ISIS in exchange for their tacit support of a new campaign of annihilation against the PKK. Seizing upon the murder of two police officers the day after the bombing for justification (a retaliation later explicitly disowned by the official channels of the PKK), the Turkish government began a massive air campaign against PKK positions in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. In addition, raids took place across the country, resulting in more than 2000 arrests and continuing to this day. So belligerent were the actions of the AKP that they even arrested one of the injured from the socialist delegation bombed in Suruç.

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The AKP claimed that it was going after all the extremist terrorists in the country: the PKK, ISIS, and the Marxist-Leninist group DHKP-C (The Revolutionary Peoples Liberation Party - Front). Of these three, the DHKP-C does not hold a candle to the others in terms of numbers or effectiveness; it seems they were thrown in for good measure. While the AKP and Erdoğan claim in the media that they are also going after ISIS, in reality this is nothing but window dressing. Of the 2544 arrested by the end of August, less than 5% were arrested on allegations of belonging to ISIS, and many of those were later released. Of the bombing campaign totaling approximately 400 airstrikes, only three targeted ISIS. These airstrikes are targeting PKK camps, especially the central one of Qandil—but civilians have also been killed, such as ten in the nearby Iraqi village of Zelgele.

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Although the Suruç bombing targeted the Kurdish movement, it is being used as an excuse to decimate it. As of this writing at the beginning of September, according to the Turkish Human Rights Association more than 47 civilians and 47 PKK guerrillas have been killed. The PKK is hitting back hard wherever it can: as of now, at least 92 policemen or soldiers have been killed, and 24 officials of the state or security forces kidnapped.

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In response to this repression, Kurdish towns and cities rose up with demonstrations and riots in every single town for many nights in a row. The response by the state was brutal; media pundits observed that the country had regressed to the bloody 1990s. While this was certainly the case from the standpoint of the state, the Kurdish movement has evolved: Kurds in more than sixteen towns took the initiative of declaring autonomy from the state and began to emphasize their right to self-defense. These declarations were met with more brutality and arrests. Especially in the towns of Silopi and Cizre, the state responded by using snipers to go after children and citizens who weren’t even directly involved in the conflicts. House raids and extrajudicial executions soon followed. Bombings of the countryside have resulted in catastrophic forest fires, inflicting yet another form of anguish on the region. Many towns in the region are still declared special security zones, a designation akin to martial law; curfews and operations by special forces are widespread.

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A new early election has been called for November 1, 2015. It is already clear that the run-up to the next election will result in escalations from the AKP and Erdoğan, who has shown that he is willing to do anything to hold on to power, even thrust the country into civil war. It is possible that he will use his executive powers to postpone the election for a year on the grounds that there is a security risk for elections to take place. The successes of the Kurds on both sides of the Turkish-Syrian border, their smart political choices and heroic fighting maneuvers have pushed the AKP and Erdoğan to a breaking point. If the current drive for a truly fascist police state is any indication, his fall from power will be as brutal as his reign.

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I am inspired by the perseverance of the Kurds who are attempting to break out of stale leftist dogmas while still insisting on revolution. The transformation of a social movement of millions does not occur overnight, but they have begun to implement new social relations and structures that aim at abolishing the state and other hierarchies, such as men over women or humans over non-humans. From my observations, I believe that this stubborn multigenerational struggle has the potential to transform the world’s most sectarian region into autonomous zones of cooperation and solidarity. As long as they are able to survive ISIS and the Turkish State and continue constructing their revolution from below, they will have much more to teach those of us fighting for liberation elsewhere.

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YPG barricades in Kobanê. In the West, the V means peace; everywhere else, it means victory.

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All photographs by the author.

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1. Geographically, Kurdistan is defined by cardinal directions. So western Kurdistan, which is in northern Syria, is called Rojava (West); northern Kurdistan, which is in southeastern Turkey, is Bakur (North); southern Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, is Bashur (South); and eastern Kurdistan, in southwestern Iran, is Rojhelat (East). ↩︎

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2. Known as Atatürk—the great Turk—after 1934. ↩︎

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3. Although Turkey has universal conscription, it also has laws which permit one to pay nearly $10,000 to be exempt from it. In addition, those with higher-level education are often able to land safer positions. Thus those who actually fight the wars are predominantly poor. ↩︎

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4. Mahir was killed in a military raid during the kidnapping of NATO technicians with the demand of freeing Deniz and two others who would also be executed, Hüseyin Inan and Yusuf Küpeli. Deniz was hung by military rule. ↩︎

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5. Although Western leftists are fascinated by the Bookchin-Öcalan connection, it is not as if Kurdish militants are walking around with Bookchin under their arms in the region. Sure, Democratic Confederalism resembles libertarian municipalities, but pointing to Bookchin as the ideological forefather reeks of Eurocentrism. ↩︎

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6. There is no question that Muslims were subjected to a conservative secularism in Turkey prior to the AKP. Erdogan’s electoral successes capitalized on the resulting frustration. ↩︎

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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A year has passed since the murder of Michael Brown, one of over 1100 people, disproportionately black and brown, killed by US law enforcement in 2014. The movement against institutionalized white supremacy and police violence has spread and escalated, gaining leverage on the authorities and the public imagination despite repeated efforts to coopt it. At the same time, we are seeing extra-governmental white supremacist violence reemerge as a force in the US, as it always does whenever state strategies for imposing white supremacy reach their limits.

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The illusion of social peace is evaporating. Over the past year, the National Guard has been called out three times to quell anti-police rioting. White racists have retaliated with church burnings and murders, while raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support murderers in uniform. The lines that are being drawn may determine the geography of racialized conflict in the US for a long time to come. How did we arrive here from the first demonstrations in Ferguson? And how should we position ourselves in these struggles?

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The Backstory: Crisis and Repression, Cooptation and Revolt

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The racialized poverty that forms the landscape of Ferguson and so many other predominantly black districts is not just a consequence of the recession of 2008. The costs of capitalism have always been inflicted first and worst on black people, from slavery and Jim Crow to the contemporary phenomenon of “surplus humanity” for whom there is no place in the economy. And since the beginning, this has engendered black resistance.

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Fifty years ago, white America faced powder keg of civil rights movements, militant black organizing, and urban riots. Because the 1960s were a time of comparative abundance and economic growth, the United States government could afford to stabilize society by integrating some people of color into more aspects of political and economic life. But even those concessions took place at a price: while a minority of black people were offered conditional access to the middle class, the more militant organizers and the majority of black communities were ruthlessly repressed. Since then, some of the leaders of the black civil rights movement have become successful politicians, while Black Panthers remain behind bars along with a million other black people.

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This is the dual operation of repression: kill or imprison the ones who won’t or can’t compromise, while integrating the more tractable into the power structure.

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Pacify whoever will listen …

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… and repress the rest.

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Today, in the age of global austerity, there are few resources available with which to strike bargains with the excluded. The rhetoric from politicians and pundits condemning protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore is a military operation intended to make it possible to use force against them without blowback, but it also shows that the conflict between the two sides is irresolvable: no one in power has any idea what to do about our society’s racial and economic inequalities. Leaders on the left are doing their best to obscure this in order to buy time. When they bought time in the 1960s, that time was used to build the jails and prisons that hold nearly two and a half million people today, to set the stage for the gentrification that is currently demolishing entire communities of color.

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This is why in 2014, neither the repressive force of the state nor the receding lure of economic success were enough to contain black rage. No wonder Ferguson exploded.

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No amount of force can stabilize an unequal society indefinitely.

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The limits of the market.

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From Ferguson to Baltimore

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Consult the appendix below for a timeline of the Baltimore uprising.

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The post–1960s strategy of integrating black leaders into the structures of state power has also reached its limits. We saw hints of this in the 2009 uprising following the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, a city whose political elite includes civil rights veterans who now oversee police that behave the same as ever towards the black and poor.

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Although Ferguson was a classic example of a black majority terrorized by a violent white elite, the power structure in Baltimore includes a number of black authority figures. That extends even into the police department: three of the six officers arrested for the murder of Freddie Gray are black. Yet putting black people in positions of state power hasn’t done away with poverty, police killings, or other forms of structural racism in Baltimore. Black politicians may have been able to ameliorate the situation to some extent, but in the end it took the riots with which people responded to the murder of Freddie Gray to force the issue of white supremacy.

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People of any background can maintain white supremacist institutions. Despite media handwringing about Ferguson’s disproportionately white police force, we don’t just need affirmative action among those who impose structural oppression; we need to make it impossible for these institutions to dominate people in the first place.

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After the initial explosion, chief prosecutor Marilyn Mosby succeeded in averting further confrontations by announcing the filing of charges against Freddie Gray’s murderers immediately ahead of the demonstrations scheduled for May Day weekend. Her decision to press charges was exceptional and courageous, but most of those charges would never have been filed if not for clashes like the ones she was trying to forestall. It is a mistake to turn people from means of protest that interrupt the status quo back to ineffective strategies that rely on the institutional channels of redress. Even if the officers responsible for Freddie Gray’s death are found guilty, that will not prove that the system can police itself, but rather that it takes a full-scale uprising to impose even a modicum of consequences on those who maintain it. Rather than setting out to reform the court system one riot at a time, it would make more sense to ask what these uprisings lack to become steps towards revolutionary change.

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In response to that possibility, those who have the greatest cause to fear change—the authorities, the corporate media, and representatives of the middle class—set out to frame the uprising in Baltimore as pathological and puerile. The curfew that was imposed in Baltimore on April 29 along with the National Guard occupation was an extension of the curfew that had already been in place¹¹1. The 2014 article linked here blithely reassures the reader of the good intentions of the police enforcing the curfew: “The Baltimore Police have recently been trained on dealing with youth. To emphasize that those caught violating curfew are not considered criminals, the city says most children out late will be transported in vans—not in the back of police cars.” Indeed, Freddie Gray was fatally injured in the back of a van, having been arrested for no criminal activity whatsoever. <br/ ><br/ >2. The counterpart of that narrative is the mother who persuaded her son to turn himself in for his role in vandalizing a police car, only to see him held on $500,000 bail—afterwards, when it was too late, she regretted telling him to entrust his fate to the authorities. for young people in that city all year. In effect, the April 29 curfew signified the infantilizing of the whole adult population of Baltimore, an intensification of the function that the state always plays in pacifying and sidelining people.

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This is the light in which we must understand the corporate media narrative about the mother who hit her son for masking up and throwing rocks on the premise she didn’t want him to become yet another Freddie Gray.²² That narrative individualizes blame for police violence—in fact, Freddie Gray was not committing any sort of crime when he was arrested. There is no individual solution for the structural violence directed at Freddie Gray and countless young people like him—and likely no solution that involves obeying the law or waiting for it to take its due course. Waiting on the courts is yet more infantilizing: hush up and let the adults take care of this.

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But that sort of sidelining is becoming less and less feasible. In Ferguson and then in Baltimore, we saw children throwing rocks because their parents had already been incapacitated or imprisoned, just like in Palestine—and because, as in Palestine, they knew that there would be no payoff to behaving themselves. There has been a lot of rhetoric about fatherless children, and indeed a shocking proportion of men have been kidnapped from black communities in places like West Baltimore. But the truth is that black youth succeeded in forcing the issue of police violence where everyone else had failed. In interrupting the functioning of a system that has no place for them, they are the ones opening the possibility of real change, not the black leadership of the previous generation.

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From Ferguson to Baltimore, the cycle of revolt accelerated and intensified. The arc of events that took a week and a half to unfold in Ferguson played out much more rapidly in Baltimore. Large parts of the city were in flames within two days of the first confrontations, and the National Guard was deployed almost immediately; Mosby filed the charges that effectively concluded the uprising just four days later. Despite the speedy quelling of the riots, it seems possible that the state had nearly reached the limit of what it could do to impose white supremacist inequality by main force: with the prisons packed, once the National Guard is deployed, escalating to a higher level of repression would mean declaring open war on the population.

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If multiple uprisings were to occur simultaneously in the same region, control might break down completely. Hence the authorities’ scrambling to mollify people they had been ignoring for years.

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Imposing the peace … for now.

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From Baltimore to South Carolina

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A week before the murder of Freddie Gray, a police officer had murdered Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in North Charleston, South Carolina, shooting him in the back as he fled. The killing was caught on video, and within three days the officer was charged with murder. Even in the birthplace of the Confederacy, the specter of uprising forced the authorities to impose consequences on the police.

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Yet whenever governmental enforcement of white supremacy reaches its limits in the United States, independent white supremacist activity picks up. The classic example of this is the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations like the White League and the Red Shirts after the abolition of slavery. In many cases, it was the same sheriffs, judges, and legislators who enforced racist laws on the books donning robes and hoods to pick up where the laws left off.

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In recent months, we’ve seen a resurgence of autonomous white supremacist activity, including a spate of church burnings that began in Ferguson immediately after the decision not try Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown. But that could be only the tip of the iceberg.

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In response to the uprisings of the past few years, we are seeing police—and the subset of middle-class America from which many of them are drawn—beginning to conceive of their interests as distinct from the rest of the state structure. In 2011, during the peak of Occupy Oakland, Mayor Jean Quan wrestled with the Oakland Police Department, which repeatedly asserted a contrary agenda. Something similar occurred between the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City last winter, when New York City police carried out an unofficial strike demanding more unconditional support from the government—in effect, demanding the freedom to employ violence with impunity. After the Baltimore uprising, there was a lot of grumbling among Maryland police who blamed their superiors for not permitting them to use more violence against demonstrators.

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This kind of frustration could give rise to new racist movements that will understand themselves as needing to take the law into their own hands in order to maintain law and order and defend private property. Something similar has occurred in Greece with the emergence of the fascist party Golden Dawn, which now counts a great part of the country’s police officers in its ranks. That makes it especially ominous that the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary organization of former policemen and soldiers, have made repeated appearances at demonstrations in Ferguson.

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Rival factions within the state: the NYPD versus Mayor de Blasio.

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Supporters of the police clash with demonstrators in Baltimore.

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Autonomous movements of all stripes have an advantage today, when government is widely discredited. Like anarchists in contrast to liberals, autonomous white supremacists are more effective than garden-variety racists because they are prepared to use direct action to achieve their goals. What is at stake here is what autonomy will mean in the public imagination: freedom and resistance to oppression, or unchecked racist violence. The discourse of autonomy is strategically precious territory; whoever is able to occupy it will be able to determine the frame within which people conceptualize social change.

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For the state, the intensification of extra-governmental white supremacist activity is an opportunity to change the subject. Such activity enables the government to present itself as protecting people from racist violence, directing attention away from all the normalized ways that the state imposes such violence. The image of the National Guard holding back white vigilantes during integration in the South gave the federal government decades of credibility, even though the same National Guard put down the riots of the late 1960s. If anything like Golden Dawn or the KKK of the 1920s gets off the ground in the US today, many people currently involved in movements against police and prisons will line up behind the government again, legitimizing those institutions as necessary tools against white supremacists even though in the long run they will always be used chiefly against the black, brown, and poor.

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Shop owner in Ferguson, August 2014.

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A member of the Oath Keepers brandishing a semiautomatic weapon during protests in Ferguson, August 2015.

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So far, we have yet to see a surge in organized group violence from fascists or rogue police officers. Autonomous white supremacist violence has remained the province of lone wolves like Dylann Roof, who carried out a racist massacre in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015, reportedly with the intention of catalyzing a race war. Photographs showed him brandishing a Confederate flag and other racist insignia.

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In response, activists renewed their appeal to the state legislature to remove the Confederate flag from its official place on the grounds of the state capitol. In 1961, Democratic Governor Ernest Hollings had initiated legislation to raise the Confederate flag on the capitol grounds as a symbol of resistance to the civil rights movement. Despite the end of legal segregation, the flag stood, defying an NAACP tourism boycott since 2000.

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On June 21, days after the Emanuel Church massacre, “Black Lives Matter” graffiti appeared on Confederate monuments in Charleston and elsewhere. On June 27, Black Lives Matter activist Brittany Ann Byuarim Newsome was arrested and charged with “defacing a monument” after climbing up the flagpole at the state capitol and removing the Confederate flag. Less than two weeks later, lawmakers voted to remove it from the State Capitol.

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This demonstrates the power of direct action. The tourism boycott had been ineffective; so long as the state perceived no internal threat to order, it could afford to shrug off a few lost tourist dollars and the indignation of activists. But when uprisings elsewhere around the US dovetailed with local outrage, the willingness of a few individuals to break the law hastened a process that otherwise could have dragged on decades longer. The spectacle of a state claiming to oppose racism arresting an activist for removing an officially sanctioned symbol of racism from the headquarters of the state left the lawmakers no choice—especially after the Ku Klux Klan scheduled a rally at the capitol for July 18, threatening to create an additional spectacle of explicit racists outside the legislature allied with filibustering Republicans within. On July 9, the legislators voted to take down the Confederate flag, rebranding themselves as anti-racists. As in Ferguson and Baltimore, direct action had shifted the terrain, compelling officials to scramble to catch up.

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Yet by focusing attention on removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol, activists had displaced rage against the racist murders in South Carolina onto a symbolic issue that legislators could address. The role of the Ku Klux Klan here aptly illustrates how extra-governmental white supremacist activity can be advantageous for the state.

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This was the context in which Klansmen and women, police, and protesters attending a black-organized counterdemonstration converged upon the state capitol grounds of Columbia, South Carolina on July 18, 2015. The Klansmen hoped to attract the attention of angry whites who felt victimized by recent victories against white supremacy; if they could present themselves as the sole remaining defenders of a flag and a tradition abandoned by the authorities, they would win new adherents for extra-governmental white supremacist organizing. The authorities hoped to preserve order, showing that they could control opponents of the state on both sides, in order to keep the state itself central for all seeking social change. The protesters, as usual, were divided between a variety of goals and methodologies; they ran the gamut from religious pacifists to black separatists to predominantly white anarchists.

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Police struggle to protect Klansmen on July 18, 2015.

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The day ended in a rout for the Klan, with a multiethnic crowd including anarchists chasing them back to their cars and pelting them with projectiles as the overextended police struggled to protect them. More Klansmen went to the hospital than protesters went to jail. The demonstrators had prevented the Klan from asserting an image of strength, hopefully discouraging dissatisfied white people from joining them. At the same time, compared to the events in Ferguson and Baltimore, the police had ceased to be the chief subject of the demonstrations; Dylann Roof, the controversy about the Confederate flag, and the Klan rally had shifted the subject away from policing and other normalized and fundamental aspects of the white supremacist power structure, towards exceptional and symbolic expressions of white supremacy. As social conflicts polarize and more and more people on both sides break off from state-based strategies, it will be especially important to continue confronting the institutionalized white supremacy of the state.

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Next Time It Explodes

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The police in the St. Louis area have continued their pattern of killing someone every month or so since the protests there last August and November. The police in Baltimore and South Carolina will surely continue killing, as well, even if they are more anxious about the consequences; apparently, it requires this level of perpetual violence to preserve the current social order. It will take more than reforms, more than individual uprisings, to put a stop to police murder.

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Over the past seven years, we have seen a slow, steady escalation in the tactics that protesters in the United States feel entitled to employ. In 2008 and 2009, only the most radical student groups went so far as to occupy universities; in 2011, Occupy became the watchword of an entire mass movement. During the Occupy movement, only the most radical groups went so far as to blockade anything; during the Black Lives Matter protests of November and December 2014, people around the United States employed blockading on a regular basis. During the protests that spread from Ferguson in 2014, only the most enraged participants engaged in vandalism, arson, and looting; yet protesters in Baltimore escalated to vandalism, arson, and looting as soon as their demonstrations escaped police control. All this illustrates the value of pushing the envelope: demonstrating new tactics, however unpopular they may be at the time, so that they enter the public imagination for future use.

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This escalation has been matched by a shift in popular discourse. During the flashpoints in Ferguson and Baltimore, some media outlets published daring editorials explaining the riots as acts of desperation, or making arguments for why people had given up on nonviolence. We have not seen such a public validation of militant tactics in the US for decades.

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Yet there is a big difference between validating and participating. These pundits seem to have obtained all the credibility of endorsing militant tactics without any of the inconveniences of employing them. All of these editorials are concerned only with explaining and legitimizing what they essentially treat as exotic phenomena; the implication is that the rest of us might accept what the rioters are doing from a distance, but certainly not participate in it ourselves. Other aspiring allies arrive at the same conclusion from a different direction, being so careful not to usurp the agency of the most affected communities that they end up standing aside entirely or putting their weight behind lower-risk initiatives.

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But it is dangerous and unethical to leave the greatest risks to the most vulnerable people. If it makes sense for the most marginalized and targeted to risk their lives to interrupt the functioning of the system that is killing them, it makes even more sense for the rest of us to do so. It’s not a question of understanding the uprisings, but of joining and extending them in order to render them unnecessary. That doesn’t necessarily mean invading others’ neighborhoods: the next time a Ferguson or a West Baltimore erupts, it might be most effective for those who wish to show solidarity to initiate actions elsewhere, in order to overextend the authorities. Nor should it mean centralizing ourselves in the narrative: solidarity means taking on the same risks that others are exposed to—nothing more, nothing less.

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The precarious rapport de force that has lasted since the Baltimore uprising will likely persist until another demographic enters the conflict. It’s not clear how much further the state can go to maintain the current order by means of pure force. If uprisings occurred in multiple cities in the same region at the same time, or if a much broader range of people got involved, all bets would be off.

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But as intimated above, the next demographic to enter the space of conflict might well be a reactionary force. South Carolina is not the only place in which struggles against state violence have shifted seamlessly into struggles against autonomous white supremacists. Some anarchists and fellow travelers have glibly invoked “social war” or “civil war,” without fully grasping that such wars usually end up playing out along ethnic and religious lines in the most reactionary manner.³³3. While 19^th century France saw a series of civil wars fought along class lines, it is telling that the only civil war in the history of the United States was initiated by those who wished to preserve slavery. As the tensions in our society increase, it is up to us to render it possible to imagine other lines of conflict. The Dylann Roofs of the world and their equivalents within the halls of power want nothing better than to see society split into warring racial factions, with poor whites joining police and other defenders of the middle class to suppress the rage of the black and disaffected. White people must not countenance this division, even out of a wrongheaded desire to stand aside out of respect for black autonomy. That would spell doom for the most marginalized people in this struggle, however much good liberals might applaud their courageous efforts from afar. Rather, we have to produce a narrative of multiethnic struggle against white supremacy and capitalism by participating directly in the clashes that are occurring right now—both so that it will be impossible for white supremacists to convince potential converts that the important lines dividing society are racial, and so that those who are more racially and economically marginalized than us will not have cause to conclude that they have indeed been abandoned.

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Fighting white supremacy in this context means spreading the clashes with the authorities, while crushing autonomous racist initiatives wherever they appear. It means confronting fascists—an essentially rearguard battle—but it also means taking the initiative in attacking capitalism and the state, intensifying the struggles we are already in. Only by foregrounding anarchist solutions to the problems of poor people, including poor white people, can we make it impossible for racists to recruit from the ranks of the poor, white, and angry.

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In short: class war, not race war. We may have less time than we know.

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“That left was too lost in delusions of success almost within their hands, delusions of maneuvering together a majority, to bother even really understanding fascism coming up fast in their rear view mirror. The urgent need was to organize a working minority to counter fascism in a much more radical way. Not by trying to defend liberal bourgeois rule. All the real things that had to be done by scattered German anti-fascists later after the Nazis were put into power—such as to survive politically, to significantly sabotage the war effort, to rescue Jews and Romany and gays, to build an underground against the madness of the Third Reich—all these things were attempted bravely but largely unsuccessfully, because they had to be done too late from scratch. This is a much larger subject, too large to dive into now, but it is on the horizon, like the smoke of a distant forest fire.”
- J. Sakai, “When Race Burns Class”

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Columbia, South Carolina on July 18, 2015: Don’t make him fight alone.

