{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "user_comment": "I support your decision, I believe in change and hope you find just what it is that you are looking for. If your heart is free, the ground you stand on is liberated territory. Defend it. This feed allows you to read the posts from this site in any feed reader that supports the JSON Feed format. To add this feed to your reader, copy the following URL — https://crimethinc.com/feed.json — and add it your reader. For more info on this format: https://jsonfeed.org", "title": "CrimethInc. : Categories : Texts", "description": "CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective: Your ticket to a world free of charge", "home_page_url": "https://crimethinc.com", "feed_url": "https://crimethinc.com/feed.json", "next_url": "https://crimethinc.com/feed.json?page=2", "icon": "https://crimethinc.com/assets/icons/icon-600x600-29557d753a75cfd06b42bb2f162a925bb02e0cc3d92c61bed42718abba58775f.png", "favicon": "https://crimethinc.com/assets/icons/icon-70x70-09272eec03e5a3309fe3d4a6a612dc4a96b64ee3decbcad924e02c28ded9484e.png", "author": { "name": "CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective", "url": "https://crimethinc.com", "avatar": "https://crimethinc.com/assets/icons/icon-600x600-29557d753a75cfd06b42bb2f162a925bb02e0cc3d92c61bed42718abba58775f.png" }, "items": [ { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/01/07/crimethinccom-now-fully-functional-in-portuguese-including-books-zines-posters-and-articles", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/01/07/crimethinccom-now-fully-functional-in-portuguese-including-books-zines-posters-and-articles", "title": "CrimethInc.com Now Fully Functional in Portuguese : Including Books, Zines, Posters, and Articles", "summary": "We are thrilled to announce the Brazilian Portuguese version of our site—along with a list of all our books, zines, posters, & articles in Portuguese.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/07/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/07/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-01-07T20:56:14Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:41Z", "tags": [ "Brazil", "Portuguese", "Brasil" ], "content_html": "

After a tremendous amount of work, we are finally able to announce the Brazilian Portuguese version of this site, pt.crimethinc.com. In addition, we have uploaded a large number of books, zines, posters, and articles in Portuguese. From now on, you can access a full list of our articles in Portuguese at crimethinc.com/languages/português-brasileiro. Below, you can find a full list of all our books (all freely available in PDF), zines, and posters in Portuguese, as well.

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This is part of our ongoing effort to fully internationalize our efforts, making them equally inclusive across all national borders and boundaries of language.

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We first made contact with Brazilian anarchists in the 1990s; our material has appeared in Portuguese going back as far as early issues of our paper, Harbinger, which appeared under the name Arauto. Since the June 2013 uprisings we have published articles from comrades, directly from within the mobilizations. In addition, comrades in Brazil and Portugal have translated a vast amount of CrimethInc. material from English and other languages into Portuguese. All this material can now be gathered here in a unified platform.

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We hope to continue our efforts to build tools and networks for communication and solidarity across the decades to come. We aim to establish strategic dialogue between anarchists and anti-authoritarian rebels active on all seven continents. Not just to translate analysis from one language or region for others, but also supporting voices of resistance wherever people are fighting against the oppression of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and the state.

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If you would like to help with translations to or from Portuguese and other languages, or if know of any material already translated and not yet on this site, please contact us by email: false.flag@riseup.net.

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Thanks—and see you on the streets!

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Below, you can click the image to download the pdf.

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Livros

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Da Democracia à Liberdade: A Diferença entre Governo e Autodeterminação – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Para comprar cópias impressas de Da Democracia à Liberdade clique aqui.

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Trabalho: capitalismo . economia . resistência – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Espere Resistência: um guia de campo – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre: um livro de receitas anarquista – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Dias de Guerra Noites de Amor: Crimideia para iniciantes – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Zines

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Para Mudar Tudo – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Voto vs. Ação Direta – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Você Está Sob Vigilância – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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A Internet Como uma Nova Cerca – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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7 Mitos Sobre a Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Anarquia e Álcool – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 01 Black blocs, bloqueios & bombas de fumaça – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 02 Coletivos, coalizões & cultura de segurança – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 03 Saúde, comportamento & violência doméstica – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 04 Sabotagem, infiltração & evasão – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 05 Grafite, estêncil, serigrafia, adesivos & lambes – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 06 (Portugues Brasileiro) Manifestações, bicicletadas, festas & festivais – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 07 Desemprego, okupas, caronas & lixeiras – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 08: Solidariedade, apoio jurídico & minando a opressão

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 09: Feitiços, performances, música & reservatórios de ideias

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Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 10: Mídia, propaganda & formas de chamar a atenção

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Posters

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A Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Vamos Mostar Quem Manda: Ninguém – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Democracia é Burocracia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Democracia é Fronteira – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Democracia é Guerra – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Democracia é Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Democracia é Prisão – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Democracia é Vigilância – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

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Textos

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Para Mudar Tudo, Comece de Algum Lugar!

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\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-mythology-of-work-eight-myths-that-keep-your-eyes-on-the-clock-and-your-nose-to-the-grindstone", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-mythology-of-work-eight-myths-that-keep-your-eyes-on-the-clock-and-your-nose-to-the-grindstone", "title": "The Mythology of Work : Eight Myths that Keep Your Eyes on the Clock and Your Nose to the Grindstone", "summary": "Most of the things we make and do for money are patently irrelevant to our survival—and to what gives life meaning, besides.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/header.jpg", "date_published": "2018-09-03T15:10:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:37Z", "tags": [ "capitalism", "Work", "labor" ], "content_html": "

What if nobody worked? Sweatshops would empty out and assembly lines would grind to a halt, at least the ones producing things no one would make voluntarily. Telemarketing would cease. Despicable individuals who only hold sway over others because of wealth and title would have to learn better social skills. Traffic jams would come to an end; so would oil spills. Paper money and job applications would be used as fire starter as people reverted to barter and sharing. Grass and flowers would grow from the cracks in the sidewalk, eventually making way for fruit trees.

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And we would all starve to death. But we’re not exactly subsisting on paperwork and performance evaluations, are we? Most of the things we make and do for money are patently irrelevant to our survival—and to what gives life meaning, besides.

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This text is a selection from Work, our 376-page analysis of contemporary capitalism. It is also available as a pamphlet.

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That depends on what you mean by “work.” Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?

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For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete. Others desperately seek employment, hardly enjoying the comfortable leisure all this progress should provide. Despite the talk of recession and the need for austerity measures, corporations are reporting record earnings, the wealthiest are wealthier than ever, and tremendous quantities of goods are produced just to be thrown away. There’s plenty of wealth, but it’s not being used to liberate humanity.

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What kind of system simultaneously produces abundance and prevents us from making the most of it? The defenders of the free market argue that there’s no other option—and so long as our society is organized this way, there isn’t.

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Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work. The natural world that provided for our needs hadn’t yet been carved up and privatized. Knowledge and skills weren’t the exclusive domains of licensed experts, held hostage by expensive institutions; time wasn’t divided into productive work and consumptive leisure. We know this because work was invented only a few thousand years ago, but human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We’re told that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” back then—but that narrative comes to us from the ones who stamped out that way of life, not the ones who practiced it.

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This isn’t to say we should go back to the way things used to be, or that we could—only that things don’t have to be the way they are right now. If our distant ancestors could see us today, they’d probably be excited about some of our inventions and horrified by others, but they’d surely be shocked by how we apply them. We built this world with our labor, and without certain obstacles we could surely build a better one. That wouldn’t mean abandoning everything we’ve learned. It would just mean abandoning everything we’ve learned doesn’t work.

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One can hardly deny that work is productive. Just a couple thousand years of it have dramatically transformed the surface of the earth.

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But what exactly does it produce? Disposable chopsticks by the billion; laptops and cell phones that are obsolete within a couple years. Miles of waste dumps and tons upon tons of chlorofluorocarbons. Factories that will rust as soon as labor is cheaper elsewhere. Dumpsters full of overstock, while a billion suffer malnutrition; medical treatments only the wealthy can afford; novels and philosophies and art movements most of us just don’t have time for in a society that subordinates desires to profit motives and needs to property rights.

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And where do the resources for all this production come from? What happens to the ecosystems and communities that are pillaged and exploited? If work is productive, it’s even more destructive.

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Work doesn’t produce goods out of thin air; it’s not a conjuring act. Rather, it takes raw materials from the biosphere—a common treasury shared by all living things—and transforms them into products animated by the logic of market. For those who see the world in terms of balance sheets, this is an improvement, but the rest of us shouldn’t take their word for it.

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Capitalists and socialists have always taken it for granted that work produces value. Workers have to consider a different possibility—that working uses up value. That’s why the forests and polar ice caps are being consumed alongside the hours of our lives: the aches in our bodies when we come home from work parallel the damage taking place on a global scale.

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What should we be producing, if not all this stuff? Well, how about happiness itself? Can we imagine a society in which the primary goal of our activity was to make the most of life, to explore its mysteries, rather than to amass wealth or outflank competition? We would still make material goods in such a society, of course, but not in order to compete for profit. Festivals, feasts, philosophy, romance, creative pursuits, child-rearing, friendship, adventure—can we picture these as the center of life, rather than packed into our spare time?

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Today things are the other way around—our conception of happiness is constructed as a means to stimulate production. Small wonder products are crowding us out of the world.

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Work doesn’t simply create wealth where there was only poverty before. On the contrary, so long as it enriches some at others’ expense, work creates poverty, too, in direct proportion to profit.

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Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything. There may be scarcity, but no one is subjected to the indignity of having to go without while others have more than they know what to do with. As profit is accumulated and the minimum threshold of wealth necessary to exert influence in society rises higher and higher, poverty becomes more and more debilitating. It is a form of exile—the cruelest form of exile, for you stay within society while being excluded from it. You can neither participate nor go anywhere else.

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Work doesn’t just create poverty alongside wealth—it concentrates wealth in the hands of a few while spreading poverty far and wide. For every Bill Gates, a million people must live below the poverty line; for every Shell Oil, there has to be a Nigeria. The more we work, the more profit is accumulated from our labor, and the poorer we are compared to our exploiters.

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So in addition to creating wealth, work makes people poor. This is clear even before we factor in all the other ways work makes us poor: poor in self-determination, poor in free time, poor in health, poor in sense of self beyond our careers and bank accounts, poor in spirit.

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“Cost of living” estimates are misleading—there’s little living going on at all! “Cost of working” is more like it, and it’s not cheap.

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Everyone knows what housecleaners and dishwashers pay for being the backbone of our economy. All the scourges of poverty—addiction, broken families, poor health—are par for the course; the ones who survive these and somehow go on showing up on time are working miracles. Think what they could accomplish if they were free to apply that power to something other than earning profits for their employers!

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What about their employers, fortunate to be higher on the pyramid? You would think earning a higher salary would mean having more money and thus more freedom, but it’s not that simple. Every job entails hidden costs: just as a dishwasher has to pay bus fare to and from work every day, a corporate lawyer has to be able to fly anywhere at a moment’s notice, to maintain a country club membership for informal business meetings, to own a small mansion in which to entertain dinner guests that double as clients. This is why it’s so difficult for middle-class workers to save up enough money to quit while they’re ahead and get out of the rat race: trying to get ahead in the economy basically means running in place. At best, you might advance to a fancier treadmill, but you’ll have to run faster to stay on it.

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And these merely financial costs of working are the least expensive. In one survey, people of all walks of life were asked how much money they would need to live the life they wanted; from pauper to patrician, they all answered approximately double whatever their current income was. So not only is money costly to obtain, but, like any addictive drug, it’s less and less fulfilling! And the further up you get in the hierarchy, the more you have to fight to hold your place. The wealthy executive must abandon his unruly passions and his conscience, must convince himself that he deserves more than the unfortunates whose labor provides for his comfort, must smother his every impulse to question, to share, to imagine himself in others’ shoes; if he doesn’t, sooner or later some more ruthless contender replaces him. Both blue-collar and white-collar workers have to kill themselves to keep the jobs that keep them alive; it’s just a question of physical or spiritual destruction.

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Those are the costs we pay individually, but there’s also a global price to pay for all this working. Alongside the environmental costs, there are work-related illnesses, injuries, and deaths: every year we kill people by the thousand to sell hamburgers and health club memberships to the survivors. The US Department of Labor reported that twice as many people suffered fatal work injuries in 2001 as died in the September 11 attacks, and that doesn’t begin to take into account work-related illnesses. Above all, more exorbitant than any other price, there is the cost of never learning how to direct our own lives, never getting the chance to answer or even ask the question of what we would do with our time on this planet if it was up to us. We can never know how much we are giving up by settling for a world in which people are too busy, too poor, or too beaten down to do so.

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Why work, if it’s so expensive? Everyone knows the answer—there’s no other way to acquire the resources we need to survive, or for that matter to participate in society at all. All the earlier social forms that made other ways of life possible have been eradicated—they were stamped out by conquistadors, slave traders, and corporations that left neither tribe nor tradition nor ecosystem intact. Contrary to capitalist propaganda, free human beings don’t crowd into factories for a pittance if they have other options, not even in return for name brand shoes and software. In working and shopping and paying bills, each of us helps perpetuate the conditions that necessitate these activities. Capitalism exists because we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity in the marketplace, all our resources at the supermarket and in the stock market, all our attention in the media. To be more precise, capitalism exists because our daily activities are it. But would we continue to reproduce it if we felt we had another choice?

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On the contrary, instead of enabling people to achieve happiness, work fosters the worst kind of self-denial.

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Obeying teachers, bosses, the demands of the market—not to mention laws, parents’ expectations, religious scriptures, social norms—we’re conditioned from infancy to put our desires on hold. Following orders becomes an unconscious reflex, whether or not they are in our best interest; deferring to experts becomes second nature.

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Selling our time rather than doing things for their own sake, we come to evaluate our lives on the basis of how much we can get in exchange for them, not what we get out of them. As freelance slaves hawking our lives hour by hour, we think of ourselves as each having a price; the amount of the price becomes our measure of value. In that sense, we become commodities, just like toothpaste and toilet paper. What once was a human being is now an employee, in the same way that what once was a pig is now a pork chop. Our lives disappear, spent like the money for which we trade them.

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Most of us have become so used to giving up things that are precious to us that sacrifice has become our only way of expressing that we care about something. We martyr ourselves for ideas, causes, love of one another, even when these are supposed to help us find happiness.

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There are families, for example, in which people show affection by competing to be the one who gives up the most for the others. Gratification isn’t just delayed, it’s passed on from one generation to the next. The responsibility of finally enjoying all the happiness presumably saved up over years of thankless toil is deferred to the children; yet when they come of age, if they are to be seen as responsible adults, they too must begin working their fingers to the bone.

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But the buck has to stop somewhere.

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People work hard nowadays, that’s for sure. Tying access to resources to market performance has caused unprecedented production and technological progress. Indeed, the market has monopolized access to our own creative capacities to such an extent that many people work not only to survive but also to have something to do. But what kind of initiative does this instill?

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Let’s go back to global warming, one of the most serious crises facing the planet. After decades of denial, politicians and businessmen have finally swung into action to do something about it. And what are they doing? Casting about for ways to cash in! Carbon credits, “clean” coal, “green” investment firms—who believes that these are the most effective way to curb the production of greenhouse gases? It’s ironic that a catastrophe caused by capitalist consumerism can be used to spur more consumption, but it reveals a lot about the kind of initiative work instills. What kind of person, confronted with the task of preventing the end of life on earth, responds, “Sure, but what’s in it for me?”

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If everything in our society has to be driven by a profit motive to succeed, that might not be initiative after all, but something else. Really taking initiative, initiating new values and new modes of behavior—this is as unthinkable to the enterprising businessman as it is to his most listless employee. What if working—that is, leasing your creative powers to others, whether managers or customers—actually erodes initiative?

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The evidence for this extends beyond the workplace. How many people who never miss a day of work can’t show up on time for band practice? We can’t keep up with the reading for our book clubs even when we can finish papers for school on time; the things we really want to do with our lives end up at the bottom of the to-do list. The ability to follow through on commitments becomes something outside ourselves, associated with external rewards or punishments.

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Imagine a world in which everything people do, they do because they want to, because they are personally invested in bringing it about. For any boss who has struggled to motivate indifferent employees, the idea of working with people who are equally invested in the same projects sounds utopian. But this isn’t proof that nothing would get done without bosses and salaries—it just shows how work saps us of initiative.

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Let’s say your job never injures, poisons, or sickens you. Let’s also take it for granted that the economy doesn’t crash and take your job and savings with it, and that no one who got a worse deal than you manages to hurt or rob you. You still can’t be sure you won’t be downsized. Nowadays nobody works for the same employer his whole life; you work somewhere a few years until they let you go for someone younger and cheaper or outsource your job overseas. You can break your back to prove you’re the best in your field and still end up hung out to dry.

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You have to count on your employers to make shrewd decisions so they can write your paycheck—they can’t just fritter money away or they won’t have it to pay you. But you never know when that shrewdness will turn against you: the ones you depend on for your livelihood didn’t get where they are by being sentimental. If you’re self-employed, you probably know how fickle the market can be, too.

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What could provide real security? Perhaps being part of a long-term community in which people looked out for each other, a community based on mutual assistance rather than financial incentives. And what is one of the chief obstacles to building that kind of community today? Work.

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Who carried out most of the injustices in history? Employees. This is not necessarily to say they are responsible for them—as they would be the first to tell you!

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Does receiving a wage absolve you of responsibility for your actions? Working seems to foster the impression that it does. The Nuremburg defense—“I was just following orders”—has been the anthem and alibi of millions of employees. This willingness to check one’s conscience at the workplace door—to be, in fact, a mercenary—lies at the root of many of the troubles plaguing our species.

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People have done horrible things without orders, too—but not nearly so many horrible things. You can reason with a person who is acting for herself; she acknowledges that she is accountable for her decisions. Employees, on the other hand, can do unimaginably dumb and destructive things while refusing to think about the consequences.

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The real problem, of course, isn’t employees refusing to take responsibility for their actions—it’s the economic system that makes taking responsibility so prohibitively expensive.

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Employees dump toxic waste into rivers and oceans.

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Employees slaughter cows and perform experiments on monkeys.

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Employees throw away truckloads of food.

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Employees are destroying the ozone layer.

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They watch your every move through security cameras.

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They evict you when you don’t pay your rent.

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They imprison you when you don’t pay your taxes.

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They humiliate you when you don’t do your homework or show up to work on time.

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They enter information about your private life into credit reports and FBI files.

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They give you speeding tickets and tow your car.

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They administer standardized exams, juvenile detention centers, and lethal injections.

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The soldiers who herded people into gas chambers were employees,

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Just like the soldiers occupying Iraq and Afghanistan,

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Just like the suicide bombers who target them—they are employees of God, hoping to be paid in paradise.

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Let’s be clear about this—critiquing work doesn’t mean rejecting labor, effort, ambition, or commitment. It doesn’t mean demanding that everything be fun or easy. Fighting against the forces that compel us to work is hard work. Laziness is not the alternative to work, though it might be a byproduct of it.

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The bottom line is simple: all of us deserve to make the most of our potential as we see fit, to be the masters of our own destinies. Being forced to sell these things away to survive is tragic and humiliating. We don’t have to live like this.

\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/09/12/after-the-crest-part-iv-montreal-peaks-and-precipices", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/09/12/after-the-crest-part-iv-montreal-peaks-and-precipices", "title": "After the Crest, part IV : Montréal – Peaks and Precipices", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2013-09-12T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

This is the final installment in our “After the Crest” series exploring how to navigate the waning phase of social movements. It is a personal reflection on anarchist participation in the 2012 student strike in Montréal and the disruptions that accompanied it. The product of much collective discussion, this article explores the opportunities anarchists missed during the high point of the conflict by limiting themselves to the framework of the strike, and the risks they incurred by attempting to maintain it once it had entered a reformist endgame.

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For a narrative account of many of the events discussed in this text, read While the Iron Is Hot: Student Strike and Social Revolt in Montréal, Spring 2012.

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We’re eager to hear from comrades around the world about your own experiences and conclusions regarding how to relate to the waning phase of movements, whether for inclusion in the forthcoming “After the Crest” podcast episode or elsewhere. Contact us via rollingthunder@crimethinc.com.

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After the Crest, part IV: Montréal – Peaks and Precipices

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This is the final installment in our “After the Crest” series exploring how to navigate the waning phase of social movements. It is a personal reflection on anarchist participation in the 2012 student strike in Montréal and the disruptions that accompanied it. The product of much collective discussion, this article explores the opportunities anarchists missed during the high point of the conflict by limiting themselves to the framework of the strike, and the risks they incurred by attempting to maintain it once it had entered a reformist endgame.

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For a narrative account of many of the events discussed in this text, read While the Iron Is Hot: Student Strike and Social Revolt in Montréal, Spring 2012.

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Timeline

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February 13, 2012. After many months of ultimatums to the government, mobilization on university and cégep campuses, and occasional actions and demonstrations, the student strike officially begins with a few departments at Université Laval in Québec City. From there, it spreads rapidly. Spring has come early.

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February 16. The student association of Cégep du Vieux Montréal votes to go on strike; the school is occupied. Late in the night, police enter the school and break up the occupation.

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March 15. After weeks of escalating violence on the part of the police, including an incident in which a cégep student lost his eye to a concussion grenade, the COBP’s annual demonstration against police brutality begins at Berri Square; the crowd that gathers is significantly larger than at any other time in the history of the event, and a night riot ensues. Although many participants escape, over 226 are arrested.

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March 22. The largest demonstration of the strike thus far is an ultimatum from the Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE) to the Liberal government in Québec City: repeal your planned tuition hike, or we will begin a campaign of economic disruption. Although actions to this effect had already been taking place in Montréal, from this point on, they to begin to occur more frequently and with more ambitious objectives.

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April 20. The Salon Plan Nord, a job fair, takes place at the Palais des congrès. Jean Charest is there to deliver a speech about his government’s plan for the accelerated development of Québec’s portion of the Labrador Peninsula—land which is still inhabited, for the most part, by indigenous people determined to live as sovereign, autonomous nations. The single largest street battle of the strike unfolds, paralyzing a large section of downtown for hours and capturing international headlines. For the first time in the strike, cops flee demonstrators. Its significance is immediately apparent to anarchists. Yet no one can predict how intense things will get.

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May 4. A truce between the students and the government has come and gone. Angry night demonstrations have taken the streets, then been pacified; morning blockades of highways, skyscrapers, and other targets have ceased altogether. People have barely caught their breath from the largest anti-capitalist May Day demonstration in recent memory. And now buses from across the province are unloading militants of all sorts in the small town of Victoriaville; the goal is to disrupt the Liberal Party convention that was scheduled to take place at a Montréal hotel, then hastily transplanted to the countryside. The clash between demonstrators and the Sûreté du Québec police force is brutal; people on both sides are badly injured, but the red squares get the worst of it. Another person loses an eye; still another is put into a coma. Things don’t feel as good as they did two weeks prior.

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May 10. The streets of Montréal have been peaceful for a few days, but this morning, smoke bombs go off in four métro stations across the city; the whole system is shut down for hours. Thanks to a good citizen with a cellphone, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) releases pictures of some suspects on its website the same day, and four people surrender at a police station soon thereafter.

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May 18. Two new laws come into effect at midnight, both of which restrict the ability of participants in the strike movement to act. The night demonstrations turn confrontational again around this time, but despite heroic efforts against the police, the movement is unable to assert itself in the streets as effectively as it did a month earlier. That said, more people are participating than ever before. Spontaneous demonstrations begin in neighborhoods across Montréal, helping new neighborhood assemblies to take off.

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June 7. The Canadian Grand Prix begins with a rich bastards’ gala. Militants fail to disrupt it, but over the next few days, despite a seriously compromised rapport de force with the police, they succeed in disrupting Montréal’s most important tourist event of the summer. Many inspiring things happen; yet it is clear that the movement is on the decline.

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August 1. Confirming what people have suspected for weeks, the premier calls a general election for September 4. The Parti Québécois asks the movement to agree to an “electoral truce.”

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August 13. Classes at some cégeps are scheduled to begin. School authorities, however, shut down classes so that anti-strike students can attend general assemblies on the matter of continuing the strike. Of the four cégeps voting on this matter, three vote to end the strike; they join schools that had voted similarly in the days prior. Except for a few departments at UQÀM, the strike collapses almost entirely over the next few weeks—though demonstrations continue, sometimes turning confrontational.

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September 4. When the votes are counted, the PQ has won a majority in the National Assembly. The tuition hike is canceled by decree a few days later. Some call it victory.

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Foreseeing Events

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Anarchists should hone our skills at anticipating social upheavals.1

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Sometimes, such events can be seen coming far in advance, offering us the chance to prepare in order to surpass the limitations of the organizations, discourse, and default tactics that are likely to characterize them. That was the case in Montréal in the summer of 2011, by which time it was perfectly clear that a student strike was on the way. By the middle of summer, it was widely known that the major student federations, ASSÉ, FÉCQ, and FÉUQ, were collaborating for a massive demonstration on November 10. This demonstration was conceived as presenting the Liberal government with an ultimatum before the movement resorted to an unlimited general strike. Earlier in 2011, the occupation of the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, had taken me and many other anarchists across the continent by surprise. In Montréal, on the other hand, we had advance warning of things to come; it was clear to some of us that we could make strategic use of this knowledge.

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A correct analysis of any situation, combined with reflection on one’s own objectives, should suggest a strategy with which to proceed.2 But how do we refine our analytical skills? I don’t want to reduce this to experience; plenty of “veterans” analyze situations badly, routinely making the same mistakes. In Montréal, that camp includes those who fetishize direct democracy, certain types of collective process, and the global justice movement that peaked here in the mobilization against the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Québec City. Québécois insurrectionists tend to dismiss that crowd—perhaps too hastily—as being attached to a romanticized notion of anti-capitalist struggle in Montréal at the turn of the millennium. And yet older insurrectionists are also guilty of using the same tactics that they’ve been using for years, often with no better sense of the political context than the younger people they are lecturing.

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Rather than deferring to age and experience, we can sharpen our analytical skills through discussion groups, general assemblies oriented towards communication as an end in itself, and more writing, theorizing, and critique. These are the processes that enable a crew, a community, or a distributed network of subversives to gain mutual understanding and refine their analyses in order to speak precisely about what is happening, what must be done, and—most importantly—how to do it. It is essential to find the time and space to do this with people you trust, whose analysis you also trust, and ideally who come from a range of backgrounds and experience.

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This isn’t a recipe for success. The future can’t be foreseen with total accuracy. But things sometimes play out in similar ways over and over again. There are patterns we can identify. We have a better chance of finding them if many of us are looking, and even better if we disagree on some things and draw on different knowledge.

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If anarchists don’t improve our ability to foresee events, we will keep repeating two grievous mistakes. First, we won’t know when it’s time for us to throw ourselves into a struggle with everything we’ve got—when the risks are worth the possible consequences. Alas, many anarchists in Montréal waited until far later than would have been ideal to get involved in the student strike. Second, we won’t recognize when we should withdraw because the movement is headed toward a catastrophe that will hurt us—as the events of August 2012 did, at the end of the strike.

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Once the school year started, some anglophone anarchists from outside the university, or who were students but who mostly organized outside of student spaces, made a concerted effort to insert themselves and anarchist ideas in general into student organizing at McGill and Concordia. This was sometimes as sloppy and disorganized as the individual anarchists involved. But that didn’t matter; what mattered was consistency. Local anarchists’ distribution of certain texts at McGill, such as After the Fall and “Communiqué from an Absent Future,” probably contributed significantly to the occupations that occurred on McGill campus during the 2011–12 school year, both before the strike even started.

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Many of the texts distributed were written in inaccessible insurrectionist jargon; anarchists often came off as total wingnuts. But the point was not to appeal to the masses. It was to make connections with specific people who would be participating in the strike when it began— a process that was developed further by inviting people to events at La Belle Époque, the newly-opened anarchist social center in the Southwest, or just by hanging out. This, in turn, encouraged those people to expand the discourse of the strike to other areas: struggle in defense of the Earth, against the police, against racism and colonialism, and so on.

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Student militants at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and Cégep du Vieux Montréal had been organizing for much longer. These two schools, from which other strikes had historically emerged, were also the source of most of the momentum for the 2012 strike. Although both schools already had a strong radical presence, political graffiti within certain buildings was ramped up in the years before the strike. Occupations and demonstrations were organized. In early 2011, Hydro-Québec’s downtown headquarters was smoke-bombed by students from Vieux, forcing an evacuation. There was also a lot of work behind the scenes—distributing propaganda, organizing informative assemblies, and the like. Syndicalist anarchists participated actively in their student associations and in the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ); this meant office work, balancing finances, writing articles for ASSÉ’s newspaper Ultimatum or for individual associations’ broadsheets, and a lot of organizing limited by the discourse of the official student movement. Some anarchists have been critical of this approach, but there’s no question that anarchists on the whole benefited from the fact that some people were doing this.

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Syndicalist methods created the strike; it could be argued that they also created the limitations that would ultimately produce the movement’s downfall. A point that is sometimes missed, however, is that every social upheaval will have built-in limitations, and there isn’t even a chance to overcome those limitations until the upheaval exists as a material reality. Despite the tensions that existed between various anti-capitalist and pro-strike factions at Cégep du Vieux and UQÀM, it is clear that the lowest-common-denominator mobilization approach of creating opposition to the tuition hike complemented direct action, if only by fostering a political environment in which other students could understand why “the issues” were serious enough that some people would take such action.

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[[https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-mont-3b.jpg “Fuck fascists, therefore fuck the administration.”\nGraffiti at Cégep du Vieux Montréal before the strike.]]

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Crises create opportunities. This is perhaps the most important maxim for anyone who wants to defend land, freedom, and dignity against the ravages of capitalism. In this context, it is problematic that many anarchists, in the years before the strike, were willfully ignorant of the political machinations that produced the flashpoint of the strike. It took a long time for anarchists who had been following the developments to convince their comrades of the importance of the impending events.

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Of course, given the right circumstances and skill sets, we can generate crises ourselves. This is exactly what some anarchists, upon finding themselves as students at institutions with a tradition of direct democracy and a history of strike-making, proceeded to do in the years leading up to 2012—just as other anarchists had done in the years leading up to 2005 and earlier strikes.

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Anglophone anarchists in Montréal—many of whom grew up in other provinces or in the US, whose French is marginal at best, often possessed of rather few francophone friends, frequently either university dropouts or enrolled at schools with less interesting political cultures—were usually not as disposed to help produce a crisis. This was also true of older anarchists, those with jobs, or those on welfare and genuinely poor; in essence, non-student anarchists of all language backgrounds. But, though anarchists from certain social positions may not have been able to contribute as much to making the strike happen, there was plenty for those people to do to improve their capacity to participate in the strike once it began.

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The most important thing is consistency—doing what you can from where you are. It doesn’t matter how limited your abilities or social position are. If you don’t drop the ball, you’ll eventually get a chance to shoot.

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If you don’t drop the ball,

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you’ll eventually get a chance to shoot.

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Seizing the Peak of Opportunity

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Though some prepared for the strike itself, few did anything to prepare for the situation that arose from it: the peak of opportunity.

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There were two such periods, actually. One started on April 20, 2012, with the protests against the Plan Nord conference, during which it became clear that the police were temporarily outmatched, and lasted until May 4, when it degenerated into more brutal and less inspiring violence at the Liberal Party convention in Victoriaville. This was a period when so much could have been done, and yet many insurrecto-hooligans contented themselves with mere rioting—as exciting as that may have been. Soon enough, it was no longer fun. It wasn’t just random unfortunates with presumably little street experience who were getting arrested and injured, but ourselves and our friends as well. This is all the worse because almost anything could have happened in Montréal at that time if people had been able to step back from the whirlwind of events, gather their comrades, identify an objective, and act.

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Friday, April 20 – inside the Palais des congrès.

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Wednesday, April 25 – central downtown.

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Tuesday, May 1 – central downtown.

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Friday, May 4 – outskirts of Victo.

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In point of fact, it seems this did happen, but perhaps too late. On May 10, the most effective sabotage of the Montréal métro to date took place, with smoke bombs going off at four different stations across the city. If such an act had occurred during a large demonstration or riot in downtown Montréal, it could have created an even more uncontrollable situation across the island—perhaps opening new windows of opportunity for anarchists and others to seize territory or go on the offensive. By May 10, however, an uneasy peace had taken hold in Québec with the pacification of the night demonstrations and the passing of the last spectacular clashes during daylight hours, May Day and the Battle of Victo. In this context, the smoke bombing incident appeared as a daring attempt to reignite conflict, not as a conscious effort to expand its scope at the height of things.

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The period that started on April 20 was not a revolutionary moment, but perhaps only because no one proposed, via words or action, to take the logical step from mass vandalism to the collective expropriation of goods and seizure of buildings—the kind of activity that would have quickly brought out even larger crowds than were already participating in the strike. Things might have gotten a little nasty after that, no doubt, especially given the lengths to which the state is willing to go to uphold the institution of private property. But had things escalated to this point, the revolutionary potential of the situation would have become apparent to everyone.

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There was a second peak of opportunity a few weeks later, and it too was squandered.

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To be clear, the opportunities that this second peak presented were not produced by militants’ capacity to maintain a rapport de force with the police. On the nights immediately before and after the government passed its Special Law to crack down on the strike, there were major street battles that lasted long into the night, probably involving the largest numbers of any post-sundown street action and certainly producing the largest mass arrests. But while many experienced these clashes as inspiring, including many out-of-town anarchists who had shown up for the anarchist book fair, the battles proved ephemeral. They were the final and most spectacular clashes of a movement that was rapidly losing the capacity to go toe-to-toe with the police that it had gained in the early months of the strike, and particularly between March 22 and May 4.

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New opportunities were produced, though, by the expansion of anti-government sentiment to parts of society that hadn’t previously been involved in the strike. Suddenly, there were small roving demonstrations in neighborhoods across the city and in cities across the province. A sizeable number of these people were said to have supported the tuition hike, but fundamentally objected to the government’s “anti-democratic” means of defending the capitalist economy and its monopoly on violence. The numbers also grew downtown; the demonstration on May 22 may have had as many as 400,000 people.

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A demonstration in the neighborhood of Saint-Henri on Thursday, May 24.

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This opened up a moment akin to the Occupy moment in other places.3 What happened is that people with radically different ideas were meeting in the streets, vaguely united by their opposition to how things were going in their society. Perhaps they were excited by the energy of the moment; perhaps they were open to challenging preconceived notions about how things should be, and how to get there.

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This didn’t happen on the scale that it could have. Many anarchists cited the shortcomings of the casserole demos and the neighborhood assemblies to justify not engaging with them. Of course, there were shortcomings; that’s to be expected whenever people more familiar with obedience to authority suddenly opt for defiance. Their strategies, rhetoric, analysis, and even attitudes weren’t always ideal from an ideologically purist anarchist perspective. But this was as true of those who fought in the streets—including those young and patriotic Québécois men who saw their combat with the police as a continuation of the FLQ’s hypermasculine methodology—as it was of those who opted to bang pots and pans or to participate in the “popular neighborhood assemblies” that had, in many cases, devolved after a few weeks into hangout spaces for all the local weirdos interested in radical politics.

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A popular assembly in the Plateau on June 10.

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The important thing here is that the confrontations of the book fair weekend marked the point when street fighting downtown started to deliver diminishing returns, in terms of its ability to disrupt the capitalist economy and improve the movement’s rapport de force with the government. At that point, it was probably more feasible to broaden the disturbances than to escalate the ones already taking place.

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Both peaks of opportunity, starting on April 20 and May 18 respectively, involved peak numbers of people engaging in particular activities—either the specific activity of fighting the police during the first peak, or the general activity of participating in the strike movement during the second. These were our chance to reach out to all the people whose political analyses, experiences, or backgrounds were different from ours. Most of them knew what they were there to do. If anarchists had articulated to others a method of how to do it while also encouraging people to go farther, it’s possible that the movement could have reached still higher peaks.

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Quit While You’re Ahead

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The strike didn’t die over the course of the summer. It stagnated.

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After the Grand Prix, the demonstrations and meetings continued—quite a lot, in fact, albeit less than during the spring. June 22 and July 22 saw tens of thousands of people come out; not a single night demonstration failed to take the streets. There was a bit of a ruckus in Burlington, Vermont, when premiers and governors in the northeastern part of the continent met there at the end of July. Plans were drawn up for a convergence for the rentrée (the return to classes and the recommencement of the suspended semester) in August, starting first at cégeps and then moving on to universities.

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All of this happened, yet none of it materially improved the strike’s prospects for defending itself, particularly in the face of an election campaign—one of the most effective tactics democratic states have at their disposal to shut down social movements. It had been suspected for weeks, then essentially confirmed in the days immediately prior, but Jean Charest, the premier, made the official announcement on August 1.

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Incidentally, August 1 also marked the hundredth night demonstration in a row since April 24.

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The Parti Québécois offered a deal to the movement: settle down a bit, we’ll win this election, and then we’ll suspend the hike. It was argued, not unreasonably, that disruptive activity could hurt the PQ’s chances of beating the incumbent Liberals. Consequently, pacifist vigilantes stepped up their efforts to interfere with confrontational tactics at the night demonstrations, and the cégeps unanimously voted against the continuation of the strike. The strike did continue in some departments at UQÀM, but the effect was marginal, and efforts to enforce a shutdown of classes were undermined by scabs, security, and police.

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Anarchists had taken many risks and suffered severe consequences in their efforts to strengthen and embolden the movement as a whole. Many had already been beaten and arrested, and faced charges and uncertain futures. More than any other political tendency involved in the strike, anarchists were the ones who escalated the situation to the point that Jean Charest was forced to call an early election to end the crisis. Yet despite our best efforts, we had become foot soldiers for a movement that had always had a nationalist, social-democratic, and reformist character. Now this movement no longer needed us to win its unimaginative and ultimately shortsighted baseline objective: the cancellation of this specific tuition hike. It became difficult to avoid the conclusion that we had been used. Many of us felt, perhaps irrationally, that our efforts over the past few months had been utterly in vain. We told ourselves that we had gained experience, friends, and so on, that we had been part of something “historic,” but this sort of positive rhetoric failed to improve morale. In some cases, it just made things worse.

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Since the strike’s end, many anarchists have argued that we failed to apply the right tactics to the situation. What could we have done differently? What would have produced a greater success for us in August?

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But this line of critique may miss the mark. Perhaps we should step back and ask whether it was strategic for anarchists to try to revive the strike after militancy had withered over the summer. At the time, everyone embraced the “common sense” assumption that the top priority was to keep the strike alive. Hindsight is 20/20, but the negative consequences of that approach should have been predictable.

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Maybe, instead, we should have just gotten out of there.

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Now, I am not proposing that we should have withdrawn all support from the strike, but that we should have withdrawn some forms of support, especially the ones that involved considerable personal risk. Anarchists had previously proven capable of this. Many anarchists withdrew at the right time during the occupation of Cégep du Vieux Montréal and the night riot of March 15. In doing so, they left less experienced participants to face their fate alone—resulting in mass arrests in both cases. This was a little callous, no doubt; but during both events, anarchists made a point of offering advice to people who were making some pretty questionable decisions about how to conduct themselves. Anarchists eventually—and in my opinion, correctly—decided to take care of themselves once it was clear that things were about to get ugly and that their suggestions were falling on deaf ears. And in the aftermath, anarchists organized support for those arrested.

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Regarding the strike as a whole, getting out wouldn’t mean, for example, anarchists suddenly abandoning their critical support of the idea of free education. A common denominator position among anarchists in Québec, from syndicalists to anti-civ nihilist types, is that Québec’s privileged proletariat deserves the nice things in life—like a useless liberal arts education—at least as much as Québec’s even more privileged ruling class. To say it differently: “If capitalism, then at least welfare capitalism.”

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Making a strategic exit wouldn’t have stopped anarchists from intervening where it made sense to do so, either—but it would have meant that anarchists ceased helping the student movement whenever it stumbled, talking confidence into it whenever it hesitated, and trying to knock some sense into it whenever it was about to go in a stupid direction. In many ways, anarchists related to the student movement the way you might relate to a partner—in this case, an overly dependent partner who was not very appreciative of the help we often offered him unconditionally, sometimes was downright emotionally abusive, and really, do we even like this guy that much?

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But anarchists often lack self-confidence. Sometimes we don’t know when it’s time to cut our losses and move on. We were under the impression that we needed the strike to go on in order to continue building up our own power. Yes, we had invested a lot in the movement, and it would have felt wrong just to pull out and let it do its own thing—which, no doubt, would have left us shaking our heads in exasperation. But was it really a good idea to invest even more in it when things were evidently headed in an ugly direction?

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Our efforts to revive the movement did a lot to hurt the momentum that anarchists in Montréal had been building, in stops and starts, for years—since long before the strike. This set us up for disappointment and depression, needlessly demoralizing and demobilizing us. The problem was that we were pursuing a grossly unrealistic objective. The option of continuing the strike, especially given the general decline in confrontational activity during the early part of the summer, simply could not compete with the option of electoral compromise with the PQ. Democratic ideas have significantly greater sway in the student movement and among the general population than anarchist ideas. As unfortunate as this is, we should recognize this and act accordingly.

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Missed Opportunities

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The worst thing about the decision to prioritize continuing the strike was that, at that point, there were plenty more interesting and worthwhile paths open. For example, we could have focused on resisting and counteracting state repression. Repression had affected anarchists the most severely, but it also affected revolutionaries from other tendencies—most significantly Maoists—as well as many people who had simply been caught up in the energy of the strike and received criminal charges as a result.

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“The strike continues on August 13!” Many militants suffered from tunnel vision in August, doing what they could to prove this poster true— but at a heavy cost for other fronts of the struggle.

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During the spring, anarchists organized some powerful noise demonstrations, and there were also actions at Montréal’s courthouse, the Palais de justice. After the strike was over, in fall 2012, a large and spirited demonstration took to the streets in solidarity with everyone facing charges, living with restrictive conditions, or otherwise suffering as a result of things they had been accused of doing during the strike. Various texts appeared on this topic, as well. Yet at the end of the summer, during the period of the election and the rentrée, there was no organizing to speak of on that front.

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The only thing anarchists did collectively in August, besides attempting to stop the rentrée, was to campaign against representative democracy itself. This could have been a promising terrain of struggle, but almost everyone involved was also wrapped up in the losing battle of continuing the strike. Things didn’t turn out well on either front—but even more importantly, both undertakings were posited by the anarchists involved as being in solidarity with the student movement, when it was precisely the student movement that was facilitating the isolation and repression of anarchists by abandoning the strike.

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In other words, the student movement was acting contrary to the principle of solidarity. And by buying into the PQ’s proposal for an “electoral” truce, the student movement sabotaged its own most basic objective, with the PQ ultimately implementing indexation rather than a true tuition freeze.

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As a side point, it’s both facile and inaccurate to blame movement leaders and politicians for this turn of events. The strike was voted down in directly democratic assemblies. No matter how loud and influential certain individuals were, it was the students as a whole who chose to abandon the strike.

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The hopeless attempt to save the student movement from itself took away from the effectiveness of anarchists’ anti-democratic campaign. It was basically the same people doing everything, and they didn’t have the energy to do everything; their energies were split between appealing to students to keep the strike going, and appealing to society at large not to vote.

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“The elections… We don’t give a fuck! We don’t vote; we struggle.”

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Anarchists saw these as identical, which was a poor understanding of the social reality. For one thing, there was the statist, reformist, pro-voting stance of the majority of the student movement’s participants—but do we really need to beat that particular dead horse any longer?

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Meanwhile, a lot of people living in Montréal have a difficult time simply surviving because of the neighborhood they live in, the color of their skin, their lack of citizenship or status, or their accent in French—if they can speak it at all. There’s no doubt that plenty of marginalized folks were down with at least certain aspects of the student movement. But neither is there any doubt that most of them had only limited interest in the self-centered struggle of a bunch of privileged brats who, broadly speaking, did not reciprocate by concerning themselves with the more dire struggles of migrants, indigenous people, and others.4

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Now, I’m not saying you need to take off your red square if you want to start talking to such people about the moral bankruptcy of democracy. But maybe the fact that the PQ is going to sell out the movement shouldn’t be the center of your analysis if you want to address people who aren’t particularly invested in the movement. All the adamant social democrats to whom anarchists’ analysis of the situation might have been useful—given that they were legitimately seeking a freeze, not indexation—were completely unwilling to listen to anarchists during election time. That was their mistake. But our mistake was to keep trying to get through to the social democrats rather than reaching out to others who might have been a little more open had we been less alienating.

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It’s hard to imagine that the results could have been worse than what actually happened if, instead of trying to engage students and other participants or supporters of the movement with anti-electoral ideas, anarchists had used the same time and energy to advance a critique of Québécois democracy by other means. Sure, I’m skeptical that dropping a banner emblazoned with the words NEVER VOTE! NEVER SURRENDER! À BAS LA SOCIÉTÉ-PRISON «DÉMOCRATIQUE!» from a train bridge in a neighborhood full of francophone pensioners, then failing to publicize that this even happened, is the best use of anyone’s time. But as confusing, poorly contextualized, and silly as that might be, at least it speaks for itself without centralizing the students’ struggle to preserve their privileged position in society.

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It’s interesting to think about what other projects anarchists could have undertaken, unencumbered by the student movement. What if anarchists, in neighborhood assemblies or more informally, had pushed a struggle against gentrification and manifestations of capitalism in the areas where we actually live, while police resources were tied up watching night demonstrations and maintaining order downtown? In other words—what if we had taken advantage of the political situation to improve our own long-term material position, rather than improving the rapport de force between the government and the students?

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We also could have done more to usurp the megaphone, both literally and figuratively. This happened earlier in the strike: on the night of March 7, after a demonstrator lost his eye to an SPVM grenade, anarchists shouted down a few self-appointed leaders’ appeals for people to express their outrage peacefully, successfully convincing the majority of the crowd to stop standing around in Berri Square and either physically confront the police or at least defy their commands to disperse. There were attacks on two different police stations that night, the first such actions of the strike.

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In August, as on March 7, there were crowds of outraged people, but this time, they weren’t outraged about police violence. Instead, as an outvoted minority, they were upset by their fellow students’ decision to abandon the strike. The situation was a bit different: to go the fighting route would have meant ignoring the final verdict of a directly democratic vote, not just a few people with megaphones. In retrospect, it’s not clear how many people would ever have been willing to do that, given that the authority of such a vote is almost universally accepted in the galaxy of Québécois student politics. But alas, it seems that, in the aftermath of those disastrous student assemblies, there was no one even able to bring up the idea to the hardly insignificant number of militants (student and otherwise) suddenly bereft of previous months’ democratic justification for continuing the fight.

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Pursuing a hard line against nationalists and their discourse would also have divided and weakened the movement, but it would have publicized anarchists’ position on the Parti Québécois in clear terms. It would have offered an opportunity to call out their racist Muslim baiting in pursuit of the xenophobe vote, and their noxious valorization of French colonization on this continent. Had harsh critiques of CLASSE and/or ASSÉ come out when the strike was still in motion, rather than months later, this would also have divided the movement, albeit instructively. But if the movement is going to lose anyway, why not divide it?

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It was clear after a certain point in August, if not earlier, that things were rapidly coming to a close. This was an inevitable result of the efforts of nationalists, social democrats, and others who had always been pursuing a conflicting agenda. Revolutionary struggle can be an ugly business, and there are times when it makes sense for us to hold our noses and work with people whose politics we consider objectionable. We should never attack or alienate those we dislike for no good reason. But, at the end of the strike, the benefits of making an open break were clear.

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This is particularly important in light of the student movement’s unforgivable failure to support those who were facing judicially imposed conditions including exile from the Island of Montréal, non-association with friends or lovers, and the possibility of serious jail time in the future. It doesn’t matter whether the accused did what the state charged them with; the point is that illegal activity was essential to whatever success the strike had, and letting anyone suffer because the state pinned some of that activity on them sets a bad precedent for strikes to come. That’s the strategic argument, anyway—the ethical one should be obvious.

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“The laws of the state and the batons of the police will not stop our revolt. Solidarity with those who face repression for their participation in the struggle!” This poster was wheatpasted widely in certain neighborhoods after the strike was over.

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In short, anarchists could have done many things other than what we did do, which was to stay at the core of the movement. It was already clear by the weekend of the Grand Prix that the movement was on its way out; the events of June and July (or the lack thereof) confirmed this. Yet anarchists continued participating in general assemblies and committee meetings; to be precise, anarchists either returned to those spaces after having left them, or came to them for the very first time during the whole strike. This was done out of a mistaken belief that it was necessary to do so, that the struggle depended on the revival of the strike.

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Depression and Demobilization

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The end of the strike was marked by a pronounced failure to address the widespread phenomenon of post-strike depression. We might better identify this as post-uprising depression, common anywhere that has experienced sustained periods of social rupture.

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Many windows opened during the strike, but now we find ourselves “between strikes,” as some people say here, which is to say in a period of demobilization. Compared to the spring of 2012, it feels unusually difficult to pull off even the simplest things.

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Depression is an understandable but unfortunate response to the end of the strike. It’s useless, and a little cruel, to tell people that they shouldn’t feel sad about something that is an objectively depressing turn of events from an anarchist adventurist’s standpoint. Like any period of social rupture, the strike offered an exciting and dangerous context, presenting challenges to anyone caught up in it. To be sure, not everyone wants excitement, danger, or inconvenience. Many people would prefer to drive down rue Sainte-Catherine without worrying about giant demonstrations, or go to school without running into hard pickets, or take the métro without fear of a smoke bomb attack or bags of bricks on the rails. In contrast, the kind of person who’s going to become—and remain—an active, attack-oriented anarchist probably thrives on that sort of thing.

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This is adventurism: the sin of actually enjoying the struggles we participate in. We may not all like the same things, or be capable of the same types of action, but our common thread—regardless of divergent physical ability, tactical preferences, skill sets, resources, and social privileges—is that we are fighters. The restoration of social peace deprives us of something we need. This peace is an illusion, and the social war continues, but it’s harder to position ourselves offensively when it’s no longer playing out in the streets every day and night—when thousands of people no longer see themselves as participants, having returned to the old routines of work or school or skid life.

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There are lots of different ways to cope with depression. Hedonism is one way; after the strike ended, there was a heavy turn in some circles towards alcohol consumption, drug use, and hardcore partying. Another way is to switch gears entirely: some left town or put all of their energy into single-issue organizing, while others threw themselves back into school or art or earning money. Some of these means of coping were healthier than others. But as a whole, they all contributed to isolating people from one another and atomizing the struggle.

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It was worse for the sizeable number of anarchists who stuck it out longer, trying to do exactly what they had been doing a few months earlier: going to demonstrations, mobilizing people for them, trying to hype people up and “make things happen.” After the electoral victory of the PQ, this simply didn’t work anymore. The problem wasn’t just that many anarchists had quit the strike by that time (although that certainly did have an impact). The problem was that anarchists in Montréal didn’t quit collectively. Instead, we quit one at a time, and often only once we had reached a maximum of exhaustion, a low of misery, or both.

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Of course, it’s a stretch to speak of anarchists in Montréal doing anything in a coordinated way. There are simply too many organizations, nodes, social scenes, and affinity groups—each of which has its own distinct goals, outlook, and capacity. But none of these groups withdrew explicitly from the strike. Formal anarchist organizations in the city, except for a few propaganda outfits into heavy theory, had never fully engaged themselves in the strike as organizations.5 It was individuals, usually working with others on the basis of friendship, who made the decision whether to drop out. The informal associations of people who worked closely together during the strike never met to discuss what people could do together as the strike was winding down. Consequently, these associations mostly evaporated with the strike.

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There were many intentional discussions in June and July, announced ahead of time through social media and listservs, but most of these were focused on “the tasks at hand”—blocking the upcoming rentrée and continuing the strike. In my own circles, there was never time or space to talk about how people felt about the situation as a whole, how they felt about their own personal situations, or what they hoped to get out of continuing to engage with the strike. Nor were there many discussions between people who felt political affinity with one another, or who cared about maintaining positive relationships with one another more than they cared about abstract political objectives.

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During the spring, we shared some incredible moments together. We flipped over police cars, partied in the streets, forced cops to run for their lives, painted the halls of university buildings according to our tastes, made out with strangers during street parties that became riots, and generally lived life to the fullest. It wasn’t all good, but the parts that were good were really good. Over the summer, like many other people, I made the mistake of attributing all that to the strike, rather than to the specific people who were in the streets acting to create those moments. The strike created the context in which those people were able to act together: it brought large numbers into the streets, it facilitated us running into each other over and over again, it frustrated and overwhelmed the forces that defend the capitalist economy.

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But the strike had no agency of its own. It was itself the product of human agency—and by no means only the agency of anarchists. Although we were an influential minority in some regards, such as determining how confrontational the demonstrations were, we were not actually that important. Another influential minority consisted of careerist student politicians who were able to influence other aspects of the strike, like which images and narratives of the strike were broadcast on television and blogspace, much more effectively than we could.

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Anarchists needn’t have been depressed by the end of the strike. This isn’t a macho admonishment that people shouldn’t let their feelings get the best of them; I don’t think the answer is for us to become coldly rational revolutionaries who move in a Terminator-like linear fashion towards our objectives. We are emotional creatures, and that is for the best. My criticism is that we staked our morale, our passion to fight, on the wrong thing: not on the health of the relationships of people seeking to be dangerous together, but on the health of the strike as a force that could interrupt capitalist law and order—which many of the people who created the strike never saw as a goal in itself, but only as a temporary means to a reformist goal.

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As the strike was winding down, I should have dedicated more time to making connections with all those potential friends. There was one demonstration in August that I knew would be boring, but I went anyway. I saw someone there I’d seen a dozen times since February. He recognized me, too, and made a reference to the sort of thing we should have been doing. I laughed, but I didn’t keep talking—even though that was the last chance I’d see him. I should have introduced myself, tried to exchange contact information, and passed on an invitation to get together at La Belle Époque. It was my last chance to do that.

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As for the people with whom I was closest during the strike—partners in the street, fellow writers of timely propaganda, and other co-conspirators—these were the people with whom I should have been discussing what would come after the strike. What did our experiences together during those months mean? As the larger movement fell apart, could that history of working together transform into something else?

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But relationships between specific people were not prioritized at the end of the strike. Instead, we prioritized relationships to masses—which, it turns out, are much more easily seduced by politicians than by people like us.

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Legacy

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It took a few months after the election for things to pick up again—but they did. Struggle in Montréal can cycle quickly from highs to lows and back again. February of 2013 saw demonstrations first against the Salon des Ressources Naturelles, a reprise of the previous year’s Salon Plan Nord, then a major mobilization to oppose the PQ’s Summit on Higher Education, at which the new governing party confirmed that, rather than freezing tuition, they would index it to inflation and the cost of living. This was not a broken promise on their part; it had been part of their election platform.

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SPVM forces move south along rue Berri on February 26, 2013.

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https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-mont-15b.jpg Banner drop, March 5, 2013: “We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison.”

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Banner leading the march, March 5, 2013: “The social peace is behind us.”

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The next month started off promisingly, with the night demonstration on Tuesday, March 5, getting a little rowdy near the Palais des congrès. Yet that was the end of this second cycle. On March 12, another night demonstration—albeit much smaller—was crushed before it even left Berri Square. On March 15, the SPVM, with the assistance of the SQ, crushed Montréal’s annual anti-police demonstration decisively. From that point on, all but one of the unpermitted demonstrations6 that marched through downtown during the spring of 2013 were kettled and dispersed before they could become disruptive.

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The police attacked the COBP demonstration on March 15, 2013 before the march was even scheduled to begin.

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On the municipal, the provincial, and the federal level, the state has taken measures to prevent any reprise of spring 2012, passing laws to restrict or criminalize the essential elements of militant protest. The most ominous of these measures is Bill C–309, which finally became law on June 19, 2013. Applicable across the entire territory of the Canadian federation, it gives courts the ability to issue a prison sentence of up to ten years if a person is convicted of wearing a mask in the course of criminal activity during a demonstration. The simple fact of being present in an illegal demonstration can be considered criminal in itself.

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Of course, actual police tactics are ultimately more important than codes and ordinances. The SPVM have evidently taken time to analyze the events of last spring, identifying their errors, drawing lessons, updating their old techniques, learning new ones, upgrading their equipment, and training officers. The results are plain to see.

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In Québécois student politics, the reformist federations FÉUQ and FÉCQ have seen their influence reduced significantly, whereas the more radical ASSÉ (the kernel around which the now defunct CLASSE was formed) has more student associations affiliated with it than ever before. This is good for us, if only because ASSÉ’s direct democracy creates spaces in which it is harder to shut people up—and anarchists are precisely the kind of people that social-democratic politicos usually want to silence.

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At the same time, ASSÉ is now disorganized and largely dysfunctional. The members who possessed revolutionary aspirations and the strategic ideas to match have largely abandoned the organization. There is good reason to think that, just as after the 2005 strike, it will take years before the organization is once again capable of mounting an effective challenge to the government. Whether or not anarchists choose to participate in that struggle (and some surely will, even if others don’t), it shouldn’t be taken for granted that the next social major upheaval in Québec will arise from the student movement.

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Indeed, in the wake of 2012’s uprising, we should reconsider the strategies that have worked for us in the past. This is certainly true for all those who, in one way or another, sought to defend “the Québec model” over the course of the strike: the most significant student strike in Québec’s history, by just about any measure, didn’t even realize its most basic demand. For anarchists fighting in this province—and anyone else who would willfully jeopardize the comforts of welfare capitalism for half a chance at revolution and real freedom—it is incumbent upon us to determine how we should proceed towards our objectives, or live our politics, or both, in what is now a very uncertain political environment.

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I will conclude with just a few concrete suggestions. First off, however we pursue our struggles in the future, we should strive to build more infrastructure, more formal communications networks, and more informal social networks that are autonomous of movements comprised largely of people with whom we have serious political differences. Doing this could make it possible that, the next time a large portion of society is drawn into the streets, we will be able to participate in the conflict without losing sight of our own values, building momentum that is not dependent on someone else’s movement.

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Once we have infrastructure and networks of our own, as many anarchists in Montréal already do, we should be sure to use them. The thing that distinguishes revolutionary infrastructure from subcultural infrastructure—that is, an anarchist social center from a DIY punk space—is that, alongside its role as another space to live, socialize, and make ends meet, it should also serve to encourage people to throw themselves into anarchist struggle, and to spread the skills necessary for that task.

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The latter first.

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There are many practical skills that some anarchists already have, and others need to learn: digital self-defense, trauma support, tactics for street action, proficiency in different languages, and so on. These are all useful for specific situations—but we also need to be prepared for general situations. We need to be able to recognize when momentum is picking up, when we are at a peak of opportunity, when things are slowly or rapidly coming to a halt, and what is strategic for anarchists to do in each of these situations. Studying history, not just because it is curious or inspiring but in order to identify patterns and apply lessons, is essential if we hope to orient ourselves in the trajectory of the next upheaval to come.

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Finally, the next time we realize that total anarchist triumph is no longer in the cards, we should consider the advantages of going out with a bang.

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Further Reading

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    Of course, upheavals are unpredictable. In Montréal and elsewhere, we have seen that whenever the police kill someone, it can spark riots. These sorts of upheavals are often led only by marginalized youth—and all too often, as with the riots that started in the London neighborhood of Tottenham in 2011, anarchists fail to contribute in any meaningful way. ↩

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    The problem of strategy in chess is the problem of determining the best way to checkmate your opponent. The problem of strategy for anarchists is more complicated, because we don’t necessarily agree as to what we are trying to achieve—but there are a few things we should be able to agree upon, such as abolishing police, prisons, and borders. Whatever our goals, strategy is how we attempt to reach them. Speaking of a correct analysis, then, has little do with a lofty concept like Truth, which is supposedly final. No analysis is correct forever; no analysis is correct outside the context in which it serves. For anarchists, who wish to bring about a revolution, a correct analysis is simply whatever interpretation of social reality best informs our efforts to achieve that objective. ↩

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    There were Québécois manifestations of Occupy, including Occupy Montréal, but they didn’t arouse nearly as much interest as the movement did south of the border and elsewhere in Canada. Even more importantly, they never put much effort into making themselves relevant by developing a street presence—even a pacifist one. ↩

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    There were many people—including anarchists, but also others, particularly anarchism-skeptical feminists—who pushed to change the discourse of the student movement from within its formal structures, such as cégep associations, CLASSE congresses and committees, and formal and informal departmental associations at universities. The aim was often to see the struggles of women, queer people, and people of color mentioned in demonstration callouts and public statements. As a result of their efforts, the analysis presented in the manifesto that CLASSE released during the summer, Share Our Future, was less terrible than it might have been. Yet improved rhetoric never translated into meaningful action on the part of CLASSE in solidarity with indigenous people, Montréal’s racialized youth, or any other marginalized category of people besides pro-strike students in Québec. ↩

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    One exception is CLAC, which did make the conscious decision to organize demonstrations during the strike, and thereby did more than simply produce propaganda. CLAC’s politics aren’t explicitly anarchist, but anarchist ideas and principles are hegemonic within the organization. ↩

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    The “Status for All” demonstration on May 18, 2013, which was chiefly organized by the migrant justice organization Solidarity Across Borders, is the single exception. ↩

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    7. \n
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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/09/11/after-the-crest-part-iii-barcelona-anarchists-at-low-tide", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/09/11/after-the-crest-part-iii-barcelona-anarchists-at-low-tide", "title": "After the Crest, part III : Barcelona Anarchists at Low Tide", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2013-09-11T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

This is the third part in our “After the Crest” series, studying how we can make the most of the waning phase of upheavals. This installment analyzes the rhythms of struggle in Barcelona over the past several years, discussing the complex relationship between anarchists and larger social movements as popular struggles escalated and then subsided. It concludes with practical input on how anarchists can take advantage of a period of ebbing momentum.

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For best results, read this text in combination with our earlier features on Barcelona: “Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters,” describing the plaza occupation movement of spring 2011, and “The Rose of Fire Has Returned,”, focusing on the general strike of March 2012. Together, the three pieces trace the trajectory of an upheaval from its inspiring but ideologically murky inception through the high point of confrontation and into the aftermath.

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After the Crest, part III: Barcelona Anarchists at Low Tide

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This is the third part in our “After the Crest” series, studying how we can make the most of the waning phase of upheavals. This installment analyzes the rhythms of struggle in Barcelona over the past several years, discussing the complex relationship between anarchists and larger social movements as popular struggles escalated and then subsided. It concludes with practical input on how anarchists can take advantage of a period of ebbing momentum.

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For best results, read this in combination with our earlier features on Barcelona: “Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters,” describing the plaza occupation movement of spring 2011, and “The Rose of Fire Has Returned,”, focusing on the general strike of March 2012. Together, the three pieces trace the trajectory of an upheaval from its inspiring but ideologically murky inception through the high point of confrontation and into the aftermath.

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Anarchists in Barcelona played an important and visible role in the social upheavals of September 2010 to May 2012, which in their turn were an influential contribution to the global upheavals taking place in those same years. By the summer of 2012, in the Spanish state and elsewhere, these upheavals largely appeared to have subsided. Anarchists in Barcelona have faced a number of important questions and difficulties as a growing social disintegration contrasts with the earlier times of social coalescence. Will the gains won in those moments of rebellion be lost now that the prevailing social mood is one of resignation?

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Whether it takes months or years, such gains are never lost, only surrendered. Social rebels can hold on to the strength they have won if they allow it to transform rather than expecting it to accumulate. It would be self-defeating to predict, from this vantage point in 2013, whether the anarchist struggle in Barcelona will lose ground or go back on the offensive, because that future rests largely on our own decisions.

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Barcelona on March 29, 2012

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Timeline of Events

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2007: A conflict arises within the squatters’ movement when one sector seeks legalization within a reformist discourse of housing rights. As a result, anarchists redouble their efforts to elaborate a critique of capitalist housing. They also question the practice of squatting for the sake of squatting.\nEnd of 2007: CGT-led bus drivers’ strike, with critical use of sabotage and anarchist solidarity, wins many of its demands.\nSpring 2008: A campaign begins for the freedom of longtime anarchist prisoner Amadeu Casellas. A year later, a similar campaign begins for Joaquin Garces.\nSeptember-October 2008: US stock market crashes.\nOctober 2008: In an action two years in preparation, populist but nonetheless practical anticapitalists in Catalunya use half a million euros robbed from banks through fraudulent loans to print and distribute hundreds of thousands of copies of a newspaper (published in three different volumes over the next two years) that criticizes capitalism and suggests alternatives. About three years later the group begins a complex of consumer and producer eco-cooperatives.\nDecember 2008: Greece is gripped by an insurrection, with solidarity actions and important consequences in anarchist practice in Barcelona.\nSpring 2009: A huge student movement against Plan Bologna austerity measures is killed off by pacifist leadership. Once occupied universities are evicted, the radical part of the student movement turns to squatting empty buildings and self-organizing a “free university.”\n2009: Barcelona witnesses a growth of coordinated solidarity actions and attacks in solidarity with anarchist prisoners and anarchists in Chile and Greece, as well as daylight attacks against targets that can be easily associated with housing and job precarity. The support campaign wins the freedom of Joaquin Garces.\nSpring 2010: The government in Madrid announces the first of many rounds of austerity measures. In preparation, major and minor labor unions, along with anarchist and other groups, begin preparing resistance across the Spanish state. In Barcelona, the first neighborhood assemblies are also formed to organize the upcoming general strike.\nSeptember 29, 2010: General strike, with major participation and heavy rioting in Barcelona.\nJanuary 27, 2011: Minority unions, primarily the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and CGT, launch their own general strike, without the major unions. Participation is significant though far from total, and complemented by several significant sabotage actions.\nMay 1, 2011: In a collaborative effort between anarcho-syndicalist organizations, socialist Catalan independence organizations, and insurrectionary or informal anarchists, a combative May Day protest successfully wreaks havoc in a rich neighborhood for over an hour.\nMay 16, 2011: A day after major protests across the Spanish state, a group of 100 activists begin an occupation of Plaça Catalunya in the center of Barcelona. Within a few days, the occupation grows to 100,000 and beyond. The 15M movement is born. Subsequently, new neighborhood assemblies appear across the city, and a series of massive protests and blockades are organized.\nFall 2011: The movement against the privatization of healthcare in Catalunya peaks with numerous blockades and occupations of hospitals and clinics.\nJanuary 2012: Public transportation workers, largely organized by the CGT, betray their promises and sell out a week-long strike before it begins, making a deal that meets none of their initial demands and wasting weeks of organizing, much of it carried out by allies and transportation-users. Fortunately, that same week, a student strike takes over the streets. Students disobey their leaders, riot, and attack the media.\nMarch 29, 2012: A general strike paralyzes the country. In Barcelona and other cities, protesters engage in the biggest riots yet.\nMay 1, 2012: The police militarize the streets, expecting possible rioting in the anti-capitalist May Day protest. Most anarchists, however, prioritize countering media and government discourses around the earlier general strike. Thousands of flyers are distributed.\nOctober 31, 2012: The minority unions hold another general strike. This time, the CGT organizes peace police to prevent riots. Most anarchists do not solidarize with the strike, and it passes practically without notice.\nNovember 14, 2012: The major unions together with the smaller unions carry out the next general strike. The neighborhood assemblies, largely weakened, and the informal anarchists, doubtful or uninspired, do not play a major role in preparing. In Barcelona, the protests during the strike are massive, but the police control the streets and brutalize people from one end of the city to the other. The general mood after the strike is of disappointment or powerlessness.

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Riot police threaten demonstrators in Barcelona during the 15M plaza occupation movement, May 27, 2011

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Rhythms of Struggle

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The social upheavals in Barcelona were not caused by material conditions. The structures and traditions that became most important in the space of the revolt were already in place before the economic crash. And the greatest spikes in popular participation in the revolt were direct responses either to movement initiatives that resonated with people’s perception of their problems, or to a perceived attack on their living conditions. Specifically, spikes occurred when the government announced an austerity measure—not when austerity measures took effect or the economic crisis as a whole began to be felt—or else when an initiative such as a strike or an occupation attracted many people and went off successfully. In other words, people’s perception of their living conditions and the possibilities for resistance has proved more real than any objective measurement of those conditions on a material level, whether evaluated in wages, unemployment, or otherwise.

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The key to gaining strength in times of social disintegration can be found in this approach. We are not mere subjects of social forces. On the contrary, we actively and confrontationally position ourselves to contradict the narrative that justifies or hides those forces. When the narrative depicted social peace and prosperity, we occupied a network of cracks in and margins of that prosperity, demonstrating that we were not content with the wages society was willing to pay us and that we knew we were not the only ones in refusal. When the narrative depicted change and reform, we positioned ourselves at the juncture of the mass of bodies beginning to appear in the streets and an imaginary horizon that contradicted the democratic ideology that mobilized and homogenized those bodies. When the narrative depicts disappointment and powerlessness, we approach the collapse of social movements with joy, because it unmasks the false promises of populists and reveals what is truly lacking for us to regain our lives.

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Just as our actions had meaning in times of social peace—just as revolutions were not inevitable in times of austerity—our actions, our projects, and the positions we choose in relation to events can sometimes tip the scales to determine whether a social disintegration erases everything that was won in a period of revolt, or whether the lull that always follows the storm will soon be interrupted by another wave of revolt.

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A simple comparison of events in the United States and events in Catalunya suggests that a highly disintegrated society is likely to sustain a single brief flare of resistance before normality resumes, whereas a more coalesced society can sustain multiple intense waves of revolt in relatively close succession before exhausting its hope and rage. Some of us hold that the activity of social struggles—understood broadly—is the best way to reverse the social disintegration caused by capitalism. The farmers and artisans who blindly resist modernization; the insurrectionaries who connect with popular rage; the activists who overcome themselves by spreading an ethic of mutual aid rather than the specialization of charity; the old people who insist on telling the stories of their defeat; and the artists who evade their own recuperation—all of them help society1 to coalesce in the face of the disintegrating force of capitalism.

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Just as the more densely knit society can sustain the reverberations of revolt for longer, the places within that society where comrades seek and generate conflict as part of an ongoing effort will not fall back into silence as quickly. In Catalunya as in the United States, a successful projectuality has allowed certain towns and cities to maintain more intense struggles where all around them the social peace has already returned. Revolt moves through the social body, but its specific functions may be performed by any of that body’s cells. We are not external to the body, as a surgeon, a sociologist, or a vanguard, but neither are we its prisoners.

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We imagine that it will be the concussiveness of repeated outbursts of revolt, and not the geometrical growth of a social movement, that will destroy the current structures of governance, the way the intense vibrations of an earthquake or avalanche liquefy the hardest materials.

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If this is correct, one of the vital tasks of rebels is to unlearn the mechanical motions of the Left and the fatalistic expectations that a mechanical worldview inculcates, and to relearn rhythmic cycles of struggle.

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The Anarchist Space

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A couple years before the new social movements broke out, many anarchists had already begun to change how they interacted and how they positioned themselves in relation to the rest of society. This enabled them to be much more effective in the social coalescence that occurred from the general strike of September 2010 through the 15M movement to May Day 2012; to play a role in extending and radicalizing that coalescence; and to hold on to a good deal of potential as it began to fade away.

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In the previous century, the anarchist space in Barcelona—the terrain of struggle which anarchists inhabit and help to create—has changed in shape and density numerous times. I would identify three different forms this space can take: a unified space, which is held together by an organizational center of gravity, with communication occurring primarily within a singular organizational set of boundaries that can presume to represent an anarchist movement; a segmented space, which is divided between multiple centers that generally do not overlap or communicate; and a fragmented space, which is comprised of numerous distinct groups or currents that, despite differing and often conflicting, intersect and overlap to an untraceable degree, so communication and connection are networked intensively. In their long history in Barcelona, anarchists have always been most effective when their space was fragmented.

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An increase in their strength, or the potential loss of that strength, has generally led them to unify their space of struggle. Unified spaces have generally precipitated major defeats, as the weaknesses of a single line of struggle can affect the entire movement.2 The contrasting interpretations of those defeats have repeatedly led to the appearance of a segmented anarchist space. In the last thirty years, the anarchist space in Barcelona has gone from unified, to segmented, to fragmented.

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The aftermath of the Casas Viejas uprising in 1933, an earlier chapter in the history of anarchist struggle in Spain

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The last change occurred primarily between 2008 and 2012.3 It was visible in the exodus of anarchists from the squatting bubble, in the bus drivers’ strike of 2008, in increasing attempts at citywide or regional coordination through 2009 and 2010, and afterwards in participation in neighborhood assemblies, plaza occupations, citywide coordinating groups, campaigns against foreclosures, campaigns against immigrant detention centers and raids, and labor assemblies for the organization of strikes. Clearly, the increase of popular resistance and the erosion of social peace helped to strengthen the anarchist space and created many more opportunities for methods of non-unified coordination to be put into practice, but the fragmentation of the anarchist space—which also made it impossible for any one part to dominate the others, and compelled anarchists to seek shared spaces—was already a fact.

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Throughout these moments of growth, a major strategic tension has played out between those who sought to unify the anarchist movement and those who fought to preserve its fragmentation.

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Neither Recuperation Nor Repression

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In part because of the change in how most anarchists are positioning themselves, neither recuperation nor repression has been able to suppress the upheaval.

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Initially, most anarchists positioned themselves in such a way as to not have any hope of nourishing or influencing the revolt. They either accepted it uncritically, happy that other people were finally taking to the streets no matter what their motives or expectations were, or else they dismissed it as reformist.

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This dismissal reveals an important miscalculation. By correctly characterizing the new neighborhood assemblies or the occupation of Plaça Catalunya as “social democratic,” radical anarchists obscured what proved to be the more important characteristic: that these spaces were spontaneous and not institutional (at least, not yet). Characterizing people or spaces as reformist is erroneous, even if factually accurate, because reformism is an institutional force that captures people and spaces, rather than an essence that emanates from them. Anarchists who were justifiably concerned with avoiding reformist strategies walled themselves off from new relationships, not realizing that spaces of encounter always have revolutionary potential. The people who fill those spaces initially enact reformist strategies because that is what they know. The structures that institutionalize those spaces are imposed afterwards by internal or external recuperators.

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The mistrust of reformism was overcome the same way in Plaça Catalunya and in the neighborhood assemblies. First, a couple of the more adventurous, eccentric, or leftist anarchists began to participate. Some of these felt comfortable in the new spaces, others were wary, but all of them were able to share space with reformists, either out of tolerance or thick skin. Then they spread the word within their circles, and soon it became popular for most anarchists to attend these heterogeneous spaces, though how they participated varied greatly.

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This pattern defied a number of my expectations, though it makes sense in retrospect. Those with the sharpest social intuition, who arrived early in the spaces that later proved to be of great importance, were hippies, leftists, and, only very rarely, combative anarchists. Later, the insurrectionary anarchists and the intensely activist anarchists4 flooded in. The activists tended to build up the structures of the assemblies and occupations without trying to distill their revolutionary potential or criticize their social democratic anxieties; on the whole, they avoided practices that would generate conflict with their newfound allies. Of the insurrectionaries, some denounced the hypocrisy of a spontaneous movement that in one moment called for revolution and in another discussed getting rid of bad politicians or rescuing the welfare state. Not realizing that incoherence is a constant feature of life under capitalism, for anarchists as well as vaguely upset citizens, they turned their back on the new movements. The others stayed, seeking a balance between conflict and connection. Their conflictive approach drove them to seek fault lines and drive them open, while also trying to be part of a constantly expanding web of relationships.

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Simultaneously, the new practice of engagement dovetailed with anarchist support for the general strikes. The strike was already an accepted tradition of struggle, and anarchists in particular have a long history of organizing them, so it was less a leap of faith for anarchists to work with unionists, influencing the outcome and character of the strikes. Their distrust of unions (which many CNT members share) helped rather than hindered their ability to radicalize the strikes, as long as they were willing to engage in some way.

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As anarchist engagement in non-anarchist spaces brought clear results, many anarchists adopted a practice of participating in spaces of encounter and fostering relationships with people in institutionalized dissident organizations, while never joining those organizations. This positioning enabled anarchists to keep leftist institutions in check, holding them up to the radical values they purport to espouse and criticizing their betrayals more directly. It is possible that this is one reason why the social struggles in Barcelona have not been recuperated.

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Another reason is that there has been no unified strategy of recuperation. The labor unions once occupied the critical position, enabling them to recuperate the most threatening of struggles.5 But new activist formations like Real Democracy Now have shown the most potential to capture popular outrage and redirect it towards superficial democratic complaints that focus on politicians and civic forms of participation. It has been in the organizational interests of unions to pull the focus of complaint back to the terrain of economics and labor—though this seems to have infected that terrain with the practice of assemblies and self-organization that was being co-opted by democracy activists. Thanks to the jockeying between competing would-be recuperators, the hollow discourse of the democrats has been contaminated with questions of economy, while the vertical terrain of the unions has been undermined by a renewed tradition of self-organization.

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Recuperation is still a danger, and some would say the anarcho-reformist CGT (the third largest labor union in the country, a split from the anarchist CNT) is the most capable of synthesizing these two strategies of recuperation. In the meantime, both the terrain of labor and the terrain of democracy are constantly destabilized by radicals who bring an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist vision. However, as labor and democracy are recuperative lenses placed on top of the fundamentally radical fields of sustenance and organization, it is probable that even if nobody employs a successful strategy of recuperation, as long as radicals do not succeed in shattering the recuperative lenses already in place, ongoing social conflicts will not be able to develop a truly revolutionary character. Nonetheless, a conflict that cannot be recuperated will continue to destabilize the State.

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One of three things could happen that would make anarchists incapable of preventing ongoing attempts at recuperation. If the media, aided by anarchist arrogance, succeed in isolating anarchists from broader movements, then the unions, activist organizations, and left-wing political parties will be able to bind social struggle within a discourse of democracy, rights, and reform. If anarchists give up their conflictive attitudes out of fear of some greater evil (such as fascism, which will be discussed presently), they will not be able to expose and criticize recuperators in the movement. Finally, if they unify and become a movement with which the unions or activist formations could negotiate, they will end up legitimizing the power of would-be leaders, and they will lose the ability to interact in a fragmentive way with other sectors of the movement. A fragmentive interaction is crucial in that it allows anarchists to criticize and create relationships simultaneously, thus generating a multiplicity of forms of both criticism and relation, undermining homogeneity and discipline in non-anarchist sectors of the social movements and potentially extending fragmentation well beyond the anarchist space.

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Repression has not failed for lack of effort by the police. Police harassed neighborhood assemblies occupying plazas or marching in the streets, they brutally evicted the Plaça Catalunya encampment, they arrested twenty-two people for attempting to blockade Parliament, they arrested large numbers of people after every riot including over a hundred after the March 29 general strike, they have imprisoned people, they have inflicted permanent injuries upon several people, and they have introduced new laws and surveillance measures that constitute a serious crackdown on popular struggle.

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Police beating plaza occupiers, May 27, 2011

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But at every step, spreading resistance has discouraged the authorities from continuing these campaigns of repression. When they arrested a list of mostly anarchists for spitting on or assaulting politicians during the June 2011 blockade of Parliament, spontaneous solidarity protests numbering in the thousands took to the streets, covered the walls with graffiti, and rained abuse upon the police. Neighborhood assemblies took up collections for their legal costs. Even though the pacifist leadership of the 15M movement, together with the media, succeeded in demonizing the violence of blocking streets and spitting on politicians, when specific people were arrested for that violence—people whom their neighbors and other protesters had gotten to know in the neighborhood assemblies or elsewhere—the entire movement claimed them as their own. When the repression failed to isolate the bad protesters and only brought more people out into the streets, the government quickly scaled down the attention they were giving to the case and quietly left it on the back burner.

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A similar thing happened with their new public snitching website, inaugurated to encourage good citizens to identify rioters from photos taken during the March 29 general strike. On the whole, anarchists responded with a clandestine mentality, assuming the reality of repression and staying low or preparing to go into hiding. Fortunately, socialist independentistes, parents, and neighborhood assemblies protested the snitching website publicly, flooding the streets in indignation or refusing to accept the criminalization of rioters. After a few weeks, the government took the website down.

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Metamorphosis: Shifts and Seasons

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If the social upheaval in Barcelona was neither recuperated nor repressed, why has it faded away? Although some important errors and weaknesses did contribute to its decline, the decline was inevitable and even healthy.

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Both leftism and the rationalist worldview it stems from train us to view the world in an unrealistic way. This generates false expectations and false criteria with which to evaluate our struggles. The crux of the matter is that we are not the abstract value both Capital and the Left see in us: we are living beings with our own autonomous rhythms that constantly fly in the face of managerial strategies and social mechanics.

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People took to the streets with a social democratic idea of revolution. Encouraged by pacifist assurances about “people power,” by media misrepresentations of the Arab Spring or the Color Revolutions, by Hollywood fantasies like the revised ending of V for Vendetta which subsequently found its way into specifically cyber-activist portrayals of revolution like the one projected in Zeitgeist 3, they thought they could bring power to its knees simply by taking to the streets.

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The neighborhood assembly in Sant Antoni, Barcelona

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When this proved false, they experienced the great emotional force of disappointment. This disappointment was delayed by the initial rush of overcoming alienation in the blossoming neighborhood assemblies, or by the recurrences of the dream of people power fostered in the massive protests organized every few months out of the 15M phenomenon. But when the assemblies shrank and the protests did not bring the results they were looking for, there was nothing left to hold back the disappointment.

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When people disappear, it turns out that their eyes go first, and their ears linger a while longer. We can react to their disappearance as a completed fact, concluding that the others were never really in the struggle to begin with and giving up on the conversation that had begun with them. Or we can recognize that the disappeared are really only half-disappeared, that they are still there, blind and invisible, listening. When we continue the conversation, banging on bank windows, taping open the gates of the metro, setting off fireworks at noise demos, the half-disappeared can hear this, and they understand it to be an invitation back into the streets. That invitation is first of all a demand that they rethink their vision of the struggle. Those who do come back, come back stronger.

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And even those who never go away do not stay in the streets consistently. They are for ever coming and going, deciding whether to let their projects die or try once more to resuscitate them. We have to recognize that even those who dedicate their entire lives to the struggle must also have their seasons.

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Earlier, I described the struggle in a time of social coalescence as a constantly expanding web of relationships. That expansion gave people a new pulse. It contradicted the unflagging march of alienation. But when it seemed to subside, people lost the collective heartbeat they had only just found.

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The neighborhood assembly in Poble Sec, Barcelona

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They did not lose the pulse because it had disappeared, but because the expansion that gives it meaning is not quantitative. It is no mistake that the science of Capital teaches us to recognize only one form of expansion. Because we are blinded to the horizons towards which the social body expands, we lose hold of it and fall back to the flat reality of alienation. Sadly, the same magic that makes the social body stronger than the chains of the State also shakes off those who have been trained to think geometrically, as much as they would like to remain in the presence of that new and growing collectivity.

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When one catches a dragon by the tail, one must never expect a smooth ride.

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The intensification of relationships that goes hand in hand with the coalescence of society is never a quantitative growth. It occurs in multiple dimensions at once. The tendrils of the web surge forward, capturing new space, linking new bodies, and then contract, deepening the intensity of those links. Just as the visible growth of a tree needs the attendant growth of the roots, a social struggle needs moments of subterranean expansion.

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In Mediterranean Barcelona, the heat of high summer makes it easy to recognize that the dog days are not moments for going on the attack or sitting through meetings, but for relaxing, exalting the body, and reflecting on recent struggles and the upcoming autumn. But the leftist obligation to produce motion often deprives us of winter. All people in struggle need a time to confront their despair, lick their wounds, and to fall back on the comforting bonds of friendship. Not realizing this animal necessity, many anarchists exhaust themselves by trying to maintain a constant rhythm, or they mistake a slowdown for a loss of strength, and they allow their gains to be washed away. But winter can be an important time to hunker down, to carry forward the projects that sustain us (and realize which those are), to test the strength of new relationships, and to sound the depth of one’s community of struggle.

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These rhythms are not uniform, just as one winter is never the same as the next. Some winters, people light fires in the open and stand by them until spring, as the Greek comrades did in 2008, which we tried to imitate, in a way, in 2010. Other winters, everyone retreats to their private hearths, as at the end of 2012. But was that a defeat?

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After the general strike of September 2010, anarchists discovered that there was tinder everywhere. They stayed busy in their burrows and prepared another great fire before the winter was out, and the general strike of January 2011 lit the way to May Day and the plaza occupation movement. With all the activity, that summer was short, and people were beginning to tire by autumn. The fall of 2011 was not the “otoño caliente” (hot autumn) everyone was expecting, informed by the logic of geometric growth. In their shrinking neighborhood assemblies, some new spaces of encounter, and the persisting spaces of coordination with the unions, people just managed to hold on through winter, riding the last of the wave that had begun in May. They kept their dreams and memories intense through lively debate, so that when the two major unions were finally forced to call a new general strike by an even greater round of austerity measures, people threw themselves into organizing it, and what was created exceeded everyone’s expectations. Through force of will, people stayed on their feet despite heavy blows of repression. Striding forward, they made it through May Day, 2012, long enough to take the streets without being intimidated by the immense police presence, and to counteract the media narrative about the March 29 riots with an onslaught of flyers, posters, and graffiti.

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After that, the social body fell asleep. The summer was long and pacific. In the fall people rallied to prepare a new round of strikes or to stop the growth of fascism, but could not see clearly how to carry those struggles forward. The next general strikes sputtered forward ineffectively, and in winter people holed up in small group projects they had created with friends, whether or not those projects had proven effective in the last months. These included specifically anarchist assemblies that organized debate and propaganda, neighborhood social centers, distros, free stores, or mutual aid networks intended to encourage anarchist responses to problems of job precarity or home foreclosures.

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Narrated as the movements of a great social body, this rhythm of rise and fall makes perfect sense. After such gigantic efforts, the collectivity needs to sleep, and that sleep is not a form of weakness but a necessary activity in which gains can be solidified. Yet many people experienced the exhaustion of the social body as defeat, as loss. In accepting this as reality, they will learn all the wrong lessons, rather than identifying the activities most crucial to the moment.

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To a slight extent, because conversations about a rhythmic rather than geometric resistance had already begun to take place, comrades in Barcelona were able to shift their focus, despite widespread feelings of defeat. Anarchists gave priority to groups of a newly expanded affinity, in which they worked together with comrades whom they had gotten to know in the recent upheavals. They debated, they recovered their energy, and they strengthened friendships new and old. If the recognition that a slowdown was inevitable and healthy had been generalized, they might have carried out these activities with a sense of triumph and innovation. Instead, most comrades had the attitude that they had to be content with an inferior kind of activity, because it was the only activity that seemed possible in the moment. Thus, they correctly took advantage of the lull to debate the hot moments of struggle of the previous months, but they failed to recognize the particular value of that moment of social slumber.

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The moment also demanded that anarchists strengthen their relationships of difference, seeking out the sincere neighbors, coworkers, and other people they had gotten to know in heterogeneous spaces such as the neighborhood assemblies. These were the people with whom they were losing contact due to social disintegration. It is of the utmost importance to resist that social disintegration, to seek out recent acquaintances and continue solidifying relationships. Obviously, it is much easier to struggle together with comrades of affinity in moments of social peace or defeatism, especially because so many other people ceasing struggling in these moments. But we must not confine our method of struggle to the “hot” moments of upheaval and coalescence. We must also learn a long, abiding struggle, and this requires reaching out to those we met and learning what practical things we can share when they no longer continue to participate in assemblies, debates, and protests.

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As noted earlier, it is also important to keep making noise, whether via protests or attacks, to invite the disappeared to return to the streets. In Barcelona, this has happened with continued student strikes and actions enabling people to ride the metro for free. However, if these actions are not undertaken as a conscious invitation, but as an attempt to maintain lost momentum, they will only contribute to the exhaustion and disillusionment of those in the struggle.

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Finally, moments of defeatism and disintegration need to be seized as opportunities for propaganda. After a strong wave of struggle, people often fall away because they are exhausted and because they are disappointed at how little they have accomplished, how much farther they have to go. This is the time when anarchists have to unmask the false promises of the recuperators and reformists. This is the time to show that all the politicians, all the government, have to be thrown out, that the police and the media are our enemy, that revolution is not an easy affair. This is the time to celebrate our collective bravery in the streets, to remember what we were fighting for, and to point to promising directions that were revealed in the recent struggle, whether those include a practice of assemblies and self-organization, a defense of houses from eviction, the expropriation of food and clothes from capitalists, the occupation of land, or the burning of banks. It is rare that the death of a struggle does not leave behind some bones that can be fashioned into new tools. We should not leave them lying in the dust.

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On the whole, anarchists in Barcelona did not seize on the temporary collapse of the struggle to point out the false promises of the recuperators. In fact, the opposite happened. When one of the neighborhood assemblies that functioned on largely anarchic lines started to flag and disappear—as had all the neighborhood assemblies at that point—some Trotskyists who had been saving their energy for that moment, and who had not committed their time and energy to keeping the assembly alive in the prior months, swooped in like vultures to blame the weakness of the assembly on the informal structure that anarchists had won in debates more than a year earlier.

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Healing ourselves, strengthening friendships, building consistent and practical relationships with people we met in the upheaval, inviting the disappeared back into the streets, showing that the disappointment only reflects the false promises of reformists and recuperators: these are the essential tasks in the moments of exhaustion, defeatism, and disintegration that nearly always follow social upheavals. These are the tasks that can set off a new wave of struggle after the inevitable low—that prepare the way for subsequent peaks and plateaus to reach ever higher. At the very least, they equip us to stay strong and be prepared for whatever comes next.

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We also need a culture of lively debate to hone our social intuition so that we can keep up with changes in context. Struggle has its cycles, but these cycles are not repetitions, and not every metamorphosis in the social struggle is cyclical.

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The context in Barcelona has shifted several times over the last couple years. At some points, anarchists cleaved to this shift like naturals, whereas they missed other shifts and had to spend months catching up—or simply lost in a terrain that suddenly behaved differently.

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The struggle shifted after the first general strike. It shifted again with the plaza occupation movement. It shifted yet again when the plaza occupation dissolved and the neighborhood assemblies blossomed. That shift was recognized and to a certain extent even precipitated by anarchists, whereas the activists and would-be politicians entirely missed the boat: they stayed on in Plaça Catalunya, trying to salvage their precious structures. After wasting a lot of effort, they partially succeeded saving those structures, but happily their absence meant they were not there to recuperate all of the neighborhood assemblies.

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Some time in summer or fall 2011, there was another shift. Most anarchists missed it. I certainly did, as I can’t even identify when it happened. The growing strength of the struggle was not matched by a growth of opportunities for waging it. The labor unions would not call another general strike, despite our attempts to pressure the minority unions to make it happen. The struggles against austerity in education and healthcare would not take a radical direction, even though they had moments of intense support and had moved towards building a practice of road blockades and occupations.

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The strategic clarity of the previous months evaporated. It became necessary to identify what we needed to struggle. We were also forced to interrogate our relationships with others in struggle when a transportation strike was betrayed (by its leadership? by its own base? the argument continues) and a student strike unexpectedly cast off those who were managing it. Clarity returned when a general strike was finally announced for March 29, 2012. We knew how to organize for that. But the questions of the winter had not necessarily been answered.

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If the growth of a struggle can only be traced geometrically, then we can only interpret it as defeat that the March 29 general strike was so strong, and the general strike of November 14 the same year was so weak. March 29 offered important lessons about organizing a strike and fighting in the streets. Given that the unions successfully pacified the November 14 general strike and the police dominated the streets, does that mean that our enemies learned their lessons, and we did not learn ours?

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Looking back on the March general strike, a friend succinctly identified the proper question, though his attitude only depressed and confounded me at the time. Three weeks of incredibly exhausting preparation went into making the March 29 strike and riots possible, and afterwards all that energy dissipated, rather than coming back to us. Was it worth it?

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Our exhaustion, along with the fear that the riots had produced in the unions, precipitated another shift. The general strike called for October 31 by the small radical unions and the general strike called for November 14 by all the unions were not unfolding in the same context as the glorious 29M general strike. Most anarchists could not find the motivation to throw themselves into preparing for them. Fortunately, this pessimism arose from a lucid social intuition. For our part, we had still not answered the question of how to make the energy of the riot return to us rather than dissipating as a cathartic outburst. And the unions, for their part, were less concerned with getting a lot of people into the street and more concerned with proving to the police that they could keep things under control. The failure of the October and November strikes—the fact that they were boring, under-attended, and ultimately demoralizing—is a victory for the struggle as long as we follow up by exploring how to effectively create a visible, large-scale confrontation that cannot be pacified by the unions or the police.

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Unfortunately, there is a time limit for finding the answer. If it takes too long to create another street confrontation, the collective lessons learned in the rioting of 29M will fade away. The answer may lie in convincing the radical unions to return to their previous combative stance, to agitate for confrontation from within the masses summoned by the major unions, or to return to large-scale occupations.

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Whatever the outcome, anarchists were wise to save their energy rather than try to reproduce a previous victory in changed circumstances.

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Noise demonstration outside Modelo prison, December 31

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Unsubstantiated Dreams

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One factor that has repeatedly made it possible to force struggles into dead ends is the refusal of anarchists to substantiate their dreams. While Barcelona’s nihilists have frequently graced the ongoing discourse on strategy with caustically cautionary warnings against optimism or planning the future, they have insisted on including dreaming in the list of luxuries that true revolutionaries are not permitted.

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Unsatisfied with the implications of a strategy of total destruction for the growing group of people who urgently need to figure out questions of access to food, shelter, and healthcare—a group that includes many comrades—most anarchists have differed with the nihilists to address the question of self-organization as a positive practice that might satisfy all life’s needs.

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Well into the rise of the movement for healthcare, some anarchists began to participate critically. Even though the dismantling of public healthcare affects them directly, they generally did not perceive the movement as relevant to them, as it was mobilizing primarily to preserve the welfare state and reinforce Western medicine.6 Later on, some anarchists discarded this apathy and began to hold debates on the problem. A small minority took the lessons of those debates and intervened in the movement for healthcare. Unfortunately, that intervention took place after the movement had already broken apart on the rocks of its own impotence.

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Workers at the Hospital Sant Pau begin an indefinite occupation

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What some comrades discovered in the course of the intervention, nonetheless, is of great importance. Many of those active in the movement harbored strong criticisms of Western medicine and were amenable to critiques of the welfare state. Most of the movement seemed to agree that healthcare was not organized in our interests even before privatization. In group conversations, nearly everybody had stories to share about disrespectful or harmful treatment at the hands of doctors and hospitals. A few participants in these conversations had even created projects for self-organizing healthcare outside and against capitalism. What’s more, many of them were friends of anarchists, or anarchists themselves—yet most of the anarchist space was characterized by an ignorance of their projects.

