![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/3.jpg\")
Demonstrators investigating the abandoned ICE vehicles apparently retrieved these “challenge coins” that ICE mercenaries receive when they kidnap people. This “coin” is decorated with a skull wearing a crown. ICE mercenaries serve king death.
\nAfter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot at least one person in north Minneapolis on the night of January 14, a crowd gathered and faced them down, confronting them and tearing down the yellow tape they put up around the area. Police reinforced the federal mercenaries, joining them in shooting a tremendous amount of tear gas and flash-bang grenades at demonstrators as well as at passing cars and houses in the residential district. Nonetheless, the officers lost control of the area and retreated, ceding the streets to those who had defied them.
\n\nIn the process, ICE agents abandoned several vehicles in the area. Demonstrators opened up the vehicles and found identity cards, paperwork, license plates, operational plans, tactical gear, and other items. Footage of demonstrators looking through these materials was broadcast live on the internet.
\n\nThis follows the atrocious murder, one week earlier, of Renee Good, perpetrated by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in the full light of day and captured on multiple videos. You can read an account of how demonstrators responded here.
\n\nOver the past month and a half, the Trump regime has sent more and more troops to the Twin Cities because they know that what happens there has implications for the whole country—and because they are losing. If the battle of Minneapolis in winter 2026 turns out the way that the battle of Portland turned out in summer 2020, it will bode ill for Trump’s ability to retain control by brute force.
\n\nIt is important to note the role that local Minneapolis police played in assaulting demonstrators tonight, despite their nominally answering to a Democratic city government that has paid lip service to opposing ICE. Police across the country have played an essential role in enabling ICE to terrorize communities. Without the continuous assistance and support of local police departments, federal agencies would already have been outmaneuvered by protest movements. When Democrat politicians claim that they need to “maintain order,” they are attempting to position themselves as junior partners in the consolidation of fascism. It may be in their interests to “maintain order” as mercenaries kidnap and murder people, but it is not in ours.
\n\nWe offer here an account from the protests following the shooting in North Minneapolis, sent to us anonymously.
\n\n Demonstrators investigating the abandoned ICE vehicles apparently retrieved these “challenge coins” that ICE mercenaries receive when they kidnap people. This “coin” is decorated with a skull wearing a crown. ICE mercenaries serve king death.
\nI had two hours left at my work shift when my phone started blowing up. Several comrades didn’t know where I was and thought I might be out in the street.
\n\n\n\n\n“Where are you?”
\n
\n\n\n“You OK????”
\n
\n\n\n“Shots fired at 24th and Lyndale”
\n
\n\n\n“They just shot another person”
\n
Every rapid response group chat was talking about the same thing. All kinds of rumors were flying around. Did they shoot one person or two? Were the victims alive or dead? Somebody said ICE had shot a 12-year-old Venezuelan boy in the leg. Somebody else said the victim was hiding in his house for fear of arrest and desperately needed medical attention. I didn’t know what to believe.
\n\nIt’s always like that when a new emergency is going down. In the course of the past 45 days of federal occupation, scrambling through a fog of war to find out what just happened has become a familiar sensation. Somebody sent me a livestream of a crowd running away as ICE agents shot tear gas grenades and flashbangs at them.
\n\nTime slowed to a crawl. I hurried to finish up the drudgery I was working on as fast as I could. When I felt like I could get away with it, I told my coworkers I had a family emergency and I had to leave early. I jumped in my car and ran every stop sign on the way to 24th and North Lyndale.
\n\nI ran into a crew of street medics two blocks north of the crowd. They told me about what they’d seen before I got there. ICE had snatched two kids suspected of throwing a firework at them—20 masked thugs charging up to grab the kids, only to release them half an hour later under intense pressure from the rest of the crowd. The medics warned me that they were going to get out before the cops started mass-arresting people. In their opinion, I was walking into a kettle. The air already stank of tear gas.