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Appendix I:
Timeline of the Baltimore Uprising

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from an interview US anarchists answered for the Greek anarchist news service, Apatris

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April 12 — Freddie Gray was arrested for making eye contact with an officer. He was intentionally injured in police custody while being transported to jail, and denied proper medical care. He passed away on April 19 as a consequence of these injuries.
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April 26 — On Saturday, there was a law-abiding protest rally in the afternoon. It concluded with a march in which participants vandalized police cars and clashed with drunk, racist sports fans. The police created a control perimeter, but inside of this space, demonstrators reportedly were free to destroy property for some hours. The police had lost control.
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April 28 — On Monday, a message reportedly circulated among high school students via social media calling for a “purge” that afternoon at a mall in Baltimore: a reference to a Hollywood movie in which laws and policing are suspended. The mall in question is a major transit center for kids traveling to and from school. Baltimore doesn’t have school buses; kids use public transit. Police preemptively shut down the mall, flooded the streets with officers in riot gear, and shut down public transportation, stopping buses and forcing everyone off of them. In this tense situation, with nowhere to go, youth began to clash with the police. In at least one instance, police officers were documented throwing rocks back at children.
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By nightfall, there were riots and fires all over the city, including some of the whiter neighborhoods. Over a hundred cars were set on fire, including many police cars, and over a dozen buildings were burned, most famously the CVS at the intersection of Penn and North. Corporate media played live footage of looting from helicopters, the newscasters wailing and wringing their hands about the loss of property while describing the people below in pejorative terms. Looking down uncomprehendingly at the people they said were “burning their own neighborhoods,” they offered the perspective of the state—the same perspective as the drones sailing over Pakistan.
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The mayor declared a state of emergency, called in police from around the state along with the National Guard, and announced a seven-day curfew to go into effect Tuesday. The overwhelmed court system was not able to keep up with all the arrestees, some of whom were eventually released without charges.
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Baltimore’s finest.

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April 29 — On Tuesday, the city was tense. On public transportation, you could hear people bragging about what they’d looted, mostly basic necessities. Witnesses reported a feeling in the air to the effect that “We did what we had to do.” Community organizations sponsored cleanup activities, as in London in 2011, and “peacekeepers” were out hoping to prevent more fighting and rioting from breaking out.
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It’s important to emphasize that because so much of the population of Baltimore is black, there were black people involved in all of these different responses—black politicians, black peacekeepers, black police, black community organizers, black business owners, black rioters.
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On Tuesday, since schools were closed, Red Emma’s (the primary anarchist space in town) provided a place for kids who weren’t in school and for homeless youth from a shelter that had been destroyed in the rioting. Free food was collected and distributed through organizations in other neighborhoods—largely church organizations, which play a role in Baltimore politics, including radical politics.
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The intersection of Penn & North, where the CVS had been burned, became the default space for protestors seeking conflict to gather—similar to the QuikTrip that was burned in Ferguson. The curfew was enforced violently at 10 pm; people fought back against police, but nothing like what had happened on Monday.
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April 30 — On Wednesday, many groups called for marches, even though the state of emergency banned all public gatherings; these marches were all granted permits at the last minute, acknowledging the leverage protesters had gained against the state. The resulting march, led by black and brown youth, was the largest anyone had seen in Baltimore for a long time, though it was dwarfed by the marches that followed on Friday and Saturday. The march conceded to police demands not to stay in front of City Hall, and made its way back to Penn Station, dispersing around 9 pm so people could get inside by curfew. More fighting ensued after curfew at the intersection of Penn and North.
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May 1 — More demonstrations were scheduled for May 1 and 2; they were expected to draw people from nearby cities and likely become confrontational again. But on the morning of Friday, May 1, state’s attorney Mosby announced that six police officers would be charged with crimes as a result of Freddie Gray’s death; one of them is being charged with murder.
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There were unpermitted marches around the city all day and late into the night. Most people gathered downtown at City Hall and McKeldin Square, the “free speech zone” where the authorities usually try to keep protestors. The march drew something like 5000 people and proceeded eleven miles, during which it picked up and lost people constantly; some sources estimated 10,000 or more participants altogether. The atmosphere was joyous. Police were not numerous enough to contain the demonstrators, but kept them from taking highways and protected certain targets. In the jail district, prisoners joined in the chanting from behind the walls, mostly “All night, all day, we will fight for Freddie Gray.”
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Pickup trucks overflowing with people joined the march in West Baltimore. It headed back downtown, then slowly dispersed around the time of curfew. However, at City Hall, 50–100 people stayed past curfew and at least 13 were arrested, many of those arrests violent. There was more curfew violence at the intersection of Penn and North, as well.
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May 2 — On Saturday, there were more marches. At this point, much of the energy had shifted towards seeking amnesty for arrestees, many of whom faced severe charges. For example, one young man who smashed the windows of a police car, whose parent had convinced him to turn himself in, was being held on $500,000 bail.
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Saturday night saw the broadest anti-curfew organizing. A mostly white group met in a mostly white neighborhood; police showed up in force, but gave warning after warning to disperse and pleaded with the group not to get arrested. People agreed to disperse, since jail support resources were already spread thin. Police reportedly offered to drive people home afterwards. Meanwhile, at the intersection of Penn and North, police beat and pepper-sprayed and arrested people, especially black protestors. A fairly large number of medics and people organizing jail support were arrested at the jail for curfew violation.
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May 3 — On Sunday, the mayor lifted the curfew two days early, responding to complaints from business owners. Things had calmed down.
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To be continued.

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1. The 2014 article linked here blithely reassures the reader of the good intentions of the police enforcing the curfew: “The Baltimore Police have recently been trained on dealing with youth. To emphasize that those caught violating curfew are not considered criminals, the city says most children out late will be transported in vans—not in the back of police cars.” Indeed, Freddie Gray was fatally injured in the back of a van, having been arrested for no criminal activity whatsoever. ↩

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2. The counterpart of that narrative is the mother who persuaded her son to turn himself in for his role in vandalizing a police car, only to see him held on $500,000 bail—afterwards, when it was too late, she regretted telling him to entrust his fate to the authorities. ↩

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3. While 19^th century France saw a series of civil wars fought along class lines, it is telling that the only civil war in the history of the United States was initiated by those who wished to preserve slavery. ↩

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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In February 2015, after months of confrontations in response to the murder of Michael Brown, a number of anarchists from the St. Louis area gathered to reflect on their experiences in the streets, their role in predominantly black struggles, and the ramifications of arson and gunfire in protests. We had sent some discussion questions to get the ball rolling, but mostly they let the conversation take its own course, speaking with admirable frankness and vulnerability. The result is an important historical document, of interest to anyone who might one day participate in something similar.

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This transcript originally appeared in the 12th issue of Rolling Thunder, which examines the movement that spread across the United States from Ferguson in great detail.

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Introduction from the Participants

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When we talk about Ferguson, it’s imperative that we recognize that what became a beautiful uprising began with a tragic loss, a brutal murder. The endless list of those killed at the hands of the state in St. Louis and elsewhere stokes our rage and fuels our tears. But like those we saw in the streets of Ferguson, we refuse to turn this profound anger and misery inward on ourselves.

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The issue of this rebellion, at the heart, is far from a simple one and therefore the answers to questions posed are far from straight forward. The editors of Rolling Thunder put together a compendium of thoughtful and critical questions—analytical and clearly posed from a distance. But because of the nature of our experiences where our lives were ripped open—exposing us to the highest highs and lowest lows—the discussion strayed far from the questions posed. Ultimately, we didn’t answer very many of them.

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We, who were in the streets together over the course of several months in some of the most intimate and exhilarating moments of our lives, had a meandering discussion. At times, we started with the questions; at other times, the discussion sparked some of our own. We were more drawn to start at the heart—how does it feel to touch the edge of your dreams? How do you possibly return to life the way it was before? Who holds you when you cry?

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Because we did cry: from the intense moments of rage to the unbelievable and unbearable beauty we witnessed and helped to create. Because we witnessed what often seems untouchable—witnessed the impossible—witnessed some of the hope that dwells in our deepest places, and we cried because we touched the edge of great, great loss. And this brought us to perhaps the most important question of all: after all you’ve been through, what do you still hope and dream for?

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Mourners in Ferguson at the site where Michael Brown was murdered, August 10, 2014.

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Background and Context: “I Was a Lot More Pessimistic before This”

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Luca: [reading] “How did you see the future of the St. Louis area before this and how do you see it now? What are the long-term effects shaping up to be? What new social bodies coalesced around the rebellion and the reaction against it or broke it up?”

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Masie: I was a lot more pessimistic about the world and St. Louis before this.

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Cameron: I definitely was.

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Emma: It was incredible to be going to things that you weren’t trying to make happen. It was such a relief.

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Luca: Yeah, it seemed like this place was in a malaise, like much of the country, but here particularly because of how this place is. And so it was totally unexpected.

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Cameron: I didn’t expect this to happen and it was amazing that it happened, but I’m also thinking, is this just the sort of thing that might just happen every twenty years and then we’re just back to nothing happening in between? I’m just not sure that it’s a thing that will keep happening. Because it happened, like, twenty years ago, in 1992, and police have kept killing people for years and years.

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Vera: We have to take into account what was happening just locally in St. Louis. Maybe riots like this only happen every twenty years, but things were happening in St. Louis that led up to it. Like the Trayvon march.¹¹1. On July 14, 2013, there was a rally in St. Louis in response to George Zimmerman being found not guilty for the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The rally culminated in about 800 people marching through downtown St. Louis. Police barricades were moved and pushed through, graffiti was written on the back of moving buses, things were thrown in the streets. It quickly became the most notable anti-police march St. Louis had seen in recent history. This march took the cake until Ferguson, which took the whole bakery. A short article on the march entitled “The Storming of the Bastille” can be found at the dialectical-delinquents.com page of Ferguson coverage.

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Luca: Yeah, this is an event on a continuum of events that start way back, before Trayvon Martin and before Oscar Grant, that maybe goes back to the 1992 riots in LA. And how do those things relate to Occupy or the Arab Spring or the popular consciousness of these mass social uprisings? They’re interconnected, even though they’re not connected in an obvious way.

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Cameron: Like, there was one guy at the Trayvon march who was getting pissed because we weren’t marching yet. And he was quoting a Tupac song, “We riot, not rally.” He kept saying that. When I saw him in Ferguson, I felt that there was definitely some kind of continuum.

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Luca: Yeah, and because that rally that happened before the Trayvon Martin march was so official, there were all these senators and church leaders there that later were also connected to Ferguson. Even though that’s a completely different population, there was some momentum connected in that way.

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Vera: They tried to turn over a police car at the Trayvon march…

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Luca: Oh, that’s right…

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Vera: …and didn’t know how to do it and people were telling them, “Well, this is how you could do it…”

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Luca: “And you should be covering your face right now…”

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Vera: I heard those conversations happening. And then to see what happened in Ferguson… I do think there was a connection there beyond just our friends.

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Luca: The other thing about how this related to St. Louis is that this place is really hard to live in, like a lot of shitty cities or rust belt cities in the Midwest. The quality of life here is pretty low. Even though cost of living is pretty low, too.

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Masie: Should we list all the ways it’s horrible to live here, so people don’t feel inclined to move here?

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[laughter]

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Masie: Air quality, interpersonal violence… it’s terrible.

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Cameron: The police are… brutal. They’re just terrible.

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Masie: There’s tons of Superfund sites.

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Vera: So much poverty and crime…

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Emma: You cannot swim in clean water.

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Luca: The water’s not clean that you’re drinking either.

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Masie: You’re at least an hour away from wilderness. At least.

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Louise: It’s crazy segregated.

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Cameron: Even the wilderness is polluted.

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[laughter]

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Masie: There’s microchips you have to wear when you’re here. Microchips under your skin…

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[laughter]

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Protesters gather in Ferguson in response to the murder of Michael Brown.

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Momentum and Limitations

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Emma: Do you think people in general hope that when police keep killing people, people will respond again? Or is it just me? Do you think that there is that momentum? Even though we’ve seen people both respond and not respond to police murders since Mike Brown’s murder?

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Vera: I just hope that when it gets warmer that’s gonna happen.

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Luca: There’s also this question of guilt that plays into it, of how people respond if there’s a gun involved. The question of whether they think the person killed by the cops is guilty. But even that person on Minnesota²²2. LeDarius Williams was shot and killed by St. Louis police on Minnesota Avenue in St. Louis city. who had a gun, people still responded. Anyway, I feel hopeful. I don’t expect it, but the possibility feels much greater now that something could happen when the police kill someone.

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Emma: And how do you think it will move beyond people responding only when the cops kill someone to responding to confront the shitty conditions of everyday life?

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Masie: My hope is—tons of people gathering, being pissed off, spilling onto whatever major street is nearby, maybe confronting police and pushing them out…

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Jane: …burning the nearest QuickTrip…

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Masie: Maybe people could just start doing that when they get an eviction notice or when cost of living is going up or food stamps are being cut. That would be my hope, but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen.

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Luca: I think that’s one of things about the limitations of the riot. There’s this disconnect between people being in the streets together and larger or more nuanced social struggle. How does rioting lead to bigger occupations or general strikes or occupied neighborhoods or completely autonomous zones or neighborhoods where the cops can never go?

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Because there are these other entities now. To answer the question of how the social terrain in St. Louis has changed, there are more activists now, these politicized people, and they’re still trying to find their way, and there’s more socialists and more Black Power nationalists or people involved in trying to get “police oversight.”

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Cameron: It seems like there’s always going to be a disconnect between those people and those who are not organizers. It’s gonna happen, but during the months between August and November, I was like, man, I feel kinda pessimistic that people are not gonna react like they did in August. The energy was different between August and November. It was more passive, though there were flare-ups from time to time.

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But then in November, that happened, and I was like, “Oh, there’s clearly some division or distinction or separation going on and I’m not even a part of that.” I’m not a part of any of those groups of non-organizer/activist people and I’m just as outside of it as the activist groups are. Maybe that also makes it seem like I think there’s some fictional group I need to penetrate and join. But I think that’s really problematic. There’s no inside I can join or a vanguard that meets who are the realest of the real. There’s just people, some who are organized in sketchy ways that I can probably never be a part of, some who just show up and fight.

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But yeah, there’s gonna be activists and organizers doing stuff in response to these killings and I think that’s still good. But before this, they were doing the same thing, that is, they were making it their “issue,” but maybe with less people. And now it’s just another single issue. Sometimes I get depressed when I think about that. But then random shit happens, like the rioting in Ferguson in November. And I see people I don’t see at meetings or at the usual organizer protests attacking police.

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I ran into some people on November 24 that I had seen in August on some of the crazier nights. They seemed prepared; it was a large group and they were just roving the streets and causing havoc. They seemed to have no interest in being peaceful.

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Protesters in Ferguson, August 2014.

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“There Was a Lot of Recruiting Going on”

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Masie: I imagine by asking about “social bodies,” though, they wanted to hear about what new people had come out of all this.

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Vera: Like, there’s more socialists in St. Louis now.

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Masie: Yeah, there used to be almost no Left in St. Louis.

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Luca: And now there’s becoming an established Left. It sucks!

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Cameron: I was starting to have some real in-depth conversations with this socialist person, and then I realized that he’s lobbying to get some alderman elected…

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Masie: Goddamn socialists…

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Cameron: And I was like, I was really into what you’re saying, and now I realize all you want to do is get to a point where your political party is a contender. Which to me is a waste of time.

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Vera: There was a lot of recruiting going on all around. At some point, it became like a political fair for the different groups.

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Luca: Yeah, even that first week, by… was it Thursday [August 14]? When it was just like a street party. With the Christian mimes and all the wingnut preachers showing up…

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[laughter]

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Todd: And there was even that Christian rap circle.

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Luca: The prayer circles.

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Vera: The people who would walk between the riot cops and the crowd just saying “Jesus” over and over again.

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[laughter]

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Vera: But even the RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party]… they were there to recruit people and they did recruit people.

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Luca: Oh yeah, they were there so fast.

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Cameron: But we were there before them.

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[laughter]

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Luca: Cuz we live here! They’re from Chicago! They had to come from out of town cuz there is no RCP in St. Louis. Well, now there is. Great!

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[laughter]

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Emma: People who have been arrested since the August and November events… some of us have gone to court for their appearances. And, yeah, the RCP is there, trying to recruit them. When we were there recently, they were trying to get people to come to some phone drive or something.

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Vera: They were even trying to recruit us. They were like, “What’s your website? How can we get in touch with you?” I mean, not that they knew who we were, but… well, they do now.

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Masie: It sucks, though, because, say you’re not involved in any group, you’re not some sort of politico, you’ve never been involved in any of this stuff before… The way people “get involved” in things is that they become activists or something. So unless anarchists are gonna do the anarchist form of activism, then what do we do? And also, how realistic is it for us to be frustrated with people who go to NGOs, or who go to these socialist organizations? Because it’s not as though they know obscure post-left theory or stuff that our friends have thought about and read for a long time.

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I understand, too, that those theories come from people’s actual experiences of having to deal with this bullshit and being frustrated with it. So there’s that hope, maybe people will get disillusioned with activism and get more into the stuff we’re interested in. But then, maybe they’ll just write off everything instead.

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Emma: Yeah, it did make me question going to court because… MORE [Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment] is there, and the RCP is there, and I’m wondering, why am I there? Do I really want to stand in line next to these other groups that are trying to recruit this person? I mean, I’m not there because I know them.

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So, yeah, it can be disheartening or something… that outside the riot or those moments I didn’t really make any friends. So I go to court cuz I hate prisons and I don’t want people to be abandoned when they get arrested, but then I don’t really know how we should…

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Luca: Well, to overgeneralize and to speak as a “we,” I think we were really careful the way we moved through things not to be a group, not to be an entity, not to recruit, not to participate in a lot of the formal activist circles that came afterward, not to try to influence this building of the Left in St. Louis.

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And that doesn’t mean we didn’t align ourselves. We aligned ourselves with people in the streets. But we walked away without having long-term relationships with people, because things were just happening in a moment rather than in this structured environment. We avoided that. You know?

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In some ways, it was a benefit to us, in terms of not being identifiable too much by the Left… I mean, identifiable to put blame on us individually. But it does mean we haven’t thrown our hat in the ring as far as trying to influence this thing that the Left is building. We haven’t even been doing the things we normally do, like tabling or handing out newsletters. We’ve stayed away from that for a lot of great reasons, but at the same time it means we’ve missed out on being influential. Often, what anarchists have done in the past is to be an influence. To be like, “Hey shit’s fucked up, shit’s fucked up.” Like pushing… but now we’re pushing in a really different way.

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Cameron: It also seems like a lot of the Leftist activist groups are in a similar predicament. They’re not building. They’re bigger, but I don’t think they’re really blowing up with people. The people still involved are those who have the stamina to deal with being political or being recruited, or being in long meetings.

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Emma: I did realize, though, that it sucks that the people that maybe I’ll have a real conversation with or build something with… it’s cuz they’re locked up, and then maybe I’ll write them a letter.

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Vera: Right.

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Emma: And then, yeah, it’s a less than ideal way to have a conversation with someone.

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Masie: There are some anarchists in town who have gone the activist route. And it’s interesting because some of them were invited to table at Antonio Martin’s funeral, or maybe the dinner afterwards. And that led to one of Antonio Martin’s family members reading stuff that we had written and stuff that other people had written about Ferguson, like, critiquing the police. And apparently the cousin was like, “I can’t believe white people think this, I can’t believe a white person wrote this.” So they actually made this worthwhile connection.

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Luca: Yeah.

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Masie: So I don’t know what to do with that.

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Luca: Well, it’s like, how do we do that more? That’s always been the question throughout this whole entire struggle, since August. How do we create long-lasting genuine connections?

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Masie: And not just be proselytizing.

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Luca: And not be trying to get dated….

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Vera: Get what?

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Luca: Dated. “Hey baby…” People were talking about getting people’s numbers so they could hang out or be friends. You know how many phone numbers I could have walked away with? But fuck that…

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Demonstrators attempting to flip a police car in Ferguson on the night of the grand jury announcement, November 24.

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Pushing the Rebellion: “We Don’t Just Want a Riot”

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Cameron: My solution to not being a part of the greater Left is to have autonomous events outside of it that are advertised. I mean, I think we’re still gonna fall into that no matter what we do. There will still be alienated relationships where we’re like “we’re the anarchists,” or “we have this idea.” But I think there are ways to mitigate talking to people like they’re recruits.

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Another thing, I wish that… I think the most active thing we were able to do is when things were actually happening. When West Florissant was autonomous in some ways. Pushing that further—that’s what I think my role is. Making that space more powerful, cuz that’s where you actually have some real conversation.

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Vera: But do you think we could have acted more or done more to continue that? Or could we have, like, been out there before the Leftists, before they started coming in and recruiting people? Could we have pushed the rioting further before they came in?

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Luca: I think that one of the things that was coming up for a lot of us was that we got to act not as anarchists. We got to act as part of a larger social force. It was really refreshing not to be the ones to bring the fight. And so it’s interesting to think… do we have any ability to push that further than it went? I don’t know. It was a tide unto itself that we got to be a part of.

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Emma: People were already pushing it.

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Masie: The irony, too, is that what brought all the fucking Leftists, what brought everyone’s attention, was the rioting. It was like, we’re taking a step away from what people normally do. We’ve caught the nation’s and the world’s attention, and so of course all these fucking vultures come in…

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Vera: And rewrite the story…

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Masie: And then… pushing the riot further, what does that mean? Cuz a lot of the more militant sides of the rioting involved guns. Did we actually want more of that?

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Cameron: I wasn’t saying I wanted to push the riot further, specifically, but to push the situation. The rebellion. It seemed like people were sort of making allusions that this QuickTrip parking lot was the space to be, there was talk of it being dedicated to Mike Brown, but then it got fenced in and it puttered out.

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Even just the murmuring about that space becoming an occupation was spreading. Some of us who maybe are in this room or maybe outside this room had some say in pushing that. It resonated with people.

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And another thing, in a more riotous situation, people are gonna be on the front lines. Some of us like to be on the front lines, but also, they’ve got it covered, so what do we do while they’re on the front lines? For example, all these cameras and journalists taking photos of people doing illegal stuff, what do we do with that? How do we make that situation safer?

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Luca: Yeah, that’s part of the learning experience. Watching it happen and participating for the first couple days and being carried away and not wanting to shape it. And then pausing and being like, oh wait, we don’t just want a riot. Something a friend said to me when we were talking about what small ways we might want to influence it, “Remember, what we want is a social revolution.”

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It helped reframe that in my brain, because I was just watching it go for so long and thinking, “this is just amazing.”

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But we influenced it even in small ways, like with the addition of graffiti. That resonated. I remember seeing graffiti go up that said “we are ungovernable” and watching people read it back and laughing and nodding. Putting those little seeds of ideas out there, helping feed the fires.

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Graffiti on the gas pump at the burnt QT in Ferguson, celebrating six decades of uprisings.

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Where It Came from and Why It Was Different

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Louise: What we were just talking about speaks to the first question. “What made this different from other anti-police struggles that you’ve witnessed or heard about? Why did it go so far so fast?”

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When you talk about it resonating with people, with the most immediate community, like in Canfield³³3. The apartment complex just off West Florissant where Mike Brown was murdered, and the original site of the militant street presence that produced the rebellion. and the surrounding area… we’re talking about people who already know that the cops are an enemy. And have for years and generations. Because of race, because there’s so many white cops there and the area’s majority black, it’s really obvious that they’re an enemy.