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This ignorance proved not to be a coincidence. Even after the intervention made these projects better known, anarchists almost unanimously failed to make use of them. This was not a political decision, as not a single critique of these projects (at least, not the more anti-capitalist ones) ever appeared. Rather, it seemed to be entirely a question of habit and rhythm. Anarchist militants were simply too busy getting beaten up by cops—and skipping meals for meetings, and subjecting themselves to who knows how much stress to support prisoners or attend assemblies with syndicalists and socialists—to help support an anarchist healthcare project that at some points was even offering free massages and other forms of therapy to any participant in social struggles who would show up. Saint Durruti, martyr of our cause, may you smile in your grave.

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These were not additions to a long list of projects that needed more labor power to keep from collapsing. They were projects that needed the encouragement of people walking through the door, projects that could give greater strength and wellbeing to anyone willing to stop being a robot for the revolution and take a sick day every now and then.

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To be clear, we are not talking about anarchists who do not know how to stop. The impossibility of holding a debate on a Sunday morning, because of the evident sacredness of the previous night’s party, attests to the dependence of Barcelona anarchists on leisure. It is not a question of being unable to replenish themselves, but of replenishing themselves in the manner of workers or machines. Once again, we are faced with a contest between the imposed rhythms of capitalism and the rhythms our bodies and struggles demand.

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But it is not only a question of rhythm. Across the board, anarchists have been hesitant to approach any question of material self-organization. A group of people centered around the Crisi newspaper and Enric Duran’s white-collar bank robbery have formed la Cooperativa Integral Catalana, a Catalan cooperative complex that includes consumers, producers, healthcare workers, and eco-communes. Unlike the United States, where cooperatives have either been a rational business decision for farmers or an innovative form of self-managed exploitation for radicals, cooperatives in Catalunya have a radical history. From the 1860s to the 1936 revolution, cooperatives were explicitly anticapitalist, sometimes utopian and often revolutionary, and fully integrated into the anarchist movement—supporting prisoners, helping create a libertarian culture, and equipping proletarian families to take care of themselves in a way that set them at odds with the demands of capitalism. They also spread practical visions—dreams, if you will—of how society might feed itself after a revolution. The CIC is also anti-capitalist and entertains revolutionary pretensions. It is by no means immune to becoming a structure for recuperation, but that is all the more likely to happen if it is shunned by revolutionaries who have a critique of recuperation.

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While anarchists are quick to criticize or physically attack capitalist forms of housing, food production, and healthcare, they have generally not joined the CIC or any other project that puts anarchist social relations into practice on a material level. By staying away, they avoid conflict with those who would turn the cooperatives into reformist or anodyne structures, just as they avoided conflict with those who kept the healthcare movement in the dead end of pleading for mercy for the welfare state.

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Capitalism is failing an increasing number of people in their simple desire to sustain themselves. This creates a ready opportunity to put other forms of sustenance into practice, but it also poses a problem. Other countries that suffer worse economic conditions than Spain have already shown that precarity can precipitate mass emigration that weakens social struggles. The same force that is beginning to oblige anarchists and their neighbors to take extended or even permanent trips to Scandinavia to work in kitchens or fish factories will also disintegrate the bonds that hold together a newly coalescing society.

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Voline identified the anarchist failure to create structures in which new social relations could be put into practice on a material level as a key factor that allowed the Bolsheviks to hijack the Russian Revolution. The same weakness has prevented Barcelona anarchists from enabling the major social upheavals to become revolutionary.

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Eventually, people get tired of just protesting. For a long time, anarchists have used the inevitable failure of protest movements as proof of the weakness of pacifism or any other practice of dissent and demands. But people also get tired of going on strike, attending assemblies, and burning dumpsters. If the principles of self-organization and mutual aid are constrained to mere slogans on posters or formulations in debates, they lose their force.

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Yet these constraints derive from very real weaknesses. Something as complicated as the self-organization of healthcare could only become reality on the basis of a profound reskilling and widespread participation. It has to grow from simple words to detailed dreams, and from small-scale to larger projects. Nor will this growth be unilinear: like everything, it will have ebbs and flows, setbacks and disappointments. But if we are not open to this growth, if we do not start these projects or spread these dreams, nor take part when others do—then who will?

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The Problem of Nationalism

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Predictably, the State has deployed a new set of mechanisms to make up for the collapse of social peace. Nationalism has been foremost among these. In Catalunya, this has manifested in two very distinct ways: fascist political movements, and the movement for Catalan independence.

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As early as 2009, there were some in Greece who identified xenophobia as perhaps the most important state strategy to enclose and counterattack the insurrection. But they were few. Anarchist responses to xenophobia and fascism were too little and too late to prevent the concerted flood of media propaganda from redirecting popular angst away from the owning class to the most marginalized.

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In Catalunya, the situation is different. Solidarity with immigrants was already a priority among anarchists and leftist activists before the crisis. At the same time, the state contains powerful forces committed to a progressive strategy of social control. The media, therefore, have not been unanimous in encouraging xenophobia and building a base for fascist political parties.

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There is another factor that may have put fascists at a disadvantage. Events in Catalunya forced the fascists to reveal their hand several years earlier than might have behooved them. This deprived them of a period of invisibility in which to build a base before going on the offensive. The factor that forced their hand was the expansion of the Catalan independence movement.

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Catalan independence march, September 11, 2012

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It could be argued that the movement for Catalan independence as such arose during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, in order to recuperate the struggle against the State and sap support for radical anti-capitalists. That argument is beyond the scope of this article. In any case, the independence movement predates the economic crisis and does not exist as a merely recuperative force, but rather as a struggle in its own right. However, in September 2012, the conservative political party in power in Catalunya jumped on the bandwagon and put their support behind a referendum for independence, which political parties in Madrid subsequently declared illegal. Spanish military officials and then fascist parties and street organizations have gone public declaring war on the movement for Catalan independence.

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This creates a number of conflicts, none of which is easy to understand. Much of the Catalan elite has entered into conflict with the Spanish elite, which further erodes the illusion of social peace and political stability—even forcing the European Union to deal with the impossible question of national independence, a can of worms that appears on the menu of many member states aside from Spain. But the conflict revolves around a fictitious community of resistance that is easy for people to join and easy for politicians to control. Just as the fascists present the immigrant as a scapegoat to misdirect people’s rage, the independence movement presents the bad government in Madrid, to be replaced by a good government in Barcelona.

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A second conflict occurs within the independence movement itself, which has traditionally been socialist and has now been hijacked by conservatives. Who will seize the opportunity to take power? Who will remain true to the lurid dream of socialism, continuing the fight for a sort of Catalan Cuba? As the movement inevitably betrays itself, the principled part might radicalize, but as long as anarchists fail to address the forms of oppression faced by occupied linguistic-cultural groups (dare I say it; nations), the indepes are likely to adhere to a nationalist vision of revolution.

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Some of them are sincere allies in the fight against repression, against austerity, and against fascism, but this is not without its own set of complications. As anarchists work alongside socialist indepes to fight the rising tide of fascism, they come face to face again with the question that was first highlighted by the 2010 general strike: how to position themselves in relation to events.

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A functional component of fascism is its exceptionalism, not only in the juridical sense meant by Carl Schmitt, but also in how it is integrated into capitalist systems of governance. Even though fascism and democracy are fully integrated as complementing strategies of control—the unleashing of fascism by Capital is not exceptional, but systematic and functional—the structure of democracy predisposes us to experience the threat of fascism as exceptional.

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Although Barcelona should be the first place on earth where anarchists would mistrust antifascist common fronts, this time as other times the threat of fascism has convinced anarchists to work together with political opportunists in uncritical alliances.

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In a curious pattern, anarchists who knew very well in the plaza occupations how to deal critically with socialists suddenly started issuing common propaganda with them, working in the same organizational framework. They forgot that before the crisis broke, they were already engaging in the most effective form of organization against fascism—the work they were carrying out against xenophobia. It goes without saying that anarchists always have and always must stand against fascism. Sometimes, this requires us to occupy common spaces of struggle with leftists. If we can only defeat the rise of fascism by pooling our strength with leftists, it makes sense to do so. But just because we share a common problem—fascism spells the annihilation of both anarchists and leftists—does not mean we have a common destination. We should never stop prioritizing the communication of specifically anarchist reasons to oppose fascism, which include our arguments against capitalism, against the State in all its forms, and against borders. Once some of them got scared into a common front, anarchists in Barcelona as elsewhere put their forces behind discourses that were essentially social democratic—attacking fascism as a violation of human rights, thereby distinguishing it from democracy rather than revealing the many common projects that the two systems of governance share.

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Not only is this dishonest, it is also stupid. Fascist parties and movements begin to flourish precisely because people are losing faith in democracy. That loss of faith is a good thing. In treating fascism as an exception, antifascist common fronts serve to reassert faith in democratic values. The people who are suffering the most from the crisis in capitalism have already lost faith in those values, which have already failed them. It is no coincidence that antifascist fronts typically exclude the most marginalized in order to present the face of the normal citizen. They want to hide the very real crisis of immigration, in order to pretend that democracy can still work. Anarchists should not be arguing that we could all just get along if we protect human rights, but rather that the crisis of immigration is a problem of capitalism rather than ethnicity.

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Even if fascism is defeated or averted, if anarchists have to abandon their struggle against capitalism to stop it, then it will have succeeded insofar as fascism is a tool deployed by the State to defend capitalism in circumstances when democracy does not suffice.

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“Fascism, never again”

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When the Tide Rolls Out

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When the labor unions tried to abandon the growing social upheaval after the first general strike got out of their control, people organized a strike through the small, radical unions, and then created entirely new spaces of confrontation through the plaza occupations. When the plaza occupations disappeared, anarchists intentionally organized new assemblies conducive to debate via which we could refine our different strategies and take measure of our collective force, countering the dispersion that previously characterized the Barcelona anarchist space. Though there were some attempts to unify, on the whole we resisted the effort to create a new organization, a movement-coordinating body that would stave off the feelings of isolation or the appearance that the movement was disintegrating.

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Such organizations tend to generate campaigns that exhaust our energies, rather than facilitating a collective process in which we find the struggles that rejuvenate us. They generate visibility for their own organizational existence rather than illuminating the fault lines that run between society and the governing apparatuses that interpenetrate it. These new assemblies did not attempt to create a social struggle for those who did not know how to find one, but to allow those already participating in struggle to sharpen their strategies. Although anarchist structures should support the participants, they should never encourage weakness, and the inability to find lines of conflict or to initiate a revolutionary project is a weakness anarchists cannot afford. Struggles are not started by activists, anarchist or otherwise. Those who seek an organization to compensate for their alienation or lack of initiative can only be a burden to assemblies oriented towards confrontation.

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By adopting this approach before the economic crisis broke, anarchists were poised to radicalize struggles when larger numbers of people began taking to the streets. Carrying on isolated battles in the depths of social peace and capitalist prosperity makes perfect sense: it limits the options for capitalist accumulation, hastening the crisis, and puts rebels in a stronger position when the crisis breaks.7 Anarchists betray that strength when they focus on the narrow economics of austerity as soon as the opportunity comes around. Those who tend towards populism will immediately tie their discourses to precarity and poverty, forgetting that capitalism is equally odious in its moments of peace and prosperity. They will lose all the strength they have built if capitalism passes into a new era of prosperity, or if fascism or some other political movement offers an apparent solution to the problem of precarity.

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We are anarchists specifically because we do not water down our critique of social ills. We seek to strike the system at its roots. Positioning ourselves in conflict with both the dominant system and its potential recuperation also means not focusing on the conflicts that are the most visible, and sometimes illusory, like the conflict between workers and austerity measures. In fact, work and austerity exist in harmony. The true conflict is harder to elucidate, but it is our job to reveal it.

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One way Capital has mediated this conflict is by imposing its rhythms on our lives, including our struggles. Social upheavals will always be followed by lulls of disappointment and apparent inactivity. Accepting these troughs and knowing how to take advantage of them is the key to preventing upheaval from being merely a flash in the pan.

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To spark new upheavals, or at least be present at their beginnings, we need to hone our social intuition. When we understand how other people perceive their problems, we will be able to make or at least recognize a call to arms that speaks to them. For these upheavals to push past stagnation, they must avail themselves of structures for the revolutionary self-organization of life. We may create some of these structures, but many more will arise independently. Anarchists should connect with those who create them, even and especially if they are not revolutionary. Recuperation is not inevitable in spontaneous structures; it is the successful institutionalization of the structures that do not succeed in connecting with a struggle for the destruction of the existing order. The tendency towards creation is an essentially liberating tendency that capitalism consistently harnesses. But it is the harness, and not the creation, that constitutes recuperation.

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What We Can Do after the Crest

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    While it does encourage us to think of the ways that power is diffuse, not simply a top-down imposition that we suffer passively, the identification of “society” as the enemy reveals a disturbing ignorance as to what exactly the State forcibly disintegrated and reconstitutes with the bonds of nationalism and the Spectacle. It is this same unknown that palpably coalesces in the space of the riot and of struggle more generally. Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that society does not exist, only the Market, was less an observation than the mission statement of capitalism. ↩

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    A classic example of this would be the disastrous strategy of collaboration with the republican government chosen by the CNT in July 1936, and their ability to suppress other strategic tendencies, such as the illegalist tendency of some Italian and Catalan anarchist expropriators in Barcelona, and the insurrectionary tendency of the Friends of Durruti group—not to mention the critical voice of Durruti himself, before he was killed by the Stalinists. The anarchist space throughout the Spanish state was far more heterogeneous and fragmented before the Civil War than is generally recognized. Dozens of different currents and tendencies were active, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in harmony. When the FAI succeeded in its important mission of blocking the syndicalist takeover of the CNT, around 1934, they also initiated the unfortunate unification of the anarchist space within and under the CNT. It is possible that this unification already bore rotten fruit in 1934, when the anarchists failed to show effective solidarity with the insurrection in Asturias, although it would take more reading to confirm whether the CNT’s organizational hegemony hindered solidarity. ↩

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    Of course, its roots can be traced back further, as when insurrectionary anarchists were expelled from or broke with spaces controlled by anarcho-syndicalists (1996), were subsequently defeated by repression in the space they had created for themselves (2003), and took refuge in the space created by squatters or returned to resume a direct engagement with the anarcho-syndicalists in the space of the CNT. This interpenetration helped lay the groundwork for the subsequent shattering of the previously segmented anarchist space. ↩

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    Those who, in my mind, have carried on the methods of the antiglobalization movement without learning most of its critical lessons. ↩

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    One might argue that a change in the physical content of labor has made unions less relevant. But in the case of Barcelona, while factory labor has clearly declined and the service industry blossomed, this does not seem to provide a satisfying explanation. In the ’20s and ’30s, two of the largest (and most radical) sectors in the CNT, as well as two of the largest trades on an absolute scale, were the wood workers’ and bricklayers’ unions. The workers in those unions were (un)employed overwhelmingly by the construction industry, which was far more precarious and short-term than factory work. Construction work tended to be given out on a per job basis. It did not generate either the sense of neighborhood or the relatively stable collective relationships that the factories did. And for the dispossessed peasants who made up the ranks of those unions, the new forms of mass construction hardly constituted skilled labor. In other words, work in the construction industry a hundred years ago was not so different from work in the service industry today, an industry that employs the vast majority of Barcelona’s underemployed anarchists. Yet those anarchists do not have a union. I would argue, in very unmaterialist terms, that the key shift has been cultural. The proletarian identity has been eroded and replaced by a democratic identity, aided by the strategic extension of commodities into the lives of the poor, and by the even more strategic universalization of bourgeois culture through television. In fact, it was probably the survival of strong feudal characteristics in Spanish society, and not the reality of factory labor, that enabled the exploited to identify so clearly as proletarian when they came to the city a hundred years ago. Although the unseen purpose of their wage labor was to unify them with their bosses, they transposed the peasant/lord division from the countryside to the apparently similar but essentially different inequality they found in the city. ↩

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    By “Western medicine,” we should not understand every European tradition of healing, but the proactively patriarchal and capitalist practice of medicine that was institutionalized in the Enlightenment and subsequently globalized. ↩

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    Given the worldwide recession that forms the backdrop of today’s social struggles, this formulation only deals with the possibility of economic crisis. But struggling in times of social peace can also provoke a crisis in governance that is not directly caused by economic recession, as in the rebellions of 1968. ↩

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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/09/10/after-the-crest-part-ii-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-oakland-commune", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/09/10/after-the-crest-part-ii-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-oakland-commune", "title": "After the Crest, part II : The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune", "summary": "Participants in Occupy Oakland trace its trajectory from its origins to the conclusion, exploring why it reached certain limits and what it will take for future movements to surpass them.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-2b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-2b.jpg", "date_published": "2013-09-10T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [ "Occupy", "Oakland" ], "content_html": "

This is the second part in our “After the Crest” series, studying what we can learn from the waning phase of social movements. In this installment, participants in Occupy Oakland trace its trajectory from origins to conclusion, exploring why it reached certain limits and what it will take for future movements to surpass them.

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After the Crest, part II: The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune

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The Rapid Ascent

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In setting ourselves the sobering task of narrating the decline of Occupy Oakland, we are at least spared any argument about when the high point took place. There might be disagreement about whether the “general strike” of November 2, 2011 deserved that title, but no one would dispute that it was the high-water mark of the local movement and a turning point in the Occupy sequence unfolding across the country.

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At that moment, describing Occupy Oakland as the Oakland Commune was not just an exaggeration. For a short time, we really were a collective force with the ambition and capacity to transform the whole city and radicalize the national movement. The experience of that day has stayed with many of us, a brief and chaotic glimpse of insurrectionary horizons that closed as quickly as they opened. Remembering this as we go about our daily lives under capitalism has been enormously painful; for many of us in the Bay Area, the last year and a half has been a process of grieving the loss of that moment. This grief was present in all the successive stages of that political sequence. Although the movement continued for months, bringing out thousands of people for explosive days of action, none of the later moments—December 12, January 28, or May 1—even remotely compare to November 2.

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Before we can analyze the Oakland Commune’s decline, we have to understand its rise and the various projects in the Bay that helped to foster it. The following narrative is not meant as a total account of all of the elements that combined to form the Oakland Commune, but rather the ones we experienced firsthand.

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During the spring of 2011, with a backdrop including the Arab Spring, the European “movement of the squares,” and its faint echo in the Wisconsin capitol occupation, comrades in the Bay Area began a slow process of reconstituting themselves as a force in the streets. This followed an extended period of decomposition and aimlessness. Many of us expected that the wave of unrest sweeping the globe would reach the US eventually, and we wanted to be prepared. That summer, the Bay Area witnessed a series of small but fierce and creative demonstrations. From the native encampment protecting Glen Cove against suburban development in Vallejo to the riotous protests in San Francisco after police gunned down Kenneth Harding when he avoided a transit fare check, the summer provided several opportunities for radicals from a range of communities to work together.

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During June and July, a mix of anti-state communists and insurrectionary anarchists organized a series of anti-austerity actions dubbed Anticuts that got people into the streets to experiment with new tactics and forms of social intervention. These were intended to map out the local terrain of struggle and the various antagonistic social constellations that might participate in future rebellions. Through these small and sometimes frustrating excursions, new march routes and ways to understand the geography of downtown Oakland emerged. For instance, the third and final Anticut action—organized in solidarity with a hunger strike in California prisons—marched from the future home of Occupy Oakland in Frank Ogawa Plaza down Broadway past the police headquarters, courthouse, and jail, holding a noise demo there before circling back towards the plaza to disperse. This small demonstration marked the first time this loop was tried. Months later, during the high-tension moments of Occupy Oakland, that march route became intimately familiar to thousands of people, sometimes repeated multiple times per day.

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The rhythm of small and medium-sized demonstrations such as the Anonymous actions against BART police and the one-day occupation of UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall continued throughout the summer and early fall. But it wasn’t until momentum began to build nationally after the establishment of the Zucotti Park camp on Wall Street—September 17, 2011—that the full potential of the relationships built over the summer could blossom. Oakland joined the national movement late, on October 10, immediately establishing a sprawling camp in the plaza in front of City Hall—renamed Oscar Grant Plaza, after the young Black man murdered by BART police in 2009. This became a liberated zone, off-limits to police and politicians and organized according to principles of self-organization, free access to food and supplies, open participation in all aspects of camp life, and autonomous action.

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The kitchen during the first week of Occupy Oakland

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In hindsight, it is striking how quickly Occupy Oakland emerged, matured, and reached its peak. Only two weeks separate the beginning of the camp from the first police raid in the early hours of October 25. After the Commune repeatedly resisted attempts by the city administration to assert control over the camp—staging public burnings of warning letters during general assemblies in the amphitheater on the steps of city hall—Mayor Jean Quan authorized the militarized police operation that left the camp in ruins and over 100 in jail.

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The camp in ruins after the October 25 early morning police raid

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Later that same day, thousands of enraged people poured back into downtown, charging police barricades around the plaza and braving countless barrages of tear gas and projectiles until the early hours of the morning. Partly because of the near murder of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen by a police projectile that night, and the dramatic footage of the entire downtown area covered in gas, the next day the police withdrew in a storm of controversy. Exultant crowds reoccupied the plaza, holding an assembly of 2000 people—the largest of the whole sequence—and agreed to go on the offensive with the November 2 strike. The fact that it seemed possible to organize a general strike in a single week indicates the degree to which normal calendar time warped and stretched in those first three weeks. During the Oakland Commune’s incredibly rapid yet brief ascent, there seemed to be no limit on what could happen in a week, a day, an hour.

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Teargas fills downtown streets during clashes in the evening of October 25 as thousands try to take back the plaza

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It all came to a head on November 2. Looking back, the scope of that day remains impressive. In less than 24 hours, the strike unleashed all the tactics explored during the entire Occupy Oakland sequence. Flying pickets, work actions, marches, blockades, occupations, and moments of riotous destruction brought as many as 50,000 people to downtown Oakland, many of whom were participating in disruptive acts for what must have been the first time.

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Oscar Grant Plaza is transformed into an anti-captialist festival during the November 2 strike

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People gathered in the early morning under a giant banner, stretched across the central intersection in downtown, reading “Death to Capitalism.” From there, the crowds quickly fanned out across the center of the city, shutting down businesses that had refused to close for the day. The camp at the plaza became a crowded anti-capitalist carnival offering music and speeches from three different stages. By early afternoon, as tens of thousands filled the streets, an anti-capitalist march led by a large black bloc smashed its way through downtown, leaving broken windows and graffiti on banks and corporations in its wake. Within a few hours, tens of thousands of people marched on the port of Oakland, shutting down all operations at its various terminals. Finally, as night fell, hundreds of people joyfully occupied the aptly-named Traveler’s Aid building a few blocks from the plaza; long empty, it had formerly housed a nonprofit serving the homeless. Within an hour, however, riot police attacked and evicted the new occupation, provoking a night of rioting during which people wrecked most of the businesses and city offices around the plaza, including a police substation.

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A banner is strung across 14th and Broadway, the central intersection of downtown Oakland at the corner of the plaza, during the November 2 strike

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We were in the middle of something without recent precedent in the US. And yet the day was just a day. There was no continuation, no sense of what might come next. The following morning, after three weeks of great weather, the first rains of the season fell and the camp lay quiet, foreshadowing the dispirited mood of the months to come. The backlash from the previous day’s anti-capitalist march and the more indiscriminate rioting later in the night was intense, as various liberal elements took the opportunity to demonize anarchists and the black bloc, calling for vigilante patrols by pacifists and initiating a reactionary backlash that caused many anarchists and radicals to steer clear of the camp for a few days. The mood shifted from elation to demoralization very quickly, especially given the failure of the occupation of the Traveler’s Aid building, which might have opened up new horizons for the Oakland Commune. It was difficult to recognize this at the time, but we had already encountered the fundamental limits of this sequence of struggle. The slow decline had begun.

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Tens of thousands march towards the port of Oakland during the November 2 strike

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Days of Action, Horizons of Struggle

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Arguably, the decline had been set in motion in the days immediately before the strike. Up until the raid on October 25, the power of the Oakland Commune lay in the camp itself: in collective activities that linked each day in the liberated plaza with the next, building momentum through consistent interaction around questions of survival rather than activism. When over 600 riot police fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades as they broke through the barricades protecting Oscar Grant Plaza in the dark morning hours of October 25, they were not only attempting to evict the camp, but to break apart the continuity of the tenuous community that we had formed.

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This first eviction backfired on them spectacularly. The crowds came back even bigger and called for the November 2 strike—a timely and effective decision. But it also marked the first moment when the energy of the Commune shifted from the daily process of holding liberated space to a strategy built around discrete “days of action.” The day in question was only one week away, and the buildup to it ran parallel with the reconstitution of the camp. But with the historic decision to strike, there was a shift away from the reproduction and expansion of the original oppositional zone. Something was lost in this transition.

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The consistent process of eating, sleeping, and organizing with many others in a liberated zone at the heart of a struggling North American city had proved to be a challenge for which few were prepared. At times, the Commune was a veritable inferno—a place of fistfights, constant emergencies, injury, illness, miscommunication, and stress. At other moments, it offered a kind of freedom and beauty unlike anything else. There were times when each person seemed full of limitless creativity, compassion, and dedication, matched by hatred of capitalism and the state. We could see the experience changing people day by day, hour by hour, and we could feel it changing us. The camp was a place of joy, laughter, and care, almost psychedelic in the confusion it provided to the senses. But mostly, it was a place that teetered on the edge of breakdown, a place in which none of the usual buffers and mediations that mask the daily violence of contemporary America were present. All the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and other poisonous dynamics that form the foundations of capitalist society rose to the surface in this liberated zone, challenging the Commune’s ability to sustain itself. We were ill-prepared for the problems the camp raised, though people made heroic attempts to respond to each new emergency.

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For this reason, many comrades welcomed the first police raid in hopes that direct conflict with the state would breathe new life into a struggle slowly dying of internal causes. After the raid, people could focus their attention outward in offensive actions like the general strike, away from the overwhelming difficulties of the camp.

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The decision to strike was not a mistake. On the contrary, it was one of the better decisions collectively made during the entire sequence. But it inaugurated a half-year period defined increasingly by days of action called for by the general assembly rather than the rhythms of shared experience. This process accelerated after the second eviction of the camp on November 14 and reached its terminal point with the late January call for another general strike on May 1—a strike that never materialized. May Day 2012 ended up being an exciting day of action, but it paled in comparison to the November 2 strike, which had been organized in only a week. The more that the Oakland Commune lost its footing, momentum, and sense of direction, the more it relied on arbitrarily chosen days of action that were increasingly few and far between.

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In the shift away from the camp towards spectacular offensives, the actions of November 2 opened up three horizons of struggle, each of which hit a wall over the following months. In many regards, the limits of these approaches were already apparent during the strike.

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First, there were the tens of thousands who laid siege to the port. Most would agree that the high point of the day—the action that had the most impact on capitalism and the local power structure—was this blockade of the port of Oakland. However, the success of that action empowered one tendency within the movement to push the struggle away from reclaiming space and disrupting the flows of capital toward a kind of trade union superactivism that later proved to be a dead end.

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Secondly, there was the attempt, later in the evening, to occupy the Traveler’s Aid building. But when riot police besieged the building, the participants failed to put up any meaningful defense. It was one thing to occupy public parks and plazas—but another thing to breach the sacred barriers of private property. Comrades had been discussing that trajectory from the beginning, but the failure of the Traveler’s Aid attempt indicated that it might remain an unsurpassable horizon.

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Finally, there was street fighting and the black bloc. This represented the dream of continuous escalation, in which a proactive offensive of black-clad rioters would usher in a new phase of increasingly widespread militant rebellion, culminating in a full-on uprising. Certainly, November 2 saw some of the most intense street conflicts up to that point, epitomized by the appearance of a large black bloc during the afternoon anti-capitalist march. Yet that night, when riot police were finally ordered to reassert control of downtown Oakland and evict the newly occupied building, this increased street militancy meant little. Police scattered the participants like a bowling ball plowing into a wedge of pins.

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Few people were organized into affinity groups capable of acting intelligently and decisively in the face of the highly trained and physically intimidating Oakland police. Inexperienced rioters had the tendency to attack weakly and prematurely, then scatter when the police counter-attacked. In addition, the presence of vigilante pacifist members of Occupy—whose violent assertion of nonviolence underscored the paradox of their position—and amateur journalists too busy photographing the riot to help their ostensible comrades both produced confusion and dissension. As is often the case in the US, comrades were able to carry out attacks on property with relative ease, adopting an effective hit-and-run strategy. But when it came to standing ground or mounting an offensive against the police, the street fighters were rarely effective.

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The New Year

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After the camp was cleared during the second police raid of the plaza on November 14, many comrades continued along each of these three trajectories, moving ever farther from the camp that had brought them together in the first place.

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The labor solidarity wing of the movement, born during the November 2 port blockade, increasingly viewed Occupy as a vehicle for supporting unions and intervening in existing workers’ disputes. On December 12, this faction led a day of action to shut down ports across the West Coast (as well as in other scattered locations such as a Walmart distribution center in Colorado). This had been called for in response to the wave of repression and camp evictions across the country in late November and early December, as well as in solidarity with the struggle of longshoremen in Longview, WA against the efforts of the multinational corporation EGT to break their union, the ILWU. While not entirely successful, the day was still impressive, demonstrating the continuing power of Occupy. As 2012 began, this labor solidarity wing of the movement was busy spearheading a regional mobilization to disrupt the first scab ship scheduled to dock at the EGT facilities in Longview. Many comrades from the Bay planned to converge on Longview in what looked to be an important showdown.

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Elsewhere, an alliance of insurrectionaries and comrades from a wide range of working groups that had sustained the camp were organizing another offensive. Regrouping from the failure of the Traveler’s Aid occupation, they had called for a massive day of action on January 28, 2012 to occupy a large undisclosed building. This was to become a new hub for the Oakland Commune.

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Finally, there was the assortment of radicals and rebels who continuously struggled to hold down Oscar Grant Plaza itself. Some of them had slept on benches in the plaza long before Occupy; some were young locals politicized over the previous months; others hailed from a range of eccentric Bay Area groupings including a contingent of juggalos. The plaza was still contested turf with regular general assemblies, events, and a 24-hour “vigil” that held space, served food, and provided a social venue. The park and empty lot a few blocks away in the gentrifying Uptown district at 19th and Telegraph had also become a second front, following a brief occupation there on November 19 that ripped down the surrounding fences and established a camp before being quickly evicted.

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This was the political climate in Oakland on New Year’s Eve, as a spirited march left from the plaza for a noise demo. The crowd followed the now familiar loop from the plaza to the police headquarters, courthouse, and jail, where people unleashed a torrent of fireworks before returning to the plaza for a raucous dance party. With hundreds attending, it was powerful demonstration that even without the camp the Commune could still call the plaza home. It was also a celebration of the struggles to come and the next major wave of the Occupy movement, which many believed to be just around the corner. In those early celebratory hours of 2012, it was nearly impossible to grasp how quickly all of these possible trajectories would hit walls. But in January, the limits that first became apparent on November 2 became debilitating, ushering in the terminal phase of the movement.

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The final night of the vigil at the plaza, hours before the police raid of January 4

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Oscar Grant Plaza was first to go. Running scuffles between the ragtag rebels of the plaza and platoons of cops looking to scare them off had increased throughout December, becoming a daily occurrence by the final week of the year. Dozens were arrested. In contrast to previous mass arrest situations, the cops and DA were clearly looking to make examples of the arrestees, who were slapped with large bails, felony charges, and a new favorite tactic of repression: stay-away orders that threatened people with additional jail time if they returned to downtown Oakland. While not as spectacular as police indiscriminately tear-gassing and spraying crowds with projectiles, the most brutal and effective repression of the whole Occupy Oakland sequence arguably occurred during the turf war over the plaza at the turn of the year. Because so many comrades were focused on organizing for the upcoming days of action, those facing the cops and courts in the plaza were isolated, without the support they needed.

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Inspired by the success of the New Year’s Eve noise demo and hoping to respond to the escalating repression, the Tactical Action Committee—a militant group composed primarily of young Black men from Oakland who had been busy defending the plaza and organizing other actions—called for the first FTP (Fuck the Police) march one week later, on January 7. On January 4, after a general assembly in the plaza ended and the majority of people went home, a militarized raid involving dozens of riot police successfully evicted the vigil. This was the third and final raid of Oscar Grant Plaza. A member of TAC was among those arrested in the operation. The rebel presence in the plaza had been successfully removed, and the upcoming FTP march took on increasing significance.

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Nearly three hundred gathered at the corner of the Plaza at 14th and Broadway on the evening of January 7. Many were masked up and ready for a fight, feeling that this was the moment to present a coordinated militant response to the successive evictions of the Commune. Led by a massive “Fuck the Police” banner, the march took off once again down Broadway on the loop past police headquarters and the jail. Clashes erupted near the headquarters as a police cruiser was attacked, bottles were thrown, a small fire was lit in the street, and lines of riot police repeatedly charged the crowd. Yet once again, the displays of militancy were just that, displays—ineffective when it came to defending comrades. Fighters were able to get in a few hits on police, but quickly retreated and fled out of downtown in the face of the OPD offensive. Arguing erupted among comrades, as it became clear that the eagerness with which many went on the attack was not matched by any kind of organized defense or coordinated crowd movement. As comrades scattered, leaving the plaza abandoned once again, another wave of arrests ensued with police units picking off isolated street fighters who had been identified by undercovers in the crowd. As with the wave of arrests around the plaza over the previous weeks, the people arrested at this first FTP march bore some of the heaviest penalties of the whole sequence, with some comrades eventually doing significant jail time.

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Comrades flee from charging lines of riot police during the first FTP march, January 7

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The first FTP march failed to reverse the rapid decline of the Commune or reassert the movement’s presence downtown. On the contrary, it accelerated this decline, signaling to the state that it was now clearly gaining the advantage. This was not the fault of TAC, who continued to hold weekly FTP marches over the following months that were usually less confrontational. Rather, it showed the limits of the uncoordinated and tactically ineffective displays of street militancy mustered by the black blocs of that period. At the time, this series of painful defeats failed to register to many comrades as a serious blow to the movement, even though the authorities had successfully swept the plaza clean and neutralized the attempt to mount a response. Many people were distracted, with their sights set on the upcoming days of action. In retrospect, the new year was clearly off to a bad start.

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Planning continued for the convergence in Longview and the January 28 day of action. General assemblies decreased in size and regularity but continued to meet, increasingly retreating to the park at 19th and Telegraph since an increasing number of comrades were prohibited from the Plaza by stay-away orders. The source of the Commune’s power, the defiant public occupation of space, was quickly drying up, though the upcoming offensives gave many comrades the sense that another wave of momentum was imminent.

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This delusion was shaken when the bureaucrats at the top of the ILWU outmaneuvered the planned blockade of the scab ship in Longview, and all plans for the convergence imploded. Occupy caravans had been organized from Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere, while the federal government announced it would defend the scab ship with a Coast Guard cutter. Comrades from across the West Coast were just waiting for word from those working directly with the Longview Longshoremen to initiate a confrontational showdown. But in their determination to reorient Occupy towards labor activism, the tendency that had coalesced during the November 2 port blockade constructed a framework that was completely disconnected from the streets and plazas from which they had emerged. With every step from the November 2 strike through the December West Coast port blockade and towards Longview, these actions ceased to be participatory disruptions in the international flows of capital as a projection of the occupation’s power beyond the plaza. Instead, they became solidarity actions, organized only with supporting the union in mind. There was naïve talk about the actions sparking a wildcat strike in the ports, or prying the union away from the bureaucrats who were eager to diffuse the conflict and cooperate with EGT. But none of this came close to materializing.

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In the end, the labor solidarity tendency within Occupy Oakland and the handful of radical Longshoremen allies were no match for the political machinations of those at the top of the ILWU, who coerced the rank and file of Longview to accept a compromise with EGT that kept them on the job while stripping them of many benefits and their job security. This was enough to ease the tension and avert the showdown. On January 27, as the last-minute plans for the following day’s attempt to occupy a building were finalized, a confusing statement emerged from the caravan organizers, announcing that the Longview workers had accepted a contract and that this was—in some unspecified way—a victory. This was how the port campaign ended: not with a bang, but a whimper.

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The next morning, the final offensive of January kicked into action. Though in many regards it was the most significant day since the general strike, the planned January 28 (J28) building occupation was fundamentally an arbitrarily chosen day of action with all the limits thereof. However, unlike the port actions, this was a massive attempt to return to what had made the Oakland Commune so powerful in the first place: liberating space from capital and the state, transforming it into a collective occupation where people could take care of each other and organize further actions. Even though many remember that spectacular day as one of the most important in their experience as part of the Oakland Commune, in relation to its stated goal, it was a disaster.

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In response to criticism of the clandestinely organized occupation of the Traveler’s Aid building on November 2, J28 was organized in a radically open structure. Regular “Move-In Assemblies” of over 100 met publicly in the plaza to plan the occupation, while giving a smaller closed group the mandate to pick a building in relative secrecy. This assembly spent countless days organizing infrastructure for the new occupation, setting up guidelines for accountability within the space and planning a multi-day festival of music, speakers, and films. As the day of action unfolded, this ambitious plan was blasted apart in the first spectacular clashes outside the target building—the massive Kaiser Center Auditorium—in what became known as The Battle of Oak Street. It was probably because people believed so strongly in the dream that a new liberated space could emerge from the Kaiser Center and resuscitate the Commune that they fought so hard and with such a collective spirit that day. But OPD had no qualms about transforming downtown into a warzone to insure that private property remained off-limits.

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Police open fire on the crowd during the battle of Oak Street, January 28

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A backup plan later in the day also failed to seize a building. As night fell, OPD called in additional police forces from across the Bay Area. After their first attempt to kettle a march of nearly a thousand people at 19th and Telegraph was outmaneuvered—the crowd dramatically escaped by tearing down the fences the city had recently rebuilt—the police finally succeeded in surrounding over 400 comrades outside the downtown YMCA. The arrestees spent the following days in filthy overcrowded cells at Santa Rita Jail.

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Amazingly, those who remained on the streets remained undaunted. They broke into City Hall, burning the American flag and vandalizing the inside of the building in revenge for the police repression. Even after riot police with shotguns chased them off, the night was still not over. An FTP march was quickly organized. In keeping with tradition, participants took the familiar loop through downtown and unleashed rocks, bottles, and other objects at the police station and jail as they passed. The Commune was not going down without a fight.

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Comrades respond to the police attack by throwing chairs and other objects at police lines during The Battle of Oak Street, January 28

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Yet that was the end. The limits had emerged one by one over the course of January, and there was no new occupation or wave of mobilizations on the way. On January 29, as comrades scrambled to support the hundreds in jail while thousands across the country organized solidarity demonstrations with Oakland, over 300 gathered at the plaza in what turned out to be the last large general assembly. They voted enthusiastically to endorse calls emerging from New York and elsewhere for a May 1 global general strike—a strike that never materialized. Many still hoped that Occupy would reemerge with a spring offensive. But given the bitter defeat in the turf war over the plaza, the implosion of the port blockade campaign, and the failure to secure a new home for the Commune, this seemed unlikely. January was the end. Occupy’s window of radical possibilities would soon be closed in Oakland and everywhere else.

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Over the following months, people carried out many amazing and inspiring radical projects. Occupy Oakland organized a series of large neighborhood BBQs across the city. The anti-repression committee set an impressive standard for how to take care of arrestees and imprisoned comrades. The SF Commune temporarily held a building at 888 Turk. Insurgent feminist and queer comrades who had come together over the previous months continued a campaign of actions and interventions while writing and distributing propaganda and texts. Clashes and attacks temporarily erupted across the Bay around May Day, while a struggle over an occupied farm emerged in neighboring Albany. Foreclosure defense campaigns successfully held off a series of evictions. For a week, people occupied an Oakland public school that was being closed down.

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Yet the chance to regain momentum had passed in January. All of these efforts were still riding on evaporating momentum from the previous fall. In their increasing detachment from each other, they represented the long process of dispersal and decomposition that began with the strike on November 2.

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Camp and Commune

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At its core, Occupy was about occupying. In Oakland and elsewhere, it was about producing a form of life defined by mutual aid, self-organization, and autonomous action. It was about defending spaces free from police, politicians, and bosses, and the necessarily violent conflict between those zones and the surrounding capitalist world on which the camps nonetheless depended. Oakland took this about as far as it could go within the framework of Occupy, establishing a zone that fed and sheltered hundreds of people each day—sometimes thousands—in brazen defiance of the city officials fifty yards away in City Hall and the cops leering from the periphery. For all the hype about social media, livestreaming, and other information technologies enabling this new wave of revolt, the grounding of the struggle in the face-to-face relationships that combined to form the occupation is clearly what gave Occupy its unique potential and created the material foundation for all the political possibilities of the movement. The authorities understood this. That’s why they cleared the camps in Oakland and everywhere else, using as much force as necessary to prevent reoccupation.

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Once the camp was cleared, the Oakland Commune became a husk deprived of its central tactic and, arguably, its reason for being. This was the reason why the vigil clung mournfully to the plaza despite repeated battering by OPD. It was the reason why the decision was made to claim a building for the movement on January 28. It was why the planning for an autonomous occupation provided the initial impetus for the convergence of feminist and queer comrades in what would later become Occupy Patriarchy. Without something to take the place of what had been lost with the camp, there was little chance that we would regain the expansive prospects of the fall.

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The strength of “the camp form” was its ability to carve out material zones of political antagonism that were not organized around petitioning the authorities for concessions through symbolic demonstration but directly providing for our daily needs through the repurposing and reclamation of urban space. This was one of the most appealing aspects of the camp: it offered the opportunity to explore ways of relating and surviving together that did not rely on the usual mechanisms—money, the state, police, predefined social hierarchies and categories—though the banishment of those things was always partial and provisional at best. This enabled the participants to bypass some of the more tedious ways in which activists develop political projects, equipping people to organize around their own survival, in their own cities, on the basis of their personal experience of oppression and need, rather than according to essentially moral objections to this or that injustice. In the context of this contagious form of revolt spreading through the communal liberation of space, the movement’s rejection of the need to issue any specific demands to authorities made perfect sense. Occupy’s power came from the proliferation and reproduction of these oppositional zones, not from its political sway.

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But if the camp was the source of our strength, it was also the source of the limits we reached, and not only because without it there was no real future for Occupy. At root, the camp was inadequate to the project of finding ways to live together beyond the specious forms of community that capitalism provides. In fact, the Oakland camp was already in a state of degeneration by the time it was cleared, and probably would have broken down on its own eventually.

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The camp was no more violent or miserable then the city of Oakland is on any given day. Yet the level of everyday misery, alienation, and abuse that makes up the mundane reality of capitalist society is truly staggering, especially when concentrated in a plot of grass in the middle of an impoverished city. When we liberate urban space in 21st century America, we have no choice but to confront the devastation produced by centuries of capitalism, conquest, and domination.

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Inside the reclaimed space opened up by the Commune, rampant interpersonal conflicts and forms of structural violence could not be contained or managed in the ways that capitalism normally does, through the violence of the police, the institutions of the state, or the ready-to-hand hierarchies provided by money and commodities. We had to confront these problems collectively and directly. But to do so adequately would have required the expropriation of resources and space far beyond what was within the grasp of the nascent movement. It also would have required the audacious dedication of participants to transcend their atomized lives and constructed identities under capitalism, going past the point of no return. The failure to overcome these fundamental obstacles enabled power relationships built on patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity to reassert their dominance within the movement while undermining and repressing the vital new relationships that had emerged through the process of struggle. These were the underlying limits that led the Commune away from the reclamation of space that had provided the basis for its initial rapid ascent, and ushered in its six month decline, passing the point of no return as the horizons of struggle that led away from the camp hit dead ends in January 2012.

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This is the double bind we found ourselves in: the camp was both inadequate and essential. A potential solution to this bind is contained in the concept of the Commune, by which we mean the projected translation of the principles of the camp onto a new, more expansive footing. Occupy Oakland became the Oakland Commune once it took the camp as the model for a project (barely realized) of reclamation, autonomy, and the disruption of capital on a much wider basis: neighborhood assemblies reclaiming abandoned buildings for their needs; social centers that could serve as hubs for organizing offensives and sustain all kinds of self-organization and care; occupations of schools and workplaces. These were the horizons that the Oakland Commune illuminated, in the positive sense, despite its limits. We believe it is likely that future struggles in the US will follow this trajectory in some way, using Occupy’s attempted offensives and space reclamations as the foundation upon which something much larger, more beautiful and more ferocious can begin to take shape.

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But the questions still remain: what would it mean to actually take care of each other and to collectively sustain and nurture an unstoppable insurrectionary struggle? How can we dismantle and negate the oppressive power relationships and toxic interpersonal dynamics we carry with us into liberated spaces? How can we make room for the myriad of revolts within the revolt that are necessary to upend all forms of domination? The effectiveness of any future antagonistic projects in the U.S. will be determined by our ability to answer these questions and thus transcend the limits that were so debilitating within Oscar Grant Plaza, forcing the Commune away from the very source of its power.

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Another wave of struggle and unrest will undoubtedly explode in our streets and plazas sooner or later. Our task in the meantime is to cultivate fierce and creative forms of cooperating, caring for each other, and fighting together that can help us smash through the fundamental limits of contemporary revolt when the time is right. If we can make substantial strides beyond these obstacles, police attacks and jail sentences will be no match for the uncontrollable momentum of our collective force.

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Some Oakland Antagonists, August 2013

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Banner during the November 2 Strike

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At the high point, it seems like it will go on forever. You feel invincible, unstoppable. Then the crash comes: court cases, disintegration, depression.

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Once you go through this several times, the rhythm becomes familiar. It becomes possible to recognize these upheavals as the heartbeat of something greater than any single movement.

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Over the past six years, cities around the world have seen peaks of struggle: Athens, London, Barcelona, Cairo, Oakland, Montréal, Istanbul. A decade ago, anarchists would converge from around the world to participate in a single summit protest. Now many have participated in months-long upheavals in their own cities, and more surely loom ahead.

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But what do we do after the crest? If a single upheaval won’t bring down capitalism, we have to ask what matters about these high points—what we hope to get out of them, how they figure in our long-term vision, and how to make the most of the waning period that follows them. This is especially pressing today, when we can be sure that there are more upheavals on the way.

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To this end, we have organized a dialogue with anarchists in some of the cities that have seen these climaxes of conflict. This is the first in a series of reflections drawn from those discussions. You can read the responses from Oakland, Barcelona, and Montréal.

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Practically all of the participants in these discussions independently reported that it was really hard for them to formulate their thoughts: “I don’t know why, but whenever I sit down to work on it, I get depressed.” This suggests a broader problem. Many anarchists depend on a triumphalist narrative, in which we have to go from victory to victory to have anything to talk about. But movements, too, have natural life cycles. They inevitably peak and die down. If our strategies are premised on endless growth, we are setting ourselves up for inevitable failure. That goes double for the narratives that determine our morale.

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Movement – A mysterious social phenomenon that aspires to growth yet, when observed, always appears to be in decline.

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When social change is gathering momentum, it is protean and thus invisible; only when it stabilizes as a fixed quantity is it possible to affix a label to it, and from that moment on it can only decompose. This explains why movements burst like comets into the public consciousness at the high point of their innovation, followed by a long tail of diminishing returns. A sharper eye can see the social ferment behind these explosions, perennial and boundless, alternately drawing in new participants and emitting new waves of activity, as if in successive breaths.

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In Occupy Oakland, a three-week occupation gave way to a six-month decline. This bears repeating: movements spend most of their time in decline. That makes it all the more important to consider how to make the most of the waning phase.

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As all movements inevitably reach limits, it is pointless to bewail their passing—as if they would go on growing indefinitely if only the participants were strategic enough. If we presume the goal of any tactic is always to maintain the momentum of a particular movement, we will never be able to do more than react quixotically against the inexorable passing of time. Rather than struggling to stave off dissolution, we should act with an eye to the future.

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This could mean consolidating the connections that have developed during the movement, or being sure to go out with a bang to inspire future movements, or revealing the internal contradictions that the movement never solved. Perhaps, once a movement has reached its limits, the most important thing to do in the waning phase is to point to what a future movement would have to do to transcend those limits.

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We had occupied the building for almost 24 hours, and we were starting to imagine that we could somehow hold onto it. I was about to go out for supplies to fortify the place when something caught my eye. There in the dust of the abandoned garage was a hood ornament from a car that hadn’t been manufactured in 40 years. I reached down to pick it up, then hesitated: I could always look at it later. On impulse, I took it anyway. A half hour later, a SWAT squad surrounded the building for blocks in every direction. We never recovered any of the things we built or brought there. Over a hundred of us met, danced, and slept in that building, outside the bounds of anything we’d previously been able to imagine in our little town, and that little hood ornament is all I have to show it happened.

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When I visited my friends in the Bay Area the following week, they were in the same state of elation I had been when I left the building: “We walk around and people see us and call out OCC-U-PY! Things are just going to grow and keep on growing!”

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Keep perspective.

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During a crescendo of social struggle, it can be difficult to maintain perspective; some things seem central yet prove transitory, while other things fall by the wayside that afterwards turn out to have been pivotal. Often, we miss opportunities to foster long-term connections, taking each other for granted in the urgency of responding to immediate events. Afterwards, when the moment has passed, we don’t know how to find each other—or we have no reason to, having burned our bridges in high-stress situations. What is really important, the tactical success of a particular action, or the strength of the relationships that come out of it?

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Likewise, it is rarely easy to tell where you are in the trajectory of events. At the beginning, when the window of possibility is wide open, it is unclear how far things can go; often, anarchists wait to get involved until others have already determined the character of the movement. Later, at the high point, it can seem that the participants are at the threshold of tremendous new potential—when in fact that window of possibility has already begun to close. This confusion makes it difficult to know when it is the right time to shift gears to a new strategy.

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We were outside at a café in downtown Oakland a couple months later. I was asking what my friends thought the prospects were for the future. “Things will pick up again when spring arrives,” they assured me.

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At first I believed them. Wasn’t everyone saying the same thing all around the country? Then it hit me: we were sitting there in the sunshine, wearing t-shirts, in the city that had seen the most intense action of the whole Occupy movement. If there wasn’t another occupation there already, it wasn’t coming back.

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Keep the window of possibility open while you can; if you have to split, split on your own terms.

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Movements usually begin with an explosion of uncertainty and potential. So long as the limits are unclear, a wide range of participants have cause to get involved, while the authorities must hold back, unsure of the consequences of repression. How do we keep this window of possibility open as long as possible without sidestepping real disagreements? (Think of Occupy Wall Street when it first got off the ground and all manner of radical and reactionary tendencies mingled within it.) Is it better to postpone clashes over ideological issues—such as nonviolence versus diversity of tactics—or to precipitate them? (Think of the controversial black bloc in Occupy Oakland on November 2, 2011.)

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One way to approach this challenge is to try to clarify the issues at stake without drawing fixed lines of political identity in the process. As soon as a tactical or ideological disagreement is understood a conflict between distinct social bodies, the horizon begins to close. The moment of potential depends on the fluidity of the movement, the circulation of ideas outside their usual domains, the emergence of new social configurations, and the openness of individual participants to personal transformation. The entrenchment of fixed camps undermines all of these.

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This problem is further complicated by the fact that the top priority of the authorities is always to divide movements—often along the same lines that the participants themselves wish to divide. It may be best to try not to precipitate any permanent breaks until the horizon of possibility has closed, then make sure that the lines are drawn on your own terms, not the terms of the authorities or their unwitting liberal stooges.

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Push the envelope.

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What is still possible once the horizon has been circumscribed? In a dying movement, one can still push the envelope, setting new precedents for the future so subsequent struggles will be able to imagine going further. This is a good reason not to avoid ideological clashes indefinitely; in order to legitimize the tactics that will be needed in the future, one often has to begin by acting outside the prevailing consensus.

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For example, at the conclusion of November 2, 2011, Occupy Oakland participants controversially attempted to take over a building. This provoked a great deal of backlash, but it set a precedent for a series of building occupations that enabled Occupy to begin to challenge the sanctity of private property during its long waning phase—giving Occupy a much more radical legacy than it would otherwise have had.

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One year’s breakthroughs are the next year’s limitations.

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The vital energy of new innovations gives way to calcification, and those innovations themselves become the next barrier that must be overcome. For example, the emphasis on tactical nonviolence that enabled a large body to converge around Occupy Wall Street became an obstacle to keeping the streets when repression escalated. Often, in places where a movement crosses a new threshold, it subsequently remains suspended at that point of development, limited by the same structures that enabled it to advance. After the occupation of the capitol in Madison in spring 2011, activity in Wisconsin never caught up to what followed in New York, just as Occupy Wall Street never matched the intensity of Occupy Oakland. In February 2012, after Occupy Oakland had died down, the student strike in Montréal set the high-water mark for contemporary struggle in North America—and anarchists in Montréal are still paying the price of this high point, facing intense police repression.

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During the burgeoning stage of a movement, participants often become fixated on certain tactics. There is a tendency to try to repeat one’s most recent successes; in the long run, this can only produce conservatism and diminishing returns. Diminishing returns are still returns, of course, and a tactic that is no longer effective in its original context may offer a great deal of potential in another setting—witness the occupation of Taksim Square in June 2013, when no one in the US could imagine occupying anything ever again. But tactics and rhetoric eventually become used up. Once no one expects anything new from them, the same slogans and strategies that generated so much momentum become obstacles.

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As soon as Occupy is in the news, anyone who had an occupation in mind had better hurry to carry it out before the window of opportunity has closed and nobody wants to occupy anything ever again. In a comic example of this tendency to fixate on certain tactics, after Occupy Oakland was evicted, Occupy Wall Street mailed a large number of tents across the country as a gesture of support. These tents merely took up storage space over the following months as the struggle in Oakland reached its conclusion on other terrain.

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Don’t regress to outmoded strategies.

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Sometimes, after a new strategy that is attuned to the present context has created new momentum, there is a tendency to revert to previous approaches that have long ceased working. When people with little prior experience converge in a movement, they sometimes demand guidance from those who have a longer history of involvement; more often, it is the veterans themselves who demand to provide this guidance. Unfortunately, longtime activists frequently bring in old tactics and strategies, using the new opportunity to resume the defeated projects of the past.

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For example, fourteen years ago, worldwide summit-hopping offered a way to exert transnational leverage against capitalist globalization, offering a model to replace the local and national labor organizing that had been outflanked by the international mobility of corporations. Yet when labor activists got involved, they criticized summit-hoppers for running around the world rather than organizing locally the old-fashioned way. Likewise, Occupy got off the ground because it offered a new model for an increasingly precarious population to stand up for itself without stable economic positions from which to mobilize. But again, old-fashioned labor activists saw this new movement only as a potential pool of bodies to support union struggles, and channeled its momentum into easily coopted dead ends.

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In the wake of every movement, we should study what its successes and failures show about our current context, while recognizing that by the time we can make use of those lessons the situation will have changed once more.

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Beware of rising expectations.

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When a movement is at its high point, it becomes possible to act on a scale previously unimaginable. This can be debilitating afterwards, when the range of possibility contracts again and the participants are no longer inspired by the tactics they engaged in before the crest. One way to preserve momentum past the end of a movement is to go on setting attainable intermediate goals and affirming even the humblest efforts toward them.

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The trajectory of green anarchist struggles in Oregon at the turn of the last century offers a dramatic example of this kind of inflation. At the beginning, the goals were small and concrete: protect a specific tree or a specific stretch of forest. After the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, the goals of green anarchists in the region hypertrophied until they reached a tactical impasse. When your immediate objective is to “take down industrial civilization,” just about anything you can do is going to feel pointless.

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Indeed, during a declining phase, it may be important to resist the tendency to escalate. When the SHAC campaign ran aground, Root Force set out to apply the same strategy against a much bigger target—scaling up from a single animal testing corporation to the major infrastructural projects underlying transnational capitalism. A SHAC-style campaign targeting a smaller corporation might have succeeded, empowering a new generation to go on applying the strategy, but Root Force never even got off the ground.

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Quit while you’re ahead.

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The declining phase of a movement can be a dangerous time. Often, popular support has died down and the forces of repression have regained their footing, but the participants still have high hopes and feel a sense of urgency. Sometimes it’s best to shift focus before something really debilitating occurs.

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Yet quitting while you’re ahead is complicated. If the connections that have been made are premised on collective action, it can be difficult to retain these without staying in the streets together.

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Months after Occupy Oakland was definitively over, police brutally attacked an anarchist march against Columbus Day, making several arrests and pressing felony charges. It is an open question whether this showed that anarchists had overextended themselves, but after a payback action the following night in Oakland, street activity in the Bay Area died down for almost a year. On the other hand, after the UK student movement died down, an explosion of riots in August 2011 suggested that many of the underclass participants felt abandoned by the withdrawal of their former activist allies from street action. It is possible that, had the movement continued in some form, the riots might have turned out differently—as a point of departure for another wave of collective struggle, rather than the desperate act of a marginalized population rising ruinously against society itself.

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Be prepared for burnout and depression.

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After the crest, when the euphoria is over, many participants will experience depression. Since the events that regularly brought them together have ceased, they are isolated and more vulnerable. Others may veer into addiction: substance use can be a way to maintain intimacy with each other and with danger itself when there is no more fire in the streets. The simple pleasures with which people celebrated their victories can expand to fill the space left by the receding tide of events, becoming self-destructive. This is another reason to establish new venues to maintain camaraderie and connection when the window of possibility is closing.

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Save energy for the fallout.

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All of these problems are often intensified by the explosion of discord that usually follows a movement’s demise. Once it is clear that a movement is definitively over, all the conflicts that the participants have been putting off come to the fore, for there is no longer any incentive to keep them under the rug. Suppressed resentments and ideological differences surface, along with serious allegations about abuse of power and violations of consent. Learning from these conflicts is an essential part of the process that prepares the way for future movements: for example, contemporary anarchism is descended in part from the feminist backlash that followed the New Left movements of the 1960s. But participants rarely think to save energy for this phase, and it can feel like thankless work, since the “action” is ostensibly over.

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It was a few nights before the eviction of the Occupy Philly encampment, and we were holding a General Assembly to decide what to do. Tensions were running high between the residents of the camp, who were primarily homeless, and those who participated chiefly in meetings and working groups. That night, a homeless man interrupted the GA to accuse several of those in leadership positions of being in league with the police, being racist, and planning to sell out the homeless. The facilitator tried to ignore the disruption, but the angry man drowned him out and eventually riled up a few more people who began shouting too. In this moment of chaos and heightened emotion, we had a unique opportunity. We could have shifted our focus from the threat that the government wanted us to react to, instead using that GA to finally address the tensions in our own group in hopes of building a force that could survive into the next phase of struggle. Instead, the facilitator tried to restore order by directing us to “break into small groups and discuss what ‘respect’ means.” My heart sank. Our shared energy was explosive; we needed to channel it, not suppress it.

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That was the last time I saw many of the comrades I’d befriended over the preceding months. The eviction wasn’t the greatest threat we faced after all.

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Repression hits hardest at the end.

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Government repression usually does not hit in full force until after a movement has died down. It is most convenient for the state to attack people when their support networks have collapsed and their attention is elsewhere. Operation Backfire struck years after the high point of Earth Liberation Front momentum, when many of the participants had moved on and the communities that had supported them had disintegrated. Similarly, the authorities waited until May 2012 to strike back at Occupy with a series of entrapment cases.

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The chief goal of repression is to open the fault lines within the targeted social body, isolating it and forcing it into a reactive position. Ideally, we should respond to repression in ways that establish new connections and position us for new offensives.

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Hold your ground.

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How do we transition into other forms of connection when the exceptional circumstances that drew us together are over? The networks that coalesce effortlessly during the high point of momentum rarely survive. While new events were unfolding, there was an obvious reward for setting differences aside and interrupting routines to converge. Afterwards, the large groups that formed slowly break down into smaller ones, while smaller groups often vanish altogether. The reshuffling of allegiances that takes place during this period is vital, but it’s equally vital not to lose each other in the shuffle.

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During the crest of a movement, participants often take for granted that it will leave them at a higher plateau when it is over. But this is hardly guaranteed. This may be the most important question facing us as we approach the next wave of struggles: how do we gain and hold ground? Political parties can measure their effectiveness according to how many new recruits they retain, but anarchists must conceive of success differently.

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In the end, it isn’t just organizations with contact lists that will remain after the crest, but above all new questions, new practices, new points of reference for how people can stand up for themselves. Passing these memories along to the next generation is one of the most important things we can do.

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Further Reading

\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/08/28/the-june-2013-uprisings-in-brazil-part-ii-giants-and-monsters", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/08/28/the-june-2013-uprisings-in-brazil-part-ii-giants-and-monsters", "title": "The June 2013 Uprisings in Brazil, Part II : Giants and Monsters", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2013-08-28T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

June 2013 saw the biggest wave of protest in Brazil’s recent history. Last month, we published a report from participants in this struggle, which began with demonstrations against a transit fare hike and quickly escalated into countrywide clashes. This is our second installment on the uprising, authored by another group, who offer a more critical perspective on the events.

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The June 2013 Uprisings in Brazil, Part II — Giants and Monsters

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Read Part I here.

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It isn’t easy to write about the demonstrations in Brazil that began in June 2013. Any attempt at analysis evaporated as the context changed dramatically from one day to the next. What began as a struggle for the reduction of the public transit fare hike became an outcry against police brutality. Then, after huge numbers of people joined the protests in the streets, the message dissolved into a fog of abstractions. When the corporate media realized how serious the threat of violence and property damage was, given the size and intensity of the demonstrations, they did an about-face, supporting the protesters and criticizing the violence of the police. Political figures, artists, and intellectual partisans of the status quo changed their tune, arguing that the demonstrations were legitimate, a fundamental “democratic right,” and represented the will of “all.” Finally, after a historic victory, the fare increase was repealed in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, and over a dozen other major cities.

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Let’s stop a moment to reflect on where we are, where we are going, and what the risks are.

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In São Paulo, the first demonstration was on June 2, and the fare increase was revoked on June 19, after six demonstrations. There were days of massive clashes and police repression like no one had seen in Brazil for a long time. The mobilization reached its peak on June 20 when protesters took the streets in more than 100 cities with great anger against police violence, carrying out attacks on state property, the media, and corporations.

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Rio de Janeiro, June 18

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Itamaraty Palace attacked in Brasilia

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The National Context of the First Demonstrations

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The first protests against the fare hikes occurred in Pôrto Alegre in southern Brazil. In March 2013, protesters took the streets and blocked the bus ticket increase. In May, protests in Goiânia accomplished the same thing. However, the cost of not increasing the fares was imposed on taxpayers, not company profits.

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The city government of São Paulo had not increased the rates for two years, but several municipalities had just announced a fare hike. On June 6, this was received, as usual, with protests by autonomous student, worker, and youth organizations mobilizing through the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL: loosely, “Free Pass Movement”) under the banner “If the rate does not drop, São Paulo will stop.” Autonomous MPL cells in other regions of the country called demonstrations for the same day. In São Paulo, about 5000 people attended and the march was violently suppressed by the military police with sound bombs, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the usual brutality. The media described the protests as mere vandalism that necessitated a strong state response. Journalists and intellectuals called the protesters a “generation without direction and without cause,” the “spoiled children of the middle class.” Nothing new so far. Average numbers, and just a little more repression than usual. With tempers rising, a new demonstration was called for the next day, June 7. Another march, more graffiti and burning trash, another police ambush, and even more repression. Police shot rubber bullets randomly and a great deal of gas. The governments of the state and the city of São Paulo claimed they could not engage with “hooliganism” and “all or nothing” demands. The Federal government made a statement condemning the demonstrations and offering to help suppress them if necessary.

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The third protest, on June 11, showed the repression could be even worse. The march started at Paulista Avenue with nearly 10,000 people escorted by 400 policemen. When participants attempted to occupy a bus terminal, the police responded again with violence and bombs, rubber bullets, and beatings, injuring dozens and making several arrests. There was resistance, and people destroyed many buses along the streets. About 20 people were arrested at random and accused of property damage; some were charged with gang conspiracy, a serious crime in Brazil. The fines amounted to $10,000 for each individual. The government still insisted that it was impossible to return to the previous transit price.

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The lack of dialogue and the repression produced a major mobilization in São Paulo for June 13, supporting the prisoners and denouncing police brutality. The popular response was massive: more than 20,000 people attended events promoted on social networks. It was also the day with the most arrests yet—230 altogether. Most of the arrestees were seized before the march began, just for carrying vinegar to protect themselves from tear gas. Journalists were arrested too. There were many reports of police beating people and even sexually abusing women. Despite everything, the authorities still refused to discuss the increase.

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At this point, the media that had been calling the protesters “rebels without a cause” were finally forced to join the wave of criticism against the police, in a shameless attempt at co-optation. The press were embarrassed by the undeniable and disproportionate violence of the military police—who usually perpetrate such violence only in the forgotten streets of the favelas and the countryside, away from others’ eyes and cameras.

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“It’s time for the whole country to meet the police only the favelas know.”

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Many were injured on June 13, including protesters, passersby, and journalists. Folha de São Paulo, a conservative newspaper accused of morally and financially supporting the repression during the Brazilian military dictatorship, counted seven journalists wounded, including two shot in the face with rubber bullets. Curiously, this paper became the leading voice against police violence, radically changing its speech.

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Cell Phones and Cameras as Weapons

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In the course of these events, a new factor became decisive. In all of the demonstrations across the country, protesters inspired by the Turkish resistance joined alternative independent media groups using cameras and cell phones to film the police, sharing the footage over the internet live or on the same day. Practically all the clashes were initiated by police, who cornered people chanting “No violence” and fired upon them as they offered no resistance. It became clear that the police were violating their own protocol, which stipulates that they should only use rubber bullets to defend themselves when they are attacked, beginning with warning shots and then aiming below the waist.

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Police attacking press with pepper spray

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Almost all the videos showed attacks on protesters standing with placards on street corners, people being shot in the face or beaten and arrested, including journalists from the mainstream media and anyone else who filmed police violence. Several images of injured people spread widely via the internet. This had unprecedented repercussions, forcing a shift in the mainstream media narrative to legitimize the marches as an expression of “democracy” and criticize the actions of the police. Journalists and conservative intellectuals apologized and changed their tone about the protests that were gaining support in the streets.

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Newspapers changed their approach to the demonstrations; first, they highlighted protester vandalism, then they questioned the brutality of the police.

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Reaching Goals, Losing Focus, and the Nationalist Shadow

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The fifth demonstration, called by the MPL for Monday, June 17, surprised those who had participated in the movement from the beginning. The momentum had spread across the country. More and more cities joined in, demanding lower prices and better quality in public transport, affirming other local causes including the right to protest itself, and decrying government overspending on infrastructure for the mega-events scheduled over the next few years. In the state of São Paulo, a young man was killed, hit by a driver who could not cross a street during the march.

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In the federal capital of Brasilia, thousands took to the streets and around 5000 people surrounded the building of the Senate and Congress, attacking and invading it. The house was empty of political bigwigs, but corporate media filmed everything. This was the first really direct message to the Federal Government.

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Crowds surround the Senate and Congress in Brasilia

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In Belo Horizonte, in addition to protesting the ticket price, people took to the streets against a ban criminalizing demonstrations that take any public road on the days of the matches of the soccer Confederations Cup; the legislation proposed sentences of up to 30 years for violators. This ban showed that Brazil was yielding to international pressure, especially from the United States, to adopt anti-terrorism laws for upcoming international sports events such as the 2014 Football World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

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In Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, and Cuiaba, the clashes became increasingly violent; some of them occurred on or around the perimeter stipulated by FIFA for the stadiums where the Confederations Cup games were happening. This perimeter is only a preview of what they are planning for the World Cup, with FIFA imposing laws such as the prohibition of demonstrations and informal trade within three kilometers of the stadiums and perhaps even banning the right to strike.

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As the clashes intensified, hackers invaded the websites and twitter profiles of government agencies and corporate media, using them to broadcast subversive texts and images of police violence, and inviting people to mobilize and continue the fight for lower fares.

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The impact of police violence and the favorable coverage given by the media produced broad popular support, with many new people joining the movement. There were solidarity demonstrations in 27 countries worldwide. The international impact was huge and even the international corporate media strongly criticized the Brazilian police and government.

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Yet the adhesion of the middle and upper class to the movement brought side effects. Across the country, people showed up with posters proclaiming phrases taken from Facebook and Twitter, slogans like “The giant awoke,” “It’s not just for 20 cents,” and vague statements against “corruption,” for tax cuts, and of love for a motherland in which people only occupy the streets for football and Carnival.

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March against the FIFA in Belo Horiozonte.

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Early on the day of the fifth march in São Paulo, announcements appeared on the internet that building materials such as bricks and pieces of iron had appeared overnight at the starting point of the demonstration. In a nearby square, a bus from the city lines was parked in a very unusual place. Many feared this was an ambush, in which potential weapons were provided to incite violence that would be “properly” suppressed by the police. This news made the city hastily gather the materials, but the circus was just beginning.

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That day, more than 100,000 people gathered in Largo da Batata, near the Faria Lima Metro Station, one of the newest and most modern stations in the city. The march followed a long, tiring route, escorted by hundreds of police officers. The “masses” in attendance had their faces painted green and yellow (the national colors) or were wrapped in the national flag, with clown noses, singing hymns and chanting their generic demands. The giant had woken up, but it had no idea what to do.

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It was necessary to focus in order to stop the increase in fares. The protesters were permitted to tramp the sacred ground of Paulista Avenue because, according the police, they deserved it for good behavior. However, dissidents marched to the Bandeirantes Palace, seat of State Government. The building was surrounded and forced open, so the police had to attack the protesters from inside the building to disperse the demonstration. The day concluded with great frustration about the loss of focus and the nationalism invading the movement.

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But about two hours earlier, in Rio de Janeiro, the protests had radicalized when a crowd attacked the State Legislature, using sticks, stones, fireworks, and Molotov cocktails to corner 70 policemen inside the building. Cars were burned, 20 police officers were injured, and the building was destroyed with losses of more than a million dollars. The people of Rio de Janeiro showed that the participation of the masses could be overwhelming for the authorities as well as for the original protesters. Trapped, the police used live ammunition, shooting seven people. Other cities, such as Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, also got in the news for confrontations, but in those cases police violence was the main story. In all the events from June 17 on, the media began to adopt specific language about the protest that was repeated on every network. In headline after headline and report after report, it was necessary to emphasize that a “minority” was responsible for the acts of violence and destruction, while the “vast majority” consisted of peaceful protesters that fit the profile required by a “democratic system.” Later, the minority became thugs, radicals, extremists, and even bandits and dangerous criminals. This was the same minority that had initiated the movement in the first place!

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The sixth demonstration, on June 18, was the last one before the rate increase was repealed; it also put new questions to the movement. The advocates of pacifism that had brought in a pride in citizenship and the desire to “preserve the public good” denounced and even personally attacked those writing graffiti and committing acts of “vandalism.” That day, the Military Police disappeared from the streets of Sao Paulo. More than 100,000 protesters marched through the center again and down Paulista Avenue. But some people from the “minority that spoils the movement” walked downtown and arrived at City Hall without difficulty. Anyone who has witnessed demonstrations in front of that building before knows it is almost untouchable and always guarded by the forces of the Military Police (which is administered by the state government) and the Municipal Guard.

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That day, the MP was not there to protect the building; its cabin located on the same corner as the City Hall was empty. In a suspicious turn of events, the way was open for the crowd. Probably the Military Police, ruled by the right-wing State Government, wanted to see the Mayor in the same danger they had faced the previous night. The result was that the City Hall was surrounded; the Municipal Guard was cornered and forced to enter the building. Its front door was smashed and decorated with graffiti. The gatehouse of the MP was destroyed and burned. A television van was torched. The streets of downtown were unprotected against the newly released anger of the people. Dozens of shops were looted by “a few thugs.” The next day, June 19, the rate increase was rescinded.

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100 Cities Take the Streets—and with Them, 100 Million New Policemen

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When he finally understood the scale of popular pressure, Mayor Fernando Haddad met with the bigwigs of his party, the PT (Workers Party), including former president Lula, president Dilma, and some marketing managers concerned with his image. The Mayor changed his tone, announcing in meetings with the MPL and in public statements that it was possible not to increase the price of tickets but it was not yet possible to predict when this could be formalized. The morning after the attack on City Hall, he announced that there would be no increase anymore.

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This map shows the locations and sizes of demonstrations. The largest had more than 300,000 participants.

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The seventh day of action became a celebration day in Sao Paulo. Over 100 cities around the country also hosted demonstrations and clashes. In Brasilia, the Palace of the Foreign Ministry, the headquarters of international relations, was surrounded with the president and ministers trapped inside. The entrance hall of the building was invaded and attacked as a crowd of over 10,000 protesters throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails took the unprepared building security by surprise. It was estimated that nearly 2 million people took to the streets nationwide. Yet the climate of optimism was fading in many places.

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In Porto Alegre, the scene of some of the most violent conflicts with the Military Police, the anarchist group Federação Anarquista Gaúcha (FAG) had its headquarters invaded by police. About 15 ununiformed policemen wearing only vests, said to be the Federal Police, raided the place without presenting any warrant, seizing materials such as books and paint in an attempt to incriminate the group for vandalism. The “minorities” that cause destruction and “come into confrontation” with police must be identified and isolated from the “good citizens” who occupy the streets “democratically.” Again, several protesters were grabbed and handed over to the police by other protesters for painting graffiti, attacking buildings and banks, or even simply covering their faces. It seemed to be the beginning of a nationwide manhunt.

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Anarchist presence in a march in Porto Alegre to halt rising transportation costs.

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Brazil is a Pressure Cooker

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The celebratory demonstration in Sao Paulo revealed something even worse than nationalism. In his move to restore the image of the PT, Mayor Haddad invited all members and supporters to occupy the streets dressed in red and with their flags to celebrate the victory of the people; he called this the “Red Wave.” Right-wing groups, claiming to be “anti-party,” tried to use the nonpartisan tone of the demonstrations to take advantage of the stupidity of thousands of uncritical protesters to call for open season on Left parties, black and gay movements, and other political minorities. An anarchist group marching nonviolently in black with a red and black flag was booed by protesters who opposed the party flags, confirming their ignorance of everything that was going on: they thought the anarchists were a party.

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Several clashes exploded between protesters for and against the presence of parties, creating a tense atmosphere on Paulista Avenue. At the same time, in the building of FIESP (Federation of Industries of the State), military officials and politicians were discussing new directions for the defense industry.

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The bright panels of the building showed a giant flag of Brazil, and the chants against political parties had no libertarian spirit. In this nationalist atmosphere, the protest was directed against the current mayor and the president of Brazil, as representatives of the PT.

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It was the first time since its foundation that this party had been thrown out of a mass demonstration by the people itself. Society has changed and they have failed to extend their connections to the newer generations, remaining tied only to some older movements like the MST (Landless Workers Movement). The right wing hoped to take advantage of this situation. These right-wing politicians run the state of Sao Paulo with Geraldo Alckimin (PSDB)—the same government that controls the Military Police that withdrew so City Hall could be attacked one night before. In this fog of vague ideas and nationalist sentiments, it’s hard to know who is who, what they want, and how they pursue their goals.

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This moment served the elite in their agenda to recapture the presidency of the republic and intensify the repression of popular social movements. The climate of tension and uncertainty remained. There were rumors on the streets and the internet about a new military coup. The United States exchanged its ambassador in Brazil with the one that was in Paraguay during the military coup in 2012. The MPL announced the end of demonstrations after its goals have been achieved, warning that the fight would continue in other ways and it was not useful to insist on unfocused demonstrations now that its original goals had been met.

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Meanwhile, on the border of Sao Paulo and in many other cities, less privileged people rose to demand their rights by closing roads. In the northern zone of São Paulo, a policeman was shot and three protesters were killed—a more serious toll than at any national demonstration for two weeks. The lives of those in the favelas who are not white or middle class are very distant from the reality people experience in the city center. The police treat resistance in the favelas differently; they occupy these areas nonstop, readily employing brutal force far from the eyes of public opinion.

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Other demonstrations were called by autonomous, nonpartisan groups hoping to maintain popular pressure around many other issues pending in Brazil. The country is a pressure cooker; the wave of demonstrations in June was just a tiny bit of steam escaping. In Rio de Janeiro on June 24, people from a favela called Mare demonstrated; in response they suffered a military incursion by the BOPE (a murderer elite police troop), who killed 13 people. Instead of rubber bullets, only real ones were fired.

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“Vandal” arrested by other protesters in Vitoria, Espirito Santo.

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The Means Must Justify Itself Now: This Fight Has No End

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In Brazil, there are countless reasons to protest. Allegations of torture against protesters have been reported in Salvador and other cities. The evangelical lobby is pressing Congress to approve psychological treatment for homosexuality and ban abortion in cases of rape—a tremendous setback for a right that women already possess only in cases of sexual violence. Anti-terrorism laws are to be voted in under US pressure to criminalize demonstrations that block the street or cause property damage. MST activists and MTST activists (the Homeless Movement) are persecuted and arbitrarily arrested. UN representatives are asking Brazil to end the Military Police, and popular groups are organizing to support this. Research shows that Brazil already has about 5000 unregulated drones flying; the BOPE and landowners are testing this technology. FIFA continues to press Brazil for more security for business during next year’s World Cup. Evictions continue everywhere in order to modernize the cityscape and build roads, airports, and structures for the upcoming mega-events. In indigenous territories, there are battles to make way for dams and power stations and secure the advancement of agri-business. The demarcation of indigenous lands is no longer the responsibility of FUNAI (National Indian Foundation) but now the EMBRAPA (Brazilian Agricultural and Livestock Research).

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Popular committees bringing together communities, students, and unions are forming in Belo Horizonte and elsewhere to discuss the next direction for popular demands. The fight is far from over. Now the people of Brazil have a new action profile in their résumé—for good or for ill. There is a lot to discuss about how to maintain a struggle without being contaminated by middle-class patriotism imported from football and Carnival, and how to face the elites who are determined to destroy or coopt the general discontent. Now the State and the Police also know what can happen when people come out to the streets; they will be careful not to make the same mistakes again. The fight is becoming increasingly harsh; new obstacles appear everywhere we have succeeded in taking a step forward. Anarchists and radicals, who have remained outside the spotlight of the media and police until now, will be persecuted as before, along with other “inciters of violence and vandalism.” Many already face charges.

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We need a new security culture to protect individuals and groups mobilizing in social struggle, new ways of defending and attacking without taking too many risks. We need to discuss diversity of tactics, considering that our militarized police force is comparable to those in countries under dictatorship or foreign occupation, prepared to kill without any dialogue. According to Amnesty International, in the favelas and in the countryside, it is the biggest killer on the planet.

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At the same time, we need to make what we are doing as horizontal, autonomous, liberating, and pleasurable as possible, because the end does not seem to be even visible on the horizon. The means will be all we have for a long time.

\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/07/27/the-june-2013-uprisings-in-brazil-part-1", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/07/27/the-june-2013-uprisings-in-brazil-part-1", "title": "The June 2013 Uprisings in Brazil : Part I", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2013-07-27T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

In June 2013, immediately on the heels of the uprising in Turkey, Brazil erupted in nationwide turmoil. Beginning with protests against a public transit fare increase, this upheaval brought hundreds of thousands to the streets in open fighting with the police. The fare increase was soundly defeated, in one of the few victories of the past several years of global revolts. But the movement was a victim of its own success, as middle-class nationalists and pacifists joined in, clashing with other protesters and muddying the issues.

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Although anarchists played a decisive role in these events, very little material about the upheaval has appeared in English from Brazilian anarchists. To correct this, we have solicited our comrades’ perspectives from inside the riots. This is the first of two collectively authored texts analyzing the conditions that produced the uprising and the lessons we can draw from it. We will publish the second shortly.

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The June 2013 Uprisings in Brazil, Part I

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The opinions, analysis, gossip, conspiracy, and witchcraft expressed herein do not purport to represent all the groups and positions in the uprisings that occurred throughout Brazil in June 2013. We do not want to erase the power of difference, the capillary plurality and molecular diversity of experiences, tactics, and political perspectives. We do not want to impose a final analysis on the uprisings. These analyses reflect only the critical perspective of an anonymous, rhizomatic grupelho (faction) active in the uprisings of Goiânia, Pôrto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. We hope to describe what occurred from a radical, anti-hegemonic, and subaltern point of view. We also aspire to convey a bit of the magic from the streets, barricades, favelas, and prisons of Bra$il, to fuel the ongoing struggles in Turkey, Egypt, Chile, Greece, Spain, Italy, the USA, and elsewhere in the Globalitarian Empire.

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Timeline of Events

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In São Paulo, the first demonstration of this new wave of revolt against the transit fare increase took place on June 6, 2013. The fare had been increased by 20 cents. This meant that a single transit cost a third of the Brazilian minimum wage, forcing some workers to skip lunch to afford it. The MPL (Movimento pelo Passe Livre: Free Pass Movement) had called the June 6 demonstration far in advance to protest the fare increase; a relatively wide coalition backed it, including left-wing and center-left parties, social movements, and the student movement. The most radical groups anticipated it with fear and excitement: fear that the parties might get traction in the movement, and excitement about the participation of the popular classes1 and more radical groups. The demonstration in São Paulo occurred in the wake of street clashes with police a few weeks earlier in Pôrto Alegre and Goiânia, in weekly mass demonstrations, bringing not only more radical sectors but also popular and poor strata to the streets.

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Demonstrations against the increase in Goiânia in late May: “We will not Pay” painted on a burning bus.

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The first demonstration in São Paulo fulfilled expectations. About 5000 people took to the streets. Leaving from the Viaduto do Chá across from the city hall of São Paulo, the march passed by the most important avenues of the city. From the first moment, graffiti appeared all over the walls; dumpsters were dragged into the street and burned, disrupting and distracting the military police. Within an hour, a confrontation with police erupted that lasted until the end of the demonstration. The police attacked with tear gas, pepper spray, and stun grenades. The demonstrators retaliated with projectiles and erected burning barricades of trash and subway turnstiles. After this battle, the demonstration proceeded to Paulista Avenue (one of the city’s busiest and most important streets), closing it in both directions. Again, garbage burned in the streets. Shops, corporate franchises, banks, and subway stations were transformed by means of paint and projectiles. The losses inflicted to the São Paulo subway were estimated at US $40,000 that day.

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São Paulo had not seen such fierce demonstrations since the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations over a decade before. Another demonstration was scheduled for the next day.

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Demonstration in São Paulo: “If the fare do not goes down, the city will stop it!”

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The same spirit marked this demonstration: graffiti on the walls, destruction of the symbols of global capitalism. Once again, the police attacked; once more, the protesters responded. A new street battle began with the police employing tear gas, bombs, and batons, and protesters defending themselves with stones, barricades, and homemade bombs. A third protest in the same mold was scheduled for the following day.

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Another big demonstration in São Paulo.

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Police search at the subway before a demonstration. Police arresting people with vinegar for treating the effects of tear gas and pepper spray.

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The protesters of São Paulo had a few days of rest after this three-day marathon; another demonstration was scheduled for June 13. This one started around 6 pm in the square Ramos de Azevedo, in the center of the city. Protesters gathered there from 5 pm on. The group went to the square of the Republic, then walked along Ipiranga Avenue to the street of Consolação, at the corner of Roosevelt Square.

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Now it was a whole new ball game. The previous week’s demonstrations had attracted more people, and this demo was attended by more than 10,000. Police appeared at the outskirts of Paulista Avenue, trying to block the demonstration to defend the interests of big business, who feared new reprisals from the enraged population. Riot police made a cordon and began to bombard the demonstration. Again, the manifestation retaliated with stones, built barricades, and destroyed targets associated with global capitalism.

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This time, the police were stopping and searching people on the subway; even before the beginning of the demonstration, they detained more than 40 people. By the end of the evening, almost 250 had been arrested. This was clearly an attempt to criminalize and intimidate the movement by means of conspiracy charges and absurd bail costs (R$20,000).

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Demonstration in São Paulo.

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Another new aspect of this demonstration was the molecularization of the revolt. As riot police increased repression, the demonstration began to dissolve naturally into small groups of 300 to 1000. These initiated new demonstrations and points of conflict all around the city center. Guerrilla battles broke out everywhere as protesters retreating from bomb-throwing police built barricades.

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Protesters trying to invade the Palácio dos Bandeirantes, the headquarters of the state government of São Paulo.

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The anticipation building up to the fifth major demonstration was intense. It was called for June 17. The media was buzzing. GLobo—the biggest TV company of Brazil and one of the world’s biggest—interrupted their programming to disseminate news about the demonstrations. Initially, the corporate media depicted the movement as a bunch of criminals; then, when it gained momentum, they began to make a distinction between peaceful protesters and vandals in an attempt to marginalize the more radical sectors.

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Yet once again, the demonstration assumed a radical character. Large banks, chain stores, and department stores were beautified with graffiti; protesters nearly overran the headquarters of the state government of São Paulo, the Palácio dos Bandeirantes; busses were vandalized…

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100,000 protesters at a demonstration in Rio.

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We had known that the commotion about the Military Police beating photographers, reporters, and protesters would attract a large mass—and that came true. About 50,000 people attended this demonstration. Now what we had feared was finally happening: the demonstration included the middle class, the opportunist parties, a few nationalist groups, and the extreme right wing. The middle class had bought the hetero-bourgeois media discourse: they called for pacifism, marching with Brazilian flags and singing the national anthem. The right wing was trying to take over the movement, bringing their own agenda: protesting “corruption” and calling for President Dilma to be impeached. This was the first demonstration in which there were reports of pacifist protesters attacking radical groups. Anarchists who were spray painting in a bank were attacked by nationalists and pacifists and forced to withdraw. Chants of “no violence” directed at the police turned into chants of “without vandalism” directed at the protesters. The game had changed again.

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A protester throws a Molotov cocktail at police in front of the ALERJ.

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Meanwhile, in Rio de Janeiro, thousands of people took to the streets the same day. Drawing on the momentum from São Paulo, a demonstration that would otherwise have drawn only a few thousand people drew over 100,000—making it the largest street demonstration in Brazil for 20 years. The starting point was on the square of the Candelária. The mass occupied the Rio Branco Avenue and marched toward the square of the Municipal Theater.

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Knowing that the parties wanted to end the demonstration in Candelária, a group of anarchists, insurrectionists, anarcha-feminists, and Maoists were able to pull the manifestation to ALERJ, the parliament of Rio de Janeiro. The scene was already chaotic when the crowd arrived there. A small group of military police had attempted to guard a barricade in front of the building; surrounded and attacked, they fled into the ALERJ. Some protesters tried to invade the ALERJ; others spray painted its walls and broke its windows; still others began to burn cars. Several groups fanned out into the surrounding area to attack banks and multinational stores; other groups started looting, distributing the goods and playing with them in the streets. For over three hours, the center of Rio de Janeiro was filled with protesters.

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From that day on, the demonstrations spread throughout the country. Pôrto Alegre returned to star in street clashes. Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro staged new mass protests; during the Confederations Cup, protesters torched several car dealerships in Belo Horizonte and protesters from Rio de Janeiro came within 500 meters of the Maracanã during the final game, advancing more than two kilometers past the perimeter established by FIFA. Rio de Janeiro witnessed the greatest demonstration in the history of Brazil, over 3 million people, including an hours-long pitched battle in which protesters clashed with the BOPE (Assault Troop of Rio de Janeiro Military Police) and chased away the Caveirão—“BigSkull,” BOPE´s tank for going into the slums to kill poor and black people.

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The people of Vitória also fought major battles, occupying the Terceira Ponte—the most important bridge of the city. In Salvador, the demonstrations became a great deal more radical, drawing broad participation especially from the poorest sectors of society. There were demonstrations in the cities around São Paulo: Campinas, Santos, Praia Grande, Sorocaba—and around Rio de Janeiro: Barra Mansa, Macaé, Campos—and in other large cities such as Curitiba, Florianopolis, Natal, Maceio, and Aracaju. At the end of June, there were days when there were protests in more than 100 cities at once, and cities like São Paulo, Pôrto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, and Rio de Janeiro had protests every day of the week. Not to mention the international solidarity protests that took place in Berlin, Barcelona, and London.

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On June 19, thanks to all the burned busses, smashed banks, and destroyed shop fronts, the governments of Rio and São Paulo jointly announced the reduction of the transit fare. This was a transparent ploy to preserve what little popularity they had left, meeting the movement’s demands before things got further out of control. This had a domino effect: soon after, several major cities also announced fare reductions, making this a historic victory. Yet more demonstrations still ensued. These focused on additional issues such as private mafia control of transportation. Belo Horizonte, Pôrto Alegre, and Vitória joined in, with protesters occupying the Legislative Chamber. In Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, protesters continued to fill the streets. Several public university offices in São Paulo and Belo Horizonte are occupied as of this writing, and we just been informed that Paulínia, in the state of São Paulo, is the first city to adopt Rate Zero after the protests: free passage on public transportation.

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The movement against rising transportation costs is not new—it has been around for some years. Three years ago, it seemed to be one of the only urban movements involving mass conflict with the state. Why was that movement so lively when others seemed lifeless? And what was its role in setting off these recent larger struggles?

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The Movimento pelo Passe Livre (Free Pass Movement) has existed since 2005. The movement arose out of major uprisings against the fare increases that had occurred in Florianópolis and Salvador. The MPL gained a disproportionate role due to stupidity of the bourgeois media, which searches for leaders and martyrs for any social struggle, embracing whatever is simplest and most marketable. The MPL is usually just another group that participates in combative forums against rising rates in the cities that have more militant struggles over transportation issues.

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These movements against rising rates have never been mass movements. In general, they are composed from the militant student movement, former students who are public school teachers, and high school students: mostly white, middle-class, heterosexual cis-men, in their overwhelming majority belonging to parties of the center-left social Democrats and Trotskyists, but also including a current of anarchists and autonomists. From the founding of the MPL until today, the protests that took place against the fare increases involved 3000 participants at the very maximum. Also, the movement did not have a radical character. Even with the participation of anarchists, the movement never managed to defend itself from police attacks, let alone begin an offensive against capitalism and the state. Its demonstrations were often marches carrying banners and drumming; when repression came, these were immediately dispersed, with rare exceptions.

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In addition, there were other radical urban movements. One of the few breaths of life in recent years was the organization of the homeless and the movement of urban occupations—squats involving poor, black, and queer people. They established important social occupations across the country and bravely resisted the attacks of the state. The campaign against the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam also gained nationwide support, drawing thousands of people to the streets and inspiring urban militants to join indigenous peoples in the Amazon in committing acts of resistance and sabotage against Belo Monte.

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Explain how the uprising spread from a few specific single issues and particular groups to the participation of many parts of the general population with a broader outlook.

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Insurrectionary situations always exceed teleological interpretation; any attempt to explain them that does not take this into account is limited to a cis-masculinist rationality and Eurocentric totalitarian reason. That said, a variety of factors have contributed to this political cauldron.

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The brave popular resistance in pitched battles around the country and the brutal police violence against demonstrators generated a social upheaval, bringing a large contingent of people to the streets. The arrival of these new protesters with little political background changed the situation. While the existing the movement radicalized in response to police repression, pacifists and nationalists attracted many of the newcomers, altering the character of the protests. In this context, extreme right-wing groups saw an opportunity to gain visibility.

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“The favela never slept!”

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The crisis of the state in Brazil has discredited all political and social representation, including professional politicians and left-wing parties. Much of the population attended demonstrations expressing this disillusionment. The right wing would channel this into campaigns against corruption, calls for the impeachment of president, and appeals in defense of the family.

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The political context of Brazil is extremely turbulent; movements offer a strategic link to the strengthening of the collective interests of groups in resistance. The negative impact of the World Cup in Brazil is already visible, and in mass demonstrations during the Confederations Cup, the voices of those who are being affected by these developments echoed in the streets, especially in cities that hosted those events. The evictions of urban occupations and policies targeting favelas are also proceeding at full speed, which also contributed momentum. The movements of black people and people of color and grassroots organizations from the favelas brought a focus on police violence and state terrorism against black youth and slum dwellers. There is also a cis-heterosexist and masculinist assault in Brazil, with religious politicians trying to implement a law criminalizing women who have abortions, and another calling for psychologists to “heal” people guilty of anti-heteronormal gender disobedience. So the voices of all kinds of feminists, women, gays, trans-people, and queer-folks also echoed in the streets across the country.

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One of the slogans of the uprising was “The giant woke up.” The participation of marginalized sectors including black people, favela dwellers, and trans-folks showed that the police who were violent downtown, with rubber bullets against rich and heterosexual protesters, were the same ones who kill poor, black, and non-heterosexual people in the slums every day. Slogans began to appear like “The Favela never slept,” “Feminists and trans-peoples never slept,” putting the movement in historical context rather than catering to the privilege of a disoriented middle class that always assumes itself to be the protagonist.

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Demonstration in Rio: “The police that repress in the streets are the same ones that kill in the favelas!”

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For more context, we can highlight the killing of eleven residents of Favela da Maré in Rio. In a demonstration of Maré residents, the police charged some people with robbery. Soon after, the police carried out a military operation in the Favela da Maré, killing eleven villagers. This produced a national uproar, strengthening the struggle of residents and politicized further demonstrations in Rio. Here is our solidarity with the families and residents of Maré and all those who live with violence every day, where direct action, radicalism, and fury in the streets reflect the realities of life on the margins of hetero-capitalism and the need to resort to such tactics as a survival strategy.

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How did the politics shift as the uprising became more popular?

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Already, before the events in São Paulo and Rio, the very first protests in Pôrto Alegre and Goiânia were fierce. The news was that protesters were closing streets with burning tires and barricades, that they were burning busses, that the government was scared and retreating and that the police were violent, trapping many people and giving rise to lawsuits. Balaclavas, Molotov cocktails, gas masks, vinegar, voluntary medical staff, gasoline, and all types of handmade bombs were deployed in almost all the demonstrations around the country, and not only by traditionally radical and insurrectionary groups. Tactics such as occupying government offices, blocking the doors of city hall, blockading roads, clashing with police, and looting became commonplace. The way the police reacted with violence and then retreated in fear only radicalized the demonstrators, creating a spirit of solidarity with arrested or injured protesters and revealing the power of horizontal grassroots organization.

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On the other hand, the victory of the fare reduction, the end of the Confederations Cup, and the appearance of middle-class, nationalist, and pacifist sectors in the movement generated a period of decline in some cities. In São Paulo, in late June, black bloc’ers and other radical protesters were repeatedly beaten up by pacifists and handed over to police. Although the protests in Rio remained quite radical, anarchists and other protesters suffered aggression from Marxist and workerist parties.

