![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/2.jpg\")
A memorial at the site where Carlo Giuliani was killed, not long after his death.
\nOn July 20, 2001, at the peak of the movement against capitalist globalization, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Genoa, Italy to oppose the summit of the eight most powerful governments in the world—the G8. During the massive demonstrations that ensued, a police officer named Mario Placanica shot and killed a 23-year-old demonstrator named Carlo Giuliani.
\n\nThe following text was written by Tomas Rothaus, a fellow participant in the battle of Genoa.
\n\n A memorial at the site where Carlo Giuliani was killed, not long after his death.
\n\n\n\nIf we are speaking seriously of revolution, then we need to take a serious look at history and see what the consequences are, not only if we fail, but even if we are triumphant. Revolutions mean blood, death, and suffering. If we are not willing to accept this, then we should not be calling for them.
\n\n—“The Lessons of Genoa.” Barricada #8. Summer/September 2001
\n
I wrote those words once upon a time, Carlo, when your blood was still fresh on the pavement and your name still in every newspaper and on every television. I published them in our anarchist journal, Barricada, and I continue to stand by them. But please don’t misunderstand them. I’m sorry you’re gone and I experience your death as a tragedy. I think about you to this day more than you could imagine. Hopefully, I’m not alone in that regard.
\n\nFor years and years, as long as I could, I made sure that every July 20, we directed the rage that we carried for you in our hearts against our enemies. In the random cities of whatever country I happened to find myself in, we made sure that Molotov cocktails lit up the night, that it rained stones in the dark against banks, that we ambushed cop cars, that we etched your name upon the walls of Boston, Goettingen, Paris, Berlin. Sometimes, to celebrate your life and not your death (as well as to throw off the cops), we chose to avenge you on your birthday, March 14, rather than the day of your death.
\n\nToday, decades after that 20th of July of 2001, I’m often reminded of you in the most unexpected ways. I’ll see a person in their forties. Decently dressed, tidy, maybe wearing a business suit or some kind of work uniform. A human just old enough to look worn from the inevitable stresses of life, love, and labor, but young enough that their youthfulness still shines through from behind the five o’clock shadow and incipient beer belly. Because when I see this random person, any random person, who is about the age you would be today, I’m reminded of the day when the cop’s bullet took away your life—and your future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/3.jpg\")
\nI’m not as outraged by your death as I am by all the life you were robbed of.
\n\nWe had an affinity in battle, and it was only fate that put you in that particular battle, on that particular plaza—the one my friends and I happened to not be at. The one time on that particular day that the police aimed their bullets not at the sky, but at the head of a human being. Your head.
\n\nFrom what I’m told, if we had lived in the same city, chances are good we wouldn’t have gotten along very well. I’m told you were one of Genoa’s punkabbestia, which (from what I understand) is like the chaos punks or street punks we had in my cities. Not particularly organized, sometimes dropping in on political meetings but definitely not an activist, militant, or any kind of cadre. The Tute Bianche, whose words to this day I’m obviously still reluctant to take at face value, called you “not particularly political.” They said that you used to spend your time at the Piazza Delle Erbe, where you would “beg and hang out with friends and stray dogs.” All of which I have nothing against—but we all know that the street punks and the obsessive young orthodox anarchists often didn’t get along very well.
\n\nNone of that matters, though. What matters is that they froze you in time. You will forever be a young street punk, if that’s indeed what you were, robbed of the opportunity to do whatever it is that brought you joy and made you feel whole as a person in the years and decades that should have still been left in your life. Maybe your youthful rebellion would have eventually faded, you would have finished your university studies, gotten a degree, moved on, and looked back with disdain at your days on the streets as a rebel and an outcast. Or maybe you would have looked at them with wistful nostalgia, as a healthy chapter you went through in your life before assimilating, getting a good union job thanks to your dad’s connections, starting a family, and throwing a coin toward the next generation of punkabbestia as you passed them on the streets that used to be yours. Or, who knows, maybe you would have become an old punk, graying but still free, dog at your side, panhandling on the streets of Genoa to this very day.
\n\nBut you were robbed of a future, so you will never be any of those things. You won’t betray us, you won’t move on, you won’t walk among us. And, even if my adventures hadn’t exiled me from Europe and I could find myself in Genoa once more, we’ll never reminisce together about that hot, sunny summer day when you could have gone to the beach but instead, outraged at the police invasion of your home, joined us in battle.
\n\nYou’ll never have a chance to move on, regret your choices, denounce the excesses of your youth, or spend your entire life staying true to them. You’ll forever be, as your best friend Daniele remembered you just a few days after your death,
\n\n\n\n\n“someone who had that evil inside, the one that is here in the air, that we all have. He didn’t fit in the society, in the system. He suffered a lot, and since he was more sensitive than us, more generous and kinder, he was also more fragile.”
\n
Forever a twenty-three-year-old, just a few short years beyond a teenager, looking at us through an aging photo, or reminding me of the brutal price of rebellion as the picture of you lying in a pool of blood flashes constantly in my head.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/8.jpg\")
\nJust as I’m outraged that you were robbed of whatever future you were yet to choose, I’m alarmed as I see your memory fading in time from the collective consciousness of those who came after you. I don’t even know why I’m addressing you in a letter. I don’t believe in the afterlife, and I doubt you did either. Maybe it’s my desperate way of grasping at a sense of control over what seems inevitable: that time eventually devours us all. That, while the circumstances may be different, both death as well as the passage of time will one day come after me just as they came for you. Still—and here I assume we’re also similar in spirit—just because it’s inevitable doesn’t mean it’s going to stop me from trying to prevent it.
\n\nYet many years have passed, Carlo, and I’ve had to lay down my weapons as well. So, since I can no longer do my part to keep your memory alive with action, here we are: a godless anarchist writing a letter to a dead street punk. Hoping others will read it and inquire about you, and about the conditions, dreams, and adventures that led to the rising tide of our movement, and the wave that swept your life with it that day. It’s the only useful weapon I can find in my arsenal today to fight the idea that you will be forgotten, just a footnote in a distant clash of a long-forgotten movement. Your face, your hopes, your dreams, and eventually your name just fading into the history books.
\n\nWe’ve been fighting the battle for your memory since the day you were killed. We’ve tried our best to be fair to it. To not assign you roles or aspirations you might have rejected. But it hasn’t been easy, and I apologize if we didn’t represent you as you would have liked. In Barricada, we boldly and without hesitation branded you an anarchist, never knowing if you identified with the word. In our defense, you can’t imagine what those hours, days, weeks, and months after you died were like.
\n\nThere were some among us, well-intentioned but misguided, who hallucinated you into an organized anarchist militant. A frontline fighter of the black bloc. They wanted to turn you into a willing martyr who gladly laid down his life for the cause. But I know you didn’t choose this, because you were close to not even showing up that day. More importantly, because none of us do. Unlike fascists, we celebrate life, not death.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/5.jpg\")
“Carlo lives—it is you who are dead.”
\nThen there were the pacifists and the reformists. These days, I try to steer clear of the hyperbolic anarchist sectarian language of my youth, but when I remember them—their actions and their words when talking about you—it comes roaring back. If you could have seen the crocodile tears of the scum of that movement! They invoked your name, pretended to hold high your memory—but they celebrated and remembered you only because you died. Those of us who acted with you, like you, who were your comrades on that day but whom fate didn’t place in the way of a cop’s bullet that afternoon in Plaza Alimonda—they denounced us. They said we were responsible for the violence, that we had brought the rage of the state upon the good demonstrators. That indirectly, we were the ones who were responsible for your death, not the state, not the cop that fired the gun. They spread absurd conspiracy theories that the black bloc and the massive, generalized, dignified resistance were the work of undercover cops and fascists.
\n\nAdrift in the parallel reality that their narrative created, they tried to attack us, tried to expel us from the movement, pushing us out toward the cops, calling us fascists and hooligans. And the next day, as we set out to avenge your death, they directed their chants of “Assassini!”—murderers—at us just as much as at the cops. They, too, made every attempt to claim you as a martyr of their movement, but in their case with the incredible cynicism and hypocrisy of vindicating your memory while denouncing all the others who acted as you did. To them, you were better dead than alive. A hooligan in life, a martyr in death.
\n\nThe ATTAC folks, the Genoa Social Forum, the Tute Bianche, the parties, the reformists, and the whole alphabet soup of aspiring managers of discontent—all of them tried to make you into a victim. A hapless and misguided youth, murdered by the state. They wanted to deprive you of agency—as they often do with those whose choices they can’t understand or don’t respect. I’m still not sure how much of it is cynical opportunism and how much of it is that they actually can’t conceive of any form of struggle beyond political maneuvering and mediated clashes. So every time we put the cops on the run—every time we opened up enough fronts to keep them at bay, so that some of us had a chance to calmly deconstruct the landscape of capitalism and take much-needed and much-deserved breaks between battles, lounging on the bank furniture we had set up in the streets with the leisure of a backyard campfire—they hallucinated some grand police master plan to justify repression against the whole anti-globalization movement. Those of us who lived were fascists, hooligans, and provocateurs, while you, by virtue of dying, became a victim and a martyr. They simply could not accept that the rebellion in Genoa was not only organic and authentic but also successful.
\n\nYou died precisely because, on that day and in that moment, we were succeeding. The cops were retreating. I don’t know if you ever knew it, but it wasn’t just there on the Piazza Alimonda—they were on the run throughout the entire area. I know this will be controversial, but given the circumstances, I’m not even sure that it’s correct to say that they “murdered” you. I’ll spare us both the voyeuristic reconstruction of the minutiae of your final moments. There were years of endless discussions about whether the bullet hit you directly or ricocheted off of something, whether you were throwing the fire extinguisher or just holding it. The soldier who shot you was eventually found to have acted in self-defense and acquitted of any wrongdoing. I’m also not so sure that it matters, honestly, aside from the need of many comrades, even anarchist comrades, to seek out the role of victim of police brutality, as if positioning ourselves in the role of perpetual victim in the face of the big bad state would lend us some moral high ground in the eyes of broader society. It’s defeatist and I hate it, as I assume you would too. The justice we were looking for was never that of the state and its courts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/9.jpg\")
Carlo Giuliani Park. Photo by Pinciolola.
\nSpeaking of fear, this is what the soldier who shot you, Mario Placanica, said to the judge shortly after killing you:
\n\n\n\n\n“I fired because I was afraid of dying. I don’t know what happened. I remember they were surrounding us, attacking us, that the jeep was an inferno. My hands were shaking and I fired without looking outside.”
\n
Don’t misunderstand me—I’m definitely no friend of cops or soldiers—but I don’t have any difficulty believing him. At the time, he was twenty years old, barely more than a teenager, sent out into the streets of Genoa that day after being told by his superiors to “be on the lookout” because demonstrators would be “throwing bags of infected blood” and that there would be “terrorist attacks.” He said, “The feeling was as if we were going to war.”
\n\nI’ve been in similar situations, including elsewhere in Genoa on that very same day. I’ve stood in the place you stood, but at a different time and in a different place, and looked into the eyes of the uniformed person in front of me. If I were the cop or soldier, I too would be afraid. Perhaps I too would pull the trigger, especially if I were a young soldier, a believer in God and country, facing an advancing and seemingly uncontrollable horde of masked anarchists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/1.jpg\")
Carlo Giuliani Park. Photo by Pinciolola.
\nFor what it’s worth, the man who killed you is a shell of a human being now. Let go from the carabinieri in 2005 due to psychological problems, today he represents himself as a “destroyed, lonely, and consumed man” who battles depression.
\n\nUnsurprisingly, I have next to no sympathy for his plight. But is he personally a murderer? I don’t know. We could never really make up our minds about that—so much so that the back cover of the issue of Barricada that we published immediately after the battle of Genoa, which was dedicated to you, in which we vowed to avenge you, includes the line “Carlo was not a victim of police brutality” while also proclaiming, “They murdered an anarchist.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/7.jpg\")
“In Loving Memory of a Fallen Comrade.” Barricada #8. Summer/September 2001.
\nAs much contempt as I hold for the man who killed you, a few years ago, he said something that helps me to understand why I, like so many anarchists, identified so strongly with you and felt your death so personally and passionately:
\n\n\n\n\n“That day for me remains a trauma, trauma for the death of a boy like me, also a victim on that tragic day. I am not an executioner, I am not a vigilante. That day I did not hold the gun for Mario Placanica, I held it for the Carabinieri, for the Italian state.”
\n
For a moment, let’s ignore the wallowing self-pity and false equivalency of how he paints himself as a fellow victim, since we both know that he was a not a conscript but a professional who willingly chose his profession. He is nonetheless correct that it was the Italian state that put the gun in this child soldier’s hand and gave him free rein to fire it against whose who rebelled. They shot you because you were “one of us.”
\n\n“One of us.” We spray-painted that on walls for years. One of the thousands and thousands on the streets of Genoa that day who chose to rebel. One of us, one and the same, regardless of what political label we slap on ourselves, regardless of whether some spend their days editing anarchist journals and plotting actions while others spend their days panhandling and hanging out with their dogs on the streets of their city.
\n\nOne of us. All of us, regardless of our more specific motivations, were there on that day because we saw this world as broken and refused to stand idly. You chose to rebel, just like us, a rock in your hand, your face masked, unbowed in dignity. No intermediaries, no staged or managed or curated spectacle of rebellion catering to the imagined tastes of the masses. Just your body as a weapon and the comrades who stood by your side as your strength. You chose this path not to die, but to live. Because you wanted to live, free and unchained.
\n\nSo free, so unchained, that I know that our affinity probably only existed in the streets, in combat against those who we recognized as our common enemies. I won’t be striking any nostalgic notes here as to what a wonderful human being you were, although your dad says you gave him “the strength of your ideals” and taught him to not judge people by “a ripped shirt, holes in their pants, or colored hair.” There will be no grief voyeurism here; the press vultures did enough of that back in the day.
\n\nOne of us. Maybe not an activist or a militant, not a cadre of any organization or structure, but one of us because you chose to fight. To fight alongside us, side by side. One of us—and that’s why they shot you. We all know that the bullet that found you could just as easily have found any one of us. It was meant for any one of us, for all of us.
\n\nOver the months and years that followed your death, I came to understand just how painfully and viscerally true this is—as comrade after comrade fell to the bullets of the state or the knives of the fascists. The same year you died, the state unleashed a storm of bullets that killed dozens in Argentina. I couldn’t help remembering you as I took cover behind our improvised barricades, not knowing if the bullets speeding towards us were rubber or lead. Years later, when a cop murdered a fifteen-year-old anarchist in Athens, many of us who shared the streets with you in Genoa rained fire on the cops outside the occupied Polytechnic. You were on our minds then, as well.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/4.jpg\")
\nWhat I’ll say next might sound contradictory, but it will make sense to other combatants. After many years, I’ve concluded that that is what we are—combatants. Of course, we don’t go to war, and I don’t pretend that we are things that we are not. It is true that there is no comparison between the risks associated with the conflicts we participate in and the conditions of actual warfare. But my life experiences and the experiences of those around me involve constant proximity to death, prison, serious injury, exile. These are not the experiences, the traumas, that most civilians experience in this part of the world—at least, not yet.
\n\nAs a combatant, I believe two things simultaneously, even as they sound contradictory.
\n\nFirst, your death was tragic. I wish it had never happened. We have tried desperately to avenge you—both out of principle and also as a matter of basic self-defense. To send the message to the state that the blood of rebels, of anarchists, carries with it a steep price.
\n\nBut at the same time—and this is where a lot of people didn’t see eye to eye with us—was your death unexpected? Probably not. Should we call it murder? Maybe in the broad sense, but the question seems almost irrelevant. Above all: was your death a reason to stop our efforts? Absolutely not. Rebellion is important. But rebels die, particularly when rebellions start to succeed and the state begins to take its enemies seriously. And when the state takes their lives, I miss them, and love even those I never met.
\n\nIt sounds like demagogy to say you miss a person who you’ve never met, and who you probably wouldn’t even have gotten along with well. But I do. I miss you like I miss Dax and Carlos, taken by fascists’ knives in Milan and Madrid; like I miss Clement who fell fighting fascists in Paris; like I miss Pocho Lepratti in Buenos Aires, Alexis in Athens, and Tortuguita in Atlanta, all taken by the bullets of the police. Or like I miss that kid in Goettingen who came into our info shop one day, whose name I can’t even remember, who I’m ashamed to say I never took seriously, who went on to lay down his life fighting against Islamic fascism and for revolution in Rojava, like so many other international volunteers. I miss them and every other comrade gone, because those bullets and knives were aimed at all of us. I miss them because they were all part of the struggle for a common idea. I miss them, as I miss you, because while I may not know the person, I know the kind.
\n\nCarlo, I didn’t know you, but I’m sorry you’re gone. I never met you but I miss you. I’ll forever be holding high your memory and trying to avenge your death, because the blood of our comrades does not come cheap. And while I still can’t find the optimism to believe in a conveniently beautiful afterlife, I can’t help but hope that you’ve smiled down approvingly upon our efforts.
\n\nThis text is adapted from the book From Riot to Insurrection: The G8 Summit of 2001 & The Battle of Genoa by Tomas Rothaus.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/6.jpg\")
This mural in memory of those killed by police appeared during the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 in south St. Louis, only a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the historic uprising of 2014.
\nIn August 2025, a powerful uprising shook Indonesia and spread rapidly throughout the region, helping to catalyze a revolution in Nepal. Yet even as it set off further explosions from the Philippines to Morocco, this momentum hit a wall everywhere as governments counterattacked with repression specifically targeting anarchists—in what some in the region have called the “black scare.” In the following analysis, Simoun Magsalin draws on the events in the Philippines to outline the challenges confronting today’s revolutionaries and explore what it will take to overcome them.
\n\nYou can read a full account of the confrontation that took place in Manila, the Philippine capital, on September 21, 2025 here.
\n\nYou can support the black scare detainees and defendants from the Philippines who were arrested at Mendiola on September 21, 2025 through Durian Distro, which is handling international donations via Ko-Fi. Please include a message noting that your donation is for the 9/21 prisoners. Salamat po!
\n\nYou can support Indonesian prisoners via Serikat Tahanan or the Serikat Napi Lintas-Lapas / Inter-Correctional Prisoner Union. Please use the “Donasi” button on their website. Terima kasih!
\n\nThis line of inquiry is equally relevant in North America, as anarchists confront intensifying repression from Prairieland to Minneapolis.
\n\nOn September 21, 2025, a host of leftists, socialists, and pro-revolutionaries marched at the fateful site where the Spanish colonial government executed José Rizal on December 30, 1896. Rizal was executed under false charges for an anti-colonial insurrection he had little to do with but which had proclaimed him as its north star. In 2025, a march of more than 80,000 Filipinos assembled by the monument where his remains are interred to express outrage in response to a massive corruption scandal involving the graft of funds designated for flood control infrastructure projects—the plunder of which through fraudulent projects caused numerous deaths across multiple tropical typhoons.
\n\nFor months before the march, the outrage had led nowhere, as the Philippine left was at an almost-historic nadir after years of opportunism, repression, and dynastic restoration from the previous Duterte presidency and the continuation of Dutertismo in the current administration headed by Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. Morale was so low that a leftist attempt to organize a general assembly in an urban poor community facing demolition apparently drew almost no one. At a factory strike, the workers self-managed their picket to limit and pacify their own actions.
\n\nYet the insurrection that broke out in Indonesia at the end of August 2025 inspired something in Filipinos. Militants from National Democracy organized limited direct action at the beginning of September, involving publicized vandalism and minor street fighting. They hoped to arouse “the masses” from slumber and invoke spontaneity. Alas, such energy did not arise—at least, not at first. Then the insurrection in Nepal bloomed and then withered, and morale rose once again. To know that power is vulnerable elsewhere is to see that it is vulnerable everywhere.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/6.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nSeveral groups announced a mass mobilization for September 21 at Luneta and at EDSA.1 The Catholic Church was one of the biggest forces that organized mobilizations, followed by various right-wing, liberal, social democratic, National Democratic, and socialist groups. Anarchists of various persuasions were there, too, in our own fashion. Banners of all kinds were on display: the National Democratic Mass Organizations (NDMOs) and Makabayan, the bloc of Sanlakas-PLM-BMP-Oriang, Akbayan, Kilusan, Kamanggagawa, Partido Sosyalista, the Spartacists, Partido Manggagawa, Manibela and other workers’ associations, and university fraternities. The right-wing Duterte Diehard Supporters (DDS)2 were there too, some projecting phrase-mongering into the military base to spontaneously induce a kudeta (Tagalog for “coup d’état”3) among the generals in a vain attempt to oust President Bongbong Marcos, catapult Vice President Sara Duterte to the highest office, and (somehow?) bring former president Rodrigo Duterte back home from his incarceration at the Hague by the International Criminal Court.4
\n\nOn the margins of all these parties was another: the party of anarchy.5
\n\nAfter the protest march program of the Makabayan bloc ended on the way to Mendiola, black-clad youth initiated violent direct action, attempting to set fire to a freight truck used as a police barricade and then lobbing rocks at the police. The police struck back with their own rocks, trapping the militants from Makabayan in the crossfire. At that moment, another wing of the party of anarchy revealed itself, opening up another front in the Philippines just as had occurred in Indonesia and Nepal. The same sigils of the One-Piece straw-hat skull-and-bones flag flew again, raised by those in anarchistic black attire.
\n\nThe spontaneous movement of September 21 (or 9/21) was no party of anarchists, much as we might wish they were. Neither were they self-identifying National Democrats, Maoists, socialists, or communists—nor fascists, though fascists want to appropriate the symbolism and significance of the 9/21 events.6
\n\nThe party of anarchy is not a particular organizational formation, but a spontaneous emergence that cohered at a time of high morale among our class. As in Indonesia and Nepal, it emerged outside the milieu known as the “left.” But how the self-ascribed left relates to this party of anarchy is of crucial importance, especially in view of how quickly some on the left sought to denounce the militants as “anarchists,” fascists, Dutertistas, or (Chinese?) saboteurs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/7.jpg\")
\nThe party of anarchy that emerged at the battle of Mendiola was small. The majority of the (at least) 277 detainees at Mendiola were not involved in the direct action at all or else were not anarchists. Many were innocent bystanders, some of whom were colonized minorities within the Philippine nation-state who didn’t even speak Tagalog and were in Manila for less than a week. Another was a student journalist who just happened to wear black to the protest and was illegally detained only because he looked vaguely like an anarchist. Around or at least 91 of the Mendiola detainees were legally minors. All were beaten on the streets and then systematically tortured, denied legal representation, denied food and medicine, and denied access to their families.
\n\nYet despite not being partisanos of the party of anarchy, they were red-tagged7 (black-tagged?) as “anarchists.” By then, this was a familiar refrain, coming as it did on the heels of the black scare in Indonesia that saw the open hunting of anarchists by Prabowo’s decree, as well as Trump’s criminalization order targeting so-called “antifa” in the United States and the accusations of Nepali politicians that anarchists had “infiltrated” the insurrection there. In September 2025, security forces were conjuring whole parties of anarchists out of the air to explain various riots and insurrectionary episodes across the world, each imagined conspiracy more fanciful than the last. If only such revolutionaries could be born fully armored and ready to fight, like a hundred thousand Athenas born from the mind of Zeus!
\n\nConspiratorial baiting of this kind is not new. In the wake of October 7, 2023, whole battalions of Hamas were identified all across the world. Paragliders in the middle of Britain? Hamas. Students occupying campuses to protest investments in the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine? Hamas. Jewish anti-Zionists? Hamas. Random people on the train who don’t look like me and aren’t bothering anyone? Hamas! As with earlier waves of red-baiting, “Hamas-baiting” and the current black scare serve to delegitimize and criminalize protest and organizing, whether in response to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza or the brazen corruption scandals in Asia and elsewhere.
\n\nWe’ve seen how black-tagging and the black scare has been deployed in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Philippines in much the same way that red-baiting was used in the past. It didn’t matter whether you were an anarchist or a social democrat—you will be red-baited and deported or imprisoned as a filthy godless communist! Non-state actors including liberals and yellow unions have used red-tagging to delegitimize their ideological rivals in the electoral or labor-union arena. Now, in a similar way, just being some kind of leftist, wearing black, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time can get you black-tagged as an anarchist and threatened with subversion charges. We saw this in Indonesia and Nepal and again at Mendiola. In a consistent, predictable way, the party of order uses the black scare strategy to suppress not only the party of anarchy, but all who criticize the prevailing order.
\n\nWhat is the party of anarchy, really? It is not something that can be constructed the way you construct a formal party. It is constituted and coheres on the basis of a social insurrection, or at least the beginnings of one. It is on this basis that the party of anarchy is not merely a threat to the dominant wing of the party of order—the caucus of the existent—but also to the caucus of the false critics, who conduct a two-line struggle within the party of order but remain its loyal opposition. The black scare, then, works slightly differently than the red scare in terms of how the caucus of the false critics uses it to target the party of anarchy.
\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of the police repression at Mendiola, another parallel narrative began to form. The direct actionists and the Mendiola detainees were at the pay of foreign agents, or of Sara Duterte—or so many commenters said. Liberals and leftists alike repeated this ad nauseam. The caucus of the false critics is constantly negotiating their place within the party of order and within the broader effort to reimpose normalcy. The black scare is used by these false critics to dissolve the party of anarchy in order to achieve that purpose. We have seen this before: for example, in the peace police who branded direct actionists “agent provocateurs” and handed them over to the police during the George Floyd rebellions in 2020. Through such actions, the false critics position themselves as a legal, legitimate, and loyal opposition within the prevailing order.
\n\nIn addition, the false critics also use the black scare to legitimize their own activism and organizations at the expense of the insurrection and the party of anarchy. They do this by tagging the party of anarchy as “saboteurs,” “provocateurs,” Dutertistas in disguise, and so on, but also by taking advantage of the efforts of the partisanos and insurrectos of the party of anarchy to build their own organizations using pragmatic pacifism and legalism.
\n\nThe black scare represents a dual threat: the obvious threat from the dominant caucus of the existent of the party of order, but more dangerously, an additional threat from the caucus of the false critics.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/8.jpg\")
Photograph from the report “Mendiola, September 21, 2025,” written by Kenneth Roland Guda and published by AlterMidya.
\nNormalcy is what we have today—the regime of work, gender, money, capital, the state, racism, ad nauseum. The party of order imposes and maintains normalcy by keeping our class dependent upon its functioning. If, as The Communist Manifesto proclaims, the workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains, why do we cling so hard to them? The prospect of our chains loosening opens us to immense risk because normalcy renders us dependent.
\n\nWe all have material interests in maintaining normalcy and much to lose from its rupture. This dependence on normalcy constrains many from becoming active pro-revolutionaries. My own disabilities, for example, tie me to normalcy, forcing me to have a material interest in the stability and predictability of medicine and healthcare. Millions of people and their families likewise have similar material interests that ties them to normalcy. Even something as basic as access to food can be disrupted by the interruption of normalcy. Such dependence on normalcy constrains us in what we can do.
\n\nUnder these conditions, we can talk of revolution and insurrection all we like, but any act of violence against the party of order means risking harsh repression. Those partisanos who cling to illegality and illegibility find refuge in the rebel peripheries. On the margins of society, they cannot intervene in the heat of the class struggle, and must instead strive for revolution from their peripheries.
\n\nThose outside the rebel peripheries operating where the imposition of normalcy is most coherent often find that they can still do some good work through the framework of legalism. Legalism pushes the left and anarchists towards “pragmatic pacifism.” As pro-revolutionaries, we refuse to affirm pacifism as a principle of the class struggle, yet we find we must be pragmatic in our relationship to violence, and even in the extent to which we publicly endorse it. This is why, when we march, the leaders of marches must meet with the police to negotiate time and space for their protest, regardless of permits.8 Even without protest permits, the police understand that informal allowances for such illegal assemblies are pragmatic in the long term. This negotiation is part and parcel of the imposition of normalcy. If we don’t negotiate, we risk repression that will drain vital resources that will have to go towards prisoner support, driving away those with lower appetites for risk, and (perhaps most importantly) being identified as an enemy of order at a time of a lull and retreat in the class struggle. This is not a value judgment: it is merely the reality of normalcy.
\n\nOutside the milieu of leftists, militants, and anarchists, normalcy takes the form of mass apolitical passivity.9 Many a Marxist would cite ideology or hegemony to explain this—yet beyond the ways that commodity relations obscure and alienate the source of the power of our class, our class is not made of sheep, nor are we passive recipients of burgis10 ideology. Nor is this merely a matter of disinterest in politics. People know the world is fucked. This condition of mass apolitical passivity is not merely ideological, but material. Being apolitical is not so much a choice as a condition—the material and ideological imposition of normalcy. Reformers, activists, militants, and pro-revolutionaries establish themselves as such by overcoming the particular material and ideological limits that this condition imposes. But even overcoming these limits does not necessarily mean that one can overcome normalcy itself—hence the necessity of pragmatic pacifism.
\n\nThrough pragmatic pacifism, reformers and leftists can negotiate their position within normalcy and the party of order. This is how the struggle for reform galvanizes many to overcome their passivity. Circles of militants become movements, movements become political parties and NGOs, and political parties run for election while NGOs support reform, and—if all goes well—these parties and NGOs win reforms for their mass bases. This process of reform legitimizes these leftists and ties them to the reigning order. To remain legitimate, they must remain within the bounds of the law, and to do so, they must continue to be pragmatically pacifist. This is how the legal and legitimate left establish themselves as false critics to the party of order, as the “permitted left” and left wing of capital.11
\n\nTo retain this status, it often becomes necessary to denounce the party of anarchy and engage in the black scare.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/9.jpg\")
Photograph from the report “Mendiola, September 21, 2025,” written by Kenneth Roland Guda and published by AlterMidya.
\nThe party of anarchy has constituted itself many times over the centuries of the modern era, from the Reformation to the great revolutions in England, America, France, Russia, Germany, China, and elsewhere. Over the past decade, we have seen it emerge in the Yellow Vest movement in France, in Hong Kong, in the George Floyd Uprising in the United States, and most recently in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, Madagascar, and here in the Philippines.
\n\nYet the party of anarchy is dissolved through the imposition of disorganization, by churches, liberals, self-appointed vanguards, the permitted left, social democracy, and other factions within the caucus of the false critics. In the People Power Revolution of 1986 (EDSA Uno), the church and the liberal oligarchs led the Filipino workers to support the kudeta plotters and install the liberal oligarch Cory Aquino as president. In the events of May 1968 in Paris, the Communist Party of France and several other left institutions demobilized the workers and radical students. In the Iranian revolution, the clerics undermined the shura councils of the working class until the Ayatollah was able to consolidate power. In Poland, liberals who wanted to negotiate a place within the Polish state apparatus undermined the self-organization of workers in Solidarność. In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong himself rushed to co-opt and demobilize the very forces he unleashed to regain and retain control over the Party-state.
\n\nThe caucus of the false critics is fearful of mass spontaneity and self-directed activity, rushing to co-opt and demobilize the party of anarchy in order to arrange the resumption of normalcy under their rising caucus. Politicians target the party of anarchy so that the caucus of the false critics can be reconstituted as the new caucus of the existent and ultimately reconstitute the party of order.
\n\nThe logic of this organized disorganization is the crystallization of legality and legitimacy as tamang proseso. Literally meaning “correct process” or “due process,” tamang proseso is invoked in the Philippines as the “right way” or a “legitimate way” to do things, usually in the context of engaging with bureaucracy or procedure. This affirmation of legality and legitimacy permeates all under normalcy, even outside the reach of the state’s law, police, and courts. Harm, for example, has to be demonstrated and proven, if not in a court of law, then via the adjudication of peers. According to the apostles of tamang proseso, “both sides” have to be heard—and this obscures the inherent power relations, whether they be the gender dynamics of rape culture or the hegemony of Israel and Zionism over Palestine before October 7.
\n\nEven in civil war, there must be tamang proseso, with guerrillas both communist and Bangsamoro bowing to the legality and legitimacy of the peace table. The negotiations at the peace table fulfill two functions. First, they represent the negotiated merger and legitimation of a faction as it ascends into the party of order. Second, they serve to demobilize the force of arms of their own faction and delegitimize any participants in the struggle who refuse to accept the compromise. In this context, tamang proseso suggests that there are only two routes to reform: negotiated integration into the party of order, or armed struggle for the purpose of negotiated integration into the party of order. The possibilities of social insurrection, rupture, revolution—much less anarchy and communization—are excluded altogether.
\n\nTamang proseso is the “correct” and “legitimate” way of doing protest, organizing, and politics. It is the mediation and management of the energies that would otherwise have cohered into the grand party of anarchy and communism. The week after the events of 9/21, former presidential candidate and outspoken socialist Ka Leody de Guzman released a solidarity statement affirming the legitimacy of the anger, yet calling for the recruitment of disaffected urban poor into his particular tendency of organizations. Most notably, this statement implied a dichotomy between the organized and the supposedly not-organized—or, to be more precise, those organized under their command and those organized outside it. Never mind that the direct action against the police forces took place outside the command of legitimate left parties, while all parties at Luneta and Mendiola did not intervene to elevate the riot into an insurrection.
\n\nEven the Maoist insurgency of the Communist Party of the Philippines–New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) is structured within tamang proseso, despite the overt illegality of their insurgency. To mamundok (go up the mountain) and join the guerrillas is seen as the “highest form of struggle” within the Maoist milieu. To criticize the brave guerrilla is cowardice—what have you sacrificed that gives you the right to critique them? If they are fighting a guerrilla war, then they must be right! Never mind that the funneling of committed militants to mamundok drains the cities of cadres who could have intervened in the class struggle (setting aside, for now, the problems with Stalinist interventionalism).
\n\nArgumentum ad guerrilla, or the appeal to the guerrilla, frames ideological issues as beyond question because the guerrilla are making a costly, sometimes ultimate, sacrifice. This cult of action takes for granted that the correctness of a strategy can be proven through dramatic deeds and mass recruitment. Yet conservative forces such as Daesh also wage such guerrilla wars—shall we consider them correct because they managed to establish the so-called “Islamic State”? The argumentum ad guerrilla is the other side of pragmatic pacifism: the fetishism of “revolutionary” violence is the inevitable reaction to the timidity of such pragmatism.
\n\nIt is this argumentum ad guerrilla that constrains the choices of those who desire social change to a choice between reformism and armed reformism, between social democracy and social democracy out of the barrel of a gun. Only these options fall within the boundaries of tamang proseso. But when we conceive of revolution merely as one apparatus against another, the notion of class power constituted for the abolition of all classes disappears.
\n\nConsequently, while the Communist Party of the Philippines recognized the events at Mendiola as legitimate albeit badly channeled violence, they called for these partisanos of anarchy to be funneled into its New People’s Army. Similarly, the legal and legitimate left called for the recruitment of the angry partisanos and insurrectos into their organization—simply to build their membership. The idea that the solution to our woes is to “organize”—or even to “mamundok“—is the slightly more radical equivalent of the liberal mantra that the solution is “to vote.” The outcome is the same: the demobilization and dissolution of the party of anarchy and the subordination of its alumni to some apparatus of the caucus of the false critics—mediation, management, and integration into political life.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/2.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nPolitical life and its notions of legality, legitimacy, and tamang proseso is the very lifeblood of normalcy. Negotiation for reforms or for a place within the hierarchy of normalcy is managed and mediated by political life. The party of anarchy, as a party outside all integrated political life, is resolutely anti-political. As such, the party of anarchy must be red-tagged, black-tagged, and subjected to the cruelest black scare because it is through the anti-political that the party of anarchy acts outside the bounds of legality and legitimacy, as it is the greatest threat to normalcy. The social insurrection and revolution abolish legitimacy, that ideology of hierarchy and class society.
\n\nIn this sense, the black scare takes place on three levels, all of which are intended to demobilize the party of anarchy. We have already discussed the first two levels. The first is repressive: the use of force to suppress the party of anarchy and in some cases opportunistically repress the caucus of the false critics as well. The second level is mediative: having dissolved the party of anarchy, to integrate its alumni into the caucus of the false critics under the general management of political life.12 The third level of the black scare is reimpositive: the restoration, resumption, and reimposition of normalcy under the old or new party of order. This reimpositive aspect of the black scare is the most insidious, for it emerges as a consequence of fear of anarchy on the part of the party of anarchy itself, which loses its coherence when the party fails to overcome the limits of insurrection.
\n\nThe repressive black scare is the task of the party of order, specifically under the dominant caucus of the existent. The mediative black scare is the task of the caucus of the false critics through their two-line struggle to become the dominant caucus. The reimpositive black scare emerges from within the party of anarchy themselves, as a consequence of the real material and ideological limits to the insurrection, limits that the insurrectos must overcome if they are to transform an insurrection into a social revolution that engulfs the whole world.
\n\nTamang proseso is the motor of the imposition and reimposition of normalcy. Against the reimpositive black scare, the insurrectos must struggle against the very power to legitimize, developing an anti-politics that rejects even (or especially) the democratic form and the legitimacy and citizenship it implies.
\n\nAside from the obvious repressive function of policing deployed against our class and the party of anarchy, policing serves the tamang proseso. The flood control scandals in the Philippines are being investigated by the Marcos-formed Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI). Such mechanisms affirm the legitimacy of the party of order. The state’s apparatus for policing corruption persuades citizens that the system works. This is how the state manages class antagonisms. That is the ultimate limitation of corruption discourse, via which citizens are reproduced and reaffirmed as such with all the passivity that implies under the regime of democracy. The abolition of legitimacy and tamang proseso starts with the failure of this discourse, the seeds of which can remain dormant for decades; there has been abject wanton corruption for a very long time, but its contradictions did not reach a breaking point until September 2025.
\n\nThe party of order proactively carries out the mediation and management of political life to prevent the party of anarchy from cohering. At crucial turning points within burgis politics, such as political revolutions or major elections, the reconfiguration of the caucuses and sub-factions of the party of order creates new avenues for mediating and managing political life. The People Power Revolution and the EDSA Republic brought segments of the Philippine left into engagement with the ruling liberal oligarchy. Consequently, the laundering of land grabbing under the administration of Noynoy “PNoy” Aquino (2010-2016) by those who called themselves popular democrats led to mass disillusionment, which contributed to the election of Rodrigo Duterte in 2016. In Nepal, the dissolution of the people’s governments by Prachanda’s decree and Prachanda’s own ascension to the premiership of Nepal led to the integration of his and other communist parties of Nepal into the caucus of the existent, while the official Maoists enriched themselves. In Indonesia, the contradictions and antagonisms that remained from the Reformasi gave way to the restoration of a son of the New Order through the election of Prabowo Subianto.13
\n\nThe party of anarchy coheres as the abject failure of tamang proseso becomes harder and harder to ignore. More and more become disillusioned, not only with the tamang proseso of the existent, but also of its false critics. Like the church invisible (a church of elect or future converts known only to the true believers of Christ), the party of anarchy first coheres as a party invisible, as affinities form between militants who recognize each other as elect but do not yet even know they are comrades and kasamas in struggle. Then, eventually, the pressure ruptures the dam. The police murder of Affan Kurniawan launched the August–September insurrections in Indonesia; the banning of Nepali social media (and therefore of criticism) launched the September 2025 insurrection in Nepal; and the long-simmering discontent from the flood-control scandals combined with the high morale from seeing insurrections elsewhere inspired the battle at Mendiola on September 21 in the Philippines. The failure to mediate and manage brought together the party of anarchy in all of these countries.
\n\nMarches overcome the limits of pragmatic pacifism and escalated into individual acts of illegalism. Acts of individual illegalism overcome the limits that block the way to collective acts of illegalism, and the riots of collective illegalism give rise to mass illegalism, then to insurrection, revolution, communization, and the unification of humanity. Each level of escalation must overcome its particular limits.
\n\nFundamentally, insurrection and revolution open the horizons to possibilities beyond the world we currently inhabit. Once we catch a glimpse of the possibilities beyond, why should we remain where we are? To remake what has been unmade? Yet our class does not make that choice, or if we have had to, we chose so with grief in our hearts as the ultimate limits of the insurrection broke up the party of anarchy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/3.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nReaction is inevitable. Revolution is not. As the party of anarchy coheres as a consequence of the failure of politics, pro-revolutionaries struggle to reconfigure themselves in relation to the party of anarchy. The repression from the party of order and mediation from the caucus of the false critics are not the only threats. The reimposition of normalcy becomes inevitable when insurrectos fail to communize social life within the insurrection and are unable to escalate towards revolutionizing the whole world.
\n\nThere will not be an invisible hand of the insurrection like there is an invisible hand of the market—or at least, not initially. Market forces are driven by the invisible hand of the totalizing logic of capital. In contrast, the logic of the insurrection emerges embryonically, as a seedling in an entire hostile ecology. Workers who become insurrectos and partisanos of anarchy stand to lose much by breaking with normalcy. Yet what we gain through that insurrectionary logic can reorganize social life during the rupture. That insurrectionary logic must fight to the death against the totalizing logic of capital, or else be smothered in counterrevolution. This is where the pro-revolutionaries must intervene to nurture and cultivate that seedling of insurrectionary logic of anarchy and communism. This is where revolution creates the revolutionaries.
\n\nIn Indonesia, the insurrection led to mass looting and mass arson of government buildings. Pro-revolutionaries convened parliaments of the streets, creating spaces for insurrectos to talk revolution. Yet they did not seize the arms before burning the police armories. In the end, the insurrectos could not defend themselves, their campuses, and their homes from goons from the party of order or opportunist looters and rapists. The insurrection did not expand into the countryside, nor did pro-revolutionaries link the different sites of insurrection together in a meaningful way. With neither the means to defend nor feed themselves, the insurrectos across the vast archipelago arrived at the same calculus with little coordination: to pacify themselves, to continue to mobilize but in a non-violent manner, to appeal for a compromise with the party of order. Self-pacification was driven by fear of reaction and counterrevolution. Yet the reaction was inevitable regardless. It was Prabowo’s reaction that became the vanguard for the global black scare.
\n\nMany in Indonesia who didn’t intervene or intervened only in a defensive manner found themselves stuck waiting for conditions to ripen, for the insurrection to develop into a feasible scenario for revolutionary intervention. Such attentisme, a “wait-and-see attitude,” is yet another form of tamang proseso—as if the proper order of operations is to consolidate a revolutionary organization before a revolution. In fact, ideal conditions do not exist, but opportunities do, and opportunities for revolution arise regardless of readiness or level of organization. Attentisme traps pro-revolutionaries in an endless loop of waiting for ideal conditions, endlessly organizing and building the movement—patience for patience’s sake. But our class is not weak because it is disorganized, our class is disorganized because it is weak. Patience and prudence were not rewarded at all, for the reaction was inevitable once the horizon for revolutionary action closed.
\n\nIn Nepal, the insurrectos armed themselves as they burned down the old order. The almost-total integration of the various official communist parties into the party of order ensured that virtually no organized pro-revolutionary force (or at least no legible force) intervened in the insurrection. Yet the insurrectos seized arms as they burned down the government, overcoming a crucial limit that the insurrectos in Indonesia had not overcome.
\n\nAfter the dust settled, it was alleged by many, including The New York Times, that a shadowy conspiracy had organized the mass arson. In political revolutions, like the one that occurred in EDSA Uno in 1986, the most organized and coherent political forces have the legality and legitimacy to take state power.14 Had a conspiracy to commit mass arson existed on the scale that many implied, that conspiracy would have been powerful enough to seize state power directly. Yet no such kudeta took power, nor did a Bakuninist-Tiqqunist invisible collective dictatorship prevent the resumption of normalcy. Nor did General Ashok Raj Sigdel use the moment to brazenly impose armed rule or restore the monarchy as many feared might occur. In the absence of a legitimate civilian government, nothing could have stopped Sigdel, not even the party of anarchy, which had failed to overcome particular limits and was in retreat.
\n\nBut while the party of anarchy in Nepal was able to pass from individual acts of illegalism to mass collective acts of illegalism, it failed to transcend the limits of legalism and legitimacy itself. Thus, when Sigdel and the army restored legality, law, and order, the army offered to confer legitimacy upon the infamous Discord election. Simultaneously, the de facto military government used the black scare to suppress the party of anarchy, shooting partisanos in the streets. The anti-political revolution became deeply untenable. How could it be otherwise?
\n\nAnti-politics may burn down the parliaments and the great mansions of the official Maoists, but how are insurrectos supposed to burn down the entire state apparatus without feeding themselves? Looting is only a temporary stop-gap solution, after all. Both Vladimir Lenin and Peter Kropotkin understood (and agreed with Karl Marx) that for the revolution to survive, it must feed itself, overcoming the distinctions between town and country. For Lenin, the solution was the great alliance between the proletariat (and the state) and the peasantry. For Kropotkin, it was free exchange between urban and rural workers. When the Bolsheviks could no longer appease and persuade the peasantry to participate in their class alliance, they resorted to open coercion, thereby triggering countless revolts by so-called “green armies.” The party of anarchy—whose primary weapons are not guns and force of arms, but the subversion of society through the “suicidal” rejection of themselves as men, as citizens, as workers—have no such army to coerce the extraction of food. Many anarchists and communists suggest that the revolution can only succeed only when it is international in character. They are correct—but how can revolution become international if cannot overcome the nearer divisions between town and country?
\n\nSo while normalcy was interrupted, as a consequence of the insurrection’s failure to sustain and socially reproduce itself, insurrectos found themselves with little choice but to seek a political solution in the restoration of the party of order. Sigdel and the army, functioning as a bastion of law and legitimacy, gracefully conferred legitimacy upon the greatest Discord poll the world has ever seen yet. Insurrectos found themselves satisfied with being citizens again, and normalcy returned, along with all the social reproduction that implies.
\n\nMany of the prisoners who escaped in the insurrection in Nepal, finding their squalid cells burned to ash, dutifully reported to other squalid cells elsewhere, for legality within the prison cell was preferable to a life of fugitivity under the weight of the party of order. The prison, including the prison that makes up the whole of society today, can only be abolished as a consequence of the abolition of the law and legitimacy. Without those, how could it even be conceivable to report back to prison? To the resumption of democracy and the order it maintains? Normalcy will be preferable to the harshest reaction. Citizenship will be preferable to uncertainty. And precisely because compulsion under capitalism is the freedom to work or starve (rather than the naked coercion of slavery or death), the grace conferred to legitimize the greatest Discord election is a wholly understandable choice. For the proletariat is revolutionary or nothing, and they are not revolutionary precisely when they reproduce themselves as workers, as proletariat, as the class of capital, persuaded to continue being loyal citizens of the party of order.
\n\nWithout overcoming these particular limits—the reimpositive black scare, reaffirming tamang proseso—things could not have turned out any other way. A grand secret conspiracy to burn down the physical manifestations of government is always insufficient—for the state, much like capital, patriarchy, and other hierarchies, coheres not in locations but in social relations. A parliament can burn down, but its legitimacy will remain intact. Reconstituted as citizens, the former insurrectos rebuilt the parliament on Discord. At that point, under the ever-watchful eye of the Nepali armed forces, the choice was clear.
\n\nHad we faced the same choices, would we be like the maquis who continued the fight against Francisco Franco after the defeat of the Spanish Revolution? Would we go on, like the Sabaté brothers who hid in the forests and mountains and persisted despite the victory and consolidation of Spanish fascism? Individual acts of illegalism, even small collective acts of illegalism—and especially such acts in the peripheries—rarely challenge normalcy enough to inspire mass collective outbreaks of illegalism like what we saw in Indonesia and Nepal.
\n\nInevitably, normalcy is reimposed. This is the result of the material and ideological limits that constrained the growth of the insurrection and smothered its embryonic logic. Tamang proseso triumphs, along with all the legality and legitimacy it embodies. The black scare takes place and insurrectos become citizens, prisoners, fugitives, or guerrillas—it matters little which as long as the party of order reigns supreme. The false critics reconfigure themselves within the new normalcy. The anti-politicized either become politicized or retreat back into passivity. “God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/4.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nThe emergence of the party of anarchy at Mendiola on September 21, 2025 revealed the impotence of all the factions of the left and post-left in the Philippines, including this author. Even without a party conspiracy, urban poor youth took action where many others could not. It is the greatest irony that those involved with party conspiracies (some of which involve armed wings) remained limited to rebel peripheries or pragmatic pacifism. Militants and cadres from National Democracy had engaged in delimited acts of vandalism and light skirmishes with the police at the beginning of September, but it was only weeks later, on 9/21, that the so-called unorganized acted autonomously. In the intervening weeks, between the beginning of September and 9/21, the permitted left shifted from limited violence to pragmatic pacifism, while these direct actionists shifted from apolitical obscurity towards openly-legible violence.
\n\nIt is not a simple thing to demand of those who were present at Luneta and Mendiola last September that they should have thrown themselves into the fray of a riot in order to escalate it into an insurrection. Instead of asking what those on the ground that day could have done differently, we could ask—what would have been required to create a situation in which they could not have acted otherwise? That is to say: what constraints shaped what actions they could take? What material and ideological limits prevented them from intervening to elevate the riot beyond its limits?
\n\nThe skirmishes and vandalism by National Democracy in September 4 involved militants who understood the risk and committed to it. At Luneta and Mendiola, during the events of September 21, the composition of the crowd was different. Many had less appetite for risk, and indeed, were ordered to disperse by those who had convened the marches.
\n\nLegality has its uses. The National Democrats who marched under the banners of the Makabayan bloc acted as the permitted left. Had they made the decision to join the riots at Mendiola, their seats in congress could have been forfeit. To lose their position within normalcy would mean forfeiting their planned reforms. Again, this is not necessarily to pass judgment on their inaction, nor to call their socialist credentials into doubt, but to recognize the limits that normalcy imposes us and to recognize when we have been tied to preserving it.
\n\nNaming our demons is the first step towards exorcising them. We cannot overcome material and ideological limits that go unnamed or unrecognized. Studying why insurrections failed, we can arm ourselves with the knowledge of what to avoid. Intentionality is impossible without cognizance. Our revolutionary forebears provided us with the language to identify various limits: the division between town and country; feeding the revolution, or the Conquest of Bread; breaking with burgis ideology, whether that be workerism, the affirmation of proletarian identity, citizenship, legalism, or legitimacy; securing the logistics of healthcare and medicine; overcoming various divisions of labor, especially the gendered division of labor and social reproduction; defense and the military question; accountability and safety; overcoming peripherality and revolutionary isolation; overcoming ideological and sectarian divisions; overcoming separations, identities, and bigotry in the working class; expropriating the expropriators; dealing with the state; resolving the “crisis of revolutionary leadership”; and many more.
\n\nThe legitimacy of the party of order has its material basis in the smooth reproduction of normalcy: simple things like the logistics of food and medicine, keeping the lights on and the hospitals open, keeping homes and dignities safe from violation. Legalism flows from this, and tamang proseso from that. Experiencing the insecurity of rupture and insurrection, how else would one imagine engaging with the state other than through the legitimate processes? To break with the party of order, then, means to challenge the material basis of its legitimacy and legality—for the logic of the insurrection to answer the hard questions of how to overcome specific limits, communizing food, safety, and care.
\n\nUnder normalcy, yes, we are pacifist because we are pragmatic. But when does pacifism cease to be pragmatic? When the time comes, will our pragmatic pacifism have become so deeply ingrained in us that it is no longer pragmatic? Will we become so used to deferring to limits that we miss the chance to transcend these limits? Our relationship to pragmatism must never be raised to the level of a principle. Pragmatism is not a “value” to uphold or defend, precisely because it is merely pragmatic. It is tautologically true that pragmatism is not principle. Pragmatism itself becomes a material and ideological limit in the insurrectionary process.
\n\nPrevious revolutionaries have made a virtue of necessity and raised pragmatic proposals to the realm of ideology. “We had to do this” on the grounds of contingency and pragmatism became “we have to do this” on the basis of principle. That is ideologization. Many such cases exist: secret police and concentration camps (whether Gulag or Laogai) were justified as pragmatic in a given context, but now pro-revolutionaries have ideologized these and raised them to principle, arguing that the repressive functions of a revolution must necessarily be carceral. Similar examples of ideologization can be found in the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein, the vulgarization that is socialism-in-one-country, the dogmatism of democratic centralism. Ideologization is the legitimization of contingency becoming tamang proseso.
\n\nIt is also not the case that the “revolution,” “anarchy,” or “communism” will “solve” issues like the liberation of women—issues that some people wish to put off addressing until after power is won or the burgesya is defeated. This is because capitalism is an alienated system built on our own alienated agency. Market forces and the totalizing logic of the capitalist mode of production both structures our agency and depends on it. It is in this sense that revolution, anarchy, and communism are still conceived in capitalist terms, as alienated agency rather than the reclaiming of our own collective agency.
\n\nThis is why revolution will not “solve” anything, nor will anarchy and communism “eliminate” domination because we will be the ones in charge of our own fate. Revolution, anarchy, and communization are our agency no longer separated from us. The revolutionary process can and will fail if we ourselves fail to overcome the material and ideological limits we face. The revolution will not “liberate” women; women and all who are gendered must liberate themselves and abolish the gendered division of labor and gender itself—to name a single example—or else the revolution will degenerate. Rather than an invisible hand of the insurrection, our own hands will be very much visible in revolution. Consequently, we must have clarity on the mechanics of the material and ideological aspects of each limit we confront, so that we can overcome and surpass them.
\n\nIt is often said that “the end justifies the means.” To this, we reply, “But what if there never is an end? All we have is means,” to quote Ursula K. Le Guin. The distance of the end we desire—nothing less than the full revolutionizing and communization of society and the end of all forms of domination—and the unimaginable gravity of what we are up against forces us to consider that “all we have are means,” at least during periods of normalcy.
\n\nIf all we have are means, then our means ought to be prefigurative15 and generative, helping us to develop agency, autonomy, and ability for self-directed militancy. These tasks are not “revolutionary” in the sense that they can trigger rupture, insurrection, or revolution by themselves, nor achieve the ends we want during periods of normalcy. Rather, they are revolutionary in that they can enable us to organize, resist, fight, and build powers and capacities that will be of use in insurrections and revolutionary situations. The fact that these capacities were severely underdeveloped explains why the recent insurrections in Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, and Madagascar ended with the demobilization of the party of anarchy and the reimposition of normalcy. In this sense, certain kinds of pragmatism—such as the pragmatism of appealing to a different faction of the ruling class, as occurred after 9/21—are self-defeating, as they accustom us to subordinating ourselves, deferring our desires, and appealing to power.
\n\nFor the ends we want, maximalism is in order—fighting for a “maximum program,” for a maximum amount of change, for anarchy, communism, and the end of all domination. Maximalism is a muscle that we must continuously practice using. As means, maximalism allows us to strengthen our capacities for thinking beyond the current moment. If the ends we seek are not ambitious—if we merely call for reforms (reforms from whom?), for accountability (accountability according to whom?), for vague unities with a different section of the oligarchy—then whatever means we build will not be able to transcend the current moment. During periods of normalcy, maximalism is a practice of political imagination that challenges us to think beyond capitalism, the state, gender, patriarchy, and hierarchy. When normalcy breaks down, it is the clear-sightedness of maximalism that enables pro-revolutionaries to resist the return to normalcy. In this sense, maximalism embodies one of the demands of the French revolutionary episode of May 1968: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.”
\n\nAlongside maximalism, we must also cultivate bravery. In the sense that it is used here, bravery is the means by which our class becomes capable of participating in insurrections and revolutions. Bravery is the impetus that overcomes the material and ideological limits of pragmatic pacifism, that enables the party of anarchy to cohere beyond a riot in order to precipitate a social insurrection. Safety in an insurrection is obviously an illusion—it is not a dinner party after all. But like a dinner party, an insurrection must be a time and space for us to finally be ourselves—our rewilding, our self-abolition as proletarianized, alienated, gendered, and separated beings.
\n\nMaterially speaking, normalcy is legitimized is through our collective dependence on its reproduction. Ideologically, this manifests as mass apolitical passivity. The permitted left and the false critics politicize members of our class by cultivating their bravery only to channel it towards seeking meager reforms. Bravery enables our class to demand more and more from the party of order. Bravery is also necessary in escalation, enabling our class to break with the party of order and the imposition of normalcy.
\n\nTo raid an armory before burning a police station can carry greater penalties than arson. What kind of bravery would be required to take up arms at such a moment, rather than reveling in mere destruction, as in Indonesia? And when the reaction inevitably comes, what kind of bravery could enable our class-in-abolition to keep our arms raised against opportunists and goons rather than surrendering them to the party of order, as former partisanos did in Nepal? The assault on our class is what drives our class to yearn for the reimposition of normalcy for some semblance of safety. Cultivating bravery also means keeping food supplies and healthcare openly available while defending ourselves from opportunists and reactionaries. Inevitably, insurrectos will also have to find the bravery to forego money and division of labor altogether.
\n\nThis bravery has to be cultivated under normalcy. One deeply pervasive constraint on bravery under normalcy is rape culture, which forces countless women and queer people out of movements. Ableism and bigotry also drive people away and break up the unities required for more bravery. Will it be our insurrection, the unleashing of our agency, if it cannot include us dancing in it?
\n\nSimilarly, when militants and insurrectos become caught up in the repressive black scare, it is crucial to support them, lest the bravery of all shall be constrained if we see that we will not be supported when reaction comes. Likewise, the fight for carceral abolition, for defunding the police and decarcerating prisoners, is essential to cultivating the bravery of our class.
\n\nA similar capacity for bravery is required in food and goods. It is abundantly clear that solidarity economies and alternative institutional arrangements (so-called dual power) cannot and will not challenge normalcy nor overcome the totalizing logic of capital. But the partial manner of these alternative lifeways can still provide us bravery and foundations for generalization under a revolution. Our intentionality in such matters, then, requires us to be cognizant of the limits of what we can do under normalcy.
\n\nInsurrection will come again, just as it has ebbed and flowed since even before the Reformation. Intentionality, maximalism, and bravery will be required for the next to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/5.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nWe are in a state of world war—from the Russian war on Ukraine to the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in Palestine and Lebanon, the US-Israeli war on Iran, the Gulf, the Horn of Africa, the conflicts in the Sahel, the civil war in Burma and West Papua, and the threat of war on Taiwan and the Southeast Asian sea. All of the sides in all of these conflicts are united on the black scare. In the war on Iran, we have seen a new mode of imperial counterinsurgency, in which the imperialists preemptively bomb revolutionary Iranians to ensure that a revolutionary movement cannot cohere. World war signals two possibilities ahead: either the opportunity for rupture and insurrection, or an even more violent imposition of normalcy throughout the world. All governments belong to the same party of order, albeit as competing and even contending factions and caucuses. Our class is not of the party of order; ours is the party of anarchy to come.
\n\nAs partisans of the party of order organize international anti-antifa conferences and intensify the black scare, our task as pro-revolutionaries is to recognize our role in the struggle ahead. Despite the deficiencies of military analogy, one reference might still be useful. In military theory, the vanguard is not the commander of the forces in a field, but the unit that scouts ahead to meet the enemy, delay them, and lay the groundwork for the main forces to advance. In this analogy, the party of anarchy is that main force, but we can open the way by scouting the metaphorical terrain. Laying down the groundwork means cultivating the bravery we all need. But the class struggle is not a war between fronts or apparatuses; it is the proletariat struggling to abolish their roles as proletarians, as men, and women, as whatever identities normalcy imposed upon us.
\n\nAs the current world war intensifies, internationalism will be crucial. Yet, as the insurrections of 2025 have shown, if the insurrectos and pro-revolutionaries have been unable to interlink struggles between town and country—or even to feed themselves—how much more difficult would it be to interlink struggles across de jure borders and states? It is in bridging and partially uniting these various separations and peripheries that pro-revolutionaries can be most effective during periods of normalcy. “It’s not up to the rebels to learn to speak anarchist; it’s up to the anarchists to become polyglot.” It is our task to speak different languages of struggle and translate these into one another. It is in our struggles interlinked that the party of anarchy coheres, from the forging of solidarities before and during the insurrection. The grand unification of various peripheries cannot be done under normalcy, but the intention and bravery to pave the way for it may be possible, so long as we do not succumb to attentisme.
\n\nHere in the Philippines, the situation is critical. There may not be enough electricity to power the most economically productive parts of the national grid in this summer. Summer is expected to be particularly brutal as it is an El Niño season, so droughts, crop failure, and heat strokes may be common. Adding in a fertilizer and fuel oil crisis, the coming crisis could signal a breakdown of normalcy on a larger scale than the COVID-19 pandemic. The black scare in response to the events of 9/21 is still ongoing, with many of those detained that day still facing charges. Yet the party of anarchy can still cohere again. If the answers remain uncertain, we can at least be certain which questions we must ask.
\n\nI cannot presume to prescribe a mode of organization, whether formal or informal, to meet the tasks of cohering the party of anarchy at a point of insurrection. To argue that we must understand the black scare and other material and ideological limits is not necessarily to argue for formal or informal models of organization.16 Here, we have simply reviewed what it will require to overcome the particular limits we have encountered. How to build the organization to fulfill those tasks without being subsumed into normalcy again is up to the coming insurrections.
\n\nThe task of overcoming limits is one that all pro-revolutionaries must undertake as the self-conscious elect of the party invisible. As pro-revolutionaries, we can see this party invisible, the coming party of anarchy, everywhere we look—the jeepney chupers, the mambubukid, kadamay, kamanggagawa, kababaihan, kabaklahan, and kasama.
\n\nAll under heaven is in chaos; the situation is excellent for anarchy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/30/1.jpg\")
Photograph by Philippine Collegian.
\nAll writing is autobiographical, more so with political theory. Dedicated to lovers, comrades, kasamasa, kaoomchies, and kaibigan—to all who persist. D—, K—, P—, T—, H—, N—, H—, I—, R—, H—, I—, A—, A—, M—, R—, B—, J—, K—, P—, A—, M—, A—, P—, L—, G—, J—, I—, M—, A—, A—, V—, A—, 1—, R—, R—, PM, ISE, BI, TDP, A!, PS, MF, and many more.
\n\nOn the wave of uprisings that spread from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, then from Indonesia to Nepal, Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, and elsewhere:
\n\nMore material on the Philippines:
\n\nEDSA, pronounced “Ed-Sa,” stands for the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the same avenue where the First and Second People Power Revolutions, or EDSA Uno and EDSA Dos respectively, took place. Similar to Luneta, marching and mobilizing at EDSA is highly symbolic. ↩
\n“DDS” originally stood for the nickname of then-mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s private army, the Davao Death Squad, which Duterte is accused of using to terrorize the urban poor of Davao City. During Duterte’s campaign for president, the fascist Dutertista movement co-opted and embraced the acronym DDS as Duterte Diehard Supporters. ↩
\nWhere appropriate, Filipinisms (words specific to the dialect of Philippine English) are used in this text. ↩
\nFormer president Rodrigo Duterte finished his term of office without much fanfare, having been constitutionally barred from running for president again as a consequence of finishing his term of office. Political dynasties in the Philippines routinely endorse family members and allies to keep power within their circle. The Duterte and Marcos dynasty colluded to run for office, with Bongbong Marcos (the son and junior of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.) running for president and Sara Duterte (the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte) running for vice president as a tandem. It is highly rare for tandems to win, as a president and vice president are elected separately, yet both won. Nonetheless, the two dynasties began quarreling in public, with Marcos ordering the extraordinary arrest and extradition of Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court. ↩
\nThe term is borrowed from Karl Marx, who first used it in what became Class Struggles in France; in this text, we play on his meaning. See Marx’s most famous usage of the terms “party of order” and “party of anarchy” in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩
\nThe Kilusang Setyembre Bente Uno (KS21) is a fascist entryist group that appropriated the symbolism of 9/21. We know they are fascist entryists because they are platformed by the usual fascist Telegram channels while claiming to be some kind of patriotic united front. Some of their members were arrested while challenging a Manila ordinance designed to prevent another 9/21. ↩
\n“Red-tag” is a Filipinism somewhat equivalent to “red-bait.” The use of “black-tagging” is a play on words, though that phrase is already sometimes used to refer to baiting or tagging individuals and groups by alleging connection to Daesh-aligned groups (the so-called “Islamic State”) like the Maute group. It goes without saying that I am not using the phrase to refer to Daesh. ↩
\nIn the Philippines, permits are required for most protests. ↩
\nThis discussion on apolitical passivity (which I term “apolicity” elsewhere) is also an intervention into the discussion in the Philippines about the notion that working-class people are “apolitical” and “passive,” which reduces individual agency to a choice rather than recognizing that individuals orient themelves in the context of their material and ideological conditions. ↩
\n“Burgis” is a Filipinism for “bourgeois,” and “burgesya” is a Filipinism for “bourgeoisie.” ↩
\nTaken from “izquierda permitida” (permitted left) discourse used in Bolivia to describe the transformation of MAS (Movimiento Al Socialismo) and other ruling left electoral parties from being a radical left (izquierda radical) to a “permitted left” (izquierda permitida). ↩
\nCompare with Phil A. Neel’s notion of an “anti-party” in his works such as “Theory of the Party.” ↩
\nAlmost literally so, since Prabowo is the son-in-law of Suharto, the old dictator of the New Order period, and Prabowo is an advocate of a return to New Order-style of governance. ↩
\nIn EDSA Uno, this force was the liberal-democratic oligarchy organized by the Church and the political-dynastic opposition to the dictatorship. The Communist Party of the Philippines failed to intervene at this crucial moment and lost the momentum for insurrection in what is now called as the “boycott error,” now understood by ideologues as a problem of “ultraleftism.” ↩
\nWhile I no longer believe in the theory of change that prefiguration and its adherents put forward, I still believe it has a place somehow, as suggested in the following paragraphs. This is not the place to expound on the subject in depth. ↩
\nNeither is informalism an inherently superior mode of organization in counterrevolutionary times. We have seen in the Philippines how informalist organization can constrain bravery no less than transmisogyny or manarchism. The dichotomy of formalism versus informalism (as also framed as pro-organizationalism versus anti-organizationalism) is a false dichtotomy. People have repeatedly raised the point against Murray Bookchin that so-called lifestylists (his referred term for informalists/anti-organizationalists) still take part in formal organizations. ↩
\nWhat can today’s rebels learn from the Stonewall riots? Why did the uprising have such an impact? To answer these questions, we explore the previously unacknowledged significance of anarchists in the rebellion and the movements that emerged from it. Along the way, we trace a queer genealogy of anarchist organizing methods in North America from the Stonewall Uprising through the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 to today.
\n\nThis is a massive, meticulously researched historical investigation. It’s a deep dive! For a shorter introduction to the subject, see our previous article, “Stonewall Means Riot Right Now.”
\n\nYou can order a zine version of this article here in order to read it in print.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/1.jpg\")
This image designed by the artist Bum Lung appeared in a book collecting the works of the Mary Nardini Gang in 2019. In fact, it repurposes the same Thomas Nast cartoon as a flyer that the anarchist group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker made in the 1960s. This connection gives us a glimpse of a subterranean relationship between queer subversion and criminal anarchism that spans decades.
\n“Be gay, do crime”? Let’s be more ambitious!
\n\nIn 1969, gays and gender rebels were already criminals. At Stonewall, they became revolutionaries.
\n\nAnd if you’ve ever participated in an affinity group at a mass protest, you’ve got them partly to thank.
\n\nHere, we revisit the Stonewall Uprising and its aftermath to trace a queer anarchist history of riots and horizontal organizing. Despite Stonewall being the most famous moment in LGBTQ history in the United States, few have explored the anarchist dimensions of the uprising, nor its influence on subsequent radical organizing and tactics. Until now, queer anarchists who have invoked Stonewall have usually focused on it simply as an anti-police riot, an example of “queer ultraviolence” in which a wide range of sexual and gender rebels including trans people, people of color, and street youth fought back against their oppressors. This is accurate, of course, and were it only that, it would still be worth celebrating. But there is a specifically anarchist legacy at the heart of the rebellion, posing strategic and tactical lessons of interest to contemporary anarchists.
\n\nThe history of queer anarchism has yet to be told. This is one of its riotous chapters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/2.jpeg\")
Queer anarchists around the world march to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising—let’s actually remember and learn from it.
\nIf you, dear reader, are a queer and/or trans anarchist, we hope you’ll find particular pleasure in this account. But there are no identity-based limits on this legacy. All anarchists and rebels should find useful insights in the story that follows. Looking back through this history, it’s surprising how much of it—the discourse about outside agitators, identity, and local knowledge in riots, the debates about leadership and representation versus spontaneity and affinity, the counterinsurgency methods—resonates directly with our own experiences in more recent rebellions across a wide range of contexts.
\n\nRadical history should go beyond simply cheerleading our ancestors and trancestors; we owe it to them to learn concrete lessons from their successes and failures. The best way to honor the courage of the Stonewall rebels is not by putting their images on our walls or social media feeds, nor by squabbling over the proper version of identity politics to govern our thumbnail accounts of history.
\n\nIt’s by drawing on their experiences to revolt more and better today.
\n\n—some queer anarchists
\n\nWe’ve researched this article using a range of primary materials (documents and accounts from 1969) as well as other historians’ writings about the events, plus interviews years later with folks who witnessed them. Where possible, we’ve included links to online sources that you can read yourself; otherwise, we have included footnotes to materials you can access in libraries. Many of the sources appear in the excellent anthology The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary Reader.
\n\nSome of the accounts directly contradict each other. We’ve done our best to sort through the various sources to pull together a well-supported overall narrative, acknowledging the limits of what we can know.
\n\nObjectivity is impossible. Yet our revolutionary aspirations will not be served by upholding mythologies that are emotionally satisfying but neglect the available evidence. A “usable past,” as we see it, isn’t an uncomplicated and inspiring fable full of hero/in/es to celebrate. It’s an analysis of history that offers lessons we can use to realize our own revolutionary dreams in the present.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/27.jpg\")
Yes honey, we know. But what can it teach us about revolt?
\nStonewall wasn’t simply a night when the cops raided a bar and people fought back. The Stonewall Rebellion spanned three nights of intense rioting throughout Greenwich Village over the course of six days. This is critical to understanding why it made such a difference then and why we still remember it today.
\n\nIt has become common to point out that Stonewall wasn’t the first queer riot. Commonly cited incidents include Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles (c. 1959) and Compton’s Cafeteria (1966). We can add to the list the Black Nite Brawl of 1961, also known as “Wisconsin’s Stonewall,” the gay community response to the Black Cat raid in 1967 Los Angeles, and various other pre-1969 rebellions.
\n\nYet our hunger for a usable riotous queer past may exceed what we can actually document. The Cooper Do-nuts incident might have happened, but novelist John Rechy is the only person who claims to remember it (and wasn’t even sure what year it took place). More people claim to remember a tussle at Compton’s, but neither police files, organizational records, media coverage, nor gay nor trans periodicals from the time offer any mention of such an incident. It may have happened, but the details and even the date remain hazy—some time in August 1966 is the best guess. While inspiring to recount as an early example of collective trans and queer resistance, whatever impact such a disturbance may have had at the time was limited.
\n\nOther instances that are better documented, while locally significant, did not spread beyond their immediate geographic or tactical limits. The Black Nite Brawl, while fierce, was essentially a bar fight on a single night. When the Black Cat was raided in 1967, the gay community didn’t riot, though they did organize a nonviolent protest. None of these were widely discussed outside the communities where they took place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/3.jpg\")
After the Los Angeles Police raided the Black Cat bar in Los Angeles in 1967, the gay community assembled to protest… but didn’t riot.
\nSurely there have been many times when queer and/or trans people fought back against oppression, regardless of whether they were documented in traditional archives or community memory. But before 1969, none of those directly catalyzed a deeper transformation in the queer/trans world beyond the immediate participants.
\n\nStonewall was different. One of the reasons why is that it lasted so much longer. The entire neighborhood around the bar became ungovernable for nearly a week, with multiple escalating clashes that centered gay, trans, and/or gender non-conforming people but grew to include a range of neighbors, street kids, and political radicals. By sustaining the disorder for many days beyond the initial bar raid, the rioters shifted what it meant to be gay in the Village—and eventually, the world.
\n\nHad the 2014 riots in Ferguson died down after one night, they would not have catalyzed the international reckoning with police violence that became known as the Black Lives Matter movement. In the years before a police officer in Ferguson murdered Michael Brown, many one-night riots took place in response to police murders—but none lasted long enough to expand into a generalized rebellion. In Ferguson, locals kept coming back to the streets; this afforded supporters time to arrive, helping to sustain the intensity. The prolonged disorder caught the attention of the public, which eventually caused the protests to spread, making Michael Brown and Ferguson into household names. This is a useful analogy for what happened in the Stonewall riots.
\n\nNowadays, people love to debate who “threw the first brick”1 at Stonewall. Actually, the question of how the rioting continued is at least as important as how it started. While the courage of those who resisted on the first night is admirable, it was the persistence of collective militant defiance in the streets over the following week that transformed it from a disturbance into a revolutionary upheaval.
\n\nOne night, however fierce, could be a fluke. Stonewall was an uprising. Let’s see how it unfolded.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/4.jpg\")
The Stonewall Inn before everything exploded.
\nThe basic story of the first night of rioting at Stonewall is widely known, though certain details about who did what remain contested.
\n\nFriday, June 27 was an ordinary night at the Stonewall, a trashy gay bar on Christopher Street in the West Village run by the Genovese organized crime family. The door was staffed by Ed Murphy, an infamous Mafia tough, pimp, blackmailer, and police snitch who later rebranded himself as a gay activist. A mixture of mostly young gay men and trans/gender-nonconforming folks sipped watered-down drinks from dirty glasses and danced, while outside the bar, more queers (including many too young to get in) congregated in the park and on the streets, laughing and camping and cruising.
\n\nShortly after 1 am, police entered the bar and announced that they were raiding the premises. It was the second raid of the same bar that week, in addition to raids on other gay bars and the destruction of trees in a popular cruising area of a park in nearby Queens. As police sorted patrons for release or arrest, targeting trans people in particular, some begin to protest and physically resist. A crowd gathered outside, grumbling at the police and cheering and camping it up as people exited the bar.
\n\nWord spread through the neighborhood. As the police exited and began loading arrestees into a paddy wagon, tension built. A trans woman smacked an officer with her purse; a butch lesbian, struggling against her captors, yelled at the crowd to do something. From the swelling crowd, people shouted, threw pennies (a pun: “dirty copper!”), beat upon the police vehicles, pulled up cobblestones from the streets, and tussled with the officers. Losing control of the situation as the crowd grew larger and angrier, the officers retreated into the bar.
\n\nThe crowd tossed bottles, stones, trash, garbage cans, and whatever they else they could find. They smashed windows, unarrested some prisoners, and pulled up a parking meter to use as a battering ram. Rioters attempted to set the bar on fire. Cops pulled their guns. More police arrived; as riot cops squared off, the crowd camped it up, chanting and dancing a kick line. For hours, the crowds clashed with police, dispersed and reassembled, set trash cans on fire, chanted, cruised, and milled around discussing their previous experiences with police.2
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/5.jpg\")
Friday night: the police raided and queers fought back.
\nAs Martin Boyce recalled of the morning after:
\n\n\n\n\nMorning came on Christopher, and those broken windows and pieces of cloth inside and diamondlike glass all over. It was a riot, no doubt about it, and there were just exhausted survivors looking dazed. We knew what happened. We all did it… There was a certain beauty to the aftermath of the riot. It was a very extraordinary kind of beauty, something to make art out of later… The beauty of shattered glass and certain kind of fag decorations being blown in the wind, by the window. It was obvious, at least to me, that a lot of people really were gay and, you know, this was our street.3
\n
For all of the ink spilled debating who played what role on the first night, all accounts agree that there were no leaders. No organizations, no formal structures, no representatives: the rebellion was a spontaneous collective outburst of rage and joy. Even attempts to chant slogans such as “gay power” or to sing civil rights anthems like “We Shall Overcome” didn’t take hold in an atmosphere of arch camp irony and fury. While efforts to take control of the riot’s legacy and bend its meaning to serve different political agendas began soon after, the first night expressed an organic, unmediated defiance. An observer writing in the countercultural newspaper Rat remarked on the absence of any effort to exert leadership as the uprising unfolded: “Strangely, no one spoke to the crowd or tried to direct the insurrection. Everyone’s heads were in the same place.”4
\n\nMany of the statements that established activists made early in the rebellion focused on the bars themselves, lamenting the system of mafia control and police payoffs. Craig Rodwell of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop circulated a flyer on behalf of his organization Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN) that declared, “The only way this monopoly can be broken is through the action of Homosexual men and women themselves. We obviously cannot rely on the various agencies of government.” Despite this anti-state sentiment, the demands asserted—for gay businessmen to run bars with “competitive pricing,” a boycott of Mafia-controlled establishments, and an investigation by the mayor’s office—suggested a limited imagination.5 While these conditions created frustration and vulnerability for many adult gay people, young queer people—ironically, precisely the constituency that HYMN claimed to speak for—were excluded regardless of who owned them, and trans/gender-nonconforming people of all ages faced additional legal and social harassment both inside and outside of them.6
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/7.jpg\")
Craig Rodwell stands in front of the Oscar Wilde Book Shop in 1969.
\nHad the riots died down after one or two nights, such demands might have remained the thinkable horizon for many participants. However, the unrest persisted across many days despite the efforts of cops, politicians, and community representatives. The prolonged antagonism with police occupying the neighborhood and the ongoing congregation of angry, rebellious queers on the streets defying authority and sharing their experiences expanded the meaning of the uprising. Over the course of the week, what had begun as a grievance related to the bars became a window into a totally different world.
\n\nIn addition to expressing being fed up and determined to resist, participants began to articulate sophisticated political analyses. One young gay rebel explained to a reporter the function of anti-gay oppression: “We strike at the family, and we undermine all the bullshit about virility that keeps most men in line.”7 These insights emerged collectively in real time as the rioters chatted and developed a shared political consciousness. An observer of the first night recalled:
\n\n\n\n\nPeople hung around till after 4 am talking in little groups. People were excited and angry. In talking to a number of kids who had been inside, it was evident most understood at least rudimentarily what was happening to them. What was and should have always been theirs, what should have been the free control of the people was dramatized, shown up for what it really was, an instrument of power and exploitation. It was theatre, totally spontaneous. There was no bullshit.8
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/6.jpg\")
Day one: the raid and the riots left the bar wrecked.
\nIn a 2019 interview, Jim Fouratt, a longtime gay activist and former Yippie who was present for the entire Stonewall Uprising, recalled a detail that hasn’t made it into the published accounts of the riots. In his account, few radical groups participated on the second night of the uprising, but the Motherfuckers were there:
\n\n\n\n\nDo you know about the Motherfuckers? Straight anarchists, black flag kind of group… I did a lot of community organizing with the East Side Yippies and that kind of stuff. And my friend Ren de Antonio called me and she said, “I want you to know that the Motherfuckers are gonna come tonight and they’re gonna try to start a confrontation with the police.” And I said, “How do you know that?” She told me that there was a closeted gay man that she was good friends with in the Motherfuckers named Superdrill… she said Superdrill told me they’re gonna come.9
\n
Did the Motherfuckers participate in the Stonewall Uprising? If so, what impact did they have?10 We may never be able to confirm with certainty what role the Motherfuckers played, but Fouratt’s recollection suggests a throughline connecting the forms of anarchist organizing on the streets of New York City in 1969 with the organizational forms that emerged out of the Stonewall Uprising. In any case, as we shall see below, multiple witnesses confirm that at least one other anarchist group was definitely involved in the riots.
\n\nWho were the Motherfuckers? Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), also known as the Motherfuckers, emerged in the late 1960s out of organizing involving Dan Georgakas, Ben Morea, and several others. Inspired by Dadaism, Spanish Civil War veterans living in exile in New York City, and the Living Theater, Morea had launched a zine called Black Mask in 1966, turning the radical message of the avant garde against the corporate art world that had defanged it and reduced it to a spectacle. Over the months that followed, he and his companions carried out some of the boldest confrontational direct actions of the late 1960s while modeling a new form of horizontal organization.
\n\nMorea had attended meetings with Murray Bookchin at which they discussed how the Spanish anarchists of the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) had organized in grupos de afinidad during the revolution of 1936. Bookchin went on to circulate influential proposals about affinity group organizing through the writings and lectures of the Anarchos Group at spaces like Alternate U, a countercultural free school in Greenwich Village in New York City. At the same time, UAW/MF began to put a similar model into practice, organizing as a “street gang with an analysis,” forming cells that participated in confrontational actions against the art establishment, the police, and the military-industrial complex.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/26.jpg\")
Ben Morea of the Motherfuckers, c. 1968.
\nIn a leaflet titled “The Brown Bag Theory of Affinity Groups,” UAW/MF laid out their philosophy:
\n\n\n\n\nThe affinity group is the seed/ germ/ essence of organization. It is coming together out of mutual Need or Desire. Cohesive historical groups united out of the shared necessities of the struggle for survival, while dreaming of the possibility of love. For man’s nature is not bounded by necessity alone — Desire appears in all its forms & man desires to desire — he seeks to fulfill himself on every level of his complex life. & it is in this psychological sense that the affinity group is a pre-organizational force, it represents the drive out of which organization is formed & in so far as it fulfills men’s desires it becomes the post-revolutionary form, the organization of satisfaction.
\n
It is striking that the Motherfuckers articulated the logic of the affinity group not only as a response to political necessity or as a way to embody anti-authoritarian principles, but an expression of desire and the longing for love. Establishing collective living spaces, working together intensively, and sharing the risks and pleasures of life in revolt, UAW/MF formed a network they called “the family,” which, as Morea recounted, “shared a tribal outlook and lifestyle.” Deconstructing and replacing bourgeois structures of kinship was part of the group’s prefigurative vision. As the radical historian Caitlin Casey explains, “The Motherfuckers saw the nuclear family as a hopelessly outdated concept but their new family as presaging the postrevolutionary society.”
\n\nMorea later recalled, “The fact that we rejected the nuclear family model and lived collectively was never arrived at in a polemical fashion or laid out as a blueprint. We just had a sense that there were other roots to living other than what the West had to offer.” In this rejection of conventional family values in favor of new models driven by desire, love, and a vision of social transformation, the Motherfuckers—despite being a mostly heterosexual formation—promoted an anti-authoritarian vision that paralleled the queer practices that were emerging a few blocks west, where networks of street queens, queer teenagers, cruisers, and gay couples were building alternative worlds.
\n\nWhile these prefigurative models of alternative kinship overlapped with social realities in the Village, UAW/MF’s tactics were a far cry from any means of protest that organized gay groups had undertaken. Pre-Stonewall organizations such as the Mattachine Society of New York employed conventional hierarchical organizing models and limited their tactics to polite advocacy, which was undoubtedly bold for a time when same-sex sex was criminalized and police harassment bedeviled the community. The MSNY’s negotiations with Mayor Lindsay’s administration and the police department had managed to secure a reduction in anti-gay arrests in the years leading up to Stonewall. But while some individual gays and lesbians such as Jim Fouratt participated in more confrontational New Left or anarchist projects, the organized gay movement remained tactically conservative through 1969.
\n\nAt a time when a broad social consensus, particularly among young people and marginalized communities, strongly opposed the Vietnam War and the US military machine, the first gay protest to take place in the city had been a 1964 picket outside the US Army Building advocating for the inclusion of gay men and lesbians in the military. The famous 1966 “sip-in” at Julius’s Bar in the Village involved men in conservative suits identifying themselves as homosexuals and then politely asking to be served in order to challenge State Liquor Authority policies that rendered gay bars vulnerable to closure. While courageous and in some cases effective, the homophile movement showed little tactical innovation. Younger activists’ efforts to propose even minor changes in the scope of actions—such as relaxing the conservative gender-conforming dress code imposed on participants in the “Annual Reminder” picket at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia—provoked fierce backlash.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/9.jpg\")
The famous “sip-in” at Julius’s Bar in the West Village, 1966. Dick Leitsch, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, is at center, addressing the bartender.
\nBy contrast, on the Lower East Side, the Motherfuckers were pushing the boundaries of protest with near-constant confrontations, property destruction, and street marches. As former Motherfucker Osha Neumann recalled,
\n\n\n\n\nWe would riot, throw rocks through the windows of the bank, and run through the streets chased by beat cops from the precinct reinforced by the Tactical Patrol Force. Those of us they caught got dragged to jail. Those of us who escaped rushed to our new storefront to churn out fliers calling for new demonstrations, which would invariably result in more riots and more arrests.
\n
UAW/MF organized their own protests, but also appeared wherever social tensions presented opportunities for insurrectionary escalation. According to Morea, “We didn’t operate from any plan, we just saw situations and took our chances. We were edge dwellers.” When entering into a conflict, they did not confine themselves within tactical limits: “Our response would include everything from peaceful protests to not peaceful battling depending on the situation. We were extremely volatile and it often depended on how hard we were pushed.” The city presented ample opportunities for escalation, especially as the temperature rose; as a Motherfucker communiqué titled “Liberation in the Streets” declared, “While the rest tremble, we look forward to the heat of summer.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/10.jpg\")
Black Mask, antecedents of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, c. 1967.
\nYet as summer of 1969 set in, few straight radicals anticipated that the most successful confrontation with the city’s notorious riot squad would come not from seasoned movement “heavies” such as Motherfuckers, Yippies, or SDS militants, but from young gay people in Greenwich Village. Many tough radicals from the New Left viewed the latter with contempt or amused indifference.
\n\nIn fact, all accounts agree that in the Stonewall riots, it was specifically effeminate gays, street queens, and trans/gender-nonconforming people that took the most prominent militant roles. “People are beginning to realize,” one New York Post author quoted the doorman at the Stonewall Inn as saying, “that no matter how ‘Nelly’ or how ‘fem’ a homosexual is, you can only push them so far.” The author continued: “With a battle cry of ‘gay power,’ the Nellies, fems, gay boys, queens—all those who flaunt their homosexuality—have been demonstrating that they have indeed been pushed too far.”11
\n\nDick Leitsch, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, noted, “The ‘butch’ numbers who were around the area and who participated peripherally in the action remained for the most part in the background. It was the ‘queens’ who scored the points and proved that they are not going to tolerate any more harassment or abuse.”12 A graffito on the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall: “BUTCHES, WHERE ARE YOU NOW THAT WE NEED YOU?”13
\n\nAs word spread after the first night of rioting that a rowdy group of street queens and campy young gays with no formal protest experience had successfully squared off against the riot police, militants flocked to the Village to learn from their experience. As gay activist Bob Kohler recounted:
\n\n\n\n\nThe big thing on everybody’s mind, especially the police and movement people, was that these were the only rioters that had gotten the best of the police. So that gave them a special strangeness. I mean, people just [wondered], How could that happen? Because there’d been riots with Yippies and there’d been riots with the SDS and Abbie Hoffman, but nobody had ever gotten the best of the police before. The police were never put on the run, and suddenly they were put on the run by the fairies, so those people were very curious: did this really happen?14
\n
As the day unfolded, radicals and countercultural people of various sexualities and genders converged on the Village, mingling and discussing the events. One lesbian recalled, “Hippies joined the queers & straight places turned gay for the week-end—it was complete madness in NYC.”15
\n\nIn addition to the likely presence of the Motherfuckers, multiple participants confirm the presence of the Crazies, an anarchist cell based in Lower Manhattan that participated in street theater, confrontational protests, and—as came out a few months later—bombings of targets connected to United States militarism.
\n\nAuthor Edmund White reported, “A mad left-wing group of straight kids called the Crazies is trying to organize the kids, pointing out that [Mayor] Lindsay is to blame.” John O’Brien, a Marxist activist with links to various radical groups experienced in street confrontations with police, reached out to the group to ask them to come on Saturday.16 While it is not known which individual Crazies were at Stonewall that night, participants in the group included Robin Palmer and Sharon Krebs, who went on to join the Weather Underground, and Sam “Mad Bomber” Melville. Five months after Stonewall, Melville was arrested en route to a planned bombing due to information passed by George Demmerle, an FBI snitch involved with the Crazies. Melville became a leader in prison organizing at Attica; he died at the hands of police and National Guard troops in the massacre that concluded the Attica Rebellion.
\n\nAs night fell on June 28, the second night of the Stonewall riots, the crowd swelled to include thousands of people. The vibe was at once angry and festively campy. Participants surged into the streets and blocked traffic, chanted, confronted vehicles, and began to throw things. At the nearby Women’s House of Detention, which confined many Black and Latina lesbians and transmasculine folks, detainees cheered and dropped burning pieces of toilet paper out of the windows of the jail to show their support.17 Angry gay and trans people began attacking police cars. Marsha P. Johnson reportedly climbed a streetlamp and dropped something heavy on a squad car, smashing its windshield, while someone else tossed a bag of wet garbage into the face of an officer in another vehicle.
\n\nAfter 2 am, the TPF riot police arrived to reinforce the badly outnumbered officers, advancing in wedge formations in an attempt to clear the streets. Queer demonstrators confronted them with taunts and kick-lines and, when forced out, escaped along side streets to disperse and then reassemble elsewhere. Setting fires in trash cans, attacking police outnumbered by the crowds, and successfully unarresting and freeing some of those snatched by the riot squad, queers continued to flood the streets until after 3:30 am.
\n\nThe success of the crowd in evading police, holding the streets, and sustaining the confrontation for hours likely stemmed from the combination of different demographics that converged on the second night. Gay residents and street queens drew on their intimate knowledge of the local terrain to find escape routes around police blockades, enabling rioters to disperse and reconverge, outflanking police efforts to re-establish control. Anarchists and other militants drew on their experience in street protest to escalate confrontations and defend against police violence and arrests. The gays, Motherfuckers, and Crazies proved a formidable coalition.
\n\nFouratt was thrilled about how the second night went:
\n\n\n\n\nWe learned through the end of it when I, when our little group met again, full of ourselves because it had been more successful than we had expected, many more people came out, it was just wonderful. I remember marching across Waverly Place in the wrong direction, going by Julius’s and shouting, “Come out! Come Out! Come out!” And they’re all raising their drinks, but not coming out! … I don’t claim to be the first person to say, “Come out! Come out!” But on the second night, that was the mantra, the cheer that you heard.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/11.jpg\")
Saturday night: Stonewall belongs to the kids on the streets.
\nOn the third night, Sunday, June 29, large crowds once again turned out, but the fierce confrontations that marked the first two nights did not take place. As David Carter explains, the police had learned
\n\n\n\n\nthat in the aftermath of Friday night’s raid it would take many more police officers than were initially deployed on Saturday to discourage gay men and women and their allies from attempting to seize the area around the Stonewall, which the homosexual citizens saw as their turf; that the police needed to arrive early in large numbers to preempt the gay citizenry from seizing the initiative; and that such a maneuver must be executed in a low-key manner or their mere presence might precipitate the outbreaks they were hoping to end. (At least the police used this approach on Sunday night and it worked.)18
\n
A gay activist writing in the Berkeley Barb also claimed that activists from SDS had promised to lend their support, but failed to show up on Sunday night.19 If the Motherfuckers returned, their presence was not felt. Other factors contributed to muting the rebellion:
\n\n\n\n\nThe second factor working in the police’s favor was that the weekend had passed. Friday and Saturday nights’ events had begun late and lasted until the early morning, something most people could not do on an evening before a workday, especially if they had already done so on the previous night or two. Thirdly, some of the demonstrators felt that they had already made their point and nothing more was to be gained by again repeating what was becoming a predictable scenario. Was it worth risking more injuries and arrests, as well as damage to the neighborhood that gay people were fighting to claim as their own?20
\n
Furthermore, earlier in the day, Mattachine activists had met with representatives of the mayor and police department and attempted to dissuade the gay community from continuing the rebellion. At the Stonewall, MSNY members encouraged people who turned up to go home, posting a sign reading: “WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF THE VILLAGE—MATTACHINE.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/12.jpg\")
An attempt at counterinsurgency. It didn’t work.
\nMSNY’s actions reflect a familiar pattern of co-optation and counterinsurgency, in which the self-appointed representatives of an oppressed group attempt to pacify their constituency in order to maintain their status as intermediaries with the dominant power structure. This model is familiar from Ferguson to Standing Rock to Minneapolis; it represents one of the most serious threats to the revolutionary potential of social movements.
\n\nHowever, at Stonewall in 1969, the elation at the possibilities opened up by the riots, the limited influence that the Mattachine Society had upon the street youth who comprised the front line of the rebellion, and the hatred that the vast majority of the community felt towards the police combined to limit the effectiveness of this strategy. The crowds remained large, if less rebellious than the night before, and an array of defiant actions took place. As Carter recounts,
\n\n\n\n\nSeveral gay youths took daring advantage of the heavy police presence in the Christopher Street area to make a guerrilla raid on the Sixth Precinct’s headquarters. They went to the police station and slapped Day-Glo blue and fuchsia bumper stickers reading “Equality for Homosexuals” on the police cars, a patrol wagon, and the personal cars of cops who had left their vehicles parked while on duty.21
\n
While the crowds did not march and clash with police as on the first two nights, the attitude remained militant and defiant. One furious young queen tore into a well-meaning straight ally who attempted to defuse the crowd’s anger:
\n\n\n\n\nThe hell you say! You don’t impress me. You are straight and you are my enemy! Don’t give me that phoney liberal bull. You made the laws. Nixon’s silent army. Now we are gonna get you! I was in Vietnam, man, how does that grab you? Huh? Huh? And, man, I’ll screw your daughter. But I’ll screw your son first! 22
\n
While some non-gay radicals did join the rebellious crowds, queer participants remained skeptical of dogmatic leftists whose humorless attempts to impose their analysis on the situation attracted little sympathy. Several sources have remarked on a joke in circulation among the gay youth participants in the uprising: “I’ve become a left deviationist.” 23 The quip picks up on a common authoritarian leftist epithet that Stalinists and Maoists used to condemn a variety of positions, particularly those that promoted more freedom than the party apparatus trusted people with, as well as the Cold War term “sex deviate,” used to denote homosexuals. This rather niche pun indicates the extent to which leftist lingo had saturated youth subcultures and how an anti-authoritarian gay sensibility used humor to mock the pretensions of both homophobes and rigid leftists—groups that overlapped considerably in 1969 New York City.
\n\nWhile full-scale riots did not break out the following two nights, tensions remained high and continued building as riot police stalked the neighborhood, taunting gay residents with homophobic slurs. An observer recounted:
\n\n\n\n\n“Start something, faggot, just start something,” one cop kept telling people. “I’d like to break your ass wide open.” After saying that to several dozen people, one man turned and said, “What a Freudian comment, officer!” The cop started swinging and hauled the guy off to a waiting wagon.24
\n
One officer fell victim to the trolling of “a wildly ‘fem’ queen,” who “sneaked up behind him, lit a firecracker and dropped it between his feet.” The cop squealed and flailed at the crowd with his nightstick; in the succeeding mêlée, a gay rioter made off with his badge. Leitsch recalled:
\n\n\n\n\nThe next day, the badge turned up hanging on a tree in Washington Square Park, stuck into a string of pickled pigs’ feet. When the cops found the badge-stuck pigs’ feet, they didn’t take them down from the tree—they beat the pigs’ feet to the ground, then picked up the badge.25
\n
This mutual taunting reflected the war between gays and police that was generalizing throughout the neighborhood and beyond. The tension ratcheted up further on Wednesday when an offensive article penned by Lucian Truscott appeared in The Village Voice, mocking the protests and the gay community. As night fell on the Village and the crowds swelled, the tension once again reached a boiling point.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/13.jpg\")
Despite the lull, queers remained in the streets—and another explosion was soon to come.