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Masie: My take on police struggles in the past in St. Louis is that they fit into one of two categories. They’re either these lone gunman-type attacks against police, which happen all the time, and then probably once a year or so someone actually kills a cop. Or it’s these vigil-type marches or gatherings after someone is killed. Which maybe are meaningful or feel good to people at them, but also maybe it doesn’t feel good to be at them cuz they’re not that powerful, and outside of that, it doesn’t really have a lot of noticeable effects. So, for example, the Scott Perry protests. Every year, the family of Scott Perry, who died in the city jail, protest outside the jail. And that gathering is meaningful, but I feel like outside of that, it’s maybe not having a lot of effects.

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And then there’s all these people who have killed cops, like Cookie Thorton, Todd Shepard, Kevin Johnson. Culturally and sub-culturally, that can have meaning, but in terms of being an actual force that can change things, I feel like there wasn’t a whole lot before Ferguson. Or Ferguson was all these different elements coming together and going beyond the limitations of those two things.

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Jane: As far as it going so far so fast… the first day [August 9] I didn’t think it was gonna get too crazy, but I think because of the police response on the second day, that’s why people rioted. Cuz there were so many police. I don’t think it was gonna get so out of control. People were just gonna march to the police department. I don’t think it was gonna turn into a riot, but then people felt trapped and they had that energy.

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Luca: So the question is, “Why was this event different than other anti-police struggles, why did it go so much further?” There are all these elements that we can try to put together to answer that question, like seeing this moment on a continuum of social uprisings, extreme repression, warrior culture (which is something that people don’t account for too often)… to create the situation where people didn’t back down this time. But I’m more excited about the notion that it’s linked to all these other moments that create social uprisings, and it’s just part of the social condition that we live under that this can happen.

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Luca: Yeah, you can’t make it happen, nor is it exciting to me to come up with a theory as to why these moments happen.

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Emma: Right. Cuz it’s uncontrollable…

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Todd: I don’t feel like anarchists should be trying to be political scientists. There’s no formula for revolt. It’s been happening for as long as we have history.

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Luca: Yeah, as long as there’s repression, oppression, there are gonna be these moments. We’re gonna push back, it’s part of who we are.

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Demonstrators riding through Ferguson after the grand jury announcement, November 24.

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Race and Representation

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Raul: Should we read another question?

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Luca: “Was there a tension between the black insurrectional force that erupted in Ferguson and the construction of blackness as a positive identity within the existing social order that suffused the subsequent national discourse? Have you learned anything about how to engage with the existing forms of oppression without falling prey to repressive strategies of definition?”

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[laughter]

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Emma: I feel like I have a sense of what they’re asking, but…

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Luca: Yeah, we have to deconstruct this question before we can answer it.

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Cameron: I think they’re basically saying, “Was there a tension between this undisciplined force against the positive, respectable black community?”

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Luca: I mean, there was this tension between the black insurrectional force and black forces of identity. I think that was playing out with people who wanted to loot versus Nation of Islam people guarding stores, or the woman guarding the Sam’s⁴⁴4. Sam’s Meat Market and Liquor on West Florissant Avenue, which was repeatedly looted during the rebellion. being like, “This is not what we’re about.”

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Vera: That phrase keeps coming to my mind too, “This is not what we’re about.” That kept coming up throughout all of our experiences there, that people would somehow take ownership of what was happening and make it like there was nothing else besides what they were experiencing. Like, how they were experiencing Ferguson was how it was supposed to be. So when someone would throw a rock at the cops, “That’s not what we’re about.”

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That’s continued through to now. That’s consistently the conversation that comes up.

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Emma: So is the answer to the question just “Yes”? Yeah, there was a tension between the peacekeepers who were sometimes black, and the combative black youth.

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Todd: It’s also that people are trying to represent blackness or people who have faced police violence or young black people or “the black community,” and then there’s also the other side. But on that side, there are people who think that it’s morally wrong to loot or to respond in certain ways, and then there are other groupings of people who are not trying to affirm their identity in any way to represent other people. People who are just trying to riot, to act out their emotions.

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Vera: And I think it does affect us, because the louder voices of the church leaders or other people who have some amount of power were trying to represent what the “black community” is all about, and we decided not to listen to those voices. We were listening or finding other people, who were maybe involved in the more radical things that were happening. Then we were called out for being racist or white supremacist, or people targeted us with that language because they said that “We weren’t listening to black people,” by which they meant black people with power.

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Luca: Well, it challenges this idea of allyship. Traditional allyship. They say that we should be “listening to black voices,” but to them that means we should be listening to, like, church leaders, people whose ideas we would never align ourselves with under any other circumstances. We’re all the sudden supposed to be listening to those people instead of finding allies we actually have affinity with, who maybe want to fight in the streets. So instead, it calls us in to question—“You’re being racist”—instead of allowing for a multiplicity of voices.

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Masie: That traditional idea of allyship only makes sense if the only black people in your lives are those community leaders. If you look at black people as not being homogenous, then there is no singular “black voice,” there are all these different black voices, and you can choose who you want to align yourself with.

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Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson attempts to ingratiate himself to protesters, as white police look on.

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“Oh My God, That White Person Just Said ‘Fuck the Police’”

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Emma: What is this second part of the question, repressive strategies of definition? Just these… identities?

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Cameron: Using words to obscure things that are happening. Like the “black community doesn’t want this” or “this identity isn’t supposed to do this.”

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Raul: I read that as saying, “How do you deal with the fact that race and racism and these very tangible forms of oppression are actually what’s going on here?” Definitely, that’s what this is about, that’s what people are responding to—without reinforcing those rigid identity categories. Like, did you find ways to engage with the fact that this is a struggle against white supremacy, without reinforcing those rigid identity categories? Without putting everyone in rigid boxes and homogenizing their experiences?

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Vera: I can only think of that answer in terms of what we were not doing. Like, we were not doing what ARC (the anti-racism collective) was doing.

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Todd: We were referring to that earlier, how we chose not to engage in typical ways that activists engage.

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Cameron: Also, it seems like white radicals or anarchists being there had an effect on people in terms of their understanding of racial dynamics and personal experiences. I’d talk to a lot of people who’d ask, “Whoa, why are you here?” being really perplexed and me being like, “I think about this all the time. I have some personal experience with police violence… It’s different, but it’s something that is pushing me to be here.” I think that blew some people’s minds.

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Most of them were not political or had not read anti-racist theory. And the argument from an activist point of view is that they should be reading it, and if they were, they would realize that we’re actually a bad influence or something. Maybe that was a way we influenced things, by being there and not being pawns. Like, actually having thoughts and engaging people without being condescending.

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Because sometimes, like that week in August, we were some of the only white people around. That’s pretty awkward, cuz of historical shit. And then for some reason, it became way more white. So that’s an interesting question, too, how did that happen…

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Emma: You mean the Leftists being there made it more white?

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Vera: Yeah.

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Cameron: Did it become “safer” for people? Were there figures people could point to, to be like, this is the new leader of the radical movement and I can talk to them, instead of it just being alienating and scary in some racist way.

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Vera: Well, OBS [The Organization for Black Struggle] got huge during all of this. That was part of it. That was a way people could engage and feel good about themselves as white activists.

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Masie: Do you all feel like between daytime and nighttime the racial make-up was different? Because the few times I was there at night, I was like “me and my friends are the only white people here.”

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Cameron: Yeah.

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Luca: At the beginning.

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Vera: And in November.

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Luca: On South Florissant.

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Vera: You mean West Florissant?⁵⁵5. The two main roads where riots broke out in Ferguson are several miles from each other but are both called Florissant. West Florissant is the main road near the Canfield Apartments where Mike Brown was murdered and is the site of the famous burning QT. South Florissant is a more developed, racially mixed part of Ferguson where the Ferguson Police Department is, and where much of the rioting that happened after the November 24 announcement of the grand jury decision took place.

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Luca: Yeah, West Florissant.

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Cameron: South Florissant was a little more mixed.

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Vera: But yeah, every time I said, “Fuck the police,” there was some black person or group of black people around who would be like, “Oh my god, that white person just said ’fuck the police.’”

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Vera: And laugh at me!

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Emma: Sometimes I was like, is it cuz I’m white or cuz I’m a woman?

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Vera: Yeah.

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Luca: It’s both, I think.

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Emma: I didn’t know if other people who aren’t women also got that.

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Cameron: I got laughed at for saying it. But I did get offered a joint once or twice after saying stuff.

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Masie: I think people just thought I was a cop. And so I’m not gonna ask someone for their number right now or what their name is or if they’re on Facebook… cuz they probably think I’m a cop.

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Raul: Sometimes people would laugh at me and repeat “Fuck the police” in my accent. I think we may have made a positive contribution in chipping away at the idea that white people don’t care about fighting the police. Or maybe next time, if things continue, maybe even years from now, there are many more people in the city who have seen white people willing to confront the police. And maybe that’s a step closer to us being able to link up with each other in conflict situations.

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Old anarchist hyperbole coming true.

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Trauma

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Emma: I’ve been thinking about the impact that violence has on us, and how it can be glorified within an anarchist subculture. Something about the rebellion, the uprising… even on the nights where there weren’t guns, it was a war zone. And if we want to sustain, or to build, a culture of resistance where it’s normal for that to happen… It seems like moments of the world that we want to see opening up will contain violence. I don’t like the violence, but I like what the violence opens up. But how does that violence affect us? How can we sustain it and not become what we hate about the violence? Which can be theoretical or interpersonal, like how we care for each other.

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Luca: One of the things that I’ve been thinking is that I still want this. Like, even though we went through this very real experience of violence, like maybe we’re some of the very small pockets of people directly affected by the violence of that week and a half. I’ve been trying to make sense of that for myself, and realizing that this is still something that I want, even though that happened. I don’t want it not to have happened. In any part of me.

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Emma: We could have done without it, but it doesn’t stop you.

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Vera: Well, it may have stopped me a little bit. In November, when we were out there and there was so much gunfire, I was ready to go because of what happened. There was a point at which I was like, “This is real.” There’s this person walking down the street next to me with a beer in one hand and a pistol in the other just shooting randomly into the air. And that was enough.

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Luca: Yeah, I’m not saying it didn’t affect us. We were together in those moments [in November] where it was just like, “Yeah, let’s go home. This is reminding me too much of what happened.”

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Cameron: We were standing in the same spot [where our friend was shot during the August riots].

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Vera: It goes back to that idea that maybe we weren’t adding that much to the riot. Maybe we don’t need to be there because we’re not adding anything. We can go and try to push things somewhere else, you know?

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Raul: But we didn’t. We just went home.

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Masie: Would it be upsetting to people if I talked about what happened to our friend who got shot? And the potential for that to happen in the future?

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Emma: We didn’t expect that to happen, so it’s good that people know that’s a possibility.

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Masie: Immediately after we’d found out he’d survived and for a few weeks after, I was hearing from people, “Thank god this is over.” Which makes sense in some way, but in my head, I’m like, “Well, if shit ever gets crazy again, it’s not like people aren’t going to be bringing handguns to shoot in America, or at least in a place like St. Louis.” This actually might happen to our friends in the future. We might fucking die in the future. Or…”

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Luca: Or not even handguns. Like, state forces, you know? I don’t think it was that far away from them starting to open fire on the crowd. Or, that was not out of the question.

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Masie: Sure, but I don’t think it was close, necessarily.

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Luca: I’m just saying it wasn’t out of the question. Like, if they’d gotten shot at enough. All it takes is one trigger-happy cop.

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Cameron: This is something that other people have talked about, but this sort of glorification of these situations… where from afar and in writing you can write about how it was this uprising against police and the state and it was all just this crazy, beautiful thing and sort of glorifying it as if it’s a movie scene. It’s a very fragmented understanding of it. But there was a push for a while, and maybe still is, of people being like, “Oh yeah, rioting is really cool! It’s the best thing!” And for me, I’m actually more interested in the actual rebellion, which encompassed a lot of other things. Like people hanging out and celebrating, or eating or talking or whatever. Organically organizing things in the moment. And then the rioting was a part of that. And maybe it was crucial to that. But…

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Luca: I think that’s what I mean, too. I mean the overall rebellion, not necessarily just the rioting. I wouldn’t not want the rioting as well, but I think it’s really good to differentiate that the rioting is an element of a rebellion.

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There is a warrior culture that’s not talked about. When I said that earlier, I meant more of the ghetto warrior culture, but also like anarchist warrior culture. Like, that we’re gonna go to jail, get the shit kicked out of us, people are gonna die, and you’re just supposed to take it. It’s just expected. It’s just part of your struggle, and you’re just supposed to suck it up. Like, I had to work through some of those ideas with some of my own trauma. That it’s OK to be like, “This was devastating. It was awful and terrible and heartbreaking and hard.” Working through that cultural idea that we have, that we don’t address.

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Emma: Yeah, that we’ve gotta be hard and militant.

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Cameron: I also think about how there are other people who didn’t come out because of that. There are so many people who were probably saying, “I don’t wanna go out there. I fucking hate the police, but I’m not gonna go out there, because there are guns.”

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I don’t know exactly what those people think, but I think it probably had an effect on people not wanting to be there, especially people that, because of their lives or their experiences, are opposed to a lot of the things in this world. I can’t calculate it, but I definitely heard people saying that. I could see people being scared, screaming when gunshots went off, and crying. That’s the warrior culture thing that’s a part of that.

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Luca: Yeah, people thought we were crazy to put ourselves in that situation.

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Masie: I was gonna say that, too, about the expectations that these crazy things will happen and we’ll just have to deal with it. There are people who can’t deal with it, they realize that too late, and they just disappear. They just change their life completely, because the standard of what an anarchist is has been built up so much, it’s like unchangeable. Or that’s the reason why some people start snitching on each other. Like, “Holy fuck, now I’m facing all these years in prison, and I was told that I could handle this, and I can’t fucking handle this.”

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Cameron: It also seems to oppose this dichotomy that you’re either the crazy one or you’re the respectable one, where you’re part of the movement or an organization. It ends up working out in favor of the organizations in some ways. There’s no other way to be that doesn’t fit into that dichotomy. There’s not an infinite number of possibilities of how to engage. It whittles everything down to a few choices.

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Vera: Is that what you [Raul] were trying to say before? I’ve been thinking about what you said when you said, “We didn’t do anything, we just went home.”

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Raul: Yeah, finding some other creative way of engaging if we weren’t gonna stay in the streets. I wanna hear other people’s thoughts on this, but I didn’t notice us having a warrior culture where we just expected everyone to be tough and not have to feel anything about that, not ever have to take a step back. Like, I know that that exists. Has existed for generations and does exist and has existed among us sometimes.

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But in this situation, I noticed us taking good care of each other. And like, fighting and coming home and crying together. And fighting and also taking care of our friends. And listening to each other when we couldn’t fight anymore (most of the time).

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So I took a lot out of the violent and directly combative aspects of what we were doing, and I felt really supported in that direct confrontation, or war-like scenario, by my friends. I didn’t feel like I just had to try to be really hard. It felt like I could be brave when I could and then cry about it when I was done being brave so I could be brave again the next day.

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Thousands of police and National Guardsmen failing to preserve order in Ferguson on November 24, 2014.

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Care and Autonomy: “There Are Also the People at Home”

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Luca: I think that we did do a good job of taking care of one another, especially that first week and the first couple weeks after our friend got shot. But it did come up a little bit in the dynamics of agency and power and who’s comfortable in the streets, and how close they could be to police lines. And people feeling ashamed of their fear for not being able to be where other people were. That came up some. But I think people tried to handle it really well.

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I’m also talking about how I’ve internalized that, as someone who’s been an anarchist my whole adult life. And then having to go through and be so intimately connected to what happened to [our friend who got shot], and then trying to unravel all that for myself, you know?

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And trying to figure out the ways this long-term trauma and violence impacted my own life. Looking at myself and trying to figure out where that trauma manifests, like when [in November] I was trying to be back at the intersection where our friend was shot. And like, knowing it’s time to leave, and not being frozen. Being able to function in a space where we’re surrounded by more gunfire and more literal fire than we were the first week. And being able to function, to be OK and feel comfortable in that environment or that terrain. But then to come back later and have to listen to a trauma therapist be like, “Yeah, it’s fucked up what happened to you. Really, really fucked up. And it’s not normal.” And just being like, “Huh…” It’s my own internal process around being “tough” or “hard.” What it means to grow up and spend your whole adult life within this culture.

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Masie: I wonder too about when to tell someone maybe not to do something cuz it’s gonna affect them if it goes poorly, or when am I just like, “That’s their own fucking life. I’m not gonna tell them what to do or control them in any way.”

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For example, I have a hard time not mouthing off to police, especially when I get really worked up. Repeatedly over the years, if I’m yelling in a cop’s face, friends will be like, “OK, you need to stop doing that.” I think it’s partially for my own sake, but maybe partially for theirs, because they’re the ones that will have to stay up all night to bail me out, right?

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So is that just that experience multiplied by a thousand? Like, “You’re going into an area where people are getting shot and almost killed. I’m the one that’s gonna have to fucking bury you.” I’m not gonna put that guilt on someone. It’s just hard for me. Because in those situations, where people are just rushing out the door to go to the riot in North County, and I’m exhausted, and I need a night to not do anything, but it’s like, “Well, realistically, I might be the one that has to bail them all out of jail and stay up all night.” Does that make sense at all? I’m not telling people they shouldn’t do those things, I’m just saying that’s some sort of reality.

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Louise: That’s something that I’ve thought about for sure. When there is a sort of warrior culture where not everyone is going out and being a warrior, there are also the people at home who are going to experience the loss of someone and have to deal with that. And people who are always on alert that someone might be taken from them, or that they might have something really awful happen to someone else. I’m sure in Canfield, that’s something that a lot of black women experience constantly. At any point, they could get a call that someone’s been shot, someone they know. The element that’s scary about some people being warriors is that it’s not just those going out being warriors. There’s also people at home.

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Raul: It makes sense in the context of the anarchist movement that romanticizes rioting and conflict to highlight the downsides of that. And also, I can dream of and put together strategically in my mind a social revolution that doesn’t look like that, or a moment where the world changes dramatically in a way that I want it to.

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But in those moments when I was in the streets and it was overwhelming, or there were guns everywhere, I also had the thought that this is just what it’s always gonna look like. All these moments you’ve dreamed of, of the world changing and getting to be one that’s worth living in for you and the people around you, this feels like a stage that we will inevitably have to move through—and participate in if we want it to go a way that we want it to go. If we’re serious about the world changing, we have to adapt ourselves to the fact that maybe that’s the reality that we’ll have to deal with and learn to cope with. And maybe it’s just a matter of not romanticizing it. If enough of us have gone through it, we wouldn’t have the kind of fetishization, but maybe we could have a realistic acceptance that that’s what stands between us and the world that we hope for. Unfortunately.

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A burning police car in Ferguson on November 24, 2014.

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Guns and Possibility

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Vera: Do we need to take a break right now? I worry about this conversation being hard.

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Masie: So… if people are using handguns, you might get shot, we realized.

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[laughter]

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Luca: We realized that’s real.

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Emma: It could be your friend and not just some stranger. And it could be like a permanent loss from your life.

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Raul: We shouldn’t fetishize it, but we also shouldn’t…

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Vera: Avoid it.

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Raul: Right, we can’t avoid it. We can’t control these circumstances either. They’re gonna come up. We can highlight the value of not bringing guns. But people are gonna do it anyway. So what are we gonna do?

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Luca: Yeah, like, this question of the role of firearms. It’s hard to know what to say about them. But we all know they changed the way it went. It created this deeply inhospitable environment where the cops would not come in because of guns.

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Masie: And sometimes it was casual and it wasn’t that scary. It was like firing a few rounds into the air, and the cops are gone. The police helicopters are gone.

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Cameron: And then the night… it was intense that our friend got shot, but even then, it was just like, these kids have guns and they’re smoking weed and just hanging out.

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Luca: Right, that’s just what it is. They’re just everywhere.

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Cameron: Some of us were talking to them, you know?

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Raul: And the night of the verdict, people shooting at the cops was what instigated collective action. People were shooting off away from the crowd, and the crowd of people moved towards that. Towards the gunshots.

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Vera: Intentionally.

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Raul: And as they started moving toward it, intentionally, they started also smashing windows, confronting the police…

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Luca: That moment that broke the tension… where everyone was standing around the night of the verdict for like 15 minutes [after the verdict was announced]… nothing’s happening, we’re all just standing there. Literally, there is like six shots fired and shit starts.

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Vera: Someone actually said, “Well, that’s gonna pop shit off.” And it did.

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Masie: Which doesn’t mean you have to fire gunshots to make shit happen.

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Emma: Right. Without guns it’s us versus them, and the enemy is clear. And then, I know that people with guns are still against the same enemy, but it is like, “OK, you have a gun, you have the power now too.” And we should have the power, not just the police, but still, that’s real. It stops you a little bit.

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Masie: Yeah, it can… in these situations, where it opens it up and makes power more diffuse, sometimes when people start shooting, it’s like, “And now we’re all just running away, and the night’s over.” Which sometimes, if the night’s over, then it’s a good time to do that. But sometimes it’s like, “Well, you made that decision for all of us.”

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Emma: I do feel like the world that we dream of, and having those moments of uncontrollability or possibility open up, will entail violence. And so just normalizing that, being emotionally prepared for that, and dispelling the glorification of it or the romanticization of it.

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There’s something too, though, in the dichotomy—or, it can feel like a dichotomy—that you either are militant or you’re passive. And the riot is crucial, but in a rebellion, how do you sustain this and how do you not make it just against police but against our whole lives? Yeah, we want a social revolution.

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And somehow, for people who are supporting or don’t want to engage in the same way, there need to be spaces or other things they can do. Or when people are shooting guns and someone’s scared and has to leave, what else can they do? Or, you don’t want to stay in the middle of a confrontation with police, so what do you do to add something?

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I mean, we need everything to be transformed. Every relation, everything. So there’s more than just fighting in that one way—even though it’s those moments where there’s violence that open up what we desire. And that’s brutal… and worth it. Or, you have to come to that for yourself—if it’s worth it to you.

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Louise: It’s interesting how much the guns being around… that people having guns, sort of enables the Left and the organizers to blame everyone who does stay out on those nights, to be like “Here you go, cops, take these crazies, they must be crazy if they’re still out here. And they want to fuck all kinds of shit up and shoot everybody, so take ’em.”

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And that really enables people to say, “These are the non-violent people, and these are clearly the crazy, violent people.” And that really serves them, to sort of sacrifice the people like that. I mean, especially on the night of the curfew, that really served them. “We’re telling everybody to go home and it’s just the crazy people who we can’t control that we’re gonna give you. That are gonna stay here.”

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Cameron: And also it’s a great strategy for police, cuz they can just be like, “We can do whatever the fuck we want now.” Whereas before, there were clearly peaceful protesters, and they couldn’t. So they just mass arrest people.

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Tense moments in the streets of Ferguson on November 24, 2014.

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Moments of Joy

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Emma: We were supposed to talk about the wonderful moments.

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Luca: Oh yeah… let’s do that.

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Vera: One of my favorite moments was the night… it was the last night when we were all on Canfield [Monday, August 18th] and there’s that restaurant right there…

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Luca: Red’s?

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Cameron: The BBQ place?

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Vera: Yeah, Red’s, I guess it was Red’s… and the cops were not coming down Canfield, so people were sort of playing with that area in between where most of the crowd was and where the cops were. And this kid lit a Molotov and just threw it into the middle of the street. And everyone was like “What!? Come on! Don’t waste it! Why the fuck did you throw it there?”