\n\nAt 24th Street, I found a crowd of about a hundred people facing off against a skirmish line of Minneapolis Police Department pigs in riot gear. The feds had already left and handed over the situation to the local cops. Somebody was slowly beating a drum. To my right, kids stood up on an elevated front lawn, screaming “Fuck ICE!” and “Fuck 12!” down at MPD. Somebody was brandishing a tear gas canister that had been fired at them, showing it off to their friends. A TV news crew was there. They tried to talk to me. I pushed my way through the crowd to get away from the cameras. Beyond the skirmish line, a block south on Lyndale near 23rd, I heard the sound of shattering glass.
\n\nI doubled back and went around the block. I came out on the other side of the skirmish line. There was a crowd of young people on this side, too. They were smashing up two SUVs that I recognized immediately as ICE vehicles by their blacked-out windows and out-of-state plates. Guys were trading kicks at the glass. Somebody was proudly displaying a big Mexican flag. One young person jumped up on the hood and stomped her foot through the windshield. Somebody with a can of red spray-paint tagged “HANG KRISTI NOEM” on the side of the other car.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/header.jpg\")
A graffiti artist identified the ICE mercenaries for what they are: Nazis.
\nA few people pulled a locked gun safe out of the trunk of one of the cars. Somebody dumped a fingerprinting kit on the ground. Someone else was rifling through a folder of documents at a frantic pace, snapping pictures of each one with a cell phone. There was an ICE face mask in the driver-side door of the nearest SUV. Appropriately enough, there was an ice scraper on the floor of the vehicle.
\n\nSuddenly, I heard a loud bang behind me. The familiar acrid taste of tear gas filled my nostrils. I started running south with the rest of the crowd. When we got to the next intersection, however, I turned around and saw that the cops were pulling back, shooting projectiles at the crowd as they moved east on 24th. The crowd got its bearings and we turned around and ran back up to 24th. There were such huge clouds of tear gas to the east of us that I couldn’t see the cops anymore.
\n\n“This is one! This is ICE!” I heard somebody yelling excitedly. She was pointing at another silver SUV parked on 24th. I checked the plates against the database of ICE vehicles that activists keep, saw that she was correct, and instantly felt silly for doing clerical work in the middle of a riot. Someone started whacking one of the side windows with the ice scraper that had been in the previous vehicle, striking it as hard as possible. After a few swings, there was a satisfying crunch as the window gave in. People around me began kicking in these windows, too. Somebody got the driver’s side door open and threw a firecracker inside.
\n\nSome overzealous cameraman—I couldn’t tell if it was the same guy from before—muscled his way through the crowd to get a shot of the ICE vehicle receiving this treatment. “No video!” someone roared at him. “If you let him take pictures of this shit, somebody is going to jail!” A few people forcefully encouraged the cameraman to turn around and leave the area.
\n\nWhen the tear gas cleared, I saw that the cops were gone. It seemed too good to be true. I ran up a couple blocks to scout the perimeter. They were nowhere to be seen.
\n\nI went back to where the two smashed-up ICE vehicles were. A festive block party mood had set in. People were setting off fireworks. Somebody was trying to pry open the gun case. Someone was dancing on top of a vehicle again while someone else blasted “I Don’t Fuck With You” by Big Sean. Young folks passed around a bottle of Hennessy. A lane of traffic had opened up. Some passing motorists raised their fists out the window and shouted “FUCK ICE!”
\n\n“I’m so proud of my city,” I found myself murmuring out loud. After seven weeks of atrocities at the hands of these fascists, people were finally fighting back. I thought about the liberals who were at home wringing their hands about how we were supposedly giving the feds an excuse for a crackdown (what the fuck did they think was already happening?) and posting on Facebook about the “language of the unheard.” The newfound comrades I was partying with around the looted vehicles seemed perfectly eloquent to me.
\n\nThe George Floyd uprising of 2020 was never very far away. Its specter has haunted Minneapolis throughout everything that has happened for the last month and a half. Tonight, January 14, it finally assumed corporeal form again. People will remember tonight as the opening salvo of the people’s counterattack against a fascist invasion.