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Overall, the victories won by insurrectionary tactics offered a breath of hope to the vast majority that took to the streets. The fare increase was repealed, the aforementioned law of “gay healing” was tabled, a bill offering impunity to parliamentarians was vetoed. In cities where there was a pacifist breakthrough, it is necessary to revise the tactics and reorganize the fight, but the feeling in the air is that militant tactics fit into a context that has passed the point of no return. From now on, Molotov cocktails, barricades, and street fighting will be part of the tradition of street demonstrations in Brazil.

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Twelve years ago, Brazil had a powerful anti-capitalist movement. Describe how Lula’s presidency and the electoral victories of the PT changed the political landscape and contributed to the eclipse of that movement.

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The entry of the PT—the Workers Party, the party of Lula and the current president, Dilma—into the presidency transformed the political landscape. However, to explain the transformation of the political context only in terms of representational politics not only obscures contingencies, micropolitics, and molecular resistance, but reproduces the modern-colonial attempts to see politics within the privileged sphere of cis-hetero-white-eurocentric-masculinist rationality.

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When the Lula government came to power, the sections of the left and social movements that benefitted from PT support stopped engaging in anti-government confrontations in return for money and privileges. This caused many movements to decline, including the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), the student movement and unions, and even some sectors of the homeless movement and urban occupations, traditionally radical and nonpartisan.

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This contributed to the decline of the anti-globalization movement, but it was not the only factor. The failure to cope with the advancement of pacifist ideology, the failure to create strategies and languages to break out of the boring traditions of the hegemonic left, and the inability to connect with other struggles also contributed to the decline of that movement. Beyond the external factors of macro and electoral geopolitics, the movement declined because it could not cope with the new context by renewing itself and creating new dynamics—“minor” dynamics, in the language of Deleuze and Guattari, “terrible” dynamics, in the language of Tiqqun.

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The social assistance programs of the Lula government have also shifted the context. On the one hand, new income redistribution and credit policies raised much of the population above the poverty line, enabling a new mass to participate in spectacular capitalism, consuming the gadgets and lethargic subjectivity of middle class identity. This created widespread political apathy. On the other hand, the credit policy has generated a huge mass of people who are no longer poor, but rather indebted. Combined with the mass entry of slum dwellers and poor people of color into universities via government programs, this politicized many sectors that traditionally were on the margins of hetero-capitalist society, producing a new indebted class with access to a discourse previously restricted to the privileged.

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The uprisings around the world that began with Greece in December 2008 and culminated with the Arab Spring in 2011 were all described as protests against austerity. What does it mean to see uprisings in countries like Brazil and Turkey where the economy is supposed to be “improving”?

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It is important to understand that Brazil’s economic growth came the hard way. It arose via a process of accumulation by dispossession—both in the countryside, where a massive influx of agro-industrial capital expanded monoculture and livestock exportation, and in the city, through urban commodification policies including the removal of slums and building occupations and the militarization of the city. But it is also important to remember that by June 2013, economic growth had already plateaued, with some evidence of decline: inflation has been relatively high this year, and the rising prices of basic commodities such as tomatoes only confirm this. Once more, the entry of a large part of the population into the arena of consumer capitalism occurred only via their going into debt.

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Though essentially reformist, this video offers a good overview of the situation around the World Cup.

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This created a tense situation. Part of the population was directly hit by the negative consequences of this economic growth: construction of dams, killings and expulsions from the countryside, evictions and removals related to World Cup and international investments, military occupations of neighborhoods. Another part of the population is suffering from the halt of economic growth, and yet another part suffers from debt as a consequence of its supposed social ascent.

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The management of Brazilian capitalism seems to have entered a time of crisis: most of its institutions are discredited, and the mechanisms that produce capitalist subjectivity seem to be breaking down. The hatred of party flags in the street demonstrations, the cries of “No more Dilma,” the disillusionment with politicians and corruption—rather than indicating that the population has been taken in by the speech of fascist and right-wing groups, these show that people are losing confidence in the most fundamental institutions of capitalism and the state. Moreover, it appears that the entry of a new population into consumer society has been a disappointment. The utopia depicted in electronics advertisements has turned out to be boring and unfulfilling.

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What has been the influence of the revolts in Greece and Spain, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement upon the popular imagination in Brazil? Did participants in the June uprising see themselves as connected to the people fighting in Turkey and Egypt at the same time?

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The Greek anarchist movement has long inspired the insurrectionary anarchist imagination in Brazil. However, until recently, we thought that the Greek anarchists could do such things because the Greek police are not militarized, whereas such revolts could never occur under Brazil’s military police. So, aside from inspiring a desire for more radical protests, Greek anarchists were not very influential. But we should also point out that the hetero-masculinist performance of some parts of the Greek anarchist movement has provoked critique from anarcha-feminist, radical feminist, and insurrectionary and anarchist queer sectors here.

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The Occupy movement also had some influence here. The occupations of squares occurring at the end of 2011 in Pôrto Alegre, Rio, São Paulo, and other cities in the country took a new generation and a new social demographic into the streets—and some of those sectors remained active, taking a role in the uprisings. This was not always for the best: part of the pacifist and nationalist wave that raged in mid-June occurred thanks to the holders of the Guy Fawkes masks, Anonymous activists and some members of Occupy.

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The Turkish resistance movement exerted a vivid influence on uprisings in Brazil. First, because like Brazil, Turkey is a country where one rarely sees violent street demonstrations, despite the abject living conditions of much of the population. Chants like “It’s over love, so here will turn Turkey” echoed in Pôrto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and other cities. Demonstrators adopted tactics of urban confrontation from the Turkish resistance: barricades of burning garbage, gallons of water in which to submerge tear gas canisters.

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Meanwhile, a letter from the Egyptian movement in solidarity with the Brazilian uprising was received with a lot of emotion by protesters.

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What was the role of anarchists in initiating the uprising, and in pushing it further? In what ways were anarchist interventions in the events successful? In what ways did they fail?

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On one hand, it is important to highlight the role of anarchists in the events. Many of the clashes with police were led by anarchists or involved a great number of anarchists. Older anarchist militants helped maintain calm and share tactics during the tensest moments; this probably preserved momentum and also ensured the safety of the participants. Black blocs also had a role in the resistance; in cities like Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, and São Paulo, they become a target of pacifist and communist parties, who felt that anarchists threatened their power. Black bloc tactics, initiated by anarchists, also spread throughout the demonstrations, especially in Belo Horizonte and Rio.

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On the other hand, thankfully, anarchists were not as important as some would think. Much of the fighting and resistance was initiated by marginalized sectors of society: the unemployed, informal workers, poor workers, homeless people, street children, unemployed teenagers, and favela dwellers. In some moments of resistance—for example, when protesters drove the Caveirão off the streets, or in Belo Horizonte when protesters burned several car dealerships—you could see only a few anarchists. This shows that the radical tactics and spirit had spread throughout the multitude, or that the anarchists had dissolved themselves into the multitude. This is important: if the imperial capture apparatus cannot identify and isolate the source of revolt, the insurrection can spread.

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It is still too early to make a balance sheet of anarchist participation in the revolt. However, it is clear that the most militant tactics, driven by young anarchists, radical feminists, anarcha-feminists, insurrectionary queers, and animal liberationists—sectors largely marginalized by social anarchism—were precisely the most effective tactics and the ones that spread the most in the demonstrations, playing a central role in the victory of the uprising.

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Have there been debates about violence versus non-violence? How have other people reacted to those who take more militant action?

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In the anti-globalization era, we sidestepped the debate about violence, non-violence, and diversity of tactics. But this debate has erupted in the current demonstrations with material consequences; it seems that now we’re experiencing what the insurrectionary anarchists experienced in Seattle in 1999. Pacifists attacking radicalized protesters and anarchists; people giving flowers to policemen and inviting them to join the protest; demonstrators kneeling before the riot police advancing toward them with weapons; pacifists asking demonstrators to bend down so the police can identify protesters who are spray painting walls or destroying shops behind them; peaceful demonstrators denouncing protesters and delivering videos of radical actions to the police; communist parties making pamphlets criminalizing anarchists and black bloc’ers, or even physically attacking them.

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Despite all this, most people feel that those victories were only possible because of the riots. This gives confidence and credibility to anarchists and insurrectionists; it also caused those tactics to spread. In cities like Rio, some center-left, social anarchist, and student sectors have sympathized with anarchists and insurrectionists and started a campaign against the criminalization of more militant actions.

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What was the role of social media in the revolt? How successful has the government been in using it to strike back at participants?

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The media has played an important role. The first major demonstrations against the increase were all announced through Facebook, and that has continued to this day. Videos of police brutality and popular resistance have been shared through social networks, offering a powerful counterpoint to the corporate media.

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But we know that the internet is not an emancipatory space, but rather a hetero-capitalist capture apparatus. Facebook (called Fachobuk by some Brazilians—a play on the word “facho,” slang for fascist) itself was strangely slow, and some news sites could not be accessed or shared. We knew that the US government was watching Facebook and the ABIN (Brazilian Intelligence Agency) was also monitoring online profiles and email accounts. We knew that the police made fake profiles in order to search for information, and phones are being tapped, along with all the old-fashioned imperial practices of spying and infiltration.

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What internal and external limits did the revolt reach? What forms of repression failed or backfired against it? Which forms were successful, and why?

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Currently there are some difficulties in attempts to rearticulate the protests in some cities. The first obstacle is the challenge of dealing with the nationalist and pacifist middle-class demonstrators who have joined the protests. This difficulty is related to a larger impasse: the question of what strategies could hinder the adhesion of this and other reformist agendas to our struggles. There is also the challenge of linking the fare protest movement with other struggles: can we connect those who are showing up to these demonstrations now to the movement of urban occupations, or the fight against evictions, or the struggles against transphobia, heterosexism, and sexism? The reproduction of hierarchical power relations within the movement has also been a problem. Posters have appeared calling President Dilma a dyke, among other transphobic, misogynistic, and heterosexist acts.

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As for repression, at first the state of São Paulo used a strategy of ordering the police not to initiate conflict, in an attempt to stifle the movement. Then they overcorrected this first strategy by intensifying repression, which clearly failed. The arrests, bail costs, and police intelligence investigations are also a strategy of intimidation. Despite some effect, this strategy has been fought back, thanks to the growing number of volunteer lawyers who have joined the struggles and the police brutality videos that are published on the internet every day.

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Speak more about the place of nationalism inside the movement, and in the backlash against it.

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It’s true, the middle class and nationalists entered into the demonstrations. Their agendas are usually shallow and empty: against corruption and violence, for education… Its political impact occurred in the momentary disruption of radical sectors that were attacked by nationalists who claimed to oppose violence. Moreover, for a certain period, many people feared that extreme right-wings groups would get traction in the middle class.

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This appearance of nationalists and the middle class functioned chiefly as a warning to groups focused on creating insurrectionary situations, rather than as a demonstration that these groups have political relevance. Moreover, we know that fascism is molecular: we saw this in the communists beating radical demonstrators and pacifists repeating homophobic chants.

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What do you expect to happen in Brazil next year, alongside the World Cup? How will this revolt change the shape of future struggles in Brazil? And what are the obstacles facing those who want to see these struggles go further?

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It is hard to imagine how things will be from now on. We know the risks of these attempts: Marxist futurology has made enough errors and missed quite a few lessons. However, we have some evidence in the current political ferment from which to build a political imagination about the coming year.

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We know that for the police and the forces of empire, these protests and the Confederations Cup serve as a laboratory for the further development of biopolitical capitalism. In recent demonstrations, the police have used new weapons such as sound cannons, water cannons, and various types of pepper sprays and Tasers. We also know that the government is taking steps towards the suspension of laws and installation of the State of Exception. Senators are already revisiting the concept of “terrorism” in order to place political street demonstrations within this framework. The World Cup general law also uses this framework, giving power to the State, vetoing the right to demonstrate in the streets with violators subject to trial in international courts.

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We also know the prospects of demonstrations to stop the World Cup. The slogans “You will not have Cup” and “I give up the World Cup, I want money for health and education” were chanted all over the country since the first demonstrations. We believe that the outlook is generally radicalized. In this sense, the expectation is of even bigger confrontations for the coming year, more people on the streets, more radicalization, but also more arrests, detentions, political repression, media manipulation, and conflict with nationalists, communists, and pacifists.

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So we face many challenges. First, we have to ensure that these mobilizations remain radical and connected to other movements and struggles, to ensure the construction of a strong supportive network that can last into 2014. Another challenge is to find strategies to maintain militant struggle while avoiding security problems that would lead to investigations, arrests, and prosecutions. An intense debate about anonymity, opacity, and social and public activism is being waged within radical organizations.

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Of course, we never imagined that we would live to see street fighting in the era of “economic growth.” But it shows us the cracks in the empire´s great wall. Now we have to achieve a breakthrough for insurrectionary and anti-hegemonic social struggles in the country, so they cannot be captured or pacified. Those who have realized that they are expendable from the perspective of global capitalism must cease to understand themselves as a reconcilable opposition and enter a final antagonism with the empire. We have to go beyond the point of no return.

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A demonstration in São Paulo, June 8: “Turkey is here. United!”

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A demonstration in São Paulo, June 17: Subway destroyed by protesters.

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A burnt bus at a demonstration in Pôrto Alegre, June 17.

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Real bullets from a police gun found by a protester at a demonstration in Rio on June 17.

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A car burning in Rio on June 17.

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Police brutality in Rio on June 17.

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Car dealerships burning at a protest in Belo Horizonte on the day of the Confederations Cup game.

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Car dealerships destroyed at protest in Belo Horizonte: “This car dealership supports the protests. But no violence!” An appeal in vain.

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Occupation of the Chamber of Councilors at Pôrto Alegre.

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“Burn the rich!” painted in front of GLobo headquarters during a demonstration against corporate media in São Paulo in early July.

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Riot police enter a hospital to arrest suspected protesters after a demonstration in Rio in early July.

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Non-hetero protester provoking police at a demonstration in Rio.

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Looting during a protest in Rio on June 17. A child taking only toys in a big department store downtown.

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Pacifists and nationalists at a demonstration in São Paulo: “Our rotting politicians are the cancer of our nation”—“The vandals do not represent us.”

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Road toll burned during a demonstration against the fare increase at Cosmópolis in the state of São Paulo.

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São Paulo City Hall surrounded by angry protesters at a demonstration in mid-June.

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Barricades at a demonstration in Salvador in late June.

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\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/07/09/standing-on-the-land-to-stand-up-against-pipelines-a-report-from-the-unistoten-camp", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/07/09/standing-on-the-land-to-stand-up-against-pipelines-a-report-from-the-unistoten-camp", "title": "Standing on the Land to Stand Up Against Pipelines : A Report from the Unist’ot’en Camp", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2013/07/09/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2013/07/09/header.jpg", "date_published": "2013-07-09T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

As corporations attempt to enter a new era of even dirtier fossil fuel production, indigenous communities are standing up to take direct action to protect Mother Earth. Some are pursuing legal challenges against violated treaties; others are creating internet-driven mass movements like Idle No More, or reclaiming their roots by going back to the land to assert traditional law. Among the latter are the Unist’ot’en, the People of the Headwater, whose lands encompass a wide swath of Northern British Columbia.

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When companies like Enbridge and Apache announced plans to build a massive pipeline corridor through these lands, it provoked outrage from the Wet’suwet’en people whose traditional territory lies directly in its proposed path. Of the five Wet’suwet’en clans, the Unist’ot’en were the first to declare themselves opposed to all pipelines being proposed to cross their traditional territories. Now the Likhts’amisyu, Tsayu, and Git’dum’den clans have followed suit and momentum is growing.

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This article tells the story from the perspective of the Unist’ot’en and their allies at the Unist’ot’en Camp through the winter of 2012-3; it has been collectively produced by both indigenous and settler voices. It recounts the development of a common front including the Unist’ot’en and anarchists and other proponents of grassroots resistance, describes the pipeline projects they are intent on thwarting, and explores the complex relationships that have arisen in the course of this struggle.

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Standing on the Land to Stand Up Against Pipelines, A Report from the Unist’ot’en Camp

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Introduction

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Across Turtle Island, a powerful resistance is rising. As corporations attempt to enter a new era of even dirtier fossil fuel production, indigenous communities are standing up to take direct action to protect Mother Earth. From Fort Chip to Beaver Lake, Red Lake to Lakota, communities are organizing. Some are pursuing legal challenges against violated treaties. Others are creating internet-driven mass movements such as Idle No More. Others still are reclaiming their roots by going back to the land to assert traditional law. Among the latter are the Unist’ot’en, the People of the Headwater, whose lands encompass a wide swath of Northern British Columbia.

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When companies like Enbridge and Apache announced plans to build a massive pipeline corridor through these lands, it provoked outrage from the Wet’suwet’en people whose traditional territory lies directly in its proposed path. Of the five Wet’suwet’en clans, the Unist’ot’en were the first to officially declare themselves opposed to ALL pipelines being proposed to cross their traditional territories. Now the Likhts’amisyu, Tsayu, and Git’dum’den clans have followed suit and momentum is growing.

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This article tells the story from the perspective of the Unist’ot’en and their allies at the Unist’ot’en Camp through the winter of 2012–3. It has been collectively produced by both indigenous and settler voices.

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Taking Care of the Land—Unist’ot’en Resistance to Pipelines and Other Projects

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Background and Cultural Context

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Colonization has left a lingering impact on the 22,000 square kilometers of unceded Wet’suwet’en territories which stretch from the Bulkley Valley to Burns Lake. Weakened by a devastating series of contact-based illnesses, the Wet’suwet’en were displaced from their land over time as more and more settlers arrived in the area starting in the late 1800s. Decades of insidious assimilation policies served to reinforce colonial land-theft, including the establishment of the Moricetown reserve and the horrific residential school program that took many children from their homes and subjected them to physical abuse, sexual abuse, and Christian indoctrination. With the settlers came the logging and mining industries. Today, the forests have been decimated, a mono-cropped shadow of their former diversity.

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Through all this, the sovereignty of Wet’suwet’en land was never surrendered, and to a large degree their culture remains intact. Today, many among the Wet’suwet’en still speak their language, fish and harvest berries as their ancestors did, and continue to maintain their traditional system of governance. But now the specter of a massive pipeline corridor has awoken a new urgency amongst the people. If the Wet’suwet’en do not rise to defend their lands now, the impact will be devastating, not only to them but for generations to come.

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The Unist’ot’en are the original people distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time, others have joined them and there are now five Clans who identify as Wet’suwet’en. Each clan has autonomous authority over its own traditional territory. Each territory has a hereditary chief who is responsible for its care.

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Sovereignty and Traditional Governance

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Hereditary Chiefs are chosen by the entire Clan Group; they prepare by learning about the features of the territory, how to conduct themselves on it, and the techniques and ceremonies that spiritually connect them to every aspect of their lands. In the past, medicine people selected chiefs while they were still in their mothers’ wombs. The current chief of the Unist’ot’en territory known as Talbits Kwa is Warner Williams, who was directed by his grandmother, the former chief, to protect the territory from development.

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The decisions of the Clan are made in their Feast Hall, where all the members of the clan gather to share gifts with each other and manage their affairs. Here the Unist’ot’en practice a form of decision-making that resembles a consensus approach. They sit down and listen to each other, and together they come to decisions that reflect the unified position of the clan. The decisions made in the Feast Hall are the ultimate authority of the land—which is important to note in relation to the Band Council System of government.

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The Band Council system is a governance structure created by the Canadian state through the Indian Act. The Unist’ot’en and grassroots Wet’suwet’en grudgingly accept that the Band Council has a limited authority, extending only to managing the affairs of the reserve it was created to represent. That authority in no way extends to traditional territory which remains governed by the Hereditary Chiefs. Therefore any deal claimed to have been reached by a pipeline company with a First Nation Band Council is not legitimate, unless it also has the consent of the Hereditary Chiefs and the Clan itself.

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With respect to Unist’ot’en traditional territory, the Moricetown Band Council has acknowledged the authority of the hereditary chiefs and therefore refrained from signing any deals with pipeline companies. In other places such as Burns Lake, where the Band Council has been signing deals without even consulting the people, there has been growing protest. Representing an unbroken line of tradition that continued even through a period when the Feast system was made “illegal” by the state, the Wet’suwet’en regard their law as pre-dating and superseding the authority of the Canadian state.

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The Clan Decision to Reject All Pipelines

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When it came out that industry and government were hatching a plan for a massive pipeline corridor through their territory, the Unist’ot’en clan assembled to discuss the issue. They made the decision to reject all pipeline proposals. This uncompromising opposition to ALL pipelines through their territory is no surprise considering the historical reputation of the Unist’ot’en as a tough and hardy people with a fierce warrior tradition. The impact of the Unist’ot’en decision is considerable as their territories account for two thirds of the total Wet’suwet’en land base.

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A major contributing factor to the decision of the Unist’ot’en was the influence of former chief Christine Holland, who directed her clan to protect the land and preserve it for future generations. The Unist’ot’en were also in a phase of reasserting their sovereignty in general; along with the other Wet’suwet’en clans, they had recently terminated unproductive treaty negotiations with Canada. In doing so, they choose to maintain their rights as a sovereign people that had never surrendered the title to their lands.

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The Unist’ot’en knew that simply making the decision would not be enough to stop the pipelines. If they wanted to regain authority over their territory, they would have to get out on it. A clan cabin was constructed on the exact GPS coordinates of the proposed path of the Enbridge Northern Gateway and Pacific Trail Pipelines (then known as the Kitimat Summit Lake Loop or KSL). The site is situated in the Unist’ot’en territory known as Talbits Kwa, whose border follows the bank of the Wedzin Kwa (known colonially as the Morice River). A single-lane bridge is the only way in and out of the territory, and can only be accessed by a logging road running south from Houston, BC.

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The First Action Camp

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That summer the Unist’ot’en called for others to join them out on the territory for what would be their first annual Action Camp in July 2010. Among those who answered the call for solidarity were local allies from the other Wet’suwet’en clans, representatives from large environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, and grassroots environmental activists and supporters of indigenous sovereignty. The camp organized a march through the nearby town of Smithers, where the Unist’ot’en served notice to the Ministries of Forest and Environment offices of their intention to manage their own affairs, announcing that any group or company which wished to access the territory would need to go through a Free Prior Informed Consent protocol with the members of the clan.

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At the rally, hereditary chief Knedebeas asserted: “Our Unist’ot’en members will not sway under the threats and actions of industry and government. My grandmother Christine Holland gave us specific directions to protect our lands—that is exactly what we intend to do.”

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Wet’suwet’en, Gitxsan, and Nat’ot’en supporters join solidarity action at chevron station in Smithers, BC

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Falling Out With The ENGOs and Transition to Grassroots Resistance

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The initial presence of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) at the first action camp was controversial. Some indigenous allies were wary based on the history of ENGOs aligning with grassroots efforts then sidelining them to sign deals with industry, such as what happened during the Great Bear Rainforest campaign; but the ENGOs had a lot of resources to help generate publicity for the Unist’ot’en resistance to the pipeline.

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Unfortunately, the relationships deteriorated over the course of the camp. It became clear that some of the ENGOs were uncomfortable with certain positions of the Unist’ot’en. One person even inquired if the phrase “No Offsetting” could be taken off one of the Unist’ot’en’s banners prior to the rally in Smithers. The Unist’ot’en regard offsetting as a dangerous false solution that allows polluters to continue their dirty practices by purchasing (often fictitious) offsets from another part of the world, but many ENGOs support offsetting—and possibly even hope to profit from it to fund their own activities

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Further complicating the situation was the ENGOs reluctance to support the Unist’ot’en’s opposition to ALL pipelines. While the ENGOs were actively running campaigns against Enbridge Northern Gateway, they were ignoring that there was an entire corridor of pipelines planned. The ENGOs argued that opposing Northern Gateway was strategic, because there was more public support for opposing the oil pipelines than the gas ones. To the Unist’ot’en, stopping one pipeline meant nothing if you allowed all the others to pass through. In the end, many among the Unist’ot’en felt that the ENGOs were there to gain credibility as supporters of indigenous struggle, rather than to do actual work to benefit the territory.

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The Second Action Camp

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Based on the way things went with the first Action Camp, the Unist’ot’en decided to move forward with credible grassroots allies who supported their message and would stand by them in a crisis. As a result, the second Action Camp, held in August 2011, was invitation only, and the ENGOs were not invited. The ENGOs didn’t miss a beat, however, and simply shifted their support to Tribal Council bodies who were publicly advocating against Enbridge while quietly signing deals with Pacific Trails.

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Smaller in scale and best understood as a transitional effort, the second camp saw the formation of solid relationships. Groups like No One is Illegal Vancouver, Victoria’s Forest Action Network, and BC Blackout emerged as the new allies of the Unist’ot’en, reflecting the new shift to community, grassroots, and autonomous support. The Unist’ot’en found that they shared many ideals with these groups—a stance encompassing opposition to ALL pipelines, respect for the sovereignty of the Unist’ot’en, and opposition to colonialism in general.

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The First Blockade: The Unist’ot’en Take Action To Defend Their Land

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The fall of 2011 saw the first real test of the Unist’ot’en’s will to defend their territory against pipeline development. A phone call in the middle of the night alerted the Unist’ot’en that Pacific Trail Pipeline drillers were coming out to do work on the territory. Because, the Unist’ot’en were in mourning for a deceased Clan member in the community of Moricetown, the cabin was not being occupied full-time, and so the Unist’ot’en had to scramble into their trucks and race out to the territory from Moricetown.

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The drillers were setting up to do work at Gosnell Creek, one of the most sensitive coho salmon spawning tributaries in their territory. The Unist’ot’en who had made the trip confronted the drillers and told them they were to cease work immediately and had five days to get all their equipment out or it would be confiscated. Later the next day the Unist’ot’en chiefs came out and issued the same command. The drillers complied and the incident was resolved peacefully.

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In solidarity with the Unist’ot’en, BC Blackout organized an autonomous demonstration outside PTP co-owner Apache’s Vancouver office. BC Blackout brought a more militant message to the settler side of Unist’ot’en solidarity, expressing the viewpoint that “the struggle to protect the land is one with the struggle to free ourselves from wage slavery and the state.” Following the December solidarity action, allies in Vancouver and Victoria organized a series of fundraisers that enabled Victoria FAN to coordinate a caravan of supporters and supplies to the Third Action camp the following summer.

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The Third Action Camp

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In August 2012, allies of the Unist’ot’en once again gathered on the territory to express solidarity. Maintaining the grassroots tone established during the second camp, the third camp saw a considerable increase in attendance. Thanks to the caravan organized by Victoria’s Forest Action Network, there were many new and young faces from radical scenes in Vancouver and Victoria; for many of them, this was their first direct experience of indigenous culture.

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A major objective of the camp was to further assert Unist’ot’en sovereignty over the territory, and a checkpoint was established at the bridge. Anyone wishing to cross into the lands of the Unist’ot’en would have to pass through a Free Prior Informed Consent protocol. The protocol was applied not only to camp attendees but to industrial activity as well.

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Although it borrows language from the United Nations, the Unist’ot’en FPIC protocol reasserts a traditional practice. Before their culture was disrupted by colonization, any visitor or trader wishing to enter or do business on Unist’ot’en land would be greeted by representatives of that clan. They would have to answer questions as to who they were, where they were coming from, how long they wanted to stay, and how their presence would be beneficial to the territory.

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When it was discovered that some of the loggers trying to pass through had been assigned cut-blocks that looked suspiciously like a pipeline right-of-way, they were denied entry and the road was closed. This created a stir in Houston, the nearby town where companies claimed they were losing thousands of dollars each day. For the first time, the executives of the logging companies were forced to come out to meet with the chiefs on the territory. After an open dialogue between the chiefs and the logging executives, it was agreed that the companies could come and collect the trees that had already been felled and logging could continue in other areas, but no new cutting was to occur for the right-of-way1.

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Education about decolonization was also a major focus of the camp, especially for the new allies, because it is important to the Unist’ot’en that their allies have a solid understanding of who they are as a people and how the pipelines relate to the larger story of colonization. Decolonization work can be a painful process in its initial stages, especially as one strips away the fables that are told to justify the theft, murder, and displacement necessary to establish the Colonial State on indigenous land.

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Yet by the end of the camp, a real sense of camaraderie had emerged. Alliances created during the second camp became cemented during the third. In the place of pacifist ENGOs, the Unist’ot’en now had loyal friends who understood the value of direct action and respected their warrior spirit. They also brought a spirit of working together to get things done—like stepping up to bottom-line the huge task of the kitchen. As the camp ended, almost everyone pledged to return the following year, or earlier if need arose.

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Permanent Occupation

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The winter of 2012 marked the beginning of full-time occupation of the camp by Unist’ot’en clan members. Based on the experience of the previous winter, the Unist’ot’en were wary that the pipeline companies would try to return and complete the work that had been thwarted previously, but with so much of their energy focused on organizing the Action Camp, there remained a mountain of work to prepare for winter out on the land.

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The immediate challenge was to ready the main cabin for winter. The covered deck area served as an outdoor kitchen during the summer but needed to be enclosed and insulated for the winter. At the same time, the momentum generated by the Third Action Camp had created a series of opportunities to participate in larger events in the Lower Mainland.

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The unist’ot’en camp in all its winter glory

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The solution emerged with the concept of front-line allies. It started with a few trusted settler allies from the Action Camp who stayed behind, initiating a daily relationship of direct support. The presence of these allies was critical in enabling the Unist’ot’en to move ahead with needed construction work while freeing up leaders to travel and raise further awareness for the Camp.

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One of these events was the problematically-titled “Defend Our Coast” rally, a coalition effort bottom-lined by some of the biggest players in the Canadian environmental movement—including Greenpeace, Tzeporah Berman, and Sierra Club. Friction abounded over framing the coast as something that belonged to Canadian society the failure to consult local organizing and indigenous communities. The action also continued the recent NGO trend of tokenized civil disobedience. In the traditional use of the tactic, civil disobedience has been a direct action to break a law perceived to be unjust, often at great risk to the participants. The classic example from the Civil Rights era is Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person. In the new incarnation being promoted by 350.org, Sierra Club, Greenpeace et al, civil disobedience has become the breaking of a random and often trivial law in order to assert a political viewpoint. In the case of Defend Our Coast, “civil disobedience” involved putting a wood stake into the lawn in front of the BC Provincial Legislature (technically illegal) in order to construct a symbolic “tanker” made of black fabric.

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Unist’ot’en allies holding ground at Defend Our Coast

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Despite the problematic aspects of the rally, it was still a major event and a good opportunity to build awareness of the Unist’ot’en effort to defend their homelands from pipeline development. Ironically, inclusion of Unist’ot’en speakers was considered controversial due to the fact that their position encompasses an uncompromising rejection of all pipelines, which exposed the limited nature of the ENGO position focusing exclusively on Enbridge and Kinder Morgan. The reluctance of the NGO world to support grassroots indigenous resistance was indicated by their placing the Unist’ot’en at the very end of an overlong program of speakers. By contrast, Band Council chiefs, many known to be industry collaborators, spoke at the very beginning of the rally.

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Nevertheless, the Unist’ot’en maintained a visible presence through the day with a large collection of banners. When the Unist’ot’en finally did get to speak, spokesperson Freda Huson shared her clan’s experience with some of the strongest words of the day: “Symbolic action will not save our land. Occupying and defending will save our land!”

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After returning from the awareness efforts in the Lower Mainland and putting the finishing touches on the main cabin, it was time to settle in for winter. Snow was coming down by the bushel and nobody knew what to expect. It seemed possible that Pacific Trail Pipeline would try to take advantage of the harsh Wet’suwet’en winter conditions to push through at the time it would be most difficult to mobilize.

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Enter The Surveyors

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They came in November of 2012, almost a year after the Unist’ot’en had kicked them out. In a coincidence that borders on suspicious, surveyors for the Pacific Trails Pipeline snuck through with a truck when one of the Unist’ot’en leaders was departing camp for some solidarity work. Another truck was spotted doing work along the Forest Service Road in neighboring Git’dum’den territory. A watchful eye was cast at the bridge, and sure enough, later that evening, a truck was intercepted trying to enter the territory. They claimed to be searching for the other truck that had slipped by earlier that morning. These contractors were stopped and as they were being questioned, the other truck emerged trying to get out of the territory.

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Entering into Unist’ot’en land to do surveying work without the permission or consent of the Unist’ot’en is a serious offense by traditional law. For this violation, the contractors were issued an eagle feather, a traditional notice of trespass. By Unist’ot’en tradition, this warning is only issued once. Historically, a second violation was treated much more severely, even punishable by death. The next day the surveyors, who worked for a company called Can-Am Geomatics, were offered a chance to return to collect their equipment. They failed the FPIC protocol by refusing to share information with the Unist’ot’en. As a result they were sent back empty-handed. Later that day, a mission of camp members was sent out to confiscate the surveyor’s equipment. To this day, it remains safely kept by the Unist’ot’en should the company ever choose to negotiate its release.

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Although the surveyors did not return to Unist’ot’en territory, they were once again discovered operating on Git’dum’den lands, for which they were also evicted, this time by a Git’dum’den Clan member, for the same reason of failing to obtain consent.

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Solidarity and Response

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After intercepting and evicting the pipeline surveyors, the Unist’ot’en called for their allies to rise up in support. The result was a day of action that saw solidarity rallies hosted in twenty cities across Turtle Island on November 27, 2012. The main purpose of the day was to deliver a message to the three companies that co-own Pacific Trail Pipelines as well as their investors. A letter was drafted and signed by Unist’ot’en spokesperson Freda Huson asserting the sovereignty of Unist’ot’en land and the denial of consent to the pipeline project. It explicitly stated that “any further unauthorized incursion into traditional Wet’suwet’en territory will be considered an act of colonialism, and an act of aggression against our sovereignty.” Although the Unist’ot’en had repeatedly informed PTP officials in meetings and via email that they were not welcome on the territory, the written letter was the first move in the direction of a strategy to target the investors as well as the companies themselves.

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In so-called Canada, actions ranged across the entire country, stretching from St John’s, Newfoundland to Victoria, BC. Almost all the critical targets identified by the Unist’ot’en were visited by supporters over the course of that day. This included Apache’s Vancouver office and Calgary headquarters, all three offices of Encana institutional investor Jarislowsky Fraser Limited, and Royal Bank of Canada branches around the country. The national scope achieved by the action reflects the new reality that grassroots organizers lacking any sort of budget can nevertheless match institutional efforts by utilizing social networks and social media.

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The day also saw support actions south of the border, including the offices of investors in New York and Texas. Activists from the Tar Sands Blockade (TSB) helped to deliver the Unist’ot’en message directly to Apache’s headquarters in Houston, Texas. In the previous week, the Unist’ot’en had demonstrated their solidarity with TSB by creating a banner and issuing a statement in solidarity with their call for action. TSB replied at the Apache office and stated, “Real solidarity is about taking action. The Unist’ot’en Clan answered our call for solidarity actions last week and today we reciprocated.” The spirit of cooperation between the Tar Sands Blockade and the Unist’ot’en Camp builds unity between two critical fronts in the battle to contain pipeline expansion.

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As it happened, Unist’ot’en spokesperson Freda Huson was in Trinidad to talk to activists who were working to oppose the development of Tar Sands in their own country. In an example of the type of solidarity that builds mutual aid, Unist’ot’en allies in Toronto visited the Trinidad embassy to deliver a message there, while activists in Trinidad visited the Canadian embassy to deliver the Unist’ot’en message.

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In Montreal, protesters managed to get inside the JFL office to the utter bafflement of the staff, who claimed no knowledge of their investments disrespecting the rights of indigenous people. Within a month after the protest, Encana backed out of the project. PTP investor EOG also backed out a month after the day of actions, leaving ownership to Apache and new investor, Chevron Corp.

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Community members perform a war dance at a PTP meeting in Moricetown

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Cast Change and The Quiet Winter

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After the surveyor evictions and solidarity actions, things quieted down on the territory. There were no more signs of contractors, and no major response from the pipeline companies. This allowed the Unist’ot’en to focus on reviving traditional practices such as hunting and trapping. It has been years since they have lived full-time on their territory, and the re-establishment of the trap-lines is a source of pride for many in the community. The trap-lines are also strategic as they reinforce the Unist’ot’en claim to the land, demonstrating that they are utilizing it for traditional purposes. The resulting gifts from the forest were presented to the chiefs for the creation of traditional regalia.

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Organizing and communications efforts continued to be a major task through the winter. Various articles were written and published by the Unist’ot’en and allies at the camp. The social media and web presence was re-structured and upgraded. Conferences were attended and further alliances made. The process of transitioning new allies into camp was initiated. And, of course, a lot of wood was chopped.

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Snowmobiles: the only way in or out of camp during the winter

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With the emergence of Chevron as the new 50% owner of PTP, allies from Rising Tide Coast Salish (based out of Vancouver) approached the Unist’ot’en about organizing a second day of action targeting Chevron and their investors. It was thought that since Chevron was new on the scene, they would benefit from a letter of warning from the Unist’ot’en as well. The day of action evolved into actions spread out over a couple days as investors were targeted on the Thursday prior to Easter Weekend, and rallies were held on Saturday, March 30.

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Just outside of Vancouver, a mock circus occurred in front of Chevron’s Burnaby refinery. In Toronto, offices of Chevron investors were visited, with hilarious results, as office staff for Van Guard Group refused to accept the letter, and went so far as to push it back out from under their door as they locked it. The activists were told to stop trespassing, the irony of which was pointed out by a Rising Tide Toronto member who commented that was exactly what they were asking Van Guard to do: stop trespassing on Unist’ot’en land. A rally was also held in front of Chevron’s Canadian headquarters in Calgary, and allies from San Francisco visited their international headquarters in San Ramon with a giant banner.

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As the snow thawed and spring approached, helicopter activity increased over the territory. Some of this was state surveillance—it is well known that the RCMP are keeping tabs on the camp—but some of it was industrial activity. In mid-April, a company was so bold as to use helicopters to drop water surveyors along the Wedzin Kwa and snatch them up before they could be intercepted by the Unist’ot’en Camp members who raced out to catch them.

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So while things are quiet for now, they will likely not remain so for long.

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A helicopter taking off in a hurry to escape being chased down by Unist’ot’en camp members

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The Pipelines Targeting Unist’ot’en and Wet’suwe’ten Territories

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The following is a breakdown of all the current pipeline proposals affecting Unist’ot’en and Wet’suwet’en territories. As the fracking boom has glutted the domestic market with natural gas, prices have dropped. Therefore, companies are desperately looking to Asia for higher prices. In order to reach those markets, new pipeline infrastructure will be needed. Once Enbridge announced its intention to build the Northern Gateway pipeline, several other companies started making plans for pipelines that would follow the same right-of-way, thus creating the potential for a massive pipeline corridor. There currently exist ten potential pipeline projects, all in various stages of development. Some are simply speculative, while others are in active development.

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Enbridge, PTP, and Coastal GasLink proposed pipeline routes across Unist’ot’en territory

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Enbridge Northern Gateway

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Originally announced in 2005 and now undergoing a Joint Review Process, Enbridge’s Northern Gateway is a proposal for a dual-line 1,170 kilometer pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat, BC. The idea is to transport 525,000 barrels of Tar Sands bitumen west to the coast for export via supertankers to Asia. It would also bring highly corrosive toxic condensate east for use in diluting Tar Sands crude. A $5.5 billion project, the Northern Gateway would cross more than 800 streams and rivers, including sensitive salmon spawning areas in the upper Fraser, Skeena, and Kitimat watersheds.

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Enbridge’s Northern Gateway is closely linked to the Canadian government’s plan to expand Tar Sands production. The extra capacity offered by the Northern Gateway alone would allow for 30% greater production over current levels. Other Tar Sands pipelines being proposed are the infamous Keystone XL and Enbridge’s proposed Line 9 reversal. Line 9 currently brings crude in to Sarnia from the United States, but Enbridge would like to use it to bring Tar Sands bitumen East. The Tar Sands are the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and have had a devastating impact on the communities in the surrounding area.

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Enbridge recently released plans for a modified route crossing the Wedzin Kwa (Morice River) a couple kilometers south of the existing Unist’ot’en Camp. This shows that industry is keeping close tabs on the camp and is well aware of Unist’ot’en resistance to the project. The new proposal changes nothing, as the new route still passes through territory under management of the Unist’ot’en. The Unist’ot’en were already planning to build pit houses in that area, so that more families could move back onto the territory.

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Pacific Trail Pipeline

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Announced shortly after Enbridge revealed its plans for the Northern Gateway, the Pacific Trail Pipeline (PTP) is a $1.23 billion project intended to link fracking operations in Northeastern BC with a proposed LNG processing plant in Kitimat (operating as Kitimat LNG). If completed, the pipeline would be able to transport 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day.

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The PTP would follow almost exactly the same route as the Northern Gateway. Totaling 473 km in length, the pipeline would run from Summit Lake, just north of Prince George (where it would connect with the existing Spectra Energy pipeline), to Kitimat. Working under the radar of public awareness, Pacific Trails was the first and so far only pipeline project to obtain all its regulatory approvals. By the pipeline company’s original timeline, this project would already be operational.

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Now owned by Apache and Chevron, the PTP is part of a trend towards integrated projects in which the parent company owns the reserves, the pipelines, and the processing facilities for whatever fossil fuel they are extracting. Often this ownership structure is disguised through the creation of various “limited partnerships.” In the case of this project, PTP is the corporate entity constructing the pipeline, and Kitimat LNG is the entity constructing the LNG processing plant and terminal. They are nothing more than empty shells to obscure the real players behind the scenes.

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Although the general perception of natural gas pipelines is that they are safer than oil pipelines, when accidents do happen the results are explosive. Natural Gas pipelines don’t leak, they explode. An explosion at the Apache-operated LNG processing site on Various Island off of Western Australia took out 30% of that state’s domestic natural gas supply for nearly six months. The investigation that followed found Apache’s safety culture to be “middle rank” and declared that there was enough evidence documenting the risk of corrosion that the accident “was not only foreseeable but to some extent foreseen.”

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Of all the companies so far, Pacific Trail has been the most aggressive and blatant in their disregard of Unist’ot’en sovereignty. In 2011 they sent drillers (who were evicted), in 2012 they sent surveyors (who were also evicted), and now they are using helicopters to airlift water surveyors in and out of the territory. As PTP is the farthest along in its development, it will be the crucial test of the Unist’ot’en’s ability to protect their land from industrial development.

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Coastal GasLink

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A late arrival on the scene, Coastal GasLink is moving quickly through the regulatory process. A massive project whose initial capacity nearly doubles PTP, Coastal Gas Link has the potential to carry up to 5 billion cubic feet of fracked gas per day. Coastal Gas Link is owned by Shell Canada and a consortium of Asian energy companies. As with PTP, Coastal GasLink’s parent companies also own the proposed LNG plant linked with the project, known as LNG Canada.

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The 650 km pipeline would cross 320 watercourses including the habitat of more than 100 at-risk species, such as white sturgeon, woodland caribou, and marbled murrelet. TransCanada documents outlining the pipeline project say it would cross four major drainages: the Peace, Fraser, Skeena and Kitimat rivers. More than 20 species of fish, including all five Pacific salmon species and steelhead, could be affected. The LNG Canada project in Kitimat has been estimated at $12 billion, while the Coastal GasLink pipeline is estimated at $4 billion. The processing plant has already received a 25-year regulatory permit to export up to 24 million tons of LNG per year, and the environmental assessment for Coastal Gas link is currently underway. Shell is already known in this region from the successful battle to prevent them from installing a coalbed methane project in the Sacred Headwaters of the Skeena, Nass, and Stikine rivers. Shell is also a major player in the Tar Sands and currently in conflict with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation over the expansion of its Jack Pine Mine in Alberta. In addition, the Unist’ot’en are well aware of the murder and devastation caused by Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta, where the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez oil spill has occurred each year for the past 50 years.

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Additional Pipelines

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Enbridge Northern Gateway, Pacific Trail, and Coastal GasLink represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of industry’s desire to expand pipeline infrastructure to fuel further expansion of Tar Sands and fracking operations in Canada. There are several more pipelines in various stages of development, many of which are waiting to see what happens with Pacific Trail.

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In addition to the Kitimat plants, two massive LNG plants are being proposed for Prince Rupert. One is calling itself Pacific Northwest LNG and is co-owned by Petronas, Progress Energy, and Japex. Transcanada has been contracted to build the pipeline for an initial capacity of 2 billion cubic feet a day, but with the potential to expand that to 3.6 billion. The other unnamed project proposed by British Gas and Spectra is also huge, with a proposed pipeline capacity of almost 4.3 billion cubic feet a day. Although the current conceptual plans for the pipelines lie north of Wet’suwet’en territory, these projects are in the early stages of development and therefore any route is still possible. Even if the eventual paths of these pipelines fall outside the jurisdiction of the Wet’suwet’en, the Unist’ot’en intend to build relationships with the affected communities so that they can ensure that opposition in one area does not simply shift development into another. The ultimate goal is not just to stop pipelines from coming through Wet’suwet’en traditional territory, but to stop all of them.

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There are also several pipeline projects hoping to pass through Wet’suwet’en Territory in hopes of reaching Asian markets. Some are older proposals such as Pembina Pipeline Expansion and Kinder Morgan Rearguard. Though somewhat dormant at the moment, the companies are actively monitoring how other projects fare against Wet’suwet’en resistance.

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And the list of companies lining up with new projects continues to grow. At first dismissed as a fool’s dream, newspaper mogul David Black’s proposal for an oil refinery in Kitimat, called Kitimat Klean, has gained serious financial backing from European and Asian sources. Black’s project has stated that if Northern Gateway fails, they will construct their own pipeline to Kitimat. Two other companies investigating the possibility of further LNG plants on the Coast include Nexen—one of the biggest players in the Tar Sands and recently acquired by China National Offshore Oil Corporation—and Exxon—famous for the Valdez oil spill in Alaska and for funding climate change denial. Exxon recently acquired 545,000 hectares in the Montney shale field and 104,000 acres in the Duvernay shale in a 2.6 billion dollar deal adding to their existing holdings of 340,000 acres of shale gas properties in the Horn River basin.

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Regardless of where these projects end up, they are a threat to the global eco-system. The Unist’ot’en and everyone who has a relationship to the Land understand that it is a holistic entity. When you take care of the land, it takes care of you. That is why the effort of the camp is not just to stop the pipelines, but to get back to the land itself. As part of this journey, the Unist’ot’en have come to see all the projects as linked, because they belong to the same colonial spirit that displaced them from their land in the first place.

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Defending the bridge after evicting PTP surveyors

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Responsibilities not Rights

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Responsibility differs from rights. The Unist’ot’en regard rights as the invention of statist bodies such as the United Nations and colonial entities such as Canada and the Band Office. They are premised on accepting the authority of the state-based system that creates them. By contrast, the Unist’ot’en regard responsibility as something that comes from the Creator through natural law. Natural law is the duty to learn about and follow the ways of Creation. In Wet’suwet’en culture, Bahni, or Warriors, have a responsibility to uphold Traditional and Natural law in the face of threat, infiltration, violence, and diminishment.

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At Unist’ot’en Camp, traditional responsibilities are upheld as a means of reaffirming the sovereignty of Wet’suwet’en land. The Unist’ot’en knew that their territory could not be defended in boardrooms or by appealing to the colonial rulers of settler society. They had to go back to the source of their traditions and laws: the land. By occupying and defending their traditional territory, the Unist’ot’en are living and enacting traditional law. Their responsibility is guided by a power-with relationship to land, not a controlling power-over mechanism as utilized by colonial settler systems.

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Traditional laws were asserted via protocols on these lands for thousands of years. The Wet’suwet’en presented themselves as such when traveling to neighboring peoples’ lands to conduct trade, build and maintain peace, assist allies in battle, and obtain resources. Knowledge bases were built over generations and expressed, at times, through a series of tactical and rigorous questions. Other times, planks were laid across canoes to provide a dance surface, and visiting nations would be required to dance their stories to demonstrate to the host nations that they were who they claimed to be—as the dance would have been known historically through trade relations. Identity was also proven through tattoo art on the chests of the male chiefs who often sat at the bow of the canoe. Traditional Laws such as Free Prior Informed Consent are not lost or eroded. They have been dormant. The knowledge of conducting them is still active. They are not mere documents at the UN office waiting to be implemented by a state; they must be asserted by peoples who live off the land, connected to the spirit of the ancestors and upholding Natural Laws. Grassroots communities live and breathe these responsibilities, growing out of a particular place.

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Industry and Government need to start learning about and respecting Traditional Law in their relation to Indigenous People. Traditionalists will not sit down at a board room or make decisions through colonial mechanisms. Recently, the Office of the Wet’suwet’en (OW) signed confidentiality and communications agreements with the Pacific Trails Pipeline company (co-owned by Chevron and Apache). By appearing to represent the traditional hereditary leadership, the OW has attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the Unist’ot’en hereditary chiefs who take direction directly from their people. The Unist’ot’en and Grassroots Wet’sewet’en have made their position clear: the hereditary chiefs are the final authority over traditional land. They will not participate in the tribal council’s attempts to re-ignite a failed treaty process and make deals with industry, nor will they make any decision without consulting the grassroots Indigenous people who are active on the land.

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“We are an impenetrable wall which is fortified by the same fighting spirits of our warrior ancestors who also refused to allow trespassers onto our sacred lands.” (photo by Adam Thomas)

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Building Relationships Out on the Land

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The Unist’ot’en and Solidarity

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When the Unist’ot’en started out on their journey to oppose the pipelines, they knew they would be facing off with one of the most powerful industries in the world. These companies are responsible for large-scale destruction of the environment wherever they operate. They are implicated in the repression and murder of indigenous people around the world. They are primary agents in the creation of the greenhouse gas emissions driving the entire planet towards catastrophic climate change. Just as importantly, however, the Unist’ot’en knew that they were not alone in confronting them.

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From the beginning, there has been a strong relationship between the Unist’ot’en and other indigenous communities fighting fossil fuel extraction. The Unist’ot’en sent representatives to the first Healing Walk in Fort McMurray organized by community activists from Fort Chipewyan. They have also visited and expressed their solidarity with people in the Peace River region living with the effects of fracking. The Unist’ot’en believe that stopping pipelines in their own territory means nothing unless it is an interim step toward stopping Tar Sands and fracking at their sources.

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From the inception of the camp, local allies from Git’dum’den and Likhts’amisyu clans have been standing with the Unist’ot’en. That support is now spreading through the territory, and more chiefs from the different clans are speaking in favor of taking direct action to protect the land. A sad aspect of colonization is that the trauma inflicted by it has limited the capacity of the community to stand on the front-line. Many of the Elders are recovering from abuse suffered in residential schools; others are dealing with drug and alcohol issues, while many of the men who would be today’s warriors are caught up in colonized lifestyles.

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Another sad effect of colonialism is that even among the Wet’suwet’en’s own people, some have become collaborators with their colonial overlords. A current example is a dispute between the people of Burns Lake and their Band Council. At issue is the fact that the elected chiefs have been making deals with the pipeline companies without consulting the community, and in direct opposition to the desire of the hereditary chiefs, whom the Wet’suwet’en people recognize as the rightful authority regarding their territories. When grassroots members of the band organized a protest, the Band Council called the RCMP to clear them out.

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Based on this experience, the Unist’ot’en felt that if they were going to succeed in protecting their territory, they would have to work with settler allies as well as indigenous people.

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The Unist’ot’en and Front-line Allies

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The decision to take on settlers as allies was controversial. Some of the Unist’ot’en’s indigenous allies expressed discomfort at the presence of settlers at the action camps. This is understandable given the history of murder, theft, and repression that characterizes settler-indigenous relations. Past experiences with settlers from the mainstream environmental movement further complicated the picture. Although the Unist’ot’en listened to their allies who were critical of settler involvement at camp, the critics were not themselves able to commit to a full-time presence at the camp. Thus a pragmatic need remained for front-line allies from settler society.

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A major and significant role of front-line allies at camp has been to help with the array of daily chores necessary to maintain a community in the bush. Felling trees and chopping wood, preparing food and cleaning dishes, collecting water, and making supply runs to town, settler allies have been an integral part of the camp. The extra presence at camp has also enabled Unist’ot’en leaders to mobilize for speaking events and key actions, as well as engage in important organizing work with the local community.

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Allies have brought specific skills to the camp, too. Many have extensive experience in previous campaigns and direct actions, or web programming and media relations. These skills all helped in the organizing of the Unist’ot’en Days of Action.

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Nov 27, 2012: Unist’ot’en allies gather in front of Apache’s Vancouver office as part of Global Day of Action

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The Unist’ot’en and Anarchy

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The relationship between the Unist’ot’en and their settler allies extends beyond pragmatic necessity. As the traditionalists come to be a minority in their own society, this prepares the way for a natural affinity with resistance cultures that have long been the minority within settler society. As the attempt to work with ENGOs collapsed, the Unist’ot’en found that the same uncompromising stance driving away one set of allies drew in another.

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From veteran tree-sitters and autonomous urban warriors to university students and independent journalists, a significant number of the new allies who rallied to the Unist’ot’en cause have been anarchists. Sometimes anarchist allies have clashed with other settler allies over the doctrine of non-violence. For example, controversy was stirred at the camp during a “hassle line” exercise, when an ally put forward a scenario for de-escalation which involved “a masked protester carrying a rock.” At this point, one of the core organizers of the camp stepped in to say that while the Unist’ot’en welcomed the support of those who wish to use exclusively peaceful tactics, they also embrace the way of the warrior.

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Indeed, the Unist’ot’en have found that the non-indigenous allies whose political and philosophical views most closely align with their own have been anarchists. At the core of these shared principles is a rejection of the colonial nation state. This is an issue some allies struggle with. They want to support the Unist’ot’en from a shared desire to stop the pipelines, but their analysis does not extend to a complete rejection of the state. By contrast, anarchists are drawn to the Unist’ot’en cause for the very reason that their analysis includes a rejection of the state.

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The Benefit of Being out on the Land

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For all the good allies do for camp, the benefits of being out on the territory are nearly immeasurable. Even staying for just a few days can be a life-changing experience. As you gather water by the side of the river, listening to its steady whoosh and dipping your hand into its cool current, you cannot help but feel something stir within you. This is living water, the way it is supposed to be, clean and pure. From the knock-knock-knock of a woodpecker in the distance, the tracks of a Big or Little Brother along the riverbank, maybe even the sight of a little martin or ferret scurrying by, the forest around you is full of life. This too is as it should be. In the air itself, there is an energy as fresh as the tall pine which just exhaled it. Everything you could possibly need is here, if you have the knowledge and know what you are looking for. This is the way all of Turtle Island used to be, before invader culture landed here carrying colonization along with it.

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These realizations strengthen the spirit and aid in decolonization, even as they induce grief for what has been lost. As more indigenous communities rise up to assert their sovereignty, decolonization must become more than a game of identity politics. It means figuring out how indigenous and settler allies can live and work side by side pursuing a shared vision. A lot has been lost, but a lot is left to protect as well. Being on the land, free from the distractions of the city, is an awakening moment, allowing one to rise above imprinted colonial identities to begin approaching life as a harmonized human being.

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The relationships built at the Camp are the backbone of the solidarity network. There’s a difference between being ideologically aligned with a struggle and having a genuine relationship with the people behind it. It is this relationship of care that will draw people back to the Camp in a time of crisis. It is this relationship of care that drives the ongoing support efforts which, though less glamorous than high-profile actions, are nevertheless the lifeblood of the camp in its current transition toward a self-sustaining community.

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Building Bridges from Resistance to Community

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The long-term goal of the camp is not just to stop the pipelines, but to be back out living on their traditional land as Unist’ot’en. In one sense, the Unist’ot’en regard time spent defending the territory as time lost that could have been spent engaging in traditional activities. That is why, even with all the organizing work to be done, one of the main priorities for the Unist’ot’en over the winter was to reestablish their traplines.

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During the spring 2013 camp, May 6 to 24, the Unist’ot’en took further steps to build infrastructure on the land in the form of traditional pithouses for Unist’ot’en families. To complement the pithouses, food-growing areas were established using permaculture methods. For the garden work, settler allies played a significant collaborative role. Some examples of new techniques the Unist’ot’en incorporated into their camp include rocket stoves, clay ovens, humanure compost, and no-till gardening.

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Traditional pithouse under construction as part of the unist’ot’en clan’s spring camp

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Another example of creative collaboration between the Unist’ot’en and their allies is the Unist’ot’en Camp Urban Junk Technology project, which seeks to develop renewable energy from scrap materials. Some of the ideas being explored are constructing wind generators from microwave ovens, converting junk car alternators into permanent magnet alternators for micro-hydro, or using old washing machines to generate power with water. The process is open-ended and decentralized, so that allies can work together wherever they are and develop solutions with whatever they are able to scavenge, then share it with the rest of the group so the ideas can be applied at the camp.

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The Need for a Network of Front-line Allies

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As the Unist’ot’en Camp continues to entrench itself on the territory, it will need continued support from a network of dedicated allies from both settler and indigenous backgrounds. So far, industry has not made a strong attempt to push through, but that will not last indefinitely. Furthermore, the objectives of the Unist’ot’en Camp cannot be achieved in isolation, as pushing the pipelines north or south of their territory does nothing to stop the overall expansion of toxic industrial projects.

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Hope for ultimate victory rests in indigenous communities joining together to re-assert authority over their traditional lands. The idea is powerful because it offers a direct solution to both the potential environmental impact of these projects and the theft of land embodied by colonialism. Such a movement would have a clear mandate and a basis for mutual support.

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As a wider resistance emerges to reassert indigenous authority, it will be crucial for each community to define what relationship it is willing to develop with radical allies from settler society. That said, the experience of the Unist’ot’en Camp suggests that the most effective role settler allies can play is in channeling support from urban areas to the front lines. Indigenous people have the will and determination to take back their land and will fight if necessary to protect it. The scale of support needed exceeds the capacity of current solidarity networks. If the Unist’ot’en Camp becomes a model of resistance for other communities to follow, these struggles will need to be linked into a wider network of front-line resistance communities and urban-based supporters.

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Coordinating a strategy to meet the needs of all communities will be a tremendous challenge. Bringing together these two elements into a network would require a shift in focus to expanding and reinforcing front-line struggle in general, rather than promoting one specific cause at the potential expense of another. At the moment, many solidarity activists in urban areas are already trying to support multiple communities, but without any coordination, their capacity for support is limited. A general network could help with coordination and focus on increasing overall capacity.

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Elements of this potential network of front-line allies could include providing ongoing solidarity at the front-lines, material support through fundraising and donation drives, creating a rapid response mechanism for emergency mobilizations, raising general awareness, and coordinating solidarity actions. With the Canadian government currently pursuing billions of dollars in resource projects over the next decade, it will take an integrated network of resistance to combat it.

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Creating a Community Corridor

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As other communities take up the Unist’ot’en model of resistance and an integrated network evolves to support them, it will be possible to create a general strategy around united campaigns. Conversations between front-line community members and allies at the camp have produced the idea of the Community Corridor: a proposal to map out sites of resistance, sites of solidarity, and means of transferring resources between them.

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Take the Unist’ot’en Camp as an example. If this proposed network of allies had a mobilization contingency plan in place and it was discovered that PTP was making an aggressive move against the camp, an emergency call for support could go out. If pipeline companies knew that the community they were threatening was connected to a dedicated network of support, they might deem the project too costly to pursue. The more comprehensive the network, the fewer places any company would be able to operate without encountering it.

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As victories were achieved in one community, new tactics and tools could be disseminated through the network to other communities. Communities that win their objectives could then focus attention on supporting other groups. For example, if the Wet’suwe’ten were able to drive off all the pipeline proposals for Kitimat definitively, they could shift their efforts to supporting resistance against the remaining pipelines destined for Prince Rupert. Once the pipeline projects were shut down, more energy could be focused directly on the fracking fields and Tar Sands themselves.

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Conclusion

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The Unist’ot’en Camp is direct resistance to colonization through the assertion of responsibility to protect traditional territory that was never ceded to the Canadian State. The direct nature of the camp strips down the problems being faced to their essential elements. If the problem of colonization is the theft of indigenous land through displacement, then the solution is to reclaim it. If the problem with industrial civilization is that its projects are destroying the planet, then the solution is to stop them. If the problem is that a pipeline company wants to come through your traditional territory, the solution is to occupy it. Indigenous peoples such as the Unist’ot’en are in a unique position to do all these things at the same time.

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If your objective is to stop the destruction of the environment, is the best way to do that through the colonial system that created the mess in the first place? Or by aligning yourself with the people who were wronged by it?

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In the months to come, the Unist’ot’en will stand against the government, its police forces, and industry, all of which conspire to steal the wealth of indigenous land. The relationship between the Unist’ot’en and their allies will continue to grow. Through their collaboration, a model of resistance is emerging that is inspiring further communities to take action.

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As companies madly rush to exploit all the remaining fossil fuels before the economy sinks under the waves of crisis produced by global warming, efforts like those of the Unist’ot’en are beacons for those who still believe in resistance. They hope that you will join them, or join others near you, in fighting for the same cause. It is not a matter of justice, but of survival—for all of us.

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The powerful Wedzin Kwah as seen from camp

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How to Get Involved

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Support the Camp

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Solidarity organizing list

\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/06/10/the-internet-as-new-enclosure", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/06/10/the-internet-as-new-enclosure", "title": "The Internet as New Enclosure : Digitized Capitalism, the Attention Economy, and the Surveillance State", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2013-06-10T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

Media transforms experience, memory, and communication into something synthetic and external. In a media-driven society, we depend on technology for access to these externalized aspects of ourselves. Books, recordings, movies, radio, television, internet, mobile phones: each of these successive innovations has penetrated deeper into daily life, mediating an ever greater proportion of our experience.

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Until the end of the 20th century, mass media was essentially unidirectional, with information flowing one way and attention flowing the other. Critics generally focused on this aspect of its structure, charging that it gave a small cabal tremendous influence over society while immobilizing everyone else as spectators. In contrast, underground media championed more participatory and decentralized forms.

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Participation and decentralization suddenly became mainstream with the arrival of widely accessible digital media. In many ways, the internet offered a liberating and empowering terrain for new modes of communication. Since the basic model was developed by researchers funded by the military rather than the private sector, it was designed to be useful rather than profitable. To this day, much of the internet remains a sort of Wild West in which it’s difficult to enforce traditional property laws. The ability to share content freely and directly among users has had a tremendous impact on several industries, while collaborative formats such as Wikipedia and open-source software show how easily people can meet their needs without private property. Corporations are still scrambling to figure out how to make money on the internet beyond online stores and advertising.

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Yet as more and more of our lives become digitized, it’s important not to take it for granted that this is always for the best. Capitalism thrives by absorbing aspects of the world that were once free and then offering access to them at a price, and this price is not always exacted in dollars.

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We should be especially attentive to the ways new media are convenient: convenience can be a sign that the infinite possibilities of human life are being forcibly narrowed down. Indeed, these innovations are barely even optional: nowadays it’s difficult to maintain friendships or get hired without a cell phone and an online profile. More and more of our mental processes and social lives must pass through the mediation of technologies that map our activities and relationships for corporations and government intelligence. These formats also shape the content of those activities and relationships.

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The networks offered by Facebook aren’t new; what’s new is that they seem external to us. We’ve always had social networks, but no one could use them to sell advertisements—nor were they so easy to map. Now they reappear as something we have to consult. People corresponded with old friends, taught themselves skills, and heard about public events long before email, Google, and Twitter. Of course, these technologies are extremely helpful in a world in which few of us are close with our neighbors or spend more than a few years in any location. The forms assumed by technology and daily life influence each other, making it increasingly unthinkable to uncouple them.

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As our need for and access to information increase beyond the scope of anything we could internalize, information seems to become separate from us. This is suspiciously similar to the forcible separation from the products of their labor that transformed workers into consumers. The information on the internet is not entirely free—computers and internet access cost money, not to mention the electrical and environmental costs of producing these and running servers all around the world. And what if corporations figure out how to charge us more for access to all these technologies once we’ve become totally dependent on them? If they can, not only power and knowledge but even the ability to maintain social ties will be directly contingent on wealth.

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But this could be the wrong thing to watch out for. Old-money conglomerates may not be able to consolidate power in this new terrain after all. The ways capitalism colonizes our lives via digital technologies may not resemble the old forms of colonization.

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Like any pyramid scheme, capitalism has to expand constantly, absorbing new resources and subjects. It already extends across the entire planet; the final war of colonization is being fought at the foot of the Himalayas, the very edge of the world. In theory, it should be about to collapse now that it has run out of horizons. But what if it could go on expanding into us, and these new technologies are like the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María landing on the continent of our own mental processes and social ties?

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In this account, the internet functions as another successive layer of alienation built on the material economy. If a great deal of what is available on the internet is free of charge, this is not just because the process of colonization is not yet complete, but also because the determinant currency in the media is not dollars but attention. Attention functions in the information economy the same way control of material resources functions in the industrial economy. Even if attention doesn’t instantly translate into income online, it can help secure it offline. As currencies, attention and capital behave differently, but they both serve to create power imbalances.

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What is capital, really? Once you strip away the superstitions that make it seem like a force of nature, it’s essentially a social construct that enables some people to amass power over others. Without the notion of private property, which is only “real” insofar as everyone abides by it, material resources couldn’t function as capital. In this regard, property rights serve the same purpose that the notion of divine right of kings used to: both form the foundation of systems assigning sovereignty. Some people believe passionately in property rights even as those rights are used to strip them of any influence in society. It could be said that these people are under the spell of property.

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Similarly, when an advertising agent sets out to make a meme go viral, you could say she is trying to cast a spell. If attention is the currency of the media, gaining it is a way to cause people to buy literally and figuratively into a power structure. The determinant factor is not whether people agree with or approve of what they see, but to what extent it shapes their behavior.

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Digital media appear to have decentralized attention, but they are also standardizing the venues through which it circulates. Beware entities that amass attention even if they never convert it into financial assets. The real power of Google and Facebook isn’t in their financial holdings but in the ways they structure the flow of information. In imposing a unitary logic on communication, relationships, and inquiry, they position themselves as the power brokers of the new era.

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Behind these corporations stands the NSA, which now has unprecedented ability to map relationships and thought processes. Monitoring Google searches, it is possible to trace an internet user’s train of thought in real time. The NSA has even less need to convert internet use directly into financial gain; the currency it seeks is information itself, with which to direct the brute force of government. The role of the surveillance state is to maintain the conditions for corporations like Facebook to do business; the more power those corporations accumulate, financial or otherwise, the more power flows back into the hands of the government.

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Until the Prism scandal, many people thought that surveillance and censorship were chiefly employed in places like Syria and Tunisia. In fact, most of the censorship technology those governments use comes from Silicon Valley—and was first applied right here in the US. Since even the slightest internet censorship presupposes effective and exhaustive surveillance, it is a small step from regulation to lockdown. The more we depend on digital technology, the more vulnerable we are to massive institutions against which we have very little leverage.

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This isn’t a criticism of technology per se. The point is that it’s not neutral: technology is always shaped by the structures of the society in which it is developed and applied. Most of the technologies familiar to us were shaped by the imperatives of profit and rule, but a society based on other values would surely produce other technologies. As digital technology becomes increasingly enmeshed in the fabric of our society, the important question is not whether to use it, but how to undermine the structures that produced it.

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To put this differently: proponents of internet freedom should ask themselves whether that freedom is really compatible with capitalism and the state.
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Further Reading

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Prism: The Internet as New Enclosure

\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/31/for-all-we-care-reconsidering-self-care", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/31/for-all-we-care-reconsidering-self-care", "title": "For All We Care : Reconsidering Self-Care", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2013/05/31/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2013/05/31/header.jpg", "date_published": "2013-05-31T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

Self-care has become a popular buzzword in activist circles. Yet until recently, it has inspired little critical discussion. Do “self” and “care” always mean the same thing? How about “health”? How has this discourse has been colonized by capitalist values? And how could we expand our notion of care outside the common stereotypes?

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In this analysis, we identify the normative tendencies in conventional self-care rhetoric, discuss how to undo the unequal distribution of care in our society, and explore the potentially transformative power of illness and self-destructive behavior.

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This is the first text in a collection of essays about care that we will publish shortly. We look forward to more dialogue on the subject.

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In the 1980s, as she struggled with cancer, Audre Lorde asserted that caring for herself was “an act of political warfare.” Since then, self-care has become a popular buzzword in activist circles. The rhetoric of self-care has moved from specific to universal, from defiant to prescriptive. When we talk about self-care today, are we talking about the same thing Lorde was? It’s time to reexamine this concept.

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But what could be wrong with care? And why, of all things, pick on self-care?

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For one thing, because it has become a sacred cow. It’s painful to hear people speak sanctimoniously about anything, but especially about the most important things. Pious unanimity implies a dark side: in the shadow of every church, a den of iniquity. It creates an other, drawing a line through as well as between us.

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Self and care—in that order—are universally acknowledged values in this society. Anyone who endorses self-care is on the side of the angels, as the saying goes—which is to say, against all the parts of us that don’t fit into the prevailing value system. If we wish to resist the dominant order, we have to play devils’ advocate, searching out what is excluded and denigrated.

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Wherever a value is considered universal, we find the pressures of normativity: for example, the pressure to perform self-care for others’ sake, keeping up appearances. So much of what we do in this society is about maintaining the image that we’re successful, autonomous individuals, regardless of the reality. In this context, rhetoric about self-care can mask silencing and policing: Deal with your problems yourself, please, so no one else has to.

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Assuming that self-care is always good means taking for granted that self and care always have the same meaning. Here, we want to challenge monolithic and static understandings of selfhood and caring. Instead, we propose that different kinds of care produce different kinds of self, and that care is one of the battlefields on which social struggles play out.

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Don’t Tell Me to Calm Down

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Though advocates of self-care emphasize that it can look different for each person, the suggestions usually sound suspiciously similar. When you think of stereotypical “self-care” activities, what do you picture? Drinking herbal tea, watching a movie, taking a bubble bath, meditating, yoga? This selection suggests a very narrow idea of what self-care is: essentially, calming yourself down.

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All of these activities are designed to engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs rest and recovery. But some forms of care require strenuous activity and adrenaline, the domain of the sympathetic nervous system. One way to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, is to allow the sympathetic nervous system enough freedom to release trauma from the body. When a person is having a panic attack, it rarely helps to try to make them calm down. The best way to handle a panic attack is to run.

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So let’s start by discarding any normative understanding of what it means to care for ourselves. It might mean lighting candles, putting on a Nina Simone album, and rereading Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family. It could also mean BDSM, intense performance art, mixed martial arts fighting, smashing bank windows, or calling out a person who abused you. It might even look like really hard work to other people—or ceasing to function altogether. This is not just a postmodern platitude (“different strokes for different folks”), but a question of what relationship we establish to our challenges and our anguish.

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Caring for ourselves doesn’t mean pacifying ourselves. We should be suspicious of any understanding of self-care that identifies wellbeing with placidity or asks us to perform “health” for others. Can we imagine instead a form of care that would equip each of us to establish an intentional relationship to her dark side, enabling us to draw strength from the swirling chaos within? Treating ourselves gently might be an essential part of this, but we must not assume a dichotomy between healing and engaging with the challenges around and inside us. If care is only what happens when we step away from those struggles, we will be forever torn between an unsatisfactory withdrawal from conflict and its flipside, a workaholism that is never enough. Ideally, care would encompass and transcend both struggle and recovery, tearing down the boundaries that partition them.

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This kind of care cannot be described in platitudes. It is not a convenient agenda item to add to the program of the average non-profit organization. It demands measures that will interrupt our current roles, bringing us into conflict with society at large and even some of the people who profess to be trying to change it.

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By your response to danger it is
Easy to tell how you have lived
And what has been done to you.
You show whether you want to stay alive,
Whether you think you deserve to,
And whether you believe
It’s any good to act.
— Jenny Holzer

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Love Is a Battlefield

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If we want to identify what is worth preserving in self-care, we can start by scrutinizing care itself. To endorse care as a universal good is to miss the role care also plays in perpetuating the worst aspects of the status quo. There’s no such thing as care in its pure form—care abstracted from daily life in capitalism and the struggles against it. No, care is partisan—it is repressive or liberating. There are forms of care that reproduce the existing order and its logic, and other forms of care that enable us to fight it. We want our expressions of care to nurture liberation, not domination—to bring people together according to a different logic and values.

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From homemaking to professional housekeeping—not to mention nursing, hospitality, and phone sex—women and people of color are disproportionately responsible for the care that keeps this society functioning, yet have disproportionately little say in what that care fosters. Likewise, a tremendous amount of care goes into oiling the machinery that maintains hierarchy: families help police relax after work, sex workers help businessmen let off steam, secretaries take on the invisible labor that preserves executives’ marriages.

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So the problem with self-care is not just the individualistic prefix. For some of us, focusing on self-care rather than caring for others would be a revolutionary proposition, albeit almost unimaginable—while the privileged can congratulate each other on their excellent self-care practices without recognizing how much of their sustenance they derive from others. When we conceive of self-care as an individual responsibility, we are less likely to see the political dimensions of care.

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Some have called for a caring strike: a collective, public resistance to the ways capitalism has commandeered care. In their text “A Very Careful Strike,” Spanish militants Precarias a la Deriva explore the ways care has been commodified or rendered invisible, from customer service in the marketplace to emotional care in families. They challenge us to imagine ways care could be wrested away from maintaining our stratified society and instead lavished on fostering togetherness and revolt.

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But such a project depends on those who are already most vulnerable in our society. It would take a tremendous amount of support for family members, sex workers, and secretaries to go on care strike without suffering appalling consequences.

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So rather than promoting self-care, we might seek to redirect and redefine care. For some of us, this means recognizing how we benefit from imbalances in the current distribution of care, and shifting from forms of care that focus on ourselves alone to support structures that benefit all participants. Who’s working so you can rest? For others, it could mean taking better care of ourselves than we’ve been taught we have a right to—though it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to undertake this individually as a sort of consumer politics of the self. Rather than creating gated communities of care, let’s pursue forms of care that are expansive, that interrupt our isolation and threaten our hierarchies.

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Self-care rhetoric has been appropriated in ways that can reinforce the entitlement of the privileged, but a critique of self-care must not be used as yet another weapon against those who are already discouraged from seeking care. In short: step up, step back.

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A struggle that doesn’t understand the importance of care is doomed to fail. The fiercest collective revolts are built on a foundation of nurture. But reclaiming care doesn’t just mean giving ourselves more care, as one more item after all the others on the to-do list. It means breaking the peace treaty with our rulers, withdrawing care from the processes that reproduce the society we live in and putting it to subversive and insurrectionary purposes.

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Beyond Self-Preservation

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“‘Health’ is a cultural fact in the broadest sense of the word, a fact that is political, economic, and social as well, a fact that is tied to a certain state of individual and collective consciousness. Every era outlines a ‘normal’ profile of health.” – Michel Foucault

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The best way to sell people on a normative program is to frame it in terms of health. Who doesn’t want to be healthy?

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But like “self” and “care,” health is not one thing. In itself, health is not intrinsically good—it’s simply the condition that enables a system to continue to function. You can speak about the health of an economy, or the health of an ecosystem: these often have an inverse relationship. This explains why some people describe capitalism as a cancer, while others accuse “black bloc anarchists” of being the cancer. The two systems are lethal to each other; nourishing one means compromising the health of the other.

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The repressive function of health norms is obvious enough in the professional field of mental health. Where drapetomania and anarchia were once invoked to stigmatize runaway slaves and rebels, today’s clinicians diagnose oppositional defiance disorder. But the same thing goes on far from psychiatric institutions.

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In a capitalist society, it should not be surprising that we tend to measure health in terms of productivity. Self-care and workaholism are two sides of the same coin: preserve yourself so you can produce more. This would explain why self-care rhetoric is so prevalent in the non-profit sector, where the pressure to compete for funding often compels organizers to mimic corporate behavior, even if they use different terminology.

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If self-care is just a way to ease the impact of an ever-increasing demand for productivity, rather than a transformative rejection of that demand, it’s part of the problem, not the solution. For self-care to be anti-capitalist, it has to express a different conception of health.

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This is especially complicated as our survival becomes ever more interlinked with the functioning of capitalism—a condition some have designated with the term biopower. In this situation, the easiest way to preserve your health is to excel at capitalist competition, the same thing that is doing us so much harm. “There is no other pill to take, so swallow the one that made you ill.”

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To escape this vicious circle, we have to shift from reproducing one “self” to producing another. This demands a notion of self-care that is transformative rather than conservative—that understands the self as dynamic rather than static. The point is not to stave off change, as in Western medicine, but to foster it; in the Tarot deck, Death represents metamorphosis.

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From the standpoint of capitalism and reformism, anything that threatens our social roles is unhealthy. As long as we remain inside the former paradigm, it may be that only behaviors deemed unhealthy can point the way out. Breaking with the logic of the system that has kept us alive demands a certain reckless abandon.

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This may illuminate the connection between apparently self-destructive behavior and rebellion, which goes back a long time before punk rock. The radical side of the Occupy Oakland assemblies, where all the smokers hung out, was known affectionately as the “black lung bloc”—the cancer of Occupy, indeed! The self-destructive energy that drives people to addiction and suicide can also enable them to take courageous risks to change the world. We can identify multiple currents within self-destructive behavior; some of them close down possibility, while others open it up. We need language with which to explore this, lest our language about self-care perpetuate a false binary between sickness and self-destructiveness on one hand and health and struggle on the other.

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For when we speak of breaking with the logic of the system, we are not just talking about a courageous decision that presumably healthy subjects make in a vacuum. Even apart from “self-destructive” behavior, many of us already experience illness and disability that position us outside this society’s conception of health. This forces us to grapple with the question of the relationship between health and struggle.

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When it comes to anti-capitalist struggle, do we associate health with productivity, too, implying that the ill cannot participate effectively? Instead, without asserting the ill as the revolutionary subject à la the Icarus Project, we could look for ways of engaging with illness that pull us out of our capitalist conditioning, interrupting a way of being in which self-worth and social ties are premised on a lack of care for ourselves and each other. Rather than pathologizing illness and self-destructiveness as disorders to be cured for efficiency’s sake, we could reimagine self-care as a way of listening into them for new values and possibilities.

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Think of Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Voltairine de Cleyre, and all the other women who drew on their private struggles with sickness, injury, and depression to craft public expressions of insubordinate care. How about Friedrich Nietzsche: was his poor health a mere obstacle, which he manfully overcame? Or was it inextricable from his insights and his struggles, an essential step on the path that led him away from received wisdom so he could discover something else? To understand his writing in the context of his life, we have to picture Nietzsche in a wheelchair charging a line of riot police, not flying through the air with an S on his chest.

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Your human frailty is not a regrettable fault to be treated by proper self-care so you can get your nose back to the grindstone. Sickness, disability, and unproductivity are not anomalies to be weeded out; they are moments that occur in every life, offering a common ground on which we might come together. If we take these challenges seriously and make space to focus on them, they could point the way beyond the logic of capitalism to a way of living in which there is no dichotomy between care and liberation.

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Further Reading

\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/23/anarchism-and-the-english-language-english-and-the-anarchists-language", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/23/anarchism-and-the-english-language-english-and-the-anarchists-language", "title": "Anarchism and the English Language, English and the Anarchists’ Language", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2013-05-23T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

To complement our Contradictionary, we’ve added an exchange with Kristian Williams about anarchist writing to our reading library. Choosing Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” as his point of departure, Kristian takes contemporary anarchists to task for sloppy writing that leads to sloppy thinking. We respond with an assault on everything normative in language, calling for an anarchist writing that shakes readers free of the control mechanisms coded into English itself.

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Anarchism and the English Language, English and the Anarchists’ Language

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This text is also available as a printable zine (Imposed PDF for Reproduction) [56k].

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Anarchism and the English Language

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An exchange between Kristian Williams and the CrimethInc. Writers’ Bloc

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Kristian Williams

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George Orwell, in his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” makes the case that “the English language… becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

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The vices Orwell catalogued—vague phrases, dying metaphors, jargon, and general pseudoscientific pretentiousness—all help to sustain our boring prose. But worse, they also produce a stagnant and stifling mental atmosphere in which thought is commonly replaced with the automatic recitation of certain prescribed words or phrases “tacked together,” as Orwell memorably put it, “like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”

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The effect on readers is certainly bad enough, but the implications for writers are more serious still. Sometimes, of course, vague and shoddy prose—and the readiness with which such is accepted—makes it possible for a writer to deliberately pass off one thing as another, or to hide bad reasoning in a rhetorical fog. More often, however, a well-meaning writer just accepts the standard currently in use and out of witless habit uses language that alters, obscures, or nullifies his own meaning. In such cases, the writer, too, is the victim: he means to say one thing, and says another; or, he means to say something, but says nothing instead.

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This dynamic poses special problems for anarchism, as a mode of thought that shuns orthodoxy on principle and should be above defrauding an audience in the fashion typical of politicians and their parties. Anarchists face the further problem that, through clumsiness and inattention, our ideas become unintelligible. This destruction of meaning occurs at many levels simultaneously: It is impossible to convince people of an idea if one cannot explain it; it is equally impossible to explain an idea if you do not understand it yourself; and it is impossible to adequately understand an idea if its only means of expression frustrate any efforts to define or analyze it. Through this process ideas are transformed into something like the Latin mass: we in the congregation may not understand the priest’s ritual mumblings, but we believe that the words will save us.

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Consider, for example, a sentence like “To be allies, cisgendered people need to check their privilege.”

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Such a sentence is, by contemporary anarchist standards, utterly unremarkable and may even be regarded as a truism. And it contains several features that make it representative of the type of writing I am discussing. The first thing one ought to notice is the unattractive and the peculiarly un-persuasive quality of the language. Simply reading the words, it is very difficult to accept that only a single century separates this writing from the prose of Edward Carpenter or Peter Kropotkin.

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Even apart from its plain ugliness, the writing is indecipherable to the uninitiated. It is dense with vague jargon terms, and offers not a single original turn of phrase, nor an image of any kind. Of its brief ten words, one—cisgendered—only exists in certain marginal academic departments and in a very narrow sliver of the political spectrum. Three others—allies, check, and privilege—are everyday English words that here take on specialized meanings. And one of these is so ambiguous as to render the sentence practically meaningless: Does check mean to examine, or to verify? Does it mean to physically block (as in hockey), or threaten (as in chess), or to decline a bet (as in poker)? Does one check one’s privilege the way one checks one’s coat at the theater, to be retrieved again after the show? Like a lot of moralistic language, this phrase manages to be prescriptive without actually being instructive: it offers us a command, but it lacks the necessary specificity to actually tell anyone what they should do in any real-world circumstance.

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I’m not complaining here that the language is difficult—on the whole it is not—but that it is unsalvageably vague. It is, or should be, a problem if your idiom makes it impossible for other people to grasp your ideas; but how much worse is it if your language helps you to hide your meaning even from yourself? To a very large degree, the language here is standing in for thought. People who write this sort of thing may have some general idea of what they are trying to say—but they needn’t have. They’ve absorbed the correct words, the way a child memorizes the Pledge of Allegiance, without much concern as to whether the words correspond to anything in particular, either in the real world or even in one’s imagination.

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My above example is drawn from queer politics, but one could easily multiply the cases if one so chose. (For instance: “The black bloc became a mere facet of the totalizing spectacle.”) All branches of anarchism—primitivists, syndicalists, insurrectionists, CrimethInc.—are similarly guilty, though the required code words and the preferred rhythm of the language may vary somewhat from one clique to the next. One need only pick up any issue of any anarchist publication—no matter what faction it represents—to find at least one example of similar writing.

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Many of the words that occur most commonly in anarchist writing are used, I suspect, with no precise meaning in mind—or at times, with a meaning quite different from the typical usage. “Accountability,” “community,” “solidarity,” and “freedom” are used, in the overwhelming number of cases, simply as markers to signify things we like or favor. When we read, for instance, that “organizers should be accountable to the community,” we are each left to wonder who this relationship is supposed to involve, and are much less certain about what it is supposed to look like. Likewise, when we read that some group wants to “hold sex offenders accountable,” it is a fair and obvious question what they propose to actually do. Do they want them to make a public statement of apology? Do they plan to beat them up? Or do they mean, by circular logic, that they will hold them accountable by calling for them to be held accountable? It is striking how seldom such questions are ever answered—but it is more striking still how seldom they are actually asked. In both cases, the key word—accountability—has been invoked, and that is thought somehow to be sufficient.

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Too often, the point of writing this way is not so much to communicate a specific idea to some real or potential readership. The words serve instead to indicate a kind of group loyalty, an ideological border between our side and the other side: we believe this, and they don’t. Or rather: we talk in this way and say this sort of thing; they talk in some other way, and say some other sort of thing.

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Adopting the proper style allows one to demonstrate how radical one is. And it is a symptom of one’s writing being shaped by concerns, often suppressed concerns, about orthodoxy. It becomes important, not only to think the right thoughts, but also—sometimes even more so—to use the right words, as though one needs to punch in the correct code, but doesn’t need to remember why that particular series of letters was selected in the first place.

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Underneath this practice of mental mimicry is the sense that words are imbued with a kind of mystical essence—some being good, others bad—irrespective of context or the use to which they are being put. The policing of language is one result, usually in the form of self-censorship but sometimes under public pressure. (I was recently chastised, for example, for using the word riot; the more vague uprising or rebellion being preferable.) Once euphemism begins to creep in, it is a short distance to travel between political politeness and pure dishonesty. At the same time, and following from the same impulse, much of our rhetoric takes on a ridiculously inflated quality. Protests become uprisings, on the one hand, while a drunken fight is described as “acting out” (unless, for other reasons, we label it “abuse”). In either case, the tendency is to write according to what should have happened under the terms of one’s own favorite theory, rather than struggling to discover and describe events as they actually occurred.

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The tendency toward rhetorical inflation is driven, I believe, by a desire to make ourselves seem bigger, better, or more important than we are—even if the only people we fool are ourselves. “Actions” sound tougher than “protests” or “rallies,” even if all we do at these “actions” is walk about with signs. And it is rather embarrassing in a political context to say “me and my friends,” so instead we say “community” when we really mean “scene,” and “scene” when we really mean “clique.” But, isn’t there the nagging suspicion that something has gone awry when we begin using the word “community” in a way that excludes our neighbors, the mail carrier, and members of our immediate family?

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Once this pattern sets in, all sense of proportion washes out of our language. Descriptions of events shrink or swell, not according to any observable feature of anything that has happened, but according to an a priori formula. One need only glance at the statements issued by competing sides in some recent anarchist controversy—the latest instantiation of the perennial debates over violence and nonviolence, or militant action versus base-building, will do—to recognize that, the two sides do not just disagree about this or that specific incident, but where questions of fact arise, each side takes an attitude of almost perfect indifference.

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The linguistic drift is dangerous because it makes honest discussion impossible. And, maybe more worrisome, people are surprisingly willing to fall for their own propagandistic tricks. A political movement cannot expect to succeed, or even survive, if it cannot face reality. But moreover, if its members in very large numbers do lose touch with the world beyond their own press releases and manifestos, the movement probably will not even deserve to survive.

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Anarchists, of course, are not the only people to write as though the words don’t matter. Much current writing is straightforward nonsense—not only political writing, but also advertising copy, academic prose, legal decisions, religious sermons, and love songs. But aside from the slipshod quality of contemporary English, and beyond even the special vices of political propaganda, anarchism has acquired several faults that are, more or less, distinctive.

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For instance, we seem to have acquired the dubious habit of adopting an everyday word, narrowing its meaning, and turning it into a kind of jargon. The above-mentioned “allies,” “privilege,” “accountability,” and “actions” are all examples—as are “process” (as a verb), “facilitate,” “recuperate,” “lifestyle” (as an adjective), “bottom-line” (verb), “spectacle,” “safe space,” “spoke” (noun), “care” (noun), and “harm.”

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Similarly, we sometimes take words that are necessarily relative and use them as though they were absolute. “Accessible” (or “inaccessible”) and “alternative” are the chief examples. Nothing just is accessible. It must be accessible to someone. Likewise, something can only be an alternative to something else. Saying that it’s an alternative to “the mainstream” is just question-begging.

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More embarrassing still, many of our jargon terms are not even our own, but have been appropriated, or misappropriated, from other traditions—Marxist, Foucauldian, post-modern, feminist, or Queer Theory. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own, and I personally admire a willingness to take good ideas regardless of the source. But we’ve started writing like undergraduates imitating their professors. We say “hegemony” when we really just mean “influence,” and “contradiction” when we’re talking about conflict, “performativity” instead of “behavior,” and so on. The results of this imitative habit are sometimes pretty odd: because of Foucault, it is now common in political writing to refer to people as bodies. Thanks to Hardt and Negri, we talk about Empire rather than imperialism. And, in a related development, we commonly talk about Capital rather than capitalism, and do so in a way that makes it sound like an ill-tempered deity rather than an economic system.

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Too often, too, we present simple ideas with complex language because we think it makes us look smarter, edgier, or more radical. We pepper our language with technical terms just to show that we’ve done our homework. There seems to be an agreement on the left that it is better to write in the style of badly-translated Hegel than to write like John Steinbeck. It is even easier, provided you don’t care to be understood.

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The problem of course is not with the words themselves. The problem isn’t even with abstraction. Any effort to apply the lessons from one case to another necessarily involves some form of abstraction. The problem is the avoidance of clarity in meaning. The solution, then, is not to simply to abstain from using certain words, or to substitute new jargon for old, but to do what we can to make our writing as clear as possible. We do that through the use of fresh imagery, of concrete detail, and by taking care to spell out precisely who and what we mean whenever we’re tempted to invoke old spooks like “the people” or mystical processes like “struggle.”

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The point here is not simply to describe the present state of anarchist writing, but to reverse the trends that have brought us here. And while many of the examples in “Politics and the English Language” are now very much out of date, Orwell’s advice remains sound. He offers one general principle, six rules, and six questions.

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The principle is: “Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.”

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The rules are:

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  1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
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  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
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  3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
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  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
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  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
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  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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It is worth noting that, were there a contemporary anarchist style guide, nearly all of these rules would be reversed: Only use figures of speech that you are used to seeing in print; Never use a short word if a long word is available; If it is possible to add a word, always add it in; Never use the active voice where you might use the passive; Always use a foreign phrase or jargon word if the everyday English word can be avoided; And write barbarously rather than violate any of these rules.

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No one has formalized such commandments, and no one has had to. The slow drift of the language, and the overall cloudiness of our thought, allows us to adopt such practices without trying, and often, without consciously recognizing it. To break such habits, however, requires a conscious effort.

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Orwell’s advice, put as succinctly as possible, might be summarized: Think before you write.

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A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What word will express it? What image or idiom will make is clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

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This approach assumes, of course, that the writer has some definite idea that he means to convey to the reader, that it is not his purpose to simply cycle through the fashionable platitudes in order to represent the right “line” or to rehearse stock phrases for some imaginary debate.

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The purpose of anarchist writing, I believe, is—or should be—not to demonstrate how radical we are, or to dazzle our friends with our erudition, but to improve the quality of anarchist thought, to give our ideas a broader circulation, and to use those ideas to help reshape the world. But the present state of our writing, taken as a whole, seems ill-suited to every one of these aims. It produces, instead, hazy thinking, political and intellectual insularity, and, ultimately, irrelevance.

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I don’t mean to suggest that the only thing standing in the way of revolution is bad prose. But it is possible that a great deal of the nonsense could be shaken out of anarchism if we commit ourselves to the clear expression of our ideas, and if we demand the same from the publications that we read. It is very difficult to write clearly unless one is also thinking clearly. And if a sentence cannot be translated from anarcho-english into plain English, there is a very good chance that it is meaningless.

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Kristian Williams is the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, and Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy. He is presently at work on a book about Oscar Wilde and anarchism.

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English and the Anarchists’ Language, Anarchism and the English Language

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English and the Anarchists’ Language

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CrimethInc. Writers’ Bloc

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“The alchemists have a saying: ‘Tertium non data’: the third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element to another, from waste matter into best gold, is a process that cannot be documented. It is fully mysterious.  No one really knows what effects change.” –Jeanette Winterson

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Kristian’s essay says much of what we would like to say to other anarchist writers. It is cowardly to conceal slipshod reasoning behind a smokescreen of gibberish—and dangerous, too, if you still encourage people to act on your arguments. Down with pseudo-academic posturing! Death to all who affix suffixes to project, potential, and position! And hyperbole to the guillotine!

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Yet seeing this spelled out as a program, our hearts rebel. Orwell’s advice, as Kristian presents it, might improve bad writing, but it says nothing about the alchemy that sets good writing apart from the merely serviceable. Nor does it engage with what could make writing anarchist. Does one write well as an anarchist the same way one writes well as a social democrat or an advertising agent? Or is anarchist writing another project entirely, which must be evaluated according to other criteria? Kristian is either making a big assumption or a fatal omission. It’s important to address this, lest his prescriptions be used against those who strike off in the right direction.

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So given the choice between incoherent, insular jargon and the clear transmission of rational arguments, let us add another dimension to the discussion. We hypothesize a third pole—the mysterious third, the factor that effects change.

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For the purposes of his argument, Kristian takes for granted that our language can adequately represent our ideas if we use it properly. But like any technology, language is not neutral; it incarnates the power relations of the society that produced it. It is generally easier to use contemporary English to convey the capitalist worldview than to express ideas or experiences outside it. There are submerged currents of resistance within English, as there are within every aspect of our society, but it tends to impose the values of the dominant social order.

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When “legitimate” is inseparable from “authority” and drastically differing activities are defined as “violent” depending on who engages in them, an anarchist cannot trust words to represent her ideas the same way they represent those of politicians and pundits. This is not just a question of misuse, as if the words would tell the truth if they were used correctly. On the contrary, the language of politicians and pundits often appears more accessible than ours because the playing field is slanted in their favor. When we try to be more accessible, we sometimes end up making their points rather than our own.

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In the face of such challenges, an anarchist has to bring the subterranean currents of resistance within the language to the surface in the course of making her case, or else she may not be able to make it at all. Moreover, as an anarchist, she must not establish new norms, but open up spaces of free play and uncertainty. Semantics is not just “the science of evading the point,” as a comrade once quipped, but one of the most important battlefields on which the balance of power is determined.

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So if we begin with Orwell’s demand to “Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about,” we must end by using words in a manner that shakes them loose of their old meanings. When we speak, we shouldn’t focus only on properly designating our ideas via language, but on destabilizing the language itself—showing how it is enemy territory and opening new points of departure.