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[laughter]

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Vera: So he lit another one and poured a whole bunch of gas into Red’s and then everybody was like “OK, make this one count!” And so he runs up there again and throws it and lights it on fire… and everyone’s cheering.

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Cameron: But then the fire went out and some person started running towards it with a jug of something… And I was like, “Oh, man, c’mon. He’s puttin’ the fire out.” And then it was just gasoline…

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[laughter]

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Cameron: He started just pouring gasoline all over it. And I was like, “This is not what I expected.” Normally when someone’s running toward a fire, they’re putting it out.

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Luca: Going back to the people who the media made invisible out there… All the young women out there. All the young women on the front lines. Not backing down and not going home.

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Emma: Yeah, even when they⁶⁶6. The Nation of Islam and the some elements of the New Black Panther Party were most responsible for initiating these calls. would be like, “Get the women out of here.”

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Vera: Yeah, so many women were like, “Fuck that.”

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Masie: I’m just gonna say it, I liked the party atmosphere down there and I liked smoking weed with those teenagers…

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[laughter]

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Luca: I had a night when it was like a block party [Thursday, August 14th] where I got high at the end of the night and it changed everything… I was just like, “This is so amazing.”

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[laughter]

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Raul: Yeah, you were texting me, like, “you gotta get down here! This is so amazing!” I texted Cameron and I was like, “So I need to get down there?” and Cameron was like, “Luca’s really high.”

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Cameron: Yeah, it’s cool, but… maybe you don’t have to rush down here.

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Luca: It just made everything that much more surreal and that much more beautiful. It was so cheesy, but, it was just like, “Oh yeah…”

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Well, it gives you pause cuz we’d been in it all week, like all week this was happening and happening and it was like, “No way, this is really happening, this is my real life right now.”

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Emma: And it was awesome how the QT became a monument. Everyone was there taking photos of themselves and of each other.

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Raul: And doing graffiti and having dance parties…

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Vera: …and handing out hot dogs…

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Luca: Yeah, and all the kids who were there. All the times that there were children or were pregnant women… especially earlier in the day, and sometimes late at night.

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Masie: I remember one of our friends saying… the second night after Vonderrit Myers was shot [Thursday, October 9th], she had her daughter there, and she was running around, doing all kinds of toddler-type things. She was hanging out with other children that age, and then our friend was talking to their mothers, asking them “Is this irresponsible of us to have kids here? You know, since it could get violent.” And the moms were like, “It would be irresponsible for them not to be here. They need to be here, we need to teach them about this.” I thought that was really awesome, really powerful.

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Cameron: There was some child psychiatrist who came out on the news saying, “Do not take your children here. They haven’t formed their reality of the world yet.”

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Luca: That’s exactly why you need to take them there.

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Vera: I was at Vonderrit’s memorial one night, and there weren’t that many of us there, but there was a woman there with five kids, and some asshole came by in his car talking about “another thug martyr,” yelling all this racist shit. And then the people that were at the memorial attacked his car and were kicking it and throwing shit and he raced away.

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And that woman was like, “That was so important for my kids to see that. To see people fight back. To not accept that sort of thing.”

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Masie: All the people hanging out of cars.

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Emma: Oh god, like twenty people! On some car that could barely pull itself.

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[laughter]

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Vera: Yeah, there were a ton of cars cruisin’ up and down West Florissant.

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Emma: It was even fun when you were sitting in your car eating and you’re like, “Well, I think we should go home now,” but then we stay and then the split second you decide to leave something happens and then you’re like “No, gotta stay.” And that just happens all night long.

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Raul: The collective momentum and anger and excitement when people are flipping over a cop car. It takes a lot of people, you really gotta give it your all. Every inch of space on that cop car was somebody trying really hard. It’s just a really beautiful experience. And how excited people are when it finally goes over.

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Vera: And then the cop car on fire with things shooting out of its trunk. That was really beautiful.

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Masie: Yeah, I remember the first night of the riot. And being like, “Shit, there’s a lot of people at that QT without masks on.” And then an hour later seeing fire and I was like, “Well… that’s one way of dealing with it. Won’t be leaving any evidence.”

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[laughter]

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Masie: Yeah, the first night of the riot I remember us all getting back together at the house and everyone being euphoric, like, “Did that really just fucking happen, oh my god!”

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Emma: Well, should we say anything else, or… end it in some grand way?

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Vera: That seemed pretty grand.

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Missouri National Guardsmen patrol the ruins of Ferguson on November 26, 2014.

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1. On July 14, 2013, there was a rally in St. Louis in response to George Zimmerman being found not guilty for the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The rally culminated in about 800 people marching through downtown St. Louis. Police barricades were moved and pushed through, graffiti was written on the back of moving buses, things were thrown in the streets. It quickly became the most notable anti-police march St. Louis had seen in recent history. This march took the cake until Ferguson, which took the whole bakery. A short article on the march entitled “The Storming of the Bastille” can be found at the dialectical-delinquents.com page of Ferguson coverage. ↩

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2. LeDarius Williams was shot and killed by St. Louis police on Minnesota Avenue in St. Louis city. ↩

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3. The apartment complex just off West Florissant where Mike Brown was murdered, and the original site of the militant street presence that produced the rebellion. ↩

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4. Sam’s Meat Market and Liquor on West Florissant Avenue, which was repeatedly looted during the rebellion. ↩

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5. The two main roads where riots broke out in Ferguson are several miles from each other but are both called Florissant. West Florissant is the main road near the Canfield Apartments where Mike Brown was murdered and is the site of the famous burning QT. South Florissant is a more developed, racially mixed part of Ferguson where the Ferguson Police Department is, and where much of the rioting that happened after the November 24 announcement of the grand jury decision took place. ↩

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6. The Nation of Islam and the some elements of the New Black Panther Party were most responsible for initiating these calls. ↩

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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From Occupy to Ferguson, whenever a new grassroots movement arises, pundits charge that it lacks clear demands. Why won’t protesters summarize their goals as a coherent program? Why aren’t there representatives who can negotiate with the authorities to advance a concrete agenda through institutional channels? Why can’t these movements express themselves in familiar language, with proper etiquette?

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Often, this is simply disingenuous rhetoric from those who prefer for movements to limit themselves to well-behaved appeals. When we pursue an agenda they’d rather not acknowledge, they charge that we are irrational or incoherent. Compare last year’s People’s Climate March, which united 400,000 people behind a simple message while doing so little to protest that it was unnecessary for the authorities to make even a single arrest,¹¹1. When was the last time 400,000 people were anywhere in New York without the police arresting anyone? That was protest not just as pressure valve, but as active pacification—as a way of diminishing the friction between protesters and the order they oppose. with the Baltimore uprising of April 2015. Many praised the Climate March while deriding the rioting in Baltimore as irrational, unconscionable, and ineffective; yet the Climate March had little concrete impact, while the Baltimore riots compelled the chief prosecutor to bring almost unprecedented charges against police officers. You can bet if 400,000 people responded to climate change the way a couple thousand responded to the murder of Freddie Gray, the politicians would change their priorities.

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Even those who demand demands out of the best intentions usually misunderstand demandlessness as an omission rather than a strategic choice. Yet today’s demandless movements are not an expression of political immaturity—they are a pragmatic response to the impasse that characterizes the entire political system.

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If it were so easy for the authorities to grant protesters’ demands, you’d think we’d see more of it. In fact, from Obama to Syriza, not even the most idealistic politicians have been able to follow through on the promises of reform that got them elected. The fact that charges were pressed against Freddie Gray’s killers after the riots in Baltimore suggests that the only way to make any headway is to break off petitioning entirely.

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So the problem is not that today’s movements lack demands; the problem is the politics of demands itself. If we seek structural change, we need to set our agenda outside the discourse of those who hold power, outside the framework of what their institutions can do. We need to stop presenting demands and start setting objectives. Here’s why.

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Making demands puts you in a weaker bargaining position.

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Even if your intention is simply to negotiate, you put yourself in a weaker bargaining position by spelling out from the beginning the least it would take to appease you. No shrewd negotiator begins by making concessions. It’s smarter to appear implacable: So you want to come to terms? Make us an offer. In the meantime, we’ll be here blocking the freeway and setting things on fire.

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There is no more powerful bargaining chip than being able to implement the changes we desire ourselves, bypassing the official institutions—the true meaning of direct action. Whenever we are able to do this, the authorities scramble to offer us everything we had previously requested in vain. For example, the Roe vs. Wade decision that made abortion legal occurred only after groups like the Jane Collective set up self-organized networks that provided affordable abortions to tens of thousands of women.

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Of course, those who can implement the changes they desire directly don’t need to make demands of anyone—and the sooner they recognize this, the better. Remember how people in Bosnia burned down government buildings in February 2014, then convened plenums to formulate demands to present to the government. A year later, they’d received nothing for their pains but criminal charges, and the government was once again as stable and corrupt as ever.

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Show us, don’t tell us.

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Limiting a movement to specific demands stifles diversity, setting it up for failure.

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The conventional wisdom is that movements need demands to cohere around: without demands, they will be diffuse, ephemeral, ineffectual.

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But people who have different demands, or no demands at all, can still build collective power together. If we understand movements as spaces of dialogue, coordination, and action, it is easy to imagine how a single movement might advance a variety of agendas. The more horizontally structured it is, the more capable it should be of accommodating diverse goals.

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The truth is that practically all movements are wracked by internal conflicts over how to structure themselves and how to prioritize their goals. The demand for demands usually arises as a power play by the factions within a movement that are most invested in the prevailing institutions, as a means of delegitimizing those who want to build up power autonomously rather than simply petitioning the authorities. This misrepresents real political differences as mere disorganization, and real opposition to the structures of governance as political naïveté.

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Forcing a diverse movement to reduce its agenda to a few specific demands inevitably consolidates power in the hands of a minority. For who decides which demands to prioritize? Usually, it is the same sort of people who hold disproportionate power elsewhere in our society: wealthy, predominantly white professionals well versed in the workings of institutional power and the corporate media. The marginalized are marginalized again within their own movements, in the name of efficacy.

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Yet this rarely serves to make a movement more effective. A movement with space for difference can grow; a movement premised on unanimity contracts. A movement that includes a variety of agendas is flexible, unpredictable; it is difficult to buy it off, difficult to trick the participants into relinquishing their autonomy in return for a few concessions. A movement that prizes reductive uniformity is bound to alienate one demographic after another as it subordinates their needs and concerns.

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A movement that incorporates a variety of perspectives and critiques can develop more comprehensive and multifaceted strategies than a single-issue campaign. Forcing everyone to line up behind one set of demands is bad strategy: even when it works, it doesn’t work.

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Limiting a movement to specific demands undermines its longevity.

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Nowadays, as history moves faster and faster, demands are often rendered obsolete before a campaign can even get off the ground. In response to the murder of Michael Brown, reformists demanded that police wear body cameras—but before this campaign could get fully underway, a grand jury announced that the officer who murdered Eric Garner would not be tried, either, even though Garner’s murder had been caught on camera.

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Movements premised on specific demands will collapse as soon as those demands are outpaced by events, while the problems that they set out to address persist. Even from a reformist perspective, it makes more sense to build movements around the issues they address, rather than any particular solution.

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Limiting a movement to specific demands can give the false impression that there are easy solutions to problems that are actually extremely complex.

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“OK, you have a lot of complaints—who doesn’t? But tell us, what solution do you propose?”

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The demand for concrete particulars is understandable. There’s no use in simply letting off steam; the point is to change the world. But meaningful change will take a lot more than whatever minor adjustments the authorities might readily grant. When we speak as though there are simple solutions for the problems we face, hurrying to present ourselves as no less “practical” than government policy experts, we set the stage for failure whether our demands are granted or not. This will give rise to disappointment and apathy long before we have developed the collective capacity to get to the root of things.

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Especially for those of us who believe that the fundamental problem is the unequal distribution of power and agency in our society, rather than the need for this or that policy adjustment, it is a mistake to promise easy remedies in a vain attempt to legitimize ourselves. It’s not our job to present ready-made solutions that the masses can applaud from the sidelines; leave that to demagogues. Our challenge, rather, is to create spaces where people can discuss and implement solutions directly, on an ongoing and collective basis. Rather than proposing quick fixes, we should be spreading new practices. We don’t need blueprints, but points of departure.

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Making demands presumes that you want things that your adversary can grant.

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On the contrary, it’s doubtful whether the prevailing institutions could grant most of the things we want even if our rulers had hearts of gold. No corporate initiative is going to halt climate change; no government agency is going to stop spying on the populace; no police force is going to abolish white privilege. Only NGO organizers still cling to the illusion that these things are possible—probably because their jobs depend on it.

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A strong enough movement could strike blows against industrial pollution, state surveillance, and institutionalized white supremacy, but only if it didn’t limit itself to mere petitioning. Demand-based politics limits the entire scope of change to reforms that can be made within the logic of the existing order, sidelining us and deferring real change forever beyond the horizon.

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There’s no use in asking the authorities for things they can’t grant and wouldn’t grant if they could. Nor should we give them an excuse to acquire even more power than they already have, on the pretext that they need it to be able to fulfill our demands.

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Our one demand: don’t mess with us.

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Making demands of the authorities legitimizes their power, centralizing agency in their hands.

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It is a time-honored tradition for nonprofit organizations and leftist coalitions to present demands that they know will never be granted: don’t invade Iraq, stop defunding education, bail out people not banks, make the police stop killing black people. In return for brief audiences with bureaucrats who answer to much shrewder players, they water down their politics and try to get their less complaisant colleagues to behave themselves. This is what they call pragmatism.

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Such efforts may not achieve their express purpose, but they do accomplish something: they frame a narrative in which the existing institutions are the only conceivable protagonists of change. This, in turn, paves the way for additional fruitless campaigns, additional electoral spectacles in which new candidates for office hoodwink young idealists, additional years of paralysis in which the average person can only imagine accessing her own power through the mediation of some political party or organization. Rewind the tape and play it again.

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Real self-determination is not something that any authority can grant us. We have to develop it by acting on our own strength, centering ourselves in the narrative as the protagonists of history.

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Making demands too early can limit the scope of a movement in advance, shutting down the field of possibility.

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At the beginning of a movement, when the participants have not yet had a chance to get a sense of their collective power, they may not be able to recognize how thoroughgoing the changes they want really are. To frame demands at this point in the trajectory of a movement can stunt it, limiting the ambitions and imagination of the participants. Likewise, setting a precedent at the beginning for narrowing or watering down its goals only increases the likelihood that this will happen again and again.

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Imagine if the Occupy movement had agreed on concrete demands at the very beginning—would it still have served as an open space in which so many people could meet, develop their analysis, and become radicalized? Or would it have ended up as a single protest encampment concerned only with corporate personhood, budget cuts, and perhaps the Federal Reserve? It is better for the objectives of a movement to develop as the movement itself develops, in proportion to its capacity.

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Making demands establishes some people as representatives of the movement, establishing an internal hierarchy and giving them an incentive to control the other participants.

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In practice, unifying a movement behind specific demands usually means designating spokespeople to negotiate on its behalf. Even if these are chosen “democratically,” on the basis of their commitment and experience, they can’t help but develop different interests from the other participants as a consequence of playing this role.

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In order to maintain credibility in their role as negotiators, spokespeople must be able to pacify or isolate anyone that is not willing to go along with the bargains they strike. This gives aspiring leaders an incentive to demonstrate that they can reign in in the movement, in hopes of earning a seat at the negotiating table. The same courageous souls whose uncompromising actions won the movement its leverage in the first place suddenly find career activists who joined afterwards telling them what to do—or denying that they are part of the movement at all. This drama played out in Ferguson in August 2014, where the locals who got the movement off the ground by standing up to the police were slandered by politicians and public figures as outsiders taking advantage of the movement to engage in criminal activity. The exact opposite was true: outsiders were seeking to hijack a movement initiated by honorable illegal activity, in order to re-legitimize the institutions of authority.

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In the long run, this sort of pacification can only contribute to a movement’s demise. That explains the ambiguous relation most leaders have with the movements they represent: to be of use to the authorities, they have to be capable of subduing their comrades, but their services would not be required at all if the movement did not pose some kind of threat. Hence the strange admixture of militant rhetoric and practical obstruction that often characterizes such figures: they must ride the storm, yet hold it at bay.

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Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a movement is for its demands to be met.

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Reform serves to stabilize and preserve the status quo, killing the momentum of social movements, ensuring that more thoroughgoing change does not take place. Granting small demands can serve to divide a powerful movement, persuading the less committed participants to go home or turn a blind eye to the repression of those who will not compromise. Such small victories are only granted because the authorities consider them the best way to avoid bigger changes.

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In times of upheaval, when everything is up for grabs, one way to defuse a burgeoning revolt is to grant its demands before it has time to escalate. Sometimes this looks like a real victory—as in Slovenia in 2013, when two months of protest toppled the presiding government. This put an end to the unrest before it could address the systemic problems that gave rise to it, which ran much deeper than which politicians were in office. Another government came to power while the demonstrators were still dazed at their own success—and business as usual resumed.

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During the buildup to the 2011 revolution in Egypt, Mubarak repeatedly offered what the demonstrators had been demanding a couple days earlier; but as the situation on the streets intensified, the participants became more and more implacable. Had Mubarak offered more, sooner, he might still be in power today. Indeed, the Egyptian revolution ultimately failed not because it asked for too much, but because it didn’t go far enough: in unseating the dictator but leaving the infrastructure of the army and the “deep state” in place, revolutionaries left the door open for new despots to consolidate power. For the revolution to succeed, they would have had to demolish the architecture of the state itself while everyone was still in the streets and the window of possibility remained open. “The people demand the fall of the regime” offered a convenient platform for much of Egypt to rally around, but did not prepare them to take on the regimes that followed.

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It only worked in Egypt because they didn’t just ask.

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In Brazil in 2013, the MPL (Movimento Passe Livre) helped catalyze massive protests against an increase in the cost of public transportation; this is one of the only recent examples of a movement that succeeded in getting its demands met. Millions of people took to the streets, and the twenty-cent fare hike was canceled. Brazilian activists wrote and lectured about the importance of setting concrete and achievable demands, in order to build up momentum by incremental victories. Next, they hoped to force the government to make transportation free.

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Why did their campaign against the fare hike succeed? At the time, Brazil was one of the few nations worldwide with an ascendant economy; it had benefitted from the global economic crisis by drawing investment dollars away from the volatile North American market. Elsewhere—in Greece, Spain, and even the United States—governments had their backs to the wall no less than anti-austerity protesters, and could not have granted their demands even if they wished to. It was not for want of specific demands that no other movement was able to achieve such concessions.

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Scarcely a year and a half later, when the streets had emptied out and the police had reasserted their power, the Brazilian government introduced another series of fare hikes—bigger ones this time. The MPL had to start all over again. It turns out you can’t overthrow capitalism one reform at a time.

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Protesting the transportation fare increase in Brazil: a concrete demand, but a Sisyphean struggle.

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If you want to win concessions, aim beyond the target.

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Even if all you want is to bring about a few minor adjustments in the status quo, it is still a wiser strategy to set out to achieve structural change. Often, to accomplish small concrete objectives, we have to set our sights much higher. Those who refuse to compromise present the authorities with an undesirable alternative to treating with reformists. Someone is always going to be willing to take the position of negotiator—but the more people refuse, the stronger the negotiator’s bargaining position will be. The classic reference point here is the relation between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X: if not for the threat implied by Malcolm X, the authorities would not have had such an incentive to parley with Dr. King.

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For those of us who want a truly radical change, there is nothing to be gained by watering down our desires for public consumption. The Overton window—the range of possibilities considered politically viable—is not determined by those at the purported center of the political spectrum, but by the outliers. The broader the distribution of options, the more territory opens up. Others may not immediately join you on the fringes, but knowing that some people are willing to assert that agenda may embolden them to act more ambitiously themselves.

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In purely pragmatic terms, those who embrace a diversity of tactics are stronger, even when it comes to achieving small victories, than those who try to limit themselves and others and to exclude those who refuse to be limited. On the other hand, from the perspective of long-term strategy, the most important thing is not whether we achieve any particular immediate result, but how each engagement positions us for the next round. If we endlessly defer the questions we really want to ask, the right moment will never arrive. We don’t just need to win concessions; we need to develop capabilities.

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Doing without demands doesn’t mean ceding the space of political discourse.

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Perhaps the most persuasive argument in favor of making concrete demands is that if we don’t make them, others will—hijacking the momentum of our organizing to advance their own agendas. What if, because we fail to present demands, people end up consolidating around a liberal reformist platform—or, as in many parts of Europe today, a right-wing nationalist agenda?

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Certainly, this illustrates the danger of failing to express our visions of transformation to those with whom we share the streets. It is a mistake to escalate our tactics without communicating about our goals, as if all confrontation necessarily tended in the direction of liberation. In Ukraine, where the same tensions and momentum that had given rise to the Arab Spring and Occupy produced a nationalist revolution and civil war, we see how even fascists can appropriate our organizational and tactical models for their own purposes.

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But this is hardly an argument to address demands to the authorities. On the contrary, if we always conceal our radical desires within a common reformist front for fear of alienating the general public, those who are impatient for real change will be all the more likely to run into the arms of nationalists and fascists, as the only ones openly seeking to challenge the status quo. We need to be explicit about what we want and how we intend to go about getting it. Not in order to force our methodology on everyone, as authoritarian organizers do, but to offer an opportunity and example to everyone else who is looking for a way forward. Not to present a demand, but because this is the opposite of a demand: we want self-determination, something no one can give us.

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Graffiti in London, 2012, reprising a slogan from the May 1968 uprising in Paris.

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If not demands, then what?

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The way we analyze, the way we organize, the way we fight—these should speak for themselves. They should serve as an invitation to join us in a different way of doing politics, based in direct action rather than petitioning. The people in Ferguson and Baltimore who responded to the murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray by physically confronting the police did more to force the issue of police violence than decades of pleading for community oversight. Seizing spaces and redistributing resources, we sidestep the senselessly circuitous machinery of representation. If we must send a message to the authorities, let it be this single, simple demand: Don’t mess with us.

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Instead of making demands, let’s start setting objectives. The difference is that we set objectives on our own terms, at our own pace, as opportunities arise. They need not be framed within the logic of the ruling powers, and their realization does not depend upon the goodwill of the authorities. The essence of reformism is that even when you win something, you don’t retain control over it. We should be developing the power to act on our own terms, independent of the institutions we are taking on. This is a long-term project, and an urgent one.

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In pursuing and achieving objectives, we develop the capacity to seek more and more ambitious goals. This stands in stark contrast to the way reformist movements tend to collapse when their demands are realized or shown to be unrealistic. Our movements will be stronger if they can accommodate a variety of objectives, so long as those do not openly conflict. When we understand each other’s objectives, it is possible to identify where it makes sense to cooperate, and where it doesn’t—a kind of clarity that does not result from lining up behind a lowest-common-denominator demand.

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From this vantage point, we can see that choosing not to make demands is not necessarily a sign of political immaturity. On the contrary, it can be a savvy refusal to fall into the traps that disabled the previous generation. Let’s learn our own strength, outside the cages and queues of representational politics—beyond the politics of demands.

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1. When was the last time 400,000 people were anywhere in New York without the police arresting anyone? That was protest not just as pressure valve, but as active pacification—as a way of diminishing the friction between protesters and the order they oppose. ↩

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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In summer 2013, we interviewed the Turkish group Revolutionary Anarchist Action (Devrimci Anarşist Faaliyet, or DAF) about the uprising that began in Gezi Park. At the end of summer 2014, we learned that DAF was supporting the fierce resistance that residents of the town of Kobanê in northern Syria were putting up to the incursion of the fundamentalist Islamic State.