\n\nWhen history is written the way it ought to be written, it will not be our ferocity, but rather, the moderation and long patience of the Twin Cities that will make people shake their heads in wonder.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/2.jpg\")
\nAhead of the 2022 elections, Brazil is now reprising the same dramatic showdown that the United States faced in 2020. As the pandemic intensifies alongside corruption scandals and the unrestrained plundering of Indigenous lands, Jair Bolsonaro’s government faces pressure from the streets and the left wing of the state. But what will it take to unseat him and break out of the patterns that brought him to power?
\n\nThe parallels between Brazil and the United States run deep. Both are settler colonial states founded on slavery. The United States has largely completed its frontier phase, while Brazil continues to expand extraction efforts into Indigenous territories. In both cases, the state has become a battleground between the far right, represented by Donald Trump and Bolsonaro, and a centrist technocracy seeking to transition to a slightly more “sustainable” and “inclusive” form of capitalism. Globally speaking, these represent competing models regarding how to preserve capitalism in the face of climate change and global economic crisis—barefaced violence versus the likes of the “Green New Deal.” Though Trump narrowly failed to hold on to power in 2020, it is entirely possible that the struggle in Brazil could turn out differently, setting a precedent for the spread of fascism in the 21st century.
\n\nOf course, neither of these models points the way out of the current nightmare of exploitation and police violence. If we want to have any hope of changing the world for the better, we have to build social movements outside the logic of reaction and reform. Had there not been four years of intense grassroots struggles under Trump, he would likely have succeeded in holding onto power one way or another—and if those struggles do not continue under Biden and whoever succeeds Bolsonaro, far-right politicians will once again be able to present themselves as the only alternative to the status quo.
\n\nIn the following report, Brazilian anarchists frame the government’s genocidal approach to COVID-19 in the context of a legacy of military rule, explore the latest wave of combative protests, and show how the institutional left functions as the first line of defense to preserve the existing order. They make the case that the conditions they face can only be fundamentally changed by means of autonomous organization and revolt.
\n\nAn earlier version of this text appeared in Portuguese here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/5.jpg\")
Anti-fascists in Belo Horizonte blockade the street in front of a burning barricade.
\nBrazil is facing a dire situation. With no federal plan to vaccinate the population, the COVID-19 death toll—already the highest average in the world at more than 1000 per day—continues to grow.
\n\nPeople across the country are once again taking the streets to face a government more dangerous than the virus. In addition to exacerbating the pandemic, the federal government and Congress are facilitating attacks on Indigenous populations, threatening their continued existence on their lands and turning over what is left of the forests to mining and agribusiness.
\n\nAt the same time, the opposition within the Senate is leading a Congressional Inquiry Commission (CPI) seeking to prove that the federal government’s negligence was intentionally designed to spread COVID-19, with a particularly deadly impact on poor, Black, and Indigenous people. The investigation has found evidence confirming this, alongside corruption scandals in the purchase of vaccines.
\n\nIn this context, many people have renewed their hope that the existing institutions might punish those responsible for more than half a million deaths. Yet those who choose to protest in the streets face unions and center-left parties that seek to channel the revolt solely towards improving their prospects the next elections. With our loved ones dying, it makes no sense to wait for verdicts or elections.
\n\nBolsonaro’s administration and the reactionary populist movement around it have doubled down on genocidal and ecocidal responses to the current crises. The institutional left and the “moderate” sectors of the social movements are actively undermining grassroots efforts by attempting to dictate what forms of struggle are legitimate and by cooperating with the state to advance their own political goals. Facing this dual threat, the only way out is through autonomous organization and revolt, as demonstrated by pockets of Indigenous, Black, anarchist, and unaffiliated resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/7.jpg\")
The official number of COVID-19 deaths in Brazil has surpassed 560,000. The slogan on the Brazilian flag translates to “Order and Progress”—a fitting slogan for the genocidal government of a colonial slave state.