\nWhile the early nights of the rebellion and the days of lull had involved anger leavened with wit and cheerful banter, the mood had turned ugly by Wednesday night. Days of homophobic police occupation, injuries and arrests, mocking news coverage, and efforts by respectability-oriented activists to defuse anger engendered a cold fury among the crowds that assembled on the night of July 2. Likewise, the police were even more brutal: one observer noted, “The cops, who had been caught off-guard and were on the defensive before, had taken the offensive and massive retaliation was their goal.”26
\n\nBy 10 pm, between 500 and 1000 people were seething in the streets. The arrival of a police motorcade to Christopher Street prompted a wave of shoving and bottle throwing. Shortly after, gay and trans/gender-nonconforming participants began to light fires in the street. The crowd discussed burning down the building housing The Village Voice in retaliation for its offensive coverage. Throughout the neighborhood, riot police attempted to snatch members of the crowd, who fought back fiercely, looting shops and smashing windows. A handful of people were arrested; a large number of people were injured, including some officers.27 Although the clash lasted a short time compared to earlier nights—the fiercest fighting lasted around an hour—its ferocity struck all onlookers. One participant concluded, “The word is out. Christopher Street shall be liberated. The fags have had it with oppression.”28
\n\nWhat makes a riot queer? One dimension involves the rupture of gendered expectations about who participates and how. Rioter Ronnie Di Brienza summed this up in a local paper a week later with an elegant audio metaphor: “Revolution is being heard on Christopher Street, only instead of guttural MC-5 voices, we hear it coming from sopranos, and altos.”29
\n\nThe MC5 were a Detroit-based rock band popular among militant New Left activists and Yippies; their manager John Sinclair had founded the White Panther Party and worked with the anarchist newspaper Fifth Estate. On tour the previous year, the Motherfuckers had started a riot at an MC5 show at the Fillmore East, leading to the band’s being banned from a range of venues. By invoking the gruff swaggering masculinity of the MC5 and the street militants associated with them and contrasting it to the effeminacy of the frontline rioters at Stonewall, Di Brienza showed how the uprising not only asserted gay and trans grievances, but deconstructed the entire notion of who could be a revolutionary.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/14.jpg\")
“Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad”—despite the mockery of local media, the effeminacy of the rioters stunned police and butch revolutionaries alike.
\nIn the US today, many leftist commentators presume that people who are disproportionately vulnerable to state violence need to be sheltered from it in militant protest. This can lead to contradictory conclusions. Some assert that those insulated by some degree of privilege should take the front lines and actively participate in militant resistance in order to absorb the brunt of confrontations; others claim that those who have more privilege should refrain from participating in escalatory activity because its effects will disproportionately impact those who have less privilege. Critics of the latter approach respond that only by taking collective risks to defy state power can we do away with the conditions that render targeted communities vulnerable to state violence in the first place. Even well-meaning efforts to police the scope of militant tactics are generally premised on the patronizing assumption that targeted communities have no agency to resist on their own behalf. Ultimately, this framing supports the state monopoly on power.
\n\nThese issues were the subject of strident debate surrounding the Stonewall Uprising, focusing most acutely on the night of July 2. Commentary on the final day of conflict focused on the demographics of the participants, and specifically the relationship between (presumably or predominantly) straight rioters from crews based outside the Village, such as the Motherfuckers and the Crazies, and the gay/trans/gender-nonconforming rebels in the streets. As Dick Leitsch from the Mattachine Society of New York observed shortly after,
\n\n\n\n\nThe composition of the street action had changed. It was no longer gay frustration being vented upon unsuspecting cops by queens who were partly violent but mostly campy. The queens were almost outnumbered by Black Panthers, Yippies, Crazies and young toughs from street gangs all over the city and some from New Jersey. The exploiters had moved in and were using the gay power movement for their own ends. A lot of them were looking for a fight, and had the police not come, they probably would have started the old game of street gangs everywhere, “beating up a queer.” The blacks and students who want a revolution, any kind of revolution, were there to exploit. They swelled the crowd and tried to recruit, but “graciously” let the queens take all the bruises and suffer all the arrests. (If they have no more courage than they displayed on Christopher Street, their revolution is a long way off.)30
\n
This narrative bears uncanny similarities to the accusations lobbed at (and within) many 21st-century North American social movements. An array of presumed outsiders—if white, coded as political radicals, and if Black, coded as apolitical criminals—are portrayed as a threat to whatever demographic is presumed to bear authentic political grievances and entitlement to local terrain. Note the invocation first of the Black Panthers and then of “young toughs” from “New Jersey.” It is almost certain that Leitsch did not interrupt rioters to ask them where they lived and that New Jersey residents were not visually identifiable as such. On the heels of the Black-led Newark riots of 1967, invoking “New Jersey” in contrast to the residents of the almost entirely white Greenwich Village neighborhood served as a racial code for white gay readers.
\n\nIn an effort to prevent people from interpreting diverse participation in the rebellion as an expression of solidarity, Leitsch even concocts a fantasy of gay-bashing gang members so intoxicated by violence that they temporarily forget to attack gay/trans/gender-nonconforming people and instead attack the police alongside them. While anti-queer street violence was a reality in New York City at this time, Leitsch rejects the far more plausible explanation that a wide range of young people, including Black and brown kids, political radicals, and others, had suffered at the hands of the police and came together to fight back against them on account of shared interests and desires.
\n\nObservers who were more connected to the city’s marginalized communities and social movements, while noting the less visibly queer composition of the streets that night, arrived at different conclusions. Bob Kohler, a white gay radical and active supporter of the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party, agreed that the crowd was different, but framed this in a broader context:
\n\n\n\n\nYes, there was a difference in the makeup [of the crowd on July 2]. There were more people rioting that could not be easily categorized, and a lot of that had to do with people that came over from other areas. The straight movement moved in heavily that night as a support. I’m assuming it was as a support. They were, of course, using it for their own ends, too… You had, for lack of a better word, provocateurs who were seeing an incident that could be used for the good of their movement or a different movement or a coalition of movements. This was one more. It was the last. There was nobody else left to riot, so people with some foresight, more foresight than I [had] at the time, could see that this could again strengthen the radical movement, that people they hadn’t really thought about were now up there in the front. 31
\n
Although referring to presumably non-gay rioters as “provocateurs” (while questioning his own use of the word), Kohler recognizes the broader participation in the night’s events as a form of solidarity oriented towards building a broader radical coalition that could resist the forms of oppression that multiple targeted communities experienced.
\n\nNeither activist specified how they knew that the rioters on July 2 were not “queens” or members of the gay community. For Leitsch, race certainly played a role, as well as gender presentation; to his credit, although not a “queen” himself, he insistently named and praised the role of effeminate gay/trans/gender-nonconforming people on the front lines of the uprising. Kohler was more familiar with the landscape of multiracial activism in the city; he may have recognized people from elsewhere. But both appear to have relied on a narrowly gendered, and to some extent racialized, interpretation of identity in reading the crowds.
\n\nAt a time when gay identity was still publicly associated with effeminacy and functioned for many as a specific subculture with distinctive cultural styles, many homosexually active men did not register to other gay people as “gay” in a cultural sense. John O’Brien, a white gay left-wing activist who was present from the first night of the uprising, remarked that his more masculine presentation aroused suspicion that he might be a provocateur or police informant when he participated in gay demonstrations.
\n\nAs one commenter on more recent queer riots has argued, one of the radical possibilities of street rebellion lies in how it can open up new ways of being in the world, weaponizing otherwise static identity categories as tools for revolt. We will never know exactly who comprised the crowd around Stonewall on July 2. Rather than asking who they had been, it might be more interesting to ask what they were becoming. Leitsch crafts a narrative in which the most marginalized members of a rebellious mass disproportionately bore the brunt of physical violence and legal consequences due to the combination of escalatory provocation and cowardice on the part of outsiders or more privileged participants. But there is another way to tell the story.
\n\nWith the benefit of historical hindsight, it is clear that the participation of non-gay radical rioters in the Stonewall Uprising constituted a vital act of solidarity. By adding important tactical knowledge, swelling the crowds, helping to free arrestees, escalating and sustaining confrontational energy, and spreading word of the uprising beyond the confines of the Village, they helped to transform the events from a fleeting expression of long-suppressed rage to a rebellion with world-historical significance. Had the Motherfuckers, the Crazies, and other anarchists and rebels subordinated themselves to the prescriptions of contemporary identity politics and stayed home, the riots might have petered out sooner and with less impact. The Stonewall Uprising illustrates the meaning of the slogan solidarity means attack.
\n\nSetting aside the question of whether observers such as Leitsch and Kohler could infallibly read the sexual and gender identities of the rioters, we must ask—were those identities fixed and static? Should those identities have been primary in determining the rioters’ relation to the rebellion? Even in Leitsch’s paranoid fantasy of otherwise homophobic “toughs” temporarily turning to fighting homophobic police in order to slake their thirst for destruction—wouldn’t that be a good thing? Instead of “be gay, do crime,” the Stonewall rioters inverted the script: by doing crime together, regardless of what previous desires they felt or sexual subcultures they frequented, people across a wide range of identities made it easier to be gay. We might even say that they invented a new way to be gay together. What affinities, erotic and otherwise, might previously unconnected people have discovered in the streets? What new possibilities might the ostensibly heterosexual participants in the riots unlocked within themselves?
\n\nThis destabilization of identity through revolutionary struggle became a hallmark of the emerging gay liberation movement, if only briefly. The earlier homophile movement’s major conceptual innovation lay in seeking civil rights for a “minority” by means of interest group politics. In that framework, a more-or-less fixed number of homosexuals existed alongside “other” minorities with their own distinctive issues (rarely, in those pre-intersectional times, did the implicit whiteness of this framework trouble white gay or lesbian activists). However, as one Gay Liberation Front activist explained in 1970 at a gathering of radical movements, gay people were coming to understand gay liberation not “as an oppressed minority fighting for rights but more the process of [creating] a society in which people can come out and be all that it’s possible to be” while rejecting “the false categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality.”32
\n\nAt Stonewall, rioters put this into practice: rejecting the false categories that divided them, they fought side by side against the police who oppressed them, and in the process changed history.
\n\nWith the Fourth of July weekend pending, both gay residents and police anticipated that crowds would be massive and the riots would intensify. Riot police continued to assemble in the Village, redirecting their attention from the Motherfuckers’ usual rebellious turf, as a local left-wing newspaper observed:
\n\n\n\n\nThe calling in of the TPF had the incidental benefit of taking the heat off the Second Avenue and St. Marks Place area of the Lower East Side, the TPF’s usual stomping grounds, allowing street people there an unusually relaxed July 4.33
\n
However, although large numbers of people assembled in the streets of the village and sporadically confronted police, major clashes did not break out. As Leitsch described the following days:
\n\n\n\n\nSporadic efforts were made to start trouble—by people who can best be described as “outside agitators,” by gay people, and too often by uptight cops who tried to start trouble to give them an excuse to start bashing heads again. Despite those efforts, no major outbreak erupted. It was almost as if everyone had decided that the point had been made and any further action would only bring on a backlash.34
\n
It is not surprising that Leitsch, as a white moderate, adopted the “outside agitator” language first deployed by white supremacists in the South against civil rights and labor organizers and later generalized to target all forms of protest. During the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, this language was so widespread that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent much of his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” addressing it.
\n\nFollowing another half century of seeing this language weaponized to divide and discredit radical social movements, it is easy to recognize such rhetoric as purely reactionary. We should understand that Leitsch’s subsequent accounts of the uprising were shaped by his experience of being marginalized by the younger and more radical participants. Rejecting his attempts to position his own organization, the Mattachine Society of New York, as the head of the gay movement in the uprising’s aftermath, radicals went on to found the Gay Liberation Front, which continued to pursue a confrontational approach and worked to form alliances with precisely the radical groups Leitsch had condemned as “outside agitators.”
\n\nBearing this in mind, let’s consider Leitsch’s description of the looting that unfolded on the night of July 2:
\n\n\n\n\nObviously, little of it was done by people who live in and frequent Christopher Street and environs, because all the most unlikely places were looted. The first shop to get hit was the “Gingerbread House,” a toy shop run by a delightful little lady who is a friend of everyone on Christopher. The other shops broken into were also run, for the most part, by nice people, sympathetic to the gay cause and the plight of the street queen. The really likely places, the “fag shops” that overprice their wares and bleed the gay market for exorbitant prices, were left alone. Shops whose managers complain the loudest about the cruising and swishing in the neighborhood were also, surprisingly, left alone. Observers in the know doubt if the looting was done by gay people.35
\n
Leitsch did not condemn property destruction or looting out of hand; rather, he criticized the looters for the specific targets they chose. His response includes a critique of the economic exploitation of the gay community and the petty bourgeois norms of respectability preached by business owners. While stopping short of validating property destruction as a tactic in service of these critiques, he cites the pattern of which businesses were attacked as evidence that looters lacked intimate knowledge of the neighborhood’s gay geography and the grievances that might prompt radical action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/15.jpg\")
Queer rioters’ intimate knowledge of the West Village helped to sustain the revolt.
\nLeitsch’s critique anticipates the debates over property destruction and “diversity of tactics” that have saturated the anarchist movement over the past three decades—particularly during the mobilizations of the so-called anti-globalization era, from Seattle to Miami to Adams Morgan. On occasion, anarchists who have become exasperated with these debates have dismissed valuable good-faith critiques of confrontational actions. Perhaps, had the Motherfuckers and other rebels who converged on Stonewall taken the time to confer with local gay residents, they might have been able to pick their targets more thoughtfully, thereby achieving an even more seductive riot.
\n\nBut was Leitsch’s representation of the looting of July 2 accurate? Lacking other sources that comment directly on which businesses were attacked and how, it is difficult to say. His rhetoric reflects a common pattern in moderate critiques of property destruction during times of widespread unrest. Knowing that the rebellion was widely popular and reflected deeply felt anger, Leitsch identified the righteous fury that queer residents felt at their economic exploitation, at the scorn targeting femme and gender-nonconforming people, and at the repression of cruising and public sex—but he attempted to redirect some of this fury against imagined “outsiders.”
\n\nPerhaps, then, we should not uncritically read the looting as poorly targeted militant action, but as an expression of outrage so popular that it forced even committed opponents of militant action to frame their critiques as a matter of targets, not tactics. Today, we need not look far to find pundits eager to defuse and recuperate popular anger by praising “our right to resist” in the abstract while criticizing every concrete action as the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong target.
\n\nLeitsch himself and other homophile groups had been organizing for years without qualitatively shifting the sense of possibility in the Village or beyond. Without downplaying their accomplishments, which included a significant decrease in police harassment and entrapment from 1966 forward, we can see that it took a dramatic break with existing forms of activism and the norms governing queer people’s relationship to public space to make the quantum leap into the era of gay liberation. Only by defying the demands of city officials, police, and established gay activists—by remaining in the streets and fighting back over an entire week while refusing to accept the tactical limits that leaders attempted to impose—did young queer people and their comrades render a deeper shift possible.
\n\nWhatever so-called “outsiders” participated in the rebellion, it is clear that the gay, trans, and other assorted members of the community around the Stonewall were ready to embrace more militant tactics. As Ronnie di Brienza, a self-described freak who participated in the first night’s riot, put it:
\n\n\n\n\nI have had a lot of shit thrown my way, but until Friday night, June 27, I was basically a pacifist. However, pacifism is fast going out the window. How many times can one turn the other cheek. There is a limit, and Friday night was it… Poof, it starts. The fags have gone revolutionary… The fags, like the true revolutionaries, have become resigned to fighting for their cause, if necessary by force and with heavier weapons.36
\n
Members of the established homophile groups reacted with ambivalence to the militancy of the riots, which many younger gays saw as a harbinger of their irrelevance. The Insider, the newsletter of the Mattachine Society of Washington, exemplified this discomfort in their coverage of the riots:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Insider does not see this exhibition of militancy as a fluke. Militant open defiance has become the most characteristic mark of the sixties’ protest movements. First used by the blacks in irrational riots, and later used more systematically by hippies and campus protestors who shut down their own universities, militancy has never been characteristic of the homophile movement. Militant protestors rationalize their destructive methods by pointing out that knocking on doors is useful only to a point. When it becomes clear that the doors are never going to open and that door knocking is only a pacifier for the masses, then it is time to knock the doors down. In these terms, the homophile movement is behind the times. It is quite possible that the homosexuals in the streets may well make obsolete much of what the present homophile is doing. For better or worse, militancy is here.37
\n
The conventional racist characterization of Black revolt as “irrational” and anxiety about the “destructive” methods of militants reflected the racial, class, and generational positioning of many homophile activists. Self-described “gung-ho right-winger” homophile activist Foster Gunnison, Jr. lamented, “It is common knowledge that the Commie-pink-anarchist fringe tries to take over any minority cause it can latch on to, and for us it had to come sooner or later.”38
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/16.jpg\")
Conservative homophile activist Foster Gunnison, Jr. condemned the “Commie-pink-anarchist fringe.”
\nWhile less reactionary, Don Jackson of the Los Angeles Advocate scolded the rebels and urged activists to rein them in:
\n\n\n\n\nHomosexuals simply cannot afford rioting and violence. Such incidents solidify straight opinion against them and will surely bring a reaction… It is essential that rational leaders appear who will redirect the anger into more peaceful and successful methods. Otherwise, history and sociology indicate, gay riots on a vast scale with needless loss of life and property damage may occur. This is not the road to equality. Such disturbances will increase the irrational hatred the straights feel toward homosexuals. Every educated reasonable member of the gay community must aid in redirecting the anger and frustrations of the more violent and emotional members.39
\n
In historical hindsight, Jackson could not possibly have been more wrong. In fact, the rioting and violence at Stonewall catalyzed an international militant movement that helped transform the lives of millions of queer and trans people, and remains better known and more widely praised than any other act of protest or resistance in United States LGBTQ history. Yet today, self-proclaimed leaders across a wide range of communities persist in saying the exact same thing.
\n\nOthers, however, broke free from the constraints of homophile timidity and enthusiastically embraced the riots. Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, a prominent gay activist couple who had participated in Mattachine organizing since the mid-1960s, penned a column in Screw that offered a full-throated endorsement of militant gay resistance to police:
\n\n\n\n\nThe revolution is taking to the streets, and it is high time that it did… We were thrilled by the violent uprising in Sheridan Square in which homosexuals put police on notice that they’d no longer accept abuse. For many decades gay people have been afraid to stand up for themselves and have allowed policemen to run over one of their most basic civil rights: the right to assemble in public. Today, however, a new generation is angered by raids and harassment of gay bars, and last week’s riots in Greenwich Village have set standards for the rest of the nation’s homosexuals to follow.40
\n
Over the years that followed, Nichols and Clarke continued to radicalize, while remaining critical of authoritarian leftists who they described as “just as unbalanced on the gay issue as is the far right. Gays get it from both ends, so to speak.”41 By the 1990s, Nichols would be authoring a column titled “The Homosexual Anarchist.” Through the crucible of Stonewall and gay liberation, some homophile activists developed a far more radical critique of the existing world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/28.jpg\")
Jack Nichols: from polite homophile… to “homosexual anarchist.”
\nThe energy unleashed by the Stonewall Uprising produced a wave of organizing that quickly rendered the existing gay activist infrastructure irrelevant. Under pressure from fired-up radicals, Dick Leitsch agreed to form a Mattachine Action Committee, and flyers circulated for a meeting on July 9, one week after the last night of rioting. Around a hundred people, mostly younger gay and lesbian radicals, turned up and made plans to organize a march against police harassment.
\n\nAt the next meeting, a week later, the young radicals made a definitive break with the old guard. When Leitsch attempted to lecture the angry crowd about the importance of pursuing progress slowly via accommodation with the straight establishment, Jim Fouratt denounced him:
\n\n\n\n\n“We have got to radicalize, man! Be proud of what you are, man! And if it takes riots or even guns to show them what we are, well, that’s the only language that the pigs understand! All the oppressed have got to unite! The system keeps us all weak by keeping us separate.”42
\n
His speech received wild applause. Leitsch’s attempts to regain control of the meeting failed. The radicals agreed to form a new organization that would sustain the energy of the Stonewall Rebellion. This became the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).
\n\nOver the years since, the GLF has often been described as “anarchic” or “anarchistic,” but little attention has been paid to the role that anarchists and anarchist ideas in its founding. The founders who assembled in late July 1969 at Alternate U were radicals from across the left-wing spectrum. As Karla Jay recalled, the crowd of around forty at the first meeting included “drag queens, bar dykes, street people, feminists, radical students, leftists, socialists, Marxists, Maoists, anarchists, libertarians, hippies, and former Yippies.”43 As gay liberation organizing blossomed across the city over the following years, regardless of whether its participants used the language of anarchism to describe themselves, the movement relied on anarchist infrastructures, engaged with anarchist concepts and tactics, and adopted a distinctly anti-authoritarian ethos.
\n\nThe location of the GLF meetings is revealing. Alternate U was a radical educational project that hosted a wide range of workshops and teach-ins, classes on a variety of radical topics, social and cultural events, and activist meetings. Located on the second floor of a warehouse at West 14th Street and 6th Avenue, it sat on the northern edge of the West Village, a short walk from Stonewall and the core of the gayborhood where the riots had occurred.
\n\nFounded in 1965 as the Free University of New York, as the Interference Archive explains, it had been launched as “a free university, with no exams or degrees, where they could learn about social struggles and everyday life,” whose participants “strove for a revolutionary experience in education.” By 1969, it had changed its name to Alternate U and was attracting participants from a wide range of movements, from radical psychologists to media collectives to women’s theater groups. The project was coordinated by a collective of radicals that included anarchists and Marxists; the space hosted the Anarchos Group and featured talks by Murray Bookchin and other anarchist thinkers.
\n\nStonewall rioter John O’Brien—a Marxist who had been expelled from the Socialist Worker’s Party’s Young Socialist Alliance for his homosexuality—served on the project’s board; this provided the initial connection that helped enable the GLF meetings to find a home there. After the GLF’s founding meetings in the space in July 1969, Alternate U continued to host many of the group’s activities, including their gay dances, the most popular and widely attended GLF project. The weekly gatherings offered the first public alternative to Mafia-controlled bars at which same-sex couples and trans/gender-nonconforming people could dance freely; this, in turn, provided a critical source of revenue for the fledgling group. Holding meetings and dances at Alternate U brought a wide cross-section of activists and the gay population at large into contact with anarchist and radical ideas.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/33.jpg\")
GLF members prepare for a gay dance at Alternate U, 1970. A poster from the May 1968 uprising on the wall behind them reads “Borders = Repression.” A message for all movements based around identity.
\nPolitical differences emerged within the GLF from the beginning, but a loose anti-authoritarian consensus determined the organization’s structure and culture. A political scientist who interviewed many of the group’s members and offered the closest early reading of the group’s politics characterized the GLF as dominated by “radicals” who “championed anarchy.” These participants coexisted with doctrinaire “revolutionaries” who “looked forward to socialism,” with whom the radicals sometimes collaborated and sometimes found themselves at odds.44
\n\nThese values were reflected in the group’s decision-making practices. According to an observer of the early meetings, “When a decision had to be made, voting was unpopular. After sufficient discussion, a “consensus” was arrived at—the membership, undivided, coming to an agreement. Time-consuming often, but solidarity-building.”45 There were no officers and no formal leaders, though informal hierarchies did solidify around those who were popular, perceived to have revolutionary cred, or sometimes, as critics noted, simply spoke loudly. While the exhilaration of being together exploring radical ideas carried the participants through the early meetings, as more political differences surfaced, clarifying the group’s structure and priorities became urgent.
\n\nMost of the participants in the GLF were gay men, but a few lesbians played prominent roles. One of them was Lois Hart. In her thirties, Hart was older than most members; she had left her life as a nun to explore lesbian identity, radical politics, and alternative spirituality. In the months before Stonewall, she had participated in courses on feminism and anarchism at Alternate U, where Murray Bookchin had spoken about anarchist organizing and affinity groups.46
\n\nIn the fall of 1969, Hart proposed that the GLF adopt a decentralized structure in which the GLF weekly meetings would serve as spaces for autonomous groups to report on their activities and coordinate efforts, while individual cells retained the freedom to work on projects independently.47 The group agreed to adopt this anti-authoritarian structure; separate clusters formed to organize the weekly dances, publish the newspaper Come Out!, study gay oppression through a Marxist lens, and pursue other goals.
\n\nJohn Lauritsen, who brought a dogmatically Marxist approach to gay organizing, dismissed the cellular structure as “some Murray Bookchin inspired notion.”48 Indeed, Bookchin had been a direct influence on Hart through Alternate U. As a gadfly critical of the authoritarian turn of SDS and the New Left, Bookchin represented an anarchist alternative that appealed to many in the feminist and gay liberation movements who were critical of traditional organizing models.49
\n\nOver the following year, fifteen cells developed under the auspices of the GLF. Some eventually broke away to become fully autonomous groups, including Third World Gay Revolution, Gay Youth, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.50 Some of these groups outlived the GLF itself, which ceased to function by early 1972. While the GLF proved short-lived, its influence rippled out across time and space, as the model of horizontal autonomous organizing based in cells and affinity groups generated new collectives and spread around the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/32.jpg\")
Murray Bookchin, who helped translate the concept of affinity group organizing from anarchists in the Spanish Revolution to the GLF’s cell structure.
\nGLF participants reflected critically on the model as it unfolded, arriving at different conclusions about its efficacy. In January 1970, Hart explained in the GLF newspaper Come Out! that “the many mentalities, dispositions, and persuasions of GLF activists and dissenters are finding expression in small groups structured after the needs, goals and philosophies of the participants.” The cell structure, she explained, reflected a commitment to direct action and active participation that necessarily required breaking with the conditioning into passivity that hampered radical movements: “In the knowledge that growth and change occur within individuals and that individuals develop only through active involvement in projects and goals of their own choosing, GLFers chose the rocky road of fluid cellular organization rather than perpetuate older, oppressive structures of Follow the Leader and passive participation by voting.”51
\n\nAs the group grew, attracting a wider range of participants beyond its initial radical core, some who were accustomed to more centralized forms of organizing became frustrated when they could not dictate the activities of the entire group according to their own ideological or tactical preferences. This became particularly pronounced with the arrival of more “well-meaning establishment types who could not conceive of something democratic that did not involve everyone being controlled by the consensus of a voting membership.” As Hart explained, “For them GLF was the Sunday Night Meeting, not groups of activists for homosexual liberation. They did not realize that we are a movement, not a static organization.”52
\n\nThose of us who participated in the Occupy movement may smile with rueful recognition here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/31.jpg\")
Lois Hart (second from right) prepares to participate in a “Lavender Menace” action at the Second Congress to Unite Women with her fellow Radicalesbians, May Day 1970.
\nNot all participants agreed that the flexibility and autonomy of the cell structure served to build the movement for gay liberation—indeed, not even all of the anarchist participants did. One such critic, Arthur Evans, became famous in the late 1970s for his book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, which called for a gay anarchist revolution in which decentralized affinity groups would use witchcraft and direct action against patriarchy and the military industrial state. In 1970, however, his frustration with the group’s chaotic structure and dispersed focus led him to join with others seceding from the GLF to form the Gay Activists Alliance, a resolutely single-issue organization with a more traditional structure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/29.jpg\")
Arthur Evans lets the straight world know exactly what he thinks.
\nRalph Hall, an artist who was to author a series of gay anarchist zines in the following years including Faggots and Faggotry and Revolutionary Limpwristed Faggot, wrote in late 1969 that the GLF’s “structureless structure” granted too much power and influence to unscrupulous authoritarians. Criticizing the members of the 28th of June cell, which took over the publishing of Come Out!, as “a flighty crop of revolutionary dogmatists,” he took them to task for glorifying authoritarian communist regimes (“What does the sexual revolution in Cuba have to do with homosexual oppression in Amerika?”) and for taking advantage of the loose consensus process to “shrewdly manipulate and brainwash the membership.”
\n\n“I thought,” Hall lamented, “we had no leaders or followers, but all participants.”53
\n\nDespite the challenges of the cell structure and participants’ internal critiques, the model spread to other cities. Dozens of GLF chapters appeared across the country over the following months; while not all of them modeled their internal structure on the New York group, many did. As NYC GLF participant Bill Weaver recalled, “There was a real struggle to establish cells. New York went through this ‘cellular’ struggle, and now, when Washington GLF or Walla Walla GLF has it, they assume at the very beginning that they’re going to have cells.”54
\n\nThe Washington, DC GLF’s adoption of the cell structure proved influential far beyond its members—indeed, beyond the entire gay liberation movement—because of the role its participants played in what was to be the largest mass mobilization in US history up to that time, the 1971 May Day protests.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/17.jpg\")
A Gay Liberation Front meeting at Alternate U in 1970.
\nThe centrality of gay organizing within the 1971 May Day anti-war mobilization did not come out of nowhere. From its inception, the nascent gay liberation movement had overlapped with the movement to end the US war in Vietnam. The pre-Stonewall homophile movement had largely remained silent on the war, while advocating for an end to the US military’s ban on homosexual service members. By contrast, gay liberationists donned T-shirts reading “Suck Cock to Beat the Draft,” joined anti-war marches, and, according to an account from the notorious queer performance troupe The Cockettes, hung out outside of military induction centers offering blowjobs to draftees in order to help them secure deferrals.
\n\nAfter Stonewall, members of the newly formed GLF took an active role in the anti-war movement. The first non-gay-organized action that members participated in with the GLF banner was an anti-war, anti-draft protest late in the summer of 1969 at Central Park. Television cameras circulated images of the group’s members and materials nationwide.55
\n\n“Through a lot of 1970,” recalled Perry Brass, a member of the GLF cell that produced the newspaper Come Out!, “I must have gone to at least six different antiwar marches where we [gay people] were all joining hands and marching up Fifth Avenue or marching in the park.”56 In the months following Stonewall, gay liberationists in California circulated a flyer riffing off of a famous quote from Muhammad Ali, titled, “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Queer.” The flyer advertised a performance by the Berkeley-based Gay Liberation Theatre, putting both the US military and the homophobic anti-war movement on notice:
\n\n\n\n\nSo we’re not going to fight in an army that discriminates against us, fucks us over, sends us to the front lines or jails us and throws us out dishonorably when we are ourselves and love our brothers. Nor are we going to fight for a country that will not hire us and fires us when we are ourselves and loving our brothers, that puts us out of and puts us down in every phase of its every institution. Nor are we going to fight in a revolution that puts us down.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/34.jpg\")
“No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Queer.”
\nAs the gay liberation movement blossomed in 1970, activists in the anti-war movement were beginning to question their model of holding mass marches in Washington, which attracted large numbers of participants and ample media attention but appeared to have little impact on the war machine. In fall of 1970, a range of anti-war groups assembled under the umbrella of the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice began coordinating plans for actions in the nation’s capital the following spring. While members of the PCPJ timed a lobbying week for the end of April to plead with politicians to end the war, more radical participants assembled in an informal coalition dubbed the May Day Tribe, including a range of Yippies, anarchists, and other radical protesters determined to shut the city down. The May Day Tribe adopted the slogan, “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”
\n\nAs the mobilization approached, a small core of DC-based activists who staffed the office and worked on coordinating logistics for the demonstration began calling themselves the Gay Mayday Tribe. Participant John Scagliotti recalled, “There were about five of us who were gay, and we sort of ran the office. We immediately became very close and out of that was Gay Mayday.”
\n\nThe group functioned partly as a political collective, partly as an underground cell undertaking a range of illegal activity, and partly as a polycule—with participants organizing, partying, and sleeping with each other. At a time of rampant FBI infiltration of radical groups, the Gay Mayday crew remained impervious to snitches because of its emphasis on queer sexual as well as political affinity. As Scagliotti explained, “They couldn’t infiltrate it, because we were all sleeping with each other. And we were doing a tremendous amount of illegal things, that they could have gotten us all for.”
\n\nBe gay, do crime indeed!
\n\nLike the Stonewall rioter who analyzed the roots of homophobia in the threat that gay men posed to a social structure based in rigid masculinity and the nuclear family, the DC organizers framed gay opposition to the war not in a paradigm of identity politics, but in a broader analysis of how patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism form a single interlocking system. As L.A. Kaufman explains:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Gay Mayday Tribe viewed its participation in the 1971 antiwar action as more than just a matter of mobilizing gays as a constituency or contingent, along the lines of “schoolteachers against the war” or “physicians for peace.” Instead, it sought to draw connections between militarism and social constructions of gender. One Gay Mayday leaflet called the Vietnam War “a straight man’s game,” created by “men who need to gain their masculine identity through the killing of women, children, and their own brothers.” A call to participation elaborated, “We know that the men running the country are very deeply sexist—they relate to each other and to situations in an uptight straight male way. These men make decisions in order to satisfy their male egos and their needs for competition with other men.” The Gay Mayday Tribe offered up an expansive radical vision, in which gay liberation could not only transform laws or lifestyles, but also undermine the very foundations of war. For, they promised, “an army of lovers would not fight.”
\n
The loose collective included members of the Washington GLF, which had adopted the New York group’s horizontal cellular structure. Kaufman attributes the GLF’s structure to the influence of the women’s liberation movement: “The radical feminist influence was also felt in the GLF’s ‘structureless’ organizational form, comprised of decentralized collectives (called, in this case, ‘cells’) with no formal decision-making process, membership requirements, or bylaws.” While Lois Hart, whose proposal had played a significant role in shaping the GLF’s structure, was certainly a feminist and active in the women’s movement, Hart also named anarchist ideas, in particular the notion of affinity groups emerging from the Spanish anarchist movement conveyed via Murray Bookchin, as central in shaping her approach to revolutionary organizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/30.jpg\")
Members of the Washington, DC Gay Liberation Front, 1971.
\nThe GLF’s approach represented one of the two major influences on the affinity group structure adopted in May 1971. The other had reached the New Left via the Motherfuckers. Kauffman connects the dots:
\n\n\n\n\nMorea and the Motherfuckers soon introduced the idea of affinity groups as teams for street combat to Weatherman, the faction of SDS that aspired to be a revolutionary fighting force and to “bring the war home” to the United States. It was during the October 1969 “Days of Rage,” perhaps Weatherman’s most notorious action, that affinity groups made their true American debut.
\n
The Days of Rage had turned out disastrously, owing in part to the centralization and authoritarianism of the Weatherman leadership. Yet activists who rejected vanguardist militarism but remained intrigued by the possibilities of decentralized and mobile formations at mass demonstrations revisited the approach in the 1971 organizing. As Kauffman summarizes:
\n\n\n\n\nBy the time the Mayday Tribe put out its call to protest, the concept of affinity groups had begun to blend with the other small-group forms that were rapidly growing in countercultural popularity: collectives, communes, cooperatives, consciousness-raising groups. “Affinity groups at Mayday,” recalls John Froines, another Chicago 7 defendant centrally involved in the action, “were both a tactical approach in terms of the street and also something more, connected to people’s linkages to one another.”
\n
In an effort to prevent the demonstrations from completely paralyzing Washington, DC, police and National Guard troops mass-arrested 12,000 people across three days of disorder—the largest mass arrest in US history. In addition to partially shutting down the city and damaging the Nixon administration’s standing, the format of decentralized affinity groups acting autonomously in coordination with each other proved enormously influential. Afterwards, it remained the preferred means of organizing mass direct action from the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s to the queer-led civil disobedience of ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the 1980s to the global justice movement that exploded onto the world stage with the protests that shut down the Seattle summit of the World Trade Organization in 1999.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/18.jpg\")
An affinity group blocks traffic near the Washington Monument, the week of May Day 1971.
\nThe fact that anarchist ideas and models rapidly proliferated in the movements that emerged from the Stonewall uprising lends weight to the hypothesis that anarchists played a meaningful role in the uprising itself.
\n\nThe GLF and the Motherfuckers both drew on the affinity group organizing model that they had absorbed from the Spanish exiles and Murray Bookchin, but each employed it in their own way. Setting out to create a new way of life on the chaotic Lower East Side, the Motherfuckers devised insurrectionary approaches to social conflict while seeking to prefigure a revolutionary society by exploring new conceptions of the family. Gay liberationists, operating in a criminalized sexual subculture involving people linked by desire rather than shared politics, also developed alternative modes of kinship, networks of mutual aid, and flexible organizational formats that facilitated horizontal collaboration across lines of difference.
\n\nOver the course of a week in the hot summer of 1969, they collided with each other as they fought the police side by side. While the Motherfuckers dissolved shortly thereafter, gay liberation exploded and spread around the country. At the 1971 May Day protests, the two threads that converged at the Stonewall Uprising—gay liberation and anarchist direct action—came back together to transmit the affinity group model to posterity, setting the template for affinity group-based mass mobilizations for decades to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/25.jpg\")
A march in 1970. Marsha Johnson is holding the trans sign at the left.
\nEvery June, queers around the world celebrate Pride—the co-opted consumerist shell that remains of the celebrations in memory of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969.
\n\nThe first “Pride” was the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, launched in 1970 by radical gay and lesbian activists intent on breaking with the moderate homophile movement of the 1960s. Thousands of marchers convened in Greenwich Village and marched north through the city, chanting “Gay power! Gay power!”—”Gay, gay, all the way!”—”Out of the closets, into the streets!” The march was non-commercial, open to everyone, trans-inclusive, and radical, concluding in a massive “Gay-in” in Central Park. As lesbian historian Lillian Faderman summed up the day, “Never in history had so many gay and lesbian people come together in one place and for a common endeavor.”’
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/19.jpg\")
Christopher Street Liberation Day March, 1970—the first “Pride.” Yes, there was a black flag there!
\nToday, looking out over the landscape of contemporary Pride, we could say that rarely have so many LGBTQ people come together in one place while managing to accomplish so little. Depending on where you live, you may be charged admission for the privilege of wandering around and spending more money in a sea of commercial vendors, corporate sponsors, and tables of polite community groups. Despite the waves of resistance to racism and police violence in the late 2010s and early 2020s, you’re likely to see cops marching in the parade. In some states, organizers’ pre-emptive compliance with drag bans has gutted even the playful apolitical entertainment that we used to have.
\n\nOf course, the anti-LGBTQ and specifically anti-trans backlash of the past decade has caused many corporations that opportunistically sought out gay consumers via Pride sponsorships to dial back their efforts. Should we be nostalgic for the days when we had the luxury of complaining about being a target market rather than a target for bigotry, scapegoating, and violence?
\n\nThe history we have explored here offers a different perspective on the legacy of Stonewall, pointing to a long-running cross-pollination between anarchist organizing and queer culture and sexuality. Consulting this, we see that queer anarchism is not just an intersection of discrete identities, but a transformative force that has played a central role in half a century of direct action and revolutionary ferment. Looking at Stonewall through this lens, we see how the queer riots of 1969 offer lessons that are directly applicable to today’s movements for liberation.
\n\nThis account of the Stonewall Uprising leaves no room for consumerism, cops, or hierarchical leaders. According to this version of the story, we celebrate the rebels of June and July 1969
\n\n\n\n\nWhen we help to push riots beyond a single night of disturbances into an ongoing rebellion against the ruling order;
\n\nWhen we resist the efforts of community representatives to defuse our anger and send us home;
\n\nWhen we mingle in the streets against the instructions of riot cops, politicians, and official activists, communicating and finding common cause;
\n\nWhen we evaluate our strategies and tactics to find ways to revolt more effectively and joyously;
\n\nWhen we organize horizontally, rejecting representation and leaders, making space to collaborate while insisting on autonomy;
\n\nWhen we form affinity groups to undertake our creative and destructive projects;
\n\nWhen we prefigure the horizontal worlds we desire beyond the workplace, the party, and the nuclear family in the ways we organize, riot, party, and fuck.
\n
When we do these things, we are truly honoring the legacy of Stonewall.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/20.jpg\")
The spirit of Stonewall: gays smash City Hall during the White Night Riots in 1979.
\nFor oral histories with Stonewall participants and GLF members, see The Gay Liberation Front Foundation and the LGBTQ History Project. Some elders are still living—reach out and talk to them!
\n\nYou can find digital uploads of the GLF’s newspaper Come Out here.
\n\nAdam Nagourney Dudley Cleninden, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America—This is largely anti-radical and obnoxiously transphobic, but includes some useful material.
\n\nHugh Ryan, The Women’s House of Detention: The Queer History of a Forgotten Prison—A queer abolitionist history of the jail a few blocks from the Stonewall.
\n\nFor more about the Motherfuckers, see:
\n\nFor more about the Crazies, see Leslie James Pickering’s Mad Bomber Melville.
\n\nOur analysis of the 1971 May Day actions draws considerably from the brilliant research of L.A. Kauffman in the article “Ending a war, inventing a movement: Mayday 1971”.
\n\nFor a narrative account of May Day 1971, see Lawrence Roberts, Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest. You can also consult the 1971 May Day protests tactical manual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/22.jpg\")
Gay Liberation Front Marches on Times Square, New York City, 1969.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/23.jpg\")
Marsha P. Johnson Hands Out Flyers in Support of Gay Students at New York University, 1970.
\nAs Jim Fouratt, a young gay radical who participated in the riots, later pointed out, the question itself betrays a lack of awareness about the material conditions of the bar and its surroundings: “And who threw the first brick? Where would you find a brick on Christopher Street, unless you brought it in your purse, you know?” Danny Garvin, another participant in the riots, recalled finding a construction site on Seventh Avenue South where retreating rioters found a stack of bricks; in any case, brick throwing was not among the first acts that catalyzed the rebellion. See Carter, Stonewall, 155. ↩
\nThis summary derives from a range of accounts, including Carter, Stonewall, Duberman, Stonewall, and several primary sources. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 181. ↩
\n“Queen Power: Fags against Pigs in Stonewall Bust,” Rat, 9 July 1969, 6; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nHomophile Youth Movement, “Get the Mafia and the Cops Out of Gay Bars,” ca. 29 June 1969, Craig Rodwell Papers, Box 5, New York Public Library; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nAccording to Jefferson Fuck Poland of the Sexual Freedom League, NYC police claimed that when they raid bars, “they are not picking on homosexuals,” but focused on bar employees and on trans/gender-nonconforming patrons: “generally men dressed as men, even if wearing extensive makeup, are always released; men dressed as women are sometimes arrested; and ‘men’ fully dressed as women, but who upon inspection by a policewoman prove to have undergone the sex-change operation, are always let go.” Poland called for direct action against cross-dressing laws through a “Switch In,” in which “a large group of males and females, of all sexual orientations, should appear in clothing unmistakably of the opposite sex. Daring the cops to bust.” Jefferson Fuck Poland, “Lady Inspectors,” Berkeley Barb, 16 July 1969, 17; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nJohn Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\n“Queen Power: Fags against Pigs in Stonewall Bust,” Rat, 9 July 1969, 6; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nInterview with Hugh Ryan, 2019. ↩
\nIn discussion with the authors in June 2026, Osha Neumann, one of the few living New York Motherfuckers, wasn’t sure: “I have no recollection of any MF being involved with Stonewall. That doesn’t mean some folks didn’t go there, but I somehow doubt it. By June 1969, I believe the core of the MFs were already heading to New Mexico.” But digging a bit deeper, it’s clear that the question is still open. In 2006, Motherfucker Ben Morea explained that the Motherfuckers were not a membership organization, but a network of affinity groups that acted independently and a label that any of them could employ: “We never called ourselves Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, although we signed our posters and leaflets UAW/MF, which anyone in the group could produce, with that name… It was essentially a loose confederation of affinity groups.” In fact, a wide range of people, from Mark Rudd and Spain Rodriguez to the Jefferson Airplane, dallied with both the organization and its tag line; there appear to have been autonomous chapters of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker as far away as Austin, Texas. Some people outside Motherfucker circles likely used the term to describe a wider range of people than Osha Neumann did. All of this is squarely within the anarchist tradition of informal organization. Regardless of whether members of the affinity groups specifically associated with Morea or Neumann directly took part in the Stonewall Uprising, it is certain that anarchists took part, and probable that some of them overlapped with the crews that identified—or were identified—as Motherfuckers. ↩
\nJay Levin, “The Gay Anger behind the Riots,” New York Post, 8 July 1969, 36; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nD. L. [Dick Leitsch], “Gay Riots in the Village,” Mattachine Society of New York Newsletter, Aug. 1969, 1–2, 4; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nBob Kohler, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Come Out! 1, No. 2, (January 10, 1970). ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 202. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 183. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 302, note 21. ↩
\nHugh Ryan, The Women’s House of Detention: The Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 196. ↩
\nLeo E. Laurence, “Gays Hit NY Cops,” Berkeley Barb, 4 July 1969, 5; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 196. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 197. ↩
\nTom Burke, “The New Homosexuality,” Esquire, December 1969, pp. 178, 304–18. ↩
\nLucian Truscott IV, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square,” Village Voice, 3 July 1969, 18; John Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History ↩
\nD. L. [Dick Leitsch], “Gay Riots in the Village,” Mattachine Society of New York Newsletter, Aug. 1969, 1–2, 4; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\n“Cop Injured 5 Seized in Village,” New York Post, July 3, 1969. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 205. ↩
\nRonnie Di Brienza, “Stonewall Incident,” East Village Other, 9 July 1969, 2; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 201-205. ↩
\nKiyoshi Kuromiya quoted in Marc Stein, City of Brotherly and Sisterly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–72, 334. ↩
\nJohn Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nDi Brienza, “Stonewall Incident.” ↩
\n“Gay Power Explodes,” The Insider: Newsletter of the Mattachine Society of Washington, Aug. 1969, 1–3; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 95. ↩
\nDon Jackson, “Reflections on the N.Y. Riots” The Los Angeles Advocate, Oct. 1969, 11, 33; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLige [Elijah Hadyn Clarke] and Jack [John Richard Nichols], “Pampered Perverts,” Screw, 25 July 1969, 16. ↩
\nClarke and Nichols, I Have More Fun With You Than Anyone, 147. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 216. ↩
\nKarla Jay, The Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation, 77. ↩
\nToby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, 90. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 101. ↩
\nMarotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, 87. ↩
\nDudley Cleninden and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, 43. ↩
\nTerence Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York’s Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971,” 116. ↩
\nLate in life, immediately before renouncing anarchism, Murray Bookchin published a screed excoriating what he described as “lifestyle anarchism,” even sneering, in passing, at “gay faery circles.” Ironically, the queer liberation movement did more than any institution to spread what is useful in Bookchin’s contributions to anarchist practice. ↩
\nDavid Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution, 127. ↩
\nLois Hart, “GLF News,” Come Out 1, no. 2 (January 10, 1970), 16. ↩
\nHart, “GLF News.” ↩
\nRalph Hall, “Gay Liberation News,” Gay Power 1, no. 9 (1969), 8. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 101. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 52. ↩
\nL.A. Kaufmann, “Ending a War, Inventing a Movement: May Day 1971.” ↩
\nIn the following analysis, Ayman Makarem of the From the Periphery media collective reviews a century of colonial violence in Palestine and Lebanon to illuminate the current Israeli occupation and what it would take to resist it.
\n\nYou can watch a video version of this essay here.
\n\nFor the third time in my relatively short life, Israel has invaded my country. They have made it clear that they want to establish a long-term occupation of Southern Lebanon. This is not the first time that this has happened; several\nmedia organizations and social\nmedia accounts have published timelines of Israeli invasions and attacks on Lebanon. These timelines usually focus on major flashpoints like the 1982 or 2006 invasions, but fall short of demonstrating the full breadth and continuity of Israeli violence targeting Lebanon. Lebanon’s encounter with Zionism goes much further back than most know, predating the establishment of the state of Israel itself.
\n\nLet’s start with Moshe Dayan.
\n\nMoshe Dayan was an early Zionist leader, born to settler parents in Palestine in 1915. He was present at practically every major landmark event in the Zionist colonization of Palestine. He joined the Haganah—a Zionist militia in Mandatory Palestine—at the age of 21, participated in crushing the Palestinian Revolt of 1936, and fought in the 1948 war, expelling swathes of Palestinians during the Nakba. From the 1950s until his death in 1981, he moved between high-level positions within the military and then within successive Israeli governments, serving as Minister of Defense in the late 1960s.1
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/14.jpg\")
Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense, circa 1967.
\nDayan encapsulates a lot about the state of Israel. A number of quotes attributed to him indicate considerable self-awareness about what he and his colleagues were doing. The words of early Zionist leaders like Dayan cut through the smokescreen of contemporary Zionist propaganda. Here, he describes the foundation of the state of Israel:
\n\n\n\n\n“We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is, a Jewish state here. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”2
\n
He said this as a person proud of his accomplishments. For those who know the history of Palestine and its encounter with Zionism, that story is very familiar—it’s just notable that it’s coming from a Zionist leader. However, Dayan also said things that reveal parts of the history that are more obscure, parts that are muddied by the tendency to focus on major flashpoints like the Nakba or the Six-Day War.
\n\nFor instance, in the early 1950s, when he was a Commander of the Southern Command, Dayan developed a policy of dealing with what they called “infiltrators”—in some cases, expelled Palestinians trying to return home or collect things that were left behind when they were forced off their land; in other cases, unorganized Fedayeen militants who would “infiltrate” their own homeland and carry out operations against the nascent Israeli state. This is how he described his policy:
\n\n\n\n\n“Retaliation is the only method that has proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side. If we try to search for that Arab, it has no value. But if we harass the nearby village… then the population there comes out against the infiltrators… The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective… There are no other effective methods.”3
\n
There’s another term for what Dayan describes: terrorism. Or still another: war crimes. Dayan’s words shine a light on the periods between the major ruptures, a history that is often forgotten. Between 1949 and 1956, there were tens of thousands of “infiltrations” every year, and Israelis carried out hundreds of bloody retaliatory raids in other parts of Palestine, specifically Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in Jordan and Lebanon.4
\n\nIn 1955, to put an end to the returnees and attacks from the north, Moshe Dayan, then Chief of Staff under Moshe Sharett’s government, proposed a plan that shocked even his Prime Minister:
\n\n\n\n\n“All that is required is to find an officer, even a captain would do, to win his heart or buy him with money to get him to agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, and create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place.”5
\n
This is precisely what the Israelis did 23 years later in 1978, when Dayan himself was Foreign Minister. A few years earlier, in 1974, Moshe Dayan had summarized his goals thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“We will make all life impossible in South Lebanon.”6
\n
Moshe Dayan speaking to the press as Minister of Defense in 1974.
\nIt is difficult to not see the parallels with what the Israelis are saying today. It has now been two and a half years since the start of the genocidal war in Gaza, and Israeli leaders have made statements like this over and over again. Since March 2 of this year, Israel has displaced\nover a million people, claiming\nthey will never be allowed to return, destroyed\nwhole villages, invaded with ground troops, destroyed hospitals and schools, killed\nentire families, killed\nmedics, and journalists, and academics. Put these together and they spell out one word: genocide. Their main targets are Shia Lebanese.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/5.jpg\")
Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, killed by Israel on April 22, 2026 in a double-tap strike.
\nWith full US backing, the Israeli government is pursuing a policy of genocide in Lebanon. In the last two months, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued not one, but two red-flag warnings of genocide in Lebanon.
\n\nThis is an existential war on Lebanon. It has been going on for decades, but now it is reaching its logical end. The Israeli government aims to tear Lebanon apart, to dismantle its capacity to exist. To understand any of this, we have to examine the joint history of Lebanon and Zionism.
\n\nThe term Lebanese Entity many not be as familiar as the term Zionist Entity, but it emerges from an analysis of the formation of the state of Lebanon that recognizes the colonial relations that formed it and its many structural and exclusionary flaws. These aspects make Lebanon particularly vulnerable to exploitation by the Israelis as well as other regional powers. They have kept Lebanon in a state of perpetual crisis since its foundation.
\n\nHere, we will outline a chronological history of the two entities and how they intersect. As an aid, we offer this timeline, which includes Israeli attacks on and invasions of Lebanon alongside key regional events throughout the period that are essential to understanding this history.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/israels-long-war-on-lebanon.jpg\")
Click on the thumbnail to access the timeline at full scale.
\nWhat Lebanon is experiencing today is not just the consequence of Hezbollah’s actions or the Iran War or the presence of Palestinian resistance in Lebanon; it is the culmination of decades of continuous assaults by the state of Israel on our sovereignty itself. We must understand Lebanon as a key vector of the European colonization of this entire region, which the state of Israel has extended and expanded.
\n\nWe begin this story in the midst of the First World War with the secretly drawn up Sykes-Picot\nagreement, which mapped out Britain and France’s ambitions in case of a victory over the Ottoman Empire—a victory that came to pass a few years later. What followed remains one of the classic examples of white men carving up Indigenous land in Asia.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/7.jpg\")
The French mandate of Lebanon and Syria.
\nBoth the Lebanese and Zionist entities emerged out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Both had previously existed as ideas but only became manifest at this point. Lebanon as a state was devised in this period by the French. Palestine, for its part, was taken over by the British, who openly declared their intention to create a Jewish Homeland in Palestine for European Zionists. The key document here is the Balfour\nDeclaration, which was drafted the same year as Sykes-Picot.
\n\nThe region that the two colonial powers carved up had been known for centuries as Bilad al Sham, which is often translated as “the Levant,” but more precisely translates to “the countries of the left.” If you consider the Arab Hejaz [the western coastal region of Saudi Arabia, where Mecca and Medina are located] to be the center, which it was for centuries of Islamic rule beginning in the 7th century, when you look east towards the sun, Bilad al Sham will be on your left, and Yemen (from the Arabic word Yameen, “right”) on your right. Colloquially, al Sham is also an Arabic name for Damascus, as it was one of the most important cities in the region.
\n\nFor hundreds of years, Bilad al Sham passed from the hands of one ruler to another. Then, in 1918, European forces conquered the land for the first time since the Crusades. This is where our story really begins.
\n\nIn 1920, in collaboration with local Maronite elites in Mount Lebanon, France created what is known as Greater Lebanon, a colonial state under French supervision. Before this, the name “Lebanon” referred to the Mount Lebanon range. To this day, older British people sometimes call Lebanon “The Lebanon,” like “The Ukraine” or “The Gambia.” It’s because those names referred to a geographical location rather than a state.
\n\nGreater Lebanon was an expansion of Mount Lebanon to include areas around it, specifically the coastal cities of Beirut, Saida, and Tripoli, as well as Akkar to the north, Bekaa to the east, and Jabal Amel to the south. The idea was to separate Lebanon from Syria and the rest of Bilad al-Sham in order to create a viable state led by a majority Christian Maronite population, as the latter was friendly to the French. Annexing those other territories ensured enough farmland, access to ports, and surplus populations for this new state. It also meant access to key water sources such as the Litani River.7
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/23.jpg\")
Lebanon was created as an expansion of Mount Lebanon via the annexation of the coastal cities—Akkar to the north, the Bekaa to the east, and Jabal Amel to the south.
\nThe British Historian, Patrick Seale, summarizes thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“[Greater Lebanon] was intended as a haven for the predominant Maronite community, France’s main clients, but, in terms of geopolitics, it was also conceived as a French fortress in the eastern Mediterranean, which could be used against European rivals as well as against Arab nationalists of the Syrian interior.”8
\n
This is the origin of the Lebanese entity. A Maronite Christian state built to advance the strategic interests of France in the region.
\n\nDuring this same period, another ethnostate was slowly being constructed south of Lebanon. But instead of allying with an existing local community, the British opted for settler colonialism, aiming to make European Zionists the dominant force in Palestine.
\n\nThe contempt that these white, colonial Europeans felt towards Indigenous populations was clear not just in these actions but also in how they described what they were doing. For example, in response to objections to using the new technology of aerial bombardments against civilian populations, Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922, is reported to have said
\n\n\n\n\n“We must reserve the right to bomb ni**ers.”9
\n
Those were the people who were now in charge of Mandatory Palestine. At that point, Zionist colonists had already been settling in Palestine for almost 40 years, though very slowly. With support of the British, that migration increased dramatically, and it soon became evident to the local Palestinian population that the British were giving favorable treatment to the new European Jewish communities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/16.jpg\")
A newspaper cover from Palestine with a cartoon depicting Balfour supporting Jewish migration and industry in Palestine, as well as the disenfranchisement of local populations.
\nExamining maps from 1918 and 1920, we can see the beginnings of the conflict over the southern part of Lebanon. The first map broadly depicts the future state of Israel, as well as Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria, without any defined borders whatsoever.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/22.jpg\")
A map from 1918. Those red lines are actually train lines; there are no borders on this map. Though hundreds of miles of railway once ran through Lebanon, they were rendered inoperable by the Lebanese Civil War. The last trains ceased running in the 1990s.
\nThe map from 1920 shows three lines that could define the northern border of the future state of Israel. The first is the Sykes-Picot line; the second is the “suggested” border, extending into Southern Lebanon; the third represents a “Maximum Demand” border engulfing all the territory up to and including the Litani River.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/21.jpg\")
A map from 1920.
\nSykes-Picot wasn’t the final agreement between the French and the British. In 1923, the two powers drafted a more detailed accord, the\nPaulete-Newcombe agreement, defining the borders between Mandatory Lebanon and Palestine more precisely. This agreement moved the borders, placing several Lebanese villages under the authority of the British Mandate. Britain took over about 20 Lebanese villages—including Malakiyya, Saliha, and Hunin, all of which were inhabited by Shia Muslims.
\n\nOver the next twenty years, the colonization of Bilad al-Sham met ongoing resistance. The largest effort to oppose the colonial process during this period was the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939. The British, alongside Jewish settler militias such as the Haganah, employed a tremendous amount of violence to crush the revolt. Yet the rebellion was so powerful that in order to crush it, the British stationed more troops in Palestine than they had in the entire Indian subcontinent.10 Afterwards, they expelled its surviving leaders to neighboring countries.
\n\nWar gripped the region over the following years; it was one of the theatres in which the European powers contended in the Second World War. Lebanon was one of the few places where the British and French fought each other directly. During this period, Allied Forces armed and trained Jewish militiamen like Moshe Dayan; this ultimately left them far better equipped than the national armies in the region.11
\n\nIn the midst of the war, in 1943, after the Vichy Government was defeated in Lebanon, Lebanese elites declared independence from France. But it wasn’t a bitter breakup; they maintained a very friendly relationship with their former colonizers.
\n\nJust after the end of the Second World War, Zionist militias stepped up their own campaign for independence in Palestine. They did so by carrying out terrorist attacks against the British, most notably the 1946 King David Hotel bombing.12 By May 1948, when the British Mandate of Palestine was set to expire, the British were eager to wash their hands of the conflict they had been instrumental in creating.
\n\nThis led to what Arabs call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from Palestine, with at least 100,000 heading to Lebanon. The villages mentioned above—Malakiya, Saliha, and Hunin—were among\nthe destroyed villages whose entire populations were expelled into\nLebanon.
\n\nLebanon participated very little in the war that ensued, known as the first Arab-Israeli war. In most locations, even within Lebanese territory, the Lebanese army withdrew, refusing to fight the Zionists. The only town that saw the Lebanese army resist was Malakiya, a Lebanese village with a predominantly Shia population that had been turned over to British Occupied Palestine. The Lebanese army successfully fended off assault after assault in Malakiya, lost the town, recaptured it, and thereby demonstrated that fighting back was possible. In the end, the Lebanese army only withdrew from Malakiya after intense international pressure.13 An Israeli kibbutz has stood in its place ever since.
\n\nThe Shia Lebanese inhabitants of Malakiyya, like those of the other permanently cleansed villages, became refugees in Lebanon. In fact, they had the\nsame legal status as Palestinians in Lebanon until the 1990s. To both the Zionists who perpetrated the Nakba and the bureaucrats of the Lebanese entity, the Shia of Jabal Amel were no different from the Palestinians.
\n\nZionist forces also carried out attacks in Southern Lebanon, notably during Operation Hiram. Not only did they invade the country, they also committed numerous massacres against Lebanese civilians, such as the\nHula massacre in November 1948, in which they killed approximately 60 civilians. Their forces reached deep into Lebanese territory, as far as the Litani river. Finally, in 1949, Lebanon agreed to an armistice with the state of Israel, which brings us to our first ceasefire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/13.jpg\")
A memorial in the Southern town of Hula with the names of all the martyrs of the Hula Massacre.
\nThe state that was founded through this ethnic cleansing, known to many as the Zionist entity, went on to be an expansionist, ethnonationalist, armed garrison state. This is clear to a lot of people today. But not as many people understand the nature of the state of Lebanon.
\n\nThe defining feature of the Lebanese entity is the political system of sectarianism. In 1943, the ruling Christian Maronite and Sunni elite drafted the\nNational Pact, stipulating that Lebanon should have a Maronite Christian President, a Sunni Prime Minister, and a Shia speaker of the house—an agreement that remains to this day. At the time, the President had tremendous executive power and the Speaker of the House was largely symbolic. Other posts in the government were likewise divided up along sectarian lines, with a majority going to Christian Maronites.
\n\nIt is a mistake to imagine that Lebanon has this sectarian system because of its many religious communities. The sectarian system is not simply an organic expression of the sectarian divisions in the country. It is a system that enabled the local elite from the main sects, with the Maronite elite on top, to become mediators between the colonial powers and the local populations. The Lebanese Marxist intellectual Mehdi Amel offers a concise description of this system:
\n\n\n\n\n“Sectarianism is the particular historical form of the political system through which the Lebanese colonial bourgeoisie exercises its class dominance within a relation of structural dependency on imperialism.”14
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/12.jpg\")
Mehdi Amel, Lebanese Marxist intellectual, 1936-1987.
\nThat might sound like Marxist word soup, but in fact, it is incredibly precise. This system means that different posts in the Lebanese state are divided among the sectarian elite—whether Christian or Muslim—with a disproportionate number of those positions going to Maronite Christians. That elite politics offered continued access to European finance, which came to form the backbone of Lebanon’s economy to the detriment of local productive economic activities like industry and agriculture.15
\n\nAt the level of everyday life, it means that, as citizens, we only exist to the state as members of one sect or another. When I vote in elections, I have to go to my father’s village, and I can only vote for Druze or Christian candidates, because they are the main inhabitants of my area. I don’t exist as a citizen, as an individual, but as a Druze from a specific area. This is somewhat similar to the current system in the state of Israel, where universal citizenship does not exist and the state reduces people to their ethnicity. Ultimately, this system disenfranchises the vast majority of people; it is not even representative.
\n\nThe sectarian system in Lebanon went through several crises in the 1950s and 1960s. But the greatest threat to its existence emerged a decade later: the Lebanese National Movement of the 1970s.
\n\nWe can divide the chief obstacles to the fulfilment of the sectarian system into three distinct aspects of Lebanese society. First, the existence in Lebanon of an entire sect, comprised predominantly of agricultural communities in the South and East, that had practically no representation within the sectarian or oligarchic system: the Shia. Located mostly in the South of Lebanon, in a region known as Jabal Amel, these communities also suffered an economic blow following the creation of the state of Israel, as their economy relied heavily on trade.
\n\nSecond, the real divisions between people were not based on sect, or religion, but on class—and the sectarian elite had no serious plan to deal with the contradictions of colonial or capitalist class divisions, let alone the feudal divisions that still existed.
\n\nMehdi Amel summarizes these first two issues in the same text quoted above:
\n\n\n\n\n“The foremost obstacle was the mass of toilers who belong to the downtrodden ‘sects’ and live either in the countryside or in the clutches of poverty in the capital. As their voices were raised, so did their acts of resistance. They demanded the system be changed, whether by putting an end to sectarian hegemony without destroying the system itself, or by putting an end to the system entirely.”16
\n
And the third major obstacle to the system was the introduction to Lebanon of over 100,000 Palestinian refugees who had been forcibly expelled from their country, most of whom were Sunni Muslim. Not only did this mess up the carefully arranged demographic balance within the country, it also forced Lebanon to reckon with the fact that it is not an island separate from the rest of the region.
\n\nAlmost immediately after their expulsion, unorganized Palestinian Fedayeen militants began carrying out operations against the nascent state built on the ruins of their homeland. Palestinian refugees also tried to return to their homes.17 In Lebanon, the army moved quickly to block these attacks and returnees, fearing Israeli reprisals. They did this by placing\nPalestinian refugee camps under what amounts to martial law, controlling movement and political activity.
\n\nThis was the context in which Moshe Dayan made the statement quoted above about annexing Lebanon up to the Litani river to put an end to these cross-border raids by Palestinian militants. In the end, they didn’t have to do that, as the Lebanese armies proved quite effective in suppressing Palestinian efforts.
\n\nAt the same time, Israel was occupied in conflicts with Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinian territories they had failed to capture in 1948.
\n\nA few key events led to the Israelis focusing more on Lebanon. The first was the Palestinian\nRevolution of 1965, which saw the creation of Fatah, the first serious attempt for Palestinians in exile to unify and organize around armed struggle. The largest organization was the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was mostly based in Jordan at that time but had a strong presence in Lebanon too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/17.jpg\")
A rally involving Palestinian fedayeen militants circa 1965.
\nThe next major development was the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967, and with it, the crushing of the hope that Arab nationalist regimes would liberate Palestine. Then, in 1970, Black September in Jordan saw the Jordanian army wage a war against Palestinian militants and expel them to Lebanon. That was when Israel really turned its focus to Lebanon. Wanting to quell assaults from the north, the Israelis begin implementing a multi-pronged strategy.
\n\nFirst, they attacked targets in the areas from which they suspected that assaults might emerge. This went hand in hand with indiscriminate bombing campaigns that did not differentiate between civilian and military targets.
\n\nSecond, Israel intentionally carried out attacks on civilians in order to try to turn them against Palestinian militant groups. For instance, in 1974, the United Nations brokered a ceasefire called the “Olive Truce” in hopes of enabling Lebanese farmers to harvest their olives. Israel violated it after just three days, carrying out ground raids and aerial bombardments.18
\n\nMoshe Dayan had summed up this policy of collective punishment in the 1950s:
\n\n\n\n\n“We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or a family in their beds. But it was in our power to set a high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying… It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce ‘the policy of strength’ toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.”19
\n
And the third strategy that the Israelis implemented in Lebanon was to court Lebanese Maronite collaborators—both in Southern Lebanon and in Beirut. Already in the early 1970s, the Israelis were arming the Phalange, or Kataeb, a far-right Maronite party founded by Pierre Gemayel in 1936 in the image of the Nazi party in Germany.20
\n\nIn response to these conditions and contradictions, in 1969, leftists in Lebanon formed what became known as the Lebanese National Movement. This proved to be the greatest threat to the sectarian system to date. The Lebanese National Movement was an explicitly anti-sectarian, pluralistic movement with strong socialist currents; it was allied with the PLO. They understood that the Lebanese struggle against the sectarian oligarchal system had to be connected with the struggle for Palestinian liberation against Zionism.21
\n\nThe Maronite elite, organized mostly within the Kataeb Party, hated all of this because they had a lot to lose. They blocked any change to the system. The first efforts to change it took the form of political maneuvers; when those failed, armed struggle erupted. This was the backdrop of the civil war in Lebanon, which ignited in 1975. As future president Amin Gemayel put it,
\n\n\n\n\n“We have tried to save institutions from any change. Although violence leads nowhere, it has helped us at least to save what could be saved. It was violence to conserve the system.”22
\n
For its part, Israel had already been supporting the Phalange for years, hosting meetings with their leaders, training their soldiers, and sending them weapons. They preferred the continued domination of the Maronite Christian elite to anything else: not only because of their mutual antagonism to the Palestinians, but also because in many ways, the sectarian system that elevated the Maronite elite to power mirrored their ethnonationalist system more than the pluralistic, leftist, and pro-Palestinian tendencies represented by the Lebanese National Movement.
\n\nWhen war broke out in Lebanon in 1975 while all other fronts functionally closed, Israel turned its full attention to Lebanon. They continued to fund the Kataeb, even though—or because—the Kataeb were massacring Palestinians. In 1976, Israel created what they called the “Good Frontier” in Southern Lebanon as a buffer zone.23 There, they installed Saad Haddad, an officer who defected from the Lebanese army to serve as Israel’s viceroy in South Lebanon. In this collaboration with Saad Haddad, the Israelis could finally fulfill the fantasy that Moshe Dayan had described twenty years earlier.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/18.jpg\")
The collaborator Saad Haddad on a tank in Southern Lebanon with Lebanese and Israeli flags.
\nThree years into the war, in 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in what they called Operation Litani. The Foreign Minister of Israel at the time was Moshe Dayan himself. Many people think of this as the beginning of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon—a period that saw Haddad’s forces commit numerous massacres in the South and solidify his hold in this newly-created buffer zone.24 But Israel’s presence in the rest of the country was short-lived. On October 10, the United States, then under Jimmy Carter, forced a ceasefire deal on Israel, which withdrew. Yet the occupation of the South continued, and so did the resistance against it.
\n\nThat ceasefire played out exactly like the ones we’ve seen more recently. Israel continued bombarding Southern Lebanon and arming their fascist Maronite Christian proxies across the country, while both the Lebanese people and the PLO acted with restraint. Eventually, this became unsustainable. On July 15, 1981, the PLO finally began firing rockets into Israel; Israel responded by carpet-bombing populated areas in the south, attacking Tyre’s port, and setting fire to an oil refinery.
\n\nOn July 24, the US brokered another ceasefire. Again, the PLO abided by it, while Israel violated it repeatedly. Then, on June 6, 1982, when the ceasefire had been in place for almost a year, the Israeli military invaded Lebanon. This time, their excuse was an assassination attempt targeting the Israeli ambassador to the UK, even though the group behind the attempt was openly opposed to the PLO. In fact, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had already been planning the invasion for months.25
\n\nThe 1982 invasion took place on a much larger scale than previous Israeli assaults. It was the first time they crossed the Litani River. The Israelis besieged Beirut and, after bombarding the city and cutting off electricity and water, managed to force a ceasefire on the PLO.26 As part of that ceasefire, the PLO agreed to evacuate Beirut, fulfilling the primary stated aim of the Israeli invasion. But the Israelis didn’t withdraw, because another aim of the invasion was to ensure the election of Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Kataeb Party, as president of Lebanon.
\n\nOn August 23, with Israeli tanks in the streets, Bashir Gemayel was elected president, a terrifying prospect for the Palestinians and the Lebanese left. Two weeks later, Gemayel was assassinated in a car bombing outside his headquarters. The assassin was later identified as a Lebanese Maronite, Habib\nShartouni, a member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party.
\n\nNonetheless, many who were loyal to Gemayel quickly blamed Palestinians. Christian fascist militias under the protection of the Israelis committed the most notorious massacre of the war, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which the Israelis aided their Christian allies in killing over 2000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
\n\nFollowing this horrific massacre, resistance against the Israeli occupation increased dramatically. Alongside other pressures, this compelled Israel to withdraw from Beirut in September 1982. This was the first time an Arab\ncapital liberated itself from Israeli occupation through armed struggle.
\n\nDuring this period, the Americans created the Multi-National Force, which entered to enforce the ceasefire between the PLO and Israel. In September 1983, the US sent 2000 marines into Lebanon to ensure the success of the Lebanese government under Bashir’s brother, Amine Gemayel.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/15.jpg\")
A badge of the Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF) with flags of all the participating powers.
\nOn October 23, 1983, two truck bombs targeting the headquarters of the US marines and the French battalion center inflicted many casualties. The former was the single largest loss of life for American marine forces since the Battle of Iwo Jima during the Second World War. The attack was claimed by a group nobody had heard of at the time, which later revealed itself as Hezbollah, the party of God.27 The US and the rest of the Multi-National Force were forced to leave Lebanon the following year, in large part because of these attacks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/4.jpg\")
The aftermath of the bombing of US marine barracks in Beirut, 1983.
\nIn 1985, Israel “withdrew” from Lebanon; in reality, the buffer zone in the South remained, where Israeli soldiers and settlers could move freely. This continuing occupation led to the rise of Hezbollah, whose guerilla fighters carried out attacks targeting Israeli troops and their proxy militia.
\n\nIsrael’s first major attempt to crush this\nresistance took place in 1993, when they unsuccessfully attempted to push them north of the Litani river. They attempted the same thing with a 17-day assault in 1996, “Operation\nGrapes of Wrath.”
\n\nThe Lebanese civil war went through many phases, ending in 1990 with the signing of the Taif Accord. But the core issues that ignited the war were never addressed, nor the issues that arose during the fifteen years of fighting. What started as a demand to end the sectarian system descended into sectarian chaos, and was ultimately resolved with some shifting of sectarian quotas and power divisions among the sectarian elite. The chief losers of the war, the Palestinians, were blamed for the war and lost almost all of their political and military presence in the country.
\n\nThe occupation of the south ended in 2000, after the resistance forces that emerged in response to that occupation—most notably Hezbollah—made it untenable. But one territory became a major sticking point, the Occupied Shebaa Farms, which the Israelis captured from Syria in 1967. Hezbollah claimed that this territory was Lebanese, arguing that the Israeli withdrawal remained incomplete.28 Others saw this as an effort to continue to validate Hezbollah’s existence as an armed resistance group after the withdrawal of occupation forces.
\n\nThus began a six-year low-level cross-border conflict, culminating in the 2006 July War. Israel once again invaded Lebanon, destroying infrastructure including oil depots, vital bridges, and the country’s only international airport. They were demanding the demilitarization of the entire region south of the Litani river. The conflict ended with a ceasefire deal brokered by the UN, stipulating that UNIFIL forces should expand their deployment as far as the Litani river.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/1.jpg\")
The destruction of a bridge in Lebanon by Israeli airstrikes in 2006.
\nThe intervening period saw a relative calm between Lebanon and the state of Israel, with few clashes and attacks. At the same time, Israeli jets, reconnaissance planes, and later drones flew over our heads continuously. Between 2007 and 2022, Israel violated\nLebanon’s airspace over 22,000 times—about four flights a day.
\n\nThis was also a period of uprisings and violence in Palestine, specifically in Gaza. After the election of Hamas in 2006, Israel blockaded Gaza. Every few years, the Israelis bombarded Gaza—what they called “mowing\nthe lawn.” Israeli settlements in the West Bank expanded throughout this period. Israelis focused on consolidating hegemony over the territories they had occupied since 1967 while making threats against Hezbollah and Lebanon.
\n\nFor their part, Hezbollah expanded from simply being an armed resistance group to become a player in the Lebanese political scene and regional affairs—for example, getting involved in the Syrian Civil War.
\n\nThat was the climate leading up to 2023. Three years after the United Nations declared that Gaza was on the way to becoming uninhabitable, Hamas’s armed wing carried out the October 7 attacks, igniting the regional war that continues today. Hezbollah responded the following day by opening up what they called the Support Front, firing rockets into northern Israel.
\n\nThis fighting simmered until September 2024, when Israel dramatically escalated its attacks on Lebanon, beginning with the notorious pager massacre. In the weeks that followed, Israel displaced over a million people, massacred civilians, killed much of Hezbollah’s top leadership, and targeted weapons depots belonging to the group. On September 30, they invaded Lebanon, again with the claimed intention of pushing Hezbollah back behind the Litani River. On November 27, they reached a ceasefire agreement stipulating that Hezbollah will disarm below the Litani River and tasking the Lebanese government with overseeing this. Israel remained in five\npositions in the South, claiming that it would withdraw if Lebanon fulfilled its obligations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/2.jpg\")
The destruction of homes by Israeli attacks, 2024.
\nDuring this ceasefire, the UN estimates that the Israelis violated the ceasefire\nover 10,000 times, while Hezbollah violated it once—a single time—in response to Israeli attacks. The Israeli violations included near-daily air strikes, assassinations, demolitions of homes, and ground raids.
\n\nThen, against the backdrop of the US/Israeli war on Iran, Hezbollah fired six rockets into Israel, precipitating the new escalation that we are witnessing today. There are many theories as to why they did this. Initially, Hezbollah claimed it was to avenge the killing of Ali Khamanei the previous day, and that it was a response to fifteen months of daily Israeli bombardment during the supposed ceasefire. Some suggest that the decision to resume bilateral hostilities offered a way for them to break out of the dynamic in which Israel treated Lebanon as a free-fire zone with zero deterrence from Hezbollah, the Lebanese state, or the so-called international community. Others argue that it was a reckless attempt to reclaim legitimacy after the defeats that Hezbollah suffered in 2024.
\n\nRegardless, we are here now. The Israelis are in Lebanon and they aim to stay. They want to create a “yellow line” in Southern Lebanon, yet another\nbuffer zone. Many people see this as a land grab that could potentially establish permanent Israeli settlements there. Others believe that Israel is setting the stage for a massive resource grab—targeting not only the fertile agricultural area but also the waters of the Litani River. Based on the full-scale demolition of the villages they have captured, as well as the last two years of ecocide in the south—for example, Israel\nusing white phosphorus munitions to poison the land—it is safe to say that the Israeli military is trying to fulfil the threat that Moshe Dayan made in 1974: “We will make all life impossible in South Lebanon.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/19.jpg\")
Israel has regularly used white phosphorus munitions in Southern Lebanon.
\nThe Israelis are trying to ethnically cleanse the entire south. Although Lebanon and Israel agreed to a new ceasefire on April 16, the Israelis have not stopped their assaults. They are wantonly destroying whole villages, making sure that life is impossible, let alone return. This raises the prospect of a prolonged displacement crisis on top of the many other crises afflicting Lebanon at the moment. This is the familiar theme of Israel’s one-sided “ceasefires,” in Lebanon as in Gaza. For the Israelis, a ceasefire is a chance to recoup, plan, and establish new facts on the ground in the areas they’ve seized. They view this as a single, continuous war, now lasting the better part of a century.
\n\nIsrael aims to destroy Lebanon. That will not change if Hezbollah disarms. The situation is pushing the country towards civil war, especially with the current government being so focused on disarming Hezbollah—both as an end in itself and in hopes of somehow deterring Israeli aggression. Civil war in Lebanon will advance Israel’s aim of fracturing and weakening the Lebanese state.
\n\nWhat are people in Lebanon supposed to do? What are the propositions on offer? Is there any feasible way to end Israeli assault and enable displaced Lebanese people to return to their homes in the south?
\n\nLebanon is at a crossroads. Two camps are forming and neither is speaking to the other. One camp, led by President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, is pursuing direct negotiations with the Israelis. They have committed themselves to the goal of monopolizing\narms in the hands of the state, while deferring anything to do with Israel to the so-called international community. The other camp, led predominantly by Hezbollah, is pursuing a course of armed struggle. Continuing on the path it set out over four decades years ago, its main strategy is continued reliance on the Islamic Republic of Iran and the military strategy of the so-called axis of resistance.
\n\nTo the former camp, the sole problem is Hezbollah: supposedly, once Hezbollah is disarmed, Israel will stop bombing us and pull its troops out of the country. To the second camp, the only recourse is directly resisting the invading Israeli army and continuing the military confrontation with Israel. Each is accusing\nthe other of treason for working on behalf of a foreign power.
\n\nThose critical of the current government accuse it of sacrificing Southern Lebanon for the sake of the rest of the country. Those critical of Hezbollah accuse them of sacrificing the rest of the country for the south. This division has a corresponding sectarian aspect as well. Added to the polycrisis in Lebanon, especially the grueling economic collapse which many claim to be one\nof the worst in a century, globally speaking, all of this is indeed a toxic recipe for civil war.
\n\nHow do we stop Israel from bombing us? How do we get them out of Lebanon? How do we reign in the militant fascism and brazen expansionism that has become mainstream in Israeli society and politics? How do we protect ourselves from the growing imperialist mania of the US empire? Apart from arming Israel to the teeth, the US has not yet gotten involved in Lebanon directly—but if history is any indication, it very well might at some point.
\n\nIt is difficult to answer these questions—not least because most of them have very little to do with us. Israel has become a deeply sick society, with poll after poll showing continued majority support for the genocide in\nGaza, the war on\nIran, the war on\nLebanon. Settlers backed by the army are conducting wholesale pogroms in the West Bank. There seems to be no internal or international mechanism to stop their expansionist and genocidal ambitions.
\n\nI left Lebanon in 2021. I left for many reasons, but the one that made remaining there unsustainable was that I saw this war coming. I was constantly terrified by the sound of Israeli warplanes overhead. I could see the growing fascism in Israeli society for what it was—a lust for domination and expansion. Israel has never declared its borders, and it’s been clear for a long time that they want to take over Gaza and the West Bank. Then what? Will they start demilitarizing their society? No. The dominant force in Israel, both politically and socially, is the need for an external enemy so they do not turn on each other. This is a recipe for violent expansionism with no internal brakes. Today, the fire that the Israelis lit in Gaza is spreading to Lebanon. Where it will stop?
\n\nI am on the record criticizing Hezbollah. The party has played a role in all of this. It has allied itself with reactionary and corrupt forces, both in Lebanon and in the region. Its military backing of the Assad regime—a significant departure from its stated goal of resisting Israel—made it unpopular in the region and may be the reason why the Israelis breached its security apparatus in the last two years. Its distinctly sectarian form of resistance and foreign backing contribute to significant strategic weaknesses.
\n\nHezbollah has proven unwilling or unable to make its case to the rest of the country. There are many valid reasons why a lot of people in Lebanon do not trust Hezbollah. A key event that contributed to this distrust, which is not well known outside of Lebanon, was the\nbrief civil war of May 2008, when Hezbollah and its allies turned their arms against pro-government parties, leading to weeks-long street battles reminiscent of the civil war.
\n\nYet in this context, I wonder about the utility of focusing on these issues. These are problems that must be discussed within the country. But the situation has changed, and we must update our analysis accordingly. Israel will not leave if Hezbollah is disarmed. History demonstrates that very clearly. The situation in Gaza shows that very clearly. The statements of Israeli leaders make that explicit.
\n\nThe fact is, Israel has been assaulting Lebanon since before Hezbollah existed. Hezbollah only exists because of Israel’s occupation. If they do successfully disarm Hezbollah, another group will form, because occupation breeds resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/20.jpg\")
Israel’s Yellow Line in Lebanon, a so-called “security belt” where the Israelis have stationed troops and are systematically demolishing villages.
\nHow do we stop the Israelis from bombing us? This question grips me every single day. But the most sober-minded people I know are just as perplexed as I am.
\n\nTo attempt to understand logic of the Lebanese government and the shortfalls of its approach, we can consult an essay that was published in the Lebanese daily L’Orient–Le Jour on April 6, 2026. The title is “Neutrality,\na Viable Lifeline for Lebanon.” This paper reflects the perspectives of some of the commentariat in Lebanon are saying, and the article represents a rare elaboration of the strategy that the Lebanese government is currently pursuing
\n\nThe essay begins with this short preamble:
\n\n\n\n\n“The imagery of our army evacuating posts in the south while leaving behind villagers unwilling to abandon their homes in the face of Hezbollah-Israeli conflict and Israeli incursions raises an important question: what is the role of a state that cannot defend its borders from invasion and occupation?”
\n
This question summarizes the basic contradiction. The government’s plan is to replace Hezbollah in the south with the national army, with the idea that the latter will protect civilians—but the author takes for granted that in fact, the army cannot do this. As we saw last month, the army\nwithdrew immediately when the Israelis began invading. So in fact, there is no basis for the argument that monopolizing violence in the hands of the state will bring order and protection, even though that is the premise of the path that the government is taking.
\n\nThe writer continues:
\n\n\n\n\n“The reality is much simpler: no army in the region can win at war with Israel; no proxy group can sell victory beyond survival; and Lebanon cannot function as a governable country—no matter how sophisticated its military capabilities—unless we dislodge ourselves, entirely, from regional war.”
\n
But how could the Lebanese state dislodge Lebanon from the geopolitics of the surrounding region?
\n\n\n\n\n“… that requires adopting a policy too often misunderstood: neutrality. Neutrality is neither dismissing the Palestinian plight by throwing morals away nor equating anything with Israeli crimes. It is demanding that Lebanon no longer pay an enormous price for hosting the Arab-Israeli conflict, or in this more recent round, the Iranian regime’s survivability.”
\n
The phrase “hosting the Arab-Israeli conflict” is particularly confusing. What could that mean? Where should it be “hosted”? How do we change “hosts”? The closest thing to a historical answer is the events of Black September (1970-1971), when Jordan violently expelled Palestinian groups to Lebanon. After that, in a sense, Jordanians did stop paying the aforementioned “enormous price,” but they simply pushed that cost onto Lebanon. How could Lebanon offload that onto some other polity? Surely the author isn’t suggesting that the Lebanese government should expel both Palestinians and its own citizens into Jordan or Syria?
\n\nSpeaking of the “Arab-Israel conflict” as if it is a timeless abstraction makes no sense. The very language is the rhetoric of Zionists. Framing the war on Lebanon as the “Arab-Israeli conflict” ignores Lebanon’s particular history with Israel, presenting this war as the consequence of abstract Arab antagonism toward the state of Israel rather than a continuous, intentional, and carefully orchestrated expansion on the part of the Israeli state.
\n\nIt is arguably true, as the author claims, that “no army in the region can win at war with Israel.” The failure of Arab states and societies to develop different means of engaging with this problem over the last several decades is one of the reasons we have arrived here. But this war has been imposed on us. It’s not our choice. The alternative, as we have seen time again, is surrender, occupation, humiliation. Or rather, the alternative to war is war by other means.
\n\nArmed resistance liberated the south of Lebanon in 2000—specifically, a strategy of asymmetrical warfare. They didn’t need to defeat the Israeli army, just as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria didn’t need to defeat the French Army,29 just as the Vietcong didn’t need to defeat the American army.
\n\nWhat could a “policy of neutrality” mean? The proposal implies that the Lebanese government has the agency to determine what happens, but also, that neutrality is both possible and desirable in the face of a genocidal force. What mechanisms would serve to assert this neutrality? Are there any historical precedents to suggest this is even possible?
\n\nThe writer’s sole example is the 1960s, when he claims that Lebanon was neutral and it worked. This claim is purely ahistorical. At the time, Israel was occupied elsewhere, fighting against Egypt. That was before the Palestinian revolution of 1965, before the crushing of Arab nationalism in 1967, before Black September in 1970, before the Arab-Egyptian peace treaty of 1977. It was only after those developments, when all other Arab states had been pacified and Palestinian militants had been expelled from those regimes, that Israel shifted the full force of its attention to Lebanon.
\n\nThe period the writer refers to as a period of neutrality was also a period of harsh repression targeting Palestinians in Lebanon. Until the Cairo Agreement of 1969, they were living under what amounted to martial law.
\n\nThis is a recurring theme throughout the region that the writer neglects to mention: neutrality comes at an internal cost. With substantial portions of the population opposing Israel, with many wanting to fight it militarily, the only way for states to prevent this is to crack down on their own populations via violent means. We can see this in Egypt’s authoritarian regime, in the Palestinian Authority, and in many other governments across the region. Instead of employing violence against the aggressor, Israel, these states turn that violence inward to repress those who would defend themselves as well as those who are moved to act in solidarity.
\n\nThose are in fact the stated ambitions of the current government in Lebanon. The president, Joseph Aoun, was elected on a platform of promising to monopolize arms in the hands of the state. However, it is clear that the Lebanese government cannot do that. The risk of civil war is too great.
\n\nSo the writer proposes that Lebanon should be occupied by a new international force that would replace the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL):
\n\n\n\n\n“Where UNIFIL is unable to deliver, an alternative security arrangement should fill the void. Greater powers must support Lebanon in its desired transition away from permanent war…”
\n
Without going into any detail about who those “great powers” might be, he confidently declares that they will ensure Lebanon becomes “neutral” and that “neutrality” will be:
\n\n\n\n\n“Lebanon’s shield—denying Israel a foothold on any single square meter of our geography. It remains our strongest defense.”
\n
Why does the writer believe this? How could anyone believe this? This is not dealing with the material realities at all. Look at Syria, where the Sharaa administration is attempting to demonstrate its “neutrality.” That hasn’t stopped Israel from occupying more Syrian land, bombing the country on a regular basis, and fomenting sectarian conflict.
\n\nThe writer’s only historical argument is that the siege of Beirut in 1982 ended after the expulsion of the PLO and the introduction of the Multi-National Force. He ignores the fact that it was popular armed resistance that liberated Beirut. He ignores the fact that even after the Israelis withdrew and the Multi-National Force remained, there was fierce resistance against the latter as well, eventually compelling them to retreat. He ignores the fact that even after the Israelis withdrew from Beirut, they continued to occupy the South of Lebanon for eighteen years, and that that occupation only ended after fierce and consistent resistance. Finally, he ignores the fact that the 1982 siege began as a violation of a 1981 ceasefire agreement. What would a new “international force”—inevitably, an American or European force—do to guarantee security for Lebanon when the Israelis violate international law day after day, year after year, decade after decade, with complete impunity?
\n\nThe idea that what Lebanon needs is more imperialism is absolutely ridiculous.
\n\nAfter what we’ve seen the “international community” do in regards to Gaza, trusting them like this is delusional. Yet this seems to be the plan of the current Lebanese government. That is the premise of the current direct talks between Lebanon and Israel, which presumes good faith on the part of Israel (and the US) where there clearly is none. Lebanon has no leverage in this context. This is asking too much of people who have no cause to trust the US or Israel or the so-called international community—especially now with the US under Trump, who has demonstrated a complete disregard for international law. Are we supposed to work with the Board of Peace—the same people who suggested turning the entirety of South Lebanon into the Trump Economic Zone? Is this the viable alternative to Israeli occupation?
\n\nThis type of thinking is pushing Lebanon towards civil war. It insults the inhabitants of Southern Lebanon, portraying them at best as deluded by Hezbollah or at worst as complicit in dragging the rest of the country into a conflict. Are they not Lebanese? Do _they_ not deserve sovereignty? Do they not deserve protection?
\n\nThere are no easy answers as to how to accomplish protecting them. But it is certain that the kind of wishful thinking represented by the article in L’Orient–Le Jour is removed from reality and history. It serves no one. It can only perpetuate the confusion of the current moment and deepen the rifts that are already tearing apart the thin fabric of Lebanese society.
\n\nThe government’s strategy is unpopular, dangerous, and doomed to fail. Resistance to the occupation is necessary; it is also a right under international law. Hezbollah is facing issues of legitimacy in the country, in many cases for very legitimate reasons. For example, one of the reasons that the author of the aforementioned article in L’Orient–Le Jour opposes Hezbollah is because Hezbollah killed his father. A lot of Lebanese politics boils down to longstanding sectarian conflict like this. That is the result of being ruled by a coalition of warlords for the last fifty years.
\n\nMany people are saying that there needs to be space to form a popular resistance movement similar to the Lebanese National Movement of the early 1970s. Such a movement would have to combine a program of anti-sectarian social cohesion, a revolutionary political program to overcome the sectarian oligarchy plaguing the country, a progressive economic program moving away from a financialized dependence economy, and an armed wing (whether of state or non-state forces) that could defend their communities from Israeli aggression. It would also have to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation.
\n\nThis is another form of wishful thinking. Who would organize this? With what resources? Lebanon has been a playground for imperialist powers for so long now that it is difficult to imagine how any form of organizing could overcome that. Nonetheless, in view of the fundamental contradictions within the Zionist colonization of Bilad al-Sham and the colonial, capitalist, and exclusionary core of the Lebanese entity, nothing less will suffice. We can still attempt to think positively, to identify what we can fight for, not just against. That is the essential thing missing in this moment of despair and humiliation.
\n\nIsrael wants to destroy Lebanon. We must all resist that by any means necessary. That means setting our priorities straight, it means unifying, it means forming communities based on common struggle. It means aiming for liberation, not just sovereignty. It also means forming connections of solidarity with other communities across the region and the world.
\n\nThe beast that is setting upon Lebanon is global and our only hope is global resistance. The fire that started in Gaza is spreading now to Lebanon. But it will not stop there. It will consume all of us—all of you, as well—unless we extinguish it.
\n\nMoshe Dayan, Story of My Life, 1976 ↩
\nFrom an address given to Technion University students (March 19, 1969), a transcription of which appeared in Ha’aretz (April 4, 1969), quoted in The Question of Palestine (1980) by Edward Said, p. 14 ↩
\nBenny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 177. ↩
\nIbid, p. 28. ↩
\nAvi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 146. ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 142. ↩
\nKamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions_,_ 1987 ↩
\nPatrick Seale, Post-colonial Syria and Lebanon, 2007 ↩
\nFrancis Stevension, Lloyd George: A Diary by Frances Stevenson, 1973 ↩
\nIllan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, p. 15 ↩
\nIbid, p. 38 ↩
\nIbid, p. 25 ↩
\nFawaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 2007, p.113 ↩
\nMehdi Amel, On the Sectarian State, 1986 ↩
\nHisham Safieddine, Banking on the State: The Financial Foundation of Lebanon, 2018 ↩
\nMehdi Amel, On the Sectarian State, 1986 ↩
\nBenny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 28 ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 160 ↩
\nPart of a funeral oration Dayan gave in 1956 for a soldier killed on the front. ↩
\nFawaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 2007, p. 102 ↩
\nIbid, p. 187 ↩
\nIbid, p. 191 ↩
\nIbid, p. 206 ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 242 ↩
\nIbid, p. 260 ↩
\nIbid, p. 278 ↩
\nDavid Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, 2010, p. 192 ↩
\nJoseph Daher, Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, 2016 ↩
\nMahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria 1830-1987, 2002 ↩
\nBen Morea has passed away. Known for his participation in Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s, he withdrew from the city and pursued a path into revolutionary animism. In the following eulogy, Tasos Sagris of Void Network recounts Ben’s subsequent visit to Exarchia, the Athenian neighborhood famed as a hotbed of anarchism.
\n\nToday, the Exarchia that Tasos describes has also changed. To mourn a person is to mourn an entire vanished world. Yet, as Tasos explores, there is a silver thread that connects Ben’s life and the legacy of Exarchia to our own present and possible future.
\n\nBen Morea is dead, motherfuckers.
\n\nTo many of us in Void Network, Ben was not simply an old revolutionary from another era, nor a nostalgic remnant of the American counterculture. He was one of those rare human beings who attempted to transform rebellion into a total form of life—to erase the borders between self and other, poetry and insurrection, art and survival, to bring global social revolution to the streets of the metropolis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/1.jpg\")
Ben Morea.
\nWe met him in April 2016, when my sister, Georgia Sagri, invited him for a series of talks and meetings at Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a space in the center of Athens bringing together art, politics, and the sciences. He was a beloved friend of hers from her years in New York. She enthusiastically introduced him to many different people—not only anarchists but also artists and other creative people from the Athens underground scene.
\n\nI enjoyed a long day and night walking around Exarchia with Ben. It was during a high point of the anarchist solidarity movement with refugees and migrants, when more than ten occupied buildings across the neighborhood housed over a thousand displaced people fleeing the wars and wreckage of the global order to seek a better future in Europe. Exarchia was no longer simply the legendary neighborhood of anarchists, punks, radical students, and street riots; it had become a fragile liberated territory where the uprooted of the Earth attempted to survive collectively in the face of the violence of borders, police raids, fascists, poverty, and abandonment.
\n\nWe walked endlessly through the narrow streets. We passed the occupied refugee squats where children played on the rooftops under torn flags, living in buildings powered by improvised, illegal electricity connections. We passed assemblies in smoky rooms filled with comrades speaking ten different languages. We walked through old cafés where anarchists argued all night about revolution, defeat, and desire while armored riot police waited at the entrances of the neighborhood like an occupying army.
\n\nI brought him to the Free Social Center Nosotros, which Void Network participated in for fifteen years, and to the self-organized political spaces scattered across Exarchia. I translated for him the slogans painted on the walls and the posters announcing demonstrations, solidarity kitchens, anti-fascist patrols, underground concerts, assemblies for imprisoned comrades, open discussions on gender, social collapse, and insurrection. He looked carefully at everything—not with the cold curiosity of an intellectual tourist, but with the trembling attention of someone recognizing fragments of a long unfinished dream.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/13.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nPerhaps what moved him most was not the militancy itself, but the atmosphere of collective survival. The defiant beauty of people who possessed almost nothing yet continued building common spaces in the ruins of austerity and social collapse. Young anarchists sharing food and ideas with refugees from Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Congo, illegal kitchens feeding hundreds every day, people from many different countries dwelling together. Abandoned buildings transformed into living organisms of solidarity as artists, dropouts, migrants, junkies, fugitives, students, and political outcasts attempted to create another form of life.
\n\nFor Ben, this was not activism as moral duty. It was the continuation of a war against alienation that had begun decades earlier in the streets of the Lower East Side.
\n\nThat night, as we were walking through Exarchia, he stopped and looked at me with an expression I will never forget and said:
\n\n“Tasos, I feel so happy that now I can die.”
\n\nI asked him what he meant.