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During the civil war in Syria that began with the Arab Spring, the Kurdish region of northern Syria, known as Rojava, asserted its autonomy and began carrying out experiments in horizontal organization. Rojava is surrounded on all sides by hostile forces: Assad’s beleaguered Syrian government, which lost control of the region a couple years ago; the Turkish government, known for oppressing its Kurdish minority; other revolutionary Syrian forces, including Islamic fundamentalists and the US-backed coalition known as the Free Syrian Army; the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, a longtime rival of Syrian Kurdish organizations; and, most pressingly, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS—an unrecognized state entity that has gained control of much of Iraq and Syria over the past two years using captured armaments originally brought into the region during the US military occupation.

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In the United States, we read corporate media accounts of refugees from Kobanê shouting “Long live America!” from across the Turkish border as US airstrikes aimed at Islamic State militants destroyed their city—a chilling re-legitimization of US military intervention in the Middle East, after the colossal failure of the occupation of Iraq. US Secretary of State John Kerry hinted that Kobanê would inevitably fall to the Islamic State, and maintained that rescuing the city was “not a strategic objective.” Yet in the end, it was not the US military, but the courage of a few ill-equipped autonomous fighters from Rojava that halted the advance of the Islamic State across the Middle East.

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With firsthand reports from the region in short supply, there were bitter polemics between English-speaking anarchists about whether to doubt the allegedly libertarian character of the resistance or extend critical support. In hopes of gaining more insight into the situation, we contacted our comrades of DAF once more. After months of waiting, we are finally able to present these two interviews—one offering general background on the struggle in Kobanê, the other delving into analytical detail about the geopolitical implications.

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Interview with a member of DAF on the Slovenian anarchist radio show Črna luknja in early January, 2015

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Can you give us an overview of the situation in the border region of Turkey and Syria, describing the militias and other key actors that are operating there?

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The people living in the region are mostly Kurds, who have been living there for hundreds of years. This region has never been represented by a state. Because of that, the people of the region have been in struggle for a very long time. The people are very diverse in terms of ethnicity and religion: there are Kurdish people, Arabic people, Yazidi people, and more. One of the major Kurdish people’s organizations in Turkey and Iraq is the PKK, and the PYD in Syria is in the same line with the PKK. As for military organizations, there are the YPJ and YPG, the men’s and women’s organizations.

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Against these organizations stand ISIS, the Islamic gangs, in which Al Nusra is involved. These are the radical Islamists. There is also the Free Syrian Army, a coalition of many different groups; they are supported by the capitalist system, but they are not as radical as ISIS. And there is the Turkish state, and Assad’s Syrian state, who are on the attack. In northern Iraq, there is also a Kurdish state, under the KDP of Barzani, which is ideologically the same as the Turkish state, but ethnically a bit different.

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What is the role of the PKK in the region, and the meaning of their supposed libertarian turn?

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The PKK has a bad reputation in the West because of their past. Twenty years ago, when it was founded, it was a Marxist-Leninist group. But a few years ago, it has changed this completely and denounced these ideas, because the ideas of their leader changed and so did the people. They went towards a more libertarian ideology after reading the works of Murray Bookchin and on account of some other factors in the region. To understand the situation today, it is also important that in the beginning, the PKK was not so ideological. It did not grow up as an ideological movement, but as a people’s movement. This is another factor explaining how it has developed in this direction.

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The Rojava revolution was proclaimed two years ago. Three cantons declared their independence from the state, from Assad’s regime. They didn’t want any kind of involvement with any of the internationally supported capitalist powers. This successfully opened up a third front in the region. It was a moment when the states in the region lost power.

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This began as a project of the Kurdish struggle. It involves directly democratic practices like people’s assemblies, and it is focused on ethnic diversity, power to the people, and women’s liberation, which is a big focus of the Kurdish movement in general, not just in Rojava. They formed their own defense units, which are voluntary organizations just made up of the people who are living there.

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You are part of the anarchist group DAF (Revolutionary Anarchist Action) in Turkey. One of your main activities over the last years has been building solidarity and mutual aid with the people in Kurdistan. Tell us about your group and what your involvement is in the Rojava revolution?

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DAF advocates a revolutionary perspective; we call ourselves revolutionary anarchists because we want anarchism to be socially understood in our region, because in this region anarchism doesn’t have any tradition or history. Our first aim is to spread the ideals of anarchism into the social fabric of our society, and for us the practice is more important than theory. Or rather, we build our theory on our practice as revolutionary anarchists.

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We are against all forms of oppression. We focus on workers’ movements and people’s movements that are oppressed due to ethnicity, we stand in solidarity against women’s oppression, and we are active in all of those movements. In Rojava, we were in touch with participants in the revolution since it started; when the resistance began in Kobanê, we immediately went to the region; our comrades organized solidarity actions on both sides of the border. We still have people there on a rotating basis, and we are still organizing actions. For example, recently, our women’s group organized an action in which they called for conscientious objection in support of the Kobanê resistance.

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DAF has organized on the Turkish-Syrian border, in a “human chain” intended to prevent fighters of the Islamic State from passing over the border from the Turkish side to join in fighting against the Kurdish resistance. Tell us about this form of direct action?

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The Turkish state has been attacking Kobanê from the west. In their discourse, the Turkish state sounds like they are against ISIS, but in practice it permits material resources, arms, and people to pass through the border, and it has been attacking the villages on the border. These villages are not very separate from Kobanê; it’s the same families and a lot of people from Kobanê pass through there when they are injured or if they want to join the struggle from the Turkish side of the border. So our comrades are staying in the villages and participating in all the actions in the communes, doing logistical support for the refugees and for injured people.

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Throughout the armed conflict, the mainstream media said that Kobanê would fall, despite the fact that the resistance on the ground never gave up. Why do you think they reported it that way?

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This was a psychological war from the beginning. The media did not want the Kobanê resistance to be heard. The coverage was part of the psychological war, because there was a lot of international support for the resistance. And when it became evident that Kobanê would not fall, they changed tactics: all the international powers tried to give the impression that they were helping with air strikes, and the Kurdish states by sending fighters. This was done right before it was evident that Kobanê would not fall, only in order to give the impression that they are not against this struggle.

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It is obvious that the people’s struggle in Kobanê is not in the interest of the prevailing world powers. What do you think the prospects are for the Rojava revolution? What is the situation on the ground now? How can people from other countries support the revolution there?

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Lately, other parts of Rojava have been attacked. If you remember months ago when ISIS first attacked the Yazid people, the Yazids were forced to flee from their cities, and they were saved by the YPD fighters. Afterwards, ISIS was repelled. Last week, the Yazid people have formed their own defense units, similar to those in Rojava. So the struggle is growing in the region, with self-defense and the idea of direct democracy gaining more support.

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Also, on the Turkish side of the border, the war is getting harsher. The government is using more violence against the Kurdish resistance. Again, last week, the police attacked and murdered a 14-year-old kid. This shows that the struggle will continue in a more violent way. This matter is not just limited to this region; you can see from the recent attacks on the journalists in France that this has to be taken very seriously on the international level, especially by revolutionaries.

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This also shows the importance of the Rojava revolution against ISIS and radical Islamism. I think that international support would mean taking more actions locally against the real powers that are supporting ISIS.

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Interview with a member of DAF, conducted by CrimethInc. operatives between October and December 2014

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How successful do you feel the intervention of the DAF has been in providing solidarity to those in Rojava struggling against the Islamic State? What resources or skills are important for anarchist groups to develop in order to be better prepared for situations like this?

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DAF has been in solidarity with the Rojava Revolution since it was declared over two years ago. Our comrades have been there since the first day of the Kobanê resistance, in solidarity, to the best of our ability, with the peoples’ struggle for freedom.

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We always knew that Kobanê would not fall and it didn’t fall, contrary to what mainstream media reported a hundred times since the resistance began. One month ago, ISIS controlled 40% of Kobanê, now it’s 20% and they are backing off. [Since this interview was conducted, ISIS has been completely driven out of Kobanê.] Given that ISIS is losing their battles with other forces in the region and getting weaker, we can say that the Kobanê resistance was successful.

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The resources and skills would be different for every specific struggle. The level of oppression and violence are different in every region and the skills for resistance are best built on direct experience. However, the skills of organization and the culture of sharing and solidarity are at least as important as any particular skills for resistance. These are almost universal. DAF has built its own experience on the culture of the commune and struggle against oppression as well as a long-term relationship of mutual solidarity with the Kurdish people and other struggles for freedom in Anatolia and Kurdistan.

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Unfortunately, it’s not possible to give a more detailed answer here on account of security issues and other concerns.

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The Turkish state has had to take steps backward in relation to the resistance in Kobanê. It has stopped openly supporting ISIS, although it is still supporting ISIS behind the scenes. It had occupying plans in the name of creating a “security region,” which included military intervention to weaken the Kurdish struggle and also attacking Assad’s forces in alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria. These plans have failed.

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The solidarity actions carried out by social movements for liberation spread around the world to an extent that was unseen in recent years. This international solidary was an important factor in the success of the Kobanê resistance. Rojava is another example proving that people can make a revolution without a vanguard party or a group of the elite, even where there is no industry. And this can happen in a place like the Middle East, where struggling for freedom means fighting against all kinds of oppression, including patriarchy as well as massacres based on ethnicity and religion.

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DAF texts have described the Islamic State as “the violent mob produced by global capitalism” and “the subcontractor of the States that pursue income strategies on the region.” Can you explain precisely what your analysis of the Islamic State is—why it appeared, and whose interests it serves?

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It is obvious that the actions of Islamic State benefit the powers (economic and political) that have goals in the region. These could be direct or indirect benefits that strengthen the hand of these powers. For example, a radical Islamist group is useful for Western economic or political powers to make propaganda about defending Western values. Islamic terror is one of the biggest issues that Western countries make propaganda about. Moreover, it is also a political reality that some countries, including the US, have agreements with these fundamentalists. This is the 50-year-running Middle East policy of Western countries.

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The Turkish state expressed a negative view of the Islamic State in every speech of its bureaucrats. But we have witnessed real political cooperation of the Turkish state with the Islamic State in relation to the resistance in Kobanê. So in this situation, it appears that they are supporting Islamic State but they are claiming that they are not supporting it.

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It seems clear that the Turkish government is hoping for the Islamic State to weaken Kurdish power in the region. But what do you think the Turkish state’s long-term goals are in reference to the Islamic State itself?

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The Turkish state has been providing large amounts of arms, supplies, and recruits to ISIS ever since the time when it was part of the globally supported Free Syrian Army. This support continues surreptitiously, since politically the Turkish state had to seem to be against ISIS after the resistance in Kobanê succeeded. Our comrades at the Turkish border with Syria are still reporting suspiciously large transports crossing it.

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The Turkish state has strong relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and their joint long-term goal is to gain more power in the region by eliminating Assad’s authority. ISIS is their ally in this respect also.

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Arguably, the Islamic State could never have come to power without the weapons and instability that the United States imported to Iraq. At the same time, it appears that US airstrikes and coordination with fighters in Kobanê have played a significant role in preventing the Islamic State from gaining control of the city. Has this enabled the United States to legitimize itself among those defending Rojava? What challenges does this create there for anarchists who oppose state power?

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This false impression is a product of the mainstream media. US airstrikes began very late, after it was evident that Kobanê would not fall, and they were not critical. The bombings also hit the areas in YPG control “by mistake.” And some ammunition landed in the hands of ISIS also “by mistake.”

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The success of the Kobanê Resistance can only be attributed to the self-organized power of the people’s armed forces. Because of this strong resistance, as well as extensive international solidarity, the US and its allies had to take steps backward.

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The bombings and media coverage are part of the political maneuvers against the revolution that will try to destroy it by including it. However, the Rojava Revolution is part of a long history of Kurdish people’s struggle for freedom. Its insistence on being stateless, its gains in the liberation of women, etc. are not coincidences.

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The challenge is to communicate the values created in the Rojava Revolution and the political reality of wartime conditions.

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When all the people (who are able) are armed, who is the vanguard? The people’s self-defense forces in Rojava include all ages, both men and women (who are already legendary fighters) from all ethnic and religious backgrounds in the region.

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The hierarchy created in the armed struggle of the guerrilla does not necessarily mean an exclusive authority in the social structures created by the revolution. This awareness is a part of the Rojava peoples’ struggle for freedom.

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Comrades from DAF and the Anarkismo Editors Group have made strong arguments that it is important to act in solidarity with the struggle in Rojava whether or not it is an explicitly “anarchist” struggle. But no society, ethnic group, or struggle is homogenous; each contains internal conflicts and contradictions, and the hardest part of solidarity work is usually figuring out how to take sides (or avoid taking sides). In your efforts to show solidarity with those struggling in Rojava, has DAF encountered tensions between more authoritarian and less authoritarian structures within the defense? How are you engaging with them?

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As you have stated, no popular movement is homogenous. The importance of the Rojava Revolution is the revolutionary efforts that are becoming generalized. This is a mutual process in which the people of Rojava are becoming aware about social revolution and at the same time are shaping a social revolution. The YPG and YPJ are self-defense organizations created by the people. The character of both organizations has been criticized in many texts as authoritarian.

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Similar discussions took place among comrades in the early 2000s in reference to the Zapatista movement. There were many critiques of the EZLN’s authoritarian character in the Zapatista Revolution. Critiques about the character of the popular movements must take into account the political reality. As DAF, we would frame critiques on the process that are based on our experiences, and which are far from being prejudgments about Kurdish movement. So there is no cooperation with any authoritarian structure, nor will any authoritarian structure play a role in social revolution.

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In the United States, some anarchists have sometimes spoken of certain ethnic groups such as the people of Chiapas as if they are “culturally anarchist.” Now some people here are speaking about the Kurdish people the same way. To us, although we do not want to render the struggles of oppressed peoples and colonized peoples invisible, it also seems simplistic and dangerous to confuse ethnic identity with politics. Likewise, our comrades in former Yugoslavia have expressed concerns over struggles that are based in ethnic or religious identity, on account of their experience of the 1990s civil war. How important is ethnic identity in the struggle in Rojava? Do you see this as a potential problem, or not?

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The Rojava Revolution is indeed made by peoples with at least four different ethnic and three different religious backgrounds, who are actively taking part equally in both military and social fronts. Also, the people of Rojava insist on being stateless, when there is already a neighboring Kurdish state in place. Kurdish ethnic identity has been subject to the denial and oppression policies of all the states in the region. Raising oppressed identities is strategically important in peoples’ struggle for freedom, but not to the extent that it is a device of discrimination and deception. This balance is of key importance and the Rojava Revolution has already proved itself in this respect.

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DAF also finds that the values that the people of Chiapas have created in their struggle for freedom align with anarchism, although “culturally anarchist” would not be a term we would use.

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The Rojava Revolution has been developing in a time when many socio-economic crises appeared around the world: Greece, Egypt, Ukraine… During the first period of the Arab Springs, the social opposition supported this “spring wave.” After a while, these waves evolved into clashes between fundamentalists and secular militarist powers. So the revolution in Rojava appeared at a conjuncture when the social opposition had lost their hopes in the Middle East. Its own international character and international solidarity will spread this effort—first in the Middle East, then around the world.

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What does the conflict in Kobanê tell us about the kind of struggles ahead in the 21st century? It seems to be an early example of what might happen in “sacrifice zones” in which traditional state forces seal off the area and withdraw, leaving autonomous communities to do battle with new fundamentalist or neo-fascist post-state organizations. Do you see what is happening there as something new, or old? Or both?

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As we stated above, this is a part of the process that started with the “spring waves.” It can be understood as a part of this theory of “sacrifice zones.” But this theory gives a great deal of importance to the character of international powers as subjects. We also have to recognize the role of internal political, economic, and social forces. We have to check out the internal capital that has relations with fundamentalists against international capitalist powers.

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Moreover, one of the biggest issues to understand the political culture of the Middle East is to recognize its unique character. Religion has a unique effect in the political agenda of the East. Not just for the Rojava Revolution, but across the board, DAF’s perspective on international politics is based in an understanding of relations of domination between social, economic, and political forces which cooperate and clash from time to time according to convenience, all of which are useless for oppressed people.

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Political Parties in an Age of Uprisings

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Poverty, unemployment, prohibitive tuition and healthcare costs, homelessness, hunger, forced migration, racism, criminalization, alienation, humiliation, suicide… These are not just the consequences of the financial crisis, but the conditions that precarious billions have experienced for decades as business as usual, serving as the laboratory mice in the neoliberal experiment. Yet thanks to the uneven distribution of the Fordist compromise, many Europeans were sheltered from this reality until the welfare state began to collapse in 2008.

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With the onset of the financial crisis, many who had previously lived relatively comfortable middle-class lives were pushed into poverty overnight. Years of upheaval followed all around Europe—not only in Greece, but also in Iceland, Spain, England, Turkey. Almost every European country has experienced some kind of popular social rebellion since 2008, all the way up to stable, social-democratic Sweden. Most of these began as single-issue struggles—the student rebellion in Croatia, protests against gold mining in Romania, the anti-corruption protests in Slovenia—but swiftly gained a more thoroughgoing character, opposing themselves to austerity and the political system or even to capitalism and the state. Mayors and ministers resigned, police stations and parliaments burned, governments fell. It wasn’t just anarchists at the core of these movements—in some countries, such as Ukraine and Bulgaria, the movements veered in a nationalistic direction. But everywhere, these protests became a space in which people who would never previously have been politically aligned could express their anger together; in many places, such as Bosnia, the most militant participants were people who had never taken the streets before. Trust in parliamentary democracy plunged to a record low, and people rediscovered direct action.

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Those protests were anything but monolithic, and they remained more reformist than radical. Many peaked with small victories, such as the resignation of the government (as in Slovenia) or the promise of negotiations with the political elite (as in Bosnia). Participants who had expected easy changes were often left disappointed. But the volatile situation posed an increasing threat to the ruling order.

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The state’s first reaction was to criminalize resistance. On one hand, this was intended to intimidate those who were protesting for the first time: often the harshest sentences were doled out to the least experienced participants, who lacked support networks. On the other hand, repression was focused on anarchists and other determined enemies of the ruling order. In the past decade, we have seen scores of social centers evicted (Ungdomshuset in Denmark, Villa Amalias in Greece, Klinika in Prague) and “anti-terror” crackdowns on dissent such as Operation Pandora in Spain and the continuing harassment of anarchists in the UK. Spain, Greece, and other countries also introduced severe anti-protest laws.

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The other response was to seek to coopt these movements. Protesters had proclaimed, “NO ONE REPRESENTS US”—not just as a complaint about the existing parties, but as a rejection of representation and liberal democracy. People who had just discovered their political power were experimenting with direct action and collective decision-making processes such as the popular assemblies in Spain, Greece, and Bosnia. In response, patronizing intellectuals and hysterical corporate media outlets demanded that protesters form political parties to unify their voices and negotiate with the state. At the same time, new political parties were positioning themselves within those movements by advocating for imprisoned protesters (like Syriza in Greece), backing protesters’ agendas in the media and parliament (like Združena levica in Slovenia), and sharing resources (like Die Linke in Germany). They appeared to be developing a party-movement model, incorporating protest groups and demands into their organizational structure.

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Syriza has its own unique origins in the specific context of Greece. So do Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, Parti de Gauche in France, Radnička fronta in Croatia, Združena levica in Slovenia, and Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal. But at this historical juncture, all of them serve the same basic function. Faced with so much unrest, the ruling order suddenly has a use for new radical political parties that promise to embody calls for “real democracy” within the existing system. Whatever the intentions of the participants, their structural role is to rebuild trust in electoral democracy, neutralize uncontrollable extra-parliamentary movements, and reestablish capitalism and the state as the only imaginable social order. When they enter the halls of power, they commit themselves to perpetuating the authoritarian institutions and unequal distribution of wealth that triggered the movements from which they appeared in the first place.

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In times like these, those who benefit from the prevailing order are willing to risk small changes in order to avoid big ones. The emerging electoral popularity of these parties all over Europe shows that the chapter that opened with the Greek uprising of December 2008 has closed. If all goes according to precedent, these parties will re-stabilize capitalism and state power, then pass from the stage of history, to be replaced by—or become—the next defenders of the status quo.

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From Greece to Germany, all eyes are on Syriza.

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Greece, Periphery of the Future

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Greece has been at the forefront of all these processes from the beginning. Greek comrades took to the streets years before revolts spread from Egypt to Brazil, and they have never really left them since, while the troika of lenders that bailed out the Greek economy—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—imposed package after package of austerity measures.

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What does this look like up close? A few years ago, anarchist groups around Europe were collecting money for a Greek comrade who needed to get her infant out of the country for an operation that would save her life. The reason was that, due to financial cuts, the Greek state had simply stopped performing certain surgeries. This story is just one among many, and most people did not have the privilege of a community to support them thus. While the fascists of the Golden Dawn killed comrades like Pavlos Fyssas on the streets and the police killed migrants on the Greek borders of Fortress Europe, the state killed poor people on the doorsteps of hospitals by denying them health care.

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As the state closed down hospitals, television stations, schools, and kindergartens, anarchists and others self-organized to set up autonomous clinics, educational projects, public kitchens, social programs, and neighborhood assemblies. Over the following years, the Greek anarchist movement became a major social force, mobilizing tens of thousands of people to fight beside them. At the same time, this ideological polarization also benefitted fascists in Greece. Golden Dawn gained power in parliament as police officers swelled their ranks. Police repression of anarchist demonstrations became ceaselessly and mercilessly violent, while the far-right-controlled media maintained a conspiracy of silence and prisoners filled the new maximum-security prisons built under the most conservative government since the military junta fell in the 1970s.

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These were the conditions in which a small coalition of Trotskyists, Maoists, Greens, and social democrats began to gain popularity under the name Syriza and the leadership of Alexis Tsipras. When thousands of people who did not belong to anarchist or leftist groups marched with anarchists and clashed with police in the fight against gold mining in Chalkidiki, the defense of the social center Villa Amalias, the struggle against Golden Dawn, and demonstrations in solidarity with migrants, Syriza took positions on the same issues. They spoke about them in a parliament and their members attended the demonstrations. Whenever possible, they took advantage of these struggles to gain recognition in the media.

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Syriza promised the end of austerity measures—though for the elections, this rhetoric softened into promises to renegotiate the conditions of Greek debt. They promised to dismantle the most brutal police units—though for the elections, this was reduced to only disarming officers that come into direct contact with protesters. Syriza promised to leave NATO—though for the elections, this was reduced to not cooperating in foreign assault missions. Syriza promised to close down high-security prisons and reestablish the universities as a no-go zone for the police, a legal privilege the movement lost after December 2008 in what proved to be a huge setback in clashes with police.

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Syriza has less power to mobilize people onto the street than anarchists, but the party successfully mobilized people to go to the voting polls. This aptly illustrates the transition that Syriza’s supposed enemies would like to see social movements undergo in Greece and all around Europe. With some people spreading rumors that there could be electoral fraud or a military coup if Syriza wins, and others threatening that such a victory would result in Greece going bankrupt, the European ruling class is successfully concealing the fact that—compared to the social movements from which it arose—Syriza is a much safer bet for them. Just as police brutality can catalyze rather than suppress resistance, electoral fraud or military intervention might trigger a new wave of movements in Greece and all across Europe. The reactions to Syriza’s election will be harsh in rhetoric but reconcilable in practice. Faced with the challenges of retaining state power, Syriza will probably deliver much less than they promised. In a globalized world, in which a country can go bankrupt overnight, capitalists don’t need to stage a coup to get their way.