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Let’s perform an example of this. Kristian urges us not to write barbarously. This sounds straightforward enough. Yet this loaded word, barbarous, comes to us from the ancient Greek onomatopoeia, βάρβαρος—it was a mockery of the foreigners whose incomprehensible speech (“bar bar bar”) marked them as inferior to Greek citizens. Similarly, in the essay Kristian cites, Orwell called on his countrymen “to drive out foreign phrases” for the sake of “the defense of the English language.” Orwell meant only to denounce jargon and abstraction, but in both cases we see how swiftly one could pass from demanding intelligibility to something more sinister. If our language is not neutral, it may be most dangerous when it is most intelligible. If that is so, our task as anarchists is to make language unfamiliar in a way that renders the ensuing confusion irresistible rather than off-putting.

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Certainly, as Kristian points out, neologisms like “cisgendered” are not familiar to everyone. But if we stay within the bounds of language that is widely used in this society, we will only be able to reproduce consensus reality, not challenge it. How could we possibly challenge gender normativity in the same terms that maintain it? We have to invent new words, styles, and discourses that enable us to say new things while seducing others into the conversation. This calls for a dynamic rather than static understanding of the transmission of meaning—not to mention a little Dadaism. It calls for poetry rather than prose: the third that is not given.

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When we approach writing thus, mere accuracy ceases to be our principle virtue. This explains some of the examples of powerful writing that fall outside Kristian’s parameters.

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A strict focus on accuracy alone would never produce a Lewis Carroll or a Kathy Acker—two authors whose work hints at the kind of anarchic style we are postulating. What is Orwell himself remembered for today—his essays, or his novels? His logic, or his neologisms? His politics, or his thoughtcrime? If not for the vitality of his imagination, his realism would never have reached us. He invented Newspeak to portray how language can be used to limit thought, but paradoxically he needed new language to convey this idea.

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And then there is the problem of bad writing that is better than good writing. We remember the famous Audre Lorde quote—“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”—precisely because, on the face of it, it is patently false. It sticks in our minds; it is an enigma, a knot we can’t stop trying to untie. The same goes for the mixed metaphors of Peter Gelderloos; we may be “defenestrating the stranglehold” long after we have forgotten David Graeber’s methodical formulations. The cheerful excesses of youth will always outshine more prudent prose, to the despair of editors and other pedants. Anarchists should make the most of this, not fight it.

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Good writers are generally intelligent, but some truly great writers are idiots savants. As one reviewer wrote of AC/DC, “One brain cell less and it wouldn’t have worked; one brain cell more and it wouldn’t have happened.” The slogans punk rock bequeathed to anarchism, which have borne its resurgence as far as Indonesia, function precisely because of their mystical banality. “Two clichés make us laugh,” wrote a certain Italian, “but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.”

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Then there is the problem of non-representational expression. A humorless reactionary might charge that the best page of Days of War, Nights of Love is the one ripped out of every copy; but the true aesthete knows it is the best page because, more effectively than any other, it conveys a sense of limitless possibility. If the anarchist author’s task is not to put up fencing but to pull up surveyor’s stakes, it is beside the point whether every reader derives the same sense from a sentence; the more widely diverging their responses, the better. Some Rorschach tests are worth more than expressions that convey the same information to everyone—and nothing else.

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Besides, those who are convinced that they speak precisely—yet see imprecision virtually everywhere they look—rarely communicate well with others. That’s not how communication works. It is a mutual undertaking, for which rulebooks are no more useful than they are for any other kind of voluntary relationship. When it comes to communication, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as the saying goes. Which anarchists are most widely read outside the anarchist milieu?

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Here we have returned to a centuries-old debate. Do we side with the lucid prose of William Godwin, or the incandescent poetry of Percy Shelley? The sober Murray Bookchin, or the intoxicating Hakim Bey? Apollonian argumentation that frames anarchism as the culmination of the Enlightenment, or the Dionysian romance of an assault on Western civilization?

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But who remembers William Godwin? A conservative minority within the anarchist movement has always held that we should be even more serious and scientific than our foes. But anarchists should concentrate on our strengths. Most people are drawn to the anarchist project by the desire for the wild and mysterious, for something ineffable. This is the same philosopher’s stone that distinguishes great art from scrupulous writing—that makes it worth violating the rules—that makes it worth writing at all. No amount of obfuscation can make up for its absence, but neither could any degree of accuracy.

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Therefore, in defiance of Orwell and our own better judgment, we are compelled to conclude: Write barbarously! Build your arguments on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your prose into uncharted seas! Break with common sense and convention in such a way that everyone else joins in!

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When in Rome, do as the Vandals do: sack it. Axe clichés and replace them with a coinage of your own mint. Topple the Tower of Babel, the imperial project of imposing a unitary logic on language and thought.

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Forget about writing properly! Barbarians to the barbarricades! WRITE BARBAROUSLY!

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CrimethInc. is a maelstrom, a collective hallucination, a practice of subversion that probably doesn’t exist at all.

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BREAKING WITH CONSENSUS REALITY, From the Politics of Consent to the Seduction of Revolution

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This text is excerpted from the publication TERROR INCOGNITA, a meditation on desire, insurrection, and the unknown.

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We who fight to create a freer world face a fundamental contradiction. On one hand, we don’t want to become a vanguard, “leading” or imposing our will on others, as that would run counter to our anti-authoritarian values. On the other hand, we believe with good justification that our political goals—including the destruction of capitalism, the state, and hierarchy—can’t be accomplished without strategies that are currently unpalatable to most of our fellow citizens. The impoverishment of millions and the destruction of our ecosystems demand that we act decisively. What criteria will equip us to challenge these systems without resorting to the authoritarian means we condemn?

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Some of us have developed a practice of prioritizing consent as a provisional answer to this dilemma. This discourse comes to us through educators who promote it as a tool for fostering mutually respectful sexuality in the midst of a rape culture. Applying this model in our intimate relationships and beyond, we seek to respect others’ autonomy by not subjecting them to actions that violate their consent—that is, by staying within the boundaries of others’ desires as they determine and articulate them. We reject coercion of any form, whether physical, verbal, economic, or otherwise, and assert our self-determination to participate in or abstain from whatever we choose.

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Yet outside of the sexual realm, consent discourse doesn’t always offer a sufficient framework with which to evaluate direct action tactics and strategy. Knowing whether an action is consensual may not suffice to indicate whether it is effective or worthwhile. Aware that most people oppose some of our tactics, we don’t plan our actions on the basis of consent, yet we don’t aspire to become a vanguard, either. Furthermore, since we can only desire on the basis of what we know, we’re unlikely to achieve liberation from simply fulfilling the desires we have now without changing the conditions that produced them. So how else might we conceive of our political project, if not through the lens of consent?

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A close examination of our activities reveals that in setting out to foment insurrection and transform society, we appear to be operating according to a logic of seduction. Are we prepared to accept the implications of this reframing? Let’s begin by examining the politics of consent and their limitations.

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Is Consent Enough?

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At first glance, the notion of basing our political practice on a theory of consent makes intuitive sense. What’s our critique of the state? It’s a body that wields power over us even to the point of life and death, and yet no one ever asked us if we wanted to be governed. Elections don’t even begin to offer us the meaningful alternatives true consent would require. It’s been said before: our desires will never fit in their ballot boxes. We promote the principle of voluntary association—the freedom to form whatever groups and collectives we want without being compelled to participate in any. We never had the chance to say no to capitalism, to government, to police, to all the systems of hierarchy that impose their rule—so clearly those can’t be consensual in any meaningful way. As we do away with the coercive systems that dominate our lives, we can reconstruct new social relations based on consent: a world in which no one controls anyone else, in which we can determine our own destinies.

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It makes sense … doesn’t it? Certainly, this discourse of consent offers a compelling way to imagine the world we want to live in. But how does it serve as a strategy for dislodging this one? It’s difficult to envision a political practice that stringently respects the consent of all people while simultaneously destroying the fabric of our hierarchical society. If we insist on the unity of means and ends, we have to dismantle coercive institutions and social relationships through non-coercive processes to build a non-coercive society. Abandoning this vision could undermine the very basis of our anarchism. Yet if we don’t succeed in dislodging capitalism and the state, the bases of economic and political coercion, we’ll never arrive at a society in which a consent-based framework could actually be tenable.

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How can we resolve these dilemmas? Let’s look more closely at what we mean by consent, and how it operates in our society and in our movements.

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Consensus Reality, Nonviolence, Liberal Consent

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Power and consent are critically intertwined. Power imbalances make it difficult or impossible to give consent freely. Can a much older person have consensual sex with a very young person? Can someone who is subjected to another’s economic control freely consent to that person’s desires? For consent to be meaningful, it must be possible to say no, any time and for any reason, on one’s own terms. When the state monopolizes the use of force and the economy controls access to our very means of survival, we cannot meaningfully choose. We call the boundaries enclosing our ability to consent under these conditions consensus reality.

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Consensus reality is the range of possible thought and action within a system of power relations. It is enforced not only through traditional institutions of control—such as mass media, religion, and the family—but also through the innumerable subtle norms manifested in common sense, civil discourse, and day-to-day life. It isn’t simply the aggregate of all our desires, melded together in a great compromise that allows us all to get along, as democratic mythology would have it. Consensus reality constitutes the ruling class’s coordinated attempt to uphold their dominance and our exploitation as efficiently as possible. Capitalist democracy secures that efficiency; it is the system that currently provides the largest number of people with incentive to participate in their own exploitation. It offers us a series of meaningless options to disguise a profound lack of agency over our lives. The trump card of capitalist democracy is the idea that everyone’s consent is respected in a marketplace of ideas within which desires can be freely expressed and influenced.

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We can argue that this marketplace isn’t truly free—corporations control the mass media, some views get more airtime than others, thus the consent is not fully informed—but this doesn’t get at the heart of things. Obviously, equal access to means of influence on a level playing field is impossible in capitalist society. But it is the systems of power, not just speech, that determine the framework within which we experience reality. All political systems—whether anarchist, fascist, or democratic—produce particular patterns of social relations. Mere discussion of these systems does not; it cannot transcend the framework in which it occurs.1 Free speech discourse offers each of us our own box of colored chalk to decorate the cement blocks around our feet, and calls that freedom; whether we can walk away doesn’t even enter into the picture. Our experience of what we are and aren’t able to do determines our sense of what is possible far more than our ideas and discourses. To shift the boundaries of our imagination and desires, we have to find ways to make new experiences possible beyond the bounds of consensus reality.

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Take, for example, the debates about violence and nonviolence that rage in every organizing coalition and Occupy movement. What is violence? At first glance, the term seems to have no more coherence than the Supreme Court definition of obscenity: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. This makes it an especially dangerous tool when wielded by liberals to control group norms. But recalling that violence springs from the same root as violation helps us get at the meaning behind how the word is used. What is called violence is any violation of norms about legitimate use of force, norms dictated by the state and incorporated into our consensus reality. The debate about violence is really a coded discourse in which nonviolence stands in for consent; when we attempt to make space for autonomy and diversity of tactics, our opponents perceive us as disregarding consent simply for opposing the terms of consensus reality.

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Observe how an anxious liberal from our local Occupy movement, dismayed by an illegal building occupation undertaken by autonomous occupiers, strives to distance the Occupy group from the occupation. He says to a reporter: “Our movement is nonviolent, it is peaceful, and it does not break the law.” The building occupation involved no physical violence, nor damage to property, nor anything that could be construed as violent even within his own definition, whereas the eviction by rifle-wielding thugs was violent enough to shock people across the political spectrum. How can we make sense of this seeming contradiction?

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It seems that the meaningful sense of violence here is a rupture of consensus reality. This liberal wishes to communicate that the building occupation felt like a violation of his consent. Why? Because it was related to a current in which he felt invested, yet he had not been invited to participate in decision-making, and it involved actions that he personally disdained. Of course, we undertook the occupation autonomously precisely for that reason: we knew we could never achieve consensus in the public general assemblies to do something that so dramatically challenged consensus reality. Whether or not the occupation hurt anyone was beside the point: its “violence” had less to do with its literal effects than its challenge to consensus reality. To him, such a challenge constituted a violation of collective consent.

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Let’s call this liberal consent: the notion that we must adhere tactically to the most conservative common denominator or else violate others’ consent. We all have to put up with this system, so the logic goes, whether we chose it or not, because any violation would put us all at risk. This goes beyond a critique of representation—you shouldn’t carry out an action on my behalf without my consent—to a critique of autonomy, since literally any action that presumes affinity with others is subject to the boundaries dictated by consensus reality.

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This is the risk of embracing a framework of political consent. Within this logic, the most moderate elements of any group or coalition will dominate by virtue of their alignment with consensus reality. What’s OK for anybody is based on what’s OK for everybody, which makes our strategies for changing this world look suspiciously similar to the world we’re trying to change. If we do in fact desire a radical break with what exists, let’s not trap ourselves in a framework aligned with the systems we want to destroy.

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Nonviolence is the only ideology that can comprehensively protect consensus reality against the antagonism of all who would transform it. By preemptively condemning anything that exceeds the parameters of civil discourse, it ensures that any resistance will ultimately strengthen the underlying framework of authority, and even passes responsibility for policing on to the loyal opposition. Liberal complicity with violent systems of control can be “nonviolent” according to this logic, because they accept the boundaries of legitimacy decreed by consensus reality. Just as every pacifist condemns armed struggle and insurrection against the state, the gains of every “nonviolent” movement and revolution they cite, from Dr. King to Gandhi, rested on a foundation of explicit or threatened state violence. We shake our heads at liberal reluctance to acknowledge that the state is fundamentally rather than incidentally violent, but that violence is woven so seamlessly into consensus reality that it simply doesn’t register.

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The violence so anxiously opposed by liberals is, by definition, that which ruptures consensus reality. And this is precisely why we consider that violence necessary: framing resistance as registering our “dissent” does not attack consensus reality but merely identifies our position within it. There are not opposing partisans within consensus reality—Republicans and Democrats, activists and reactionaries—but only partisans of consensus reality and partisans against it.

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In short, the liberal notion of consent is a barrier to revolution. By definition, breaking consensus reality cannot be consensual. We have to move beyond political consent discourse to imagine liberating strategies for transforming reality.

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Can We Rescue the Political Discourse of Consent?

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So liberal consent is a tool for defending consensus reality, useless to our project of liberation. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to give up on the discourse of consent itself. Are there ways to respond to these objections within a consent-based framework? Let’s explore some of the possible responses to liberal consent rhetoric.

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Decision-making should be weighted to prioritize the most affected. According to this principle, the greater the impact a decision will have on a person, the more leverage he or she should have in the decision-making process. For instance, the opinions of a poor neighborhood’s long-term residents should count for more than those of developers or wealthier newcomers when determining whether to build new condominiums. Thus, how consensual an action is depends not on whether every citizen, equal under the law, would check yes or no about it on a ballot; rather, individuals’ feelings are weighted proportionally according to how the consequences will impact them.

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This sidesteps some of the problems of negotiating political consent across power differentials; it looks attractive as a way to navigate conflicting priorities in a society based on values beyond the profit motive. But does this principle offer us useful guidance on how to get there? We can’t easily determine who will be most affected by strategies intended to create unpredictable situations so as to open up the horizon for transformation. Some activists see those most vulnerable to the potential consequences of militant tactics as the most impacted by any escalation beyond the confines of consensus reality politics. In practice, this concern can function to impose a tactical conservatism, reproducing the effect of liberal consensus and creating a dichotomy between resisting effectively and prioritizing others’ safety.2

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On the other hand, in trying to legitimize our efforts according to this principle, we sometimes fall into the trap of using the example of a few individuals who support an action to stand in for an entire imagined demographic. We ascribe a mythical authenticity to specific local, working-class, indigenous, or other people who express enthusiasm for our activities, implicitly writing off those who don’t. We make such supporters into a sort of prosthesis for ourselves that entitles us to act against the ostensible majority, imagining our chosen comrades to represent the most affected. Every activist has a preferred imaginary friend, whether the workers favored by IWW organizers, the West Virginia locals courted by opponents of mountaintop removal, or the extras in hip hop videos that insurrectionists hope will join them in the streets.

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This is not only tokenizing, but dangerous, as it can lead us to overestimate popular support for our actions. Yet it is supported by a variety of rationalizations: just because we don’t see public support doesn’t mean it isn’t there; the people who are most marginalized—who, we assume, are most likely to support our unpopular actions—are the least free to express that support publicly; and so on. There is some truth in these arguments. But when we gamble on this imaginary-friend fantasy as an effort to weigh by proxy the consent of the unrepresented—now represented by our presumed affinity with them—we’re just deluding ourselves.

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Decision-making must be broadened to include all the people impacted. Often, many of those who will be impacted by supposedly consensual decisions do not have appropriate leverage on them. For instance, the university’s board of governors can decide by consensus to raise tuition, but what kind of consensus is that without the participation of the students who’ll be paying it? If decisions included all stakeholders and elites couldn’t impose them by force, wouldn’t there be hope for a politics of consent?

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Unfortunately, this framework is more useful for preventing actions or challenging their validity after the fact than for initiating them. The impacts of our actions ripple out far beyond our ability to trace them or the range of lives they will touch. We cannot even hope to be aware of every person who would be impacted by a decision, much less solicit meaningful input from each of them to confirm or deny consensus. In practical terms, expanding the participation in decision-making to everyone affected would either require resorting to majority-rule democracy—not a consent-based framework—or accepting the impossibility of ever making decisions.

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Here we have to confront the reality that broad consensus on many issues will never exist. We might be able to agree about what to cook for dinner, but on the real questions about how to organize society and distribute resources, no consensus is possible today. In a class society stratified by white supremacy and patriarchy, our interests are fundamentally in conflict. Certainly we share many interests in common, and we can imagine worlds in which people aren’t pitted against one another in contests for status and survival. But we will not be able to desert this world by consensus.3

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We’re acting in self-defense. As this reasoning goes, the operation of oppressive institutions constitutes an attack on us, and we don’t need the consent of our attackers to defend ourselves. This harm isn’t always on a literal, direct, individual level, as in that specific Starbucks window makes my individual life increasingly precarious and impossible. In a hopelessly complex global economy that masks the root causes of the harm it creates, nearly any attempt to launch a defensive counterattack will seem either symbolic or misdirected. Still, in this sense, direct action can be framed as defending ourselves against violations of our consent by state and capital.

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But the rhetoric of direct action as self-defense doesn’t offer us much guidance for how to move forward. In this model, state and capital are the protagonists, and the various formulations of we that we self-defend the mere objects of their actions. We can only react, not strategize new initiatives. Furthermore, the framework of self-defense is based in the terms of liberal individualism, with our private personal rights beginning where those of another end. What is it that we’re defending? Our role in society as defined under capitalism and patriarchy? Our rights as dictated by the democratic state? To get free, we should be fighting to destroy our selves! Not our bodies and lives, of course, but our selfhood as it’s constituted by state and capital.

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If selfhood extends as far as the bank windows, if our selves overlap so extensively, we need another framework—we’re not just defending ourselves. At best, self-defense is a justification, not a praxis; at worst, it’s a disingenuous smokescreen that leaves us without a framework to evaluate our effectiveness.

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Consent has to be informed. In all consent-based ethical systems, medical, sexual, and otherwise, authentic consent requires full knowledge of the implications of a decision. On the political level, this criticism goes, if we all had access to complete information, we would make decisions differently. This is the basic hypothesis of liberalism: the best of all possible worlds will result when people have access to all relevant information and the means to discuss it openly in order to make rational decisions.

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The fatal flaw in this reasoning is that it fails to take power dynamics into account. When access to money and property determines our ability to act, under the rule of a state that reserves the sole right to employ violence, knowledge is not in fact power. Furthermore, it seems to demand a politics of total transparency, which would either preclude illegal activity or consign us all to the certainty of prison. An informed consent framework neither enables us to imagine how to achieve a consensus for revolution nor suffices to determine how much information to share with whom about the actions we take to fight for it.

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In concluding that the consent framework can’t accommodate our political needs, we’re not endorsing the violation of consent. Rather, we’re acknowledging that the consent framework has not been sufficient to transcend the self-defeating dichotomy between either respecting consent to such an extent that we can’t overthrow capitalism or disregarding it entirely. The point is to come up with a framework that solves those problems, not to throw out what gains we’ve made already.4

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In fact, our basis for opposing capitalism and hierarchy goes far beyond the claim that these systems operate without our consent. Ultimately, we fight for new worlds out of desire, and in order to move beyond the limitations of political consent discourse we have to look more closely at what desire is.

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Desire, Consent, and Politics

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What is desire? Let’s conceive of desires not as internal elements emanating from within individuals, but as autonomous forces that flow through them. Individuals don’t desire things; whole societies produce and circulate desires, even if those desires remain submerged in most people. The fundamental unit of our analysis is not the individual human being, but the desire, with humans as the medium.

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How can we conceive of desire and selfhood as they relate to consent and political action? The existing consent discourse presupposes static notions of self and desire. It presumes that desire is monolithic, composed of a single thrust rather than multiple pulls in different directions. When we have multiple desires, the desire that garners the plurality in our internal electoral process is assumed to be the only one that counts. Consent discourse presumes that what we want is knowable and can be articulated within the framework of our shared reality.

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In reality, the desires we experience are not fixed or unitary. They shift constantly based on our experiences and contexts. They are multiple, contradictory, and divergent, surprising us with their diversity, frustrating us with their mutability. They resist our attempts to confine or domesticate them. They simply can’t fit into a two-dimensional binary model of consent, wherein we either want something or we don’t. This realization is terrifying, but it opens up new ways of understanding the revolutionary project in relation to the consensus reality arrayed against us.

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The nature of desire is complex and centrifugal, in contrast to the simplifying and centripetal nature of interests. The traditional approach of the left is for organizers to assist constituencies in winning victories that build power, which will presumably be deployed towards increasingly radical ends. The goals of these victories are generally framed in terms of the interests of the constituency, not their desires. This is a clever trick: as interests appear to be an objective rather than subjective matter, it is easier for an outside managerial class to get away with defining and representing them. Interests can be framed as unitary, coherent, and integrative, whereas desires are multiple, inchoate, contradictory. Identity groups share interests; friends and lovers share desires. Interests are composed of calcified blocks of desire standardized to make sense within consensus reality.

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Not only is desire far more complex and unstable than our discourses allow, it’s also shaped by the conditions of our misery and exploitation. Even amid contradictions and chaos, the range of what it is possible to desire rarely escapes the confines of consensus reality. Who really imagines that in a free world, we’d dream of ergonomic chairs for our cubicles, more TV channels and brands of detergent, longer chains and softer cages? This is not to demean the struggles of those who fight for better conditions within this system. It’s just to say that we would be paltry revolutionaries indeed if we based our programs merely on the consensus desires of groups whose allies we want to be.

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The task of the revolutionary is not the task of the ally. We are not here to make the dreams of the proletariat come true. The proletariat is produced by capitalism, which we want to destroy. The task of the revolutionary is to shift our collective sense of the possible, so that our desires and the realities they drive us to create can shift in turn. We are here to transform reality beyond where our notions of consent can lead us. We need a different discourse to imagine the transformations that can open pathways out of consensus reality.

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Introducing Seduction

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There’s another framework that seems to be implied by our current practice, whether or not we acknowledge it. That framework is seduction.

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What is seduction? It’s a rather unsavory concept, bringing to mind manipulative attempts to induce others to let themselves to be used for one’s own ends. In a sexual context, it can imply either a romantic, charismatic, persuasive use of charm to propose a sexual encounter, or a way to trick someone into succumbing to one’s advances. The connotations are discomfiting, but the salient factor is the implication that the seducer creates a desire, rather than simply unearthing it. It is this sense that we find most interesting in considering the problems of desire and consensus reality on the political level.

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When we seduce, we present someone who ostensibly doesn’t want something with a new situation in which they may want it after all. Whereas consent focuses on obtaining the go-ahead for an external action—“Is this OK?”—seduction focuses internally, on desire: “Could you want this?” Our practices of seduction don’t aim to induce others to do things they don’t want to do, but to induce others to want to do them, in the most meaningful sense: to want to take on all the risks and pleasures they entail.

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Again, we don’t believe that we can persuade everyone to consent to our dreams of anarchist revolution; not only is the deck stacked against us, but the dealer, the table, and the whole house. We don’t buy into the idea that our goals are what everybody “really” wants, nor do we assume that everyone would adopt our views if only they had access to all the right information. We don’t claim to represent anyone beyond ourselves, nor to stand in for any silent majority; in that sense, anarchist revolution is not a democratic project. Nor do we, despairing of those things, decide that to be true to our principles we must give up on transforming society altogether and retreat into isolation among the few comrades with whom we can establish meaningful self-determined consensus. We don’t think it’s hopeless to resist in the face of the stranglehold of consensus reality. We want a different path forward, one that doesn’t assume desire to be fixed, that doesn’t rely on liberal consent.

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We neither wish to impose our will on others by force, nor to disregard their desires. Instead, we want to perform a kind of magic, an alchemical operation. We want to induce desires, not simply fulfill them.5

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As anarchists, our greatest strength lies not in the coherence and reason of our ideology, but in the passionate actions we undertake and the ungovernable lives we lead. Let’s not try to convert people to anarchism; let’s set out, with mischievous glee, to infect everyone around us with the anarchy that flows in our veins. Let’s produce situations in which anarchy is possible, even likely—even desirable to those who might not feel any inclination towards it today.

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How did you become an anarchist? Did you emerge from the womb in a black hoodie? Did you “always know” you were going to crave riots, stale bagels, and photocopy scams? If not, chances are you had some sort of experience that opened you to a sense of possibility you hadn’t previously been able to imagine. For me, it came at age 18, during the height of the anti-Iraq war protests, when I heard a vague rumor that I should show up at a certain concert. I did, and lo and behold, when it ended a group of maniacs appeared with drums and banners, and before I knew it I’d joined 200 others marching in the street, permits be damned. We were unstoppable. The blood boiled in my veins and I howled ecstatically until I lost my voice. Things were never the same again.

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Now, I’d participated in polite permitted marches before. If you’d asked me if I desired to go on a feisty unpermitted midnight march, I probably would have thought it sounded cool. But I didn’t actively desire it beforehand; if I’d been forthrightly invited, I might have declined out of anxiousness or indifference. The desire was generated by the context, the mystery, and the experience itself. I suspect that the key was that it was unexpected and illicit: it took me beyond myself, opening some door of desire that couldn’t be shut. Had someone asked me in advance whether I would consent to participate, that might have undermined the very sense of liberation I experienced.

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Trust me, I’m as uncomfortable with the implications of this as you are. But we need to look honestly at the transformative experiences that opened the door for us into radical politics and think about how we can construct and open those types of doors for others. If we’re not going to be a vanguard and we’re not going to convince everyone to join us through mere rational discourse, this might be what we’ve got to work with.

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Transformation, Invitation, Contagion

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How does seduction work? We hypothesize that seduction unfolds via three processes: transformation, invitation, and contagion. We transform circumstances, creating space for new possibilities and thus new desires to flourish; we invite others to participate in these new situations, to experiment with different modes of action and desire; and we infect others with curiosity, an insatiable desire for freedom, and the means to experiment towards it.

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We strive for transformation because if we desire on the basis of what we know, we can only induce new desires that exceed the confines of our current reality by shifting the conditions in which we live. Sometimes it can be as simple as doing things in the street without permits, or using a park or building for an entirely new purpose. Disobedience is crucial to transformation; nothing opens up a sense of possibility like literally breaking the rules. But our behavior is constrained by far more than traffic laws and zoning regulations; social norms, gender roles, and innumerable other systems shape how we act, and each way we’re constrained provides new terrain for transformation. The key lies in challenging what’s taken for granted in a way that opens up the possibility to act differently, and to imagine how the world would be different if those rules and borders were no longer fixed.

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Invitation requires neither persuasion via rational discourse nor imposition by force. Here we maintain the spirit of consent discourse, asserting our respect for the wishes of others and opposition to coercion. We aspire to a world based on voluntary association, in which participation is based on our own free choice rather than force or manipulation, and thus we aim to prefigure that world through our methods of creative resistance.

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This can take many forms: leaving the doors open in the occupied building, modeling mutual aid at public Really Really Free Markets, offering black bandanas and cans of paint as the march leaves the show. Of course, we can’t literally invite others to participate in many actions beforehand, either because they have to be organized clandestinely or because we honestly don’t know what will happen. But we can shape our actions to maximize the agency of potential participants.

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Seduction casts the invitee as the protagonist, the one whose agency counts—in contrast to consent discourse, which merely seeks permission. The whole point is for people to discover new desires, to want to do something they didn’t want before; they have to be in the driver’s seat for that to be possible. In this sense, we are using seduction to mean the opposite of its traditional negative connotation of trying to get something from people against their will or at their expense.

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Finally, we aspire to invite others into practices that will prove contagious: ideas that self-replicate, models that can be applied in a variety of circumstances, attitudes that prove infectious. Contagion ensures that rebellion isn’t restricted to activists, scenesters, or any other particular group. Only when revolt spreads so widely that it can no longer be quarantined to a specific demographic will anarchy move permanently beyond the anarchists. We succeed when others emerge from the spaces we create feeling more powerful. We win when the ruptures of possibility we open prove impossible to close.

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When Seduction Fails

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Unfortunately, our actions don’t always achieve these goals. Sometimes we try to cast spells of transformation and they fail.

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One way our efforts can go awry is when they position the organizing cabal as the protagonists rather than the invitees we hope to seduce into participation. In these cases, our actions don’t spread, but remain the province of a distinct group. For partisans of transformation, what counts is the circulation and contagion of subversive ideas and practices, not the power of a specific social body—be it anarchists or the Party.

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Sometimes when our seductions fail, those we’ve attempted to invite feel used rather than seduced. Over the years, this has proved one of the primary causes of the unpopularity of unilateral militant activity. It’s flattering to be offered a role as a protagonist in an exciting story, but it isn’t so pleasant to feel that others are trying to take advantage of you. When people speak with frustration in a debriefing conversation about the lack of consent implicit in how an action played out, we must understand that as a failure of seduction. When they speak of consent, they’re describing their reaction to the actions that took place; our analysis of seduction treats the desires underlying these as the center of gravity.

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Perhaps we can best understand such conflicts by reframing them: they are not merely contests between people with different desires, but contests between different desires playing out between people as well as within individuals. The failure of an unpopular action doesn’t stem from the fact that it failed to meet the desires of participants or bystanders. Rather, the action failed to enable subversive desires to arise or flow into new hosts. Critics who frame their objections in consent discourse may not be fundamentally opposed to the tactics in question after all; they may simply not feel that they had the chance to become protagonists in their own stories of rebellion.

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Into the Unknown

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What are anarchists good for? We don’t see ourselves as “the” revolutionary subject, nor its vanguard or representative. But that doesn’t mean we’re irrelevant to the struggles and upheavals around us. We up the ante and rep the anti; we call bluffs and take dares; we discover lines of flight out of consensus reality. We take risks to induce others to share them with us; we take care of each other so we can be dangerous together.

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Ultimately, the politics of seduction don’t rely on rational argumentation to influence people. We dive headlong into the terrifying fires of transformation, allowing strange passions to seize us. It’s not that these desires are “ours”; rather, we are theirs. We become lightning rods that crackle with flows of charged desire.

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Let’s not forget the importance of seducing ourselves with our actions. It’s frighteningly easy for activism to ossify into dreary, repetitive routines. Actions that don’t emerge out of our own desires are unlikely to seduce us or anyone else. Sure, some kids will be radicalized by the Food Not Bombs run by four burnt-out punks who resent every Sunday they spend in the kitchen. But we forge our deepest relationships of struggle in collectively experiencing the new, the exciting, the terrifying. It’s not only beautiful but strategic to live lives that push to the outermost edges of what’s possible.

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The stakes are high. From consent discourse, we retain the prioritization of caring for others and paying attention to their needs. We must never disregard the well-being of those we invite into zones of transformation; yet neither can we play it safe and allow consensus reality to dictate our range of possible dreams and actions. We cannot promise safety, but we can share in the danger of the unknown, in its pleasures and its risks.

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Contact the authors at terrorincognita@riseup.net.

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  1. \n

    For instance, within capitalist democracy, the very ability to speak “freely” seems to offer proof of the system’s justice by virtue of the state ensuring “free speech.” In anarchic social relations, our ability to speak freely justifies itself, needing no state to “protect” it or define its limits. When we frame expressing our desires as “exercising a right,” we define our legitimacy to act in terms of our relationship to the state, rather than asserting that our desires are inherently valid. ↩

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    This has happened again and again, from the post-inauguration march through Adams Morgan in Washington DC in 2005 to the Oscar Grant riots, any time collective action isn’t peaceful, legal, and fully pacified. People who are more vulnerable to state violence or other potential consequences of escalation—and, more often, self-appointed spokespeople whose privilege enables them to feel entitled to represent others—speak out against militant tactics. Since many anarchist agitators are shielded in part by the privileges of white skin, a male body, no children, and legal citizenship, it is held to be irresponsible to raise the stakes without the input of more vulnerable people who may be affected. Anarchists often counter that those shielded by privilege are precisely the ones who should put their bodies on the line. But in large mixed crowds with a potential for explosive conflict, the question of consent inevitably rears its head. Self-righteous leftists assume that the purpose of massing in the streets is simply to “speak truth to power,” but the rest of us have to grapple with how to precipitate conflict in ways that don’t reinforce the wedges our enemies would drive between us “bad protestors” and our potential comrades. ↩

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    One of the implications of this analysis is that we must unflinchingly recognize conflict as a reality. The vision we’re putting forward aims not just to create a world in which all is consensual. We strive to prioritize each other’s consent as much as possible, while recognizing that sometimes we really are in conflict, and we have to acknowledge conflicts rather than sweeping them under the rug of an imposed consensus. Our ideal is not a world without conflict, but a world in which conflicts don’t produce hierarchies and oppression. We envision associations that can come together and break apart according to our desires; unlike the state, these would require no imposed consensus. ↩

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    Also, what does this imply in the realm of sexuality? Remember, our goal in acknowledging the limitations of consent discourse is not to discard it entirely but to determine where it can take us and where else we need to go. Consent provides us with crucial tools for treating each other with care in sexual interactions. At the same time, we can challenge simplistic notions of desire: some of our most deeply erotic moments occur not when we finally achieve a desire previously fixed within us, but when we experience unexpected and unprecedented forms of pleasure. Perhaps insights from our discourse of political seduction can offer perspective on our sexuality, but we maintain our allegiance to consent discourse in sex. Our critique of political consent discourse isn’t abstract, but based on its tactical shortcomings, the limitations of what it allows us to do and imagine. By contrast, sexual consent discourse has proven its utility in our daily lives, inducing us to examine our desires and transform how we relate to each other erotically. ↩

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    5. \n
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    Wait, there’s nothing liberating about attempting to induce desires in others. That’s the function of the advertising industry, the lever of demand that has driven capitalism over the past century. Democracy purports to be a marketplace of ideas where we can all talk about what we want and then decide; different configurations of desire are constantly at war. Ad firms don’t just create specific desires, they enforce a mode of desiring that can be routed through the consumer economy. Propaganda, subliminal messaging, induced addiction, outright violence: these comprise a brutal arsenal aimed at us every moment of the day. Around the globe, the military clears the path for neoliberal pillaging, while NGOs get into the business of inducing people to want to be successful at generating currencies that can be exchanged on the global market. Ought we not be suspicious of a project framed in such transparently manipulative terms? As grim as it looks, this vista reveals that if we are not partisans of certain modes of desiring, we will remain objects rather than subjects within these desiring wars. We cannot retreat into essentialist notions of unearthing our “true” desires from some internal vault, nor a pseudo-Buddhist project of extinguishing desire on an individual level while the world burns. What sets us apart is that we strive to create a world in which every person can realize her unique potential on her own terms, rather than simply pushing for this or that option within the current conditions. ↩

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    6. \n
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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/04/17/accounting-for-ourselves-breaking-the-impasse-around-assault-and-abuse-in-anarchist-scenes", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2013/04/17/accounting-for-ourselves-breaking-the-impasse-around-assault-and-abuse-in-anarchist-scenes", "title": "Accounting for Ourselves : Breaking the Impasse Around Assault and Abuse in Anarchist Scenes", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2013-04-17T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "\n
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Sexual assault and abuse continue to plague anarchist circles and spaces. In response, we’ve developed processes to hold each other accountable outside of the state. But why can’t we seem to get them right? This essay examines the context in which these community accountability models emerged and analyzes the pitfalls we’ve encountered in trying to apply them. To move beyond the impasse around sexual violence within our scenes, we need to challenge the idea of community itself and take our resistance in new directions.

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Introduction

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“I don’t believe in accountability anymore… my anger and hopelessness about the current model are proportional to how invested I’ve been in the past. Accountability feels like a bitter ex-lover to me… the past ten years I really tried to make the relationship work, but you know what?”

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— Angustia Celeste,

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“Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability”

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Getting Started: Origins and Purpose

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Sexual assault and abuse tear us apart. They fracture our communities, ruin individual lives, sabotage projects and organizing, reveal nasty contradictions between our supposed ideals and our actual practices, and maintain a climate of fear and oppression, especially for women. Sexual assault is political; it is a function of patriarchy, not just an individual harm done by individual people (usually men) to others (most often women). Sexual assault and abuse, partner violence, child abuse, and sexual harassment are primary ways that men physically impose domination over women. Sexualized violence helps to maintain patriarchy, heterosexism, trans oppression, ageism and oppression of youth, racist colonialism, and genocide. The struggle against sexual assault and abuse is essential for revolutionary transformation.

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The accountability process model has been one of the primary tools used by anarchists to address assault and abuse in recent years. This essay analyzes this model in hopes of provoking honest, self-critical discussion about how we respond to assault and abuse within anarchist scenes, and imagining directions to move forward.

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This article is NOT intended to serve as an accessible introduction to community accountability processes; it assumes that you have some knowledge of what they are and how they work (or don’t work). It draws specifically on North American anarchist, punk, and radical activist subcultures and presumes that the reader understands their context and language. If you don’t, try reading some of the sources cited below before this one. If you’re an anarchist and you’ve had some experience with efforts to respond to assault and abuse within your scene under the label of “accountability,” this is intended for you.

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Gender Frameworks

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Gender is complicated; some folks we might perceive as male or female don’t identify that way, and some don’t identify as either. In referring to “men” or “women,” we mean folks who identify that way, whether cisgender or transgender. Throughout this essay, both survivors and people who’ve assaulted or abused others are referred to in general using “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun. Assault and abuse can be committed by anyone against anyone, across gender lines; sometimes cis women, trans men and women, and genderqueer folk assault, and often cis men are survivors as well. But this acknowledgment should not erase the fact that the vast majority of folks who abuse and assault are cis men, and the majority of folks they abuse and assault are women.

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Sexual assault and abuse are neither gender-specific (i.e., they can only happen by or to people of a certain gender) nor gender-neutral (i.e., the gender of a person who assaults or is assaulted is irrelevant to the conversation). We must understand the gendered patterns of assault and abuse as an expression of patriarchal domination, without making invisible experiences that fall outside of that gendered framework.

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Restorative and Transformative Justice

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In speaking about accountability processes, we’re referring to collective efforts to address harm—in this case, sexual assault and abuse—that focus not on punishment or legal “justice” but on keeping people safe and challenging the underlying social patterns and power structures that support abusive behavior. In the loosest sense, this might simply mean a few friends sticking up for someone who’s been hurt: asking them what they need, and trying to negotiate for those needs with the person who hurt them and among the community they share. Some processes involve a group that mediates between an individual and the person calling them out, or separate groups supporting each person and facilitating communication between them. These processes usually involve setting out conditions or “demands” for the person who’s been called out as a means of restoring safety or trust and preventing the harm from happening again, and some method for following up to ensure that these demands are met. All of these different approaches share an intention to address the harm done directly without relying on the state.

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Community accountability appeals to anarchists as a critical alternative to the adversarial framework of the criminal “justice” system. According to this framework, two parties in conflict are assumed to have opposite interests; the state considers itself the aggrieved party and thus acts as mediator; and “justice” means deciding which person is correct and which person suffers consequences—which are determined by the state, and usually unrelated to the actual harm done or its root causes. In contrast, restorative justice focuses on the needs of the ones harmed and those who did harm, rather than the need to satisfy the abstract principles of law or to exact punishment. Folks who’ve been harmed play an active role in resolving a dispute, while those who harm are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions and repair the harm they’ve done. It is based on a theory of justice that sees “crime” and wrongdoing as an offense against individuals or communities rather than the state. Many of the current working models for restorative justice originated in Maori and North American indigenous communities.

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Building on that framework, the transformative justice model links restorative justice’s focus on rectifying harm rather than strengthening state power with a critique of systematic oppression. According to Generation Five, an organization that grounds their work to end child sexual abuse in this model, the goals of transformative justice are:

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The anarchist practice of community accountability rests in theory on these underlying principles, along with the DIY ethic and a focus on direct action.

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Where We’re At

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Anarchist Community Accountability: Recent History and the Current State of Things

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How did this set of practices around responding to sexual assault and abuse emerge? In the 1990s and early 2000s, women and other survivors responded to assault and abuse in a variety of ways, including making zines calling people out to distribute at shows, discussing their experiences amongst themselves, warning people in other communities about repeat assaulters, and in some cases physically confronting them. The Hysteria Collective based in the Portland, OR area represented one of the early structural attempts to respond to sexual assault, producing and distributing literature, challenging the presence of abusive men in the punk scene, and organizing a conference. In other towns, folks formed girl gangs for self-defense and concerted confrontational action. However, more often than not, such efforts were isolated, belief in rape myths persisted amongst anarchists (especially men), and survivors who attempted to speak out were ignored, shunned, dismissed for distracting attention from more important issues, or blamed for COINTELPRO-style divisiveness.

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In response, anarchist women and others worked to encourage anarchist scenes to take sexual assault and abuse seriously and promote a culture of consent. Much of this spread through zine culture, particularly Cindy Crabb’s Doris and Support zines; also, workshops began appearing at radical conferences discussing survivor support, consent, and positive sexuality. Men’s groups began to organize against sexual violence in some radical scenes, such as the Dealing With Our Shit (DWOS) collective founded in Minneapolis in 2002. A major turning point occurred at the 2004 Pointless Fest in Philadelphia, where concert organizers publicly announced that three women had been raped at the event and established collectives to support the survivors and figure out how to deal with the rapists. These collectives became Philly’s Pissed and Philly Stands Up, long-standing separate but collaborating collectives devoted respectively to survivor support and assaulter intervention.

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Assault, accountability, and consent became topics at nearly all anarchist conferences and gatherings. Many distros began to carry zines on the subject, touring bands spoke from stage about it, and anarchists in many other cities formed support and accountability collectives. Organizers of mass mobilizations began to develop plans for response, culminating in a full-scale sexual assault response infrastructure at the anti-G20 convergence in Pittsburgh in 2009.

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So how do things stand today? Terms such as “consent,” being “called out,” “accountability process,” and “perpetrator” are in wide use, to the point of becoming the subject of jokes. A great many people have been called out for abusive behavior, and dozens of accountability processes are ongoing in various stages. An identity politics around the labels “survivor” and “perpetrator” has emerged, with scenes polarizing around them. In spite of efforts to caution against this and encourage all participants in accountability processes to remain self-critical, these labels have sometimes been used to leverage power, dispense or deny legitimacy, and erase differences in experience.

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Philly Stands Up continues their work, getting paid by colleges to lead trainings on their model and functioning as a sort of semi-formal sexual assaulter surveillance organization, with folks from around the country contacting them for updates on different ongoing processes. They networked with other groups doing transformative justice work at the US Social Forum in Detroit and hosted a three-day training for community accountability organizers in January 2011. Numerous other similar collectives have been attempted among anarchists in other cities, though few have had the longevity or prominence of PSU. As more and more intra-scene communication moves onto the internet, a number of websites (most prominently anarchistnews.org) have become major hubs for shit-talking around the politics of assault and accountability. Websites have also appeared giving information about specific individuals who have assaulted or abused others.

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Most anarchist gatherings now issue guidelines about consent and sexual assault response, and often address the presence of people involved in accountability processes. Based on the policies developed by sexual assault response organizers at the 2009 Pittsburgh anti-G20 mobilization, organizers at the 2010 anti-IMF mobilizations in Washington DC posted an announcement stating “No Perpetrators Welcome.” It explained that in an effort to make the demos safe for survivors, “people who have perpetrated in the past, people running away from accountability processes, and people who refuse to respect the IMF Resistance Network consent guidelines” were prohibited from all organizing spaces and events. More recently, organizers for the 2012 Toronto Anarchist Book Fair echoed this language banning all perpetrators, but added:

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We understand and respect that communities have engaged in their own processes around these incidents. If you have gone through an accountability process and the survivor, joined by the community, feels you have sufficiently dealt with your shit, this statement does not include you.

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Likewise, the organizers of the 2012 New York Anarchist Book Fair banned:

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People who have perpetrated inter-personal violence, assault and/or harassment unless they are actively engaged in an accountability process and currently in compliance with all the terms and/or demands of that process (according to the facilitators, the survivor, and/or whomever’s been designated to monitor the agreements emerging from the process).

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A major source of controversy has been the pre-emptive banning of individuals who’ve been called out for sexual assault or abuse from anarchist gatherings. In recent years, survivors and their supporters have increasingly requested for particular individuals who have sexually assaulted others to be banned from upcoming events. Organizers have struggled to prioritize believing survivors without pre-emptively condemning people, and to balance transparency against privacy and avoiding retraumatization. An internet brouhaha emerged when a person online posted an email they had received from organizers of the New York Anarchist Book Fair, asking them not to attend without specifying the reason. Some interpreted the email as a Kafkaesque, authoritarian presumption of guilt through anonymous rumor, while others defended it as an effort to remain neutral while attempting to secure a sense of safety for other attendees.

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While controversies persist around our methods of response to sexual assault, norms around sexuality have shifted significantly within anarchist scenes in recent years. Discourses of consent have expanded, while information about assault, survivor support, and options for accountability has become increasingly available. This has noticeably changed how we conduct sexual relationships, relate to our own bodies, and respond to survivors. Compared to previous years, many anarchists have become more conscious of sexual power dynamics and increasingly empowered to communicate boundaries and desires.

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However, sometimes abusers in anarchist communities “talk the talk” of consent and support while doing the same old shit. As the author of “Is the Anarchist Man Our Comrade?” challenges:

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Accountability processes often do a lot of good but sometimes they just teach men how to appear unabusive when nothing’s changed but the words coming out of their mouth. Survivors and friends are left wondering if said male is no longer a threat. Eventually the issue recedes from peoples’ minds because they don’t want to seem overly reactionary and don’t know what further steps to even take and the perpetrator is able to continue on in their life without much changing.

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How can we prevent these discourses from being appropriated by the sensitive anarcha-feminist sexual assaulter? It seems that the availability of community accountability processes hasn’t changed the patterns of behavior they were developed to address. What isn’t working here?

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Ten Pitfalls of Community Accountability Processes

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Two important qualifications: first, these are pitfalls of accountability processes as they’re actually practiced, as we’ve experienced them. Some of these pitfalls aren’t inherent to these processes, but are simply mistakes commonly made by people who undertake them. One might respond to many of these critiques by saying, “Well, if people actually applied the model as it’s intended, that wouldn’t happen.”

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Fair enough; but for any such model to be widely relevant and applicable, it has to be robust enough to be able to succeed even when conditions aren’t optimal, or when folks don’t or can’t follow the model perfectly. So bear in mind that these pitfalls don’t imply that our accountability models are futile or doomed. On the contrary, because we’re invested in figuring out how to end assault and abuse, we have to be unflinchingly critical in examining efforts to do so.

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Second, the things people frequently say to avoid responsibility should not be mistaken for problems with accountability processes. For example: “This stuff distracts us from the real revolutionary issues; it’s divisive and hurts the movement; holding people accountable is manipulative/coercive/overemphasized/a power grab,” and so forth. These are not pitfalls of accountability processes; these are problems of patriarchy and its supposedly anarchist apologists.

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That said, here are some of the major difficulties we’ve encountered in the processes we’ve developed to hold each other accountable for sexual assault and abuse within anarchist scenes.

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1) There is no clear sense of when it’s over, or what constitutes success or failure. When can we say definitively that a certain person has “worked on their shit”? What will allow a survivor and their supporters to feel comfortable with someone continuing to participate in a shared community? When expectations aren’t explicit, goals aren’t concrete, or the time-line and means of assessment aren’t clear, confusion and frustration can follow for everyone involved.

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This often happens because we have so little experience with alternative modes of resolving conflict and addressing harm that we don’t know what to look for. For instance, even if a person has “been accountable,” the survivor may or may not necessarily feel better. Does this determine the success or failure of a process? If someone has done all the things asked of them, but others aren’t sure if the steps taken were effective, what could confirm that real change has taken place? It may or may not actually be possible to restore trust after harm has been done; if not, this may not be the right type of process to undertake.

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Likewise, past what point can we agree that someone has NOT worked on their shit, and we shouldn’t bother wasting our time on it anymore? Some accountability processes drag on for months and years, diverting collective energy from other more fulfilling and useful ends. One stubborn sexist can sour an entire scene on making good faith efforts to hold folks accountable—which goes to show how important it is to know when to end an attempted process before it drags everyone down with it. If we’re going to invest so much time and energy in these processes, we need a way to assess if it’s worthwhile, and when to admit failure. And that requires determining what failure would mean: for instance, kicking someone out of a scene, trying other modes of response, or admitting to a survivor that we can’t enforce their demands.

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2) Standards for success are unrealistic. For instance, the common demand that someone work on their proverbial shit is either too vague to be meaningful, or practically translates to a profound psychological transformation beyond the bounds of what we can achieve. As the article “Thinking Through Perpetrator Accountability” puts it:

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Perpetrator accountability is not an easy or short process… It takes a lifelong commitment to change behaviors that are so deeply ingrained; it requires consistent effort and support. When talking about follow-up, we should be making schedules for weeks, but also talking about checking in after months and years. It takes that kind of long-lasting support to make real transformation possible.

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Let’s be frank: if we expect people to remain involved in an accountability process for some scumbag they don’t even like for years, and we expect this as a norm for an increasing number of processes for different people, who may or may not be cooperative—we are not setting a realistic standard.

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That’s not to say that the article is wrong; transformation of patriarchal and abusive behavior patterns is a lifelong process. But is it really a surprise that we fail to sustain these difficult, unrewarding processes stretching over such lengths of time, when few anarchists in our scene follow through on long-term commitments to even our most fervent passions? What can we realistically commit to doing?

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3) We lack the collective ability to realize many demands. We can say we’re committed to meeting survivor demands, but that’s just empty rhetoric when that would require resources we don’t have. Do we know of suitably anti-authoritarian feminist counselors and therapy programs, and can we pay for them when the person called out can’t? Can we enforce our wishes on someone who isn’t cooperative—and as anarchists, should we? What consequences can we enact that actually matter? In a transient subculture, can we realistically commit to following up with someone for years into the future, and establishing structures of support and accountability that will last that long?

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One phrase commonly used in survivor demands and support discourse is “safe space,” that ever-elusive place in which survivors will be able to feel comfortable and fully reintegrated into collective life. What does safety mean? Is it something that we can promise? From reading the policies of recent anarchist gatherings, it appears that the primary method of securing safe space involves excluding people who have harmed others. But safety means more than quarantining those who have ruptured it for particular people, since rape culture and patriarchy suffuse all of our lives—they’re not just the result of a few bad apples. While exclusion can shield survivors from the stress of sharing space with people who’ve harmed them, and help to protect folks in our community from repeatedly abusive people, exclusion falls painfully short of safety. In fact we may rely on banning others from spaces less because it keeps people safe than because it’s one of the only safety-related demands we can actually enforce.

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In the essay “Safety is an Illusion,” Angustia Celeste condemns the “false promises of safe space”:

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We can’t provide survivors safe space; safe space in a general sense, outside of close friendships, some family and the occasional affinity, just doesn’t exist… there is no such thing as safe space under patriarchy or capitalism in light of all the sexist, hetero-normative, racist, classist (etc.) domination that we live under. The more we try and pretend safety can exist at a community level, the more disappointed and betrayed our friends and lovers will be when they experience violence and do not get supported.

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What would genuine safety for survivors and for all of us look like? Are there other strategies in that direction that we can enact beyond exclusion and ostracism?1

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4) We lack skills in counseling, mediation, and conflict resolution. Often survivor demands include finding a counselor or mediator. To be effective, this person should be willing to work for free or on a sliding scale; hold anti-authoritarian politics and a survivor-conscious feminist analysis; have the time and energy to take an active role in working with someone over a long period of time; and be close enough to the community to understand its norms, without being directly involved in the situation. How many of these people are there? How many of us even have basic active listening skills, let alone the ability to navigate complex dynamics of consent and assault, patriarchal conditioning, anti-authoritarian conflict resolution, and psychological transformation? And for those few who do fit the bill, or at least come close, how many aren’t already swamped and overwhelmed?

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Perhaps this is everyone’s fault for not collectively prioritizing these skill sets. Fine, but what do we do right now? And how do we avoid creating a division of labor where folks with a certain set of skills or lingo become akin to authorities within anarchist versions of judicial processes?

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5) This stuff depresses people and burns them out. It’s intense, emotionally draining work to engage in community accountability, often with little appreciation or compensation. It can be exhausting and unrewarding, particularly when the processes rarely succeed in keeping a community intact while satisfying all participants. The gravity of the work scares people off, and understandably so.

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This isn’t to say that we should try to make community accountability for sexual assault and abuse fun and lighthearted. But we need to acknowledge that this is a barrier to people stepping up and staying committed for the long-term involvement we’re saying is necessary for success. And these problems are magnified when we rely on skills and experience that only a few people in our circles have.

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6) Accountability processes suck up disproportionate time and energy. None of us signed up for anarchy because we love participating in exhausting, interminable processes to address the stupid ways people hurt each other within our subcultural bubbles. We became anarchists because we hate cops, because we love punk shows, because we want a freer world, and for a million other reasons. When we spend so much time and energy trying to resolve internal conflicts and convince intransigent sexists to take responsibility for changing their behavior, we risk cutting ourselves off from the passions that brought us together in the first place.

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It’s easy to get demoralized about anarchist politics when we can’t even stop assaulting each other, let alone smash the state and abolish capitalism. It’s not that working to end sexual assault and patriarchy is not revolutionary—on the contrary! But if accountability processes⎯particularly frustrating and unsuccessful ones⎯come to occupy too much of our collective energy, we’re not likely to stay engaged and bring new folks into our struggles.

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We can’t sweep assault and abuse under the rug and silence survivors in the name of false unity. This previous norm perpetuated oppression and made us less effective all around, prompting community accountability efforts to emerge in the first place. We have to find a way to deal with our abusive behavior that doesn’t swallow up all of our energy and demoralize us.

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7) Subcultural bonds are weak enough that people just drop out. Bear in mind that many of the less coercive models of restorative justice on which community accountability frameworks are based originated in smaller-scale indigenous societies, with stronger social and cultural affinities than most any of us in the current United States can imagine. The notion that we should attempt to preserve the community and allow folks who’ve hurt others to remain integrated into it relies on the assumption that all parties are invested enough in this “community” to endure the scrutiny and difficult feelings that accompany going through an accountability process. The affinities that draw people into punk and anarchist scenes often aren’t strong enough to keep people rooted when they feel threatened by what they’re asked to do. Folks who’ve been called out often just pick up and leave town, sometimes even preemptively before they’re called to account for their shitty behavior. Short of communicating with similar social networks in the assaulter’s new destination (which happens increasingly often), there’s not much we can do to prevent that. When the primary consequences we can exact for noncompliance with accountability demands involve forms of ostracism and exclusion, people will avoid these by skipping town or dropping out.2

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8) Collective norms encourage and excuse unaccountable behavior. Our individual choices always occur in a social context, and some of the collective norms of anarchist scenes facilitate, if not directly justify, kinds of behavior that have often led to boundary-crossing and calling out.

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For example, in many anarchist scenes, a culture of intoxication predominates and most social gatherings center around alcohol and drug use. Few safeguards exist when folks drink or use to excess, and few alternative spaces exist for those who want to stop or reduce their drinking or using without losing their social lives. Humor and conversation norms reinforce the notion that extreme drunkenness is normal and funny, and that people are less responsible for their actions while drunk then while sober. Weekend after weekend, we create highly sexualized spaces with strong pressure to get intoxicated, resulting in groups of people too drunk or high to give or receive solid consent.3 Then in the aftermath of the harm caused in those situations, we expect individuals to deal with the consequences of their choices on their own, rather than all of us taking responsibility for the collective context that normalizes their behavior.

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Of course, none of these dynamics excuse abuse. But sexual assault takes place in a social context, and communities can take or avoid responsibility for the kinds of behavior our social norms encourage. Alcohol and drug use is just one example of a group norm that excuses unaccountable behavior. Other entrenched dynamics that folks seeking accountability have cited as hindering their efforts include the idolization of scene celebrities (people in popular bands, renowned activists, etc.); the notion that sexual and romantic relationships are “private” and not the business of anyone outside of them; and the belief that groups who face systematic oppression (such as queers and people of color) shouldn’t “air the dirty laundry” of intra-community violence, since it could be used to further demonize them.

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Are we willing to examine and challenge our group norms on a collective level, to see how they promote or discourage accountable behavior? Is it possible to hold entire scenes collectively accountable for what we condone or excuse? Attempting to hold a whole group of people accountable in some structured way would likely multiply all of the problems we experience with accountability processes oriented around a single person. Yet without acknowledging and challenging our collective responsibility, holding individuals accountable won’t be enough.

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9) The residue of the adversarial justice system taints our application of community accountability models. Some of the most vitriolic backlash against accountability processes has been directed at their pseudo-judicial nature. On the one hand, folks who’ve harmed others rarely have experience being called to account for their behavior except via authoritarian systems; attempts to do so often prompt accusations of “witch-hunts,” “authoritarianism,” and cop/judge/lawyer/prison guard-like behavior. Previously anti-state militants often do miraculous turnarounds, suddenly becoming extremely interested in the US government’s guarantees of “justice”: “Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty, man? Don’t I get a fair trial? Can’t I defend myself? Listen to my character witnesses!”

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On the other hand, folks pursuing accountability have received similar conditioning into adversarial conflict resolution, so it can be very easy to fall into that mode of framing the process—especially when faced with an infuriatingly stubborn anarcho-rapist. Some participants have used accountability processes as a way to threaten consequences or leverage power over others. While this may be an understandable response to the frustration and powerlessness often felt in the aftermath of abuse and assault, it can undermine attempts to pursue non-adversarial solutions.

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A damning critique of the failure of anarchist accountability processes to escape the logic of the legal system comes in a communiqué explaining why a group of women physically confronted a sexual assaulter:

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We did what had to be done out of sheer necessity. As radicals, we know the legal system is entrenched in bullshit—many laws and legal processes are racist, classist, heterosexist and misogynist. Alternative accountability processes, much like the traditional ones, often force the survivor to relive the trauma of the assault and force her to put her reputation—a problematic concept in itself—on the line as “proof” of her credibility. They end up being an ineffective recreation of the judicial process that leaves the perpetrator off the hook, while the survivor has to live through the memory of the assault for the rest of her life. The US legal system and the alternative community-based accountability processes are simply not good enough for survivors, and certainly not revolutionary.

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10) Sexual assault accountability language and methods are used in situations for which they were not intended. One example of this misapplication involves the widespread use of the principle of rape crisis survivor support specifying that supporters should “always believe the survivor.” This makes perfect sense in a rape crisis organization setting, solely focused on providing emotional support and services to an individual who’s experienced a form of trauma that is widely disbelieved, when being believed is instrumental to the healing process. But this doesn’t make sense as a basis for conflict resolution. In rape crisis counseling settings, or when someone discloses to you as a trusted friend seeking support, the focus should remain on the needs of the survivor. But transformative justice involves taking into account the needs and thus the experiences and perspectives of all parties involved, including the person who assaulted.

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This does not mean that we have to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s lying; that’s the residue of the adversarial system again. Nor does this mean that all perspectives are equally valid and no one is right or wrong. It does mean that to encourage someone to be accountable, we have to be willing to meet them where they’re at, which means accepting that one person’s experience can vary significantly from that of someone else. Being accountable requires being open to the possibility that one is wrong, or at minimum that someone else could experience the same event in a dramatically different, hurtful way. But having the survivor entirely define the operating reality may not lend itself to this mode of community accountability.

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Another example of the overuse and misapplication of sexual assault accountability discourse comes when people call others into accountability processes for a wide range of behaviors that aren’t sexual assault. For instance, if someone feels angry and hurt after the breakup of a non-abusive relationship, it might be tempting to frame their grievances through the lens of calling someone out and demanding accountability. It could take the form of demanding that someone be banned from certain spaces, drawing on the gravity this exerts as a common accountability process demand. It’s understandable that folks who feel angry or hurt for any number of reasons might want the kind of instant validation of their feelings that can come (in some circles) from framing one’s hurt and anger as a call-out requiring “accountability”—whether or not that process and language makes sense for the situation.4

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This is dangerous not only because these terms and tactics were designed for certain types of conflicts and not others, but also because their overuse may trivialize them and lead others to treat dismissively the very serious situations of assault and abuse for which they were developed. It’s encouraging that issues of sexual assault and abuse have entered so widely into the discourses of radical communities. But we should be careful to avoid generalizing the methods developed for responding to one specific set of conflicts and oppressive behaviors to other situations for which they weren’t intended.

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In some cases, folks frustrated by someone’s problematic behavior have even felt reluctant to call the person out on it for fear of that person being labeled a “perpetrator,” or of others presuming the hurtful but mild form of non-consensual behavior to have been sexual assault, and thus the person addressing it to be a “survivor.” When this overuse of sexual assault accountability language dovetails with the identity politics around survivor/perpetrator and policies such as the “no perps allowed” statement, this effort to promote accountability could end up discouraging people from speaking out against other forms of crummy behavior, for fear of someone being permanently tarred with the “perp” brush rather than having a few conversations, apologizing, and reading a zine.

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New Directions and Further Questions

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So where do we go from here? The widespread disillusionment with accountability processes suggests that we’ve reached an impasse. We’re proposing four possible paths to explore—not as solutions to these pitfalls so much as directions for experimenting to see if they can lead to something new.

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Direction 1: Survivor-Led Vigilantism

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“I wanted revenge. I wanted to make him feel as out of control, scared and vulnerable as he had made me feel. There is no safety really after a sexual assault, but there can be consequences.” -Angustia Celeste, “Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability”

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Two situations in which prominent anarchist men were confronted and attacked by groups of women in New York and Santa Cruz made waves in anarchist circles in 2010. The debates that unfolded across our scenes in response to the actions revealed a widespread sense of frustration with existing methods of addressing sexual assault in anarchist scenes. Physical confrontation isn’t a new strategy; it was one of the ways survivors responded to their abusers before community accountability discourse became widespread in anarchist circles. As accountability strategies developed, many rejected physical confrontation because it hadn’t worked to stop rape or keep people safe. The trend of survivor-led vigilantism accompanied by communiqués critiquing accountability process models reflects the powerlessness and desperation felt by survivors, who are searching for alternatives in the face of the futility of the other available options.

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However, survivor-led vigilantism can be a valid response to sexual assault regardless of the existence of alternatives. One doesn’t need to feel powerless or sense the futility of other options to take decisive physical action against one’s abuser. This approach offers several advantages. For one, in stark contrast to many accountability processes, it sets realistic goals and succeeds at them. It can feel more empowering and fulfilling than a long, frequently triggering, overly abstract process. Women can use confrontations to build collective power towards other concerted anti-patriarchal action. Physical confrontation sends an unambiguous message that sexual assault is unacceptable. If sexual violence imprints patriarchy on the bodies of women, taking revenge embodies female resistance. Above all, it’s unmediated; as the author of the article “Notes on Survivor Autonomy and Violence” wrote:

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A common criticism of accountability processes of all varieties is their tendency to mirror some sort of judicial system—structured mediation toward rehabilitation or punishment of one kind or another. While an outcome dictated by the survivor is certainly not akin to one dictated by the state, the process remains a mediation. Conversely, to move away from this judiciary is to reject mediation, a remnant of the idea that our interactions must be somehow guided by third parties, even third parties we choose ourselves. To that end, an attack on one’s rapist is unmediated and direct, precisely that which any judicial system forbids; the line between desire and action is erased.

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Of course, there are plenty of disadvantages to vigilantism, too. Choosing to escalate the situation brings serious risks, both legally and physically. Cops are more likely to bring charges for a group physical assault on a man than an “alleged” sexual assault. And, as advocates for battered women know, partner violence has a very real possibility to turn deadly; more women are killed by their partners than by any other type of attacker. Beyond the immediate risks, you can’t beat up a social relationship, as they say; throttling an individual scumbag doesn’t do much to make anyone safer or end systematic rape culture, however satisfying it may feel to a vindicated survivor. As mentioned above, the desire to address the roots of rape culture in responding to individual assaults helped give rise to community accountability efforts in the first place.

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There’s also a legacy of non-survivor-accountable vigilantism, a type of male violence that has been widely identified by survivors and anarchist women as being more about masculine ego trips than promoting healing and safety. A critique of this phenomenon comes from Supporting a Survivor of Sexual Assault, a zine oriented towards male allies of survivors, in its discussion of the principle “No More Violence”:

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Is kicking a rapist’s ass going to make the rape not have happened? Will his pain make the survivor’s go away? Does the survivor need to be trying to chill out another out-of-control, violent man? Probably not.

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Since non-trans men commit the overwhelming majority (some say over 99%) of sexual assaults, men who are supporting a survivor need to be especially conscious of the impact of male violence. It is male violence that causes rape, not what ends it. Your actions must be those of ending male violence.

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We cannot speak for the responses that survivors, women in particular, may make to rape. If women, as a majority of survivors, decide to collectively respond in a way that involves violence or asking male supporters to participate in violence; that is something for women and survivors to work out for themselves. For men who are supporting a survivor, however, it is absolutely essential that you put aside your desires for masculine retribution and interrupt the cycle of male violence… It is not your responsibility, or right, to come in vigilante-style and take matters into your own hands.

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This critique influenced the decision of groups like DWOS in Minneapolis to adopt “non-violence” as a principle. Notice, however, that this critique intentionally does not apply to survivor-led vigilantism, but to unaccountable non-survivor responses.

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Apologists for anarchist men attacked by survivor-led groups claim that vigilantism is authoritarian: “Accountability cannot be a one-way street or else it becomes a synonym for punitive and policing power.” But as the survivor communiqués make clear, vigilantism is not a form of “accountability,” at least not community accountability based on transformative justice as it’s generally conceived within anarchist circles; it’s an explicit rejection of it. It’s not a pseudo-judicial process; it declines both state-based and non-state methods of conflict resolution in favor of a direct, unmediated response to harm. Whether or not we think it’s appropriate, it shouldn’t be mistaken for a form of accountability gone wrong. On the contrary, it’s an intentional response to the perceived failure of accountability methods.

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So long as our practices around accountability for sexual assault and abuse don’t successfully meet folks’ needs, vigilantism will continue, challenging anarchist advocates of transformative justice to make their ideals a reality. Should we be trying to develop sufficiently effective accountability responses so that vigilantism isn’t necessary? Or should we be developing and extending our practices of survivor-led physical confrontation?

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Direction 2: Prevention Through Gender-Based Organizing

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It’s an obvious point, but worth making: instead of spending all this energy trying to figure out how to support people who’ve been assaulted and respond to those who assault, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on preventing all this assaulting in the first place? Easier said than done, of course. But so far, we’ve only discussed reactive, after-the-fact responses to forms of harm that we’re assuming will continue, even as we figure out better ways to react.

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To borrow the language of the nonprofit rape crisis center world, responding to assaults and working with assaulters through accountability processes falls under intervention, or tertiary prevention. Primary prevention entails preventing first-time assault and abuse through education and by shifting social, cultural, and institutional norms, while secondary prevention involves identifying risk factors associated with assault and abuse and intervening to prevent them from escalating. So we shouldn’t necessarily deem responses such as accountability processes failures if sexual assaults continue in anarchist communities. Instead, we should broaden the kinds of preventative work we’re doing alongside them. What might we be doing to stop all this from happening in the first place?

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Outside of anarchist circles, prevention work around gender violence usually centers on education: for women, around self-defense and harm reduction; for men, around combating rape myths and taking responsibility for ending male violence; and for all, healthy communication and relationship skills. In anarchist circles, some women have mobilized around sharing self-defense skills, and a great deal of popular education (mostly led and conducted by women) has taken place around consent, communication with partners, and positive sexuality. As noted above, while this has noticeably shifted the sexual discourses used by anarchists, we need more extensive engagement with gender oppression to break entrenched patterns.

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One pathway towards this deeper transformation has come through gender-based collectives, specifically men’s groups focusing on changing attitudes towards sexuality and consent among men. However, with a few exceptions such as DWOS in Minneapolis, the Philly Dudes Collective, and the Social Detox zine, there has not been much visible presence in recent years of anti-sexist men’s organizing among anarchists. Previously in certain scenes, anti-sexist men’s groups allied with autonomous women’s organizing. These formations are currently out of fashion for a number of reasons, including anti-feminist backlash, a certain understanding of trans and genderqueer politics that labels all gender-based organizing as essentialist and problematic, and the absorption of so many committed anti-patriarchy militants of many genders into sexual assault response and accountability work. Could forming anti-sexist men’s groups to do assault and abuse prevention work in tandem with autonomous women’s organizing prove fruitful as another direction in which to experiment?

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This approach could offer several advantages. Creating structures to share skills for dismantling patriarchy and self-transformation might reduce problematic behaviors among participants while also providing an infrastructure for accountability responses when folks did harm others. Pre-existing men’s groups allow folks to take responsibility for self-education and action against patriarchy that doesn’t have to be contingent on a “perpetrator” label or “demands.” And folks could be referred to groups for a wide range of behaviors that might not raise eyebrows on their own but could be warning signs of underlying patriarchal patterns, so that others can intervene before those patterns manifest in more harmful ways (i.e., secondary prevention). For once, we’d have a place to offer folks who, whether by community compulsion or self-motivation, want to “work on their shit.”

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But beyond just dealing with problematic behaviors, men’s groups provide space for deeper relationship building, learning, political clarification, emotional intimacy, even fun. This should provide incentive for folks to get involved and stay engaged, since it’s not centered solely on debilitatingly intense crisis-mode accountability work. The kinds of study, reflection, and relationship-building that take place in these groups can strengthen the other radical organizing folks are doing in anarchist scenes, leaving us with more options, skills, and people able to respond in crisis situations. And unlike many internally-focused community accountability strategies, men’s groups can interact with non-anarchist individuals and groups to spread anti-patriarchal messages and practices while learning from other feminist organizing, making our efforts relevant to broader social struggles against gender violence and patriarchy.

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But wait… what about this whole gender thing? Amid the current gender politics of North American anarchist scenes, it’s common to view any gender-specific organizing as suspect. Isn’t this just a remnant of tired identity politics, vestiges of leftist guilt, outdated essentialism, and suspiciously authoritarian practices? Don’t we want to destroy the gender binary, the real root of patriarchy and gender oppression? And doesn’t organizing based on gender (or assigned gender or whatever) just reinforce the patriarchal and transphobic framework we’re trying to destroy?

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Certainly there are difficult questions to address in determining who “counts” as a man, whether we base our understanding on self-identification or social recognition or birth assignation, where different genderqueer and trans folks fit, and figuring out who was “socialized” how. And ending hierarchy and alienation in all their forms will require strategies more liberating than identity politics. But let’s be realistic: distinct patterns of oppressive behavior and power still fall pretty predictably along gender lines. If gender-based organizing can help dislodge those patterns, perhaps we must embrace that contradiction and do our best to engage with it in all its messy complexity.

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Beyond the question of gendered organizing in principle, there are other possible problems with this approach. Without subscribing to the notion that there are “good” anarchist men who’re not the sexual assaulters we need to worry about, we can acknowledge that the folks who might benefit most from examining their sexist behavior will likely be least inclined to participate. Also, participating in a formal men’s group could be a way for sexists to gain legitimacy, diverting attention from their crappy behavior by waving their feminist ally membership cards at people who call them out. And if the focus on gender-based organizing privileges men’s groups, even anti-sexist ones, over autonomous women’s and/or trans organizing, that could stabilize rather than challenge patriarchal power relations in a scene.

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Direction 3: Not Accountability, But Conflict Resolution

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Our struggles for accountability suffer because we have so few models, methods, or skills for resolving conflicts amongst ourselves. While it’s admirable that we’ve put so much energy into figuring out strategies for responding to assault and abuse, there are innumerable other kinds of conflict and problematic behaviors that we also need tools to address—and as we’ve seen, the sexual assault-specific accountability methodologies aren’t appropriate in dissimilar situations. What if we prioritized building our conflict resolution and mediation skills?

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Of course, there are specific issues relevant to sexual assault and abuse, and these shouldn’t be eclipsed in a general focus on conflict resolution. But if there’s a precedent, language, and skill set for addressing a wide range of conflicts and harm, and being asked to participate in a conflict resolution process becomes common and less threatening, perhaps we’ll be able to respond less defensively when we learn that our actions have hurt others. Rather than extending the identity politics of survivor and perpetrator, we could create more nuanced language that neither idealizes nor demonizes people, but asks all of us to remain engaged in lifelong processes of self-transformation. This requires empathy towards folks who have done harm, to create space for them to own up to their behaviors and heal.5

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What are the advantages of framing sexual assault accountability processes within a broader emphasis on conflict resolution? There would be no need for a definitional hierarchy or litmus test to determine what “counts” as serious assault or abuse. By setting a precedent of collective engagement with less intense conflict, we would gain valuable experience to serve us in crisis situations. Framing conflict resolution as a collective responsibility could prevent the emergence of a specialized class of people who always facilitate these processes, and make it easier to find supporters with sufficient distance from a situation to be able to mediate neutrally.6

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One cautionary point needs to be made very clearly: mediation is not appropriate for many cases of partner abuse. The article “Thinking Through Perpetrator Accountability” lays it out:

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Mediation should not be used as a substitution for an accountability process. Mediation is for two people having a conflict that needs to be resolved; abuse is not mutual. Abuse is not simply about two people needing to come to the table to work things out. Mediators may certainly be useful for helping to facilitate some of the concrete negotiations within an accountability process, but please do not suggest a session with a mediator as an option instead of a long-term commitment to an accountability process.

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Counselors for domestic violence survivors learn that “couples counseling” should not be undertaken in a clear situation of partner abuse, because abusers will usually manipulate the process, leaving the abusive and unequal dynamics underlying the relationship unaddressed. This is important to bear in mind so that a shift to a conflict resolution framework isn’t applied to situations of abusive relationships.

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What about other disadvantages? Well, there’s still the problem of responding to existing problems by prescribing solutions that demand skills or resources we don’t have. What can we do in the meantime, while undertaking the long-term work of learning how to resolve our conflicts? Survivors might feel frustrated to see assault and abuse lumped in with less intense or politically significant conflicts, minimizing the harm they’ve experienced. Asking survivors to use less forceful language when addressing perpetrators could reinforce the survivor-blaming messages that they are overreacting, that sexual assault is not a significant issue worth naming strongly. Also, male “experts” in conflict resolution could hijack survivor support work and divert its feminist focus. We must acknowledge the specific context of sexual assault and abuse, honor the pain and rage of survivors, and account for oppressive power while broadening the range of conflicts we can address.

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Direction 4: Concentric Circles of Affinity

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There is no such thing as accountability within radical communities because there is no such thing as community—not when it comes to sexual assault and abuse. Take an honest survey sometime and you will find that we don’t agree. There is no consensus. Community in this context is a mythical, frequently invoked and much misused term. I don’t want to be invested in it anymore.

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— Angustia Celeste, “Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability”

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At the heart of all of these questions lies one unresolved problem: what is “community?” Are we in one together as anarchists? As punks? As people in a certain local scene? Because we’re at the same protest, show, or mass mobilization? Do we choose to be in it, or are we in it whether we like it or not, regardless of how we identify? And who decides all of this?

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You can’t have community accountability without community. The entire transformative justice framework falls apart without some coherent sense of what community means. But unfortunately, no one seems to be able to answer this question for our milieu. And without an answer, we find ourselves banging our heads against the wall again and again, when a slimy assaulter just skips town or drops out of the scene after being called out, or when someone wields enough power in a scene to gerrymander the boundaries of community to exclude survivors and allies. This is not an abstract question: it’s fundamental to what we do and how power operates in our scenes.

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Community becomes concrete through specific institutions, such as the websites, gatherings, social centers, and collective houses that comprise the North American anarchist scene. Although no one is taking attendance (except possibly the FBI), and many of us quarrel about who counts as a real anarchist, those of us who move through these spaces have a sense of being a part of something. We weave together this sense through shared practices that mark us as teammates: dress and body modification, quirks of diet and hygiene, conversation with specialized lingo and points of reference.

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But is being a part of an anarchist “milieu” enough of a basis for the kind of community demanded by these accountability strategies? Can we realistically apply these models to our diffuse, fragmented, mostly unstructured associations of misfits?

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As we move through our lives navigating connections with friends, neighbors, and comrades, we’re not just part of a single unitary community, or even a web of multiple communities. Rather, our relationships with others take the form of concentric circles of affinity. From these, we can trace a tentative model to imagine how to apply community accountability models to anarchist scenes.

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One of the major flaws in our notion of anarchist community lies in its nature as implicit and assumed, rather than explicit and articulated. We don’t often directly state our commitments to and expectations of the other people with whom we share various kinds of “community,” except in specific projects or collectives; for instance, by living together, housemates agree to pay bills on time, wash the dishes, and respect each other’s space. What if we extended that degree of explicit intention to all of our relationships of affinity? Impossible: we’re supposed to sit down with every anarchist in North America—or even just in our town—and spell out explicit standards for how we relate and what we expect from each other?

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No, of course not… and that’s exactly the point. We can’t do that, so we have to figure out how to collectively determine these things within the different webs of relationships in our lives. Rather than presuming a “community” and attempting to hold people accountable based on that fiction, we should define our expectations of and commitments to the others in our various circles of affinity, and use them as the basis for our responses to conflict and harm.

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For example, let’s say that as my innermost concentric circle I have my affinity group. These are the folks I trust the most, with whom I take risks and for whom I’ll do whatever it takes. I’d be willing to give these people the benefit of the doubt in resolving conflict and addressing harm far more than any other people. Under this model, I would sit down with my affinity group and preemptively discuss how to address conflicts with each other when they come up, ranging from the most minor to the most serious disputes and forms of harm. Think of it as a sort of pre-nuptial agreement for friends and comrades, covering the bases in case things should go wrong. That way, I have a clear sense of how to respond when one of my crew does me wrong, and a shared basis of trust for working with them in a potentially long-term process of transformation. While I wouldn’t extend that trust to most people, within this group we share a deep and explicit affinity, so I’ll be open to criticism, calling out, and transformation with the trust that my comrades will be, too. Other examples of this innermost circle of affinity might be families (birth or chosen), houses and land projects, various types of collectives, or tight-knit groups of friends.

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The next circle outwards might be a shared community space, such as an infoshop or social center. It’s a fairly consistent group of people, some of whom I’m closer with than others, but also an open space, so folks may come that I don’t know. Since it’s not a totally fixed group and not every single person can or would settle on direct agreements with one another, there can be collective agreements around respect, consent, anti-oppression, use of resources, and such. These don’t have to be authoritarian; they can be collectively determined, revised at any time by the consent of those most affected, and no one is compelled to abide by them; folks who can’t or won’t can choose not to participate in the space. As a result, I would be willing to go along with trying to hold someone accountable insofar as they wanted to continue to participate in the space. Since what defines our “community”—the terms of our affinity with each other—is our shared experience of participation in the space, then if one of us ceases to participate in it, we’re no longer in community with one another, thus shouldn’t expect to be held or hold others accountable through it. And accordingly, if someone violates or refuses to abide by the collective standards, there’s a procedure in place by which someone can held accountable for their actions; and if they refuse, others can exclude them from the space in good conscience. Other examples of this second circle of affinity could include specific events, larger organizing projects, and folks who hang out loosely in shared social spaces.

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This framework of concentric circles of affinity helps us imagine where we can best apply the accountability practices with which we’ve been experimenting these past few years among anarchists. As the circles move outwards to mass mobilizations, “anarchists,” “punks,” and our broader radical “community,” it’s harder to imagine how we could concretely define community and navigate accountability within it. There’s no reason to expect anyone to be “accountable” to us based on whatever abstraction we claim to share with them. Without a concrete basis, our “community” has neither carrot nor stick; we can’t reward people for going along with our demands and we can’t coerce them into doing so. So if some random person who’s supposedly an anarchist sexually assaults someone, it might not be realistic to approach our response to the situation in terms of community accountability.

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So then what do we do? Call the cops, beat them up, kick them out of all the institutions controlled by folks with whom we share affinity? And how do we deal with the recurrent problem of people who leave one scene only to resume abusive behavior in another? We don’t have any clear answers. But we have to start having discussions in every circle of affinity about our terms of engagement and how to address harm and resolve conflict, before we’re in crisis and forced to figure it out as we go. Until we’ve done that thoroughly in every collective, space, social group, and other anarchist formation, we can’t realistically aspire to formal community accountability as a strategy for dealing with our shit.

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Forming affinity groups is a crucial part of anarchist organizing. It can be as simple as pulling together a crew of friends to do an action, or as formal and structured as you can imagine. Crucially, it preserves the basic principle of voluntary association at the heart of anarchy, the idea that we can do what we want with whomever we want without coercion or bureaucracy. This simple process has formed the core of our actions at demos and mobilizations, but perhaps we can use it to conceptualize our entire anarchist community and milieu. If we can create stronger ties with each other and understand our affinities more concretely, perhaps we’ll have the basis to make community accountability something more than a vague and contentious dream.

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We hope this essay will contribute to self-reflection among anarchists about where our affinities really are. Perhaps we can address many of the pitfalls of our experiments with accountability processes thus far by making our expectations of and commitments to one another as explicit as possible. We also can consider extending survivor-led vigilantism, pursuing anti-sexist men’s groups and gender-based organizing to undermine rape culture, or broadening our focus on conflict resolution and mediation. Whatever paths we choose, anarchists must continue trying whatever we can to break this impasse around abuse and assault in our scenes. Our liberation depends on it.

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Appendix

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Works Cited

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Resource List

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Groups and Organizations

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Books

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Zines

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Other Resources

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PDF Downloads

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  1. \n

    Challenging banning and exclusion as primary accountability tactics raises more thorny questions about how to evaluate survivor demands, not just in terms of our ability to enact them but our willingness to do so. Is our role as proponents of anarchist accountability simply to adhere to the demands set forth by a survivor, even if we disagree with them strategically or ethically? Being an ally can be defined as doing what the survivor wants, no matter what; but we believe that no liberation can result from suspending our autonomy and uncritically following demands, no matter whose. Yet when is it our place as supporters to criticize what a survivor claims they need to heal or feel safe? ↩

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    At times, people honestly trying to be accountable have left anarchist scenes entirely in order to give space to a survivor. While better than not cooperating, this subverts the transformative justice ideal of keeping folks part of a community. ↩

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    One common challenge occurs when someone doesn’t clearly remember what happened in an encounter for which they’ve been called out, or remembers the experience differently from how the person calling them out remembers it. A survivor may assume that this is simply a ploy to avoid responsibility, which is possible; but often, people’s memories simply don’t line up. If accountability processes are not pseudo-judicial attempts to determine “the truth” of what “really happened” as confirmed by some authority, how can we reconcile these differences? Do the memories of all parties have to match in order for demands to be legitimate? Can someone take responsibility for doing things they don’t remember?

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    From our experience intervening with people who’ve been called out, acknowledging that someone may experience reality differently from them forms an important first step. For example, we can ask them to admit that something they experienced as consensual may not have been experienced that way by someone else. The sincere apology a survivor seeks may not be forthcoming if the person they’re calling out doesn’t remember an interaction in the same way. Still, accepting that the other(s) may have felt violated by something that they did can open someone towards examining and changing some of their behaviors, if not taking full responsibility. ↩

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    It’s difficult to acknowledge this without slipping into the kind of minimizing and denying language that’s so often used to silence survivors. We don’t want reactionaries to pick up on it and use it as another weapon in their arsenal of denial: “They’re just power-tripping on this ‘accountability’ trend when that doesn’t even apply to this situation,” and so forth. Still, we need to be able to talk openly about this to learn how to respond more effectively to assault and abuse. ↩

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    As a self-described perpetrator explains in a comment on “Notes on Survivor Autonomy and Violence”: “I’m not saying that survivors have to feel empathy for people who did them violence. But if we’re going to build communities that can actually outsurvive patriarchy, instead of being atomized and pummeled to dust by it, I think somebody will need to have empathy for perpetrators. Speaking from my personal experience, I know that I never would have had the courage to actually own up to my shit and deal if I hadn’t found a couple folks that actually cared about me and found a way to show me empathy… And I don’t think empathy means making excuses for someone. In fact, in this context, I think it means not letting someone make excuses, not letting them escape their responsibility and their history, and making sure they own up to the consequences that come from the actions they’ve taken. It also means listening to them, sincerely, even while doing this, and seeking understanding. And I believe it means making sure that perpetrators do feel consequences for their actions, but not punishments. It also means finding resources so that the perpetrator can first learn and then practice a different pattern of habits and actions… I think what is required for accountability processes is empathy. Empathy and anger, at the same time.” ↩

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    It’s worth asking whether or not “neutrality” is possible or desirable in conflict mediation. In many conflicts, one party wields greater power than the other, and if effort isn’t made to intervene in that power dynamic, neutrality can often amount to collusion with power. An alternative model of a mediator’s orientation towards parties in a conflict is “bipartiality” rather than neutrality. According to this framework, a mediator advocates for both parties, but also challenges them when they leverage their access to power within the conflict, asking them to consider the ways that their power blind them to the experiences of those lacking that power. ↩

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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/08/14/while-the-iron-is-hot-student-strike-social-revolt-in-quebec-spring-2012", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/08/14/while-the-iron-is-hot-student-strike-social-revolt-in-quebec-spring-2012", "title": "While the Iron Is Hot : Student Strike & Social Revolt in Québec, Spring 2012", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2012-08-14T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "\n
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While the Iron Is Hot: Student Strike & Social Revolt in Québec, Spring 2012

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This is the first of a two part series; for an analysis of the events described herein, read While the Iron Is Hot: Anarchist Analysis of the Revolt in Québec

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In February 2012, as the Occupy movement tapered off, a strike broke out against austerity measures in the Québécois higher education system. Prevented from occupying buildings as it had in 2005, the student movement shifted to a strategy of economic disruption: blockading businesses, interrupting conferences and tourist events, and spreading chaos in the streets. At its peak, the resulting unrest surpassed any protest movement in North America for a generation.

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In this comprehensive report, we chart the strike action by action, from its awkward beginnings through the high point of the revolt and the emergency measures with which the government attempted to suppress it. At each stage in its development, we explore why the strike assumed the forms it did, and analyze the forces competing to push it forward, suppress it, or coopt it. Like the Oakland port blockade of November 2, 2011, the strike suggests a path forward out of the strategic impasse resulting from the Occupy evictions; it also demonstrates that building a capacity for confrontation is an infrastructural project, no less so than any community institution.

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Cast of Characters / Glossary of Terms

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The CÉGEP system is composed of every collège d’enseignement général et professionel, or cégep, in the province of Québec. Most Québécois students enter these schools at age seventeen, at the same time that students elsewhere in North America would be entering the twelfth grade. There are two main options at cégep: pre-university programs, which usually last two years, and vocational training programs which usually last three years and provide students with some kind of trade certificate at the end. For anarchists, the most interesting characteristic of cégeps is that they are full of teenagers who aren’t yet quite as jaded as their older peers, and understand that criminal records before the age of eighteen are less serious.

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FÉCQ, the Federation of Québécois College (i.e., Cégep) Students, and FÉUQ, the Federation of Québécois University Students, are two separate student federations that represent most students in the province of Québec. Although they represent different demographics, their politics and internal structures are very similar.

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ASSÉ, the Association for a Syndical Student Solidarity, is the other student federation in Québec, representing students at both cégeps and universities. Unlike its counterparts FÉCQ and FÉUQ, the raison d’être of ASSÉ is to achieve free and universally accessible education in the province. Its analysis has always been feminist and anti-neoliberal, but not anti-capitalist.

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Immediately before the student strike of 2005 began, ASSÉ and several unaffiliated student associations formed a larger coalition to facilitate organizing. This was CASSÉÉ, the “enlarged coalition of ASSÉ,” whose name rhymed with the French adjective for “dead broke” as well as the verb “to break.” CASSÉÉ was dissolved after the 2005 strike ended.

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A new coalition was formed for the 2012 strike, called CLASSE—the “large coalition of ASSÉ,” whose name may reference either classes at a school or class relations.

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CLAC, the Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles, is an organization with a long history in Montréal. Besides organizing the anti-capitalist May Day demonstrations for the last three years, it was involved in the Montréal side of organizing against both the FTAA summit in Québec City in 2001 and the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010.

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CRÉPUQ, the Conference of Québécois University Rectors and Principals, is an organization intended to represent the interests of university administrations across Québec. Its main offices are housed in downtown Montréal’s Loto-Québec Building.

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Québecor is a media and communications corporation that owns—among other things—the right-wing Journal de Montréal and Journal de Québec newspapers and the Sun News Network, an English-language television channel that could be considered the Canadian equivalent of Fox News.

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Hydro-Québec is Québec’s state-run hydroelectric corporation.

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The SPVM is Montréal’s municipal police force, whereas the SQ—the Sûreté du Québec, literally “the safety of Québec”—is the provincial police force.

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The word “casserole” usually refers to a stove pot in French, but in May of 2012, it became an adjective that was appended to the word manifestation or manif in order to indicate something new: a demonstration in which people march in the streets banging pots and pans. In Montréal English, this is referred to as a casserole demo or simply a casserole.

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Blocking entry to class is arguably what distinguishes a student strike from a student boycott. Both the media and those anti-strike students who find themselves trying to talk their way through a hard picket often try to explain things to militants: “You see, you’re confused about what you’re doing. This is a boycott, and because it’s a boycott, other students shouldn’t be prevented from going to class and professors shouldn’t be prevented from teaching.” The usual argument is that students are consumers, not workers; they are not withdrawing services, but refusing to use a product that they have already bought. This is deceptive. Universities are social factories; they produce the specially trained workers—not just skilled, but also disciplined and able to follow orders—that the capitalist economy of Québec needs to function. At the moment, they are actually producing too many trained workers, and so production needs to be ramped down. This threatens many people whose survival, or at least their quality of life, is currently tied to this system. One of the best ways to fight back is cease all production, to stop any part of the factory from functioning.

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Some labor unions, while supporting the strike to a greater or lesser degree, insist that only labor unions can legally go on strike; therefore, what students in Québec have been doing is a boycott. Of course, there was a time when anything that could be called a strike was strictly illegal. The militancy of the labor movement was what encouraged states to recuperate hierarchical unions into the ruling order and grant the right to engage in limited strike actions under certain conditions.

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Background: Prehistory of the 2012 Strike

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Ancient history: 2005.

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The Liberal government had made the decision to turn most of the bursaries in the “loans and bursaries” student financial aid program into loans that would have to be repaid. All the major student federations, from the reformist FÉCQ and FÉUQ to the “combat syndicalist” ASSÉ, opposed the reforms.

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The strike started February 21, when the anthropology students’ association at the Université de Montréal—a member of CASSÉÉ—approved a strike mandate. Things really began three days later, on February 24, when more than 30,000 members of CASSÉÉ entered the strike. FÉCQ and FÉUQ called for strikes on March 4 and March 9 respectively, and by March 15, there were over 100,000 students on strike across the province.

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The strike, which lasted a month and a half, was the longest and most disruptive up to that point in Québec’s history. There were numerous manif-actions over the course of the strike: blockades of bridges, blockades of the port and the casino, sabotage of gas stations, disruptions of underground shopping centers. There were also confrontational demonstrations involving attacks on police and private property. For the government, the strike’s negative effect on the economy became more significant than the savings that might have been derived from cutting bursaries.

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The government eventually chose to negotiate with “the students”—meaning the leaders of FÉCQ and FÉUQ, not CASSÉÉ. Unlike the 2012 strike, in 2005 the reformist federations represented the majority of striking students, and the leaders of those organizations were happy to return to class as soon as the government withdrew its reforms. To be clear: they backed down precisely when the government was in a position of profound weakness, missing the opportunity to mount the pressure further and secure greater concessions. Militants associated with CASSÉÉ denounced the leaders of FÉCQ and FÉUQ as traitors; during one infamous action, they released rats into FÉUQ’s offices. Yet isolated in the face of intensifying police repression, CASSÉÉ could not continue striking for long; it was soon forced to disband.

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For some, 2005 was the year school ended and the strike began.

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2005 was the first year that the student movement used the symbol of the red square, indicating that students were “squarely in the red”—an expression that works as well in French as in English. Without acknowledging its origins, the students appropriated this symbol from the direct action-oriented anti-homelessness movement that had been quite powerful in Montréal just a few years earlier. On March 30, 2005, some militants hung a giant red square from the giant cross on Mount Royal that overlooks the city; this became a lasting image of the strike.

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November 2007.

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Tuition had been unfrozen. University enrollment cost Québécois students $100 more than the year previous.

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In an effort to begin a longer-lasting unlimited general strike in 2008, general assemblies at a few isolated schools across Québec—mostly associated with ASSÉ—obtained strike mandates for November 12, 13, and 14. Hard pickets were organized, including one at Dawson College, the first anglophone school ever to participate in a student strike. There was also an occupation at Cégep du Vieux Montréal, brutally repressed by the police in an event remembered as “the Tuesday of the batons.” Because of the repression, efforts to block entry to classes were generally ineffectual.

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There was no strike in 2008. The movement was disorganized. Tuition increased by another $100 the following year for Québécois students; the hikes continued for the specified amount of time, ending with the 2011/12 school year.

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December 6, 2010.

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The Liberal government in power since 2003 met in Québec City with representatives of CRÉPUQ and the three student federations. Busloads of students arrived from across Québec to demonstrate outside the summit, especially from Montréal. Inside, the government and CRÉPUQ confirmed to the student representatives that, beginning in the 2012/13 school year, tuition would increase by $325 each year for five years; they insisted that the decision had already been made and there was no alternative. This prompted the student representatives to walk out, after which a motley group of anarchists, party communists, and other militants attempted to get in: they infiltrated the building, spray painted walls, and attempted to build barricades and break down the doors of the conference room before Québec City police chased them out.