\n\n“Everything we did so many years ago, so far away, has taken root here. Exarchia is what we were fighting for with the Motherfuckers!” Since the early 1960s, from the days of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, he explained, he had dedicated his life to creating liberated social zones in New York and across the United States. Spaces where people could escape the prison of normality to invent new forms of collective existence. Free territories where art was no longer separated from life and revolution was no longer separated from everyday experience.
\n\nNow, decades later, on the other side of the planet, he had encountered another generation continuing the same struggle in different historical conditions. Not the white American dropouts of the psychedelic era, but refugees, migrants, precarious youth, and anarchists surviving the catastrophe of neoliberal Europe.
\n\n“Now I can die happy,” he told me. “We are winning.”
\n\nWe continued walking through the streets of Athens, surrounded by the graffiti, the helicopters, the police sirens, and the burning memory of all unfinished revolutions.
\n\nThat same night, in the center of the city, Ben Morea gave what was for many of us an unforgettable historical speech. For hours, he answered questions from anarchists, freaks, radical artists, and young rebels who gathered around him with the hunger of people seeking lived experience. He spoke about the birth of the counterculture as if describing an underground war. He told stories about riots, communes, outlaw survival, collective madness, criminality, revolutionary theater, the attempt to assassinate Andy Warhol as a strategy to block the spread of heroin in freak communities, sabotage, psychedelics, fugitives, and impossible dreams with a mixture of tenderness and levity.
\n\nMost of those stories would be impossible to summarize here. Perhaps they can only survive the way all insurgent knowledge survives: passed from mouth to ear to mouth, from generation to generation, like a secret fire moving through the darkness of this world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/16.jpg\")
\nBen Morea belonged to a generation that understood something that has almost been erased from the collective political imagination today. They grasped that revolution was not merely a program for the future but a transformation of everyday life in the present. Not an ideology to be consumed, not an identity to perform, but a dangerous reorganization of existence itself.
\n\nBefore the museums, universities, and fashion industries domesticated the aesthetics of revolt, before rebellion became a commodity circulating through social media and cultural branding, Morea and the comrades around Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker attempted to dissolve the separation between art and life completely.
\n\nThey did not want radical art, but radical existence.
\n\nFor them, art could not remain imprisoned inside galleries, theaters, literary circles, or intellectual prestige. A painting that did not attack the conditions of everyday alienation was merely decoration for the ruling class. A poem that did not open breaches inside consciousness was simply another dead object circulating in the market of culture. Even revolution itself risked becoming another form of bureaucracy if it lost contact with desire, ecstasy, madness, and collective imagination.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/7.jpg\")
\nThis was one of the deepest contributions of Ben Morea and the Motherfuckers: they understood that capitalism does not survive only through economic exploitation or police violence, but through the colonization of perception itself. Through the production of obedient identities. Through the management of desire. Through the reduction of life to work, consumption, and passive spectatorship.
\n\nLong before the language of contemporary critical theory existed, they were already attacking the society of separation with their bodies, their actions, and their forms of collective living.
\n\nThey stole food and distributed it freely.
\n\nThey occupied spaces and defended houses with open doors where anybody could be free at any time.
\n\nThey organized street theater as social attack.
\n\nThey disrupted cultural institutions.
\n\nThey transformed everyday gestures into acts of refusal.
\n\nThey attempted to create temporary liberated zones in the heart of the metropolis where people could experience forms of relations outside commodity logic.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/2.jpg\")
\nIn this sense, Ben Morea was not only an anarchist militant. He was a poet of social space creating poetry inscribed directly upon the nervous system of the city.
\n\nDuring those years, the streets of the Lower East Side became laboratories of anti-capitalist imagination. Runaway teenagers, junkies, artists, political fugitives, radical musicians, criminals, undocumented people, trans and queer outcasts, psychedelic heads, and street gangs all collided in an unstable ecosystem where counterculture and insurrection became inseparable. It was dirty, chaotic, often self-destructive, and filled with contradictions, but it carried an intensity almost impossible to imagine today within the managed sterility of contemporary urban life.
\n\nWhat terrified American society was not simply the riots or the political extremism. It was the appearance of human beings who no longer desired to be integrated into the existing order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/8.jpg\")
\nThe Motherfuckers represented a direct attack upon the American dream because they rejected the entire psychological architecture of normality: career, patriotism, private property, productivity, family discipline, social obedience. They transformed dropping out into a collective weapon.
\n\nThis is why they remain important today.
\n\nNot as a romantic relic of the sixties, but because the central conflict of our era remains exactly the same: will human life be completely reduced to economic functionality or can new forms of collective existence emerge against the machinery of control?
\n\nAnd perhaps this is why Ben recognized something familiar in Exarchia.
\n\nBecause despite all the historical differences, he once again entered a territory where people were attempting—however imperfectly—to reclaim life from the structures managing it, refusing ideological purity and political branding and living together in political and social antagonism against the establishment.
\n\nCommunal kitchens / Occupied buildings / Illegal assemblies / Underground art / Collective risk.
\n\nFriendships formed inside repression / People discovering each other again through struggle instead of competition.
\n\nThis was always the real battlefield.
\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/6.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/5.jpg\") \n | \n
The dominant culture constantly tries to convince us that capitalism is natural—to accomplish this, it destroys every social experience that could generate another perception of reality. Isolation becomes normality. Competition becomes common sense. Fear becomes social organization. Human beings cease to imagine freedom because they cease to experience collective power.
\n\nThe Motherfuckers and other anarchist and autonomous movements across the world have sought to explore the opposite possibility: that people can become ungovernable when they rediscover themselves and each other outside institutional mediation.
\n\nFor this reason, the system always attempts to neutralize rebellious movements in two ways simultaneously: through repression and through cultural absorption.
\n\nPolice attack bodies. The spectacle attacks memory.
\n\nEvery radical gesture is eventually transformed into style, merchandise, or harmless mythology. The revolutionary becomes an icon. The outlaw becomes an aesthetic reference. The living experience of revolt is emptied of danger and returned safely to society as entertainment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/10.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nBen Morea refused this domestication until the end of his life. He disappeared. This disappearance was itself a political gesture. Unlike so many public revolutionaries who slowly transformed themselves into celebrities, academics, or nostalgic commentators of their own past, Morea withdrew from visibility almost completely. Hunted by the state and exhausted by the implosions that destroyed much of the revolutionary energy of the sixties, he turned away from the machinery of political spectacle.
\n\nBut he did not surrender to normality. He did not “grow up.” He did not reconcile with the world. He did not moderate his politics or his passions. Instead, he moved toward another frontier of existence.
\n\nFar from the metropolitan centers of visibility, consumerism, and ideological production, Ben Morea spent years living close to Indigenous communities and spiritual traditions across North America. Not as an act of exotic escapism, but as part of a search for forms of knowledge and relation that industrial civilization has almost annihilated.
\n\nBen Morea speaks at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University on April 23, 2024, describing why he and his comrades had occupied the same university almost six decades earlier: “It wasn’t just to stop the war, it was to replace the ideology that created the war. The idea of occupation, a colonialist mentality. Not only did we want to stop the war, we wanted to end the mental state that would allow the war to become a reality.”
\nMany Western revolutionaries speak endlessly about liberation while remaining trapped within the same colonial mentality they claim to oppose: domination over nature, domination over time, domination over imagination, domination over the body, domination over meaning itself. Morea began searching elsewhere. In Indigenous cosmologies, communal memory, ritual practices, and non-Western understandings of land, he encountered another dimension of resistance—one far older than the modern revolutionary tradition. A resistance not centered solely on seizing power, but on preserving relationships with the Earth, the ancestors, the spirits, and collective forms of life against the expanding desert of industrial capitalism.
\n\nThis journey lends an almost mythic quality to his later life. He never became a new age guru or a “spiritual leader”—he probably hated such descriptions. For us, he embodied a rare continuity between revolt and transformation of the self. He remained, until the end, a human being searching for freedom beyond the categories offered by the dominant civilization.
\n\nAnd perhaps this is why his presence affected so many younger anarchists decades later. Because beneath the stories, the legends and the historical aura, people sensed something increasingly rare in contemporary political culture: he had truly risked his life for another world, and he had never psychologically returned from that journey.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/12.jpg\")
\nToday, in an era where even dissent is rapidly transformed into consumable identity, the legacy of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers becomes important again not as historical nostalgia but as a living provocation. Because the catastrophe they fought against did not disappear. It expanded across the entire planet.
\n\nThe Metropolis they saw emerging in the 1960s—the society of alienation, surveillance, spectacle, and emotional paralysis—has now become almost total. Capitalism no longer simply exploits labor. It occupies attention, emotion, sexuality, language, memory, and imagination itself. Human beings are increasingly transformed into isolated economic units permanently connected to systems of consumption and digital control while simultaneously disconnected from collective experience, from nature, from physical community, and from any deeper sense of meaning.
\n\nThe result is a civilization filled with information but emptied of presence, a society of communication without encounter, visibility without intimacy, opinion without lived experience, a planetary loneliness managed by algorithms and pharmaceutical industries.
\n\nInside this landscape, the radicalism of the Motherfuckers acquires new force precisely because it was always more than merely ideological. They were fighting against a model of existence. The battlefield they fought on remains the central battlefield today.
\n\nA contemporary revolutionary cannot simply imitate the aesthetics of the sixties. The costumes, slogans, and mythology of past revolts are useless when they are disconnected from the historical necessity that produced them. What matters is the impulse beneath their actions: the refusal to allow capitalism to define the limits of reality and human possibility.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/15.jpg\")
\nTo live “against the wall” today means refusing psychological integration into the machinery of fear and passivity.
\n\nIt means defending spaces where people can still encounter each other directly outside commodified relations. It means rebuilding forms of solidarity in societies designed to fragment every collective bond. It means fighting against the war, the apartheid, the genocide, the environmental and psychological destruction, protecting zones of human unpredictability inside a civilization obsessed with management and control.
\n\nThe liberated territory is not only the occupied building or the street confrontation. It is also the communal kitchen / the underground art space / the collective garden / the occupied university and the collective house / the public assembly and the secret meeting / the barricades, the fires on the streets, the smell of benzine on my hands, and to hold you in the mist of the tear gas / the pirate radio station / the neighborhood organization of mutual aid / the friendship that survives a political defeat / the refusal of narcissism and permanent digital mediation / the defense of the imagination against the dictatorship of cynicism.
\n\nBecause cynicism has become one of the primary weapons of Power.
\n\nThe system no longer asks people to believe in a beautiful future. It merely asks them to stop believing that anything other than a dystopian future is possible. This emotional exhaustion produces populations that continue obeying not because they are convinced, but because they feel existentially defeated.
\n\nThis is why every authentic community of resistance becomes dangerous. Because it immediately threatens state power militarily and existentially, and because it reawakens suppressed human capacities: trust, collective joy, solidarity, courage, eroticism, care, spiritual intensity, and the experience of shared risk.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/18.jpg\")
Spirou Trikoupi, a squat in Exarcheia that housed nearly a hundred migrants from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Kurdistan, and elsewhere. The squat was run by a regular weekly assembly and featured a bar, a library, and classrooms for children. Police brutally evicted it in August 2019, kidnapping the migrants at gunpoint and taking them to detention centers and concentration camps.
\nThe Motherfuckers understood that revolution without the transformation of everyday life becomes just another authoritarian structure. But they also understood the opposite danger: that counterculture without social struggle degenerates into narcissistic lifestyles and harmless bohemian consumption.
\n\nThis conundrum remains unresolved today. On one side, we see political movements emptied of poetry, desire, and imagination, reproducing the same emotional misery as the system they oppose. On the other side, we see cultural scenes obsessed with personal expression while completely detached from material struggle and collective responsibility.
\n\nBen Morea and his friends, among them Osha Neumann and many others, represented a rare attempt to hold these two dimensions together: insurrection and beauty, fury and tenderness, collective discipline and ecstatic freedom. Perhaps this is why his words in Exarchia carried such emotional force for me. He recognized that despite all defeats, despite repression, cooptation, and exhaustion, fragments of that old dream still survive wherever people attempt to create living communities of resistance in the ruins of capitalism. Not perfect communities, not ideological utopias, but temporary breaches in the social machinery. Places where people can breathe differently.
\n\nAnd perhaps this is the deepest lesson that his life can offer younger generations of anarchists, artists, and revolutionaries today: that resistance is not only the struggle against oppression. It is also the defense of human intensity against the civilization of emotional death.
\n\nTo remain capable of wonder in a world organized around despair.
\nTo remain capable of love in a culture built on contention.
\nTo remain capable of collective imagination inside systems designed to isolate consciousness.
\nTo continue creating free spaces even as history appears to collapse around us.
This was the invisible thread connecting the streets of the Lower East Side to Exarchia decades later.
\n\nNot a political model or an ideology frozen in time, but the persistence of a dangerous human desire: to live differently / to feel differently / to relate differently / and through this transformation of everyday existence, to open cracks in the apparent inevitability of this world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/11.jpg\")
\nPerhaps this is what Ben Morea understood better than most of the revolutionaries of his generation: that the struggle for liberation is not only about changing institutions. It is about protecting the possibility of another kind of human being from extinction.
\n\nBen Morea’s life leaves behind no doctrine, no party line, no strategic blueprint that future generations could mechanically reproduce. Perhaps this is precisely why his presence continues to resonate so deeply today. He reminds us that the most powerful revolutionary experiences escape institutionalization and refuse to solidify into ideology. He belonged to a generation that believed that history could suddenly open upon new horizons. That everyday life could be reinvented. That human beings could escape psychologically, existentially, and materially from the systems shaping them.
\n\nMany of those dreams were defeated. Others were absorbed by capitalism and transformed into style, fashion, or harmless cultural memory. Entire fragments of the counterculture were commodified and sold back to society as entertainment while the economic and technological machinery of domination expanded to a planetary scale.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/14.jpg\")
\nAnd yet something survived. Not the mythology of the sixties, the romantic image of rebellion, the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but a certain irreducible human force. A refusal.
\n\nA refusal to accept alienation as destiny.
\nA refusal to reduce existence to work and consumption.
\nA refusal to abandon collective life even in periods of historical darkness.
\nA refusal to surrender imagination to the administrators of reality.
This refusal passed through many forms across the decades: through communes, occupations, pirate radios, underground newspapers, autonomous social centers, Indigenous struggles, anti-fascist networks, street riots, collective kitchens, night attacks, artistic experiments, migrant solidarities, and invisible friendships formed in the margins of defeated movements.
\n\nBen Morea carried this force through his entire existence. Even his disappearances were meaningful. In a civilization obsessed with visibility, self-promotion, and political branding, he chose opacity, distance from fame; he chose to protect the living intensity of revolt from becoming another spectacle to be consumed. This choice gave his life a rare integrity. He remained dangerous because he never fully allowed himself to become socially legible. And perhaps this points toward one of the deepest lessons emerging from his trajectory: that revolution is not an identity.
\n\nIt is not a subculture, a career, a scene, or a posture of moral superiority. Revolution, at its deepest level, is a transformation of relations—with others, with the body, with desire, with fear, with nature, with the self and with time itself. This is why the most meaningful revolutionary moments are often experienced not as political obligation but as sudden expansions of life.
\n\nA collective meal inside an occupied building.
\nA forbidden conversation lasting until dawn.
\nThe preparation of explosives in the living room.
\nA street filled with people refusing fear together.
\nA neighborhood defending migrant residents from fascists and police.
\nA city without government.
\nA temporary experience where the loneliness imposed by capitalism suddenly cracks open and another form of existence becomes thinkable.
These moments are fragile. Often temporary. Sometimes tragic. But they leave irreversible marks inside personal and collective consciousness. Once someone has experienced this intensity, normality itself becomes unbearable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/9.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nPerhaps this is why so many people who met Ben Morea across generations felt affected not simply by his ideas but by his presence. He carried within him traces of another relationship to reality—one shaped by collective risk, existential commitment, and lived rebellion rather than intellectual abstraction. He belonged to that increasingly rare category of revolutionaries who understood that freedom is not a future paradise guaranteed by historical progress.
\n\nFreedom exists only when people create it together in the present. Even if briefly. Even if imperfectly. Even when the entire world appears to move in the opposite direction.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/17.jpg\")
\nToday, as authoritarianism rises globally, as surveillance penetrates everyday life and war industries reorganize the killing machine, as genocide in Palestine and ecological collapse accelerate, as social existence becomes increasingly mediated by automatic behaviors and algorithms, the temptation to despair has become enormous. Many people retreat into cynicism, private survival, digital paralysis. Others seek refuge in ideological certainties that cannot address the spiritual and emotional devastation that contemporary capitalism is inflicting.
\n\nAgainst this landscape, Ben Morea’s life stubbornly demonstrates that human beings remain capable of creating liberated social spaces even within catastrophe. Small territories of intensity, lovers of Total Freedom, moments of collective beauty, communities of resistance, experiments in chaos.
\n\nThis is how I choose to understand the meaning of the phrase he whispered to me while we were walking through Exarchia: “We are winning.”
\n\nThe state had not collapsed. Capitalism had not been defeated. History had not fulfilled the dreams of the sixties. But somewhere, on another side of the planet, amid crisis, migration, repression, and social devastation, new generations were still attempting to continue the unfinished work of liberation. The fire had not been extinguished. It had simply changed languages and places.
\n\nWe fight to defend the human capacity for insurrectionary imagination, to preserve tenderness against brutality, collectivity against isolation, poetry against the administration of existence, living memory against the spectacle, and freedom against all the visible and invisible walls surrounding human life.
\n\nBen Morea is dead.
\n\nBut somewhere tonight, in occupied demolished buildings, underground gatherings, spontaneous conversations, illegal raves, and secret psychedelic ceremonies, in hidden bars and collective kitchens, in street riots, acts of solidarity, existential poetry, abstract paintings, in impossible dreams, fragments of his spirit continue moving silently through the darkness of this world.
\n\n—Tasos Sagris / Void Network
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/3.jpg\")
\nA Life in Rebellion—Ariel Uesseler
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/4.jpg\")
\n The war that the United States and Israel are waging in the Middle East is not solely directed at Iran. In addition to occupying the entirety of Palestine as well as the Golan Heights and other parts of Syria, Israeli troops are currently occupying parts of Lebanon while Israeli airstrikes pummel the country from above. At least 800,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon since the beginning of March. Left unchecked, the Israeli government will reduce Lebanon to uninhabitable wreckage, just as it has Gaza.
\n\nTo understand the consequences for people in Lebanon, we reached out to Elia Ayoub, who previously spoke to us about the uprising that took place in Lebanon in October 2019 against the sectarian rule of warlord oligarchs. How should we understand the latest round of hostilities in the context of the last several decades? How does this assault shape the prospects for Lebanese movements for liberation?
\n\nElia Ayoub is an anti-authoritarian historian and researcher from Lebanon. He hosts The Fire These Times podcast, runs the Hauntologies newsletter, and hosts online classes on modern Lebanese history. You can donate to support people displaced by Israeli attacks on Lebanon here.
\n\nHow did Israeli policies impact your life and the lives of those around you as you were growing up in Lebanon?
\n\nI would have to go back decades to give anything close to a full picture. Israel has been bombing Lebanon for a good part of the past four decades, even if we limit ourselves to starting in 1982. They militarily occupied south Lebanon until 2000, and then bombed Lebanon again in 2006. That was when they developed their notorious Dahieh military doctrine—so called after Beirut’s southern suburbs (Dahieh means “suburb” in Arabic)—which explicitly calls for disproportionate bombing of civilian areas to put pressure on Hezbollah. They bombed Lebanon again in 2023 and especially 2024. Then they signed a “ceasefire” with Hezbollah, which they have violated at least 10,000 times since, according to the UN.
\n\nAnd now they are bombing again.
\n\nIsrael violates international law as a matter of state policy. I was 15 years old during the 2006 war. I remember watching Israeli jets dropping bomb after bomb over Dahieh. Close friends who are from the South, Dahieh, and the Bekaa valley have experienced death, displacement, and trauma multiple times over. Virtually everyone in Lebanon has witnessed an Israeli bombing, regardless of their age. If you have lived in Lebanon for a long enough period, you have experienced Israeli state violence.
\n\nWe’re talking about millions of people from all walks of life, of all political persuasions—children and their parents and grandparents. For example, my 89-year-old grandmother, who fled the Nakba in 1948 as a child, has never passed more than a few years at a time in nearly a century of life without being directly or indirectly impacted by Israeli state violence. That’s all we know about Israelis. There is a widespread perception that they are incapable of existing as a political culture without war.
\n\nThis is entirely missing from most of the coverage I’ve seen, which is limited to inhuman geopolitical abstracts. What is happening right now is not just about Hezbollah (which is already unpopular in Lebanon) dragging the country into foreign wars. If this was simply about Hezbollah, Israel wouldn’t be ethnically cleansing entire villages by dynamiting them. Israel wouldn’t be spraying herbicides over large swaths of Lebanon and Syria to kill crops and wildlife in order to make the land unusable for agriculture. Israeli politicians wouldn’t be routinely threatening to bomb Lebanon back to the dark ages, or threatening to turn Dahieh into Gaza, or designating all Lebanese Shias—roughly a third of the population—as a hostile population.
\n\nHezbollah, a deeply reactionary party that I’ve long opposed—I say this simply to avoid confusion—would have never existed in the first place were it not for the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. There would have been no reason for a group that called itself the Islamic resistance to exist were it not for the fact that it was necessary to resist such a brutal foreign occupier.
\n\nAnd now, in the past few days, Israel has ordered the forced evacuation—effectively, the ethnic cleansing—of the entirety of southern Lebanon, Dahieh, and parts of the Bekaa. History is repeating itself, only now the weapons of mass destruction that the Israeli government possesses are even deadlier than before.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/1.jpg\")
Israel repeatedly struck Beirut’s southern suburbs during the first week of March 2026.
\nHow have Israeli policies and actions towards Lebanon and the region as a whole shifted over the past decade?
\n\nA sort of stalemate prevailed for most of the period following 2006, with escalations here and there. The Israelis were busy bombing Gaza from 2008 onward, especially in 2014, and Hezbollah occupied with defending the Assad regime in Syria. During that period, Israeli politicians never missed an opportunity to tell Lebanon that they can destroy us whenever they want—that they intend to do so.
\n\nWhatever Israel did in Gaza, we knew that they wanted to do the same in Lebanon. It didn’t take a genius to conclude that. Israelis tell us these things outright.
\n\nWhat has shifted is that Israeli politics has become even more explicitly genocidal than before. The attacks of October 7th provided an already genocidal political culture with the excuse it needed. We’ve all seen the results.
\n\nFrom a Lebanese point of view, seeing Israel get more and more violent made a lot of people conclude that, once they are “finished” with Gaza, they will turn their eyes to Lebanon.
\n\nRepeated Israeli incursions and air raids have created mass displacement within Lebanon. How have Lebanese people organized themselves in these chaotic moments? What groups or movements have helped people escaping the war?
\n\nWe should remember that this latest round of mass displacement comes after a similar one in 2024 that mostly affected the same areas. There are established paths for those with connections to stay with friends or relatives, for those with means to rent out a place, and so on.
\n\nAs for those who do not have these means, they are the hardest hit; many have been sleeping on the streets. We often see neighboring villages that aren’t as affected sheltering those who are fleeing, at least temporarily, while people make their way to their destination, if they have one in mind. People are adapting to an evolving situation on a daily basis. Some are fundraising on their own or as part of groups, others are volunteering with soup kitchens.
\n\nHowever, it’s impossible to “escape the war,” as the consequences are felt throughout the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/2.jpg\")
Israeli armoured personnel carriers (APCs) on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border on March 8, 2026.
\nIn 2019, there was a burst of social movement activity in Lebanon drawing people together across sectarian lines to reject the domination of warlord oligarchs. What became of that time of possibility?
\n\nI wrote about this for CrimethInc. at the time.
\n\nThe 2019 moment was the biggest uprising this country had ever seen. It was only possible because of years of organizing and protests, years of governmental corruption, and—of particular importance to this conversation—a long enough period of time without Lebanon being bombed. We would have not been able to take to the streets if Israelis were bombing those streets and our homes—which is what is happening now, once again.
\n\nThis shows how Israel has been good to Lebanon’s sectarian regime.
\n\nThe horizons that opened up in 2019 were closed soon after by a combination of factors: repression (including by Hezbollah), economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the August 4, 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut. For most of the years since, most people have been simply trying to survive, with many people working on mutual aid, soup kitchens, and other forms of community building. We could reasonably attribute the emergence of those efforts to those few months in late 2019 and early 2020 that showed people—in particular, the generation that came of age after the 1975-1990 Lebanon wars—what is possible when we get together and organize.
\n\nThat’s where that time of possibility went. But I think we haven’t seen the end of that potential yet.
\n\nHow do you understand the relationship between Netanyahu’s government and Trump’s government today? Which is determining the course of events, and towards what end?
\n\nWe know from US officials, including Marco Rubio, that Israel made the call to attack Iran and the US decided to join—so in that sense, the Israeli government is the one making the call. It’s surreal that the smaller power managed to drag the much larger power into this, and that a decision made by a fairly small number of people in Israel has had such consequences for the world economy, not to mention the ongoing death toll and the environmental disaster.
\n\nThe Americans have no end goal. They did not plan ahead at all. Now we’re seeing Trump unhappy with Israel bombing Iranian oil depots, which means they didn’t even coordinate together. It’s unclear what the Israelis want beyond spreading chaos as an end in itself. It’s possible they were arrogant enough to believe that they could impose regime change in Iran via aerial bombardment alone, but as far as I can tell, they are happy simply to destroy as much of Iran as they can, while they can. This is a regime that has gotten away with carrying out genocide in view of the entire world for over two years, so it clearly believes it can act with impunity indefinitely.
\n\nThere are different ideologies on the American side as well. The Christian nationalist and Zionist Pete Hegseth is celebrating the destruction in Iran as a victory in and of itself. As for Trump, he is clearly out of his depth. He did not expect things to get this bad this quickly. He likely hoped for an outcome like the one in Venezuela, where he got rid of Maduro but kept the regime in place with Delcy Rodríguez in charge but subservient to the will of the US government. They cannot achieve that in Iran—not only because the Iranian regime is more powerful, but also because the Israelis have their own priorities.
\n\nIf the Americans were smarter, they would have understood by now that their problem is Israel. Even if your goal were simply to preserve US supremacy, American support for Israel has been a disaster. They have destroyed the illusion of Gulf security in a matter of days, destabilized the world economy, and proven to every government, once and for all, that the US cannot be trusted. However this ends, we are going to see a realigned world with reduced US influence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/3.jpg\")
The consequences of an Israeli airstrike on the southern suburbs of Beirut on March 9, 2026.
\nOf all the responses to the US and Israeli aggression modeled by different political forces in Lebanon and throughout the surrounding region, which could point towards a horizon of liberation?
\n\nIn Lebanon, groups like Buzuruna Juzuruna, which focuses on food sovereignty, and Egna Legna, an Ethiopian migrant women-run non-profit providing shelter, food safety and more, are examples of what is possible in the country beyond the sectarian and nationalist status quo. Queer Mutual Aid Lebanon is another one, as their definition of the queer community in Lebanon is not limited to Lebanese queers only.
\n\nIn times of war, “humanitarian” discourse can either reproduce existing power dynamics—for example, by ignoring migrant domestic workers or queer Lebanese people—or depoliticize an inherently political situation—for example, reporting on how migrant domestic workers are affected without mentioning that Israel is bombing civilian areas forcing everyone to flee. Groups like the ones I have cited cut through all of this. They operate on a logic of people supporting people because they’re people. That can be a very radical act.
\n\nMilitary attacks by foreign powers—especially by imperialist nations—often produce a strong patriotic feeling among those who experience them. How should movements for liberation engage with this?
\n\nThis isn’t really happening in Lebanon because the country is already fractured. There are many people who also blame Hezbollah for responding to Khamenei’s assassination by launching rockets towards Israel, so you’re not going to see a “rallying behind the troops” situation.
\n\nWhat are the most effective things that grassroots social movements elsewhere in the world can do right now to support those enduring this violence?
\n\nI always hesitate with questions like this one, only because “effectiveness” is a criterion that involves too many different factors to consider. As a general rule, I’d say adopting an anti-authoritarian framework is a good way to avoid downplaying the suffering of people who live under regimes like the Ayatollah’s while recognizing that this war has nothing to do with liberating those people.
\n\nI also think this is a situation in which the diasporas and their supporters outside of Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine can play a significant role. For example, there is very little space in Iran today for pro-Palestine activism, because the Ayatollah’s regime has long co-opted pro-Palestine discourse to its own ends—which have nothing to do with decolonizing Palestine and promoting an anti-Zionist solution that treats everyone equally regardless of religion or ethnicity. Iran has a system that can reasonably be described as gender apartheid. A state like that cannot liberate Palestinians from Israel’s ethno-supremacist apartheid.
\n\nThose of us in the diasporas can make the link between the authoritarianism of Israel and the authoritarianism of Iran without equating the two. This is crucial, because we need to be sensitive to the experience of those who are victimized by both regimes. To a Palestinian in Gaza, it could sound offensive to say that Iran is as bad as Israel, and vice versa to the Ayatollah’s victims in Iran. The absence of such nuance makes it easier for those—including parts of the Iranian diaspora—who promote the idea that Israel will liberate Iran.
\n\nThere is anti-Arab racism among the Iranian diaspora that, ironically, shares similarities with the Ayatollah regime’s repression of non-Persian groups such as Ahwazi Arabs and Kurds. It is a form of ethno-supremacy that attracts and is attracted to the Zionist ethno-supremacy that most readers of this platform are more familiar with.
\n\nOn the Palestinian diaspora side, more could be done to recognize the violence of the Ayatollah’s regime and the so-called “axis of resistance,” both of which have killed thousands upon thousands of people—including Palestinian Syrians who opposed Assad—while pretending to be pro-Palestine. Such connections are much more difficult to make in our region, but diasporas with more privileges can help build those desperately needed bonds.
\n\nWhile we’re at it, we should also be building bonds with members of the Jewish diaspora that reject Zionist ethno-supremacy in favor of building a common future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/4.jpg\")
The site of an Israeli airstrike targeting the Lebanese city of Tyre on March 6, 2026.
\nOne of the most exhausting things about horrific tragedies like this is that they force us to focus on harm reduction rather than on building the world of our dreams. If not for the US and Israeli attacks, what would you prefer to be thinking about, doing, creating?
\n\nI would be living in my home village in Lebanon, thinking about whether to go somewhere more rural where I could work on and with the land to build food sovereignty and promote mutual aid from the ground up across the country and beyond.
\n\nI would be spending more time in the woods there, learning local names for the animals and plants with my child, who has never been to Lebanon.
\n\nI appreciate this question, because it can be easy to forgot the scale of what was robbed of us. I do my best to keep hope and create roots wherever I am, but I am also always mourning what the multi-generational machines of destruction that are the Israeli and American states have done to our lives.
\n\nAs long as there is a rogue and hyper-militaristic Zionist state to our south, it is too dangerous for me to live in Lebanon with my child.
\n\nWe present a interview with Htet Khine Soe, an activist who organized in Burma1 for more than 20 years before relocating to Mae Sot in Thailand at the end of 2021. The interview was carried out by Ban Ge, a Chinese anarchist who has come back and forth to Mae Sot and worked closely with Burmese activists after the coup.
\n\nThis February, the military coup in Burma entered its fifth year. In Yangon, life appears to have returned to a fragile normality. Worn down by a revolution that seemed endlessly prolonged with no clear horizon of victory, many who once left their jobs to join the Civil Disobedience Movement have gradually returned to the system they once abandoned.
\n\nMeanwhile, in rural areas and border regions controlled by the armed forces of the resistance, the “Spring Revolution” has increasingly hardened into a stalemated civil war. The military junta’s drone strikes and aerial bombardments have become routine, and civilians continue to pay the price.
\n\nUnder these conditions, the military has moved forward with what it calls a long-delayed general election—widely described by observers as a sham election. With opposition parties dissolved or suppressed, there is little doubt that the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) will secure victory.
\n\nShortly after the 2021 coup, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM)2 and nonviolent protests met with brutal military crackdowns. Some activists fled to the jungles, where they trained with ethnic armed organizations that had long fought against the military, forming People’s Defense Forces (PDF) and launching armed resistance. Others embarked on exile, scattering across the world. Mae Sot, the Thai border town opposite Burma, became one of the first destinations for many exiles and wounded resistance fighters.
\n\nIn February 2023, during events marking the second anniversary of the coup, I met Htet Khine Soe (Ko Htet), a Burmese anarchist activist, and decided to follow him to Mae Sot. We took an eight-hour bus ride from Chiang Mai, crossing the mountain ranges of Thailand’s Tak Province before reaching the border. Along the way, I told him about anarchist self-organized spaces and resistance networks in China. He, in turn, recounted stories from the revolution—flashmob strikes, urban guerrilla actions, assassinations, escapes, and exile.
\n\nDuring the first year after the coup, Ko Htet helped organize the General Strike Committee and flash mob strikes, and eventually became drawn into urban guerrilla operations. After a comrade he worked closely with was arrested, his name appeared on the wanted list and was circulated on a state-run media platform, forcing him to flee Yangon.
\n\nIn December, he escaped to Lay Kay Kaw, a town in Karen State, then known among young exiles as a “liberated area.” With PDF training camps located in nearby jungles, the town became a hub through which weapons and ammunition circulated, eventually making their way back into cities like Yangon and Mandalay to supply urban guerrilla groups.
\n\nBut this also made Lay Kay Kaw a military target. On December 15, five days after Ko Htet arrived, the military launched airstrikes on what had been called a “peace town.” He fled across the river into Thailand alongside waves of other displaced young exiles.
\n\nHis wife, Su Yi, an activist too, later arrived in Mae Sot with their two children to join him. The family obtained “stateless cards” and finally settled here. Their home gradually became a gathering place for the revolutionary exile community. After October 7, 2023, their children—an elementary-school-aged son and daughter—would tell visiting guests who brought Coca-Cola, “Don’t drink Coca-Cola—for Palestine.”
\n\nIn 2025, Ko Htet and Su Yi opened a T-shirt shop in Mae Sot called All Colours Are Beautiful—an anarchist wordplay hinting at the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB). Upstairs from the shop is their screen-printing workshop, where they produce many of the shirts sold there.\nOne of the most popular designs reads in English, No One Is Illegal. In a town where much of the population lives in various shades of legal uncertainty, wearing that shirt in public is strikingly provocative. Recently, Ko Htet sent me a photo of an immigration detention registration card showing a Burmese detainee standing before a height chart—the standard mugshot background—still wearing that same No One Is Illegal shirt.
\n\nOn the fifth anniversary of the coup, I invited Ko Htet to reflect on the revolution from an anarchist perspective: the tensions between their movement and the mainstream revolutionary forces represented by Aung San Suu Kyi, and how leftist networks of Burma—formed before the coup—have continued to organize and survive through exile.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/4.jpg\")
Htet Khine Soe in a flash mob strike in Yangon, March 2021.
\nAfter the 2021 coup, how did anarchists in Burma mobilize within the anti-junta movement? And what were your main disagreements with mainstream supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi?
\n\nOn the eve of the coup, rumors were already circulating, but almost nobody truly believed it would happen. The 2008 Constitution3 had already granted the military enormous institutional power, including an automatic 25% of seats in parliament. Under such arrangements, it seemed unnecessary for the military to seize power outright. Yet, on February 1, 2021, the coup took place.
\n\nOn the morning of the coup, I discussed with comrades who used to work with the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU)—one of the country’s main leftist student organizations—and with members of our anarchist antifa group how to mobilize people to take to the streets. However, senior figures of the National League for Democracy (NLD) who had not yet been arrested, along with supporters of [Burmese politician] Aung San Suu Kyi, called on the public not to act immediately and instead to wait seventy-two hours. They were spreading the belief that international aid—and even an R2P intervention4—would soon arrive, encouraging people to stay home rather than take to the streets in protest.
\n\nBut that same day, the internet was cut off. Suddenly neither the military nor the NLD could effectively spread their propaganda. The movement I was involved in struggled to bring people onto the streets during the first three days. Communication between us was difficult, and organizing under those conditions was extremely challenging.
\n\nThe female workers of the Garment factory in Yangon’s well-known industrial district of Hlaingthaya were among the first to take to the streets in protest, while ABFSU, ignoring the NLD leadership’s calls for restraint, began organizing on their own. Meanwhile, ordinary people started spontaneously banging pots and pans from their balconies every evening in protest.5
\n\nFebruary 6 was the first, biggest day. Garment workers in Hlaingthaya again took to the streets while the military quickly blocked the roads. But on that same day, a nationwide wave of demonstrations began. Even people I knew who were normally indifferent to politics joined the mass protests.
\n\nAt that moment, nearly everyone united under the same slogan: opposing the coup and demanding the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. I even responded to NLD calls by buying red clothing and wearing it to demonstrations.
\n\nOn February 12, I became involved in organizing the General Strike Committee (GSC), which was formed for the fight against dictatorship from the people’s movement, made out of party members from a total of 25 groups, including ABFSU, labor organizations, and political parties. The GSC’s core demands were resisting military dictatorship, freeing Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners, and abolishing the 2008 Constitution altogether. At that time, any political mobilization that did not include the demand to release Suu Kyi would struggle to gain public support. Still, we always emphasized the release of all political prisoners, not only her.
\n\nOur main disagreement with the NLD concerned the 2008 Constitution. NLD leaders and their supporters hoped to use the 2008 Constitution as a framework to restrain the military and preserve the outcome of the election. We, on the other hand, believed that this era had ended and that the constitution itself must be abolished. People needed to unite not just to defend an election result, but to dismantle the military’s structural role in Burma’s political system.
\n\nAt that time, protests took place almost daily. Public enthusiasm for resisting military rule was overwhelming. Whether or not people fully agreed with our political positions, once a crowd gathered, more people kept joining. During demonstrations, we organized speeches and morale-boosting segments explaining why removing the 2008 constitution was necessary.
\n\nOn March 3, during a protest organized by the General Strike Committee, more than three hundred people were arrested. After that, some groups began making crude explosive devices and noise bombs to push back against police and military repression in the streets. At the same time, the NLD and its supporters began accusing us of resorting to violence. They argued that once protests became violent, the revolution’s image in the international community would suffer.
\n\nOn social media, NLD supporters also labeled the General Strike Committee as communist or leftists. Because of decades of state propaganda portraying communism as a national threat, such accusations easily created suspicion and hostility toward us among the public.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/1.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, “Anti-Fascist Day”: leftist groups burning the 2008 Constitution on the street in Yangon. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/6.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, “Anti-Fascist Day.” Leftist groups burning the 2008 Constitution on the street in Yangon. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\nAfter the military’s bloody crackdown on March 27, large-scale peaceful protests in the cities became almost impossible, and many people went to the jungles to begin armed resistance. But some chose to stay and continue the struggle in urban areas. Could you describe what that period was like?
\n\nMarch 27 was Burma’s Armed Forces Day, known locally as Tatmadaw Day. That day, large anti-coup protests once again broke out in major cities such as Yangon and Mandalay, and we took part as well. The military responded with brutal force, killing hundreds of protesters across the country.
\n\nIt is important to understand the historical meaning of that date. March 27 was once known as Anti-Fascist Resistance Day (ဖက်ဆစ်တော်လှန်ရေးနေ့)and was only renamed Tatmadaw Day in 1955. Originally, it commemorated the birth of the very army that later staged the coup: on March 27, 1945, General Aung San led Burmese forces in an uprising against Japanese fascist occupation. After Burma gained independence in 1948, Aung San’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League became the ruling political force.
\n\nSo on that same commemorative day in 2021, people took to the streets to protest against the coup carried out by that army, effectively reclaiming and redefining the meaning of the day through resistance. The massacre that followed demonstrated once again that the force once celebrated as anti-fascist had itself become fascist. After the crackdown, many of us deliberately began referring to March 27 once again as Anti-Fascist Day.
\n\nAnother day we have tried to reclaim is Martyrs’ Day on July 19, which commemorates the assassination of General Aung San. In official narratives, only ethnic Bamar figures are recognized as martyrs. Leaders from minority ethnic groups who died in conflicts with the central state are rarely, if ever, granted that status.
\n\nAfter the March 27 crackdown, it became increasingly difficult to organize peaceful demonstrations in cities. Many of my comrades left for the jungle to receive military training with ethnic armed organizations. Some went to Kachin State along the China-Burma border and Rakhine State bordering Bangladesh to train with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Arakan Army (AA), while others went to the Karen State border region to join the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA).
\n\nLater, some who returned from those areas told us that when new arrivals reached the camps, they were often greeted with a simple question as a test: “Are you joining the revolution to liberate the people, or just to free Aung San Suu Kyi?”
\n\nAs for me, I chose to remain in Yangon. From that time on, together with other comrades, we began organizing flash mob strikes—brief, rapidly assembled demonstrations that dispersed before security forces could respond. Many young people enthusiastically joined these actions, allowing resistance in the city to continue, even under increasingly dangerous conditions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/7.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, a flash mob protest in Kyi Myin Daing, Yangon. The banner says, “We will throw the fascists’ bones into the Bar Ka Yar ravine.” In Kyi Myin Daing, there is a large ravine called Bar Ka Yar. The flag in the photo is ABFSU flag. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\nHow did strategies change for those who stayed in Yangon compared with the earlier phase of resistance?
\n\nFlash mob strikes continued in Yangon until the end of 2021. During this period, our demands were no longer limited to opposing military rule or calling for Aung San Suu Kyi’s release. Instead, we began using protests to communicate broader political messages and bring forward issues that mattered to us.
\n\nAs mentioned before, we worked to reinterpret historical commemorations such as Anti-Fascist Day and Martyrs’ Day. We also pushed discussions about gender issues within the revolution, the impact of mining projects and land confiscation, ethnic relations, and the need to confront long-standing Bamar chauvinism. On anniversaries related to the Rohingya genocide, we organized actions in Muslim neighborhoods that connected solidarity with the Rohingya to broader global struggles, including solidarity movements for Palestine.
\n\nPeople carried banners into the streets expressing remorse for the role that members of the ethnic majority had played, directly or indirectly, in the persecution of the Rohingya. Looking back now, it is clear that while many people sincerely expressed regret, others treated such gestures as tactical tools for anti-coup mobilization; deep down, many still held Bamar nationalist views.
\n\nIn mid-April, the National Unity Government (NUG) was formed in exile, and several leaders from grassroots movements were incorporated into its structure. But many of their strategies and decisions were difficult for us to understand. While young people were still risking their lives by staging flash protests in the streets, the NUG began calling for “silent strikes,” asking people to stay home and shut down economic activity instead of protesting publicly.
\n\nAt the same time, internet shutdowns continued, making communication increasingly difficult. In response, we launched the Molotov Newsletter project in April. Our editorial collective were all leftists and the paper was published weekly.
\n\nWe printed and distributed physical copies in Yangon. The first issue, released in April, received an unexpectedly strong response: we distributed about 5000 printed copies there. Later that same month, the authorities declared it an illegal publication. Ironically, in the atmosphere of that time, this only made it more popular.
\n\nSince it was difficult to reach other regions physically, we uploaded the newspaper’s PDF online so people in different areas could download and distribute it themselves. Each issue received around 30,000 to 50,000 downloads on average.
\n\nSome of those who went to the jungles for training returned to the cities after only a month or two, and armed resistance began to appear in urban areas. Could you talk about that period?
\n\nAround May, some of those who had gone to the jungle for military training began to return to the major cities. They brought weapons with them and began carrying out urban guerrilla operations. Weapons started circulating in Yangon, and from then on, many young people joined flash mob protests during the day and took part in guerrilla actions at night.
\n\nIn August, the military raided an apartment on 44th Street in Yangon that served as a base for a group of young activists. Shortly before the raid, those young activists had planted a bomb beneath an anti-junta banner; when police came to remove the banner, the device exploded.\nLater, we learned how the location had been exposed. A taxi driver who regularly worked with the group had been arrested by the military. He himself had actively supported anti-junta activities after the coup and was someone we trusted. Under brutal interrogation, he was forced to reveal the location of the safe house on 44th Street.
\n\nOn the day of the raid, five people leaped from the rooftop in a desperate attempt to escape arrest. Two were killed instantly when they hit the ground, while three others were critically injured and taken to hospital. Inside the apartment, three more were captured alive. The survivors were later charged with the illegal manufacture and possession of explosives and sent to prison, where two of them died behind bars.
\n\nOnly one person managed to escape that day. He hid for twelve hours beneath a small rooftop “shelter”, barely daring to move as soldiers searched the building below. Under cover of darkness, he finally slipped away and later crossed the border illegally into Mae Sot.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/5.jpg\")
In the beginning of 2024, Ko Htet organized the funeral for the boy who fled 44th Street raid. The funeral turned into a protest. (Photo: El Kylo Mhu)
\nIn the winter of 2023, he fell ill with what should have been a treatable disease, but without proper identification documents, he was unable to receive adequate medical care in Thailand. He eventually died in Mae Sot. I helped organize his funeral, and what began as a farewell soon turned into a protest.
\n\nAfter the 44th Street raid in Yangon, more young people, driven by outrage, joined assassination operations in the city. They named their group the “44th Street Urban Guerrilla Group,” and revenge became a major motivation behind their actions.
\n\nPersonally, I always felt conflicted about these operations. I never actually aimed a gun at anyone. But because I worried about those comrades—most of them Gen Z kids—I often helped in other ways, keeping watch or driving them to and from operations. Step by step, I found myself involved anyway. For me, killing someone, or even seeing someone die in front of me, is extremely difficult to bear. It is a line I have never been able to cross emotionally.
\n\nDuring one of the operations, I saw a military affiliated woman shot. She collapsed right in front of me. For the next two years, she kept appearing in my nightmares.
\n\nOne day in 2023, I received a call from a stranger’s profile on Facebook Messenger. When I answered, it turned out to be one of the comrades from 44th Street who had been arrested. He had briefly gained access to a phone while being taken to court and used the chance to call me. He told me that the woman we believed had been killed was actually alive and was now testifying against him in court. I don’t think he expected my reaction. Hearing that she had survived, I felt an enormous sense of relief.
\n\nDuring that first year after the coup, how would you describe the relationship between leftist movements and the broader anti-coup revolution?
\n\nIn the first year after the coup, leftist organizing was highly structured. The revolution enabled our networks to expand rapidly. Many young people who had previously been apolitical or deliberately kept away from politics became radicalized, while those who already shared similar values were finally able to find one another.
\n\nBoth the streets and the public sphere became spaces where different political forces competed for hegemony within the movement. At that time, one of the slogans raised by the General Strike Committee was “Uproot the Fascist Military,” and it quickly spread and became widely popular. Another slogan people embraced was, “We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Chains,” from the Communist Manifesto. I even printed these slogans on T-shirts, and they were warmly received by protesters.
\n\nLeftist language began to enter the revolutionary space in a visible way. More and more people used the vocabulary of leftist struggle and anti-fascism in street protests. Through Molotov Newsletter, we tried to provide historical context, explaining what fascism and anti-fascist movements actually meant, so that these slogans would not remain merely emotional expressions but become part of a deeper political consciousness.
\n\nAnti-fascist protest songs were also created from the leftist community to remind people that, historically, many forces that once claimed to fight fascism eventually became oppressive themselves. That was not a path we wanted to follow. For example, when Aung San Suu Kyi stood alongside the military at the International Court of Justice, defending Burma against accusations of genocide, many of us saw that moment as her becoming an accomplice of fascism.6
\n\nDuring your formative years, how were people able to access leftist or anarchist ideas in Burma?
\n\nLeftist forces in Burma have long existed under heavy repression. When I was a teenager, books about contemporary student movements were extremely difficult to find. There were only a handful of books covering Burma’s history after independence. By contrast, there were plenty of works about the monarchy and the British colonial period. In official education, anti-colonial nationalism dominated the historical narrative, while discussions of resistance movements and social struggles after independence were often erased altogether.
\n\nMost writings on post-independence resistance or alternative political thought were published abroad following different waves of exiles, and bringing such books back into the country was difficult and sometimes dangerous.
\n\nBefore 2007, internet access was still very limited in Burma. To hear perspectives that differed from official propaganda, we relied largely on foreign radio broadcasts such as the BBC or Radio Free Asia. At the time, some propaganda and literary materials from the Burmese Communist Party circulated, along with a publication called Revolution (အရေးတော်ပုံ), which we could occasionally access online in fragments. We could also find some materials related to the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU). But it is important to remember that, in those days, listening to so-called “enemy radio stations” or reading banned publications could lead to serious punishment, including imprisonment.
\n\nThe ABFSU has been the most important leftist student network in Burma. It was founded in 1936, when Burma was still under British colonial rule, and later played crucial roles both in the struggle for independence and in repeated anti-military movements.
\n\nAfter the military coup in 1962, student protests were brutally crushed, and the regime blew up the historic student union building at Rangoon University. Yet student resistance did not disappear. New waves of student protests erupted in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Then, during the nationwide pro-democracy uprising in 1988—the so-called 8888 Movement—the ABFSU flags returned to the streets and again became a symbol of resistance against military rule. Afterward, the military authorities frequently labeled the organization as a communist front or subversive force. When I was in university, I helped establish an ABFSU branch on my own campus.
\n\nAt the same time, the military’s propaganda machine consistently portrayed the Burmese Communist Party as one of the main sources of national instability and division. Ironically, after General Ne Win seized power in 1962 and established a decades-long military dictatorship, the only legal political party allowed by the regime—the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP)—claimed to follow socialism, promoting what it called the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” which in practice meant economic isolation, centralized control, and authoritarian rule.
\n\nYears of economic decline and social stagnation under this system led many people to associate poverty and repression directly with socialism. As a result, terms like “communism,” “socialism,” and even “leftist” became deeply stigmatized in public discourse. For many people, these words evoked fear or distrust. Because of this historical experience, mobilizing people around leftist ideas has always been extremely difficult in Burma.
\n\nWhen and how did you begin organizing actions in an anarchist way?
\n\nAround late 2013 and early 2014, we began forming anarchist reading groups and building networks for action. It was a very particular political moment. Formal military rule had ended in 2012, but Aung San Suu Kyi had not yet taken office—those years were widely described as a transition period. The military managed what it called a democratic transition; some political prisoners were released, and activities previously banned—such as public gatherings and publishing—became partially legal again. Civil society organizations began to emerge, and for a moment, it felt as if the country was moving toward normalcy.
\n\nAt the same time, Aung San Suu Kyi traveled around the country promoting a strategy of nonviolence and electoral change. She encouraged people to transform Burma through voting, but she did not support protests on the ground. Meanwhile, we became involved in organizing protests around land confiscation affecting farmers, workers’ labor rights, and later the student movement against the Thein Sein government’s National Education Law.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/2.jpg\")
An action carried out by Anonymous Burma in Yangon, 2014.
\nIn 2014, we created a group called Anonymous Burma and began carrying out actions under that name. Even in that period, organizing open street protests was still difficult and risky. So we wore masks, burned parliamentary posters in city centers, and set off fireworks to draw attention. Some people began calling us Burma’s version of “antifa,” and individuals with similar political views contacted us wanting to join.
\n\nZin Lynn, once a legendary leftist activist, now a political prisoner, was also part of our group Anonymous Burma. He had been a leading figure within ABFSU and was also a musician who wrote many revolutionary songs, including the anthem of ABFSU. He introduced generations of young protesters to classic revolutionary songs—writing Burmese lyrics for Bella Ciao, Do You Hear the People Sing, and The Internationale, so they could be sung in the streets, not just remembered from afar. After the violent crackdowns of March 2021, he went to the jungle for military training, later returned to Yangon to participate in urban guerrilla actions, and was arrested in September that year.
\n\nHe remains in prison today. You can see many leftist activists in exile paying tribute to him in their publications and during live performances.
\n\nIt was also during this period in Yangon that we began working with Food Not Bombs Burma. Kyaw Kyaw, the lead singer of the punk band Rebel Riot, had started organizing Food Not Bombs activities in Yangon in the early 2010s, and many of their political songs deeply influenced us. From then on, Food Not Bombs, Anonymous Burma, and ABFSU often worked together in protests and political/social organizing.
\n\nIn 2015, Burma held its first election of the transition era, and many ordinary people felt hopeful about the country’s future. But our resistance activities continued. That year, we organized what became known as the “Long March,” calling on students to march from Mandalay to Yangon in protest against the newly introduced National Education Law, which centralizes control over universities and increases state—and indirectly military—control over education. Thousands walked 600 km starting from Mandalay, and the government brutally cracked down in Letpadan, a city north of Yangon.
\n\nWith elections approaching, supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD were hostile toward our movement. They believed our protests would harm the election and disrupt the democratic transition. In their view, we were causing trouble at a critical political moment.
\n\nIt seems that, faced with the common enemy of military rule, the relationship between the Burma leftists and Aung San Suu Kyi was often ambiguous—sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive.
\n\nIn fact, I have never voted for the National League for Democracy. In 2015, I did not vote. I also did not vote in the 2020 election. At the time, parts of the left started a “No Vote” movement. The only time I ever voted in Burma was during the 2008 constitutional referendum, and I voted against the constitution.
\n\nIn reality, before Aung San Suu Kyi came to power, much of Burma’s left had supported her. Since the 1990 election, ABFSU had strongly backed the NLD. When I was a teenager, I also took part in youth campaigns demanding her release from house arrest.
\n\nHowever, after her release in 2010, we soon realized that we could not agree with many of her policies and political agendas. For instance, while we demanded the complete abolition of the 2008 Constitution, she chose to accept its framework and participate in elections within it. Meanwhile, many large-scale mining projects continued under her administration, including the highly controversial Letpadaung copper mine, where we participated in protests against environmental damage and forced land seizures. Many of these projects had originally been signed during military rule with foreign companies, including Chinese firms. Instead of stopping them, her government responded harshly to local resistance.
\n\nThe same was true for projects such as the Chinese-backed Myitsone Dam in Kachin State, where protests were also suppressed. Her administration promoted economic development and foreign investment, but the result was often land confiscation and the displacement of local communities.
\n\nThe final break came with the Rohingya genocide in 2017. When she traveled to the International Court of Justice, some of us still hoped she might expose the military’s crimes. Instead, she publicly defended the military. Soon afterward, NLD supporters put up posters across the country showing Aung San Suu Kyi standing side by side with military leaders, with the slogan: “We stand with Aung San Suu Kyi.”
\n\nFor many of us on the left, that was the moment of definitive rupture.
\n\nOn October 7, 2023, mainstream “revolutionary circles,” including figures connected to the NUG and many representatives of the Bamar majority, openly expressed pro-Israel positions. Toward the end of 2025, when ABFSU issued a statement condemning what it described as US imperialism following the American intervention in Venezuela and the arrest of Maduro, it triggered intense backlash in Burma, with many people accusing ABFSU of being communist. In your view, when did the left begin to lose its mobilizing power?
\n\nIn the first year after the coup, leftists and anarchists finally found a battlefield where we could play a real role. At that time, we still had strong mobilizing power and were able to bring many left-wing issues into public discussion. Even into 2022, many activities continued, though increasingly underground. But as the initial revolutionary energy began to fade, leftist movements themselves also started to weaken.
\n\nBy 2023 and 2024, the Spring Revolution had entered a period of decline. The military kept advancing and consolidating control, while forces on the revolutionary side became increasingly fragmented and disorganized. Some revolutionary leaders openly made homophobic remarks, and reports of systematic sexual and gender-based violence emerged in certain so-called “liberated areas.” Yet under the banner of revolution, such issues were often deliberately downplayed or concealed, because many feared that internal criticism would weaken resistance against the junta.
\n\nMany comrades I once struggled alongside are now armed. Five years have passed. They are no longer the same people. The gun has become their form of power.
\n\nThose youth joined armed resistance out of anger and hatred toward military rule. But as the war dragged on, problems within the National Unity Government itself became more visible, and many fighters began to feel disillusioned. They had taken up arms to resist oppression, only to find that structures of power and hierarchy also existed within the revolutionary camp, the NUG leadership did not seem fundamentally different from the junta they opposed.
\n\nAs a result, more and more fighters chose to leave the jungles. Because of documentation and mobility restrictions, many could not travel far, and a significant number eventually ended up in border towns like Mae Sot.
\n\nDuring the early phase of the revolution, in Molotov Newsletter, we repeatedly stressed that armed resistance must be guided by political values, or else the struggle could degenerate into fragmented warlordism. But in reality, most People’s Defense Force units today are not politically oriented; their only unifying political position is opposition to the military junta. Similarly, any ethnic armed group that fights the military is automatically seen as a legitimate political force, often without further scrutiny.
\n\nYet many of these armed groups remain organized primarily along ethnic lines, and their political communities are built around ethnic identity. This risks reproducing new forms of ethno-nationalism rather than overcoming them. Even groups widely regarded today as among the most progressive, such as the BPLA (Bamar People’s Liberation Army), still operate within this framework to some extent. The difference is that they are more familiar with progressive discourses, and they attempt to regulate their conduct through such values, which is why they are still seen as one of the few armed groups that seriously engage with political questions.
\n\nNow it is the fifth year after the coup, the military has begun organizing what many observers call a sham election. How do you understand this moment?
\n\nMany people who left their jobs as part of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) have eventually been forced to return to the very systems they once resisted, simply in order to survive. Others have sought asylum in third countries [after to Thailand]. The boycott movements that began in 2021 have become increasingly difficult to sustain. The military understands this reality very well, and it is precisely under these conditions that it has moved forward with what many see as another staged election.
\n\nSome political forces that stood on the margins of the NLD camp during the early days of the uprising, such as the People’s Party, are now participating in this widely criticized electoral process. At the same time, candidates in the election increasingly speak of “ceasefire” and “peace”—language that would have been almost unimaginable just a few years ago, when revolutionary momentum was still there.
\n\nI think that one important reason we have reached this point is that the National Unity Government (NUG) imposed its leadership on what initially was a spontaneous uprising led by young people, especially Gen Z protesters. Soon after the protests began, the NUG emerged, and most of its ministers came from the generation shaped by the 1988 uprising and the 1996 student movement. At the same time, some movement leaders who had strong influence among young people were incorporated into the structure, often as tokens, so that the leadership would not appear completely disconnected from the younger generation.
\n\nFor example, the NUG emphasizes what it calls representative politics—ensuring that women make up around half of leadership positions, or that different ethnic groups are included. But this does not necessarily mean that those women representatives oppose patriarchy, nor that ethnic representatives genuinely fight for the collective right of their communities. Often, such representation serves more as a display of diversity.
\n\nPeople still hate the military junta, but they are also tired of the Spring Revolution itself. Many who once devoted themselves fully to resistance are slowly returning to ordinary life, worn down by reality. I feel this personally. In the first year after the coup, I could devote myself entirely to the revolution. Now, like many others, I also struggle to survive.
\n\nFrom my perspective, the “Spring Revolution” has already failed. This is very difficult to say openly, and after so much sacrifice, many people cannot accept it. But I do not think we can continue living under the illusion that victory is just around the corner. If one day we want to win again, the only path forward may be to return to political education, to organizing young people, and to reclaiming the terrain of ideology and values.
\n\nAt the same time, I must add that my experience and my assessment of the revolution do not represent all leftist resistance fighters in Burma. The comrades who went into the jungles for military training and continue to fight in ethnic armed territories or in regions like Sagaing in central Burma experience the revolution very differently.
\n\nMore recently, in November 2025, the Spring Revolution Alliance formed. Many armed groups joined this alliance and moved away from the leadership of the National Unity Government. They pledged to guide themselves through shared progressive principles. For many people, this alliance still represents a remaining hope for unity within the resistance.
\n\nOn one hand, it feels as though revolutionary momentum is fading. On the other, here in Thailand, it seems that within the Burmese exile community, the “revolution” has become an NGO-driven industry. How do you see this?
\n\nIn fact, this trend did not begin after the Spring Revolution. Its roots go back to the earlier period of democratic transition.
\n\nAfter Aung San Suu Kyi came to power in 2015, Burma did experience a period of relative opening. For many people, it was the first time they felt Burma was reconnecting with the wider world. It was also during those years that a large number of Western NGOs entered Burma, bringing substantial funding into civil society.
\n\nMany former grassroots activists began establishing their own NGOs and became part of this new institutional ecosystem. Agendas were often shaped by donors, and activists increasingly worked according to funding priorities. Activism gradually became a profession.
\n\nBetween 2015 and 2020, you could clearly see that many projects and programs within civil society were shaped by externally driven agendas, sometimes poorly aligned with the actual needs of communities on the ground. During this process, it was painful to watch how some activists who had once been full of energy and conviction were gradually absorbed—and sometimes corrupted—by the NGO system.
\n\nNow, five years after the coup, we see the emergence of yet another generation of so-called NGO activists. Some use the revolution and people’s suffering to build personal careers—obtaining scholarships abroad, entering international NGO networks, and becoming spokespersons for Burma’s democratic struggle. Yet in reality, many of them are increasingly distant from what is happening on the ground.
\n\nFor my part, I have always followed a different logic. I maintain my own small business so that I can sustain myself independently while participating in social movements. Whether during the transition period or now, my comrades and I have continued to organize according to anarchist principles, relying on crowdfunding and mutual aid rather than writing budgets, applying for grants, or submitting project reports to keep our work going.
\n\nCould you describe how you are involved in social organizing now, in exile?
\n\nAt this stage, most of what I do focuses on organizing within the exile community. I arrived in Mae Sot at the end of 2021. From then on, I stopped my work with the General Strike Committee and shifted toward local community organizing.
\n\nMae Sot hosts a large transient population. Many are young people; many others are families who fled with their children. Quite a number of them once participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement and, after leaving their jobs, were blacklisted by the military authorities. Unable to leave Burma legally, they ended up stuck in this border town in a kind of temporary existence. Mae Sot is also a place of rest and supply for many PDF fighters. Some are still active in jungle-based resistance and only come here occasionally to rest. Others have left the battlefield because of injuries or disillusionment and are trying to survive here for now.
\n\nSome of these people may eventually resettle in third countries, but I believe many will one day return to Burma. For now, almost everyone here lives in a state of suspension—without stable work and without a real home. Yet many revolutionaries do not see these displaced people as part of the revolution anymore. Gradually, I realized that this is exactly where we need to work: organizing those who are stranded in these border spaces.
\n\nSo I started what we call the “Mae Sot Home,” using it as a platform to organize everyday activities—football matches, film screenings, reading groups—to bring together people from very different backgrounds: migrant workers, exiled resistance fighters, Bamar, Karen, and members of Muslim communities. Through these gatherings, we talk about anti-fascism, gender issues, and ethnic relations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/3.jpg\")
An iftar during Ramandan in Maesot, 2024. Food Not Bombs Mae Sot providing food to the Muslim community.
\nAt the same time, together with other comrades, we established Food Not Bombs Mae Sot. We cook meals for displaced Burmese refugees, but not in a charitable, top-down way. Instead, we want to convey ideas of mutual aid and solidarity. Some people involved in armed resistance mock or even attack us, saying that now is the time for weapons, and that Food Not Bombs sounds like anti-war activism. But in reality, we were already organizing Food Not Bombs activities in Yangon in the early 2010s, long before the coup. We are fighting the military today so that one day we can live peacefully again—not so that society remains permanently militarized.
\n\nWithin the work of Mae Sot Home, football has become one of our most important organizing tools, partly for safety reasons. Many people here lack legal status, and public gatherings often exist in a gray zone. We once tried to organize a concert and were reported to the authorities, which forced us to change venues at the last minute. Football matches, however, are easier to hold, since the sport is widely accepted and popular locally. More importantly, football has almost no barriers to entry, and Burmese migrant workers in Mae Sot already have a strong football culture. It becomes an easy way to bring together young exiles and migrant workers. We also organize women’s teams and youth matches, and during these events, we discuss issues such as domestic violence, gender equality, and anti-fascism.
\n\nSome people who had migrated here before the coup originally felt distant from the revolutionary movement; but through playing football together, they gradually began to engage in conversations and understand the struggles others are facing. At the same time, some young people who arrived after the coup, especially those from big cities, sometimes become absorbed in their identity as “revolutionary exiles” and look down on those who came earlier—often migrant workers or Muslim cross-border traders—seeing them as not progressive enough. But in reality, racism and Bamar chauvinism also exist within the revolutionary movement itself. Rather than constantly drawing lines between friends and enemies, I think it is more important to leave room for people to change.
\n\nBurma’s education system has produced generations shaped by nationalist prejudice. Now, through the ruptures caused by the coup, revolution, and exile, we may finally have a chance to win some of them back.
\n\nMany Burmese anarchists use the English term “Burma” instead of “Myanmar” because of the latter’s association with the ruling military regime since its official adoption in 1989. Other Burmese leftists prefer “Myanmar” despite this association, because “Burma” (also preferred by the liberal National League for Democracy) is linked more closely to the Bamar majority, as well as to British colonialism. The terms are identical in Burmese; the different English spellings represent the literary and colloquial pronunciations. Both terms derive from the Bamar term for their own ethnic group. ↩
\nLaunched after the February 2021 coup, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) of Burma is a nonviolent resistance movement, in which civil servants and workers went on strike and refused to cooperate with the junta, becoming a central force in the Spring Revolution despite severe repression. ↩
\nThe 2008 Constitution, drafted under military rule and approved in a controversial referendum shortly after Cyclone Nargis, is widely seen by opposition forces as a tool to preserve military control. It reserves 25 percent of parliamentary seats for the military, effectively granting it veto power over constitutional amendments. ↩
\nThe Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a United Nations-endorsed international norm adopted in 2005, designed to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. It posits that sovereignty implies responsibility, and if a state fails to protect its population, the international community must intervene via diplomatic or, as a last resort, military means. ↩
\nThe practice of banging pots and pans from balconies at dusk comes from a traditional Burmese folk belief that making loud noises at twilight drives away evil spirits. ↩
\nIn December 2019, then State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi appeared before the International Court of Justice in The Hague to defend Burma against charges that the military had committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims. ↩
\nWith the backing of the Turkish government and the blessing of the United States and European governments, the Syrian military is surrounding the self-governing communities of Rojava, seeking to forcibly integrate them into the Syrian state. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Rojava have signed a peace treaty agreeing to integration, but the outcome remains to be seen.
\n\nAt the conclusion of 2024, Turkish-backed insurgent forces entered Damascus, overthrowing the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Their leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, became president of Syria. Over the following year, the new Syrian government set out to curry favor with imperial powers around the world, including the regime of Donald Trump, in order to consolidate power over the country.
\n\nOn January 6, 2026, the Syrian transitional government launched an offensive in coordination with jihadist paramilitary forces against the Kurdish neighborhood Sheikh Maqsood in the city of Aleppo. The SDF withdrew on January 10 along with a large number of displaced refugees.
\n\nThree days later, the Syrian government attacked Rojava as a whole. On January 18, Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa announced a ceasefire agreement with the SDF, but fighting resumed immediately. Rojava faced the threat of a full-scale war of extermination, including the possibility that the Turkish military would invade once again. On January 20, the SDF agreed to a ceasefire stipulating that the region will be subordinated to the Syrian government in Damascus and the SDF will be integrated into the Syrian military. Yesterday, this ceasefire was extended; but as of now, parts of Rojava remain under siege.
\n\nAlthough proponents of the state claim that a strong and centralized government is necessary to prevent “chaos” and ethnic violence, we can see that in Syria, the opposite is true: those who aim to centralize state power in their hands are using ethnic violence as a means to do so. This is hardly the first time in history that an effort to unify a country under a centralized government has coincided with a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
\n\nHere, we present a statement from American, Chinese, and Russian anarchists who have fought to defend Rojava about what these latest developments mean for the future. For more background on the history of this conflict, you could begin here. You can follow updates from anarchists in Rojava here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/09/4.jpg\")
A map of the region on January 26, 2026, after the pause in hostilities.
\nIn 2012, as the regime of Bashar al-Assad began to lose control of the country at the outset of the Syrian revolution, Kurdish groups that had been organizing underground for decades seized the opportunity to fill the power vacuum, expanding their autonomous structures to defend their people. Over the years that followed, the Rojava revolution became a multi-ethnic force consisting of Arab, Kurdish, Syriac, Assyrian, Armenian, Yezedi, and Turkmen communities, among others. In battle after battle, the combined strength of these communities within the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) liberated a large swathe of land from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other fundamentalist factions, bringing relative security, stability, and autonomy under the principles of democratic confederalism proposed by the Kurdish freedom movement and its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan.
\n\nThe autonomous administration of Rojava demonstrated that there is an alternative to the rule of autocratic dynasties and brutal theocracies in the Middle East. Yet the revolution has many enemies—most prominently, the settler-colonial Turkish state under the leadership of the neo-Ottomanist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. To undermine Kurdish self-determination, the Turkish state has long sponsored fundamentalist groups in Syria, sheltering the al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), cultivating a puppet force in the Syrian National Army (SNA), and facilitating the flow of money, personnel, and weapons to the Islamic State (ISIS).
\n\nHowever, Turkey is not the only geopolitical force that has sought to establish hegemony in northeastern Syria. France colonized Syria in the early 20th century; the United Kingdom played a pivotal role in dividing the people of Kurdistan into four nations. Later, starting in the 1990s, the government of the United States of America waged a generation of wars in neighboring Iraq, dramatically destabilizing the entire region and contributing to the rise of Sunni fundamentalist groups like Al-Qaeda. The Russian state supported the Assad regime militarily, economically, and politically; Vladimir Putin was the main guarantor of its existence in the face of the popular uprising that became the Syrian revolution. Together with his counterparts in Washington, DC, Putin is now building military and economic ties with the new Syrian regime, helping it to solidify its grasp on power. Donald Trump’s family has extensive business ties to Qatar, and his administration’s strategic interests broadly overlap with those of the global Sunni geopolitical axis involving the Turkish government and the Gulf States, especially when it comes to Iran.
\n\nIn many ways, fundamentalist movements such as al-Qaeda and ISIS are a consequence of the instability that various foreign powers have inflicted on the entire region. Despite their rhetoric about a “war on terror,” these empires have introduced war, terror, and tremendous suffering to this land.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/rojava-is-a-grave-for-fascism-2026/rojava-is-a-grave-for-fascism-front_color.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nCaught within the struggle for dominance over the region by competing American, Russian, Turkish, Israeli, and Iranian powers, the revolutionary autonomous project of Rojava never had a future in the plans of any empire or nation-state.
\n\nIn 2018 and 2019, the Turkish army and its Syrian proxy SNA occupied the territories of Afrin and Serekaniye, immediately purging the indigenous Kurdish population from these areas. Following the rapid collapse of the Assad regime in 2024, the HTS-led Syrian Transitional Government (STG) now seeks to impose the banner of Sunni-Arab nationalism and sectarianism upon all the territories of Syria. The new Syrian army has advanced with brutality, aiming to destroy the most important achievements of the Rojava revolution—women’s liberation and the comparatively peaceful co-existence and self-governance of all ethnic groups. There are hundreds of videos and pictures recording the crimes committed by transitional government soldiers as they advanced in 2025 and 2026. In January 2026, many recorded themselves mutilating the bodies of women fighters and cutting off their braids as trophies.
\n\nMost of the lands that the revolution liberated from ISIS are now back in the hands of theocratic fascists: Manbij, Tabqa, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, Shaddadi. As internationalists, we took part in the liberation of much of this terrain, fighting shoulder to shoulder with our Arab and Kurdish friends. Many of our comrades sacrificed their lives for the revolution in these places. It is painful to watch these achievements undone.
\n\nWestern governments have given Damascus the green light to subject Rojava to the threat of a war of extermination. They are just as responsible for the situation as Turkey and the STG. Yes, the Western military coalition played a role in the struggle against ISIS; their support was instrumental in the defense of Kobani in 2014 and the liberation of Raqqa in 2017. That only makes their betrayal of the SDF more instructive: they are prepared to use Kurdish people as cannon fodder, but they would rather see ethnic cleansing in Rojava than a multi-ethnic, egalitarian experiment that exceeds the control of nation-states.
\n\nThe heads of these governments hurried to shake the hand of Abu Mohammad al-Julani after the arrival of HTS in Damascus swept him into power. At the same time that these governments declare that they look forward to working with the new Syrian government to combat ISIS, ISIS loyalists and sympathizers are in the ranks of the STG, displaying their flags.
\n\nAl-Julani’s vows to protect minority groups have been revealed to be falsehoods. First, al-Julani’s forces went west to massacre the Alawites. Then, they drove south to decimate the Druze. Then, with the blessing of the governments of Turkey, the United States, France, and Israel, they pushed east to attack the Kurds and the diverse array of other communities that dare to defend the shared project of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society.
\n\nTo prevent the Syrian government from fabricating the narrative that Kurdish people were occupying Arab lands and making war on Arab people, the SDF withdrew to Kurdish-majority areas, where they managed to halt the advance of the government forces. Through fierce resistance, they managed to block the original plan to physically annihilate Rojava, forcing Damascus back to the negotiating table. But the current ceasefire is fragile, the steps to integrate Rojava into the Syrian state are vague, and it remains to be seen to what extent the Syrian government will honor any of its promises.
\n\nThe Syrian military still has not lifted the siege of Kobane. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people still cannot return to their homes.
\n\nAs internationalists, we condemn the American, Russian, and European governments. This treachery is just the latest in a long list of their crimes against humanity. It is clear to us that all nation-states operate without ethics or morality. The machinery of the state has no humanity and the people who run this system have lost theirs, as well. Oil and resource extraction, trade routes, spheres of influence, and political and military hegemony are the language and principles of empire. According to imperial logic, this latest betrayal of the Kurdish people by the American government constitutes a mere policy change, regardless of how much bloodshed it brings about.
\n\nAs enemy forces besiege Kobanê and set their sights on Heseke, Til Temir, and Qamişlo once again, we remain committed to defending the revolution. Only time will tell if the current ceasefire will hold. Every time that the SDF has rejected the unacceptable terms that Damascus seeks to impose, STG forces seize the opportunity to unleash a terror campaign against the population while blaming the SDF. Yet more symbolic representation for Kurds and other communities in Syrian government and society will solve nothing. As long as fundamentalist Islam, sectarian violence, and the politics of centralization drive Al-Julani’s regime, there will be no lasting peace in Syria.
\n\nThis crisis has put a spotlight on the chief goals of the movement in Rojava: to defend the people who live here, to resolve conflict through political rather than military means, to enable people to organize themselves as they see fit. All of these values remain intact, even though the SDF and the autonomous administration of Rojava have been compelled to agree to a peace treaty on unfavorable terms.
\n\nIn response to the agreement, some people outside Rojava are portraying the revolution as defeated—while at the same time, some of us remain in defensive positions around Rojava with rifles in our hands, still prepared to prevent the enemy from advancing. Revolutions are not defeated by decisions imposed from above; they are determined by what ordinary people decide to do, even in the most adverse conditions. Whatever happens, we will continue fighting for, side by side with, and from within this revolution. This is a setback, but it is not the end of the story.
\n\nAs long as we are able to organize with the people around us, to offer space for internationalist comrades, to pursue collective education and training, to advance the cause of a self-governed society coexisting in diversity and exercising women’s freedom, we will continue to do all of these things. The agreement with Damascus may compel us to engage in these activities differently, but it will not stop us. It will not be easy to put an end to what has begun here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/09/3.jpg\")
\nWe call on all anarchists, socialists, anti-fascists, and internationalists to remain committed to the defense of the Rojava revolution and the communities that are a part of it, whatever takes place in the negotiations between SDF officials and the Syrian government.
\n\nThe preservation of people’s power and autonomy in distant lands starts on your own homefront, especially in countries that are powerful actors in international politics. We have learned humbly from the revolution in Rojava—from its forms of organization, from its revolutionary spirit, from the readiness of the participants to sacrifice and from their courage in the face of powerful enemies. We understand that our weapons and bodies alone are no match for the war machines of empire and modern nation-states. To counter such an enemy will require a global revolutionary people’s war.
\n\nWithout fundamental changes to the international order, Rojava and all social revolutions and liberation movements will always be at the mercy of great powers. They will take advantage of our experiments when it is convenient, then abandon and crush us when we are no longer of use to them. The only way to neutralize this threat is to engage in internationalist cooperation and organization, uniting our struggles globally. Today, the defense of Rojava is one front and focal point of such efforts.
\n\nTo offer practical support on an immediate basis, you can donate to projects like Heyva Sor, Riseup4Rojava, and Tekoşîna Anarşîst and raise awareness about the plight of Rojava via social media, press releases, distributing zines and books, and showing movies.
\n\nAs a longer-term organizing strategy, we can connect the Kurdish struggle with other fronts engaged in parallel struggles. In the United States, the racist violence that ICE is perpetrating to advance Trump’s kleptocracy mirrors the strategy of al-Julani, who has awarded government and military positions to the jihadists who are committing massacres in order to forcibly integrate minority communities into a “unified Syria.” In addition to spreading information and narratives, we must also connect people’s concrete needs with political ideas about how we can meet them together, building networks and mutual support groups that can connect people of a variety of backgrounds. Finally, while electoral politics will never function as a vehicle for fundamental change, in some places, it may possible to pressure politicians not to be complicit in enabling ethnic cleansing to occur in Rojava or elsewhere.
\n\nWe write as anarchist internationalists hailing from the three most powerful empires of our time: the United States, Russia, and China. On a planet catapulting toward ecological catastrophe and a third world war, we seek to transcend geopolitical fault lines and repressive political dichotomies in order to stand side by side in struggle against our oppressors. If we are to bring about a new global system based on autonomy, justice, and social plurality, the current system of nation-states, economic exploitation, and patriarchy must be dismantled. We are told of wars between empires, but everywhere we look, we only see wars of all shapes and forms against the people. The undoing of empires must therefore come from within, from the people, through our own self-organized initiative.
\n\nWith revolutionary greetings and respect.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/09/1.jpg\")
People in Rojava celebrated Newroz.
\nTêkoşîna Anarşîst—The website of a revolutionary anarchist organization working in northeastern Syria
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/09/2.jpg\")
\n In the following analysis, anarchists from Germany explore how events from German history should inform those who are resisting the consolidation of authoritarian power in the United States today.
\n\nGreetings from Germany. Even though we have seen many videos of police murdering people, it still enrages us every time. After the murder of Renee Good, we reflected on what we could do to support the opposition to Donald Trump.
\n\nWe have decided to share our experiences from Germany and German history in hopes that this will help people in the United States to defend themselves against attempts to control, pacify, and divide. One of the central elements of the Nazi rise to power in Germany was the fact that the leaders of the Social Democrat parties participated in the crackdowns suppressing a series of uprisings.
\n\nIn addition, we want to call on everyone else in the territory claimed by Germany to support the resistance in the United States with all resources available. If Trump is stopped, we may also have the chance to defeat authoritarianism here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/8.jpg\")
“Remember Renee—Don’t let the state destroy all good in the world.” A poster in remembrance of Renee Good seen somewhere in Germany. You can download the design in Appendix I, below.
\nBefore the Nazis took power, Germany had one of the largest workers’ movements in the entire world. This movement was dominated by the Social Democratic Party (SPD). From 1919 on, the second strongest power was the Communist Party (KPD). Consequently, the German workers’ movement has always been strongly focused on elections as a means of acquiring state power.
\n\nDespite this focus on the parliamentary route, the rank and file of the German workers’ movement has repeatedly been compelled to resort to other means. In 1918, a revolution organized by workers and soldiers overthrew the emperor and created the first German republic, creating a government led by the Social Democrats.
\n\nShortly afterwards, right-wing militias and elements of the official military staged a coup against the government in Berlin. The government fled.
\n\nIn response, a nationwide general strike took place with millions taking part. In the Ruhr area, workers went a step further: tens of thousands armed themselves and drove the police and military out of the region, establishing workers’ councils. In the cities where the anarcho-syndicalists were strong, people also expropriated companies. The workers were so powerful and the regular German military so weak that the most important industrial region of Germany, a region with millions of inhabitants, was liberated from the control of the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/3.jpg\")
An anti-fascist workers’ militia in the town of Dortmund during the Ruhr Uprising.
\nAfter the strikes, direct actions, and militant struggle stopped the coup, the same social democrats that the workers had helped to victory quelled the uprising. To accomplish this, they made use of some of the right-wing militias that had previously been involved in the coup. They were able to do this because half of the workers withdrew from action after the “legitimate” government was back in power.
\n\nTo crush the Ruhr uprising, state forces murdered over a thousand workers, including many of the most militant fighters of the workers’ movement. Consequently, they were not able to participate in the resistance to the growing fascist movement in the following decade.
\n\nSome 93 years after the suppression of the Ruhr uprising, it was the same party, the SPD, that deployed over 31,000 cops to the G20 summit in Hamburg to defend the autocrats Trump, Putin, Erdogan, and Xi.
\n\nToday, the SPD is in a coalition with the conservative CDU. Its chancellor, German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz, gives speeches in which he speaks of migrants as “a problem in the cityscape.”
\n\nIn short, the SPD are to Germany what the Democrats are to the United States. The Democrats, too, are trying to pacify the resistance against Trump in order to maintain their own power.
\n\nWithout the uprising that took place in 2020, the Democrats likely would not have returned to power. Yet after that uprising, the Democrats sought to eliminate the most militant elements of the resistance via repression while doing their best to re-legitimize the same institutions—such as ICE—that now serve Trump once again.
\n\nWe do not know how history would have turned out if the workers had not let themselves be divided during the Ruhr uprising—if many of them had not given up as soon as the democratically elected rulers were back in power. But the Ruhr uprising was the best chance to stop the rise of fascism in Germany. After that, no large anti-fascist insurrection took place again.
\n\nIn the long term, it’s better not to compromise, not to let oneself be pacified and disarmed, whether literally or figuratively. Being uncompromising and taking risks is often safer than restoring the status quo.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/4.jpg\")
German SWAT police attempting to suppress resistance to the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, in order to defend Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Saudi Arabian finance minister Muhammad al-Jadaan.
\nThe other lesson that we can draw from German history is that civil war is not the worst thing that can happen. After 1933, there was resistance to fascism in Germany, but the resistance movement was too weak to wage a large-scale struggle like the Ruhr uprising.
\n\nBy contrast, in countries like Spain and Italy, where the workers’ movement was not dominated by social democrats focused on elections but rather was driven by anarchists and socialists focused on grassroots organizing and action, a long struggle took place against the fascist regimes that came to power, involving extensive resistance.
\n\nIn the case of Spain, after decades of unauthorized demonstrations, strikes, and militant attacks, the capitalist elite were forced to introduce a democratic system as a concession. The foundation for this extensive resistance had been laid by generations of peasants’ and workers’ resistance from which a great anarchist movement grew, culminating in the anarchist revolution in 1936 and the civil war from 1936 to 1939. Although the anarchists were defeated in the civil war, their efforts left such a mark in Spain that eventually fascism was abolished without the sort of military defeat that was essential to ending fascism in Germany.
\n\nTo be clear, we do not want a civil war. We want a social revolution—we want people to stand so decisively against the state and capitalism, with such unity, that the other side is too small to wage war at all. But if our only choice is between civil war and a dictatorship that will have a free hand to imprison and murder millions of people, then the decision should be clear. Civil war is better.
\n\nDemocrats in the United States are trying to stoke fear that “non-peaceful” confrontations with ICE and the Trump regime will lead to the deployment of the military. And then what? People will get shot for protesting? But aren’t people already being shot?
\n\nWhat the Democrats really fear is not that people could be hurt in the streets, but that Democrat politicians might lose their jobs. Because they want to maintain their own power, they try to pacify and divide the resistance with rhetoric about the necessity of remaining “non-violent” and “law-abiding.”
\n\nWhat happens when a population unites against a regime and no longer stops at what is legally permitted? We saw the answer in Germany in 1989 when the GDR (the so-called “German Democratic Republic”) collapsed.
\n\nAt that time, the resistance to the regime was not all “nonviolent.” There were attacks on the police. The demonstrations were not law-abiding—in fact, they were all illegal. Millions of people broke the law. Because of the number of people on the streets refusing to obey, the regime knew that it would have to use the military, including tanks, to quell the uprising.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/5.jpg\")
“No Power for nobody”: Anarchists participate in the largest demonstration against the GDR Regime in 1989. Anarchists, especially anarcho-punks and eco-activists, played an important role in bringing down the dictatorship.
\nParts of the government became afraid of escalation. They were unsure whether their military was ready to obey the order to attack protesters. They asked their main ally—the Soviet Union—to support them with troops. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev refused.
\n\nThe Trump regime is not dependent on Moscow, at least not in this particular way. But it relies on an American state apparatus that is not entirely under its control.
\n\nAs long as the Trump regime is not forced to use the military and all other available forces, as long as the loyal shock troops of ICE suffice to enable them to accomplish their goals, those who are not yet definitively on Donald Trump’s side will not have to make a decision. They will not have to experience a Gorbachev moment in which they might decide against carrying out Trump’s orders.
\n\nEscalation always involves the risk of losing. But holding back in this situation means choosing to lose.
\n\nThe downfall of the GDR also shows that it is not necessarily useful to address resistance directly to the despot, as he will not be the one who hesitates, but rather to those who are not completely ideologically on his side.
\n\nIn the context of the United States, this would mean not to focus all energy on ICE and Trump. It is important to oppose them, but that will go much better if every time Democrat politicians send local and state police and National Guard to protect ICE, they experience consequences that make it impossible for them to continue to do so.
\n\nThe uprising in the GDR did not succeed in a vacuum. In many countries in Eastern Europe, the heads of numerous dictatorships were forced to decide whether to double down on repression or make concessions. Any weakening of the dictatorship in a neighboring country made it possible to expand the fighting elsewhere, because it was no longer possible to move troops from one Warsaw Pact state to another.
\n\nWe want to propose a question. What would it take to ensure that a mayor in the USA can no longer send the police when people try to confront a hotel full of ICE agents? What has to happen to compel a governor to order his National Guard not to interfere? What circumstances would have to prevail on the street to make it impossible for the National Guard of one state to be sent in another?
\n\nWhile fascists and autocrats are not yet in power in Germany, the day when they could be is not far away. The AFD (Alternative for Germany) is about to become the strongest party in Germany. The AFD represents positions similar to the MAGA movement, and the demographics that support them are similar.
\n\nWhile it has a clearly fascist base, most people do not vote for the AFD because they support its positions. As surveys show, they vote AFD to express their anger at the existing system. Consequently, the AFD is now especially successful in the Ruhr area—the region where the largest anti-fascist uprising in German history took place in 1920—as well as in East Germany. This is not a coincidence. After the people in Ruhr area mined coal for 100 years to support German industry and German wars, the region was left impoverished the way that the Rust Belt in the United States has been since the 1970s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/6.jpg\")
A survey of AFD voters in February 2025, in which 85% of them claimed that the AFD was the only political party via which they could express their protest.
\nAnd who was responsible for this? The SPD—the social democrats who managed the process of economic decline for 50 years while diligently profiting from their posts in the state apparatus until the situation finally became so stark that they could not maintain their majorities.
\n\nAnd here we find another parallel: just like Trump, the AFD does not promise material improvements to its base; rather, it promises hatred and violence. It will not benefit the majority of its constituents. The AFD openly states in its election program that it intends to cut German social spending, just as the Republicans are doing under Trump. Its leaders are primarily recruited from the academic elites; they are not the ones who are at risk from these cuts.
\n\nThe neoliberal left (SPD) and the conservatives (CDU) who are currently in power in Germany have already partially implemented these cuts on the grounds that doing so would stop the AFD from gaining support. Unsurprisingly, this has done nothing to erode the popularity of the AFD. These neoliberal leftists and conservatives are comparable to the right wing of the US Democrats.
\n\nThe only other notable political force in Germany is the Left Party, which now represents the new Social Democracy. It’s clear where this will end up. In the neoliberal global order, and due to the decline of the imperialist rule of Europe, the Left Party will not be able to carry out significant social reforms. Like Syriza, it will betray its predominantly young voters—this has already been shown in the decision to abstain from the vote on a pension package, which allowed the law to pass. (At the expense of the younger generations, this pension package preserves the status quo of the state pension without compelling privileged groups—such as Beamte, a special group of state employees, entrepreneurs, and self-employed people such as doctors—to pay into the general pension system.)
\n\nTo summarize: just as in the United States, where the Democrats do not represent a real alternative to Trump and cannot stop the fundamental causes of authoritarianism, in Germany, there is no real alternative to be found within the state.
\n\nThe only way out would be a movement that overturns the fundamental power structure of society, putting an end to the state and capitalism. Unfortunately, the prospects for this in Germany are currently very weak.
\n\nIn view of all these factors, we could be reduced to despair, but actually, we are still capable of hope. We are able to hope because we have experienced that what is happening in the United States can spill over to Germany. Inspired by the George Floyd uprising, tens of thousands in Germany spontaneously took to the streets against the violence of the police in the summer of 2020—something that has not happened in Germany for decades, because, thanks to their “good training” see Appendix II, the police rarely kill white people from the middle class. Summer 2020 was one of the few moments in the past decades when, for a moment, something other than the status quo seemed possible.
\n\nAfter that, protests continued against police murders, although—being organized by an alliance of liberals, social democrats, and parts of the so-called “radical left”—they were mostly directed at securing the convictions of the policemen involved. As in the United States, this strategy has failed utterly. Instead of becoming more “accountable,” police are expanding their powers in Germany, including the use of Tasers, AI-based surveillance, and the installation of monitoring software.
\n\nBut if people in the US succeed in stopping Trump and the resistance that unfolds exceeds the control of Democrat politicians, if something better than the old status quo becomes possible, that will also inspire people in Germany and all around the world.
\n\nThat is why we want to call on everyone in the territory claimed by Germany to support the resistance against Trump.
\n\nThe only route that promises long-term security is the route to another world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/7.jpg\")
15,000 people protest in solidarity with the George Floyd Uprising on June 6, 2020 in Berlin.
\nAfter seeing the above photograph of this poster hanging in Germany, we’ve succeeded in acquiring a PDF of it, which you can download here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/9.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the PDF.
\nIn their attempts to pacify resistance to the Trump regime, Democrats promote the narrative that a “better trained” police force would be less violent.
\n\nThe example of the German police shows that this is false. German police are among the most highly trained in the world. German officers receive two and a half or even three years of training. They receive training in deescalation and communication. This does not prevent them from murdering people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/1.jpg\")
German police receiving training about racism against Sinti and Romani people.
\nA well-trained police force does not create more freedom and security. It creates a stronger state. It is precisely this “strong” state that has repeatedly made great horrors possible in German history.
\n\nIn 2024, police in Germany shot and killed 22 people. For comparison, if the population of Germany were equivalent to the population of the United States, this would mean that German police killed approximately 100 people. In the United States, police kill over 1000 people a year, but the figures in Germany do not include those who have been killed by the police in other ways—there are no central statistics about the total number of police murders in Germany, just as there were no public statistics about police murders in the United States until fierce demonstrations brought the subject to light. Firearms are much harder to come by in Germany, yet the police still kill people, even without that justification.
\n\nIn any case, despite all the training, the number of people that police shoot in Germany is increasing.
\n\nAre police less likely to do violence to people because they are trained to “help” them? Consider the case of a deaf 12-year-old, whom police shot on the night of November 16, 2025. The police were sent by the youth welfare office because the 12-year-old had left a residential group of the youth welfare office to visit her family. Shortly after midnight, several police officers broke into the family’s home, pulled the mother, who was also deaf, out of the apartment, and shot the 12-year-old with both a pistol and a Taser. The child survived, though critically injured. The police claim that the 12-year-old had a knife in her hand. If she really did have a knife in her hand, it was a spontaneous attempt to defend her family against the violence of the state.
\n\nThe reasoning of the police for the operation was that the twelve-year-old urgently needed insulin and therefore had to intervene. The logic is that the state must protect people from themselves by force, must violently rule them for their own good. Training is not the issue here. The problem is the monopolization of force by an institution that exists for the sake of using violence against the general public.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/2.jpg\")
The entrance to the apartment building where German police shot a 12-year-old girl on November 16, 2025. It is located in Hamme, a working class neighborhood in the town of Bochum in the Ruhr Area.
\nCongratulations on surviving 2025 and welcome to our year in review report! What did we accomplish this year? Let’s review!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/8.jpg\")
\nIn the United States, the year 2025 arrived like a nightmare. Danger. Terror. Hatred. All of the worst elements of humanity had taken power and were preparing to use the institutions of the state to inflict tremendous harm. War was already raging in Ukraine, genocides underway from Palestine to Sudan. How much worse could it get?
\n\nWe, at least, were not taken by surprise. Four years ago, looking back on the debacle of January 6, 2021, we anticipated Trump’s return; when Elon Musk bought Twitter, we pointed out that his purchase resolved the fundamental conflict within the capitalist class, between Silicon Valley and Trump’s authoritarian nationalism; by summer 2024, we sensed what was coming:
\n\n\n\n\nDonald Trump will win the election. Then all the institutions that centrists have counted on to protect them—electoral politics, the court system, the police, ordinary citizens’ inclination to obey the law and respect the authorities—will become weapons in the hands of their enemies. Of course, many of us already experience these institutions as our adversaries. Biden’s supporters will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to work alongside us against them, or if, in fact, they prefer fascism to freedom.
\n
Despite these warnings, the opening months of Trump’s second administration shocked many people who had foolishly expected a rerun of Trump’s first presidency, not the sudden arrival of a much more destructive and cynical strategy of governance. Others remain in denial to this day, assuring themselves that however bad things have gotten, they cannot possibly continue to get worse at such a pace.
\n\nOn the contrary, we remain convinced that only grassroots action can change the trajectory we are on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/6.jpg\")
First, they came for the immigrants. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement mercenaries.
\nNot everyone had the good fortune to survive 2025. Police officers murdered well over 1200 people in the United States in 2025. Dozens more perished in ICE custody. Hundreds of thousands of people have been brutally snatched from their communities, held in abominable conditions, and deported. The cuts that Elon Musk and his flunkies made to aid programs have reportedly already inflicted many hundreds of thousands of deaths. Countless more will follow as the autocrats continue to “streamline” the state to play a purely repressive function.
\n\nNonetheless, as we have documented, the assault has reached a plateau, if not yet an impasse. It is time to get our bearings, identify the vulnerabilities that our oppressors have opened up by demolishing the concessions that their predecessors made, and launch a counterattack that could propel us into an entirely different future.
\n\nFor a full accounting of the struggle in the United States throughout 2025, consult our retrospective, “At the Turning of the Tide.” For more background, revisit the events of 2024.
\n\nWe began 2025 with two foundational texts proposing how to come to grips with the rise of autocracy.
\n\n“It’s Safer in the Front: Taking the Offensive against Tyranny” makes the case that, facing ascendant fascism, it is more dangerous to try to avoid confrontation than it is to go on the offensive. Bringing together a series of anecdotes from the front lines of a quarter of a century of anarchist mobilizations, this text also offers a brief overview of the ways that repression has ramped up since the 20th century.
\n\nThe second text, “Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace,” argues that, rather than powerlessly accusing Donald Trump and his cronies of lawlessness, our best hope is to organize concrete acts of resistance on a horizontal and participatory basis. In other words, to become anarchists.
\n\nIn June, we followed these with a third text, “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism,” revisiting the distinction between charity and mutual aid in hopes of unlocking the revolutionary potential concealed within the latter.
\n\nWe concluded the year with the aforementioned analysis, “At the Turning of the Tide.”
\n\nIf you only have time to read a few things we’ve published this year, start with these four.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/05/2.jpg\")
From “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism.” Click on the image to read the essay.
\nEarly in 2025, we published a report on the student walkouts in Los Angeles, one of the first signs of life from what became a powerful movement.
\n\nOver the following weeks, we published a text from a bus driver facing austerity measures, titled “The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk,” followed by a reflection on the federal kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil.
\n\nWhen a wave of resistance to ICE gathered momentum in June, we published reports from participants in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, Chicago, and Seattle. In fall 2025, when ICE concentrated their violence on Chicago, we published a report from the blockades at the Broadview holding facility, followed eventually by reflections on the efforts to target that facility.