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The party for your right to fight?

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Our Dreams Will Never Fit in Their Ballot Boxes

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For those who see no connection between the ways that electoral politics and capitalism concentrate power, it is tempting to imagine that a new political party could finally make the system work the way “it is supposed to.” But even anarchists, who have no faith in representational politics or reform, might hope that a Syriza-led government could create a more conducive environment for resistance. Indeed, it is an open secret that members of Syriza have served as the lawyers of many anarchists; why shouldn’t they continue to play a protective role at the helm of the state?

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All this is hopelessly naïve. In the long run, no party can solve the problems created by capitalism and the state, and Syriza’s victory will only hinder the revolutionary movements that we need. Here’s why.

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Syriza will reestablish the legitimacy of the institutions that are responsible for the crisis in the first place.

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Indeed, the entry of Syriza into power has already re-legitimized the institutions of government for many who had lost faith in them. Regardless of Syriza’s intentions, it is this same government apparatus that forces the effects of capitalism upon people, blocking access to the resources they need. Even if it were possible for Syriza to use state power to combat the effects of capitalist accumulation, sooner or later the reins of the state will return to the hands of those who usually hold them. When that happens, efforts to delegitimize the government will begin all over again from scratch.

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This cycle of disillusionment and re-legitimization has served to preserve the authoritarian structures of the state for centuries, always deferring the struggle for real freedom beyond the horizon. It’s an old story stretching from the French revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1870, through the Russian revolution and the national liberation struggles of the 20th century, right up to the election of Obama.

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Syriza itself will do nothing to undermine the fundamental hierarchies of politics. Many of these new left parties started as ostensibly horizontal networks, promising real transparency and democratic decision-making processes. But as they grow, they inevitably abandon horizontal structures and come to mimic the older parties they claim to oppose. These changes are often justified as political pragmatism or solutions to the problem of scale—and indeed, the exigencies of representational politics do not lend themselves to the sort of horizontal, autonomous structures that can arise in genuine grassroots social movements. So it is that at the top of every successful party like Syriza, Združena levica, or Podemos, we can expect to find a charismatic leader like Alexis Tsipras, Luka Mesec, or Pablo Iglesias. These leaders’ personalities become entangled with the parties, in ways reminiscent of Hugo Chavez and other famous politicians of the Left. If you are building a party that has to play according to state’s rules, you will end up with a structure that mirrors the state. This internal transformation is the first step towards re-establishing the status quo.

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Leftist parties have always displayed a contradictory attitude towards the state. In theory, they assert that the state is merely a necessary evil on the path towards a classless society; on the field of realpolitik they always protect and defend its repressive mechanisms—for no one who wishes to hold state power can do without them. Some of these new parties do not even wait to gain power to take that path; in Slovenia, as part of their struggle against austerity, the left opposition party Združena levica has called for the police to receive better equipment and more officers. Today, these new political parties see state power as an essential precondition for their struggle against neoliberalism; rejecting the privatization of state owned companies, they propose nationalization as one of the primary ways to fight the consequences of economic crisis. Their goal is not to dismantle the state and the economic disparities it imposes, but to preserve the bourgeois ideal of the welfare state with a neo-Keynesian economic program.

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When this was possible in the past, it was only possible for a few privileged nations at the expense of exploited millions around the globe—and even the beneficiaries of this arrangement weren’t sure they wanted it, as the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s showed. Today, when capitalist accumulation has intensified to such a degree that only massive austerity programs can keep the economy running, the old compromises of social democracy have become impossible, and everyone acknowledges this except the snake oil salesmen of the left. The doomsaying of German economists who are concerned that Syriza will sink the Greek economy is true enough: in a globalized economy, there is no way to redistribute wealth without causing capital flight, unless we are prepared to abolish capitalism along with the state structures that preserve it.

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Most of the participants in the movements of the past seven years are not yet prepared to go so far. They entered the streets out of frustration with the existing governments, but they saw these movements as a way to seek an immediate solution, not as a single stage in a centuries-long struggle against capitalism. When the protests didn’t produce immediate results, they joined parties like Syriza that promised quick, easy solutions. But what seems pragmatic today will be an embarrassing mistake that everyone remembers with a headache tomorrow. Isn’t that always how it goes with parties?

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Syriza supporter waving the Greek flag to celebrate their victory.

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Syriza has no choice now except to enforce order, pacifying the movements that propelled them into power.

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It is too early to predict what the precise relationship will be between the new governing party and the movements that put them in place. We can only speculate based on past precedents.

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Let’s return to the Brazilian example. After Lula came to power, the most powerful social movement in Brazil, the 1.5-million-strong land reform campaign MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), found itself in a considerably worse position than it had faced under the preceding conservative government. Although it shared considerable membership and leadership with Lula’s own party, the necessities of governing precluded Lula from assisting it. Though the MST had managed to compel the previous government to legalize many land occupations, it ceased to make any headway whatsoever under Lula. This pattern has played out all across Latin America as politicians have betrayed the social movements that put them in office. This is a good argument for building up strength we can use on our own terms, autonomously, rather than trying to get sympathetic politicians into office—for once they are in office, they must act according to the logic of their post, not the logic of the movement.

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Syriza came to power by courting votes and watering down demands. Representative democracy tends to reduce politics to a matter of lowest common denominators, as parties jockey to attract voters and form coalitions. Indeed, Syriza’s first move after the election was to establish a coalition with Independent Greeks, a right-wing party. In order to preserve this coalition, Syriza will have to make concessions to their partners’ agenda. This will mean, first, forcing unwanted right-wing policies past its own membership—and then enforcing those policies on everyone else. There’s no getting around the essentially coercive nature of governing.

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Many anarchists hope Syriza will put the brakes on state repression of social movements, enabling them to develop more freely. Didn’t Syriza essentially support the riots of 2008? But back then, they were a small party looking for allies; now they are the ruling elite. In order to retain the reins of the state, they must show that they are prepared to enforce the rule of law. Though they may not prosecute minor protest activity as aggressively as a right-wing government would, they will still have to divide protesters into legitimate and illegitimate—a move out of the counterinsurgency handbook that guides governments and occupying armies the whole world over. This would not be new for Greece; the same thing happened under the social democrats of PASOK in the early 1980s. Even if Syriza’s government does not seek to maintain the previous level of repression, their function will be to divide movements, incorporating the docile and marginalizing the rest. This might prove to be a more effective repressive strategy than brute force.

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In these new conditions, the movements themselves will change. Syriza has already become involved in many grassroots social programs; they will probably offer the most cooperative of these projects more resources, but only under the mantle of the state. It will become harder and harder for grassroots organizers to remain truly autonomous, to demonstrate the difference between self-organization and management from above. Something like this has already occurred in the US non-profit sector with disastrous effects. We may also cite government involvement in supposedly grassroots neighborhood organizing in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.

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This kind of assimilation into the logic of the state is essential to parties like Syriza. They need movements that know how to behave themselves, that can serve to legitimize decisions made in the parliament without causing too much of a fuss. Indeed, the mere prospect that Syriza might come into power has kept the streets of Greece largely empty of protest since 2012, intensifying the risks for anarchists and others who continued to demonstrate. Parties on the Syriza model can pacify the public without even entering office.

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So what happens to the rest of the movement, to those who continue to assert their autonomy, seeking to build power on their own terms outside the institutions? That is the question before us.

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The ecstasy of assimilation.

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Where Syriza fails, fascism will grow.

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Facing international pressure, a divided electorate, and the structural relationship between state and capital, Syriza cannot hope to resolve the day-to-day problems that most Greeks face as a result of unbridled capitalism. In the long term, this may open the gates for the last governmental solution that Greece has not yet tried: fascism.

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A profit-driven economy inevitably concentrates wealth into fewer and fewer hands. In a globalized world, any country that tries to reverse this process scares off investors; this is why today even the wealthiest nations are being forced to feed all the infrastructure of social democracy into the fire, keeping the market healthy at the expense of the general population. This problem could be solved by the revolutionary abolition of private property and the state that defends it, but there is only one way to preserve the support infrastructure of social democracy while maintaining capitalism, and that is to narrow down who gets to benefit from it. This is the meaning of the food distribution programs Golden Dawn organizes “for Greeks only.” In this regard, nationalist and fascist parties have a more realistic plan for how to maintain the safety net of the white middle class than ordinary socialist parties do.

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That’s why it is so dangerous for parties like Syriza to legitimize the idea that the government can solve the problems of capitalism by implementing more socialistic policies. When they fail to deliver on their promises, some of those who believed in them will turn to far-right parties who claim to have a more pragmatic way do accomplish the same thing. This is already happening all around Europe. In Sweden, the flagship of social democracy, decades of left-wing activism aimed at preserving government programs have just opened the way for fascists to claim that, in order to protect those programs, the borders must close.

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But fascists need not take power to be dangerous. They are dangerous precisely because, like anarchists, they can carry out their agenda directly without need of the state apparatus. Indeed, we may be entering an era when a variety of political actors will find it more strategic to be positioned outside the government, so as to avoid being discredited with it. Now that the state can no longer mitigate the effects of capitalism, people are bound to become more and more disillusioned and rebellious. Where radical left parties hold state power, seeking to pacify their former comrades who remain in the streets, it will be easier for right-wing groups to present themselves as the real partisans of revolt—as they have in Venezuela, for example. The insurrections of the past decade are sure to continue, but the important question is what kind of insurrections they will be. Will they put people in touch with their own collective power, setting the stage for the final abolition of capitalism? Or will they look more like what happened last year in Ukraine?

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With anti-Islamic hysteria and nationalist groups like Germany’s Pegida on the rise all over Europe, fascism is not just a future threat, but a clear and present danger. Leaving it to governments to deal with fascists via the rule of law is doubly dangerous: it supplants the agency of grassroots movements with the mediation of the authorities, and—once more—it legitimizes state institutions that may eventually fall into fascist hands. Some may consider Syriza a bulwark against fascism, but only autonomous social movements can defeat it: not simply by fighting against it reactively, but above all by demonstrating a more compelling vision of social change.

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The other socialists with Greek flags—the nationalist ones.

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Fighting Harder, Wanting More

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If Syriza’s victory succeeds in lulling those who once met in the streets back into spectatorship and isolation, this will close the windows of possibility that opened during the uprisings, rendering Syriza themselves redundant and offering a new model by which to pacify social movements around the world. But they are playing with fire, promising solutions they cannot deliver. If their failure could open the door for fascism, it could also create a new phase of movements outside and against all authoritarian power.

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For this to be possible, anarchists in Greece and everywhere around the world must differentiate themselves from all political parties, inviting the general public to join them in spaces beyond the influence of even the most generous social democrats. This will mean facing off against the opportunistic politicians who once joined them in the street. It will not be easy, but it is the only way. If nothing else, now that the elections are over and Syriza stands on the other side of the walls of power, the lines are clear.

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Abolishing capitalism and the state is still unthinkable for most people. Yet, as Greece has seen, the measures that could stabilize capitalism for another generation are still more unthinkable. In the day-to-day practices of Greek anarchists—the occupied social centers and university buildings, the self-defense patrols against Golden Dawn, the social programs and assemblies—we can see the first steps towards a world without property or government. If these practices reached an impasse in 2012, it was partly because so many people abandoned the streets in hopes of a Syriza victory. These are the examples to emulate from Greece, not the Syriza model. Let’s stop dallying with false solutions.

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Still our last, best hope.

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Appendix:
Dogs of Greece—A Political Primer

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[left] Loukanikos, the celebrated “riot dog” who made a name for himself by participating in every demonstration in Athens since 2010, represents the fighting spirit of autonomous movements. Unfortunately, he reportedly passed away in 2014, having retired from street action in 2012 to wait for Syriza to assume power.

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[center] Golden Dawg, a fascist lapdog serving the capitalist elite, is happy to show his teeth from the safety of his master’s arms. He pretends to have his own agenda—but note the leash!

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[right] And here is the latest addition to the Greek kennel, a canine partisan of Syriza. “Throw me a bone,” he says! Some see him as Loukanikos’s successor, but there appear to be a few differences. As for the leash, he insists it’s just a matter of pragmatism: “A leash is just a tool like any other,” he says. “If it’s in the right hands, you can do good things with it.”

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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A wild and growing anti-police revolt is in full swing across the Bay Area. It is a node in the growing national movement sparked by the insurrection in Ferguson following the police execution of Michael Brown, and at the same time it is a continuation of local struggles dating back at least to the 2009 Oscar Grant riots in Oakland. Some of us who have participated in events in the Bay over the past two and half weeks urgently desire to communicate to others around the world about what is unfolding here. Our aim is not to claim bragging rights or to establish Oakland as the riot capital of the United States. On the contrary, it is necessary to spread word of the unprecedented nature of these events precisely because it suddenly seems more possible than ever before that revolt against white supremacy and the police could spread beyond the usual spaces of protest.

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In order to illustrate the magnitude of what has unfolded since a grand jury announced it would not indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, we must make one point clear: we are losing track of how many highways have been blockaded, which stores have been looted, which intersections have seen the fiercest fighting with police. All of this has been unfolding on a nightly basis for over two weeks. Roughly 600 people have been arrested. Many of the main business districts across the East Bay are boarded up. It has become routine to hear police and news helicopters tracking the latest riot each night. Militarized police forces from across northern California are now regularly being deployed in our streets. Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Emeryville have all experienced riots and looting.

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“I can’t breathe.”
–Eric Garner’s last words while being
choked to death by NYPD officers

“It has never been like this before. There is no breathing room.”
–an unnamed Oakland police officer lamenting
the current wave of protests

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Many of us have been through various movements and small-scale revolts in Oakland and the Bay Area over the past decade or more. Yet this is something different. While the numbers taking the streets on any given night are not massive—usually in the range of 500 to 1500—the consistency and level of intensity that this insurrectionary wave has unleashed have not been seen here in decades. All this is unfolding outside the control of any organization or political clique. At this point, there are barely even specific call outs for marches or meet ups: crowds of neighbors, students, activists, and militants are now gathering each night on their own chaotic initiative. An informal alliance of graffiti crews, groups of friends composed primarily of young Black and Brown rebels, and clusters of anarchists of various stripes and backgrounds has emerged to create the most vibrant and combative tendencies within the uprising. Those who show up with suggestions as to where the energy of the crowd might best be applied are given a hearing, and sometimes their proposals are carried out. Those who attempt to calm and manage the situation are ignored, and often attacked if they attempt to impede others’ actions.

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The initial wave of rioting, marches, and blockades in Oakland during the week of November 24 was just the beginning. There followed multiple blockades of the 880 and 980 freeways, numerous die-ins blocking roadways, and shutdowns of the West Oakland BART station—and then the riots began in earnest. Here is a rough timeline of the events of the past two and a half weeks, followed by our initial reflections.

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Revolt against Police in the Bay Area: November 24 - December 10, 2014

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November 24: A grand jury in Ferguson refuses to indict officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson burns. Over 2500 meet in downtown Oakland and proceed to block the 580 highway for hours. Then the crowd marches back downtown to the police station, where clashes erupt on Broadway. Participants erect burning barricades and loot several corporate stores, including a Starbucks and Smart and Final grocery store. Dozens are arrested.

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Demonstrators blocking the freeway, erecting barricades, and looting on November 24.

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November 25: A small crowd takes over highway 880 in Oakland. A larger crowd blocks highway 580 later in the night, and nearly 100 are arrested. The remaining crowd creates massive burning barricades across Telegraph to hold back police. A series of corporate stores are looted in North Oakland and gentrifying businesses are smashed. Another mass arrest occurs near Emeryville at the end of the night.

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November 26: A destructive march plays cat and mouse with Oakland police in downtown and West Oakland for hours before being dispersed by police. Multiple businesses in downtown are damaged and more are arrested.

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November 28: A coordinated civil disobedience action at the West Oakland BART station shuts down all service in and out of San Francisco for over two hours. That night, in San Francisco, nearly 1000 protesters lay siege to the shopping district of Union Square during Black Friday, clashing with police and damaging fancy stores. They march into the Mission district, where stores are looted and banks are smashed. The night ends in a mass arrest of the dwindling crowd.

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Barricades on Telegraph Avenue on November 25; the Black Friday march on November 28.

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December 3: A New York grand jury fails to indict any officers in the choking death of Eric Garner. Crowds block Market Street in San Francisco. In Oakland, a march weaves through downtown; riot police prevent it from reaching OPD headquarters. Instead, participants march through the wealthy Piedmont neighborhood.

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December 4: Another march weaves through Downtown Oakland, eventually heading east towards the Fruitvale district, where there is a showdown with Oakland police and a mass arrest. In San Francisco, a die-in blocks Market Street for a second night.

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December 5: Hundreds march through downtown Oakland, holding a noise demo in front of the jail to support those arrested during the revolt. The crowd moves on to take over the 880 freeway before being pushed off by police. Next, the march surrounds the West Oakland BART station and destroys the gates protecting the riot police inside. The station is shut down for an hour before the march moves back downtown, where property destruction, clashes with police, and arrests occur.

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December 6: A march originating near UC Berkeley campus eventually clashes with Berkeley police near their headquarters and proceeds to loot multiple stores, including a Trader Joe’s and Radio Shack. The crowds grow as many students take to the streets. In response, police departments from across the region pour into central Berkeley, firing dozens of rounds of tear gas and physically attacking demonstrators and bystanders, inflicting serious injuries.

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Demonstrations impact BART on December 5; street confrontations on December 6.

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December 7: On Sunday night, another march starts in Berkeley and moves into North Oakland, clashing with police, destroying multiple California Highway Patrol (CHP) cruisers, and taking over Highway 24. CHP officers use tear gas and rubber bullets to push back the crowd. People respond with rocks and fireworks, then march back into downtown Berkeley, destroying bank façades and ATMs. They attack cell phone and electronics stores, culminating with the looting of Whole Foods. The night ends with hundreds of people gathering around bonfires in the middle of Telegraph, popping bottles of expropriated Prosecco. Police are afraid to engage the crowd, but some participants are snatched in targeted arrests.

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Demonstrators wreck CHP vehicles during a blockade of Highway 24 on December 7.

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December 8: The third march from Berkeley is by far the largest. Over 2000 people take over Interstate 80, stopping all traffic for two hours, while another segment of the demonstration blocks the train tracks parallel to the freeway. The crowd attempts to march on the Bay Bridge but is pushed back into Emeryville where over 250 people are mass arrested.

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December 9: The fourth march from Berkeley sets out once again down Telegraph Avenue into Oakland and shuts down another section of Highway 24 and the MacArthur BART station. Increasingly violent clashes ensue with CHP officers in full riot gear, who open fire with rubber bullets and beanbag rounds, causing numerous injuries and ultimately pushing the crowd off the freeway. The march then looped through downtown Oakland and made its way into Emeryville, where a Pak N Save grocery store was looted along with a CVS pharmacy and a 7 Eleven. The night ended with another round of arrests, scattering the crowd.

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December 10: Hundreds of Berkeley High School students stage a walkout and rally at city hall. A smaller fifth march from Berkeley makes its way into Oakland where a T-Mobile store is looted and other corporate stores are attacked. People point out and attack undercover CHP officers in the crowd, who pull guns on the crowd as they make an arrest.

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Undercover officer threatening demonstrators who outed him on December 10.

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The rhythm of unrest has changed tempo repeatedly over these twenty days, but shows no signs of quieting. Revolt has shifted fluidly between various forms of resistance—from relatively calm marches to mass highway blockades, intense street fighting, and targeted expropriation. This has kept the movement resilient and capable of bringing in a diverse range of new participants day after day, even when there are sharp disagreements over which tactics are appropriate and little consensus over what direction the movement should take.

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It is difficult to anticipate what will happen next. No one predicted that this revolt would be sustaining this level of intensity more than two weeks after people first gathered at 14th and Broadway while Ferguson burned. At this point, it appears likely that the momentum will continue in some form until at least the week of Christmas.

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The long-term repercussions are unclear. At the very least, it seems that the reactionary period of social decomposition that followed the high points of struggle here in the Bay during 2011 and early 2012 is over, and something new and even more ferocious is taking shape. We can also tentatively conclude that the tactic of blockading major infrastructure, including highways, has spread beyond the high water mark previously set by the port blockades of the Occupy movement. There have been at least ten highway blockades in the East Bay alone over the past couple weeks; such blockading is now considered a favorable tactic even by those who identify as “peaceful protesters.”

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Meanwhile, the consistent pace of combative demonstrations that traverse municipal boundaries is pushing local law enforcement infrastructure to its limits. Police units are increasingly reluctant to engage with the crowds; officers who find themselves locked in street fights are retreating more frequently. Media reports suggest that the first two weeks of protests have cost Oakland $1.36 million in overtime alone.

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Of course, the unrelenting pace of events is also straining the anti-repression infrastructure that has become such a vital sustaining force for rebellious movements here in the Bay. This infrastructure is one of the lasting local manifestations of Occupy Oakland; it has roots stretching back to the Oakland 100 Support Committee, formed in the immediate aftermath of the original Oscar Grant riots. Arrests are now occurring every night, arraignments every day, rides must be coordinated to and from Santa Rita Jail constantly and additional money is desperately needed to bail out arrestees with more serious charges. How we follow through with displays of solidarity and direct material support for arrestees will determine how much strength we gain from this uprising moving forward.

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Downtown Berkeley on December 7.

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Standing in the streets of Oakland in December 2014, it seems that we have come full circle almost exactly six years after Oscar Grant was executed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle. The journey that began by the Lake Merritt BART station on January 7, 2009 when that first OPD car was smashed has taken many twists and turns through various waves of protest and movements, many of which have manifested in rioting and clashes with police in and around downtown Oakland. Meanwhile, a wave of small uprisings has unfolded in an increasing number of locations across the country in response to one police execution after another: Portland in 2010, Denver in 2010, Seattle in 2011, San Francisco in 2011, Atlanta in 2012, Anaheim in 2012, Santa Rosa in 2013, Flatbush in 2013, Durham in 2013, Salinas in 2014, Albuquerque in 2014. In each of these local uprisings, the name of a person whose life was taken by the state was snatched from oblivion and burned into collective memory through the actions of those who chose to revolt.

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The brave people of Ferguson pushed this past the point of no return by doggedly refusing to leave the streets night after night, showing that these revolts could extend in time and increase in intensity. If there is one answer as to why those of us in the Bay now find ourselves in a near insurrectionary situation tonight, it is simply this: we are no longer alone. Another city has set a new precedent for resisting the racist police state, so Oakland is no longer an outlier.

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The new paradigm of struggle emanating from Ferguson was further reinforced during the second week of the revolt, as news spread that a New York grand jury had failed to indict any NYPD officer in the strangling of Eric Garner. What had previously been restricted to singular outbursts of anger in reaction to individual cases of police executing Black and Brown people became a systemic struggle confronting the structures of white power and state violence within this country. This struggle is no longer just about Michael Brown, Eric Garner, or Oscar Grant, or even the thousands killed by police whose names have never entered the public consciousness. It is about the violent marginalization and enforced social death of entire Black and Brown communities. It is about the role of the police in exercising lethal force with impunity to maintain this order and uphold the slave state foundations of American capitalism.

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Demonstrators blockading Interstate 80 on December 8.

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We can now finally speak of a national anti-police movement that came into being through the fires and blockades of late 2014. This should be celebrated as a massive victory for resistance in the United States. An important milestone has been reached and we are watching the results unfold every night before our eyes.

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Many days ago, it became impossible to predict what would come next. We hope this uncontrollability spreads to new locations, in ever more creative forms of disruption and attack.