\nDemocracy is typically presented as the antithesis of dictatorship and fascism. Yet as we have seen in Spain, Greece, Chile, and elsewhere, these two forms of governance often transition smoothly from one to the other according to the needs of those who rule. The Congressional Inquiry investigations may offer hope to some, but we cannot afford to rely on these sorts of democratic rituals that ultimately exist to lend false legitimacy to a destructive system. Especially in the Americas, where the foundational violence of Black slavery and Indigenous genocide continue in every country, we must confront the problems at their roots.
\n\nCopying Donald Trump’s playbook, Bolsonaro and his militias are promising to contest the result of the 2022 elections if the electronic system is not replaced by printed ballots. He has appointed more than 6000 active high-ranking military officers, many of them generals, to high civilian government positions—more than the 1964-1985 dictatorship—and bought the support of the Military Police with prestige, immunity for crimes committed on duty, and real estate credits. He is conducting an ongoing campaign to arm his supporters, which has already doubled the number of weapons in circulation in Brazil. Angry gangs of white men help him construct an image of popular support and to threaten the opposition.
\n\nThere are important parallels here with the political situation in the United States preceding the 2020 elections. During the investigations that began in 2017 and the first Trump impeachment process starting in December 2019, part of the US population waited to see if the institutions would fulfill their promise to punish President Trump. The protests that had taken place against the administration since its inauguration subsided while people waited to see if the authorities would solve the problem. It was only after police murdered George Floyd in May 2020 that the streets again became the main stage for people’s action.
\n\nProminent Democratic Party figures and liberal news outlets like the New York Times accused the insurgent elements of the George Floyd rebellion of frightening the public, offering the perfect image of an “internal enemy” for Trump to use to present himself as a solution to political chaos and the health crisis. However, as it turned out, a significant part of the population identified with the militant protests against police violence and racism, and as a result, Trump’s popularity plummeted.
\n\nIt was not democratic institutions but rather the courage of the people facing the police and white supremacist militias in the streets that isolated Trump and undermined his political viability, succeeding where every investigation and impeachment had failed. If the few who had no choice but to take action in the streets had been left to fight alone, the far right could have gained even more momentum by occupying the streets alongside the police. Together, police and militias would have gained more legitimacy and control of the situation, helping Trump to dominate the public debate ahead of the election.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/header-2.jpg\")
Protesters in front of the burning Third Precinct of the Minneapolis Police after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
\nTo understand Trump and Bolsonaro in the politics of our time, we have to grasp that they do not represent the death of democracy. Rather, they foreground the elements that democratic governments have always shared with fascist regimes: police and prisons, racism and patriarchy, genocide. Winning the popular vote and amassing enough support in parliament to act with impunity have sufficed to enable them to carry out their authoritarian plans. This is explicit in Brazil, where the military faced no consequences for the persecutions, arrests, tortures, disappearances, and murders perpetrated during the last dictatorship.1 Bolsonaro is just the current representative of this project, the “military party” that has controlled the Republic since its foundation in 1889.
\n\n“Brazilian Military Party” - with subtitles.
\nLong before he became president, Bolsonaro represented a violent project threatening the freedom and lives of poor and excluded people—but we could not imagine the dimensions that this would assume during the pandemic. With 2.7% of the world population, Brazil already accounts for 13% of COVID-19 deaths globally. Indigenous peoples face not only the pandemic, but also fires in the Amazon and the Pantanal as well as the advance of agribusiness, illegal mining, and unregulated logging. Lawmakers are determined to hand over Indigenous reserves to large estates and extractive projects in the name of GDP growth.
\n\nTo date, this extermination plan has cost more than half a million lives under the guise of “saving the economy” by packing people into workplaces, schools, and crowded public transit to catch COVID-19. This is not a fringe conspiracy theory about a secret plan to spread the virus. A study of thousands of federal and state laws, conducted by Conectas Human Rights and the University of São Paulo, concluded that the Bolsonaro government had knowingly enabled the pandemic to spread. The CPI investigations also included testimony showing how at least 400,000 deaths could have been avoided if people had taken basic measures to promote prevention.