\n\nWhen ICE agents returned to the Twin Cities, people confronted them once more.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/3.jpg\")
By the end of the year, the student walkouts had spread from Los Angeles to Charlotte, North Carolina.
\nIn March, we published the final installment in our series chronicling the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia. In July, as Stop Cop City defendant Ayla King prepared to go to trial, we published an overview of the absurdly tenuous case against Ayla and the other RICO defendants. Almost all of the charges have since been dropped, though the threat of future state persecution still hangs over the heads of the accused.
\n\nFollowing up last year’s campus occupations in solidarity with Gaza, we covered a daring Palestine solidarity occupation at the University of Washington in May. In October, we published a statement from a participant in the Thousand Madleens to Gaza flotilla, followed by an account of the direct action campaign that shut down Elbit Systems—Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer—in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
\n\nFinally, as we do every year, we observed Steal Something from Work Day—this time, by celebrating employees who shared company goods with the general public during a time of need.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/20/header.jpg\")
The weekend of the Festivals of Resistance was the anniversary of the brutal police murder of Tortuguita, a participant in the movement to Stop Cop City. Mourners courageously redecorated this billboard in the middle of New York City in Tortuguita’s memory.
\nAt the end of December 2024, we called for people to organize “Festivals of Resistance” the weekend immediately before Trump was to take office, in order to share skills and prepare for the onslaught. Over two dozen cities hosted events in response to this call. Afterwards, we published reportbacks from some of them.
\n\nWe published a call to take action on May Day, as well, and a call for anti-authoritarian blocs at the October 18 “No Kings” demonstrations around the country. Afterwards, we reached out to participants in a dozen cities and towns to learn how their efforts went and published a collection of their reflections.
\n\nFinally, we published a reportback from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering.
\n\nAnarchists at one No Kings rally led the entire crowd off the sidewalk and on a spirited march throughout the city.
\nEarly in 2025, we published a short guide titled “Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE.” Copies of the trifold version appeared everywhere—for example, during the disruption of a US Customs and Border Protection recruiting event in Chicago.
\n\nTen months later, drawing on the experiences of Chicago organizers, we followed up with “Standing Up to ICE,” a guide spelling out the steps a community can take to stand in the way of ICE kidnappings on a large scale.
\n\nIn between, we published “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Operational Security: Fighting Back, Staying Free,” a comprehensive guide to maintaining your anonymity while engaging in street actions, as well as “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Reinforced Banners” and “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Lockdowns and Blockades.”
\n\nIn addition, in response to Donald Trump’s cartoonish announcement that his administration would be designating “Antifa” [sic] a “major [?!] terrorist organization,” we circulated\n“Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression,” spelling out steps that organizations, activists, and others who oppose fascism can take to be ready to endure an authoritarian crackdown. If such a crackdown has not yet taken place, we owe that chiefly to the resistance that has tied down federal mercenaries on other fronts, as we argued at the end of the year:
\n\n\n\n\nIf federal agencies have yet to move with full force against a target other than immigrants, it is only because people have fought so hard to obstruct ICE. This drives home the true meaning of solidarity: the best way to protect ourselves tomorrow is to protect each other today.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/1.jpg\")
Demonstrators outside the Broadview holding facility. They’re in there for us, we’re out here for them.
\nBetween May and July, we published a series of texts from the Mideast, including a reflection on what the Rajaee Port disaster in Iran revealed about the systematic racism that Baluch ethnic minorities face; a statement from Iranian, Kurdish, and Afghani feminists arguing against reductive positions in regards to the conflict between Israel and Iran; and an analysis of what the decision of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) to lay down their arms means for the whole region.
\n\nIn August, a wave of protest against austerity spread across Indonesia, then escalated dramatically in response to the police murder of Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old delivery worker. While the Indonesian government managed to reestablish control, a few days later, a similar eruption toppled the government of Nepal, setting a template for what became known as the “Gen Z uprisings,” a series of revolts from Madagascar to Peru.
\n\nWe published an interview with anarchists in Nepal who participated in the revolution, followed by an article by another Nepali about the new horizons it opened up. The following month, we published an interview with participants in the subsequent uprising in Morocco, as well.
\n\nWhile conditions in the United States and Europe have been grim, these distant fires suggest that the age of uprisings is not over. The plumes of smoke rising from the horizon today hint at events that could break out much closer to home tomorrow. It is urgent to think through what lasting gains movements can achieve during such surges of activity in an era when the apparatus of the state has proven incapable of reform.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/2.jpg\")
Indonesia.
\nOur most ambitious historical project of the year was “Anarchists in the Movement against Police and White Supremacy,” tracing anarchist contributions to uprisings against white supremacist policing from the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to the George Floyd Uprising of 2020.
\n\nWe also published a collection of reflections from participants in the Seattle Solidarity Network on their seventeen years of organizing to support laborers and renters in their struggles with bosses and landlords.
\n\nSeeking to equip people for the urgent struggles of 2025, we published a text about the General Strike of May Day 2006, one of the high-water marks in the fight against the oppression of immigrants in the United States, and two articles about how people organized to shut down the machinery of deportation in France in the 1990s. Both of the articles were adapted from the newly published book Another War Was Possible, a firsthand account of anarchist street action at the turn of the century, to which we contributed the preface.
\n\nFinally, we shared a eulogy for Karl Garside, a lifelong participant in the animal liberation movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/header.jpg\")
A scene from the uprising of 2020.
\nThis year, via our Ex-Worker podcast, we released audio versions of a handful of our articles, including “It’s Safer in the Front,” “Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace,” “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism,” “Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression,” and our coverage of the origins of the wave of resistance to ICE in Minneapolis to Los Angeles.
\n\nWe also collaborated with subMedia and the Coordinadora Anarquista Tejiendo Libertad on a video and poster campaign to counter ICE recruitment.
\n\nMERCENARIES: A Video and Poster Campaign to Counter ICE Recruitment
\nWe published a work of speculative fiction, “Survival: A Story about Anarchists Enduring Mass Raids.” We also designed a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the “street gang with an analysis” that introduced the concept of the affinity group to English-speaking anarchists in the 1960s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/9.jpg\")
\nIn 2025, we released our first record in over a decade—the album “Hope against Hope” by Catharsis, long known as one of the world’s most extreme and uncompromising underground hardcore bands. The first pressing of the LP sold out immediately, but we will have a second pressing available soon. You can read an array of reviews of the record here, or read Kim Kelly’s interview with members of the band.
\n\nCatharsis supported the album with tours on the East Coast of the United States and in Europe, and has further tours scheduled in 2026. The vast majority of the other music we have released over the past thirty years is available here, all of it free of charge.
\n\nCatharsis: “Hope against Hope.”
\nWe also published a text written by the surviving members of the Russian hardcore band Sandinista! in memory of their bandmate, Timur Kacharava, on the twenty-year anniversary of his murder at the hands of fascists.
\n\nFinally, we reprinted our Contradictionary, alongside other print projects.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/7.jpg\")
\nHere follows a more or less comprehensive list of the zines, posters, and articles we published in 2025 in different languages, organized from most recent to oldest.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/at-the-turning-of-the-tide/at-the-turning-of-the-tide_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/make-ready-safeguarding-our-movements-against-repression/make-ready-safeguarding-our-movements-against-repression_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/chicago-against-ice-la-migra-la-policia-la-misma-porqueria/chicago-against-ice-la-migra-la-policia-la-misma-porqueria_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/resistance-reader/resistance-reader_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/minneapolis-to-feds-get-the-fuck-out-how-people-in-the-twin-cities-responded-to-a-federal-raid/minneapolis-to-feds-get-the-fuck-out-how-people-in-the-twin-cities-responded-to-a-federal-raid_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/seven-steps-to-stop-ice/seven-steps-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/it-is-fascism-start-acting-like-it/it-is-fascism-start-acting-like-it_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/melt-ice-be-water/melt-ice-be-water_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/los-angeles-stands-up-to-ice-a-firsthand-report-on-the-clashes-of-june-6/los-angeles-stands-up-to-ice-a-firsthand-report-on-the-clashes-of-june-6_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/cop-city-is-everywhere/cop-city-is-everywhere_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/survival/survival_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/remember-2020-we-can-win/remember-2020-we-can-win_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/8-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice/8-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/its-safer-in-the-front/its-safer-in-the-front_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/mercenaries-2025.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. (Português Brasileiro, Español, Español) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/we-are-all-anti-fascist.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/for-spirits.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/security-culture.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/the-whole-world-hates-the-police.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/fantastic-demands.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. (Español) \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/may-day-means-resistance.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. (Italiano) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/its-double-or-nothing-for-everyone-now.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/fell-in-love-with-fire.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/depose-trump-depose-musk.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/4.jpg\")
\nA year into the second Trump era, authoritarians are in control of the federal government, but they have yet to gain control of society at large. They have done tremendous harm, but their assault has hit a plateau, if not yet an impasse. They have to project strength at all times precisely because they are not invincible. It is finally possible to imagine how we might not only defeat them but take advantage of the situation to make profound changes.
\n\nHere, we revisit the structural forces behind Trump’s return to power, review the events of 2025, and propose a strategy for how to fight our way out of the Trump era together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/2.jpg\")
The more precarious a social order, the more violent force is required to preserve it.
\nThe political crisis in the United States today is the consequence of economic processes that have been underway for generations. The rise of fascism is not a fluke brought about by the demagoguery of a single individual, but the logical outcome of profit-driven capitalism.
\n\nThe neoliberal order paved the way for this by deepening the gulf between the rich and poor, militarizing policing in order to preserve those disparities, and creating a downwardly mobile population desperate for scapegoats. In a globalized economy, politicians cannot mitigate the impact of capitalism on their constituents without investors taking their business elsewhere.1 Consequently, “left” parties have consistently failed to deliver on their promises, while reactionary parties have pulled public policy and permissible discourse steadily to the right—with centrists serving as a sort of ratchet preventing policy and discourse from shifting back.
\n\nUnderway for decades, wealth polarization has begun to produce qualitative shifts. In 2003, Bill Gates was considered the world’s wealthiest man with roughly $40 billion to his name; in October 2025, Elon Musk’s net worth reached $500 billion. Today, the world’s ten richest men control considerably more wealth than the poorest three billion people. When wealth becomes this unevenly distributed, the ruling class exerts so much power relative to the rest of the population that representative democracy changes character. A single man like Elon Musk can determine the outcome of an election by buying up communications platforms and bribing voters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/1.jpg\")
\nIn such circumstances, it’s not surprising to see toadies like Curtis Yarvin arguing that billionaires should have formal political supremacy to match their economic supremacy. The desire for a politician who would “run the country like a business”—which is to say, like a dictatorship—has always been an autocratic fantasy. Having become accustomed to authoritarianism in the economic sphere, an increasing number of people are prepared to accept it in the political sphere as well. This creates a feedback loop: the more inequality there is, the more popular authoritarianism becomes, as people from every political faction conclude that, being too weak to assert their interests themselves, they need a powerful champion to do so on their behalf.
\n\nFor over a century, democracy has functioned as the political counterpart to free-market capitalism. Both promise social mobility to individuals while preserving the inequalities fundamental to monarchy and feudalism, the systems that preceded them.2 For a while, democracy served to temper the violence of the economy and the state, at least towards the comparatively privileged. But as economic and political disparities deepen, neither capitalism nor democracy function to stabilize the social order any longer.
\n\nThe economy has changed in other ways over the past half century. For example, today’s billionaires are increasingly accumulating their wealth through speculation. Whereas Henry Ford made his fortune by selling cars,3 Elon Musk assembled his mostly by benefitting from spikes in stock prices. Donald Trump and Musk are both hype men whose strategy is to ceaselessly scale up their promises, double or nothing, before anyone can evaluate the real outcome of their previous ventures. Like the cryptocurrency boom, this is a symptom of an era in which the rate of profit is declining, rendering speculation more profitable than old-fashioned commerce.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/6.jpg\")
\nCapitalism is a fire that must continually consume resources in order to go on generating profits for the victors. Eventually, capitalists are compelled to treat the state itself as a site from which to extract profit rather than a means of stabilizing the terrain in which they compete. In an era of declining profits, capturing and pillaging the state becomes the ultimate gambit for hype men.
\n\nFor decades, we heard about such things taking place in overseas autocracies—Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Hungary. Neoliberal pundits like Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama believed that these were less advanced societies that would eventually catch up to the West as the free market civilized them. In fact, it was the European and North American democracies that were behind the times. Donald Trump and his henchmen studied the model that these authoritarian societies offered in order to import it to the United States.4
\n\nAgain, this was not simply the initiative of a few malevolent individuals, but the consequence of structural developments. In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to subsidize social safety nets for their citizens in part thanks to outright resource extraction in the parts of the world that were on the receiving end of their imperialistic ventures. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the world was divided into the wealthy consumer nations of the imperial core, where most citizens enjoyed the privileges of democracy, and the impoverished producer nations of the periphery, where the majority of people were treated as cheap labor and subjected to correspondingly repressive regimes. As economic disparities widen and life becomes more precarious in the imperial core, it should not be surprising that political liberties are eroding here, as well, while the forms of repression that were practiced overseas are brought home. Aimé Césaire termed the latter tendency the imperial boomerang.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/18.jpg\")
Fascists from the group Patriot Front marching in 2021. The rise of fascism is the logical outcome of the consequences of neoliberalism.
\nBut the transition to cutthroat capitalism, scorched-earth policies, and rule by brute force entails risks for the ruling class, as we shall see.
\n\n\n\n\nBarring 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.
\n\nIn 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.
\n\n–The Ukrainian Revolution and the Future of Social Movements
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/12/5.jpg\")
A throne after the looting of the president’s residence in Almaty during the uprising in Kazakhstan in January 2022.
\nThose who followed the rise of autocracy in Russia know what to expect when it takes hold. Everything looks more or less the same—the police go on policing, landlords go on collecting rent, people go on showing up to work. The transition takes place so smoothly because all the necessary elements of fascism were already present under democracy. Nonetheless, there are telltale signs. You see militarized state mercenaries in the streets more and more often, masked and heavily armed. Protest becomes progressively more difficult and dangerous, until the last protesters are arrested for standing alone holding blank pieces of paper. And sooner or later, once the security agencies have the internal situation under control, the regime goes to war—for fascism must always have an enemy to mobilize against.
\n\nThe second Trump administration represents an experiment in authoritarianism that has not occurred in the United States in living memory. This time around, Trump has control of practically the entire executive branch and the Supreme Court, as well as the backing of Silicon Valley. Yes, the United States was already built on white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonial violence—but those who do not want to update their analyses to reflect the new situation are simply in denial.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/9.jpg\")
Gregory Bovino, dubbed Border Patrol “Commander at Large” (a rank with no statutory basis) by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, oversaw ICE raids in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and New Orleans through the latter half of 2025. The transition from democracy to autocracy involves the emergence of new militarized groups that operate outside the old protocol.
\nFor the purposes of this analysis, we won’t linger on the strategic frameworks and objectives driving different elements of the Trump coalition—the Heritage Foundation’s “Unitary Executive Theory” intended to concentrate dictatorial power in Trump’s hands, the Christian nationalists’ Seven Mountain Mandate aimed at gaining control over society at large, the counterinsurgency strategy refined in Iraq and Afghanistan that the military and police bring to bear upon protest movements and unruly communities in the US, the Christian and Jewish Zionists’ efforts to use Palestine as a testing ground to establish genocide as a means of gentrification, the Silicon Valley corporations and petroleum companies and cryptocurrency profiteers all seeking license to pillage with impunity.
\n\nWe will confine ourselves to identifying some of the regime’s initial objectives:
\n\nWhen the Nazis took control of Germany, their program of Gleichschaltung—an electrical metaphor for consolidation—swiftly did away with all other political parties and organizations. The Trump administration knew that if they attempted to accomplish something similar, they would provoke a backlash that they could not control. The above program represents the most they believed that they could get away with.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/11.jpg\")
Concentrating resources in the hands of ICE is both a means of forcibly changing population demographics and a way of establishing mercenary violence as a profitable industry within a society in which most people face diminishing prospects.
\nAt the close of 2025, the administration has fulfilled the majority of these objectives. Do they still have enough momentum to advance to the next stage of their operation?
\n\nThe first Trump administration opened with thousands of demonstrators taking the streets of Washington, DC in defiance, setting the precedent for four years of fierce resistance that ultimately resulted in Trump’s departure from office. The second Trump administration opened with Proud Boys marching in the streets of DC where the anarchist black bloc had marched on January 20, 2017. It was the Proud Boys’ first appearance in the capitol since the failed coup attempt of January 6, 2021, for which Trump had just issued blanket pardons.
\n\nWhere were the anarchists and other protesters on January 20, 2025? At the opening of Trump’s second term, many people were paralyzed by the idea that any sort of resistance would only play into his hands. Ahead of the tame protests that the group 50501 organized for February 5, some panicky liberals speculated that it was a setup to declare martial law:
\n\n\n\n\n“Project 2025 outlines specific plans to use any mass protests as an excuse to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement, up to and including deploying deadly force.”
\n
Today, it’s easy to forget how many radicals bought into some version of that narrative. Trump and his supporters appeared to be an unstoppable force, something out of a nightmare. Hadn’t we already spent four years risking everything to defeat them, only to see them rise from the dead even stronger? As they took over the state apparatus with every other political faction in disarray, the terror that they inspired was their chief asset. Fascism depends on the management of perceptions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/7.jpg\")
Proud Boys and other fascists returned to the streets of Washington, DC on January 20, 2025.
\n\n\n\nState capture is a type of systematic corruption whereby narrow interest groups take control of the institutions and processes through which public policy is made, directing public policy away from the public interest and instead shaping it to serve their own interests. [Joel S.] Hellman et al. introduced the concept in the 1990s to describe patterns of behavior observed during the first decade of transition in parts of the former Soviet Union (FSU) and Eastern Europe… The captors of the state were businesspeople, soon to be known as “oligarchs,” who purchased influence over policy formation through direct kickbacks or promises of favors, using personal connections to the individuals and parties holding political power. This framing of business as the captors of politics probably always overstated the separation between the two spheres.
\n\n-Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett, State Capture and Development: A Conceptual Framework
\n
Elon Musk and his underlings immediately set about dismantling every part of the government that did not help them accumulate wealth or keep the citizenry in line. The cuts they made have already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths without significantly reducing the federal budget. “Government efficiency” was beside the point: they were showing that a new era had arrived in which the state would represent new values.
\n\nAnarchists that we are, we cannot help pointing out that if all these programs had been maintained by autonomous grassroots projects, it would have been impossible for a Sieg-Heiling fascist and his juvenile henchmen to dismantle them in a matter of months. Panning back to a longer timeframe, we can understand “state capture” both as the process by which the institutions of the state supplant grassroots initiatives, rendering the public increasingly dependent upon the state, and the second phase of the process, during which oligarchs gain control of the state who see no utility in ensuring that it is perceived to function as a neutral arbiter or to play any broadly beneficial role whatsoever.
\n\nBut it is important to remember that the state actors who integrated those initiatives into the state in the first place—not just aid programs and social security, but also representative democracy itself—understood themselves to be making repressive concessions, concessions that were necessary to subdue social unrest. Musk and his colleagues are wagering that the technologies of repression—or else apathy and despair—have progressed so far that these concessions are no longer necessary.
\n\nThey are gambling that hard power is worth more than soft power. They would prefer that people live in terror of being murdered in a random naval strike than that people support US foreign policy. To cite a recent example, Trump is assuming that the advantages he gains by pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández, the corrupt former president of Honduras who made millions of dollars flooding the United States with cocaine, are worth more than the credibility that he gives up by doing so in the midst of an apparent military campaign against narco-trafficking.
\n\nIn brazenly destroying every feature of the government that could preserve its perceived legitimacy in the eyes of a great part of the general public, they are taking a risk, perhaps a bigger risk than they understand.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/5.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Berlin. While Germans are famously hesitant to acknowledge fascism outside their borders (“It’s only fascism if it’s from the fascism region of Germany, otherwise it’s just authoritarianism”), Elon Musk convinced them that he was the real thing.
\nThe poet Juvenal wrote that the people of ancient Rome were bribed with bread and circuses to accept the end of democracy and the establishment of the dictatorship known as the Roman Empire. The tried-and-true playbook to accustom people to autocracy is to meet their material needs while channeling their attention towards activities that substitute for self-determination.
\n\nDonald Trump is trying to accomplish something more unusual: he aims to preside over the destruction of the last vestiges of the social safety net and the impoverishment of much of what remains of the middle class while buying off his support base with entertainment alone. His administration has not bolstered the economy but further destabilized it, as if intentionally rendering people more precarious, desperate, and exploitable. In return for this, we are supposed to content ourselves with watching the violent reality television gameshow of his presidency. Less bread, more circuses.
\n\nWhatever far-right propaganda outlets claim, tariffs and crackdowns on immigrants will not improve the economic prospects of white US citizens. Already, an impoverished US working class was only kept appeased by the cheap consumer goods produced overseas by underpaid labor; it would only be possible to move those production operations to the US if desperate American workers were compelled to work for even lower wages than they do today. Likewise, deporting those who have been forced to work the lowest-paying jobs on the market will only make goods and services more expensive for everyone else.
\n\nThe real reason for the tariffs and the deportations is that they are mechanisms of autocracy: they offer ways to maximize the leverage that Donald Trump can exert on governments, corporations, and ordinary people from the Oval Office. The tariffs enable him to negotiate quid pro quo agreements with governments and corporations for his own benefit, the deportations to build up a loyal paramilitary force tasked with attacking whomever he deems an internal enemy. Trump has been using antitrust mechanisms in the same way, along with the so-called Department of Justice and litigation in general. Likewise, cutting off funds to healthcare and education will not strengthen the United States as a political or economic force; it is solely intended to concentrate more power in Trump’s hands while leaving ordinary people occupied with the challenges of bare survival.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/23.jpg\")
\nAbove all, the goal is to accustom the general population to suffering—both to others’ suffering and to their own. This is the point of the extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, of the gratuitously brutal arrests of Mahmoud Khalil and other green card holders, of Trump’s efforts to weaponize the legal system. This explains why they commit their worst atrocities not in secret, but as media stunts.
\n\nAgain, rather than seeing this simply as the audacity of a few malevolent individuals, we should understand it as a response to structural factors. Previous generations of autocrats took care to channel resources towards the bread side of the bread and circuses formula. If today’s autocrats do not, it is not because they are foolhardy, but because they are constrained by contemporary conditions. We should seek out the consequent fault lines and vulnerabilities.
\n\nBy the opening of the second Trump era, the powerful grassroots movements that had clashed in 2020 had been tamped down on both sides. State repression likely played a role in this—the response to the coup attempt of January 6, 2021, the judicial persecution of the Stop Cop City movement—but nonetheless, the subsiding of these movements is one of the enigmas of our time. Had the entire population of the United States simply been reduced to digital spectatorship and isolation?
\n\nMany people expected that Trump’s pardons would bring the Proud Boys and right-wing militias back in full force. It may be that many of those who would have joined them instead sought to join ICE, or else waited on the institutions of the state to follow through on Trump’s promises. But what became of the millions who had participated in the George Floyd uprising?
\n\nThe first unruly protests involving highway blockades and student walkouts took place in Los Angeles at the beginning of February. The first demonstrations at Tesla dealerships followed later that month. Through the spring, older middle-class liberals were arguably the demographic most represented in protest activity. This illustrates the extent to which Trump’s return to power was facilitated by widespread disenchantment and disaffection. Practically every other segment of society had already been reduced to cynicism. Comfortable liberals were the only ones who still had something to lose—the idea that they lived in a democracy.5
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/4.jpg\")
\nHowever tame the participants, the Tesla protests had an impact. Weekly protests at Tesla outlets across the country supplemented by vandalism and arson contributed to a steady decline in overvalued Tesla stock; on March 10, it plunged 15%. The next day, Trump staged a Tesla commercial at the White House in return for another $100 million from Musk. Tesla stock rebounded, but the stunt showed that the protests were taking effect. It may also have put additional strain on their relationship.
\n\nOne of the first signs that the Trump machine was not unstoppable came on April 1, when Elon Musk’s preferred candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court lost the election, despite Musk pouring over $25 million into the campaign. The next day, Trump announced his tariffs, a clumsy effort to reset US trade polices to the year 1930—likely not what transnational capitalists like Elon Musk had had in mind when they backed him. The Tesla protests had not subsided. On April 22, Musk told anxious Tesla investors that he would shift his attention away from Washington, DC.
\n\nOn May 27, the same day that San Diego locals clashed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in one of the first publicized instances of resistance, Musk criticized Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” Trump hosted a sendoff for Musk on May 30, the last day the two were able to maintain the appearance of being on good terms.
\n\nOn June 3, locals in Minneapolis drove ICE out of a neighborhood. The next day, people confronted ICE agents as they carried out raids in Chicago and Grand Rapids.
\n\nOn June 5, the feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump exploded into the public, with Musk announcing that Trump was in the Epstein files and suggesting that Trump should be impeached a third time.
\n\nEarly in the second Trump administration, some had speculated that capitalists like Elon Musk were the true powers behind the throne and would prove more powerful than Trump. Yet looking at the example of Russia, we see that Vladimir Putin successfully used the instruments of the state to crush every rival, however wealthy. Thus far, Musk has played a far weaker hand than Trump. So long as the state determines the conditions that prevail in the market and retains a monopoly on violent force, control of the state is the currency of power that trumps all others.
\n\nThe very next day—Friday, June 6—people in Los Angeles responded to an ICE raid, precipitating days of fierce unrest. Trump deployed National Guard to LA, fulfilling the fears of those who had claimed that violent protest was exactly what he wanted. However, the protests did not die down when the National Guard arrived in Los Angeles. On the contrary, they continued, inspiring solidarity demonstrations around the country, the first wave of confrontational demonstrations since Trump had taken office.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/20.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Los Angeles, June 2025.
\nThe No Kings protests were scheduled for June 14, the day that Trump had arranged a military parade in Washington, DC for his birthday. With the National Guard on the streets, some feared that the day would herald the beginning of military rule.
\n\nJune 14 began with a Trump supporter shooting multiple Democratic politicians in Minnesota. Nonetheless, over five million people turned out to demonstrations in thousands of different locations. As in August 2014 and May 2020, militant confrontation preceded mass protest: rather than frightening people away, it drew out more people, driving home the urgency of the situation and wresting the news cycle from Trump’s control. By contrast, only a few thousand spectators attended Trump’s military parade.
\n\nIn the history of the second Trump administration, the first chapter concludes with the protests of June 14. Until that day, it wasn’t clear how much popular support there was for resistance, nor how little enthusiasm there was for Trump’s desire to turn the military against the public, nor what would happen if people took the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/14.jpg\")
\nOf course, ICE did not leave Los Angeles. A protracted war of attrition followed, in which ICE mercenaries recycled tactics that neo-Nazis had previously employed for street demonstrations. At the same time, local organizers developed a playbook to track their movements, force them out of hotels, and equip rapid response networks to resist them.
\n\nOn July 4, a shooting took place during a demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Center south of Fort Worth, Texas. The police ultimately arrested 18 people, charging them with an array of crimes including “transporting antifa materials.” The Trump administration hailed this as the first legal case against “Antifa,” aiming to set a precedent for criminalizing protest in general. The case is ongoing.
\n\nAt the beginning of August, a teenager who had worked alongside Elon Musk to dismantle the US Agency for International Development claimed that he had been assaulted in downtown Washington, DC. Musk had originally hired him to work at Neuralink; barely out of high school, by August, this boy had already worked inside the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Social Security Administration. This résumé speaks volumes about what kind of expertise—and security—can be found in federal agencies under Donald Trump.
\n\nTrump used this opportunity to deploy the National Guard to Washington, DC. Yet the presence of Guardsmen in DC did not suppress expressions of dissent. If anything, it had a demystifying effect, showing that putting the military on the streets could not serve to consolidate control while spurring grand juries to openly defy prosecutors.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/3.jpg\")
ICE mercenaries recycling tactics that they had previously used for neo-Nazi street demonstrations.
\nOn September 10, racist propagandist Charlie Kirk was shot while promoting Trump’s agenda at a university in Utah. Although the young man who killed Kirk had himself grown up in a conversative family, Trump and his supporters jumped at the chance to call for a crackdown on “the left,” with one Trump supporter declaring\nwithout irony that the shooting of Charlie Kirk was “the American Reichstag fire.” For the first time since Trump entered office, grassroots fascist groups around the country held public demonstrations.6
\n\nCentrists provided cover for Trump and his supporters by joining the chorus of Republicans who treated Kirk’s death as a more significant tragedy than the tens of thousands of fatalities caused by gun violence in the US every year, including the Democratic politicians assassinated three months earlier. Whether they were motivated by fear or genuine concern for human life—dubious in view of their silence about the genocide in Gaza—the consequence was to give the Trump administration and its supporters a free hand.
\n\nTrump and his henchmen are hastening into fascism as fast as they can. They have already scripted the scenes in advance. There is no such thing as “giving them an excuse” to crack down—they are determined to make use of whatever opportunities arise, however far-fetched. The important question is whether others will enable them to do so. The burning of the Reichstag in February 1933 enabled the Nazis to consolidate power in Germany only because other political factions responded to it by granting the Nazis emergency powers. The way to stop a Reichstag fire is not to attempt to control those who act in response to the violence of the state, but rather to refuse to legitimize fascist initiatives or narratives under any circumstances. Anything else is complicity, pure and simple.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/12.jpg\")
Charlie Kirk, meet Horst Wessel.
\nOn September 17, Trump announced that he was designating “Antifa” as “a major terrorist organization.” Satisfied with the progress of the initial phase of their program—“First, they came for the immigrants”—the Trump administration was moving on to the next stage: “Then they came for the anti-fascists.” A government doesn’t announce that it has embraced fascism; it simply declares anti-fascists to be enemies of the state.
\n\nOn September 21, nearly 100,000 people packed into a stadium in Arizona for a Trump rally billed as a memorial service for Charlie Kirk. Stephen Miller’s speech channeled Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Trump and Musk were seen together for the first time since May. Presenting themselves as victims enabled Trump and his supporters to regain momentum after the reversals of June. Fascists must appear to be both Übermensch and underdog; this propulsive contradiction lies at the core of their project.
\n\nNational Guardsmen were still occupying the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Trump had announced that he would deploy the National Guard to Chicago, where a massive ICE operation was underway, and to Portland, Oregon as well. On September 30, he convened US military officials from around the world to instruct them to use American cities as “training grounds.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/26.jpg\")
“We’re under invasion from within,” Trump declared to a gathering of US military leadership on September 30. “No different than a foreign enemy.”
\nOn October 8, Trump hosted a panel of far-right grifters whose business model was to spread fear and lies about anti-fascists. One guest, Jack Posobiec, explicitly stated to the approval of Trump and his cronies that “Antifa” originated in the Weimar Republic—making it clear for all to see that the administration considered those who resisted the rise of Adolf Hitler to be its foes.
\n\nIt was a frightening moment to be an opponent of fascism. Hundreds of people had lost their jobs for not responding to Charlie Kirk’s death to the satisfaction of their employers; the Turning Point organization was targeting one professor after another for suspension. Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, fled the country. The anti-fascist media platform It’s Going Down shut down.
\n\nIn such a situation, it is tempting to withdraw from proactive efforts to focus on preparing for repression—but doing so cedes the initiative to the authorities, permitting them to continue to gain momentum.
\n\nThe Trump administration was preparing the next phase of its assault. How far would it go, and how fast?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/10.jpg\")
An ICE agent in Chicago points a weapon directly at a photographer. Fall 2025.
\nAhead of the October 18 reprise of the No Kings protests, Trump and his underlings described the participants as “Hamas supporters,” “antifa,” and “paid protesters” representing “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, a “small but very violent and vocal group.” This apparently did not deter anyone from participating. Exceeding expectations, nearly seven million people turned out for the October protests, considerably more than in June. While the demonstrations themselves were mostly staid events controlled by local Democrats, they drew out a wide range of people, some of whom were eager to engage in more concrete protest activity, especially in places where ICE was active.
\n\nTrump’s National Guard deployments were hitting legal obstacles. He called off a threatened troop deployment to San Francisco at the last minute. Resistance to ICE operations continued in Chicago and elsewhere around the country, fostering new grassroots networks and tactics.
\n\nThe election results of November 4 showed that, far from building a consensus in favor of their rule, the Republican Party was losing support. The hot potato had changed hands again: voters who had cast protest votes against Biden now blamed Trump for the economy. In electing Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City, voters rebuffed centrist Democrats who had, yet again, argued that Trump’s victory indicated that Democratic policies had to shift even further to the right. Mamdani’s victory also gave Trump an additional adversary to track, drawing his attention from “Antifa” to other threats.
\n\nIn the wake of the elections, new rifts became visible within the Republican Party. The so-called “antisemitism task force” of the Heritage Foundation resigned in response to the foundation’s president defending extreme-right podcaster Tucker Carlson for platforming an avowed antisemite. Zionist Jews who had partnered with Christian nationalists for the sake of exterminating Palestinians likely already understood that this coalition included people who wanted to exterminate Jews as well. But by November, it was clear that Jewish Zionists were not the ones in the driver’s seat, and the prospect of electoral losses diminished their incentive to put up with the situation for the sake of retaining power.
\n\nMarjorie Taylor Greene was forced to resign from Congress after clashing with Donald Trump over his unwillingness to release the Epstein files, saying “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.” Although her withdrawal from office suggests restiveness among some elements of Trump’s base, it confirms that Donald Trump continues to wield the power of life and death over Republican politicians. To consolidate the sort of control over the United States government that Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan established over Russia, Hungary, and Turkey, Trump must show that he can sacrifice even his staunchest allies. All successful autocracies involve this sort of farcical infighting and jockeying for position. They don’t call it competitive authoritarianism for nothing.
\n\nIn a polarized political climate, such fractures are unlikely to turn a significant element of Trump’s base against him, but they illustrate why Trump has to project strength at all times. Trump’s supporters have debased themselves for the sake of his cult—avowing falsehoods, excusing atrocities, enduring cognitive dissonance. The moment that the rewards for doing so dry up, there will be hell to pay.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/22.jpg\")
Justice delayed, justice denied.
\nBitcoin had spiked when Trump took office, ahead of his promised deregulation of cryptocurrency. It peaked immediately before the White House panel spreading fear about “Antifa.” In November, however, it plunged, shedding almost a third of its value. At the same time, there were murmurings that the Artificial Intelligence investment bubble could burst, tanking the stock market. Some Republicans likely feared that Trump’s tariffs and general recklessness could contribute to an economic crisis. This may have diminished their eagerness to be counted among his most obsequious supporters.
\n\nOn November 26, two National Guardsmen were shot in Washington, DC by a disaffected Afghani war veteran. Trump once again sought to capitalize on this event to intensify his campaign against immigrants, but his Reichstag fire strategy was already producing diminishing returns. It bears mentioning that the shooting would not have occurred if Trump had not deployed the National Guard to DC in the first place. “She swallowed the spider to catch the fly… I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.”
\n\nOn November 29, ICE attempted to carry out a major operation in New York City, only to be\ncompletely thwarted by popular resistance. People surrounded the ICE agents, blocked them, and escorted them out of the city. Rather than subduing the population, Trump’s heavy-handed attempt to make federal agencies into a political weapon had inflamed people, drawing them out of despair and fear into passionate collective action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/16.jpg\")
\nOn December 15, Kash Patel’s FBI claimed to have arrested five alleged members of “an anti-capitalist, anti-government movement,” four of whom were accused of participating a bomb-making conspiracy. The Criminal Complaint bears the hallmarks of a classic entrapment case.
\n\nThe end of 2025 finds us at another turning of the tide. If federal agencies have yet to move with full force against a target other than immigrants, it is only because people have fought so hard to obstruct ICE. This drives home the true meaning of solidarity: the best way to protect ourselves tomorrow is to protect each other today. Trump and his henchmen would already be carrying out extrajudicial killings in our communities if they could. They may yet.
\n\nHaving put the pieces in place to target anti-fascists, it is almost inevitable that federal agencies will follow through. Any FBI agent who wants to advance his career now has an incentive to set up an entrapment case, and more ambitious assaults are probably on the way as well. If these succeed in reducing people to silence, if the frame-ups play well to television audiences and turn public opinion against popular resistance, this will embolden not only the Trump regime, but also Democratic politicians who would happily be rid of their pesky rivals. We should respond to the next round of repression in ways that bring people together to experiment with new tactics, the same way that people have formed rapid response networks in response to ICE raids.
\n\nThis is not the first time—not even the first time this century—that federal agencies have declared anarchists to be their number one domestic target. The FBI did the same thing in May 2005. Within seven months, they had initiated “Operation Backfire,” one of the flagship cases of the Green Scare alongside the SHAC 7 prosecution. Looking back twenty years, we can see that refusing to let our movements fracture under pressure is as crucial to our safety as any particular security culture practice.
\n\nIf Trump’s support continues to crumble, this may prevent him from targeting his adversaries in a systematic way, but it will not reduce the danger he poses. If his situation grows more precarious, there will be more Reichstag fires, more Charlottesvilles. Like Benjamin Netanyahu, he may instigate wars—or worse—as a means of evading his day of reckoning.
\n\nNonetheless, the only way out is through. Today, it is clear for all to see that there is no route to a better future that does not begin with building the capacity to resist the violence of the state.
\n\nUpdate: Three weeks after this text was published, the United States attacked Venezuela and ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good in cold blood in the streets of Minneapolis, fulfilling the foregoing predictions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/15.jpg\")
\nChiefly concerned with job security, Democratic politicians have sought to focus attention on the 2026 elections, even as Congress itself has been largely sidelined by the executive and judicial branches of government. The 2026 elections could be to Trump’s second term what the Mueller investigation was to his first: a spectacle that distracts people from the urgent matter of building real power. Regardless of how people vote, the elections will only matter if the balance of power shifts against Trump both in the streets and inside the state.
\n\nIn 2022, our comrades in Turkey reported a similar dynamic under Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan:
\n\n\n\n\nFor the past ten years, there has always been an election on the horizon that people hope will deal a death blow to Erdoğan… there have been no less than six of these elections, ranging from a referendum to presidential, parliamentary, and mayoral elections. Some of them were repeated until the “correct” result was delivered.
\n
Donald Trump has made it crystal clear that he will not leave power voluntarily. On October 23, Steve Bannon stated that there was a plan to arrange for him to serve a third term. Had there been no George Floyd uprising, Trump might well have succeeded in enlisting more elements of the state in his 2020 coup attempt. This time around, he has installed loyalists atop all of the agencies that refused to support him then. It is possible that he might conclude this term with his administration even more fractured than last time—but only if we exert considerable pressure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/24.jpg\")
Update your tactics before it’s too late.
\nIf Trump will not leave power voluntarily, we have to evaluate our protest strategies accordingly. We must build the capacity to exert leverage in ways that militarized occupiers cannot easily counter. The Democrats who have argued that Trump’s National Guard deployments were not necessary on the grounds that the demonstrators were not being unruly enough to warrant them are thinking in a way that can only serve Trump. Remaining sedate and well behaved will simply open the way for fascism. The question is not how to keep crowds under control, but how to become impossible to control.
\n\nEven those who only wish to for electoral victories must understand the importance of grassroots unrest, as we saw in 2020:
\n\n\n\n\nIn op-ed after op-ed, centrists expressed concern that the street confrontations of May and June 2020 might swing the election to Donald Trump. In fact, Democratic voter registration in June 2020 increased by 50%, while Republican voter registration grew by just 6% that month. Those who cited the protests as a factor in determining how they cast their ballots in 2020 voted for Joe Biden by a margin of fully 7%.
\n\nIn other words, the George Floyd Revolt helped get Biden elected.
\n\nAnd remember—the George Floyd Revolt did not begin with a voter registration drive. It got off the ground with the burning of a police precinct. According to a Newsweek poll, 54% of those surveyed believed that this was justified. If that had not occurred, the movement would not have succeeded in pushing the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others into public discourse, and there would have been no electoral gain for the Democratic Party. There is no way to create powerful movements without taking real action against the causes of injustice.
\n
Even if Trump is removed from power, whether by election or other means, authoritarianism is here to stay. Now that this is the ascendant model, we see politicians from across the political spectrum cozying up to the reigning despots—not just Eric Adams, but even Zohran Mamdani—or taking pages from their playbook, like Gavin Newsom. The Republican Party has been reinvented as the private vehicle of a single man; the Democrats who worked so hard to brand themselves as sanctimonious rule followers are hastening to emulate their rivals.
\n\nIf or when Trump loses control, a power struggle will ensue, and the winner could be an autocrat like himself—from either political party. This is yet another reason why, if we want to see real social change, we have to build grassroots movements that are not dependent upon representational politics, that can act effectively regardless of who holds office.
\n\nWe must make it clear to everyone that even the most well-meaning Democrats do not represent a real alternative, however they might update their campaign platforms. The Biden administration drove millions of people to vote for Trump because the Democrats failed to address the problems that capitalism is creating. If we manage to force Trump from power once more only to repeat this cycle yet again, the next wave of fascism will be more horrific than we can possibly imagine.
\n\nThe movement against Trump must dig deeper and look further than electoral politics. We must center practices that put power in the hands of ordinary people, pursuing a strategy that outflanks and delegitimizes party politics along with capitalism and the violence that sustains it. We have to dismantle the mechanisms that produce billionaires in the first place. We have already caught glimpses of what that can look like.
\n\nThe problem is much bigger than a single politician, party, or government. The same forces that brought Trump to power in the United States are bringing similar figures to power in Argentina, Chile, Europe. We are enduring the dying throes of a centuries-old social order that threatens to destroy us along with itself. We will only survive if we can solve the immediate problems we face in ways that enable us all to build a new way of life together. This is the secret promise of the rapid response networks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/17.jpg\")
Volunteers staffing a community defense center set up at Home Depot.
\nHow do you topple an autocrat?
\n\nFirst, identify segments of his support base that are not permanently committed to his reign,7 but whose backing is essential to keeping him in power. Analyze their interests. Identify what is more important to them than maintaining his reign. Think about their vulnerabilities. Then identify a form of activity that could put that segment of the autocrat’s supporters in a situation in which they will prefer to withdraw their support.
\n\nEngage in that activity—whatever it takes. Repeat as needed until enough sectors of society shift their commitments.
\n\nSomething like this occurred in summer 2020, when Trump concentrated federal agents in Portland in an effort to show his supporters in the capitalist class that he could successfully impose order and preserve business as usual. Essentially, he was attempting to provide proof of concept to potential investors in a coup. Because he failed, most major capitalists did not support his 2021 coup attempt. The credit for this goes to the crowds who showed up every night, whose courageous efforts not only defeated the federal agents but convinced elements of the ruling class that Trump’s efforts to remain in power would only endanger them.
\n\nThe anti-Tesla protests of spring 2025 demonstrated the effectiveness of this strategy. Facing a unified front of fascist demagogues, Christian nationalists, and tech billionaires, the protesters applied pressure to Tesla dealerships and achieved startling results within three months. Coincidentally or not, the fracturing of the alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk—one of the most powerful participants in Trump’s coalition—took place immediately before the June 2025 uprising in Los Angeles, distracting Trump at a crucial juncture.
\n\nIf we do not wish to live under the autocratic rule of Donald Trump or his successors for the rest\nof our lives, we will have to use direct action to break up his support base, compelling those who have remained passive to take a stand against him.
\n\nAnd then, we will have get to the root of the problem.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/21.jpg\")
\nWith the old institutions in disarray and faith in politicians at an all-time low, this would actually be an auspicious time for a powerful liberation movement—if only such a movement existed. The chief problem is not the strength of our enemies, but our own weakness.
\n\nCountless people on the receiving end of Trump’s policies experience a daily emotional reality of rage restrained by terror, in which the fear of state violence mounts at a pace that only barely keeps up with their fears for the future. Should cracks appear in Trump’s control—for example, if a movement emerges that can consistently outmaneuver his forces—it could unleash a tremendous amount of pent-up energy. Whoever can bring people together on that basis will open a path that millions will rush to tread.
\n\nThere will be no returning to Biden’s America. The destruction that Elon Musk and Donald Trump have wrought cannot be undone. But they have showed millions of people how urgently real change is needed. In the wreckage that they have created, it should be easy to make the case that our institutions of memory and care should never be at the mercy of a few narcissists. Everyone should be able to recognize that the legal system was only a few appointments away from tyranny all along, that the entire political system has always functioned to keep most people at a distance from their own agency.
\n\nIf nothing else, the lines are drawn clearly now. The far right can no longer pretend to oppose the billionaires who finance them; the billionaires can no longer pretend to be creating prosperity for all; the Zionists who threw their lot in with the Heritage Foundation can no longer pretend to represent resistance to fascism. Who can still pretend that Silicon Valley deepens our social ties, that Artificial Intelligence makes us more creative, that cryptocurrency enriches us? Those who made excuses for ICE and the police in 2020 must now see them for what they are, a reserve army waiting to serve any despot—just as they must see that borders are not lines between communities but open wounds within them.
\n\nAs we brace for the worst, we should also prepare proactively to bring about a best-case scenario. As terrifying as this situation is, if we survive, we will arrive in a different world. Right now, in the midst of battle, let’s identify what it will take to get there, popularize our proposals, and start to realize them together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/19.jpg\")
Demonstrators blocking a highway in Los Angeles.
\n\n\n\nIt’s you against the billionaires. At their disposal, they have all the wealth and power of the most formidable empire in the history of the solar system. All you have going for you is your own ingenuity, the solidarity of your comrades, and the desperation of millions like you. The billionaires succeed by concentrating power in their own hands at everyone else’s expense. For you to succeed, you must demonstrate ways that everyone can become more powerful. Two principles confront each other in this contest: on one side, individual aggrandizement at the expense of all living things; on the other, the potential of the individual to increase the self-determination of all human beings, all living creatures.
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/16/13.jpg\")
\n“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.” –Syriza Can’t Save Greece: Why There’s No Electoral Exit from the Crisis ↩
\n“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.” –From Democracy to Freedom ↩
\nWhile Henry Ford and Elon Musk share an affinity for fascism and white supremacy, Ford famously bought up all the stocks in his company in 1919 in order to take it private. By contrast, Musk made his billions largely as a consequence of stock market speculation, which has left Tesla stocks dramatically overvalued relative to the actual income that Tesla sales bring in. ↩
\nThose facing off against Donald Trump in the United States would do well to study resistance in China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and other authoritarian contexts. ↩
\nThe refrain of the democrat: “Take everything from me, but leave me the idea that I choose this state of affairs of my own free will!” ↩
\nIn August, one journalist had asked Where Have the Proud Boys Gone? Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point, sought to use the opportunity to set up chapters around the country. It remains to be seen to what extent they will succeed in expanding the grassroots reach of the far right, which no longer has the advantage of purporting to oppose the establishment. ↩
\nEspecially in the era of rage-driven social media, it can be tempting to focus on those who are most committed to supporting the autocrat, but that is a mistake. There is little to be gained by focusing on those who would sooner die than see their leader deposed. ↩
\nTwenty years ago, on November 13, 2005, Timur Kacharava, an anti-fascist and a hardcore musician, was murdered in a barbaric attack by neo-Nazis in the very center of St. Petersburg, Russia. Although for us, his death was not only a huge personal loss, but also an event that largely determined the further trajectory of our lives, we do not want this text to read as an obituary, a sentimental memoir, or a biographical note. The goal we are pursuing transcends all personal experience and individual biography.
\n\nIn his Theses on the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin left us a secret key to understanding how an appeal to the losses and unrealized possibilities of the past could operate. He argued that such an action can interrupt the linear course of historical time, suspend the present for a moment, however brief, and fill it with liberating significance. He called this “a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” Weak, because it has no external, transcendent justification beyond the logic immanent in historical processes. Messianic, because it can be transformed into action that brings humanity closer to liberation.
\n\nBy appealing to events that took place twenty years ago, we want to speak to the present and, first and foremost, to our friends and to those who may become our friends. Today, as neoliberal capitalism is rapidly transforming into outright fascism, we recognize the messianic appeal and acknowledge an obligation to interpret our own experience of loss and defeat as a collective promise charged with hope.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/17/1.jpg\")
Timur Kacharava in September 2005.
\nIn the late 1990s and early 2000s, as teenagers who had recently graduated from high school and started university, we first learned about the independent hardcore punk scene. Although St. Petersburg’s underground music scene had always been disruptive and diverse, this discovery was a real revelation for us. We encountered something that, as it seemed to us at the time, far surpassed musical subculture. Our spontaneous rejection of the world around us took on a constructive shape for the first time in our embracing of hardcore punk and DIY ethics. Music ceased to be an end in itself and became a form of being-together, a tool for building a community that existed according to its own autonomous rules in spite of cultural differences and state borders.
\n\nThese rules and principles were interpreted in different ways and took shape in constant disputes and disagreements and were influenced by the ideas of anti-fascism, veganism, and straight edge, actively practiced in our environment. In our own place of residence, we had to create this environment from scratch with our own limited resources: organizing concerts, publishing zines, distributing CDs and cassettes among interested friends and acquaintances. This unalienated activity gradually became for us a glimpse of another possible world, a point of entry into anti-fascism and anarcho-communism, a springboard to political action.
\n\nWe met Timur when he was only 14. This encounter, due to happenstance, was transformed into profound friendship and collective music making. Timur took from us what we had only recently taken from others. He was recording large quantities of tapes and CDs and photocopying various punk, hardcore, and anarchist publications.
\n\nWe rehearsed together long and hard, trying to learn to play instruments and create what would later be known as Sandinista! We walked together through the night city, its parks, outskirts, forests, and seashores. We listened to music, read Heartattack!, Inside Front, and Vzorvanoe Nebo [Exploded Sky], exchanged recordings, argued, participated in the first anti-fascist actions, prepared and distributed food to the homeless, and traveled to punk festivals and concerts in Moscow, Minsk, Warsaw, Riga, Vilnius, Prague, Pilsen, and Berlin. Our collaborative music-making gradually came to discover its own language, initially influenced by heavy hardcore bands of the 1990s such as Unbroken and “Rather Be Dead”-era Refused and later moved closer to the more raw and politicized hardcore/punk in the vein of Econochrist, Tragedy, and Catharsis.
\n\nToday, these recordings are still relevant to us both musically and substantially as a token of collective work whose overall result always exceeds the sum of the individual effort that was invested in it. At the same time, it is important to note that the final form of these songs should largely be credited to Timur’s restless enthusiasm and musical talent.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/17/2.jpg\")
Timur and Julia in 2003.
\nUnlike what was then a still emerging, small-scale anti-fascist movement, radical nationalists and neo-Nazis in Russia in the early 2000s had a developed infrastructure, their own combat units, and mass support among football hooligans. The murders of migrants, pogroms, and other crimes they committed often not only went unprosecuted but also received silent approval from the authorities and law enforcement.
\n\nWithout any tradition to fall back on, the anti-fascist movement in Russia initially developed from scratch, based on spontaneous reactions to neo-Nazi atrocities as a small and completely grassroots youth initiative. The official Soviet version of anti-fascism had by then completely lost all relevance and therefore had almost no relation to its emergence.
\n\nIn the early 2000s, Russia went through various stages of consolidation of state power and strengthening of law enforcement structures after the criminal redistribution of property and mass privatization of the 1990s. The role of nationalist rhetoric in these processes and the connection between the state apparatus and nationalist organizations were emotionally yet accurately described in several analytical articles by the anti-fascist civil rights activist Stanislav Markelov.
\n\nIn his essay “Patriotism as a Diagnosis,” he describes patriotism backed up by the criminal state as a disease of society, a tool for depoliticizing and maintaining a passive condition of silent majority and a tactic to distract attention from the real problem of growing social inequality.
\n\nMarkelov is best known as the lawyer of the plaintiff on the high-profile trial of colonel Budanov, who was accused of raping and murdering Elza Kungayeva, a teenage girl from Chechnya. Markelov’s uncompromising stance on nationalism and his consistent support for anti-fascists caused strong irritation not only among representatives of neo-Nazi groups, but also among nationalist-minded military and representatives of law enforcement structures.
\n\nOn January 19, 2009, several years after the murder of Timur Kacharava, Stanislav Markelov was murdered by a gunshot in the head in the center of Moscow. He was accompanied by a journalist, anti-fascist and environmental activist Anastasia Baburova. She was fatally wounded by shots and died in the hospital later the same day.
\n\nDuring the investigation, it was found that behind the murders of Markelov and Baburova was a neo-Nazi group, the Russian Nationalist Combat Organization. This group was later recognized as responsible for the murders of at least ten other people: anti-fascists, migrants, law enforcement officers, and martial arts athletes of non-Russian origin. Members of the group had access to the addresses and photographs of\nleft-wing activists from the database of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Center for Countering Extremism, and one of the group’s members had been a former Federal Security Service (FSB) employee.
\n\nAccording to our information, the attack on Timur was also not accidental and his killers were hunting him down specifically. We do not know for sure what caused such intense attention. Perhaps Timur turned heads at one of the anti-fascist actions by his striking appearance and eccentric behavior; it is also possible that his markedly non-Russian, in fact Georgian surname attracted attention. We can be certain that Timur had former friends who became neo-Nazis and knew his name and identity.
\n\nThe bloody street clashes between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists in Russia came to an end when the state completely monopolized the right to use violence. Right-wing radicals who did not fit into the system at that point became an irritation to the authoritarian regime and were crushed by repression. Those of them who proved their loyalty became part of the repressive apparatus themselves. The anti-fascist movement, on the other hand, turned into a full-on enemy of the state, which to this day is systematically persecuted, as we can see, for example, in the “Network” case. and more recent “Tyumen” case.
\n\nStanislav Markelov’s articles are important for understanding how the depoliticization, collapse of social relations, and resentment-based patriotism that accompanied the rise of capitalism contributed to the strengthening of an authoritarian political regime built around a cult of brute power. In 2022, these processes led to an aggressive imperialist war in Ukraine, the possibility of which Markelov was also able to foresee in his writings.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/17/4.jpg\")
An anti-fascist memorial action in St. Petersburg in the early 2000s.
\nAt first glance, it may seem that the struggle we waged was meaningless and doomed to fail from the outset. Today, we find ourselves in a world turned upside down, with appearances becoming more important than actual messages, language being emptied of meaning, and many concepts getting so subverted as to lose all significance. This emptiness simultaneously breeds suspicion of everything and, paradoxically, forces one to believe in the most irrational explanations of what is happening. In such a world, the fight against Nazism becomes a cover for imperialist ambitions that raze entire cities to the ground, while opposition to antisemitism is used to justify unprecedented genocide and cultural racism, which makes those who do not share a certain set of cultural values unworthy of all sympathy and deprives them of human status.
\n\nThe distorted mirror of representation, which has completely replaced lived reality, is a direct consequence of the aestheticization of politics, which Benjamin, already mentioned above, had warned about at the very dawn of our era.
\n\nContemporary capitalism is a continuation and a new stage in the development of the society of the Spectacle, which has become a Spectacle of technologically mediated communication; it has proved capable of absorbing, assimilating, distorting, and putting to use almost any liberating, potentially revolutionary idea.
\n\nIn his Practical Reason (1972), Pierre Bourdieu used the term doxa to refer to generally accepted truths and judgments that are not subject to questioning or critical reflection. He contrasts doxa with opinion—that which can be openly challenged and discussed. We must admit that many of our dreams have become the doxa of the left-liberal mainstream, the currency of cultural wars that numb and disarm us in the face of the real civil war that capital is waging against us with unwavering success.
\n\nBut to remember is to fight. This slogan of German anti-fascists, Erinnern heißt kämpfen, is not only a reference to the past. It is even more a call to action in the present. The memory of fallen comrades has no collective dimension unless it becomes part of the struggle, unless it recognizes and feels the “weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” We continue to disavow this corrupt and distorted world and call on you to fight for a new one, to fight alongside us, to fight better, more consciously, and more consistently than we have. We remain with those who are the living, with those who refuse to be victims, who refuse to bargain their oppression, who are ready to sacrifice themselves in this struggle against the multi-headed monster. But we ask you not to forget that even if we strike one of its heads, we can never be sure that a new one will not appear in its place. Our main goal is to strike the hydra in its heart. This heart is the very production of neoliberal subjectivity, the formatting of our relationships, ways of thinking, and lifestyles by capitalism.
\n\nDon’t forget that when we go on stage, we all become part of the Spectacle. So avoid identity, this hidden symbolic currency. People who refuse to play the identity game cannot be fully recognized in—and as—the system and therefore pose an invisible but real threat to it. Rejecting the omnipresent identity politics allows us to see each human being not as a collection of predetermined settings, but as a possibility, thus opening up a universalist dimension of living and being together.
\n\nGo into the shadows, be anonymous and invisible, look for safe ways to communicate, look for spaces that are inaccessible to control and surveillance. Hide in the cracks and crevices of this world. Only in such spaces are true friendship and real international solidarity possible today; only there can the living word and uncorrupted art exist, and communism still be possible.
\n\n\n\n\nNEIN, NO, NET!
\n\nNein! No! Net! That was the cry of those whose children were being murdered. That was the cry of the children who were frightened by the knocking on the door at night and the smell of blood, the knocking on the door at night and the smell. Stop them! stop! Stop them! stop! They don’t know they need freedom. They’ve forgotten that we need… Freedom! You are! My body! Libertad tu eres mi cuerpo! If we give nothing ourselves, we lock them in a cage. If we are incapable of sacrifice, then our way of life is a prison. And the more things and words we have in it, the sooner we all will suffocate. Libertad tu eres mi cuerpo! I still believe, i still know. I will be, i exist.
\n
NEIN, NO, НЕТ! You can find this song on bandcamp here.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/17/3.jpg\")
You can download the Sandinista! album here.
\nElbit Systems is Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. On September 8, 2021, Elbit announced it would open an “Innovation Center” in Cambridge, Massachusetts for its subsidiary company KMC Systems. The Innovation Center lasted less than three years before activists forced it to close.
\n\nLast year’s early-lease termination of the KMC office is the first time that activists in the United States have forced Elbit Systems to close a facility. It is also one of the few successes that the US Palestine solidarity movement has achieved since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza in 2023. This anonymously submitted analysis explores the year-long targeted direct action campaign that successfully evicted KMC Systems from Cambridge.
\n\nOn September 8, 2021, Israel’s largest weapons company announced that its subsidiary KMC Systems was opening an “Innovation Center” in the heart of downtown Cambridge. KMC Systems (henceforth referred to as its parent company, Elbit) explained the new facility as part of the company’s anticipated growth. Starting their expansion in Cambridge put the company within walking distance of its “top talent” recruitment pools of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While the city’s mayor gleefully cut Elbit’s red ribbon, activists took note. But they didn’t strike immediately.
\n\nIn nearby Somerville, many Palestine solidarity organizers had their hands full pressuring Puma to end its contract with the Israel Football Association. Others were quietly preparing to publish an interactive research project tracking Zionist collaboration across Massachusetts, known as The Mapping Project. Over a year passed before a protest was organized against Elbit, following the deadly raid that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) perpetrated against the Jenin refugee camp in January 2023.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/8.jpg\")
In December 2021, BDS Boston demonstrators forced Puma to temporarily shut down their outlet store.
\nDays later, a crowd of 300 people gathered at Cambridge City Hall and marched two blocks to disrupt the Innovation Center at 130 Bishop-Allen Drive. As the three-story building was surrounded by a sea of Palestinian flags, several dozen activists stormed the downstairs lobby. Keycard access-only elevators prevented activists from reaching the second floor where Elbit rented space. Instead, organizers gave speeches against the weapons company, disrupted work for the first-floor tenant, and left before police could carry out arrests. The march continued unimpeded to the nearby MIT campus.
\n\nMonths later, in April 2023, organizers called the first rally specifically singling out Elbit. A few dozen activists met up, marched through the street to the office, and yelled outside. A few weeks later, a May 15 Nakba Day rally-turned-march stopped at the Elbit facility. This time, someone spray-painted “Land Back” across the building before slipping back into the march.
\n\nSensing what might be coming, Elbit attempted to obscure its presence. After the two consecutive protests, it removed the KMC Systems logo from view and tinted the office windows. Too late.
\n\nThat spring, an activist group called BDS Boston declared a campaign to evict Elbit from Cambridge. They started by canvassing the businesses around Central Square where Elbit was located. By their third canvass, every business in the vicinity had been reached. Many were sympathetic; a few offered to display informational leaflets condemning their neighbor. Two blocks from the office, a popular Palestinian coffeehouse prominently displayed the flier at the register. One can only hope it spoiled the lunch break of at least one Elbit employee.
\n\nFrom April to October 2023, BDS Boston regularly canvassed the surrounding block. Often a few people, sometimes as many as twenty, would gather outside Elbit during the weekday and hand leaflets to passersby with information about the weapons company in their backyard. This early activity wasn’t confrontational, but it established a visual presence and routine of frequency that would be important in the months to come.
\n\nEarly canvassing efforts were also supported by the Filipino group Malaya Movement. In August, the group filed a policy order in the Cambridge City Council to support the Philippine Human Rights Act. In it was a clause condemning Elbit’s war crimes in the Philippines. The Cambridge City Council voted to remove all mention of Elbit.
\n\nBy early fall, messages such as “War criminals work at 130 Bishop-Allen Drive” and “Elbit out of Cambridge now!” were graffitied on sidewalks throughout the wealthy neighborhoods near the office, generating minor chatter on local Reddit threads.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/4.jpg\")
Elbit removed the address of its Cambridge facility from its website in October 2023. Activists publicized the information themselves.
\nOn October 7, 2023, the siege on Gaza was momentarily broken when 3000 militants led by the al-Qasam brigades overpowered the Zionist occupation by sea, in the air, and above and below the ground. The world was shocked; many anticipated the escalation in violence from the Israeli military that followed immediately after. An urgent momentum pulsed through the international Palestine movement. Demonstrations erupted everywhere. In Boston, hundreds of people took the streets in support of the resistance. One of the first major rallies in Boston focused on Elbit.
\n\nWithin a week, a new group modeled on the British direct action network Palestine Action (and briefly operating under the same name) prevented Elbit workers from accessing their Cambridge office. Before opening hours, three Palestine Action US activists barricaded the door to the building by bike-locking their necks to the door handles. One also dumped red paint across the sidewalk and spray-painted “Shut Elbit Down” on the building. Having successfully deterred the employees, the activists were able to unlock themselves and slip home right under the noses of the bewildered Cambridge police.
\n\nWithin a few hours, anonymous activists vandalized the building again. The walls were spray-painted with anti-Elbit slogans and the keycard machine was smashed. Four days later, anonymous activists hit the building once more, smashing keycard readers and dousing the building in red paint that took weeks to remove.
\n\nIntercontinental Real Estate, the real estate company that owns the Bishop-Allen building and leased the second floor to Elbit, was targeted a week later. Anonymous activists sprayed red paint across their office and smashed the keycard readers. A local news station was also covered in red paint.
\n\nDuring this time, BDS Boston transitioned from canvassing the sidewalk to picketing the office and announcing noise demonstrations. The small-to-medium crowds these regularly drew now brought megaphones and banners.
\n\nOn October 30, Palestine Action called a rally outside of the Elbit office. More than 200 people arrived. Police set up a perimeter of metal barricades around the building and staged officers behind them. The crowd chanted against the police for protecting a weapons company. Several people began pushing through the barricades toward the building. Unprepared, the police panicked. They snatched people from the crowd, tackling them and pepper-spraying wildly. One cop lost his footing on wet leaves and cartoonishly crashed into the sidewalk. Officers openly argued with each other about what to do. Activists de-arrested each other and pushed back against the police; some enthusiastically hurled eggs and smoke pellets at them.
\n\nAltogether, nine people were arrested on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to assault on an officer. All were released that same evening, and eventually, a judge dismissed all of their charges.
\n\nAfter the October 30 rally, Palestine Action dialed back on the Cambridge Elbit facility. The group called for a protest there on December 14, which was later quietly rescinded. Online, they promoted actions against Elbit Systems of America nationally, pushing people to get organized against the war machine, form affinity groups, and take direct action. In November, the group organized its last public action before disbanding. On November 20, activists descended on the Elbit manufacturing facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire. They bike-locked entrances, smashed glass doors, covered the building in paint, broke the HVAC system, and graffitied “Free Gaza, Fuck Elbit!” Four people were arrested; they ultimately served 40 days in jail and two years on probation.
\n\nAround Boston, various NGOs and the Democratic Socialists of America made futile appeals to Elizabeth Warren and other members of Congress to endorse a ceasefire. Local chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now briefly mimicked the performative arrest actions of Jewish activists that made headlines in DC and New York City. The Party for Socialism and Liberation wore people out marching outside empty consulate buildings and rallying over the weekends in public parks. Occasionally, unaffiliated activists staged disruptive actions against Boeing, Raytheon, and Boston trucking logistics.
\n\nMeanwhile, BDS Boston was brainstorming new ways to exert leverage against Elbit. By the end of October, the group launched a tertiary target campaign against the landlord, Intercontinental Real Estate. On social media, BDS Boston published the names, emails, and phone numbers of the three other companies renting space at 130 Bishop-Allen Drive. For the next ten months, the downstairs work-bar and the upstairs architecture firms received emails and phone calls about their neighbor on the second floor.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/1.jpg\")
BDS Boston outreach material about Elbit Systems in November 2023.
\nBDS activists were straining the relationships inside the building at the same time they were calling the real estate company themselves. When the landlord’s receptionist started hanging up calls, activists tried a new way to get through to the company. A local tenants union sent organizers into another of Intercontinental’s properties, a luxury apartment complex downtown. Activists canvassed the irritated residents about their landlord, Intercontinental Real Estate CEO “Peter ‘Genocide Profiteer’ Palandjian.” Complaints certainly got back to the company. By the time the tenants union organized a second canvass, private security was there waiting for them.
\n\nOn January 22, BDS Boston expanded its actions against Elbit to include investor JP Morgan Chase. That day, nearly 200 people marched to the Harvard Square Chase Bank branch. Acting on their own, a few individuals went ahead of the march and disrupted the branch office, yelling anti-Elbit chants and throwing bloodied prop money everywhere. Outside, activists picketed in a long, unbroken circle taking up the whole block. The branch closed for the day.
\n\nLess than a month later, hundreds of activists shut down a Chase Bank branch in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. A handful of people recreated the bloodied-money disruption; others brought rubble and bloodied linens to dump outside the entrance, creating a visual of the company’s investment in Elbit’s genocide. The large crowd blocked entry to the bank until it closed for the day, then shut down traffic in the adjoining intersection, where speakers from Palestinian Youth Movement praised direct actions interrupting the US-Zionist war machine. Others spoke in support of Palestinian armed resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/9.jpg\")
JP Morgan Chase’s Form 13F filing with the SEC in May 2024 showed a 70% reduction in Elbit shares held, with its holdings falling from shares worth a total of $54 million to just $16 million.
\nSimilar actions recurred a few more times. BDS Boston would announce a branch location, usually drawing over 100 people. As the crowd picketed the location and physically prevented people from accessing the branch, others acted autonomously as they saw fit, usually by throwing prop-money inside the branch or dumping rubble, paint, and bloodied linens at the doorway. Each action succeeded in closing the branch for the day. Only once was someone arrested for allegedly dumping rubble, and that person’s charge was eventually dismissed.
\n\nOn April 17, 2024, Columbia students took over the lawn in a Student Encampment for Gaza. Police raided them the following day. When Columbia students’ tents sprang back up, they were not alone. Within a week, similar protests erupted across the country. In Boston, students set up camps at Harvard, MIT, Emerson, Boston University, and Northeastern.
\n\nDays before this “student intifada,” BDS Boston simultaneously disrupted four Chase Bank branches across the city. This was the last of the bank protests until mid-summer, and the penultimate such protest of the whole campaign. Most Palestine organizers were directing their energy to sustaining the camps throughout the city.
\n\nDisruptions targeting Elbit didn’t pick back up again until the end of May. Riding the energy of the student encampments and the Chase Bank disruptions, picketers began coming out in larger numbers and with greater appetite to take the intersection outside of the Elbit office. At least 50 people repeatedly showed up and blocked cars from turning onto Bishop-Allen Drive, usually resulting in petty pushing matches with otherwise impotent Cambridge police. The protesters always stood their ground.
\n\nIn February, BDS Boston organizers had learned that Elbit employees didn’t have to come to the office on days when there was a protest. Pickets resumed regularly. By early May, the Chase Bank actions had decreased in frequency. JP Morgan Chase SEC filings showed a 70% reduction in Elbit shares, dropping their holdings from $56 Million to $16 Million. Activists kept phone-blitzing the other businesses in Elbit’s building throughout spring and summer. Furious secretaries occasionally relayed the message that the landlord was trying to break the lease with Elbit as soon as possible. Organizers took this as encouragement, but treated it as nothing more than a rumor. If true, it was time to double down against the landlord.
\n\nIn late June, more than 100 people gathered in Harvard Square to do just that. The crowd marched a mile north to the $15 million home of Intercontinental Real Estate CEO Peter Palandjian. Rallying outside the yellow mansion, activists blasted Palandjian for cashing “blood money rent checks” and demanded that he immediately evict Elbit. Annoyed neighbors decried the noisy midday disruption. Activists plastered his street with pictures of his face, captioned: “WANTED FOR CASHING IN ON GENOCIDE. TELL YOUR NEIGHBOR TO EVICT THEIR GENOCIDAL TENANT.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/7.jpg\")
In late June 2024, protesters gathered at the $15 million home of Intercontinental Real Estate Corporation CEO Peter Palandjian, demanding he evict Elbit’s medical subsidiary KMC from its “Cambridge Innovation Center.”
\nIn July, BDS Boston and Palestinian Youth Movement called for a week of action. The goal was to increase Boston community engagement with the Elbit campaign, planning something every day of the week. PYM led a Palestine 101 workshop over a kick-off dinner, presenting to over 100 people. The next morning, a crowd shut down the Harvard Square Chase Bank branch from the moment it opened until closing time. Later, PYM hosted a Tatreez workshop, followed by a No Tech for Apartheid teach-in.
\n\nThe following evening, BDS Boston and PYM held an 18-hour picket outside the Elbit office. By day, activists picketed Elbit and chanted in support of the resistance. A People’s University for Palestine teach-in was set up right in the middle of the street. By night, the demonstration became a vigil and memorial for Palestinian martyrs. Only once did an agitator try to disrupt it: one night, a lone man with a sound cart interrupted the vigil with an Arabic-language recording of Zionist propaganda. Activists collectively shouted him down, surrounding him with kuffiyehs and eventually outlasting him.
\n\nLater, the space was converted again. Activists set out tarps and pillows and got comfortable in the street. They projected Tell Your Tale Little Bird, a documentary about Palestinian women resistance fighters, against the concrete wall of the building. For the whole night, the intersection belonged to the protest.
\n\nOn another night, a few dozen activists returned to the landlord’s house in North Cambridge. Near 2 am, they gathered outside his front yard, banging noisemakers and shouting demands to evict Elbit. As private security chased and attempted to film the protesters, an irate Palandjian stumbled onto the porch, yelling in his underwear.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/10.jpg\")
Police surveil Palestine solidarity demonstrators on September 2, 2024.
\nBy the end of the summer, the campaign had gained traction. Direct action against Elbit was a cornerstone of Palestine organizing in Boston. BDS Boston staged weekly pickets outside the office, taking more space and becoming increasingly comfortable pushing back police. Peter Palandijian was growing irritated. The upstairs tenants passed on rumors that most Elbit employees had started to work from home. The office was nearly always vacant.
\n\nOn August 18, the Cambridge Day local news reported the office was empty. Elbit confirmed this publicly: they were gone. A few days later, activists held a march to celebrate. They took over the intersection below the now-empty office on the second floor, where flecks of red paint were still visible under the drawn window shades. Someone adjusted the usual chant “Elbit is not welcome here” to “Elbit is no longer here!” The crowd cheered. Hot-headed police repeatedly threatened to arrest activists, brandishing zip-ties, but the activists were undeterred.
\n\nSomeone got on the megaphone. “You will not hear the word ‘victory’ from BDS Boston’s lips until Elbit Systems is completely dismantled. Until Palestine is completely liberated. Instead, you’ll hear us say: onward.”
\n\nThe year-long campaign to evict Elbit Systems was animated by four groupings: the independent activist group BDS Boston, the direct action network Palestine Action, the Palestinian community group Palestinian Youth Movement, and anonymously acting individuals and affinity groups. Together, this constellation cut a new path for Palestine solidarity in Boston and for protest in the city in general.
\n\nThis campaign was unique in the Boston Palestine ecosystem. Instead of pandering to city or federal politicians, it focused on impeding a specific unit of the Zionist war economy. The campaign also differed from one-off actions at Boeing and Raytheon sites. Disruptions against Elbit were routine, occurring almost weekly for the better part of year. Leasing office space in a shared building was a particular vulnerability activists were correct in exploiting.
\n\nThe campaign was most led by independent, autonomous groups with strong political lines supporting each other’s tactics. The Elbit campaign rejected symbolic arrests and peace-policing. When people gathered in a crowd—whether of 20 or 200—it was to impede work, not march symbolically. Those who used megaphones praised those who used spray paint cans. This is a meaningful departure from the timid NGO-locomotive that typically drives Boston protests.
\n\nAnd it worked.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/2.jpg\")
Activists shut down Elbit Systems in October 2023.
\nHere follow some individual reflections on the campaign.
\n\nAfter October 7, the first actions at the Elbit office were vandalism. The building was graffitied and doused in paint three times in four days. Its keycard reader was smashed, as was the keycard reader at the Intercontinental Real Estate office. A local news station was doused in red paint. These actions occurred frequently—and the police had no leads, with the exception of one person who took public credit for one vandalism (their charges were later dropped by a judge). All of the anonymous vandalism was openly celebrated by the public-facing organs of the Elbit campaign.
\n\nThe October 30 rally immediately followed this slew of paint actions. Predicting more vandalism, the police cordoned off the building with metal fencing and surrounded it. Protesters didn’t accept this turn of events, pushing through the police line and hurling eggs and smoke pellets at police. This was a major departure from the docile rallies Cambridge police had come to expect—and it showed in their aggravated and dysfunctional response.
\n\nTogether, the weeks of vandalism followed by the confrontational demonstration signaled a willingness to escalate against Elbit. This specter lurked behind all future protests. It likely contributed to the work-from-home option Elbit eventually gave employees in response to protests. This was a useful leverage point for activists, turning less-confrontational protests into deterrents to come to work. Frequent protests meant fewer employees coming into work, which rendered the physical office a redundant business cost.
\n\nBy October, BDS Boston started a tertiary target campaign against the Cambridge “Innovation Center.” Over the next ten months, the group would experiment with three different types of tertiary targets: the landlord, Elbit Systems investors, and clients of KMC Systems.
\n\nGoing after KMC Systems’ clients was the least-explored of the tertiary target campaigns. BDS Boston only organized two phone blitzes demanding that clients cut ties with the Elbit subsidiary. Once, the group called for a rally outside a research and development summit where KMC and its clients were present.
\n\nBDS Boston spent more time protesting Elbit investor JP Morgan Chase. The group organized several successful disruptions at a handful of consumer branches across greater Boston. The direct impact of these protests on Elbit was likely negligible, but they substantially benefitted BDS Boston itself. The group swelled in numbers during the bank protests, drawing more than 100 people each time. Protests at Chase Bank were always on weekends, providing the opportunity to be involved for those who couldn’t make the Elbit office pickets during the work week. Repeated success in closing branches with minimal effort built momentum and confidence that showed up later at pickets.
\n\nThe most effective tertiary target was the landlord, Intercontinental Real Estate. This was both the weakest link in the chain and the most consequential. It was easy for protesters to make Elbit a business liability for Intercontinental on several fronts.
\n\nThe fact that Elbit shared the building with several other businesses represented a vulnerability. Disruptions outside the building (vandalism, noisy picketing, clashes with police) irritated the other tenants. Wearing down the other tenants, canvassing other Intercontinental properties, and showing up at Palanjian’s home at all hours made it easier to let the lease lapse.
\n\nGroups that can analyze targets, experiment with tactics, and integrate strategic lessons are indispensable to winning campaigns. Palestine Action US disbanded after two actions. By November 2023, the anonymous vandalism at Elbit had ended. Palestinian Youth Movement got involved in 2024, after the campaign outlasted other local initiatives. Were it not for BDS Boston’s unwavering focus and repeated actions against Elbit over the course of a year, the “Innovation Center” might never have closed.
\n\nIt was easy to get distracted after October 7, 2023. The Toufan al-Aqsa operation and Israel’s resulting scorched-earth policy generated unforeseen public support for Palestine. Masses of people flooded the streets looking to take action. Many groups called protests all over the city—protests with shifting targets and little strategy. BDS Boston was a joinable organization with an active campaign against a sensible target; this offered a meaningful way to get involved.
\n\nThe politics of BDS Boston also played an important role. BDS Boston is not an NGO, but an independent political group; it does not focus on appealing to politicians, but on direct action. The group supports Palestinian resistance and is staunchly anti-Zionist. Around Boston, it distinguished itself by supporting The Mapping Project, an online resource tracking Zionist collaboration in Massachusetts; BDS Boston weathered a public feud with the BDS National Committee in Ramallah, which denounced that project.
\n\nThese political distinctions aren’t trivial. They are important guardrails against cooptation. It’s no coincidence that BDS Boston helped make space for a campaign that broke away from NGO protest norms.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/6.jpg\")
A demonstration outside the offices of Elbit in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 30, 2023.
\nThe state inevitably responds to effective action. Smart campaigns seek to minimize, leverage, or crush the countermeasures that the authorities take against them without capitulating to intimidation. Activists must stay abreast of the shifting terrain of repression in order to minimize the damage it can do.
\n\nFollowing the slew of vandalism against the Elbit facility, building security increased to a round-the-clock stakeout by Cambridge Police and private security personnel. Usually, there was never more than one guard, numbing himself with cellphone blue-light and drive-thru fast food to bear the boring night shifts. This minor adjustment was evidently enough to deter vandalism. Who knows what the vandals’ strategic calculations were; still, it’s worth stating that activists don’t always have to be on the back foot with police.
\n\nThat much was evident at the October 30 rally, when the rowdiness of the crowd caught police off guard. How much more could have been achieved with a bit more coordination? By December, police were showing up more prepared.
\n\nPalestine Action intended to hold another rally outside the facility on December 14, but quietly canceled it. The only ones who showed up were the police. That morning, photos went viral showing Cambridge Police staging two snipers on the roof of a business directly across from Elbit. Activists were right to use the resulting scandal to their advantage. While some anti-police advocates turned out to City Hall decrying the disproportionate show of force, anti-Elbit organizers played up the tension with Elbit’s co-tenants: Why is an architect coming to work under the scope of a sniper?
\n\nThe three strategic pivots in response to the increased police presence at the facility between October and December were an outright end to vandalism, the scandal about the snipers, and a shift to tertiary targets. The latter move opened new spaces to gather and gain confidence when organizers felt the Elbit site was “too hot.”
\n\nFollowing the success of this campaign, police have been expanding their toolkit. By summer 2024, three flock AI license plate reading cameras were installed on the Bishop-Allen building, and another at the entrance of the Intercontinental Real Estate office. For now, these are some of the only Flock cameras in the state of Massachusetts. Police are also requesting new surveillance camera installations around Cambridge, starting with Central Square.
\n\nThis is not a recipe for shutting down Elbit offices. Each campaign confronts a unique convergence of forces. In sharing this story, we hope to share how some organizers assessed their specific situation and uplifted each other’s tactics to win.
\n\nIn addition to a strong analysis, Boston activists were consistent. Whether it was an individual or small group acting by night, a few dozen activists picketing Elbit during business hours, or hundreds shutting down Chase Bank on the weekend, there was activity against Elbit nearly every week for one year.
\n\nIf you are reading this east of the Mississippi, you are within hours of an Elbit facility. With dedication, you can change that.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/3.jpg\")
Activists shut down Elbit Systems in October 2023.
\nAugust 3, 2023: BDS Boston and Malaya Movement canvass outside Elbit.
\nAugust 21, 2023: BDS Boston canvasses outside of Elbit.
\nSeptember 7, 2023: BDS Boston canvasses outside of Elbit.
\nOctober 12, 2023: Three Palestine Action activists bike-lock their necks to the entrance of the Elbit office, blocking employees from entering. Someone pours red paint all over the sidewalk. “Shut Elbit Down” is spray-painted on the building. That night, the building is vandalized again, spray-painted with “Elbit Makes Genocide,” “Fuck Elbit,” and “Elbit Get Out.” The key-card machine is smashed.
\nOctober 16, 2023: During the night, anonymous activists douse the Elbit building in red paint and graffiti it with “Elbit Arms Genocide.” The keycard reader is also smashed. This is the third consecutive vandalism against the Elbit office in four days.
\nOctober 18, 2023: Elbit removes the Cambridge office from its website.
\nOctober 24, 2023: Sometime in the night anonymous activists target the office of Elbit’s Cambridge landlord. The Intercontinental Real Estate office is sprayed with red paint; its keycard readers are smashed.
\nOctober 30, 2023: 200 activists rally outside the Elbit office. Many push through police barricades; several hurl eggs and smoke pellets at Cambridge Police. Nine are arrested, though a judge eventually dismisses all charges.
\nEarly November, 2023: Activists disrupt a career fair at Wentworth University sponsored by Elbit Systems, at which KMC Systems also had a recruiting table.
\nNovember 2, 2023: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nNovember 5, 2023: Multiple blocks of Cambridge’s Central Square are chalked with the names of Palestinian martyrs.
\nNovember 17, 2023: Tufts University students blockade the administrator building for several hours demanding divestment from Israel. A few savvy students in the blockade use the school’s personnel website to learn the names of the campus police responding to the action and begin chants addressing each police officer by name.
\nNovember 26, 2023: Activists disrupt a baggage claim area at Boston Logan airport in protest of Boeing. One activist is arrested. Several dozen more continue to rally outside the airport for a few hours.
\nDecember 2, 2023: BDS Boston picket outside Elbit.
\nDecember 13, 2023: Puma announces it will no longer sponsor the Israel Football Association (IFA).
\nDecember 14, 2023: Cambridge Police are photographed staging snipers on the roof across the street from Elbit in anticipation of a protest.
\nDecember 16 2023: Activists gather for a “family-friendly” protest at Cambridge City Hall. Free food is served, several speeches take place, and attendees dance dabke together on the City Hall lawn. Activists spray-paint yard signs reading “ELBIT OUT OF CAMBRIDGE” and chalk the steps of City Hall with anti-Elbit slogans.
\nDecember 18, 2023: More than 50 activists block trucks in the rain at a shipping terminal in Boston to protest the blocking of aid trucks at the Rafah crossing.
\nJanuary 1, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside Elbit.
\nJanuary 17, 2024: Activists block the entrance to a Raytheon manufacturing facility in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. Red paint appears on the Raytheon sign.
\nJanuary 20, 2024: More than 100 people shut down a Chase Bank branch in Harvard Square. Activists disrupt the branch by throwing bloodied money, preventing people from entering, and picketing outside.
\nFebruary 8, 2024: Activists disrupt BNY Mellon, an investor in Elbit Systems, at their Boston office, throwing bloodied-money and chanting anti-Elbit slogans.
\nFebruary 11, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nFebruary 17, 2024: More than 100 people shut down a Chase Bank branch in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Activists disrupt the branch by throwing bloodied money, dumping rubble and bloodied linens at the entrances, preventing people from entering, and picketing outside. After the branch closes early, activists take over the adjoining intersection to give speeches in support of the Palestinian armed resistance.
\nFebruary 21, 2024: Activists learn that Elbit employees can work remotely on days there is a protest. BDS Boston schedules a picket outside Elbit at 9 am.
\nFebruary 27, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nFebruary 29, 2024: Activists block the entrance of the Elbit facility in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. Six are arrested.
\nMarch 4, 2024: More than 50 people block trucks at a Boston shipping zone for an hour to protest the blocking of aid trucks in Gaza.
\nMarch 7, 2024: BDS Boston protests outside of MassMEDIC, a medical device manufacturing summit, over Elbit’s participation. Activists demand KMC Systems clients end their contracts.
\nMarch 9, 2024: More than 100 people shut down a Chase Bank branch at the Prudential Center mall in Boston. Activists disrupt the branch by throwing bloodied money, dumping rubble and bloodied linens at the entrances, preventing people from entering, and picketing outside.
\nMarch 19, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nMarch 22, 2024: Seven people block the entrance of the Elbit manufacturing facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire using lock boxes.
\nMarch 26, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit. Elbit releases its 2023 financial results to shareholders.
\nMarch 30, 2024: Activists block traffic for Palestinian Land Day on the Longfellow Bridge using chains and bike locks.
\nApril 6, 2024: Palestinian Youth Movement and BDS Boston hold a joint demonstration against Elbit.
\nApril 15, 2024: Activists simultaneously disrupt four Chase Bank branches across Boston by throwing bloodied money and chanting anti-Elbit slogans.
\nApril 17, 2024: Columbia University students camp out on the lawn for Gaza, sparking a national wave of student encampments. Within a week, Boston campuses recreate the action with camps springing up at Emerson, Northeastern, MIT, Harvard, Boston University, and Tufts.
\nMay 15, 2024: Palestine solidarity activists protest around the city for Nakba day. Anti-Elbit graffiti appears around Boston. JP Morgan Chase SEC filings show a 70% reduction in Elbit shares.
\nMay 29, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit. Activists drop a banner reading ELBIT KILLS from the Charles Bridge.
\nJune 5, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nJune 12, 2024: Activists occupy the lobby of Boeing. Barricading themselves inside, they prevent a gathering crowd of employees and police from entering. After an hour, the activists leave together, without arrests.
\nJune 12, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nJune 26, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nJune 29, 2024: 100 activists march to Peter Palandjian’s house for a noise demonstration. Palandjian is the CEO of Intercontinental Real Estate, the landlord leasing office space in Cambridge to Elbit.
\nJuly 3, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nJuly 12, 2024: Start of the BDS Boston and Palestinian Youth Movement week of action. Over 100 people join the welcome dinner and Palestine 101 workshop.
\nJuly 13, 2024: BDS Boston shuts down the Chase Bank branch in Harvard Square from open to close. Activists blocked the entrances with lockboxes and human chains.
\nJuly 15, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit for 18 hours. Teach-ins happen throughout the day. By night, the picket converts into a vigil for martyrs, and then a movie screening. Activists hold the intersection outside the office for the entire time.
\nLate July 2024: Activists hold a noise demo outside Peter Palandjian’s home at 2 am.
\nJuly 24, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nJuly 31, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nAugust 7, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nAugust 14, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nAugust 21, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nAugust 26, 2024: BDS Boston pickets outside of Elbit.
\nSeptember 2, 2024: BDS Boston calls for a march and rally outside of the Elbit office to celebrate the early termination of the lease.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/10/5.jpg\")
Palestine solidarity demonstrators march to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on September 2, 2024.
\nFrom sabotaging hunts and abattoirs to exposing cruelty through covert investigations, Karl Garside was among Britain’s most prolific Animal Liberation Front militants, dedicating over 40 years to the fight for total liberation.
\n\nOne of the brightest flames in Britain’s animal rights movement has gone out. Karl Garside, Animal Liberation Front (ALF) militant, hunt saboteur, and investigator has passed away aged 59 from heart disease. For more than four decades on the front lines of the fight for animal liberation, Karl fearlessly took direct action to end animal abuse. Across those years of action, he was involved in more actions claimed by the ALF than any other individual, which would make him Britain’s most prolific ALF activist.
\n\nKarl was born in Birkenhead in March 1966. In the mid-1970s, his family settled in Altrincham, Greater Manchester. In 1983, aged 17, he threw himself into the fight for animal liberation, going vegan and skipping classes at Trafford College to disrupt the Grand National horse race by invading the course. That same year saw him carry out his first ALF action at Mister Monty Furs, smashing windows and cycling home in a balaclava. He became a member of the Northern Animal Liberation League (NALL), quickly rising to prominence.
\n\nThe following year, Karl conducted undercover reconnaissance at the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) laboratories in Alderley Edge, dressing in a suit and pretending to attend a job interview ahead of a major raid. That April, he was part of a mass raid by NALL, when around 300 activists stormed and occupied the ICI labs.
\n\nThat year also saw Karl become an active member of Manchester Hunt Saboteurs, primarily targeting the Holcombe Hunt. Opposing fox hunting became one of Karl’s greatest passions and he dedicated much of his life to confronting hunts directly. He was integral to establishing the Hunt Retribution Squad (HRS), which warned the frequently violent Holcombe Hunt that any harm done to saboteurs would provoke direct retaliation.
\n\nIn August 1984, he was one of 200 activists who took part in the Eastern Animal Liberation League’s raid on the Unilever research laboratories in Bedford, where animal experimentation took place, while a demonstration took place at the front. Karl was among 25 people convicted of conspiracy to burgle, with combined sentences totaling 41 years. He served eight months in prison for his part in the raid, but this didn’t deter him.
\n\nWhile awaiting trial, Karl participated in coordinated ALF attacks on the House of Fraser store in Altrincham, smashing 22 plate-glass windows overnight with ball-peen hammers to highlight and disrupt the chain’s sale of fur. Karl and his then-partner were released from prison just after Christmas in 1986. They celebrated the end of their parole the following year by helping dismantle a monument local hunt saboteurs had stolen from Wemmergill Moor, a notorious grouse-shooting estate. After carving “Hunt Retribution Squad” into the monument, they delivered it directly to the British Association of Shooting and Conservation headquarters, locking the gates shut with bicycle locks. Karl insisted the statue be prominently re-erected outside their entrance in protest against grouse shooting.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/20/1.jpg\")
Karl (left) on the autumn 1992 cover of HOWL, sabbing a grouse shoot.
\nKarl rapidly became a key figure in organizing national hits against hunts notorious for cruelty. He coordinated major actions against the Beaufort Hunt following the infamous exhumation incident and helped establish the annual Cumbria “fell weeks” alongside his friend and fellow hunt saboteur Dave Callender. These were week-long operations in March when many hunts had already packed up for the season, disrupting a different pack each day across harsh mountainous terrain. Up to 100 activists from the North and Midlands came together under one roof, working side by side for six days of relentless sabbing.
\n\nKarl also played a key role in national actions against the Altcar hare coursing event and the Quantock Staghounds. After fell week, through the nineties, he and others kept the pressure up by hitting a different Saturday hunt still running late in the season. The approach was simple: no tolerance for nonsense. If hunters kicked off, they got it back and Karl made sure of that. Terrier men who thought they could get away with violence quickly learned otherwise. Many late-season Saturday meets in March and April descended into pitched battles that even the authorities couldn’t control.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/20/2.jpg\")
Karl (left) and Dave Callender (right), calling the pack away from a hunt on Blencathra during a fell week.
\nFamously, on the night his daughter was born, while other new fathers were calling relatives from the hospital payphone, Karl was busy using it to coordinate a hunt sab for the following morning. After leaving Manchester, he remained deeply committed, on various occasions sabbing with groups from Aberystwyth, Liverpool, and Sheffield. He also sabbed extensively in Surrey and throughout Wales.
\n\nKarl’s activism evolved with the movement. While he was known for hunt sabbing during a particularly violent era, he also took part in a wide range of clandestine actions. These actions were intended to stop abuse, expose cruelty, and increase the cost of complicity.
\n\nFrom the late eighties onwards, Karl became a key figure in ALF campaigns, working closely with a small circle of trusted activists to carry out direct action against a wide range of targets involved in animal exploitation. These included companies that supplied laboratory staff, farms involved in egg and dairy production, slaughterhouses, meat wholesalers, and businesses linked to hunting and bloodsports. At its peak in the 1980s and ’90s, the rolling waves of economic sabotage that the ALF unleashed on vehicles and buildings caused damage running into many tens of millions of pounds.
\n\nWhile the ALF is best known for liberating animals, Karl specialized in property damage. He acted both to stop animal abuse and to deter those responsible from continuing their harm. In 1993, Karl joined the fire brigade, motivated by a desire to gain the practical skills and training he needed to become a more effective activist for the ALF. His time in the fire service didn’t last long and he quickly returned to full-time animal rights activism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/20/3.jpg\")
Karl (in green joggers), sabbing the Royal Rock Beagles in Little Barrow, Cheshire, 1995.
\nThe Consort Beagle Campaign began in late 1996, targeting a breeding facility near Ross-on-Wye where around 800 puppies were kept in wire mesh cages for vivisection. In early 1997, during a protest marking Barry Horne’s first hunger strike, activists broke in and rescued ten puppies. Sixteen more were later liberated in ALF actions. Karl was among those who broke into the site and freed a beagle. The campaign escalated when hundreds of activists tore down fencing and overwhelmed police at a World Day for Animals in Laboratories demo. After just ten months of intense pressure, Consort closed and around 200 beagles were rehomed.
\n\nBuilding on that success, the campaign to close Hillgrove Farm in Oxfordshire began in 1997, targeting a profitable cattery that bred cats for laboratories in the UK and abroad. Daily protests, nighttime vigils, and home visits to staff made Hillgrove a national focus for the anti-vivisection movement. On World Day 1998, 1500 activists confronted police and tore at the fencing surrounding the farm, while others damaged the owner’s property. Karl played a decisive role in the campaign, which saw over 350 arrests and 21 prison sentences. After nearly two years of sustained pressure, the farm closed in August 1999 and 800 cats were rehomed. It remains one of the most significant victories in British animal rights history.
\n\nAfter the Hillgrove campaign, Karl and his young family moved to Surrey, where they lived on a narrowboat. Momentum continued with the campaign to shut down Shamrock Farm, the UK’s only importer of primates for laboratories. Beginning in 1998, Save the Shamrock Monkeys (SSM) organized a mix of protests, all-night vigils, and large national demos. Despite a £3 million annual turnover, the facility lasted less than 16 months under pressure. Karl took part in the campaign, which ended in March 2000 when the site announced its closure following an arson attack on a director’s car. Although Shamrock claimed its primates would be humanely relocated, all were sold to laboratories. The closure marked another landmark victory in the fight against vivisection suppliers.
\n\nAfter Shamrock, the fight turned to Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), the largest animal testing laboratory in Europe. In 1999, the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign was launched with the goal of closing HLS through sustained pressure on its clients, suppliers, and financial backers. Karl joined the campaign early on, taking part in direct actions across the UK and putting pressure on staff at all levels of HLS. SHAC became one of the most high-profile and heavily policed animal rights campaigns in British history. Despite intense state repression, including surveillance, raids, and long prison sentences for organizers, the campaign succeeded in cutting HLS off from banks, insurers, and many corporate partners. Karl remained active throughout SHAC’s peak years, supporting actions that exposed the cruelty inside the labs and challenged the corporations funding it.
\n\nWhile living in Surrey, Karl and his family played a central role in the Surrey Anti-Hunt Campaign, a focused effort to shut down the Old Surrey, Burstow, and West Kent Hunt. Launched in the wake of a near-fatal incident in 2000 in which saboteur Steve Christmas was run over and seriously injured by a hunt vehicle, the campaign applied the same uncompromising tactics used successfully against animal testing suppliers. For several years, Karl helped organize sustained pressure on the hunt and its supporters, combining regular sabbing with public outreach, intelligence gathering, and targeted actions. It was one of the first campaigns in the UK to treat a fox hunt as a primary target rather than a weekly opponent, and helped establish a new model for anti-hunting activism.
\n\nKarl also supported the SPEAK campaign (originally launched as SPEAC, Stop Primate Experiments at Cambridge) from 2002 to 2007. The campaign, run by his friend Mel Broughton, successfully pressured the University of Cambridge to abandon plans for a new primate testing lab, citing financial risk. After that victory, the campaign shifted focus to Oxford University, where a new animal research facility was under construction. Over the next three years, SPEAK delayed the project through sustained protest and action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/20/4.jpg\")
Karl in the field during a covert investigation.