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Better than nothing, but no repeat of the siege of Millbank Tower in London, England, less than a month before.

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March 12, 2011.

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The Alliance sociale—a coalition of seven labor unions plus FÉCQ and FÉUQ—called for a demonstration on March 12, 2011 to demand an “equitable budget.” In a callout for an anti-capitalist contingent, anarchists denounced this organization, its rhetoric—particularly its appeals to the middle class—and its shortsighted strategy of trying to replace one gang of politicians with another. When the day actually came, twelve people wearing black were identified to the police as troublemakers by union peace marshals; they were arrested before the demo could begin, charged with criminal conspiracy and possession of weapons, and given non-association conditions with one another. The conspiracy charges were quickly dropped.

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A spontaneous solidarity demonstration was called for that night; mostly anarchists showed up, and there were clashes with police. One popular slogan that night was LE 15 MARS, LA VENGEANCE (“March 15, REVENGE!”), referring to the annual anti-police demonstration a few days later. Unfortunately, the anti-police demo on March 15 was shut down after only forty-five minutes.

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Further events in March 2011.

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On March 24, the finance minister’s Montréal offices were briefly occupied, and a disruptive march spontaneously followed. A week later, on March 31, during a “national” demonstration called by all three student associations, militants associated with ASSÉ occupied the offices of CRÉPUQ in the Loto-Québec building on rue Sherbrooke, with some anarchists participating. The occupiers quickly negotiated with the police to be let out of the building, but people remained congregated in front of it and refused to disperse until the police used flash-bang grenades.

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These clashes were indecisive and at the time it was unclear what strategy was behind them. Yet they showed that some participants in the student movement were willing to interfere with business as usual.

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Suddenly, Occupy Montréal.

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Shortly after Occupy Wall Street failed to occupy Wall Street on September 17, people in Montréal—like others around North America—organized their own spinoff. Rather than building momentum for a strike, many people shifted their energy into Occupy (or Occupons) Montréal, a movement that quickly took on many problematic characteristics. These included strict pacifism, fetishizing the general assembly, and accommodating the participation of a nationalist militia that serves as a place for citizenists1 and white supremacists to recruit new members. Whereas established anarchist scenes elsewhere in North America at least tried to engage with the local manifestations of the Occupy phenomenon, anarchist engagement with Occupy Montréal didn’t last long at all.

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While others were laboring to challenge the widespread notion that nonviolence offered a viable strategy for an anti-austerity movement, Occupy Montréal gave this fallacy a renewed credibility. As people sought to identify the specific ways that capitalist exploitation was intensifying in Montréal, Occupy Montréal embraced a simplified analysis needlessly imported from the United States. When militants were strategizing about occupying something, Occupy Montréal had the unfortunate effect of making many people shy away from that word lest they be associated with the 99% rhetoric.

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No matter the richness of Montréal’s own traditions of resistance—they couldn’t compete with a mass-produced cookie-cutter protest culture imported from south of the border.

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November 10, 2011.

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During summer 2011, FÉCQ, FÉUQ, and ASSÉ agreed to present an ultimatum to the government on November 10: concede to our demands or we strike. A staggering amount of movement resources was poured into promoting this ultimately pacifying demo. The involvement of FÉCQ and FÉUQ was controversial among more radical students, on account of their betrayal of the 2005 strike.

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The day started with pickets at several schools. Some of these, especially on anglophone campuses like Concordia and Dawson College, were “soft” pickets that didn’t attempt to block entry, while others were “hard”—although not always effective, as at UQÀM, where many workers and students were able to slip past the pickets into the school.

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The demonstration started in the afternoon, with several contingents from the universities and cégeps in the downtown area converging on avenue McGill College. The demo marched around downtown for a long time, and when it finally returned to McGill College, there was a confrontation at Jean Charest’s Montréal offices in which one militant was arrested; this was partially the fault of demo organizers associated with FÉUQ, who sabotaged efforts to attack the building. Several others were arrested nearby at an occupation of McGill University’s administration building. Once again, the organizers of the demo, this time including ASSÉ militants, sabotaged the efforts of those who wanted to announce to the crowd of what was happening close by. The organizers insisted that it was time for students to get back to their buses, willfully ignoring the fact that a large portion of the crowd was from Montréal.

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November 10, 2011: riot police enter McGill campus for the first time in 42 years.

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The confrontation at McGill’s administration building.

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Fewer people would have been in the streets if November 10 had been explained as a day of confrontation, like the recent actions in defense of education in Italy, Greece, Chile, and even England. But how useful were the additional participants, if the result was a passive demonstration that the government could ignore? Even if we consider it desirable to present ultimatums to the government, wouldn’t it have been more persuasive to deliver that threat by doing something and threatening to keep on doing it?

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February 13, 2012.

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The November 10 ultimatum had been ignored—so the strike began. Two departments at Université Laval and one department at UQÀM voted to go on strike and join CLASSE. From this point on, the number of students on strike increased every day for about a month and a half.

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February 17: The Occupation of Cégep du Vieux Montréal

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On February 17, 2012, the students of Cégep du Vieux Montréal voted to go on strike and join CLASSE. The school administration had already stated that, in the event of a successful strike vote, they would close the building and prevent the school from being occupied as had happened in 2005 and, briefly, in 2007. The strike vote took place online, but as soon as the results were announced, students voted in a general assembly—held in the cégep’s cafeteria—to occupy the building. It is possible that, in the course of this discussion, it was agreed that barricades should be built; it is also possible that the possibility of doing so was merely discussed. In any case, some people began building them while others called for people to show up from other schools, and still others continued talking in the general assembly.

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The brief occupation of Cégep du Vieux exemplified the negative influence of Occupy on the opening phase of the student strike. The general assembly has a long-established place in most francophone schools; in this case, a sizeable proportion of the participants treated it as an end unto itself, rather than as a tool unto an end. As more militants and police arrived at the school, the assembly continued, discussing questions less and less relevant to the situation at hand. Furthermore, the participants showed themselves to be completely out of touch with reality—exemplified by their continuing to discuss whether to endorse barricading the building even as others were already doing so.

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A barricade on the escalators leading from the second floor to the third floor during the Cégep du Vieux occupation.

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Many students of the cégep, opposing the strike or simply dismissive of outside help, went around bothering people—particularly anglophones, especially those less capable in the French language—about what they were doing in “notre école.” Those building barricades were threatened and provoked, although no actual fights broke out. Elsewhere, others vigorously argued with “outsiders” and “troublemakers” who had equipped themselves with fire extinguishers in preparation for the eventual police siege, ultimately frustrating those people enough that they decided to leave. Others used the fire extinguishers anyway, but by that time, many people had left the premises with a sense of how badly things were going to end. There had been a call for general participation, but this was immaterial for an angry minority that probably didn’t want anyone getting unruly but found it easiest to attack those who couldn’t speak French or who weren’t studying at that particular institution.

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There was no plan for the occupation, and while it’s not certain that it could have been held successfully if there had been a plan, the lack of preparation didn’t help. Many people had very little sense of the layout of the building, which is built onto the side of a large hill, giving the police the option to enter from one of the higher floors and progress downwards to the lobby where the general assembly and the bulk of occupiers had eventually moved. Certain militants started building tall barricades on the front steps and additional ones on higher floors. Other people drank and partied.

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Throughout the occupation, no one took action to evict the school’s security guards, who were allowed to roam freely, impotent to stop what was going on but collecting evidence that was used in criminal proceedings later. For the most part, cameras were not sabotaged, nor even covered up. One particular person filmed everything, evidently with good intentions, but the police later confiscated his camera and used his footage as additional evidence. These failures to act, failures to think, and failures to tell people Stop fucking filming, tabernak de câlisse! cost dearly, as the subsequent police investigation turned up lots of evidence against those who had committed “acts of mischief” during the night.

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Despite a dangerously permissive attitude to surveillance during the Cégep du Vieux occupation, at least one camera got what it deserved.

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The occupation lasted nine short hours altogether. A small group of students who had locked themselves in a classroom were the last militants in the building.

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The brief occupation of Cégep du Vieux was the only attempt at a lasting occupation of a university or cégep building during the entire strike, and its failure had major ramifications.

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In contrast to 2005, when many buildings were occupied, the police and the university administrators immediately sent the message that lasting occupations would not be tolerated. This is what forced people to take the streets day after day, making the 2012 strike more visible and disruptive than the previous one.

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March 7–15: Things Heat Up

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Two and a half weeks since the beginning of the strike, March 7 marked a turning point. By this time, there had already been many demonstrations and a few blockades of critical infrastructure, such as the blockade of the Jacques-Cartier bridge on February 23. Thus far in 2012, the SPVM had refrained from using flashbang grenades or tear gas to repress students, deeming batons and pepper spray sufficient. By March 7, it was high time for them to escalate tactics; it was a little surprising that they hadn’t already.

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The day reprised the events of March 31, 2011. As that day, the crowd converged on rue Sherbrooke in front of the Loto-Québec building, although this time, no one had infiltrated the CRÉPUQ offices. The intention, apparently, was simply to walk in and occupy the building. The crowd also dragged metal fencing to the area from elsewhere and used it to create barricades on rue Sherbrooke, a major downtown thoroughfare. Riot police attacked these barricades and went on to attack the crowd with pepper spray and batons, arresting a few people in the process. The crowd didn’t disperse, and at that point flashbang grenades were used to get them running. Shrapnel from one of these hit one participant, Francis Grenier, in the face. Glass from the sunglasses he was wearing was forced into his right eye, permanently disabling him.

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If this had just been a moment when a crowd realized that cops weren’t their friends—yet another incident in which police maimed someone without facing any consequences—it wouldn’t have been particularly significant for anyone except for the people affected. But things played out differently.

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An Occupy-style assembly was called for Berri Square that night, with the organizers appealing for calm and promising people a chance to “express their indignation.” Instead, when people gathered, angry militants who wanted nothing to do with the organizers’ pacifying rhetoric told them to shut the fuck up. This small group of instigators, the most vocal element in the crowd, called for the crowd to take the streets; most followed them. In the course of the subsequent demonstration, projectiles were thrown at police officers, police cruisers parked at a substation on boulevard Réné-Lévesque were vandalized, and—in a truly epic moment—people used crowd control barriers as battering rams against the front doors of the SPVM headquarters while the police nearby were still scrambling to put on their riot gear. Sadly, it was the peace police who wrested the barriers from the hands of the indignéEs, who were evidently not expressing their indignation in an appropriately passive manner in the eyes of the assembly organizers.

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One of the prominent chants that night was LE 15 MARS, LA VENGEANCE. This had first been chanted a year previous, on the night of March 12, 2011. The implication was that the police would pay for their abuses at the upcoming annual March 15 anti-police demo. In 2011, this hadn’t occurred; 2012, on the other hand, saw the largest demonstration in the history of the event.

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In the week between March 7 and March 15, three developments paved the way for this. Anarchists fliered and postered aggressively for the March 15 demo. In addition, there was a crucial development in the political development of CLASSE, followed immediately by a very interesting day and night in the streets.

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In stark contrast to FÉCQ and FÉUQ, every decision CLASSE makes as an organization is determined in a directly democratic fashion. Since February, delegates from CLASSE’s constituent student associations plus independent activists have physically met for two days of decision-making each and every weekend; this is called a congress. Whatever the problems of direct democracy, the decisions that emerge from these congresses illustrate clearly enough the attitudes and political consciousness of those in attendance. On March 11, the second day of a congress held in Montréal, CLASSE’s members voted to endorse the March 15 anti-police demo and encourage militants to attend in large numbers. This was unprecedented in the history of the student movement—CASSÉÉ’s congress had firmly rejected the idea during the 2005 strike—and it had a tremendous impact on the streets.

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This is what direct democracy looks like.

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Meanwhile, the social struggles committee of CLASSE organized a demo for March 13 connecting the struggle against austerity and neoliberalism—but not capitalism—in Québec to similar struggles in Greece, Spain, Chile, and Colombia. Outside the skyscraper that apparently houses the Colombian consulate in Montréal, a small group of black bloc militants fought police and spray painted a police car. A fight ensued between pacifists and militants who had come prepared for a confrontation. Images of this were broadcast throughout the media and used to highlight “divisions” in the student movement, or as proof that anarchists had “infiltrated” it. At this time, most sections of the mainstream media in Québec were trying to portray some students as legitimate and others as violent. This strategy changed later, when the entire movement was demonized and only “the 60% of students who oppose the strike and are quietly attending classes” were lauded.

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That evening had been announced as Unlimited Creation Night at the Pavillon Hubert-Aquin on UQÀM’s main campus. Militants at that school had called for participants in the movement, as well as the general population, to “come democratize art in the larger sense”—whatever that means. Although the propaganda was intentionally vague and surreal, it was clear that a university building was going to be occupied and used for more creative purposes than normal.

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Not surprisingly, the school administration did not want this event to occur. In the days leading up to it, a small notice on the front page of the UQÀM website declared: “There is no event by the name of Unlimited Creation Night organized by students at UQÀM on March 13, no matter where the information comes from.” On the day itself, Pavillon Hubert-Aquin—with its large courtyard and ample space—was closed and guarded by school security, and the few organizers and other militants who showed up at the beginning of the evening were neither willing nor prepared to break in. However, the administration had left another building open.

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Pavillon J.-A.-DeSève, just next to Hubert-Aquin, was a less desirable space, but a giant party erupted in it and lasted long into the night. Furniture plundered from the building was placed in the street, free food was served from the lobby, and people started passing around alcohol and other intoxicants. The “democratizers of art in the larger sense” ran down corridors with paint rollers, graffiti blossomed in the area around the building, and participants sang anti-cop songs; it ended with an impromptu late-night march through city streets that saw attacks on police cars and widespread vandalism, before the participants escaped into the métro, smashing surveillance cameras.

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All of this had a joyous tone very different from the so-called “festivity” of the average passive march. In addition to fleur-de-lysé flags and vapid rhetoric about democracy, such marches are usually depressing for anarchists because young, able-bodied people are cheering and having all the appearances of a good time when they have absolutely nothing to celebrate: they are hurtling towards impoverishment without doing anything to resist. On Unlimited Creation Night, people created something new and enjoyable, something worth defending and replicating—something that the state would do everything it could to snuff out as soon as it had the chance. The unlikeliness of the event, and its unexpected success, were worth celebrating in and of themselves.

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This last aspect marks March 13 as very different from the events at Cégep du Vieux a few weeks previous. In the earlier occupation, the prevailing attitude—or at least the most obnoxiously visible one—had been that the occupation’s only purpose was to put pressure on the administration and the government. Here, the occupation offered a glimpse of a different way of relating to each other and the urban environment.

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This brings us to March 15. Since 1997, March 15 has been designated International Day Against Police Brutality, although Montréal is the only city where it has been consistently observed. The demonstration typically attracts a lot of youth—chiefly homeless kids from downtown and Hochelaga or black and Arab youth from across the city—as well as the usual anarchists, Maoists, and other militants, many of whom are prepared to fight the police. The demonstrations of 2010 and 2011 had been muzzled by an overwhelming police presence, pre-emptive arrests of organizers in the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality, and those organizers’ poor choices of routes and starting locations.

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This trend was completely reversed in 2012. With CLASSE endorsing the march, the numbers converging at Berri Square far exceeded anything from the past few years. Although, after they were attacked, the police were still able to split the crowd, this did not disperse the demonstration. Instead, for the first time in the strike, several rowdy crowds roamed different parts of downtown and the police were completely unable to control the situation. Condominiums, police vehicles, and corporate stores were attacked, graffiti bloomed everywhere, and some people even managed to loot a Future Shop.

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Shocked pacifist in background: “MADAME AND/OR MONSIEUR, what are you doing to my peaceful student movement!?”

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Upon attacking a street fighter engaged in property destruction, a vigilante is himself attacked.

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Gathering projectiles.

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One Molotov cocktail was thrown—the first in the course of the strike.

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Posing: who wouldn’t?

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Police de Montréal, milice du Capital.

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It was not surprising that March 15 was confrontational; it’s always confrontational, if not always successfully confrontational. There was no reason to think that this would change the character of the strike—and for at least a few weeks, it didn’t. However, a much larger group of people attended than in previous years, and as in the resistance to the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010, they learned firsthand that those who fought back had a much better chance of escaping. The mass arrest—accounting for about 100 of the 226 arrested—that took place late in the evening near the Berri-UQÀM métro station targeted almost entirely people insisting on their right to demonstrate peacefully, long after the SPVM had declared the demonstration an unlawful assembly.

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Having more people in the streets helped those who came to fight the police; even if most people weren’t doing anything, this caused significant logistical problems for officers who were doing all they could to get people to disperse or at least return to the sidewalks. The unsettlingly warm weather was also a boon. Unfortunately, as in previous years, no one made an effort to forge lasting connections with the youth who always come out in large numbers on March 15 but rarely attend other demonstrations. There’s little evidence that the most marginalized people in the city have seen the strike as relevant to them.

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March 26 to April 19: Week(s) of Economic Disruption

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In early March, CLASSE had agreed with FÉCQ and FÉUQ that another “national” demonstration in the same style as November 10, 2011 would occur on March 22, issuing a further ultimatum to the government: this time, if you don’t concede to our demands, we are going to begin a concerted campaign of economic disruption. Once again, instead of threatening economic disruption by demonstrating what the movement could do to that end, the CLASSE strategy was geared towards winning over public opinion via the mass media. This is certainly important, but should not be prioritized over actually building collective power.

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Anarchists attempted to organize a blockade of Montréal’s port in order to give the day a confrontational aspect. Without the institutional support provided to the passive demonstration downtown, however, this wasn’t as successful as hoped.

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March 22, 2012.

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As anarchists anticipated, the government ignored one of the largest demonstrations that had ever taken place in the history of the Canadian state up to that point, with more than 200,000 people in the streets of Montréal. As hesitant as CLASSE’s congress had been to support economic disruption, this drove almost all the members of the coalition to embrace the notion that the time is now. CLASSE threw itself into the project of halting the functioning of the capitalist economy in Montréal, Québec’s economic engine. It went from simply promoting disruptive manif-actions on its website, most of which were organized by particular student associations or by informal groups, to organizing these actions itself. On Monday, March 26, the first semaine de la perturbation économique started. Many more followed.

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Another image from March 22: “The strike starts today.” An inaccurate statement, but CLASSE’s concerted campaign of economic disruption started soon after.

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The CLASSE-organized manif-actions brought huge numbers of people to the streets, but at other manif-actions—smaller ones organized autonomously of CLASSE with fewer movement resources dedicated to them—the numbers were also significantly boosted. Trickle-down economics is bunk, but the trickle-down effect seems to work in popular revolts.

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Before getting into how things played out, let’s acknowledge all the manif-actions that had already been happening. ASSÉ militants had organized several manif-actions in the 2010–11 school year; its political culture—which was largely diluted by incorporating less militant student associations into CLASSE—was heavily oriented towards direct action. In 2012, student associations that had been members of ASSÉ before 2012 independently organized several demonstrations and actions in February: a march on Autoroute 40, an attempt to shut down the Centre du commerce mondiale, and a blockade of the Jacques-Cartier bridge. These were not all small affairs, though they were smaller than some of the huge actions that followed in April 2012.

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The defining characteristic of the manif-actions of the 2012 strike was that they began very early in the morning, usually between 5:30 am and 9 am, but most often at 7 or 7:30. Their usual purpose was to disrupt the workday, either by delaying commuters trying to get to work or by preventing them from entering their workplaces when they arrived. There were many variations on these general themes. Once CLASSE called for economic disruption, there were suddenly a lot more early morning actions: many more people were getting up to participate in them, and space opened up for people to plan their own efforts.

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Between March 26 and April 19, there were literally dozens of actions. The head offices of the SAQ, the state liquor distribution corporation, were blocked on March 27, and its Montréal distribution center was blocked on April 5. The port of Montréal was blocked for the second time in a week, and much more successfully than before, on March 28; thanks to greater numbers, reaching at least a thousand by the time militants reached their destination, the police did not move in for over two hours. There were further blockades on April 5 and April 10.

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Militants at the port on March 28.

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On March 29, four different marches—each color-coded to represent a different line in Montréal’s metro—started at Square Phillips and roamed around different parts of downtown as part of a demonstration called the Grande Mascarade. Endorsed by CLASSE and organized with the coalition’s logistical support, all participants were encouraged to wear masks. The reason was explicitly stated: to normalize the practice of remaining anonymous in the face of the repressive police apparatus. One participant was quoted as saying that the organizers of the demo were “not calling for violence, but if people do it, that’s why we’re in the streets, it’s for that that we are on strike. It’s to create the opportune moment.”

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The orange and yellow banners of March 29. Each banner was themed differently.

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A map of the itineraries followed by the four marches on March 29.

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Some militants did take advantage of the moment created by the Grande Mascarade to engage in acts of vandalism, but not many. Three people were arrested and charged with mischief, accused of being responsible for everything that had happened during the day; one of these was Emma Strople, who was later singled out for persecution by the police and the judiciary. Undercovers were instrumental in these arrests.

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National Bank, the only Canadian bank headquartered in Montréal, was targeted repeatedly during this period. On April 4, their shareholders’ meeting at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel was disrupted, resulting in the first mass arrests on the Island of Montréal since the evening of March 15: over 70 people altogether. On April 11, when a different demonstration with a different target set out from Square Victoria every hour for twelve hours, blockading National Bank’s headquarters was the first action of the day. It lasted a little over an hour. At the northeast corner of the building, businesspeople physically attacked militants and were beaten in return, until the police finally moved in with pepper spray. April 11’s morning blockade was probably the most successful of any action in the “skyscraper blockade” genre.

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Blocking a car from entering the parking garage at National Bank on April 11.

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Simultaneously, another manif-action—called by the student associations of several cégeps in northern Montréal and the suburb of Laval—interfered with morning commuter traffic by blocking the Viau Bridge, one of the links between the Island of Montréal and the Island of Jesus, for over an hour. Later on that day, demos departed from Square Victoria every hour, some of them causing further disruption. Militants ran through La Baie, a large department store, causing chaos, around noon, and in the afternoon, there were physical confrontations with security as demonstrators attempted to blockade the headquarters of Québecor and—later again—the Montréal offices of CIBC, another bank.

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The events of April 11, mostly focused on National Bank in the morning.

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With enthusiastic outside support, militants based at Concordia University organized an ambitious action for the morning of April 13: the blockade of Concordia’s Hall Building during the second day of exams. In a qualitative break from anglophone Concordia’s response to every other student strike in the history of Québec, some departments there had gone on strike and there had been a number of small actions at the school—though compared to what had happened at francophone schools, the strike was still a failure there. The April 13 blockade failed when students who were eager to take their exams poured coffee on the tiled floor beneath the militants blocking the tunnel between the métro station and the Hall Building—and, on the count of three, charged and breached the human wall. The police did nothing until militants decided to take the streets, at which point they broke out the pepper spray.

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On April 19, a morning manif-action billed as ON SHUTDOWN LE CENTRE-VILLE (“we are shutting down downtown”) started at Square Phillips, immediately breaking into two contingents. One proceeded to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s Montréal offices and blockaded them to prevent employees from entering; the other remained mobile, wandering around downtown to cause chaos and distract the police. Eventually, the mobile contingent joined the blockaders; they were finally forced to disperse from the building by the police. People kicked the cars belonging to civilians who tried to drive through crowds, a practice that became common even in very passive demos, since it is widely understood that motorists can hurt people.

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[https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/montreal/17b.jpg A human blockade at the CIBC tower. The banner reads: “The state ignores our cries. FÉCQ and FÉUQ appropriate them. Students against the sexist tuition hike!”]

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In addition to mass actions like these, there were attacks on the economy that only required a small number of people, as well as attacks that could be considered less economic than political in their targeting. The latter continued after the movement shifted its attention from early-morning manif-actions towards a practice of marching in the streets every night. We can place the sacking of the education minister’s offices in this latter category: buses of militants unloaded at Line Beauchamp’s offices in the north of Montréal and proceeded to storm the building and destroy everything, leaving the employees frightened. The Battle of Victo on May 4, discussed below, in which the provincial Liberal Party’s annual convention was targeted, is another example of political targeting.

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Perhaps the most significant economic attacks were the ones that targeted the métro system during the morning rush hour. On April 16, bags of bricks were left on the rails at locations around the city, causing chaos. This happened again on April 25 when two smoke bombs went off on different lines, and then another smoke bomb went off in Complexe Desjardins, a shopping center home to many business offices. On May 10, there was much greater chaos as a result of four smoke bombs going off in some of the city’s major métro stations. Those who are now facing criminal charges for that action will be the first in history to be charged with a certain provision in Canada’s post–9/11 anti-terrorism legislation that forbids anyone from committing a terrorist hoax, defined as the creation of a situation in which it is reasonable for people to believe that terrorism is occurring or is about to occur.

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Other attacks appeared less strategic, taken individually—graffiti, window breaking, nocturnal attacks on parked police vehicles—but together created an atmosphere of tension. Such attacks always occur in Montréal, but they increased in volume after the beginning of the strike. On the night of April 15, notably, there was a coordinated attack on four different government ministers’ offices around Montréal, in which windows were broken and unignited Molotov cocktails were supposedly left inside the buildings “as a threat,” although the logic behind such a threat is opaque. Other targets included SNC-Lavalin, the engineering firm that built the security fence in Toronto during the G20 summit, and the offices of Le Journal de Montréal.

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Gallons of red paint on the Montréal offices of the Ministry of Education, Leisure, and Sports in the early morning of April 1.

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The aftermath of an attack on a government minister’s Montréal office on the night of April 15.

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The offices of SNC Lavalin early in the morning on April 22.

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The offices of the Journal de Montréal were attacked the very next night.

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These and many other actions could not have become as militant as they did outside of the context of manif-actions happening all the time, far more often than this best-of-the-strike list can portray.

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April 20–22: Plan Nord, Plan Mort

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In spring 2011, Charest unveiled a new marketing campaign and a plank for getting him and his party re-elected: Plan Nord. There was a flurry of attention in the media about “one of the biggest social and environmental projects in our time,” as the government website described it; propaganda posters began appearing in the métro explaining how the plan would create jobs and bring prosperity to Québec. Anarchists were concerned, but at first it was unclear how to organize against the project.

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Of course, Plan Nord is not a substantive thing in itself. It is simply the way that the government of Québec has chosen to brand its recently accelerated efforts to colonize the Labrador Peninsula, dispossess its indigenous inhabitants of their land and resources, use those resources to generate quick money, and restore confidence in the future of Québéc’s troubled capitalist economy. The south of Québec has been colonized and exploited more thoroughly, and now this area is unproductive in comparison to other advanced capitalist economies of similar size. But there is no substantive difference between what is happening in “the north” versus “the south”; it’s simply a matter of progression, with the development of the former lagging behind that of the latter for a variety of reasons. From the perspective of capitalists, it makes sense to identify potentially profitable areas that are not yet being exploited as efficiently as they could be—so the only real policy aspect of Plan Nord is a commitment by the government to begin fixing this situation in earnest, with certain objectives twenty-five years down the line. The rest is marketing and propaganda.

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In the Labrador Peninsula, the Québécois government will allow forests to be clear-cut, rivers to be dammed, and open-pit mines to be carved into the land, including uranium mines. An influx of workers will result in a population boom; there will be new housing in many northern towns, and probably many new towns altogether. There is even talk of constructing a deep-water port on Ungava Bay to take advantage of the Arctic Ocean’s new opening to seaborne trade. To connect all these new mines, clear-cuts, and settlements, new highways will slice across the land.

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Many such projects are already underway in the north, and were long before the announcement of Plan Nord. For example, Hydro-Québec, the state-owned power corporation, has been building new dams on the Romaine River since 2009 in spite of resistance by the Innu of Uashat mak Mali-Utenam. It also makes no sense to separate development in “the north” from the continuing project of squeezing profits out of “the south.” Among other projects, capitalists would like to see a gold mine dug on Mohawk territory just northwest of Montréal, a new Atlantica-style highway linking Sherbrooke to New Brunswick across the forests of northern Maine, and a massive expansion of fracking all along the Saint Lawrence river valley. There is also the legislative project of loosening environmental protections, which will affect every part of the province. All of these efforts, alongside urban projects like the reconstruction of the Turcot interchange in southwest Montréal, are part of an integrated strategy of developing unproductive areas into productive areas across the entire Québécois territory.

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Given that the development that is ongoing everywhere, there are specific reasons the government initiated a media campaign focusing on “the north.”

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First, greenwashing. The government promises that 50% of the territory north of the 49th parallel will be protected in perpetuity. For this, Charest has already won praise at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, where he was compared and contrasted favorably with climate criminal and general bogeyman Stephen Harper. Liberal environmentalists, who might have otherwise caused trouble by starting a Facebook group or running an ad in the newspaper, will be satisfied that only half of Québec’s portion of the Labrador Peninsula will be paved or otherwise destroyed. As a result, radical Earth defenders who don’t compromise on these matters will be more easily isolated and smeared as unreasonable. Similarly, the government has emphasized how many indigenous leaders are completely on board and how the creation of “economic opportunities” for indigenous people will help end the “social problems”—caused by colonialism—in their communities. And what could be a nobler goal than ending indigenous poverty?

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Second, manifest destiny. The distinct shape of the Labrador Peninsula has often been used as a symbol of national pride, and it is this shape that has become the logo for Plan Nord. It has been a dream of nationalist intellectuals for many years that Québec’s great frontier should be tamed and settled by French-speaking Québécois de souche, both because that would strengthen a Québécois claim to the entire territory in the event of independence from Canada and because it is seen as desirable in itself—even if this project is being undertaken by a federalist government. Instead of the left-wing and social-democratic strains of nationalism currently popular among young people, the development of the north offers a different vision of patriotism for those who would imagine themselves rugged individualists seeking adventure and opportunity: a nationalism that has better things to do than protest in the streets.

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Third, inspiring confidence in the Québécois economy. Since spring 2011, the premier has flown around the United States, Europe, and twice to Brazil to present a flashy PowerPoint presentation to potential investors about the enormous wealth that is about to be torn from the ground. Québec has long had a bad reputation in international business circles because of its strong(er) unions, its bureaucracy, its (allegedly greater) corruption and organized crime, its frustrating (albeit widely ignored) language laws, and its (somewhat) restive population. In the context of global financial worry, the Plan Nord campaign emphasizes two points. First, that there is a solid plan to rocket out of Québec’s socialist malaise, and second, that this territory is one of the largest remaining landmasses in the world that has not yet been thoroughly exploited—so there is a lot of cash to be made. The campaign also aims to inspire confidence in Québécois workers who might be concerned about job opportunities in the province.

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Before the strike, resistance to Plan Nord had consisted of little more than a few speaking events, less-than-rowdy protests outside conferences and ministerial meetings, pranks pulled on apolitical engineering students, and workshops situating Plan Nord in the context of the continuing colonial processes of Canada and Québec. Once the strike started, this changed. In connection to the students’ struggle against tuition, but looking beyond it, anarchists were able to mobilize significant numbers of people for actions.

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On March 5, the SQ dismantle a blockade built by Innu land defenders on Highway 138 in the Côte-Nord region.

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Militants block the entrance to a skyscraper in downtown Montréal on the morning of April 2.

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On March 12, a week after the Sûreté du Québec dismantled a blockade that the Innu of Uashat mak Mali-Utenam had built on Highway 138 to defend their lands around the Romaine River, about two hundred people demonstrated their solidarity in Montréal in front of the headquarters of Hydro-Québec. On April 2, there was a morning manif-action blocking workers from entering a downtown skyscraper housing the offices of Golden Valley Mines, Quebec Lithium, and Canadian Royalties, companies that really have no business existing but which also happen to be heavily involved in the renewed colonization of the north. This action, which caused significant disruption for about an hour, presaged the larger skyscraper blockades that followed.

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These actions were part of a growing wave of struggle against Plan Nord, but—along with almost everything else that had happened over the course of the strike up to that point—they were overshadowed by what occurred when Charest decided to bring his well-practiced speech to downtown Montréal at the Salon Plan Nord, a giant job fair and pro-development propaganda festival held on April 20 at the city’s premier convention center, the Palais des congrès.

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Four demos were called for April 20: one by No One is Illegal, one by a group of Innu women who were walking to Montréal from the Côte-Nord as a means of protest, one by anarchists (including those who had organized the events of March 12 and April 2), and a fourth—by far the largest—by CLASSE. All four started in the hour before noon, so militants had to choose between which one they wanted to attend. Anarchists largely opted for the smaller, non-CLASSE demos.

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When people recount the story of April 20, the No One is Illegal demo is often forgotten. For one thing, it was the smallest of the three confrontational demos; for another, it had a different theme from the others. The participants in the other demonstrations might have opposed Plan Nord because neoliberal governments won’t redistribute natural resource wealth in a properly socialist fashion, because the industrial death machine that is Civilization should be ruthlessly annihilated, or because of some other nuanced analysis regarding present matters—but all of them were going to the same place, to oppose the same policies, and hopefully to get uncomfortably close to the same despicable person. The target of the No One is Illegal demonstration, on the other hand, was an agent of the federal government rather than the provincial one: Jason Kenney, the immigration minister, a racist scumbag certainly deserving of some uncomfortable proximity in his own right.

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Kenney was in town to deliver a talk called “Targeted, Fast, and Efficient Immigration Systems with Focus on Jobs and Growth” at the Hilton Bonaventure hotel. He was arguing, essentially, that the demands of the market should be the most important factor determining who can immigrate to Canada. About 100 people were on the steps outside the hotel in a non-confrontational demonstration. There were also two groups of people who intended to cause disruptions inside. The first group, ten to fifteen people, entered the building up to two hours before and waited, disguised as Starbucks customers. The second group arrived shortly before the event was scheduled to begin, brazenly running into the building before security could lock the doors. Both groups converged in the building, fought their way past the security officers in the hotel lobby, and shook the final set of doors off their hinges. They burst through triumphantly, and—to their surprise—found themselves in an empty room.

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At this point, they missed the opportunity to overturn tables of expensive food and glassware, but their faces were not concealed and security officers were taking lots of pictures. The police who had been outside watching the demonstration at the steps arrived, but everyone managed to escape to the street. There were no arrests and everything was over by 1 pm, so the participants were able to participate in later events. Later on, once the speech had actually started—much later than planned—other infiltrators with tickets to the event disrupted it.

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Meanwhile, the anarchist demonstration started at Square Phillips in central downtown. Four groups were collaborating on it: La Mauvaise Herbe (a green anarchist collective), the Collective Against Civilization, the Anti-Colonial Solidarity Collective, and PASC (Projet accompagnement solidarité Colombie, which organizes locally in solidarity with the struggles of people in Colombia). Whether or not all the members of these groups would describe themselves as anarchists, the discourse around the demonstration was explicitly anti-state, promoting self-determination and autonomous action. Green-and-black flags on bamboo poles were distributed in the crowd.

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The anarchist demonstration leaves Square Phillips on April 20.

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The original plan for this demonstration, decided long before the CLASSE demo was called for, was to march around downtown delivering speeches at specific locations—buildings housing the offices of corporations involved in mining, construction, and so on—and eventually reach the Palais des congrès where it could divide into a disruptive component and a more child-friendly component. This wasn’t what happened, though. While the demo was still roaming central downtown, participants received calls that there was an urgent need for more people at the Palais des congrès.

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Some participants in the CLASSE demonstration.

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CLASSE’s demonstration had started at Berri Square and marched directly to the palace to confront Charest, reaching the palace’s eastern side on rue Saint-Urbain. Militants bypassed the line of riot cops at the front door by storming the parking garage. In the palace’s eastern lobby, there was a prolonged confrontation between unarmored cops and demonstrators who were determined to ascend the escalators to the job fair. Eventually, riot cops arrived to push the crowd out of the building and then out of the area altogether. Many had already opted to withdraw before the police charge forced everyone out.

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Militants invade the Palais des congrès and fight to enter the job fair.

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This was the news that participants in the anarchist demo were receiving from the Palais des congrès. Some of them wanted to cancel the original plan and rush to the palace; others wanted to stick to the planned route, while still others wanted to join the Innu women’s demo outside the headquarters of Hydro-Québec, just up the hill from the palace. This debate, which took place bilingually in the middle of a moving demonstration, went on too long for those who wanted to proceed immediately to the palace; they split off. Shortly thereafter, the organizers announced that the remainder would be going to Hydro-Québec. This meant that both groups were heading in the same direction on parallel streets, with the first group about a block and a half ahead.

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At this point, all four demonstrations were converging in roughly the same area, but this was still a very large area containing an enormous number of people. Some demonstrators were closer to the headquarters of Hydro-Québec on boulevard Réné-Lévesque, others on rue Saint-Urbain were in the process of getting chased from the east side of the palace by riot cops, while still others were grappling with unarmored cops and breaking windows at the west side of the palace, at the intersection of rue de Bleury and avenue Viger. At Hydro-Québec, many were pushing to move back down towards the palace, while others argued that people should leave so as not to bring repression upon the Innu elders; meanwhile, the riot police moved down Viger from the east side of the palace to the west side. Coming from the crowd on Réné-Lévesque, from the anarchist demo, and elsewhere, most militants who wanted to fight gravitated towards the intersection of Viger and de Bleury. This location became a continuous flashpoint.

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Fighting with the police at the palace’s northwest entrance.

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Property destruction on April 20.

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Demonstrators tried repeatedly to approach the Palais des congrès, while the police endeavored to prevent this, bloodying the demonstrators in the process. At first, the riot police made several charges, at one point forcing the entire crowd down Viger as far west as Square Victoria. But people kept coming back, and they quickly figured out that they didn’t have to run together in a straight line down the street, but could also escape into the open square southwest of the intersection or to the parking lot on the hill to the northwest. When the police sallied forth too far, they could be themselves surrounded: a whole group of riot officers was briefly encircled and pelted with stones before they used their superior weaponry and armor to force their way out. They could also be injured: during one police attack, two cops were felled by stones and had to be carried away, one appearing to be unconscious and the other suffering from a serious limp. For two hours, people attacked the Palais, ran away, then attacked again.

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A riot cop shoots a flare at anti-Charest party crashers.

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A street fighter throws a rock on April 20.

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A fire hydrant spewing its contents.

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Footage of the fighting between the SPVM’s riot cops and street fighters at the intersection of Viger and de Bleury.

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To the surprise of those in the streets, during this entire time, the small platoon of riot police protecting that side of the palace never once received reinforcements. The police were critically understaffed that day. Large numbers of officers were trying to monitor events throughout downtown, but Montréal frequently deploys massive numbers of riot cops to control riotous situations, even as many as three hundred, while this seemed to be about fifty or sixty. The obvious reason is that April 20 came on a Friday, the last day in a long week of manif-actions and passive demos—the police often did not know which would be which, and had to prepare for both—and this week came on the heels of several other weeks like it. The police force as a whole was worn out, not up to its best game. This is why it was on April 20 that the SQ was first called into the streets of Montréal: they were needed to relieve the pressure on the cops in the SPVM.

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The events of April 20 showed the growing power of militants in the streets. Many of them had become experienced street fighters over the course of a few weeks; many were enraged after continuous police attacks on their demonstrations and pickets. It was not only pragmatic but also cathartic to attack these forces in return.

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The geography helped, too. The Palais des congrès sits at a lower elevation than its surroundings, with a low hill on either side to the north and south. The area is full of tight streets and alleys in which militants in light clothing are more mobile than police, but also large open areas where it is logistically impossible to kettle demonstrators. The parking lot also played an important role: it provided cover from snipers shooting plastic bullets, a refuge in which to duck away from police charges, and a vantage point from which to throw stones. It also appeared that the cops were hesitant to douse the cars parked there in tear gas. Finally, that area of downtown was full of broken stones and debris for making barricades.

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A street fighter faces west on avenue Viger, with the parking lot to the left.

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The parking lot, full of militants.

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The confrontation at this intersection lasted for perhaps two hours. During this time, militants were frequently forced to move from place to place, but they held one location continuously: the intersection of rues Saint-Alexandre and de la Gauchetière, just beyond the top of the parking lot. There were anarchists gathered there at all times. The police never sallied forth that far, and it was out of the line of sight from the palace. Whenever street fighters got separated from their comrades, they could go there to find others they knew.

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Even though events felt urgent and fast-paced throughout, in retrospect it might have been useful for some people to hold an impromptu assembly at that intersection to determine whether there were things that could be done to improve the odds for the street fighting. Could supplies have been obtained from elsewhere? There was time. Could a collective strategy have been hashed out? Probably not, but some problems could have been pointed out, such as the fact that many people were throwing rocks without masks in the full glare of media cameras. Exactly what should and what should not be communicated in the streets is unclear, but it’s clear that information multiplies combat effectiveness and that this “safe zone” might have been a good place to share information.

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When people decided to leave the flashpoint at the western end of the palace, they did so of their own volition, albeit without any discernable collective process. Participants found themselves gathered in large numbers at the safe zone after another police attack, certainly not defeated, but the crowd started cheering and moving towards Square Victoria. From there, they marched rowdily to rue Saint-Urbain via rue Saint-Jacques, attacking the Centre du commerce mondiale and other locations on the way. At the eastern end of the palace, the bulk of demonstrators joined the “green zone”2 part of the protest. Counter to the common conception of a “green zone” group, this one had been offering sandwiches and backrubs to street fighters that wandered over, including those in black bloc attire. They did this while making music and entertaining some would-be seekers of employment—who were locked out of the Salon Plan Nord for the duration of the chaos—with weird anti-civilization street theater.

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On the eastern side of avenue Viger, at its intersection with rue Saint-Urbain, a line of unarmored police with nightsticks blocked the street. As some marchers proceeded north into the Chinese Quarter, militants attacked the cops with projectiles; others soon joined in. The cops backed up as militants approached, until they turned and fled west down the avenue to hide behind the line of riot police running east from the western flashpoint. Like sharks smelling blood, street fighters gave chase to the injured officers. This was the first time in the strike that a large number of police didn’t just retreat slowly from an angry crowd, but bolted in fear. A certain body of theory suggests that events like this one are important for the morale of oppressed people; events shortly after April 20 seem to corroborate this. In the following two weeks, there were three other extremely confrontational demos: April 25, May Day, and May 4 in the town of Victoriaville.

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Cops running for their lives.

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The confrontation in full.

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The riot cops, unfortunately, attacked vigorously and forced militants back into the main crowd, marching north through the Chinese Quarter up to rue Sainte-Catherine.

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It is unclear why exactly the march left the area. It is certainly possible that, by this point, after at least three hours of street fighting in that vicinity, people were simply bored of that spot and wanted to go wreak havoc on the rest of downtown. It was around this time, however, that the Sûreté du Québec finally arrived to relieve the SPVM of their duties defending the Palais, enabling Montréal’s police force to regroup and mount a more relentless attack on the demo, ultimately breaking it up.

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Many people had already left at this point, satisfied with what they’d accomplished, and everyone was fatigued. Before dispersing, the crowd walked past the headquarters of the SPVM on rue Sainte-Catherine and found many empty police vehicles in the parking lot; several street fighters ran into the lot, smashed windows with hammers, dropped cinderblocks on the windshields, and generally did as much damage as possible until cops in vans rolled in to attack them.

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It rained heavily on the second day of the job fair. Only about 200 people showed up to demonstrate; supposedly a group of them once again entered the palace’s parking garage and began vandalizing vehicles parked there. This was the SPVM’s justification for arresting a total of 90 people that day.

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Sunday, April 22, the weather was nice again, and the joint demonstration for Earth Day and the student strike was larger than the last “national” demonstration on March 22. There were between 250,000 and 300,000 people in the streets.

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The April 22 demonstration on the eastern slope of Mount Royal.

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Many consider the weekend of April 20 to be the moment that the movement transcended its limits as a student movement, or even an anti-austerity movement, and blossomed into a genuinely anti-capitalist and anti-systemic revolt with a more total critique behind it. Demonstrators’ targets included the Liberal government, but also many institutions of capitalism, in particular the police. Perhaps this was because Plan Nord is going to add a tremendous amount of carbon to the atmosphere—a totalizing issue if there ever was one—and because it is a manifestation of capitalism in its most basic accumulative form. In any case, it felt good, and that feeling carried over into the following weeks.

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April 24 to May 16: The First Wave of Night Demonstrations

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Throughout the entire course of the strike—in fact, from December 6, 2010, when the student federations walked out of the meeting with the government and CRÉPUQ—the government had refused to negotiate with student representatives. Charest and his education minister, Line Beauchamp, were open to discussing the situation with the presidents of FÉCQ and FÉUQ, but categorically refused to sit down with CLASSE until the group denounced violence and reined in its rowdier members. They singled out comments made by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a spokesperson for CLASSE, in early April for particular ridicule: “We [the executive of CLASSE] have no mandate from our members to advocate violence or to denounce it.”

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April 22, on the second day of their weekend congress, CLASSE approved a motion that was reported in the media as a denunciation of violence, sometimes as a denunciation of “physical violence.” It was not, in fact, a categorical denunciation of everything that could be construed as violence; it was only a rejection of violence against people, and even here, there was a caveat allowing for self-defense. The membership would not have countenanced any stronger, but CLASSE’s media committee spun the statement in a positive way and the media accepted it. This was enough for the government to announce on Monday, April 23, that it would sit down with CLASSE at the negotiating table, on one condition: no disruptive demonstrations during the negotiating period.

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The CLASSE executive body agreed to this condition. This was both controversial and complicated. It just so happened that CLASSE had no actions planned for the next two days anyway, so it was possible that the exec was only committing to two days without disruption—although some believe that, without a mandate to do so, the representatives were cementing a truce that would have lasted longer. In any case, a demonstration that had been planned for the night of Tuesday, April 24, which was not organized by CLASSE itself but by a striking department at UQÀM. It was postponed for one night, supposedly because of bad weather conditions, even though we’re talking about Québec here—people had been marching in snowstorms throughout February. Incidentally, the weather turned out to be great. Many saw this as the CLASSE exec putting pressure on the department, although it could very well have been an effort on the part of the department to respect the truce negotiated by the exec—in which case one wonders why they made up the stupid excuse about the weather.

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Some militants unaffiliated with the striking UQÀM department, and opposed to the truce, organized their own demonstration for the same time and place. It gathered at Berri Square and took off into the streets. Although only a small part of the crowd engaged in confrontation, there was practically no one present who wanted to interfere with others’ efforts to throw rocks at the police or smash the windows of banks. Not much happened, and the police eventually dispersed the crowd, making five arrests. It was enough, however, for Beauchamp to kick CLASSE out of the negotiations on Wednesday morning. The CLASSE exec insisted that it hadn’t endorsed the demo, that the demo had been organized against its wishes, but Beauchamp accused CLASSE of playing both sides, noting that the Facebook event for the demo was linked from the coalition’s website. In solidarity with CLASSE’s chastised spokespeople, the leaders of FÉCQ and FÉUQ walked out of the negotiations as well.

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That night, April 25, the postponed demo—billed as an OSTIE DE GROSSE MANIF DE SOIR, which loses much of its charm when translated to “big fucking night demo”—was much bigger and involved a much wider variety of people, including a significant number of people more politically aligned with FÉCQ and FÉUQ, few of whom had participated in CLASSE’s campaign of economic disruption. It’s conceivable that many of them had only been in the streets in the large passive demonstrations organized by the reformist federations; when large numbers of people began fighting the police, it could very well have been the first time they had ever been around that sort of thing.

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When the crowd gathered at Berri Square that night, many different groups bloc’ed up in different parts of the square, announcing their presence to each other using white bike lights. For whatever reason, they had chosen not to gather at the square together, but to keep their distance from one another; this is the only time this happened during the strike. When the crowd started moving, there was a group of about seventy street fighters at the front of the demo and another group of about fifty around the middle; the latter group was unaware of the first group until it passed through areas that had sustained considerable property destruction. Both groups began collecting stones and chunks of pavement early on, saving them in bags. Over the course of the night, police were consistently attacked and forced to retreat under a hail of stones. At one point, a police substation was attacked for several minutes; one media source reported that police officers were fearful during the attack that a Molotov cocktail might be thrown in. The riot lasted three hours.

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April 25, 2012.

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“The SPVM’s Neighborhood Post 21 was the target of casseurs [hooligans or thugs], with many of its windows broken. The police officers inside said they had been afraid to see a Molotov cocktail being thrown through the openings in the windows.”

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— an article in La Presse (French)

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After April 25, the high point of confrontation for the night demos, things quickly calmed down as peace police—in French, les paci-flics, i.e., pacifiste + the word for “cop”—increasingly began attacking street fighters: sometimes simply trying to dissuade them, other times to demask them or render them directly into the hands of the authorities. Although confrontational actions continued throughout the period of night demonstrations from April 25 to just before the weekend of the anarchist book fair in May, they became a lot more dangerous. On several occasions in early May, the SPVM thanked “the collaborators” on its Twitter account. Anarchists continued to distribute propaganda critiquing pacifism and arguing for diverse tactics—but generally speaking, confrontational action died down until May 16.

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Emma Strople, one of three people the SPVM accused of committing acts of mischief during the Grande Mascarade on March 29, had been arrested on Tuesday, April 24 for allegedly breaching release conditions forbidding her from participating in any demonstration that was declared an illegal assembly. She was released on Wednesday morning, with no modifications to her conditions, after the bail had been paid. That night, she was arrested a second time.

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In solidarity with Emma Strople, comrades march to the prison where she is being held on April 28.

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The SPVM reported to the court that Emma had once again breached her conditions. In fact, as security camera footage from the métro showed, she was not present in the demo at the time that the police alleged she was. Regardless, she ended up spending four nights at the Tanguay Prison for Women in the northern neighborhood of Ahuntsic; during this time, about 75 people showed up to participate in a noise demonstration that marched the sixteen blocks west from Henri-Bourassa métro station to the prison. When she was released on April 30, her conditions had been modified: in three days’ time, she would no longer be allowed on the Island of Montréal for any reason. She had been exiled.

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May 1: Creative Destruction in Montréal

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In Québec, the major labor unions continue to observe May Day as International Workers’ Day; this has generally been to the disadvantage of those who want to turn May Day into a day of confrontation with capitalism and the state. For many years, there was no discrete anti-capitalist demonstration. Instead, anarchists and party communists participated in the union march, collaborating in their own marginalization even as they distributed propaganda in hopes of “changing the consciousness of the workers” or something to that effect.

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In 2009, a separate march of mostly Maoists and anarchists was organized downtown, which traveled to the financial district; there was no confrontation, because everyone was waiting for someone else to start things. In 2010, as part of its campaign to mobilize people in Montréal to participate in the resistance to the G20 summit in Toronto, the recently reconstituted CLAC organized a demonstration that saw a few banner drops and a little graffiti. Things heated up in 2011, where there was more significant confrontation with the police.

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May 1, 2011.

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In 2012, CLAC endorsed a call from Occupy Oakland for a worldwide general strike on May Day, and called explicitly for “direct action” as well as “creative destruction”. Perhaps because CLAC is not an exclusively anarchist organization, there was also a call for an anarchist contingent during the demonstration that emphasized confrontation even more explicitly: “Make sure you know to stay tight and only throw from the front,” it says, addressing problems that continue to plague street actions in Montréal. It also called for people to dress in black.

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A portion of the crowd assembled for May Day as the demonstration leaves the Champ de Mars.

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The demonstration started on the Champ de Mars, just in front of Montréal City Hall, and quickly moved towards the downtown core. It may have featured the largest black bloc that has ever taken the streets of Montréal—perhaps 300 people. Unfortunately, this didn’t result in the resounding success of April 20.

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Part of the black bloc, walking past the Palais de justice towards central downtown.

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Militants turning off boulevard Réné-Lévesque onto rue Université.

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A militant at May Day 2012.

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There were lots of Maoists, as well.

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The police were well-prepared for a confrontation, and acted more decisively to break up the march than they had at any other point during the strike. Before any property destruction had taken place, the police declared the demonstration illegal. A tactical group walking alongside the middle part of the crowd charged almost immediately after the declaration, breaking the march in two. At the intersection of rues University and Sainte-Catherine and nearby, street fighters confronted the aforementioned riot police and managed to hold their own for some time.

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Militants fought back briefly against an overwhelming police presence on May Day.

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Looking good, May Day 2012.

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Street Fighter University on the rue Sainte-Catherine.

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Kicking a canister back at the police.

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Fighting the police on May Day.

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Soon, however, more police rushed in from the south, and chased the demonstration for several blocks. They did this by playing a sort of game of leapfrog. When demonstrators ran from a line of riot police, the slower police would load into a fleet of riot vans, which would then drive past another line of riot police already deployed ahead and quickly unload to chase the anarchists another short distance before repeating the process.

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Running from the police on May Day.

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The relentless chase strategy had three effects:

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  1. It made it very difficult to counterattack, although some put up a heroic effort;
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During the chase, a small group of militants—a fraction of those who were bloc’ed up—tried to fight the police by running ahead, gathering projectiles, and then either falling back or waiting a moment so they could throw what they had on hand before running ahead again. It is possible that, if more people had attacked the police instead of running, things could have gone differently. In the event, though, this was not a very wide effort.

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A large section of the crowd on rue Sherbrooke, immediately before the police arrived from the intersection of Sainte-Catherine and Université.

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Police charging on rue Sherbrooke as street fighters’ flares and Molotovs explode at their feet.

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There were a few scuffles later on at Berri Square, but nothing to write home about.

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In one of the most memorable images of May Day, 2012, a group of masked militants taunted police with donuts dangling on strings from sticks. These cops were in the tactical group that managed to divide the demo so decisively. The donut gag was funny, and it still is funny. If even a fraction of the people in the streets that day had been ready to strike first, however, those cops would have been forced to retreat and we might have had a resounding victory rather than a cheap laugh.

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Roflmaozedong.

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If the general assemblies that later emerged out of the casserole demos—discussed below—had existed before May 1, it would have been interesting if an attempt at a general strike could have been organized, similar to what took place in Barcelona on March 29, with roving picket lines in neighborhoods and comprehensive shutdowns of many workplaces. It’s unfortunate that workplace-oriented groups like Montréal’s Industrial Workers of the World didn’t take the call seriously despite inquiries from other anarchists. CLAC, for its part, deemed itself incapable of organizing a general strike.

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2012 marked a further marginalization of the passive union demo. Whereas the year before, the two demonstrations had consisted of roughly equal numbers, at least twice as many people attended the anti-capitalist demo this year.

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In discussing May Day, it’s worth noting that the anarchist callout was controversial among anarchists themselves. Many assessed it as pure posturing that accomplished nothing except to draw more heat to the May Day demonstration, thus facilitating its repression. This critique assumes that, if not for the callout, the numbers of police—or their preparation, or their willingness to attack the demonstration—would have been significantly less, while the number of militants properly prepared for confrontation would not have been significantly less. It is impossible to know what would have happened, of course, but considering the recent history of May Day and the troublemaking pedigree of CLAC, it seems unlikely that the police presence wouldn’t have been overwhelming.

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May 4: The Battle of Victo

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On April 29, the Liberal Party announced that it would hold its annual conference in the small city of Victoriaville, two hours from Montréal and an hour and a half from Québec City. The downtown hotel in Montréal where the event was previously scheduled to take place was too vulnerable to blockading, and the Liberals hoped that enough distance from the metropolis would prevent militants from causing too much trouble. CLASSE, other student associations, and some community organizations and labor unions swiftly announced that they would send buses.

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The convention was held at the Hôtel le Victorin on the northwestern outskirts of town, in an area of empty parking lots and fields punctuated by low-lying buildings. Victo doesn’t have its own municipal police department; consequently, defense was to be provided by the SQ, a force that is much less experienced with “crowd control” situations and less sophisticated in its approach to street fighters than the SPVM. With the adversary and the terrain so different, the Battle of Victo played out differently than anything that happened in Montréal.

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This dude was ready.

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On the strikers’ part, some basic things weren’t organized at all, which might have been less problematic if it had been communicated clearly in advance. Many people were under the impression that CLASSE was organizing a genuine convergence in Victo, for example, with a place where people could spend the night for the duration of the convention. It is unclear if anyone had any serious intention to do this. In theory, the Cégep de Victoriaville—at which the student association had rejected the tactic of a student strike, if not necessarily the movement’s goals—could have been used for this purpose with the collaboration of pro-strike students there. Ironically, the Liberals saw to it that the school was closed on Friday, May 4, with the school administrators implying that vandalism might take place on the campus.

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The buses unloaded in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart about twenty minutes’ walk south of the Victorin. When enough people had gathered, they marched straight up the street and confronted the suited-up SQ police stationed behind low metal barricades just in front of the southernmost entrance of the hotel. Quickly, the police found themselves under a barrage consisting mostly of empty plastic water bottles but also a few smoke bombs, while all around them, people shook the barricades and started to dismantle them. It wouldn’t have been particularly difficult to jump over the barricades and rush the visibly frightened police, and probably even breach the hotel—but people were hesitant to go on the offensive too quickly and the police were allowed to don gas masks in front of the crowd without concealing what they were doing.

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Once again, militants were hesitant to attack first. The results were predictable.

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At the entrance to the Hôtel le Victorin, just before things got hectic on April 4.

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This is further away from the hotel, but it’s odd that everyone accepted the low fence blocking access to the parking lot.

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SQ cops at the front of the hotel await their turn to suit up. The air is hazy because of militants’ smoke bombs.

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Soon, tear gas canisters were launched and many people were forced to retreat from the hotel. This environment was unlike anything street fighters had known in Montréal. Much of the area was completely open: fields, parking lots, and empty roads, the locals knowing better than to approach the warzone. There was a residential subdivision nearby and many dug-up plots of land, providing more stones than could be found on the most crumbling downtown city street. Four different lines of confrontation appeared, with street fighters hailing projectiles upon the police at each, taking the green recycling bins from people’s homes to shield themselves from rubber bullets while the residents looked on. The air was thick with a gas much stronger than anything that had been used in Montréal, and it was difficult for those who hadn’t come prepared with gas masks or at least vinegar-soaked bandanas and goggles to stay close to the action. People did all the same.

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The cloud of tear gas was very thick near the hotel. The smoke bombs contributed too.

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Immediately before the SQ attacked the crowd on April 4.

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Officers shooting tear gas at demonstrators.

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Demonstrators fighting back.

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Fighters in the battle of Victo.

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Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s: returning a tear gas canister.

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A barricade on May 4.

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Many reported afterwards that Victo was the most intense experience they had ever had. The number of injuries was staggering. One militant, Maxence Valade, became the second person to lose an eye, and another, Alex Allard, nearly died from injuries to his head. At least three other people were carried away in stretchers. The SQ, instilled since the 1970s with the idea that they might one day become the military force of an independent Québec, wear army-green uniforms reminiscent of Soviet soldiers and utilize armored personnel carriers. For the duration of the conflict, their helicopter flew terrifyingly low to the ground, presumably to intimidate.

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An SQ riot bus that was surrounded by the crowd for quite some time wasn’t given any attention by street fighters until late in the evening. At that point, people started smashing its windows and spray painting it, prompting a lone officer to tackle one vandal in an attempted arrest. Other militants responded and the officer was beaten until he released his captive. A patrol car lurking behind the demonstration tried to intervene, but fighters surrounded it and smashed its windows at close range with the officers inside; they retreated, abandoning their rescue attempt. It took a charge involving a large number of riot cops to save the lone officer.

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The events of May 4 in Victoriaville.

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There were only four arrests during the day. After it became clear that the majority of militants were no longer interested in being bombarded with projectiles, the crowd retreated to the Wal-Mart parking lot and mostly loaded into buses without incident. Three buses that left later than the others were stopped by the SQ on the way out of town, and one of these—the bus rented by organizers based at McGill and Concordia—was ordered to return to the SQ station in Victo so the teargas-soaked passengers could be properly processed and charged. This was the only bus with criminal charges, though there was apparently a plan to intercept the other buses when they returned to Montréal; fortunately, the sympathetic bus drivers dropped people off at different locations than originally planned. At the station in Victo, people on the McGill/Concordia bus were kept in the vehicle for ten hours, under the watch of armed SQ guards that patrolled the aisle and prevented people from speaking.

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Although the Liberal Party convention was delayed, the event was not canceled. In fact, since everyone had left town at the end of May 4 and no one was interested in spending another second there, the rest of the convention saw no confrontational protest whatsoever, only colorful signs. For those interested in direct action, this could be seen in a positive light. The point wasn’t simply to protest what the Liberals were doing, but to breach the Hôtel le Victorin and physically engage with some of the people who are fucking us over in concrete ways. People made a strong effort to do so on Friday, May 4, and were no longer capable of doing it afterwards, going home to lick their wounds—a much better use of time than hanging around ineffectually.

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Another lesson of the Battle of Victo: as long as militant resistance remains concentrated in Montréal, it is doomed to failure. In this particular city, it is normalized, to the point that it can be factored into the authorities’ strategic calculations. Obviously, they intend to put an end to it eventually, but if it is contained here in the meantime, it is much easier to control. Whenever there are attempts to push the boundaries in other parts of the Québécois territory, there is hell to pay. This was shown not only on May 4, but also in the brutal approach that the SQ used against hard pickets of schools in the Outaouais and the suburbs north of Montréal. Despite this, the capacity to project our power into other regions of the province, and above all to foster cultures of resistance there, is critical for the future.

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May 16–24: The Rule of Law and the Emergency Measures

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On March 30, as a result of legal action by anti-strike students at a small cégep in the north of the province, Québec’s courts had issued an injunction forbidding any demonstrator from doing anything to block a student of that school from going to class. In the following six weeks, at least 38 more injunctions were issued to similar effect. The pickets continued anyway. Notably in Gatineau and Sainte-Therèse, both outside Montréal, and at the Collège de Rosemont within the city, riot police were called in to break the pickets.

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In Montréal, where the fighting spirit was the strongest, the injunctions proved impossible to enforce; there were simply not enough police to go to the schools and keep them open. Perhaps the most notable effort to defy an injunction had taken place on the campus of the elite Université de Montréal on April 12. Hundreds of militants broke into two buildings; thousands cheered as a battering ram was used in one of them. Participants painted graffiti and destroyed computer systems, snipping fiberoptic cables in over twenty classrooms.

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A sampling of the chaos at the Université de Montréal on April 12.

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Gallons of paint stain the auditorium floor after an occupation.

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With the second breakdown of negotiations between the representatives of the government and the student federations on May 10, it is suspected that Charest and his cabinet began to consider an emergency law to restore order and cripple the movement. A well-publicized incident at UQÀM on Wednesday, May 16, is supposedly what pushed the premier over the edge: unable to prevent students from entering the building, one hundred masked militants instead roamed through the campus, entering classrooms and making efforts to prevent classes from taking place, ranging from screaming “Scab!” to physically removing people from classes. Such things had been happening at UQÀM for months, but with the help of the media, the government seized on the events of Wednesday morning to announce his party’s crisis-ending loi spéciale on Wednesday afternoon. It was debated in the National Assembly the next day. By midnight on Friday, May 18, it was law.

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Charest’s law forbids any kind of demonstration from taking place within a certain distance of a university or cégep campus, and introduces heavy fines for anyone who does anything to prevent students from going to classes: from $1000 to $5000 for individuals, from $7000 to $35,000 for student leaders or union leaders, from $25,000 to $125,000 per day for student or labor organizations. It demands that any demonstration of more than fifty people submit an itinerary to a police agency at least eight hours before it begins, and grants the police the power to modify the route however they see fit to prevent threats to “the order and security of the public.” For the 11 universities and 14 cégeps that were on strike when the bill was passed, it suspended classes for winter semester, stipulating that those classes would be completed in August and September in a special session. The law is set to expire on July 1, 2013, although it is possible that it could be renewed or that part or all of it might become permanent.

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Coming into effect at the same time was the new version of Montréal’s bylaw P–6, explained below. Despite the fact that, unlike the Special Law, mayor Gérald Tremblay’s law has been used against demonstrators in Montréal consistently since May 19, and despite the fact that these updates to the pre-existing law are permanent, bylaw P–6 has gotten a fraction of the attention from the mainstream media, the revolutionary and reformist left, and anarchists. To be clear, every single demo that has so far taken the streets chanting ON S’EN CÂLISSE LA LOI SPÉCIALE!—roughly, “the special law, we don’t give a fuck about it!”—has been declared illegal under the municipal law rather than the provincial law.

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Bylaw P–6 was first introduced in 2001, and it stipulates that any demonstration can be declared illegal at the discretion of the police if they have reasonable grounds to believe that it will cause “a commotion” or otherwise endanger public order. It also forbids anyone from bringing blunt objects to demos, naming baseball bats as well as hockey sticks—famously used during the 2001 Québec City anti-FTAA demonstrations to knock tear gas canisters back at police. The first fine under this bylaw originally ranged from $100 to $300, with $300 to $500 for the second offense and $500 to $1000 for every subsequent offense. The new version of the law increases the fines significantly, such that the first offense is now $500 to $1000, increasing by the third and subsequent offenses to as much as $3000. Specifically naming scarves, masks, and hoods, it forbids anyone from concealing their face “without a reasonable motive.” Like the Special Law, it necessitates total collaboration with the police, demanding that the complete routes of demonstrations be disclosed to them in advance.

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On the evening of May 16, the largest noise demo that has ever occurred in Montréal took place at the Tanguay Prison for Women, in solidarity with the women being held there for their alleged role in the smoke-bombing incident on May 10, mentioned above, as well as everyone else facing judicial repression for the events of the strike. After a massive display of fireworks, calling back and forth with the prisoners for ten minutes, and the release of a smoke bomb underneath an SQ vehicle—as it was the provincial police who were overseeing the event—well over 100 demonstrators returned to Henri-Bourassa métro station, flowed past the cops inside, hopped the turnstiles, and caught a southbound train leaving at the most serendipitous moment possible. A chant of “Berri! Berri! Berri!” started, and people got off at Berri-UQÀM station, joined the night demo, and participated in what was the first confrontational demo of that type in a few weeks. It was dispersed after forty-five minutes, several banks having been damaged.

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A bank attacked on the night of May 16.

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It was Charest’s announcement of the Special Law on May 16 that heated up the night demos again, not the consistent effort by a small group of anti-capitalists associated with CLAC to oppose Tremblay’s mask law with explicitly pro-mask demos. This shows the problematic consequences of the popular focus on particular politicians as bogeymen. Since at least 2009, Tremblay had been trying to criminalize masks in order to tame the March 15 demonstrations, among others; now, he has used the opportunity of the strike to accomplish that and advance his project of turning Montréal into a respectable city for bourgeois colonizers and transnational capital. Montréal’s city council, though, draws less attention than the ideologically heated National Assembly, nor is the mayor as polarizing a political figure.

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Laws themselves can also serve as bogeymen, distracting from the root of the issue. There is a huge tide of popular resentment against the Special Law, which is widely deemed to contravene the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and which is currently being challenged in court. If that law was actually being used, this might have the effect of arousing more anger in the population. On the other hand, there is no controversy around bylaw P–6, even though it has been used to repress the movement. In fact, whenever there is outcry on Twitter that “this demo was declared illegal under that fascist special law!” the SPVM has been able to pacify the tweeting intelligentsia with a simple correction: “No, actually, that law was not used. Instead, the demonstration was declared illegal under a municipal bylaw.” It shouldn’t matter under which particular code it was made illegal, but somehow the unwillingness of the police to use the controversial law is seen as a moral victory for those who support the students, even if the same purpose is accomplished with other laws. Anarchists should take note of how many militants have failed to address law itself as a weapon that can be employed against us.

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The night demo of Wednesday, May 16 was the most confrontational in some time, with pacifist opposition to confrontational tactics much more cowed than had become usual. People were angry. Over the next few days, anarchists from across the continent arrived for the Montréal Anarchist Bookfair, probably the largest annual gathering of anarchists in the territory of the Canadian state. It’s tempting to assume that this influx of anarchists explains why the nights of the bookfair weekend were particularly crazy. In fact, that’s unlikely. For many in Québec, especially in Montréal, Charest’s Special Law represented a shift into fascism that they felt it urgent to oppose.

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The demonstration on Friday night, May 18, was the third time that Molotov cocktails were deployed against police in the course of the strike. Two were thrown at police at the corner of boulevards Réné-Lévesque and Saint-Laurent, failing to hit their targets. At that point, the police declared the demonstration illegal and began employing tear gas and flashbang grenades; they only made four arrests during the night, however. The demonstration lasted until 3:30 am, with several groups roaming around downtown as well as the Plateau neighborhood a bit further to the north. After the initial clash, much of the night was passive, but not entirely: in the Plateau, banks and other corporate sites were attacked.

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Police on Friday night, the weekend of the bookfair.

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Anarchopanda, a controversial figure, crying on May 18.

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Saturday night was marked by a lot of people, particularly bar patrons, joining demonstrators in the streets, as well as a few instances of particularly random and unintelligent violence from the police. On rue Saint-Denis, as they were charging a group of militants, they began beating an older man who could not run fast enough. On the same street, they invaded the patio of Le Saint-Bock, a pub. Some of the patrons on the patio were wearing red squares—hardly uncommon in any crowd in Montréal these days—and a few of them may have berated the police who were attacking militants a few meters away.

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There were considerable exchanges of projectiles between police and demonstrators at the gates of McGill University, then at the intersection of rue Ontario and boulevard Saint-Laurent. At the second confrontation, the militants were blocked from continuing south by the police line, but they had an uphill advantage and hailed enormous quantities of rocks on the police. If more riot police hadn’t started moving east along rue Sherbrooke—their aim being to block Saint-Laurent from the north and kettle the demonstration—the demonstrators might well have broken the line on Ontario.

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It was only after this confrontation that the demonstration continued east to rue Saint-Denis, where it encountered welcoming crowds of bar patrons. A mix of hardcore militants and drunk people looking for excitement built an enormous bonfire at the intersection of Saint-Denis and Ontario. When the police moved in, people retreated to Berri Square nearby, but were quickly dispersed as the police used an overwhelming amount of tear gas. A total of 69 people were arrested.

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The bonfire…

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…and then the cops.

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On Sunday night, the police were determined to arrest a lot of people; there were 308 arrests in total. The demonstration was marked by intense confrontation from the very start, with lots of militants taking the initiative to break up concrete and rain stones on the police. The SPVM responded by charging the demo repeatedly in order to split it into smaller, more manageable groups. In one instance, a large number of street fighters found themselves kettled. Rather than submit to arrest, they counted down and charged, breaking out of the kettle. Several of them were injured by police batons, but everyone got away. Unfortunately, many others didn’t, including many anarchists visiting from other cities.

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Wednesday, and the bookfair weekend.

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These were the nights when many out-of-town anarchists experienced the events unfolding in Montréal for themselves. This was the time when the strike was perhaps the most intoxicating and beautiful, too. The number of people in the streets, the ferocity with which they fought even in the face of the emboldened and intensely brutal SPVM, the knowledge that some people broke through a police kettle and escaped what would have otherwise been a mass arrest… Notwithstanding how many people were arrested and brutalized, these made for some good stories when visitors returned to their hometowns.

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In the following days, street demonstrations became more passive, but that didn’t stop the SPVM from attacking, harassing, and arresting people. Monday night’s passive demonstration saw a brief reprieve from the chaos, perhaps because both militants and the cops were exhausted from the weekend. That demo did little more than walk to Charest’s mansion in the rich neighborhood of Westmount, stand in front of it, and chant.

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Tuesday, May 22, was the day for the “national” demonstration in Montréal and the 100th day since the strike had begun. An enormous mass thronged the streets—boosted by busloads of militants arriving from Toronto and other cities in Ontario to express solidarity, but above all by the large numbers of people who opposed the Special Law more than they opposed tuition hikes. At the beginning of the demonstration, FÉCQ president Léo Bureau-Blouin called for everyone to follow the route that the organizers had divulged to the SPVM so that people could protest “in all safety.” Both CLASSE’s contingent and an autonomously organized anti-capitalist contingent refused to obey.

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May 22, 2012.

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The demo, estimated at 400,000, was impossible to control, even with significant numbers of peace police and (presumably) undercover SPVM officers. Taking advantage of this, street fighters thoroughly destroyed a section of downtown in broad daylight: banks and isolated police vehicles were attacked, and neither marshals nor cops could do anything to interfere. This was the only significant moment of violence by militants on Tuesday. Later on, when CLASSE’s contingent defied the Special Law by leaving the preordained route and attempting to meet up with the night demonstration that was trying to leave from Berri Square at the same time, the atmosphere was not confrontational so much as disobedient. Both the night demo and the CLASSE march were brutally suppressed, with the SPVM reporting 113 arrests that night.

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The night of Wednesday, May 23, saw the single largest number of arrests of any night in the strike: 506 people altogether, including 30 children who had been banging pots and pans with their parents. This was an almost completely passive demonstration—only a small number of people were wearing hoods or masks, and there were virtually no attempts to fight back despite numerous provocations from the police—but it defied the new restrictions on routes for demonstrations. Casserole demos converged on downtown from the neighborhoods; there were people all over the city. The police, emboldened by new laws and angry about recent events, cracked down hard. This episode puts the lie to the claim that “thugs always get caught.”

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There has been a certain amount of debate among anarchists about how much to focus on legal issues. We don’t respect the law in any case, right? Yet it’s obvious that, since May 19, the confrontational character of the strike has become much less evident. The law affects us. Even more, it affects those who have yet to reject the law on principle, whose participation in the movement and presence on the streets have been so important in creating this moment.

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“This stinks of fashism.” [sic]

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This is a problem, and the most obvious answer to it is propaganda. Anarchists need to present our ideas in opposition to the idea of the law. To start with, if people in Québec want to talk about fascism—and indeed, they’re fixated on using that particular term, fascism, to the point that it’s useless to try to persuade them to use more precise language—we should shift the object of popular concern away from specific laws or tyrants. Instead, we should highlight the fact that legal codes are weapons to destroy, and that like other weapons, they occasionally need upgrading. We should point out that, in many different places and contexts, emergency laws have outlived the emergency.

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Finally, there’s the tendency to focus on the Special Law rather than bylaw P–6. If we are going to focus on specific laws, we should at least direct attention to the law that is actually being used. The provincial Special Law faces enormous public opposition as well as a legal challenge. Bylaw P–6, on the other hand, is invisible and seemingly benign. Anarchists need to peel back this veneer by loudly defending the practice of wearing masks while denouncing any law, government, or generalized sociopolitical system that seeks to suppress it. Direct-action-oriented anarchists are more likely to oppose the law in the streets than in the courts, but the usefulness of attacking it on other fronts is undeniable.

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From May 21 on: The Rise of the Casseroles

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It should be clear by now that the movement is not homogenous, and that many questions—about strategy, about ethics, about what is occurring in the first place—have been divisive. But generally speaking, when it comes to issues with which everyone in the movement has to grapple, anarchists tend to find ourselves on the same side. No hesitation about the first-person plural this time: we have rejected the strategy of pacifism; we have rejected “political solutions” and appeals to nationalism; we insist on autonomy in choice of action and solidarity with those accused of using more intense tactics, such as the defendants charged in the smoke-bombing case. There is at least one exception to this rule, however: we do not agree about the casseroles. There is no consensus about how the emergence of the casseroles helped or hindered the fight against capitalism.

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A casserole demo.

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Anarchists who view them positively are likely to emphasize that the casseroles are the most socially visible manifestation of popular rage against Charest’s and Tremblay’s anti-dissent laws. They have enabled the movement to spread into areas and demographics it would not have taken root in otherwise; they’ve also been replicated in cities across Canada and the world as a gesture of solidarity. They gave rise to popular neighborhood assemblies that bear within them the seed of a different way of making collective decisions. In some places, these assemblies have taken explicitly anti-capitalist positions, and they could initiate struggles against the specific forms that capital takes locally.

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Anarchists who view them negatively are likely to emphasize that they emerged precisely when it was most critical for the night demonstrations downtown to maintain numbers. The situation coming out of the bookfair weekend seemed ready to explode, but it didn’t—in part because of the casseroles that, according to some of those who initially spread the idea, were explicitly intended to “lower tensions” and “calm things down.”

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Clearly, there were worthwhile things about the casserole demos, particularly the ones that took place in the neighborhoods early on. They brought the strike to many parts of the city all at once, and because they involved large numbers of people and were dispersed geographically, they were difficult to police or control. They provided an accessible means for many people to participate in the movement in some capacity; otherwise, many people might only have read about it in the paper or heard stories from their kids, grandchildren, or older siblings. The original idea was that on May 21, people should bang pots on their front steps, on their balcony, or from their window at precisely 8 pm for fifteen minutes: no more, no less. People seized on the idea and transcended the limits of its original conception as a stationary protest; by the night of Wednesday, May 23, there were roving casserole demos in the streets of Verdun, Villeray, Centre-Sud, Hochelaga, Ville Saint-Laurent, the Plateau, Saint-Henri, and elsewhere. Many of these started in their neighborhoods but eventually made their way to the downtown core, making the situation there all the more uncontrollable.

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The casseroles also launched neighborhood assemblies, which offer the potential for people to make decisions with their neighbors that change the character of the place they live. These are still very young; it should be no surprise if some of them die out or turn into even more farcical repetitions of the worst aspects of Occupy Montréal—though many assemblies have taken measures to avoid its shortcomings. In many neighborhoods, anarchists have put a lot of energy into their local assemblies, which have become explicitly anti-capitalist projects featuring committees dedicated to continuing the strike via direct action. This bodes well for the start of the special semester on August 13.

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So the casserole demos made the movement more visible and accessible to people who live in the neighborhoods. What the casseroles did downtown is a different matter. Essentially, they pacified the night demos for a second time. The night demos had emerged in late April as a raucous and uncontrollable response to the truce agreed upon by student leaders without the consent of the membership; it took nearly a week for the police and their de facto allies, the pacifist vigilantes, to impose a certain amount of order upon them. The weekend of the bookfair, militants overturned that order with pitched street battles more ferocious than the night demos of late April. The passing of the new laws, widely described as fascist by movement participants of all political stripes, prevented those who wanted to obstruct physical confrontation with the police from justifying their behavior with pacifist dictums. It is widely understood in Québec that fascism must be fought, perhaps even by violent means. It would have been useless for those seeking to calm things down to argue that the new laws were not fascist, because—given the hyperbolic political discourse popular in Québec—fascism isn’t identified by objective criteria so much as by popular rhetoric. The partisans of pacification needed a new strategy.

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This, of course, was the casserole. The word is a francization of the Spanish word cacerolazo, which means roughly “the hitting of a stew pot” and refers to a rebel tradition that first became widespread during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile during the 1980s—another situation which many in Québec, but also many people elsewhere, would characterize as fascist. At a time when other forms of resistance could result in the death or torture of militants or their family members, the cacerolazo represented a relatively safe way for people to build a visible culture of opposition in Chile—though still one for which they could be punished severely.

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The situation in Québec today cannot be compared to Pinochet’s regime. No doubt things are bad and getting worse, but people here do not face the risk of extrajudicial execution for engaging in militant confrontations with the police, nor do they have to worry about their relatives being tortured in government jails. Some would like to pretend that the casserole demos have replaced confrontational night demos as the favored tactic of the movement because the situation no longer allows anything else, but that is simply false. They have emerged because certain people want this kind of demo instead of another kind of demo. That is to say, these people want to express dissent with less risk to themselves.

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When downtown Montréal is seized by street fighting, signals of disorder appear. Graffiti, broken windows, open fire hydrants, sirens, riot police… All of these make visible the social war that is always taking place in this territory, and they interrupt the aura of stability Montréal needs to attract foreign investment, tourists, and international business conferences. While loud demos that block traffic and adorn the streets with red square stickers can also do that, it is clear that they do it less; they are also less capable of holding their ground when the police want to keep them out of certain areas of the city, and they are easier to recuperate into the business-friendly image of a democratic Québec that welcomes dissent. Raymond Bachand, the finance minister, prefers casseroles to casseurs; he says he welcomed the new type of demonstration as good news. Perhaps he likes the message they send: that the movement is tired and no longer capable of the kind of economic disruption that could force the government to offer concessions in an effort to restore the social peace.

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It should be stressed again that less confrontational demos aren’t inherently bad. They are more accessible to people with anxiety or mobility issues, and people who want to bring their kids into the streets without fear of chemical weapons. Casserole demos that start at Berri Square and wander around downtown, however, will never be as safe as demos in the neighborhoods—and the initially large neighborhood demonstrations shrank significantly once the demos at Berri Square started drawing large numbers of people who might otherwise have marched closer to their homes.

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In order for the revolt to spread and victory to be achieved, whatever that looks like, we need diverse tactics that complement one another. Riots downtown can work well with festive resistance everywhere else3 because they make that festive resistance, which also presents demands contrary to the government’s austerity program, look more palatable. But the casseroles’ monopolization of the movement has decreased the power of both the confrontational and the festive forms of resistance.

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Knowing that pacifists do their best to impose their preferred tactics upon every section of the movement, the challenge facing the rest of us is to find ways to keep different kinds of demonstrations separate, making it clear which kinds of activities are welcome where. It is difficult to define green zones and red zones, for example, when demos are happening every single night, but efforts were being made in June—when, unfortunately, the chaos in the streets began to die down—to associate certain nights with certain kinds of demos. In some neighborhoods, the lack of energy in the nightly casseroles prompted people to pick specific nights of the week to come out in force—Wednesday in Saint-Henri, Sunday and Wednesday in Hochelaga—while ignoring downtown. At the beginning of June, anarchists and others in CLAC attempted to organize specifically anti-capitalist demonstrations starting at Berri Square downtown every Saturday night. These were intended not only to welcome a diversity of tactics but also to exclude the fleur-de-lysé flag and marginalize those who wave it. Similar efforts could gain momentum soon.

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For anarchists elsewhere, it is important to dispel the myth that simply banging pots together in the streets can create a revolutionary situation. This is obvious, yet pot-banging still seems to be the most common expression of solidarity with the struggle in Montréal. That’s great, the feedback is appreciated, but we’d much prefer for people to start pulling things off where they are than fetishizing what is for us, in a number of ways, a very frustrating element of the struggle. If you’re going to fetishize anything, why not look at the headlines from a few weeks before the casseroles, when manif-actions often paralyzed downtown and drove the police to their wits’ end?

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June 7–10: the Canadian Grand Prix

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When this report was drafted in the first week of August 2012, the weekend of the anarchist bookfair was the last period of intense confrontation. In comparison, the weekend of the Canadian Grand Prix wasn’t half as crazy, but it was more intense than what happened in the weeks before or after it. It is difficult, perhaps ludicrous, to compare different moments in the strike in terms of an undefined intensity, but let’s do it anyway: the Grand Prix weekend felt more like a microcosm of the time between the end of March and the beginning of April than the period from the end of April to the beginning of May.

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To be clear, a sustained and militant confrontation with the police lasting four days, as happened from the afternoon of June 7 to the evening of June 10, would have been remarkable at any point before the student strike. For comparison, the period of March 12–15, 2011 was much less militant and involved fewer participants than the Grand Prix weekend, but was considered a very hectic time for the anarchists involved.

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In the weeks after the passing of the Special Law and the modification of bylaw P–6, CLASSE stepped back as the main engine of the movement and other groups stepped up, including CLAC and some neighborhood assemblies. During the strike, the activities of CLAC had mostly been limited to distributing propaganda, organizing demonstrations against Tremblay’s mask law, and the May Day demonstration. While others dithered, however, CLAC was the first to take seriously a strategy that was being considered in various circles of the movement: to disrupt Montréal’s festival and tourism season. They did this by organizing a demo with a very confrontational discourse for the opening ceremonies of the Grand Prix weekend on Thursday, June 7, and called for disruption of the Grand Prix in general.

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The Canadian Grand Prix, part of the Formula One World Championship, is the biggest tourist event of the summer in Montréal. There is something to be said about how Bernie Ecclestone, perhaps the most important person behind the F1 franchise, is a despicable misogynist and racist whose open sympathies with historical fascist leaders are well-documented. It’s also worth mentioning that militants in Bahrain had called for the cancellation of April’s Bahrain Grand Prix, part of the same franchise, because that event would benefit no one but the brutal regime in that country. Many militants here have been inspired by anti-capitalist and libertarian currents in the Arab Spring, and some are directly connected to struggles in that part of the world, so there was a strong push to express solidarity with the Bahrainis’ struggle. The most obvious motivation, however, was that the Grand Prix is a repulsive spectacle that generates huge profits for rich people in Québec and elsewhere while providing no benefit to most people here.

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In fact, for many who live in Montréal, it is one of the most obnoxious times of the year. Downtown, bike lanes are closed, there is extra car traffic, and there are throngs of tourists and salespeople trying to sell them things. Much of this is concentrated on and around Crescent Street, where the local business association claims that “Crescent Street has always had a special connection with racing and cars.” This is the site of the LG Grand Prix Festival, featuring musical performances and augmented beer sales for the street’s bars.

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The Grand Prix and associated festivities were an obvious target. People hoped that a successful mobilization would give the struggle the spark it needed to ignite again and stay fiery all summer.

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A widely circulated image of Yalda Machouf-Khadir being arrested early on June 7.

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On the morning of June 7, several people were rounded up in police raids, including Yalda Machouf-Khadir, an anarchist who is also the daughter of a prominent left-wing politician. She and her partner—who are now being charged for crimes at the Université de Montréal on April 12 and at the education minister’s offices the next day—were arrested at her family’s home and subjected to a great deal of media attention; journalists had been tipped off, so they were ready to take her picture as she was taken out the door in handcuffs. The timing of these arrests was clearly intentional: they were designed to intimidate militants and discourage large demonstrations later in the day. It is unclear how well this worked, but the crowd that gathered to participate in the CLAC-organized demonstration that afternoon was the smallest that had been seen for such a widely-publicized event in months: only several hundred people.

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The target of CLAC’s demonstration was a rich bastard’s gala being held in a converted industrial building in the Little Burgundy neighborhood. It started at the corner of rues des Seigneurs and Notre-Dame, about two blocks from the target. Starting so close to the event was a strategic mistake. In what is probably the most open, alley-riddled, and courtyard-profuse neighborhood in the entire city, the demo gathered at an intersection that was already blocked to the west and south by riot police behind metal barricades, making it easy for lines of riot police to move into the streets leading north and east and create a kettle.

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That is exactly what happened fifteen minutes after the demo was set to begin, at which point it was still immobile because people were still trickling in. Very few people were arrested, but there was a considerable pile of black clothing, fireworks, and makeshift weapons left in the middle of the crowd, all of which were confiscated. All in all, it took about an hour and a half for the kettled people to be released.

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The autonomous neighborhood assembly of Saint-Henri, the neighborhood directly west of Little Burgundy, had organized a neighborhood contingent to march the short distance from Saint-Henri’s eastern limit to the CLAC-designated meeting point in safer numbers. This contingent, probably consisting of less than 50 people, gathered on the open grounds adjacent to the Lionel-Groulx métro station—a large area that, like Berri Square, would have been very difficult to kettle. If CLAC had started the demo at this location or some other open area a little further from the target, it would have been harder for the police to repress it. It is clear from the amount of material that had to be abandoned at the intersection of Notre-Dame and des Seigneurs that people were prepared for a significant confrontation. The beginning of a demo is always the most vulnerable period, and the SPVM was able to disarm the crowd because it began in such a vulnerable location. If the demo had been able to get moving, the open layout of Little Burgundy would have caused the police significant problems, not necessarily at the heavily-defended target building but perhaps on the commercial rue Notre-Dame and certainly downtown once the crowd joined the demonstrations going on there.

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Although several hundred people were kettled, others were not. They marched around the residential parts of Little Burgundy, disrupting traffic and occasionally dragging things into the street. At one point, the crowd surrounded a police cruiser, forcing it to speed away as quickly as possible, and gave chase. Besides this, little happened until the kettled crowd had been released and everyone assembled to march toward Crescent Street downtown. A short battle ensued with the unarmored police guarding the southern entry to the street where the greater part of downtown’s official Grand Prix festivities take place, and people stayed in the streets until midnight, joining up with the night demo and also the ma-NU-festation—naked demonstration—that occurred that night.4 Despite the earlier disarmament of the crowd, street fighters still had fireworks and boat flares to use against the police; though they weren’t able to approach Crescent Street again, disruption and property destruction took place throughout central downtown.

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A ma-NU-festation.

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Police under attack on June 7.

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Fireworks explode during the Grand Prix demonstrations.

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Thursday, June 7.

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On Friday night, a demonstration—once again, much smaller than it should have been—set out from Berri Square and headed west towards Crescent Street. The SPVM tried to block all entry to a vast section of the downtown core, preventing the crowd from moving north of boulevard Réné-Lévesque for a long time. The crowd moved west along Réné-Lévesque; at rue Guy, the SQ attacked with rubber bullets and flashbang grenades, forcing people to retreat back east. They finally breached the police lines at Dorchester Square, a large open area which the police could not effectively line the entire way; most of the crowd made it through north to the crowded rue Sainte-Catherine, from which they were able to proceed west to Crescent Street. At the corner of Crescent and de Maisonneuve, one street north of Sainte-Catherine, the crowd stood around chanting slogans and failing to drown out a musical performance taking place a few feet away before the police pushed them out.

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Saturday night, the police were even less successful at preventing people from penetrating the areas rife with tourists. People continuously took the streets, pulling fences into them to use as barricades and generally causing havoc. The police responded with pepper spray and tear gas, severely affecting many tourists and other bystanders who were passing through or watching events unfold. It was militants, of course, who treated these people with the medical supplies they had on hand. Several stores and police vehicles were attacked, including two cars parked outside the hotel where the Montréal conference of the International Economic Forum of the Americas was scheduled to occur the next day.

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Saturday, June 9.

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Sunday was fairly quiet on the streets, both during the day of passive protests against the aforementioned conference and at night.

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Throughout the weekend, political profiling was the norm in the streets of Montréal and especially in the métro system, with the SPVM reportedly on heightened alert for any activity that might have sabotaged the transportation of people to and from the race site on île Sainte-Hélène—an island accessible only by bridges and the métro’s Yellow Line. People wearing red squares were routinely harassed; if they took the métro line heading to the island, they were sent back to Berri-UQÀM station. There, they were issued fines for “loitering on the train,” on the grounds that they went one place and immediately returned, or else told that they were banned from Berri-UQÀM station for life. One person was reportedly kicked out of the métro system because she was reading aloud from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; when she had the audacity to walk back into the métro, she was arrested and held without charges for the rest of the day.

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In some respects, the mobilization against the Grand Prix was a success. Dave Stubbs of The Gazette wrote just before the weekend that “for the first time in memory, this weekend’s 43rd Formula One Canadian Grand Prix is not expected to be sold out”—and indeed it wasn’t. The economy was hurt, and the effects have continued over the course of the summer: in early August, it was reported in all the major newspapers that Montréal saw significantly fewer tourists in July than it had a year previous.

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Yet the Grand Prix weekend did not succeed at recreating the spring in the summer. It was a brief period of heightened confrontation in a quiet phase. Of the many theories as to why momentum has died down, none is conclusive, and most lack analysis. Even before the strike, revolutionary activity has tended to die down every summer in Montréal; perhaps it isn’t surprising that this summer is quieter than the previous spring, though far wilder than the summer before. That’s no excuse, especially when our enemies aren’t taking time off from gathering intelligence, planning, and preparing materially for the coming confrontations. In light of the conditions being endured by certain comrades and the very real possibility of prison time, this situation is even less acceptable. But if the movement isn’t crushed in one year, the Canadian Grand Prix next summer may be disrupted even more significantly.

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For the conclusion, continue to While the Iron Is Hot: Anarchist Analysis of the Revolt in Québec.

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  1. \n

    Citizenists range from affirming the privileges of citizenship to calling explicitly for non-citizens to be deported—or worse. Citizenism is structurally similar to white supremacism, and often overlaps with it; in the Québécois context, citizenists emphasize knowledge of French and acceptance of “Québécois values.” ↩

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    At counter-summit convergences in the turn-of-the-millenium “anti-globalization” era, different demonstrations would often be classified as green zones, yellow zones, or red zones. Red zones were the most dangerous areas to demonstrate, often the places where street fighting would take place. Yellow zones involved less disruptive or confrontational forms of direct action, and were therefore considered less dangerous. All effort was made to make green zones “safer spaces” without significant risk of repression. ↩

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    The author does not mean to insinuate that riots cannot be festive. ↩

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    Pro tip: tear gas or pepper spray is very unpleasant on exposed genitalia. ↩

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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/08/14/while-the-iron-is-hot-anarchist-analysis-of-the-revolt-in-quebec", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/08/14/while-the-iron-is-hot-anarchist-analysis-of-the-revolt-in-quebec", "title": "While the Iron Is Hot : Anarchist Analysis of the Revolt in Québec", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2012-08-14T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "\n
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While the Iron Is Hot: Anarchist Analysis of the Revolt in Québec

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This is the second of a two-part series; for a chronological account of the events analyzed herein, read **While the Iron Is Hot: Student Strike & Social Revolt in Québec, Spring 2012**

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To fill out our chronology of the unrest in Québec, we posed the following questions to our Montréal correspondent, who answered them with the assistance of other participants in the Printemps érable. The interview concludes with an epilogue bringing the action up to the minute, when a convergence to block the resumption of the semester is about to begin.

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It’s important to acknowledge that, while the strike has had effects throughout the province of Québec, our coverage focuses almost entirely upon events in Montréal. The strike has played out differently in this city, a multilingual and sprawling metropolis with dozens of overlapping anarchist scenes and a rich history of anti-capitalist resistance, than it has in the rest of the province. A large number of anarchists and other radicals inhabit a limited number of neighborhoods in a ring around downtown Montréal, making it an important flashpoint for struggle.

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How did militant street tactics develop and proliferate in the course of the strike? What can anarchists elsewhere in North America learn from this?

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Discussing the tactics that militants have employed in the streets of Montréal and elsewhere in Québec, and discussing how those tactics have changed, it is often said that tactics escalated over time, and whenever things were pacified, the implication is that the tactics were de-escalated. Entire demonstrations, some of which were extremely large, are described as confrontational or non-confrontational. This kind of language is woefully imprecise. These terms can communicate nothing more than a feeling, an ambience of the moment, leaving the specific mechanics of what was going on obscure.

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This is not to argue that tactics can never be ranked in some kind of loose conceptual hierarchy, from those that are less effective at inflicting damage to property or those who defend it—and thus entail less risk—to those that are more effective and riskier. For example, from lesser to greater intensity:

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  1. giving riot police the middle finger,
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  2. throwing rocks at them,
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  3. throwing Molotov cocktails at them.
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That categorization is arbitrary and its variable, intensity, isn’t rigorously defined, but it can be useful to think about tactics in this way.