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–Some Oakland Antagonists, December 10, 2014

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To support arrestees in this struggle, please donate to the legal support fund.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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It should have come as no surprise yesterday when the grand jury in St. Louis refused to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who murdered Michael Brown last August in Ferguson, Missouri. Various politicians and media outlets had labored to prepare the public for this for months in advance. They knew what earnest liberals and community leaders have yet to acknowledge: that it is only possible to preserve the prevailing social order by giving police officers carte blanche to kill black men at will. Otherwise, it would be impossible to maintain the racial and economic inequalities that are fundamental to this society. In defiance of widespread outrage, even at the cost of looting and arson, the legal system will always protect officers from the consequences of their actions—for without them, it could not exist.

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The verdict of the grand jury is not a failure of the justice system, but a lesson in what it is there to do in the first place. Likewise, the unrest radiating from Ferguson is not a tragic failure to channel protest into productive venues, but an indication of the form all future social movements will have to take to stand any chance of addressing the problems that give rise to them.

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A profit-driven economy creates ever-widening gulfs between the rich and the poor. Ever since slavery, this situation has been stabilized by the invention of white privilege—a bribe to discourage poor white people from establishing common interests with poor people of color. But the more imbalances there are in a society—racial, economic, and otherwise—the more force it takes to impose them.

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This explains the militarization of the police. It’s not just a way to sustain the profitability of the military-industrial complex beyond the end of the Cold War. Just as it has been necessary to deploy troops around the world to secure the raw materials that keep the economy afloat, it is becoming necessary to deploy troops in the US to preserve the unequal distribution of resources at home. Just as the austerity measures pioneered by the IMF in Africa, Asia, and South America are appearing in the wealthiest nations of the first world, the techniques of threat management and counter-insurgency that were debuted against Palestinians, Afghanis, and Iraqis are now being turned against the populations of the countries that invaded them. Private military contactors who operated in Peshawar are now working in Ferguson, alongside tanks that rolled through Baghdad. For the time being, this is limited to the poorest, blackest neighborhoods; but what seems exceptional in Ferguson today will be commonplace around the country tomorrow.

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This also explains why struggles against the police have taken center stage in the popular imagination over the past decade. The police are the front line of capitalism and racism in every fight. You might never see the CEO who profits on fracking your water supply, but you’ll see the police who break up your protest against him. You might not meet the bank director or landlord who forces you out, but you will see the sheriff who comes to repossess your home or evict you. As a black person, you might never enter the gated communities of the ones who benefit most from white privilege, but you will encounter the overtly racist officers who profile, bully, and arrest you.

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The civil rights struggles of two generations ago have become struggles against the police: today, a black man can become president, but he’s exponentially more likely to be murdered by an officer of the law. The workers’ struggles of a generation ago have become struggles against the police: in place of steady employment, a population rendered expendable by globalization and automation can only be integrated into the functioning of the economy at gunpoint. What bosses once were to workers, police are to the precarious and unemployed.

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Sign of the times

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In view of all this, it is not surprising that police violence has been the catalyst for most of the major movements, uprisings, and revolutions of the past several years:

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The riots that shook Greece in December 2008, ushering in an era of worldwide anti-austerity resistance, were sparked by the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
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In Oakland, the riots in response to the police murder of Oscar Grant at the opening of 2009 set the stage for the Bay Area to host the high-water mark of Occupy and several other movements.
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The day of protest that sparked the Egyptian revolution of 2011 was scheduled for National Police Day, January 25, by the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Said, which memorialized another young man killed by police.
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Occupy Wall Street didn’t gain traction until footage of police attacks circulated in late September 2011.
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The police eviction of Occupy Oakland, in which officers fractured the skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, brought the Occupy movement to its peak, provoking the blockade of the Port of Oakland.
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In 2013, the fare hike protests in Brazil and the Gezi Resistance in Turkey both metastasized from small single-issue protests to massive uprisings as a result of clumsy police repression.
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The same thing happened in Eastern Europe, setting off the Ukrainian revolution at the end of 2013 and sparking the Bosnian uprising of February 2014.
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Other cities around the US have witnessed a series of intensifying rebellions against police murders, peaking with the revolt in Ferguson following the murder of Michael Brown.
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It isn’t just that the police are called in to repress every movement as soon as it poses any threat to the prevailing distribution of power (although that remains as true as ever). Rather, repression itself has been producing the flashpoints of revolt.

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The police cannot rule by brute force alone. They can’t be everywhere at once—and they are drawn from the same social body they repress, so their conflicts with that body cannot be concluded by purely military means. Even more than force, they need public legitimacy and the appearance of invincibility. Wherever it’s hard for them to count on one of these, they’re careful to exaggerate the other. When they lose both, as they have in all of the previously described movements, a window of possibility opens—a Tahrir or Taksim Square, an Occupy encampment or building occupation, the occupied QT in Ferguson last August—in which it becomes possible to imagine a world without the boundaries and power imbalances they enforce. This window remains open until the police are able to reestablish their facade of invulnerability and either delegitimize the kind of force it takes to confront them, à la Chris Hedges, or else relegitimize policing itself.

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Such relegitimization can take many forms. In Occupy, it took the form of rhetoric about the police being part of the 99% (which could just as easily have been said of the Ku Klux Klan). In Egypt, people overthrew several governments in a row only to see the police and military resume the same function again and again, each time relegitimized by the regime change; it turned out the problem was the infrastructure of policing itself, not a particular administration. In the Ukrainian revolution, when the police were successfully defeated, the same self-defense forces that had just routed them took over their role, performing it identically. Calls for “community self-policing” may sound innocuous, but we should recall the white vigilante groups that roamed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Policing, in practically every form we can imagine it, is bound to perpetuate racism and inequality. It would be better to talk about how to do away with the factors that give rise to our supposed need for it in the first place.

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In protests against the killing of Michael Brown, relegitimizing the police has taken the form of demands for police accountability, for citizens’ review boards, for police to wear cameras—as if more surveillance could possibly be a good thing for those too poor to survive within the law in the first place. It is naïve to present demands to authorities that regard the police as essential and see us as expendable. This can only reinforce their legitimacy and our passivity, fostering a class of go-betweens who build up personal power in return for defusing opposition. We should be grateful to the demonstrators in Ferguson who refused to be passive last night, rejecting representation and false dialogue at great personal risk, refusing to water down their rage.

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For the only possible way out of this mess is to develop the ability to wield power on our own terms, horizontally and autonomously, stripping the police of legitimacy and shattering the illusion that they are invincible. This has been the common thread between practically all the significant movements of the past several years. If we learn how to do this, we can set our own agenda, discouraging the authorities from taking the lives of young men like Michael Brown and opening up a space in which they cannot enforce the structural inequalities of a racist society. Until we do, we can be sure that the police will go on killing—and no prosecutor or grand jury will stop them.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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On August 19, ten days after police murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a slew of corporate media stories appeared charging that “criminals” and “outside agitators” were responsible for clashes during the protests. CNN alleged that “all sides agree there are a select number of people—distinct from the majority of protesters—who are fomenting violence,” quoting a State Highway Patrol Captain, a State Senator, and a former FBI assistant director to confirm this.

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Today’s militarized police understand that they are operating on two different battlefields at once: not only the battlefield of the streets, but also the battlefield of discourse. So long as most people remain passive, the police can harass, beat, arrest, and even kill people with impunity—certain people, anyway. But sometimes protests get “out of hand,” which is to say, they actually impact the authorities’ ability to keep the population under control. Then, without fail, police and politicians proceed to the second strategy in their playbook: they declare that they support the protesters and are there to defend their rights, but a few bad apples are spoiling the bunch. In this new narrative, the enemies of the protesters are not the police who are gassing and shooting people, but those who resist the police and their violence. When this strategy works, it enables the police to go back to harassing, beating, arresting, and killing people with impunity—certain people, anyway.

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Sure enough, a few hours after these articles about “criminals” and “outside agitators” appeared, the St. Louis police killed another man less than three miles from Ferguson. Here we see how defining people as “criminals” and “outsiders” is itself an act of violence, setting the stage for further violence. You can predict police behavior at protests with a fair degree of accuracy based on the rhetoric they deploy in advance to prepare the terrain.

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So when we hear them say “outside agitators,” we know the authorities are getting ready to spill blood. All the better, from their perspective, if people buy into this rhetoric and police themselves so no officer has to get his hands dirty. This is often called for in the name of avoiding violence, but self-policing returns us to the same passivity that enables police violence to occur in the first place. How many people would have even heard about Michael Brown if not for the “criminals” and “agitators” who brought his death to our attention? Self-policing also preserves the impression that we all choose this state of affairs of our own free will, reinforcing the impression that anyone who does not is an outsider.

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“All sides agree there are a select number of people—distinct from the majority of protesters—who are fomenting violence.” –CNN

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What is an “outside agitator,” anyway? Deploying the National Guard to a town of 21,000 people—isn’t that outside agitation? When Occupy Oakland was in the news in 2011, there was a lot of rhetoric about “outside agitators” coming to the city to start trouble with police, until it came to light that over 90% of Oakland cops lived outside of Oakland. Surely if anyone deserves to be labeled outside agitators—in Ferguson, Oakland, or any other community around the US—it is the authorities.

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But what about people who come from out of town to participate in protests? The CNN article claimed that “among those arrested are residents of Chicago, Brooklyn, Washington, San Francisco, Austin, Des Moines, and Huntsville, Alabama, according to jail records.”

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This might sound like convincing evidence to middle class readers. But anyone who has been poor and precarious knows that the permanent address you give when you are arrested may not be the same as the place you actually live. You might give a different address because you aren’t sure your current housing will last, because the landlord doesn’t know your place has more people in it than are named on the lease, or simply because you don’t want local vigilantes to know where to find you. Instead, you might give a more reliable long-term address, perhaps from another state.

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Still, let’s imagine that some of these arrestees who gave out-of-town addresses are in Ferguson for the very first time. Wouldn’t that make them outside agitators? Perhaps it would, if the issue was specific to Ferguson alone and they had no stake in it. But in “Chicago, Brooklyn, Washington, San Francisco, Austin, Des Moines, and Huntsville, Alabama” the police have killed black men under identical circumstances. The militarization, brutality, and systematic racism of the police are in effect all around the country, not just in Ferguson. When people are suffering the same forms of oppression everywhere, it makes sense for us to come to each other’s assistance, to make common cause.

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This is not outside agitation. It is solidarity.

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So long as we understand the problems we face individualistically, we will be powerless against them. Solidarity has always been the most important tool of the oppressed. This is why the authorities go to such lengths to demonize anyone who has the courage to take risks to support others. Throughout the civil rights struggles of the 20th century, participants who are celebrated as heroes today were tarred as “outside agitators.” The term has a long history on the tongues of racists and reactionaries.

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In this light, it is ironic, if not unexpected, that one of the corporate media stereotypes of the “outside agitator” is the “white anarchist”—as if all anarchists were white. It’s no longer considered decorous to call people race traitors, so the allegation is inverted: white people who fight alongside black and brown people must not have their best interests at heart, certainly not as much as the police and corporate media do. Although declaring oneself an anarchist does not magically free a white person of the racism that pervades our society, it is racist indeed to attribute all the unrest in Ferguson to “white anarchists,” denying the existence or agency of black and brown participants.

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This is the corporate media attempting to play a race card of its own, in order to create divisions between those who struggle against police brutality. It’s not surprising that the authorities would seek to create discord along racial lines—one of the chief reasons race was invented was to divide those who would otherwise have a common interest in overturning hierarchy.

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To emphasize this once more, we have to understand the deployment of rhetoric about “outside agitators” as a military operation intended to isolate and target an enemy: divide and conquer. The enemy that the authorities are aiming at is predominantly black and brown, but it is not just a specific social body; it is also an aspect of our humanity, a part of all of us. The ultimate goal of the police is not so much to brutalize and pacify specific individuals as it is to extract rebelliousness itself from the social fabric. They seek to externalize agitation, so anyone who stands up for herself will be seen as an outsider, as deviant and antisocial.

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This would be more likely to succeed if most people were integrated into comfortable places in their power structure. But the problem with their strategy, at this particular historical juncture, is that more and more of us are finding ourselves outside: outside a steady workplace, outside a recognized position of political legitimacy, outside the incentives that reward people for keeping quiet. We are finding ourselves outside, and finding each other. We are finding that it doesn’t make sense to go on being docile, that our only hope is to stake everything on fighting together for our collective survival rather than contending amongst ourselves for a place in the hierarchy.

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Next time, the authorities will be lucky if the disturbances are confined to a single town, so they can accuse those who go there of being outside agitators. The racism and police brutality for which Ferguson is now infamous are widespread. The next conflagration could spread everywhere, like Occupy did. Stop killing us, or else.

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This illustration is available in poster form from artist Corina Dross, to raise funds for arrestees in Ferguson.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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“I’m committed to making sure the forces of peace and justice prevail,” Missouri Governor Jay Nixon said in Ferguson on Saturday, August 16, after a week of conflicts sparked by the police murder of teenager Michael Brown. “If we’re going to achieve justice, we first must have and maintain peace.”

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Is that how it works—first you impose peace, then you achieve justice? And what does that mean, the forces of peace and justice? What kind of peace and justice are we talking about here?

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As everyone knows, if it weren’t for the riots in Ferguson, most people would never have heard about the murder of Michael Brown. White police officers kill hundreds of black men every year without most of us hearing anything about it. That silence—the absence of protest and disruption—is the peace which Governor Nixon wants us to believe will produce justice.

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This is the same narrative we always hear from the authorities. First, we must submit to their control; then they will address our concerns. All the problems we face, they insist, are caused by our refusal to cooperate. This argument sounds most persuasive when it is dressed up in the rhetoric of democracy: those are “our” laws we should shut up and obey—“our” cops who are shooting and gassing us—“our” politicians and leaders begging us to return to business as usual. But to return to business as usual is to step daintily over the bodies of countless Michael Browns, consigning them to the cemetery and oblivion.

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Governor Nixon’s peace is what happens after people have been forcefully pacified. His justice is whatever it takes to hoodwink us into accepting peace on those terms—petitions that go directly into the recycle bin, lawsuits that never produce more than a slap on the wrist for the killers in uniform, campaigns that may advance the career of an activist or politician but will never put an end to the killing of unarmed black men.

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Keeping the peace in Ferguson

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Permit us to propose another idea about how to address conflicts—what we might call the anarchist approach. The basic idea is straightforward enough. Real peace cannot be imposed; it can only emerge as a consequence of the resolution of conflict. Hence the classic chant: no justice, no peace.

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Left to itself, a state of imbalance tends to return to equilibrium. To maintain imbalances, you have to introduce force into the situation. The greater the disparities, the more force it takes to preserve them. This is as true in society as it is in physics.

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That means you can’t have rich people and poor people without police to impose that unequal relation to resources. You can’t have whiteness, which inflects and stabilizes that class divide, without a vast infrastructure of racist courts and prisons. You can’t keep two and a half million people—nearly a million of them black men—behind bars without the constant exertion of potentially lethal violence. You can’t enforce the laws that protect the wealth of good liberals like Governor Nixon without officers like Darren Wilson killing black men by the hundred.

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The militarization of the police is not an aberration—it is the necessary condition of a society based on hierarchy and domination. It is not just the police that have been militarized, but our entire way of life. Anyone who does not see this is not living on the business end of the guns. These are the forces of peace and justice, the mechanisms that “keep the peace” in a dramatically imbalanced social order.

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Sometimes they appear as surveillance cameras, security guards, police stopping and searching or shooting us. Other times, when that becomes too controversial, the forces of peace and justice reappear as the good cops who really seem to care about us, the earnest politicians who want to make everything better—whatever it takes to get public opinion back on the side of the ones who shoot the tear gas. Still other times, the forces of peace and justice are community leaders begging us to leave the streets, accusing us of being “outside agitators,” or promising some more effective outlet for our rage if only we will cooperate—anything to thwart, discredit, or defer immediate concrete struggle against injustice. In every case, it’s the same swindle: peace now, justice later.

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But real peace is impossible until we put an end to the violent imposition of inequalities. All the conflicts that are currently suppressed by the forces of order—between developers and residents, between rich and poor, between the racially privileged and everyone else—must be permitted to rise to the surface. Make it impossible for anyone to coerce anyone else into accepting a relationship that is not in her best interest: then, and only then, there will be an incentive for everyone to address conflicts and reach accord.

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This is the only way forward, but it’s a daunting prospect. It is not surprising that people often blame those who stand up for themselves rather than coming to terms with how deep the divisions in our society run. This explains why so many apparently well-meaning pundits have pretended not to understand why people would engage in looting as a form of protest against the murder of Michael Brown. The same constant imposition of force that took Michael Brown’s life separates millions like him from the resources they need on a daily basis. In this light, looting makes perfect sense—as a way of solving the immediate problems of poverty, of rebelling against the violence of the authorities, and of emphasizing that change has to be more thoroughgoing than mere police reform.

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Let us not resent those who get out of hand for reminding us of the conflicts that remain unresolved in our society. On the contrary, we should be grateful. They are not disturbing the peace; they are simply bringing to light that there never was any peace, there never was any justice in the first place. At tremendous risk to themselves, they are giving us a gift: a chance to recognize the suffering around us and to rediscover our capacity to identify and sympathize with those who experience it.

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For we can only experience tragedies such as the death of Michael Brown for what they are when we see other people responding to them as tragedies. Otherwise, unless the events touch us directly, we remain numb. If you want people to register an injustice, you have to react to it immediately, the way people did in Ferguson. You must not wait for some better moment, not plead with the authorities, not formulate a sound bite for some imagined audience representing public opinion. You must immediately proceed to action, showing that the situation is serious enough to warrant it.

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Ferguson is not unique—there are countless such towns across the United States, in which the same dynamics play out between police and people. The rebellion in Ferguson will surely not be the last of its kind. Those of us who don’t buy into Governor Nixon’s program of peace now, justice later must prepare ourselves for the struggles that are soon to unfold. May we meet one day in a world without tear gas, in which skin color is not a weapon.

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Appendix:
Struggles against the Police—A Reading List

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The conflict in Ferguson over the murder of Michael Brown is only the most recent of many such uprisings around the US. This is an incomplete review of firsthand accounts and analyses of the previous precedents for struggles against policing.

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Los Angeles, CA (April 1992) No We Can’t All Just Get Along: Hip Hop, Gang Unity and the LA Rebellion & From Passive to Active Spectacle: Afterimages of the LA Riots
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Cincinnati, OH (April 2001) How Fast It All Blows Up
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Oakland, CA (January 2009) Unfinished Acts: The Context, Conflicts, and Consequences of the 2009 Oakland Rebellions
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Seattle, WA (January to March 2011) Burning the Bridges They Are Building: Anarchist Strategies Against the Police in the Puget Sound, Winter 2011
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Atlanta, GA (October 2011 to March 2012) Don’t Die Wondering: Atlanta Against the Police Winter 2011–2012
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Anaheim, CA (July 2012) The Anaheim Anti-Police Riot, A Love Story
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Brooklyn, NY (March 2013) The Flatbush Rebellion
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Durham, NC (November 2013 to January 2014) Unforgiving and Inconsolable: Durham Against the Police
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…Finally, from participants in the events in Ferguson, we recommend An Eye for an Eye Makes Our Masters Blind: One Account of Last Night’s Anti-Police Riot and Let Us Not Become Police, Let Us Not Become Sheep.
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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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With just a few days left before the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, we conducted an interview with our comrades in São Paulo about the demonstrations that are unfolding. In a wave of unrest emerging on the heels of last year’s riots against proposed transportation fare hikes, thousands are once again flooding the streets and clashing with police in hopes of disrupting the games. We anticipate more unrest in the coming weeks.

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What is your analysis of the situation surrounding the World Cup? Why are so many Brazilians opposed to it?

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There are many reasons to oppose the World Cup in Brazil. Since 2007, popular committees like the Comitê Popular da Copa have been organizing protests and campaigns against the social costs of the World Cup, with the participation of many anarchists.

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First of all, 250,000 people have already lost their houses in the cities that will host the games, without a fair repayment and under operations reminiscent of what the former Nazi government did with Jews, immigrants, and others: they painted a number on their doors one day, and evicted them the next. Those people were forced to sign papers accepting these bad conditions, or else lose everything with no hope of repayment at all.

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Second, there are thousands of workers who earn a living from informal work on the streets, and they will be forbidden to work inside the FIFA-imposed perimeter during the days of the games. This perimeter extends for two miles around the stadiums and the area of the Fan Fests, where the games will be shown on the streets via giant screens. In addition, prosecution will target those who sell products that FIFA has been given a monopoly over, such as the products of sponsors.

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The families of the ten workers who died during the construction of the stadiums are also waiting for reparations.

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Alongside all this, FIFA is imposing a state inside of the Brazilian state. The whole population can see how corruption is increasing with these structures for the mega-events, while our lives are being destroyed. In 2007, the government said that no public money would be used, yet we have seen approximately $4 billion spent on infrastructure to host the games. That includes mega-stadiums and roads, and lots of other buildings that won’t even be finished for the games and will not be useful in the future, while hospitals, schools, public transportation, and work remain precarious for most of the population. Strikes are taking place everywhere in a way we have not seen in a long time, including teachers, students, bus drivers, and subway workers.

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Nor have the other struggles in Brazil disappeared. The homeless movements, indigenous resistance, the black and women’s movements, and LGBTTT organizations are all getting some attention now, fighting for their rights and intensifying their struggles. The MTST, a big movement for housing in São Paulo, organized an occupation with a thousand families, including those who lost their houses because of the World Cup, near the Itaquera Stadium where the first match will take place.

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Indigenous protesters clashing with police in Brasilia, May 2014. One officer was shot in the leg with an arrow; the ceremony to open the exhibition of the World Cup trophy was cancelled.

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The expected profit for FIFA in Brazil is greater than the last two World Cups put together. To ensure this, state repression has increased against social movements and all manifestations of dissent—criminalizing strikes and demonstrations that block the street, persecuting leaders and collectives, attempting to pass anti-terror laws and other oppressive measures. They are using vague terms that leave a great deal of room for interpretation to the courts. For now, nobody knows exactly what is a crime or what can land you in prison during a demonstration or mobilization. During the games, there will be a state of exception and special courts to condemn people.

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Another $1 billion has been spent on training and weapons to repress demonstrations. Israel is providing training to the police and the army, and is selling drones and other anti-riot weapons and devices. The military police are being trained by the French police as well as the former American mercenary company, Blackwater [which has changed its named to Academi]. Rumors that the huge organized criminal groups in Brazil want to repeat the actions of 2006, when they brought all of São Paulo to a halt, are being used to justify these operations.

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All the police forces and the army are working together in a way we have never seen before. Probably the biggest legacy of the World Cup will be the growth of state apparatuses for governance and repression. These apparatuses will keep this country a perfect place to exploit cheap labor and resources while a growing economy grants enormous profits to international Capital.

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Military police fire tear gas at demonstrations near Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro on June 30, 2013.

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Yes, they are related. First, because many of the movements, collectives, and autonomous militants that composed the struggle against the fare hikes are involved directly or indirectly with the uprisings against the World Cup. Second, and maybe most importantly, they are related because they question a project of a society based on the logic of capital. Remember, the fare hikes were attempted in a country that has one of the most expensive public transportation fees of the world, relatively speaking (consuming approximately a third of the average household income), and a very precarious, overcrowded transportation system owned by a small group of businessman. This is a place where the urban fabric nearly collapsed due to lack of planning, where public space is being hijacked by the private sector, where roads and highways are controlled by the automobile industry, where the distribution of the city geography is dictated by real estate speculation.