\nFollowing earlier successes in direct action, Karl spent the final decade of his life focused on covert investigations, while continuing to take part in direct action until 2020. In 2014, he founded the Hunt Investigation Team (HIT), a grassroots collective dedicated to exposing cruelty and illegality within hunts through covert surveillance and evidence gathering. HIT quickly gained a reputation for its professionalism and impact. That same year, during the badger cull, Karl was arrested for aggravated trespass while sabbing. Despite focusing increasingly on investigative work, he remained committed to frontline action.
\n\nAs the founder of HIT, he oversaw some of the most impactful exposés in the British animal rights movement. In 2016, HIT’s footage led to an official investigation into the South Herefordshire Hunt after evidence emerged of fox cubs being thrown to hounds in a kennel yard. As a result of HIT’s investigation, the South Herefordshire Hunt disbanded entirely. The following year, HIT exposed illegal hunting and wildlife persecution on the Moscar grouse shooting estate, revealing the use of snares and traps targeting protected species.
\n\nIn 2018, the team revealed that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had hired a known blood-sports enthusiast to kill wildlife on conservation land, leading to a backlash that forced the organization to cancel the contract. That same year, they captured footage of a badger caught in an illegal snare set by a hunt master and filmed another badger dying slowly during the Cumbria cull, raising serious concerns about the cruelty of government-sanctioned wildlife management.
\n\nKarl also turned the lens on the meat and fur industries. In 2019, footage Karl obtained from a Welsh abattoir showing disturbing abuse of animals triggered a criminal investigation. In 2020, they returned to Moscar and also filmed inside Gressingham Foods’ duck slaughterhouse, exposing brutal handling of animals. That year they uncovered the activities of a lone trapper in South Wales who was snaring, killing, and skinning foxes to sell their pelts, offering a rare glimpse into the UK’s connection to the global fur trade.
\n\nIn 2021 and 2022, Karl and HIT carried out a series of high-profile investigations that made national headlines. They filmed hounds being shot dead at the Beaufort Hunt’s kennels and exposed routine abuse at farms supplying the organic and dairy sectors. One of the most politically sensitive investigations came in 2022 when HIT revealed wildlife crime on the estate of William van Cutsem, a close friend of Prince William. The exposé prompted a police raid and widespread media coverage. Footage Karl helped obtain also contributed to successful prosecutions of fox hunters brought by the League Against Cruel Sports.
\n\nIn the final months of his life, Karl had begun working full time as an investigator for the League Against Cruel Sports, continuing his lifelong mission to expose animal cruelty. On his final day, he rescued hens from a so-called free-range farm before heading out for a run.
\n\nFor his entire adult life, Karl was the tenacious, driven, ruthlessly obsessed man that we all knew. Nothing could shake him from his chosen path. He had a brain that was unrivalled, able to think outside the box, able to inspire love and devotion and loyalty and commitment from those who volunteered to assist him. He was always wedded to the notion of his own tight personal security, aware that so many of his colleagues had been brought down by the state and imprisoned. He was, frankly, the one the state missed. He was the quiet one, the thinker, the planner, shunning the limelight and keeping himself focused on what really mattered. Yet he subscribed to the Irish Republican tradition of always being there for the families and children of those comrades that got locked up. Karl was the best of men, the best of colleagues, and the best of activists. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.
\n\nKarl is survived by a daughter and two granddaughters.
\n\nThe photograph at the top of this eulogy shows Karl with his much-loved daughter, on holiday in Gardenstown, Scotland.
\n\nOn May 12, 2025, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) announced its dissolution after more than four decades of armed struggle against the Turkish government. This came on the heels of a call from imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan to disband the organization. On July 11, PKK fighters participated in a ceremony signifying disarmament. What will this mean for Kurdish movements for liberation and for the Middle East in general?
\n\nIn the following analysis, a Kurdish feminist militant draws on over ten years of political and research engagement with the Kurdish liberation movement to explore these questions. Raised in Iran and based in the Kurdish diaspora, the author, Soma.r, has been in close contact with women participants and remains actively connected to the movement.
\n\nA group of PKK fighters symbolically disarmed on July 11, 2025, in Jasna Cave, located in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. The site carries deep historical and political significance: in 1923, it served as a refuge and command base during British colonial attacks. That same year, Jasna Cave became a clandestine printing site for Bangî Haq (“Call of Truth”), the first revolutionary Kurdish newspaper, founded by the journalist Ahmad Khwaja. This act wove together anti-colonial resistance, political struggle, and underground journalism.
\n\nA century later, the act of disarming here is not surrender—it is a political statement, echoing through layers of time. It draws a line between the past and the present, invoking memory as strategy. In choosing Jasna, the fighters remind us: revolutions may shift shape, but their roots run deep. Where empire once sought silence, Kurdish voices printed truth. Where arms are now laid down, new struggles may rise—rooted in the same earth, but shaped by new imaginaries.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/1.jpg\")
Jasna Cave, the site of the symbolic disarmament of the PKK on July 11, 2025.
\nThis act gains further resonance in light of recent events. Just two days earlier, Abdullah Öcalan, the legendary PKK leader, reappeared in a video message—his first since 1999—calling for the end of armed struggle and urging a definitive shift toward democratic politics. This moment invites not merely commemoration, but interpretation: how does a guerrilla movement, once synonymous with armed resistance, perform political transformation through symbolic acts?
\n\nTo understand the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)’s self-dissolution, we must bear in mind the breadth of its social base, which spans tens of millions. Since Öcalan’s imprisonment in 1999, the Kurdish movement in Turkey has grown beyond its guerrilla origins into a complex political project rooted in diverse urban and rural, secular and religious, Kurdish and non-Kurdish constituencies—though the proletariat remains central. It now operates through a hybrid structure combining an armed wing in Qandil with a wide civilian network involving unions, municipalities, legal parties, women’s organizations, media, and transnational solidarity platforms. Its political praxis is at once territorial and transnational, legal and clandestine, militarized and deeply social. Among the most transformative shifts has been the rise of the Kurdish women’s liberation movement (KWLM), which has repositioned gender emancipation as both a symbolic and strategic core. Across Öcalan’s letters, the Rojava project and KWLM’s expanding role are consistently upheld as the PKK’s most significant contemporary achievements.
\n\nIn a significant development for the Kurdish political landscape, the PKK announced its dissolution following its 12th Congress. This decision was shaped by a series of dialogues initiated in October 2024, involving Abdullah Öcalan (via his nephew and the delegation of the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party) and prompted by statements from Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli, a far-right, ultranationalist political party in Turkey. Öcalan emphasized the need for transitioning the Kurdish question from armed struggle to democratic politics, stating he had the capacity to lead this shift if the conditions allowed.
\n\nIn response, the PKK began internal consultations and expressed readiness to convene a congress under Öcalan’s guidance. On February 27, 2025, Öcalan issued a formal “Call for Peace and a Democratic Society,” urging the PKK to end its armed activities and take responsibility for achieving a peaceful resolution. In response, the PKK declared a unilateral ceasefire on March 1. This was followed by the organization’s 12th Congress, where the decision to dissolve the PKK and end its armed campaign was formally adopted by the leadership of both the PKK and the Party of Free Women in Kurdistan (PAJK).1
\n\nÖcalan’s strategic vision was more fully developed in the May 2025 issue (No. 521) of Serxwebûn, the PKK’s official monthly publication. This final issue featured the complete 20-page document Öcalan had submitted to the Congress, along with a four-point letter addressed to the delegates, outlining the political framework for the transition to a peaceful and democratic phase of the Kurdish movement. Announcing the end of its uninterrupted 44-year history, the magazine declared: “Everything is in place for a new and stronger beginning.”
\n\nIn his April 27 letter, Abdullah Öcalan outlines a transformative vision for the post-PKK era centered on democratic nationhood, ecological and communal economics, and democratic modernity as an alternative to both the capitalist nation-state and real socialism. He proposes democratic society as the political program of the new era—one that does not aim to capture the state but to create autonomous, grassroots-based structures like communes. Within this framework, concepts such as democratic socialism, communalism, and regional confederalism become central to both Kurdish liberation and broader regional transformation. Öcalan calls this a new form of internationalism and urges all actors to take responsibility for materializing it, suggesting that success in Kurdistan could have ripple effects across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.2 The texts in this issue—including speeches, resolutions, and congress documents—reflect an attempt to reconfigure the movement’s strategic horizon.
\n\nÖcalan’s recent call for dissolution is not without precedent, as the PKK has long oscillated between armed struggle and negotiation. However, this moment signals a more profound ideological shift: since 2004, the movement has restructured itself around “democratic confederalism” via the Kurdistan Democratic Communities Union (KCK)—an umbrella framework that includes the PKK but is conspicuously absent from the current dissolution plan.
\n\nThe meaning of “dissolution” remains highly ambiguous. Does it signal the end of the PKK, a mere rebranding, or a tactical shift within a longer arc of political adaptation? More critically, what does dismantling a structure that has historically blurred armed resistance and grassroots mobilization mean for anti-state and anti-colonial struggles in the region?
\n\nEven within the PKK, interpretations vary. Zagros Hiwa, the Foreign Relations spokesperson of the KCK, stated on Sterk TV that the resolutions call for ending armed conflict—not disarmament—and questioned the feasibility of this, given the 100-meter proximity between Turkish soldiers and guerrillas. Others disagree. Amir Karimi, from the PKK’s Iran-Kurdistan branch, asserted, “Those who have fought and endured the most have the greatest right to speak about peace.” Meanwhile, the Speaker of the Turkish Parliament, Numan Kurtulmuş, framed the process as part of a national effort to resist imperialist fragmentation:
\n\n\n\n\n“Iraq and Syria have been fragmented, Lebanon has become ungovernable. Libya, Sudan, and Somalia have been divided. These countries have turned into battlefields fueled by tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions, and some have been dismantled through terrorist organizations. We could have passively waited like a ‘yellow cow’ for our turn to be broken apart, or Turks, Kurds, and all others could unite to defeat this imperialist agenda. We have chosen the latter path and are committed to moving forward together.”
\n
Unsurprisingly, this call has generated division, uncertainty, and a wide spectrum of responses among Kurdish activists. Here, we will unpack these questions by analyzing the PKK’s historical evolution in relation to peace processes, and explore the broader implications of its dissolution for contemporary anti-state, anti-capitalist, and decolonial movements.
\n\nWe will begin with a brief overview of how revolutionary violence emerged through armed struggle in the Kurdish movement, and how this trajectory became entangled with a series of failed peace initiatives that often reproduced new cycles of war. Then, we can turn to the core question: why did the PKK pursue unilateral disarmament? We will examine his decision in relation to shifting political dynamics at regional, national, and global levels. Finally, we will reflect on the stakes, uncertainties, and strategic calculations surrounding this move, concluding with a gendered reading that foregrounds the role of the Kurdish women’s liberation movement in shaping both the limits and possibilities of this process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/8.jpg\")
Abdullah Öcalan announcing the dissolution of the PKK in a video message in July 2025.
\nAs the PKK declared on May 12, 2025:
\n\n\n\n\nThe PKK was born as a liberation movement against the policy of denial of the Kurdish people enshrined in the Treaty of Lausanne and the Turkish Constitution of 1924.
\n
From a recognized imperial “nation,” Kurds became “ethnic minorities” in states that repressed, assimilated, and erased them. Despite being nearly 40 million strong—20% of Turkey’s population—Kurds remain the world’s largest stateless people, excluded from political and cultural recognition.
\n\nState repression has often taken genocidal forms: Iraq’s Anfal campaign (1987–1988) killed 180,000 Kurds; Syria’s 1960s denationalization policies left tens of thousands stateless; Iran frames military attacks on Kurdish regions as jihad; and Turkey long banned the words “Kurd” and “Kurdistan,” labeling Kurds as “mountain Turks.” The war between the PKK and the Turkish military alone has claimed over 40,000 lives, in a broader context of Kurdish conflicts that have killed more than 250,000 since the 1960s.
\n\nThe Turkish Republic was built on the genocide of Armenians and the denial of Kurdish identity, both of which served to impose a homogenizing nationalist project. The PKK emerged in the 1970s in direct response to this exclusionary regime. Its opposition was not only military but cultural and political, as symbolized by Leyla Zana’s 1991 parliamentary oath (“I take this oath for the fraternity of the Turkish and Kurdish peoples”)—in Kurdish—for which she served ten years in prison.
\n\nToday, Turkish imperialism combines internal colonialism with regional neo-imperial expansion. Since 2016, Ankara has deployed proxy Islamist militias—like the “Syrian National Army” (SNA)—across northern Syria (Afrin, al-Bab, Azaz, Jarablus, Idlib). These militias allow Turkey to outsource warfare while advancing a neo-Ottomanist agenda of forced Arabization, Islamization, and demographic engineering. Promises of salaries up to $2500 attract youth surviving on mere tens of dollars, turning war into precarious employment.
\n\nSince 2015, Turkey has launched successive operations—Euphrates Shield, Olive Branch, Peace Spring—occupying Kurdish areas, displacing populations, and enabling looting, mass violence, and ethno-political reengineering. Airstrikes in Iraq on Qandil and Sinjar have intensified, with little global response. This war model—privatized, precarious, and transnational—has extended to Libya (2019–2020), Azerbaijan (2020), Yemen, Niger, and Pakistan. Paramilitary networks linked to Turkish intelligence, like the Sultan Murad Brigade, operate from Kurdish villages such as Sinara near Afrin.
\n\nTurkey’s reach is also extraterritorial: in Europe, Kurdish activists are surveilled, extradited, or killed. Assassinations of key feminist figures like Sakine Cansız (Paris), Hevrîn Xelef (Syria), and Nagihan Akarsel (Iraq) reflect a gendered strategy of decapitating revolutionary leadership and stifling transnational feminist articulation. Turkish imperialism fuses Islamist militiafication, transnational war economies, and fragmented sovereignties, producing a deregulated violence in which market logics trump state interests.
\n\nThis extraterritorial violence is not an isolated extension of state power, but a core mechanism of a broader geopolitical agenda. This aggressive projection of force is not merely opportunistic; it is part of a broader neo-Ottoman, neo-colonial project aimed at reasserting Turkish influence across its former imperial territories. Central to this vision is the integration of Kurdistan’s geography and resources into the emerging architecture of global trade—particularly through the Middle Corridor, discussed below.
\n\nYet this violence has generated an equally transnational resistance. The PKK has politicized the Kurdish question, transforming a stateless population into an organized political subject. Led in large part by women, its project remains one of the few contemporary revolutionary visions centering social justice, pluralism, and radical critiques of power. Against statist, campist, or nationalist leftisms, which are predominantly shaped by vertical, militarist, and masculinist paradigms, the Kurdish movement—especially its feminist dimension—shifts the political from state-centric paradigms to embodied, localized, and solidaristic forms. Its slogan, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (“Woman, Life, Freedom”), forged in decades of subaltern struggle, became a global cry during the Iranian uprising of 2022.
\n\nBut this resistance was made possible by armed struggle. And that raises the key question: what becomes of the Kurdish revolutionary horizon with the announced dissolution of the PKK?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/6.jpg\")
\nThe repeated collapse of peace processes in Kurdistan reveals not a lack of Kurdish commitment but the entrenched refusal of regional states to recognize Kurdish rights. In Iran, the 1989 Vienna talks ended with the assassination of Kurdish leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou and his colleagues—an act replicated in the killing of his successor, Sadegh Sharafkandi, in Berlin in 1992. In Iraq, Baghdad’s breach of the 1970 Autonomy Agreement led to the genocidal Anfal campaign.
\n\nTurkey has followed a similar trajectory. While the Kurdish movement has consistently sought dialogue, Turkish state policy oscillates between short-lived peace gestures and systematic repression. President Özal’s early-1990s initiative died with him, and the decade that followed saw massive state violence, including torture, forced displacements, and cultural erasure. The 1999 capture of Abdullah Öcalan marked a shift: he called for a ceasefire and the PKK’s dissolution. Yet the state’s punitive response only deepened Kurdish mistrust.
\n\nDespite repression, the Kurdish movement transformed. By 2004, democratic confederalism emerged, rejecting nationalism in favor of grassroots pluralism. Armed resistance continued alongside legal-political strategies, culminating in the electoral gains of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP). But peace efforts, including the Oslo talks (2008–2011)3 and the İmralı Process (2013–2015), were sabotaged by the state. First, the leak of negotiations sparked a nationalist backlash in 2009; later, in 2015, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan abandoned the Dolmabahçe Memorandum in response to Kurdish advances in Syria, particularly the victory of the YPG and YPJ (the People’s Defense Units and Women’s Protection Units) in Kobanê. The collapse of the peace process triggered a brutal crackdown that displaced over 350,000 people and resulted in the deaths of around 1700 individuals, while also positioning Turkey among the world’s leading jailers of journalists. By August 2016, Erdoğan was denying that any negotiations had ever taken place. From this perspective, the Turkish government’s gestures toward peace negotiations have often signaled its preference for military operations, whether via war or coup.
\n\nFor many Kurds, armed struggle has become an existential necessity against what they see as colonial domination precisely as result of this asymmetric conflict, which some describe as a “war against peace.” Inspired by Frantz Fanon, the PKK frames violence as strategic self-defense. While internal critiques question urban warfare and protracted militancy, broad Kurdish support persists, rooted in historical trauma and the failure of political avenues. The state’s persistent framing of Kurdish identity as a threat reinforces this impasse.
\n\nBy 2025, any such horizon appeared more elusive than ever. But “all that is solid can melt into air.” As highlighted by Kurdish scholar Adnan Çelik and other voices within the movement, Öcalan’s message during the PKK’s 12th Congress, while unexpected, signaled a rupture: in contrast to his 2015 call for a “democratic opening,” the 2025 statement stripped away the ideological richness of previous appeals, omitting critiques of the nation-state, neoliberal capitalism, internal colonialism and patriarchy. While the initial statement portrays the PKK as a Cold War relic devoid of strategic or ideological legitimacy—calling for its disarmament without political concessions or recognition of Kurdish historical claims—this stance is partially revised in the April 27 letter, which devotes significant attention to the history of Kurdish repression by regional states and the PKK’s legacy of resistance.
\n\nWidely perceived as a unilateral capitulation, Öcalan’s shift provoked shock within the movement—with many interpreting it as a form of implicit humiliation and erasure of past sacrifices, according to Çelik. Yet rather than triggering collapse, it spurred both immediate organizational responses—such as a proposed dissolution congress—and an intense interpretive effort to preserve critical legacies. This moment signals a major strategic reconfiguration, shifting focus from the pursuit of a sociopolitical project to the management of militant heritage, memory, and political resilience amid a transformed geopolitical landscape.
\n\nToday, the Kurdish question remains structurally unresolved. Reconciliation is impossible so long as the Turkish state cycles between hollow peace offers and brutal repression. As the state clings to nationalist paradigms, the Kurdish movement continues to adapt—between insurgency and imagination, memory and resilience.
\n\nThis tension between state denial and Kurdish endurance came into sharp focus in Erdoğan’s post-disarmament landmark speech on July 12, where he officially acknowledged that the Turkish state committed mass killings of Kurds, stripped them of their rights, and initiated this violence in places like Diyarbakır prison. He admitted to burning villages, criminalizing unidentified individuals, banning the Kurdish language, and denying mothers the right to speak Kurdish with their children. Delivered in the wake of the PKK’s symbolic disarmament, the speech, insisting on unity of Turks, Kurds, and Arabs, marks a shift from insurgency to reconciliation, serving as a state-orchestrated spectacle in which the Turkish state reasserts its sovereign power by controlling the narrative of both past violence and future order, positioning itself as the sole arbiter of memory, truth, and historical legitimacy. Framed as an act of closure, this moment instead consolidates state authority. The dissolution of the Kurdish armed struggle is not met with genuine political transformation, but with symbolic containment. What appears as peace is, in reality, a rebranding of domination, setting the stage for new forms of control under the guise of reconciliation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/4.jpg\")
Women participating in the symbolic disarmament of the PKK on July 11, 2025.
\nIn a letter dated April 25, 2025, Abdullah Öcalan articulated the rationale behind the proposed dissolution of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), framing it not as defeat but as a deliberate paradigm shift. He stressed that this process, far from an immediate disarmament demanded by the Turkish state, requires deep ideological critique, self-reflection, and a prolonged debate to reshape both personality and mentality. The PKK, founded to elevate Kurdish national consciousness and expose systemic oppression, now faces a phase in which the next step toward freedom must be built on democratic institutions, cultural renewal, and communalism4—transformations that the PKK as an armed hierarchical organization may no longer embody. It is within this trajectory that the dissolution must be understood: as the culmination of a theoretical break from the 20th-century nation-state model and its militarism, defined by systemic violence that has now “lost its justification (raison d’être).” Öcalan’s vision of democratic confederalism, grounded in local autonomy, gender equality, and ecological economy, signals a decisive break from the statist, militarized models of the past and a move toward a post-state societal project.
\n\nThis ideological evolution, however, is neither sudden nor uncontroversial. Since the 1990s, the PKK has undergone significant internal transformation, confronting the collapse of socialism and the authoritarian tendencies inherent in statist paradigms. The movement’s survival has depended on adaptability and critical engagement, culminating in the Twelfth Congress’s decision to embrace dissolution as a radical reorientation rather than a capitulation. The letter emphasizes that a failure over two decades to fully integrate democratic, ecological, and feminist principles into organizational structures has precipitated this moment of decisive change.
\n\nStrategically, the Kurdish political presence has gained prominence across Turkey and the broader Middle East, particularly through women’s liberation initiatives and political advances in all four Kurdish regions. This progress challenges Turkey’s prior framing of the PKK as a mere terrorist entity. Presidential advisor Mehmet Uçum’s recent declaration that “Kurds are an essential component of the Turkish nation” signals an ideological recalibration at the state level.
\n\nIn this situation, the dissolution of the PKK can be seen as a tactical move to remove obstacles to international recognition, especially of Kurdish structures in Rojava, where the “terrorist” label has served to justify Turkish military incursions. Disarmament aims to protect Rojava as an autonomous political project, ensuring its survival and legitimacy on regional and international stages. Reports suggest that a meeting between Abdullah Öcalan and Masoud Barzani (the longtime leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Iraqi Kurdistan) may soon take place—a development that, above all, strengthens the hypothesis of an emerging Kurdish regional alliance aimed at reinforcing the stability of Rojava in the current geopolitical context.
\n\nDespite the diplomatic gains stemming from the role Kurdish forces played in the fight against ISIS, international support has remained inconsistent. Öcalan’s call for voluntary dissolution could be a preemptive strategy to avert total defeat amid growing military isolation. Since the collapse of the 2015 peace process, intensified Turkish military pressure—cross-border operations, drone warfare, and surveillance—has confined PKK operations primarily to Qandil, eroding its capacity within Turkey. Even the 12th PKK Congress, which was recently held, took place 12 years after the 11th Congress, primarily due to the lack of security and to military pressure from Turkey. The PKK addressed this issue in a letter released on May 4, addressed to the people and activists of the movement:
\n\n\n\n\nA retrospective look at the past two decades reveals the following: although the new paradigm was intended to facilitate deeper integration with society, in practice, it was the cadre members who experienced the greatest disconnection from it—even as the movement as a whole moved toward decriminalization. While the aim was to cultivate stronger organizational structures and promote communal and socialist modes of life, what actually emerged was a rise in individualism and materialism. It is evident that in our engagement with the masses, we failed to provide adequate education or foster the organization of a truly democratic society. In the military domain, we were unable to develop or implement effective training and organization for social self-defense. We remained, in the mountains, at the level of guerrilla units detached from society and completely encircled. This condition not only led to increased casualties but also weakened the political and propagandistic impact of our armed struggle. Gradually, our capacity for effective warfare became confined to a very limited geographical area.
\n
Technological advancements, notably algorithmic warfare and real-time surveillance, have deepened this isolation, as NATO states prioritize relations with Ankara. Meanwhile, Kurdish autonomy in Syria is under threat from that regime’s centralization, and Turkish influence grows in northern Iraq with tacit local approval. These conditions have driven the PKK’s political center from armed struggle toward seeking civil and institutional legitimacy across the Kurdish region. The dissolution represents a symbolic disarmament and strategic relocation, shifting the Kurdish struggle into political and transnational arenas, where popular power is redefined outside the paradigm of military confrontation.
\n\nThe decline in PKK recruitment and the failure to translate anti-ISIS alliances into lasting international support underscore the necessity of this strategic recalibration. Öcalan’s proposal is understood by supporters not as surrender but as a lucid adaptation to changed geopolitical and military realities, including the prospect of a temporary ceasefire in Qandil and Rojava.
\n\nAccording to many Kurdish analysts, Öcalan’s stance reflects his persistent opposition to Israel and his reluctance to see the Kurdish movement forced—out of strategic necessity—into a tactical or pragmatic alliance with it. This, they argue, is what drives his pursuit of preemptive political solutions aimed at avoiding such alignments. Other proponents of the Kurdish movement contend that the decision by Öcalan and the PKK was a strategic attempt to prevent Kurdistan from becoming the next Gaza of the Middle East. They argue that the PKK’s military constraints in the face of a highly technologized inter-state and international war apparatus—coupled with Turkey’s persistent campaign to annihilate Kurdistan and Rojava—necessitated a political recalibration. This shift, they suggest, is also informed by the waning material and symbolic power of global solidarity with the Kurdish cause, which remains significantly weaker than the widespread support mobilized for Palestinians. From this perspective, if Turkey were to enact a Gaza-like scenario against the Kurds, there would be little international capacity or will to intervene. With diminishing material means of resistance and the absence of comparable regional or international mobilization, Kurdish actors must adopt alternative strategies for survival. This decision is thus viewed not as a retreat, but as a calculated and pragmatic tactic to endure within an increasingly unlivable geopolitical context.
\n\nThis strategic pivot cannot be understood without acknowledging the profound human toll of the conflict. Kurdish guerrillas, PKK cadres, and especially civilians are exhausted; the cumulative costs of the war have become unbearable. Thousands of young lives have been lost, entire cities destroyed, families fractured, bodies scarred, generations shaped by prison, exile, precarity, and stigma. This accumulation of suffering over more than forty years imbues the word “peace” with a new resonance: not as capitulation, but as a vital necessity—a breath long awaited after decades of suffocation.
\n\nFrom the Turkish state’s perspective, the dissolution aligns with a political strategy orchestrated by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who aims to extend his power beyond the constitutional limit of 2028. By presenting himself as the architect of a new peace process, Erdoğan hopes to win over parts of the Kurdish electorate while fracturing the opposition. Framed as reconciliation, the call to end armed struggle is, in reality, a maneuver to disrupt emerging alliances between Kurdish forces and progressive opposition currents. In 2019, the tactical support of Kurdish voters—notably via the HDP (now the Peoples’ Equality Party, DEM)—was crucial to the opposition’s victory in major cities like Istanbul and Ankara. This strategy seeks to isolate secular-nationalist factions within the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) from those open to dialogue with the Kurdish movement while maintaining a securitization discourse for domestic use. This electoral engineering rests on a dual calculation: weakening the joint mobilization of the opposition and deterring Kurdish forces from criticizing the regime too openly for fear of jeopardizing a potential peace.
\n\nIn this complex configuration, the Kurdish movement finds itself in a position reminiscent of the 2013 Gezi Park protests. As then, any opening toward dialogue with the state paradoxically implies recognizing its legitimacy, even as it remains the primary object of contestation. This tension requires the Kurdish movement to adopt a balanced posture: to engage in peace efforts without dissolving into Turkish institutional politics or alienating broader social movements. The result is a form of strategic isolation, but it can also be an opportunity to construct an autonomous political space in which the Kurdish question can be articulated without weapons, yet without renunciation.
\n\nMeanwhile, Erdoğan continues to exploit the rhetoric of securitization, criminalizing Kurdish political figures and perpetuating the trope of the “internal enemy” to consolidate his conservative base. The contrast between ongoing repression and the conciliatory language of peace underscores the cynical nature of the initiative: it is not a genuine commitment to resolution but a tactical move cloaked in the guise of dialogue.
\n\nBoth Erdoğan and the Turkish state as a whole seek to facilitate the integration of Kurdistan and its resources into contemporary capitalist markets through its disarmament. In a speech outlining the new 2025 process, Erdoğan openly articulated the capitalist objectives driving this initiative:
\n\n\n\n\nA Turkey free from terrorism will elevate the Turkish economy above all else. Once we achieve this goal, the Turkish Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges (TOBB) will be the primary beneficiary. From this point forward, Turkey will compete in a new league.
\n
Likewise, Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek stated that Turkey has spent nearly $1.8 trillion over the past five decades on the “fight against terrorism,” and ending the conflict could bring significant economic benefits to the country.
\n\nThese economic imperatives, however, are not confined to domestic considerations alone. They are embedded in Turkey’s broader geopolitical ambitions. The so-called 2025 peace process between Turkey and the PKK is less a genuine step toward reconciliation than a geopolitical maneuver aimed at neutralizing Kurdish military, political, and economic power as a precondition for Turkey’s integration into neoliberal infrastructural capitalism. Central to this strategy is the realization of the “Middle Corridor,” a trans-Eurasian trade route connecting China to Europe via Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Turkey. This corridor positions Turkey as a logistical hub in global capitalist circulation. It is crucial to both China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, a multi-trillion-dollar project linking China with Europe, Africa, and the Middle East through land and sea routes) and the US-backed India–Middle East–Europe Corridor (IMEC, a competing infrastructure project aimed at securing Western geopolitical and commercial dominance).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/10.png\")
The “Middle Corridor.”
\nMore recently, this vision has been reinforced through the “Development Road” initiative—a $17 billion project spearheaded by Iraq, Turkey, and Gulf states, which links the Persian Gulf (via Iraq’s Grand Faw Port) to Europe through Turkish territory. The proposed route cuts directly through Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast, further amplifying the geopolitical stakes of Kurdish containment. In the aftermath of October 7 and the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians, regional geopolitical alignments have been further destabilized—producing a new wave of strategic corridor politics in which Turkey’s logistical and diplomatic centrality has only intensified. Amid the collapse of traditional power balances in the Levant and Gulf, Turkey’s control over these infrastructural routes—particularly those that bypass Iranian and Syrian influence—has become even more indispensable to both Western and non-Western blocs.
\n\nBut for Turkey to consolidate control over these routes, it must erase all subaltern or non-state actors, especially Kurdish forces. The disarmament of the PKK should therefore be read not as demilitarization but as the foreclosure of Kurdish armed struggle under a new regime of infrastructural securitization. With Iran’s “Shia corridor”(Tehran–Damascus–Beirut axis) neutralized, Assad toppled, and the axis of the PKK and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) severed under US and Israeli pressure, Kurdish actors have been structurally removed from regional power negotiations. With NATO’s tacit support, Turkey has carried out military campaigns and demographic reengineering to consolidate control over Kurdish regions. In this context, “peace” becomes a euphemism for capitalist pacification, with political reconciliation replaced by spatial and military containment to enable uninterrupted flows of capital, goods, and geopolitical influence across imperial corridors of extraction and control.
\n\nErdogan’s endorsement of the PKK’s call for disarmament should be seen in the broader context of shifting Middle Eastern geopolitics and the evolving balance of power in the region. It also reflects Turkey’s strategic use of Kurdish dynamics to counter rivals such as Israel and Iran. A complex interplay of domestic and regional political calculations has pushed Turkey toward adopting this tactic. This is clearly articulated in a letter from the Central Committee of the PKK dated May 4:
\n\n\n\n\nThe escalation of the Third World War in the Middle East, the outcomes of the Gaza conflict that began on October 7, 2023, the significant strikes by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israeli assaults, and the collapse of the Ba’ath regime in Syria—thereby extending the regional transformation to Iran and Turkey—have all played a pivotal role in bringing us to this stage. The fear and existential anxiety engendered within the Turkish state and the AKP-MHP government, combined with pressures for democratic change imposed internally by our movement and the Turkish people, and externally by the transnational capitalist system, constitute the primary factors motivating the [Devlet] Bahçeli administration and his well-known rhetoric and calls to action. Consequently, we have reached the current stage as a result of the aforementioned political and military developments.
\n
The paradox is profound: a movement possessing considerable territorial and organizational strength is forced to reinvent itself precisely because that power makes it susceptible to algorithmic annihilation. Ultimately, Öcalan’s proposal invites a fundamental rethinking of revolutionary struggle in an era defined by drones, metadata, and total surveillance. It challenges the Kurdish movement to imagine a form of resistance that transcends armed confrontation, finding power in silence rather than gunfire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/3.jpg\")
Weapons burn during a ceremony representing the symbolic disarmament of the PKK on July 11, 2025.
\nThe announcement in February 2025 of the PKK’s potential armed disengagement raises profound questions about the conditions under which a protracted guerrilla struggle might transition into a political process, especially in a context marked by entrenched authoritarianism, repression, and ideological deadlocks. While some interpret this move as a sign of strategic and ideological reconfiguration, it remains deeply ambiguous. The Turkish government, framing the moment not as a “peace process” but as a “cleansing from terrorism process” (“Terörden arındırma süreci”), signals a punitive stance that departs from the conciliatory language of 2015, casting doubt on the possibility of a just and comprehensive resolution.
\n\nThis presents several urgent questions. Can democratization in Turkey be defined as merely symbolic gestures—such as the conditional release of Abdullah Öcalan (and bringing him to parliament to call on the Kurds to withdraw from Qandil and embrace a peaceful political path) or limited cultural concessions—or must it entail far-reaching constitutional reforms, the mass release of political prisoners, and formal recognition of Kurdish collective rights, including regional autonomy and the right to Kurdish-language education? Would the reinstatement of annulled municipal mandates, the return of exiles, or a general amnesty suffice to convince the PKK that a viable political path has emerged? Many fear that Erdoğan might renege on his commitments once he has secured the political leverage he seeks, repeating the betrayal of the 2015 process and risking a return to conflict with the Kurdish movement in a position of fragmentation and weakened legitimacy.
\n\nUnlike other peace processes—such as those involving the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in Colombia, or Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain—the Turkish state has refused to engage in truth and reconciliation, constitutional restructuring, or genuine political recognition. In Colombia, for instance, disarmament was accompanied by restorative justice initiatives, often led by women and survivors of state violence. A similar potential lies within the Kurdish women’s movement, yet the Kurdish case remains exceptional in its systematic criminalization and denial of the existence of a political problem. At the same time, what distinguishes the PKK case from many other examples is that it has the support of a powerful and influential mass-based civil and political movement. The struggle has not been confined to the military sphere alone, but has also taken deep root in civilian and political arenas.
\n\nThe decision of the PKK to engage in disarmament exposes internal contradictions. Despite being imprisoned since 1999, Öcalan remains the movement’s unchallenged authority, centralizing decision-making in a vertical structure that suppresses internal pluralism. His recent statement—“I can say that the opponents of the process have no value. They will fail”—epitomizes a model in which charismatic authority overshadows collective deliberation, generating a legitimacy crisis in which fighters and activists are expected to follow top-down directives without mechanisms for participatory decision-making. This centralization reproduces a depoliticized militant base and stifles the internal democratization needed for genuine transformation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/7.jpg\")
\nIn the evolving landscape, some analysts highlight two developments that could mark preliminary steps toward disarmament and a transition to a democratic order. First, in a symbolic gesture, a group of guerrilla fighters, some of whom previously held leadership positions, publicly laid down their arms in the presence of the media, accompanied by a statement declaring:
\n\n\n\n\nWe are ready to participate in democratic politics.
\n
Second, the Turkish Parliament is anticipated to establish a body provisionally titled the “Commission for Social Peace and Democratic Transition,” tasked with formulating a legal and institutional framework to support disarmament and broader democratic reforms.
\n\nWhile these initiatives may initially unfold on a limited and symbolic scale, their proponents view them as indicators of mutual willingness to move forward in the peace process. Nonetheless, past experiences, such as the dispatch of three groups of guerrillas to the Turkish state between 2000 and 2007, underscore the persistent vulnerability of such efforts to repressive state policies and the enduring structural distrust that continues to hinder durable resolution. Neither the guerrilla fighters nor the PKK leadership appear to be naïve about the risks involved. They seem to be approaching the process with strategic caution and political foresight, deliberately preserving the option of returning to armed struggle if necessary. As Bese Hozat,5 Co-Chair of the KCK Executive Council, stated in an interview following the symbolic disarmament of 30 guerrilla fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan in July:
\n\n\n\n\nIf we were to unconditionally comply with every demand made by the state, it would lead to the following outcome: other groups would be expected to do the same—destroy their weapons, return to Turkey, and surrender. If such an approach becomes the norm, the fate awaiting us and our comrades would be either imprisonment or death. But such a future is not one we accept. The Turkish state must understand this.
\n
Still, some within the movement view this as an opportunity to transcend its hierarchical militarist Leninist legacy. A shift toward broader civilian participation and internal renewal could reposition the PKK within a wider democratic framework. The emergence of the DEM Party as a significant actor suggests the possibility of transforming a Kurdish nationalist formation into a pluralistic force capable of uniting Turkey’s broader democratic constituencies. Yet the risk of abandonment—by both the Turkish state and international supporters—looms large, making the promise of renewal contingent on structural reforms, not rhetorical accommodations.
\n\nA framework of transitional justice is crucial. Without acknowledging past atrocities—particularly during the 1990s and the brutal 2015–2016 period—any ceasefire will remain fragile. Truth, reparation, and the decolonization of national narratives are prerequisites for meaningful peace. Otherwise, Kurdish collective memory will continue to bear unhealed traumas that could reignite conflict.
\n\nThe regional context renders disarmament precarious. Syria remains unstable, and the fragile ceasefire between Kurdish forces and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), following the recent Kurdish Unity Conference, appears increasingly uncertain. Turkey’s ongoing military campaigns against Kurdish positions in Iraq and Syria, including over 500 airstrikes on PKK-controlled zones in Iraqi Kurdistan in May 2025 alone, undermine the feasibility of a peace transition. Simultaneously, Ankara’s alleged back-channel offers—such as recognizing Kurdish autonomy in Syria in exchange for the dissolution of the PKK—remain vague and untrustworthy. A full-scale offensive on Rojava would threaten to collapse the civil and military architecture of the Kurdish project.
\n\nWithin this transnational configuration, the PKK is not an isolated guerrilla force but part of a broader network established since 2002 through the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), which includes the PYD in Syria (2003), PJAK in Iran (2004), and the PÇDK in Iraq (2002). These sister organizations, while nominally autonomous, are ideologically aligned with Öcalan’s vision of democratic confederalism and are deeply embedded in their respective societies, particularly through women-led initiatives. The ambiguity of Öcalan’s disarmament call—whether it targets solely the Turkish wing of the PKK or extends to these allied entities—adds to the uncertainty. Some analysts suggest that cadres could be redeployed to other fronts, like PJAK or Rojava, rather than demobilized outright, raising the possibility of a tactical rather than strategic dissolution. Then, the fate of guerrilla forces in the Qandil mountains remains uncertain, as Ankara’s signals are ambiguous and often contradictory, blurring the line between rumor and reality. For example, AKP member Şamil Tayyar claimed that nearly 300 senior PKK members would be relocated to third countries such as South Africa and Norway, while approximately 4000 fighters would be gradually received at the border. Yet, beyond such unofficial remarks, what concrete steps—beyond rhetorical gestures—will the Turkish state actually take?
\n\nDomestically, Erdoğan’s suppression of the CHP—which has historically been a secular nationalist party complicit in anti-Kurdish policies—reveals the paradoxes within the Turkish opposition. For many Kurds, the CHP remains part of the problem rather than an alternative, complicating the formation of an inclusive democratic coalition. Meanwhile, internal tensions within the Kurdish movement, combined with Erdoğan’s autocratic consolidation, continue to fragment the political field, making a pluralistic political realignment uncertain.
\n\nDespite these challenges, the Kurdish movement demonstrates remarkable resilience and strategic adaptability. It continues to articulate a political vision that resists militarization while affirming the right to self-defense—aligning itself with global decolonial struggles. In Rojava, for example, the Autonomous Administration sustains a formidable security infrastructure, including the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), YPG-YPJ, and Asayish forces, estimated at over 80,000 members. In Rojhilat, the PJAK continues to organize opposition to the Iranian regime. These formations reflect a deeply rooted, transborder movement that cannot be reduced to a mere guerrilla phenomenon.
\n\nThis material infrastructure suggests that even if the current process collapses, the PKK and its allies could pivot to a new, perhaps more fragmented and protracted, phase of resistance. Decades of asymmetric warfare, ideological consolidation, and social embedding have given the movement a capacity for survival unmatched by many revolutionary actors. Its legitimacy stems not just from military capacity, but from its cultivation of political consciousness, gender liberation, and grassroots autonomy.
\n\nAt the heart of this hope lies a deeper ethical question. Is it not profoundly unjust—perhaps even cynical—to project our visions of radical democracy, anti-capitalism, feminist internationalism, and non-state anti-fascism onto a people already burdened by marginalization, repression, structural poverty, and relentless criminalization? Can we, in good faith, ask a geopolitically vulnerable and besieged people to carry, alone, the burden of our revolutionary utopias? How can a marginal revolutionary force—politically and militarily isolated, devoid of state or international backing—survive not only as an organization, but as a carrier of political vision and emancipatory practice? How can it preserve its ideals in an environment dominated by powerful states and imperial actors willing to annihilate it through massacres, ethnic cleansing, and systemic sexual violence? This critical juncture compels us to reconsider the very terms of our solidarity. How can we maintain a radical political stance in a global order increasingly dominated by militarization and authoritarianism, without falling into romantic abstraction or political resignation?
\n\nWhat remains at stake is not just the fate of an armed group, but the viability of a political project that has redefined the parameters of struggle in the Middle East. As the specter of renewed war looms amid unfulfilled promises and military escalation, the Kurdish movement continues to pose a universal question: how can a revolutionary force, stripped of statehood and facing overwhelming repression, preserve its emancipatory praxis without succumbing to erasure or compromise?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/5.jpg\")
\nLong overshadowed by the PKK, the Kurdish women’s movement has emerged since the 1990s as a powerful ideological and organizational actor—what many describe as a “revolution within the revolution.” Initially marginalized within a militarized, male-dominated structure, Kurdish women militants turned this exclusion into a strategic opportunity by forming a dialectical and reciprocal alliance with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. This relationship, far from patriarchal submission, allowed both parties to become political resources for each other: Öcalan instrumentalized the women’s movement to expand and reform the PKK, while women used his symbolic authority to center gender liberation within the Kurdish struggle.
\n\nÖcalan’s recognition of women as the “vanguard force of the revolution” was key to redefining leadership and legitimacy in a movement long shaped by virilism. He encouraged the creation of women’s parallel structures and supported jineolojî, a feminist epistemology theorized as central to his vision of democratic confederalism. In turn, Kurdish women legitimized his ideological leadership. They especially reaffirmed Öcalan’s call for a suspension of armed struggle after his capture in 1999—a moment of deep crisis for the PKK marked by mass defections in 2002–2004 (roughly 1500 fighters left the PKK amid ideological reorientation and internal struggles that culminated in a return to armed conflict in mid-2004). The women’s continued loyalty during this period was a strategic choice aimed at preserving ideological continuity amid fragmentation and repression.
\n\nYet this loyalty had limits. Proposals for greater autonomy—such as the creation of a Kurdish Women’s Workers’ Party—were blocked by the PKK’s Central Committee, revealing persistent structural constraints. Still, the alliance held, particularly as Öcalan’s ideological turn in 2005 toward democratic confederalism placed gender equality at the core of a new political model. In 2012, Öcalan refused to meet a peace delegation without women’s movement representation, underscoring their indispensability. Symbolically, in 2013, women in Rojava announced the creation of the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) on Öcalan’s birthday, reaffirming both their trust in his vision and their claim to autonomous militancy.
\n\nThis paradox—building women’s political autonomy through a male leader—raises critical tensions. While Öcalan’s discourse promotes decentralization and demilitarization, his charismatic authority remains central. The movement’s feminist horizon is thus entangled with strategic dependence. Öcalan’s repeated calls for PKK disarmament, particularly in recent years, amplify this contradiction: they challenge the militarized masculinity long embedded in revolutionary struggle, yet they also provoke uncertainty about women’s influence within a de-armed political process.
\n\nHistorically, armed resistance enabled Kurdish women to gain visibility, leadership, and legitimacy. Combat shattered gender taboos and created symbolic capital, even as it risked reproducing what some theorists call “adopted masculinity”—a replication of patriarchal norms under the guise of revolutionary equality. The current shift toward demilitarization, while opening space for community-based, non-hierarchical feminist practices, also threatens to dismantle the structures that protected and empowered women under conditions of state violence. This tension is central to debates about the future of the movement.
\n\nThe potential dissolution of the PKK prompts urgent questions: Will the Kurdish women’s movement seize the moment to assert full autonomy? Will it develop a distinct feminist stance on this strategic shift? Does dissolution weaken or empower women within the Kurdish struggle?
\n\nDisarmament could represent either a step toward feminist peace or a strategic vulnerability. Some militants advocate cautious, conditional demilitarization—contingent on institutional consolidation, international recognition, and guarantees for women’s rights as it entrenched masculine war mentalities, opening space for radical, community-based, non-hierarchical feminist practices. Historically rooted in masculinist ideals—where heroism, martyrdom, and military valor defined legitimacy—Kurdish revolutionary violence is now challenged by Öcalan’s call for demilitarization, which seeks to shift the movement toward a feminist horizon disentangled from militarized masculinity. But others warn that demilitarization could expose women to renewed patriarchal and state violence, especially if gains made by the YPJ or YJA-Star (the Free Women’s Units, Yekîneyên Jinên Azad ên Star), are not politically safeguarded.
\n\nBeyond armed struggle, Kurdish and Turkish women have long played vital roles in broader civil resistance and peace commitments. The Peace Mothers (Dayikên Aşîtîyê)—Kurdish mothers who lost children to the PKK–state conflict—became symbols of nonviolent resistance in the 1990s and 2000s. Campaigns like “Don’t Touch My Friend” (1990) and “Women Walk Together” mobilized grassroots networks to confront nationalism, racism, and war.6 In 2009, the Feminist Initiative for Peace (BİKG) brought women together across ethnic lines to demand demilitarization, social reconstruction, and inclusive peace processes. These movements demonstrated how women have transformed experiences of loss and marginalization into political agency.
\n\nIn a letter dated May 30 from İmralı Prison to the Jineolojî Academy, Öcalan reaffirmed that women’s liberation is the true measure of socialism, calling it the foundation of his revolutionary struggle. He described jineolojî as an ongoing transformative project and women as potential leaders of peace and democracy in the Middle East. In fact, Öcalan relies on women to lead this transition, given women’s leading role in previous peace efforts in Kurdistan.
\n\nThe choice of Bese Hozat—a long-time commander and co-chair of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) and a close comrade of Sakine Cansız, the iconic feminist PKK leader assassinated in Paris in 2013—as the central figure in the symbolic PKK disarmament ceremony on July 11 underscores the enduring centrality of women’s leadership in the Kurdish movement. Even at a transitional moment, this symbolic gesture reaffirms the movement’s ideological commitment to gender liberation and honors the legacy of revolutionary Kurdish feminism.
\n\nThe challenge now lies in navigating the contradictions of demilitarization: balancing feminist ethics with the need for protection, autonomy with strategic alliances, and peacebuilding with political agency.
\n\nAny future peace process must center the lived realities and political visions of Kurdish women. Their role has not been peripheral but foundational—and it is their strategic decisions, not only Öcalan’s, that will shape the Kurdish movement’s next chapter.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/9.jpg\")
Bese Hozat leading the symbolic PKK disarmament ceremony on July 11, 2025.
\nFrom the perspective of supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the potential dissolution of the organization should not be interpreted as the end of the Kurdish struggle, but rather as marking a new and as-yet undefined phase of resistance. While this perspective embodies a strategic optimism, it also demands careful reflection. Redefining resistance within such a complex context requires a nuanced understanding of its inherent limitations, contradictions, and risks. In other words, although this approach may open new avenues for the movement, it should not be accepted uncritically as a definitive solution without thorough analysis. Mechanisms for integrating the critical feedback of PKK members and activists—particularly the voices of female political prisoners—into this process are necessary to ensure its legitimacy.
\n\nThe PKK faces a confluence of complex challenges, including intensified military and technological pressures as well as political constraints at both domestic and regional levels. These challenges severely limit the movement’s capacity to sustain armed struggle and achieve structural transformation. The shift toward civilian-led, legal forms of organization represents a significant strategic gamble. While this transition warrants serious consideration and experimentation, its success depends on the fulfillment of several critical conditions; absent these, failure or marginalization remains a substantial risk. Moreover, the tension between the state’s immediate pressures and the PKK’s long-term vision for a protracted political process raises questions about the viability and timing of this shift.
\n\nShould the political process once again be undermined by Erdoğan, the PKK is prepared to resume armed resistance, not out of desperation, but as a continuation of its enduring political logic grounded in collective dignity and self-determination. Nonetheless, such a resurgence would likely entail significant difficulties and costs, disproportionately borne by the Kurdish population.
\n\nFar from being merely a tactical actor, the Kurdish liberation movement embodies a broader political project that fundamentally disrupts prevailing notions of sovereignty and legitimacy across the region. Any substantive shift in its strategic orientation demands a grasp of the interplay between structural constraints, geopolitical risks, and asymmetrical power relations at the local, regional, and international levels. At best, the movement’s turn toward institutionalization could not only consolidate its political legitimacy but also open new avenues for intra-Kurdish reconciliation, particularly with long-standing rivals such as the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). This strategic realignment could potentially lay the groundwork for a transnational Kurdish political architecture—one more intelligible and diplomatically acceptable to international actors, especially Western powers that have historically marginalized Kurdish claims in favor of their strategic alignment with Ankara.
\n\nThis ongoing redefinition of Kurdish resistance also confronts substantial internal challenges, including factional tensions and the imperative for political reconciliation, which must proceed in tandem with regional and global actors’ acceptance. Yet this process offers the potential to cultivate more inclusive and legitimate political structures.
\n\nFinally, the proposed transformation in the language and modalities of resistance—articulated by Abdullah Öcalan and PKK supporters—responds to the realities of contemporary technological surveillance and warfare. This challenges conventional militant resistance, emphasizing adaptability, resilience, and the re-articulation of power in novel, less visible forms.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/13/2.jpg\")
Weapons burn during a ceremony representing the symbolic disarmament of the PKK on July 11, 2025.
\n“The process that culminated in our Twelfth Congress began with a meeting on October 23, 2024, between the nephew of Leader Apo, and our delegation.” This meeting took place in response to statements and calls issued by Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), starting in early October. During the meeting, Leader Apo publicly stated that ‘if the necessary conditions are met, he has both the theoretical and practical capacity to move the Kurdish issue from a context of violence and conflict to one of democratic politics and legal resolution.’ In the ensuing months, a series of meetings were held between the delegation of the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) and Leader Apo on İmralı Island. These encounters were accompanied by messages from Leader Apo that further shaped the process. He first addressed letters to the leadership of political parties in Turkey, followed by correspondence directed to us. In these letters, he articulated his position on concluding activities conducted under the PKK’s name and ending the armed struggle, asserting that its historical mission had come to an end. In our reply, we expressed our readiness to hold the proposed congress, while underscoring that such fundamental decisions could only be made with Leader Apo’s direct involvement and leadership during the congress itself. Taking a further step, Leader Apo, through the DEM Party delegation, issued the ‘Call for Peace and a Democratic Society’ on February 27. In this call, he urged us to convene the congress and make decisions to officially end activities under the PKK’s name and bring the armed struggle to a close. He also declared his willingness to take full historical responsibility for the initiative. Following this call, in a public statement released on March 1, we reaffirmed the position previously shared in our letter to Leader Apo. To support the process, we declared a unilateral ceasefire, which we communicated to the public. These developments sparked intense public discourse both domestically and internationally. We actively engaged in these discussions, presenting our views and striving to offer both written and verbal assessments to help our people and allies gain a clear and thorough understanding of the process. Furthermore, we transmitted both the records of the meetings held with Leader Apo and the directives prepared on behalf of the PKK and PAJK (Kurdistan Free Women’s Party) leaderships concerning the organization of our party. All of these actions were undertaken with the full awareness and consent of the congress delegation. For the full statement, see the PKK Central Committee declaration dated May 4, 2025. ↩
\n“Our vision for the new era is grounded in the reconstruction of society based on democratic nationhood, eco-economic principles, and communalism. To philosophically establish this structure—its ideological dimensions and its embodiment within broader society—we bear the responsibility of formulating its theoretical and conceptual framework… We are in the process of shaping the ideological components, practical program, and tactical-strategic dimensions of the future. The democratic society constitutes the political program of this era. It does not target the state as its primary objective. The politics of a democratic society is democratic politics… Democratic socialism, likewise, signifies a socially grounded democracy… The free life of peoples is made possible through the commune… In an effort to transcend modernity and the real socialism that served it, we sought to develop a new analysis and an alternative socialist theory. We called this framework ‘Democratic Modernity.’ In it, the democratic nation is proposed as an alternative to the nation-state; the commune and communalism replace capitalism; and economy-ecology is put forward in place of industrialism. Corresponding analyses were developed to articulate and support these conceptual shifts… Victory in Kurdistan will also have an impact on Syria, Iran, and Iraq. The Republic of Turkey will have the opportunity to both renew itself, embrace democracy, and assume a leading role in the region… I can confidently say that the opponents of this process are devoid of meaningful values—and they will ultimately fail. However, bringing this vision to fruition places a significant responsibility on all parties involved. Regional confederalism is revealing itself as an absolute necessity; at the same time, this path inevitably calls for the emergence of a new form of internationalism.” You can read the full letter here. ↩
\nThe Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) responded with intensified repression. In 2009, the “KCK trials” led to the arrest of nearly 10,000 people—politicians, human rights defenders, unionists, and feminists—under broad charges of terrorism. ↩
\nThe concept of the “commune” becomes central. For Öcalan, it represents the authentic instrument of the people, opposed to the nation-state, which he sees as the armed extension of capitalism. Building a communal society via democratic municipalities is achievable only with a coherent anti-capitalist struggle, supported by political clarity and unwavering resolve. Without these, the project will falter. ↩
\nBese Hozat’s family were victims of the massacre that the Turkish state carried out during the Dersim uprising in 1938. She said her family was subjected to genocide, with both her father and grandfather killed. Her brother and sister were also murdered by the Turkish state. Her grandmother, a survivor of the massacre, managed to escape after enduring severe hardship at the hands of Turkish soldiers. ↩
\nSee, for example, this article by Soma Negahdarinia. ↩
\nIn the following reflections, participants in the Seattle Solidarity Network share what they have learned in the course of seventeen years of experimenting with tactics via which workers and tenants can act together against bosses and landlords.
\n\nFor an action-obsessed group like the Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol), pausing for reflection is a rare thing. Upon receiving the invitation to prepare this text, we embarked on a collective process that included written interviews with more than a dozen participants with different levels of involvement over the years—exactly the sort of inefficient endeavor that we work so hard to keep out of our regular organizing activities. It was a little embarrassing how high emotions were for people at times, but that also shows just how much SeaSol means to all of us, whether we were in it for a long or even a short period of time. What follows is our best effort to share with you who we are and what we’ve learned over the past seventeen years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/16.jpg\")
\nThere’s a twinge of nervous energy down your neck and a pinch of hunger in your stomach as you walk towards your first Seattle Solidarity Network action. It’s right before dinner time. Weather-wise, it’s the sort of gray, overcast late afternoon that is so typical of this region. You’ve brought yourself to some northern suburb. You’re venturing across a stretch of sprawl that looks like countless others. Even though you can’t recall ever being on this specific block before, the setting feels so familiar. The street signs and pavement remind you of the block where you live.
\n\nYou know from the mobilization email that there’s a restaurant nearby. It’s at an intersection, next to a gas station, across the street from a strip mall. You also know the restaurant’s owners are petty, entitled, and completely obnoxious. They fired somebody from the kitchen for bogus reasons and now they’re refusing to hand over that person’s final paycheck. It’s not much for the bosses—a few hundred dollars—but it’s devastating for the person fired, who has rent and other bills to pay. They’re still looking for their next job. And you can relate. You’ve worked at places like this, for people like this, and they took advantage of you like this. Again, there’s the feeling of familiarity.
\n\nThen the recognizable hassle of bad jobs in dull neighborhoods gives way to a feeling of excitement in your chest and legs. This is a first for you. Having parked your car a block away, you walk along the sidewalk of an arterial road and approach the meetup spot. You see a small group huddled together with a dozen homemade picket signs. You join them. At the top of the hour, you go around in a circle introducing yourselves. You and one other person are new to this fight. Some others have been doing this sort of thing since the 2010s. The person who got fired is here, too. You get a little briefing on the action to take place: Today, you’re picketing. You grab a sign and march along to the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.
\n\nYou’re in a solidarity network now. You and this odd lot of sign holders, baristas, email writers, phone tree operators, dishwashers, canvassers, apartment dwellers, and leaflet writers. You’ve read about “solidarity” and today you are getting a clearer idea of what it might mean.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/4.jpg\")
\nWhat follows is a collection of reflections from current and former members of Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol) intended to inform current and future organizing efforts. We cover the “who,” “what,” and “why” of the organization, including the principles under which we operate and the lessons we’ve learned. While some of the text is a synthesis collectively written by an ad hoc committee, we’ve tried to center the voices of individual members to show the breadth of experience with the organization and to let productive critique of the organization come through.
\n\nSeaSol was started with only the most essential anarchist ideological positions. The point wasn’t to create an elaborate organization and set forth a detailed analysis; the point was to attack landlords and bosses, to be combative and effective. To explore the “how,” read SeaSol’s 2011 guide) to building a solidarity network.
\n\nSeaSol is a mutual support organization. We use collective direct action to fight for workers’ and tenants’ specific demands. These demands typically address stolen wages, stolen deposits, unsafe working conditions, landlords refusing to make repairs, and discrimination. Unlike service organizations, the expectation is that those who take on a fight will join the organization and show up at other people’s fights as they are able.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/3.jpg\")
\nSome members of the Seattle branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded SeaSol in late 2007. They wanted to find a way to build a revolutionary proletarian social movement by winning tangible victories despite having only a small number of supporters.
\n\nAt the time, the IWW in Seattle only had one organized workplace. Most of the IWW members were students or other young people with marginal employment—only staying in a given job for a few months at a time. Organizing unions in an era of precarious employment seemed like a stretch. While the IWW (and most radical unions) would focus on one workplace and try to win over a critical mass of workers in that workplace, SeaSol tried to develop more of a class-based organizing approach. Their class politics prompted them to view tenants’ and workers’ issues as inextricably linked and they hoped that by engaging with both tenants and workers they would be able to ensure a broader level of activity for their new organization.
\n\nNonetheless, they did take some lessons from the IWW and others. For example, they learned about demand deliveries and workplace mapping from the IWW. Workplace mapping means analyzing who is ready to join a fight, who is loyal to the boss or landlord, and who is on the fence. Early SeaSol was inspired by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), which did a lot of direct action. They also followed the example set by a courageous friend. Their friend had applied to a restaurant in Chicago. She worked there for one day, which the manager called an unpaid “training day.” Then was told not to come back because she wasn’t hired. She came back the next day with ten friends and demanded to be paid for the day’s work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/17.jpg\")
A diagram plotting “How much can we hurt them?” against “How hard is it for them to give in?” in order to identify which fights are winnable.
\nHere, some of the early SeaSolers reflect on the network’s origins.
\n\nMickey: SeaSol started out of a series of conversations among comrades at a time when the anti-globalization and anti-war movements were on their last legs. Many of us had been politicized in the anti-war movement or immediately before that during the anti-glob summit protests. We shared a common critique of the ineffectiveness of the activist culture that these two movements were organized around. We felt that this activist culture was alienating to proletarians by design, ineffective at bringing anarchism to the masses, and ineffective at winning struggles against capitalists. To address these problems, we wanted to build a worker-focused project that made anarchism practical and pragmatic to proletarians. We were motivated by historical expressions of anarchism in the old workers movement as well as more recent iterations of anti-state proletarian activity.
\n\nWe had seen how difficult it was for other groups to start anarchist tenant unions or workplace unions from scratch with few or no resources. We had also been languishing in the Seattle IWW for about a year prior to SeaSol’s start, trying to build the branch through organizing campaigns and not having much success. For these reasons, we settled on a direct action casework model pioneered by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP for short). We also took some inspiration from Vancouver’s Anti-poverty Committee. We initially conceived of SeaSol as a temporary platform to get to a place where we could take on larger tenant and workplace organizing campaigns, i.e., to form an autonomous tenants’ union or industrial union.
\nMatt: SeaSol was created in reaction to many of the perceived deficiencies of the anarchist movement and activist left… Basically, we wanted to do something that required struggle at the level of people’s everyday lives, not struggles against some powerful, abstract, distant force that we were doomed to lose, such as the movement against the Iraq War (from 2003 onward). We also felt disgust with the symbolic protest aspects of anti-war and anti-globalization stuff. The anti-globalization movement was great fun. It was empowering to me and mobilized and radicalized a lot of people, but its ephemerality was evident. When I moved to Seattle from the UK, I was disturbed by the weakness of the anti-war movement. It was clear that many projects and direct action groups that existed for a few years around the time of the 1999 WTO protests had already disappeared, while others, such as Indymedia, were fading away rapidly. SeaSol was founded because we thought we should try to win actual victories, even if small ones, instead playing into the martyrdom of the great but impossible cause and the self-righteousness of “at least we’re doing something” symbolic protests. We also felt frustration that the majority of anarchist projects were not conflict-based. They were infoshops, bookshops, food distribution projects, newspapers, websites—all good stuff, but all auxiliary to the engine of the movement and the school of socialism, class struggle. We believed in collective class struggle through direct action and building a social base.
\n\nAlso, we had had no luck in various unionization attempts with the IWW and were fed up with how specific organizations such as NAF [Northwest Anarchist Federation] were putting the ideological cart before the horse of having a common strategy and plan of action…
\n\nAs an attempt to avoid these problems, we discussed more promising movements: the “direct action casework” of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Canadian inter-union solidarity “flying squads” seemed to be appealing forms to imitate. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a great amount of detail on how those groups operated, so we looked at our own experiences. A friend in Chicago had worked at a restaurant for one day, only to be told it was a “training day” and she wouldn’t be paid. She resolved this problem by walking into the restaurant with a large group of friends and refusing to leave until the issue was settled. We were looking to create something that was the opposite of the flaws we perceived in the movements we had emerged from: a focus on the immediate issues caused by capitalism in daily life as experienced by the general population of Seattle and ourselves, not as activists—specialists in social change—but workers in precarious employment or living conditions; a focus on effective strategy rather than moral force; realistic opposition to targets we could actually overcome; and an approach that placed us in direct conflict with the powerful interests in society rather than one that sought to create an alternative but coexisting culture. SeaSol is itself partially a product of the crisis—without the low pay, unstable jobs, landlords trying to cut corners, and high unemployment, perhaps the group would not have generated the interest and momentum to keep going.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/12.jpg\")
\n For a more comprehensive description of SeaSol’s organizational model and tactics, see the SeaSol manual. In short, SeaSol’s tactics involve a series of escalating actions that make it easier or cheaper for the boss or landlord to give in than to refuse. The approach varies depending on the person or company on the other side. The first priority is to win the fight against them.
\n\nPete: All the time I spent with SeaSol organizers creatively discussing effective tactics, looking for leverage in fights, and focusing our energies on winning has deeply ingrained a knowledge and attitude toward organizing that I take everywhere. I should add that what attracted me to SeaSol in the first place, which I credit with truly radicalizing me, was that the meetings were focused and concise, fully dedicated to getting shit done. These are the same principles I use in labor organizing, which has had the effect of motivating the people I work with.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/13.jpg\")
\n The second priority of SeaSol is to build capacity. From the outset, the organization had both defensive and productive aspects. On the one hand, it defended a community from exploitation at work, scuzzy landlords, and other predatory behavior. At the same time, through this defensive process—through the demand deliveries, pickets, parties, and even through the tedious meetings—the participants could experience moments of social transformation, of solidarity, winning small fights in order to gain strength, experience, and reputation so that they could take on bigger fights.
\n\nDC: SeaSol did two things. One: it directly addressed the practical problems of wage theft and tenant issues. Two: it served an educational and agitational function. Its momentum came from normal people democratically organizing themselves. It played a role in building capacity and consciousness that intermediaries like nonprofits and law firms—and most unions—couldn’t. In the context of precarious employment, alienation, and cultural amnesia, SeaSol was a transformation of the anti-capitalist energy that had, in an earlier era, been directed into the formal workers’ movement and left-wing political parties. It was a way to take action where we were, a hopeful starting point for something bigger.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/14.jpg\")
\n Capacity building includes spreading our model and training organizers who can go on to organize and take action in other places.
\n\nLlama: As direct action mutual aid, I think it works pretty well. Sure, we are not disrupting the system as a whole, but we are absolutely creating a community and network… I think what SeaSol builds for people includes:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/15.jpg\")
\n Let’s look at the tactic of the demand delivery. As the authors of the SeaSol manual point out, it might be quicker and easier to send a demand delivery by mail or email. But the purpose of the demand delivery is not only to communicate a written message to the boss or landlord. The purpose is to empower the participants in the action. When the demand is met, they will know it is because they were there taking a risk and defending someone in their community.
\n\nHere, we reflect on how our tactics relate to our strategic vision for the organization.
\n\nDolly: SeaSol is not a social service… the workers and tenants at the centers of our fights are not provided with a service, but take on equal roles in organizing their own campaigns. Those who are not members of SeaSol when they come to us are required to become members and are expected to show up for others’ fights in the future as far as they can. In a perfect world, it would work out this way every time SeaSol took on a fight. It hasn’t always, though. […]
\n\nDoing work with SeaSol provides a way better working-class political education than any book. Lots of people come into the organization as some kind of liberal or democratic socialist and leave, or stay, as anarchists. People learn how landlordism works from doing secretary duty (answering phone calls and emails from people who contact us with their problems) and fighting landlords. People learn that the nonprofit-industrial complex is parasitic and unhelpful to the working poor when it comes to affordable housing, because they see examples of how these organizations fail real people week after week. SeaSolers have front-row seats, in real time and in real life, to how governments and legal systems work to keep landlords and bosses in power, and to the fucked up things that they do with that power. These are things that SeaSolers understand on a visceral level from hard experience, not just intellectually. The knowledge you get from reading about some stranger’s experience on Reddit, or a philosopher’s opinion in a book, is very different. SeaSol learning is not just an idea you entertain, but something you confidently know and are ready to convince others of.
\nDC: SeaSol was not about providing services. It was about building solidarity, about theorizing our response to the disunity of capitalist life, and about acting collectively. Actions are open to everyone. Solidarity brings the group together, not the arbitrary circumstances of one’s social situation. One advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t limit activity within one sphere of one’s life—the job, the apartment, the circle of friends. So participants in the solidarity network relate to each other in many different ways. Mostly, we’re just “comrades.” The common cause of people who join campaign after campaign is more than just challenging the individual power of this or that boss or landlord; it is opposition to all the brutality of the everyday indignities of capitalism. […]
\n\nI first attended a SeaSol action around 2010. I was visiting Seattle from out of town and an old IWW contact told me to come out and see what SeaSol was doing. I had experienced some wage theft and other employment issues from working in food service, but I hadn’t seen an organized group of people addressing those sorts of issues. For most people—even most people in the IWW!—workers’ militant direct action is merely theoretical or historical, provided they think about it at all. Opportunities for that sort of unionization are just vanishingly slim. Even when unionization opportunities are present, we often lack the skill, consciousness, and group cohesion to take advantage of them.
\n\nSeaSol’s model overcame some of the limitations of the IWW approach. Whereas the IWW focused on union organizing campaigns at discrete workplaces, SeaSol built campaigns for the whole class of workers and renters. At the same time, SeaSol’s actions had a narrower focus and were appropriate to our circumstances; instead of the years-long efforts to organize unions (typically at workplaces where turnover outpaced the campaign), SeaSol made demands that could be articulated simply and met promptly. […]
\n\nSeaSol prioritized the effectiveness of actions above anything else. I don’t think Jane McAlevey2 was a conscious influence on the group, but “organizing to win” is the ethos of SeaSol. In the earlier years, social retreats and parties helped promote group cohesion. These were the high points, though it’s hard to say whether, and to what extent, the solid sense of group cohesion was the cause or effect of successful actions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/7.jpg\")
\n Four-Fingered Fisherman: It felt like a meaningful disengagement from appealing to electoral politics for me. The previous mass movements I had been a part of could not escape the recuperative energies of that kind of appeal. Like those movements, the solidarity network model focused on the individual acting in concert with others as the engine of change, but it changed the target. It exposed the various nexuses of power that are, most importantly, within striking distance and enabled communities to take immediate and impactful action against them in a way that the mass movements I had been a part of were largely missing. […]
\n\nThere was also always an acute focus on the model, following the chain of escalation, etc. I think it would be fair to characterize the model and the effectiveness of actions as one of the topmost priorities for SeaSol. This can be a double-edged sword, because any form of dogmatic adherence to something can create the kind of structural rigidity that ultimately ossifies and kills a project. SeaSol mitigated that particular risk by placing an emphasis on debriefing after every action and acting on issues identified in those spaces. […]
\n\nAs I came to learn the solidarity network model and begin working to help implement it, I felt for the first time that I was participating in something that had a high potential for creating transformative spaces for people. After participating in two moments of great social rupture that inevitably simmered back down to the status quo, it felt like the next logical step to take the energy that I had for those and put it towards developing something specifically to the benefit of the people around me rather than acting in the abstract. […]
\n\nDespite the fact that I am no longer currently organizing with SeaSol, my time working on the project represents some of the most foundational and important political activity that I have ever been a part of. It created space for me to grow personally, to expand my organizing capabilities while doing the same for all of the people we took on fights alongside. It secured meaningful, material victories for people, showing them that those could be achieved by direct action. It did all of this while intentionally avoiding getting sucked into electoralism even while Seattle had a self-identified socialist sitting on the city council. Perhaps most importantly, it did this in a way that kept many people engaged with the project for years, parents included, in a setting that tends to lack the cultivation and maintenance of intergenerational relationships.
\nJavabean: There is often a tendency for leftist organizations to see themselves as institutions of political theory that view struggle as secondary to politics, dedicating an excessive amount of time to discussing theory in groups in an attempt to create a singular, cohesive political identity.
\n\nSeaSol does not prescribe its members’ politics, it doesn’t try to guide its organizers’ understanding of theory. If a meeting starts to veer too far into broad discussion of theory and political identity in general, we will put effort into refocusing on the relevant topics, which are never theoretical. Someone needs their paycheck, someone needs their apartment keys, etc.
\n\nThe politics of SeaSol are the collective politics of its members, and what keeps that state of political being from spinning off is very much a social model of organizational structure: people with toxic politics will find SeaSol an unpleasant place to be, and eventually be shown the door. It’s not a perfect system, but I’ve never seen a perfect system, and at least we spend our time fighting fights.
\nLilly: I’m not sure anyone actually presented it this way to me, but when I joined (in 2009), I remember thinking SeaSol was designed to make every person at the center of a fight into a traditional organizer with SeaSol. This would turn out to be a narrow view of organic organizing; it played out seldomly in SeaSol. What happened more often was a ripple effect or branching: an activated person in a community or social group could motivate four or five fights while being at the center of just one of them. Most people who had fights continued to come out to actions for years, and in some cases, forever.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/11.jpg\")
\n SeaSol has been around through many waves of struggle and organization—the antiwar movement, the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic, and the Palestine solidarity movement. Over the past seventeen years, SeaSol has taken on around sixty fights. So far, we have registered a full or partial victory in roughly nine out of every ten of the fights we have completed. We estimate that around 2000 people have engaged with SeaSol in one way or another. Around 400 have become members of the network.
\n\nLilly: Once, we were fighting a developer who sat on the board of an environmental NGO. We hoped to get a flyer detailing his racist employment behavior into the hands of as many people attending this NGO board event as possible. They held their event at a restaurant that had limited public sidewalk and a private parking lot, which made it tricky to distribute the flyers. Another organizer and I dressed in our fanciest clothing, hoping the attendees would infer that we had a relationship to the event venue. They did, and every single car stopped to roll down their window and take our flyer.
\n\nOn a picket line outside of an apartment building, a property manager came out to the line to explain how she was “just doing her job,” claiming that she was “trying to help and really cared for” the person at the center of the fight, whose deposit was being stolen. The property management company had actually produced pictures that were verifiably not from the SeaSol member’s apartment. We were coming out of a solidarity network conference and had other solidarity network organizers in town. Perhaps because they were backing us up, or because it was a rowdy action, or because I have been a renter the entirety of my childhood and much of my adult life and have visceral memories of scrubbing apartment walls in hopes of getting a deposit back, something in me just gave way.
\n\nI verbally tore into the property manager. She knew this was not right, she knew she was stealing $350 dollars from a family that needed it to put down at another apartment—and for what? For a company that routinely steals deposits, knowing people won’t normally advocate for their return. If she cared about the person at the center of the fight, she would advocate to her bosses for the return of the deposit. If she couldn’t do that, she’d better not come out to the line trying to tell us shit. It must have registered, because I remember looking at her face as it broke and she just started crying before running inside. I’m not usually the schadenfreude type, but that knowing she heard and at least momentarily understood the pain she was causing others in this world meant a lot to me.
\nDolly: The Admiral Pub fight was one of my all-time favorites as far as what it showed SeaSol can achieve. Lucio, who was a cook at the Admiral Pub in West Seattle, was arrested by ICE and detained. The owner of the business, Eric Galanti, stole his paycheck. Lucio had family members still in Seattle who joined SeaSol and fought and organized on Lucio’s behalf while he was incarcerated and subsequently deported to Mexico.
\n\nLucio’s nephew, Luis, was active in the fight. We did a lot of pickets for several months at the Admiral Pub, and then at Bourbon Jack’s, another bar Galanti owned in the neighboring town of Kent, Washington. During that picket, the Kent police approached us to ask Luis to talk to Galanti with them.
\n\nWe all sat down, and Luis faced his uncle’s boss. The boss was flanked by cops. Luis was flanked by SeaSolers. Vuvuzelas could be heard blasting down the street. The normal power dynamic in this group had shifted, and I could see and feel it. The power was with Luis and the rabble of protest kids! The rich business owner was powerless, and the cops were decorative but useless. Galanti cut Luis a check for the full amount of wages he had stolen from Lucio . We walked away victorious. We walked away with a powerful experience that showed how direct collective action can shift the power dynamics in unjust situations to win demands for the working class.
\nThe Four Fingered Fisherman: Hands-down the most impactful moment in my time with SeaSol was our fight against a regional hotel chain called Silver Cloud, which fired a long-time dishwasher named Prospero for a no call no show the day after he suffered a massive heart attack while working in their dishpit. Prospero waited for months while we wrapped up another fight, showing up to every SeaSol meeting and supporting that other campaign before we could begin with his.
\n\nOnce we initiated his campaign, he fought for what was owed to him with a joy, determination, and consideration for his friends who still worked there that was almost unbelievable. We fought those bastards alongside him for months and finally won after confronting the multi-millionaire owner of the hotel chain at his lakefront home several times, just blocks from where Jeff Bezos was then living. The day that Prospero received the check from them in the mail, he treated himself to a film at the theater and quietly passed away without having cashed the check.
\n\nFortunately, we were able to assist in ensuring that his family was able to cash the check so that he could return to them one final time. Prospero’s indomitable spirit enabled him to hang on to life just long enough to put the bastards who wronged him in their place, in hopes that it would prevent them from doing the same thing to the rest of his friends there. That memory will stick with me until the day that I join him in the great unknown.
\nDC: [My favorite memory of SeaSol is] Making friends. Oh, and this one time I ran into a friend’s boyfriend at a taco truck we were picketing. He was a young guy, but he literally worked at Goldman Sachs. When he asked me why I was there, I explained the wage theft thing to him. He was so excited that we were doing direct action. He joined us for a bit and was yelling at the truck owner about how he’s never coming back there to eat. The next day, I saw his girlfriend. Apparently, he had told her all about the fun he had picketing. She half-jokingly told me to stay away from her boyfriend. She didn’t want me to give him any radical ideas. She wanted him to keep on the straight and narrow path to bourgeois wealth. She was sweating.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/10.jpg\")
\n Our theory was that SeaSol might start with ideologically-committed anarchists, but it would grow to include people from outside “the scene.” We hoped that by winning small but meaningful victories, SeaSol’s direct action casework would attract increasing numbers of people to engage in demonstrations and organizing. The organizing work was supposed to serve both educational and practical ends, deepening and extending the working-class movement against exploitation.
\n\nWe saw some success in this. In Walter Winslow’s 2011 interviews with SeaSol members, every respondent
\n\n\n\n\n“who did not initially get involved with SeaSol for any sort of ideological reasons, reported that they wanted to see SeaSol continue to grow to successfully take on larger and more significant problems in society.”
\n
One organizer put it poetically:
\n\n\n\n\n“the basic motif of SeaSol that I know is we do what we can today so we can do what we want to tomorrow.”
\n
SeaSol has measured its success by the fights it has won, but also by its capacity to grow. After seventeen years, how have we fared according to those standards?
\n\nOf course, the history of working-class movements includes plenty of failures. Capitalism is still here, structuring our lives and our ability to resist its dynamic push and pull. SeaSol is hardly unique as an organization that has failed to overthrow it. We’ve seen solidarity networks based on SeaSol’s model start in several other cities, but to our knowledge, none of those are still around today. This speaks to SeaSol’s success as the organization that has lasted the longest—we have to be doing something right!—but it also suggests some possible problems in the SeaSol model.
\n\nFundamentally, we must question the degree to which our project has helped develop class consciousness, taught us about the limits of our power, increased the scope of our demands, and prefigured the social relations and dynamics we desire. Could there be problems with our theories and our model? Certainly, it hasn’t been particularly easy to adapt them to other conditions. The problems we’ve observed relate to some familiar themes: lacking a critical mass; lacking committed organizers; challenges recruiting and integrating new people; burnout and retention; drama and interpersonal conflicts. The critical commentary on solidarity networks (such as this article) suggests some important questions:
\n\nThe following reflections relate to some of the lessons we’ve learned in trying to address these issues.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/1.jpg\")
\nEmily S.: I was sixteen when I joined SeaSol in 2010 and nineteen when I began to gradually break away from the group. (I was already aware of some basic tenets of anarchism and came to a meeting after seeing the words “solidarity,” “mutual aid” and “direct action” on a poster.) I don’t think I became an independently effective organizer during that time, but I learned a great deal and participated in parallel political moments, like Occupy/Decolonize Seattle and the 2011 port shutdown, alongside other SeaSolers. The parts of the group that immediately appealed to me were the focus on winning and the framework for choosing and carrying out fights. My criticisms of it eventually arose around issues of racial dynamics between organizers and between organizers and people coming to us with fights. (Patriarchal dynamics that affected white women were mostly eventually addressed.)
\n\nOne incident I remember, the straw that broke the camel’s back for my involvement, was at a meeting after we had voted to take on a fight with a certain monetary demand. Two longtime organizers had apparently been talking with each other and had decided that for whatever reason, the demand was unrealistic and proposed it should be replaced with a lower amount of money to be more “winnable.” They had not talked about this with the people bringing the fight, who were Latino restaurant workers, and the latter had no input until it was brought up formally at the meeting. While everyone has equal ability to participate in meetings (though as I recall these two workers communicated via a volunteer interpreter, so inevitably more friction was involved), I did not feel that everyone involved was on equal footing and I thought it was disrespectful given that no additional information had been discovered in the interim that would have justified reopening the topic. (I spoke my mind at the meeting, to no avail.)
\n\nI do not recall which fight this was, and for all I know it went on to be successful, but I know from what I was told afterwards that the workers were not happy with how things went down at that meeting. While I had always felt respected and appreciated in Seasol, I did not feel like I had the social skills or clout to intervene in a way that would be satisfying in the long term, and mostly stopped going to meetings. In my view, this was an example of the concept of winnability being taken too far: toning down a demand for no concrete reason and at a cost to those workers.
\n\nAnother incident was a much more serious mistake. Before the first picket of Boracchini’s, one of the founding members of SeaSol had gone on a local right-wing talk radio show to speak about it, without asking approval from the rest of the group. This led to the presence of many counter-protesters, and one of our members was seriously hurt at this picket. The violence would not have happened if the action hadn’t been publicized to all the wrong people. It was a major blunder, and an inexplicable one given the generally democratic nature of the group.
\n\nSeaSol provided me with many formative relationships and experiences as a young adult in a way that’s hard to sum up today. The main takeaways I have are the experience of militancy, the willingness to break all the normal social rules and get in the bosses’ faces; the general principles of planning an escalation campaign; and how to use mobilizing lists for actions (something that I later realized is surprisingly rare). While I’ve never been involved in another group with the dedication with which I was involved in SeaSol, it gave me a solid and practical education in core aspects of organizing that are almost universally applicable.
\nJavabean: My realistic critique of that as an overall organizational strategy is that it’s not always easy to recognize when it’s necessary to shift focus to building capacity. I think that we tend to put so much focus on maintaining a fight that outreach and organization building can look like additional work for an already exhausted organizer, which can lead to a diminished organization, and member burnout.
\n\nThere’s no straightforward answer of when to build an organization and when to fight fights. I think the only real answer is to keep the focus on output. If your organization doesn’t create material results, figure out why. It might be that you’re focusing on “recruitment” when you should be focusing on action; it might be the reverse. It might be something else entirely. At the end of the day, SeaSol is more interested in what we can do than in how many people come to meetings. […]
\n\nTo be honest, I think that this question [about what happens when struggles are at a low point] gets right to SeaSol’s biggest weakness, and it can seem existential. When an organization is built on people’s ability to connect and form collective action over material struggle, and it judges its efficacy on its ability to engage and win on that level, then its primary source of energy is those fights.
\n\nWhen there isn’t a fight, people get bored, lose interest, and capacity falters. SeaSol has been fortunate to have had members that have the energy to keep things going in those times. As much as I wonder how long SeaSol could survive without a fight, my immediate response to that thought is, “If SeaSol doesn’t have fights, what’s the point of it even existing?”
\n\nI haven’t been around for a serious existential lull, but I think that historically, the answer is that there’s enough struggle out there to go around, and so we actively look for fights, and that re-energizes the organization. […]
\n\nJust to get this out of the way, SeaSol can’t be specifically “substitutionist” in any way that I would understand it, because it’s not a political party. SeaSol has no collective revolutionary agenda beyond (arguably) the likelihood that most of its members would hope that the existence of solidarity networks might generally raise class consciousness, contribute in some way to aspirational goals in a way that could be described in terms of base building, or create pathways that might assist in community organizing that is antithetical to capitalist hierarchies.
\n\nThe thing about that is: SeaSol doesn’t actually do any of that. We fight fights that we can win. We’ve literally never talked about revolution or political goals in a meeting beyond those directly relevant to what’s in front of us. [In fact, revolution and political goals have been discussed in meetings that this member may not have attended.] If we were to co-opt a fight, it would be for an agenda that doesn’t exist. There isn’t really a definition of “substitutionism” that I could see being realistically applied to SeaSol in any serious way.”
\nMickey: SeaSol took off and was far more successful than I think any of us initially imagined it would be. Some of the challenges presented by activist culture that we had critiqued in the anti-glob and anti-war movements followed us into SeaSol, such as voluntarism. But we were able to address other challenges successfully through this new hybrid form of class struggle unionism. For example, we were able to recruit workers from a variety of backgrounds to our network, introducing them to a functional and pragmatic anarchism.
\n\nThe success of the model also made jumping to other forms of struggle very difficult. Expanding our fights between single tenants or workers into larger collective fights that could form the nucleus of future unions continued to be a persistent issue. Our fights often stayed between isolated tenants or workers. We found out that it was fairly difficult to use the solidarity network model to build a tenant or workers union. […]
\n\nIntegrating into any anarchist/left-wing project is difficult and turnover/attrition is inevitable. That said, this is one of the things SeaSol did well. There was a formal system for bringing new people in and making sure they were engaged. SeaSol also offered childcare at meetings and sometimes organized meetings or materials in Spanish, since some members were Spanish-speaking. While there was plenty of turnover, we recruited and integrated many long-term members into our organizing committee. The theoretical and strategic framework was largely syndicalist and somewhat reductionist on purpose. This framework was perpetuated via regular and consistent organizer trainings. There were attempts to organize political education in SeaSol, but I’m not sure how successful they were.
\nDolly: Revolutionizing the global labor movement and toppling capitalism is a tall order for any single organization or idea. In my twenty-something mind, this was possible for SeaSol. If we fought enough of them, the solidarity network model would spread, and bosses and landlords wouldn’t be able to exploit us anymore. Capitalism would surely fall. For a couple of years there, it seemed like it was happening! Honestly, as I approach my forties and SeaSol similarly enters a slower, more measured and reflective phase, I still believe this model holds key components to the liberation of the working class. We operate using the principles of cooperative self-governance and decision-making. We rely on direct action tactics. We have no paid staff or hierarchy or membership dues. We can definitely improve, but there is a lot about SeaSol that is… perfect. […]
\n\nOur toolbox of tactics has evolved. We’re really creative, passionate, smart people. What we will do for a $99 fight we believe in is unhinged. We have fought international corporations like Greystar in coordination with other solidarity networks and won. We’ve organized strikes and beaten enormous corporations like Chase Bank that traditional unions wouldn’t dream of touching. SeaSol has also cultivated a tight-knit, positive anarchist community whose members have built lifelong friendships. SeaSolers have strong cross-generational relationships built on real class struggle. Our community fights bosses and landlords together, yes, but we’re also a community of people who care for one another outside of that context. […]
\n\nAlong with attracting top-notch organizers, our organization tends to attract people who see an opportunity to take advantage of a place that doesn’t have any membership dues or barriers to membership and seem to delight in being the center of drama and interpersonal strife. The group has a big problem with being helpless in the face of abusive behavior by such people—it’s a pattern that has repeated itself a handful of times since I joined and I wish I knew how to solve it. Many people have “gotten tired of dealing with [person x]” and left before the group got up the courage to vote [person x] out. We don’t have a great process for doing this, and one solid organizer left over the process itself. […]
\n\nGroup cohesion is generally easy when we have fights and we only intentionally work on this when problems arise. Occasionally, groups of female-identifying SeaSolers (affectionately calling ourselves “SheSol”) have gotten together to address problematic or threatening behavior specifically directed at us. We then brought issues to the group with proposals about how to resolve them, which were approved each time. There have been personality problems over the years, with people doing various things—seemingly intentionally—to disrupt the harmony of the group and manipulate and abuse others emotionally. This has been awful, but we’ve found ways to deal with it each time, by eventually voting the member(s) in question out after a certain amount of damage has been inflicted. There has been talk of establishing a process for dealing with this, but no clear proposals have been made. It’s messy.
\nIke: I’d say a majority of people who find out about SeaSol don’t end up taking on any role—even something as small as note-taking.
\n\nMy impression is that SeaSol’s default mode of transmitting knowledge is person-to-person, and we could probably make better use of written material and organize it better. For example, anyone can volunteer to be a secretary / facilitator, and new people who have been around for a few weeks are encouraged to do so, but the actual knowledge of how to do it properly is conveyed either through shadowing someone or through SeaSol school, which runs sessions on this topic maybe one or two times per year. I’ve been trying to document the things I was confused about when I joined and I think it’s been helpful.
\n\nAlso, our niche seems to be people who already know they’re leftists and are familiar with the way “orgs” tend to talk. I haven’t seen much success in converting “normal” people to organizing or much repeat engagement with SeaSol from people we helped with their own fights in the last two years. I do know that some organizers had prior SeaSol fights, so that may be a short time span.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/6.jpg\")
\n Jane: On the side of “lessons learned,” we have learned that doing this work does not magically transform people into anarchists or other flavors of lefties. It seems to me that it took a preexisting lefty ideological commitment to motivate people to stick around long term as organizers. But as for a list of people who might show up if we asked them about a compelling fight, that list grew and is pretty large now…
\n\nIn terms of my personal desire to have more influence over my organizing work, I definitely achieved that goal as one of the people putting my heart and tons of hours into the work. But I feel like we were in crisis mode for many years, perennially overstretched, and so not really taking the time to develop or mentor people who maybe wanted to be more involved but hadn’t already developed those skills in other parts of their lives. So it’s possible that people felt that same inner circle / outer circle dynamic that I had felt in my union work, again totally unintentionally. There’s only so many hours in the day and we were trying to win those fights. And organizing work is often tedious and more people want to have opinions about it than want to actually do the work.
\n\nRegarding unexpected outcomes, it’s the friends you make along the way, right? Actually, I’m still super tight with a bunch of SeaSol folks and it’s been fun seeing how they’re using the skills that we all developed together in other organizing projects, in their jobs, and so on. I think fighting gross misconduct in employers and landlords will never go out of style.
\n\nAs (mostly) anarchists, we were pretty helpless in the face of basic social dysfunction. We’re so inclusive and want to be nice. But people who would have just gotten fired from actual jobs were allowed to stick around for far too long and to be a psychic and emotional drain on the group. When we actually managed to eject one or two, it nearly broke us. If anyone has managed to crack the code on that problem, I’d love to hear it.
\nDC: Of course, SeaSol’s model has its own limits. The tangible returns of even successful campaigns—a $500 paycheck here, a $1000 deposit there—aren’t great compared to the energy and time put into the campaign. (Although I’d argue that the intangible results are more important!) Obviously, SeaSol hasn’t generalized any of its individual campaigns into some bigger revolution. Many people are burnt out from the time, dedication, and courage required. We keep bumping our heads up against the limits of coordination, communication, and alienation. […]
\n\nSeaSol also isn’t always prepared for a legal counter-attack. We’re vulnerable when an employer uses the courts (lawfare) to harass and intimidate us.
\nLilly: Regarding failure, almost ten years after I left the organizing team I would still prefer to say “I didn’t give it my best effort,” rather than the truth, which is that I totally did and I still feel I failed. I think I learn more everyday about why it didn’t work “better”—and how flawed and grandiose it is to think “I failed” at social revolution. At one point during organizing, it became almost physically painful when people uninvolved in the daily struggle would ask why it wasn’t “scaling” or picking up speed. And honestly? It wasn’t scaling because of the sheer weight of that metaphorical boulder representing an entire economic system, and the innumerable divisions between us in society.
\n\nCriticism flowed constantly: why didn’t SeaSol create more community? Why didn’t it scale? Why was it focused on single-worker or tenant fights? Well, it did do all those things and aspired for more, but the reality of constant, concerted oppression was more extreme than I previously understood. Existing under capitalism—let alone resisting under it—is exhausting, demoralizing, and traumatic. Solidarity Networks are a great method to get elbow-deep into resistance, for pushing that boulder around for a few moments, letting someone else under it breathe before it rolls back on top of all of us. I think that is the type of community and resistance building we need, repeatedly, even if it’s barely manageable. If we keep gaining momentum on this boulder, if we keep organizing and shifting it around, we will eventually keep up the momentum to push it off of us for longer and longer periods; I have no doubt that if more people participated in SolNets, we’d see increased community capacity over time. […]
\n\nDuring my time, one organizer quit by basically telling everybody how much he hated each of them and especially the relationships that organizers formed. It can’t be reduced to this because there was so much going on at the time, but one point he made was that SeaSol organizing was not really sustainable with a working-class lifestyle. He was kind of right. Doing something that hard and doing it extremely well took a handful of people making SeaSol their entire lives. Now, many of those people were working class, but still. It took a lot. I hope that anyone engaging in solidarity networks realizes that balance is really difficult, but not impossible. The frustration around ease of participation is valid; solidarity networks should try to be as inclusive as possible. And it is not fellow organizers or members who dictate the difficulty of participation so much as the conditions from which all fights originate: capitalism.
\nThe Four Fingered Fisherman: I think it is inarguable that the social context has changed; the Trump years, the George Floyd Rebellion, climate catastrophe, and the genocide in Palestine, among other things, have all pulled us in a million different directions, often in reactive way. Moments such as those are always going to shift some of the energy away from a geographically-focused, long-term project like SeaSol.
\n\nHowever, I would posit that a serious and strategic assessment of the limitations of these moments, which we continually find ourselves running up against, points us back toward the keystone elements of the solidarity network model and what has made it so successful for SeaSol. In this regard, the most important elements of the solidarity network model that I have taken away from it as it can be applied to the current social context are having a geographically-restrictive focus (even when tied to a broader mass social movement), being regenerative in their capacity, and using direct action to target relevant local manifestations of power. […]
\n\nWhile SeaSol was generally pretty intentional about reserving use of its mobilization list and organizing energies for its own demand-specific campaigns, there were moments in my time with the organization when we directly organized to support broader goals. The largest single SeaSol mobilization that I participated in was when we hit our entire mobilization list to bring people out into the streets to face off against the Northwest Hammerskins4 on an attempted so-called “Martyr’s Day” march they were planning in 2015. SeaSol mobilized over 70 people from our list and offered a contingent at the action for our supporters in a context that might otherwise have felt prohibitively dangerous . Beyond using the project itself as a space to participate in broader social movements, however, I have always felt that SeaSol is one of the primary points of entry here in Seattle for new, politically-activated people to come in and quickly develop skills and experience that they can then apply in other spaces.
\n\nThat was certainly my personal experience, and I have seen that play out for many others as well in my time here.
\nMatt: We were also inspired by the positive reception we got from anarchist and communist groups around the world.
\n\nAmong other unintended positive effects, it increased the credibility of the anarchist movement around the time of Occupy. We could point to some tangible and practical victories we had achieved. This helped to put us in a position to win the battle of ideas (and organization) against liberal collaborationists.
\n\nThe big problem was scale. It’s great to win a few thousand dollars back in lost wages for a few dozen members, and to help families avoid eviction and so on, but that is a tiny drop in the ocean, so I believed that the model had to grow exponentially to even keep up with capitalist society. That is why I favored speaking tours to spread the model and encourage growth of new groups. This was quite successful in the short term, but most of those groups folded after only a few months to a year. (Perhaps in our enthusiasm, we made it sound too easy.)
\n\nAnother impasse was about what to do with the local Seattle group in order to achieve constantly increasing growth—should we form specialized groups focusing on tenant committees and workplaces, or should we split into smaller regional groups for different parts of the area?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/5.jpg\")
\n We won’t shy away from it: We want you to start a solidarity network, or at least to borrow heavily from the idea. The solidarity network narratives and critiques that we have shared here attest that manifesting a community of solidarity and resistance through sheer organizing energy is an experience worth the effort it takes to sustain. The responses describe applied, practical solidarity as an antidote to apathy and agony.
\n\nSolidarity networks are a way to blow life into the working class. We want you to play a part in this resuscitation, to pound on the chest until you hear the ribs crack if you need to. Give this your best effort. Because it works. Even if it’s completely exhausting. And despite everything—anxiety and ruined relationships and failed fights, extreme edges of human behavior and fraught moments when it feels like it may actually be impossible—solidarity networks may still be one of the best forms of organizing on offer.
\n\nDolly: Fascists are becoming bolder, which has increased the relevance of the solidarity network model and increased the importance of security culture within SeaSol. Bosses and landlords have been gaining power and traditional business unions are weakening, all of which increases our relevance for obvious reasons. The climate crisis and racial injustice are shifting within our social context. Both are caused by capitalism, and people active in SeaSol and similar organizing care deeply about both of these things.
\n\nSeaSol, over the years, has also made me increasingly doubtful of the effectiveness of governments and legal systems for making any kind of meaningful gains for the working class. I’ve seen people turn to legal fights rather than SeaSol fights, and seen those just drain them of time and resources until they peter out into nothingness. I can see that the bosses and landlords who write the laws of our land also benefit from them. I see that wage theft is the most common type of theft, and that wage theft laws are not enforced. That is a design feature, not a bug, because the employing class writes these laws and enforces them, not the working class. They have ensured that the working class will never overthrow them within the systems that they have set up.