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Compared to most North American cities, in Montréal, the use of certain tactics by street fighters—including anarchists, Maoists, and hooligans whose politics are less precisely defined—is more normalized, and less contested. This was true long before the student strike began in February. Black bloc attire and masks, constructing barricades or simply tossing traffic cones into the street, throwing rocks and other projectiles, breaking windows and looting stores… if a Montréal local hears that a hockey riot took place, she can make an educated guess as to which of these tactics might have been used before she gets the details. The same applies to days like March 15 and May 1, to reformist demos that anarchists deem worth intervening in, and to the spontaneous demos that have occurred after the police have murdered someone.

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It is accurate to say that, over the course of the strike, a significant number of participants from diverse political backgrounds have escalated their street tactics to about the same level as those employed by the aforementioned anarchists, Maoists, and hooligans. Throughout February and March, as well as earlier demonstrations like the one on November 10, 2011, anarchists employing black bloc tactics or wearing masks were often the only ones physically confronting the police and destroying the property of capitalists, putting them at odds with many of the other people in the street and leaving them isolated. Later on, though the tension between pacifists and street fighters didn’t disappear, the street fighters were a lot more numerous and some of them were running around with giant fleur-de-lysé flags—a sure sign that others besides “the usual suspects” were taking the fight to the police.

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On the other hand, it would be inaccurate to say that anarchists on the whole have escalated their practice of street fighting. Since the strike began, anarchists have been doing the same thing they always do, the difference being that they are doing it more often. Every year in Montréal there are reformist demos at which anarchists challenge the organizer-imposed code of conduct, anti-capitalist demos at which the only ones trying to impose limits on the actions of anarchist street fighters are the police, and spontaneous manifestations of rage when the police do something particularly heinous. The strike has caused all three types of events to happen with a much greater frequency than would otherwise occur, but the anarchist approach to each has been essentially the same.

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As to being confrontational, it’s also inaccurate to say that the movement became more confrontational over time, because whether or not they were successful, there were attempt to blockade bridges and highways even in February and early March. What happened is that, in March, the congress of CLASSE made the decision to adopt a more confrontational strategy as an organization—after some of its constituent members had already been pursuing such a strategy for weeks. But this simply meant that there were more resources for those organizing confrontational actions, which is what led to a greater frequency and diversity of targets: the port, the government-owned alcohol distribution corporation’s depot, and eventually downtown skyscrapers and events like the Salon Plan Nord. On campuses, the intention of classroom and campus blockades was, from the very beginning in many places, to let no one in for any reason whatsoever, and people used whatever tactics were necessary for that purpose.

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It’s possible to argue that, gradually over the course of weeks, militants selected targets and carried out plans more intelligently. But as to whether they were trying to be more confrontational, things were simply different at different times and varied between people. The truce between the CLASSE exec and the government, the loss of Francis Grenier’s eye, the experience of seeing police run in fear… all of these, in complex ways, affected the courage and rage of different participants in the movement and, at certain times, contributed to a more confrontational attitude.

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All that said, there have been some innovations on the streets. For one, rather than always seeking out rocks and other projectiles, more street fighters have started to bring tools—hammers in particular—with which to make the projectiles out of Montréal’s crumbling streets. For another, street fighters have started counting down aloud in order to coordinate their efforts, whether before attempting to break out of a kettle—as succeeded on May 20—or hailing rocks upon police.

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Another innovation has been shields, which hadn’t been seen much at demonstrations for at least several years before November 10, 2011. The most conventional shield format is to drill together a combination of plexiglass sheets, foam, cardboard, and chloroplast—the stuff from which election signs are made. The idea of painting them to look like the covers of politically solid books, from L’insurrection qui vient to Nineteen Eighty-Four, came to Montréal from Rome, where student demonstrators used the tactic during the anti-austerity demonstrations in late 2010. Although shields hold promise, especially if they could be made of sturdy, light materials like the shields of the insurgent strikers in northwestern Spain, their actual use has been hit-or-miss and it’s questionable how useful they would be in fast-moving demos on the streets of Montréal. They were useful on the open fields of Victo, and would have been useful on April 20 if anyone had brought them; on both those days, both sides were holding fixed positions, and there was less hand-to-hand combat and more use of rubber and plastic bullets. In a situation like May Day, on the other hand, it’s unclear how shields—which are not usually carried by the most muscular people—could have been useful against unrelenting waves of riot cops. Thus far, shields have been used primarily for symbolic purposes: they are most common at passive demos like the one on March 22, perhaps in an effort to add an air of militancy to the carnival of fleur-de-lysé flags and papier-mâché puppets.

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There have also been interesting developments in how things tend to play out in the streets. Particularly after the passing of the Special Law, people in black bloc attire—and what the media has presented as black bloc attire, i.e., anyone wearing a mask and looking vaguely “anarchist”—have frequently been approached by others in the streets and offered praise: “You’re so brave to be doing that kind of thing.” There is now a much greater degree of solidarity between people who are dressed to fight and those who aren’t, with several instances of unmasked people putting themselves at risk in order to pull their street fighter comrades out of the clutches of the police. There is even a sports-fan-style chant—ALLEZ LES NOIRS!—which literally (and atrociously) translates into English as “go blacks!” Crowds of hundreds have chanted these words at the tops of their lungs.

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It is now widely understood that it is a good idea to build barricades in almost any situation. This has occasionally resulted in very good barricades consisting of huge amounts of debris, construction material, loose furniture from nearby cafés, and—more and more frequently—fire. However, more often, people simply drag an item or two into the street and no one else joins in. Sometimes, people dump garbage into the streets not even to find projectiles, but seemingly because they believe this will magically obstruct police vehicles. Not taking the time to build effective barricades, or not being able to get others to help you do this, is one thing. Doing something that has no effect on the police while making the streets more disgusting for the people who live there, unnecessarily annoying them in the process—that’s another thing entirely!

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Riot police are able to mount their interventions because they can move freely through side streets, but a more widespread practice of erecting strong barricades in a march’s wake would not only interfere with the normal functioning of capitalism—it would make successful police interventions much harder to pull off, especially as the demonstration’s speed increases. Montréal would be a good place to import tactics used by street fighters in many major European cities: flipped dumpsters and luxury cars pulled or pushed into the street could obstruct police far more effectively than a few traffic cones.

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There has also been an increased use of Molotov cocktails, nearly unheard of in street confrontations in North America for a long time. Their use has been sporadic, and it’s unclear what conclusions can be drawn here. It’s worth noting, in any case, that some people are now willing to take things to that level.

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At first, very few people wore masks or goggles in the streets, but the experience of police brutality and CLASSE’s explicit call for direct action and economic disruption changed that very quickly. What had always been a small minority became the majority of the participants in many demos. All it took was a critical mass of people in March and April, augmented by efforts to vocalize support for normalizing the practice, whether via the distribution of texts or in CLASSE’s explicit endorsement of March 29’s Grande Masquerade.

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In addition to the explosion in the use of masks and goggles, there has also been a significant increase in the use of black bloc attire by other militants at a time when many more experienced street fighters have begun opting for “light bloc” instead. “Light bloc” means wearing different clothes than one normally would and concealing one’s face and other identifying features, but not attempting to achieve a uniform look, in hopes that individual criminal acts won’t be attributed to anyone who is caught if arrests take place before the crowd de-blocks. The reasoning is that light bloc enables street fighters to disappear into a diverse crowd more effectively than black clothing, keeps street fighters from appearing as outsiders, and doesn’t attract preemptive police attention. A lesson that many local anarchists drew from March 12, 2011—when individuals in black bloc attire were targeted and arrested pre-emptively—is that one should be skeptical of overusing or fetishizing the black bloc tactic. Many had been skeptical before that, but afterwards, black blocs practically disappeared until February 2012, whereas they had previously been a regular feature at anti-capitalist demos.1

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Some experienced street fighters in the anarchist milieu have been critical of the recent propensity to habitually wear black in the streets, echoing constructive criticisms that followed the attempt at a general strike in Oakland on November 2, 2011. This habit distinguishes street fighters from those around them—arguably inhibiting confrontational behavior from spreading—without significantly improving anyone’s ability to confront the police, since there is ample evidence that people can break the law and get away with it whether or not they wear black. Because street fighters in this city are frequently terrible at keeping tight, it is not uncommon for isolated individuals wearing black to be dispersed throughout the crowd, creating an unnecessarily dangerous situation.

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Finally, there still isn’t a lot of communication between fighters in the street. People stick to their own crews for the most part; different crews rarely stay tight for very long in a moving demo, and it’s possible that many fighters don’t know what to say to others they see in the streets or else they don’t know how to say it. Even though it is clear that spreading information is important, it is almost certainly unclear what information needs to be spread at any moment, and the reality of social awkwardness is undeniable. As in a bar or at a party, people tend to stick to their friends rather than venturing out to meet new people.

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This is all improving, albeit too slowly. One shift is that now, when fighters throw rocks at windows when people are on the other side of the glass, others more often approach them to suggest they use a hammer or metal garbage bin instead. When some throw from the back, others make a point of explaining that it’s better to go to the front to ensure that only the intended damage is done.

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There is also increasing debate as to whether the small economic damage caused by petty property destruction is worth it. Ultimately, of course, individuals will decide for themselves. This debate echoes the allegation that some anarchists tend to measure the success of an action only by counting how many windows were broken, how many police vehicles were torched, and so on. In any case, by such a standard, the strike has been an unqualified success. Rather than critique those who might think this way—or the ones who construct this straw man caricature—we could just accept that there are valid reasons to applaud damage to the property of capitalists, and acknowledge that wider and more frequent use of the tactics that can accomplish this—as seen in Montréal since February—is a laudable objective.

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So now that we’re deep into abstract hypothesizing, how might anarchists see the kind of mayhem that has recently swept Montréal in their own cities?

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There is no easy answer. In Montréal, certain anarchists have been pushing for years to make sure that demonstrations transgress the limits imposed by the state—chiefly by the police—and sometimes also by organizers, movement politicians, and peace police. It is important to understand this as an infrastructural project. It involves procuring and constructing materials, gathering and disseminating information, laying plans and developing strategic acumen. All this organizing creates and replicates a tradition: confrontation with the police is now normalized in Montréal, more so than in most North American cities. But as much effort, energy, and passion as this has required, the reality is that Montréal’s political culture, which differs from any neighboring city, has made this process easier. This culture could not exist if not for Québec’s unique history over the last fifty years; it cannot simply be replicated elsewhere.

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Wherever a militant political culture comes from, however it is cultivated, it is important for anarchists to reach out to those who show themselves willing to fight. In Québec, that includes the students, specifically the students who have engaged in some way in CLASSE’s campaign against the government. In many other parts of North America, it seems that—however politicized they might be—university students on the whole are rarely willing to translate their politics into any kind of action that might adversely affect their career prospects or weekend plans. If anarchists elsewhere—many of whom are students themselves—want to see their own towns erupt like Montréal has, perhaps they should start making connections with folks whom it might be a little harder to relate to, at least initially.

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What forms has state repression assumed, and how have participants countered it?

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The natural response of the state to resistance is repression. In Québec, there has been resistance at many different levels, and accordingly repression has taken a variety of forms.

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We can designate three categories of repression here: the tactics school administrators have used to dissuade students from doing anything inappropriate; the physical violence the SPVM and the SQ have employed against people in the streets; and the conditions that Québec’s judiciary, in collaboration with the police and the government, has used to prevent people from taking action again in the future.

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The politics of the administrators vary from school to school. While many schools—especially the anglophone institutions—are governed by decided neoliberals, it is possible that some administrations are more left in some sense of the word. Regardless, on the whole the administrators have chosen to do their job: to control and suppress any tendency towards direct action among their students. Some have done this job less enthusiastically and less effectively, but they are not our allies—far from it.

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Many schools have threatened students with a variety of academic consequences and other punitive measures, ranging from expulsion to a certain amount of community service. These measures include failing kids, expelling them, firing them from university-paid jobs, temporarily banning them from campus, and fining them—in short, pushing them out, or else pressuring them to drop out of their own accord. As one of the goals of the austerity measures is to shrink the postsecondary education systems that are exerting a net drain on capitalist economies worldwide, any drop in student enrollment is welcome. The university can inflict less pain than the courts, but administrators—whose role is comparable to the role of the police, in that it involves maintaining the normal functioning of capitalism—have frequently collaborated with police investigators to bring criminal charges against militants. Their actions impact people’s family lives, their pocketbooks, and in some cases their legal status in Canada. Even bearing in mind our critique of schools and the soulless middle-class lives that academics lead, it should be clear that it is unacceptable for people to be denied control of their destinies by these petty authority figures.

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Several schools, in particular Concordia and McGill, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on extra security to protect their campuses. On the topic of private security, there was often rhetoric to the effect that private security are not our enemies the way police are, that a lot of them are hard-working immigrants just doing their jobs, and picking fights with them isn’t a good idea. This is ridiculous. Private security goons have been instrumental in gathering intelligence for administrations and for the police—and like the police, they frequently hurt people and get away with it.

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Now let’s discuss the repressive tactics of the police.

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“We are not for the establishment of a police state; we know that it is necessary to work with the population and create links. But there are groups for that. Our job, as police officers, is repression. We do not need a social worker as a director, we need a general. In the end, the [SPVM] is a paramilitary organization—let’s not forget it.”

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These are the words of Yves Francoeur, the director of Montréal’s police union, spoken in 2008 during a rebellion in Montréal-Nord. Considering that worker-employer relations couldn’t be better at the SPVM, one can imagine that this statement reflects the entire leadership’s understanding of their role. From the very beginning, and even before the strike began, Montréal’s police force has approached the student movement with a counterinsurgency strategy.

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According to the conceptual hierarchy of British imperialist Sir Frank Kitson, an insurgency has three stages. In the first stage, it poses no real threat and is only potentially insurgent; in the second stage, it disrupts the economy but is not genuinely threatening; only in the third stage can it actually threaten the government. The proper approach for a counterinsurgent force is to comprehensively surveil the movement while it is in the first stage, and its security practices are not very developed, in order to prevent it from reaching the second stage, then destroy it ruthlessly if does reach the second stage, in the hopes of preventing it from ever threatening the security of the state.

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In 2012, the movement advanced from the first stage of Kitson’s hierarchy to the second stage. The response of the SPVM has been somewhat more constrained than Kitson deemed appropriate for British subjects in India, Ireland, and Malaya. This is likely because, unlike colonial police forces, the police in Montréal often need to get people in elected office and the judiciary to support their plans—and the latter are often less strategically astute. Still, from the very beginning, the objective of the police has been to destroy the power of the movement. Two of the sources of the movement’s power are, first, the numbers of people willing to take the streets and, second, the willingness of many of those people to transgress the limits imposed on protest. The approach of the police has been to dissuade people from doing certain things and, knowing the importance of picking battles, to dissuade people from attending demonstrations where those things happen, while permitting people to attend more passive demos.

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Perhaps, early in the strike, the police were a little bit restrained when it came to dealing with the students. It’s pointless to make assumptions about the collective psychology of the SPVM, but they may have genuinely believed that most students were good citizens and the unrest was only anarchist infiltrators instigating things. This changed quickly. The student movement, rather than collaborating with the police, chose to accommodate troublemakers; very soon, anyone wearing the red square could be appropriately treated as a troublemaker.

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Physical violence, whether tactical or just the kind of generalized asshole behavior exemplified in this video, is one way to get people off the streets. Police made heavy use of pepper spray and baton attacks throughout the strike. Flashbangs were an early addition that quickly came to characterize almost every demo; plastic and rubber bullets have been used more sparingly. Over time, the authorities shifted from trying to contain demos towards actively attacking them via police charges. Relentless offensives, like the one seen on May Day, have been rarer.

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There have been multiple reports of male police molesting female arrestees. They routinely subjected arrestees to as much pain as possible; when searching people’s bags, they would open bottles of lemon juice or water and pour them over the other contents of the bag. Much of this sort of thing has been caught on tape, but the SPVM has a good PR position and a cozy relationship with the mainstream media. The fact that videos exist on YouTube doesn’t mean that anyone is going to see them, and it seems that only those who already hate the police seek them out. In any case, there is strong support from a certain portion of the population for “giving CLASSE-holes what they deserve,” and if the police get a reputation for being brutal and unpredictable, all the better for them.

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In comparison to the rhetoric coming from Toronto’s police after the G20 summit or the Vancouver police after 2011’s hockey riot, the SPVM’s spokespeople have rarely said anything to the effect of “we will catch everyone.” They know that would be an impossible task. Instead, they imply that they will punish everyone. Everyone who takes to the streets will suffer for it, one way or another.

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In addition, a few people have been specifically targeted for attack, with the full cooperation of the Crown (the government prosecutors) and the media.

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Emma Strople, who was initially arrested and charged during the Grande Masquerade on March 29, was specifically targeted during on the nights of April 24 and April 25, the first two night demos. As the police arrested her, far from the demo which she had left before it had been declared an illegal assembly, they explained that they had it out for her and they were going to make her life hell.

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Police raided the homes of Roxanne Bélisle and François-Vivier Gagnon—two of the four people who turned themselves in to police custody soon after their faces were published by the media, described by the police as wanted in connection to the May 10 smoke-bombing incident. Yalda Machouf-Khadir’s house was also raided. The police conducted a search for black clothing and items that could link her to the attack on Line Beauchamp’s office on April 13 or the events at the Université de Montréal the day before; they ended up mostly confiscating anarchist literature and anti-police flyers.

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On June 11, one militant who had been dealing with problems unrelated to politics—he had been the first to discover the lifeless body of his sister after she had committed suicide—was arrested while driving from Montréal with his family to attend his sister’s funeral in the Saguenay. It is widely understood that the SQ, who pulled over the car on the highway about a half-hour’s drive from the island, knew his situation and pulled him over at the worst possible moment in order to get him to cooperate, promising that he might still be able to attend the funeral if he did so.

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These are isolated and particularly egregious incidents. More common behaviors include surveillance of “prominent activists”—although there are far too many of those for it to be an easy task—the application of non-association conditions or conditions that restrict a person’s ability to participate in demonstrations, and a condition that has so far been applied only to Emma Strople and two others: exile. These three people are banned from the judicial district of Montréal—corresponding mostly with the Island of Montréal—for any purpose other than going to court. All three are people who have lived here for years. And even before they could get release conditions, however oppressive, many people have been denied bail and held in jail for periods of up to a few weeks.

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On the streets, the police have deployed undercovers, sometimes in very large numbers, to facilitate the arrests of troublemakers—and possibly to gain control of the front of demonstrations to lead them in a direction that is favorable to police strategy, although this is difficult to confirm and may just be paranoia on the part of some militants. There will typically be more than one group of undercovers in any given demo, with at least one group trying to gather intelligence on those who are causing trouble and keep track of their location. A different group will follow them out of the demo, and often a third group will make the arrests. There is evidently a growing concern on the part of the SPVM, however, that their undercovers may be recognizable and could risk serious physical harm in the streets.

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Anarchists have responded to all this in a number of ways, if inadequately. One thing anarchists have done well is to continue the tradition of prison solidarity noise demos, facilitating many more people participating in them. On March 29, there was a manif-action that disrupted the normal proceedings at the Palais de justice (yes, the Palace of Justice) in solidarity with those facing charges related to the occupation at Cégep du Vieux. On April 28, there was a solidarity demonstration of about 75 people at Tanguay Prison for Women, where Emma Strople was being held at the time; this was probably one of the bigger noise demos that had happened in Montréal up to that point. On May 16, there was a larger demonstration, consisting of over 100 people, expressing solidarity with three of the four people being held there in relation to the May 10 smoke-bombing—Geneviève Vaillancourt, Vanessa l’Écuyer, and Roxanne Bélisle—as well as every other victim of police and judicial repression over the course of the strike.

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Despite these efforts, the response by anarchists—and by the movement overall—has been severely lacking. There has been no consistent campaign to disseminate information about the ones who currently face the harshest consequences of anyone in the movement. There has been no message to the effect that, if the authorities can get away with persecuting these people, that will empower them to do the same to everyone else. In addition, there has been very little in the way of response to those parasites upon the movement who denounce the ones who take greater risks or who, in positions of power, fail to take any action in their defense. The only thing that has happened is that, on a few isolated occasions, some brave people have endeavored to avenge wounds inflicted on their comrades—as on the night of March 7, when militants took to the streets to avenge Francis Grenier’s eye in the first night demo of the strike—and there have been demonstrations at the courthouse and prison in solidarity with comrades entangled in the criminal justice system. Both of these are good. Passion is important. But we need a strategy that can actually support these people, building a movement around them that will threaten our enemies and dissuade them from trying to do the same thing to anyone else.

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How were decisions made throughout the strike? How did anarchists engage with these processes or intervene in them? What has been anarchist in decision-making throughout the unrest?

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Whether they are manifested as the direct democracy of general assemblies, the representative democracy of certain states, or something else, democratic ideals are inherently authoritarian and contrary to projects of liberation. This has been argued effectively elsewhere. One has to understand this principle to understand anarchist participation in the strike.

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There is a powerful tradition of direct democracy on francophone campuses. Directly democratic decision-making processes were a key component of the leftist social movements that challenged the state in the 1960s and, among other things, forced the creation of the cégep system and the Université du Québec. In the years after the so-called Quiet Revolution, the new Québécois welfare state’s political class successfully bureaucratized labor unions and community-initiated health clinics; the people in power distrusted the population’s ability to make decisions for itself. Such bureaucratization was much less successful in the schools, though, as professors continued to engage in radical politics and students developed autonomous and militant political cultures. This was particularly true of schools in and around Montréal.

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It is broadly agreed among students that a widely publicized general assembly is the highest authority regarding what students should do in a strike, including what can legitimately be done to school buildings. If a general assembly votes for a strike, every student is obliged to go on strike. If there is a vote that a building should be occupied, many consider it indisputable that this should happen. Student associations and highly partisan professor faculties, as institutions, have reinforced these ideas with their propaganda and the lessons they teach in classrooms.

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But there is opposition to these ideas from within the student milieu, most visibly from students who support Charest’s tuition hikes—some of whom wear a green felt square in protest of the strike. They are roughly equivalent to Young Conservatives or Young Republicans in other parts of North America, the sort of people who would argue that “most students are leftists by default” and that the truly radical position to take on campus would be to support—wait for it!—fiscal responsibility. Echoing the Liberal Party leadership, they usually rail against general assemblies for two reasons: first, because they don’t conduct secret votes, so anti-strike students are made to feel intimidated for expressing their unpopular opinions; and second, because GAs have deemed themselves unaccountable to the rule of law.

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Anarchist critiques of general assemblies are currently less visible—and, frankly, less coherent. Generally speaking, we have been arguing since at least the beginning of Occupy Montréal, in October 2011, that general assemblies should be spaces for communication and logistical coordination, not sources of legitimate authority. Some anarchists, however, often justified their actions during the strike as being consistent with the democratic decisions of certain student associations’ GAs. This is particularly common during hard pickets and other disruptive actions at schools, when anti-strike students and faculty and pro-strike students and their supporters (including anarchists) have often found themselves talking or yelling at each other.

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Perhaps some anarchists don’t see the contradiction here, or perhaps they are using words cynically to achieve an objective, such as trouncing the green squares in an argument. Either way, this much is clear: these situations aren’t the easiest venue in which to introduce a more nuanced anarchist perspective, especially when that perspective is that those who identify with different interests in the social war are irreconcilable enemies. But if we are anarchists, and that is what we really think, then we should say it!

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Anarchists who happen to be students have been the ones who engaged most earnestly in general assemblies, sometimes going so far as to “rock the vote”—spending precious hours of their lives convincing people to show up to the GA to vote in a particular way. This might seem an even more glaring contradiction, but there is a qualitative difference between this kind of activity and, say, campaigning for a nominally more left-wing political candidate. Even if anarchists reject everything that makes them significant, successful strike votes have a social effect that creates a space where student anarchists can engage in the struggle—by going to demos, distributing literature, sabotaging public transportation systems, and so on—rather than worrying about their studies.

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This, at least, was the theory. Yet successful strike votes have not protected students from collective punishment in the form of a forced return to class or the threat of losing their semester—something that is expensive, if nothing else.

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Initial anarchist attempts to organize their own GAs, starting in the few weeks before the strike began, did not work out as intended. The idea was to bring anarchists from Montréal’s myriad scenes together, to determine what different people were doing so as to coordinate action in a strategic way. These were not open assemblies; as a result, they were poorly attended, few people showed up consistently, and they weren’t very productive. Most anarchists found that it was more rewarding to spend their time and energy outside of these assemblies, and it’s hard to blame them.

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It is easy enough to say that if only anarchists had dedicated more energy to this process of getting to know each other and figuring out how to cooperate, they could have had a more sustained and measurable effect on the strike. But the simple fact is that people weren’t ready to come together at that time, and they still aren’t. Montréal’s street fighters are segregated into a variety of cliques; putting an end to this segregation will be a slow process, if it is possible at all.

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More recently, since the beginning of the summer, CLAC has attempted to organize anti-capitalist assemblies as spaces of communication. This is a good effort; so far it has produced some good results, including more anti-capitalist contingents at “national” demonstrations and more anarchist outreach such as the campaign against the elections.

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Anarchist intervention in neighborhood assemblies—many of which were initiated by anarchists—holds the most promise. Every neighborhood assembly is different, but many of them—including Mile End, Saint-Henri, Pointe-Saint-Charles, Mile End, Hochelaga, and Villeray—have significant numbers of anarchists participating. They point to a different type of organizing, rooted in the immediate and pragmatic aspects of struggle rather than presumed ideological common ground.

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Epilogue: Preparing for the Next Round

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The strike is not over, so this report can have no tidy conclusion. Starting after the Grand Prix weekend, when we began writing, the movement’s street presence has died down apart from a few events, but there have been developments on other fronts. Militants have traveled far and wide to spread news of the struggle in Québec to other parts of the continent. CLASSE has organized strategic consultas in just about every significantly populated place in Québec, as well as several cities in Ontario. The premier has called an election. Autonomous anti-capitalists have made their own call: from August 13 to August 17, they want people to come to Montréal and help to sabotage the start of the special semester stipulated in the Special Law—as many as ten weeks’ worth of classes crammed into five, and the last chance that the government is offering to students at striking schools to make up the semester that was first extended into May because of the strike and then canceled altogether by decree.

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Although it is the official policy of CLASSE to defy the Special Law—which has yet to be applied to militants as of this writing, despite being on the books for over two months—it seems that the organization is keeping back from organizing, demonstrations, or other actions to block the rentrée, the return to classes. This is sensible for their part, and probably useful to anyone who will need legal support. CLASSE has a lot of money, but its access to that money is precarious, and it’s all too likely that violations of the law would be punished by an asset freeze or fines imposed by automatic withdrawal. This is not to say CLASSE is shying away from opposing certain provisions of the new law. It will continue to organize disruptive demonstrations that do not collaborate with the police, though it’s likely that these demonstrations will target institutions other than schools.

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Over the summer, CLASSE has focused on bringing its message to the people of Québec and the students of Ontario. From an anarchist perspective, this message can be charitably described as inadequate. The coalition’s new manifesto, “Share Our Future”—the English translation of which makes the scrappiest Montréal anarchist translation job look pretty damn good—includes some tokenistic references to marginalized elements in our society and other issues that anarchists in particular pushed to include, but that’s it. Worse, instead of sounding passionate, it sounds like precisely what it is: the product of a consensus process among people whose politics and strategic approach vary widely. Consequently, it is a litany of lowest common denominators, not an inspiring call to arms.

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In the meantime, the election is on, and Pauline Marois, leader of the Parti Québécois, is doing her best to divert the power of the strike movement into her election campaign. She and her star candidate Léo Bureau-Blouin, who was president of FÉCQ until June, have kindly asked the student movement not to cause trouble during the campaign, arguing that disruption will play into the Liberals’ re-election strategy. And it probably will, but that doesn’t matter. If the strike movement does not effectively sabotage the special semester, those who refuse to go to class will suffer the consequences and the movement’s rapport de force with whichever government comes to power on September 4 will be significantly diminished. A large segment of the movement thinks the most important thing is to drive Charest from power—when, in fact, the most important thing is for the movement to become confident of its own power.

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Student associations at a few schools have already voted to comply with the rentrée. Others, like the one at Cégep du Vieux Montréal—which, in the spring, voted to remain on strike until free education is realized in Québec—are going to fight it out.

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For its part, CLAC has launched an anti-electoral propaganda campaign and disseminated a call for three demonstrations: one for the day that the election is announced; one for the leaders’ debate, although apparently there will be several; and one for the day of the election itself.

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It is unclear what the plan is for the first week of the rentrée, but a multilingual website has been set up to inform people of the plan as it is determined. There are three cégeps opening up on August 13 and fourteen in total for the week, but whether or not the student associations at each of those schools will have decided to renew their strike mandates on August 10 is unclear. Another website has been set up to arrange housing and transportation.

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There have been two “national” demonstrations since the Grand Prix, one on June 22—a small and passive event of less than 100,000 people—and another on July 22, which was a little bit bigger and a little more exciting. An anti-capitalist contingent broke off from the main march in defiance of bylaw P–6 and the Special Law, although the militants involved did nothing more than disrupt traffic.

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July 22 demonstration in Montreal: quiet, but with lovely banners. The one on the left reads: “To vote is to abdicate. To abstain is to struggle.”

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On the morning of August 1, Jean Charest announced the 40th Québécois general election. Incidentally, this was also the night of the 100th consecutive night demonstration, and both the student federations and the neighborhood assemblies had planned to give the demonstration more life than it had possessed in some time. Assemblies based in the neighborhoods to the north and the east of Berri Square organized marches that gathered more people as they passed through each neighborhood until they reached the square.

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On the 100th night of night demos: “Villeray disobeys.”

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The neighborhood contingents approaching Berri Square on August 1.

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After a passive summer, things are heating up again.

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There were clashes with police. Bank windows were smashed out and dumpsters dragged into the streets. The police deployed their usual weapons: batons, pepper spray, flashbang grenades. A total of 15 people were arrested. The struggle continues.

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Further Reading

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    The only notable exception was the night of June 7, 2011, when a spontaneous anti-police demonstration took place in response to the shooting of two people in downtown Montréal the previous night. ↩

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    2. \n
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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/04/19/the-rose-of-fire-has-returned-the-struggle-for-the-streets-of-barcelona", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/04/19/the-rose-of-fire-has-returned-the-struggle-for-the-streets-of-barcelona", "title": "“The Rose of Fire Has Returned!” : The Struggle for the Streets of Barcelona", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/rosefire/2b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/rosefire/2b.jpg", "date_published": "2012-04-19T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "\n
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“The Rose of Fire Has Returned!”, The Struggle for the Streets of Barcelona.

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In May 2011, tens of thousands occupied plazas throughout Spain in a protest movement that prefigured similar occupations around the world, including the Occupy movement in the United States. On March 29, 2012, a nationwide general strike erupted into massive street-fighting in Barcelona, as participants wrested control of the streets from riot police. How did this come to pass, and what can it tell us about what will follow the occupation movements outside Spain?

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Here, our Barcelona correspondent provides extensive background on the riots of March 29, tracing the trajectory from the plaza occupations to the general strike, and explores the questions that have arisen as anarchists face new opportunities and challenges.

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The History

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“La rosa de foc ha tornat!” This was the expression of excitement on many people’s lips during the general strike throughout Spain on March 29, 2012. While the unions estimated an impressive 77% turnout, it was the fires blackening the skies over Barcelona that everyone talked about.

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At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, when more anarchist attentats and bombings were carried out in Barcelona than in any other two countries combined and dozens of churches and police stations were burned to the ground, the city was affectionately known as la rosa de foc, “the rose of fire.” The period of “revolutionary gymnastics” in the ’20s and ’30s foregrounded the city as a laboratory of subversion for anarchist struggles worldwide, a role that was taken further with the revolution of July 1936. The struggle of Catalan maquis—guerrillas—during the Franco years was the precursor to the guerrilla struggles that blossomed in Europe and Latin America in the ’60s and ’70s; in some cases, it was the vector along which experience and materials were directly passed on. But this history has largely been lost, thanks to the rupture imposed by fascism and democracy, and Barcelona lost its significance on the revolutionary stage.

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With the backing of the democratic powers, forty years of dictatorship and repression effectively suppressed the anarchist movement in Catalunya and the rest of the Spanish state. A great deal of pro-anarchist sentiment remained, but this was dissipated when the rebounding social revolution was sidetracked by the transition to democracy in the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands of people were taking the street, hoping to pick up the torch that had been dropped in ’36, but the government played its cards well, the returning CNT played its cards poorly, and democracy carried the day. Since then, the city has been tamed, if not outright pacified, and the rose of fire forgotten.

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Fierce neighborhood struggles continued into the ’80s, but these were largely limited to marginalized immigrant1 neighborhoods and they were calmed by the political and economic integration—or bulldozing—of the slums and shantytowns that gave them birth. In the ’90s, there were several intense squatter and antifascist riots, but the media successfully spun these as isolated phenomena. In the ’00s, social control and pacification made great leaps forward. A new police force trained in democratic policing tactics, the mossos d’escuadra, were introduced along with an insistent public campaign of civic behavior ordinances; in time, the riot disappeared along with street-fighting know-how, the use of Molotov cocktails, and the practice of resisting evictions. The police became untouchable: they only had to charge—or simply draw their batons—to send people scattering.

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A combative spirit was still widespread, at least among anarchists, some squatters, and a part of the Catalan independentistes,2 but the tools needed to express it were lost. In 2007, when police tried to win undisputed control of the streets once and for all by kettling and shutting down any non-permitted protest, the so-called antisistema3 halted this by seeking broader alliances, returning to the streets, and emphasizing the contradiction between the State’s attempted power grab and its democratic narrative. This persistence achieved some results, but no one could figure out how to go back on the offensive.

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When the economic crisis eroded the public welfare that had guaranteed the social peace, many more people besides the couple thousand antisistema began to take action. Neighborhood assemblies formed, pushed forward by well-meaning reformists, indepes, or closet libertarians, and attracting a few Trotskyists and similar types. The anarchist CNT and the anarcho-reformist CGT, kept in shape by minor labor struggles in a supermarket chain and among the bus drivers, geared up for a battle more worthy of their history.4 The indepes, irked by years of irrelevance despite strong public support for independence from Spain and reenergized by the emergence of a new political party that has not yet entered government to betray them, also made ready for a new offensive. And the black bloc anarchists, finally ready to take the initiative after years of action-repression-prisoner support, moved from the limited field of clandestine action, antisocial propaganda, and self-organization within autonomous ghettos to a more porous terrain on which the skills they had honed could have greater effects.

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Barcelona General Strike, September 29, 2010

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The general strike of September 29, 2010 was called by the major unions (CCOO and UGT) along with the smaller unions like the CNT and CGT. But a large part of the organizing was also carried out by neighborhood assemblies, non-union anarchists, indepes, and others. On a national level, it was a success from the union standpoint, achieving majority participation despite being the first general strike in eight years. In Barcelona, it was also a success from an insurrectionary standpoint, precipitating an intense riot in which attacks on agents of government and capitalism generalized. The rioting was largely spontaneous, carried out by many more people than the usual suspects, and reached a scale and intensity not seen since at least the la Cine Princesa riots in 1996.5 A large number of arrests with serious charges and an intense campaign of demonization via the media conditioned future actions and attitudes. Nonetheless, September 2010 left diverse actors with more strength and social backing.

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Banco Español “discredited” after the general strike of 2010

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CCOO and UGT immediately went to the negotiating table and traded in a large part of that backing for the privilege of signing on to the Socialist government’s pension reform. Both unions were in true form. UGT had been a major force in hampering proletarian struggles in the ’20s and ’30s; they were the mass organization that gave the paltry number of Stalinists in 1936 the cover they needed to sabotage the revolution. CCOO (Comisiones Obreras, Workers’ Commissions) is the institutionalization of the libertarian communist Workers’ Autonomy movement of the ’70s. When the fascists who became the Popular Party were looking for leftists to invite into government to help them forestall revolution by putting on a democratic mask, they found their men in the CCOO and the newly reformed Socialist Party (PSOE).

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On the other side of things, the CGT (a split from the CNT) and the two CNTs (another split) got over their age-old enmity and started working more closely. Squatter and black bloc anarchists also started working together with CNT anarchists or joining the neighborhood assemblies and working with indepes, closet libertarians, and community activists. Widespread isolation, as much the result of a shared social condition as of any particular choices, began to melt away.

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In January 2011, these latter groups decided to organize another general strike without the two major unions. Most people regard this second strike as a failure on account of the low level of participation. This frames the purpose of a strike through the quantitative, organizational mentality of a union. The historical significance of the January strike was to demonstrate that CCOO and UGT were losing their hold. It showed that those operating from a more insurrectionary logic could seize the initiative, cause a significant disruption, and communicate radical ideas if they were willing to work beyond narrow affinities and address the immediate concerns of livelihood usually monopolized by reformist discourses. This discovery is at the heart of two tensions that recur throughout the history of the events of March 29. These tensions have to do with how the principle of affinity changes its behavior between times of isolation and times of coalescence; and how immediate concerns are frequently paired with reformist methods, and idealist concerns with revolutionary, methods, creating a false polarization. This will be explored further in the final section.

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After January 27, 2011, the next significant date was May Day, when the anticapitalist protest comprised of black bloc anarchists, the CNT, and many indepes marched from Gràcia to the rich neighborhood of Sarrià, where they smashed a hundred banks and luxury stores before police managed to disperse them. May Day 2011 demonstrated the strength of this new encounter between previously segregated sectors of antisistema. People still did not have the power to withstand the police, nor had they regained street-fighting know-how, but they did manage to go on the attack. For years before 2011, black bloc anarchists in Barcelona had been trying to regain May Day as a combative holiday, failing every time despite creative and varied attempts, while the CNT anarchists had been content with peaceful marches commemorating a waning history. The success in 2011 was an important breakthrough. It also revealed a fear that anti-capitalist violence against the rich would resonate widely, as the media suppressed most news or imagery of the protest.bus drivers, geared up for a battle more worthy of their history.6

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On the other hand, criticisms by some fellow protestors demonstrated that these new relationships would be lost if the hooded ones used heterogeneous, multitudinous spaces instrumentally as a mute and convenient terrain apt for wreaking havoc and nothing else. The specific criticisms were not pacifist, nor were they coming from people who were displeased by the smashing up of a rich neighborhood. They had more to do with who bore the brunt of the repression, who held the line against the police, and who carried out the smashing; or with sticking to joint objectives, or sharing information so others wouldn’t be unprepared for a confrontational situation. Nonetheless, after years of dealing with a broad public rejection of their violence, the more insurrectionary of the antisistema were predisposed to ignore these criticisms.

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Shortly after May Day came the plaza occupation movement of May 15. How 15M developed in Barcelona and how the democrats had to mask themselves simply to participate in their own creation demonstrated the influence of anarchists, well beyond their numbers. Politicians were not allowed. The practice of open assemblies and the idea that “no one represents us” generalized. Every group and organization had to pay lip service to decentralization, horizontality, and mutual aid, and a number of new groups and activities practiced them. A rapidly growing minority in the movement shifted from seeing the media as allies to responding with criticism, disgust, and even physical attacks. Pacifist hegemony was defeated in a matter of months. Neighborhood assemblies experienced a quantum leap, growing from six to over twenty, with participation swelling from dozens to hundreds and moving from indoor locations to central plazas in every neighborhood. A few neighborhood assemblies even allowed the autonomous direct action of participants and practiced pluralistic rather than unitary decision-making, thus surpassing the petty authoritarianism of direct democracy.

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Madrid, May 20, 2011

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Protests became so common, along with the practice of marching in columns from every neighborhood to the center before the start of a protest, with even a group of fifty being able to take over a major street, that police stopped trying to contest non-permitted protests. Solidarity and prisoner support became shared responsibilities as thousands of people, including entire neighborhood assemblies, mobilized when those who would previously have been isolated as antisistema were arrested for assaulting politicians. Multiple neighborhoods started “mutual aid networks” based loosely on a model developed by anarchists in Seattle and Tacoma, and the first of these, in the neighborhood of Clot, made waves throughout Catalunya by organizing the first resistance to a mortgage eviction that physically contested police.

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Some people only changed their terminology, but on the whole practices were changing. Though many new people did start to call themselves anarchists, anarchists remained a small minority, but an influential minority.

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Anarchists spread out over a broadened terrain, often fighting alongside new friends in the neighborhood or the workplace. At the same time, they increased internal communication through debates and assemblies, sharpening their practices, sharing ideas, and building a sense of common strength. Although some anarchists desired unification, most did not, and the anarchist space remained fragmented yet communicative. Most coordination was spontaneous—on the basis of shared information rather than joint planning.

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This was never a smooth process. Anarchist principles were hugely influential, but anarchist arrogance often prevented further cross-pollination. The critique of recuperation—of reformist activists and institutions neutralizing social struggles—was widely held among anarchists in Barcelona; in the ’90s and ’00s, even the CNT had been accused of this by other anarchists. The majority of Catalan libertarians have never considered themselves part of the Left. But now anarchists were discovering an undeniable value in working with people of a reformist bent, or whose vision of revolution tended towards recuperation.

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It was hard to decide whom to work with, how to argue against a reformist position without shooting the messenger, how to navigate a situation in which anarchists suddenly had a lot of influence yet our cherished principles depended on others to be put into practice. Many anarchists changed in the course of these experiences, but few could be heard to admit how much they had learned from contact with other people or how necessary the struggles of non-anarchists were to the contradictory, chaotic whole. On the other hand, it suddenly became less cool to be openly arrogant, and many anarchists criticized their comrades and themselves and called for more humility. A few argued that sincerity is more important than affiliation or political affinity in choosing whom to work with.

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At the end of February, 2012, there was to be a four-day-long public transportation strike in Barcelona. The workers’ leaders—those who spoke loudest and most eloquently in their assemblies—called for major disruption and joint struggle between metro workers, bus workers, and users—that is, everyone not rich enough to have a car. Their proposals were widely applauded and voted into effect. Given that the CGT was one of the largest unions among the bus drivers, and supporting a bus drivers’ struggle had gone well in the past, most anarchists decided to throw themselves headlong into efforts to support the strike.

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Despite the popular support organized in neighborhood assemblies and other spaces, the transport workers wavered as the media mobilized a fictitious public disapproval to condemn the strike. Shortly before it was to begin, union bureaucrats played dirty games, and workers reneged on their promises, made private deals, and abandoned those from whom they had demanded solidarity. The strike never got off the ground, and the effort was a major failure. Some comrades took this as a sign to be more cautious, others as a warning to be more uncompromising. Significantly, it became apparent that many anarchists, like the Trotskyists and socialists, did not see themselves as protagonists in the strike—as users who had been in struggle for months already against fare hikes—but as allies to a struggle that was not their own. On one hand, this view masked a populist failure to criticize a clear betrayal of solidarity. On the other hand, it demonstrated an openness to self-criticism among those who had approached a reformist struggle simply for the opportunity of confrontation it presented. The episode also raised the question of the legitimacy of decisions made in assemblies and how seriously to take them, seeing as people will vote one way after a rousing speech, then the other after a week of bad press.

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The failure of the transport strike would have been demoralizing, just one month before the general strike so many people were hinging their hopes on. But unexpectedly, the Wednesday of that same week, a minor but important riot broke out in a student and teacher demonstration held during a day-long strike in the universities. The riot raised morale and sent an important message about the source of resistance. It spread as student leaders who had controlled and pacified past movements in the university were effectively silenced—the microphone literally snatched out of their hands by libertarian students—and rowdy students, many of them uninvolved in anything resembling politics, went wild while many others gave symbolic support or flocked towards, rather than away from, zones of conflict. In the aftermath, spokespersons for the platform against the privatization of universities were obliged not to condemn the rioting, knowing they would face a critical loss of support.

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Finally, CCOO and UGT called a general strike for March 29. Smaller regional unions in Galicia and Euskadi had already called a strike for that day, and the two major unions signed on to make the strike general and countrywide. CNT and CGT, unwilling to strike on their own after the experience of January 27, quickly followed suit.

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CCOO and UGT were essentially forced into this. Ever since the previous summer, as the dwindling 15M movement fumbled about for effective targets and tactics and the rich and powerful continued in their onslaught, everyone had been talking about the need for another general strike. The unions dawdled, explaining pedantically how difficult it was to pull off. Finally, as the joke goes, President Rajoy produced it accidentally in January when, at an important Eurosummit, he told the Dutch and Finnish prime ministers how good and “aggressive” his new Labor Reform was, how it would make it much easier to fire workers, but it would “cost [him] a general strike.” He did not know that his microphone was on.

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The strategy of the major unions was to sabotage their own strike. People had months to prepare for the general strike of September 2010, so they could make their own plans apart from the unions. This time, CCOO and UGT called it less than three weeks in advance. They put up almost no propaganda until a day or two beforehand, letting the media dominate the conversation. Their ideal outcome would be statistically massive participation and a huge turnout to their own protests, without riots or major disorders. With widespread popular anger, it would be almost impossible to bring crowds into the street while keeping things under control, but if they could minimize the opportunity for the antisistema to prepare for disorder and keep their own flocks separate from the rabble in the streets, they could minimize their losses.

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Anti-capitalist preparations for the strike took multiple forms. Anarchists worked alongside indepes, socialists, and others in neighborhood assemblies, strike committees, and meetings of workers or the unemployed; or they prepared in their own affinity groups, assemblies, or unions (the CNTs). No one, neither police nor antisistema, could make reliable plans for the day. They could either attempt to impose order, or move within disorder.

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The Strike

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In several neighborhoods, the general strike began at midnight, with small groups closing down bars and setting off a traca, a long strip of noisy fireworks. In Casc Antic, a picket supposedly connected to the CGT entered a casino as if to shut it down, and made off with over 2,000 euros in cash; the union quickly denied any connection. As a result, the casino unexpectedly had to close the day of the strike and claimed damages of €50,000. Starting around 6:30 in the morning, barricades shut down the major highway and rail entrances to Barcelona: Av. Meridiana; Gran Via; Diagonal; la Ronda Litoral; metro Zona Universitaria; metro Llacuna, and others.

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The morning barricades

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Starting as early as 4 a.m. in some neighborhoods, and at 7 in others, people convened roving pickets that shut down roads and closed businesses that tried to open—primarily bakeries, bars, and supermarkets. In Horta, 200 people blocked streets, stopped and sabotaged buses, and smashed the windows of the Mercadona, a major supermarket chain infamous for threatening and harassing its workers. In Sants, the picket invaded the train station and beat up a businessman who tried to grab one of the picketers. In Clot, 80 picketers went up and down the neighborhood, shutting down every single street with barricades of dumpsters until riot police attacked, making three arrests. In neighboring Poble Nou, a small picket of CCOO and UGT symbolically blocked a road while the larger neighborhood picket closed shops until the riot police swooped in, chasing the Clot picketers who had taken refuge there. In Sant Andreu, riot police charged the picketers outside city hall, arresting three. In Raval and Eixample, there were morning protests in addition to the pickets.

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At 11 a.m., four different neighborhoods met at Plaça Glories to march together to the center, shutting down Gran Via on the way and insulting a small group of CCOO and UGT picketers standing on the sidewalk. There were tens of thousands of people in the center for the “unitary picket.” It was at this point in the September 2010 strike that the riot started, but this year there were more people, and the plan was to march away from the center, towards Gràcia. Unfortunately, major avenues, specifically designed to control rebellion, had been chosen as the most direct route for the march, and the huge crowds advanced slowly in the hot sun, far from the businesses on either sidewalk.7 The result was neither a protest nor a picket. Nonetheless, most businesses in the vicinity closed as a precaution. One luxury hotel that had been collectivized by anarchists back in ’36 was paint-bombed, but generally the atmosphere was tranquil. Early in the procession, some people swarmed the stock exchange and set a trash fire at its front doors, but quickly backed off when the riot police drove up. At Jardinets de Gràcia, the march stopped for nearly an hour, though the column of people still stretched all the way back to Plaça Catalunya.

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Then some people with flags and banners finally managed to get the crowd moving, turning off to the left into Eixample. Early on, someone threw a flare onto the eaves of a hotel, starting a small fire. The sight of smoke had a magical effect. The passive, helpless crowd was suddenly transformed, as masks appeared and people covered their faces. Tools came out or were pried from the landscape, and soon every bank and luxury store the crowd passed was smashed. Dumpsters were overturned and set on fire. “But they closed!” an older demonstrator asked in astonishment as a luxury store was smashed, “What are you doing?” Clearly, some people wanted the picket to remain a picket, and did not understand the purpose of going on the attack.

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A fire engine moved in and riot vans were seen racing around in the distance; it was later learned that they were pushing back the bulk of the crowd coming up from Pl. Catalunya to prevent reinforcements when it came time to attack the rioters. Many people held back, but thousands pressed forward, smashing more banks and completing a circle to return to Jardinets. At this point the mossos (the Catalan police) attacked, racing forward with riot vans on both flanking streets and cutting off a part of Jardinets. Several people were run over, many more beaten as they ran the sudden gauntlet appearing around them, and a few arrested, although the crowds were so huge that it was difficult for the police to hold the ground necessary to cuff people and drag them away. The largest part of the rioters, mostly anarchists, ducked into the narrow streets of Gràcia, where they could possibly have seized the whole neighborhood and destroyed Gràcia city hall, guarded by only a few police who locked themselves in upon the appearance of five hundred black-clad rioters. But the latter were still in panic mode after the police assault, and they dispersed. Over the following hours of hiding out and trying to regroup, many anarchists remarked on the principal long-term weakness in street situations in Catalunya: people always run from the cops. Elsewhere, in fighting lower down in the city, a group advanced with dumpsters, rocks, and flares without being immediately scattered, but more significant gains were necessary.

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At 4:30 p.m., the march of the CNTs, the CGT, and other anarchists convened in Jardinets to march back down to Pl. Catalunya. About 10,000 strong, with at least tens of thousands of people nearby tying up the police, they casually strode down the posh street of Pau Claris, burning dumpsters in every intersection, smashing open every bank and tossing flares and trash inside. The rampage also led to conflict within the march, as some protestors confronted and tried to unmask the rioters. An eerie scene appeared in their wake: onlookers gawking at the ruins, the numerous columns of smoke, and the firefighters passing trash fires five meters in diameter as they raced to put out the burning banks. At the corner of Pl. Catalunya by the Corte Inglés, one of the most important shopping malls in the country, the mossos attacked and set up a cordon to protect the mall.

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The anarchists dispersed, most of them joining the immense crowds in the plaza. For over an hour, tranquility reigned, journalists mingling with the crowd filming freely. Then, little by little, youth and hooligans,8 many of them not even masked, began to escalate against the police in the upper right corner of the plaza, throwing trash and setting a dumpster on fire. When the dumpster fire grew so large the police had to pull back their vans to keep them from also catching fire, the rowdy crowd attacked, chasing police an entire block to Plaça Urquinaona. Police made as though to counter-charge and people began panicking and running. This time, those with more street experience calmed the panic and urged everyone to stand their ground and fight back, which the hooligans and some others quickly did. Finally, the necessary tools for turning the streets and sidewalks into projectiles appeared or were created from what was at hand, and the police were pelted with a barrage of rocks. In almost an hour of freedom on a street won by force, hooligans, anarchists, and indepes smashed into and set fire to a Starbucks and a bank, and with an almost sick determination smashed through a glass and then a metal wall to open a back entrance to Corte Inglés and set a fire in the coveted shopping mall, as media and bystanders filmed, some out of curiosity and others as a deliberate attempt at intimidation. A few people also shouted at the rioters, but thousands more applauded and held their ground rather than panicking, running, and leaving them isolated, as would normally happen.

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With huge crowds intentionally or unintentionally backing up the rioters, the police could not get around to attack them from behind. Slowly, they advanced under a hail of rocks. When another group of riot police charged up along the Corte Inglés from the lower right corner of the plaza, the crowd drew back and the police regained the entire block that had been taken from them, along with one side of Pl. Catalunya.

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But still people did not retreat. They attacked several press vans, stealing a tank of gasoline from the generator in one of them and putting it to quick use. They started improvising barricades and smashing up the sidewalk for more rocks. For what seemed like another hour, police continuously fired a hail of rubber bullets, wounding many protestors. One person lost an eye, another had a lung punctured. A four-year-old child was shot. But people made shields or took cover behind a row of jersey barriers and other obstacles to continue throwing rocks at the police. In most instances, hooligans and immigrant youth were at the front, with a handful of anarchists, and their bravery was inspiring.

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Finally, to take back the plaza, the mossos had to use tear gas for the first time in their decade-long history. The gas was not that strong, but as an unknown it provoked fear. The first couple canisters were kicked back, but the next few sent the crowds retreating towards Plaça Universitat, smashing more banks and starting more fires on the way. For the next hour, all the streets around Plaça Universitat belonged to the people, until police were finally able to advance another two blocks. Next, fires broke out in Passeig de Gràcia (above Pl. Catalunya) and Raval (the immigrant neighborhood below Pl. Universitat). In the latter area, immigrants and anarchists set fires all night, set up barricades, smashed banks, and gathered rocks, hoping the police would come. Excepting a few undercovers who were quickly chased out, there was little confrontation, only because the forces of order chose to avoid it. All throughout the city, on the periphery of the major points of conflict, people raided supermarkets, smashed banks, burned dumpsters, and beat up undercovers. Late into the night, firefighters raced back and forth, in the center or on the outskirts of town. For a day, the police lost control of the city, as they had on September 27, 2010; perhaps for the first time since the Cine Princesa riots of 1996—although this time on a much larger scale—a large group of people learned how to push the police back in sustained fighting.

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The riot was an event of great significance. The economic shutdown was obvious, even if many shops did not close down. Perhaps a thousand dumpsters were turned into barricades, along with countless tires and other objects. 295 dumpsters were burned, causing the city half a million euros in damages, not counting the streets and sidewalks ripped up, or the many banks and chain stores smashed or set on fire. But the experience of winning the streets was the most significant. In the aftermath, anarchists felt victorious, while the Catalan Interior Minister acknowledged that this was a sign of times to come—an image from the future, as it were. In the buildup to the general strike, no one believed that one day’s actions would solve anything, and this conviction remains even though the strike surpassed everyone’s wildest expectations. But what was gained will be vital for the battles ahead.

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The Barcelona Stock Exchange at the end of the day

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The Repression

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In Tarragona, another city of Catalunya, the antisistema took advantage of the fact that all the riot police were in Barcelona and went on a rampage, burning the offices of several political parties and attacking police cars. The next day, police arrested nine known radicals, from indepes to anarchists, lacking evidence but making up for it with their desire for revenge.

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There were a total of 79 arrests in all Catalunya on March 29, 56 of which were in Barcelona. Many arrestees were beaten and injured in the police stations. Two had to have their spleens removed as a result of the beating. At a solidarity protest outside Modelo prison a few days after the strike, the police carried out an arbitrary and particularly sadistic arrest of one demonstrator, removing him from his wheelchair and leaving it in the street as riot cops cleared a path through the angry crowd for the paddy wagon’s exit, breaking a bone of at least one protestor.

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Most of the arrested are out on bail or conditional liberty, awaiting trial with serious charges, a process that will take two years or more. Three were denied bail: two indepes who were arrested in the morning with compromising materials, and one of the picketers arrested early in the day in Clot, who is also awaiting trial for harrassing politicians during the siege on Parliament in June. In the most intense moments of fighting, police were rarely able to make arrests, and little evidence exists to connect arrestees to the day’s most flagrant crimes. Nonetheless, the courts understand the political need for exemplary punishment, and they will make the necessary arrangements.

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The politicians, meanwhile, are seeking new repressive tools to combat an increasingly rebellious future. In Madrid, the Spanish government is pushing ahead with changes to the penal code, and in Catalunya the Generalitat9 is calling for harsh new measures. The basic characteristics will be familiar to anyone acquainted with repression, and they are summed up by the complaints of Felip Puig, the Catalan Interior Minister, that the law has been too permissive of these “violent ones,” and his appeal to the good citizens of Catalunya to help isolate them. In the first line, the penal code will be changed, with the following probable results: the right to assembly will be limited to prohibit masking and disguises; “public disorder” charges will be expanded to include entering a public institution to protest or blocking access to the same; the minimum sentence for public disorder will be raised to two years, allowing the accused to be held in prison those two years awaiting trial; the charges regarding “criminal organization” will be made more flexible; “assault on authority” will be expanded to include passive resistance to the police; much harsher charges will be given for throwing objects at the police; and sentencing for vandalism will be raised to match sentencing for similar charges under the antiterrorist laws.10 Specifically in Catalunya, the number of riot police will be increased by 25% and a special prosecutor will be appointed to focus solely on “urban violence.” More cameras will be installed in public places and police will increase filming of demonstrators.

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In the second line, the Generalitat will set up a website to encourage and facilitate citizen snitching, and perhaps also to set up a mechanism for the crowdsourcing of identifying rioters from photos, as has been done in other countries. They will also attempt to shut down websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts that call for violent protest, and they will ask citizens not to encourage such violence by sharing personal footage of rioting and street-fighting on their blogs and Facebook.11 The media, for their part, will continue to demonize the “violent ones” in hopes of isolating them. And the new penal code will allow prosecutors to charge any organization with a felony for calling a protest that ends in violence.

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The anarchists have lost no time responding to this. The two days following the strike, there were solidarity gatherings outside the jail and courts. On April 2, a solidarity protest of about five hundred went from Pl. Universitat to Modelo prison. Less than a week after the strike, thousands of copies of at least two anarchist posters appeared on the walls of the city, justifying the riots. One asked, “What did y’all expect?” while the other proclaimed “The end of obedience!” There is talk of connecting these cases with other recent cases of repression—the arrests from the September 2010 strike, the January 2011 strike, May Day, the Pl. Catalunya eviction, the anti-eviction battle in Clot in July 2011, the eviction of an occupied building in October 2011, the Parliament arrests—for which there are already protests and support actions planned. Coordinated attempts to publicize and oppose the new laws are also in the works.

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There are also attempts at criticism and collective learning, as some of the arrests were preventable, and in some cases people precipitated confrontations when it was not wise to do so or when others wanted a safer atmosphere. In Plaça Catalunya, those who wanted to be safer could easily go to the side of the plaza away from the fighting, and in fact there were many families with children or older people in the plaza symbolically supporting those fighting the police. But this was not possible in other spaces, nor would there have been promising opportunities to attack the police even if everyone had wanted to.

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These criticisms are much easier to understand and act upon now that the pacifist back-stabbing that arose with the 15M movement has been surpassed. And it seems that anarchists, rather than denouncing such concerns in unwavering pursuit of constant confrontation—a strategy that has already been tried here and abandoned—are willing to listen and change their ways, following good experiences working with the people making those criticisms. Any change would not be towards pacification, but towards the blending of different spaces and forms of struggle, in order to assume the offensive in ways that do not endanger others and that can spread.

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The lessons learned

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The events of 29M hammered home a few important lessons.

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When it comes to street-fighting, some observations stand out more immediately than others. The most fundamental precondition for action isn’t having a plan—as plans always fall apart in these situations—nor coming materially prepared, although that doesn’t hurt. The most fundamental need is the ability to push back the police. Those who win a space directly from the police can subsequently do everything. The ability to beat the police comes down primarily to attitude, secondly to experience, and thirdly to materials. The first two can produce the third from the urban landscape, if no one has prepared them in advance.

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Those who were most effective in pushing back the police were young people from a mix of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds with little or no prior street experience. Their effectiveness was multiplied when people with more experience and preparation joined them. Likewise, anarchists who fought alongside them accumulated more street experience in one day than in the preceding year of protests. Experience does not accumulate passively. It only accrues to those with attitude.

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Less apparent is the importance of those who were not on the front lines. The sine que non of the March 29 riot was the crowd physically and emotionally backing those in the thick of the action. The forms and intensity of this support must be diversified and increased, a need that is inhibited by the idea that anarchists either fight on the front line or run away. The anarchists in the third line raising their hands and telling people to stay calm are equally important, along with those farther back breaking the pavement into projectiles—too often, the latter activity is carried out on the front line, where people and the piles of stones they accumulate are more vulnerable. It is also necessary to have comrades who do not participate in the fighting, but who argue in favor of it against those who try to pacify or isolate the rioters, and others farther back in the areas safer for children or old folks, who applaud the fighting or cheer every time a new fire breaks out, and who encourage people not to abandon the fighters, but to see them as “ours.”

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“Against the aggression of the rich and their politicians: self-defense”

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Winning the support for this kind of street-fighting was a gradual but steady process after the mass emergence of pacifism in the 15M movement. In many ways, that movement was structured to be an assault on the memory of struggle here, and many people, from indepes to anarchists, had an interest in recentering that history in the new movements, as it had been centered in the trajectory of struggle from the 29S general strike to May Day 2011. This legacy is the vessel of a deeply rooted anti-capitalist analysis and a combative practice. Together, these two aspects of popular history legitimize radical struggle and the actions that must accompany it, highlighting the superficiality of pacifism and democratic populism.

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In the first weeks of the plaza occupations movement of 15M, anarchists repeatedly had to argue against pacifism, distribute fliers and texts, and justify every minor detour from the most tamed and civic forms of activity. Police violence hastened this learning cycle. In all the subsequent major demonstrations, anarchists identified the point of conflict and tried to push it forward, emphasizing visible rather than clandestine actions. For the first few months, the point of conflict was graffiti. Nearly everyone had already assumed the technically illegal action of seizing the streets for every single protest, but if people masked up and started painting banks during a protest, others in the crowd got angry and even tried to physically protect the banks. For every two people who painted, five more were needed to defend their actions and sometimes physically protect them. Protest by protest, fewer people objected to political graffiti—provided it was directed at banks, government buildings, and other hated institutions—and more people in the crowd argued in favor of the spray-painting. The significant action was not the vandalizing of a bank, but the popular debate that came to legitimize it.

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The next point of conflict centered around masking up. By October, hardly anyone criticized spray-painting in demonstrations, but argued you should do it without a mask. Again, anarchists defended the practice and distributed literature about it, but masking was less likely than spray-painting to generate an open conflict, so there were fewer opportunities to engage. Around this time, the police arrested people who had been caught on tape harassing politicians during the siege of parliament in June, so it became easier to explain the practical reasons for masking up, even as the media flooded with rhetoric about the cowardice of masking up. Fortunately, the practice easily communicates itself on a visual and stylistic level, especially among the youth; but in Barcelona it still creates a rupture between those who automatically sympathize with the practice and those who are automatically turned off by it.

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In other demonstrations, people introduced more offensive tactics by paint-bombing especially odious targets such as the Stock Exchange and political party offices. Outside of the space of demonstrations, on random days in random neighborhoods, hooded ones appeared to smash a bank and quickly disappear again, creating another possibility for the normalization of attacks. But before this process could continue further, it suddenly accelerated with the student riots and then the general strike. On the one hand, these events normalized combative popular resistance, giving more people a chance to participate. On the other hand, they allowed those sympathetic to such attacks to quickly accelerate and break away from those inclined to condemn the violence. While a few thousand people might be able to win in the streets for an hour or two, in the long run if such a group does not continue to expand and undermine the barriers of legitimacy placed around it, it will inevitably be isolated and pacified. Nonetheless, by the time of the strike, a large part of Catalan society had been accustomed to low levels of street conflict and property destruction, and the worsening prospects for the future gave some of them the rage to support a sudden escalation of this conflict.

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Spectacularization—the practice of reducing action to images—is a strong force for isolating rioters. While opposition to the press and awareness of the need for protective measures are slowly spreading in the form of attacks on journalists and efforts to convince bystanders not to film, there is still a dangerous degree of spectacularization during riots. The spreading of new chants, an effective tactic in the radicalization of 15M and the struggle with pacifism, has also been used against the media; one couplet, “The press aims, the police shoot,” has become popular since October. However, there is not yet any chant against filming by ordinary people, although some propaganda has been distributed on the subject. Nonetheless, if journalists can be pushed out of protests and come to be understood as equivalent to the police, the most dangerous forms of spectacularization will be eliminated.

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It is also necessary to take a step back from the exigencies of street-fighting to ask what was accomplished and what the point was. The most important elements of the conflict were emotional and symbolic, not economic. The State, itself the source of currency, cannot be destroyed by economic losses but only by popular attack. If CCOO and UGT had achieved 2% higher participation in the strike and prevented any riots and property destruction, total economic losses would have been far greater, yet social struggles would have gained nothing. What was gained was the interruption of the narrative of social peace that is vital to governance, the temporary spread of participation in outright resistance, and the experience that will make it possible to surpass this rupture in the future and to create relationships with the strangers who became our comrades for a day.

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This latter activity is rarely attempted, even though it is one of the most promising opportunities such insurrectionary moments offer. Anarchists live in the same neighborhoods as the hooligans who led the fight against the police, but they are totally alienated from one another as long as there is no riot going on. People who engage in street-fighting should not be idealized, but many of them suffer police violence on a daily basis, and at least some of them have strong anti-authoritarian tendencies. Anarchists should approach them and others as people we will live alongside and participate in assemblies with after the revolution.12

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In order to bring that revolution nearer, it will be necessary to surpass the natural divide between night and day, learning to sustain riots over multiple days. Only when they extend in time will they have the possibility of growing into an insurrection that extends from city to city. Otherwise, they will serve merely as an emotional release. In the meantime, when normality returns, the question is how to build off what was won, how to access the collective experience of the riot and prevent the social pendulum from swinging towards reaction.

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Only the last part of this question is answered within the collective body of knowledge: support the repressed; build relationships across the divides imposed between good and bad protestors, and between protestors and spectators; counter the media backlash by highlighting the role of the media in the social war; and oppose new repressive measures legislated by the State.

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The Strategic Tensions

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Historically, the anarchist movement in Catalunya has constructed its identities more around shared practices and locales than unifying ideologies. It is inaccurate and inappropriate to speak—as distant spectators tend to—of insurrectionary anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists as two opposed and distinct groups. These ideologies exist, but as a fluid interchange along with other positions, rather than as opposite poles. They are more practice than ideology.

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Until the end of July 1936, when it became a class-collaborationist and ultimately statist organization, the CNT was without a doubt the most important revolutionary organization in Spain, but it functioned in equal parts as a union and as a pole for the construction of informal combative neighborhood networks.13 Important figures within it ran the gamut from insurrectionary to syndicalist, and the exodus of the latter was an important step in its radicalization. Cenetistes14 fought for libertarian communism, collectivism, and cooperativism, or they simply fought against present conditions, not knowing what could come next. Many militants changed their position and practices depending on the fortunes of the social struggle, so that the most insurrectionary in one moment would be the most moderate in another moment, as in the case of Garcia Oliver. Ascaso and Durruti, perhaps the most principled of the most influential members, were both committed syndicalists—insofar as they saw the union as an important tool for workplace agitation and organization—and insurrectionists, as they believed the time for attacking and thus building the capacity for armed struggle was always at hand; they had argued and practiced this in the ’20s, at a time when most thought it more prudent to wait. At times, their practices coincided heavily with the individualist, illegalist anarchists who often made their base in the Raval; at other times, they seemed like pure union militants.

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To give another example, probably the most important anarchist social center formed in Barcelona in the years before ’36 was the appropriately named L’Ateneu Eclèctic.15 It would not have passed the censor with the more traditional descriptor of ateneu llibertari, but the adjective “eclectic” was equally accurate. As Abel Paz, the anarchist historian from the same neighborhood (Clot) would later write, it was a social center where pacifists mingled with practitioners of propaganda by the deed; where an influential anarchist individualist held study courses alongside the libertarian youth group or CNT militants who carried out propaganda or sabotage in the nearby textile factories; the home base for the large anarchist collective Sol i Vida, which practiced vegetarianism, nudism, free love, and excursions to the mountains to practice with firearms, and a formative space for the Barcelona group of Mujeres Libres.

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Nowadays, anarchists in Barcelona typically denominate themselves with imprecise caricatures (els black bloc, els refors, els hipis) or with references to a locale such as a neighborhood or social center, whose participants are diverse and change over time, but the conglomeration of which contributes a particular character. In this way, they fulfill the inevitable need of having to name themselves and one another, and they do so in a way that is prone to stereotyping and even disrespect, but also flexible and blurred, allowing individuals to move easily between labels and thus also facilitating debate between different groups rather than rendering difference as a competition between irreconcilable ideological opposites.

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One of the two CNTs is jokingly referred to as a syndicate of insurrectionaries, whereas some “black bloc” anarchists hold ideas about unity, formal organization, and technological civilization that would make anglophone insurrectionists shudder. Almost every anarchist in Barcelona today recognizes the importance of the CNT in building the revolutionary movement that made July 1936 possible; they also blame the CNT for the revolution’s failure. Most of the anarchists outside of the CNT blame that organization’s dynamics for the loss of the revolutionary opportunity during the transition to democracy in the ’70s, while cenetistes are more likely to acknowledge some errors but blame state repression. Italian insurrectionary anarchism, brought to Spain by the Córdoba bank robbers in 1996, found its most active adherents among the FIJL, the youth organization that subsequently split from the CNT. The CNT’s position, denying support for the bank robbers, also caused many others to leave, but some who left have subsequently rejoined, and its character has changed over the years.

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In the aftermath of the strike, the CNT of Sabadell (a city just outside of Barcelona) released a statement criticizing the Barcelona branch of the CGT for distancing itself from the riots and speaking of good and bad protestors. The title of their communiqué was “Against the System, Its Defenders, and Its False Critics,” a direct reference to the insurrectionary classic, At Daggers Drawn.

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The strategic tensions that manifested throughout this long history of 29M do not signify a contest between two ideological poles; readers who attempt to mine the account to further such a contest will be missing the actual conversations happening among comrades in Barcelona. The points outlined here have arisen in local debates; they are based in present needs rather than abstract competitions.

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The principal strategic tensions alluded to above have to do with unity and engagement. One important theoretical dispute is between anarchists who see unity as a goal and those who do not. In times of isolation, this tension is unlikely to arise; both those who prefer to work in affinity groups and those who prefer to work in popular or open groups will have few options regarding what spaces to operate in, and the projects of one type of group will likely appear irrelevant to the projects of the other. Those preferring different approaches will likely dismiss or ignore each other, while internally, tendencies towards disunity will usually be overcome by the need to work together because of the scarcity of potential comrades.

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In times of high momentum and coalescence, these different approaches can meet and overlap, while many more potential comrades appear. In this new dynamic, some anarchists will feel that difference is creative, while others see it as disorganization. Some will believe that fragmentation is a natural property of non-coerced groups, while others will believe that greater affinity is the natural result of working together. Some will seek to maximize the range of possibility, creating a chaotic social struggle, while others will seek to coordinate and unify, producing a disciplined social struggle—or, lacking the force or common identity to instill discipline, an organization that attempts to encompass or represent the entire struggle.

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The other theoretical dispute results from the erroneous association of reformist practices with addressing immediate concerns on one hand and revolutionary practices with adhering to abstract ideals on the other. In times of low social struggle, it is easiest for anarchists focusing on immediate concerns to adopt reformist language and practices, and for anarchists committed to revolutionary practices to frame their action in terms of long-term ideals. When a wider range of people start talking about immediate problems in more angry, uncompromising terms, some revolutionary anarchists will jump to the opposite pole, suddenly talking about immediate problems—and forceful, perhaps even revolutionary solutions—without expressing their long-term desires and radical analyses.

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The others, meanwhile, will disdain popular struggles and further withdraw towards purely anarchist projects. Bringing uncompromising anarchist ideals to the complexity of immediate problems is the most difficult option, and thus the most rare.

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Both of these tensions have everything to do with moving from an antisocial position to a populist one. This is fundamentally an error of not transcending the limitations—both chosen and imposed—of a period of social isolation, instead fleeing towards the easiest, most superficial practice of communication when new convergences make this possible. Anarchist populism is the result of comrades abandoning the good instincts but preserving the bad habits of the antisocial position.

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In the sort of coalescence experienced in Barcelona between 2010 and 2011, anarchists faced a changing environment and they inevitably changed with it. Everything they gained, they gained through an instinct or a strategy of engagement, exploring new spaces of protest and intervening in heightened social conflicts. Anarchists have influenced the ideals and practices of the new social movements out of all proportion to their numbers. Many errors, meanwhile, stemmed from the limits of populist or antisocial tendencies. The possibility remains that anarchists will remain outside these movements, left behind as reformists steer them towards institutionalization, or that anarchists will lose themselves in these movements, abandoning their principles for fear of being marginalized. These two errors are simultaneous and complementary.

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After the September general strike and the 15M movement, anarchists recognized the opportunity to work in much larger groups, and these were the tightropes they had to walk. At the beginning, 15M had the appearance of a broad social awakening. As most participants found no means to continue in that direction and returned to the barbituates of normality, the wave receded, but the previous formations of social struggle had been left in disorder. They were more populated, more numerous, more heterogeneous, and more entangled.

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Reacting to the inevitable decline in the social movements that had suddenly expanded during the summer of 2011, and the fact that new spaces of protest and action were still much larger and heterogeneous than before—and thus, in a conservative logic, more susceptible to dwindling and factionalizing—some anarchists exhibited a populist tendency. Fearful of losing their newfound support, they downplayed their anarchist identities and sought greater unity on the basis of necessarily watered-down anti-authoritarian analysis. Other anarchists fortified their antisocial position, convinced that participating in these new heterogeneous spaces would require compromising their principles, as seemed to be the case with their populist comrades.

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The anarchist space of Barcelona is fragmented and communicative. It is neither unified in a single organization or identity nor segmented in isolated, non-communicative scenes. Fragmented and communicative anarchist spaces tend to be particularly potent in developing new practices and adapting to changing circumstances.

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Anarchist propaganda around the recent general strike was less openly anarchist and accordingly less radical. Many problems and principles that are important to anarchists have been almost entirely left out of recent anarchist propaganda, at a time when more people than ever are open to radical ideas, and drastic proposals are necessary. Missing this opportunity, many anarchists have focused on single-issue propaganda that emphasizes the immediate problems of normal people: work, healthcare, housing, education, the police. They trace these problems back to capitalism and the State, but in a way that encourages a critique based in convenience that could disappear as soon as someone lands a good job. The tendency has been more to avoid isolation than to push the envelope. This tendency may foil repression, but the relationships it creates and the critiques it spreads are likely to be superficial.

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Other anarchists have withdrawn to publications and actions intended strictly for themselves and other anarchists. Some have produced propaganda that criticizes the disappearing welfare state in a way that mocks the hardship people are suffering because of this disappearance. Nonetheless, this position also fosters a certain strength and independence of action that probably deserves some of the credit for the victory in the streets.

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These tensions are unresolved, and they constitute more of a balance than a contest. How do we share radical critiques of this society without scaring away other members of it? How do we participate in heterogeneous spaces without facilitating our own recuperation? How do we counteract the narrative the media attempts to impose without ceasing to be dangerous to the established order?

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In any case, anarchists have more and stronger relationships now than two years ago, and are armed with more potent experience. Debates are ongoing; already, there are attempts to confront the criminalization carried out by the State in the aftermath of the riot, and to distill the lessons of that day of spontaneous fury.

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New innovations will likely arise as comrades in other countries prepare for their own general strikes, and those innovations might find their way back here. Perhaps the tremors of disorder generated in Barcelona will help shake off the illusion of stability that still reigns in other countries, showing the whole world that it is not the rioters in the streets who are surrounded by the forces of order, but the ruling classes who cling to disappearing islands amid a swelling sea of rage.

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Appendix I: A Clarification on Influential Minorities

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The key difference between an influential, insurrectionary minority and a vanguard or a populist group is that the former values its principles and its horizontal relations with society and tries to spread its principles and models without owning them, whereas a vanguard tries to control them—whether through force, charisma, or hiding its true objectives—while a populist group offers easy solutions and caters to the prejudices of the masses in fear of being isolated. The populist group never actually overcomes isolation, as that would require forming strong relations that can abide a difference of opinion. Instead, it simply mimics the mass.

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Because they both seek the warmth of the herd, the vanguard and the populist often become bedfellows, as the Stalinists and the UGT did during the Spanish Civil War. Within this partnership, the former will be more effective and will make use of the latter.

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The influential minority, meanwhile, is prone to developing an antisocial tendency—as its idealism contrasts with the unprincipled pragmatism of the majority—and becoming accustomed to the role of gadfly. If this tendency manifests as a disdain for the rest of society and a commitment to realizing its principles despite and against the masses, it is likely to find common ground with vanguardist groups, who will probably use it as shock troops for carrying out offensives—as in the October Revolution. If, on the other hand, it takes the easier antisocial path of abstracting its principles, it will limit its influence, because nothing around it will reflect its ideals or invite its engagement. Only when they constantly relate their principles to the complexity of their surroundings can such minorities serve as a model for others to become actors in their own right.

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The influential minority works through resonance, not through control. It assumes risks to create inspiring models and new possibilities, and to criticize convenient lies. It enjoys no intrinsic superiority and falling back on the assumption of such will lead to its isolation and irrelevance. If its creations or criticisms do not inspire people, it will have no influence. Its purpose is not to win followers, but to create social gifts that other people can freely use.

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Appendix II: Propaganda Archive

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Text of an anarchist poster put up before the strike

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What is a general strike?

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It’s the interruption of the normal functioning of the system. It’s blocking the flows of people and merchandise. It’s sabotaging the gears necessary for the system’s functioning. It’s attacking those responsible for our oppression. It’s confronting the defenders and false critics of the current paradigm. It’s struggling in our daily spaces (neighborhood, work, school, etc.). It’s going out into the streets and sharing what little we have left: rage, bread, and dreams. It’s using the entire arsenal of tools that the history of the oppressed has put at our disposal.

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A general strike can only be wild, all the rest is self-parody. We’ll see each other on the 29th of March in the streets!

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Text of a flyer distributed to youth before the strike

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They’ve snatched away your future. The superficial welfare, the American Dream they imposed on previous generations is something they can no longer promise you. No diploma, no healthcare, no mortgage, no career, no car, no retirement, no iPod, no ski vacations. Forget it all. Now they are saddling you with the following future: a merciless competition between those who manage to attain a stable job as cops, bankers, metro guards, managers, or engineers, and those who will have to live going from one precarious, short-term job to another, handing out publicity flyers, cleaning up after tourists and rich people, working as waiters, cashiers, whores, cooks, metal scrappers, busting your ass working in construction or messing up your eyes working behind a screen. In other words, the bastards without a conscience who want to work as mercenaries, scabs, or exploiters will triumph and everyone else will be left without retirement, healthcare, or a salary.

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Take a good look at your friends. Which of them would kick you out of your apartment for not being able to make the rent? Which of them would lock you up in prison for stealing or selling drugs as a matter of survival? Which of them would fire you just to increase their profits? They’re the ones who will take over the world and control your future, while all of you who are honest, solidaristic, and humble are gonna get fucked.

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They’ve destroyed the world you will inherit. They’ve poisoned the water and the air through their greed and disrespect for nature. They’ve cut down the forests to turn them into commodities. They’ve fucked the climate out of pure caprice and arrogance. They’ve contaminated our minds with an authoritarian, pedantic education and a stupefying culture. They’ve stolen our knowledge of how to feed ourselves, heal ourselves, build our own houses, and resolve our own conflicts so that we remain dependent on their wage labor, their police and their justice, so that we only have to learn how to serve them, obey them, and use the machines they force on us rather than our own tools. They’ve made history disappear so we don’t understand how this happened, how we lived before capitalism, and how we could live in our own future, created by us and not by them, that greedy pack of exploiters, authoritarians, torturers, and murderers.

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This disappeared history is the history of our resistance, our struggle against all authority, and therefore it constitutes the seed of a future without them. But if they destroy the entire world, if they convert it into an uninhabitable place where we will be perpetually dependent on their technology and their control, there won’t be a future for anyone.

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Burn it, then. Burn the future they’ve assigned you. Burn the plans they want to impose on you. Burn their inhuman authority, burn their false wisdom. Burn everything that is a lie to create the possibility, however improbable, that the seeds of a new world sprout from the ashes of this one. And don’t trust in anyone except for your friends, those who prove to be solidaristic, those who feel rage. And when they call you “violent,” when they call you “senseless,” when they demand you stop or attempt to recruit you, it’s because they’re afraid of losing control, of being revealed as nothing but authoritarian idiots who have destroyed the world and the future.

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Burn it all, to start anew, and without them.

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To the indefinite strike, to the recovery of sabotage, fire, vengeance, and permanent revolt.

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“The struggle gives us what power takes away!” A poster from one neighborhood calling for the strike, and listing the day’s events.

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Text of an anarchist poster distributed after the strike

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The End of Obedience

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You had to beat us, shoot us in the face, and gas us. You had to detain us and mistreat us, imprison us and isolate us. You had to threaten us with new laws and tell everyone we were “terrorists.” You had to do all that and more to try to get us to lower our heads. But despite everything you have done, you didn’t get what you wanted.

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In the face of all your threats, all your orders and blackmails, on the 29th of March we lit bonfires in the streets. We weren’t a group, we weren’t 300 or even 2000. We were many more. We were those whom you trample every day, thinking we won’t defend ourselves. We were those you squeeze dry in precarious jobs. Those you turn out into the streets if you want to seize their houses or if they can’t pay the rent. Those you govern like resources, like numbers in your statistics. On the 29th of March, we disobeyed you and suddenly everything began to rumble. Now we are conscious of our strength. We feel your world crumbling and we won’t help you raise it up again.

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We prefer to build our own. The end of obedience!

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For Further Reference

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Documentary: Barcelona March 29 General Strike

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  1. \n

    Most of the immigrants at that time were from southern Spain. ↩

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    2. \n
  2. \n

    Catalans opposed to Spanish occupation of their country. There are many different “indepe&drquo; organizations, most of them socialist, and many youth organizations. Leftwing Catalan political parties that participate in the Spanish government (e.g., the ERC) are considered indepes but often excluded by radical and socialist indepes. Catalanist fascists on the other hand are not considered indepes. ↩

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    3. \n
  3. \n

    The term invented by the press to lump together all social rebels deserving of repression and undeserving of a political voice. Because of the history in Catalunya, neither anarchists nor indepes could be explicitly targeted for repression without contradicting the sensitive democratic narrative, as both of these groups are widely known and thought to have political legitimacy. ↩

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    4. \n
  4. \n

    The CGT, the much larger of the two unions, is the result of a bitter split from the CNT that raged throughout the ‘80s, weakening the original organization. The CGT participates in the institutionalization of the labor unions achieved by the watershed Moncloa Pact (1977). Although the entire CNT rejected the pact, many CNT unions subsequently thought it necessary to accept the new reality and modify their principles, leading to a split. The splits eventually formed the CGT participate in workplace elections that assign official representatives to the workers, and accordingly they receive government subsidies. It should be noted that in the Spanish state, only legal labor unions can call a strike. If a general strike is official, all workers have the legal right to participate, although many employers do not respect this right. One downside of the tradition of labor struggles in Catalunya is that wildcat strikes are rarely considered, because combative labor unions exist, and the official strike is a longstanding social institution. ↩

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    5. \n
  5. \n

    The Cine Princesa riots followed the eviction of squatted social center, the Cine Princesa, on Via Laietana, on October 28, 1996. Participants in riots frequently disagree when ranking the importance and intensity of different uprisings. More than anything else, riots are subjective occurrences, and being in a different part of the city or having different standards will greatly change one’s evaluation. The riots of 29S spread spontaneously among thousands of people throughout several parts of the city, mostly as running engagements of short duration. The Cine Princesa riots involved focused and determined attacks by hundreds of people—squatters and some neighbors—against property and the police in one part of the center. ↩

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    6. \n
  6. \n

    At other times, the media readily used imagery of disorder and destruction to mobilize public support for repressing the antisistema; the difference in their strategy on May Day suggests a motive we can only infer. ↩

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    7. \n
  7. \n

    In Barcelona, the major avenues are constituted by a wide road flanked by strips of park and smaller side roads, so that large crowds will usually walk down the center road leaving buffers of emptiness on either side, useful for police movements or the maintenance of a peaceful atmosphere; the strips of park make it difficult, lacking strong will, to seize all three roads at once, as large crowds always walk down the center. ↩

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    8. \n
  8. \n

    In this case, not strictly sports hooligans, but marginalized and rowdy youth, as distinguished from people who consciously and habitually participate in social struggles, revolutionary projects, activist campaigns, or politics. ↩

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    9. \n
  9. \n

    The Catalan government, which forms an “autonomous community” within the Spanish state. ↩

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    10. \n
  10. \n

    The Spanish state was one of the first to elaborate a domestic politics of antiterrorism. The target, the independence struggle in Euskal Herria, the Basque country, was also a major public enemy of the Franco regime. Many of the victims of the antiterrorist laws were youths who participated in combative street protests against Spanish authority. Under the law, they could be arrested, tortured, and sentenced to long prison terms just the same as members of ETA. In other words, antiterror laws in Spain had already been adapted from focusing on armed guerrilla groups to focusing on horizontally organized street protests or autonomous sabotage. ↩

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    11. \n
  11. \n

    It is curious to note that both anarchists and rulers feel threatened by the expanded dissemination of riot porn through blogs, Facebook, and similar media. The anarchists fear the spectacularization of confrontation and publicizing of images that could help make arrests, whereas the State fears the autonomous, self-organized communication of imagery undermining media control. Note that in self-appointed First World countries, the media rarely spread images of large crowds attacking symbols of wealth or forces of order. ↩

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    12. \n
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    While we should not predicate our struggle on an expectation that we are going to win, since we probably won’t, we should absolutely use the prospect of a future anarchy as an active imaginary that guides and colors our current practice. ↩

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    13. \n
  13. \n

    See Chris Ealham%squo;s Anarchism and the City; ignore his contradictory anti-insurrectionary strategic suggestions. ↩

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  14. \n

    CNT members, “cenetistas” in Spanish. ↩

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    15. \n
  15. \n

    An “ateneu,” or athenium, is a type of proletarian social center begun in the second half of the 19th century where workers and others could come together to educate themselves, hold study or debate groups, and other activities. “Llibertari” means libertarian, a common synonym for anarchist. ↩

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    16. \n
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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/04/08/beware-join-the-experimentation-committee", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/04/08/beware-join-the-experimentation-committee", "title": "Beware/Join the Experimentation Committee!", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2012-04-08T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "\n
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Beware/Join the Experimentation Committee

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This manifesto appeared in VORTEXT, organ of the Experimentation Committee. It is available in PDF form here.

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“You need to know how to experience freedom in order to be free. You need to free yourself in order to experience freedom. Within the present social order, time and space prevent the experimentation of freedom because they suffocate the freedom to experiment. Only by upsetting the imperatives of time and social space will it be possible to imagine new relations and surroundings. The old philosopher said one can only desire on the basis of what one knows. Desires can only change if one changes the life that produces them.”

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– Anonymous, At Daggers Drawn

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If it works, it’s obsolete. Real innovation rarely comes from the successful—those who have something to lose can’t afford to stumble about at random. On the contrary, it comes from the ones who have their hands free: lunatics, ne’er-do-wells, outsiders, MAXIMUM ULTRAISTS.

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In sleepy backwaters far from academia’s ivory towers, teenagers improvise munitions and Wright brothers invent airplanes. Most never achieve fame, not even of the fifteen-minute variety. They don’t contribute to the sort of progress recorded by historians—incremental, linear, triumphalist. They aren’t part of an avant-garde: that presupposes a direction, when it is precisely the refusal of direction that enables them to make their discoveries.

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Some call this play. Others call it folk science. We call it the Experimentation Committee. The Experimentation Committee doesn’t hold yearly conventions or award laurels. For the most part, it is comprised of people who never meet each other. It is not a membership organization but a secret society of the elect, which one may join only by departing from all that is familiar. It is a tunnel of darkness, a cocoon in which one becomes another.

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Joining the Experimentation Committee is not only a matter of experimenting in means, but also in ends: not just acting according to values—however “radical”—but, as Nietzsche put it, revaluating them.1 This kind of behavior is no walk in the park. Those who have chosen a project or direction can at least evaluate their success according to an external measure; without this convenience, there is no staving off self-doubt and existential crises. The Experimentation Committee is not for the faint of heart.

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When you understand something, you know less, for you no longer see the field of possibilities. People are only likely to break new ground when they don’t understand how something works, when they imitate without mastery or comprehension. In this regard, the internet may actually be a barrier to innovation—it tends spread identical copies, not unique imitations.

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If you aren’t sure what we mean, hurry—cease reading this instant and compose your own text expressing whatever you can imagine we might mean. Only thus will you have any hope of generating something new.

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Abstract theoretical considerations about what is needed rarely bear fruit; more often, people discover innovations by trying things at random until one works, albeit to achieve a previously unsought end. Only then do the theoreticians catch up, explaining why it works and why its results are desirable. This suggests that innovators should prioritize wide-ranging experimentation, even at random, over carefully-crafted hypotheses. New strategies arise from new tactics, not vice versa.

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To participate in the Experimentation Committee, one must go beyond merely insisting that “another world is possible,” unless perhaps it is the other world depicted by Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard (as “J.J. Grandville”). Rather, one must “remain impossible as long as those who are now possible remain possible,” as Bakunin put it: the point is not to legitimize even the outlandish as realistic, but to abolish reality as we know it.

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All of us have been part of the Experimentation Committee at some point in our lives—at least long enough to become anarchists, antinomians, or whatever it is you are that explains why you’re reading this. Yet like the reference points for anarchist revolution, our examples of bona fide participation in the Committee are largely mythological.

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Let’s start with the Situationists in their younger days, drifting around Europe, investing their chance encounters with meaning, before they became so fucking ideological. From their dérives we derive the principle that the Experimentation Committee must wander rather than seek.2

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Every cup that runneth over, everyone who exceeds his role—who goes beyond—qualifies for membership. We count Subcommandante Marcos of the EZLN among the Experimentation Committee not because he participated in a revolutionary uprising but because he found time in the midst of it to write children’s stories about a talking beetle. This ski-masked Scheherazade, desperately sending out tales of Durito from his muddy camp in hopes of maintaining enough liberal attention to escape massacre for another week, cannot fail to touch our hearts even when his politics do not.

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If the French gang Os Cangaceiros really did squat a top-dollar condominium—rather than the usual abandoned warehouse—solely in order to provoke a police attack, that also qualifies as the requisite excess. Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz are first-round draft picks. Playing free jazz isn’t enough, but Sun Ra qualifies. Punk bands like Contropotere and Gism almost make the cut, but Creation Is Crucifixion enlisted when they started reprogramming video games in addition to playing hardcore. Voina seems inspiring, though our Russian comrades report—not surprisingly—that they’re assholes. Neither Marinetti nor any other marionette of state or capital has a damn thing to do with the Committee.

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It is rarely easy to mobilize support for Experimentation Committee arrestees. All the more reason to burn the prisons.

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The Experimentation Committee claims the death rattles of sacred cows as its national anthem. The Experimentation Committee strikes fear into the hearts of all who earnestly wish to succeed. The Experimentation Committee is an unquenchable fountain of youth, ceaselessly replenishing the world despite all our efforts to seal it up. Compose your last will and testament—double or nothing—and join up.

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Comrades—Surely It Is Too Late, but We Need You for the Experimentation Committee.

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To apply, mail one of the following to:

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VÖÖÖRTEXT
\nvortex[at]crimethinc.com
\nP.O. Box 494
\nChapel Hill, NC
\n27514
\nUSA

\n\n\n\n

God Punishes the NYPD
\nNihilist Rube Goldberg Machine
\nJudith Butler Does Battle with the Hydra of Gender
\nThe Suicide of Barack Obama
\nDead Letter from the 1980s
\nRed Herring
\nCat with Moth Wings
\nCrime or Miracle: A Complete Human Being
\nLucifer Abandons Cain to His Fate
\nSatan’s Daughter Liberty Invokes His Assistance in Storming the Bastille
\nNo Artist—No Title
\nThe City Was a Hunchback, Sinister at Dusk
\nWeapons for Children
\nLa Belle Dame Sans Merci
\nThe Sound of Tiny Hatchets
\nUnload the Drum Machine!
\nBid for Popularity
\nTrojan Horse

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Those who fulfill demands made in the name of the Experimentation Committee earn the right to make such demands of others. Expand the Committee!

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    \n
  1. \n

    When economists revalue a currency, they do so in relation to other currencies; thus one may simply understand Nietzsche as proposing that we reevaluate traditional values relative to other values. But we can also imagine him to be arguing for a way of thinking and living that produces new values. As he says, one must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star. ↩

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  2. \n

    “Aimless is my song. Yes, aimless. As is love and life,. And creator and creation.” – Heinrich Heine ↩

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    3. \n
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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/03/27/the-illegitimacy-of-violence-the-violence-of-legitimacy", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/03/27/the-illegitimacy-of-violence-the-violence-of-legitimacy", "title": "The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy", "summary": "What is violence? Who gets to define it? Does it have a place in the pursuit of liberation? This discussion never takes place on a level playing field.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/violence/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/violence/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2012-03-27T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2026-02-03T20:04:34Z", "tags": [ "violence", "nonviolence", "legitimacy", "Occupy", "Hedges" ], "content_html": "

What is violence? Who gets to define it? Does it have a place in the pursuit of liberation? These age-old questions have returned to the fore during the Occupy movement. But this discussion never takes place on a level playing field; while some delegitimize violence, the language of legitimacy itself paves the way for the authorities to employ it. [You can listen to an audio version of this text here.]

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“Though lines of police on horses, and with dogs, charged the main street outside the police station to push rioters back, there were significant pockets of violence which they could not reach.”

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– The New York Times, on the UK riots of August 2011

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During the 2001 FTAA summit in Quebec City, one newspaper famously reported that violence erupted when protesters began throwing tear gas canisters back at the lines of riot police. When the authorities are perceived to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, “violence” is often used to denote illegitimate use of force—anything that interrupts or escapes their control. This makes the term something of a floating signifier, since it is also understood to mean “harm or threat that violates consent.”

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This is further complicated by the ways our society is based on and permeated by harm or threat that violates consent. In this sense, isn’t it violent to live on colonized territory, destroying ecosystems through our daily consumption and benefitting from economic relations that are forced on others at gunpoint? Isn’t it violent for armed guards to keep food and land, once a commons shared by all, from those who need them? Is it more violent to resist the police who evict people from their homes, or to stand aside while people are made homeless? Is it more violent to throw tear gas canisters back at police, or to denounce those who throw them back as “violent,” giving police a free hand to do worse?