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In this scenario, the fare increase was much more then 20 cents: the hike would interfere directly in the mobility of people and, in a city like São Paulo which has 28 million people, it became an issue of depriving the population of basic rights such as school, health care, or home ownership. With that context in view, we can see that when an international company such as FIFA puts on a huge enterprise such as the World Cup, the whole country is submitted to the same immiseration as the fare hikes would produce. This is a matter of the privatization of the public sphere with the collaboration of the local government.

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Demonstrators attack a Caixa bank during a protest against the World Cup in São Paulo, January 2014.

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The World Cup is not going to start on June 12. The World Cup already started in 2007, when Brazil was officially given the responsibility of hosting this massive capitalist spectacle. From that moment, people were being evicted from their homes in order to build stadiums and infrastructure for the Cup, workers were having their activities restricted by the government, and so on. This is the reality of the Cup for the poor and peripheral. These same people are not going to be able to go to the stadium to watch the matches, because the cheapest tickets cost more than the monthly minimum wage. In that sense, the Cup is a classist spectacle that the poor are not only unable to see, but they also must pay for.

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So these struggles are related in the sense that they both confront a development project that has no place for the majority of the country’s population. And, not by coincidence, they both encounter the very same response from the state: the brutality of its police and army.

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Demonstrations against the World Cup in São Paulo, January 2014.

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The Black Bloc is all over the news again. Are these actions bigger than in previous years? Are there other tactics that have spread in Brazil?

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Black Bloc tactics are not really on the news right now as much as they were in the months following the victory against the fare hikes. They are still occurring on the street, albeit on a much smaller scale and without much coordination. But they remain a target of the state and the media; the Black Bloc appears on the news as a “threatening organization” that is being investigated as a terrorist group. This is probably because the authorities fear that this reaction to (and intolerance of) state violence can spread. The police are looking for the origins of the black blocs, trying to find out who these people are, collecting information about those detained at demonstrations and from others who leave traces on the internet. They are performing a big lawsuit as if the black bloc were a national criminal organization. What bullshit.

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But there are many people who have been introduced to radical thoughts and tactics for the first time through the black blocs in last year’s demonstrations. Consequently, many of them act without any other anarchist background, as if they were a movement, with “official” Facebook pages, calling demonstrations by themselves. This can facilitate the pigs’ work of finding and identifying them. Also, we can see some of them acting as if their tactics are the best on all the earth, that they should always be used no matter how or when, and not trying to engage in dialog with the other movements that call for demonstrations. So these people sometimes act in a way that ruins the original plan for a march route, or that exposes others to more risks rather than protecting them—such as barricading other people into the same corner with the police, saving their own asses while others are trapped. Unfortunately, some other movements are avoiding them, and sometimes avoiding everybody with black or black and red flags. This is a moment to rethink the way these tactics should be used. But it is difficult for other anarchists to create dialog with this new generation. Maybe only experience will show us solutions.

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Black Bloc protesters supporting the teachers’ strike in Rio de Janeiro, fall 2013.

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Demonstrators damage turnstiles during protests against the transportation fare increase.

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Have the uprisings that followed last year’s Brazilian protests in Bosnia, Turkey (again), Ukraine, Thailand, Taiwan, or anywhere else influenced the struggle against the World Cup? And have the nationalists who caused so much trouble in the movement against the fare hikes returned to the protests in Brazil?

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After the uprising in Turkey, we haven’t seen any other social mobilizations being particularly influential on the struggles here. None of these other movements have been discussed in the debates here.

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Fortunately, middle class liberals and nationalists haven’t found a reason to come into the streets again. We saw only one attempt to recreate a march for “Family, God, and Property”—a reenactment of an event that took place during the dictatorship—but it was a true failure. But it is possible to feel that this tension with the nationalists persists. Recent events—including people publicly beating accused thieves or even locking them to posts, and lynchings that had the support of some journalists and authorities, usually against black and poor people—have showed that Brazil hides a monster that can emerge at any time.

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The favelas have been severely affected by the development plans leading up to the World Cup. There have been evictions and raids and some deaths. How have people responded to this repression?

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In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, we have witnessed the most offensive operations since 2009 by the UPP’s—the Pacification Police Unit, a project that has the objective of seizing control of the favelas where the only state institution present is the police. This is like a new conquest of the West, with the excuse of “fighting the drug market,” in which private capital supports this operation in order to explore the potential of these communities that until now use resources and services beyond the control and taxation of the state. Resistance to these operations has been strong, and these units are always attacked, particularly after the police commit murders.

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We see this “molecularization” of organized revolt when these frequent murders are followed by huge riots. In São Paulo, in January there was at least one bus burned every day in protests against police brutality or for better life conditions in the poor neighborhoods. This is even taking place in small cities like Paty dos Alferes, where all the police stations were burned and all the police were attacked by crowds after a girl died during an arrest.

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Conflicts with the police in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, April 2014.

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After the uprising in Brazil during winter of June 2013, we already knew that other fights were about to take place against the World Cup. So during the rest of 2013, we saw radical tactics and also radical organizing taking place in all the struggles in which anarchists could be involved. We witnessed new occupations by the homeless movements, including buildings with hundreds of families. But we didn’t obtain any new spaces for anarchist projects, and anarchist squats and social centers are very rare in Brazil. The few that exist are threatened by serious repression.

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At the same time, some of these spaces and collectives saw a huge groundswell of popular interest in participating in debates, organizing, study groups, and other forms of anarchist activity. It was good to see that people realize that the struggles of 2013 emerged from an anarchist tradition and experiences from the anti-globalization movements of the preceding 15 years.

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We should return to this question again after this new June, this new winter to come; we will see where we will be after that. But in this moment, it is important to test our abilities and the connections we can make. In this context, being in contact and sharing knowledge and support around the world is very important. Thanks a lot for this conversation.

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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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We have heard terrifying stories from the revolution in Ukraine: anarchists participating in anti-government street-fighting behind nationalist banners, anarchist slogans and historical figures appropriated by fascists, a dystopia in which familiar movements and strategies reappear with our enemies at the helm.

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This text is a clumsy first attempt to identify the important questions for anarchists elsewhere around the world to discuss in the wake of the events in Ukraine. We present it humbly, acknowledging that our information is limited, hoping that others will correct our errors and improve on our analysis. It has been difficult to maintain contact with comrades in the thick of things; surely it is frustrating to be peppered with ill-informed questions amid the tragedies of civil war.

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What is happening in Ukraine and Venezuela appears to be a reactionary counterattack within the space of social movements. This may be a sign of worse things to come—we can imagine a future of rival fascisms, in which the possibility of a struggle for real liberation becomes completely invisible. Here follow our hypotheses and an English-language reading list on for those who are still catching up.

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In each of the previous examples, initial police repression caused a single-issue protest to metastasize into a generalized uprising, transforming a square in the heart of the capital into a fiercely defended urban autonomous zone. This seemed to offer a new political model, in which people cohere around tactics rather than parties or ideologies. (It is telling indeed that Occupy was named for a tactic rather than a goal.) All these revolts could be broadly interpreted as reactions to the consequences of capitalism, though anti-austerity proved too narrow a frame: Turkey and Brazil saw protests over the effects of ascendant economies, not recessions. In any case, the majority of the participants have not described these movements as anarchist or anti-capitalist, framing them simply as grievances with specific governments and economic policies.

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When photos began to circulate of the protests in Kiev, it’s not surprising that many in the English-speaking world assumed approvingly that these were part of the same phenomenon. Once again people were criticizing the government, occupying a central square, fighting the police. The specific organizers and demands had always seemed incidental—whether it was ¡Democracia Real YA! or Adbusters, the departure of a dictator or canceling a fare increase, we assumed that the important thing was the antagonism these upheavals facilitated against state control.

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Occupy goes to hell.

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Then we read in horror that nationalists and fascists were at the forefront of the confrontations and dominated parts of the organizing. Many reacted by disclaiming any connection, concluding that the events in Ukraine were simply a fake revolution funded and orchestrated from above.

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But all the secretive manipulation in the world wouldn’t suffice to generate uprisings where there is no popular discontent. Comrades in Ukraine have emphasized that the revolution was produced by a genuine grassroots social movement, not only a far-right putsch fostered by capitalist interests. Anarchists in Venezuela have said the same about the protests occurring there, in which right-wing politicians have seized the opportunity to mobilize against the socialist government. In both of these countries, reactionary forces are taking advantage of the same popular ferment that anarchists considered so promising elsewhere.

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In fact, there have been signs of this possibility all along. In 2011, Greek flags suggested the presence of nationalists in Syntagma Square in Athens; fully-armed militia members showed up to Occupy Phoenix in Arizona. Frustration with the government and the economy do not automatically suggest anti-state and anti-capitalist solutions. In Ukraine, caught between Russian colonialism and “corruption” on one side and European Union neoliberalism on the other, nationalist movements make more intuitive sense to many people than a movement to abolish nations.

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Are they an image from the future?

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A few years ago, it was possible to hope that the coming insurrections would be a naturally fertile ground for anarchist resistance. Now it is clear that, although anarchists can find new affinities within them, nationalists can capitalize upon them just as easily. This may be an inherent problem with movements that cohere around tactics, and it poses serious strategic questions to anarchists. Would we have done anything differently in 2011 had we known that we were developing a protest model that fascists could appropriate wholesale?

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What had been a purely symbolic conflict over space with Occupy became full-on paramilitary urban warfare in Ukraine. By taking the front lines in confronting the authorities, nationalists and fascists have won themselves legitimacy as “defenders of the people” that will serve them for many years to come. Surely fascists around the world have been watching, and will be emboldened to try the same thing elsewhere when the opportunity arises. Fascists, too, are plugged into a global imaginary; we ignore this at our peril.

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But it is not simply a question of fascists emboldening other fascists. The real danger is that the popular imagination about what it means to resist will become militarized—that those who wish to be “effective” will conclude that, like the Ukrainian rebels, they should form hundred-person fighting units with a strict hierarchy of command. We are not opposed to armed confrontation, of course—as we have argued elsewhere, it is essential for any social movement aimed at liberation to be able to push back against the police, and this is rarely pretty in practice. But different formats for confrontation encode different power relations and forms of social change within them. The model we have seen in Kiev 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.

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The professionalization of rioting.

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The other edge of this sword is that, if burning barricades are branded “fascist,” those who oppose fascism will avoid building them for fear of being misunderstood. We can imagine both fascists and pacifists wishing to promote this misunderstanding. Yet it would not be wise to cede barricade-building to fascists in a time of escalating upheaval.

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All this serves to remind us that 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.

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The movement in Ukraine is not the only one to occur in Eastern Europe; it’s just the most spectacular. It was preceded by tremors in Slovenia, Bulgaria, and elsewhere; more recently, Bosnia erupted, though thankfully most of the participants there explicitly disavowed nationalism. Barring world revolution, the crises inflicted by capitalism will continue to provoke social unrest until the emergence of some massive new mechanism of control or appeasement.

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In a globalized world, state structures are forced to impose and perpetuate these crises, but are increasingly powerless to mitigate the effects. This makes the state a sort of hot potato; any party holds the reins at its own risk, as Morsi’s downfall showed in Egypt. On the other hand, in moments of crisis, whoever is capable of effective action against the repressive forces of the state will accumulate popular credibility. This is how our present era is anarchist even where fascists are concerned.

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In the case of the Ukrainian revolution, this means that the right-wing Svoboda party could lose their credibility as victory forces them to become the shock troops of neoliberal reform, whereas the more extreme Right Sector could come out ahead, having set a precedent in the streets regardless of how Ukrainians vote in the next election.

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Beneath the paving stones, the counterrevolution.

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If the state is a hot potato, it follows that the most important conflicts play out between the antagonists of existing states, not just between them and the state itself. Identifying ourselves, via word or deed, merely as antagonists is not clear enough when we are not the only antagonists of the ruling powers. Our opposition to all hierarchy and domination must be communicated in everything we say and do; otherwise, we risk bolstering a reactionary opposition. Pursuing escalation for its own sake won’t necessarily communicate our politics, nor open a path to liberation; it could even equip our enemies to do the opposite. But avoiding escalation will have even worse consequences.

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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. No, we should be there with all we’ve got—for what is at stake in each struggle is never just a single issue, but rather the spirit of opposition itself. We have to be in the front lines if we wish to set the terms of engagement and determine the narrative. For anarchists, that does not mean forming paramilitary organizations, but rather offering points (in space, tactics, and discourse) around which much larger social bodies can cohere according to a logic that challenges both the state and its authoritarian opponents.

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We fear that many of our potential comrades will respond to the news from Ukraine by avoiding future confrontations—effectively siding with the preservers of the status quo and leaving the field of struggle to authoritarians. On the contrary, the events in Kiev show what that path leads to.

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As far as we can tell from reading the reports, anarchists and others who had avoided the demonstrations were compelled to get involved after all when the stakes were raised to dictatorship or revolution. But at that point, the front lines were dominated by fascists, who attacked anarchists and feminists when they tried to organize under their own banners. So anarchists had to participate on others’ terms, and their contributions may have strengthened a movement from which fascists are deriving new power.

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The worst-case scenario.

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Of course, different crises offer different opportunities, and Ukraine was a worst-case scenario from the beginning: relatively small anarchist and anti-fascist movements, entrenched nationalist traditions and organizations, and the situation of being torn between authoritarian Russia and the neoliberal European Union. Even if a powerful anarchist movement capable of self-defense had been prepared to show up to the Euromaidan protests from day one, what position could anarchists have taken on the question of trade with the EU without opportunistically violating their principles or gratuitously alienating the rest of the protesters? (To be fair, we have read that Right Sector does not endorse integration into the European Union, either.) If nothing else, this situation drives home the importance of initiating contagious responses to today’s crises on our own terms wherever possible, before history beats us to the punch.

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We are not faulting our Ukrainian comrades for how things have turned out. They are doing their best against incredible odds. Rather, we need to understand what has happened in Ukraine so we can be prepared before the next situation like this arises.

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If we understand the Ukrainian revolution as part of the same wave of protest that overthrew several governments in North Africa, the tremendous impact of this phenomenon on global politics becomes clear. It is no trivial matter to bring Russia to the brink of war with a nation of 45 million. A variety of capitalists and state actors must be evaluating these protest movements as a way to pursue politics by other means. As more resources flow into the hands of reactionary participants in social struggles, we will likely see more developments like those in Ukraine and Venezuela.

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Likewise, powerful governments will not stand by and let common people get a taste for overthrowing them. They will be pressed to intervene, as Russia has in Ukraine, in hopes that war can trump insurrection. War is a way of shutting down possibilities—of changing the subject. It is a risky business, however—it can help governments to consolidate their power, but history shows that it can also destabilize them.

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War supplants participatory insurrection with the spectacle of professionalized violence, sidelining the general population.

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With war looming, even the limits of violent nationalism become obvious. Mere protest militancy is worthless in the face of the Russian military; only contagious disobedience could serve to even the odds when a social movement does battle with a superpower. This is the one thing anarchist opposition to the state has going for it today: in a globalized world, all insurrections must ultimately become international or perish.

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And as long as capitalism produces crises, there are bound to be insurrections.

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Strategies for the
Worst-Case Scenario

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From this great distance, we have struggled to understand what different strategies Ukrainian anarchists and anti-fascists have employed to make the best of this situation, and what conclusions they have drawn about their effectiveness. We would be grateful to hear more from Ukrainian comrades about this.

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We have read about some supposed anarchists and anti-fascists, including the group Narodniy Nabat (“People’s Bell”) and football fans associated with Arsenal-Kiev, who have tried to work alongside nationalist groups in hopes of influencing them or at least getting access to the same public. Such alliances of convenience strike us as a dangerous mistake; the weaker ally is more likely to absorb the logic of the stronger, and to strengthen the position of the stronger ally rather than their own. Though we have heard contradictory assertions about whether groups like “Autonomous Resistance” qualify as nationalists or fascists in the conventional sense, it is clear enough from their gender politics that they are not comrades.

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Familiar slogans in ominous company.

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At the same time, we agree with one Ukrainian syndicalist that standing aside completely in such contexts can only strengthen the state, and that it is inappropriate to justify this on anti-fascist grounds when there are fascists on both sides of the conflict.

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We have read some Ukrainian comrades arguing for the establishment of a separate front of struggle outside the Maidan occupation. As a long-term strategy, this seems sound. But it seems to us that opening another front shouldn’t mean simply falling back on what is familiar—the forms of protest and labor organizing that have been less and less effective over the past century. We doubt that the strategy of workplace organizing will be any more effective in Ukraine than it has been elsewhere around the world since the triumph of capitalist globalization; workers in revolt are increasingly finding one another in the streets, not the workplace. Presumably, the Euromaidan protests have been so successful in part because they are contemporary in the same way that Occupy was: rather than starting from the increasingly unstable foundation of the workplace (or the marginality of subculture), they contested the center of society—literally in urban space, figuratively in political discourse. Any attempt to establish a second front should study what made Euromaidan such an important front in the first place.

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Finally, we have heard rumors about anti-fascists who were able to keep fascists out of the protests in Kharkiv. This sounded promising until the newspapers reported that Viktor Yanukovych had fled to Kharkiv—if anti-fascists were able to keep fascists out of the movement only in the parts of Ukraine in which the movement was too small to threaten the government, that is not particularly good news. We await more updates from Kharkiv; it will be especially interesting to hear how anti-fascists are interacting with pro-Russian demonstrators there now.

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Grim vistas ahead. Keep your heads up, dear friends.

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Reading List:

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Some English-Language Sources

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Ukraine: A Harsh Antifascist Confrontation Awaits Us—About nationalist violence and cooptation directed at anarchists and antifascists
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An Interview with Mira, Andrei, and Sascha of Antifascist Action Ukraine—More background on fascist activity in the movement and attacks on anarchists
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Maidan and Its Contradictions: An Interview with a Ukrainian Revolutionary Syndicalist—One of the most detailed sources of anti-authoritarian perspective on these events we’ve been able to find in English
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Ukrainian Anarchist Dispels Myths Surrounding Euromaidan Protests, Warns of Fascist Influence—Transcript of an in-depth radio interview on The Final Straw with a member of the Autonomous Workers’ Union, some weeks before the climax of the protests
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Euromaidan: A Revolution between the Political Right and the Left—This is not written by comrades, but it offers some interesting background on the relations between the different far-right groups and the left-wing “Narodniy Nabat” (People’s Bell) group that has chosen to fight alongside them; scroll down for English
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The Ukrainian Euromaidan: The Solution to Putin, or Just Another Fascist Political Coup?—Thorough background on the statist and fascist interests involved in the Euromaidan protests
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Ukraine Riots: “Involuntary Ejaculation of Fire”—An analysis of the causes behind the street confrontations in Kiev in January, 2014
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Fifty Shades of Brown—Thoughts on the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime from the Autonomous Workers Union
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Lviv 19–21 February 2014—A personal narrative about the developments in Lviv
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Readers may also want to consult our recent interview with a member of Kiev’s Autonomous Workers’ Union and our older article about nationalism and behind-the-scenes manipulation of social movements in Serbia: Fake Revolutions, Real Struggles.
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Meanwhile, in Venezuela

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An interview with Venezuelan anarchists about the protests of 2014, in English translation
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CrimethInc. is an anonymous network of anarchists and insurgents, a desperate measure against quantification and computation, a flaming hearse for the hierarchies of our age.

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Does Trump Represent Fascism or White Supremacy?

Fascism is Obsolete, Whiteness is Here to Stay

Different Global Futures

Why the Left Shares the Blame

Battle for Sacred Ground

Report Back from the

The Battle

Riot on the Prairie

Aftermath

Considerations for Solidarity

To Learn More

After the Election, the Reaction

Trump le Monde

The Price of Defeat

The Reaction to Come

Further Reading

The Secret Is to Begin

Getting StartedFurther ResourcesFrequently Asked Questions

Getting Started

Further Resources

General Inquiry

Critique

Celebration

Action

Frequently Asked Questions about Anarchism

What about human nature? Don’t we need laws and police and other authoritarian institutions to protect us from people with ill intent?

So what would you do about people who only care about themselves, who are willing to do anything to others for their own benefit?

If there were no government, what would you do if a gang were terrorizing your community?

But in spaces where government has broken down, like Somalia or Camden, New Jersey, we often see incredible violence.

What about the tragedy of the commons?

Isn’t equality impossible, except equality before the law?

But if we overthrow the government without offering something to take its place, what’s to stop something really nasty from filling the power vacuum?

A society without government might work on a small scale, but we live in a globalized world with a population of billions.

But why call yourself an anarchist? Doesn’t that just alienate people?

It’s all right to protest peacefully, as long as you don’t do anything violent.

Do you really think you can make a difference?

But isn’t this utopian? Isn’t it better to be practical?

El Secreto es Empezar

EmpezandoPreguntas comunessobre el anarquismo

Empezando

Preguntas comunes sobre el anarquismo

¿Pero, y la naturaleza humana? ¿No necesitamos leyes, policía, y otras instituciones y autoridades que nos protejan de las personas con malas intenciones?

Entonces, ¿qué harías con las personas que sólo se preocupan por sí mismxs, con aquellxs que están dispuestxs a hacerle cualquier cosa a lxs demás con tal de obtener un beneficio personal?

Si no hubiera ningún gobierno, ¿qué harías si algún grupo aterrorizara a tu comunidad?

Pero en lugares donde el gobierno ha caído, como en Somalia o Camden, New Jersey a menudo vemos una violencia increíble.

Qué pasa con la tragedia de los comunes?

¿No es la igualdad algo imposible, exceptuando la igualdad ante la ley?

Pero si derrocamos al gobierno sin ofrecer ninguna alternativa para sustituirlo, ¿qué podríamos hacer para impedir que algo realmente malo trate de llenar ese vacío de poder?

Una sociedad sin gobierno podría funcionar a pequeña escala. El problema es que vivimos en un mundo globalizado con una población de miles de millones.

¿Porque te autodenominas anarquista? ¿Con eso no logras sólo alejar a las personas?

No hay problema con protestar pacíficamente, siempre y cuando no hagas nada violento.

¿De verdad crees que puedes hacer la diferencia?

¿Pero no es eso utópico? ¿No es mejor ser prácticxs?

Born in Flames,Died in Plenums

The Bosnian Experiment with Direct Democracy, 2014

The Plenum vs. the Street

Institutions vs. Tools

Presenting Demands vs. Building a Common Language of Struggle

Government vs. Self-Organization

Democracy vs. Freedom

Further Reading and Viewing

“Gotovo je!”

Reflections on Direct Democracy in Slovenia

Occupations and the Democracy of Direct Action

The Limitations of Assemblies in the Student Movement

Building Institutions or Opening up Space?

Against and Beyond (Direct) Democracy

From Democracy To Freedom

What Is Democracy?

Common denominators of democracy: a way of determining who participates in making decisions(demos) a way of enforcing decisions(kratos) a space of legitimate decision-making(polis) and the resources that sustain it(oikos)

Monopolizing Legitimacy

The Original Democracy

Representative Democracy—A Market for Power

Direct Democracy: Government without the State?

Destination Anarchy!

Every Step Is an Obstacle

Destination:Anarchy.Everystepisanobstacle.

From 15M to Podemos

The Regeneration of Spanish Democracy and the Maligned Promise of Chaos

I. Emergence

Getting Started
Further Resources
Frequently Asked Questions

Empezando
Preguntas comunes
sobre el anarquismo

Born in Flames,
Died in Plenums

Common denominators of democracy:

a way of determining who participates in making decisions
(demos)

a way of enforcing decisions
(kratos)

a space of legitimate decision-making
(polis)

and the resources that sustain it
(oikos)

Destination:
Anarchy.
Every
step
is
an
obstacle.

Beyond Politics,
Beyond Democracy

The
French
9/11