\n\nI had a lot more faith in things like electoral politics when I first joined SeaSol. I’m a lot more critical of those systems now. I consider myself an anarcho-syndicalist. My education didn’t come from reading theory so much as through watching people’s situations play out in the context of organizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/8.jpg\")
\n The picket wraps up and your solidarity network crew does a group go-around, each person recounts a favorite moment from the last two hours. One person—you think they’re the barista, they might have authored the leaflet—says they loved it when the boss stepped out to yell at the picket line. They can’t imagine the vein on the boss’s forehead can handle another picket like this one.
\n\nAnother member—the other person brand new to the fight—proudly shares the moment they were able to turn a customer away, leaflet in one hand and picket sign in the other. Two solidarity network members who had stepped over to the side to talk to the police when they arrived report to the group that the boss was the one who called the police to the picket yet again. The person at the center of the fight goes last and thanks everyone for coming out.
\n\nIt’s now dusk. The street lights are flickering on. You are still in the middle of a stretch of suburban nowhere, at an intersection next to a gas station across the street from a strip mall. But you’re feeling different. You and the dishwashers, phone tree operators, leaflet authors, apartment dwellers, and the barista return your picket signs to the back of the truck that transported them there. The concept behind this group is sinking in. Solidarity.
\n\n“It really is so simple,” you think to yourself. “When we stand up for one another, the rest of the petty, entitled, obnoxious bosses will probably buckle just like today’s did.” You head back home to think about the next action. Maybe you will finally check out one of the planning meetings, too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/9.jpg\")
\nAn Owie to One Is an Owie to All: A Six-Step Plan for Helping Your Parent-Friends Remain Activists
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/2.jpg\")
\n Agitate, Educate, Inoculate, Organize, UNION is an IWW organizing strategy. ↩
\nJane McAlevy was a community and labor organizer who guided many successful campaigns by inspiring workers to organize for power in their own unions and communities by taking militant, collective action in overwhelming numbers. ↩
\nSubstitutionism is a term in Marxist theory referring to a situation or analysis in which the activity of the revolutionary party is supposed to substitute for the activity of the working class. This was a question from outside of SeaSol; many of us were unfamiliar with the term. ↩
\nNorthwest Hammerskins is an affiliate of Hammerskin Nation, a white supremacist, fascist, antisemitic and homophobic neo-Nazi “skinhead” group in the United States. ↩
\nBy revisiting the struggles that took place at the turn of the century from the vantage point of our current dystopia, we can grasp how much is at stake in today’s struggles.
\n\nThis text appears as the introduction to the book Another War Is Possible, just published by PM Press, which documents the experiences of one anarchist fighting against capitalism and the state across three continents in the course of the so-called anti-globalization movement. You can read more about it in the appendix.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/6.jpg\")
\nIt was the end of the 20th century and capitalism had triumphed.
\n\n“Really existing socialism” had collapsed. Elections were taking place everywhere, bringing new politicians to power to sign neoliberal trade agreements. In place of dictatorships, the free market reigned victorious.
\n\nFrancis Fukuyama declared it “the end of history,” proclaiming
\n\n\n\n\nthe end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
\n
For politicians, advertising agents, and corporate executives, it was a time of jubilation.
\n\nThe social ferment of the 1960s had ebbed. In the United States, radical politics largely subsisted in subcultural milieux—environmental movements, radical bookstores, the hip hop and punk scenes. Europe also had the rave scene, the squatting movement with its network of social centers, and the vestiges of the powerful movements of the mid-20th century. On the opposing side, there were fascists, but they, too, were largely confined to subcultural milieux. Outside those enclaves, social peace prevailed, as everyone scrambled to get their piece of the pie or waited for their ship to come in.
\n\nIt was a fools’ paradise. Globalized capitalism was moving wealth around faster and further than ever before, but in the process, it was concentrating it into fewer and fewer hands, slowly immiserating the vast majority. Anarchists knew that the apparent unanimity around the new world order would not last forever. Eventually, there would be another round of conflicts and history would continue moving forward. The real question was how the lines would be drawn.
\n\nWe met at hardcore punk shows. We were reading about the Panthers, the Yippies, the Ranters, the Diggers, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. When we heard that someone had spray-painted “NEVER WORK” on the wall of the Boulevard de Port-Royal during the May 1968 uprising, we took it literally, embarking on a life of crime.
\n\nOthers took a different approach, drawing on a different toolset. We quit our jobs; they unionized their workplaces. We squatted buildings; they did tenant organizing. We rejected formal organization; they created federations. We hitchhiked to events; they showed up with vans full of gear.
\n\nEventually, we began to run into each other at conferences and demonstrations. Everything that rises must converge.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/5.jpg\")
An anarchist sails across the heads of the police into the embrace of comrades during demonstrations against the presidential inauguration on January 20, 2001.
\nFortunately, anarchists were not the only ones who had a bone to pick with the reigning order. On the first day of 1994, just as the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up against the Mexican government in Chiapas, setting a powerful example of grassroots struggle against neoliberalism. Inspired by the EZLN and other anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements, people around the world began to organize protests, networks, occupations, global days of action.
\n\nTo most people in the United States, taking on the authorities seemed absurd, if not downright quaint. Corporate media journalists refused to even say the word capitalism aloud, substituting “anti-globalization” as if we were part of a worldwide movement for parochialism. The bitterest conflicts were over “violence”—to be precise, over whether it was acceptable to respond in kind to the perpetual top-down violence of the state. But the most difficult challenge was to enable people to imagine that the capitalist world order was not inevitable, that another world was possible.
\n\nNonetheless, for a few years—let’s say, from 1999 to 2001—the chief conflict playing out on the global stage was between neoliberal capitalism and the grassroots movements that opposed it. On June 18, 1999, thousands of people converged on London for a day of action heralded as the Carnival against Capitalism, during which some of them almost succeeded in destroying the London Stock Exchange. The following November, demonstrators successfully blockaded and shut down the summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Over the next two years, almost every major international trade summit occasioned fierce street conflict.
\n\n“Should we try to get across?” I shouted, but we were already running, it was a split-second decision, we were already on the bridge by the time she answered “Let’s do it—we’re doing it” and we were sprinting for the other side. Behind us, I could hear the POP, POP as the cops fired tear gas and rubber bullets; around us, I could hear the impact of the bullets, the clatter as the canisters landed, the hiss as their noxious contents filled the air; ahead, I couldn’t see anything, the gas blotted out the sky, there was only the unknown—and beyond that, if we were lucky enough to reach it, a city to destroy, a world to create.
\n\nThe stakes were higher than we knew. If all of the people who were on the losing end of cutthroat capitalism failed to grasp that it was the source of their misfortunes, they would be susceptible to nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and demagoguery when they realized that the market was not fulfilling their hopes. But if we could make our case that capitalism was the chief cause of their misery, they might join us in our efforts to build a new society. There was a short window of time in which it seemed possible that we might succeed.
\n\nThis was the war in which the author of this book participated—a war fought to forestall all the senseless wars that came afterwards. We were fighting for a world in which all human beings could encounter each other as equals, in which the profit imperative would not trump the needs of human beings or the threat of climate change.
\n\nWe set out from the campus at noon. Hundreds of people were there, ready, suited up—hoods, helmets, shoulder pads, the works. One group was pushing a full-size catapult. I was walking behind some people who were pulling a giant puppet representing the World Bank. Sledgehammers kept falling out onto the asphalt from inside the papier mâché.
\n\nAmong the crowd, I recognized his crew from the inauguration the previous January. You develop an instinct for such things, even when everyone is masked. In idle social conversations and online forums, we were rivals. But in a situation like that, you want everyone there.
\n\nAt some point, the police drove a water cannon right at the crowd. A certain masked anarchist ran right up to it and smashed out the window before it could get a clear shot at us. The driver pulled away in a hurry.
\n\nWell, that’s fucking crazy, I thought. Wow.
\n\nPerhaps if everyone had been able to see what was coming, more people would have fought as hard as the author of this book. Few understood how dire things could get.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/4.jpg\")
\nUnfortunately, we were not the only force contending to determine how the lines of conflict would be drawn in the 21st century. Provoked by centuries of colonial violence, Salafi jihadists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Neoconservatives in the Bush administration snatched the opportunity to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq, precipitating the so-called “clash of civilizations” they had been fantasizing about. The new century opened with a series of bloodbaths.
\n\nThis declaration of war served to obscure the possibility of any other war, any other stakes for which people might fight. The authorities in the United States and their symmetrical adversaries in al-Qaeda aimed to assert their rivalry as the central conflict in history, sidelining the rebels in Chiapas and the demonstrators who had shut down the Seattle WTO summit.
\n\nIn the United States, authoritarian socialist parties took advantage of the situation to seize the initiative from anarchists and other horizontally organized projects, gaining control of the anti-war movement through front groups (Not in Our Name for the Revolutionary Communist Party, ANSWER for the Workers World Party). The transformative grassroots models of the visionary anti-capitalist movement gave way to reactive protests addressing uncaring politicians.
\n\nThe US government passed the Patriot Act. The FBI stepped up operations targeting Muslims in particular, but also environmentalists and animal liberation activists. Politicians expanded and militarized the police. On November 30, 1999, the government of Seattle had fielded just 400 police to defend the summit of the World Trade Organization; in 2017, 28,000 security personnel defended Donald Trump’s inauguration.
\n\nOverseas, the brutal US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cost nearly a million lives, driving more people into the ranks of the jihadists. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria a decade later showed that the invasions had only strengthened the forces that the neoconservatives purported to be attacking. In 2010, when a wave of revolutions began in Tunisia and spread across the Mideast, it hit a wall in Syria in part because of the Islamic State and its supporters. We’ll never know what the uprisings of the so-called Arab Spring and other social movements in the region could have accomplished if not for the harm wrought by the so-called “War on Terror.” When the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan in 2021, that only underscored how pointless as well as destructive the US invasions had been.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/1.jpg\")
Bashar al-Assad had hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered to maintain his grip on Syria, yet lost in the end nonetheless. The United States did the same in Afghanistan. These pointless and horrific tragedies are only a glimpse of what awaits if we continue down this road.
\nThe violence and poverty that resulted from all of these wars, occupations, and insurgencies drove refugees towards Europe from Africa and the Mideast by the million. Something similar was taking place south of the US border, as the havoc wreaked by the North American Free Trade Agreement and the militarization of police and paramilitaries plunged whole regions into bloodshed. Nativists on both sides of the Atlantic took advantage of the refugees’ desperation to drum up racism and fear.
\n\nMeanwhile, in the former Eastern Bloc, capitalist profiteering left many people worse off economically than they had been before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This generated waves of nationalism, enabling autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán to consolidate control. Emulating their model, politicians like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Giorgia Meloni came to power in the Americas and Western Europe. They channeled the rage of the eroding middle class towards openly fascist politics, encouraging their supporters to blame refugees, queer and trans people, Jewish people, and “communists” for the ways that the free market had failed them.
\n\nDriven by rampant industrialism, climate change hammered coastlines and incinerated forests. The COVID-19 pandemic—the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation—the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires—the genocide in Gaza: all this will be familiar to you unless it has been eclipsed by even worse by the time you read this. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will not be the last of the wars to come if we continue down this road—wars made possible by the consolidation of autocratic power and inevitable by economic and ecological crises. Looking at the weaponization of refugees on the border between Belarus and Poland and the use of prisoners as cannon fodder in Ukraine, we can see that—unless we change course—life is going to be increasingly cheap in the 21st century.
\n\nOn June 18, 2023, exactly 24 years after the Carnival against Capitalism in London, the top article in the New York Times acknowledged what we had been saying for a quarter of a century: capitalist globalization creates catastrophic wealth inequalities, wrecking the biosphere and generating extreme-right nationalism. The article recited all the talking points of the average anti-capitalist protester of 1999, right down to the criticisms of the International Monetary Fund. Even the capitalists themselves now wish that we had won.
\n\nAll of these tragedies had yet to occur when the struggles described in this book took place. Who knows—if more of us had fought harder, we might have averted some of them.
\n\nBut we can’t fault the author of this book. He was always in the front lines.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/3.jpg\")
The anarchist black bloc marches out to confront the police during the riots in Québec City protesting the proposed (and ultimately defeated) “Free Trade Area of the Americas” in April 2001.
\nWe ran into each other at a book fair some years after the events described in these pages. I recognized him from the streets, but we had never had a proper conversation.
\n\nUnexpectedly, we hit it off immediately. In person, it didn’t matter that I was an adventurist dropout and he was a boring platformist.
\n\nHe wanted to know if we were going to release a sequel to a certain controversial memoir we had published about a delinquent living on the run. “Politically, it’s trash,” he said. “But as a story, it’s so exciting.”
\n\nI didn’t share his high opinion of it. I thought the humor compensated for the lack of character development, but speaking as a career criminal, the subject matter was positively banal. We had printed it as a strategy to undermine the materialism and timidity of kids from the suburbs, not to appeal to seasoned anarchists like himself.
\n\nHe persisted. “Come on, you have to do a sequel!”
\n\nI told him that he should write a memoir of his own, recounting his adventures in the streets. That would be worth publishing, I said.
\n\nIt only took him two decades.
\n\nWorld history is a vast stage. On the scale of all humanity, each of us is only one out of billions. But it is up to us how we approach our role in the drama. We can see ourselves as spectators and passively accept our fate—or we can understand ourselves as protagonists and set out to discover how much influence we can exert on the course of events.
\n\nThe author of this book took the latter approach. As a result, he participated in a surprising number of the historic events of the turn of the century. The litany of his adventures attests to how much a single person can accomplish with a bit of determination, whether in a time of social peace or of pitched conflict. Fortunately, he survived and, with a little encouragement, managed to write down some of what he experienced.
\n\nThe result is the valuable historical document that you are holding in your hands. Not everyone who lives through epoch-making street-fighting on three continents has the opportunity to write such a memoir. Buenaventura Durruti didn’t.
\n\nLike Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist or Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, this book offers a firsthand record of a pivotal time period. You can learn a more about what things were really like from such a text than from any secondhand summary.
\n\nBut this is not simply historical reference material. None of the struggles described in this book have reached a conclusion. All of them continue on a much larger scale and with even higher stakes: the struggle against fascism, against the violence of borders, against the subordination of ecosystems and communities to the demands of capitalism, against the violence of the police and the military, against autocratic power.
\n\nAnother war was possible—and it still is today. If the consequences of our failure to abolish capitalism at the turn of the century were two decades of butchery, economic crisis, ecological disaster, and fascist reaction, think what will ensue if we fail to rise to the challenge this time. History didn’t have to turn out the way it did in 2001—and it doesn’t have to continue down that road now. This book remains timely because it tells part of a story that you have to finish.
\n\nThere are many ways to participate in these struggles. Physically fighting fascists and police officers is only one of a wide range of tactics, and it is hardly the most important. From the author of this book, you can learn what some of those who came before you tried and what you might be able to do yourself. We—the survivors of the previous round—will be fighting alongside you.
\n\nIf we don’t speed it on its way, capitalism will take another century or more to collapse. It will sweep us into wars like nothing we have seen before. The resulting catastrophe will bury all of us in the wreckage.
\n\nLet’s fight together for a better future. Another war is possible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/2.jpg\")
“Across centuries of darkness, we can already see from here—the sun on the horizon of a new dawn.”
\nThe following is our description of the book Another War Is Possible, which appears on its back cover.
\n\nAt the turn of the century, the movement against capitalist globalization exploded onto the world stage with mass mobilizations in Québec City, Washington, Genoa, and other cities. Anarchists faced off against heads of state, captains of industry, and riot police by the thousands. While the authorities sought to bend all living things to the profit imperative, anarchists set out to demonstrate a way of fighting that could open the road to a future beyond capitalism. The twenty-first century was up for grabs. And every time, Tomas Rothaus was there, fighting on the front line.
\n\nIn Another War Is Possible, we follow Tomas from his days as a young militant to his tenure editing the publication Barricada. In vivid prose, he recounts the lessons he learned from veterans of the Spanish CNT—his first experience trading blows with police in the streets of Paris—his adventures slipping across borders to participate in epoch-making riots. With Tomas, we breathe tear gas, we tear down fences, we tour the squats and battlefields of three continents.
\n\nAlong the way, Tomas shows that the tragedies of the twenty-first century were not inevitable—that another war was possible. His testimony is proof that another world remains possible today.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/05/28/anarchists-in-the-movement-against-police-and-white-supremacy-from-the-los-angeles-riots-to-the-george-floyd-uprising", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/05/28/anarchists-in-the-movement-against-police-and-white-supremacy-from-the-los-angeles-riots-to-the-george-floyd-uprising", "title": "Anarchists in the Movement against Police and White Supremacy : From the Los Angeles Riots to the George Floyd Uprising", "summary": "A timeline tracing anarchist contributions to anti-police uprisings from the Rodney King riots of 1992 to the George Floyd uprising in 2020.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/header.jpg", "date_published": "2025-05-28T11:05:25Z", "date_modified": "2026-05-28T21:57:11Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "To observe the five-year anniversary of the burning of the Third Precinct at the beginning of the George Floyd Revolt, we have prepared a timeline tracing the trajectory of anarchist contributions to uprisings against the police from the Rodney King riots of 1992 to the uprising in Minneapolis in 2020. This story has never been told in full; we hope this cursory effort will help participants in tomorrow’s movements to understand the history that they are part of.
\n\nNeedless to say, this is just one of many ways to tell this story. Countless historical threads converged in the George Floyd uprising. We could trace some of them back to the hip hop underground, others to gang truce mediation efforts, others to the Black Panthers. But this is one of them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/7.jpg\")
Demonstrators in May 2020.
\nToday, five years after the uprising of 2020, it is easy to forget all the victories that the movement against police and white supremacy has won since the turn of the century. Two decades ago, it was difficult to see how to expand the conversation about police violence; no one could have imagined that in 2021, even after a bipartisan campaign against the proposal, 44% of voters in a major metropolitan area would vote to abolish the police. Two decades ago, it was unthinkable that tens of thousands of people would embrace direct action and take up black bloc tactics. If we have lost some of this ground thanks to the reactionary administration of Joe Biden and the fascist government of Donald Trump, this does not mean that the struggles of the past two decades were for naught. It should only serve to remind us that in a pitched conflict, we cannot rest on our laurels—we must constantly be fighting to build the world we want to live in.
\n\nUntil the Ferguson rebellion, very little was known about how many people the police kill in the United States. Police departments and federal agencies did not release the statistics. The only ones who were really speaking about the issue were those whose communities were immediately impacted by police violence and those who had a systematic analysis of the institution of policing. Today, by contrast, news outlets like the New York Times freely publish statistics about police murders.
\n\nWhy was the fight against racist police murders able to produce the most powerful social upheaval in living memory? The movement that eventually led to the George Floyd uprising got off the ground in the first place because, starting with the protests against the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009, the participants were able to connect the following crucial elements:
\n\nOther movements have not been able to establish this connection between analysis, action, and context, and have subsequently remained stunted. If we want to mobilize an effective resistance to the aspiring autocrats who hold power today, or to industrially-produced climate change or other threats, we have to learn from the George Floyd uprising.
\n\nIt was also crucial that the movement against police and white supremacy centered those who have the least cause to preserve the existing order. This should not be lost on middle-class people who hope that others will join them in resisting the Trump regime. In order to involve enough people to succeed, any movement against Trump will have to address the material needs of the oppressed, giving them a stake in the fight. If we don’t want to live under autocracy, there is no way around it—we have to organize against all forms of oppression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/14.jpg\")
Graffiti on the gas pump at the burnt QT in Ferguson in August 2014, placing it in a context of eight decades of uprisings.
\nRioting in response to police murder is as American as apple pie. The previous generation was deeply impacted by the riots in Watts in 1965 and in Detroit in 1967, among others. To trace the trajectory of contemporary anarchist involvement in movements against the police, however, we’ll start in 1991.
\n\n\n\n\nLOS ANGELES, March 3, 1991—On the shoulder of the freeway, police are beating a man. Because we are in the US, and because the man is Black, we will know that this is a routine event, an ordinary brutality, part of the very fabric of everyday life for non-whites. But something is exceptional this time. There is an observer, as there often is, but the observer holds in his hands an inhuman witness, a little device for producing images which are accepted as identical with the real. The images—grainy, shaking with the traces of the body behind them—enframe this event, defamiliarize it, make it appear in all its awfulness as both unimaginable singularity and example of a broader category of everyday violence. The recorded beating of Rodney King marks, as many have noted, the beginning of one of the most significant episodes of US history.
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/6.jpg\")
Los Angeles, 1992.
\nIn Los Angeles in April 1992, a jury acquitted the police officers who had beaten Rodney King, setting off a citywide uprising. In that largely pre-digital era, when news traveled somewhat more slowly, narratives about those events reached many young people through music, including songs by Dr. Dre, Sublime, and other Los Angeles locals.
\n\nThe riots exerted a formative influence on an entire generation. Satellite actions took place from San Diego and San Francisco to Las Vegas and Atlanta. In 1996, smaller scale rioting took place in St. Petersburg in response to the police murdering an 18-year-old Black man named Tyron Lewis.
\n\nToday, when social media has been saturated with footage of police senselessly beating and murdering people—especially Black and Indigenous men—it could seem almost quaint that footage of the beating of Rodney King inspired such uproar. The democratization of video technology has contributed not only to outbreaks of unrest like the LA riots and the George Floyd Revolt but also to desensitizing and accustoming people to racist police violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/5.jpg\")
Los Angeles, 1992.
\nIn the late 1980s and early 1990s, the do-it-yourself punk underground helped contribute to a renaissance of anarchism around the world. One of the networks that emerged in the United States was Anti-Racist Action, modeled on Europe’s Anti-Fascist Action but adjusted to account for how central racial oppression has always been to capitalism in North America.
\n\nThe environmental movement also contributed to the reemergence of anarchism. Thanks to Earth First! and the earth and animal liberation movements, a powerful current of direct action organizing spread in ecological circles; it was only later that the shifts heralded by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth contributed to professionalizing and taming them. At the turn of the century, green anarchist publications like Disorderly Conduct, Anarchy Magazine, and Do or Die helped to introduce insurrectionary anarchism to North America, promoting the idea that anarchists should look for opportunities to fight directly against their oppressors alongside other rebellious elements of the oppressed.
\n\nGreen anarchists who cut their teeth using militant tactics in forest defense campaigns converged alongside tens of thousands of other demonstrators in Seattle in November 1999 for the protests against the World Trade Organization summit. Some of them participated in the notorious black bloc on November 30 that drew considerable attention to that tactic. This helped to set the template for the next two decades of anarchist street action.
\n\nIn Cincinnati, on April 7, 2001, a white police officer murdered 19-year-old Timothy Thomas. Thomas was the fifteenth Black man Cincinnati police had killed in six years. On April 9, Thomas’s mother joined other protesters at City Hall, where the police chief and the mayor refused to apologize for the murder.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/10.jpg\")
A Cincinnati Police officer pushes his knee into a person’s back in Cincinnati on April 10, 2001.
\n\n\n\nAngered at these responses, the crowd proceeded to take over City Hall. Windows were smashed, the American flag was removed from the flagpole and turned upside down, and the mayor was forced to leave via the back door. Hundreds more protesters arrived at City Hall that night. As the crowd swelled to 1000, they marched to the central police station.
\n\n \n
Anarchists from Cincinnati, some of whom were involved in Anti-Racist Action, participated in the riots that took place over the following days. As the Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin wrote in “Black People Have a Right to Rebel,”
\n\n\n\n\nWe can soon expect to see other such rebellions in various American cities because similar contradictions exist… The task of Black radicals is not to call for new federal legislation, an FBI investigation, or a citizen review board. We must educate our people about the truth of this system, and begin to build a mass resistance movement against racism and internal colonialism. This resistance should be by any means necessary.
\n
Like the Los Angeles riots, the uprising in Cincinnati was a multiethnic revolt against institutional white supremacy. Yet some of the tensions that were to reemerge in Oakland, Ferguson, and Minneapolis were already evident. As one anarchist collective wrote in July 2001, wrestling with the questions facing non-Black participants,
\n\n\n\n\nIt’s hard to claim to take leadership from the “Black community” when there’s no one viewpoint predominant in that community. And symbolically “confronting privileged space” is not necessarily the same as supporting the struggle of the Black community.
\n
How essential was anarchist participation in the Cincinnati uprising? By the account of the anarchists who wrote about it, they played only a peripheral role. Nonetheless, the spread of anarchism and the uprising in Cincinnati took place in parallel, as if in response to the same unseen developments. The first half of 2001 was the high point of the movement against capitalist globalization; only five months earlier, in November 2000, one of the only significant mobilizations in the Midwest had taken place in Cincinnati in response to the Transatlantic Business Dialogue conference. After the momentum of the anti-capitalist movement stalled a few months later, anti-police uprisings also paused.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/8.jpg\")
A lone protester in the middle of Race Street throws a can at a police line on April 10, 2001.
\nThe attacks of September 11, 2001 interrupted the momentum of social movements in the United States. It took years to fulfill Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s prediction that there would be more uprisings.
\n\nThe authorities had learned from the defeat they had suffered during the WTO meeting in Seattle, when a few hundred police had been outmaneuvered by tens of thousands of protesters. In November 2003, when a few thousand embattled demonstrators gathered in Miami to oppose a summit regarding the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, a tremendous force of militarized police was prepared to repress them. Many protesters saw tanks on the streets of the United States for the first time that day—something most people didn’t see until media coverage of the Ferguson uprising in August 2014.
\n\nThe authorities had copied the strategy of convergence that protesters had used so effectively against global trade summits in Seattle, Washington, DC, Québec City, and Genoa. It was clear that if future uprisings were to take place, they would have to involve more people than could be coordinated through any particular network or mobilization, and they would have to take the authorities by surprise.
\n\nThe anti-war era (from fall 2001 to summer 2008) was a period of reaction; protest movements were dominated by liberals and authoritarian socialist front groups that sought to limit the range of tactics and strategies that participants could employ. At the same time, as a consequence of the previous cycle of protest against police racism and murder, many local movements against police brutality had been channeled towards demanding civilian review boards and police oversight committees, which rarely had any actual impact on police violence. In some parts of the United States, this was so successful that anarchists perceived local organizing against racist police violence as hopelessly co-opted and reformist.
\n\nIn 2007, aiming to regain momentum at the end of the Bush era, anarchists around the United States began to prepare for mass mobilizations against the Democratic and Republican National Conventions scheduled for summer 2008. A countrywide network dubbed Unconventional Action took the lead in coordinating, drawing on the convergence model that the anti-capitalist movement had made famous at the turn of the century.
\n\nAround this time, anarchists in North America were beginning to encounter the first clumsy translations of The Call, The Coming Insurrection, and the works of Tiqqun, all hailing from the same milieu in France. Many Anglophone readers initially conflated this political tendency with the older brand of insurrectionist anarchism exemplified by Alfredo Bonanno. The French texts drew much of their appeal from association with the anti-police riots that had taken place in the urban peripheries of France in October and November 2005, which struck many readers as more interesting than anything that had recently occurred in the US.
\n\nThe protests at the party conventions that summer delivered mixed results, but the organizing around them revitalized anarchist networks across the country—for example, giving rise to Bash Back. In the Bay Area, which hosted one of the most vibrant anarchist milieux in the country at that time, the local Unconventional Action group—UA in the Bay—continued to meet after the conventions in order to organize local actions.
\n\nAt the same time, the global financial crisis of 2008 was setting in. The first significant responses to it took place overseas.
\n\nOn December 6, 2008, police in Greece murdered a 15-year-old anarchist named Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Anarchists all around Greece immediately precipitated a countrywide insurrection, attacking police, destroying business districts, and occupying universities. This ushered in an era of worldwide resistance to austerity measures and police violence. As graffiti in Athens put it, “Sometimes, tear gas can make you see better.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/4.jpg\")
Demonstrators chase off riot police in Greece in May 2010.
\nIn the Bay Area, anarchists organized a solidarity march that unexpectedly succeeded in pushing past police to enter the Westfield Shopping Mall during the Christmas rush. As participants in UA in the Bay reported afterwards,
\n\n\n\n\nWe regrouped outside the entrance to the mall. At this point so many curious shoppers had gathered that it was impossible for the police to enter the crowd and arrest anyone else. Several of our comrades were dragged past us by squads of police and into a paddy wagon on the street. Some demonstrators got back on the sound system and began to denounce the police. Unexpectedly, the message resonated with a number of the shoppers, many of whom were people of color who may have had their own beef with the law. Boisterous chants of “Fuck the Police” began to echo off the buildings.
\n
This was a sign of things to come.
\n\nOn New Year’s Eve 2008, a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer murdered Oscar Grant. Like the beating of Rodney King, this atrocity was captured on video; it circulated widely on the internet.
\n\nOn January 7, the day of Oscar Grant’s funeral, an ad hoc group dubbed the Coalition Against Police Execution organized a rally at the Fruitvale BART station where Grant had been killed. The rally drew perhaps a thousand people. The organizers intended to register their disapproval of the police and enable people to let off steam without things getting out of hand, according to the established model. Participants in UA in the Bay have described what happened next:
\n\n\n\n\nA member of the crowd would get on the mic and demand action, invigorating the protesters and calling for the crowd to march. Immediately after, the organizers would take back the mic, call for calm, and restate their belief that we should channel our energy into “legitimate” channels. They would promise to march “in ten minutes” or “after this amazing next speaker.” This went on for a number of hours, and the crowd grew restless.
\n\nThe crowd continued to swell as this continued. A group of anarchists began to gather toward the back of the rally. After a while, it became apparent that the organizers had no intention of marching, while a good many protesters did. So the anarchist bloc, not being ones to wait for permission, began beating improvised drums and left, accompanied by the vast majority of the crowd, including the rally organizers.
\n
That was the crucial moment when, after a period of malaise, anti-police movements in the United States became ungovernable once again. The fact that members of UA in the Bay helped to initiate the night’s events makes it possible to trace a continuous through line from the mass mobilizations of the turn-of-the-century anti-capitalist movement through the cycle of anti-police uprisings that stretched from the Oscar Grant Rebellion to the George Floyd Revolt and beyond.
\n\n\n\n\nEverything escalated after we turned toward the police station. Several blocks on, the march met a solitary police car with two officers inside. The crowd quickly approached the surprised officers; being boxed in, they abandoned their car and fled on foot. People started jumping on the hood and roof while others smashed out the windows. A flaming dumpster appeared out of nowhere and careened toward the car. Just as it smashed into the car we looked to our left and saw a phalanx of cops in full riot gear approaching us. They began unloading pepper bombs and other less-lethal ammunition. The crowd fled into the surrounding streets, and the riot was on.
\n
As another anarchist recounted, not everyone immediately understood the significance of these events:
\n\n\n\n\nLater that night in the holding cell, some of those arrested had moments of serious regret as they speculated about the possible charges they might face. A seasoned Black organizer who had also been rounded up addressed the group: “In ten years, nah fuck it, in six months you ain’t gonna remember sitting in here right now—all you’ll remember is the night the town stood up.”
\n
Afterwards, according to the report from participants in UA in the Bay, the police, town officials, reformist organizers, and other authoritarians sought to undermine the solidarity that had made the riots possible by focusing blame on white anarchists, casting them as “outside agitators.”1
\n\n\n\n\nIn the days following the riot, public outrage seemed to focus on anarchists participating in the uprising. News outlets published articles in which they blamed anarchist provocateurs for the “violence.” This was frustrating, but not entirely unexpected. One commentator said, “if they’re blaming us, at least they’re not blaming other [less privileged] participants.” […]
\n\nFor the record, anarchists were present for all aspects of the uprising, and acted in unity with other rioters, despite others’ subsequent attempts to drive a wedge between anarchists and other participants. There were times when anarchists shared skills garnered through years of street demonstrations, such as how to conceal one’s identity or evade police. But it’s disingenuous to characterize anarchists as playing a leadership role. Anarchists worked side by side with a diverse crowd that night, but the rage that fueled the fire came from those who face brutal police repression every day of their lives.
\n
In *The Failure of Nonviolence, Peter Gelderloos recalls how at a demonstration a week later, aspiring “white allies” from an organization that claimed to oppose white supremacy attempted to exert paternalistic control over both anarchists and angry Black youth in the name of safety:
\n\n\n\n\nDuring the January 14, 2009 protests for Oscar Grant, a week after the first riots, white activists from the Catalyst Project, together with people from different churches and NGOs, donned bright vests and linked arms to protect property and prevent rioting. Many accused any white person they saw (some of whom were Oakland residents, some of whom were not) of irresponsibly endangering youth of color. They didn’t say anything about all the white people who stay home every time the cops kill a young black man.
\n
Despite these challenges, anarchists strengthened their relationships with the grassroots participants in the revolt by playing a significant role in the subsequent legal support process. The issue is discussed in greater detail here. You can read more about the Oscar Grant riots in the text Unfinished Acts.
\n\nAnarchists participated in the Oscar Grant riots on account of their rage against police and white supremacy and their desire to deter the state from killing people. But this also reflected intentional strategizing about how anarchists might open up new horizons of possibility:
\n\n\n\n\nIn December 2008, after the Greek insurrection, a small number of anarchists intentionally promoted two tactical proposals as a way to break out of the impasse that summit-hopping and other approaches from the so-called “anti-globalization era” had reached. These two proposals were university occupations and anti-police revolt. Although both of these had occurred in the United States before, these anarchists believed that they had untapped potential.
\n\nThese experiments began humbly, with a few dozen people occupying buildings at the New School in New York and a few hundred people rioting in Oakland after Oscar Grant was murdered. The former led indirectly (via the “Occupy Everything” slogan of the student occupation movement and the subsequent occupation of the capitol building in Madison) to the Occupy movement; the latter set a precedent for the revolts in Ferguson and later, in May 2020, Minneapolis. The long-term potential of those models was not immediately apparent in their awkward beginnings, nor were the permutations that the movements arising from those initial examples would undergo.
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/12.jpg\")
\nAnarchists always seek to participate in struggles against white supremacy, police, and oppression. But in the years following the Oscar Grant Rebellion, many anarchists in the United States shifted from focusing on activist campaigns and mass mobilizations to seeking to participate in and spread social unrest. To some extent, this reflected the influence of overseas anarchist movements and ideas, but it was no coincidence that this occurred after the 2008 recession intensified the pressure on the population at large, especially oppressed communities. Suddenly, although reactionary attitudes lingered (the years 2009-2014 saw a tremendous amount of controversy about “violence” versus “non-violence”), countercultural groups were not the only ones seeking to engage in resistance.
\n\nEarly in 2010, two participants in Void Network, a Greek anarchist collective, embarked on a speaking tour of the United States to discuss a book about the Greek insurrection of December 2008, We Are an Image from the Future. They presented at the Black Rose infoshop in Portland, Oregon on March 21. The speakers emphasized that when the police kill a person, the essential thing is to act immediately in response with whatever numbers you can muster.
\n\nThe following day, Portland police murdered Jack Dale Collins, the third killing they had committed in a period of weeks. Local anarchists met in a park and immediately set out, chanting “Cops, pigs, murderers!”—a chant borrowed from the Greek insurrection. When they reached Burnside Avenue, they pulled dumpsters into the street, smashed the windows of a bank and a Starbucks, and clashed with police outside the local police station. A communiqué appeared immediately afterwards reading, in part,
\n\n\n\n\nWe fight against police violence because we feel rage and sadness whenever they kill someone.
\n\nWe fight in solidarity with everyone else who fights back. And by fighting, we are remembering what it is like to be human.
\n\nIn these moments when we surprise ourselves, we catch little glimpses of the world we fight for.
\n
This action introduced property destruction and autonomous black bloc marches in Portland to a context beyond the large demonstrations of the fading anti-war movement. It precipitated a cycle of anti-police struggles in Portland through the spring and summer of 2010, which functioned as a bridge between the Oscar Grant riots and everything that came afterwards. Crucially, anarchists up and down the West Coast were in continuous communication and coordination throughout this period.
\n\nOn August 30, 2010, a Seattle police officer murdered John T. Williams, a 50-year-old Native American man. Police in the Puget Sound area murdered four other men that same week.
\n\nAnarchists in Seattle called for an assembly on September 21, at which to discuss how to respond to police violence. The invitation was open to all, with one caveat:
\n\n\n\n\n“Arguments for police reform are not welcome at this assembly. If you choose to express good faith in this violent and oppressive system you will be asked to leave. The only requirement for attendance at this assembly is the desire for the total abolition of the dominant social order that commits violence against us—including the police force. To this end, political parties are unwelcome—including so-called ‘revolutionary’ ones.”
\n
The participants reached a rough consensus that the important thing was to interrupt city officials’ efforts to channel anger into dialogue and reformism. Nonetheless, it was difficult to break the reformist organizers’ grip on what could happen in the streets.
\n\nIn “Burning the Bridges They Are Building,” one participant describes how months later, in January 2011, a tame protest march organized by the authoritarian Revolutionary Communist Party finally got out of the organizers’ control:
\n\n\n\n\nAs the march wandered through the crosswalk of a busy intersection, a woman—unknown to the anarchists, unaffiliated with the RCP, and holding only an umbrella—refused to leave the crosswalk. She blocked a city bus, which in turn blocked several lanes of traffic, which quickly backed up for blocks. While she stood there defiantly, she began to mock the other demonstrators for their passivity and cowardice. The few anarchists quickly joined her in the intersection.
\n
To the organizers’ and cops’ dismay, the demonstrators ended up blocking the intersection for hours. This anecdote captures the way that these movements often escalated. The impetus generally came from ordinary people from the communities impacted by police violence; but because of their analysis of power, anarchists were usually among the first to join in.
\n\nA series of combative marches took place in Seattle between January and March, in which participants repeatedly damaged police cars and defended each other from police attacks. When it came out that no charges would be filed against the officer who murdered John Williams, many hundreds of people took the streets, taking up the combative tactics that a small number of anarchists had demonstrated. The movement in Seattle showed that the Oscar Grant uprising was not a fluke. As Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin had foreseen, the conditions that made it possible existed all around the United States.
\n\nThis was born out in the Bay Area the following July, when people responded to a string of police murders by temporarily shutting down multiple Bay Area Rapid Transit stations and once again taking the streets:
\n\n\n\n\nWithin a few hours of hearing word of SFPD’s latest atrocity, we called for a march against the police in the Mission District. About 100 of us gathered, donned masks, and marched down Valencia St. toward the Mission Police Station. We attacked the first pig car that approached. We attacked ATMs and a Wells Fargo as well. We upturned newspaper boxes and trash bins, throwing them into the streets at the encroaching riot cops. We screamed in the pigs faces and confronted them at their front door. By 1 AM, we had dispersed without arrest.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/2.jpg\")
Anarchists marching in Seattle on February 16, 2011.
\nAt the same time that this sequence of events was playing out in Seattle and San Francisco, movements against police violence were assuming a central role in unrest outside the United States, echoing the events in Greece in 2008. On December 17, 2010, a young Tunisian named Mohamed Bouazizi had set himself on fire to protest his treatment at the hands of police, setting in motion the wave of uprisings that came to be known as the Arab Spring. 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. In August 2011, riots broke out in the UK in response to the police murder of Mark Duggan.
\n\n\n\n\nIt 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.
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/3.jpg\")
Demonstrators confront police in Egypt at the opening of 2011.
\nOn September 17, 2011, the Occupy movement got underway in Manhattan, expressing a protest against the prioritization of finance capital in the state response to the recession but also a rudimentary opposition to capitalism in general. In fact, the movement didn’t gain much traction on the popular imagination until footage of police attacks circulated later that month. After that, Occupy spread like wildfire.
\n\nOccupy represented an improvement on the convergence model in that it presented a reproducible and decentralized framework, drawing people to a rapidly proliferating number of flashpoints. The structure of the movement reflected the participation of anarchists from the very beginning—including at least one Greek anarchist, who reputedly was responsible for the intervention that led to the horizontal assemblies.
\n\nIn Oakland, the legacy of the Oscar Grant riots set the stage for the Bay Area to host the high-water mark of Occupy. When police evicted Occupy Oakland, fracturing the skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, the movement responded with a general strike including a blockade of the Port of Oakland.
\n\nThree years later, in “From Occupy to Ferguson,” we explored how the Occupy movement reached its limits because of pacifism, fundamental contradictions within democracy, and the absence of a critical mass of working-class people of color.
\n\n\n\n\nWhy did [the Occupy movement] subside without achieving its object of transforming society? First, it offered almost no analysis of racialized power, despite the central role of race in dividing labor struggles and poor people’s resistance in the US. Second, perhaps not coincidentally, its discourse was largely legalistic and reformist—it was premised on the assumption that the laws and institutions of the state are fundamentally beneficial, or at least legitimate. Finally, it began as a political rather than social movement—hence the decision to occupy Wall Street instead of acting on a terrain closer to most people’s everyday lives, as if capitalism were not a ubiquitous relation but something emanating from the stock market. As a result of these three factors, the majority of the participants in Occupy were activists, newly precarious exiles from the middle class, and members of the underclass, in roughly that order; the working poor were notably absent. The simplistic sloganeering of Occupy obscured the lines of conflict that run through our society from top to bottom: “police are part of the 99%” is technically true, economically speaking, but so are most rapists and white supremacists. All of this meant that when the police came to evict the encampments and kill the movement, Occupy had neither the numbers, nor the fierceness, nor the analysis it would have needed to defend itself.
\n\nWhen a movement reaches its limits and subsides, it illustrates the obstacles future movements will have to surpass.
\n
All around the country, however, struggles against police violence were cross-pollinating with the fiercest elements of the Occupy movement. On October 17, 2011, ten days after Occupy Atlanta got underway, a march including anarchists departed from the encampment at Woodruff Park to protest the police murder of 19-year-old Joetavius Stafford. A month later, police murdered Dwight Person in front of his family in an illegal “no-knock” warrant that was addressed to a different house, and another march departed from the park. Shortly before Christmas, a police officer shot 19-year-old Ariston Waiters in the back while he was handcuffed, and once again, a march took place in response. Each of these involved a larger contingent of anarchists employing black bloc tactics, as chronicled in “Don’t Die Wondering: Atlanta Against the Police Winter 2011–2012.”
\n\nOn February 26, 2012, a white vigilante murdered Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black young man in Florida, enraging people all around the country. In Atlanta, institutional organizers sought to gain control of a response scheduled for March 29:
\n\n\n\n\nA friend of ours had made an anonymous Facebook profile to create the event and had billed it as a march. This was all very intentional. A few careerists, however, used the opportunity to get a permit for the event and to move it to the Capitol. They held press conferences announcing that it was happening there and that it would simply be a rally, not a march. They, of course, get to decide who speaks and who doesn’t.
\n
Nonetheless, after a carefully controlled rally, a multiethnic crowd of several dozen people set off on a breakaway march.
\n\n\n\n\nSomeone jogged up to a ParkAtlanta meter and smashed the screen with a large wooden dowel bearing a black flag. Someone else, without a shirt tied around their face, kicked a newspaper stand into the street, and several others dragged them into the intersection. A capitol cop jogged up from behind the march and began chastising us: “Hey you! Pick that box up this minute!” People yelled back at him and picked up the pace a little bit. The march turned a corner and found itself on an empty street with a large number of police cruisers parked outside a government building. The lone cop following the march quickly turned and ran when someone jogged up to the nearest squad car and smashed out its front window with a wooden dowel.
\n\n“Ohhhhh!!!!” the crowd all yelled at once. Someone else ran up behind them with a hammer. They took out the windows of another squad car, and someone after them jumped up onto the car and stomped in the windshield.
\n\nWhile some people dragged barricades into the streets, others continued smashing the windows out of every police vehicle and luxury car on the street for two blocks.
\n
In July 2012, locals in Anaheim, California rioted after officers murdered a man. In March 2013, people in Brooklyn, New York responded to police murdering 16-year-old Kimani Gray by marching on the 67th Precinct and pelting it with garbage and bottles. In Durham, North Carolina, in November 2013, when 17-year-old Jesus “Chuy” Huerta mysteriously died of a gunshot wound to his head with his hands cuffed behind his back in the back of a police cruiser, anarchists worked with his family to organize a demonstration during which protesters marched to the police station and smashed out its windows.
\n\nEach of these outbreaks of rebellion lasted only a few hours at a time. But understood as a series, they show that people around the United States were experimenting with more confrontational forms of resistance, learning from each other in a dialogue comprised of actions as well as words. In many cases, anarchists were among the only explicitly politicized participants.
\n\nFrom the beginning, police, politicians, liberals, authoritarian socialists, and other aspiring leaders had sought to marginalize anarchists by depicting them as white thrill seekers, promoting a narrative according to which it was anarchists, not police, who were endangering people of color. As people experimented together in the streets, they also began to push back against this way of weaponizing identity discourse to suppress resistance. In April 2012, participants in the movements in Oakland had published “Who Is Oakland?”—a lucid corrective:
\n\n\n\n\nAnti-oppression, civil rights, and decolonization struggles clearly reveal that if resistance is even slightly effective, the people who struggle are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation, and death. […]
\n\nNo demographic category of people could possibly share an identical set of political beliefs, cultural identities, or personal values. Accounts of racial, gender, and sexual oppression as “intersectional” continue to treat identity categories as coherent communities with shared values and ways of knowing the world. No individual or organization can speak for people of color, women, the world’s colonized populations, workers, or any demographic category as a whole—although activists of color, female and queer activists, and labor activists from the Global North routinely and arrogantly claim this right. These “representatives” and institutions speak on behalf of social categories which are not, in fact, communities of shared opinion.
\n
In May 2014, Indigenous Action published “Accomplices Not Allies,” a critique of “allies” who continue to center themselves even as they pretend to put themselves at the disposal of others’ struggles for liberation:
\n\n\n\n\nWhere struggle is commodity, allyship is currency. Ally has also become an identity, disembodied from any real mutual understanding of support. […]
\n\nThis kind of relationship generally fosters exploitation between both the oppressed and oppressor. The ally and the allied-with become entangled in an abusive relationship.
\n
They argued that those who are fighting for their own liberation need comrades who have their own reasons to fight:
\n\n\n\n\nWe need to know who has our backs, or more appropriately: who is with us, at our sides?
\n
These texts helped to legitimize the idea that the way to act in solidarity with those on the receiving end of police violence was to fight alongside them, not to try to deescalate struggles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/17.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Ferguson flip a police car in November 2014.
\nElsewhere around the globe, resistance to police violence continued to set off upheavals. 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 police repression. 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.
\n\nIn fact, the window of possibility that had opened with the insurrection in Greece was already closing as authoritarian regimes and politics reasserted themselves around the world. Nonetheless, in the United States, resistance to the police was only just getting underway.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/15.jpg\")
Militarized police in Ferguson, August 2014.
\nOn July 13, 2013, after the acquittal of the man who murdered Trayvon Martin, people around the country had gathered in protest. At the demonstration in St. Louis on July 14, anarchists encountered other protesters that they were to meet again a year later. This shows how the movement against police was already starting to produce waves of countrywide action while bringing together people who were prepared to push things further.
\n\nOn August 9, 2014, a police officer stopped an 18-year-old Black man named Michael Brown. Witnesses report that the officer shot Brown as he fled with his hands up in surrender. A crowd quickly assembled from the neighborhood; some locals fired shots into the air and set a dumpster alight. Police responded with an armored riot vehicle, a helicopter, dogs, and assault rifles—but furious mourners forced them to withdraw.
\n\nThe next day, people gathered for a prayer vigil at the site of the shooting, including anarchists from St. Louis. The crowd marched to the police line, yelling insults and throwing things. Police attempted to drive through the crowd, but people surrounded them and smashed out their windows. The police fled.
\n\nOne anarchist described the ensuing situation:
\n\n\n\n\nThe block is ours. The police are maintaining lines at Ferguson Avenue (to the south) and just north of the bridge for the 270 interchange (to the north). The mile or so between is totally unpoliced and filled with thousands of people.
\n\nThis commercial stretch, full of parasitical businesses, has numerous small roads leading east into the densely populated neighborhoods just a block away. The police, too afraid and outnumbered to enter a residential area seething with outrage, are unable to block those streets. As they hear about what is going on, people are pouring into the commercial district on foot, in cars, on motorcycles. For once, the geography of this suburb is on our side.
\n
The uprising in Ferguson crossed a crucial threshold because, for the first time, the rebellion continued beyond a single day. As the unrest persisted, it offered a point of convergence for all who wanted to resist police violence. For nearly two weeks, demonstrators faced off with militarized police every night as people around the country watched the events unfolding via news and social media and debated the issues of police violence, repression, and militant tactics.
\n\nAfterwards, comparing the uprising in Ferguson to the Occupy movement, we argued that the uprising had overcome the limits that the Occupy movement had reached:
\n\n\n\n\nIt’s possible to understand the social momentum originating in Ferguson as an answer to the failures of Occupy. Where Occupy whitewashed the issue of race, the protests in Ferguson placed it front and center. Where Occupy confined itself to the unfavorable terrain of “political” physical sites and reformist demands, the people who rose up in Ferguson were fighting on their own streets for their own very lives. Whereas, with the temporary exception of Occupy Oakland, Occupy lacked the will to stand down the police, people in Ferguson braved tear gas and even bullets to do just that. Where Occupy sought to conceal all the different forms of hierarchy and strife that cut through this society beneath the unifying banner of “the 99%,” the conflicts in Ferguson compelled everyone to confront them. […]
\n\nThe momentum proceeding from the demonstrations in Ferguson has its own internal tensions, which will become more apparent the further it goes. Is the problem police brutality, or policing itself? Is the rightful protagonist of this struggle the local poor person of color, the respectable leader of color, the white ally, or everyone who opposes police killings? If it is the latter, how should we deal with the power imbalances within this “everyone”? How should demonstrators from outside the most targeted communities relate to conflicts playing out within them, such as disputes over tactics or risk?
\n
You can read a full timeline of the Ferguson uprising here and a day-by-day account of one anarchist’s participation here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/9.jpg\")
A demonstrator in Ferguson faces off with a line of riot police in 2014.
\nOver the following three months, people around the country reflected on the example of the brave fighters who confronted the police in Ferguson—and all the while, police continued to murder people in St. Louis and everywhere else, stoking rage and urgency. On November 24, when the legal system failed to indict the officer who murdered Michael Brown, demonstrators once again took the streets of Ferguson, confronting a well-prepared, fully militarized occupying army of police and National Guard and nonetheless striking powerful blows against them.
\n\nThis set off solidarity demonstrations all around the country, after the fashion of the viral model demonstrated by the Occupy movement. The clashes of November and December 2014 arguably reached the highest pitch that popular struggle had attained in the United States in years. The Bay Area saw seventeen consecutive days of marches, vandalism, looting, and freeway blockades.
\n\nOn April 12, 2015, police in Baltimore arrested and intentionally brutalized Freddie Gray. He died of his injuries one week later. A week after that, demonstrators gathered for a protest that immediately spiraled out of control. Within two days, riots, looting, and fires were breaking out all over the city, including in some of the wealthier neighborhoods. 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.
\n\nThe revolt in Baltimore had escalated more rapidly than the uprising in Ferguson, but the authorities had brought in the National Guard more quickly, as well, shutting the window of possibility.
\n\nLess than two months later, on June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof carried out a white supremacist mass murder at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Having been outflanked by grassroots resistance in the streets, the forces of white supremacy were falling back on non-state terrorism.
\n\nIn August 2015, reflecting on the sequence of events across the preceding year, we recognized that future uprisings would have to occur everywhere at once in order to outflank the repression mobilized against them. At the same time, we discerned that a white supremacist backlash was on the way and noted the ways that the revolts were still limited by a narrative prioritizing identity as a measure of the legitimacy of resistance. The conclusion of the essay is worth quoting in full.
\n\n\n\n\nIt 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.
\n\nThe 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.
\n\nBut 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. 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.
\n\nFighting 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.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/16.jpg\")
A demonstrator in Ferguson displays a sign reading “Nice night for a revolution” in 2014.
\nPolice continued to murder people, and revolts continued to break out in response, but as a consequence of the authorities’ readiness to respond immediately with heavy-handed repression, the movement had reached a plateau.
\n\nOn November 15, 2015, police officers in Minneapolis murdered Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old Black man. In response, demonstrators established an occupation outside the fourth police precinct. On November 23, far-right vigilantes attacked them, shooting five people. Nonetheless, the following July, when a police officer murdered Philando Castile in front of his partner and child during a traffic stop, demonstrators took the streets again, blocking freeway traffic and defending themselves from police.
\n\nThat same July, Baton Rouge police officers murdered Alton Sterling, sparking protests in Baton Rouge and Dallas; during the latter, a gunman killed five police officers before the police killed him with a robot-delivered bomb. On August 13, 2016, the fatal police shooting of 23-year-old Sylville Smith triggered a riot in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The next month, there were riots in Charlotte, North Carolina in response to the police murdering Keith Lamont Scott.
\n\nBy this point, anarchists were still participating in the front lines of these protests, but in some ways, they had lost ground within the movement. In response to the explosion of activity following the Ferguson uprising, formal Black Lives Matter groups had achieved a new hegemony within protest organizing. Whereas previously, institutional leadership had sought to prevent demonstrators from engaging in unpermitted marches or blocking freeways—with the consequence that when that failed, spaces of freedom opened up—now a new generation of leaders and protest marshals was prepared to lead marches, even onto freeways, but still sought to sideline anarchists in order to retain control. As the tide went out and mass participation dropped, the participants that remained were largely activist groups that successfully leveraged the usual charges of “privilege” and “outside agitators” to marginalize anarchists.
\n\nMany anarchists shifted focus from fighting the police in anti-racist struggles to fighting the fascist movements that were on the rise. This was a risky proposition: it was not auspicious to cede the ground of anti-police discourse while moving to an even more potentially lethal field of conflict. But with fascist violence spreading around the country, many anarchists concluded that they had no choice.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/14.jpg\")
A CrimethInc. sticker reading “Police Not Welcome” behind the burned-out husk of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis in 2020.
\nWhen Donald Trump came into power in 2017, anarchists around the country swung into action, marching against his inauguration, helping to shut down airports in response to the Muslim Ban, and defending their communities from fascist mobilizations.
\n\nYet mysteriously, revolts in response to police murders suddenly ceased. This is a historical enigma yet to be properly accounted for. Police did not by any means stop murdering Black and brown people. As we wrote in our retrospective on the year 2017,
\n\n\n\n\nThe only city to see a major movement against racist policing in 2017 was St. Louis, where the social movements and tensions that gave rise to the uprising of 2014 had continued unabated. This points to some of the ways that the reaction represented by the Trump administration succeeded in setting back social movements and taking possibilities off the table. Have we missed opportunities to let the communities that are most directly targeted by police know that we are still ready to stand with them when they stand up for themselves outside the useless channels of reformist organizing?
\n
Perhaps all that changed was that anarchists and other activists were so busy reacting to fascist violence that they failed to provide the necessary solidarity to the communities most targeted by police violence. The pause in anti-police uprisings seems to bear out the hypothesis that, despite the fact that anarchists were rarely central to the revolts, there was some sort of subterranean connection between the two—if only in that they were both downstream of the same developments.
\n\nThe pause in uprisings continued until May 2020. There were a few protests when police killed people, but nothing like what had occurred in Oakland, Seattle, Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, or Charlotte. This seems to suggest that for good or ill, these uprisings were not just occurring as a consequence of localized outrage on the part of targeted communities, but also because of a shared discourse and imagination regarding the possibility of revolt and the form it could take. The solidarity and support of many different communities and groups, including anarchists, played a crucial role.
\n\nSo revolts against police aren’t just mechanistically produced by police violence. They depend on a shared vision, shared reference points, familiarity with previous precedents, a collective capacity to mourn and to care for each other, a shared sentiment that the police lack legitimacy, disillusionment with reform measures, and networks and community institutions that have not been integrated into the processes that preserve the ruling order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/13.jpg\")
Graffiti in New York City during the hot summer of 2020.
\nIn 2020, the pandemic hit the United States, upending everything. As we argued at the time, this came on the heels of the successive failures of various legal, judicial, and electoral challenges to the order Trump presided over:
\n\n\n\n\nBy the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in full force, all the statist means of seeking social change had been exhausted. Trump exacerbated the situation, seizing the opportunity to arrange a massive wealth transfer of billions of dollars to the richest stratum of society in the midst of the worst economic recession in living memory. In this context, millions of people in the US, alongside billions around the world, spent mid-March to late May in isolation, contemplating their own mortality. It had never been clearer that the institutions of power are fundamentally hostile and destructive to the lives of ordinary people.
\n\nThis is why, when the news of Black rebels’ response to George Floyd’s murder spread, even white middle-class liberals felt the tragedy viscerally. The pandemic suspended some of the mechanisms that ordinarily insulate the privileged from identifying with the most marginalized.
\n\nThose who are always targeted by police, who suffer most from racism and poverty, recognized that it was now or never. Heroically, all around the US, they staked their lives in an all-out attack on their oppressors—and millions of stir-crazy people of all classes and backgrounds joined them in the streets.
\n
And the rest, as they say, is history.
\n\nOne additional point bears adding: owing to right-wing opposition to the COVID-19 lockdown, the far right was more opposed to police in May 2020 than it had previously been in living memory. That internal confusion bought the revolt a couple weeks at the beginning of June 2020 during which Trump’s supporters were not able to mobilize an effective reaction. Finally, in mid-June, Tucker Carlson was able to catalyze right-wing opposition with his trademark hostile and mendacious coverage of the police-free zone in Seattle.
\n\n\n\n\n“The uprising in Minneapolis brings all the unsettled debts of that era back into play, but in a totally different context, in which a lot more people have been radicalized, society is much more polarized, and it is increasingly clear to everyone that—whether from the bullets of the police, COVID-19, or global climate change—our lives are at stake.”
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/1.jpg\")
Los Angeles during the 2020 uprising.
\nIt remains for a future analysis to trace in detail how the Biden administration systematically undermined the progress that the movement against police had achieved, paving the way for its own defeat at the hands of a resurgent fascist movement under Trump, and how anarchists sought to prepare for this by continuing the anti-police movement in the form of the fight to stop Cop City.
\n\nRetracing the trajectory that led from the Rodney King riots to the George Floyd Rebellion, we can see both the potential and the limitations of the role that anarchists have played. Although anarchists usually comprised only a small part of the movement, they were one of the only ideologically driven groups that consistently showed up from the very beginning all the way through to the end. Again and again, the movement grew exponentially thanks to the moments when it exploded out of control as a consequence of ungovernable, confrontational action; it is significant that anarchists were one of the only groups consistently supporting this approach from the beginning.
\n\nAt the same time, from the beginning to the present, the movement against police has repeatedly reached limits the same way that the “anti-globalization” movement and the Occupy movement did. This is not just a consequence of repression. It is also due to counter-insurgency tactics from both within and without, and from the fact that although anarchists have often succeeded at introducing new tactics and discourse into movements, they have often become disoriented when they are no longer the ones determining the pace of escalation.
\n\nIt remains an open question how the next phase of the movement can unfold under an increasingly repressive and technologically advanced government. But the question has never been more important.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/11.jpg\")
\nYou can read accounts of some of the events described here in the collection We Fight: Three Decades of Rebellion Against the Police .
\n\nAs Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” ↩
\nWe’ve prepared a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s. Up Against the Wall Motherfucker gained notoriety participating in the occupation of Columbia University in 1968; they were instrumental in introducing anarchist politics into the hippie counterculture and resistance to the Vietnam War, emphasizing the importance of affinity groups and direct action. The text is taken directly from an Up Against the Wall Motherfucker broadside.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/18/fantastic-demands_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nOur utopia is an environment that works so well we can run wild in it.
\n\nUntil our most fantastic demands are met, fantasy will be at war with society. Society attempts to suppress fantasy, but fantasy springs up again and again, infecting the youth, waging urban guerrilla warfare, sabotaging the smooth functioning of bureaucracies, waylaying the typist on her way to the water-cooler, kidnapping the executive between office and home, creeping into the bedrooms of respectable families, hiding in the chambers of high office, gradually tightening its control, eventually emerging into the streets, waging pitched battles and winning (its victory is inevitable).
\n\nWe are the vanguard of fantasy.
\n\nWhere we live is liberated territory in which fantasy moves about freely at all hours of the day, from which it mounts its attacks on occupied territory.
\n\nEach day bring new areas under our control.
\n\nEach day a new victory is reported.
\n\nEach day fantasy discovers new forms of organization.
\n\nEach day it further consolidates its control, has less to fear, can afford to spend more time in self-discovery.
\n\nEven in the midst of battles, it plans the cities of the future.
\n\nWe are full of optimism.
\n\nWe are the future.
\n\nIn a time of escalating repression and desperation, it is bracing to revisit the avowed optimism of our revolutionary forebears. This optimism concerns not just whether it is possible to win, but what would constitute victory and who stands to benefit.
\n\nFantasy—the imaginative excess that escapes the confines of prevailing reality—is common to all human beings. The most repressed and conservative individual could ruthlessly suppress his tendency to daydream while awake, but nonetheless, every night, when he closes his eyes to sleep, he will dream uncontrollably.
\n\nTo side with fantasy is to side with the suppressed creativity within every human being against everything that is constraining about our institutions, everything that is suffocating about our rituals and routines. It means fighting on behalf of all against everything we do to limit ourselves and each other.
\n\nFantasy represents sensitivity to possibility itself. Anarchists aspire to create conditions in which all creatures are able can fulfill their potential on their own terms. This entails abolishing the boundaries between the excluded and the included, the subordination of what is called “wild” to what is called “civilized,” the subordination of the physical to the mental and the body to the mind.
\n\nIf fascists have gained the upper hand in our society for now, it is precisely because they have been so successful in subjugating fantasy, channeling it towards their narrow-minded pursuit of coercive power rather than letting it run wild and free. Fantasy can serve oppressors when it is caged and yoked to machinery of domination—but fantasy, liberated, liberates all in turn.
\n\nThe original version of this text appears in two different forms. The collection Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: the incomplete works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group presents it with two frames of an image of a primate, whereas page 46 of this collection includes three frames and an additional phrase:
\n\nTo put thought underground… so that wildness can come above ground.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/18/1.jpg\")
\nThe more complete version bears the letters “ESSO” in the lower left, with a hand-drawn circle around them, standing for the East Side Service Organization. Sometimes known as the East Side Survival Organization, this was the business front that UAW/MF established to receive donations with which to support the hippie runaways and others who were living precariously on the streets of lower Manhattan in the mid-1960s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/18/2.jpg\")
\nThose who want to learn more about Up Against the Wall Motherfucker can read Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion, a memoir by prominent participant Ben Morea, just released by Detritus Books this spring.
\n\nYou can consult Ben’s Instagram page to see some of his artwork. His now-defunct blog is archived here.
\n\nThis account picks up where our previous article about the Anti-Deportation Collective left off, chronicling scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s.
\n\nAs Donald Trump attempts to put $45 billion towards expanding the gulag system of immigrant detention in the United States, it is crucial to learn how people in other countries have resisted state violence against undocumented people in the recent past.
\n\nThis true story is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, a narrative from within the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. You can follow the author here.
\n\n\n\n\nThe Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective) was explicit that our support for the sans-papiers was intrinsically linked to our anarchist principles. We emphasized that our interests were linked to theirs in our desire for the abolition of states and borders, for the end of capitalist labor exploitation, for the freedom and autonomy of human beings. At the same time, we worked hand in hand with the collectives of sans-papiers that were largely autonomous of party or NGO structures and who were most welcoming of solidarity in the form of direct action.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/3.jpg\")
\nThe Ibis hotel at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport is about what you would expect of a two- or three-star airport satellite hotel. Drab exterior and unspectacular office-style architecture on the outside, sullen-looking businessmen and stereotypical stressed-out families with 2.3 children running around the lobby on the inside. The lobby is the one and only particularity. It’s a ground-floor-only structure with a flat roof that connects the significantly taller buildings where the hotel rooms are located.
\n\nWhat makes this particular hotel unique is inside one of those towers. And what is inside it is the reason why two hundred people are about to storm through the main doors, access one of the towers (with the assistance of a comrade who has entered incognito to hold open a strategically important access door), rush up a flight of stairs, smash a window, and take control of the rooftop over the lobby.
\n\nWhat makes this particular hotel unique is a testament to the mundane and banal nature of oppression in consumer capitalist society. In this hotel, side by side with the hustle and bustle of the businessmen and the joy of the vacationing white European families, is the despair of other human beings who are being held here against their will.
\n\nAn entire wing of this Ibis hotel is a prison, where people without documents (sans-papiers) are held before their definitive deportation on an Air Afrique or Air France plane. It is a prison made possible by the collaboration of the Accor hotel group with the French state’s deportation machinery.
\n\nAs we pour out onto the first-floor rooftop through the busted-out window, a few comrades unfurl a large banner reading “Stop Deportations!” and hang it over the front of the building, covering the Ibis logo, to the loud cheers of the few dozen supporters who remain outside the building. Sophie and I manage to clamber out onto the roof—and there, we make an important discovery. The prison, or “temporary detention center” as the supposedly human-rights-conscious socialist government prefers to refer to it, is apparently on the same floor, just opposite from where we entered onto the roof! We can make out shadows through the windows of people throwing peace signs. We can see them banging on the windows.
\n\nOur reaction is visceral and instinctive. Fifteen or twenty of us break into a run toward the other side. We’ve barely reached the windows—the first kicks and elbows are flying against them—when we hear people yelling, “Stop! Stop!” They are from the action group that planned this action. “I know what you’re thinking, but it probably won’t work, and most importantly, the immigrants themselves asked us not to do it.” What we are thinking is, obviously… prison break! There are still no cops here to speak of, so what would it take to pull the plug on the largely symbolic action and flee here while giving cover to whoever wanted to use the chance to escape? If they were to succeed, then the action would be an all-around success anyway. Accor publicly shamed, the detention center breached, some individuals given another concrete chance at freedom.
\n\nThe action group from our collective, the Collectif Anti-Expulsions, has been in touch with a collective that is in contact with these detainees. “We explained to them that the chances of a successful escape are low,” they explain. Sadly, this is objectively true, since we are outside the city and at an airport of all places. There is only one train in, as well as a few buses and a highway, which makes it almost impossible to escape as a mob. “They know that if they try to escape and fail, they’ll be subjected to penalties; it will allow for a legal extension of their detention time, and it’ll possibly earn them a ban from the French territory. They said they’d rather take their chances with the passengers on the plane.”
\n\nI take an uncharacteristically deep breath and quietly process my feelings of anger, frustration, and sadness. The point isn’t lost on me, and there’s a good chance they’re not wrong. My comrade is referring to the strategy of appealing to passenger solidarity in order to get deportees taken off the planes, a tool we have often used successfully to prevent deportations and run out the clock on a person’s detainment.1 But that doesn’t make it feel any less frustrating.
\n\nOther comrades, though, are less introverted than I am, and a shouting match breaks out. “What the fuck is this shit? This isn’t supposed to be a lobby group! We’re standing in front of the windows of a fucking unguarded prison and you’re telling me I shouldn’t touch them because some people I don’t know and who I’ve never spoken to are against it? What kind of process is that? You think this is autonomy? If I wanted to be told what to do without being asked my opinion about it, I would have joined a party or become a cop.”
\n\nThe comrade speaking, Alice, is one of the classic totos among us. Toto is the either loving or derogatory francophone shorthand for anarchist autonomes. To put it mildly, she and the affinity group around her are not fans of delegation or of tempering messaging or tactics to account for optics or appease others.
\n\n“If they don’t want to escape through the open windows, nobody is going to force them, but I don’t see what that has to do with me breaking them or not,” she spits out, before turning furiously and walking away. The tension between collective members subsides for the rest of the day, but it’s indicative of a growing strategic rift inside the group.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/1.jpg\")
Graffiti in Paris outside an Ibis Hotel, reading “Accor collaborates to deport the undocumented. Let’s attack Ibis, Mercure…” It is signed CAE for Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective).
\nThe middle-aged man leaning through the shattered window and trying to interact with us is a walking, living stereotype of a French detective. Flannel shirt over a notable beer belly, light-brown suede jacket, balding, and a prominent mustache. He is missing the obligatory aviator glasses that would complete the look, but I guess sunglasses might be a bit much since it is past 4 pm on a cloudy and rainy afternoon in the dead of Parisian winter—in other words, basically night.
\n\nAnd indeed, regardless of his unconvincing promises that there will be no arrests if we leave soon and peacefully, we’re about ready to make our exit. We’ve been on this roof for a few hours now, and since the initial excitement of being out here (and yelling at each other) wore off, we’ve spent the last few hours milling around and chatting in the freezing cold. The monotony was only broken when some comrades arrived with drinks and sandwiches, which they tossed up to us. There is no further practical or symbolic objective to be attained by our continued presence in the rain on this windswept roof.
\n\nThe only way off the roof is through the same broken window we used to get onto it in the first place. It’s barely wide enough to fit one person at a time, so any kind of concerted mass attempt to get out of here is completely off the table. Worryingly, as we peer our heads through the window to look down the hotel corridor, we see that quite the welcoming committee is waiting for us. The hall is packed on both sides with a veritable gauntlet of riot cops. We confer among ourselves, determined not to let them split us up, intending to protect each other against targeted arrests. We quickly agree that we’ll all enter the corridor through the window and begin massing there, in order to then head down the corridor and stairs as a compact group.
\n\nAs the first brave souls climb through the window and into the cop-filled hallway, it becomes clear that the cops have something else in mind. They begin to push and shove people, trying to muscle them down the hallway and toward the stairs. Preferring to stick to the original plan, our comrades meet the baton swings with kicks and blows. Those of us who remain on the roof hesitate, unsure whether it’s best to use the threat of our continued presence here as leverage—to this day, I have no idea how they would have evacuated us from there if we had decided to stay indefinitely—or if we should hurry to get as many people into the hallway as possible to defend our comrades.
\n\nSomebody yells at the mustached detective cop that if he doesn’t get the other cops to back off and allow everybody into the hallway, we’ll all stay on the roof. Incredibly, the move works and the cops retreat partially, allowing all of us to get into the hallway, together and untouched. We begin heading down the stairway, once more flanked by riot cops. As most of us reach the ground floor and begin exiting the building, I hear shouting and immediately feel a football-stadium-like avalanche of people pushing from behind. We pour out into the street in a disorganized blob.
\n\n“They started hitting us with batons from behind and arresting people in the middle of the stairs.” It’s Sophie, who was one of the last people off the roof.
\n\nIn the middle of nowhere, with cops everywhere, it’s clear there is nothing more to be done here. As we hastily head to the train station, somebody proposes the usual idea, “We should go to the police station until they release them.” A woman speaks up. It’s Alice, the toto from the argument at the beginning of the occupation. “Yes, we could go to the police station and beg for their release. Or we could pay a visit to some of the other Ibises in the city until they beg us to stop, as a way to force the police to release our comrades.”
\n\nWith that, the remaining hundred of us head into the city under cover of night, minutes later erupting into the first of the evening’s three Ibis hotels, where a masked crew of ten corners a frightened-looking concierge.
\n\n“Get on the fucking phone and call your boss. Now. Tell him this isn’t going to stop until our comrades are freed without charges.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/2.jpg\")
\nWe’re in the heat of battle in the midst of the annual NATO summit. A black bloc of about a thousand people, mainly from Germany and France, has fought intense battles with the police all day. The bloc has just fought the cops back off of a railway overpass, and we now have an endless arsenal of rocks from the tracks at our disposal. The clearly overwhelmed cops retreat under the ferocity of the attack. Fifteen thousand robocops have been assigned to protect this summit, with the goal of rendering militant resistance impossible. For the second day in a row, they are failing spectacularly.
\n\nAs we advance into the Port du Rhin neighborhood, revolutionaries join local residents in looting a pharmacy, then set it aflame. The day before, local immigrant youths guided black bloc activists around the neighborhood as they erected barricades, fought running battles with the riot cops, and attacked a military jeep. In turn, black bloc’ers aided local youths in prying open the gates of a police storage space where seized scooters were stored, returning them to the community.
\n\nWe have now arrived at the border; only a river stands between us and Germany. German riot cops line the other end of the bridge, and the bloc is content with building barricades to prevent them from crossing while lobbing the occasional stone in their direction. I walk back from the front line for a well-deserved break and take in the scene behind us.
\n\nThe first thing I notice is the now-abandoned border police station, completely ablaze. Schengen has rendered this border obsolete—at least for a time—but the symbolic value of a burning border crossing is enormous.
\n\nNot far behind the border crossing, flames are starting to emerge from a five-story building. Just a few minutes earlier, a hundred black-clad militants ransacked the lobby and turned the furniture into flaming barricades in the street. It’s a sign that our movement does not easily forget and a reminder that collaboration does not pay. Strasbourg’s Ibis hotel is engulfed in flames.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/6.jpg\")
The burnt husk of Strasbourg’s Ibis hotel—a consequence of the corporation profiting on the kidnapping and deportation of immigrants.
\n\n\n\nIf the Ibis hotel had to burn, it was not as an act of senseless destruction, but a concrete protest against the Accor brand (which owns, among others, the Ibis chain) and its complicity in the deportation of “illegal” immigrants through the rental of its rooms to the State as a last “housing” location for immigrants before their deportation.
\n
\n\n\n-Antifascist Left International, “Riots, Destruction, and Senseless Violence,” Göttingen, Germany, April 2009
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/5.jpg\")
The cover of the Antifascistische Link International’s text “Riots, Destruction, and Senseless Violence,” with the inscription “Offensive. Militant. Successful.”
\nAt that time, the French state could only hold undocumented immigrants for a period of ten days, at the end of which, if they had not yet been deported, they had to be released again until their eventual date of deportation. ↩
\nIn the following account, the author recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places.
\n\nThis is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, narrating experiences from the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/26/1.jpg\")
\nIt’s early evening and Sophie and I are sitting in the long-distance-train waiting area of Paris’s Gare de Lyon, one of Europe’s busiest train stations. All around us are travelers scurrying to and fro. Stressed-out tourist families, a camera still flung around Dad’s neck, rushing their kids through the station mix with tired-looking businessmen waiting to get back home.
\n\n“You did a great job with your outfit,” she says to me as she looks me over from head to toe. I met Sophie at an action (or demonstration, or concert, or something of the sort) about a year ago, and we have been inseparable at political events since. She is my age, a student at Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School),1 and if I didn’t know very well the context in which she’s making this comment, I might think she’s flirting with me.
\n\n“You’re looking pretty good yourself,” I respond in kind.
\n\nShe has managed to transform herself into the spitting image of your perfectly forgettable average French teenage girl. Basically, she looks like a younger Sporty Spice in her Adidas tracksuit and sneakers. I, on the other hand, have gone with a significantly preppier look: khaki pants, polo shirt, nondescript jacket, and moccasins. She looks at me again, pauses, and slightly withdraws her compliment: “It’s not the most functional wardrobe, though. The khakis stand out and the moccasins probably aren’t great for running.”
\n\nI shrug. “I did what I could. I was mainly concerned with getting this far.”
\n\nWhile we are sitting among the tourists and businessmen, doing our best to look like a somewhat mismatched young teenage couple waiting for a train back to their city, we are in fact not travelers, and the correct term for our attire is not outfit but disguise. We are not here to take a train, but to stop one. A train that transports imprisoned human beings against their will every single night. The 21:03 to Marseille, otherwise known to us as the deportation train.
\n\nOur objective is to stop the Paris-to-Marseille overnight train, which the French National Railway Company, better known for its French initials SNCF, permits the French government to use to transport North African immigrants, usually of Algerian or Moroccan origin, by rail to Marseille. Once in the port city, they are expelled from French territory by boat. The attempt to block this train is an idea born of the Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective), and it was decided that if we were to have any chance of success, we should disguise ourselves as best as possible and infiltrate the station in small groups, since trying to march in there as a demonstration probably wouldn’t get us very far.
\n\nThe CAE, officially formed only a few weeks earlier in early April 1998, was an autonomous collective born in the heat of the movement of the sans-papiers of the mid-’90s, a French term meaning “without papers” that refers to the movement against the deportation of undocumented immigrants and in favor of their “legalization.” The collective’s broadly accepted guiding principles2 were as simple as they were clearly steeped in anarchist modes of organization, thought, and action:
\n\nThe plight of the sans-papiers had exploded into the public consciousness following a series of highly publicized church occupations in 1996 by undocumented immigrants themselves. This culminated on August 23, 1996 in a raid in which nearly two thousand police officers stormed the Saint-Bernard church, resulting in the detention of 210 undocumented immigrants.
\n\nAfter that, solidarity demonstrations with the sans-papiers in Paris regularly numbered in the tens of thousands, with the participants—and their demands and methods of action—representing the broad spectrum of the French center left and radical left. This included the Communist Party and the CGT union, but likewise the sizable anarchist blocs of the CNT, Anarchist Federation, Alternative Libertaire, SCALP, and everything in between. Importantly, the sans-papiers themselves were organized into several collectives and structures; they were active and leading participants in their own struggles. As with all communities, they were not a monolith. Within the sans-papiers organizations, one could find a similarly broad spectrum of ideas and strategies in regards to demands, objectives, and methods of action.
\n\nWhile the sans-papiers organizations, regardless of their politics, were limited in their methodology by the logical constraints of their situation—the fact that an arrest or identity control could quickly lead to a possible deportation with devastating, even deadly, potential consequences—the reformist organizations were unsurprisingly bound by the constraints of their respect for legality and their acceptance of the basic premises of states and borders and the idea that a human being should in some way or another be bound by the possession of a particular piece of paper, or lack thereof, based on their place of birth.
\n\nOr, even more absurdly, as is the case in France, their bloodline.
\n\nWe anarchists, on the other hand, had no such constraints. Our solidarity with what were clearly some of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society—workers, people of color, many of them women, escaping from what were some of the most horrendous conflicts in the world at that time—was immediate and instinctive. But through our position of unconditional solidarity with the sans-papiers and the assertion that in the world we are fighting for, no human will ever be illegal and freedom of movement will be for people and not just for commodities, we articulated a position of necessary rupture with the concepts of states and borders. If our demands could not be granted by the state and our objective could not be realized within the framework of its existence, then it naturally followed that we would not look to the state to grant those things.
\n\nConsequently, we were embarking on a concrete struggle to prevent deportations and make it possible for people to live where they chose and how they chose. The same stance toward the state applied in this struggle as in our abstract analysis: the state was our enemy, and we were determined to wage war against it within the appropriate context of the time and situation we found ourselves in, in hopes of preventing it from carrying out its objectives. The greater our success, hand in hand with those sans-papiers who were open to our solidarity and methods, the greater our collective power would grow as a movement and the greater the degree of agency, autonomy, and freedom we would be able to realize.
\n\nWe were not making demands, but seeking to force concessions and create realities. Concretely, that meant that deportations are for stopping. To do so, we would attack the state’s machinery of deportation, its infrastructure, and the enterprises that collaborated with it and benefited economically from assisting with the hunting, caging, and expelling of human beings.
\n\nWe did so out of solidarity, out of conviction, but also with the explicit understanding that despite our privileges and different realities, our struggle was the same as theirs. In fighting alongside the sans-papiers, as accomplices rather than allies, we were also fighting for ourselves:
\n\n\n\n\n“Their situation makes us all more precarious in labor relations, the repression and control developed against them will affect us eventually as well, the hardening of borders is also a barrier to our freedom of movement, because we are also foreigners to this world and we will be pushed further and further into clandestinity (by choice but also by necessity if we are to live our desires) by the constant evolution of the law and the states.”3
\n
So there we are, sitting under the elegant industrial-era steel and glass roof so typical of venerable European train stations—a fittingly dramatic setting for the impending confrontation. We are waiting anxiously for the moment when an unknown number of cops will appear, escorting what I expect will be a handcuffed individual through the hall, at which point we are to spring into action and form a human chain to prevent them from loading him onto the train. Failing that, we are to do everything we can to prevent the train from departing. We are not pacifists, and while there is a general consensus that our side will avoid unnecessary escalations, there is an equally clear agreement that the priority is not optics, but accomplishing a concrete and tangible objective.
\n\nNonetheless, I’m anxious about our chances of success. “Do you see any familiar-looking faces?” I ask worriedly. I’m scanning the hall as best I can and I don’t like what I see.
\n\n“No, I can’t even see Alan or Mary. I wonder if they made it in.” Mary is another Lycée Autogéré student and Sophie’s best friend, while Alan is slightly older and the token cliché-looking punk—complete with mohawk and faux leather jacket—in our little youth affinity group.
\n\nNot one of us is old enough to be a legal adult, yet the four of us already have a fair amount of experience getting into trouble with the state. We met at a Comité d’Action Lycéen (CAL, or “High School Action Committee”) meeting, a place that can only be described as a breeding ground for high-school-age anarchists.
\n\nWe’re young, fanatical, and unencumbered by wage slavery enough to enjoy ample free time, which we use to be regulars at every demonstration, action, occupation, political squat, concert, debate, and confrontation within the greater Paris area. When we’re not doing that, we’re spending our nights together drinking, getting stoned, and listening to Ska-P’s “El vals del obrero” in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Or at least the others are—myself, I’ve discovered Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionist and concluded that my mind and body are weapons for revolutionary struggle, so I should keep them free of drugs and alcohol. This makes me lots of fun at parties.
\n\nStill, no matter how combative we may be, no matter how sharp I keep my proverbial weapons, if there are only twenty of us when the cops show up, this is probably not going to go well. “Fucking unions,” Sophie mutters under her breath. “What are they good for if they can’t even bring out fifty people for something like this?” Her complaint is directed at SUD, short for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique (“In Solidarity, United, Democratic”), a small leftist union born in the aftermath of the 1995 general strike, whose railway branch had promised to mobilize for this action.
\n\nI shrug. “Who knows, it’s not like we know what they look like. Maybe it’ll work out.”
\n\nI’m trying to be positive, because this is the route we have chosen; if we’re at the ball, we might as well dance. It doesn’t seem like there are many alternatives available, anyway. A couple of weeks earlier, we were able to occupy the tracks, successfully delaying the train for a few hours. The cops eventually cleared the tracks via a liberal use of batons and CS gas, and when we returned a few days later, we found an army of police guarding the tracks.
\n\n“Look, look, right there!” Sophie points to one of the entrances to the hall, her voice trembling with a mix of excitement and anger. I’m just spotting what she is pointing at, a young man probably in his twenties being led by an escort of seven or eight cops, when immediately my concerns about our numbers today are erased. From every corner of the hall comes a loud burst of disapproving whistling, followed immediately by what seems like the entire crowded hall erupting in thunderous chants of “Non, non, non… aux expulsions!” amplified and rendered even more urgent by the echoes generated by the closed space in which we find ourselves.
\n\nThe first few people rise from their seats, sprint over to where the line of CRS riot police are guarding access to the platform and the train, and link arms. A few more join them. Then dozens more. Friends and comrades appear from everywhere among the crowd. The chants declaring that no human being is illegal ring loud and constant as we too join the human chain. There are hundreds of us! There are so many of us that we form two lines across the opening to the platform—one facing the cops who were already stationed there to prevent us from attempting to get access to the tracks, and another facing back toward the hall, preventing the cops who are escorting a captive from reaching the train. Sophie and I find ourselves in the first of those two lines.
\n\nThe next few minutes pass in an adrenaline-fueled blur. The sight of the person we are trying to protect from deportation right in front of us illustrates poignantly what is at stake, and the disconcerted looks of his police escort only embolden us. Clearly, they aren’t sure whether to push through or abort.
\n\nThe police are familiar with resistance to deportations. We regularly show up at airports, informing passengers as well as airline workers about what is happening on their flights and what their employers are making them unwilling accomplices to, urging passengers to refuse to fly on flights that are simultaneously prisoner transports. We have had varying degrees of success. We’ve tried to disrupt and prevent deportations too, as we did a few weeks earlier at this same spot.
\n\nBut we’ve never done this.
\n\nAt least, never by the hundreds, never with the palpable feeling that we might actually succeed. I think the cops sense that, too.
\n\nThe next scene is of an extreme and almost intimate violence. Clearly, the order has been given to clear access to the train. CS gas and batons fly all around us. We are not armed. We have no flagpoles, no helmets, not even the cloth of a banner to protect ourselves with. Masks cover our faces while linked arms keep us together, but this leaves us practically defenseless against the baton blows. With neither word nor warning, the riot cop directly to my right pulls out a metal retractable baton from the inside pocket of his jacket, and in one swift motion he extends it and brings it down with a thud against the head of a comrade next to me. I hear the crack and immediately see blood gushing from the wound at the top of his forehead. His arms go limp, and the best I can do is kind of release my arm, which I have linked around his, and push him backward as he slumps, so that he falls toward the line of comrades facing the station and not at the feet of these unhinged cops.
\n\nBefore I can assess the wisdom of this course of action, I am already instinctively launching a kick at the stomach of the cop who has injured my neighbor. This cop has been sneering at us since we stood up, waiting for his moment to injure a “gauchiste de merde,” the French for “piece-of-shit leftist,” which is exactly what nationalists and fascists like to call us in Argentina, as well. Sophie yells for me to get back, but her voice barely registers on my radar. Comrades break the line to carry away the injured friend just as I broke ranks with my kick. Still others, blinded or unable to breathe due to the CS gas, also break ranks and retreat.
\n\nThe young Algerian is forced onto the train. The following week’s edition of Le Monde Libertaire, the weekly newspaper of the francophone Anarchist Federation, later reported4 that the train
\n\n\n\n\n“departed with a delay of thirty minutes. […] The train would stop several kilometers farther, in Melun, waiting for another train transporting approximately half of its original passengers.”
\n
The missing passengers had been unable to board due to the clashes between demonstrators and police.
\n\n\n\n\n“The train was again stopped at the Lyon-Perrache station around 2:30 am by activists there, but not before having made an unscheduled stop at L’Estaque station to disembark the prisoners and place them in the detention center at Arenc, as the cops were concerned about the possible actions of further demonstrators in Marseille.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/26/3.jpg\")
\nThere are still two clearly defined fronts inside the waiting area. We are standing on one side, now about twenty meters or so away from the trains.
\n\nA small group of people start to leave—about twenty people, all wearing high-visibility vests. They are the SUD railway trade unionists, who had shown up to the action after all, but decided that with the departure of the train, their participation was over.
\n\nThe rest of us still number solidly in the hundreds. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. It’s poor attendance even at a third-division football match, barely enough people to fill a subway car. Even a strictly anarchist demonstration in Paris could number into the thousands. But in my eyes at that moment, these people are the whole world. Who cares about numbers, optics, or the opinion of sheep? I feel at home among these two hundred who have put their bodies behind the conviction that no human being is illegal, who have shown with their actions that the state and its agents are to be confronted head-on.
\n\nRather two hundred ultra-leftists, adventurists, extremists, or whatever else they may call us than two thousand who will stand idly by because party or union discipline says now is not the moment and this is not the way—or twenty thousand who will march down the street with us proclaiming that no human being is illegal, only to placidly continue with their day while others are dragged, often drugged and bound, to prisoner transports. I’m grateful for the participation of the sympathizer, the unionist, the party member, the reformist. I understand we need them to exert political pressure. But I feel now that my place is with the militants and the fighters, no matter the numbers.
\n\nIn front of us is a wall of riot cops, now too far to reach us with their gas and truncheons. The idea of police as the armed guards that enforce the dictatorship of capital through the state-sanctioned monopoly of violence gave way to a much more urgent feeling—a burning hatred of those who hurt my friends in order to perpetrate injustice. Whoever wears that uniform is the immediate means of our oppression and therefore my enemy.
\n\nSomebody has come back from another track with a backpack full of stones. As the chants against deportation continue to roar, a few dozen of us attack the cops. There’s sadness and frustration still, because we failed, but there is also joy. There is a feeling of collective refusal and liberation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/26/2.jpg\")
\nAs we finally make our retreat from the station, smashing security cameras, advertisement panels, and automated ticket counters along the way, I am already thinking about the young Algerian whose deportation we were trying to stop. Tonight wasn’t about making an abstract political statement against deportations. It wasn’t a militant yet still symbolic action against the machinery of expulsion and the barbarism that categorizes human beings based on where they happen to have been born. The objective was to stop the kidnapping of a specific human being. And while there is still some distant hope that comrades farther down the line, in Lyon or in Marseille, might still succeed, we, at least, have failed, and my mind is already focused on how I, or we collectively, can do more.
\n\nDespite my concerns that we didn’t do enough, the very next day, I am confronted with the press and the good citizens of Paris howling that we did too much. I pick up a newspaper on the way to school and find articles pontificating about the extremists at the train station, outraged at the disorder, condemning the supposed outbreak of violence. Too much disorder, too much violence—words coming from exasperated good citizens of Paris as they walk past me at the very same train station and see the smashed ticket-vending machines. The constant hand-wringing about “the extreme left, emboldened, becoming increasingly aggressive, violent, and dangerous” has only intensified since the election of the socialist and communist center-left government coalition.
\n\nWhat was damaged? As I make my way through the station, I take note of the “damage.” The only damage to the station is to the machines that hinder our freedom of movement and convert the need to get from one place to another into an economic consideration. To the advertising panels that pollute public space and turn any place where the human eye might rest its gaze into propaganda for the constant consumption of goods we don’t need. And finally, to the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras, ensuring that anyone who rejects this system of consumption and control can be more efficiently surveilled and criminalized.
\n\nWhat precious order did we disrupt? If the order they are referring to is this superficial peace and tranquility that has nothing to do with justice, then the problem is not that we were violent or disorderly but that we effectively disrupted the orderly procedures of oppression. The order of those who prefer the continuation of oppression as long as they can turn a blind eye to it—or worse, celebrate it in the name of nationalism or racism—to the turbulence of the struggle to end it.
\n\nViolence? We threw some stones, probably injured nobody. The injured were on our side, those who faced the armed forces of the state with not much more than our bodies and the occasional flying object. What is a few smashed ticketing machines and advertisements compared to the violence we witnessed? The violence that takes place constantly, unceasingly, in every immigrant neighborhood swept by kidnappers working for the state—during every ticket control in the subway that triggers a domino effect that ends in deportation—on flights leaving constantly with prisoners, often drugged and handcuffed, transported as human cargo against their will.
\n\nIn regards to the life of this man, I don’t intend to shock or traumatize with speculations about what his fate might be, what his circumstances were, whether he was torn from a family, a partner, a project, his dreams. It doesn’t matter. I assert his freedom to live as he chooses and where he chooses because my anarchism demands this as a minimum condition of human dignity and a rejection of the system of states and borders that I seek to destroy. This violence, this war on individuals in the name of states and nations, is the only relevant violence here, the violence that is carried out in the defense of oppression.
\n\nIt is a machine of violence built to protect and perpetuate the system of exploitation and human suffering that pits human against human in a needless struggle for survival. A machine that has colonized the minds of people to such an extent that they can only recognize violence at the point of impact—the fist striking a face, the rock striking the policeman’s shield—and only when it interrupts the order that ordinarily inflicts it.
\n\nThis renders invisible the ceaseless unspeakable violence that flows from the system of nations, capital, and class society: death due to lack of access to health care, famine and hunger created by artificial scarcity, workplace accidents and deaths caused by the drive to skimp on safety measures in order to maximize profits, endless religious and nationalist wars. Immigrants drown in the seas around Fortress Europe or die of dehydration in the heat of the Arizona desert in desperate attempts to escape poverty and improve their lives. This systemic violence, the violence of oppression, barely even registers to most as such.
\n\nI make my way through the city, still lost in my thoughts as I exit the subway into the largely immigrant neighborhood where the CNT offices are. Two cops are parked outside the subway, nonchalantly checking people’s identification at random. “Papers, please.” The normality of everyday violence.
\n\nFaced with this reality, who cares about legality? Who cares about popular opinion? When there were few of us and we occupied the tracks, our action was completely peaceful. Yet the mercenaries of the state came and beat us without hesitation in order to achieve its objectives. Although they were able to accomplish this in a relatively “orderly” manner, due to our small numbers and tactical avoidance of violence, was that not the victory of an immeasurably greater violence? Would a greater violence on our end, for the purposes of liberation, not be justified? In what thought process does it follow that nonviolence represents the moral high ground, when adherence to nonviolence makes the perpetuation of human suffering and oppression possible?
\n\nThere is a moment that I will never forget from the day we were beaten off the tracks a few weeks prior to the story I have recounted.
\n\nI can barely see him through the glass, his complexion and the reflection of the station lights against the train’s windows making it difficult to distinguish his features and facial expressions. Two cops are moving him through the train, one holding each arm behind him, his hands cuffed together in front. Suddenly, as they pass an open window we can clearly see as he turns to us. He lifts his hands and displays a victory sign with each, as he mouths “thank you” to us. There is sadness, dignity, and gratitude in his face. I don’t know anything about him, who he is, where he is from, what brought him here, what he is being sent back to. But I know that violence—life-changing and potentially fatal violence—is not taking place in the delaying of the train. Violence is what is being done to him inside it.
\n\nIt’s not that we are too violent, but exactly the opposite. If we don’t employ the full arsenal of our capacity for collective revolutionary action, to be a force against the system of control that oppresses all of us, are we not as complicit as those who see it but choose to turn away?
\n\nWhat we are doing is not too much.
\n\nIt’s not nearly enough.
\n\nParis’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School) is an experimental public school founded in 1982 that “places students in a condition of autonomy, encouraging them to resolve challenges themselves, in a collective manner if they so choose.” Academically, the school rejects grades, while structurally, its day-to-day operations are decided on collectively by teachers, students, and staff in a directly democratic fashion, principally through working groups and assemblies. Unsurprisingly, the school has steadily provided new and young blood into the anarchist and antiauthoritarian movement, and just as unsurprisingly, it was a target of a fascist attack in 2018. The high school’s website (in French) can be found here. ↩
\n“Lutter auprès des sans-papiers: Histoire du CAE Paris,” Courant Alternatif, February 1, 2006, http://oclibertaire.free.fr/spip.php?article115; translation by the author. ↩
\n“Un bilan critique du Collectif Anti-Expulsions d’Ile-de-France,” Cette Semaine, no. 85 (August–September 2002), https://cettesemaine.info/cs85/cs85cae.html; translation by the author. ↩
\nJacques, “Étrangers expulsés, étrangers assasssinés!,” Le Monde Libertaire, no. 1123 (May 14–20, 1998), available at https://ml.ficedl.info/spip.php?article3761; translation by the author. ↩
\nThe movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest was one of the most important social struggles of the Biden era. Its trajectory tells us a lot about the challenges we confront today under Donald Trump. In the final chapter of our chronology, we trace the movement’s concluding phase, beginning in 2023 and ending with Trump’s arrival in power, and explore what we can learn from it.
\n\nYou can consult a timeline of events in the appendix.
\n\nIn the wake of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020, politicians and profiteers in Atlanta set out to create a compound in which to train police to use militarized force to suppress protest activity. In response, a movement emerged to defend Weelaunee Forest, the forest slated for destruction to make way for the training facility known as Cop City. This movement picked up where the George Floyd rebellion left off, seeking to channel widespread anger against police violence into a campaign mobilizing a wide range of people and tactics against a concrete target.
\n\nOver the following three and a half years, this movement gave rise to one of the fiercest struggles of the Biden era. Opponents of Cop City repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction project. In response, the authorities killed one forest defender and distributed outlandish terrorism and racketeering charges charges at random. While the movement became so broadly popular that the government of Atlanta was forced to use a variety of strategies to prevent voters from participating in a referendum on Cop City, politicians across the political spectrum unified in favor of pouring a virtually unlimited quantity of public funds into the coffers of the police and their allies.
\n\nThe arrival of the second Trump era has vindicated the decision to focus on resisting police militarization. Every repressive policy that Trump decrees will be imposed by police and other state mercenaries. The opposition that emerged in Atlanta sets the template for the social struggles that will play out under the second Trump administration. On one side, a political class unified in favor of repression unhampered by precedent or law; on the other side, a popular movement involving many different elements of the population using a wide array of tactics and strategies.