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In this state of affairs, there is no such thing as nonviolence—the closest we can hope to come is to negate the harm or threat posed by the proponents of top-down violence. And when so many people are invested in the privileges this violence affords them, it’s naïve to think that we could defend ourselves and others among the dispossessed without violating the wishes of at least a few bankers and landlords. So instead of asking whether an action is violent, we might do better to ask simply: does it counteract power disparities, or reinforce them?

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This is the fundamental anarchist question. We can ask it in every situation; every further question about values, tactics, and strategy proceeds from it. When the question can be framed thus, why would anyone want to drag the debate back to the dichotomy of violence and nonviolence?

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The discourse of violence and nonviolence is attractive above all because it offers an easy way to claim the higher moral ground. This makes it seductive both for criticizing the state and for competing against other activists for influence. But in a hierarchical society, gaining the higher ground often reinforces hierarchy itself.

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Legitimacy is one of the currencies that are unequally distributed in our society, through which its disparities are maintained. Defining people or actions as violent is a way of excluding them from legitimate discourse, of silencing and shutting out. This parallels and reinforces other forms of marginalization: a wealthy white person can act “nonviolently” in ways that would be seen as violent were a poor person of color to do the same thing. In an unequal society, the defining of “violence” is no more neutral than any other tool.

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Defining people or actions as violent also has immediate consequences: it justifies the use of force against them. This has been an essential step in practically every campaign targeting communities of color, protest movements, and others on the wrong side of capitalism. If you’ve attended enough mobilizations, you know that it’s often possible to anticipate exactly how much violence the police will use against a demonstration by the way the story is presented on the news the night before. In this regard, pundits and even rival organizers can participate in policing alongside the police, determining who is a legitimate target by the way they frame the narrative.

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On the one-year anniversary of the Egyptian uprising, the military lifted the Emergency Laws—“except in thug-related cases.” The popular upheaval of 2011 had forced the authorities to legitimize previously unacceptable forms of resistance, with Obama characterizing as “nonviolent” an uprising in which thousands had fought police and burned down police stations. In order to re-legitimize the legal apparatus of the dictatorship, it was necessary to create a new distinction between violent “thugs” and the rest of the population. Yet the substance of this distinction was never spelled out; in practice, “thug” is simply the word for a person targeted by the Emergency Laws. From the perspective of the authorities, ideally the infliction of violence itself would suffice to brand its victims as violent—i.e., as legitimate targets.1

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So when a broad enough part of the population engages in resistance, the authorities have to redefine it as nonviolent, even if it would previously have been considered violent. Otherwise, the dichotomy between violence and legitimacy might erode—and without that dichotomy, it would be much harder to justify the use of force against those who threaten the status quo. By the same token, the more ground we cede in what we permit the authorities to define as violent, the more they will sweep into that category, and the greater risk all of us will face. One consequence of the past several decades of self-described nonviolent civil disobedience is that some people regard merely raising one’s voice as violent; this makes it possible to portray those who take even the most tentative steps to protect themselves against police violence as violent thugs.

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“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence… linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”

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— UC police captain Margo Bennett, quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle, justifying the use of force against students at the University of California at Berkeley

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The Master’s Tools: Delegitimization, Misrepresentation, and Division

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Violent repression is only one side of the two-pronged strategy by which social movements are suppressed. For this repression to succeed, movements must be divided into legitimate and illegitimate, and the former convinced to disown the latter—usually in return for privileges or concessions. We can see this process up close in the efforts of professional journalists like Chris Hedges and Rebecca Solnit to demonize rivals in the Occupy movement.

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In last year’s Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House: Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution,” Rebecca Solnit mixed together moral and strategic arguments against “violence,” hedging her bets with a sort of US exceptionalism: Zapatistas can carry guns and Egyptian rebels set buildings on fire, but let no one so much as burn a trash can in the US. At base, her argument was that only “people power” can achieve revolutionary social change—and that “people power” is necessarily nonviolent.

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Solnit should know that the defining of violence isn’t neutral: in her article “The Myth of Seattle Violence,” she recounted her unsuccessful struggle to get the New York Times to stop representing the demonstrations against the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle as “violent.” In consistently emphasizing violence as her central category, Solnit is reinforcing the effectiveness of one of the tools that will inevitably be used against protesters—including her—whenever it serves the interests of the powerful.

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Solnit reserves particular ire for those who endorse diversity of tactics as a way to preclude the aforementioned dividing of movements. Several paragraphs of “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools” were devoted to denouncing the CrimethInc. “Dear Occupiers” pamphlet: Solnit proclaimed it “a screed in justification of violence,” “empty machismo peppered with insults,” and stooped to ad hominem attacks on authors about whom she admittedly knew nothing.2

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As anyone can readily ascertain, the majority of “Dear Occupiers” simply reviews the systemic problems with capitalism; the advocacy of diversity of tactics is limited to a couple subdued paragraphs. Why would an award-winning author misrepresent this as a pro-violence screed?

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Perhaps for the same reason that she joins the authorities in delegitimizing violence even when this equips them to delegitimize her own efforts: Solnit’s leverage in social movements and her privileges in capitalist society are both staked on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate. If social movements ever cease to be managed from the top down—if they stop policing themselves—the Hedges and Solnits of the world will be out of a job literally as well as figuratively. That would explain why they perceive their worst enemies to be those who soberly advise against dividing movements into legitimate and illegitimate factions.

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It’s hard to imagine Solnit would have represented “Dear Occupiers” the way she did if she expected her audience to read it. Given her readership, this is a fairly safe bet—Solnit is often published in the corporate media, while CrimethInc. literature is distributed only through grass-roots networks; in any case, she didn’t include a link. Chris Hedges took similar liberties in his notorious “The Cancer in Occupy,” a litany of outrageous generalizations about “black bloc anarchists.” It seems that both authors’ ultimate goal is silencing: Why would you want to hear what those people have to say? They’re violent thugs.

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The title of Solnit’s article is a reference to Audre Lorde’s influential text, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Lorde’s text was not an endorsement of nonviolence; even Derrick Jensen, whom Hedges quotes approvingly, has debunked such misuse of this quotation. Here, let it suffice to repeat that the most powerful of the master’s tools is not violence, but delegitimization and division—as Lorde emphasized in her text. To defend our movements against these, Lorde exhorted us:

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“Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark… Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”

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If we are to survive, that means:

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“…learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish… learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

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It is particularly shameless that Solnit would quote Lorde’s argument against silencing out of context in order to delegitimize and divide. But perhaps we should not be surprised when successful professionals sell out anonymous poor people: they have to defend their class interests, or else risk joining us. For the mechanisms that raise people to positions of influence within activist hierarchies and liberal media are not neutral, either; they reward docility, often coded as “nonviolence,” rendering invisible those whose efforts actually threaten capitalism and hierarchy.

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The Lure of Legitimacy

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When we want to be taken seriously, it’s tempting to claim legitimacy any way we can. But if we don’t want to reinforce the hierarchies of our society, we should be careful not to validate forms of legitimacy that perpetuate them.

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It is easy to recognize how this works in some situations: when we evaluate people on the basis of their academic credentials, for example, this prioritizes abstract knowledge over lived experience, centralizing those who can get a fair shot in academia and marginalizing everyone else. In other cases, this occurs more subtly. We emphasize our status as community organizers, implying that those who lack the time or resources for such pursuits are less entitled to speak. We claim credibility as longtime locals, implicitly delegitimizing all who are not—including immigrants who have been forced to move to our neighborhoods because their communities have been wrecked by processes originating in ours. We justify our struggles on the basis of our roles within capitalist society—as students, workers, taxpayers, citizens—not realizing how much harder this can make it for the unemployed, homeless, and excluded to justify theirs.

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We’re often surprised by the resulting blowback. Politicians discredit our comrades with the very vocabulary we popularized: “Those aren’t activists, they’re homeless people pretending to be activists.” “We’re not targeting communities of color, we’re protecting them from criminal activity.” Yet we prepared the way for this ourselves by affirming language that makes legitimacy conditional.

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When we emphasize that our movements are and must be nonviolent, we’re doing the same thing. This creates an Other that is outside the protection of whatever legitimacy we win for ourselves—that is, in short, a legitimate target for violence. Anyone who pulls their comrades free from the police rather than waiting passively to be arrested—anyone who makes shields to protect themselves from rubber bullets rather than abandoning the streets to the police—anyone who is charged with assault on an officer for being assaulted by one: all these unfortunates are thrown to the wolves as the violent ones, the bad apples. Those who must wear masks even in legal actions because of their precarious employment or immigration status are denounced as cancer, betrayed in return for a few crumbs of legitimacy from the powers that be. We Good Citizens can afford to be perfectly transparent; we would never commit a crime or harbor a potential criminal in our midst.

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And the Othering of violence smooths the way for the violence of Othering. The ones who bear the worst consequences of this are not the middle class brats pilloried in internet flame wars, but the same people on the wrong side of every other dividing line in capitalism: the poor, the marginalized, those who have no credentials, no institutions to stand up for them, no incentive to play the political games that are slanted in favor of the authorities and perhaps also a few jet-setting activists.

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Simply delegitimizing violence can’t put an end to it. The disparities of this society couldn’t be maintained without it, and the desperate will always respond by acting out, especially when they sense that they’ve been abandoned to their fate. But this kind of delegitimization can create a gulf between the angry and the morally upright, the “irrational” and the rational, the violent and the social. We saw the consequences of this in the UK riots of August 2011, when many of the disenfranchised, despairing of bettering themselves through any legitimate means, hazarded a private war against property, the police, and the rest of society. Some of them had attempted to participate in previous popular movements, only to be stigmatized as hooligans; not surprisingly, their rebellion took an antisocial turn, resulting in five deaths and further alienating them from other sectors of the population.

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The responsibility for this tragedy rests not only on the rebels themselves, nor on those who imposed the injustices from which they suffered, but also upon the activists who stigmatized them rather than joining in creating a movement that could channel their anger. If there is no connection between those who intend to transform society and those who suffer most within it, no common cause between the hopeful and the enraged, then when the latter rebel, the former will disown them, and the latter will be crushed along with all hope of real change. No effort to do away with hierarchy can succeed while excluding the disenfranchised, the Others.

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What should be our basis for legitimacy, then, if not our commitment to legality, nonviolence, or any other standard that hangs our potential comrades out to dry? How do we explain what we’re doing and why we’re entitled to do it? We have to mint and circulate a currency of legitimacy that is not controlled by our rulers, that doesn’t create Others.

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As anarchists, we hold that our desires and well-being and those of our fellow creatures are the only meaningful basis for action. Rather than classifying actions as violent or nonviolent, we focus on whether they extend or curtail freedom. Rather than insisting that we are nonviolent, we emphasize the necessity of interrupting the violence inherent in top-down rule. This might be inconvenient for those accustomed to seeking dialogue with the powerful, but it is unavoidable for everyone who truly wishes to abolish their power.

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Conclusion: Back to Strategy

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But how do we interrupt the violence of top-down rule? The partisans of nonviolence frame their argument in strategic as well as moral terms: violence alienates the masses, preventing us from building the “people power” we need to triumph.

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There is a kernel of truth at the heart of this. If violence is understood as illegitimate use of force, their argument can be summarized as a tautology: delegitimized action is unpopular.

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Indeed, those who take the legitimacy of capitalist society for granted are liable to see anyone who takes material steps to counteract its disparities as violent. The challenge facing us, then, is to legitimize concrete forms of resistance: not on the grounds that they are nonviolent, but on the grounds that they are liberating, that they fulfill real needs and desires.

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This is not an easy matter. Even when we passionately believe in what we are doing, if it is not widely recognized as legitimate we tend to sputter when asked to explain ourselves. If only we could stay within the bounds prescribed for us within this system while we go about overthrowing it! The Occupy movement was characterized by attempts to do just that—citizens insisting on their right to occupy public parks on the basis of obscure legal loopholes, making tortuous justifications no more convincing to onlookers than to the authorities. People want to redress the injustices around them, but in a highly regulated and controlled society, there’s so little they feel entitled to do.

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Solnit may be right that the emphasis on nonviolence was essential to the initial success of Occupy Wall Street: people want some assurance that they’re not going to have to leave their comfort zones, and that what they’re doing will make sense to everyone else. But it often happens that the preconditions for a movement become limitations that it must transcend: Occupy Oakland remained vibrant after other occupations died down because it embraced a diversity of tactics, not despite this. Likewise, if we really want to transform our society, we can’t remain forever within the narrow boundaries of what the authorities deem legitimate: we have to extend the range of what people feel entitled to do.

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All the media coverage in the world won’t help us if we fail to create a situation in which people feel entitled to defend themselves and each other.

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Legitimizing resistance, expanding what is acceptable, is not going to be popular at first—it never is, precisely because of the tautology set forth above. It takes consistent effort to shift the discourse: calmly facing outrage and recriminations, humbly emphasizing our own criteria for what is legitimate.

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Whether we think this challenge is worthwhile depends on our long-term goals. As David Graeber has pointed out, conflicts over goals often masquerade as moral and strategic differences. Making nonviolence the central tenet of our movement makes good sense if our long-term goal is not to challenge the fundamental structure of our society, but to build a mass movement that can wield legitimacy as defined by the powerful—and that is prepared to police itself accordingly. But if we really want to transform our society, we have to transform the discourse of legitimacy, not just position ourselves well within it as it currently exists. If we focus only on the latter, we will find that terrain slipping constantly from beneath our feet, and that many of those with whom we need to find common cause can never share it with us.

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It’s important to have strategic debates: shifting away from the discourse of nonviolence doesn’t mean we have to endorse every single broken window as a good idea.. But it only obstructs these debates when dogmatists insist that all who do not share their goals and assumptions—not to say their class interests!—have no strategic sense. It’s also not strategic to focus on delegitimizing each other’s efforts rather than coordinating to act together where we overlap. That’s the point of affirming a diversity of tactics: to build a movement that has space for all of us, yet leaves no space for domination and silencing—a “people power” that can both expand and intensify.

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Further Reading

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“Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission, 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us … if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back.”

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– Solidarity statement from Cairo to Occupy Wall Street, October 24, 2011

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    Witness how police officers routinely charge arrestees with whatever violence they have inflicted upon them. ↩

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    For what it’s worth, though Solnit alleges that we “don’t seem prepared to act,” the authors of “Dear Occupiers” and this text are all lifelong participants in social movements, most of whom live well below the poverty line far from liberal Meccas like her San Francisco. This subject strikes very close to home for us: several of us have faced trumped up rioting charges and many of us have dear friends in prison. We choose to write anonymously in part because, not being professional journalists, we can’t count on employers not to discriminate against us for our political beliefs, and also because these beliefs attract more hostile attention from the authorities than those of Solnit or Hedges, but above all because we don’t seek to found careers or personal fame on our efforts to change the world. ↩

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    3. \n
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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/01/18/2012-the-empire-has-no-clothes-whats-at-stake-in-the-new-year", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/01/18/2012-the-empire-has-no-clothes-whats-at-stake-in-the-new-year", "title": "2012: The Empire Has No Clothes : What's at Stake in the New Year", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/empire/1c.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/empire/1c.jpg", "date_published": "2012-01-18T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

The new year breaks on a turbulent world. Increasingly superfluous, we pour into the service industry—greasing the wheels for consumption rather than producing anything of lasting value—or scavenge at the margins. Forced to be ever more flexible and mobile, competing against ever-broadening swaths of the population for ever more precarious jobs, we aren’t just atomized, we’ve become plasma—a shapeless, reactive mass in which even the most elementary bonds have been broken.

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This doesn’t signify the triumph of capitalism, but a new phase of uncertainty for the system as well as its subjects. Today, even liberals acknowledge that 99% of the population has little stake in perpetuating the status quo. Yet only the most doctrinaire Marxists still believe history will deliver us to utopia: maquiladoras on the moon seem equally likely. The current turmoil simply affords us a window of opportunity, a window with no guarantees. If we fail to seize it, the system will stabilize once more, as it has in every previous crisis: and this time we can be sure the stabilizing mechanism will not be the carrot, but the stick.

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To summarize an earlier analysis: when it’s easier to overthrow governments than to reform them, we shouldn’t base our strategies on incremental victories, but popularize ways of fighting that create new social bodies. As people lose their previous positions in society, traditional struggles will collapse, but the disenfranchised will pour into every struggle that creates new commons. Yet these commons can only survive as long as they spread: we can only defend ourselves offensively.

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These hypotheses were borne out throughout 2011, from the so-called Arab Spring to the fall of the occupations. Here are some of the factors we expect to shape the context of struggle in 2012.

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Not the Carrot, but the Stick

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In the economic crisis, policing and private security are one of the only remaining growth industries. The fierce and apparently coordinated police repression of occupations should come as no surprise in a nation where nearly two and a half million are incarcerated and police kill hundreds every year. That violence is only going to intensify. There’s no other way to keep the superfluous population under control, especially as we get unruly.

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We should brace ourselves for increasing levels of force—perhaps beyond anything we can imagine—and countering these in the streets will be essential to the next phase of resistance. But the strategy of the stick means more than tear gas and SWAT team raids. The authorities can’t utilize force without provoking greater unrest unless they delegitimize the targets and break up all social configurations that could fight back. Demonizing insurgents in the media, driving wedges between and within social bodies, and buying off potential allies are all essential steps in this strategy. In this context, implicit offers of immunity to cooperative elements in popular movements are functionally identical to police violence, as they prepare the ground for it. Protesters who seek to distinguish themselves from the irrational and unruly are accepting complicity in everything that is done to the latter.1

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We can already see how this has played out in various parts of the world over the past year. In Egypt, a widespread popular revolt obtained its original object, but fragmented afterwards as some continued fighting for liberation while others abandoned them to the bullets of the military. In the UK, the disconnection between protest movements and the suffering underclass meant that the inevitable revolt of the latter took an antisocial form, limiting its scope. On the other hand, Occupy Oakland has been able to continue escalating precisely because anarchists and other angry poor people were never successfully marginalized.

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The Cycle of False Hope

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Four years ago, savvy young people eager to change the world lined up behind a politician’s promise of “Hope.” In 2011, many of the same people took to the street; the Occupy Movement was a logical next step for the Obama Generation once electoral politics failed them. We can expect this cycle of hope and disillusionment to continue now that the occupiers’ attempt at autonomous direct democracy has been crushed by force. Faith in leaders was the first to go; faith in nonviolence might be next.

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In a time of widespread anxiety and discontent, it’s tempting to throw one’s weight behind anyone who offers to fix the economy and the social ills that supposedly caused its decline. When one promise inevitably fails, the next round of proposals tends to be more extreme. In the coming years, there will be more militancy across the political spectrum and more willingness to act outside the established institutions.

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Unfortunately, direct action does not always serve liberating ends. The crucial battle right now is not between illegalism and law and order, but between competing visions of upheaval—and our most dangerous enemies may not be bureaucrats or executives. One of our tasks as anarchists is to unmask would-be leaders and their false promises—the pied pipers of pipe dreams. This is not for the faint of heart: anarchists who lacked the mettle to take an unpopular stand when Obama was elected will be hard-pressed to take on apparently horizontal social movements that ultimately function to stabilize capitalism.

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Anarchist principles are catching on throughout society, well beyond the plaza occupations. From the right we hear that “every tea partier is a tea party leader,” and at least some people take this rhetoric seriously. For now, this trend seems simply to be fostering an extra-parliamentary version of two-party politics, with little serious opposition to capitalism on either side. But every moment of disillusionment can also be a moment of transformation. We may find strange bedfellows in 2012.

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Higher levels of conflict are going to become increasingly routine …

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The Taming of the Technological Frontier?

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“Not the carrot, but the stick”: we picture security guards with actual nightsticks, but this clampdown will also occur on the newest terrain of struggle, digital communication. The same technology that helped capitalists outflank the resistance of the 1960s has produced new forms of revolt, from file-sharing to viral riots. Without the advance endorsement of Anonymous, for example, Occupy Wall Street might never have gotten off the ground. We can expect to see a worldwide authoritarian backlash against the internet-spread and twitter-savvy revolts of 2011.

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Much of this clampdown will take the form of direct surveillance and censorship. We take for granted that those are chiefly employed in places like Syria and Tunisia; in fact, most of the censorship technology those governments use comes from Silicon Valley—and was first applied right here in the US.2 Since even the slightest internet censorship presupposes effective and exhaustive surveillance, it is a small step from regulation to lockdown.

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Yet not all digital repression is as heavy-handed as the firewall around China. Think instead of the digital forensics utilized by police in the UK to follow up on last summer’s riots. Alongside this kind of surgical targeting, we can expect yet subtler efforts to delegitimize resistance and guide discourse away from anything that could prove disruptive. The attention economy of Facebook and Youtube is ideal for both approaches.

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The current struggles over digital privacy and “free speech” are not just a matter of civil liberties; they will have significant consequences for the next phase of struggle in the streets. The more difficult it becomes to speak freely and safely online, the more specialized the role of circulating information will be, and the more difficult it will become to coordinate revolt spontaneously. The resulting power imbalances may figure strongly in the cooption and neutralization of struggles: in some plaza occupations, the disproportionate power of the media working group has already been a recurring problem. If the clampdown succeeds, this will only get worse.

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Keeping up the Fight

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Of course, our best defense against the authorities utilizing all the intelligence they gather is not proper computer security, but thriving social movements. When people are used to acting together and discontent is simmering, the powerful are afraid to provoke a storm they can’t control. Again, the best defense is a good offense.

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As different groups compete for ownership of the struggle, we should be especially suspicious of every attempt to manage the forms revolt takes. The do-it-yourself ethic that seemed revolutionary in the 1990s ultimately helped solve the crisis of the previous form of capitalism, preparing atomized individuals to self-manage our integration into the economy; self-managing the taming of our own rebellions may well be the next phase of this program. The non-profit post-industrial complex is a familiar example of this: it is essentially a return to feudalism, in which the powerful dole out just enough resources to the well-meaning to keep the population quiet. We expect to see some new examples as social conflict continues. Some of the best managers might be impressively militant.

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Today the question isn’t whether there will be resistance—we no longer need to buy plane tickets overseas to get a taste of it—but what social forms will characterize it, what precedents it will set. We’ll probably see heterogeneous zones like Occupy Wall Street open up repeatedly over the coming years, each time drawing in new sectors of the population with diverse perspectives and agendas. These spaces will inevitably rupture as the elements that constituted them form new configurations and new fault lines emerge. Our goal should not be to preserve these for their own sake, then, but rather to make sure the right ruptures occur.

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Alongside attempting to intensify explicitly political movements such as the plaza occupations, we should also figure out what role to play in the violent clashes we can expect to see more frequently. Even after a remarkable wave of anti-austerity protests, anarchists in London seemed unprepared for last August’s Tottenham riots. We need to be able to act swiftly and decisively in such moments. We probably won’t succeed in imposing our own political agenda on them; even if we could, it might put us in the ranks of the managers and protest marshals. What we can do is demonstrate in practice how different forms of revolt are relevant to each other, and help to link them together. Looters need hackers, and hackers need looters too.

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A Crisis of Legitimacy

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Whatever their results, presidential elections are a ritual for reinforcing the legitimacy of the government and its political process. In 2012, this legitimacy is in question to an unusual extent. The popular rhetoric of autonomy and participation is the flipside of a growing skepticism towards our rulers.

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Right now this skepticism is mostly expressed in the language of corruption and mismanagement; people doubt the legitimacy of this government, but perhaps not of government itself. For the ruling class, holding that line will be the top priority this year. Our priority will be the opposite.

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At the same time, we’ll be facing our own crises. Would-be leaders have always used discourses of legitimacy to isolate their foes—violence versus nonviolence, locals versus outside agitators, goal-oriented discipline versus unproductive chaos. As the false promises become more extreme, so will the recriminations. Pandering to their discourse reinforces their advantage, but declaring ourselves on the side of the illegitimate is not enough to undermine the force of legitimacy itself. How we navigate this complex problem will determine our ability to link different social bodies in revolt.

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No matter what, we cannot sit back and let the cycle of hope and disillusionment run its course, however costly those who profit off of false hope make it to intervene. Nothing we say is credible if we fail to provide examples of action to those who are ready to act. An escalating cycle of conflict produces a growing apparatus of control. If we wait until every solution except anarchy has been tried, it will be too late.

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… and the stakes keep going up.

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  1. \n

    This process is particularly insidious in that those who are offered immunity often experience this as a victory for the movement—inclusion in the political process, for example, or at least unprecedented dialogue with the powerful. The complicit may not even know they’re part of a peace treaty that renders others more vulnerable. A great part of complicity is ignorance—if you don’t notice people suffering, you’ve probably already been bought. ↩

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    Much of this technology was originally developed to maximize white-collar productivity at US corporations; the third world dictatorship market didn’t really open up until the initial development costs had been covered. Just as it was easier for China to industrialize after Europe had, once censorship technology is developed it becomes more and more affordable—this is another aspect of how policing is one of today’s growth industries. Rhetoric about freedom aside, the US government would never inconvenience the censorship industry; the latter is intrinsic to US national security, in that through these companies the US has a backdoor into the security practices and information flow of every country employing them worldwide. That is to say—to maintain its imperial position, the US has to remain at the forefront of free market solutions for repression. This is an interesting example of how economic practices are inextricable from the political forms that vouchsafe them, and vice versa. ↩

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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/01/01/nightmares-of-capitalism-pipe-dreams-of-democracy-the-world-struggles-to-wake-2010-2011", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/01/01/nightmares-of-capitalism-pipe-dreams-of-democracy-the-world-struggles-to-wake-2010-2011", "title": "Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy : The World Struggles to Wake, 2010-2011", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2012-01-01T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "\n
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The crisis continues. This isn’t just a hiccup in the market, but a structural breakdown. A system driven by competition for ever-increasing profit can’t run indefinitely; sooner or later everything that can be commodified has been drawn into the market, all the capital accumulates in a few hands, and the profits dry up.

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Today the factories of every industry produce commodities more and more efficiently via automation that renders workers increasingly redundant. The only way to profit on these commodities is to cut costs: to eliminate workers or pay them next to nothing. But without work or wages, people can’t play their part as consumers. The only job openings are with the police, who wage a never-ending war on the population to control the poor and unemployed. This is why our world is overflowing with cheap shit, with human life cheapest of all.

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As commodities get cheaper and consumers get poorer, how can capitalists continue making a profit? Credit was invented as a way for consumers to go on shopping even when they weren’t paid living wages. When the sale of real goods can no longer produce profit, profits must be made on expected future returns—in other words, on speculation.

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But like any house of cards, debt can’t be built up forever—eventually someone calls it in. The house of cards collapsed under its own weight in 2008 when it became clear that the expected future returns could never materialize. Rather than reconsidering their faith in capitalism, the authorities are now gutting the last vestiges of the support structures established to pacify the old labor movement, feeding every last stick into the fire.

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The financial crisis signals a deeper metaphysical crisis: this system, which perpetuated itself by creating unfulfillable emotional needs, cannot provide for the global population’s material needs either. The high rates of unemployment from Egypt to the US are not simply caused by the corruption of despots like Mubarak, nor the greed of specific capitalists; they are evidence that a system that never worked for us is on the verge of ceasing to work at all.

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In response, some hope to resurrect social democracy. But wasn’t it social democracy that neutralized the resistance movements of the 20th century, while building up a state powerful enough to impose the current inequalities? Democracy has always been the guardian of capitalism, giving the greatest possible number of people reason to invest themselves in hierarchies and coercive institutions, equating freedom with property rights. If capitalism is doomed, we need something altogether different—the truth is, we always did.

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Capitalism won’t crumble overnight. Its rituals and values are so deeply ingrained in us that its demise could take generations, and it might give way to something even worse. If we want to have any influence over what comes next, we have to pose the right questions with the ways we fight and the narratives we propagate. Here we’ll trace the trajectory of popular struggles against austerity and capitalism around the world across 2010 and 2011, identifying their limitations so as to push further next time.

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Pitfalls and Paradoxes: The Student Protests of March 4, 2010

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The economic crisis that entered the public consciousness in 2008 prompted governments to inflict massive cutbacks on public education. The student movement that began in December 2008 with the occupation of the New School in New York City—itself a private school—intensified with a series of protests and occupations throughout fall 2009, principally in California.1 These culminated in nationwide demonstrations on March 4, 2010. The Bay Area was the epicenter of this day of action, with tens of thousands in the streets; but at this epicenter, the contradictions within the movement came into stark relief.

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While anarchists had been at the forefront of the occupations, reformists took the lead in organizing for March 4, planning a standard march and rally. They also attempted to seize control of the narrative. A week before the day of action, a dance party at UC Berkeley turned into a small-scale riot as students took the streets, mingling with non-students and defending themselves against police attacks. There were only two arrests, but afterwards liberals and leftists alleged that outside agitators were attempting to hijack the movement—a story some had been repeating for months, which has become all the more familiar since.

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As in the anti-war movement seven years earlier, anarchists had largely limited themselves to escalating the tactics of the student movement. Most militant actions were organized informally, and there was neither an autonomous body for coordinating these nor a voice for them in the organizational structures of the larger movement. This opacity offered the element of surprise, but it ultimately enabled reformists to outflank radicals by dominating the public discourse and planning actions that were unfavorable for confrontation. Likewise, because anarchists weren’t able to popularize a narrative identifying the student movement with the larger struggles of the disenfranchised, most people took it for granted that the point of the struggle was simply to get more funding for public education. Consequently, it was difficult to legitimize the participation of non-students except as passive “allies,” let alone make a case for a struggle against government.

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On March 4, a march of several thousands departed from Berkeley towards Oakland. Student organizing groups jockeyed with black-clad militants for the lead. The march joined younger students and teachers in downtown Oakland for a rally at which the usual speakers took turns at the podium. A breakaway march had been planned to depart from the rally, but one speaker took the stage to discourage anyone from participating, emphasizing that it would be illegal and dangerous. The word on the street was that radicals had established some sort of back-room deal with public organizers that the latter reneged on. Most people left after the rally, but a couple hundred eventually regrouped around a sound system and set out, managing to block the freeway before being mass-arrested. A fifteen-year-old student fell from the freeway when the police closed in, suffering serious head injuries and tragically confirming the speaker’s warning.

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Afterwards, there were declarations of victory and hysterical recriminations, but the student movement had passed its peak. Without the initiative of the militant participants driving the movement, the reformist wing drifted into hopeless attempts to influence politicians; momentum collapsed. The same pattern played out elsewhere in the country.

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Anarchists have to find a starting place from which to act in a society in which few even understand our goals. This creates paradoxes such as joining a struggle for education in a country in which education has always been tied to the state. Participating in the student movement, anarchists risked legitimizing social structures, roles, and privileges they would otherwise set out to undermine. The student movement of 2009-2010 might have gone further if it had been reframed as a part of a larger struggle involving all who were losing or had already lost their positions in the economy—not to mention those who never had any in the first place. In any case, it set the stage for Occupy Oakland to do this.

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Anarchists were “occupying everything” long before Occupy Wall Street was a gleam in Kalle Lasn’s eye.

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Reaching Limits: May Day, 2010

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On May Day 2010, small but fierce anarchist demonstrations and attacks on property took place in many cities around the United States, notably including Santa Cruz, California and Asheville, North Carolina. Eleven people were arrested in Asheville, charged with conspiracy and other felonies and held on $65,000 bail.

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The arrests sent shockwaves of controversy throughout anarchist circles. One editorial entitled “What I would do with $55,000” [sic] argued that it would be more strategic to leave the arrestees in prison and use the money to buy screen-printing equipment and pay the rent of social centers in Chicago. This is noxious indeed, but it showed how polarized the debate had become between partisans of infrastructure and confrontation, and how unfavorably insurrectionists had positioned themselves on the field of public discourse in advance of repression.

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That question, raised in bad faith, still speaks to an important issue. What could anarchists do offensively with such an enormous sum of money? What would it mean to take the initiative, raising $65,000 to advance a confrontational program intentionally rather than reactively? Divorced from a strategy that incorporates repression as a necessary phase, following a blind mantra of attack is like taking the first vulnerable piece you see in a chess game: it can set you up for crushing defeats. This leaves anarchists always on the back foot.

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Four days later, well over 100,000 people gathered in Athens, Greece to protest government cutbacks and tax increases mandated by the European Union and International Monetary Fund. Wave after wave attempted to storm the parliament in Syntagma square; this was arguably the closest Greece had come to insurrection since the riots of December 2008. It came to an end when three people were killed in a fire irresponsibly started by rioters in a bank still staffed by employees.

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Many believe that this tragedy prevented a potentially revolutionary situation from unfolding. It also inverted the narrative that had framed resistance in Greece since December 2008, associating murder with protesters rather than police. It takes ten thousand people ten years to legitimize militant struggle, and a single fool an hour to discredit it.

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The mood was bleak afterwards on both sides of the Atlantic. While anarchists in the US bickered about the Asheville 11, in Greece they debated about how anti-social tendencies had taken root and set the stage for the bank fire. Some still declared the worldwide actions at the beginning of May to be a success, but it’s worth noting that few towns in the US hosted repeat events on May Day 2011.

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When a strategy begins to produce diminishing or counterproductive returns, this is an opportunity to reevaluate and experiment. While the existing anarchist movement struggled to come to terms with the limits it had reached, new protagonists took the stage.

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Anarchy in the UK:

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The Student Movement, November-December 2010

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On November 10, 2010, the National Union of Students drew 52,000 people to London to protest an austerity bill that would raise the tuition cap from £3290 to £9000. As the main demonstration moved by Millbank Tower, a splinter group of hundreds, headed by no more than 30 black bloc anarchists, broke into the Tory Headquarters there. As they smashed windows, painted graffiti, and clashed with police, thousands of supporters gathered in the square outside, building a fire from their signs and placards. It took the police hours to regain control. Helicopter footage showed the occupiers lining the railing on the roof of Millbank, papers blowing out over the crowd far below while smoke rose from the fire.

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While individual anarchists were among the first into the building, none of the organized anarchist groups in the UK turned out in great numbers. The photos of suspects circulated by the police and media didn’t show the faces of longtime militants but those of the nation’s youth. The participants referenced the unrest sweeping the globe—“France, Greece, now here too”—but this marked the entry of a new generation into confrontation with the state.

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The UK had been comparatively quiet for years. Previous protest campaigns had largely been organized by full-time activists; consequently, an activist subculture had emerged. This subculture helped to foster radical activity and infrastructure, but it was disconnected from the experiences and concerns of most of those suffering from capitalism.

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The attack on Millbank ignited a wave of protests, walkouts, and other actions involving more than 100,000 people over the next two months.2 Occupations occurred at schools throughout the country, serving as nerve centers to broaden and coordinate the movement. Several thousand young people converged in London again November 24 and 30; the police responded by surrounding and “kettling” demonstrators for hours. The movement peaked on December 9, with thousands participating in clashes in London while the British parliament passed the austerity package. Police kettled and viciously attacked protesters, sending one boy to the hospital in need of brain surgery; protesters defended themselves, smashed the windows of the Treasury and other buildings, and attacked a car bearing Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall.

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In contrast to the US student movement, the disenfranchised took a primary role in these protests, often to the chagrin of “proper” student organizers. In one video clip from December 9, masked hooligans asserted, “We’re from the slums of London—how do they expect us to pay £9000 for uni fees?” Politicians and corporate media endeavored to drive a wedge between the different demographics that comprised the movement, but this diversity was its primary strength.

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Activity tapered off after the bill passed. As in Greece in December 2008, the end of the year served as the closing of parentheses around a period of increased momentum.

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The movement in the UK came on the heels of strikes and labor unrest throughout Spain and France; it coincided with a comparable student movement in Italy, culminating similarly on December 14 with fires and rioting outside the Italian Parliament during a controversial vote. Things were heating up.

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New Fronts in Information Warfare:

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Wikileaks, Anonymous, Lulzsec

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While austerity protests drew in wider and wider swaths of the population, the same thing was taking place online. After Wikileaks released classified documents from the Afghanistan and Iraq occupations and US diplomatic cables, several corporations broke off relations with the group, cutting off its access to funds. In response, Anonymous—an internet meme serving as an umbrella for collective action—orchestrated distributed denial of service attacks on many of these companies, shutting down their websites and attracting international attention.

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In the 20th century, the first wave of hackers had been motivated by curiosity and mischievousness; their successors pursued personal gain, working for criminal enterprises or security organizations—often in that order. Now, finally, it seemed that politicized hacking was coming into its own. Some of this attention may have been convenient for the US government, which was seeking to position itself for online crackdowns; but it also reflected the determination of online communities that existed by virtue of anonymity and free circulation of information to protect the necessary conditions of their existence.

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While the culture of early Anonymous had been steeped in the adolescent humor and hostility of the message boards where it originated, by 2011 participants in this and similar projects frequently endorsed an anarchist agenda. For example, after targeting the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Lulzsec proclaimed, “We’re doing this not only because we are opposed to SB1070 and the racist Arizona police state, but because we want a world free from police, prisons and politicians altogether.”

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Information heists can reveal the shady underside of the authorities, discrediting them while dispelling the myth of their invulnerability. The cables released by Wikileaks describing President Ben Ali’s pet tiger enjoying a luxurious diet while Tunisians starved stoked the flames of revolt in that country. But these attacks further a longer-term strategy, as well. Both 21st-century capitalism and the repressive apparatus that protects it depend on the circulation of information. Forcing corporations and governments to be cautious about how they share data cripples them.

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CNN: What’s the end goal for you? What do you want to see happen as a result of Operation Payback?

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Anon: Personally? A utopian society. This is just a new way to fight …

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The Insurrection Comes: “Arab Spring,” December 2010-March 2011

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No one was prepared for governments to begin toppling. The first to go was Tunisia. Demonstrations commenced after an impoverished street vendor set himself on fire in protest of his treatment by police; at first, these protests were marginal, but every attempt at repression fanned the flames until unions and even lawyers joined in. Turnouts only increased after Ben Ali fled the country on January 18.

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The first massive demonstrations took place in Egypt a week later, organized by a coalition of predominantly youth groups. One of the most influential forums supporting these was a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Saeed,” named for a man murdered by police. The protests were violently repressed, and the government shut down internet and cell phone access throughout much of the country; but once again, this only spread and intensified the resistance. After clashes with the police left many police stations burnt to the ground along with the headquarters of the ruling party, demonstrators shifted towards strategic nonviolence rather than taking on the military directly. By early February, a great part of the country was participating in the revolt, despite hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries.

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President Mubarak repeatedly offered to grant protesters’ demands, but always a step too late; as momentum increased, people gained the confidence to demand more and more, until they would only be satisfied with his departure. He finally resigned on February 11. The following weeks saw similar uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere around the Middle East, and an all-out civil war that ultimately drove Gaddafi from Libya.

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Although North Africa might seem far away, in a globalized world we shouldn’t be surprised by how familiar everything in this story is: unemployment and bitterness, actions organized by groups protesting police brutality, even college graduates working at coffee shops. There are no exotic overseas revolutions in the 21st century. Though these events dwarfed the preceding riots in Greece and the student movement in England, they sprang from the same source and assumed similar forms. The waves of unrest that had washed Europe in the preceding years helped set a precedent for what it looked like to revolt, which North Africans pushed further than Europeans had imagined possible.

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We can learn a lot about revolt in the 21st century from studying these events. The upheaval began at the margins—Tunisia is a relatively minor nation, while Egypt is the most populated in the Middle East—and at the social periphery, among the unemployed, the young, and the poor. It spread to all social classes and metropolitan centers, going on to exert influence worldwide. In a fully networked world, instability at the fringe can threaten power at the center.

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These uprisings continued the experimentation with new technologies and decentralized organization that characterized the anti-globalization movement, showing that anonymous networking could initiate full-scale leaderless rebellions. As information has become the lifeblood of capitalism,3 rendering the internet the new global factory floor, these were its first workers’ councils—a new kind of collective intelligence enabling people to organize themselves directly without representation.

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At the same time, if communications technology was essential to the uprising, it was because it subverted its conventional role in the West, bringing people together rather than enabling them to remain at a distance from one another. This is proven by the fact that the demonstrations only intensified when Mubarak shut down cell phone and internet service. The material infrastructure of the internet is still quite centralized; while it can be useful, it is a mistake to depend on it as long as it remains in capitalist hands.

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Mubarak faced a no-win situation: if he left communications technologies running, they would be used against him, but taking them down provoked outrage and international solidarity. In the future, we can expect the authorities to suppress unrest by structuring and directing the flows of information rather than interrupting them. They already seem more adept at this in the US, where Facebook is not usually used to coordinate insurrections but as a space for atomized individuals to compete for social capital.

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Although the North African upheavals involved labor unrest, they started outside the workplace and remained focused on public spaces like Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The old labor movement was predicated on the way the production process gave workers common experiences, just as the subcultural strategies that followed it were based on the common references consumers shared. In the era of precarity, in which the common condition that unites us is that we are all at the mercy of an economy that offers us no permanent role, it makes sense for the factory occupations of 1968 to be replaced with the seizure of public space. Likewise, police are to the unemployed what bosses are to workers; in countries where young people suffer astronomical unemployment, it’s not surprising that revolts begin with attacks on the police.

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The drawback of starting from outside the workplace is that it can frame the object of the revolt in political rather than economic terms. While the revolts in North Africa were produced by economic conditions, they opposed themselves chiefly to the forms of government rather than the economic structures that produced these; in the end, they may have been limited by the absence of an alternate vision for human relations. Without this, people fell back on the traditional narratives of nationalism—as exemplified by Egyptian flags and the chant “Muslim! Christian! We are all Egyptian!”—and democracy. As often happens, the forms the rebellion assumed were far more radical than the demands it presented. As the Middle East continues to ferment and new traditions of resistance take root, we can hope that the vision implied by these forms will come into its own as an end as well as a means.

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The peak of the so-called “Arab Spring” was followed by a period of chaos that continues up to today. The state desperately needs people to distrust and fear each other; without this, it lacks its chief justification for existence. Just as Mubarak’s undercover police had posed as looters in order to justify a crackdown, outbreaks of ethnic violence have been convenient for those who wish to relegitimize state power. Yet Tahrir Square has been re-occupied by demonstrators again and again; the ousting of Mubarak and Ben Ali was clearly only the beginning of a long struggle.

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Egypt received the second most military aid from the US in the world, after Israel—$1.3 billion a year. The tear gas canisters fired at demonstrators were inscribed “Made in the USA.” The oustings of Mubarak and later Gaddafi show that once things go far enough, military force is no longer a trump card; the military can hardly bomb its own cities. At the same time, to achieve more than a change of rulers, an insurrection has to spread into the ranks of the military and beyond national borders. It’s unclear when we will cross this threshold, but nobody saw the Tunisian uprising coming, either.

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EGYPT WAS A RIOT

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Obama (recent supporter of Mubarak, February 11): “Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained by violence… For Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence that bent the arc of history toward justice once more … I’m also confident that the same ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that the young people of Egypt have shown in recent days can be harnessed to create new opportunity: jobs, businesses.”

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Occupying the Capitol, Not Attacking Capital:

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Wisconsin, February-March 2011

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On the heels of the Egyptian example, anti-austerity protests gathered steam even in the US. Four days after Mubarak stepped down, a line of people mobilized by the Teaching Assistants Association waited to address the Wisconsin state legislature about proposed budget cuts and anti-union legislation. When the hearing was closed for the night, the queue became an impromptu occupation, as those who hadn’t gotten to speak were reluctant to lose their places.

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The Capitol building was occupied until March 3, becoming a rallying point for unprecedented demonstrations. Teachers called in sick to work en masse, shutting down schools; anarchists and fellow travelers occupied a university building in Milwaukee in an attempt to spread the unrest; rumors circulated about a general strike.

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On March 9, while Senate Democrats were absent in protest, Wisconsin’s Republican Senators passed a part of the proposed austerity package—a bill stripping public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights. In response, thousands returned to the capitol building, pushing past state patrolmen to reoccupy it in defiance of the court order that had concluded the previous occupation.

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The centrality of the capitol building throughout the protests drove home prior to the Occupy movement how important it is for a movement to establish a relationship to physical place. Just as university occupations served as nerve centers during the December 2008 uprising in Greece, the capitol building offered a focal point for demonstrators to build momentum over a period of weeks and a site to converge in response to new developments. In a time of universal estrangement, when we can only congregate in spaces designed to make us shop or cheer for sports teams, common space itself has become radical and radicalizing.

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This level of disruption was unusual for a quiet Midwestern state like Wisconsin. But once again, though the occupation assumed comparatively radical forms, it still limited itself to law-abiding democratic discourse. This created strange bedfellows for the protesters; for example, individual police officers expressed support for the occupation early on, though they later helped put a stop to it. This also paved the way for the Democratic Party to squander whatever momentum remained afterwards by channeling it into a doomed campaign to recall the governor.

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However devious the Republicans’ machinations, they passed the bill by democratic process, the same way countless other bills are passed. Although the protesters saw themselves as partisans of democracy, in forcing their way back into the capitol on March 9 they were essentially asserting that their illegal occupation of the building was more legitimate than Senators doing what they were elected to do in it. Unfortunately, this was never articulated; people were prepared to break the law, but not to cease believing in it. It speaks volumes about the function of the Left that liberal organizers entered the capitol illegally on March 9 just to persuade everyone else to leave with them.

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Between February 15 and March 3, the original occupation of the capitol had been undermined one compromise at a time. First the police politely asked people not to be in one room; they were being so nice about everything, and weren’t they on the same side? Then they gently asked people to vacate another room, and longtime organizers supported this, and so on—until the former occupiers found themselves out on the pavement, dumbfounded. This same process took only one night to play out again on March 9.

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This underlines an important lesson: the first compromise might as well be the last. Whenever we concede anything, we set a precedent that will be repeated again and again, emboldening those for whom it is more convenient if we don’t stand up for ourselves. If police didn’t arrest demonstrators in the capitol, it was not because they supported the occupation, nor because demonstrators had the right to be in the building, but because the demonstrators had mobilized enough social power to force the authorities to back down. Politeness and obedience could only detract from this leverage.

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In popular struggles, one role anarchists can play is to be the ones who refuse to yield. We can also pass on our hard-won analyses to less experienced protesters—for example, emphasizing that however personable individual police officers might seem, they cannot be trusted insofar as they are police.

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To accomplish this, however, anarchists have to be vocal and in the thick of things, not looking on from the margins as they were in Wisconsin. Anarchists of a more insurrectionist bent gravitated to the occupation in Milwaukee, which failed to pick up steam, while anarchists in Madison largely focused on providing infrastructure.4 Offering resources can be a good way to connect with strangers; yet our task is not just to facilitate protests of any kind, but to ensure that they threaten the power structure. To this end, we have to seize the initiative to organize actions as well as infrastructure—engaging the general public in the process, not just other anarchists. Clashes with the state are bound to be more controversial than free meals and childcare, but this controversy has to play out if we are ever to get anywhere.

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The occupied theater building in Milwaukee

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A common complaint from the more combative participants in the Madison occupation was that leftist organizations had already determined the character of the protest. Anarchists were afraid to act, fearing that they would simply be marginalized if they challenged the dominant narrative. In fact, there’s nothing to lose in such circumstances, when for all intents and purposes anarchists are already marginalized. The solutions promoted by the Left don’t point beyond the horizon of capitalism; even when they aren’t utterly naïve, they serve to distract and neutralize those who desire real change. Where the field is split between left and right, we may as well disrupt this dichotomy by acting outside of it. Even if we fail, at least we broaden the terrain.

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This brings up the larger question—what should be the goal of anti-austerity protests? In Wisconsin, most participants took it for granted that their goal was to stop the bill: in other words, to keep things the way they had been. This treats the financial crisis as if it were just an excuse dreamed up by greedy capitalists.

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But from the capitalist perspective, austerity measures really are unavoidable; there’s no other way to keep the system running. Elsewhere in the US, earnestly heartbroken Democrats were proposing similar measures for their own states—largely without opposition, thanks to the stupefying effect of the two-party system.

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Capitalism is not a static condition but a dynamic process transforming the world. A protest can’t freeze history. Even if one wave of cutbacks can be stopped, a thousand more assaults will follow. The state literally can’t back down—the politicians have nowhere to go. This means that apparently realistic goals, such as blocking a particular budget or bill, are actually less realistic than attempting to change the entire system.

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This was lost on many North American workers. Wisconsin teacher Peggy Kruse was quoted as saying, “Most teachers are more than happy to take the 18% pay cut, to do anything that will help get the state back and running. We’re most concerned about the loss of collective bargaining rights.” In other words, we’ll concede anything—just don’t take away our right to concede! Let Bill Gates keep his $56 billion while we get pay cuts or pink slips, but don’t touch the illusion that we choose this state of affairs.

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Accepting defeat in advance correlates with a blind commitment to peaceful protest. Signs in Wisconsin read “FIGHT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN,” but Egyptian protesters burned down police stations. No amount of Obama doublespeak can render that peaceful.

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If we shouldn’t evaluate anti-austerity protests according to whether they thwart new legislation or how many people they draw to rallies, their content becomes the important question. Do they create new relationships between people, new ways of relating to material goods? Do they demonstrate values that point beyond capitalism? Do they produce new momentum, new ways of fighting, new unruliness?

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The capitol building symbolized democracy, which is to say collective participation in top-down control. Occupying it implied that the people could be better stewards of democracy than their elected representatives. Insofar as workers behaved themselves even as their right to organize autonomously was stripped away, they proved this to be the case.

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Like the student movement, the movement in Wisconsin stalled because it limited itself to opposing specific legislation affecting one demographic. Framed as a last-ditch effort to protect the privileges of state employees, it could only go so far; people of many walks of life got involved, but the narrative prevented them from taking the lead. Yet millions of workers without union jobs or state salaries were already suffering the same conditions the Republicans wanted to force on state employees. A movement involving all these different sectors of society as equal participants could have snowballed; it would also have been much more difficult to control. Spontaneous high school walkouts in February had hinted at this possibility, connecting the proposed cutbacks to the alienation of young people who had yet to be thrown at the mercy of the job market. Instead, the predominantly white union workers framed the protest as a matter of defending their own privileges, sidelining other demographics such as unemployed African-Americans in Milwaukee and thus dooming themselves to defeat.

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Get over it

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It Spreads: The Plaza Occupation Movements, May-June 2011

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The time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don’t have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt. The next time 300,000 of us take to the streets, let’s not go back home at the end of the day. Let’s go with our sleeping bags, knowing that on that night we won’t sleep in our beds.” -Franco Berardi Bifo

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The spell of occupation extended beyond Wisconsin—along with the spell of democracy. Real Democracy Now (appropriately abbreviated DRY in Spanish), a new group professing to be outside all existing political parties and ideologies, organized protests against austerity measures and political corruption around Spain on May 15; afterwards, the idea spread by Twitter to camp out in plazas in imitation of the Tahrir Square encampment. Organized around assemblies based on “direct democracy,” these occupations swiftly drew thousands of participants in many cities around Spain. Communists, anarchists, and partisans of various national liberation movements mingled with people of other walks of life, many of whom had not previously been involved in protests or considered themselves politically active.

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By the countrywide elections the following weekend, hundreds of thousands of people had visited or participated in the occupations. Nearly half of the population abstained from voting, with blank ballots doubling to 5%.

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On May 27, police arrived at the occupation in Barcelona to “clean up” the plaza. Tens of thousands converged to oppose them. Organizers attempted to impose a code of nonviolence, as they had in every proposal in the assemblies, but as the police attacked clashes broke out all the same. After a long battle, the occupiers forced the police to withdraw; over one hundred people were injured, many with broken bones.

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In some cities, the occupations had signed on the to DRY manifesto from the outset, becoming ideologically homogenous; these occupations did not expand as much or last as long. The occupations that remained sites of contention for a range of ideas and approaches were much more vibrant and enduring. Nonetheless, by mid-June the plazas had emptied throughout the country, though in some cities neighborhood assemblies took their place. Because they did not mount an offensive on the state and private ownership of capital, there was no endgame for the occupations: they were exciting experiments in convergence and self-organization, but offered no obvious road forward.

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Like the UK student movement, the plaza occupation movement marked the entry of new demographics into conflict with the state—including many from the disenfranchised middle class. These newcomers accepted some of the premises of longtime radicals, such as autonomy from political parties; in this regard, they went much further than protesters in Wisconsin had. At the same time, they brought many of their dogmas with them, including pacifism. Likewise, the myth of a better, purer democracy remained alive and well in the plazas. The central assemblies addressed demands to the government and monopolized legitimacy, if not power, in the occupations.

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In Greece, plaza occupations inspired by the ones in Spain began on May 25. These lasted longer than the Spanish occupations, drawing hundreds of thousands at the high points. They built up to a 48-hour general strike on June 28-29 coinciding with the Greek parliament narrowly voting to accept the new austerity measures decreed by the European Union. In Greece as in Spain, the new refugees from the middle class brought pacifism with them alongside various brands of nationalism. The pacifism threatened to divide the movement: as had occurred in the wake of the Toronto G20 protests and elsewhere, baseless conspiracy theories circulated that the “hooded ones” at the front of clashes with the police were actually somehow in league with the authorities. The nationalism was also ominous; although only a small minority in the occupations were out-and-out fascists, as the economic crisis worsens even mild nationalism may turn into xenophobia.

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Despite these internal challenges, the general strike was marked by massive violent clashes with the police. For the first time since May 5, 2010, the insurgents who had risen up in December 2008—anarchists, anti-authoritarians, students, the underclass—were joined in the streets by the general public.

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Anarchy in the UK, Take Two: Riots and Reaction, August 2011

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A month later, Chile erupted in its wildest riots in years, with 874 people arrested in student protests against the privatized education system—the same day that Standard & Poor’s downgraded the United States credit rating. Immediately afterwards, riots broke out in the UK in response to the police murder of Mark Duggan. Far from subsiding, the unrest generated by the crisis was ricocheting back and forth across the globe.

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The riots began on August 6 in London following protests in Duggan’s native Tottenham and spread swiftly around the country, intensifying in other cities after police clamped down in the capitol. These were the opposite of the plaza occupations: a single subset of society escalating its private war on police and private property, without narrative, demands, or illusions, and thus coming directly into conflict with the rest of society as a whole. Participation occurred chiefly along class rather than racial lines, with many groups being effectively multi-ethnic.

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Redistribution of power

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Redistribution of wealth

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Altogether the riots inflicted around £200 million of damage, including widespread looting and arson. Once again, Twitter and Facebook were used to coordinate action on the ground, although the authorities took extensive advantage of this to arrest and prosecute participants—foreshadowing future clampdowns. Five more people lost their lives in the disorder.

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The UK riots followed close on the heels of the unsuccessful anti-austerity protests, showing the consequences of denying a generation any prospects within capitalism. The subsequent push to cut off rioters’ families from social services underscores how the riots formalized the emergence of an excluded class that will only be controlled through unbridled violence. The appearance of vigilantes during the riots, including fascist groups like the English Defense League, indicates the breadth of forms that violence will take.

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In this context, it’s chilling how many people identified with the corporate media narrative demonizing the rioters, even turning out with brooms in a media stunt calculated to show that ordinary British people supported the continuation of law and order. If the British working class has any hope of defending itself against the next round of austerity measures and diminishing employment opportunities, this can only come from common cause between rioters and other elements of the exploited. The availability of the underclass as competition for employment is precisely what enables capitalists to keep wages and benefits down; in attempting to assert and defend their own privileges, obedient workers doom themselves to be the next on the chopping block. Of course, globally speaking, British workers have only recently begun to lose their comparative privileges, so perhaps it is not surprising that it is taking them some time to come to terms with their current condition.

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Do-it-yourself class treachery

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The absence of effective anarchist initiatives immediately following the riots was not promising; history appeared to be racing ahead of anarchists just when it was most important for them to intervene in it. Treating class as a kind of identity politics had not equipped the conservative majority of British anarchists for a world in which the most determinant struggles occur outside the workplace.

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The Shape of Occupations to Come

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In September 2011, protesters in North America finally hit upon a format that could spread, based on the models already tested elsewhere around the world. We’ll discuss the lessons of the Occupy movement to date in a forthcoming analysis. Here, let it suffice to say that Occupy Wall Street caught on around the continent because it fulfilled conditions that could easily be deduced from earlier successes and failures worldwide. This suggests that studying the shortcomings of these precedents can also teach us how to improve on this success.

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One obvious lesson is the importance of decision-making structures conducive to anarchist action. At no point during the buildup to the protests of March 4, 2010 or the occupations in Wisconsin did anarchists establish an autonomous public organizing body to play a role such as the RNC Welcoming Committee played at the 2008 Republican National Convention or the PGRP played at the 2009 G20 in Pittsburgh. This was a strategic error that enabled liberal and authoritarian organizers to monopolize the public discourse around the protests and determine their character and conditions in advance. Without the leverage afforded by public organizing of our own, we can always expect to be hoodwinked and betrayed by those who don’t share our opposition to hierarchical power.

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The actions that go well for anarchists are likely to be the ones initiated by anarchists, or else in conjunction with others who respect anarchists’ goals and autonomy. In such cases, anarchists are more likely to succeed in determining the character of events, choosing a terrain conducive to confrontation. This may explain why occupations and apparently “spontaneous” actions have given more space and opportunity to decentralized forms of resistance than large-scale events such as the permitted marches of March 4, 2010. Authoritarian and lowest-common-denominator organizations can more easily dominate the latter, both by literally laying the groundwork of what is to happen and by monopolizing legitimacy in the public eye by presenting themselves as representing the movement. So long as anarchists remain on the margins of liberal and authoritarian organizing, organizing breakaway marches and the like, the lack of initiative and “legitimacy” in the public eye will always impose structural limits on our efforts.

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We need public, participatory calls and organizing structures, both to offer points of entry to everyone who might want to fight alongside us and to make it impossible for authoritarians to stifle revolt by arranging the battlefield to be unfavorable for it. Public organizing can complement other less public approaches, but often it’s necessary to render them possible in the first place. Not surprisingly, the cities in which anarchists succeeded in carrying out inspiring actions as part of the Occupy movement—Oakland, Seattle, Saint Louis—were the ones in which they either had considerable leverage within the general assemblies or maintained their own open anti-authoritarian caucuses.

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As capitalism renders more and more people precarious or redundant, it will be harder and harder to fight from recognized positions of legitimacy within the system such as “workers” or “students.” Last year’s students fighting tuition hikes are this year’s dropouts; last year’s workers fighting job cuts are this year’s unemployed. We have to legitimize fighting from outside, establishing a new narrative of struggle.

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If we can accomplish this, we will neutralize the allegations of being “outside agitators” that are always raised against those who revolt. Better, we will transform every austerity conflict into an opportunity to connect with everyone else who has been thrown away by capitalism. Our goal should not be to protect the privileges of those who retain their jobs and enrollment, but to channel outrage about everything that capitalism has taken from all of us.

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In addition to exacerbating the contradictions inherent in the financial crisis, we should undertake to make life in upheavals more pleasurable and robust than workaday life. Those who participate in wildcat strikes, blockades, and occupations should experience these as more exciting and fulfilling than their usual routines, to such an extent that it becomes possible to imagine life after capitalism. As many anarchists live in a permanent state of exclusion, making the best of it despite everything, we should be especially well-equipped to assist here.

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Finally, we have to be tireless in our critique of democracy, as the alternative people in this society intuitively fall back on against the excesses of capitalism. The more unpopular this is, the more important it is that we do it. Private property and government are the two great sacred cows of our age—the ones for which our lives and the earth itself are being sacrificed—and challenging the ways they monopolize legitimacy is one project, not two. They are two heads of the same beast; they cannot be beaten separately.

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“It was a symbolic battle—or more precisely, a frighteningly real and bloody fight over a symbolic location; the fight itself was the message.” –a participant in the battle for the
\nEgyptian Ministry of the Interior

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  1. \n

    See Rolling Thunder #9. ↩

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    2. \n
  2. \n

    This vindicates the call for anarchists to set off “chain reactions of revolt” that had appeared a few months earlier in our analysis, “Fighting in the New Terrain.” ↩

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    3. \n
  3. \n

    Today, high-speed global communication is essential for coordinating the flows of capital, commodities, and speculation; this is how capitalists outflanked the old workers’ movements, shifting centers of production swiftly around the world to force laborers to compete to offer the cheapest labor. But every advance in repression produces a symmetrical advance in resistance tactics. ↩

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    4. \n
  4. \n

    This is not the first time anarchists have contributed their organizational skills to an essentially liberal protest. At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, about 100,000 people participated in demonstrations; this included thousands of anarchists, many of whom limited themselves to logistical roles. Afterwards, this was recognized as a tremendous missed opportunity—hence the efforts to take the lead in planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. These conventions are covered in Rolling Thunder issues #1 and 7. ↩

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    5. \n
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\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/11/27/personal-accounts-from-a-building-occupation-movement", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/11/27/personal-accounts-from-a-building-occupation-movement", "title": "Personal Accounts from a Building Occupation Movement", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2011-11-27T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

These narratives accompany Breaking and Entering a New World, the story of the occupation of a derelict building in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on November 12-13, 2011.

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I.

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You’ve been passing the empty warehouse almost daily over the nine years you’ve lived in this town. Giant windows comprise the whole front façade of the building, displaying the dusty remains of some long-abandoned showroom, and to the right a short driveway buts into a flaking silver garage door. You’ve peered in those grimy windows, squinting to see what lies through the empty doorway in the wall of the front room visible to passersby like yourself. Biking home on warm summer nights you’ve wondered how a prominent spot on the main street in town could sit abandoned and rotting for over a decade. You’ve heard grumbles about the wealthy absentee landlord who sits on it from half a state a way, content to let it rot. You’ve mused in fleeting moments on the crazy things that could be possible in such an enormous space. You’ve noticed the snowballing amount of graffiti inside, lighting up the walls of that front room and—you can only imagine—the uncharted expanse that must lie beyond it. And as your bike rolls past it to work in the mornings, and then again on the way home, day after day, your curiosity ossifies into just another dull throb at the irrationality and injustice of life in this town. After all, what could you do?

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Then all of a sudden, something has changed. Just a little way up the street, folks have been occupying the plaza in front of the post office with tents and tables and banners, just as people around the world have been occupying spaces in their cities. A rumbling current of outrage against the wealthy who exploit us with impunity has begun to reverberate, even in this recession-proof affluent college town. In blog posts and whispers, we hear of creative actions, conflicts with the police, illicit dreams. Something is changing—could it be our sense of what’s possible?

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And then, an evening at first like any other: biking up Franklin Street after a day spent partly at work, partly perusing the anarchist book fair where folks swap books, ‘zines, strategies, and stories about the kinds of resistance they’ve seen or can imagine. Instead of heading home, you pull your bike over on a brick walkway, and there you see a surge of people, banners, a few drums, flowing out along the sidewalk then spilling across the street. There’s a tight sense of anticipation, something crackling through the rowdy crowd, and you’re drawn into it. You scan the street—where are the police?—and then you notice something you’ve never seen before; that same empty warehouse, but this time, with elegant banners spanning those grimy windows.

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But wait—those banners are inside the building! And then you see the crowd of which you’re now a part swelling on the sidewalk in front, and streams of people heading through a now-open silver garage door, and a dim golden glow emanating from the long-empty space. As you step onto the sidewalk and then the short driveway, you see shapes of people, friends and strangers, milling about beyond the banners in the front room. Someone to your right hands you a pamphlet, while on your left a bullhorn crackles to life. Across the street Friday night pedestrians are stopping to chat with the red-shirted valet parking attendants, who shrug their shoulders and fold their arms with intrigued smiles. You turn back around to the open door, just a few steps ahead. Through the gloom you can see shapes, outlines of a vast expanse, a canvas of possibility. Do you dare? You approach the doorway, your breath caught in your chest. And then, heart pounding, you step inside.

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Vastness. Pure vastness. How can a building be so enormous? A single orange extension cord snakes across a vast concrete floor to a gerry-rigged contraption of silver flood lamps. The warm grey yellow light floods up and outwards to a massive ceiling of latticed wooden beams, casting criss-crossed shadows to the eaves of the roof beyond. The cinder block walls seem to extend out endlessly, an impossible distance, to a back door that must be a football field away. A few graffiti pieces dot the walls, but are swallowed up by the boundless expanse of gray walls and peeling dull green paint. A massive flaking metal marquee sign, splayed across the floor along a side wall, reads “Carolina” in an elegant cursive. Two revelers exchange gleeful shouts, then hoist the twelve-foot long rusty word up and shuffle past you to haul it out front, where a swelling crowd listens to a clean-cut speaker describing various possible futures for a building like this. But this isn’t just a building anymore. This is an experiment. This is an adventure. This is a challenge.

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Around you, people wander, suffused with wonder, pointing and exclaiming. Behind you in the front showroom music reverberates and the flicker of a projector has begun to dance across the walls. As you tentatively step forward, you recognize some people from the book fair earlier or from the occupation up the street, but also random folks walking by, hipsters you’ve seen a parties here and there, and others you don’t recognize at all. Some stride out into the massive open space, gesturing animatedly, while others haul speakers into the front room or wooden pallets against the wall.

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A decade’s dust coats the floor, and you stifle a cough. But already a cluster of people to your right are chatting about who’s headed out to get a push broom, where they can find a mop, who’s got a can to line with the trash bags someone just dropped off.

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Back across to your left in the front room, dozens of people are settling into a semicircle around a performer, whose enchanting voice begins to echo through the rafters, bringing goose bumps to your arms. And in front of you, some fifty yards off into the opposite corner of this massive space, you see a woman whose name you can’t recall, though you know you’ve seen her on the bus before. She is alone, dressed in a burgundy sweater over blue jeans with a billowy white scarf, and she is whirling, dervish-like, to her own rhythm. As you stand watching, bewildered but with growing joy and awe, she twirls and spins, ducking and flowing with liquid grace, while the golden flood lamp light crosses the flickering of the projector against her elegantly moving silhouette to cast dazzling shadows across the empty wall. The voice from the front room rises, electrifyingly powerful, to a hair-raising crescendo, and still the white-scarfed woman crouches and whirls, her back to you, facing her reflection on the dirty gray wall, playing with the delicate motions of her shadow amidst the crisscrossing light.

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Your head stretches back and you look up to the dark brown lattice of wooden beams along the massive ceiling, and as whistles and enthusiastic applause waft through the vastness, you feel a sense of vastness inside yourself, an expanding oceanic awe and excitement—a sense of possibility.

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And then you realize that the question you resignedly asked yourself biking by this warehouse each day has irrevocably changed. Now you wonder: what could we do? And the possible answers seem to stretch out limitless before you, like dancing shadows dappling the cinder block walls.

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II.

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I am an anarchist. I have been in assemblies, street marches, and squatted buildings enough times to satisfy my curiosity and wear out my enthusiasm. I have also been in countless failures, countless hare-brained adventures rationalized by the conviction that “something must be done.” On Saturday night, I expected to take part in yet another.

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I joined the march knowing little about people’s plans. The idea of occupying a building was in the air, and I had a hunch that someone might go for it, but that didn’t answer any of my questions. What was the goal? Would this be another publicity stunt, or did somebody actually think we could hold a space long enough to do something? When the police came, would the march continue, or would we stand our ground and wait to get arrested? I hoped someone had an exit strategy for whatever mess we got ourselves into. As for me, I figured I would tag along and try to be useful if things got hot.

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My first glimpse of the building didn’t exactly make me hopeful. A few people who had filtered inside were attempting to dance to techno music coming through some tinny laptop speakers, but other than that it looked like the abandoned, gutted warehouse that it was, not the future community center the leaflets described. A few banners taped to the front windows made me think with embarrassment of an SDS protest, with trite slogans and poorly drawn icons of “radicalism.” My friends and I milled around out front making up nonsense chants to mitigate the boredom. Some kid started preaching through a bullhorn to no one in particular. At least he was doing something. It seemed that exit strategies were too advanced for this plan; so far there was very little worth exiting.

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Soon police started to arrive. A squad car parked in the middle of Franklin Street while two others circled the block, trying to figure out what was going on. A couple particularly brawny officers posted up across the street to help keep an eye on things. They looked bored too.

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Someone suggested we bring in some furniture to make the space a little cozier. First up was a discarded magazine rack he had seen earlier that day; I helped retrieve it and marched it proudly through a throng of college kids outside the McDonald’s. When we set it down, somebody else materialized with a box of zines and flyers, and began arranging them on the shelves. So, we had a library. That’s a start.

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By now, the police had gotten their orders and were moving in. Three of them crossed the street and made their way towards the entrance, flashlights in hand. A crowd of about fifty people, who had been dispersed throughout the space and on the sidewalks outside, quickly gathered between the cops and the gate, unsure what came next. Now the chants came in handy. Police are social animals; they get nervous when they can’t hear their leaders’ voices through the walkie-talkie. “A-! Anti-! Anticapitalista!” we shouted—a standby among anarchists, who always want to sound like they’re from some other country, but evidently intimidating to the Chapel Hill PD, who must have thought we were reciting some ancient curse in Latin. Whatever it was, they backed off. We learned much later that the confrontation had indeed persuaded them not to evict that night, which they had originally planned to do.

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For the moment, we had free rein to transform the space as the police abandoned their posts and contented themselves with occasionally cruising by. A generator and PA were brought in and the dance party began in earnest, followed by a show originally booked at a distant acquaintance’s basement. I joined a crew gathering discarded pallets and cardboard from elsewhere in town, so that those who stayed the night would have something more comfortable to sleep on than a cement floor. Occupations are one thing when they exist only for the news cameras; they are quite another when they materially benefit the occupants. Behind the library we set up a table, which was soon laden with soup, bread, and three pans of delicious curries.

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The next morning, there was plenty of coffee and grits with greens. Years of work with the Really Really Free Market had taught anarchists how to provide for a crowd. Overnight, more lumber and tools had been brought in, along with a washbasin and a propane stove and heater. A carpenter I hadn’t seen in years was already building custom tables for the appliances. Some kind of meeting was being held in the front room, but I felt that meetings could wait for later. There was work to do.

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In Europe, where the squatting movement has been a force for decades, the people who help establish a squat often have no intention of living there. Experience has shown that it is vitally important to build up the space as much as possible in the first forty-eight hours. In some cases, this means fortifications against police attack, but the most important effect is social. A dramatic transformation of a derelict building gives outsiders a reason to support the project, and it gives participants a tangible sense that they have something worth fighting for. If we did get evicted, I wanted to leave with a memory of what could have been. They could take away a building, but they couldn’t destroy a shared determination to fight.

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I took it upon myself to let in a little light. The western and southern walls of our squat were filled with eight-foot windows, all of which had been boarded up for years. The only glass left uncovered was the display room on the north side facing the street. The property owner had probably been worried about kids throwing rocks through the panes facing the alley, but I expected we would face less hostility from strangers than this multimillionaire.

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The plywood itself presented some problems, though. It was held on by self-tapping bolts that could only be removed with a hex bit, and the wood had swollen around them so that each one had to be dug out with a chisel before the socket would fit on. If I’d been getting paid, I would have cursed my boss for every stripped screw and awkward angle. This was for me, though. A couple friends joined in, and another crew started taping clear plastic sheeting over the handful of panes that were already broken.

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Soon, we could see the results with each sheet of plywood we brought inside, destined to be a table or a bathroom wall. The light was pouring in, illuminating surfaces that had not seen the sun in a decade and dust still hanging in the air from the morning’s monumental sweeping campaign. For me, this was a profound moment. When the building was just a number in a ledger-book, it had no need for light. The physical change signified something deeper: what mattered here, for the first time, was life—not real estate, but human needs. I fantasized with my workmates about murals and gardens as we took down the final boards and brought them in, carefully gathering the screws for future use. The space was ours.

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Everybody who has felt the injustice of this world dreams of revenge from time to time. I myself find it hard to trust those who only talk about building a new world, about peace and community, and never about destroying the world we know. I wonder if their reality has been different than mine, or if their positive attitude serves some other agenda. My skepticism when I arrived at our future community center was, among other things, a doubt that a group of people clearly unprepared for militant confrontation could pose any threat to the powers enforcing daily misery in this inhospitable world. In the twenty-one hours that we held the space, that skepticism turned to joy, a sense of imagination and possibility that I seldom associate with political action. We were living in a world where nothing was scripted, and it seemed like it might last.

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When the raid came, I was across town gathering resources for the space. I rushed back, but it was too late: our squat looked like a conquered city, and my comrades were lying on the ground at gunpoint. I stood across the street shouting and jeering until my voice gave out, until the last arrestees had been carted off in the brand new eco-friendly bus that Chapel Hill had sent for them. The banners that had embarrassed me the night before came down as we watched, powerless—except for two hanging overhead, too high for the cops to tear at them, that proclaimed, with a mix of tragic pride and irony, “OCCUPY. EVERYTHING.”

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In a press conference held the next day to justify the use of force, the police chief explained that anarchists had blocked the front windows with banners so that officers could not see what dangers might await them inside. Their assault rifles held off a fear of the unknown. I winced a little, but couldn’t help laughing too. We didn’t block the windows, we opened them! It was not obscurity they feared, but unpredictability—the unpredictability of freedom, the same unpredictability that made them retreat before a chanting crowd that first night. They overreacted because they knew nothing else to do; all their training revolves around one nonnegotiable tenet, that someone must be in control.

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I do not feel that we lost, even when I walk down Franklin Street and read the “condemned” sign now posted out front. The sense of possibility remains; there is a new intensity when we mask up for a black bloc downtown, an aliveness that pulls on those around us. My only regret is that we never got to name our space. Its memory persists, but incommunicable, faceless. If I fight now, it is not only to honor that memory, but also to give it form for all those who can only imagine it in the abstract. We will be back. Next time we’ll be ready.

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III.

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At twice a day for three years, I may have walked by the abandoned car dealership on the main strip in my small town literally two thousand times. Having one foot in the local graffiti community I’d also been inside a few times. It was eerie and quiet, dark and dead inside. The inside was dark but the entire front was giant windows so one had to move slowly and keep a bit low while exploring the 10,000 square foot art gallery.

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Six months later, we left the anarchist book fair with banners and drums and 75 excited people in tow. As the march approached the dealership I could already see our friends with black masks on, putting up giant banners in the front windows: “Capitalism left this building for dead (Giant circle A) We brought it back to life”—“Stop taking orders, Start taking over”—and, of course, “Occupy Everything.” By the time we actually got to the building, there was a projector casting footage of the Oakland general strike on the main wall visible through the windows, while techno music was bumping from the now open garage door. We marched in and the crowd followed us with sounds of surprise, delight, and excitement as they saw the massive space illuminated by clip lights affixed to a ladder in the center of the room. Pamphlets were distributed offering a floor plan for all the amazing things this space could be and a manifesto about reclaiming the public space capitalism has stolen from us.

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After the movie, folks gathered back outside. The police had arrived and people seemed confused and perhaps a bit nervous. Somebody gave a rousing speech and the crowd started chanting at the police, who quickly backed off and did not return for the evening. Once the boys in blue had retreated, the mood lightened and people flooded back into the front room where a DJ was spinning popular dance music; the protest footage had been put on loop in the background.

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This was what we had needed. The tent city occupation down the street was a constant battle: cold, wet, under siege by drunks… conflicting beliefs and personalities had been threatening to tear us apart, and as the conditions got worse and the general assemblies became a chore numbers had dwindled, further killing morale. But tonight we danced! Differences aside, we smiled and discussed the possibilities of moving the tent city into the building for the winter; a yoga instructor scheduled a class for 4 p.m. the following day, the first event at our new community center.

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I stepped out to get some air. A couple approached me and asked “What’s going on here?”

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I handed them the pamphlet and explained, “We’re turning this building into a community center.”

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The man’s face lit up. “That’s great! I worked as a chef next door for years and this place just rots here!”

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I nodded and added matter-of-factly, “It’s an illegal occupation.”

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“Even better!” he said enthusiastically.

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People started returning from around town with desks, couches, pallets, and cardboard to sleep on since it seemed we’d be staying the night. Folks I’d seen from all over town were coming by to check things out after a tweet and some text messages went out; the music and dancing continued until well after the bars had let out.

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IV.

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After the more diplomatic and physically imposing among us successfully encouraged the two semi-hostile drunks to stagger on their way, we shut the garage door and battened down the hatches for the night. The dozen or so of us who were still awake gathered for one last little council to plan how to handle the night. I scanned the warehouse; suddenly the massive space seemed more imposing, a bit creepy, with just two lamps casting a dim light through the enormous cavern. Surveying the scene, it seemed that in addition to the handful of us chatting quietly that several others had already bedded down for the night. A trio of oogles were squished in a corner, their dog still wandering around sniffing things. A lone crust punk from out west was asleep against the wall, half sitting up on a bare pallet, arms folded. Does anyone have a spare blanket for that guy? Two sleeping bags jutting out from the wall near the front room remained inert, occupied by a mysterious pair who had presumably slept through the performances and three-hour dance party; maybe they just had really effective earplugs?

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As we discussed night watches for security (two folks out front, one out back, one inside), where to pee and poop (in a bucket in the far corner), how to alert each other in case of a raid or other emergency (whistles), and other crucial details, I tried to keep up and contribute, but I was fading fast. I’d been sick for a week already, and the combination of a long day tabling at the anarchist book fair, the insane adrenaline rush of the march and occupation, euphoric dance party overexertion, general stress and uncertainty about police response and random drunks, and overall overwhelmingness had taken their toll. As soon as we broke up, I headed wearily over to the two pallets I’d laid out against the far right wall.

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Now that it was 3 a.m., a deep November chill had set in, and I knew it would be a challenge to stay warm. Fortunately my sleeping bag, borrowed from the outdoor occupation up the street, proved up to the task, reinforced by the thin blanket I draped over it. I snuggled in—hey, these pallets aren’t that uncomfortable after all!—and wrapped a thin undershirt over my nose and mouth as an improvised dust mask.

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A deep quiet settled in, periodically ruptured by inexplicable squeaks and groans from the walls or slurred laughter from drunken pedestrians outside. Some twenty or twenty-five feet overhead, I could see the wooden beams of the ceiling faintly in the dim light of the remaining lamps. The sound of my friend on night watch pacing slowly from front door to back provided a bit of reassurance. Still, I couldn’t sleep amid the excitement, the anxiety, the odd noises and the unfamiliar setting. When was the last time someone slept in this building, I wondered? Graffiti writers had been in here, as the walls testified, but there weren’t any signs of overnight or longer-term visitors before we entered. Was I among the first of a new generation? Who would sleep here tomorrow night, the night after? How would we keep each other safe, ensure consent and respect, have somewhere more private and comfortable to shit than a plastic bucket in a dark corner? Would the police really let us hold the space? Would the owner care? Would they use inspections officers and fire codes to shut us down, strangle us in red tape? How will the media report on it? What kinds of events could we have here? What would “we” answer all of these questions? Should I find someone to sublet my room and move in here? Will I get asthma or brown lung disease or something from all this dust?

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These and ten thousand other questions ricocheted through my skull as the night hours slowly peeled away. And it wasn’t until I noticed the daylight seeping in through the front windows and heard the murmurs of the night watch folks chatting with the people who’d arrived to relieve them that I realized I had fallen asleep at all. Somehow we’d made it through the night, I pondered sleepily. What the hell would the day hold?

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V.

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Shortly before the raid, I got a call informing me that police had been seen congregating not far from the occupation. I began to walk around the building, spreading this news. As I finished telling people out back, two white, unmarked SUVs pulled up to the back of the building. As soon as I saw them moving towards the building, before they announced themselves as “police,” I raced to the front of the building, repeatedly yelling “Cops!” Not many people had been inside; I saw some people move outside, while others who had already been outside looked around in alarm.

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When I reached the front of the building, I took a few steps down the driveway and suddenly saw assault-rifle-wielding paramilitary troops flying around the corner of a neighboring building. They were shouting for us to get down—”Face down on the pavement”—as they cycled the barrels of their rifles from me to those around me. I hit the deck almost instantly. The entire event was so surreal that it didn’t even feel like it was happening to me. As I lay with my face in the pavement, I heard someone to my side ask in a somewhat strained voice if the cop standing over him was going to shoot him; I later learned the cop was shoving a gun into the man’s back as he lay on the pavement. I couldn’t see what was going on and figured it was best to lie still. I dimly registered being given instructions about my hands and the subsequent tightening of handcuffs; I attempted to get my sleeves between the plastic zip-ties and my skin, as nerve damage is frighteningly common with zip-ties.

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I was finally rolled onto my back and seated on a low wall. At this point, I looked around and realized that none of the cops had any sort of crowd-dispersal equipment. Whereas I had seen batons, riot shields, and “non-lethal” weapons like tear-gas, mace, and rubber bullets at the evictions of numerous other occupations, here I saw only tactical vests, extra magazines, and assault rifles. At least one of the officers did have a taser; however, it was holstered and appeared to be incredibly awkward to access, especially compared to the live-ammunition firearm in his hand. As arrestees were loaded onto the public transit bus with a large Wells Fargo ad on the side, to be transported to the Hillsboro jail, I couldn’t help but reflect on the violence displayed towards people who had given no indication of possessing weapons. The fact that the CHPD had willfully defended a decrepit building’s vacancy by threatening my life and the lives of other non-violent protesters struck me, and strikes me, as abhorrent.

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VI.

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When I saw the occupying of the old Chrysler building, it opened a part of myself which had been closed off and boarded up, much like the building itself. I saw people with smiles helping each other clean and build things. There were so many different people with the desire to come together—it was beautiful, and has been carved into my mind ever since. It made me want to see more positive things for my community, things that would somehow ricochet throughout it. I desired hope, which I once believed to be a weak sentiment. I desired to feel helpful instead of helpless. I desired to believe people would come together for a change, for something other than a sports game. Now I feel like that is more possible. So many people caught a glimpse of potential in that building. If our lives could be shifted away from money and more towards needs, things like a community center could happen.

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But instead of a community center being set up, I returned to a police raid. Machine guns were the only weapons visible—no tear gas, no rubber bullets, just loaded machine guns with plenty of extra magazines handy. It was chilling to witness a variety of people being pushed with guns, handcuffed, and illegally searched. A large group of people formed to support the occupiers and “Shame!” the police.

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A whole new level had been shown to me. They are afraid of us getting together on our own terms and will attempt to divide us at all costs. This is our movement—a movement for the people, by the people. This is not a protest, this is progress.

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VII.

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We gathered after the general assembly for the solidarity march with all the occupations around the country facing eviction and police brutality. But unlike our solidarity marches of years past, tonight we marched for ourselves too. Since the raid, it hadn’t been uncommon to turn on the news and hear people referring to “New York, Oakland, Chicago, and Chapel Hill.” Our quiet little town had become a spectacle; the incident had made the front page of every local paper for days in a row, and it seemed like everyone I passed on the street was talking about it.

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An anti-police march a few nights previous had brought 100 people into the street blocking traffic, wearing masks—itself a crime in our state, for which our friends at Occupy Asheville were facing charges—and antagonizing the police, who were terrified of winding up on the national news again for attacking protesters already protesting police brutality. Now our numbers swelled to over a hundred and twenty and we took the street without masks. While the occupation at Peace and Justice Plaza and the occupation of the abandoned car dealership had been clearly defined as separate events, it was obvious that each benefitted from the other’s existence. The month-long, harmless encampment had established us as “friendly neighborhood protesters,” while the squatted social center had (literally) overnight brought publicity and a sensation that powerful action was possible, letting the country know that Occupy Chapel Hill was a big deal.

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The police cars flanked us as we marched back to the sight of the raid and then down to the new high-rise apartments which members of our community had caught felony riot charges for protesting just a few months earlier. The cops were on the defensive and we knew it. We dared them to fuck with us, all parties involved fully aware that the whole nation would hear about any police misconduct. Finally, we returned to the occupation where rousing speeches were made and flyers were distributed for the next march, only a few days later.

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\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/11/27/breaking-and-entering-a-new-world-pioneering-the-future-of-the-occupy-movement", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/11/27/breaking-and-entering-a-new-world-pioneering-the-future-of-the-occupy-movement", "title": "Breaking and Entering a New World : Pioneering the Future of the Occupy Movement", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/14b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/14b.jpg", "date_published": "2011-11-27T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-08-29T22:52:43Z", "tags": [ "Occupy", "squatting" ], "content_html": "

This is the story of the occupation of a derelict building in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on November 12-13, 2011, told in the voices of a wide range of participants. While anarchists and corporate media have circulated news of this action far and wide, the experiences shared inside the building have remained a sort of black box. This report opens up that box, just as the occupiers opened up the building, to reveal a world of possibility.

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Some of the narratives below are excerpted from longer accounts, which can be read in their entirety here.

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Slideshow courtesy of Underground Reverie

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In contrast to the occupation movement in some parts of the US, anarchists were involved in Occupy Chapel Hill from the very beginning, sending out the initial call and facilitating the first meetings. The points of unity consensed upon at the first gathering were based on the Pittsburgh Principles, and the group never adopted a nonviolence agreement.

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At the second assembly, we debated whether to set up an encampment. Some argued against it, claiming that the police would evict us and insisting we should apply for a permit first. In nearby Raleigh, occupiers had applied for a permit but were only granted one lasting a few hours; everyone who remained after it expired was arrested. A few of us thought it better to go forward without permission than to embolden the authorities to believe we would comply with whatever was convenient for them.

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A different facilitator would have let the debate remain abstract indefinitely, effectively quashing the possibility of an occupation, but ours cut right to the chase: “Raise your hand if you want to camp out here tonight.” A few hands went hesitantly up. “Looks like five… six, seven… OK, let’s split into two groups: those who want to occupy, and everyone else. We’ll reconvene in ten minutes.”

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At first there were only a half dozen of us, but once we took that first step, others started drifting over. Ten minutes later there were twenty-four occupiers—more than we believed the local police were prepared to arrest—and that night fully three dozen people camped out in Peace and Justice Plaza. I stayed awake all night waiting for a raid, but it never came. We’d won the first round, expanding the zone of the possible.

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On November 2, participants in the general strike in Oakland attempted to occupy an empty building that had previously provided services to the homeless. This controversial action ended in dramatic confrontations with riot police, but opened up a new horizon as winter crept up on the occupation movement.

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Saturday, November 12, following the second annual Carrboro anarchist book fair, upwards of fifty people gathered for a march in solidarity with the occupation movement.

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We couldn’t tell if we were parading yet. The crowd had begun to move, but it was still finding its rhythm and cohesion. But we two found our cue: there was a little boy, maybe five years old, carrying a black flag on the end of a six-foot bamboo pole. It tottered, sometimes bumping other paraders, as he struggled proudly and joyously to keep it aloft. We were with him.

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Undercover officers were already following participants, peppering them with inappropriate questions.

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This middle-aged white guy in a puffy red winter vest shuffled to catch up with us. Curious and clueless, he was in from “out of town,” he knew nothing about Anarchy or Occupy, and he was hoping we would explain things to him. Did we want to “smash capitalism?” Did we know what the plan was for tonight? Sometimes we couldn’t resist saying hilarious nonsense to him, but mostly we told him about how much we loved detective movies.

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The march proceeded to the 10,000-square-foot commercial building at 419 West Franklin Street, a former Chrysler-Plymouth dealership empty since 2003. The absentee owner, Joe Riddle, was among the town’s most widely loathed property holders. He had no plans for the building; as it was sitting on property valued at close to a million dollars, only a powerful corporation could possibly purchase it.

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When we left the book fair, I had no idea what to expect, other than that we would be heading towards the plaza occupation. I was caught off guard by the large number of people and full of excitement as we made our way through a parking lot to the street. When we arrived, I was surprised to see the group move in the opposite direction. By the time we’d crossed the street to the building, I was so caught up in chanting and looking around at the crowd that I hadn’t taken stock of where I was. At this point, I looked toward the front of the march and saw that the windows of a building had been decorated with two large banners.

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The march veered up the driveway in front of the building. As the crowd approached the vertical-sliding door, it glided up and two or three pairs of eyes stared out from under hats and over bandannas. As we streamed in, I saw people conversing and looking around the huge main room, silhouetted by the electric lights that had been rigged up and placed in the center. Someone handed me a folded sheet of paper that presented one of the most truly exciting ideas I had ever seen: the proposal that, amidst this global economic and political collapse, a community could form around this long-abandoned and maliciously wasted property and make something of benefit to the town at large. As I walked around the premises, I couldn’t believe that this was happening before my eyes. While I was caught entirely off-guard, I was eager to see where it would go.

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Participants distributed leaflets proposing that the space could be turned into a social center serving the community, including a meticulously designed blueprint showing some of “the countless uses such a building could be put to once freed from the stranglehold of rent.” Over the course of the evening, these handouts were warmly received by hundreds of passersby.

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I stepped out to get some air. A couple approached me: “What’s going on here?”

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I handed them the pamphlet and explained, “We’re turning this building into a community center.”

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The man’s face lit up. “That’s great! I worked as a chef next door for years and this place just rots here!”

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I nodded and added matter-of-factly, “It’s an illegal occupation.”

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“Even better!” he said enthusiastically.

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The leaflet spelled out an anticapitalist rationale for occupying the building, framing it in reference to the local context:

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Across the US, tens of thousands of commercial and residential buildings sit empty while people sleep in the streets or descend into poverty paying ever-rising rent. Chapel Hill is no different. This building has been empty for a full decade, gathering dust and equity for a faraway landlord while rent skyrockets beyond our ability to pay. A brand new “green” development remains empty right up the street, gentrifying the neighborhood so longtime locals have to move to Durham. This is what happens when our town is shaped by profit rather than human need.

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A handful of police officers positioned themselves across the street, a threatening but hesitant presence.

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We had a police liaison ready and waiting, but they never initiated contact with us. When the police crossed the street towards the building, about fifty of us gathered in front of it, chanting “A—Anti—Anticapitalista!” The officers hesitated—what was this strange incantation?—and withdrew. That chant cast an enchantment, magically protecting the occupation.

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Two people from the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership also arrived; after the building had remained untouched for so many years, they had coincidentally just arranged for an artist to make a display in the front window. Occupiers engaged personably with them, exchanging contact information to open negotiations about the space. Later this was intentionally omitted from the authorities’ account of events, so as not to disrupt their narrative about dangerous and unapproachable anarchists.

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Meanwhile, more and more people were arriving, passing through the open garage door to explore the building.

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Vastness. Pure vastness. How can a building be so enormous? A single orange extension cord snaked across the vast concrete floor to a jury-rigged contraption of silver flood lamps. The warm grey yellow light flooded up and outwards to a massive ceiling of latticed wooden beams, casting crisscrossed shadows to the eaves of the roof beyond. The cinderblock walls seemed to extend out endlessly, an impossible distance, to a back door that had to be a football field away.

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Some people began cleaning the interior; others set up a kitchen, a reading library, and sleeping areas. Trucks and cars were pulling up in the driveway one after another to unload supplies. A show originally scheduled in a local basement as an after-party for the book fair was moved to the occupation.

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S— performed her set a cappella, kneeling on a blanket in that immense darkness with all of us pressed around her, a spark sailing up into the night. She’s always an amazing singer, but this was something else. When she opened her mouth, the whole world poured out: childbirth and tear gas, clear streams and mountaintop removal, rage and exaltation and tragedy.

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Occupying a building means investing yourself in a space that may be taken from you any minute, in a time you know is short; it forces you to be present in a way we rarely are, to confront your own mortality. Death accompanies us at every step, devouring us instant after instant, but we only awaken to this when we stumble into unrepeatable moments. Without that awareness to give it urgency, music is only music; that night, it was existence itself, running through our fingers like sand.

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R— joined her with his berimbau for the last song. When he hit the first note and paused, it echoed through the building and throughout our lives. Death and the police—the great erasers—were close at our heels, but for that moment we were immortal together, viscerally alive.

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A joyous dance party ensued in the front room, as several dozen people cavorted with increasing abandon to live DJs while looped footage from the Oakland general strike was projected larger than life across the wall behind them. Over one hundred people from many different walks of life passed through the building in the course of the evening; locals who had only seen each other around town introduced themselves and conferred giddily. Many of these were younger anarchists, students, and hipsters employed in the service industry, but others were long-established residents old enough to recount stories from the days before the automobile dealership closed. There were even a few attendees who possessed positions of influence at the university or in local politics; later, of course, it never came up that they had participated exuberantly in an illegal occupation.

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The most exciting thing for me about occupying this building was the looks on my friends’ faces. Surprise. Accomplishment. Possibility. Unbridled joy.

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None of us thought we could hold this building, but several hours in we were still dancing, still chatting with passersby, still dreaming about what would come next. What if this building could actually be ours? What if we could be powerful enough together to build the beautiful things we deserve? I had so many conversations with strangers about what we can make and be for each other outside the constraints of capitalism, so many daydreams about living in a world where everyone has enough—and on each of these new friends’ faces, I found the resolve to make something worth taking risks for.

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As the festivities finally died down, about two dozen people settled in to sleep in the building overnight, securing the doors and unrolling sleeping bags on cardboard and wooden pallets. Others stood watch—some inside, some outside—waiting to sound the alarm in case of a police raid.

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Occupy Chapel Hill had encamped in the only public space in Chapel Hill, a concrete plaza outside the building that serves as post office and courthouse, located at the edge of a long stretch of bars. At 2 a.m. every night, patrons stumble from the bars, tearing down signs, kicking tents, and shouting obscenities at occupiers. No wonder so many occupiers fled to Occupy Chrysler for the cavernous safety of the abandoned car dealership at the other end of the street. While four or five members of OCH waged the stressful nightly battle to deescalate intoxicant-fueled anger at the plaza, I settled with one companion on the stoop in front of the Chrysler building to stay awake and watch while weary occupiers got some well-deserved rest.

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Traffic dwindled, leaving only a cold quiet street of brick buildings and gold-leafed trees, a few stars, and the just-waning moon. In those quiet hours before dawn, anything seemed possible in the town where we both had lived most of our lives. If the landlord antagonistic to the town let us stay, if the town antagonistic to the landlord let us stay, if a nonprofit arts organization with tentative access to the building partnered with us, if any of those things happened we had the skills among us to winter off the grid easily. At three times the size of the public plaza, the hulking building behind us not only offered room for Occupy’s general assemblies, teach-ins, and sleeping, but ample space to become whatever a community envisioned: a kitchen, a clinic, a classroom, a library, a movement and arts space. It seemed all we had to do was wait for morning and begin.

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Police officers dropped by in the morning, unsuccessfully seeking to gather intelligence from those on watch duty. This visit was also omitted from their later narrative of events. The artist who had been invited by the Downtown Partnership to decorate the storefront showed up shortly thereafter; a friend of participants in Occupy Chapel Hill, she expressed support for the occupiers. This didn’t prevent enemies of the occupation from later using her as an excuse to justify the raid.