\n\nThis makes the lessons of the fight to stop Cop City essential reading for all.
\n\nThe movement to Stop Cop City was exemplary in several ways.
\n\nFirst, the movement began from the premise that victory might be within reach. Although they were taking on powerful adversaries, the participants in the movement did not take it for granted that they would lose. Rather than simply setting out to make a gesture, they began from the premise that it was possible to achieve a concrete change in society—or at least, that they had a responsibility to discover whether it was possible through ambitious action. They set concrete goals and experimented with a variety of strategies to achieve them.
\n\nSecond, the participants did not water down their politics or tactics out of a misguided desire to appeal to a broad range of people. The George Floyd uprising, which began with the burning of a police precinct, demonstrated that boldness and a radical analysis can be at least as galvanizing as a timid approach calculated to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
\n\nFinally, the participants set out to create a movement that was both popular and combative. Rather than accepting a role on the margins, they asserted direct action and the aim of abolishing the police as core to the movement. They made a point of articulating their intentions clearly and accessibly, making them known far and wide, with the goal of welcoming as many people as possible into a movement aiming to enact profound change.
\n\nIf every movement began from these points of departure, it seems likely that many of them would succeed.
\n\nIn the United States today, the wealthiest members of the ruling class control hundreds of billions of dollars apiece, while tens of millions of people struggle to put food on the table. The impossible task of imposing this state of affairs on an increasingly restless population is left to the police. Without police, politicians and executives would not be safe for an instant, as recent events have demonstrated.
\n\nIn this context, it is not surprising that the authorities threw every resource at their disposal into imposing Cop City on Atlanta, freely shedding blood and violating their own laws in the process. In the Biden era, this sufficed to overcome resistance to the project, because a large part of the population remained aloof from the movement, retaining faith in democracy and the rule of law. As we enter the second Trump era, however—which is already characterized by the abandonment of all compromise and the erosion of whatever perceived legitimacy state institutions still possessed—no one will be able to stand aside from social struggles for long.
\n\nIn view of this, the most important question is not whether the movement achieved its express goals, but how its legacy will equip people for the next round of struggles. At the minimum, it has helped to clarify the complicity of the entire political class in the violence of the police while setting important precedents for movement solidarity and diversity of tactics.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/13.jpg\")
“From the border to Weelaunee and Palestine, we defend life.”
\nAlready, the confrontations between those who seek to militarize the police and those who aspire to create a world without domination have spread from Atlanta all around the country.
\n\nIn 2022, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources announced that the National Guard training center at Camp Grayling sought to take over an additional 162,000 acres of publicly-owned land, more than doubling the area under its control. Inspired by the example of the movement to Stop Cop City, protesters mobilized against this expansion. In the end, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources was compelled to reject the original request, instead offering 52,000 acres to the military via short-term use permits.
\n\nIn the Bay Area, anarchists launched a movement to oppose a “Cop Campus” in San Pablo, California. In Charlotte, North Carolina, locals initiated a campaign targeting the construction of a local Cop City project. Even where resistance does not immediately emerge, building these facilities could prove difficult in a climate of widespread opposition: in East Somerville, South Carolina, developers scrapped their contract to build a new police training center in favor of building condos on the valuable real estate slated for development.
\n\nAs the US government increasingly emulates carceral states like El Salvador, stopping these facilities may be among the principle responsibilities of revolutionary movements. But whether it is a question of opposing police militarization, standing up for housing and the environment, or preserving public health, the same dynamics that emerged in the fight over Cop City will come to characterize more and more social conflicts.
\n\nCop City is everywhere. Our resistance must be, as well.
\n\nThis is the concluding chapter of our chronology of the movement. You can read the earlier installments here:
\n\n“Don’t Stop: Continuing the Fight against Cop City” chronicles the movement’s fortunes through the second half of 2023, including the Block Cop City mobilization.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/10.jpg\")
\n In the previous chapter, we discussed the Block Cop City mobilization and some of its immediate consequences, including the burning of sixteen Ernst Concrete trucks that same night, which led to the company’s departure from the project.
\n\nIn November 2023, mobilizing in response to the RICO charges against 61 people in late summer was a bold move. Only 500 people showed up, partly due to warnings from nonprofit staffers and activist groups—liberals and anarchists alike—about how “dangerous” the action would be. Despite this, no participants were arrested, a significant achievement for a movement that has often seen riot police tackle elderly picketers.
\n\nAfter Block Cop City, autonomous groups organized around two new efforts. One idea, a nationwide convergence outside Georgia, emerged during the sixth week of action, alongside the Block Cop City proposal. The other followed the anniversary of Tortuguita’s death.
\n\nOn January 2, 2024, anonymous authors published a statement titled “The Day of the Forest Defender,” which circulated widely online and in print. The statement briefly described the January 18, 2023 killing of Tortuguita by Georgia State Patrol and proposed a permanent commemoration of that day through resistance. The authors drew parallels to global commemorations, including Black August (honoring George and Jonathan Jackson), The Day of the Young Combatant (March 29, remembering Rafael and Eduardo Vergara Toledo’s deaths fighting the Pinochet regime in Chile), November 17th (commemorating the 1973 Polytechnic University revolt in Greece), and December 6th (marking the 2008 police killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos and the subsequent insurrection in Greece).
\n\nThe statement called for January 18 to be recognized as a day for actions, workshops, vigils, and other events honoring Tortuguita and all those who have died defending the Earth. It emphasized that movements in the United States must confront the repression targeting the Stop Cop City movement and respond with ongoing acts of resistance beyond just supporting those facing charges.
\n\nAs the anniversary approached, it became clear the government sought to assassinate Tortuguita’s character, as Tortuguita had become a martyr for the movement. Attorney General John Fowler filed a cynical motion to include excerpts from Tort’s journal in the RICO discovery, claiming it contained evidence relevant to the case against other activists. Filing this motion made the private journal a public record, and right-wing commentators spread what they considered to be shocking quotations across the internet and television.
\n\nIn the end, the court denied that motion, but the journal’s contents had already been digitized and published. The public saw notes from Food Not Bombs meetings, fragmentary thoughts, jokes, scattered remarks, abbreviated lists, dates, and drawings. Among these were instances of hyperbole, anti-police humor, and iconography, the kind of thoughts shared by millions of young people across the country. None of the leaked material scandalized the movement. We may never know how the television-viewing public perceived the coverage at that time, as many simply adopt the most recent perspective they hear. In any case, the news outlets and their audiences did not have the final word on the killing of a 26-year-old anarchist.
\n\nOn January 16, two days before the Day of the Forest Defender, a feller-buncher was set on fire in Weelaunee Forest. This machinery was burned at the forest’s edge near Interstate 20, on a parcel of land owned by Shadowbox Studios. The online communiqué reaffirmed the movement’s commitment to this section of the forest and highlighted the continued vulnerability of the developers to sabotage, despite the $41,500-per-day security budget allocated by the Atlanta city government to protect the construction site. In acting early, the saboteurs presumably hoped to set the tone for the days to follow.
\n\nAfter the action, the government announced it had spent $20 million on security for the project, bringing the total cost to $110 million. This figure excluded the damages incurred by private contractors but included increases in insurance premiums.
\n\nOn January 18, Day of the Forest Defender events drew a total of over 1000 participants across approximately fifty locations. Vigils, rallies, movie screenings, and marches took place in cities including Seattle, Portland, Corvallis, Boise, Arcata, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Pablo, Stanford, Sacramento, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Tucson, Lincoln, Denver, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Columbus, Akron, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Carbondale, Minneapolis, Lansing, Pontiac, Richmond, New Orleans, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Savannah, Tallahassee, Miami, Asheville, Chapel Hill, DC, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Binghamton, Bridgeport, New York, London, Berlin, and Atlanta. There was an event in Rojava, as well.
\n\nThat night, anonymous groups carried out acts of vandalism and sabotage. In Atlanta, anarchists broke windows at two Nationwide Insurance subsidiaries. In San Francisco, activists smashed eighteen windows at the Police Credit Union. In Novi, Michigan, caltrops were placed at the driveway of MTU Solutions. Elsewhere, windows were etched with corrosive chemicals.
\n\nAnarchists overseas also conducted invite-only actions, reflecting global sympathy for the movement and its sacrifices. In Hanover, Germany, anarchists burned an Autobahn GmbH. In Amsterdam, saboteurs slashed the tires of UPS trucks, a Police Foundation funder. In northern England, activists raided a chicken farm and liberated the animals. The communiques for all of these actions referenced Tortuguita.
\n\nAs tragedies pile up, movements for liberation must focus on rigorous, ongoing education. Without it, they will remain trapped in cycles of short-lived outrage, unable to build lasting movements, organizations, or projects. The Day of the Forest Defender could serve as an opportunity for education, clarifying important lessons for years to come. If it succeeds, future activists will be able to learn from our struggles and mistakes, just as the movement against Cop City draws inspiration from past struggles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/8.jpg\")
Day of the Forest Defender demonstration in Berkeley, California on January 18, 2024.
\nThe Day of the Forest Defender reinvigorated networks in Atlanta and beyond. On January 25, activists burned four machines owned by Brent Scarborough Company at a construction site on Boulevard Drive, near Custer Avenue.
\n\nFour days later, on January 29, activists rushed onto a Brasfield & Gorrie jobsite in Midtown (at 12th and Juniper) and locked themselves to construction equipment. Dozens of supporters gathered at ground level, halting construction for several hours. Two people were arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing. Could this method become a new approach for forest defenders fighting Cop City? It seemed to spark enthusiasm among a new layer of activists who were committed to resisting Cop City even after the clearing of the forest.
\n\nBefore this approach could be tested further, events took a drastic turn with severe consequences for the movement—and perhaps for all movements in the near future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/9.jpg\")
Machines belonging to Brent Scarborough burned on Boulevard Drive. The company was repeatedly targeted for their contract with Brasfield & Gorrie to build Cop City.
\nAt 6 am on February 8, hundreds of police officers, federal agents, and state patrolmen raided three houses simultaneously. This was not the first time they had worked together to raid a home. But it was the first time they had targeted multiple houses at once within context of the movement.
\n\nTwo homes in Lakewood Heights were near recent acts of arson and sabotage targeting Brent Scarborough Company. The third, in Starlight Heights, was a few hundred feet from the Cop City construction site. The raids followed a joint investigation by the Atlanta Police, FBI, and ATF. The APEX Unit led the raid at one Lakewood home, the ATF at another, and the FBI at the Starlight Heights residence, with support from the Georgia State Patrol and Bureau of Investigations.
\n\nAt the house raided by the APEX Unit, a helicopter hovered overhead as officers arrived in armored vehicles. Wearing balaclavas, brandishing long guns, and obscuring their name tags, they pounded on the door. One resident, hands raised, opened the door before it was broken, possibly avoiding gunfire. Another resident, topless, was dragged outside despite asking for a shirt. Masked plainclothes officers photographed detainees on their phones. Neighbors filmed and shouted at the officers. Inside, police overturned furniture, punched holes in walls, and ransacked the house. They seized t-shirts, laptops, a camera, and phones. One resident was detained for eight hours at police headquarters; agents photographed his tattoos but did not interrogate him before releasing him without charges.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/12.jpg\")
APEX Unit of the Atlanta Police blocking a residential street in Lakewood Heights after conducting a raid on a single-family home.
\nAt the house that the FBI raided, dozens of agents arrived and loudly announced themselves. Those inside were permitted to sit while agents searched through the shelves, cabinets, books, and cushions. The intruders seized some phones, but made no arrests. The agents combed through belongings with meticulous care, avoiding errors or oversights.
\n\nAt the ATF raid, agents surrounded the house, shining flashlights and barking orders. They detained the residents of a backyard unit and broke down the front door of the main house, throwing flash-bang grenades inside. The agents abused residents and destroyed belongings, dragging one person down the porch stairs by their hair and staging intimate photographs in order to humiliate the residents. They arrested one person on charges of First-Degree Arson, later accusing them of involvement in the June 2023 attack on a police training facility in which eight police motorcycles were burned using time-delayed devices.
\n\nUnlike the 2023 raid on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, the targets of this massive operation were not public figures. They were not known to the media, did not face RICO charges, and could not easily express what connected their situation to the broader movement. Setting aside concerns about why the police decided to target these individuals, the movement’s ability to rally support was uncertain. When the police raided the Solidarity Fund, activists, journalists, and even politicians spoke out in their defense. Who would come to the aid of accused terrorists and arsonists?
\n\nBefore the end of February 8, the movement responded boldly. The Stop Cop City Vote Coalition (the group organizing the referendum campaign), Emory Stop Cop City, and others called an emergency press conference at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters. As a result, the Police Foundation—which had been vandalized during the first Week of Action in 2021 and again after Tortuguita’s killing in 2023—sent all staff home early.
\n\nDuring the press conference, public figures associated with the movement spoke out, condemning the repression and asserting that it was not just an attack on the fight to stop Cop City, but an assault on everyone’s right to organize and resist social injustices. This would have sufficed to counter the media narrative that the police chief had attempted to craft with his self-assured, misguided statements earlier that day. But the organizers went further. When a journalist asked if the pro-referendum coalition condemned the burning of police motorcycles—the act the police cited as justification for the raids—a prominent local activist associated with the Movement for Black Lives answered:
\n\n\n\n\n“Hell no. No. Not at all. And if I’m being completely honest with you, Atlanta deserves even more than that. Real talk. They are lucky. This city is lucky. This country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all. But some of us cannot take that risk. But those who can? Bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows I’ll sit with my lighter and be like ‘damn.’ But the best thing I can do is use my voice, use my feet, use my heart, talk to my people, and organize. And I’ll put my body on the line and show up and do as much as I can. Because we need every, every means necessary to deal with the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care. No! And I would imagine my comrades would feel the same. No! We are not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every ‘proper democratic process.’ As one of the students says: ‘If we can’t get this in the courts, if we can’t get this in the council, then we are going to take it to the streets!’ Because our people, our children, my babies, are worth the risk.”
\n
In the days following the raids, others worked to demonstrate that both the principle of solidarity and the spirit of resistance remained intact despite the intensifying repression.
\n\nPress conference, downtown Atlanta, February 8, 2024.
\nIn the early morning of February 10, anarchists in St. Paul set fire to two Home Depot trucks and the trailers carrying expensive lumber. A claim of responsibility posted online expressed support for the individual arrested in the raids and quoted the “March 5th Movement” communiqué accompanying the action that the arrestee was accused of participating in: “The time has come to destroy those who destroy the Earth.”
\n\nThat same night, in Lakewood Heights—the location of two of the raids—a police cruiser was set on fire. The car was parked outside a cop’s home. An anonymous statement published online with the action read:
\n\n\n\n\n“We wish to dispel any notion that people will take this latest wave of repression lying down…We all have something to lose; it is simply a matter of living out our beliefs or submitting to the police state. Inaction is a choice just as much as action, and we all have to live with the choices we make.”
\n
This act targeting a police officer at home, shortly after a major operation, sent authorities into a spiral they wouldn’t recover from for nearly six months.
\n\nBy mid-morning on February 10, Lakewood Heights was effectively under occupation. Local, state, and federal agencies laid siege to the area. Police cruisers lined highway off-ramps, intersections, and major streets. An armored vehicle was stationed on Jonesboro Road, a key street in the neighborhood. A helicopter circled overhead for days. Unmarked cruisers sped through the area, parking outside the homes of suspected “militant anarchists” (in the words of Chief Shierbaum), tailing individuals, photographing them, pulling over motorists, and asking pointless questions. The GBI, FBI, and ATF canvassed door-to-door, dug through trash cans, and paraded K-9 units through the community.
\n\nAround 4 pm, dozens of police vehicles gathered at Kipp Vision Elementary on McWilliams Street, marking the southern border of the Lakewood neighborhood. They drove north several blocks, shut down roads, and established a perimeter around a single-family home. After kicking in the front and back doors and finding no one inside, they ransacked the place—flipping over chairs and tables, pulling posters off walls, and breaking furniture. Finding nothing of interest, they left as quickly as they had come.
\n\nOutside, Chief Shierbaum addressed the media. With nothing to show for the raid, he focused on the burned police cruiser, absurdly claiming that “someone could have died.” Though he admitted no one was home at the time, he claimed that police had targeted the house based on a “preliminary investigation” suggesting the arsonists might have returned there after setting the cruiser on fire. He ended his press conference ominously: “The person we were looking for knows who he is,” and that the police would like to speak with him.
\n\nIn a courageous countermove, the resident of this home held his own press conference the next day. He asserted that he was targeted not for any crimes, but because of his support for the movement. He refused to yield to leading questions from journalists, who tried to imply he had prior knowledge of attacks on Cop City. Instead of denouncing the attacks, he maintained that it was the police who had created the dangerous conditions, not anarchists. At the end of the conference, he invited journalists into his home to show them the damage from the raid.
\n\nHad more community members responded this way, publicly asserting their unity and refusal to accept raids and harassment of activists, the following months might have played out differently.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/11.jpg\")
Faith leaders denounce the repression of Cop City protesters.
\nIf there had been no militant response to the raids, the government might well have carried out more raids and arrests, something they had explicitly stated was in the works. Politicians and police often fail to make good on their promises. Possibly, the authorities thought they would find evidence in the course of their raids that they did not find. Perhaps they expended too much political favor kicking in so many doors for so few arrests. Both could be true. The courage of the responses from the movement probably impacted the situation as well.
\n\nMovements that fail to respond swiftly to attacks often lose morale. It is a significant weakness only to be able to advance with the consent of one’s adversary. At the same time, movements should resist the temptation to get caught in high-risk grudge matches, boxing themselves in ever-shrinking fields of action that involve fewer and fewer participants. This applies to everyone, not just those who burn police cruisers.
\n\nIn the weeks following the raids, the movement stalled. There was no systematic canvassing of the besieged area, nor were large demonstrations organized to denounce the raids. Local engagement was missing precisely when it was crucial. While many recognized the need to mobilize in such a way, many key figures in the movement were in retreat—intimidated by police drones, unmarked vans, or still out on bond from their felony RICO charges. To have been able to seize this missed opportunity, the movement would have required broader participation, more people prepared to take initiative, and greater support from the wider community. Perhaps this was a “chicken and egg” dilemma.
\n\nOne advantage the movement had long held over the Atlanta Police Foundation was the ability to stage interventions outside of the forest, outside the city, outside the state of Georgia. Convergences allow movements to remain focused and precise, drawing together many of the movement’s most dedicated participants and supporters. Decentralized action makes the movement more agile, resilient, and capable of replenishing its ranks, since organizers can introduce new participants to the movement far from the epicenter of repression.
\n\nWhat if these two strengths could be combined, converging far from the center of surveillance and intimidation?
\n\nBy the second week of February, police cruisers began parking outside the homes of more than a dozen Atlanta residents, day and night. According to local media reports and The Guardian, officers parked their cars, shined floodlights, and generally created an air of menace in Lakewood Heights and southeast Atlanta. Between mid-February and early September 2024, officers parked outside these homes up to ten times a day. This amounted to well over a thousand instances of overt surveillance against alleged participants in the movement and their neighbors.
\n\nEven before the February raids and subsequent harassment, opponents of Cop City began organizing a nationwide convergence in Tucson, Arizona. This marked the first large-scale attempt to mobilize forest defenders and anti-Cop City activists outside of Atlanta in the three years of resistance to the project. After the inconclusive events the previous November, this was a creative innovation worth pursuing. If the movement could catalyze participation on a larger scale by cultivating centers of participation further from the epicenter of repression, it might give itself a new lease on life and continue deploying both confrontational and participatory means.
\n\nOn February 23, just weeks after the raids in Atlanta, hundreds of people converged in Tucson. They gathered at Mansfield Park, exchanging food, pamphlets, schedules, and embraces. For those who had participated in previous weeks of action in the Weelaunee Forest, this scene was familiar—though this time, without helicopters overhead.
\n\nIn the late afternoon, 150 forest defenders marched from the park to a nearby lot that had been abandoned by developers and authorities; they transformed it into a temporary autonomous zone. Participants redecorated the lot with graffiti, tents, and folding tables. Workshops, presentations, and skill-shares drew several hundred more people over the next few days. For those who had traveled from afar, the warm Arizona night was likely a pleasant surprise.
\n\nThat evening, away from the reclaimed plaza, an anonymous group smashed windows at three Nationwide Insurance locations. The weekend had officially begun. Around one hundred people slept beneath the Tucson sky.
\n\nOn Saturday, February 24, local residents and seasoned anarchists intermingled all day long in strategy sessions, workshops, and assemblies about the movement and the challenges it faced.
\n\nThat afternoon, Ben Morea, of the legendary New York City anarchist groups Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), addressed 75 people in a corner of Mansfield Park, sharing the lessons he had learned as a lifelong rebel against all authority, domination, and closed-mindedness. Young participants asked him questions and received heartfelt responses.
\n\nThe movement against Cop City and to defend Weelaunee Forest has benefitted from its continuous cross-pollination with autonomous and unruly youth subcultures. It has also benefitted from the participation of elders, movement veterans, and seniors who offer their own perspective and insights on the world, with the wisdom of many decades of hard-earned lessons and experiences.
\n\nThat night, a few hundred people gathered at a nearby community arts space for a hardcore punk show organized within the context of the convergence. Anarchists distributed pamphlets and posters about the movement, while punk bands played fast and angry music into the late hours of the night.
\n\nIn Santa Cruz, California, a Nationwide subsidiary was vandalized with spray paint, its locks glued shut.
\n\nOn Sunday, February 25, 80 people gathered in downtown Tucson, dressed in black clothing and masks. The crowd had apparently assembled on an invitation-only basis. They marched toward the Presidio Plaza, down Stone Street; some began smashing windows. The sound of hammers and stones colliding with glass rang through the night. Masked protesters smashed the plate glass windows at a Wells Fargo. Paint fumes drifted into the air, rising above the glimmering wreckage. PNC Bank shared the same fate.
\n\nA few police cruisers confronted the crowd. Hooded protesters responded, lobbing stones and fireworks, sending the officers into retreat. The crowd circled back to Presidio Plaza before dispersing. Pairs of protesters sprinted in different directions. Sirens wailed in the distance. Within minutes, the crowd vanished, just as police flooded the area. Three pedestrians were arrested and charged with felonies. Later, the charges were dropped.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/2.jpg\")
PNC Bank on Stone Avenue redecorated by protesters.
\nThis demonstration echoed the march on the APF headquarters in Atlanta during the first Week of Action, when the movement still lacked mass sympathy but possessed the element of surprise. It also recalled a specific type of protest undertaken by US anarchists between 2007 and 2011—small affinity group actions that exploited the element of surprise and mimicked the energy of a riot, albeit on a smaller scale. The most infamous example was the May 1, 2010 vandalism of a gentrifying shopping area in Asheville, North Carolina, followed by the arrests of eleven people, facing felony charges and bond amounts of $65,000 each.
\n\nSuch demonstrations are risky. The crowds involved are often too small to effectively repel police incursions, leaving stragglers and passersby vulnerable to snatch squads. Moreover, these actions are often ignored or misrepresented by the media, and because they’re not destructive enough to warrant widespread attention, their broader political or social impact is negligible—at least, in terms of public perception. However, the February 25 demonstration was accompanied by a press release, which ensured extensive media coverage. Though the worst consequences were avoided, it appeared that this demonstration neither galvanized nor demoralized the movement. In that regard, its impact on the movement was more similar to Block Cop City than to the January 21, 2023 black bloc or the March 5, 2023 raid on Cop City.
\n\nOne might wonder if the risk was worth it, given the lack of tangible results. If nothing else, considering the context, it was remarkable that so many people were willing to take part in such actions just weeks after the recent raids in Atlanta. Arguably, the virtues and courage that movement participants are able to embody for one another are more important than what they communicate to their adversaries. Perhaps the networks that enable these actions are more durable than those that rely solely on other tactics. In that case, it is the relationships and organization of those networks that gives them strength, not risk tolerance or bravado alone.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/1.jpg\")
Windows broken at the Stone Avenue Wells Fargo during the “Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City” in Tucson, Arizona.
\nThe next day, as media outlets published dramatic images of broken glass from the night before, dozens of protesters gathered at the Nationwide Insurance headquarters in Scottsdale, two hours from Tucson. Armed with poster-board signs and whistles, they faced off against hundreds of police officers. The office was closed, the entire area under heavy police surveillance. Law enforcement clearly expected a militant confrontation at the office building, but the office itself was tucked away in an office park far from the city center, easily policed. The few protesters who gathered there, undeterred, courageously faced down the absurd overreaction of the police.
\n\nMeanwhile, in Forest Hills, Arizona, six activists locked themselves into concrete-filled barrels blocking the entrance to a gated community housing a regional executive of Nationwide Insurance. With only a few journalists and medics for support, they successfully shut down access to the wealthy community for hours. During that time, they explained their actions to the neighbors of the Nationwide executive.
\n\nAt the same time, in New York City, over two hundred people marched to AXA XL and Nationwide offices. AXA XL insures Brasfield & Gorrie, the contractor behind Cop City, while Nationwide insures the Atlanta Police Foundation. The crowd surged into the building, pushing past police and security. They flooded the atrium and stairwells, dropping banners from the second-floor balconies as their chants echoed through the halls. It was the largest demonstration against Cop City to take place outside Atlanta. The next day, several Nationwide offices in New York City were vandalized. The day after that, someone slashed the tires of ten NYPD cruisers in an expression of solidarity with the movement.
\n\nThese actions in Arizona and New York illustrated the relationship between participatory and clandestine tactics, as the Weeks of Action in Atlanta often led to greater sabotage against those destroying the forest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/3.jpg\")
Scottsdale, Arizona, February 26, 2024.
\nBy March 2024, a new round of actions against Cop City were in full swing. The weekly picket at the construction site, established over the winter, continued to grow as temperatures rose. On March 5, the anniversary of the historic raid on the Cop City site, around 20 Black women gathered at Mayor Andre Dickens’ private residence at 6 a.m. They held banners, chanted slogans, and delivered speeches condemning the repression of the movement and demanding the city unblock the referendum process in order to permit residents to vote on the land-lease ordinance.
\n\nTwo days later, on March 7, another activist locked down to construction equipment at a Brasfield & Gorrie worksite in Midtown. A crowd gathered outside with megaphones and banners, just as they had during the January lockdown at a nearby construction site. After several hours, the forest defender was removed by police and cited for misdemeanor “trespassing.”
\n\nAt the same time, authorities continued extensive surveillance and harassment in Lakewood and southeast Atlanta.
\n\nOn March 11, a crowd of Austin residents confronted Mayor Dickens while he was participating in a panel at the South by Southwest music event. As Dickens began his speech, protesters unfurled banners, hurled insults at him, and chanted “Viva, Viva, Tortuguita” while throwing fliers into the air. The event was ruined. In a desperate attempt to shield himself, Dickens called out, “Look at who is doing this,” cynically using identity politics to deflect from his responsibility for the harm occurring in Atlanta. The disruption continued, and Dickens was heckled all the way out of the building.
\n\nThree days later, on March 14, eight machines owned by Brent Scarborough were set ablaze in a suburb south of Atlanta. Anonymous saboteurs issued a statement online, highlighting the lack of coverage surrounding the attack. They argued that while actions in the city often prompted police statements and media coverage, news of attacks in the suburbs was generally suppressed. This may have been the most destructive act against Brent Scarborough yet.
\n\nAs the movement regained its footing after the February raids, new activists flocked to meetings, fundraisers, and direct action trainings. This led to more daring actions. Two activists climbed a 250-foot crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie construction site in Midtown Atlanta. Unlike previous lockdowns, which involved small groups stalling work for a few hours, this action was riskier and posed a serious challenge to security. After several hours, police scaled the crane and used an angle grinder to capture the activists, who had locked their arms inside a steel pipe.
\n\nThe courts reacted harshly, charging the two with “False Imprisonment,” a felony kidnapping charge. The police claimed the crane operator, on the ground, was “unable to leave” due to the activists suspended nearly 20 stories above him.
\n\nThis absurd charge gave pause to many. If camping in a forest, passing out fliers, civil disobedience, breaking windows, and rioting were all punished with the same severity, what actions remained for those unwilling to risk imprisonment? What would it take to stop the construction?
\n\nAt the same time, across the Atlantic, the Israeli invasion of Gaza continued. Graphic images and reports arrived daily showing the brutal toll on Palestinian civilians. Horrific footage recorded and broadcast by Palestinians depicted scenes of unimaginable violence. Soldiers decapitated children. Fighter jets vaporized hospital wards. Aid workers shoveled human remains into trash bags to turn them over to loved ones.
\n\nFor six months, protesters in the United States blocked highways, disrupted speaking events, shut down ports. While often small, these actions were passionate and contributed to growing momentum. On April 15, coordinated highway blockades took place around the country. Two days later, a group at Columbia University in New York established a protest camp. When the administration brought the NYPD in to attack students and faculty, outrage spread across the country. By the third week of April, protesters had established or attempted to establish “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” at over a hundred campuses.
\n\nAtlanta was no different. On April 22, an anonymous group wheatpasted slogans around Emory University, linking the institution with Cop City and the Israeli occupation.
\n\nOn April 25, dozens of protesters rushed onto Emory’s Quad at 7:30 am, erecting tents and banners that read “No Cop City,” “No Genocide,” and “Defend the Forest.” Protesters were able to assemble tents, but not much else. At 10:15, protesters attempted to march but were blocked by officers who fired pepper balls. Riot police used rubber bullets and batons. In the chaos, medics were tackled, journalists maced, and professors arrested.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/5.jpg\")
“Divest from death—no Cop City, no genocide.” A banner raised at the Emory University Gaza Solidarity Encampment in April 2024.
\nWhile the police reasserted control of the Quad, students rushed from classrooms, eager to witness—and join—the unfolding conflict.
\n\nBy 11:30 am, nearly 500 people had gathered around Emory’s Quad. A group surrounded the Atlanta Police cruisers holding detainees from the earlier chaos. The crowd chanted, “Every city is Cop City.” Tensions flared as the cruisers tried to leave and protesters rushed into the road to block their exit. Police fired pepper balls into the crowd and tackled another student. People poured out of nearby classrooms, pushing closer to the police lines while chanting, “Shame on you.” In the standoff, snatch squads arrested several more protesters. The crowd then swarmed to de-arrest them, hitting and shoving officers, successfully freeing at least one person. Some began throwing bottles. The cruisers left and the crowd marched toward Convocation Hall.
\n\nStudents, community members, faculty, clergy, and activists then reconvened in the Quad. Supporters brought food to the protesters, who gathered in small groups to discuss their next steps. At least 28 people had been arrested and many others were injured. Though the police were absent, those assembled were uncertain how to proceed.
\n\nWord spread that students at the Candler Theology School had occupied the atrium and were calling for supporters to join them. Around 300 people headed to the school. By the time they arrived, police had blocked the doors to prevent an occupation. Masked protesters with reinforced banners pressed into the police lines, throwing bottles and signs in an attempt to break through. For the third time, police fired pepper balls at the crowd, sending many running or retreating from the building.
\n\nDespite the efforts of a few dozen who tried to push through, the larger crowd lacked the will to confront the police directly. Had they been more unified and prepared, they likely could have seized the building. Instead, exhausted and underprepared, the crowd—still several hundred strong—retreated to the Quad.
\n\nAround 9:15 pm, most protesters dispersed, anticipating the 11 pm campus curfew.
\n\nBetween us and peace, a line of police officers. Clashes outside Emory Candler School of Theology.
\nThe next day, 500 people reconvened in Emory’s Quad following an autonomous call to action circulated anonymously online. The flier outlined two demands: divest from Israel and the Atlanta Police Foundation, and drop all charges against those arrested in the previous day’s protests. As the crowd gathered, students and activists delivered impassioned speeches on a megaphone, connecting the fight against Cop City to broader issues like US imperialism in Palestine and systemic racism.
\n\nAfter an hour of speeches, the crowd marched toward Cox Hall. A few protesters forced open the doors and hundreds poured inside, chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Stop Cop City.” The atmosphere was upbeat but cautious—there was no immediate threat of arrest, but most participants quickly retreated to the Quad after the brief transgression.
\n\nRepresentatives from the “Open Expression” committee—the Orwellian name of the group that the university established to monitor protests under the guise of “protecting rights”—warned the crowd that if protesters set up camp or took over a building, the police would be called. They claimed that, because someone had painted “Escalate 4 Gaza” on a bathroom mirror, the entire event was at risk of forced dispersal. These mediators exerted significant influence over the movement; on April 26, they effectively neutralized momentum, discouraging further action.
\n\nAs the hours passed, hundreds lingered in the Quad, blasting music and socializing, before dispersing by the 11 pm curfew.
\n\nAmid nationwide protests, on April 27, the Atlanta Police Department hosted a recruitment event in New York City. In August 2023, forest defenders had disrupted a similar event, blocking the doors and throwing buckets of shrimp into the convention center atrium. Protesters sought to disrupt this event as well. The evening before, someone poured fast-drying cement into the Marriott Hotel’s toilets, repeatedly flushing them to mix it with the water. This presumably caused extensive damage to the plumbing. Activists also covered the courtyard with posters of Tortuguita and graffiti denouncing Cop City. The next day, anonymous activists released 300 crickets into the building and pulled the fire alarm. The event was ruined once again.
\n\nMeanwhile, in Atlanta, Emory President Greg Fenves sent an email warning students and faculty about dangerous “outsiders” supposedly spreading violence and vandalism at protests. His rhetoric aimed to divide campus affiliates from the broader Atlanta community to better control dissent. When someone spray-painted the word “genocide” on a campus building, Fenves condemned it as “hateful.”
\n\nWhile the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published opinion pieces claiming that Palestine solidarity protests were at risk of being “co-opted” by activists seeking to stop Cop City, activists from Arcata, Los Angeles, New York City, Tucson, Richmond, and New Orleans drew explicit connections between the two struggles, emphasizing the link between US military operations and domestic policing.
\n\nDespite the attempts to undermine the protests, including the outrageous ruling from the internal conduct board that found protesters had “violated” the rights of Open Expressions the previous fall, public sentiment remained firmly opposed to the repression. Nearly all of the 28 arrestees from April 25 were Emory students, faculty, or alumni, undermining allegations about outside agitators.
\n\nOn April 28, hundreds gathered again in the Quad. Faculty and students announced their intention to hold a “No Confidence” vote against President Fenves for summoning the Atlanta Police Department to arrest and abuse protesters. The vote resulted in a 75% supermajority against Fenves and the administration.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/7.jpg\")
A Defend the Forest / Stop Cop City banner at the Gaza solidarity encampment at Emory. These are the alleged “outside agitators” described by President Greg Fenves.
\nProtests across the country escalated, with dramatic confrontations between protesters and police. Scenes of police beating and gassing students, alongside moments of protesters linking arms and overpowering police encirclement tactics, inspired many. On May Day, around 300 people gathered once again at Emory, carrying reinforced banners.
\n\nFor the third time that week, protesters flooded into a building, this time filling the atrium of the Undergraduate Admission Bookstore. To hold the building, participants would have had to broadcast their intentions to stay; some people would have needed to barricade doors with tables, chairs, and other obstacles. However, the crowd lacked unity and tactical direction. Representatives from Open Expressions again informed protesters that they would call the police if the action continued. With no clear plan to withstand a police response, the crowd dispersed, leaving the building unoccupied.
\n\nThe Gaza Solidarity protests at Emory University had ended for the time being.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/6.jpg\")
A demonstration at Emory Undergraduate Admissions, spring 2024.
\nSince April 2021, activists have focused on the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program at Georgia State University. The program facilitates exchanges between metro Atlanta officers and Israeli police, sharing tactics for controlling marginalized communities. Some argue that GILEE’s training of US police in Israeli military tactics may have inspired the concept of Cop City.
\n\nOn May 4, around one hundred people gathered at Hurt Park near Georgia State University and marched to the GILEE office at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Upon arrival, protesters faced off with police at the front doors. Using reinforced banners as shields, they charged the police lines, hoping to enter the building. Police responded with batons and mace, but the protesters held their ground. After several minutes, recognizing that they couldn’t enter, and anticipating police reinforcements, they left together without arrests, showing the power of direct confrontation in the Gaza solidarity movement.
\n\nThe next day, sixty protesters returned to Hurt Park. Surrounded by riot police, they held a meeting to discuss next steps before leaving without marching. Law enforcement, hoping for a confrontation, was left frustrated.
\n\nOn May 6, Emory University moved its commencement ceremony off campus to Gwinnett County in hopes of avoiding disruption from Cop City/Gaza solidarity protests.
\n\nYet as the semester ended, campus-based protests subsided nationwide. In Atlanta, eight months later, protests had not returned.
\n\nProtesters and police clash outside of GILEE headquarters in downtown Atlanta.
\nWhen movements lose the ability to innovate and set their own timelines, participants often convince themselves the pause is not politically risky. “Once the semester starts…,” they tell themselves. “After May Day…” or perhaps “After the election…” This mindset can signal a movement’s collapse. Patience and strategy are vital, but waiting on things to develop “organically” or on others’ timelines is generally a sign of stagnation. Bold action, audacity, and collective organization are essential to the pursuit of change.
\n\nAs attention shifted from the forest to the city, the opportunities to take action expanded, in theory, even as the ability to take advantage of them contracted. The will to act had spread, but the vulnerabilities of the Cop City project were shrinking. Construction continued day and night, funded by contractors with deep personal and professional stakes in the Police Foundation. It began to appear that only a serious revolt could halt the project—if even that could. Across the country, mayors and local governments announced their own Cop City projects—in New York, Oakland, Nashville, Charlotte, and beyond.
\n\nIn early June, autonomous groups within the Cop City and Gaza solidarity movements called for a joint action to disrupt the first Biden-Trump debate, which was scheduled to take place in Atlanta. The call encouraged people of all tendencies to act. If unrest could unfold outside electoral events, as it had in Costa Mesa, Albuquerque, and elsewhere in 2016, the fight against Cop City might expand its purchase upon the public imagination. Failing to do would mean consigning millions to passivity and spectatorship as the US power structure sought to monopolize their attention, narrowing the spectrum of political possibility to two elderly candidates who both sought to increase police funding and continue sending billions to Israel to fund the genocide in Gaza.
\n\nBut catalyzing confrontations at a national security event was a tall order.
\n\nThe weeks leading up to the Presidential debate were eventful. Police harassment in Lakewood reached new heights. On May 29, The Guardian reported officers shining lights into residents’ homes, running sirens at random. In one instance, someone placed a lit traffic flare in a bush outside an activists’ home, sparking a fire.
\n\nAround this time, cameras appeared on the streetlights outside the houses that APEX and the ATF had raided. The camera outside the former was concealed in a metal box with black duct tape, peering through a tinted window at the home’s entrance. The box containing the other camera wasn’t covered in black duct tape, but simply labeled “High Voltage.” It resembled the devices placed outside the homes of several Memphis Black Lives Matter activists in 2018.
\n\nAt the end of May, several water mains burst in Atlanta, cutting water access to large parts of the city, especially Black neighborhoods south of I-20 and west of the I-75/85 connector. The morning that the system failed, Mayor Dickens flew to Nashville for a fundraiser with wealthy elites and lobbyists. For nearly a week, tens of thousands of residents had only brown or murky water, and some in the southeastern parts of the city had no water whatsoever. On social media, many linked the water crisis to funding for Cop City.
\n\nAs the geopolitical influence of the United States wanes and climate disasters worsen, such breakdowns will likely become more common. Unless we reclaim our resources from warmongers and police, social chaos will merge with catastrophe. It’s easy to anticipate the consequences, as desperate people are already experiencing the equivalent in many parts of the world.
\n\nNew fronts of repression were opening further afield. In Charleston, South Carolina, federal agents surrounded a sedan on the interstate and forced it to pull over. The driver, a 20-year-old anarchist, was served with a subpoena for a federal grand jury investigation into the December 31, 2023, arrest of a person accused of painting anti-Cop City slogans on multiple Thomas Concrete trucks and setting them on fire.
\n\nOn June 25, the legal team representing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in the RICO case targeting the movement filed a motion in court. It revealed that local and federal law enforcement had mishandled confidential client-attorney communications, primarily emails. These were supposed to be processed by a third-party “filter team” to protect the rights of the accused, a process the defense had warned the prosecution about three times. As the trial approaches—dates still pending—more such violations are expected, as the charges against the movement are largely political rather than legal.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/14.jpg\")
A camera on a light pole outside of a home raided by Georgia police. The metal box is covered in duct tape to obscure its similarity to a similar device installed on the same day at another house a few blocks away. The camera inside the plastic window is difficult to see with the naked eye, but can be seen clearly in this photograph.
\nOn June 27, several activists locked themselves to the entrance of Hudson Technologies in Smyrna, an Atlanta suburb within the I-285 perimeter highway. Hudson Technologies works with the Israeli Defense Forces; the activists were drawing attention to its role in the violence in Gaza. They also emphasized the right of Atlanta residents to participate in the popular referendum against Cop City. This was the third time that anti-war protesters had targeted Hudson. Earlier, on February 14, activists had glued the locks and spray-painted the building. On June 3, all the windows were broken in retaliation for the US-backed Israeli invasion of Rafah, a Gaza Strip area designated a “safe zone” for refugees.
\n\nLater that afternoon, protesters gathered in west Midtown, between Spring Street, the 17th Street bridge, Northside Drive, and south toward Home Park and Georgia Tech University. Advocates for affirmative action and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs stood on the 17th Street bridge. Nearly a hundred protesters, most of them Black, were surrounded by police separating them from a pro-Trump rally just fifty feet away. At the Israeli consulate on Spring Street, around a hundred socialists and anti-war activists gathered at 5 pm, chanting slogans and listening to speeches. Another demonstration was assembling in a small park in Home Park.
\n\nThis group stood apart from the others. On Hemphill, 10th Street, and surrounding streets, helmeted police squads stood watch with bicycles in hand, their heads swiveling. Undercover vehicles crept down side streets, likely carrying federal agents. Atlanta Police vehicles and motorcycles blocked roads and shone their lights on sidewalks and intersections. Meanwhile, ninety people in black hoodies, face masks, keffiyehs, and helmets assembled near 10th and State in a green space. The sound system nearly drowned out the noise of helicopters overhead. As the sun began to set, many waited for others to arrive to begin the march. In the end, no one else came.
\n\nA few speakers delivered fiery speeches, grounding the crowd in the gravity of the moment and the need for militant action. Forty cops stood watch on the adjacent street, many just out of sight.
\n\nWhat could be done? With over a hundred people facing charges—61 of them under RICO—it’s easy to see why the crowd was small. Without the prospect of confronting a Cop City contractor, it was hard to grasp the stakes of the event, especially for those still focused on direct action rather than mass disorder. One could blame other groups for scheduling “competing” events at the same time, but would two hundred people have done what the boldest one hundred could not? Would one hundred people taking confrontational action elsewhere provide a real boost to resistance against the electoral farce or against Cop City? Probably not—unless they had breached the fortified construction site. The movement, like society at large, was being squeezed by immense forces it had yet to take the measure of.
\n\nAfter some deliberation, many of the brave individuals present determined that the demonstration they had hoped for was not feasible. They made the decision to march out of the park together and disperse. Following a brief standoff with police, the crowd managed to leave the controlled zone and exit the area without any arrests.
\n\nPerhaps unknowingly, the participants had arrived at the end of a movement trajectory.
\n\nAt that very moment, as the debate reached living rooms around the country, everyone could see that by permitting the bureaucracy behind Joe Biden to maintain its ossified grip on power and siding with the forces of repression at every step, the Democrats had ceded the 2024 election to Trump and the future of America to a new breed of autocracy:
\n\n\n\n\nSuddenly, in the midst of Biden’s debate with Trump on June 27, it became inescapably obvious that their pragmatism was about to lose them the 2024 election, their only alibi for all the atrocities they had endorsed up to that point.
\n
A new cycle was opening, even darker than the Biden era. The fight against Cop City had represented the best hope to continue the social movements of the first Trump era and the best chance to address the challenges they had confronted. The struggle reached an impasse at the same moment that the contours of the second Trump era came into focus:
\n\n\n\n\n“Every time we lose a battle, we are forced to fight it once more, but on worse terms.”
\n
As of March 2025, it appears that the movement to defend Weelaunee Forest and stop Cop City has been effectively neutralized. The pace of actions has stalled, and the kind of qualitative interventions that might spark new forms of resistance or mobilize additional communities have come to a halt. The petition for a referendum against the land lease remains mired in legal battles. Much of the forest has already been destroyed. Key support structures, including the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, are entangled in high-stakes litigation. Long-term participants have faced harassment, intimidation, and collective punishment. Direct action to isolate Brasfield & Gorrie subcontractors from the Atlanta Police Foundation no longer appears feasible.
\n\nUnless something unexpected were to happen to the heavily fortified facility itself, which is now nearing completion, the only remaining hope for the movement would be a mass uprising capable of shifting the balance of power from the police to the population at large. But there is currently no sign of such an uprising on the horizon.
\n\nIn analyzing the repression of the movement, we must be careful not to attribute more insight, strategy, or strength to our adversaries than they actually possess. At the same time, we owe it to ourselves and to those who will come after us to honestly assess the limits and challenges the movement faced so that future movements can anticipate similar obstacles and overcome them.
\n\nThis process can feel like studying a volcanic eruption: those with the clearest view risk perishing in the flames.
\n\nFrom its inception in April 2021 until the murder of Tortuguita in January 2023, the movement remained remarkably small. While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the movement’s size, we can say that during this early period, all public marches, rallies, and demonstrations drew fewer than 175 participants. Concerts, raves, and other social events occasionally drew up to five hundred people to the forest, including a generator party along the banks of Intrenchment Creek during the first week of action in late summer 2021. At any given time, only a few dozen people maintained the encampments in the forest.
\n\nWhy is this? The United States had just emerged from the most powerful social movement in living memory, involving millions of people protesting against police violence.
\n\nNon-participants are notoriously difficult to understand. Analyzing the Stop Cop City movement, it is hard to attribute its shortcomings to a lack of outreach, media coverage, or information sharing. For years, anarchists, abolitionists, and radicals implemented a comprehensive media strategy—conducting interviews, drafting press releases, and writing articles for a range of outlets from anonymous anarchist blogs to international media platforms. Organizers also directly contacted hundreds of thousands of people through face-to-face canvassing.
\n\nThe anarchists at the core of the movement were aware of the risks involved in conducting a militant but isolated campaign. Significant strategizing went into addressing this challenge from the earliest weeks. Within the direct action wing of the movement, countless hours were devoted to developing frameworks that were both confrontational and accessible to those new to radical politics. The theory of escalation that the organizers shared held that only a mass uprising could pose a serious challenge to the police; the direct action campaign was intended to ignite this.
\n\nWhy, in the wake of the 2020 revolt, did so many fail to rally to the struggle against a new police facility? How could so few engage in the fight to save a vital urban greenspace during an era of cataclysmic environmental collapse? This is difficult to grasp. But perhaps those aren’t the right questions. Maybe it’s not just a matter of awareness or political consistency.
\n\nAs of 2023, Atlanta’s population stands at just 520,000. Adding in the populations of its largest suburbs—DeKalb, Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett—the total rises to about 3.3 million, spread across 1300 square miles. That’s roughly 2500 people per square mile. The broader “Metropolitan Atlanta Area,” with its six million residents across 39 counties, spans a vast, mostly semi-rural expanse in a deeply conservative state. Most of these people live an hour or more from the city’s core. During rush hour (roughly 3 to 8 pm), some areas are nearly three hours away from the city limits. Consequently, we can’t realistically count all these millions as potential participants in a movement centered in Atlanta.
\n\nTo grasp the functional population distribution of Atlanta’s “inner metro” area, it’s useful to compare it to cities like Tampa (2300 people per square mile), Indianapolis (2400), and Charlotte (3000). These cities are more similar in terms of urban density. When considering outreach programs, local participation in protest movements, and attendance at rallies, marches, or encampments, the most important factor is the will and enthusiasm of the public. That will is shaped by several factors including the difficulty of getting around, the city’s notorious traffic, its underdeveloped public transit, and the sprawling neighborhoods that keep people isolated within their specific quadrant of the city or the surrounding suburbs.
\n\nConsider the 2020 George Floyd protests. At their peak in late May and early June, only two or three protests drew more than five thousand people. Most barely exceeded one thousand. When residents clashed with police and burned down the Wendy’s on University Avenue after Rayshard Brooks was murdered that summer, the crowd likely did not exceed six or seven hundred. This is important when we consider the prospects for a mass protest movement in Atlanta and whether it could be driven by local residents. The same is true for many other cities across the United States, as most are not significantly denser than Atlanta.
\n\nThese conditions are neither neutral nor accidental. Atlanta was once a far denser city. In the early 20th century, streetcars carried workers and visitors through neighborhoods filled with brick townhomes, corner stores, and thriving industry. The first challenges to this dense, “walkable” urban core emerged in the 1920s and ’30s, when General Motors began dismantling streetcar lines and promoting cheap automobiles. However, after the summer of 1967, a year marked by open confrontations between Black youth and police across the US, the federal government took a special interest in this process. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, convened by the FBI, examined the causes and protagonists behind over three hundred rebellions against police across the country, especially in Newark and Detroit. At the end of their report, they recommended a drastic restructuring of cities, emphasizing “spatial deconcentration”—the deliberate dispersal of urban populations, particularly the Black working class.
\n\nIn the 1970s and ’80s, this concept became a government mandate. The federal government poured billions of dollars into infrastructure, promoting the construction of interstate highways that cut through the heart of Black communities in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration’s deregulatory policies gave a massive boost to the automobile and construction industries, enabling them to widen roads and expand freeways, while also outsourcing production overseas to regions with lower wages. These highways were not built in vacant lots—they ran straight through low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods, shattering communities and displacing families.
\n\nBlack communities were gutted. Industry and jobs moved to the suburbs (or overseas), and white flight followed, leaving Black workers behind. As factories relocated and middle-class white families moved to the outskirts, the policy of “last hired, first fired” ensured that Black workers, already facing systemic discrimination, were the first to lose their jobs.
\n\nThis was not simply poor urban planning. It was a deliberate reorganization of cities intended to decimate the urban core and reshape the economic landscape. The scars of that era continue to mark cities across America today.
\n\nThe decision to build a movement that could draw in activists from outside Atlanta—indeed, from outside Georgia—was surely made with these considerations in mind, and for good reason. Still, the participation of out-of-towners was neither consistent nor decisive enough to halt the project. Local participants lacked the tactical leverage they needed; without the resources of national support, they were at a disadvantage. The authorities could concentrate local, state, and federal forces against the movement; only outside support could even the odds.
\n\nThe government understood this. That’s why Allison Clark of the Community Stakeholders Advisory Committee, Michael Julian Bond of the Atlanta City Council, Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, Mayor Andre Dickens, and countless other proponents of Cop City sought to normalize a simple, devastating, repressive formula, encapsulated in one of their oft-repeated mantras:
\n\n“Traveling out of state to protest is a form of domestic terrorism.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/16.jpg\")
I-85, I-75, and I-20 all pass through the heart of downtown Atlanta, segregating the city into four quadrants.
\nAs repression intensified, the movement lost its flexibility and capacity for innovation. After the City Council approved the project in fall 2021, one faction of the movement adopted a simple framework: defend the forest, pressure contractors to withdraw, and evade or repel police operations. But as police violence escalated and prosecutors leveled increasingly outrageous charges, the once vibrant and audacious movement faltered. It struggled to match the force of the state, especially after the killing of Tortuguita.
\n\nThis was also evident in the difficulty of planning the next steps. There was no unifying strategy capable of addressing both the intensifying attacks of the state and the passive spectatorship of the wider public. The principle of “decentralization” did not suffice to resolve this problem.
\n\nThousands considered themselves to be on the movement’s “front lines.” Between the first and fifth weeks of action, this perception was an asset, regardless of whether it was accurate. During those early months, generating widespread sympathy and engagement was a key priority. Organizing cultural events, mushroom walks, bike rides, and similar activities in the forest or across town played an important role in maintaining visibility and involvement.
\n\nAfter the police lost control of the forest following the July 2022 burning of Boyette Brothers equipment and the music festival during the Fourth Week of Action, the balance of forces shifted definitively in favor of the movement. For a brief period, it seemed theoretically possible that the movement could pursue more conventional tactics, such as mobilizing hundreds for a direct assault on the site—which at that time was still little more than a police staging area—or launching a mass encampment at the Prison Farm. However, what was theoretically viable was not always politically realistic. Who would have carried out such a raid at that time? How would they have been organized? Here, we see how tactical questions are always political questions.
\n\nSome well-intentioned commentators—many of them participants in the movement—have suggested that the movement contracted after Tortuguita was killed on January 18, 2023. On closer examination, this is simply not true. The movement grew significantly after Tortuguita’s death. The number of participants increased; the frequency, scale, and intensity of actions increased. These grew even more after the March 5, 2023 raid on the Cop City construction site. It is true that they did not increase enough to counterbalance the extent to which the state was concentrating force against the movement. It is also true that the tactics that had made the movement feel powerful for a small dedicated core became impossible after Tortuguita was killed. But the movement should not be reducible to the tactics of any specific group or tendency. Therefore, it cannot be argued categorically that the potential of or participation in the movement receded after the killing. The movement arguably reached its peak of participation in the summer of 2023, during the City Hall mobilizations. The period of lowest participation was actually in fall of 2022.
\n\nWith this context in mind, we can see that the domestic terrorism arrests and the killing of Tortuguita were, in part, a consequence of low participation, not a cause of it. Tragically, fall 2022 was the moment when the movement had gained the greatest leverage against Cop City, as it had created a stalemate between forest defenders and police. To break that stalemate, city officials and law enforcement began spreading lies about protesters, labeling them “terrorists” and falsely claiming they had fired guns at contractors. In this way, they gradually built the political will to employ deadly force against the movement, as well as persuading state and federal authorities to get involved.
\n\nSome participants recognized this danger at the time. To maximize the leverage that the movement had gained against Cop City, many people concluded that they needed to expand the struggle as rapidly as possible. Their goal was to involve a large number of people in viable tactics that had the potential to halt the project. For some, this meant organizing community meals and concerts in the forest. Others focused on building infrastructure, such as cabins and warming stations, to encourage mass participation. These “place-makers,” if you will, organized around the idea of making the forest a place where people would want to spend time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/15.jpg\")
One of the structures built by the movement in Weelaunee People’s Park, also known as Intrenchment Creek Park.
\nThe grassroots left had largely abandoned the movement, leaving it to anarchists to organize against Cop City. Punks, ravers, and artists contributed what they could, but their involvement was mostly peripheral. Some activists worked tirelessly to draw these communities deeper into the struggle, seeing them as potential key players who could fill in where the traditional left had fallen short.
\n\nOrganizers of the weeks of action sought to mitigate the participation problem by drawing in large numbers of people for short periods of time.
\n\nBy fall 2022, the actions that were needed were far beyond what the available forces could mobilize. While city officials and law enforcement sought to prepare the ground for lethal violence, the only ways for the movement to break the stalemate in its own favor would have been to mobilize massive numbers of people or deal a series of blows so devastating that they eroded the political will of those behind the project.
\n\nYet only a handful of people were still circulating through the forest, mostly in the context of parties, plays, or concerts. Even fewer were focused on leveraging force against Cop City outside of the forest through demonstrations, blockades, or occupations. Those committed to direct action were not able to compensate for the absence of large numbers of people, as their tactics remained largely confined to hit-and-run acts of destruction, presumably necessitated by their own small numbers.
\n\nThose who lived in the forest faced difficult challenges. At times, some individuals behaved in ways that made it more difficult to solve problems, reconcile differences, and pursue shared goals. This also contributed to the isolation of the encampments.
\n\nThe efforts of those involved in direct action outside the forest, those working on “place-making” efforts within the woods, and those curating cultural experiences that connected the forest with surrounding communities all plateaued.
\n\nInstead, as the pressure increased, the movement’s capacity for creative, sustained resistance dwindled. Early on, abolitionists argued that some environmentalists were less concerned with the police than with protecting “nature.” This tension was compounded by the fact that some of those temporarily living in the forest framed their interests as opposed to others, claiming parts of the forest as their “homes” and suggesting that weeks of actions, fundraisers, or protests were violating their personal space. In turn, some anarchists criticized others for lacking a sufficiently militant vision, accusing them of pushing for mere policy changes. Meanwhile, many working groups within the movement failed to prioritize the forest’s physical integrity, not realizing that once the trees were gone, it would be considerably more difficult to resist the construction of Cop City.
\n\nIn the end, not enough participants pushed beyond their comfort zones. When their preferred tactics became too difficult, many stopped participating entirely, regardless of their stated objectives.
\n\nHow could this story have turned out differently?1
\n\nLet’s return to summer 2022, when the movement showed that it was too powerful for the local authorities to control. What if, at that moment, people around the country had organized a massive outreach campaign calling people to converge on Atlanta for a range of broadly confrontational and participatory actions?
\n\nAll of this did in fact occur a full year later, in fall 2023, when several speaking tours crisscrossed the United States promoting the Block Cop City mobilization2 and hundreds of people gathered in Atlanta for a weekend of action. Perhaps if something similar had taken place in 2022—when the movement was up and coming rather than embattled, when the state had not yet used spurious charges of terrorism and racketeering to intimidate potential participants, when supporters were not yet busy trying to respond to the genocide in Gaza—it might have drawn much larger numbers, which might in turn have made it more difficult for the government to regain the initiative.
\n\nFor that to have taken place at the end of summer 2022, however, a critical mass of people outside of Atlanta would have had to realize how pivotal the movement was and immediately invest energy in organizing to support it. They would have needed to recognize—long before the police murdered anyone or charged anyone with terrorism—that the movement’s apparent success introduced new perils. Had they succeeded in bringing new forces to bear against Cop City, this would likely have contributed to tensions with established local organizers in Atlanta and with those who were already occupying the forest. They would have needed to accept those tensions as necessary growing pains.
\n\nThe outcome of the struggle over Cop City has had profound implications for movements around the United States and, consequently, for people all around the world. If nothing else, we can learn the importance of recognizing the stakes of a fight while there is still time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/18.jpg\")
\nEvery movement that undergoes severe repression experiences internal conflict, and the movement to stop Cop City was no exception. As has been said before, the function of repression is not simply to strike the immediate targets, but to send shockwaves through a movement in a way that opens up fault lines.
\n\nThe movement endured three years of intense struggle, in part, by adhering to one fundamental principle: members refrained from publicly denouncing each other. Disagreements or critiques were handled internally whenever possible. Groups that could not reconcile their differences simply avoided each other. Saboteurs, tree-sitters, rioters, and others took action against Cop City, secure in the knowledge that they would not be labeled “crazy” on prime-time news—at least, not by other activists. Canvassers, community organizers, fundraisers, and event coordinators could rest assured that, for the most part, social media would not be flooded with rage-fueled rants denouncing their strategies as hopeless or naïve.
\n\nAnonymous internet users violated this principle repeatedly. Each time, it threw the radical segments of the movement into temporary disarray. Coinciding with moments of intense repression, spiteful statements and semi-coherent allegations flooded the internet, contributing to an atmosphere of fear and tension. This underscores the need for well-delivered, constructive criticism—whether in public venues or private face-to-face exchanges.
\n\nFrom the earliest days of the movement, some grassroots organizers sought to smear it. Through whisper campaigns, gossip, and private conversations, they tried to prevent it from gaining momentum. They labeled it “all white,” or claimed that organizers hadn’t “consulted the community” before launching actions, echoing the “outside agitators” narrative pushed by the police chief and Mayor Dickens. On a podcast, one person shamelessly declared the movement “more disappointing than Cop City itself”—a pro-repression stance thinly disguised as progressive politics.
\n\nUntil the struggle became too large to ignore, some local activists derided it. On Signal groups, they sowed doubt, division, and paranoia—particularly targeting out-of-towners and newcomers—while technically adhering to the movement’s commitment to discretion. As large non-profit organizations began to support the movement, some activists discouraged them from allocating resources to the participants who were taking significant risks.
\n\nIronically, many of those who attempted to undermine the movement also sought to benefit from its momentum. NGO staffers and careerists continue to cash in, earning accolades and grants on behalf of a movement for which they risked very little. Meanwhile, many of those facing felony charges and living under surveillance continue to struggle below the federal poverty line.
\n\nCritique is essential. Aspiring revolutionaries should actively seek critical input, as the cost of error can be extremely high. Criticism helps refine strategies and fosters humility in the face of immense obstacles and uncertainty. Anyone serious about dismantling the carceral state, overthrowing capitalism, and transforming the world must first admit that they don’t know everything and that it will be necessary to refine their theories and strategies on an ongoing basis.
\n\nUnfortunately, petty and self-serving forms of criticism remain all too common. Real critique uplifts, educates, and transforms the participants. When people engage in denunciatory attacks and gossip, this can obscure the true cost of political errors, burying self-reflection under an avalanche of invective and rumor. This fosters defensiveness, stubbornness, ego trips, and factionalism, ultimately leading to the propagation of dogmas that remain untested. This isn’t just a problem for collectives, crews, and organizing groups—it can stunt entire movements. It’s a challenge that all humanity has a stake in overcoming.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/19.jpg\")
\nThose who have fought to oppose the construction of Cop City in Weelaunee Forest were correct to identify the project as marking the dawn of a new era of police militarization in the United States. Local authorities plan to build at least eighty additional police training facilities across the United States; every state except for Wyoming is planning at least one.
\n\nDespite courageous efforts, they did not manage to save the forest from destruction or prevent the completion of the project. Only two options remain for closing down Cop City: pressuring policymakers to defund it after it opens or directly destroying the site. Only a mass revolt or carefully planned acts of sabotage unlike any that have occurred thus far could achieve either of those outcomes. During the movement, thousands repeatedly chanted, “If you build it, we will burn it.” It remains to be seen whether they were serious or bluffing.
\n\nThe police are a central pillar of the state. Appearances aside, the government is not primarily composed of bureaucracies, libraries, clinics, or universities. At its core, it is made up of armies, borders, prisons, and police.3 Societies embroiled in destabilizing conflicts often see social services, welfare, and even parliamentary systems collapse, but the repressive functions of the state never collapse on their own—they can only be dismantled by powerful revolutionary movements.
\n\nThe power of the police will not simply fade away. Those who rule depend upon it; it is essential to preserving the inequalities that are the foundation of their authority. All evidence indicates that the power of the police will continue to expand until the social order that requires it is destroyed. If that occurs, it will not simply be the consequence of a change in public opinion; it will involve real people taking real actions against real infrastructure. Because the concentration of armed force is inevitable in all unequal societies, doing away with the police will require abolishing artificial scarcity and war between classes, castes, and nations.
\n\n\n\n\nWe did not fight to stop Cop City because we believed that all it would take to reform capitalism and the state would be a few concerts and a little vandalism. We fought because we hoped that this particular fight could clarify the stakes of the struggle that is taking place at this critical juncture in history, drawing more people into action and deepening our joint effort to change the world.
\n\nAnd that is something we still believe in.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/17.jpg\")
\nDecember 27: A Chase Bank in NYC is vandalized with “Stop Cop City” and “Free Gaza” painted on its veneer and its doors locked. A demonstration takes place outside the home of Jonna Hamilton, the senior legal counsel of Nationwide Insurance, which provides coverage for the Atlanta Police Foundation.
\nDecember 31: Charleston Police and FBI arrest a 21-year-old in Charleston, South Carolina. Police allege the accused is responsible for burning two trucks belonging to Thomas Concrete, and for painting “You build it, we burn it” on the trucks, as well as slogans about Weelaunee Forest.
\nJanuary 1: A car is burned outside of Portland City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez’s house. The action is dedicated to fallen revolutionaries, including Tortuguita, as well as two unhoused people in Portland who died as a consequence of police enforcement tactics advocated by Gonzalez.
\nJanuary 2: A proposal appears online inviting people to conduct solidarity actions and events on January 18, the day of Tortuguita was killed. Manuel’s Tavern is vandalized in advance of an appearance by Mayor Dickens; its doors are glued shut, its walls painted. The scheduled visit is canceled.
\nJanuary 16: A feller buncher belonging to Shadowbox Studios is burned in the forest.
\nJanuary 17: The news comes out that the cost of the Cop City project has increased from $90 million to $109 million. The authorities blame security costs, damage from protests, and increased insurance costs.
\nJanuary 18: On the “Day of the Forest Defender,” around the country, hundreds of people participate in events commemorating the death of Tortuguita. Nearly fifty events take place for the occasion, including vigils, teach-ins, rallies, film screenings, and fundraisers. In addition, 18 windows are broken at the San Francisco Credit Union; in Hanover, Germany, a car belonging to Autobahn GmbH is burned; windows are broken at two different Nationwide subsidiaries in Atlanta; MTU Solutions is vandalized in Novi, Michigan; UPS tires are slashed in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
\nJanuary 19: Someone liberates ten chickens in the Northern UK in memory of Tortuguita.
\nJanuary 25: Four machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned on Boulevard Drive near the Federal Penitentiary in southeast Atlanta. No communiqué appears online, but local police stage a press conference nonetheless.
\nJanuary 27: A bank in Chicago is redecorated with posters in memory of Tortuguita.
\nJanuary 29: Protesters lock down at a Brasfield & Gorrie job site in Midtown.
\nJanuary 30: A cybersecurity incident cripples the municipal government in Atlanta.
\nFebruary 1: Someone sabotages 11 ATMS belonging to Truist Bank with glue and glues the doors shut.
\nFebruary 8: Atlanta Police, the ATF, and the FBI raid three homes in southeast Atlanta in a joint operation, each targeting one house. They arrest one person, charging him with first-degree arson, and detain another for several hours. Police attempt to violently humiliate the residents of the house they raid, forcing one resident outside without her clothes on to be photographed by masked thugs; at another house, officers drag a resident down the stairs by his hair.
\nFebruary 10: In Lakewood, Atlanta, just blocks from two of the houses raided on the 8th, a police car catches fire in front of the home of an APD officer. The accompanying statement reads, in part: “We wish to dispel any notion that people will take this latest wave of repression lying down, or that arresting alleged arsonists will deter future arsons.” In St Paul, Minnesota, two trucks and trailers loaded with timber are burned at a Home Depot in solidarity with Jack and those affected by the raids. “It is time to destroy those who destroy the earth,” the statement reads.
\nFebruary 11: Police raid another home in Lakewood, in broad daylight, following the burning of the police cruiser the day before. Nobody is arrested or detained, and nobody is home. FBI, GBI, ATF, the bomb squad, helicopters, armored vehicles, and undercover police vehicles establish a presence in the area for days. In San Francisco, Waymo self-driving cars are vandalized “with hammers and knives” in solidarity with those in Atlanta facing police harassment.
\nFebruary 12: The owner of the home raided on February 11 holds a press conference denouncing the police action at his home.\nElsewhere, the Davinci Development website is vandalized by hackers.
\nFebruary 23: The Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City in Tucson, Arizona brings together a few hundred activists from the Southwest. Three Nationwide subisidiaries lose their windows in Tucson, Arizona.
\nFebruary 24: A Nationwide subsidiary in Santa Cruz has its locks filled with glue and its walls covered in spray paint.
\nFebruary 25: During the Nationwide Summit, 80 people gather in a black bloc in Tucson. They march several blocks and smash all of the windows of Wells Fargo and PNC Bank in Presidio Plaza. Some decorate the walls with Tortuguita’s name.
\nFebruary 26: Dozens protest at the Nationwide Headquarters in Scottsdale, AZ. Hundreds of police are deployed. At the same time, six activists lock themselves down to concrete barrels in entrance to a gated community in Fountain Hills, Arizona, where a regional executive of Nationwide lives. In New York City, over 200 protesters march into the offices of Nationwide and AXA XL—insurers of the Atlanta Police Foundation and Brasfield & Gorrie, respectively. This is the largest protest connected to the movement to take place outside of Georgia.
\nFebruary 27: A video release shows multiple Nationwide locations vandalized in New York City.
\nFebruary 28: Ten New York Police Department vehicles are splashed with paint and have their tires slashed.
\nMarch 5: About twenty Black women protest outside the home of Mayor Dickens in the early hours, demanding the city government drop the court appeal blocking the referendum to stop Cop City. In the United Kingdom, a dairy farm in Leistershire is extensively vandalized in solidarity with Jack and others facing repression in Atlanta.
\nMarch 7: One person locks down to construction equipment at a Brasfield & Gorrie site in Midtown as a crowd gathers below. After several hours, he is removed and charged with misdemeanor trespassing.
\nMarch 11: Protesters disrupt a Mayoral panel featuring Andre Dickens in Austin, Texas. The event is canceled and Dickens is chased off-site. In Oregon, a butcher shop in Portland is vandalized in solidarity with Jack.
\nMarch 14: Eight machines belonging to Brent Scarborough are burned in Henry County, GA.
\nMarch 27: Two activists climb up a 250-foot crane at a Brasfield & Gorrie job site in Midtown Atlanta to disrupt work. This time, the activists are charged with felonies. Elsewhere, an I-5 highway sign is redecorated.
\nMarch 28: Anarchists in the northern United Kingdom liberate 41 ducks from a farm in memory of Tortuguita and in solidarity with Jack. Also, at some point in March, someone tampered with the tables of the Atlanta Police Department, temporarily freeing the horses.
\nApril 16: Several pieces of machinery belonging to Brasfield & Gorrie are burned in Fayetteville, Georgia. No communiqué accompanies the action, but police publicly speculate that it is related to Cop City.
\nApril 22: People wheat-paste posters and paint slogans all over Emory University campus denouncing the institution for ties to Israel and the Atlanta Police Foundation. Six surveillance cameras are disabled by various methods.
\nApril 25: Students and others set up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza at Emory University in the context of a national mobilization against US support for the Israeli genocide in Palestine. Protesters connect Israel to Cop City. Emory Police and Georgia State Patrol attack the crowd, firing pepper balls at protesters, tasing medics, and slamming professors to the ground. As the day passes, crowds descend from classes onto the quad to confront police and block prisoner transport vehicles. Police shoot rubber bullets at students. In the early evening, faculty and students occupy Candler School of Theology atrium. As police arrive, protesters use reinforced banners to clash with police and to protect each other from rubber bullets and pepper balls.
\nApril 26: More than 500 people reconverge on the Emory quad after a day of clashes with police on campus. Protesters flood Cox Hall, temporarily occupying the building. During an emergency faculty meeting on campus, staff move to hold a “no-confidence” vote on President Fenves. Fenves sends an email to thousands of students, alleging that “outsiders” were converging on campus in buses. Despite his allegations, corporate news platforms report that over 90% of the previous day’s arrestees were students or faculty. In New York City, during an Atlanta Police recruitment event, someone pulls the fire alarm of the Marriott hotel and 300 crickets are released inside the building. Graffiti decorates the courtyard.
\nApril 27: To further disrupt the Atlanta Police recruitment event, cement is poured into the plumbing system of the hotel.
\nApril 28: Faculty and staff walk out on Emory campus, denouncing President Greg Fenves for calling the police on student protesters.
\nApril 29: Three OMNY machines and three MTA machines on the New York subway are smashed in memory of Tortuguita. At Cal Poly Humboldt, a Gaza solidarity protester builds a tree-sit beside occupied Siemens Hall in memory of Tortuguita.
\nApril 30: During the eviction of Hamilton Hall and the West Lawn at Columbia University, the crowd begins chanting “Stop Cop City.”
\nMay 1: Hundreds march on Emory Campus with reinforced banners, temporarily seizing control of the Oxford/Undergraduate Admissions building. Police drag George State University students wearing keffiyehs at the graduation ceremony off stage.
\nMay 3: Some 75% of Emory faculty vote “no confidence” in President Fenves. Protesters march to the headquarters of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program on Georgia State University campus, long the target of the stop Cop City movement and now of the Gaza solidarity protests as well. Protesters clash with police while trying to enter the building, using shields, reinforced banners, and umbrellas to protect each other. The crowd disperses with no arrests.
\nMay 4: About 60 protesters gather near the GILEE headquarters again; several dozen riot police stage nearby. The crowd decides not to march and assembles in deliberation instead.
\nMay 6: Morehouse students issue a public letter to the Board of Trustees, reiterating their call to sever ties with Cop City and the Atlanta Committee for Progress and to cut ties with Israel.
\nMay 7: The Atlanta Journal Constitution attempts to split Stop Cop City and Gaza solidarity protests by urging anti-war activists not to be “co-opted” by activists fighting police militarization in “southeast Atlanta,” just a few miles from Emory campus. Spelman students issue an open letter to the Board of Trustees urging them to cut ties with Israel and Cop City.
\nMay 10: Columbia University Hamilton Hall arrestees issue a statement directly connecting the genocide in Gaza to the GILEE program and the construction of Cop City and similar projects around the United States.
\nMay 11: Thirteen Emory arrestees issue a public statement demanding that Emory cut ties with Israel and Cop City and drop all charges against protesters on campus.
\nMay 20: The Atlanta Police Foundation pays twelve temp workers hired by “Our America” to attend a City Council session in order to read statements in support of Cop City.
\nMay 21: An NYPD bus is burned in Brooklyn in memory of Tortuguita and in retaliation for police brutality at a Palestine solidarity protest in Bay Ridge, NYC.
\nMay 29: The Guardian publishes an article exposing constant surveillance and harassment of southeast Atlanta residents. The harassment includes hundreds of visits by police at homes day and night; during these visits, officers sometimes park outside of the houses for a few minutes without approaching. Other times, they shine lights into windows and blare their sirens outside the homes of activists with suspected ties to the Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City movement. In one instance, a lit road flare is placed in the bushes directly outside a window.
\nMay 31: Multiple water mains explode across Atlanta, leaving a majority of residents without clean running water for a week. Many people connect the collapse of city infrastructure to the channeling of tremendous amounts of funding to police.
\nJune 3: Groups involved in the movement join Palestine solidarity activists in calling for disruptions at the first US Presidential debate on June 27.
\nJune 5: A 20-year-old anarchist named Cyprus is subpoenaed in Charleston, South Carolina and summoned to a Federal Grand Jury investigating alleged acts of arson against Cop City subcontractors.
\nJune 20: In NYC, people disrupt a budget session at City Hall. NYC Mayor Eric Adams wants to cut the public library budget in order to build a Cop City-inspired facility in Queens. Local New Yorkers begin organizing against the project.
\nJune 25: A lawyer representing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund files a motion to dismiss the case against them after it is learned that the Attorney General’s office failed to hire a “filter team” to redact client-attorney emails subpoenaed by the State. Those emails were read by law enforcement and included in evidence.
\nJune 27: Using reinforced pipes, activists lock down in the driveway of Hudson Technologies in Smyrna, Georgia. Hudson produces arms for the Israeli army. Activists denounce the war on Gaza and demand a right to vote via referendum on Cop City. That night, two demonstrations take place in the vicinity of the Presidential debate. Several hundred police officers swarm the area, both in uniforms and undercover. Around one hundred protesters gather for a black bloc but decide not to initiate a combative demonstration. They march a few blocks before dispersing without arrests.
\nJuly 4: Cyprus publicly declares their intention to resist the Federal Grand Jury targeting the Stop Cop City movement. They call for others to resist the hearings without compromise. Six Flock cameras are destroyed in Savannah, Georgia.
\nJuly 10: In Okemos, Michigan, protesters visit the home of Paul Kearney, Chief Claims Officer for Accident Fund Insurance.
\nJuly 31: A grand jury subpoena targeting Cyprus is withdrawn, likely as a consequence of their commitment to resist the hearing.
\nAugust 13: A machine belonging to the Brent Scarborough Company is burned on Memorial Drive. Unknown saboteurs use “improvised incendiary devices” to destroy the machines of the Cop City contractor.
\nAugust 22: A industrial railroad bridge burns near Milwaukie, Oregon. The saboteurs connect the shipping company to the Israeli war in Palestine and to Cop City.
\nJanuary 18, 2025: Day of the Forest Defender events coinciding with “Festivals of Resistance” against the incoming Trump-Vance-Musk administration take place in over twenty locations. Five hundred people gather in Richmond. In Olympia, a thousand people march. The mother of Tortuguita joins local musicians at an event in Atlanta. Somewhere in Northern California, anonymous saboteurs disable a dozen trucks belonging to Green Diamond Resource Company in memory of Tortuguita.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/14/20.jpg\")
\nRe-litigating the past can be tempting for those who have experienced traumatic failures and setbacks, as it allows us to take responsibility for the past by criticizing ourselves and others. It is important to approach such questions with humility and to resist the temptation to shift the goalposts in response to setbacks. From the outset, participants in the movement boldly maintained that they intended to win. Some of them criticized discourses that trivialized the concept of victory or made apologies for failure. “The real stopping Cop City is the friends we made along the way”—it might be easy to say something like this today, but it would not represent the spirit of the movement. ↩
\nSpeaking tours promoting the movement to defend the forest did take place in 2022, but on a smaller scale than the speaking tours in the lead-up to the Block Cop City mobilization. ↩
\nIn contexts where the power of the police is subcontracted out to third parties or paramilitaries, we could say that the state itself has already transformed into a corporate or factional enterprise. ↩
\nIn 2006, students around the United States engaged in spontaneous walkouts protesting the repression of undocumented people, culminating on May Day in the first great general strike to take place in the US in the 21st century. Today, as students are once again staging walkouts and people around the country are taking to the streets against the immigration policies of the second Trump administration, it is a good time to revisit this earlier high point of resistance.
\n\nThe following report originally appeared in issue three of Rolling Thunder, our Anarchist Journal of Dangerous Living.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/05/6.jpg\")
You can order these stickers here.
\nMay Day 2006 saw the first nationwide general strike in the United States in several decades. The immigrant rights movement had declared that fine spring day “A Day without Immigrants,” in response to right-wing rhetoric to the effect that “we don’t need immigrants.” They replied “Ok gringo, if you don’t need us, we’re not going to go to work or school, nor buy or sell anything on this day. Let’s see how well this country runs.”
\n\nThe strike was a stunning success, despite a number of spineless Latino “leaders” condemning the strike, saying that it would create a backlash and send the wrong message. As if the bill in Congress that would deport twelve million people and militarize the US-Mexico border wasn’t a backlash!
\n\nAcross the country, immigrants and their allies walked off the job, skipped school, shuttered the windows of their shops, and refused to spend any money. In Phoenix, thousands of workers took the day off and blockaded the entrances to various Walmart and Home Depot stores. Nearly all the chain restaurants in the city had to close or slash their hours due to the strike. Dozens of meatpacking plants, employing thousands of workers, were closed down nationwide due to that industry’s reliance on immigrant labor.
\n\nLos Angeles was possibly hardest hit, with a good portion of the city completely shut down. The port of LA, one of the country’s largest, was ninety percent inactive thanks to the overwhelming majority of truckers refusing to haul goods that day. A small but rowdy portion of the more than one million people who marched for immigrant rights in LA chose to round off the day in running battles with the police, throwing rocks and bottles, dragging debris into the streets, and vandalizing outdoor advertisements. California’s state legislature was forced to close when janitors, cafeteria workers, and maintenance people did not show up to work at the capitol building. Meanwhile, across the country, the New York state legislature shut down mid-session when Black and Latino legislators walked out in solidarity with the protest. Back in California, the agricultural counties were hit particularly hard, with major corporate farms such as Gallo Wines being forced to halt production for the day.
\n\nA riot broke out in Santa Ana, CA when police tried to disperse a crowd of fifteen hundred that had taken over a major boulevard. The crowd responded by raining bottles and rocks on the cops, who were forced to retreat until a riot squad was brought in to quell the revolt. In New York City, scuffles broke out with police when a crowd thousands strong attempted to take the Brooklyn Bridge.
\n\nNearly half a million people marched through the streets of Chicago, and another one hundred thousand marched in Denver, where it was reported that scuffles broke out between protestors and Minutemen counter-protestors. Several hundred cities and small towns across the country experienced demonstrations, many of them the largest those cities had ever seen.
\n\nIn a sign that the immigrant rights movement may be diversifying, the windows of a Department of Homeland Security office in Santa Cruz responsible for deporting immigrants were shattered overnight. According to a message posted on the internet, dozens of banks and “financial institutions” saw their locks glued and ATM machines sabotaged in western North Carolina, in an apparent move to support the general strike.
\n\nSouth of the border, throughout Mexico, hundreds of thousands of people observed a sister day of protest labeled “A Day without a Gringo,” in which Mexicans boycotted all US business interests. Mexico City saw a crowd of several thousand gather to listen to Zapatista leader Marcos speak and to show their solidarity with their brothers and sisters struggling north of the border. Afterwards, several hundred demonstrators took a tour of the business district, smashing the windows of US-owned banks and restaurants. In Monterey, a group of women gave out free tacos in front of a McDonald’s in an effort to support the boycott. Meanwhile, every major border crossing from El Paso to San Diego was shut down by groups of angry Mexican citizens on their side of the border, preventing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of goods from crossing the border that day.
\n\nAll in all, May Day 2006 was one of the largest days of protest the United States had ever seen. Counting Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, DC alone, there were nearly two million people in the streets, with an equal or greater number joining in smaller demonstrations elsewhere across the US. It was a day of protest based on the principles of direct action, the centerpiece of which was a general strike. In many places, demonstrators went further, blockading businesses that exploit immigrants and engaging the police in battles when push came to shove.
\n\nIt was fitting that it was immigrants who brought May Day back to its former splendor. It was here in the United States, in Chicago, that this international day of workers’ solidarity was born in the struggle for the eight-hour day. Radical immigrant workers, the majority of them anarchists, were at the front of the struggles that made May Day what it is, offering their tears, sweat, and blood in the fight for a better way of life.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/05/3.jpg\")
\nThis contemporary account by an outside sympathizer offers a snapshot of the momentum that led to the general strike of May Day 2006 and a glimpse of political discourse about immigrants’ struggles at that time.
\n\nEarly in 2006, I was riding my bike through downtown Tucson on my way to write a story about recent Indigenous uprisings on a faraway island in Indonesia. My mind was occupied by mundane worries: low air pressure on the rear tire, cars driving too close to me, wondering if I was getting skin cancer from so much sun.
\n\nI had nearly completed my daily pilgrimage to the office when these trivial thoughts were interrupted by a sea of people moving steadily in my direction from several blocks away. There was joyful shouting, people carrying indistinguishable flags and banners. “Wasn’t Saint Patrick’s day last week?” I thought to myself. As I neared the energetic crowd, I soon realized this was no state-sanctioned holiday, and it sure as hell had nothing to do with the Irish.
\n\nInstead, I saw two or three hundred mostly Latino youth marching defiantly down the street. Recalling the numerous record-breaking protests against racist anti-immigrant laws of the past week, I realized I had run into a student walkout.
\n\nAs I neared the next block, I was amazed to find a group of three hundred students already rallying in front of the federal building. Over the next half hour, the crowd swelled to over a thousand as more and more fugitive students arrived in groups of ten, fifty, a hundred. The energy and excitement of these youthful rebels nearly overwhelmed me as their chants of “¡Si se puede!” (“Yes, it can be done!”) rang through the air, at times drowned out by the constant honking of supportive passersby. Others chanted “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” in reference to the United States’ arbitrary heist of the northern portion of Mexico over a century ago. Still more carried signs reading “No human being is illegal.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/05/2.jpg\")
\nThe following day, I was again riding my bike through downtown, somewhat more prepared to run into a protest, because I had heard that students were planning another walkout. I was disappointed when I encountered a small crowd of fifty kids walking on the sidewalk. “I guess they let their steam out yesterday,” I thought pessimistically to myself. As I rounded the corner onto Congress Avenue, I was forced to eat my words. The crowd was nearly double the size of the previous day’s, overflowing the small plaza in front of the federal building into the streets. The initial fifty were just stragglers. Soon, the massive crowd surged towards the federal courthouse, where thousands of immigrants are deported every year, and proceeded to block the entrance to this institution of oppression for half an hour. Meanwhile, hundreds of other students cruised the streets of downtown in perilously overloaded vehicles, blasting the music of their home countries, waving Mexican flags, and carrying posters of Cesar Chavez. Whether or not it was intentional, these cruisers, in conjunction with the sea of protestors swarming downtown from all directions, brought Tucson’s business district to a standstill.
\n\nThe energy, defiance, and sheer power of these demonstrations stands in stark contrast to the dreary, well-behaved, state-approved parades put on by our country’s numerous leftist organizations. “These are no mere protests,” I thought to myself, “this is an uprising.” This initial speculation was confirmed when I got back home and looked at the news reports. Even the corporate media acknowledged that well over a thousand Tucson middle- and high-school students had dropped their pens and paper and taken to the streets to protest the government’s attempted crackdown on immigration. At one school, someone pulled a fire alarm after the principle attempted to direct students into the gymnasium, ensuring their escape to the streets. At another school, several dozen students scaled a barbed wire fence after administrators locked the only exit shut. Other students took their anger out on the Border Patrol, notorious for its rampant racism and sadistic abuse of detainees, by throwing rocks at its Tucson headquarters.
\n\nWhat I saw in Tucson was no isolated incident. In Los Angeles, thirty-six thousand students walked out three days in a row, shut down four freeways, and repeatedly clashed with the LAPD when the latter attempted to break up this spontaneous outbreak of rebellion. In Fort Worth, Texas, not exactly a hotbed of radicalism, several hundred students walked out and proceeded to take over the city hall. Police responded by injuring several students, one of whom required hospitalization. There’s nothing like a group of grown-up armed men beating school children! In Pasadena, California, police opened up on a crowd of one hundred and fifty students with pepper balls in an attempt to disperse them. The students responded to this unprovoked attack by throwing rocks and bottles at the police.
\n\nIn San Diego, six thousand students took to the streets in five days of class disruptions. On the final day, they attempted to take over the Coronado bridge that spans San Diego Bay, but were stopped by a wall of California Highway Patrolmen. In Santa Ana, student occupations shut down several government offices, including the tax collector’s office.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/05/1.jpg\")
“No human being is illegal.”
\nThis massive wave of civil disobedience on the heels of the previous week’s pro-immigrant demonstrations is no doubt a sign of a healthy and rapidly growing national rebellion. Where do predominately white anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial movements in this country fit into the picture?
\n\nFirst off, gringos need to understand that immigrants to the US are for the most part fleeing the poverty, hunger, and violent repression manufactured abroad by our country’s government in order to ensure the relative comfort of our lives here at home. It is no coincidence that the “flood” of illegal immigrants from Mexico skyrocketed after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The human beings who are risking their lives (several hundred die every year) traversing the arid borderlands are not doing so to steal people’s jobs. They are trying to ensure the survival of their families by earning slightly more than the starvation wages they find, if they are lucky, south of the border.1
\n\nRadicals in the US should extend solidarity to the immigrant rights movement in every way possible. This is not the time for professional activists to step up and “show the masses the way.” The folks fueling the fire of this uprising seem to have a pretty clear analysis of the situation and an equally clear vision of how to win. The last thing they need is some know-it-all honkies to come in and tell them what to do. If you need further convincing of this fact, consider that the immigrant rights movement has managed in a matter of weeks to mobilize an enormous and militant movement that is already beginning to surpass what the anti-war movement, with the “help” of all those well-paid professional activists, has accomplished in the past three years.
\n\nSympathetic gringos can offer direct assistance by cooking food for demonstrators, hanging posters, organizing solidarity actions, offering rides to demonstrations and meetings, acting as legal observers, raising funds for legal expenses (hundreds have already been arrested for acts of civil disobedience), and showing up to demonstrations.
\n\nOne role I believe we have a particular responsibility to play is confronting racist boneheads such as the Minutemen who have spearheaded the massive anti-immigrant backlash. The sheer idiocy of anyone of European descent in North America complaining about illegal immigrants is maddening enough—but when these bigots start walking around with guns to “protect the borders of the US” as a code for promoting their racist ideals, and receive significant backing from prominent Republicans and the media in return, we have a duty to stop them. Wherever these racist thugs hold a rally, we should organize a larger counter-rally. Whenever they organize a meeting, we should be there to disrupt it. Those of us who live near the border can interfere with their “civilian border patrols” by warning would-be crossers of their presence. (A megaphone and a spotlight will help.)
\n\nWe can show our solidarity by continuing to fight the colonialist policies that have impoverished other countries and created this whole immigration “problem” in the first place. Shutting down the World Trade Organization in Seattle was a good start, but we totally dropped the ball on NAFTA and CAFTA (the equivalent agreement for Central America). However, it is not too late to defeat the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and resistance to it throughout the rest of the continent is still fierce. I reckon it’s never too late to get the other two repealed either. While welcoming economic and political refugees into our country is a good start, if we want to create a truly just world for everyone, we must destroy the policies that force people to make the trek in the first place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/05/5.jpg\")
You can obtain these posters here.
\nRadicals must address the anti-immigrant sentiment that sometimes boils up within our own ranks—for example, in certain sectors of the environmental movement. Groups such as the Sierra Club have flirted for years with the asinine notion that poor immigrants are somehow a major source of ecological destruction in the US. The line of logic proceeds thus: the increase in population is causing major sprawl, and by moving to the US—hold your breath for this one—immigrants start to consume at the rate that US citizens do. If I understand this right, it’s OK for us to continue consuming the world’s resources at a suicidal rate, but not for anyone else to? Talk about blaming the victim! Instead of scapegoating immigrants, we should be working first and foremost to reduce our own consumption of resources.
\n\nIt is equally ridiculous to allege that immigrants cause sprawl. They are not the ones building the second and third trophy homes that are eating up wilderness across the country. Come to think of it, they often are the ones building these homes—not for themselves, but for the exorbitant lifestyles of middle- and upper-class US citizens. Don’t even get me started on the devastation that the massive border wall that some are calling for would have on the ecological integrity of the Sonoran desert ecosystem.
\n\nRadical immigrant groups that are fighting for better wages and work conditions in the US also deserve support. Groups such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) have both launched numerous protests, boycotts, and speaking tours to achieve better pay in the fields. During FLOC’s boycott of Mt. Olive pickles, anarchists in North Carolina helped by protesting at grocery stores (including trashing Mt. Olive products in the store), painting banners, and offering rides to FLOC organizers who did not have documentation or driver’s licenses. The CIW recently won in a boycott against Taco Bell demanding that they pay tomato pickers more per pound, and have just launched a fresh boycott against McDonalds hoping to achieve the same goal. I’m sure you can think of a number of ways to help compel McDonalds to meet their demands.
\n\nComida no Migra—“food, not border patrol”—is a new take on the Food Not Bombs model that is catching on in many communities across the US. Instead of serving lunch or dinner in the park, participants get up early in the morning to bring food to immigrant day laborers at the places where they wait for work. Not only does this provide folks with a little sustenance and good cheer, it also puts observers on site to make sure no one messes with them. This is important because the Minutemen, not knowing what else to do with their pathetic lives, have started protesting at day labor sites to intimidate immigrants. Similarly, it’s not unheard of for immigrants to get picked up by some asshole, work all day, and then not get paid; even worse, there have been incidents in which racists have picked up day laborers and beaten or killed them.
\n\nThere is a lot of work to be done in the fight for immigrant rights. Whether that means offering childcare to families so that they can attend meetings, translating information on workers’ rights into Spanish, or blockading immigration detention centers, there are many fronts in this battle and all of them are important.
\n\nIt would behoove radicals in the US to study the solidarity work people in Europe and Australia have done around immigration and asylum seeking. Check out the No Border network—a massive European immigrants’ rights coalition. In Australia, activists have repeatedly broken political asylum-seekers out of detention centers and provided them refuge.
\n\nThere is much we can offer. The fight for immigrant rights is not about us and how radical our politics are. It is about lending our solidarity to people in struggle.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/05/4.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nEven if they were just “here for a free ride,” as the right wing asserts, I’d say good for them. After all we’ve stolen from them and the places they came from, it’s merely a matter of them coming and getting a little piece of the pie back—in other words, reparations. ↩
\nIn 2019, militants in Austin, Texas started an organization with the aim of defending homeless camps against sweeps—forced removals disguised as “cleanups” carried out by cops and work crews. This organization, Stop the Sweeps, intervened in a cycle of struggles that included the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and the winter storm of 2021 while attempting to consolidate a pole for confrontational activity and strategic thinking. Here, we explore the history of this movement in detail, seeking to distill lessons about autonomous organization that can aid revolutionaries in future struggles against dispossession.
\n\nIn June 2019, Austin City Council passed a reform legalizing “camping,” taking away the tool of misdemeanor ticketing from the Austin Police Department, which had used it for two decades to push homeless encampments into the deep woods and routinely dispossess the residents. The NGO left promoted this as a dramatic advance in the civil rights of houseless people, while NextDoor reactionaries decried it as a sign of the debasement of the once great city of Austin. In the news and on Twitter, Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott exchanged barbs with Democratic Austin Mayor Steve Adler, each taking one of these sides.
\n\nThe following November, friends and comrades formed Stop the Sweeps Austin (STS), a political intervention intended to undermine both of those positions. The core aim of STS was to show that both the progressive city and the reactionary state used similar techniques, rationales, and low-wage contractors guarded by police to systematically dispossess the poorest and most marginalized people in Austin—and that in doing so, they were continuing policies of displacement that had begun more than a century earlier with colonization and the policing of enslaved and formerly enslaved populations. Confronting the sweeps was both materially and discursively strategic. The idea was to cut away at the foundation of the post-decriminalization strategy for displacement, heightening antagonism towards both of the political factions that depended upon it.
\n\nTo do this, Stop the Sweeps Austin rallied sympathizers to intervene against weekly encampment sweeps by city and state forces while building parallel networks of mutual aid and political support. STS drew on existing solidarity networks descended from decades-running projects, informed by the living memory of the social movements of the homeless in the 1980s. We also benefitted from historical research and movement elder storytelling to extend our understanding of local history to the founding of Austin.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/13.jpg\")
The sweeps are intended to destroy what little stability and sense of home the houseless are able to establish.
\nWe now recognize that we were a part of a national movement against sweeps that peaked early in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on the momentum of the George Floyd Uprising. Autonomous groups in California, including the Sacramento Homeless Union and Where Do We Go in Berkeley, had been organizing against sweeps through 2019. In an early phase of STS organizing, we were roped into coalition building and national legal work by the Western Regional Advocacy Project; yet these projects did not offer meaningful coordination between groups to advance an autonomous vision grounded in direct action. There were efforts in Los Angeles to build out anti-sweep programs that seemed similar to ours from afar, though they started from a stronger orientation towards social democratic city politics. Fiercer resistance in Minneapolis built to flashpoints in 2020 including the occupation of an empty hotel and militant encampment defense. The circulation of the insurrectionary framework “You Sweep, We Strike” saw attacks on contractors and city infrastructure in Seattle, Santa Cruz, and Minneapolis. It was difficult to connect with these projects to learn from them directly, but easy to boost each other’s content from afar.
\n\nFive years after the founding of Stop the Sweeps Austin and two years after its quiet dissolution, we are writing this piece in hopes of refining the lessons of this recent high point of movement activity. We will begin by painting a picture of the moment in 2019 when Stop the Sweeps emerged, then situate that moment in a longer history of colonization, development, and homeless resistance. Having done so, we will distill the strategic frameworks that guided our organizing, then follow the trajectory of the movement to the limits it encountered. In each section, we will present our hypotheses and the lessons we learned along the way, illustrated via specific practical experiences.
\n\nWe offer these as reflections both for the local movement—to remind it of its history, its victories and defeats—and for revolutionaries everywhere seeking to think through crucial questions about autonomous organization. Today, we are preparing to confront a new phase of camp repression in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Grants Pass” decision, which green-lights criminalization and displacement in California and elsewhere.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/33.jpg\")
A sign on a tent in downtown Austin.
\nBefore 2019, most encampments lasted about three months before police evicted them—a cycle of temporary inhabitation and dispersal. This constant motion is essential to the cycle of development, as it opens up land and keeps bodies moving through the various infrastructures built to profit on them—shelters, social services, housing, prisons, hotels, and stores, all of which increasingly resemble each other.
\n\nThough “camping” was formally legalized in June 2019, enforcement had actually ceased during the winter of 2018-2019. Citing a paucity of funds due to the consequences of the catastrophic Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) paused its contracts providing camp removal, attempting to hand them off to the City of Austin. The city government did not immediately pick up the contracts at the same pace. At the same time, informal directives were given to APD to slow the pace at which they inflicted tickets for camping, fearing court rulings enforcing an expansion of the Martin v. Boise circuit court ruling, which had slowed camping ban enforcement on the West Coast. This occurred alongside a soft strike by organized Austin Police officers who had significantly slowed their response times to minor crimes, aiming thereby to press their demands for more power.
\n\nThe repeal of the camping ban created a political opening, enabling the camps to survive indefinitely on public land. Tent cities blossomed in January and February, mainly under state-owned freeways, and grew more elaborate. Shanty towns and shelters made from wooden pallets, political signs, and tarps as well as more modest tents and cardboard populated the city north to south and east to west, dotting the parks and the underpasses of major highways and appearing beside libraries and around the social services buildings downtown. This offered new forms of collective stability and security for the unhoused: the camps served as points of connection, stable locations at which to receive social services, and places for those new to life on the streets to get oriented and find support. They represented a strategy for mutual safety against harassment by reactionaries and police, providing a sense of collective life and care.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/36.jpg\")
An encampment below the I-35 overpass in the heart of downtown Austin.
\nThis occupation of space shocked liberals and conservatives alike, many of whom saw it as a display of public disorder or an embodiment of the ever-intensifying crisis in affordable housing. In Stop the Sweeps, for our part, we saw the expansion of the camps as a sign of the self-organizing capacity of the homeless and a demonstration of the power of land occupation—indeed, a signal of disorder for those invested in the property system. STS sought to build connections centering this sense of self-organization to build a defense network against the waves of displacement that were the cause and consequence of life in the camps.
\n\nAt that time, the displacement of the housed poor had continued unabated across Austin for decades, in keeping with national trends and local plans to develop and gentrify first West Austin and then East Austin, which was historically home to Black and brown Austinites following a century of segregation. Recent statistics show that most homeless Austinites were displaced from the zip codes that they currently reside in, often in areas suffering intense gentrification. While most recent literature on rising rents in Austin focuses on the spike following the pandemic, money had been pouring into Austin neighborhoods long before that, aided by historically low interest rates intended to flip houses and entire blocks into money makers. Projects that had been paused since the previous real estate bubble burst in 2008 were resumed during the 2010s with towers and “luxury” apartment blocks mushrooming from the mycelial networks of capital and property that had accumulated and expanded during the “bust” period.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/39.jpg\")
\nIn the late 2010s, the local Maoist movement (now mostly disbanded and critiqued as a cult by former members) waged a years-long struggle against a development slated along East Riverside, an effort to reinvent a low-income area as a luxury new-urbanist hotspot: the Domain on Riverside. The developers ultimately succeeded in evicting low-income renters from multiple high-density apartment complexes, which consequently remained boarded up for years just a short walk away from one of the largest encampments on that avenue.
\n\nThese Maoists represented a political pole in 2019 Austin, offering a mixture of public and secretive activity that prioritized direct action and confrontation with a diffuse array of enemies that they saw as aligned with the interests of capital. On the one hand, this meant that developers were confronted in public meetings and at their homes, and on the other, that former allies were castigated online and in person after political breaks. The Maoists also confronted other minor political figures, including DSA-oriented candidates, and disrupted their meetings. At the time, the Maoists had developed a reputation for being arrested, both at marches and in their homes, and facing elevated charges. Their former leader, Jared Roark, who went by the name Dallas, was arrested in his home for weapons possession after a tragicomic confrontation with an expelled former member of the Maoist’s armed unit.
\n\nThe DSA and an array of activist non-profits oriented towards electoral and council-level reforms represented another pole of activity. While less active in the streets, this alliance fused respectable political activity—rallies, press conferences, and testimony at City Council—with flirtations with abolitionist frameworks. The Homes Not Handcuffs coalition emerged out of this scene; they won the 2019 camping ban rollback, spawned the autonomous mutual aid organization Street Forum, and recomposed briefly to defend the camping ban at the polls in 2021. Their organizing relied heavily on personal relationships with City Council “progressive” heavyweight and current Texas Representative Greg Casar and on a progressive political machine comprised of organizations like Grassroots Leadership and Workers Defense Project, which had won reforms at similar scales through the City Council in the 2010s.
\n\nSTS oriented ourselves by drawing from political traditions and organizations that overlapped with these but were distinct from them. Many of the initial organizers were drawn from the local anarchist milieu, which had been working to draw links between different tendencies and organizations. One was the Peaceful Streets Project, which had emerged from right libertarian circles amidst the Occupy Wall Street cycle at the end of 2011, but had split left in the course of a decade of anti-police struggle. PSP served as the local Copwatch, filming police interactions and developing an aggressive interventionist style in which they named and shamed local cops, occasionally becoming personally known to the police themselves.
\n\nAnother influence were members of the Autonomous Student Network, who had cut their teeth organizing at the University of Texas and had gone on to participate in the Peaceful Streets Project and the Occupy ICE movement that established an occupation outside a detention center in San Antonio; they also helped to start Street Forum. These organizers brought an experimental streak to organizing, with a willingness to take risks and say what only anarchists can say.
\n\nContributing historical memory and serving an organic link to Austin’s homeless movement were members of The Challenger Street Newspaper, also born in 2011 out of the ashes of The Advocate, a long-running more traditionally NGO-style paper. From its beginnings, The Challenger was smaller and scrappier than the Advocate, with more will to participate politically in social movements. The Challenger published monthly issues with articles written mainly by homeless people in Austin, focusing on life on the streets of Austin, political commentary, poetry, and art. The Challenger had resuscitated the memory of Homer the Homeless Goose, the mascot of the Street People’s Advisory Council—a direct action organization of homeless Austinites in the 1980s who led occupations of vacant buildings and, famously, the downtown lake.
\n\nAlong with contributions from other early members involved in anti-prison struggles and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the DSA (which was focused on mutual aid), these organizations helped build the political framework that STS used as we attempted to build an alternative pole, intervening in the fight to defend the camps. This enabled us to synthesize tactics and strategic insights from a variety of experiences. Coupled with insatiable demands and a hostile attitude to the state, that equipped us to punch above our weight.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/27.jpg\")
The shelters were full.
\nNow that we have set the stage in 2019, let’s back up to explore the history of homelessness in Austin and the movements combating it.
\n\nThe City of Austin was established as a military maneuver intended to project burgeoning Anglophone power westward after Texan independence from Mexico in 1836. Settlers established a semicircle of forts to the west to defend the new capital from raiding Comanches and other Indigenous people. Austin’s famed Barton Springs are part of a chain of springs in Central Texas that had been in continuous use by Indigenous peoples for over 10,000 years; they appear in some Texas rock art. Military campaigns and raiding and surveying parties sought to drive Indigenous peoples from their lands throughout Texas. The city’s first camping ban excluded Indigenous peoples from camping inside city limits.
\n\nSlavery was an integral part of the economy of early Austin, with up to a third of its earliest recorded population comprised of enslaved Black people. White people who enslaved twenty people or more were known as “planters” and held special status. As a consequence of the boom-and-bust cycles of for-profit agriculture, planters often enslaved more people than they could put to work on the plantations that ringed the city. Consequently, many enslaved people worked and lived in the city instead of on plantations. They provided various urban services, remitting a percentage of their income to their enslavers.
\n\nSome elements of the ruling classes sought to target these Black people who were enslaved but living somewhat independently. They formed Vigilance Committees of private citizens to maintain white power in the districts where these people lived. Later, they demanded the establishment of a municipal police force so that the public would have to pay for the policing of Black people. This was one of the origins of what became the APD.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/34.jpg\")
A continuing history of white supremacist violence: troopers playing a role in the sweeps targeting the houseless.
\nAnother famously followed the Civil War some years later. With slavery abolished and the fighting over, freedmen and former Confederate soldiers arrived in the city alongside other poor whites. Black freedmen established communities—sometimes permitted on private land, but often squatting near creeks and in other undesirable or far-flung areas of town. To discipline these surplus populations, the city government proposed a police force. The Black Codes forced Black people who did not find employment to labor in conditions resembling slavery. Black work crews assembled that way played a major role in constructing Austin’s State Capitol.
\n\nAlongside the police, a series of city plans served to structure the racial order of the city. Following the official decree of segregation in 1928, slums comprising over ten percent of the town’s area were evicted. People who were renting or who did not have clear title to the land where they resided were displaced en masse through these “Slum Clearance Plans” and federally funded Urban Renewal programs, and the land was often turned over to state use (including the sites of the University of Texas, the state government, and the hospitals between Congress and the I-35 Freeway). These displacements served to impose a line between a Black and brown East Austin and a white West Austin. This segregationist project shaped the messy post-emancipation reality of scattered Freedmen’s towns and Mexican enclaves over the following 80 years.
\n\nAccording to Gus Bova, in the 1970s and 1980s, subsidized housing fell out of favor alongside a generalized crisis in manufacturing work. Across the country, people were being thrown out of industrial work while cheap housing was disappearing, and Austin was no exception. The local booms and busts in the housing construction market, which employed low-wage labor, contributed to this. Federal policy also began to support housing as a collateralized asset, both for big banks and consumers, seeing a hot real estate market as a sign of a healthy economy that bolsters consumer spending and debt. Periodically, this policy gets ahead of itself, spawning crises like the one in 2008—but even at the best of times, it inexorably raises housing costs for everyone while concentrating property in the hands of fewer and fewer landlords.
\n\nThe city’s “Innovation Team” traces the beginning of NGO work intended to benefit the homeless to 1966, citing a charity’s pamphlet offering services to “transients” and “non-residents.” Bova and the “Innovation Team” both point to 1985 as a watershed year in which the city set up the first of many task forces to fight homelessness. Bova concludes that by 1985, the accumulation of crises in employment and housing had produced considerable homelessness in Austin.
\n\nNot long after, the Street People’s Advisory Council (SPAC) formed, bringing together rebels from the Task Force with politicized homeless people. Drawing lessons from actions against the Vietnam War, these activists purchased a goose which they publicly threatened to kill and eat, after first considering a swan donated to the city by a member of the local elite. After the goose drew the attention of an outrage-hungry press, they pardoned the goose and named him Homer. Homer and his human compatriots went on to lead occupation marches on abandoned buildings and the flotilla occupation of Town Lake.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/22.jpg\")
Activist Molly Ivins, who camped out in protest of Austin’s 1996 Camping Ban, meets Homer the Homeless Goose.
\nThe SPAC and Homer captured headlines, hearts, and minds for several years, helping to generate an activist milieu that included the Mad Housers (a collective of builders that constructed mobile shelters and the flotilla rafts that were used to occupy the lake) and the Blackland CDC (a neighborhood organization which co-organized the occupation of vacant houses being demolished by the University of Texas in east Austin). They operated as a part of nationwide movements, joining organizations like the National Homeless Union, the Houston Homeless Union, and others in coordinated campaigns, including one dedicated to takeovers of vacant housing.
\n\nThey won some reforms, including increased shelter funding, the dedication of vacant housing to serve as transitional housing, and a decades-long detente on UT development of the Eastside; but the SPAC campaign was ultimately repressed. The APD consistently hounded the organizers; allegedly, so did other homeless people, and “animal rights” activists concerned for the well-being of the adventurous Homer. City officials played a role in repressing the flotilla protest, changing a “night-fishing” ordinance that allowed the legal occupation of the lake to create new restrictions that made it possible to seize the boats. Nonetheless, the story of Homer and the SPAC and their direct action served as inspiration for activists from the Challenger Street Newspaper to launch several efforts of their own throughout the 2010s.
\n\nThe next major cycle of struggle emerged in response to Austin’s camping ban in the mid-1990s. Research by Gus Bova locates the impetus for the camping ban in activism by the Downtown Austin Alliance (DAA), a consortium of downtown business and land owners. According to Bova, the DAA was incorporated as a Business Improvement District, a quasi-governmental organization to which businesses pay special taxes to fund private security and political activity. Their first move was to organize “Downtown Rangers” who biked around downtown harassing homeless people and acting as the DAA’s private arm of the Austin Police Department, which supervised them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/2.jpg\")
Austinites protest the camping ban proposal at City Hall in 1996.
\nThe DAA also began to organize for a camping ban, picking up model legislation from the American Association for Rights and Responsibilities—which shared white nationalist co-founder John Tanton with the anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform. Though the ban passed easily in 1996, its passage led to a brief wave of campouts by housed people in protest. A year later, the city council was preparing to repeal it, as it had only served to shuffle people from place to place in the city and deeper into the woods. Amid pressure from the DAA, the council led by then Mayor Kirk Watson “compromised,” keeping the ban but establishing homeless services in downtown Austin. This led to the establishment of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH), which served as an anchor for similar services in the area. It also illustrates the connection between homeless services and policies that police and harm their clientele.
\n\nIn addition to the camping ban, city police and administrators used their powers to harass homeless people and encampment communities. One example is captured vividly in the 1995 documentary Bouldin Creek Greenbelt Family, filmed by camp residents themselves as well as housed cable access volunteers. The film chronicles the daily life and communal practices of the camp, including a scene in which the residents grill burgers for more than a dozen people for dinner time. This pastoral peace is disrupted by cops on horseback who bark orders at the residents to vacate before sending heavy machinery to destroy their property and territory. The family is scattered about town with whatever possessions they can carry.
\n\nThe Bouldin Greenbelt Family.
\nThese practices of harassment and disruption met an opponent in the late 1990s in Leslie Cochran, a gender-defying homeless resident who, encountering repression upon moving to town, became a one-man army agitating against the police. Leslie’s crusade—which included city council appearances, elaborately painted signs protesting his treatment by APD, and a run for mayor—put him front and center in the popular imagination of Austin in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His legacy is complicated. His nonlinear, playful relationship with gender made him the butt of jokes about trans people and a celebrated spectacle of the Austin Weird. Many people forget that around his much gawked-at thong, his ass was often painted “Kiss this, APD.”
\n\nAlongside Leslie and the camping ban campout, other homeless organizing lacked the thread of direct action and independence that had characterized the SPAC. One such campaign was House the Homeless, established by legal aid worker Richard Troxell. Troxell took credit for creating the concept of the police Winnebago in Philly, and for the one-hour health exemption to the no-sit no-lie ordinance that followed the DAA’s campaign for the camping ban. Troxell, to his credit, acknowledged the roles of both the wage system and the police in creating and perpetuating homelessness, but followed these ideas into increasingly wonkish policy proposals. Also on the scene was the Austin Advocate, which successfully organized the first street newspaper with homeless vendors, including Leslie, staged prominently around Austin. While the Advocate relied heavily on these vendors, the vendors had little role in the writing or publishing process.
\n\nA split in the last months of the Advocate led Val Romness, a longtime producer of homeless media involved in the Austin Cable Access scene that released “Bouldin Creek Greenbelt Family,” to establish the Challenger in early 2011 with Advocate vendor Fred Pettit after the Advocate had ceased meaningful production. The Challenger began operations without nonprofit status or funding, operating more horizontally, though helmed consistently by Romness. This openness, along with creative participation by local anarchists, led to increased ties between the paper and radical milieus, with early collaborations with Monkeywrench Books, Austin Anarchist Study Group members, Treasure City Thrift, and remnants of the then-dissipating Rhizome Collective. In late 2011, these relationships helped to foster the Challenger’s intervention in the local iteration of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.
\n\nWhen the revolutionary wave that took shape in Tunisia and spread to Tahrir Square in Egypt reached Austin in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the results were mixed. The first General Assemblies were announced by a distinctly Austin mixture of white yogis and libertarians, who hoped for a non-confrontational interpretation of “Occupy.” In contrast to the tent encampments popping up in other cities, they proposed a 24-hour protest at Austin City Hall with sleeping quarters in an electric taxi warehouse several miles away. The ad-hoc leaders cited the camping ban as the main reason they chose this tack, not wanting to break the law and burn bridges with the police, whom they regarded as part of the “99%.”
\n\nChallenger Newspaper members saw themselves as a part of this eclectic upswell of the downwardly mobile and called for an alternative encampment called Tent City across the river from City Hall to bring attention to their own issues, including the 1%-driven camping ban. Organizers attempted to rally support from Occupy Austin (OA) participants for a sunset confrontation with police, but APD moved in early, dispersing the camp before it could gather steam. Tent City organizers and anarchists relocated the tents to City Hall and set them up, confronting several more conservative members of OA. Tent City and the Challenger made a bold claim for autonomous action early on with the support of an OWS founder, the late, great David Graeber, who was in town visiting his girlfriend and happened to save a toddler occupant from an overzealous opponent of the tents.
\n\nThrough shrewd maneuvering and the opposition of a roused crowd, the ones with the tents won a standoff with APD, establishing precedent for a more robust occupation and the participation of the homeless movement. As the occupation wore on, more and more of those in the occupation at City Hall were homeless, sleeping at the site overnight, though usually on the limestone stairs rather than setting up more tents. This led to tensions within the Occupy Austin movement, as some participants grumbled that their movement had been “coopted” by the poor. Against this tendency, and alongside organizing by participants of color, a more radical streak emerged, making space for a diverse array of voices and actions. The “anniversary” event in 2012 was led by Challenger/Tent City-oriented occupiers. The Challenger had moved its weekly meetings to the occupation and was organizing within it through the Ending Homelessness Working Group (EHWG). On the first birthday of Occupy Austin, the EHWG, the OA General Assembly, and the Challenger called for a march on the City-owned vacant Home Depot building with the intention of occupying it, taking inspiration from OWS and Occupy Oakland.
\n\nThe march on the Home Depot was unsuccessful, but led to several other attempts to occupy other vacant lots around Austin. Homeless occupiers established a camp, also called Tent City, in South Austin, which focused mostly on recreating daily camp life rather than advancing political conflict. Though it was intended as an experiment, the camp hosted a small group of members mostly focused on avoiding the cops, not unlike other camps. It gradually disbanded after several evictions, without the sort of flashpoint of camp defense that might have re-politicized it. Its fizzling led to questions about what sort of organizational capacity successful camp defense would require, questions later consciously taken up by Stop the Sweeps Austin.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/35.jpg\")
Tents line the trail along the Colorado River on the south edge of downtown Austin.
\nFrom 2019-2022, the camps that surrounded and besieged the Capitol practiced an ungoverned and unregulated form of life that violated the order of capital. Recognizing the camps as forms of insurgent self-organization on the part of the dispossessed, we sought to defend them and expand their potential in the face of attacks from a wide array of political forces. This runs counter to the logic of specialization and legibility that typically characterizes activist campaigns, which often aim to represent the dispossessed as a distinct constituency (“the homeless”) through demands and negotiation on the terrain of policy, recruiting to an organization to negotiate on their behalf, and cultivating a specialized minority of “directly-impacted” activists. Instead, we emphasized the defense, generalization, and expansion of forms of insurgent self-organization that are illegible to politicians, social service providers, and activists alike. Where much of the NGO left saw a lack of organization, demands, interests, and representatives, we saw an abundance of potential in the camps themselves.
\n\nWe did not romanticize camps as the revolutionary communes-to-come. Different camps had different cultures and different levels of cohesion. In some camps, people took lots of responsibility for each other, checking in to ensure others were fed, warm, and healthy, with those taking responsibility for assisting others and mediating conflicts forming an organic leadership. In other cases, big personalities declared themselves leaders, with mixed reactions from other residents ranging from dismissiveness to outright hostility. Some camps’ internal dynamics were defined by competition and hostility, with fights and thefts common as people merely tolerated living alongside each other. People would often move between camps as a consequence of conflicts with other residents or as a means to seek different conditions in regards to drug use, fights, noise, pests, or other issues. Recognizing the camps as self-organized phenomena means taking all these contradictory realities into account while still affirming the self-activity at their core as a response to a shared condition of dispossession.
\n\nWhatever the internal dynamics of each camp, their occupation of public space constituted an attack on the logic of property and capitalist development. Land belonging to the city or state government was taken over by forms of organization beyond their control and put to unauthorized and unregulated uses. While privately held property was never directly taken over, the public presence of the dispossessed rendered class conflict explicit and impeded development. The proliferation of camps in close proximity to sites of commerce or luxury apartments made these places less appealing to the comparatively wealthy, who complained about the numerous signs of the dispossessed living their lives in public—including accumulated survival supplies, the buildup of waste from humans living without infrastructure, and public expressions of mental and emotional crisis and other things that those with houses have the luxury of doing in private. A public homeless population coming into contact with students, tourists, consumers, and investors threatened to make Austin an unattractive location for new festivals, conferences, companies, and residents.
\n\nThe proliferation of camps from 2019 to 2022 was an impediment to development and gentrification in Austin, alongside and overlapping with system-wide shocks including the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic downturn, and the George Floyd Rebellion. While the camps are sources of power that impact the political and economic terrain around them, they are not properly political: they do not make demands, they are not legible forms of organization or constituents that can be represented. In recent years, others have used the term ante-political to refer to forces that precede or exceed the traditional sphere of politics. This framework helps us understand the power of the camps and the nature of the political attack on them.
\n\nThe attack on the camps and on the unhoused in general was carried out according to two distinct logics of governance. One is outright exterminationist, its aim being to socially cleanse undesirable populations by dispersing the camps and driving people out of town or into jail cells. The other is managerial, the aim being to regulate the homeless and precarious through services and facilities administered by the state, social service providers, or private and non-profit landlords. The former attacks the camps for simply existing; the latter aims to subjugate their ungoverned activity to managed and profitable social services. Both attack them for violating capitalist order. The same institutions can make use of both logics, like when Governor Greg Abbott opened a Texas Department of Transportation parking lot—now known as Camp Esperanza—as a “shelter” to regulate the homeless and legitimize his sweeps, or when the city government used sweeps to enforce the newly reinstated camping ban in 2022.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/7.jpg\")
A hole in the fence at the sanctioned camp opened by Governor Greg Abbot on a Texas Department of Transportation lot in 2019.
\nThe mainstream movement to repeal the camping ban framed the struggle as a conflict between conservatives and progressives: Greg Abbott and the reactionaries of Take Back Austin on one side, Austin’s social movements, city council, and social service providers on the other. This battle was encapsulated in the ongoing Twitter war between Abbott and Adler over the camping ban repeal. In reality, both the state and city governments depended on the sweeps to manage homelessness, only according to distinct logics. Before the repeal of the camping ban, the city government had been sporadically using sweeps to clear camps, and they kept their own sweep schedule parallel to the state government’s sweeps under the highways. When sweeps resumed after pausing for the pandemic, the city government had taken over all of the sweeps from the State. This shared dependence was most explicitly laid bare when the city government swept the ARCH camp the same day the state government began its sweeps of the highways.
\n\nRe-framing the camps as an ante-political insurgent force can give us a clearer picture of the competing forces that aim to attack this form of insurgency, enabling us to move away from some of the limitations of activist frameworks. Reformist activist approaches can lead us into the trap of allying with the managerial logic of governance in the name of pragmatism, as seen in groups like The Other Ones Foundation (TOOF), Austin Mutual Aid (AMA), and Little Petal Alliance (LPA). More radical activist approaches can end up fetishizing the thinking and activity of the activists themselves, creating organizations that exist for no sake but to reproduce themselves or insular scenes that become disconnected from any material force. Rejecting both of these errors, we believe that focusing on our relationship to existing forms of insurgent self-organization can provide a counterweight to both reformist managerialism and radical impotence.
\n\nWhile Stop the Sweeps used activist tactics, we did so while understanding the insurgency of the camps as primary, rather than our own activity. Faced with the practical question of how to join forces with the camps and mount a defense against sweeps, we recruited and mobilized from within activist milieus, and we used activist tactics such as creating media, pushing limited demands (but not policy), rallies, home and office demos, and call-ins as part of campaigns against specific targets. Similarly, after Abbott opened what eventually became Camp Esperanza, we maintained an early presence to build relationships, trace the fault lines, and conspire with the residents to undermine this new form of management. When the COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis, we participated in shaping the camp support infrastructure that filled this gap, temporarily helping sustain the camps while developing new forms of collaboration with them. But we did so with a determination to bolster the defense of the camps, not seeing these things as ends in themselves, nor claiming to “organize” the homeless or integrate the camps or their residents into the terrain of political representation.
\n\nNow, on the other side of this movement arc, we feel it is important to re-articulate this position, which may have been forgotten amid the frenzy of service-oriented mutual aid, activist infighting, and reacting to our enemies’ offensives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/8.jpg\")
Governor Greg Abbott, scumbag.
\nInformed by the tactical sensibility emerging through the last two decades of struggle—the port shutdowns during Occupy, the highway takeovers during Black Lives Matter protests, the targeting of ICE and prison contractors, and other struggles that we have participated in or learned from—Stop the Sweeps understood power as a question of infrastructure and logistics. Decision-making bodies are largely empty political theaters carrying out the will of dominant social forces—be those reactionary populist movements or factions of capitalists, non-profits, or police. Their emptiness makes demonstrations at the well-guarded halls of power ineffectual. The real power in this world is in the infrastructure that is used to administer and maintain this civilization; a decision to carry out sweeps can only be enforced if there are workers, trucks, and money that can be mobilized to that purpose. Infrastructures can be vulnerable to pressure, and this makes it a strategic site for potential pressure and direct action.
\n\nWe understood that City Hall and Abbott would never willingly stop the sweeps. Instead, once the state government started conducting sweeps in November 2019, we paid attention to who was conducting them. The sweeps were carried out by a work crew driving a few contractor trucks and overseen by a couple supervisors directly from the Texas Department of Transportation. The police were not actively removing people’s belongings; they served as a passive backup force that intervened only to suppress unrest or resistance. They were largely hands-off with us, allowing us to be in the camps as we filmed, harassed the work crew, and talked to residents. We noticed the same dynamic when the Austin Public Works Department carried out sweeps in November 2019 along other public easements with a different contractor’s name on the truck.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/40.jpg\")
A group of contract workers throw away belongings at a sweep under a highway overpass.
\nDigging through city and state contracts, we traced a whole web of contractors. We discovered that the city and state both contracted through WorkQuest, a central contracting agency offering services and products and employing disabled people. WorkQuest, in turn, contracted out to other agencies: EPSI for the state sweeps and Relief Enterprises for the city sweeps. Sometimes these subcontractors also recruited labor from temporary staffing agencies like Pacesetters or received people doing “community service” through Downtown Austin Community Court. Sometimes the work crews themselves consisted of other homeless people, though some we met ended up leaving because they couldn’t stand to participate in oppressing other people in the same position as them.
\n\nOnce we uncovered the contractors, we saw the WorkQuest contract as a strategic vulnerability. Our theory was that if there was enough pressure to make contractors back out or make the sweeps more costly, it would diminish the political will to carry them out. We hoped that if WorkQuest dropped out, it would impair both the City and State from doing sweeps. We identified the phone numbers of WorkQuest employees, the locations of offices, and the addresses of executives; we used these for targeted phone zaps, a home demo, and a guerrilla fliering action at the WorkQuest store. This strategy draws a lot from the “tertiary targeting” model used in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign and more recently in the Stop Cop City movement. While the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted our focus on WorkQuest, we learned months afterwards that they had dropped the contract in March 2020 due to our pressure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/19.jpg\")
A home demo.
\nUnfortunately, WorkQuest dropping the contract did not stop the sweeps. As the city government took over the sweeps in the fall of 2020, WorkQuest passed off the contract directly to Relief Enterprises; we had only removed the middleman. Relief Enterprises had fewer physical sites to target; we had little luck finding a truck lot where we could mobilize a blockade or some other collective action. The few locations we did find appeared to be shared with other businesses in industrial parks, and the vehicles appeared to be dispersed between a few sites rather than concentrated in a single lot. Much of our energy targeting them was directed into call-in campaigns to City Hall when their contract came up for renewal, or car demos targeting the Mayor and City Council members. Beyond the car demos, we lacked effective ways to mobilize groups of people offensively during the height of the pandemic, and our energy was tied up in other initiatives like the camp support network.
\n\nFrom 2020 to 2022, we succeeded in using these methods to win concessions that softened the sweeps. The authorities let people keep their tents and belongings, permitting them to name what was and was not trash and to remain in their camps during the sweeps; the City tried to frame them as progressive “clean-ups” to appease critics. While they continued throw away furniture, mattresses, structures, and temporarily unattended belongings—and we continued to push back on each of those fronts—these sweeps were a far cry from the early Texas Department of Transportation sweeps that forced people to move all their belongings across the highway or lose everything.
\n\nAll these advances were undone when Prop B, a reactionary referendum initiative spearheaded by local anti-homeless forces with Save Austin Now, reinstated the camping ban and the sweeps returned as a force of devastating displacement. Since we had tied up so much of our energy in pressuring City Council alongside initiatives like the camp support network, we had not built up the forces we needed to take the fight directly to the sweeps infrastructure once the political terrain was closed off to us. By the time Prop B came down, the movement was already declining, and it was too late to reorient towards a new strategic framework. When we got started, we had been critical of Homes Not Handcuffs for only pushing the policy front without building the capacity to defend that victory against the inevitable reactionary backlash. In our pursuit of political leverage on the sweeps contract, we fell into a similar trap: we had not built up the power to defend the gains we had made against an inevitable reaction in the political terrain.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/24.jpg\")
\nIn our experience, an infrastructural understanding of power also opened offensive paths for us to avoid getting locked into head-on, symmetrical conflicts with better-resourced adversaries. It does not usually make sense to attempt to meet our enemy’s repressive forces head on with greater numbers or force—whether in a defensive attempt to hold a space against a siege or an offensive attempt to besiege the guarded fortresses of our enemies (City Hall, the Capitol, downtown). While there are conditions under which such confrontations are strategic, in general, we have found that if a movement’s strategy is defined around pursuing those, this will exhaust the movement, incur defeats, and reduce it to largely reactive activity. An asymmetrical approach instead considers where our adversaries are weak, how to stretch them thin by going where they are unprepared, and finding pressure points that maximize impact—such as the infrastructure undergirding a project. This enables a movement to take the initiative, forces its adversaries to respond from a position of weakness, and creates the conditions to win victories and mobilize greater forces.
\n\nWe learned some of these lessons the hard way in camp defense. While the initial defense of the ARCH was inspiring for stopping a sweep head on, it also illustrated the difficult of repeating such a victory: our adversaries could come back at any time, and being ready to stop them on short notice would have required an unsustainable level of vigilance and capacity for rapid response. Similarly, the weekly schedule of the highway sweeps meant that one day’s victory could be swept away by the work crew’s return the next week. By pivoting to an asymmetrical conflict model, targeting WorkQuest with pressure at places we weren’t expected, we opened up new fronts and took the initiative, acting on our own schedule rather than responding to the sweeps schedule.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/12.jpg\")
The camp outside of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (right) and its late-night removal by city workers armed with a mechanical claw (left).
\nThis does not mean that movements should abandon defensive fights, but that we should shift our approach to them. Asymmetrical approaches de-emphasize holding terrain at all costs, while recognizing it as essential. Rather than an all-or-nothing fight, defending terrain becomes a question of maximizing the costs for our opponents, minimizing our own losses, increasing combativeness and offensive opportunities, and rebuilding or seizing new terrain after the siege. Even when our movement was smaller, our efforts were strongest when they balanced tactical, defensive retreats with counteroffensives against the infrastructure of the sweeps.
\n\nWe continued to maintain a presence at sweeps, where we aimed to maximize delays, build connections and courage to support resistance in the camps, and help people rebuild afterwards. We knew that the sweeps operated according to a tight schedule, and that substantial delays along their route would either force them to come back another day, delay a sweep until the following week, or impact their obligations to other contracts. We reasoned that any delays we could force might give some relief to those further down the schedule who would get passed over that week, and that delays would drain more money and labor out of the contract. We also helped people to replace the tents and other survival gear that they had lost in sweeps in order to minimize the impact on people’s lives and ensure that the camps could persist.
\n\nEmploying this strategy, we achieved a couple major victories when entire camps resisted the sweeps, refusing to move or harassing the sweeps crews to slow them down. Some of these moments of resistance emerged spontaneously; others only after sustained efforts building direct relationships that gave us a basis of trust and courage to act alongside camp residents. Based on internal emails from Public Works, we know that our presence was a major nuisance for them. Eventually, they cracked down on our ability to mess with the sweeps from within the camps by enforcing a “work zone” rule allowing them to arrest people for trespassing while a sweep was ongoing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/30.jpg\")
An early graphic used by Stop the Sweeps to orient new volunteers to the wide range of ways to engage a sweep.
\nBy the end of the sweeps defense movement cycle, many of these lessons had been forgotten or had not spread widely enough, or we simply lacked the capacity to act on them. We had lost the ability to put pressure on the infrastructure of the sweeps or to turn the conflict into an asymmetrical one rather than a head-on clash. By 2022, due to the enforcement of the work zone rules, sweeps watch crews were unable to do much more than bear witness to the suffering of others or help them move their belongings. At a moment when the movement was declining, some tried to mobilize larger groups to resist each sweep head on, but these groups never really materialized. Actions like the City Hall occupation, while politically important in other ways, remained focused on targeting the symbolic halls of power rather than the material infrastructure of the sweeps. There was one small appearance at the home of the Relief Enterprises CEO, but it was far less forceful than the 2020 home demo against WorkQuest.
\n\nWhile it likely would not have stopped the post-Prop B sweeps, it remains an open question how returning to an understanding of the infrastructural nature of power and a strategy of asymmetrical conflict might have opened new avenues for the movement when it was facing decline. What if sweeps watch didn’t just invite people to bear witness to devastation, but converted camp defense into highway blockades that stopped the circulatory system of the city? Such a strategy could have employed the car demo tactic as well. What if the occupation of City Hall had targeted the offices and homes of sweeps contractors, or other politically and economically important parts of the city beyond the trap of downtown?
\n\nThere are no guarantees, only possibilities and questions to bear in mind in future fights. But it is essential to recognize that for now, our enemies are much bigger and better equipped than us, and we are strongest when we target their weak points rather than being drawn into direct clashes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/25.jpg\")
Posters left behind after a small 2021 home demo at the home of the CEO of Relief Enterprises, the contractor responsible for the sweeps since 2020.
\nOne of our hypotheses, tested and refined through our experience in Stop the Sweeps, is that what we call social movements can be better understood as an open field of forces, each engaged with others to various degrees in relationships of collaboration and contestation, affinity and hostility, coalition and competition. What we describe as a “movement” is an emergent culmination of the interplay of these forces, irreducible to any sum of its component parts. Distinct actors within this field might be understood as poles—rallying points around which cohere a set of ideas, strategies, and ways of acting. These poles exert forces within the field of the movement, attracting new people and connections, pushing back on others, and spreading or clashing with other ideas within the terrain. Some poles may be able to affect those around them through their actions, transmitting ideas or causing shifts in the field of possibilities; other poles may find themselves isolated or ineffective, unable to act on their own terms or influence others.
\n\nThis view of movements as a field of forces and polarities clarifies a few things. First, it directs our focus not just to what an individual or a group is but to what it can do—how it affects the field of the movement and others in it. This emphasis on doing can help us let go of anxieties around recruiting people to join our organizations, focusing us instead on ways to spread autonomous and militant ways of acting. Influential poles can generate powerful proposals, models, or invitations to act that spread across crews, organizations, and networks. Furthermore, we can better understand the lines of transmission between groups, factions, and ideologies in movements through this framework. Rather than perceiving distinct sects (as implied by the term sectarian), we can discern how the force exerted by a pole can overflow the boundaries of a particular organization, or how people and groups themselves can move between different poles of a movement through their activity.
\n\nUsing this framework, we can perceive and act upon the possibilities latent in open-ended situations. We can see how these situations emerge as organic reactions to flashpoints of oppressive force; we can grasp how a protest movement can reach a scale and intensity that escape the control of those who “organized” it to become more potent and infectious. Perceptive and strategic militants can find the openings in such moments to contribute in ways that help to shape the outcome—forging new relationships, advancing new strategies or tactics, and enabling greater coordination, self-organization, or escalation. In Stop the Sweeps, this was one of our greatest strengths, whether we were engaging with a sweep, the waves of activity in the course of the George Floyd Uprising, the Abbott encampments and city COVID hotels, or rallies and occupations initiated by other groups.
\n\nStop the Sweeps emerged to fill a gap in the existing movement. While the Homes Not Handcuffs (HnH) coalition had secured the legislative victory of repealing the camping ban, they had failed to build the political force necessary to defend their win. So, when the city government responded to a wave of reaction a few months later by sweeping the ARCH at the same time that the state government cracked down with sweeps under the highway, the non-profit coalition was caught flat-footed. They scheduled a meeting at Street Forum the weekend before the sweeps to plan a response that would focus on legal observing, documentation, media campaigns, and continued legislative advocacy. The non-profit coalition kept most of its focus on Abbott’s exterminationist rhetoric, drawing no attention to the city’s or NGO’s use of sweeps to control the unhoused.
\n\nThe cell that became Stop the Sweeps began as a group of friends who started showing up in the mornings at the camp outside the ARCH in anticipation of the sweep. The timing of these sweeps was left vague and constantly delayed; but keeping this rhythm for two weeks led to a series of connections with people at that camp and some strategic conversations among the handful of us. When the announcement finally came that the ARCH sweep would occur on the same day as Abbott’s sweep of the camps under the highway, we had already laid the groundwork for launching Stop the Sweeps.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/18.jpg\")
A Homes Not Handcuffs rally at the Texas Governor’s Mansion in 2019, protesting Abbott’s threats to sweep camps.
\nWhen we attended the Homes Not Handcuffs response meeting and noticed that their plan did not include any attention on the sweeps at the ARCH, nor plans for direct resistance to the sweeps, we decided to break out into our own group adjacent to their meeting. At that meeting, we developed our own plan to mobilize a combative presence at the ARCH. While we could not stretch ourselves to mobilize on multiple fronts, we retained some presence at the highway sweeps to support any organic resistance to them. We took the name Stop the Sweeps—both a demand and a form of action—and put out our own call to action on our nascent socials.
\n\nRather than attempting to convince the HnH coalition to adopt a more confrontational strategy (or calling them out for their failure to do so), we identified an opening in the movement where we could act and filled it. We sidestepped direct conflict with the non-profit wing of the movement in favor of opening up space for autonomous action alongside the non-profit’s strategy. Seizing the opportunity to mobilize where the rest of the movement did not have a presence was advantageous in this regard, and helped avoid conflicts over “hijacking” or about escalating beyond the risk tolerance of HnH. Similarly, while those of us at the highway camps communicated with HnH forces on the ground, we made separate decisions to support unhoused people planning to resist the sweeps while the others focused on their strategy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/29.jpg\")
\nMaking our own plan enabled us to connect with other scattered forces, both within and outside the movement, that had been looking for more combative forms of engagement. In the days leading up to the ARCH sweep, we connected with members of the DSA-LSC who were involved in HnH and hungry to employ direct action tactics against the sweeps. They were able to leverage some of the contact lists that the coalition had not utilized, using email blasts and phone banking to turn people out to the ARCH. Through our existing connections, we were also able to pull in friends from anti-fascist and anti-police organizing.
\n\nConsequently, a small group without its own base was able to bring together about thirty people on a Monday. We temporarily prevented the destruction of the camp at the ARCH—at least, until they came back at 4 am.
\n\nFrom its inception, Stop the Sweeps existed in this delicate balance between maintaining connections to other actors in the movement and acting on our own terms. We attended the meetings that Homes Not Handcuffs hosted and maintained lines of communication with people in those groups; at the same time, we planned our own ways to engage on the ground, created our own narrative, and called our own actions. Calling our own action at the sweep that Homes Not Handcuffs had decided not to respond to was one example of this; mobilizing to support unhoused people who planned to resist the sweeps under the highways was another.
\n\nHomes Not Handcuffs held one more meeting after the sweeps started. We attended and made up most of the “sweeps defense” breakout group; the other two groups were focused on policy advocacy around criminalization and housing. We ultimately absorbed the sweeps defense group into our efforts; we later learned that the other groups never got off the ground after that meeting. The consolidation of this pole and its rapid growth gave us the momentum to transition into confronting the Texas Department of Transportation’s weekly sweep schedule after November 4. As the only group still actively following, resisting, and shaping the narrative around the sweeps, we were able to shift the movement towards a more radical position.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/31.jpg\")
Mercenaries destroying the homes of the houseless.
\nA few months into our work together, we had started to develop relationships with a wider range of groups. Seeking to increase the coordination and strategic intelligence of the movement, we initiated a closed assembly called The Hive. We framed it as an assembly that we were curating to be focused on shared action and reflection, explicitly not a decision-making space. The space was organized around three central principles: priority to grassroots, autonomous groups over non-profit and political organizations; a commitment to not undermining the work of other groups; and a commitment to not collaborating with the police against other wings of the movement. This last principle was intentionally crafted to make space for groups organized at state-run camps, which navigated complex relationships with the police and security that governed them, while holding a line to insulate the rest of the movement.
\n\nThe Hive brought together a wide range of factions including non-profits, self-organized homeless collectives, the street newspaper, DSA, mutual aid groups, tenant organizers, and harm reduction groups. It served as a venue for communication and cross-pollination across different groups and fronts of the struggle. At various points, the assembly grappled with questions related to squatting and takeover schemes, pushing back against policing in the COVID hotels, and forming locally-rooted support and defense groups for camps. Many of the relationships that formed through this assembly came to form the initial core of the Camp Support network.
\n\nBuilding on the relationships formed in the Hive, we were positioned to bring groups together to build out the Camp Support mutual aid network after existing social services shut down following the outbreak of COVID-19. One comrade connected us with a church kitchen; the local Food Not Bombs chapter provided know-how and a network of cooks to start sending out meals. As we met more groups after the George Floyd Uprising, we were able to help them connect to this work in addition to sweeps watch, bringing together a dozen or so small organizations offering everything from harm reduction to resources for sex workers. At first, the success of this network underlined the painfully slow response of the city government to the public health crisis.
\n\nThis was complicated when city resources finally caught up months into the pandemic and approached the network about using our volunteers to shuttle its prepared meals. The network accepted this deal, opting to use them as we pleased and to build what we hoped would be fighting relationships with camp residents. This part of the mutual aid work remained underdeveloped; the volunteers who brought food only showed up to fight alongside people at sweeps on rare occasions. Camp support coordinators did use their access to city food program meetings to pester city bureaucrats into putting pressure on the agencies running sweeps, and this was one prong of a successful effort to defeat most of the sweeps during the initial months of the pandemic.
\n\nOur ability to act decisively and maintain a wide range of complex relationships with other formations depended in large part on the high degree of trust and shared context within the core group of Stop the Sweeps, which emerged from our long-term relationships and experience throwing down together. The strong connections among our core group enabled us to take bold action and gave us the emotional resilience to engage in more complicated coalitional relationships with tact and grace. We had space to voice and think through critiques of other formations and strategies and to reflect on our relationships to other groups despite our differences. This helped release pressure and avoid unnecessary direct conflict.
\n\nAs time went on and some of our initial crew stepped back, we started to bring in new people we met through our activity. We developed a set of principles and a process for onboarding people, emphasizing experience working together and a sensibility that resonated with our principles and strategy. We avoided rushing to recruit people, and emphasized the many ways to get involved in specific forms of activity that did not require formally joining Stop the Sweeps—such as planning specific actions, coming to the Hive, and coordinating around sweeps defense. This process helped to expand our crew and bring in new energy at crucial moments, especially when the movement was beginning to scale up and we encountered a number of other fellow travelers.
\n\nThis also meant that the group composition slowly shifted so that there were fewer long-term, high-context relationships in the group. Eventually, many of us only knew each other from the movement against sweeps. As the latter phases of the movement brought more intense conflicts and we encountered new limits, members of our crew responded differently to these situations. Some members pushed to engage more directly in the intra-movement conflicts, such as by making demands of Austin Mutual Aid (AMA).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/23.jpg\")
Unhoused people and activists rally at an encampment set up at City Hall by Little Petal Alliance in response to the passage of the new camping ban.
\nWhen Little Petal Alliance (LPA) launched an occupation at City Hall in response to Prop B, our group was divided in new ways. Some members saw the occupation as an open-ended situation full of potential and self-organization that exceeded any one group, and wanted to engage with it; others were wary due to a combination of tactical critiques and legitimate criticisms of the harmful and opportunistic behaviors of members of LPA. When the camping ban ushered in the demolition of camps, some members pushed for more urgent activity and took out their frustrations on other participants in the movement. Most devastatingly, this led to a split with one of the unhoused activists who was a founding member. Our experience demonstrates the need to remain attuned to how the changing composition of a group over time, alongside shifting movement conditions, can change the forms of trust and collaboration that are possible, even if it nominally remains organized around the same principles and strategy.
\n\nUnderstanding our activity in terms of the constitution of poles allows us to evaluate our relationships with other formations on the basis of what they make possible or foreclose. Relationships with other groups—even those with whom we have significant differences when it comes to our orientation towards demands, reform, the state, or other institutions—can open up opportunities to leverage information, increase our ability to circulate proposals and influence other factions of the movement, and produce openings for creative forms of activity. If we understand the porous, shifting, open-ended nature of all groups, we can see how they might transform in the course of a movement. Cultivating relationships with groups that work with the state while maintaining our own irreducible antagonism towards it can create new tensions, reshaping the demands of other wings of the movement and making it more difficult for the authorities to divide a movement into those they can co-opt and those they can repress.
\n\nThe central consideration in such relationships is to keep the initiative and always maintain autonomy. Relationships can also have the effect of stifling possibilities rather than generating them; we can stifle our own initiatives for fear of upsetting other factions, end up tailing other formations, or become absorbed in the efforts of other groups. Maintaining the initiative within the field of movement polarity moves us away from the habit of merely critiquing other groups’ activities that we disagree with, so that we focus instead on how to develop and spread our own ideas and models for action as we collaborate and compete with others for influence.
\n\nThese relationships require minimum standards of respect. Active hostility or denouncements, undermining others’ efforts, collaborating with the state against other wings of the movement, or acting as an extension of state, politician, or capitalist influence over the movement often precludes such relationships. Such dynamics have often defined the relationship between autonomous groups and other factions of movements, whether reformist, non-profit, or authoritarian left. However, it is not inevitable that these relationships must always be antagonistic. An understanding of movement polarity can identify the avenues for collaboration beyond simplistic ideological categories, so that autonomous groups can avoid becoming trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict with everyone else.
\n\nOur relationships with Homes Not Handcuffs enabled us to receive and leverage certain forms of information regarding the motivations of city council members and the dynamics between them, upcoming meeting items and policy changes, and pressure points and information about the effects of our actions on the departments enacting the sweeps. We were also able to produce scandals as a means of shaping the demands that HnH brought to City Council, which enabled us to exert influence on the negotiations without participating in them. At the same time, we were able to continue agitating against the city departments and social service providers that the coalition negotiated with.
\n\nThis framework also helped us to locate our work in this particular campaign in relation to the broader radical milieu in Austin. In 2019, the organizing terrain was complicated for autonomous organizers. Most organizing was dominated by non-profit organizations, the vast majority of which were hostile to more radical activity. There was a range of progressive non-profit and community advocacy organizations that had more radical political ideas, but whose activity was mostly oriented around policy advocacy and rallies at City Hall. Within the radical milieu, the Maoist milieu surrounding Red Guards Austin (RGA) had absorbed many of the people looking for more militant activity who were dissatisfied with the community organizer scene. As a consequence of sectarian conflict with other movement organizations, abusive authoritarian dynamics, and reckless disregard for their members’ well-being, Red Guards Austin had poisoned the well for militant activity. It was hard to engage in militant organizing, criticize non-profits, or even to wear a mask without being accused of being part of Red Guards.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/17.jpg\")
An encampment at City Hall.
\nPart of our goal was to use our activity in Stop the Sweeps to open the field for more activity beyond the influence of the non-profit organizations and the Maoists. We developed a way of acting that emphasized autonomous principles without explicitly flagging ourselves as anarchists. We experimented with ways to push the tactical repertoire of the movement without entering into direct conflict with other factions or alienating potential collaborators. Many of us were intimately familiar with the caustic effect that the Maoists specifically had on movements that they entered and knew that we could not maintain our autonomy or initiative while working with them. We also knew that they thrived on direct conflict and polemics against other groups. So when they made attempts to gain inroads into the movement, we simply ignored them and did our own thing.
\n\nThere is a long history of conflict between the autonomous factions of various movements and those oriented towards reformist negotiations or party organization building. In some cases, the strategies of autonomous militants contribute to this dynamic, particularly when they create a situation in which the contradictions between groups are resolved through a simple sorting of ideological or tactical alignments. Call-outs and polemics, direct conflict with reformist or “less militant” factions of a movement, and filtering all political allegiances through a rigid ideological filter can mirror liberal denunciations, collaboration with the state, and peace policing.
\n\nIdeally, the framework of movement polarity offers an experimental path beyond this impasse, though it can challenge assumptions about the role of ideology. How correct our critiques are will make no difference if they only result in us constructing isolated cliques instead of developing the ability to intervene in complex situations. Our hypothesis is that positioning ourselves within these contradictions rather than forcing them towards a simple resolution can open up generative possibilities. We hope others will test and refine this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/15.jpg\")
\nWe were media savvy yet media critical. This is rare in a milieu divided between anarchists who oppose any engagement with media on principle and anarchists whose primary form of communication is the Instagram-Infographic-Industrial-Complex.
\n\nWe used social media as a tool to develop our own narrative and analysis of the sweeps. Every week, we would get practice writing reports on the previous week’s sweeps—drawing attention to their cruelty and to the growth of the resistance. This regular rhythm helped us document the sweeps at a point when most of the media coverage had dried up along with the attention of the larger organizations. As our posts spread—sometimes, ironically, due to reactionary hate comments boosting our performance in the algorithm—we were able to invite more people to join us in sweeps watch. For those who wouldn’t or couldn’t join, combining these posts with calls for phone and email blasts offered ways to enable spectators to participate.
\n\nAt the same time, we strategically engaged traditional news outlets. We had access to some media contacts thanks to Homes Not Handcuffs, and we mobilized a number of these outlets to cover the ARCH sweep and create political pressure around it. In the process, we developed a number of relatively friendly media connections who helped to circulate our narrative and occasionally follow up on reports and questions that helped to inform our campaigns.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/28.jpg\")
Austin police move to arrest a homeless Stop the Sweeps member who set up a protest tent outside of the downtown homeless shelter after the camp there was evicted.
\nAt a certain point, we were able to use an offensive media strategy to produce scandal. Whenever we caught the sweeps crew on camera in an egregious act—throwing out water during the height of summer, destroying camping supplies in violation of their stated “clean-up” policies, or harassing and threatening sweeps watch volunteers—we could circulate the media and draw negative attention. Sometimes, this alone was enough to exert pressure on the higher-ups, and we saw the crews act differently on subsequent sweeps.
\n\nSometimes, we took this further. We would generate a scandal, then tap one of our friendly media contacts to reach out to the relevant city department or company for comment. The department, trying to maintain public legitimacy, would make some minor concession to something we were demanding. The journalist would tweet out this response and, without waiting for a formal article, we would seize on this as new “policy.” Then we would launch a new set of demands, always pushing the envelope. We did not treat these demands as points of negotiation, but as discursive trenches—as soon as our enemies made a concession, we would dig new a new trench to keep pushing them further, ensuring they remained on the back foot. Combined with phone zaps and on-the-ground resistance, this approach de-fanged the sweeps for most of 2020.
\n\nWhether we were publishing our own reports or engaging with journalists, our strength came from developing our own strategy for engaging each of these media forms rather than letting them impose their logic on us. We used social media to circulate report-backs, but we avoided using it for discourse or petty conflict; we did not subordinate our political activities to the pursuit of followers or engagement. Similarly, we used corporate media to circulate our analysis and to produce scandals for our opponents while refusing to get mired in concerns about optics or respectability. Releasing a press release for a home demo was a way of seeking publicity on our own terms. We intentionally avoided news stations that we knew were hostile; we did not fetishize talking to media as an end in itself.
\n\nAll media and communication tools contain their own internal logic. If we don’t intentionally impose our own logic on them, they will impose their logic on us. Our movements already recognize how corporate media represent specific class interests. We are starting to become aware of how social media do the same—from outright censorship to the ways that algorithms privilege certain forms of interaction while suppressing others, thereby shaping how we think, act, and relate.
\n\nThis became especially clear to us as we reflected on one of our most-used tools, the Signal chat.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/1.jpg\")
What happens when all organizing moves to Signal?
\nEarly on in our campaign, we used Signal chats in limited ways. We communicated via one core chat for the Stop the Sweeps crew. Some of us maintained a small text blast system that we would plug new contacts into; we used this system to announce upcoming sweeps and bring people out to sweeps watch. We would follow up with them in direct messages, then orient them on the ground. This worked well enough until one week, the person bottom-lining follow-up fell ill. To streamline communication, they made a Signal chat including all the people who would be coming out for sweeps watch that day so we could coordinate with each other. Over the next few weeks, this pattern of starting coordination-focused group chats for sweeps days continued until we created a general sweeps watch chat, where a growing layer of participants from outside the core group could share information and self-organize breakout chats for specific sweeps.
\n\nThe sweeps watch Signal chat became the movement’s defining platform. As we encountered new allies and plugged them into sweeps defense, they would be added to this chat. The chat took on a life of its own, with people announcing upcoming sweeps and self-organizing separate chats for each week’s sweeps. At first, most people in the chat probably knew most other people in it, or else came to know them by participating in sweeps watch. The conversations were mostly limited to sweeps-related planning. The big Signal chat enabled us to scale up our organizing by taking the labor of follow-up and orientation off our hands: someone new could connect with other people on the ground and get the lay of the land from whatever experienced people were there. Creating another large channel to coordinate camp support—complete with its own array of breakout chats related to specific projects, infrastructure, and camps—increased the movement’s capacity to scale.
\n\nIf you’ve been running in activist circles long enough, you know where this is headed.
\n\nAt some point, the Signal chats hit a crucial turning point. They had expanded in size, in part due to the ballooning camp support network that was bringing new people into sweeps watch. By that time, a large number of the participants had not met each other. The expansion of the movement ecosystem meant people in each chat were likely involved in a number of other projects, with varying degrees of affinity or tension with other groups in the ecosystem. While this communication system worked for a while, it began to break down around the same time that the movement began to hit other limits.
\n\nThe big chats slowly lost their focus on coordination as people started to use them as discussion forums in which to debate strategy and tactics. At times, a small group of people would engage in lengthy discussion in the chats, with dozens of others as a captive audience. This became particularly fraught in moments of emotional intensity (for example, immediately after a sweep)—especially when the parties in conflict did not know each other or already had existing tensions. Over time, other movement conflicts were imported into the chat, as well. By the time the camping ban came down, these dynamics had already drained collective engagement in the big chats. Consequently, the movement fragmented as economic normalcy was imposed at the conclusion of the lockdown.
\n\nThe Signal chat is a useful tool, but like other communication platforms, it tends to impose its own logic. As a Signal chat grows, two things happen. First, the chats can generate too much noise to be helpful. High-traffic conversations among dozens of participants quickly add up to hundreds of messages, especially if there are not shared norms regarding what sort of information belongs in the channel. Second, the levels of trust and vulnerability decrease as fewer of the participants are connected by real relationships. This compounds with the way that tone, body language, and other aspects of communication are lost via text—so that when conflict takes place, it occurs without a basis for trust, leading to escalating tension and hurt feelings.
\n\nIn our experience, Signal chats were most useful when organized around a defined purpose, usually limited to coordinating and sharing information. Ideally big, chats should keep chatter to a minimum, making space for deeper coordination or planning conversations in smaller breakout chats, such as the date-specific sweeps watch chats. Strategic debates and conflicts should be worked out in small groups or private chats between comrades engaging in good faith. Higher-stakes emotional conversations or strategic debates should ideally take place in person or at least on a call, to maximize the extent to which the participants can be emotionally present and engage in a full spectrum of communication. It may be helpful to set a precedent for moderating and maintaining norms in a chat early on to ensure that chats do not devolve into meetings or amorphous discussion forums. Because we had not set that precedent at the outset, it was difficult for us to intervene as moderators.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/11.jpg\")
Sweeps watch.
\nThese are ways to adjust how we use the tool; but we should also reduce our dependence on the tool. If a Signal chat is frequently being overwhelmed with other kinds of conversation, that indicates a need for additional containers. In our experience, while there were lots of meetings to deal with the week-to-week activities, our movement had few containers for broader reflection or debate, few release valves for tensions and conflict. Building these missing components into our movements is essential—otherwise, what you repress will eventually burst into the chat in explosive ways.
\n\nSome of these things are more feasible with Signal now. Signal has since added Admin roles and permissions, which enable better moderation and the creation of announcement-only channels. Movements may benefit from centering dedicated announcement-only channels in order to ensure that a broad range of participants receive the most essential updates. Letting smaller chats handle planning, coordination, and strategy can create more intentional and sustainable avenues for those conversations.
\n\nOn the other hand, it can inhibit a movement to over-correct and impose limits too early. If your organizing channels consist of small chats without much activity, it’s not helpful to impose rules to limit activity—and rather than reducing message quantity, too many breakout channels containing the same five people will only gratuitously inflate the number chats. While it eventually limited us, for a time, the open Signal chat enabled us to grow. The best thing is to anticipate the limits and develop plans for addressing them as you reach them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/14.jpg\")
Home: don’t steal.
\nThe last year or two of the camp support movement was defined by conflicts around money. This mirrored similar conflicts elsewhere around the country between 2020 and 2022. Questions about who raised money and what they used it for became divisive, provoking inflammatory conflicts that dissolved organizations, even entire movements. We want to reflect on our experiences for the next time these questions resurface and offer some thoughts for movements elsewhere to consider as well.
\n\nIn the early weeks of Stop the Sweeps, we carried out limited goal-oriented fundraising, chiefly to replace tents, sleeping bags, and other essential survival gear lost in the sweeps. This was strategic as well as ethical: replenishing these supplies helped maintain the camps and thwart the goal of the sweeps. Our largest fundraising effort was a $3000 GoFundMe to buy 100 tents. The member with keys to the GoFundMe tracked itemized withdrawals and purchases. Since the goals were clear and the stakes relatively low, we were able to make most decisions easily over Signal chats, filling time-sensitive needs for shelter after each sweep. Most discussions focused on which stores to purchase from. Occasionally, we also fundraised for bail and legal funds for friends who were arrested resisting the sweeps. Had we expanded the scope of our fundraising, made larger purchases, or made fundraising a core facet of our organizing strategy, we might have needed a different container for financial decisions.
\n\nMoney played a bigger and more controversial role in the camp support movement, which from its early days networked together a number of different initiatives around shared infrastructure, such as collective kitchens that relied on various organizations for their distribution network. One group, named Austin Mutual Aid (AMA), began to form a fundraising apparatus for this network. Its founder, Bobby Cooper, was a contentious figure; a white man from New York who had organized in Occupy Sandy, his ego and abrasive personality caused some tensions in this network. For the most part, the network was big enough and Austin Mutual Aid small enough that people could hold them at a distance, only approaching them for funds around things like water in the summer or cold-weather gear in the winter.
\n\nThings changed with Winter Storm Uri in 2021. AMA had had the forethought to claim a name primed for search engine optimization. As millions around the country turned their attention to supporting groups in Texas, AMA’s winter fundraiser gained mainstream attention—going so far as to be shared by cast members of Queer Eye. It ballooned to some $3 million, and AMA gained the national media spotlight as the face of mutual aid in Austin. Suddenly, a group that had been marginal and annoying was central to the movement. This inflamed the existing tensions and resentments, adding stakes on the scale of millions of dollars.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/10.jpg\")
Volunteers sort through clothes at an ad-hoc Austin mutual aid donation center during Winter Storm Uri.
\nThe following months saw protracted conflicts over the allocation of this money, the handling of the Winter Storm response in general, and AMA’s role in relation to the rest of the movement. The conflict crossed Signal threads, Instagram slide decks, and many-hours-long Zoom and Jitsi calls. Probably every organization in the movement had at least one meeting about AMA, and many participated in AMA’s “community meeting” to decide how to distribute the money. Among other things, people accused AMA of taking credit for work that was largely carried out by other groups, raising money and gatekeeping access to it, white saviorism, charity-style work, using other groups’ media for their own fundraising, and not using the funds to offer people long-term housing, whether in the hotels that were taken over during the freeze or in regular apartments.
\n\nStop the Sweeps participated in some of these conflicts, including private criticisms of AMA, social media call-outs, and hour-long Zoom calls. How might we have approached those conflicts differently? How could future movements avoid or mitigate them?
\n\nThere was certainly truth to the criticisms of AMA. There was a crucial moment when AMA’s fundraising far exceeded what they had hoped to raise or had plans for. That could have been a good time to pause their fundraiser and direct potential donors to some of the other projects that were raising funds, like the Jordan’s Place police-free autonomous zone established by the Black revolutionary organization 400+1 in East Austin during the 2021 winter storm. Instead, AMA leaned into the spotlight, taking media appearances, speaking on behalf of the movement, and claiming others’ work.
\n\nAMA’s blunders should serve as a warning to any group that might accidentally stumble into large sums of money—as a number of pre-existing bail funds and mutual aid projects did in 2020—to take a cautious and disciplined approach to finances. Organize fundraisers with clear plans for how much you hope to raise and how you will use it. While it can be great to exceed goals, at a certain scale, raising more money than anticipated can create confusion, liability, and conflict. It may be better to shut down a fundraiser once it has exceeded its goal and direct people to other groups. This can insulate your crew from money conflicts, redistribute resources in crucial ways, and help build goodwill with the broader movement.
\n\nRegardless of who raises them, large sums of money can generate conflict and create liability. While AMA was a particularly controversial organization, we doubt that any organization that ended up in that position would have avoided criticism and conflict. Controlling large amounts of money and attention inevitably stokes resentment, jealousy, and political factionalism. Even if a group has a solid plan for raising and using large amounts of money, and even if that group maintains good relations and collaboration with other factions of the movement, the existence of that fundraising capacity can give rise to all sorts of friction. The project you are funding will be criticized: it’s not militant, not mutual aid, not strategic, not sustainable, not democratic enough, it doesn’t center the right groups, it’s not safe enough, not organized enough. Not all of this critique will be in good faith; some of it will simply be a cover for interpersonal or factional competition.
\n\nWe should be generous and graceful in our criticisms of groups that stumble into money. While we should generate and share good-faith political critiques of the decisions that they make, moralizing and attacks often do not help anyone. Groups are not necessarily enemies or threats to a movement because they don’t use money in the ways that we think they should or distribute it through the process we consider most just. Many such groups are simply figuring out a complicated situation as they go, the same way we would in their shoes.
\n\nIf we aim to work in movements that involve a wide range of political and strategic orientations, we will have to accept diverging perspectives on big questions. Unnecessarily escalating political conflicts into movement-wide fractures consumes a disproportionate amount of everyone’s energy, sapping it from more fruitful activities. When we identify the political differences that distinguish us from another group, those offer ripe ground for launching new projects, leading by example, and acting on our own terms, rather than simply criticizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/32.jpg\")
Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
\nTo understand the rapid growth of the movement against sweeps and its ultimate collapse, it is helpful to think of movements as always running up against and struggling to transcend particular limits. Focusing on the limits of movements moves us from a framework that externalizes our problems (blaming them on liberals, non-profits, the state, the police, sectarians, authoritarians, rival factions) to a framework that approaches our problems chiefly as internal, organizational questions. If our movements will inevitably confront co-optation, repression, or fragmentation, we should look inward to understand what aspects of our strategy make us vulnerable to these and experiment with ways to become capable of overcoming them.
\n\nThe effectiveness of any tactic is determined by context. This includes considerations such as whether it brings new people into the movement, whether the movement can sustain the tactic, and how prepared our enemies are to mitigate its effectiveness. The same tactic repeated in a different context, or even at a different point in the same movement, can produce completely different results. Innovation and experimentation can help overcome limits related to tactics, while fetishizing or stigmatizing tactics can keep a movement stuck in ineffective repetition.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/26.jpg\")
Sweeps watchers try to save a tent during a sweep off Riverside Drive in 2019. This sweep was one of our early victories; we stalled the crew for hours and ultimately saved the camp.
\nTranscending the limits of sweeps watch by reorienting towards camp support helped us expand the movement at a crucial moment. For the first few months, the rhythm of sweeps watch helped us connect to people in the camps, plug people into a concrete activity, gather information about the contractors, gain experience in confrontational action, and make a political scandal out of the sweeps. Over time, we began to hit new limits, as we could not add numbers fast enough to keep up with the sweeps and faced arrests as a consequence of new work zone rules. Before COVID-19 hit, we had already begun to imagine alternative ways to approach sweeps watch, such as creating locally-based networks in the neighborhoods near particular camps.
\n\nThe switch to camp support activated a new, broader network of people and activities. People built consistent relationships with the specific camps they supported, which enabled them to report back on camp needs and any sweeps announcements. This brought more people into sweeps defense generally, so that our smaller group’s capacity wasn’t always stretched to its limit. Camp support also overcame a barrier to using the old sweeps defense model during the pandemic: when traveling between the camps posed the risk of inter-camp viral transmission, the distributed defense model helped mitigate that threat. As camp support grew, so did our capacity to mobilize people against the sweeps through sweeps defense, phone zaps, and car demos. This network also leaped into action with the George Floyd Rebellion. One of the main battlegrounds of the rebellion in Austin was in front of APD headquarters, where protestors shared the space with a camp under the highway overpass at I-35 and 7th Street. After the height of the uprising, many individuals and new groups joined the network, turning to mutual aid work as a continuation of the uprising, sometimes at the same location.
\n\nTactics that generate potential at one time can themselves become limits. This becomes clear when we reflect on the missed opportunities of “mutual aid.” Camp support arose at a critical moment when existing social services had shut down due to the pandemic, leaving many on the street without consistent access to food and other necessities. Filling this gap, mutual aid was a way of securing the survival of the camps; this hearkens back to some of the forms of mutual aid as communal care and support that precede colonialism and capitalism, and which oppressed and exploited peoples have used to survive within them. During the first phase of the pandemic, the Camp Support network basically supplanted the city’s disaster response efforts. This recurred when the network mobilized to supply and shelter dozens of people during Winter Storm Uri, filling in where the city government did nothing. In both cases, the network’s efforts compelled the city to offer access to some food program meetings and to ask to use the network to deliver its prepared meals. The network made use of these resources, nominally towards its own ends.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/9.jpg\")
Supplies stored in an Austin Mutual Aid donation center after Winter Storm Uri.
\nThese efforts were closely tied to confrontational movement activity, as they were connected to sweeps defense, the rent strike movement of the early pandemic, and the George Floyd Rebellion; consequently, they were also part of a broader strategic framework. By the end of 2021, however, something had changed. The initial political context of camp support had been forgotten. Moralistic rhetoric framed mutual aid as a radical act unto itself, putting it above criticism and turning it into an obligation. This erased the need for mutual aid to be connected to other confrontational political activity; the only purpose was to provide the most meals to the greatest number of people. At the same time, the conditions were changing: social services had resumed, making camp support food distribution less essential, and even wasteful in some cases. Yet to make an argument for focusing on something other than “mutual aid” was considered unthinkable.
\n\nWe suspect that our experiences with the fetishization of “mutual aid” were a fractal reflection of a national trend. For us, mutual aid is important as a political project, not a moral task. Camp support and food distribution are good, but whether they are worth the majority of our organizing efforts depends on the conditions we are acting in and what the results will be. We understood camp support as a way to deepen our relationships with the camps, seeing the meal as a chance to build a foundation for trust so as to collaborate in more militant sweep defense or combative activity around other issues. This framework is distinct from a social services model that treats service provision as the end goal. It demands that we evaluate how much energy mutual aid efforts take and whether they are worth pursuing at the expense of other tasks.
\n\nThis form of mutual aid also ran up against limits we can see in previous cycles of autonomous disaster response and mutual aid. In the initial window of a disaster, autonomous groups can effectively set up and sustain infrastructure to support large groups of people. While highly effective during this window of time, they are rarely able to translate this into a deeper crisis for the state or the economy, nor to undermine the inevitable reimposition of normalcy, organize new and enduring social relationships, or transform these efforts into sustainable and combative projects after the disaster recedes.
\n\nNotably, what people were calling mutual aid was decidedly not mutual; it was a largely one-directional, service-oriented model of activism. Early on, this emerged of necessity due to COVID-19 precautions, which limited our ability to build more collective relationships and gather with people. However, over time, this meant that the relationship between a camp support volunteer and a food insecure person in a camp was primarily defined by the giving and receiving of a meal. Sometimes, this relationship included other “case worker” services, such as help with medical services and public benefits—but that, also, failed to break the dynamic of service provider and recipient. Delivering food did not in itself generate deeper political relationships, enable shared struggle, or build the reciprocity that could grow into new kinds of social relationships and life-giving infrastructure.
\n\nAdditionally, this meant that very little of the infrastructure built for camp support could actually sustain the ones doing the work—instead, it wore out the small handful of people who coordinated most of the effort. The early growth of camp support was possible in large part due to the pandemic shutdown, with paused or remote work and increased benefits enabling large numbers of people to dedicate time to the efforts. By spring 2021, however, the slow reimposition of normalcy meant that benefits were drying up, life was getting more expensive, and more people had to go back to work, draining the network’s capacity. With most of the infrastructure geared towards outward-facing service provision, the mutual aid networks could not provide people the support they needed to stay engaged in the movement. In the slow decay of the mutual aid networks, we were neither living nor fighting.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/21.jpg\")
\nThis model of activism is ripe for cooptation because it is essentially similar to state or NGO social services—just horizontally organized and less well-funded. Without no political strategy beyond feeding as many people as possible, in the face of waning capacity due to changing economic conditions, it was difficult to justify refusing to collaborate with the city government or social service providers. While the radical wings of the movement decried these changes with radical rhetoric, there was no alternative strategic framework to illuminate the limits of the camp support model. Radical ideas do not sustain people in a movement, resources and infrastructure do—and the radical wing of the movement was largely competing with the state and the nonprofit-industrial complex on their home turf. The limitations of the camp support model set the stage for the cooptation of certain wings of the movement, with groups like AMA working with social service providers like ECHO and Little Petal Alliance forming the mobile outreach wing of Sunrise Church.
\n\nIf power is fundamentally determined by infrastructure, movements also confront infrastructural limits. What are the supply lines that move resources, the entry points that bring in new people, the sites of care that help reproduce the movement, the hubs where we can organize combative actions or spaces for reflection? What are their vulnerabilities, and how can our adversaries attack them? These may be direct attacks—raids, evictions, restrictions, regulation—or other issues, such as an economic shift that forces people to step back from a movement in order to resume earning money.
\n\nIf we accept that movements inevitably go through phases of growth and shrinkage, we can orient our strategies towards anticipating and responding to these moments. Movement growth can necessitate new organizing formats or infrastructure to accommodate new participants, lest they overload the existing channels; movement shrinkage also requires abandoning rigid practices to make room for new possibilities. In the growth phase of a movement, the key thing is to be flexible and decisive in order to seize opportunities to level up. During movement decline, it is important to make space for reflection and strategic reorientation, to be prepared to drop practices that are no longer effective or sustainable. A movement increasing its capacity during a growth phase feels very different from a movement contracting in its decline phase, even when the movement’s actual capacity is in fact greater in the latter case.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/20.jpg\")
A tent set up on the lawn of the WorkQuest CEO during a Stop the Sweeps home demo that took place at a time when the movement’s capacities were growing.
\nWhat could have helped us to surpass the limits we reached? In view of the camp support network’s ability to out-organize the city government in the early phase of crisis, how could we have used this position of power to undercut its legitimacy, make deeper connections with those we were supporting, reinvent social relationships via new experiments in organization, or build enduring infrastructure to enable collective survival? We can try out Phil Neel’s use of the concept of “competitive control,” a term used by military strategists to describe insurgencies that produce a base of support and an alternative geography of resistance by providing services and stability where the state has failed, often alongside efforts to destabilize the state. While this framework is derived from military thought and applied to a range of repressive forces like the Taliban, it can help us to consider how autonomous forces might build power in conditions of crisis and collapse.
\n\nWe can consider the efforts of 400+1 to establish an autonomous zone named Orisha Land during Winter Storm Uri as a source of inspiration. 400+1 was a federation and cadre organization oriented towards Black revolutionary autonomy that acted parallel to the camp support network, with some overlap, collaboration, and connection between the movements. During Winter Storm Uri, they declared an autonomous police-free zone called Orisha Land in the historically Black (but gentrifying) Rosewood neighborhood. They occupied a park to establish a resource hub and shelter for unhoused Black people. Renaming the park Jordan’s Place, after a Black man named Jordan Walton who was killed by APD, they maintained the occupation for a few weeks after the storm and broadcast proposals for transforming the park with gardens, community programming, and ambitious visions for shelter and housing.
\n\nThe city government ultimately cleared 400+1 out of the park in a repressive maneuver parallel to its recuperation of “mutual aid” groups. While the city government incorporated some aspects of the mutual aid network, using the groups as volunteer pools for future crisis responses such as running warming and cooling centers and distributing supplies, it repressed the militant faction that was contesting its legitimacy. This counterinsurgency strategy undoubtedly inflamed some of the later movement conflicts, as those who witnessed the eviction of Jordan’s Place while AMA aligned with the city government and service provider alliance directed their ire against the latter.
\n\n400+1 were not without their own limitations, some of which they shared with the broader movement. While they were capable of powerful gestures, these were often primarily spectacular, such as a live-streamed armed procession around the neighborhood to declare the autonomous zone. Some former members report that they did not manage to follow through on all of the promises that they made to people during the Winter Storm occupation. In 2022, the group saw an exodus of members in response to internal hierarches and conflicts over responses to harm within the organization.1 Still, without romanticizing this organization, we can evaluate the strategic direction they pursued: exploiting the crisis of the winter storm and the failure of the police to maintain order to contest the state’s control of territory and promote combative visions of neighborhood-based autonomy.
\n\nWhat similar experiments could the camp support and sweeps defense networks have undertaken? Attempts to occupy vacant housing, hotels, or restaurants in order to establish autonomous shelters, kitchens, or resource hubs would have served to contest the state and private property. Such gestures, even if unsuccessful, can erode state control and legitimacy during crises, while opening directions that counterbalance the threat of cooptation. Some of us discussed this and followed some of these threads over the course of the movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/16.jpg\")
The police and cooptation are two sides of the same coin.
\nThere were moments when this approach seemed possible, such as when the network was able to run a shelter out of a hotel during the winter storm with the acquiescence of the manager. There were loose discussions about turning this into an ongoing occupation after the storm, but the necessary combination of attention, resources, and opportunity never coalesced. Perhaps if some of these gestures had proliferated, they could have worked in tandem with the efforts in Orisha Land to heighten the crisis, creating an ecosystem of escalation that could have frustrated efforts to repress some initiatives while recuperating the others. Since winter storms have become a nearly annual occurrence in Austin, mutual aid groups could build the relationships and capacities over the year to launch such initiatives when the next one hits.
\n\nBeyond these offensive paths, the network also could have tried to create lasting autonomous infrastructure. Building infrastructure for outdoor mobile kitchens or collectively-managed kitchens that could operate long term without dependence on churches could have enabled the movement to grow and transform. Perhaps, as vaccination access made it possible to begin gathering with others again, the network’s activity could have shifted from constant meal delivery services to hosting community dinners at which food was not simply given but shared, fostering new kinds of social relationships while sustaining the people making the food and running the space. Such communal gathering spaces could host trainings, assemblies, and strategic conversations—so that sharing food would give rise to collective deliberation, forming the basis for future projects. Ambitious proposals like these could have flourished by making use of the money AMA doled out after the winter storm.
\n\nAnother path could have included shifting away from food delivery towards projects that addressed a need while simultaneously creating new relationships beyond the service provision model. Community gardens could have opened up new kinds of relationships with housed people supported by the mutual aid network; tending gardens offers a shared project to bring together activists and neighbors, which can help sustain households and open up relations of sharing with other neighbors. The vegetables grown could supply a broader network of food delivery and collective kitchens. A squatted garden in an occupied lot could offer space for unhoused people to camp and a rallying point to defend against gentrification.
\n\nWe can’t know what path the movement should have taken. Actualizing any of these possibilities would have involved messy, situational questions. We can keep these horizons and strategic directions in mind for the next time we enter a similar cycle of struggle, but seizing these opportunities depends less on analytical precision than on our ability to strategize and plan in the midst of an emerging situation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/4.jpg\")
Take the offensive.
\nThe dwindling phase of the movement from spring 2021 into 2022 was a perfect storm of movement shrinkage, fragmentation, conflict, and escalating state repression, with each factor intensifying the others in destructive feedback loops. Economic pressures compounded the cumulative effects of over a year of intense movement activity, contributing to a buildup of tension, trauma, and burnout. Unaddressed emotional dynamics exploded around high-stakes contention following the freeze, worsening previous resentments. Escalating conflicts accelerated the process of decline as they consumed the movement’s limited capacity, while others who were less invested simply withdrew. The escalation of repression with the passage of the city camping ban, the statewide camping ban, and the scorched earth sweeps over the summer increased the pressure on the movement in the midst of these dynamics. Heightened urgency and stakes caused an even greater explosion of conflict as people took out their frustrations about the movement’s limited capacity on each other. Decline produces conflict produces decline; repression causes decline and conflict, which amplify the effects of repression. A vicious cycle in which we were the main actors, with our enemies largely in the background.
\n\nIn addition to being our own worst enemies, our entire milieu was targeted by at least one bad actor using the moniker “Precious.” This person sought to map our traumas and fault lines, extract money, and exacerbate tensions. In the aftermath of the massive monetary windfall received by Austin Mutual Aid, a member of our collective began corresponding with the “Precious” Instagram account. “Precious” was later linked to a set of other accounts across social media that had targeted organizers across the South in Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta using the same playbook of social mapping techniques and warped social justice language to call out organizations for various failings, real or invented. Several of these accounts were revealed to carry right-wing content if one scrolled back.
\n\nThis episode was later documented and reported on by others using a dossier created by members of the impacted organizations. We mention this here to emphasize that when trust is already low and strategic thinking compromised, other actors will find ways to exploit the opportunities that open up.
\n\nMovements in decline must learn to lose better. That means clearly assessing our capacities, the conditions we are facing, and what is and is not possible. This can be a heavy task. Admitting defeats means accepting the grave consequences that come with them; in 2021, it would have meant admitting that we were no longer in a position to stop the sweeps and all the devastation they inflicted. We must grieve these losses while discerning what we can preserve from a phase of struggle in order to position ourselves for the next fight, wherever it emerges. Seeking to do this would shift our focus from desperate attempts to throw what little we have at our enemy to identifying which relationships, infrastructure, practices, and actions can equip us to lay the groundwork for the next phase of struggle. That approach could enable us to return to an asymmetrical conflict framework and to avoid getting locked into losing direct confrontations with our enemies. Strategic retreats, regrouping, and reorientation can enable a movement to continue taking the initiative instead of merely reacting, in order to be better prepared to intervene in the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/6.jpg\")
Our enemies in orange.
\nStrategic thinking should not depend on the analytical, perceptive, or strategic capabilities of select individuals; it must become a political practice involving the entire movement. Even small gestures by crews and collectives articulating new principles and strategies can open a space for reflection. Collective infrastructure or practices can offer space for the movement to reflect on and adjust its activity, analyze changing landscapes, identify strategic opportunities and limitations, and release difficult emotions, tensions, and concerns. Such spaces can help build the strategic capabilities and emotional resilience of the movement. They can enable people to encounter each other across organizational or ideological lines, facilitating a circulation of ideas and strategies that can prevent the calcification of rigid ideological camps.
\n\nSuch efforts can take various forms. In our experience, they included articulating a set of political principles and strategic interventions through sweeps defense in order to constitute another pole in a movement; building working relationships with a wide spectrum of actors, from factions within encampments to activist groups, in order to enable collaboration and the circulation of tactical insights; and assembling The Hive as a space for coordination, reflection, and proposing new directions. In The Hive, in particular, we see both positive examples and missed opportunities.
\n\nThe relationships we built through the early Hive assemblies became the foundation of the early camp support network, which implemented some of the strategic conversations that had started in The Hive about neighborhood-based camp defense networks. This enabled the movement to level up at a critical moment. The Hive continued at a slow but steady rhythm through 2020, growing to include a wide range of factions at the height of the movement. However, by 2021, we had fallen out of practice. Assemblies saw less attendance as people focused on more urgent day-to-day work and meetings, and we put less effort into facilitating or reinvigorating them. By the time that the movement began to fracture and decline, there was no dedicated space or practiced rhythm for processing, addressing tensions, or big picture strategy discussions. Without dedicated infrastructure for facilitating these conversations, most organizations simply focused on the immediate needs of their particular project.
\n\nContinuing The Hive might not have resolved these problems. Strategic thinking is a habit that must be practiced and built into the rhythms of our work. We can offer a space for it, but that doesn’t guarantee that others in the movement will accept the invitation. If participants do not take it seriously, or cannot dedicate time to it due to the demands of their projects, the benefits will be limited. Nonetheless, such infrastructure has value even if only a minority of movement participants utilize it. It can still position them to make more effective interventions and proposals, holding open the window for strategic thinking and initiative. We must move from diagnosing our movement’s crises in the aftermath of their collapse to actively experimenting with ways to overcome their limits.
\n\nThose who participate in future cycles of struggle will continue to grapple with these questions. How can autonomous mutual aid efforts use the opening of a disaster and their ability to out-organize government responses to further undercut the legitimacy of the state and the economy? If we understand daily life within capitalist social relations as a constantly simmering crisis, how might projects that arise in reaction to acute crises (such as COVID-19 and the winter storm) maintain their initiative as the window of the disaster closes? How do we move away from a unidirectional, service-oriented model of activism to a model that generates new social relationships and communal infrastructure for meeting shared needs? How can mutual aid and crisis response enable a movement to take the offensive? There is no single right answer or right tactic; what counts is the ability to pose the necessary questions, stay creative, and take the initiative.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/38.jpg\")
This could be you.
\nWe believe the questions we grappled with will reappear because the struggle against sweeps is a harbinger of the struggles against precarity, dispossession, and displacement to come. We have already seen the encampments reappear in the refugee camps around Gaza and the solidarity encampments on college campuses in the United States—where, in Austin, some have experimented with using Signal to transcend some of the limits we discuss here. The camp is an image of the future—a future in which increased economic precarity, climate crises, wars, and state repression produce new waves of displacement and migration, and new forms of repression and managerial governance arise in response. Migrant caravans form tent cities at the border, facing the brutality of Border Patrol and police alongside the bureaucracy of the immigration system and resettlement programs; migrants bussed to New York end up circulating between camps and shelters, facing the brutality of sweeps and the bureaucracy of NGO management alongside a precarious working class that already cannot find sustainable employment or afford rising rents due to waves of gentrification.
\n\nAs these crises intensify, the question of insurgent survival appears on the horizon. We need to organize collective sustenance and dignity in the face of the dispossessions to come—and to do so in ways that will undermine and fragment the forces of the state and capital. To do so, we will have to act both from within and alongside the ranks of the precarious and dispossessed and to join forces with the forms of insurgent self-organization that emerge, such as encampments and migrant caravans. The question is how to simultaneously survive the crises inflicted by the prevailing order with dignity while throwing it into crisis in a way that enables us to explore new ways of living.
\n\n—Some former members of Stop the Sweeps ATX
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/5.jpg\")
\nThe successes, limits, and lessons of 400+1 are not our story to tell. We encourage our comrades who participated in that organization to publish their own reflections. ↩
\nFive years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.
\n\nThis is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.
\n\nOctober 2019 in Santiago, Chile. The president has called in the armed forces against the people for the first time since the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.
\n\n“Wait, I don’t get it. The advertisements are untouched. There’s not even graffiti. Not a single window is broken.”
\n\n“Yes. And?”
\n\n“I mean, the shelves are all empty. Did they just evacuate all the merchandise, or was it actually looted?”
\n\n“Haha what? Of course it was looted, the whole neighborhood looted it. Well, women and children first.”
\n\n“And no one destroyed anything?”
\n\n“Look, the idea isn’t to give them a bigger insurance check. Besides, if things keep going the way they are, that building may soon be ours.”
\n\n“That would be a serious step. I can’t imagine things ever reaching this point where I come from. Good luck with your struggle.”
\n\n“No! No, no, no, brother—our struggle. You’re here. You’re in this. Tell people.”
\n\n“I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone back home.”
\n\n“Explain it like this: neoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/5.jpg\")
The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”
\nOn October 17, 2019, Chile’s student movement was on its heels, facing new legislation that put police in schools for the very first time. With the students’ normal organizing environment swept out of their control, the movement launched a campaign against a routine increase in public transit fare. With a right-wing billionaire in the presidency, the prospects for resistance looked dim.
\n\nEverything changed in a single day. On October 18, a small rush-hour protest at a metro transfer station triggered a stoppage of Santiago’s entire public transit system. As commuters were stuck in hot traffic, images of police beating students began to circulate on their phones.
\n\nSantiago exploded. In one weekend, over a hundred metro stations were attacked, with ten completely destroyed. A quarter of the Wal-Marts (the largest grocery chain) in Chile were looted or burned. The government declared martial law in response to civil disturbance for the first time since the 1973-1990 Pinochet military dictatorship—but the people would not back down.
\n\nChile graffiti reel, 2019-2020.
\nWe decided to take a break from our country after I finally beat criminal charges resulting from participating in combative political activity. We had just crossed the border out of Ecuador when we heard reports about an uprising there. Peasants were marching on the capitol, choking off the highways to force the president to reverse proposed austerity measures.
\n\nYou said, “We should go back.”
\n\nI said, “If it were Chile…”
\n\nJust two weeks later, it was.
\n\nI’m not from Chile, but I lived there for years.
\n\nWe arrived in Santiago a week before everything exploded, and almost immediately encountered an evasión [a collective fare-dodging action] that students were staging. It was your first time in Chile, and I was excited for you to get a small taste of student rebellion. And, hey, getting where we were going quicker without having to pay the second highest transit fare in Latin America?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/9.jpg\")
Evasion, 2019.
\nOK. But the best part was how fun it was. It was so fun that the following day, when we heard the shriek of students rushing down the escalators towards the turnstiles, that we ditched our free bus ride and rushed into the station. As if we had just scored the winning goal, the teenage rebels thrilled, chanting “If you don’t jump, you’re a cop!” as we hopped through the turnstiles they had liberated. We kept evading whenever we encountered fare-dodging actions that week, even if we didn’t really need a metro ride.
\n\nOn October 18, I was supposed to give a talk at some friends’ anarchist ateneo [social center]. You were out on the town while I was back at my old apartment preparing. You WhatsApp’d me some videos of kids wilding out in the metro station. Was it really Los Heroes [a metro station]?1 You were at the center of history? God damn. I just YeahYeahYeah’d you because I had seen Chilean riots before. “Oh I’m glad you got to see that. We have to get ready to leave though.”
\n\nYou—somehow—got back to my old apartment where we were staying. Knowing what I know now, I don’t even understand how you got there in time. But you were always good at finding me in the streets over the coming months, even when things got chaotic. What should have been a 45-minute commute to the ateneo took two and a half hours. Time can be elastic in Chile, sure, but it really shouldn’t take that long.
\n\nSomehow, we got there. No one else did, though. Over the months that followed, the coolest people I met flattered me with, “Oh, I was going to come to your talk that day! But then, well…”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/8.jpg\")
The CrimethInc. presentation in Villa Francia on October 18, 2019.
\nAs we waited for an audience, I saw two ten-year-olds walking down the middle of the street with a children’s couch the size of a playpen.
\n\n“There’s no way they’re gonna do what I think they’re gonna do to that couch, right?”
\n\nThey did. Right onto the fire at the end of the block. We started to piece it together: what you had seen, no one at the event, the heavy traffic, this flaming barricade. Santiago was going off.
\n\nWe crossed downtown to our friend’s apartment, closer to the action, but it turned out the action was everywhere. The husk of a bus. Smoldering buildings. At one point, our cab driver wasn’t sure what to do because the intersection had cops on one side and fighting encapuchados [masked heroes] on the other.
\n\nI was still YeahYeahYeah-ing your wide eyes when I left the following day, despite all my friends’ insistence that this was something special. When I got to the anarchist book fair in Buenos Aires—to give my talk again—the whole book fair was cancelled. They managed to get through a couple of the time slots, but everyone was talking about Chile. Looking at their phones. Cheering for our team whenever we struck a blow and expressing outrage every time there was news about repression. It didn’t take long for the organizers to pack it all in and just open up the social center so the whole book fair could simply watch the news from Chile.
\n\nMy friend, one of the organizers, walked over to me while I was wide-eyeing the events on the television. He whispered to me, “Dude, why the fuck did you leave?”
\n\nThe third time I tried to give my ill-fated talk, it was in the middle of the revolt, both temporally and territorially. Some anarchists had opened up a squat in one of the looted and abandoned businesses right by the main protest plaza. Enough people said they still wanted to see my talk—even though I didn’t understand why they would be interested in anything other than what was going on around us—that I decided to organize a presentation at the squat. Plus, I loved the space and wanted to keep it active. During talks there, one would regularly hear the uproar of revolt just outside the door, although we occasionally had to tuck our heads into our knees and wait out the wafting clouds of teargas.
\n\nNobody came. The host had been optimistic, but after waiting a couple of hours, he informed me that the legendary 1970s Basque punk band, La Polla Records, was playing in a stadium that day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/10.jpg\")
Fifty years of punk rock in the middle of an insurrection: “No rest, no peace!”
\n“I don’t really like punk rock, so I didn’t mind opening up the space for you. But I guess everyone’s there.”
\n\nBut I do like punk rock. So I grabbed my loosies and hopped on my bike.
\n\nAlmost ten years ago now, five punks died in Santiago when bouncers violently beat back a rush of poor punks who were trying to get into a show where the British crust band Doom was playing. Wanting to avoid a similar situation—or simply intimidated by the uncontrollable, pay for nothing, fight for everything spirit that was consuming Chile—the security at the stadium would simply allow you to walk in without a ticket. I even took my bicycle in.
\n\nInside the stadium, 15,000 punks were letting their hair down. Out in the plaza, every sector of the oppressed was present, and while we gave the cops our worst, we tried to be on our best behavior with each other because survival depended on our collective bonds. For example, a fragile truce existed during those months between the different soccer hooligan barras bravas so that they could fight the police together. On the rare occasions that fights did break out between demonstrators, everyone would chant “If you fight, you’re a cop! If you fight, you’re a cop!” Wild anarchist idealists went to the plaza with their most polished pitches to promote the values we believed would deepen the revolt.
\n\nInside that stadium, however, the pressure was off. The plaza always had an element of carnival, but the La Polla Records show felt much more like a celebration of how far the anarchy had gone. If you know, you know, and everyone there got it—all punks—and we could just be bad because being bad together was so good. We didn’t need justifications or explanations, we could just enjoy the environment of collective, chaotic rebellion. While we had to mind our interactions on the frontline (“If you recognize me behind my mask, no you didn’t”), lest buchón sapo [Argentine, then Chilean, for “snitch”] plainclothes track our social connections, here in the stadium, those of us who had maintained a professional candor with each other in the streets could embrace and see the whole of each other’s faces erupting in radiant laughter.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/7.jpg\")
Demonstrators snap a photo of the declaration of intra-hooligan, anti-police unity. It reads, “We lost too much time fighting among ourselves,” with each word atop the colors of a different team.
\nEveryone was sharing alcohol and weed and whatever else they had. A skinhead hooligan had hacked the stadium’s sprinkler system and was spraying mist over his section of the crowd under the hot summer sun. People climbed onto the sound tower and the roof of the stadium to hang banners in solidarity with the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche struggle or to dance silhouetted against the setting sun.
\n\nHere, the audience was in control—except the audience was totally out of control. Just a few songs into La Polla Records’ set, they had to stop in the middle of a song because too many enthusiastic hooligans had gotten on the stage and one had fallen into the drumset. They weren’t trying to stop the show, really. They were just excited.
\n\nA few more songs of the same, and one fateful fight between a bouncer who tried to suggest to a fan that he shouldn’t grab the singer’s neck in order to sing along, and the whole thing fell apart. Altogether, La Polla Records played something like five songs before abandoning the stage. As dusk came on, the atmosphere shifted from enthusiasm to anger.
\n\n15,000 punks rule! La Polla Records in Chile, February 2020.
\n15,000 grumbling punks and anarchists and hooligans and skinheads filed out of the stadium. Honestly, the amount of inward-facing frustration was so high that the most strategic choice the police could have made that evening would have been to allow the infighting to take its natural course. However, when there are thousands of punks occupying the road outside the stadium drinking and destroying traffic infrastructure, the pigs just can’t help themselves.
\n\nAnd neither could we. The most beautiful, glorious street battle of those six months unfolded before my eyes. We could see the police descending from up in the hills, so their arrival was anticipated. There was an air of “Here we go…”
\n\nBrightly colored mohawks bounced in and out of visibility amid clouds of tear gas. The most wildly dressed peacock punks engaged in feral smashing of beer bottles against police, while boom boxes provided a fast-paced tupa-tupa-tupa soundtrack to the riot. We didn’t see the best practices of gas masks, goggles, and gloves that the frontline used in the plaza. This was pure fuck you energy.
\n\nI had made a friend earlier that night while standing around selling cigarettes—but our befriending quickly accelerated when we realized we needed to rely on each other to get out of there safely. Even though they had, let’s say, much more reason to avoid capture by the police, on our first attempt to extract ourselves, they grabbed my arm and said, “Can we just watch it though?”
\n\nYeah… except no! They were shooting shit at us! Dozens of punks rushed past us and, behind them, mechanical faceless stormtroopers advanced out of the gas clouds, arms drawn. We turned and ran.
\n\nIn those six months, I mastered a whole audio taxonomy of booms—deep ones for the spent spray paint cans thrown into street fires, three different mid-level frequencies for different police projectiles, and the most piercing booms, fireworks. With the cops at our heels, we heard—BOOM—and instinctively I told my friend, “Jump!” No shit, a smoking canister hurtled under our feet. BOOM BOOM! Instinctively, again, “Duck!” This time, they went right over our heads.
\n\n“We absolutely have to get out of here.” We turned down a side street and wandered to the home of a friendly but ribbing communist who was excited to share his plan to subvert either the anarchist circle-A, or the constitutional process—I couldn’t tell which—by making a circle-A logo for the “Apruebo” (Approve) campaign for the constitution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/12.jpg\")
“Stop prohibiting so many things, I can’t keep up with disobeying them all.”
\nOver the last five years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing the material from this documentary in live presentations. In the days that this film depicts, every time I organized a talk, it was interrupted by the fiercest street confrontations in decades, or a people’s insurrection just across the border, or an uncontrollable wave of rioting punks. I wish that was still happening today. It’s better to do than to watch.
\n\nSince those days, I’ve presented the live version of Fell In Love With Fire within autonomous territory held in defiance of state power—in Weelaunee Forest, at a Los Panchos community in Mexico City, in People’s Park, where the audience sat on a trashed excavator left from the last riots to retake the park in 2022. It is my hope that this videozine, this documentalgo, can serve as tool to bring those kinds of spaces onto the map of other projects of rebellious self-determination across the globe and across time.
\n\nPlease, don’t limit your use of this video to isolated viewing, nor to sterile, polite, seated events to raise funds. Use it to raise hell.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/3.jpg\")
Their side.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/4.jpg\")
Our side.
\nYou can download the English .srt subtitles file here to translate the subtitles into another language for us.
\n\nLos Héroes is not far from La Moneda, the metro stetion where kids dropped a televisión onto the tracks—shutting down the metro and setting off the chain reaction of revolt. ↩
\n![flyer](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/35.jpg\"){kind=link}