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An assembly discussing anarchist strategies against the prison-industrial complex had been planned for the book fair venue at noon. It was moved to the front room of the occupation; dozens of people participated, sticking around afterwards for lunch catered by a supportive local restaurant. Others, several of whom were carpenters or construction workers by trade, were busy fixing up the building: sweeping the floors, unboarding the windows, and building structures to supplement the furniture dropped off by enthusiastic locals.

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After lunch, a rumor circulated that the police were preparing to raid the space. A few dozen of us gathered for an impromptu meeting. It struck me how different this was from the general assemblies of Occupy Chapel Hill. Those were often bureaucratic nightmares, breeding boredom and aggravation as people deadlocked over minutia and droned on just to hear themselves speak.

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Here, there was nothing abstract about the issues at hand, nothing that promoted pointless arguing or ego trips. We were putting our bodies on the line just by being present; these were real choices that would have immediate consequences for all of us. For once, we didn’t need a facilitator to listen to each other or stay on topic. With our freedom at stake, we had every reason to work well together. Maybe the problem at the plaza had been that we weren’t risking enough.

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We decided that if the police came and it was clear we couldn’t keep the building, we would all leave in a group, taking our belongings with us and being sure not to leave anyone in their hands. They must have had that meeting infiltrated or else they wouldn’t have known to swoop in right after it; later, they claimed they were afraid we were dangerous, but their real fear must have been that we would bring the occupation to a close on our own terms, without any losses.

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Many people hurried home from this meeting to get more supplies and return to the building prepared to hold it for the long haul. The police took this opportunity to carry out a fully militarized raid.

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I was sitting on the brick edge of the flowerbed, drinking coffee and sharing a chocolate bar with friends, alternately watching Franklin Street’s pedestrians and glancing at the yoga class beginning inside our building. The conversation was lighthearted; we were all dizzy with the excitement of taking a stand against the wastefulness of the property owner. We feared our joy might be short-lived—we anticipated being quickly evicted, and had committed to a plan to leave peacefully when the police arrived—but nevertheless, we were reveling in our future plans for the community center we hoped to establish.

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I was suddenly distracted by the headlights of a white SUV, growing larger and larger in the back door of the building. I heard someone inside yell “POLICE!” I pictured a few officers arriving to tell those inside the building that it was private property, that they had to vacate or be arrested. I sighed and began to collect my belongings.

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But as I rounded the corner of the building, I was met by a group of police officers and Special Emergency Response Team members—my brain automatically labeled them “soldiers.” Some were wearing familiar black Chapel Hill Police Department uniforms; others green fatigues and tactical vests. All were carrying loaded weapons—automatic rifles and handguns. Many had belts loaded with extra cartridges, ammunition, and plastic zip-tie handcuffs. They were running towards me, pointing their guns and screaming “ON THE GROUND! EVERYBODY ON THE GROUND! FACES ON THE PAVEMENT!”

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I paused. Surely they don’t mean me, I thought. Surely they aren’t carrying those guns because they’re scared of me. Knowing that I was outside, and that my bag only contained notebooks, pamphlets, and a coffee thermos, it seemed impossible that these police officers were really running towards, really screaming at, really aiming their weapons at me. I took a moment to set my half-empty cup of coffee on the edge of the flowerbed. But as the barrels of their rifles drew closer, I realized yes, they are running at me. I threw myself to the concrete, face down.

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I listened to my own ragged, heavy breathing and the sounds of boots. I was torn between the visceral need to see the friends I had been sitting with and a fear that made me squeeze my eyes tightly shut. I focused on my breathing—in, out, in, out. What would have happened if I’d hesitated any longer before falling to the pavement? Would they have fired? If I’d reached into my pocket to protect my phone, would they have killed me?

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I heard a man’s gruff voice above me: “Please place your hands at the small of your back.” A second passed before I realized he was addressing me. I took my hands from beneath my face and placed them behind me. I felt him take my hands and pull one through each loop of the plastic handcuffs. I heard the tk-tk-tk-tk ratcheting of the cuffs being tightened. I remained face down on the sidewalk. I counted seventy-two of my own deep breaths.

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An operation coordinated between multiple police departments shut down several blocks of Franklin Street, Chapel Hill’s primary artery, for over an hour while officers waving assault rifles stormed the building. They arrested eight people and detained many more, including journalists and legal observers. Ironically, the city bus requisitioned by police to hold arrestees bore an advertisement for Wells Fargo on the side. A large crowd immediately gathered across the street chanting “Shame!” and “Police, Police, the Army of the Rich!” and explaining the circumstances of the raid to curious passersby.

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That evening, less than six hours later, a spirited solidarity march of nearly a hundred people took the streets of downtown Chapel Hill, marching around the main thoroughfares chanting “Occupy Everything” and “We’ll Be Back.” Some carried black flags; others bore banners reading “Under Capitalism We’re All Under Gunpoint” and “Fight Back.” The majority of the participants marched as a black bloc, sending a clear message that they were not intimidated; many supporters and curious passers-by followed behind.

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I’m not the kind of person who gets up in front of people to tell them what I think—I’m usually too nervous to address even a small crowd. But that night I felt like my voice was the voice of all the women in the march; my voice was as strong as one hundred people’s voices, screaming, “Cops, Pigs, Murderers!” at the top of my lungs. Afterwards, I told my friend that I felt like I needed to yell for all the ladies, because I wanted to be sure everyone would hear us, too. I yelled as loudly as I could. It was hard to imagine a reason to be anywhere but there, surrounded by the most awesome human beings I know, in that beautiful moment.

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The march was followed by a benefit show packed with well over a hundred people. Locals and visitors from around the state expressed solidarity with the arrestees, the building occupation, and the anticapitalist movement. The owners of the venue had openly approved of the black bloc assembling there and returning after the march; this marked a watershed gain in public support for anarchists in Chapel Hill.

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Everyone was there, even the Women’s Studies professor I’d dated—my housemate loaned her his scarf for the black bloc. Our band somehow ended up playing, too, even though we weren’t on the bill and hadn’t practiced in half a year; people were waving black flags in the air as they danced. The whole weekend was like an anarchist cartoon, with all the clichés crowded in back to back: the book fair, the workshop, the squat, the assembly, the raid, the march, the show. I hadn’t slept in something like 72 hours; things were starting to feel surreal. Had those blonde students with black sweatshirts over their UNC gear been real? Were they really shouting “Fuck the Police!” with us?

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Monday afternoon, dozens of protesters disrupted the press conference at which the mayor and police chief attempted justify the raid. This swift response prevented the authorities from spinning a narrative of public support and likely contributed to later public willingness to express disapproval. Media attention continued to focus on outrage against the police rather than the violation of property rights.

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That evening, Occupy Chapel Hill gathered for a contentious general assembly at the original encampment. There were more people in attendance, and more energy, than there had been at any general assembly since its inception; whether or not one approved of the building occupation, it had undeniably breathed life into the local movement as well as garnering it national attention. The discussion revealed that the differences within Occupy Chapel Hill were hardly fatal. In subsequent general assemblies it became clear that the building occupation had radicalized many if not most participants, further expanding their notion of the possible.

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Over the following week, people inspired by the efforts in Oakland and Chapel Hill occupied buildings in Saint Louis, Washington, DC, and Seattle. This new wave of actions pushed the Occupy movement from symbolic protests towards directly challenging the sanctity of property.

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photo by Nancy Munoz

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On Thursday, over one hundred people marched up Franklin Street expressing solidarity with occupiers worldwide and reaffirming their opposition to the raid; many of them were taking the street for the first time. The following Monday, two hundred people from a wide range of demographics assembled at the police station, marched without a permit down a major boulevard to the town hall, and continued to block traffic and raise a ruckus for hours while some of them entered the city council meeting to speak out or disrupt it. Local government was in disarray, the police were powerless to do anything with public disapproval at an all-time high, and a diverse social movement was coming together around anarchist-initiated efforts. A solidarity march the same night in Atlanta underscored how widely the ripples from the building occupation had spread.

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This story demonstrates how swiftly a social movement can take off when a few individuals seize the right opportunity to push the envelope. By creating an open, irresistible space that transformed all who passed through it, the occupiers shifted the political landscape in a single night. The authorities were confronted with a no-win situation: they had to choose between ceding territory and discrediting themselves in the public eye. Swift follow-up enabled anarchists to turn subsequent attempts at repression into additional opportunities to forge connections and spread the virus of resistance.

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As the economy worsens and social conflict intensifies, the conditions will be increasingly ripe for contesting the physical territory of capitalism. But this can only succeed and spread when it is viewed above all as a way to fight for social territory. The relationships we build in the process of fighting are the territory we win, even more than the plazas and buildings we seize.

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I do not feel that we lost, even when I walk down Franklin Street and read the “condemned” sign now posted out front. The sense of possibility remains; there is a new intensity when we mask up for a black bloc downtown, an aliveness that pulls on those around us. My only regret is that we never got to name our space. Its memory persists, but incommunicable, faceless. If I fight now, it is not only to honor that memory, but also to give it form for all those who can only imagine it in the abstract. We will be back. Next time we’ll be ready.

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Appendix

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For full-color poster version, click here. For practical tips on protecting your community from the police, click here.

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Seven Myths about the Police

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The police exercise legitimate authority. In fact, the average police officer is not a legal expert; he probably knows his department protocol, but very little about the actual laws. This means his enforcement involves a great deal of bluffing, improvisation, and dishonesty. Police lie on a regular basis: “I just got a report of someone of your description committing a crime around here. Want to show me some ID?”

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This is not to say we should unthinkingly accept laws as legitimate, either. The entire judicial system protects the privileges of the wealthy and powerful. Obeying laws is not necessarily morally right—it may even be immoral. Slavery was legal, aiding escaped slaves illegal. The Nazis came to power in Germany via democratic elections and passed laws through the prescribed channels. We should aspire to the strength of conscience to do what we know is best, regardless of laws and police intimidation.

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The police are ordinary workers just like us; they should be our allies. Unfortunately, there’s a big gap between “should be” and “are.” The role of the police is to serve the interests of the ruling class; anyone who has not had a bad experience with them is likely privileged, submissive, or both. Today’s police officers know exactly what they’re getting into when they join the force—people in uniform don’t just get cats out of trees. Yes, most take the job because of economic pressure, but needing a paycheck is no excuse for evicting families, harassing young people of color, or pepper-spraying demonstrators. Those whose consciences can be bought are everyone’s potential enemies, not allies.

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This fairy tale is more persuasive when it is couched in strategic terms: for example, “Every revolution succeeds at the moment the armed forces refuse to make war on their fellows; therefore we should focus on seducing the police to our side.” But the police are not just any workers; they’re the ones who chose to base their livelihoods upon defending the prevailing order, thus the least likely to be sympathetic to those who wish to change it. In this context, it makes more sense to oppose the police as such than to seek solidarity with them. As long as they serve their masters, they cannot be our allies; by denouncing the institution of police and demoralizing individual officers, we encourage them to seek other livelihoods so we can one day find common cause with them.

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Maybe there are some bad apples, but some police officers are good people. Perhaps some police officers have good intentions, but once again, insofar as they obey orders rather than their consciences, they cannot be trusted.

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There’s something to be said for understanding the systematic nature of institutions, rather than attributing every injustice to the shortcomings of individuals. Remember the story of the man who, tormented by fleas, managed to catch one between his fingers? He scrutinized it for a long time before placing it back at the spot on his neck where had he caught it. His friends, confounded, inquired why on earth he would do such a thing. “That wasn’t the one that was biting me,” he explained.

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Police can win any confrontation, so we shouldn’t antagonize them. With all their weapons, equipment, and surveillance, the police can seem invincible, but this is an illusion. They are limited by all sorts of invisible constraints—bureaucracy, public opinion, communication breakdowns, an overloaded judicial system. If they don’t have vehicles or facilities available to transport and process a great number of arrestees, for example, they can’t make mass arrests.

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This is why a motley crowd armed only with the tear gas canisters shot at them can hold off a larger, more organized, better-equipped police force; contests between social unrest and military might don’t play out according to the rules of military engagement. Those who have studied police, who can predict what they are prepared for and what they can and cannot do, can often outsmart and outmaneuver them.

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Such small victories are especially inspiring for those who chafe under the heel of police violence on a daily basis. In the collective unconscious of our society, the police are the ultimate bastion of reality, the force that ensures that things stay the way they are; taking them on and winning, however temporarily, shows that reality is negotiable.

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Police are a mere distraction from the real enemy, not worth our wrath or attention. Alas, tyranny is not just a matter of politicians or executives; they would be powerless without those who do their bidding. When we contest their rule, we’re also contesting the submission that keeps them in power, and sooner or later we’re sure to come up against some of those who submit. That being said, it’s true that the police are no more integral to hierarchy than the oppressive dynamics in our own communities; they are simply the external manifestation, on a larger scale, of the same phenomena. If we are to contest domination everywhere, rather than specializing in combating certain forms of it while leaving others unchallenged, we have to be prepared to confront it both in the streets and in our own bedrooms; we can’t expect to win on one front without fighting on the other. We shouldn’t fetishize confrontations with uniformed foes, we shouldn’t forget the power imbalances in our own ranks—but neither should we be content merely to manage the details of our own oppression in a non-hierarchical manner.

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We need police to protect us. According to this line of thinking, even if we might aspire to live in a society without police in the distant future, we need them today, for people are not ready to live together peacefully without armed enforcers. As if the social imbalances and fear maintained by police violence are peace! Those who argue that the police sometimes do good things bear the burden of proving that those same good things could not be accomplished at least as well by other means.

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In any case, it’s not as if a police-free society is suddenly going to appear overnight just because someone spray-paints “Fuck the Police” on a wall. The protracted struggle it will take to free our communities from police repression will probably go on as long as it takes us to learn to coexist peacefully; a community that can’t sort out its own conflicts can’t expect to triumph against a more powerful occupying force. In the meantime, opposition to police should be seen as a rejection of one of the most egregious sources of oppressive violence, not an assertion that without police there would be none. But if we can ever defeat and disband the police, we will surely be able to defend ourselves against less organized threats.

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Resisting the police is violent—it makes you no better than them. According to this line of thinking, violence is inherently a form of domination, and thus inconsistent with opposing domination. Those who engage in violence play the same game as their oppressors, thereby losing from the outset.

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This is dangerously simplistic. Is a woman who defends herself against a rapist no better than a rapist? Were slaves who revolted no better than slave-holders? There is such a thing as self-defense. In some cases, violence enforces power imbalances; in other cases, it challenges them. For people who still have faith in an authoritarian system or God, following the rules—whether legal or moral—is the top priority, at whatever cost: they believe they will be rewarded for doing so, regardless of what happens to others as a result. Whether such people call themselves conservatives or pacifists makes little difference in the end. On the other hand, for those of us who take responsibility for ourselves, the most important question is what will serve to make the world a better place. Sometimes this may include violence.

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Police are people too, and deserve the same respect due all living things. The point is not that they deserve to suffer or that we should bring them to justice. The point is that, in purely pragmatic terms, they must not be allowed to brutalize people or impose an unjust social order. Though it can be empowering for those who have spent their lives under the heel of oppression to contemplate finally settling the score with their oppressors, liberation is not a matter of exacting revenge but of rendering it unnecessary. Therefore, while it may sometimes even be necessary to set police on fire, this should not be done out of a spirit of vengeful self-righteousness, but from a place of care and compassion—if not for the police themselves, at least for all who would otherwise suffer at their hands.

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Delegitimizing the police is not only beneficial for those they target, but also for police officers’ families and police officers themselves. Not only do police officers have disproportionately high rates of domestic violence and child abuse, they’re also more likely to get killed, commit suicide, and struggle with addiction than most sectors of society. Anything that encourages police officers to quit their jobs is in their best interest, as well as the interest of their loved ones and society at large. Let’s create a world in which no one oppresses or is oppressed, in which no one has to live in fear.

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“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both.”

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— Frederick Douglass

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How to Fuck the Police

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On the Streets:

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Organizing a Copwatch Program

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Copwatch groups seek to contest or at least limit police repression by directly monitoring police officers. Copwatch volunteers patrol the streets, observing police and recording their interactions with civilians. They often concentrate on areas of high police activity or to which known trouble-making cops are assigned. Copwatch groups also advise people of their rights and listen to their stories, and otherwise endeavor to undermine and thwart the police state.

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Most radicals, not to mention many others, realize that the idea of policing itself needs to be completely rethought. In the meantime, people have to be protected from the brutality they face daily at the hands of the police.

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Get a Group Together

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Form a group. Put out calls for one everywhere, even on the bulletin boards of church groups and local grocers, not just in the activist community. Approach your neighbors—the best neighborhood watch includes a copwatch.

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Educate people in your community and other communities, especially targeted ones, about their legal rights, and about how to carry out a copwatch. Hold classes everywhere in your city, at accessible places and times. These can be formal events, or informal teach-ins outside a movie theater or between performers at a show.

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Hold regular, accessible, well-advertised meetings—don’t depend on the internet for all or even most of your communications. Many of those who need copwatch most are unlikely to have easy or regular computer access. Decide as a group what your goals are and how you will go about achieving them.

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Find hotspots where police repression frequently takes place. Look for them in the police blotter in your local paper, or ask around in neighborhoods, or approach lawyers who do a lot of street work and request advice.

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Establish patrols, and have them report on their observations on a regular basis. Your group will be more effective if it is well organized.

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For a variety of reasons, it makes the most sense for people to do copwatch patrols in their own neighborhoods. If it is important that you patrol another neighborhood, make an effort to become familiar with it: get to know locals, and make sure you understand local issues and context. Canvas from door to door if necessary, introducing yourself and your group and announcing your intentions and motivations. Be open to input from locals; they are the ones who will experience the bulk of the repercussions from everything that happens in their neighborhood. Come through on your commitments: don’t just show up out of nowhere doing a copwatch program for a little while and then disappear, stick around until locals know who you are and that they can count on you.

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When the cops are particularly brutal or kill someone, raise a ruckus about it. Put pressure on them and keep it on. Approach the survivors and follow their lead as to how to handle things. Offer to organize protests or benefit events, screenprint shirts, or play media liaison for them. If they’re into it, hold demonstrations, spray paint the names of the victims and murderers everywhere, smash out the windows of the offending police station.

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Agitate for laws and regulations that enforce stricter controls on police. Try to get the worst police officers fired. If your community has a Citizen Review Board, make an effort to give it teeth. Police review boards should be elected by district, not appointed. They must be empowered to impose punishments and fire officers.

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People from communities that are terrorized will often be understandably afraid to stand up for themselves. A copwatch program can be the first step towards solidarity with each other.

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How to Copwatch

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To copwatch effectively, all you need is your eyes and ears, and some means of recording incidents. A small notebook and pen or pencil are the most useful and least conspicuous. A camera or video camera can also be useful, as can a cell phone or an audio recording device.

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Copwatching is generally safest and easiest if you make sure to follow the letter of the law. There should be no drugs, alcohol, or illegal weapons on your person or in your system. Be careful not to jaywalk. This author has friends who have done a perfect copwatch, then jaywalked almost immediately after leaving the scene, receiving a $50 ticket for their efforts. If you are driving, make sure that you and all of your passengers have on seat belts. Resist unnecessary horn honking or loud music as you drive away—violations of noise pollution laws and ordinances can be used as excuses to detain and arrest you. If you are not following the very letter of the law, you may end up doing more harm than good and could get yourself arrested. Don’t give them any excuse to bust you.

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Copwatching is best done with two or three others—you are less likely to be arrested in a group. One cool-headed person can take the role of speaking to officers, getting their names, ranks, badge numbers, district designations, squad car numbers, license numbers, and general descriptions, thus making them aware of your being there as observers. The others should hang back, recording every detail of the encounter, being careful not to interfere, provoke, or draw attention. If you have the numbers, one person can pose as an individual onlooker with no connection to the rest of the group. Decide on your roles before the encounter, if possible.

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Presumably, you are there to defuse the situation, not escalate it. Don’t goad the police into arresting people as a way of getting back at you because of your attitude. Reign in the hostility you feel towards them—be polite but firm. Remember, police are dangerous. Walk, don’t run, and avoid quick or sudden movements around them.

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At the same time, don’t be so easily intimidated that you cannot accomplish your task. Police officers who feel threatened by your concern about the victims of their repression may well threaten you, shouting “Move on!” and puffing themselves up like territorial frogs. In the course of your interactions with them, you’ll develop a sense of what to expect from them and an instinct for exactly how seriously to take their threats.

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Carry cards detailing legal rights, flyers with information about local copwatch programs, and other information with you to give to people subject to arrest or harassment. Inform people about their rights, and of any numbers, local services, or internet sites by means of which they can contact a lawyer or learn how and where to file a complaint. Citizen complaint review boards are often virtually useless as a way of dealing with police brutality, but they can be useful for documenting incidents. Be aware of local laws and limitations—for example, in some cities, in order to be able to file a lawsuit against the city, you must send a letter to the mayor announcing your intention to sue the district within six months of the incident in question. In such a case, you should emphasize to people who have suffered police brutality that they should keep their options open: “You don’t have to follow through with it, but you should secure your right to sue if the incident was severe enough for you even to think about doing so.”

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When observing police officers’ interactions with civilians, try to get as much information as you can. Make note of the day, time, and exact location of the incident; the officer’s name, badge number, district, and physical description; where arrestees are being taken; the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of any witnesses; and vehicle or license numbers for any police vehicles involved in the incident. Use cameras or other recording devices to document the event from beginning to end. Take down complete descriptions of police actions and any resulting injuries. If there are injuries of any sort, even preexisting ones, be sure to detail what medical attention was or was not offered by the police—people have been let go by officers after copwatch members observed them being denied medical attention, even though the injuries had been not caused by the police.

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If you feel it is warranted, you can call 911 and report that someone is being injured. Wait until the end of your statement to note that it is the police doing so, but don’t leave that out, and stick to the facts. As all 911 calls are recorded and are relatively hard for the justice system to “lose,” they can provide useful documentation for legal proceedings. You can also call a friend’s or your own answering machine and record what is happening as it happens, assuming the tape is long enough. The sound quality may not be as good as an on-site recording device would provide, but the police cannot confiscate the tape; this method can be particularly useful if everyone present is getting arrested. If you get arrested and the police don’t take your cell phone immediately, call a talk show or progressive radio station from the back of the police vehicle.

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If you witness someone else being arrested, try to give the arrestee a way to contact you, and vice versa. This is not to say you should give your name or get their name in front of police. Give your name and contact information only if you are comfortable with the police getting it, unless there is another way.

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If you are comfortable doing an assertive copwatch, introduce yourself when you approach the scene and explain that you are there doing a copwatch. Ask police why they are detaining or arresting people, but don’t ask arrestees for their names directly, as they might not wish the police to have it. If arrestees say their names and addresses to the police loud enough for you to hear, write them down. If the justification for the stop seems to be vague, ask officers to name the section of the law they are enforcing. Officers will lie and make mistakes—if you know the code do better or have a copy of it with you, speak up. Don’t approach or speak to the arrestee directly while he or she is being detained; if you do, you risk being arrested. Sometimes you’ll have to do just that, but know what you’re getting into.

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If a detainee is let go or ticketed, make use of the opportunity to give your flyers and rights cards to them. If a detainee is arrested, you can fold a card in half and ask the officer to give it to him or her—fat chance, but miracles happen. You can’t speak to an arrestee directly without risking trouble, but you can loudly talk about what rights people have with the police or a bystander or your compatriot. These include the right to remain silent, the right to speak to an attorney, the right to refuse a search of your person, personal items, or car.

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Stick around until the police have moved on. The Rodney King beating began with what seemed to be a routine traffic stop.

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Make use of every opportunity to have educational conversations. Speak to onlookers about their rights, about what citizens can do about police brutality, about community alternatives to policing. When answering questions about legal matters, don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” This is always better then giving out wrong information.

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Collect statements from other witnesses if you can. Many will not want to get involved. Try to persuade and educate them otherwise, and get statements from them even when you can’t get their names.

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Keep the information you have gathered from your copwatching. If your copwatch group does not keep records, keep track of it yourself. It can be useful to submit copies of your records to government agencies, so they will have them documented and on file. Do not edit any videotapes you shoot, as this can render them useless as evidence in court.

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If possible, carry with you the text of the laws most commonly used to justify harassment. In addition to being familiar with and ready to cite local laws, it can help to learn local police regulations, though it is often difficult to obtain copies of these. During your encounters with police, be forceful rather than tentative, but remain polite.

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In extreme cases, police will smash or confiscate and “lose” your equipment to keep you from having evidence against them. If it seems like this might happen, a member of your group should swiftly leave the area with the evidence that has been gathered so far.

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Be prepared to be arrested. Though copwatch is not illegal, police will trump up charges. Carry ID and at least $50 if you want to be able to get out of jail swiftly and easily.

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Know what you will and will not do in extreme situations. Consider in advance what risks you are willing to take and what charges you are prepared to receive in order to intervene if someone is being beaten, injured, or killed by the police. Decide this ahead of time and talk about it within your group, so all of you know what to expect from one another. If you copwatch in some areas, you will eventually find yourself in this situation.

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Be prepared to follow through on your work. If you couldn’t get an arrestee’s name and you feel that the situation was bad enough to warrant further investigation or that the abuse will continue after the arrest, go to the station to which he or she has been taken. Loudly and firmly ask what condition the arrestee is in and demand to know the charges he or she has received; explain what you saw during the arrest, and ask to make a complaint against the officers. This makes the police aware that people are concerned and will follow through; it may stop a back room beating.

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Be careful leaving the area after a copwatch. Police have been known to follow, ticket, target, or beat copwatchers a few blocks from the site at which they were observed. Don’t let down your guard.

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Report on what you have seen to your group, to whatever citizen review boards your area has, however ineffective, and to your community at large. Talk to city council members about police conduct, and show them your evidence. Tell them you want hearings and policy changes. Get your information to the National Lawyers Guild and or the ACLU. Tell community and church groups. Write up reports and spread them through local independent media outlets, both websites and papers.

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If your copwatch group is ready, you could establish a copwatch hotline, a phone number people can call to report the activities of police officers; you could even have a response team ready to follow up calls. You could also start your own local copwatch paper or website, reporting on your observations, the conduct of local police, and the struggle in your community to survive and thwart police repression.

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Copwatching Alone

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Don’t copwatch alone if there are other options. You should not ignore those in exceptional danger just because you are alone, but be aware that lone copwatching entails taking extra risk. If you have been convicted of felonies, have a lengthy arrest record, or are not a citizen, you should probably not copwatch alone unless the circumstances are really exceptional. Be less assertive in engaging the police or the individual being detained or arrested than you would be if you were in a group. Police officers are much more likely to arrest or assault you if there are no other witnesses present.

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Be especially careful to obey the letter of the law. If possible, remain at least twenty feet from the incident that you are watching; try to phone someone and let him or her know what’s happening. As always, take complete notes and, if possible, photos, audio, or videotape of the incident. If you take photos, make sure that they are taken at the last possible moment, to ensure the safety of you and your camera. Be especially careful leaving the area.

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In Private and Community Spaces:

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Handling a Police Raid

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If police knock on your door, do not invite them inside; step outside and close the door before speaking to them, locking it behind you if need be. If there are other people in the house, make them aware that the police are present. Don’t address other people in the house by name; let them decide how they want to identify themselves. After saying clearly “I do not consent to this search,” stand aside and maintain silence. Do not answer any questions.

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If you are arrested or detained in the course of a raid, do not resist unless it is absolutely imperative that you escape and there is a high likelihood that you will be able to do so; instead, calmly ask on what basis you are being held. Don’t volunteer any information or answer any questions except when you are asked to identify yourself. No matter what they tell you, speaking to the police can never accomplish anything except making things worse for you and those you care about. If you have a lawyer, upon interrogation—whether formal or informal, whether by federal agents or local officers—simply present your lawyer’s card and state, “You can speak with my lawyer.” If you don’t have a lawyer, assert and maintain that you will seek legal counsel before answering questions.

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If the police say they have a warrant, ask to see it but do not at that point resist the search. A warrant is simply a piece of paper signed by a judge; it should have an address and some terms of the search. It is not valid without a judge’s signature. In most cases, the police cannot enter your residence legally without a warrant. To get a warrant, they must have probable cause and a judge must sign his or her name validating this; judges can be sneaky, but they also don’t want any heat to come back on them. This is why we often don’t see warrants used in activist raids: there simply isn’t the probable cause. If they can’t get a warrant, the police may try to use other pretexts to get in: fire code violations, health violations, looking for people who have warrants out for their arrest. Educate yourself on local laws and municipal code. If the police come by when there is someone inside who has a warrant, it may be best for that person to go outside so the police cannot use this as a justification for entering the building.

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If your space may be raided, decide in advance how you will handle this. Except in a few specific cases—for example, if you are engaged in a political squatting action with widespread community support, and you intend to resist eviction by militant means—it will make the most sense to cooperate carefully with the police, and then take revenge later by legal or extra-legal means. Determine with everyone involved what image you will try to project—“nonviolent peace activists suffering unjust police harassment,” for example—and maintain it from the beginning of the process through the follow-up media and court campaigns. Hold discussions in advance, so everyone who may be affected by a police raid knows what to expect, how to conduct themselves, and what their role will be in your response. Make sure everyone is comfortable with the decisions made and understands each other’s needs.

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Sometimes a police raid will come as a surprise. Other times, especially if they are planning a raid on a larger scale, such as at an infoshop, activist house, or convergence space during a mass mobilization, you may be able to see it coming. Stay aware: if they are escalating their surveillance of your building or your activities, this may culminate in a raid. This surveillance may take the form of infiltration by undercover agents, who may be easy to recognize as such—on account of poor acting, suspicious questions, or suddenly getting involved right before an action—or very difficult to detect.

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If you are involved in any kind of activity that demands security, your collective should decide ahead of time how careful to be in working with others who desire to get involved in your group and in actions you plan. Do you need to have a vouching system to protect against loose-lipped liberals and undercover cops? Or do you want to work with large numbers of people to such an extent that it makes more sense to leave things wide open? Some collectives decide not to take on last-minute stragglers right before an action: police infiltrators usually show up late, because there isn’t enough funding to put them in earlier.

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If you are on good terms with groups that are in dialogue with the authorities, they may be able to tip you off when a raid is nigh; likewise, locals familiar with the workings of the local police force might be able to provide useful insights. For a serious raid, the police will establish a staging area a couple blocks from the location, which may give away their plans at the last minute if nothing else has.

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In preparing for a potential raid, be conscious of what you have on the premises and what can be found nearby in dumpsters and adjacent lots. Make sure nobody has any illegal drugs or paraphernalia, recognizably stolen items, or other material which authorities could use against you. Police officers will routinely confiscate such standard household items as paint thinner and PVC pipe and claim the possessors were using them to make bombs. Such ludicrous charges will not generally stand up in court, but they can enable the police to denounce your group to the public; they can also paralyze individuals, preventing them from participating in serious actions until their court cases are finished.

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Knives, spray paint, gasoline, anarchist literature, bottles of urine, and other similarly dangerous articles will all be needless liabilities when the police show up, unless you’re actually planning to fight them off with the stuff. Be conscious of what can be seen even when your doors are shut and locked; the police can use items “in plain view” to look further, even without a warrant. In extreme cases, the courts have declared it permissible for the police to enter a home to investigate further after seeing something suspicious through a window. Be careful to follow the very letter of the law: police who can find nothing else to use against you may ticket you for parking more than ten inches from the curb, for example.

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Have a phone tree in place, to be activated in the case of a raid: there should be a couple numbers you can call to reach people who can instantly call others, and so on, until a large number of people have been informed. It is important that there is always at least one person off-site who knows what to do if he or she is the only person not arrested.

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Don’t leave phone lists or similar information accessible to the police; there’s no sense in doing their intelligence work for them. If those informed by the phone tree converge immediately upon the space being raided, this will force the police to restrain themselves, and show them and the community at large that this is an issue many take seriously; in a best case scenario, this can even transform the raid into a positive, community-building event. Have local media ready to come: don’t miss the chance to have the local alternative or pirate radio station report live from your raid, or to get sympathetic coverage in the alternative press. Plan in advance what spin you want to give the story, so the police play into your hands. Compose a press release ahead of time and have it ready to go out.

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If you fear a police raid is possible or imminent, keep a video camera charged and equipped with a blank tape, ready for use in documenting police conduct. You can also hide secret cameras on the premises; these may prove especially important if the police break their own laws in the course of invading your space. Get every single badge number and license plate, and record every movement and action of each individual police officer; in court, it will be very much to your advantage if you can prove that, for example, a police officer who claims he remained outside during the raid was actually upstairs knocking over bookshelves and breaking things. Your camera people should be levelheaded; even if things are heating up, it may be more important in the long run for them to record events as they unfold, calmly and consistently, than to get involved.

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Once you’ve got documentation, keep track of it. Don’t edit or adjust it in any way. Be able to prove that your footage has been in your “line of possession” from the time you recorded it to the time it appears in court; this means you should be able to document everywhere it has been, and show that it has been in the care of good, law-abiding citizens the whole time—and as few of these as possible. To this end, it can be wise to leave your material with someone’s conservative parents or responsible sister-in-law; this can also be a way to make sure it is not seized in a secondary raid. Keep an organized journal, with times and dates and signatures, detailing all your observations from the time you first begin to fear a raid might take place. After one occurs, compile written narratives, with signatures, from all witnesses and participants, while the events are still fresh in everyone’s minds.

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If you’re in the middle of organizing an action or campaign from the space that may be raided, make sure it won’t be crippled by a raid. Keep important materials elsewhere, make sure that all the people in pivotal organizing positions are never in the space all at once, see to it that there are other spaces to which activities can be shifted. Establish a place to get back together after the raid or ways to reestablish contact with one another and make sure that everyone is accounted for.

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When bringing suit against the city over a raid, work out the local chain of command and sue as high in the hierarchy as you can. Those who hold power will attempt to portray any misconduct as the anomalous incompetence of individual underlings; your job is to show that the raid was orchestrated from on high and that the people at the top of the pyramid are to blame, if not the system itself. Get the best lawyer you can—the American Civil Liberties Union is generally a better resource than the National Lawyers’ Guild when it comes to violations of 4th Amendment rights regarding search and seizure and 1st Amendment rights regarding freedom of speech. If you don’t own the space that was raided, make sure you have the cooperation of the landlords: emphasize that they too can get something out of the proceedings. Keep the media informed throughout the affair, and keep the pressure on.

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Account

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As we were organizing a convergence against a particularly ridiculous meeting of politicians, it became evident that our city’s Red Squad had its eyes on us. We continued our work, though we realized that, under the circumstances, we lacked the numbers to go forward with our original plans of turning the city into our playground. We narrowed our focus and message, deciding our best bet would be to embrace the image of pacifist peace activists: this would give us an advantage should the defenders of Power attempt a smear campaign against us. Having established this strategy, we decided that the weekend would go ahead as planned, with a festive street march and demonstrations outside the hotel where the politicians were meeting.

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As the dates for the actions approached, we saw a steady increase in police traffic around our collective space, which was serving as a meeting and organizing point for the demonstrations. On multiple occasions, we experienced the unique pleasure of visits from undercover cops. Keeping tabs on liberal organizers we knew maintained ties with the police, we received additional clues that we were facing impending state repression, which was likely to take the form of a raid on our space.

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We met as a collective and resolved to act preemptively in order to minimize any possible harm we would suffer and, if possible, humiliate and expose the police. We started by compiling a phone tree of our friends and supporters in the community, as well as a list of local media contacts. Drawing on the precedents established by the numerous police invasions of autonomous spaces that summer, we took a number of precautions, such as removing items that had justified earlier absurd charges against revolutionaries: for example, we removed all kitchen knives and Vitamin C pills, since cooking utensils and supplements had been considered weapons and drugs in other raids. We also cleaned the space and planted new flowers around the house, hoping this would make the police look even more ridiculous should they choose intrude on our space. We stockpiled photo and video cameras, tape recorders, note pads, and other recording devices, and spread them throughout the house, both openly and covertly. We made sure that at least one of the collective members was downstairs at all times, and that our door was always locked—though this was particularly difficult, with so many people coming in and out. People who could not risk arrest stayed at other locations.

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Everyone who spent time in the space was briefed on the situation and developed an understanding of the collective’s rights. In a move that later proved to be of some importance, we painted the door with some “house rules,” including bans on weapons, animal products, and substances. This has since been used in both the media and in legal decisions as a further embarrassment to the police. We also prepared a press release, leaving only a few blank spaces for the details of the expected raid, and left it with an uninvolved family member in case the raid was accompanied by numerous arrests.

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Busy as we were with organizing against the meetings, we were still able to keep our space open for concerts and other events. Two nights before the planned protests began, the police arrived during one of these shows, an apolitical folk performance. The raid caused quite a bit of alarm for the artists and visitors! At that time, some of us were leaving to work on the pirate ship puppets—described as “anarchist body armor” in police reports to the media—that we were planning to use for street theater. As we were loading the ships into a pickup truck, we noticed that police vehicles were assembling at every nearby intersection and decided to attempt to leave. As soon as we began driving, we were pulled over for the most minute of traffic violations. We called back to the space, where police were already knocking on the door. We set in motion our well-planned phone tree, calling our lawyers, leaving reports on answering machines, and informing scores of friends that we were in trouble. It turned out that the police had used supposed fire code violations to get into the house, because it is standard practice in our city for housing inspectors to be “protected” by police. Each cop and each inspector were followed everywhere by comrades from our ranks who documented everything. The police went through our book selection, our kitchen, our desks, our basement, our storage areas, even our bathroom, not to mention the personal belongings of those living upstairs. They searched our whole house and the squatted house next door. They towed our cars, on the ridiculous pretension that they were parked three inches too far from the curb! In the end, they didn’t use violence or arrests; they just hoped to scare us and reveal our supposedly violent machinations to the public.

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The phone tree, however, paid off. The local media as well as a slam poetry group showed up immediately, along with about fifty of our friends. In conjunction with the drumming and the constant flash of still cameras, the slam poets created an atmosphere of festive defiance and creatively informed the media and curious passers-by about just how fucked up this situation was. While normally hostile to radicals, the local corporate media could not resist covering the obvious foolishness of the police, who wandered about the property en masse with bomb-sniffing dogs while obviously earnest and non-violent activists explained how the events of the evening were—can you believe it?—causing them to “lose faith in this society.”

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Thanks to the thoroughness of our preparations, we were able to upstage law enforcement prior to the main event of the protests themselves; this coup gave us much-needed attention and credibility. Additionally, afterwards we were able to succeed in suing the city for tens of thousands of dollars. This enabled us to fund many new subversive projects, which the forces of order are even less equipped to deal with in the aftermath of their ill-thought-out raid.

\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/06/08/fire-extinguishers-and-fire-starters-anarchist-interventions-in-the-spanish-revolution-an-account-from-barcelona", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/06/08/fire-extinguishers-and-fire-starters-anarchist-interventions-in-the-spanish-revolution-an-account-from-barcelona", "title": "Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters : Anarchist Interventions in the #Spanish Revolution, an account from Barcelona", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/barc/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/barc/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2011-06-08T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "

In May, a new movement spread across Spain and elsewhere around the world, with crowds occupying public spaces in an attempt to formulate a new resistance to the effects of capitalist crisis and austerity measures. We are excited to present Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the #Spanish Revolution, a full report from a comrade on the ground in Barcelona. This report chronicles the trajectory of the movement and offers a critical analysis of the potential and limitations of the forms it assumed.

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Barcelona, Spring 2011

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Chronology of An Unexpected Event

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Buildup:

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September 29, 2010: The major labor unions, CCOO and UGT, along with the anticapitalist CGT, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (which has multiple splits), and other small unions, hold a general strike to protest the bank bailouts and proposed austerity measures included in the Labor Reform. In many city centers and industrial zones, participation in the strike is massive. In Barcelona, the streets erupt in heavy, day-long rioting. CCOO and UGT pickets, on the contrary, tend to be symbolic and spectacular. Both organizations subsequently sign on to the Labor Reform. Before or shortly after the strike, half a dozen neighborhoods in Barcelona form neighborhood “social assemblies.”

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November 28, 2010: Elections in Catalunya replace the governing Socialist Party with the rightwing Convergencia i Unió, which adopts a hardline, pro-police rhetoric.

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January 27, 2011: Acting apart from the major unions, the CGT, CNTs, and COS (a left Catalan coordination of syndicates) hold a general strike in Catalunya, which is also called for in Euskadi and other parts of the Spanish state. The strike coincides with the approval of the Labor Reform, supported by the major unions and the Socialist Party (which has led the government in Madrid since 2004). In certain cities, the strike receives substantial support in the transport and manufacturing sectors, but generally achieves little participation. In Barcelona, burning barricades, sabotages, pickets, and contentious protests win a combative visibility for the strike.

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May 1, 2011: In Barcelona, the anticapitalist Mayday protest, supported by the CNTs, CGT, COS, socialist indepes (Catalan independence activists), and informal or “black bloc” anarchists, leads thousands of people into the emblematic rich neighborhood, Sarrià, where protestors burn dumpsters and luxury cars, smash up approximately a hundred banks, fashion stores, and car dealerships, cover the walls in spray-painted slogans, and throw bottles and paint bombs at police before being dispersed in a heavy charge. The mood is exultant. The weeks before and after are marked by especially high quantities of sabotage and attacks.

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#Revolution Breaks Out:

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Sunday, May 15: A recently formed platform centered in Madrid, Democracia Real Ya or “Real Democracy Now” (DRY), holds simultaneous protests in dozens of cities throughout the Spanish state, convened via Facebook, Twitter, Indymedia and various activist listservs. That night, the idea is spread via Twitter to camp out in Puerta del Sol, a central Madrid plaza, modeling on the Tahrir Square occupation in Egypt. In other cities, occupations also begin in central plazas that night or the next night.

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Monday, May 16: In the evening, eighty to a hundred people begin an encampment in Plaça Catalunya, the symbolic center of Barcelona, which in the last decade has become almost exclusively a tourist zone. As in other cities, the occupation organizes itself with a general assembly. A small number of anarchists are participating. In the meeting, they argue down the proposal to sign on to the Real Democracy Now manifesto from Madrid. Many other people also express the need for the Barcelona encampment to develop independently. It is decided the encampment will release no unitary manifestos that attempt to speak for all participants. Notwithstanding, principles of unity already authored by the DRY activists—non-party assembly decision-making, nonviolence, and unity among los indignados, “the indignant”—are successfully imposed.

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Tuesday, May 17: Early in the morning, the police attack the occupation in Madrid, beating and harassing the 250 people camped out there and arresting 19. However, comrades gather outside the jail, and the square is subsequently reoccupied by an even larger and more energetic crowd. The Barcelona encampment grows to over a thousand. As in other cities, the central assembly begins to create commissions to work out various infrastructural and ideological needs; these include “extension,” “communication,” “content,” “assembly preparation,” “financial,” “legal,” and “kitchen.” During the day, DRY activists carry out nonviolent sit-ins in various banks. Hundreds of people are sleeping in the plaza overnight.

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Wednesday, May 18: The encampment makes the front page of Barcelona’s various free newspapers, which are more trend- and controversy-sensitive than the traditional newspapers. Up until now, the latter had been silencing the events, but once the cat is out of the bag they take the lead in sculpting public opinion on the so-called 15 May or 15M movement. At the nightly cassolada (pots and pans noise demo) and assembly, the crowds in Plaça Catalunya reach 5-10,000. Many anarchists who had previously abstained from the pro-democracy protest, either out of disdain or because other protests were happening the same weekend, spontaneously converge in the crowd. Several bring whatever anarchist flyers and pamphlets they had laying around, and these are quickly snatched up by the crowd. Anarchists make plans to hold a debate on democracy the next day, without getting approval from the central assembly.

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Thursday, May 19: Twenty thousand people take part in the cassolada and assembly, and during the day thousands more people pass through, or hang out to make music and art. In the evening, some anarcho-punks have set up a distribution, which serves as a convergence point for various anarchists. The first original anarchist critiques of the situation are printed and distributed (see appendix), while timely texts on democracy and nonviolence that have recently been published in the Catalan anarchist journal, Terra Cremada, are reformatted as flyers and distributed. In the late afternoon, we start the debate with a critique of democracy. Fifty people of all sorts crowd in to participate, with great interest. We use an old megaphone lent by the CNT, but many speakers prefer not to use it; thus a small upward limit is placed on participation on the debate, as no more than the fifty people closest to the center can hear over the background noise of the plaza.

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Night of May 19 in the plaza

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Friday, May 20: Anarchists set up a tent in the morning, with a table for distributing flyers, posters, and other literature. More critiques written by participants in the occupation are printed. A self-appointed representative of one of the commissions attempts to kick out the anarchist tent and another tent set up by members of a performance-oriented squatted social center, on the justification that space in the plaza is reserved for the commissions. The evening meeting is largely dominated by Trotskyists and small-scale, left-wing Catalan independence politicians. The crowds have swelled beyond the limits of the plaza, and can no longer be counted. Even though a high quality sound system has been set up, the half of the multitude that rings the margins of the plaza cannot hear the assembly. The number of commissions has reached, by some counts, 17, along with multiple sub-commissions. Meaningful participation in the official structure becomes increasingly impossible.

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Food distribution

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Consensus in the plaza?

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Saturday, May 21: The “Day of Reflection,” a constitutionally mandated holiday before Election Sunday. Protests of any kind are firmly prohibited this day. If the occupation previously constituted an illegal gathering, as of Saturday it is a flagrant violation of the Spanish Constitution. In general, people are defiant and contemptuous of the law. There had been much talk of police evictions, but with the massive crowds, President Zapatero and the Supreme Court have decided to be tolerant. Notwithstanding, DRY activists in many cities use the threat of police eviction as an excuse to remove anti-election banners. In Barcelona they are unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of people pass through Plaça Catalunya to witness the “revolution.” Everyone in the city is talking about it. Out of the Content Commission, which had previously been trying to impose a reformist statement of minimum demands, a “Self-Organization and Direct Democracy” sub-commission is formed, with heavy anarchist participation.

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Sunday, May 22: Countrywide elections take place for city governments and deputies. The Socialist Party loses its majority; by next year they will have to be replaced in Madrid by the conservative Popular Party. However, both of these two major parties lose a huge portion of their traditional votes. Extreme right and fascist parties pick up a large number of votes, although they remain relatively small. In Catalunya, left-wing independence parties and other fringe left parties greatly increase their proportion of the votes and enter into power in some cities. In Euskadi, the recently legalized Basque independence party Bildu wins major victories and becomes the second largest party in the region. The greatest winner is abstention, which is the preferred option for one-third to one-half of the electorate, depending on the region. Additionally, blank or null votes double or even triple, to reach around 5%. Messi, Shakira, and “mi puta madre” gain record numbers of votes. In Plaça Catalunya, the crowds remain unbelievably massive, but contrary to all previous days, the atmosphere is more like a county fair, as many people come from the polling stations to check out the curiosity.

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Monday, May 23: The occupations around Spain continue, although they begin to diminish. In Barcelona, the cassolada is shortened from an hour and a half to half an hour. The general assembly involves 5-10,000 people, roughly the same amount as the first Wednesday. A proposal consensed on by the Self-Organization sub-commission to decentralize the assembly and respect autonomous decision-making processes is voted on and receives overwhelming support. However, thirty people, mostly Trotskyists, vote for “more debate” and the proposal is sent back to the commission, as debate is impossible in the massive general assembly.

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Tuesday, May 24: During the day, the encampment in Plaça Catalunya is very small, but all the physical structures (computer lab, sound system, kitchen, garden, tents) guarantee its continued presence. The central assembly is only half as large as the previous day. By this point, anarchists have printed and distributed at least 20,000 flyers, pamphlets, and posters, all paid for by donations collected at the anarchist tent.

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Wednesday, May 25: The numbers remain the same as the previous day. Some activists begin to build houses in the trees of Plaça Catalunya to make an eviction more difficult. In the neighborhood of Clot, the Social Assembly of the neighborhood holds an open meeting in the market square. 150 people, young and old, come to participate. After engaging conversations, debates, and brainstorms, the meeting ends with a cassolada. Other neighborhoods begin to do the same, sometimes joining up with the weekly pickets held by local hospital or education workers protesting cutbacks.

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Police attack the plaza on May 27

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Friday, May 27: At 6:30 a.m., approximately 300 riot police move into Plaça Catalunya in order to “clean up” the plaza for “hygienic reasons” and to remove potentially dangerous clutter ahead of tomorrow’s European football championship between Barça and Manchester, which is to be televized in the plaza. About two hundred people are sleeping in the plaza at the time. A meeting is called; this is the same tactic certain activists used to centralize and pacify 500 people in a major occupation in Barcelona before the January general strike, enabling the police to detain and evict the lot of them with ease. Thinking they have come to evict the plaza, tens of thousands of people surge towards the center and surround the police. Sanitation workers are loading all the materials in the plaza into trucks. Thirty-five trucks are filled with tents, tables, chairs, sleeping bags, computers, kitchen equipment, literature, the sound system, and more. Protestors unsuccessfully attempt to prevent the trucks from leaving the plaza, provoking police charges. Dogmatic pacifists attempt to force everyone to sit down and hold signs saying “nonviolent resistance.” They physically force some people to sit down, and accuse those who do not of being infiltrators. Hundreds of people are beaten by police while sitting down. Over time, more and more people take to their feet, either as a rejection of the extreme degree of pacifism or simply to allow themselves to be more mobile in confronting the police. As the police are repeatedly swarmed and surrounded, they fire rubber bullets into the crowd at close range. People begin to throw plastic bottles, trash, water, and juice at the cops, and in a few cases rocks are thrown. Pacifists form a human chain to protect the police lines, but the crowds eventually push past them and swarm the police, forcing them out of the plaza and cutting off the surrounding streets. Perhaps fifty thousand people or more have converged on the center, and the atmosphere is triumphant. 121 people have been injured, many with broken bones. One person is reported to have lost an eye and another person to have lost hearing in one ear. One person’s lungs and spleen have been punctured by a rubber bullet fired from less than two meters away. He is sent to the hospital in critical condition; no reliable information can be found about him afterwards. A rumor circulates that a Portuguese protestor in Barcelona has died.

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Saturday, May 28: Football fans gather for the European championship. Normally, a giant TV screen is installed in Plaça Catalunya, but due to the continuing occupation, the screen is placed at another point in the city center. The media worry about clashes between protestors and football hooligans, and rumors circulate that Nazis are planning to infiltrate and attack the plaza. Pacifists form cordons to block off all the entrances to the plaza. No football fans are allowed entry. The pacifists watch as fans fight with police, and cheer as they are arrested. Even youths are denied sanctuary in the plaza. The pacifists attempt to silence anarchists shouting at the police. After this day, many anarchists stop participating in the occupation, or shift to the neighborhoods.

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Winding Down:

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Sunday, May 29: In other major cities, including Sevilla and Valencia, the occupations have continued, but they have been monopolized by DRY activists; there is little open debate and low participation. In the nightly meeting in Sevilla, only about two hundred people participate, while during the day scarcely fifty people are present.

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May 29: People remain in the plaza in Barcelona

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Wednesday, June 1: The general assembly in Plaça Catalunya has shrunk to a stable thousand people participating every night. The tents, kitchen, garden, and sound system stolen by police have been replaced. During the day, a few hundred people hang out. In the neighborhoods, open meetings and cassoladas continue to gain steam. Some neighborhoods begin to block streets, a proposal that was always too controversial for the general assembly. DRY activists in some neighborhoods insist that the neighborhood assemblies must be auxiliaries of the central assembly in Plaça Catalunya, but they do not seem to be successful. In some cases, exclusive nonviolence is abandoned as a principle of unity. In Clot, participation in the neighborhood open assembly grows to two or three hundred, and new plaques are installed to change the name of the square to “Plaça de l’Assemblea.” Open assemblies and cassoladas are carried out in perhaps ten other neighborhoods.

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Thursday, June 2: A fringe left political party sets up a table in Plaça Catalunya, but anarchists physically eject them, provoking a confrontation with pacifists. Pacifists, meanwhile, continue to eject Pakistani street vendors from the plaza, while refusing to apply the same policy to the generally white citizens who buy beer from them. Anarchists begin several arguments with these pacifists. Two days later, the first text in a non-European language to be distributed inside the square appears. It is a flyer in Urdu, asking the vendors not to sell beer in the plaza, because it hurts the image of the occupation.

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Sunday, June 5: Comrades in Madrid report that the occupation there has largely degraded. Many junkies are shooting up in the plaza, possibly encouraged to go there by police or simply taking advantage of the autonomous zone, while Nazis have attempted to join the assembly and the protest marches on multiple occasions. The rumor circulates that DRY founders in Madrid are talking about turning their platform into a political party before the federal level elections scheduled for the fall. In Barcelona, anarchists organize a talk criticizing the imposition of nonviolence in Plaça Catalunya. That evening, the general assembly decides to dismantle the encampment but keep the information tables and commission tents open during the day. Plans are prepared for a blockade of the Catalan parliament on June 15, and for a major protest on June 19. Lead organizers propose to have a security cordon within the march in case certain people start chanting violent slogans.

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Poster about the May 27 attacks: “All you need to know about the police is this, and nothing more”

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The Characteristics of the Occupation

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The first day I set foot in the plaza, I knew I was experiencing something unique. No one here had ever seen anything like this. Thousands of people, friends and strangers, crowding together, announcing their indignation, defying the law, calling for revolution. I had hardly ever spent time before in Plaça Catalunya. It was just a place for tourists and pigeons. Now I could pass hours here and have conversations with all sorts of people. A Pakistani man asks me to help translate what’s going on. A young student comments on a flyer I’m handing out. Two grandparents argue about democracy and the best way to go about the struggle.

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Once people saw that I was handing out flyers, they lined up to take them and soon I was all out. During the first week, everyone was excited, everyone was desperate for new ideas and perspectives. In a matter of days we distributed thousands of flyers, many of them new texts written just for this situation. On the other side of the city and in the metro, I often saw people reading our texts—not just glancing at them, but poring over them. That first week, I could go into any bakery or copy shop in town and request free bread or cheap copies “for the plaza” and receive at least a sympathetic response, and often a lot of free materials.

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What we have experienced in Barcelona is a rupture—not so much in State control, in view of the democratic forms chosen by the occupation movement, but most definitely in people’s affective reality. Society left its isolation cells and physically manifested itself in the middle of the plaza, and many people were feeling its presence for the very first time. They were recognizing how isolated they had been until now, in the plaza, where they encountered a force, a collective power, waiting to be reborn. In these unprecedented circumstances, people could begin to believe in the possibility of situations that were entirely new.

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Before, when you handed someone an anarchist flyer, they might think about it for a while, it might improve their understanding of you, it might annoy them, but in any case they would only digest it at the level of opinions—because you were talking about something hypothetical, something unreal. But in the plaza, hearing our conversations or reading the literature we had on our table, people would really begin to debate: “But if we get rid of all the politicians, new ones will just come replace them.” “No, these kids are right! We need to get rid of all of them. If we’re able to get rid of the first batch, we can get rid of the next ones too!”

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People’s aesthetics no longer marked their political niche. The most important thing was their bravery and sincerity. Many times I saw grandparents berating young punks for being too passive, or people dressed for work taking a more radical position than activist hippies. And everyone was talking about real possibilities. For at least the first week, these people meant it when they chanted “Aquí comença la revolució!” “The revolution begins here!”

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So where did the so-called Spanish Revolution end up?

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I remember yelling to a friend, high on the mass excitement of those first days, “This is our revolution! No barricades, nothing romantic like that, but what do we expect? It’s a piece of shit, but we already knew this is the world we live in. We have a lot of work to do!”

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Within the complexity of the Spanish Revolution, one could find plenty to denounce. For a critical anarchist, it would be easier to reject the whole thing than embrace it. Fortunately, on the whole Barcelona anarchists refused to take the easy road.

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Most noteworthy in its long list of faults were its disappointed pretensions of being revolutionary. The Democracia Real Ya activists did their best to place the whole movement in an ideological straightjacket from the beginning. In Barcelona in particular, these activists were joined by a legion of minor league politicians, particularly Catalan indepes, as well as Trotskyists and dogmatic pacifists, all trying to get a piece of the pie. These in turn were aided by a great mass of well-meaning people who were simply reproducing the values of democracy and nonviolence taught to them by the system, and no small number of highly skilled and no less well-meaning activists of the anti-globalization or student variety—including some anarchists—who cherished the processes of consensus and direct democracy.

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This complex agglomeration of people formed a powerful recuperation machine that could not be neutralized with any simple approach. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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The preamble of the DRY manifesto gives a good impression of their political brand:

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“We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us. Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.”

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

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However, to carry out this balancing act, they did have to adopt vaguely antiauthoritarian organizing principles inherited from the antiglobalization movement, such as open assemblies, no spokespersons, and no political parties.

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Proposals centered on direct action or sentiments containing a rejection of government and capitalism were easily neutralized within this ideological framework. The former would be paternalistically tolerated as cute little side projects eclipsed by the major projects of reformist demands, and the latter would be applauded, linked back to the popular rhetoric already in use, and corrupted to mean an opposition to current politicians or specific bankers.

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

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

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

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

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After visiting another city where the encampment had basically killed itself through boredom, I realized that these antiauthoritarian consensus activists had also partially saved the day in Barcelona. Because radical anarchists are so extreme in our critique, we often lack social intuition; we have a hard time viewing the world from the perspective of “normalized” citizens. And while the #Spanish Revolution took everyone by surprise, it especially took us by surprise. Only a few of us had arrived by Wednesday, the third day of the occupation, and most did not come until Thursday or Friday. However, the consensus activists tended to be at the heart of it from early on. Many of them were experienced moderators, thanks to their participation in the great mobilizations of the antiglobalization movement, so they were often the ones facilitating the central assembly. And because they functioned as a bridge between the parasitic grassroots politicians and the masses, they also functioned as a shield for anarchist ideals, because they were actors in their own right who had their own goals, quite distinct from the goals of the DRY activists or the Trotskyists.

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In cities where this activist core did not exist, DRY activists or Trotskyists quickly homogenized the encampments and vigorously suppressed radical ideas. These encampments soon shrunk like a desiccated corpse, with more parasite than host body. In Barcelona, on the other hand, anarchists enjoyed legitimacy and presence from the get-go, and the grassroots politicians generally had to pay lip service to anarchist organizational ideals, giving radical anarchists more room to work in.

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One of the most repugnant features of the occupation, which ultimately caused many anarchists to stop participating, was the imposition of nonviolence. Nonviolence was one of the original principles of the DRY platform, and in Barcelona the first antiauthoritarian participants either did not try to or were not able to reject it. Nonviolence was never debated, but always included in every action proposal, so the choice before the central assembly was always nonviolence or nothing. In the beginning, activists carried out a few peaceful sit-ins. For May 30, DRY announced an action to be carried out throughout the entire Spanish state: that day, everyone should withdraw 155 euros from their bank accounts (155 = 15-5, or 15 May), “a peaceful and subtle act, but sufficiently contentious and attention-grabbing to clearly demonstrate the indignation we feel, and also our strength and commitment to take this through to the end,” in their words.

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But generally, their action plan was to do nothing, to stay in the plazas, to prevent people from seizing or blocking the surrounding streets, and to talk about another protest on the fifteenth day of the following month. When anarchists in Barcelona distributed flyers on the third day of the occupation, they quickly released a statement, not approved by any assembly, saying that the occupation was strictly pacifist, and that the police were trying to infiltrate and encourage violence; therefore all the good citizens should bring their cameras and take pictures of everybody and everything.

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I believe it was the first Wednesday or Thursday when a group of activists dropped a huge banner from a major building alongside the plaza, reading “Politicians, Bosses, Bankers, CCOO UGT [the major trade unions] Fuck Off.” The crowds cheered exultantly. Two days later, another group blocked a street and cut open a section of the giant billboard covering another building, to reveal a large spray-painted slogan beneath; if I remember correctly, it said “No one represents us!” On this second occasion, some people cheered, but self-appointed leaders tried to stop the action and denounced it as violent.

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When police carried out their hygienic operation on Friday, May 26, pacifists verbally or physically obliged everyone to sit down and to hold signs with the words “nonviolent resistance.” The police beat the protestors with glee, opening heads and breaking arms. On a few occasions when people attempted to snatch away police batons, pacifists ran towards them to bring their message of peace. As thousands more people arrived to liberate the plaza, they overwhelmed police lines and surged towards the cops in the middle, shouting and starting to throw things. Pacifists formed a human chain to protect them. Police were eventually pushed back, not without completing their cleaning operation and allowing the sanitation trucks to depart with all the materials they had stolen. Even though the crowds generally pushed past the limits set forward by the pacifists—and they certainly didn’t do it sitting down waiting for the legal team, as the pacifists had advised—the ideologues of nonviolence still claimed it as a victory. They also falsely stated that the police attempted to evict the plaza and were defeated. All this should come as no surprise, as pacifists have done the same thing with the Arab revolts—emboldening statists like Obama to do the same.

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The following Saturday was the worst day, when the pacifists formed human chains to keep football fans out of the plaza and cheered police as they arrested hooligans. When there were still comrades in critical condition in the hospital, injured from rubber bullets shot by police officers, these same pacifists proposed going to support a rally the police were holding to protest their upcoming wage cuts.

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There were other problems as well. Senegalese immigrants selling sunglasses and Pakistani immigrants selling beer and sandwiches moved into the autonomous zone we had created in the plaza. Selling things on the street, if you’re not rich enough to have your own store or kiosk, is illegal in Barcelona, and the cops often amuse themselves chasing immigrant street vendors. Enter the Convivencia (coexistence, living-together) Commission. The CC formed with the explicit objective of not allowing antisistema to come and take over the plaza. Antisistema is a media term originally used to refer to anarchists in a depoliticized and delegitimizing way; it has since been extended to squatters and anyone else who falls outside the range of acceptable democratic opinion. In popular usage it is almost a synonym for hoodlum or hooligan. Consequently, the proposal to form the CC won popular approval in the assembly before any debate could be had, and despite the fact that many non-anarchist participants in the plaza had signs criticizing the media use of the term “antisistema.”

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The CC police set themselves the task of kicking out the Pakistani lateros (beer vendors). Their justification was that “they bothered people” by offering beers for sale every few minutes, and that they “created a bad image” for the encampment (in the media). Multiple times, anarchists confronted CC members, who often went around with name-tags and walkie-talkies, but to no avail. Despite accusations of hypocrisy and racism, they specifically refused to talk to the people who had the money to buy the beer, and only focused on pushing out the people whose livelihood was based on selling it.

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There was a heavy dose of legalism as well among the leading organizers. They attempted to get us to take down our signs against voting, claiming it could be used as a justification for a police eviction, even though the whole occupation was blatantly illegal. At another point they raised a stink when some people started an urban garden in the plaza; they complained that replacing the mulch beds around the fountain with plants was “uncivic.” For context, the civisme laws in Barcelona have been an aggressive tool to kill street culture and make things more comfortable for tourists. Anarchists in the plaza often had to argue against legalist mentalities; it helped that the occupation in itself sprang from illegality. On this front, we gained some ground; the garden, for example, was not suppressed.

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There were also problems with certain junkies and drunkards who had taken up residence in the plaza and constantly harassed or even assaulted women. Pacifist organizers and the Convivencia Commission tried to prevent the feminist assembly in the plaza from organizing self-defense classes and taking care of the problem on their own, instead paternalistically offering to protect them. Anarchists had a hard time dealing with the junkies and drunkards who were being jerks. On the one hand, we were glad they were taking advantage of the autonomous zone to live without police harassment for a few weeks. On the other hand, some of them acted in ways we wouldn’t tolerate from anybody; in another context, only residual liberal guilt would have kept us from knocking them on their asses. Unfortunately, the situation was extremely complicated: any use of violence could have provoked a major confrontation with the pacifists, with totally unforeseen consequences. Worse still, it could have a conservative backlash that would have vindicated and demanded more of the CC’s policing activities.

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On the whole, however, there was much in the plaza to value. It was an extensive, chaotic space of self-organization where people met their logistical needs—sometimes going through the official channels, sometimes not. There was a library, a garden, an international translation center, a kitchen with big stoves and solar cookers, and at any time there were a couple concerts, workshops, debates, and massage parlors taking place, along with innumerable smaller conversations and encounters.

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And it was amazing to encounter a wider anarchist community there, to find that most comrades had the same idea to come down to the plaza even though the most visible discourses emanating therefrom were staunchly social-democratic. The comrades we met there were not always members of our pre-existing affinity groups, but also libertarians we had never worked with before. On the whole, comrades demonstrated an impressive commitment, agility of action, and a nuanced and incisive critique. It became clear again that the old stereotype of the anarchist ghetto is at best only partially true. At the first chance to join a collectivity and communicate with others, most of us were there, even though it was often an uncomfortable or even hostile environment. The very fact that we can speak of an “anarchist ghetto” indicates that we are less isolated than most people. This communality that we carry with us makes us stand out; the “ghetto” is formed less by attitudes on the interior and more by the imposition of a general social isolation on everybody else. In Barcelona, this has become truer in the last few years, now that many anarchists have distanced themselves from the tradition of squatting for the sake of squatting.

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Not exactly on the turn of a dime, but within the space of a couple days, many dozens of us dropped our routines and threw ourselves wholeheartedly into the occupation—staffing the literature table, writing or finding texts and photocopying them, having conversations and arguments, joining the commissions, and organizing debates, talks, and concerts. It was an incredible feeling to find so many accomplices in the middle of a social singularity, to spend the night conversing, arguing, and analyzing the day’s events, to spend the following morning writing the next round of announcements and critiques, to pass the siesta printing, and then to go back down to the anarchist tent for an afternoon and evening of distribution, meetings, and the assembly.

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Inevitably, we exhausted ourselves. Talking with comrades who took part in the December 2008 insurrection in Greece, it sounded like people reached their physical limits in three weeks. Evidently, debates and meetings are more taxing than riots and tear gas: most of us started to burn out after a week or two. Many of those who were most active in the first week were gradually replaced by a sort of second shift of those who had taken longer to be convinced of the need to participate.

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A Note on Technology

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A reader might notice that from the vantage point of the internet, it seems like the “#Spanish Revolution” was based almost entirely around Twitter and Facebook, virtual communication that doesn’t feature at all in my account. In reality, except for the occasional tech geek wandering by suggesting that we could solve all the world’s problems with virtual simultaneous internet democracy, that part of the revolution simply didn’t exist for me.

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Perhaps this is not surprising, in that I don’t have a cellphone and don’t use Facebook. In the end, these are just tools for spreading the word, and while they do change the terrain, from a certain point of view they are superfluous. I found it easy to be in the center of important happenings and to stay informed. Toting a cellphone around would have just wasted my time and left logs of all my movements and communications for the police to browse at their leisure. For the past millennia, there have been occasions in which people gather together spontaneously in surprising numbers. As social isolation increases, networking technology helps overcome the growing distances, but it also plays a role in creating them in the first place.

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I recall a talk in a Barcelona anarchist social center, in which we called an Egyptian anarchist in Tahrir Square via Skype. She laughed about the whole Twitter and Facebook obsession, explaining that those tools were useful but that their importance had been exaggerated by Western media.

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Mediatized democracy

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Anarchist Strategies

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After debating the matter with comrades nearly every day for weeks, I think those of us who chose to participate in the occupation with an anarchist critique made the right strategic choices. Our only errors come down to a question of finding the right balance between the various forms of activity.

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The few anarchists who were there at the beginning were instrumental in blocking the signing of the Democracia Real Ya manifesto and in approving the decision not to produce any unitary manifestos. This allowed the Barcelona occupation to take on an independent character and develop according to its own needs, which endowed it with more vivacity. In Sevilla, by contrast, the occupation in Las Setas signed on to the Madrid platform from the beginning, never developed as much diversity or strength, and quickly lost what it had. And in Madrid, the assembly passed a law early on to allow no ideological symbols or ideological groups in the occupation, which was a decisive factor in preventing the anarchists there from ever setting up their own table to distribute propaganda. Accordingly, they had far less visibility, though they made a major effort to participate in the various commissions. We owe what we achieved in Barcelona in part to the fact that some anarchists went to the protest and occupation at the very beginning, despite the odious democratic rhetoric that predominated; and that they did not only go as warm bodies, but as fighters or activists with their own specific critique.

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We owe what we achieved in Barcelona in part to the fact that some anarchists went to the protest and occupation at the very beginning, despite the odious democratic rhetoric that predominated; and that they did not only go as warm bodies, but as fighters or activists with their own specific critique.

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After more anarchists arrived on Wednesday and Thursday, there was a debate that ended in an impasse: do we participate in the assembly and the commissions, or do we stay at the margins? A couple of us argued that the place of the anarchists is always in the margins, and our role is to subvert the center and make sure the margins are more alive, more creative, and more interesting than the center. Fortunately, we did not win that debate, although subsequent events vindicated our position. In the end, most “radical” anarchists1 participated in various commissions, especially Content, where minimum demands and political programs were formulated. Anarchist participation basically made this commission explode, as the Trotskyists and social-democrats who previously dominated it found it impossible to get approval for their populist programs with us involved. Subsequently, the commission broke up into about a dozen sub-commissions: these included labor, ecological, and other themed ones, and also “Self-Organization and Direct Democracy.” This did not prevent the Trots from subsequently speaking in the name of Content and trying to delegitimize the decisions of the sub-commissions.

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Those favoring self-organization (anarchists and autonomists) and those favoring direct democracy (radical liberals) were lumped in the same sub-commission; the latter found this appropriate, while the former considered the two terms to be diametrically opposed. Of course, the former were right, but it was a good thing the two groups were lumped together because this allowed the two camps to debate, spreading a critique of direct democracy beyond anarchist circles and giving anarchists good practice in communicating. Not to sound arrogant, but the partisans of self-organization tended to win the debates, as the democrats had superficial ideas and generally less experience in any kind of struggle.

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By participating in the commissions, anarchists achieved multiple victories. In a few instances, we changed the form of the occupation; in many instances, we held effective debates, crystallized our analysis, and gained contact with a broader antiauthoritarian community. We also blocked several attempts to pacify or neutralize the most beautiful aspects of the occupation.

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However, within a couple weeks most of us realized that we had made a mistake by putting so much energy into the commissions. We had effectively sequestered anarchist ideas in a few useful but relatively small spaces; we had exhausted ourselves with daily meetings; and we had allowed ourselves to be seduced by the official organizational structures, which generally proved themselves impervious to decentralization from the inside. Meanwhile, we had only realized a tiny fraction of the occupation’s potential for self-organization. This is ironic, in that most of us were busy talking about self-organization in the appropriate commissions.

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On a few occasions, we defied the central assembly and the commissions by organizing things on our own, starting projects in small affinity groups and working out conflicts with other projects on a case-by-case basis. We set up the literature tent, organized two or three talks, two or three debates, helped organize a concert, and helped organize an “escrache” protest at a nearby workplace that had just fired a worker for being pregnant. If we had only put half as much energy into the commissions, those valuable debates still would have happened, but we could have organized ten times as many informal events in the plaza, making it a reality that the margins were stronger than the center.

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As it happened, within a week the anarchist tent had become a place where people rested between meetings—this meant that we weren’t having as many spontaneous conversations with random passersby. The margins, I should clarify, were not a lifeless place waiting for anarchist leadership. There was already a great deal of activity there, much organized by hippies, but little of it had any explicit political content; thus it was less contentious, and more easily delegitimized within a dichotomy of work/leisure or culture/politics.

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On the first Friday of the occupation, the day we set up the anarchist tent with the literature table, a vital strategic decision had to be made unexpectedly. Someone from some commission came up to tell us that the plaza was reserved for commission tents, so we had to move to the edge, basically a sidewalk area outside the entrances to the inner plaza. The guy was very clever, and used a convincing argument: if we stayed there, then the Trotskyists and Stalinists and all these other parties could also set up their tents, and we didn’t want to be responsible for that, did we?

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At the time, there were only about six of us there. I don’t want to make myself too much of a protagonist; everyone telling the story from their own perspective will remember analogous episodes, because we have all made heroic efforts in these days. But the fact of the matter is, I soon found there were only two of us who opposed moving the tent, and the other one was willing to accept the majority position. I argued forcibly: who cares if all the little Marxist-Leninist parties in the world move in? The commissions and the official structures are far more dangerous. Furthermore, we were fully legitimate in setting up this tent, because we were not a pre-existing political party but a spontaneous initiative that arose from the plaza itself. Most of the people in the tent at that point had never worked together on any project before, and a couple of us had met for the first time in the plaza. Not only was it our responsibility as anarchists to defy the commissions and open up the plaza for all sorts of initiatives, but it was a good thing if they subsequently tried to kick us out in the general assembly. As anarchists, we want to make existing conflicts visible, not avoid them. Let them try to kick us out, and then see where this democratic revolution goes.

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We argued face to face with various commissiocrats, sometimes being nice, sometimes being outraged, until they were convinced or exhausted. We also built some common ground with another tent they were trying to kick out, one that had been set up by some performance kids from a circus squat. If we had not won that little battle and realized the need to seek conflict not only with the State but also in the social movements, which also contain the State, we would have been at a severe disadvantage in everything that followed.

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Repression comes in many forms

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Other strategic decisions were easier. We all agreed it was important to confront the keepers of order, such as the people from the Convivencia Commission. We started arguments where necessary, but remained willing to reconcile and be friendly if they stopped acting like cops or politicians; this actually happened on a couple occasions.

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Our propaganda efforts also didn’t need any discussion, and they were modestly Herculean. It’s impossible to say how many flyers we handed out, but it may well have exceeded 30,000, plus hundreds of pamphlets and posters. Surprisingly, it was all self-financed via a donation jar at our table. Especially in the first week, passersby tossed in huge quantities of coins and even bills so we could keep printing our supposedly extremist and alienating propaganda.

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The final strategic conflict I’ll detail involved criticizing allies who were involved in the centralization of the meetings. Our criticisms were harsh at times, and they strained more than a few friendships, but I think it was absolutely necessary. By widely posting the accusation that the assembly was being manipulated by Trotskyists and left Catalan politicians, we put these people on the defensive and limited their activity. The same approach was harder with the DRY activists, unfortunately, because they were previously unknown and they were in the middle of the whole thing from the beginning.

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Meanwhile, by strongly criticizing the consensus activists for facilitating this manipulation and recreating the State, we made visible an absolutely vital line of conflict, deflating the various excuses that hid authoritarianism within questions of process and inefficiency. This latter group, the consensus activists, mostly had good intentions, and some were in fact comrades, so they were genuinely sensitive to criticism. The results of our attempts to criticize them will surface in the coming months as they evaluate their own intervention in this phenomenon and we continue criticizing them. It is necessary that as soon as possible, everyone who honestly desires freedom recognize that democracy must be destroyed in all its forms.

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This is what democracy looks like: Friday, May 27, Plaça Catalunya

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What We Learned

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We can derive a number of lessons from this experience, many of which are still being digested.

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For me, the first is this: there can be no more excuses for mass assemblies moderated by consensus specialists. It is important for collectivities to come together; when this happens, it is important. But the only mass organizational form that can exist without being imposed is that of an encuentro, an encounter, where people speak their minds or share ideas or ask for help on initiatives that they are starting without needing anyone’s permission. Within this encounter, there can be individuals and affinity groups, people involved in formal (nonparty) organizations or informal federations, or whatever. The whole question of formality or informality is a distraction—it doesn’t matter, it only comes down to personal taste. From an anarchist viewpoint, the only necessity is that there be no decision-making body that has more legitimacy than all the others. A social movement is essentially an attempt by society to be reborn out of the void of capitalist alienation. We should not have to adhere to any single organizational form in order to fully participate in the social movement, because every single one will exclude certain kinds of people.

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In the past, the CNT played this role. To participate in the struggle in Barcelona, you practically had to work within the CNT, and they screwed it up something awful. It would be a similar mistake to grant legitimacy to a mass assembly, regardless of whether it uses consensus or voting, because depending on the time and location of the meetings, how long they last, whether there are chairs to sit in or whether the space can be accessed by handicapped people, some people will be excluded. Even if you could design the perfect meeting form and rewind capitalist development to recreate a proletariat that all went to work and went to bed at the same time, there would still be exclusion, because some people just don’t do meetings, while others have large crowds and speechmaking in their blood. The only answer to this is to recognize a web of decision-making structures and organizing forms with equal legitimacy, destroying once and for all the divide between public and private.

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Secondly, we learned again what makes a good intervention: presence plus critique. Presence means being there, but it also means participating, becoming a material and integral part of what is going on. Critique means not leaving your brain at home because you think you’re going to scare people off with your anarchist ideas; it means expressing yourself, and also listening, and evaluating your own behavior.

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I had a chance to compare our experiences with a failed anarchist intervention in another city that confirms this point. Some comrades went to the encampment there just as warm bodies, without criticism. Others went provocatively, snubbing everything and everyone and leaving when they got a bad reaction, deciding not to come back because it wasn’t a comfortable space for them. It strikes me that these two opposite approaches are complementary. Both are based on avoiding personal discomfort.

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Some further lessons:

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People are situational, not sovereign. This same idea seemed to be confirmed by the Greek experience. With the possible exception of a few Nietzschean superbeings, people are not sovereign individuals who live according to their opinions. Rather, people respond to their situations. Accordingly, the same person who has little time for an anarchist text on a normal day of the week will stop and read it and fantasize with you about overthrowing the State if you happen to meet them in the unexpected terrain of a spontaneous collectivity. The next question to explore is to what extent we can plant seeds, in the boring moments, that will stay with people and have the chance to sprout when those people enter the unpredictable terrain of a rupture.

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Collaboration between the various sects of libertarians was vital. Perhaps affinity groups are overrated: in the end it did not matter so much whether a fellow anarchist agreed with you on the question of the existence or nonexistence of the proletariat; it mattered more whether we could get along and communicate. It was a great advantage to have many different perspectives mixing, different strategies being developed, and different people being drawn to participate in different ways. The anarcho-syndicalists made a great effort to be present in many of the commissions, and it was funny and instructive seeing them participating in the same popular debates with nihilist and insurrectionary anarchists. They also brought with them the important tradition of the CNT, which granted legitimacy to anarchist participation on the whole.

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Decentralization is not the same as dispersal. A mass gathering point such as Plaça Catalunya can give us a sense of collective strength, which dispersal would dissipate. Decentralization means not utilizing a unitary organizational structure with central nodes. It is a question of mode, not scale. Many people, including some anarchists, misunderstood the anarchist proposal for decentralization as a proposal to shift activity to the neighborhoods. While this was in fact part of what most anarchists were proposing, it is equally possible to transplant centralized structures at a smaller scale to all the neighborhood assemblies. Fortunately, the Barcelona neighborhood assemblies, which formed around the September general strike, had already defeated an attempt to centralize them within the umbrella organizing structure that arose around the strike. They preferred their autonomy. As such, they were a favorable terrain for anarchists, especially where we had already been participating in our neighborhood assembly. It was harder for grassroots politicians to take them over, and harder to impose an ideological unity, because we already had a point of unity: we lived in the neighborhood together, and we had no pretensions of all thinking the same way.

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An open meeting in a Barcelona neighborhood, May 25

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When we express anarchist ideas honestly, humbly, and passionately, it can reveal that many of those who remain silent are already partially on our side. Inertia and common values work against us and favor the populists and democrats, but anarchist ideas almost always win a debate because they speak to an inalienable impulse towards freedom that exists in everyone who still has a heart. The important thing, then, is to participate in the debate, as long as that debate does not legitimize official political channels but takes place between ordinary people. It is no coincidence that the dogmatic pacifists boycotted the debate we organized about nonviolence. They’re not interested in a debate, but in imposing their practice.

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Nonviolence is not a cultural peculiarity, but a real danger everywhere democracy exists. I thought that with its Mediterranean culture and its long, living history of forceful struggles, Spain would never have a problem with nonviolence. But in a period of a few years, it has appeared with a strength that could rival the pacifism in the UK or US. And these pacifists do not generally emerge from a trajectory of the historical nonviolent struggles in Spain, such as the antimilitarist movement. Rather, they have been created out of whole cloth by the democratic context itself; the ground was prepared, in my mind, by the tolerance of leftist, democratic, rights-based discourses in the antagonistic social movements of the last couple decades. People who identify as peaceful should be heartily encouraged to make themselves at home within our struggles. Nonviolence, on the other hand, must be treated with contempt until it is made synonymous with cowardice and snitching, and decent pacifists abandon ship to never again be confused with cop-lovers. By continuing to use the dichotomy of nonviolence and violence, and arguing whether or not our actions qualify as violent, we are only empowering them. Violence does not exist: it is a vague and moralistic category. Only nonviolence exists, and it means selling out, running away, and censoring other people’s struggles.

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Barcelona, May 27

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Direct democracy is just representative democracy on a smaller scale. It inevitably recreates the specialists, centralization, and exclusion we associate with existing democracies. Within four days, once the crowds exceeded 5,000, the experiment in direct democracy was already rife with false and manipulated consensus, silenced minorities, increasing abstention from voting, and domination by specialists and internal politicians.

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In a story worthy of Kafka, we were trying to schedule a debate and we wanted to let those at the Activity Commission know. The kid at the table looked down at his form, a crappy little piece of paper written up in ballpoint pen, and told us we couldn’t have our event in the spot where we wanted. “Why?” I asked, getting ready to go ballistic. The response was far more pathetic than I had expected. “Because our forms are divided into different columns, see, one column for each space in the plaza, but that space over by the staircase, well that’s not an official space.” “That’s okay, we don’t mind, just write it down.” “But, but, I can’t. There isn’t a column for it.” “Well, make a column.” “Um, I can’t.” “Oh Christ, look, which one’s open—look, here, ‘Pink Space,’ just write our event down for the ‘Pink Space’ and when the time comes we’ll just move it.” Within two weeks, without any prior training, the Spanish Revolution had created perfect bureaucrats!

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Some radical anarchists put too much trust in the commissions. They were only useful as spaces for debate and as spaces to subvert. For example, in the beginning, the assembly decided not to release unitary manifestos speaking for everyone. Subsequently, in the commissions, anarchists had to fight proposals for minimum demands and manifestos every single night. Finally, there was a commission meeting with no anarchists present, and the minimums were passed through the commission and subsequently ratified by the general assembly, which ratified nearly every proposal passed before it. On the other hand, the anarchist proposal to decentralize the assembly was voted on twice, and each time achieved overwhelming support, but curiously was defeated on technicalities both times. This action demonstrated that we were right, we had lots of support, and the assembly was a sham—that, in itself, was a victory. But direct democracy cannot be reformed from within. It has to be destroyed.

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

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Finally, we learned our own limits. After two weeks of meetings, debates, and grassroots bureaucracy, some of us were ready to shoot ourselves. We were exhausted, and we had made the grave error of dropping all our other projects and actions. This demonstrated a necessary flexibility, but it also meant that during these most critical moments, radical anarchist actions weren’t happening in the streets. It always felt vital to be in the meetings, in case something should go wrong, but we could have moderated our participation and devoted some energy elsewhere.

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In this respect, it became obvious that we lack people who are comfortable with public speaking. This is a vital skill we need to develop collectively. Often, people with antiauthoritarian critiques made up a large proportion of a meeting, but we just sat through it all and listened to bullshit because none of us wanted to take the microphone. In the second open assembly in the Clot neighborhood, I started to get depressed because it was exhibiting none of the antiauthoritarian sentiment as the first one. Populist inertia was steamrolling us. Finally, I took the mike and launched into a ten-minute speech urging a focus on long-term revolutionary goals and self-organization, and slamming reformism, pacifism, and attempts at a homogenous unity. A huge part of the crowd cheered, and afterwards more people were motivated to get up and express similar sentiments, shifting the direction of the whole meeting. At the end, half a dozen people, from grandmothers to students, thanked me for my contribution, while others came over to start arguments that ended with them either convinced of or at least respecting the anarchist position. I didn’t enjoy speaking or receiving compliments—it made me feel nervous and self-conscious—but I wonder: if I hadn’t, would the meeting have run its course with the uninterrupted illusion of a reformist majority?

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Now that the Plaça Catalunya occupation is disappearing, the struggle will continue in the neighborhoods, in the radical unions, in preexisting affinity groups, and in the new relationships that have been formed during these days. Time will tell, but I suspect we have made a great leap forward by participating in the neighborhood assemblies, meeting new accomplices, and winning ourselves a great social visibility in spite of a hostile democratic environment. The real revolution is a long time in coming, but its sputtering attempts to come to life are plainly visible in these surprising, pathetic, exhausting, beautiful moments, as long as we have the fortitude to be there.

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Further Reading

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Two of the “official” sites:

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Pages with some anarchist perspectives:

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Appendix: Translations from Original Texts in Catalan and Spanish

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“Why We Don’t Lay Claim to Democracy”

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Possibly the first anarchist text to come out of the occupation, this was published alongside “And after Sunday, what then?”

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We participate in the struggles against home repossessions, against evictions, against the cutbacks and all the abuses we suffer daily. We create social centers, libraries, newspapers with counterinformation and analysis, community gardens, and specific events. We practice direct action, attacking the symbols of our oppressors such as the police, the politicians, and the banks. For all these reasons, we do not lay claim to democracy.

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We believe that it is only necessary to lay claim to freedom, without establishing limits to our desires. Frequently it is thought that “freedom” and “democracy” are synonyms, but democracy always leads to an even stronger social control—it is dictatorship with other weapons, it is the State that tricks us into participating in our own domination. There is no single democracy in the entire world where the people are free, and this is not a question of corruption but rather of the normal functioning of democracies.

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Like all kinds of states, democracy is based on centralization and the monopolization of decision-making. It doesn’t matter if we all participate in these decisions, because massive assemblies are easy to manipulate. The person with the microphone, the people who want to lead, will always be within the majority and the minority will always be silenced. In Plaça Catalunya we are creating a real democracy and this is our great mistake. We are reproducing the same roles that exist in parliament, we are creating the progressive politicians of tomorrow.

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We imagine a Plaça Catalunya with a diversity of assemblies, where everyone can start initiatives without passing through a centralized and cumbersome assembly, thus giving everyone the experience of participating in a process of autogestion instead of being spectators. We can organize millions of initiatives with greater fluidity without having to pass through the commissions, which are easily dominated by specialists. We don’t need others to tell us what we can do.

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We are not satisfied with the single voice of the centralized assembly, because it’s hardly any better than the daily silence of capitalism. We want a plaza full of voices, of assemblies, of conversations. We’re truly interested in creating links between all of us, but we’d like to do it in another way: through solidarity between the struggles and not through the homogenization of our ideas.

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Let’s destroy democracy and spread freedom!

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“And After Sunday, What Then?”

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In Tahrir Square, after bringing down the dictatorship, people realized that it was only the beginning. Even though none of it appeared in the media, afterwards there was a whole series of strikes and occupations in factories and other places. Bringing down the dictatorship was just one step forward for opening the struggle and keeping the State from shooting them all down.

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In Plaça Catalunya, if we bring down the monopoly of the political parties and the electoral farce, what will we have accomplished? Nothing more than to open new possibilities to struggle and achieve what we really want: the autogestion of our lives and the end of exploitation and social hierarchies.

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We want to collectivize the social wealth, as our grandparents did in the revolution of 1936, and in the insurrections of Figols, Casas Viejas, Asturias, and the Hospitalet Commune in the years before. The dictatorship destroyed these struggles, but not our desire for freedom. Later, the democracy has maintained and intensified the social and economic changes made by the dictatorship.

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If we end this circus of politicians, we will have the opportunity to realize our dream of self-organization and collectivization. Without a doubt, these implies a hard struggle with much determination, responsibility, and perseverance if we really want to solve the problems we suffer. They will call us violent, they will repress us, they will try to assign us leaders and new politicians.

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Therefore it is indispensable:

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It is not easy, but it is possible. The path is long and as long as our dream of liberty remains alive, we will be more alive than ever.

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“Grave Errors of the Protagonists of the Central Assembly”

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This flyer appeared on the first Friday of the occupation.

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“Patience, patience – this isn’t easy.” [Words often spoken by the meeting moderators] The forms and structures taken by the central assembly are not something natural, but rather a specific choice towards centralized instead of decentralized structures. Even though many of the organizers are surely reproducing what they already know in good faith, the effect and the purpose of centralization is to create a structure in which the majority cannot participate, they can only watch and vote.

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“We are creating a space for expressing ourselves.” Lies. With a central assembly, they are silencing 9,999 spaces for expressing ourselves, replacing them with one single space. Didn’t they notice that in the hours before the Central Assembly there was a multitude of meetings, conversations, assemblies, and initiatives not controlled by anyone?

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“Everyone agree? Good, consensus.” It is evident that in the majority of votes in the General Assembly, it is the abstaining vote that wins. Only four days of real democracy and we’ve already reproduced everyday democracy and massive apathy. They are killing the revolution with boredom.

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“There’s no time to debate here, this has to pass through the commissions.” But when there are thousands of people in the plaza, when in the meetings only the people closest to the speaker can hear, when some commissions last until five in the morning, there is no possibility to debate in the commissions either. A structure has been created in which delegation is necessary. The democracy with which we are all fed up has been reproduced.

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How to Manipulate an Assembly

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For he who has the microphone and announces the proposal, it is extremely easy to generate the desired consensus.

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–Always propose the desired option in the first position. E.g. “The proposal is to do a silent march to Plaça Sant Jaume. Everyone in favor?” No one wants to be in the minority, so those who aren’t in favor will abstain from voting, so there will be the appearance of consensus.

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–Avoid debate on your ideological foundations. E.g. “The proposal is to carry out a nonviolent actoin against the banks.” Nonviolence is never debated, but imposed, by making exclusively pacifist proposals so that the options will always be doing nothing, or doing something nonviolent. You can’t be a future politician if you don’t know how to control the rage of your flock. This is what democracy is all about.

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–When you monopolize the microphone to make speeches and sway the masses, it’s best if you don’t use the exact same gestures as Lenin did, so as not to reveal your true intentions.

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–Never, under any circumstances, allow decentralization or spontaneity to flourish, because then your loyal masses would be replaced with a multitude of self-organized, creative, and liberated people.

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Concrete Proposals for a Self-Organized Plaza

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–Replace the monopoly of the commissions with a multiplication of organizing groups. Multiple kitchens, multiple communication and extension groups, with more autonomy, more fluidity, more possibility to develop diverse forms for diverse tastes, more space for everyone’s participation without creating silenced minorities. These groups would communicate among themselves, collaborating when they consider it opportune.

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–Convert the Central Assembly into a general encounter for exchanging information and resources, and generating a collective environment and consciousness. Here one could make proposals in order to seek support and allies, but without obliging everyone to sign on. If we don’t have spokespeople, we don’t need unified texts either. If we don’t have leaders, we don’t need homogenized actions. What unites us is the fact that we are here and we are self-organizing our resistance.

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Down with centralization! Up with self-organization!

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“The Greatest Violence Would Be Returning to Normality”

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This flyer appeared about a week into the occupation.

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In Plaça Catalunya we are already thousands. We have taken the center of the city. We have made it ours, and with our determination we have opened a fault line of indignation in the wall of consent and social resignation.

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Now we only have two options: allow this crack to close up, losing a unique opportunity for a veritable social change, or open it as much as we can, widening it until it reaches the very foundations of our misery and exploitation.

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If we want to get somewhere, if we want everything that we denounce and disdain to disappear, we must exceed the limits of the plaza. We must exceed the limits of the very legality which yesterday told us we could not occupy it, and today tells us we cannot leave it, that we cannot touch the normality that surrounds it.

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We must disobey the voice of Power when it tells us that blocking a street is violent while it blocks human lives with layoffs and exploitation, when it tells us that confronting the police is violent while they torture immigrants and and dissidents in their jails, when it tells us that attacking a bank is violent while it leaves whole families on the street for not paying the mortgage.

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We must disobey, because no revolution has ever been carried out while respecting the laws of the powerful. We must disobey, because the greatest violence would not be to continue to act illegally, but rather to pass up the opportunity to end once and for all the abuses and all the massive violence this society produces.

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We must take the streets, we must extend the revolt to all the neighborhoods and every field of life.

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We don’t want just a plaza, we want the whole city.

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“Assemblies, Democracy, and Capitalism”

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This text appeared on a poster produced about a week into the occupation.

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The democratic form is the most perfected political system that Capital has encountered for its development and universal implantation. There is no practical criticism of democracy without a criticism of capitalism. To accept or attempt to reform capitalism implies accepting or trying to reform its most appropriate political form. Democracy separates political decisions from the rest of social life. It foments the illusion that we are equals before the law and the institutions, while obscuring the fact that while it offers these possibilities they will only be a reality for those who can employ them. This separation avoids class antagonism or gender differences, reducing conflicts to an apparently neutral sphere in which it will be possible to achieve equality via discussion and consensus among the affected parties. And it is this mechanism that brings with it a generalized demobilization, in which any movement that is oppositional in the beginning can be integrated through dialogue between representatives.

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Nonetheless, the criticism of democracy cannot be reduced to the manner in which decisions are made. Democracy, whether direct or representative, is the supremacy of means over ends, and the dissolution of potentialities into that which is purely formal. If a movement advances and confronts Power, it is not democratic. But if the conflict or the movement can be compatible with arbitration and conciliation, then it is normal that form and procedure should be the most important considerations. Organizing an assembly according to the proper norms becomes more important than what the assembly decides. Those who privilege procedures of administration are condemned to creating an administrative apparatus, instead of resituating discussion within the content of our experience, our words and our actions. Reality is inverted, and it is forgotten that revolution is not only a question of form. It is the nature of this change we must insist upon. To create a world without money, without the exchange of commodities, without the buying and selling of labor, without companies as competing poles of value accumulation, without work being separated from the rest of our activities, without the State, without a political sphere that is specialized and isolated from our social relations.

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“Important Information Regarding a Possible Eviction of the Plaza”

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This was the official text put on the encampment website on May 20 and handed out among participants.

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    Regarding political and electoral posters: removal of posters that urge voting for any political optoin [including blank or null votes] will now begin [in order to comply with Spanish law regarding the “Day of Reflection” before Election Sunday].

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    In the case of police intervention, we will all sit down in the plaza. It is our duty to show our ID and our right to politely ask for the badge number of the police officer. IMPORTANT: Once seated on the ground in the plaza, make use of the LEGAL TEAM, identified by their reflective jackets, to act as mediators between the plaza and the police. (The LEGAL TEAM is a defense commission belonging to the Bar Association).

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    We define ourselves as a gathering [to attempt to dodge the law prohibiting protests in the days before the election].

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    In the case of arrest NEVER make a statement in the police station. We are providing all of you with the phone number of the LEGAL TEAM so they can give you legal aid.

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    I use this term simply to separate us from those of the consensus/moderation crowd and those whose participation was not openly anarchist. ↩

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