\n\nAt the same time, studies attesting to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black and Indigenous populations have faced institutional censorship, while civil servants who tried to apply health recommendations that have worked around the world have experienced retaliation. Bolsonaro has supported a campaign to boycott vaccinations, promoted ineffective medicines, and, more recently, deliberately delayed purchasing vaccines in order to buy overpriced vaccines through tax havens.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/8.jpg\")
“Bolsonaro Out! And take Mourão, the military officers, Guedes, and the vaccine thieves with you.” General Mourão and Guedes are the vice-president and economy minister of Brazil, respectively.
\nDuring the CPI, Senator Alessandro Vieira compared the search for those responsible for the deaths in the pandemic to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official responsible for the logistics of Hitler’s concentration camps. Others discussed the city of Manaus during the oxygen crisis in the state of Amazonas, when hundreds of people with severe COVID-19 suffocated in hospitals without care, the dead were buried in mass graves, and, in the phrasing of Senator Otto Alencar, the city was used as a “testing ground” for mass treatment via ineffective drugs like chloroquine.
\n\nThe investigation in the Senate has attracted the attention of those who do not want to “just wait for the 2022 elections”—they are anxiously awaiting the results, just as millions in the United States waited in vain for Trump to be convicted. But the Brazilian colonial project is more alive than ever: the same Congress that is investigating the Bolsonaro administration is doing nothing to stop the laws that pave the way for the destruction of biomes and peoples.
\n\nSince early June 2021, Indigenous people from at least 25 ethnic groups have been gathering in Brasilia to protest against a bill known as PL 490, which hands over their territories to predatory economic exploitation, weakens Indigenous land rights, and encourages the assimilation of native people who have chosen to live in isolation from whites and urban societies. To assert the right to their lands, Indigenous people will need to prove their ownership status up until the day the 1988 Federal Constitution was passed, at the very end of the dictatorship. This attack on Indigenous peoples is one of the worst of the Bolsonaro administration, but it was drafted in 2007 and advanced considerably under the Workers’ Party. It is a step towards the “point of no return” of devastation in the Amazon, the largest tropical forest in the world, which suffered the greatest deforestation of the decade in 2020 and may never fully recover.
\n\n“The Uprising Is for the Earth” - with subtitles
\nOn June 8, 800 Indigenous people gathered to pressure the Constitution and Justice Commission (CCJ) of the House of Representatives, which could approve or reject PL/490. At the door of the FUNAI (the National Indian Foundation, the Brazilian government body that establishes and implements policies relating to Indigenous peoples), police attacked the protesters with rubber bullets and other less-lethal munitions while they were gathering and singing traditional songs.
\n\nOn July 22, the day of the vote on the law, the police again attacked the protesters outside the Chamber of Deputies, who shot back with arrows and hit two policemen. The confrontation postponed the vote to July 23, when it was approved by the majority of lawmakers. The camps in Brasilia persist; as of this writing, they include almost 2000 Indigenous people from 52 ethnic groups.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/zumpanoandressa/status/1407451700999430149\n\n\n
Police attack Indigenous groups in front of the Chamber.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/andrevallias/status/1407669832070410242\n\n\n
Chief Kretã Kaingang made a necklace with tear gas canisters fired against Indigenous people in Brasília on July 22.
\n\nThe Indigenous people who have remained in their territories have organized solidarity actions together with other autonomous movements to support and echo the struggle in Brasilia. On June 25, Guaranis from the Jaraguá Indigenous Land used tires and burning barricades to block highways in São Paulo. On June 28, Guajajaras, Puris, and Xoklengs blocked an avenue in Rio de Janeiro. The Pataxó people in the south of Bahia blockaded the BR101 highway on July 22 to the chants of “Let’s sing, dance the catimbó, to bring Bolsonaro back bound in vines.”
\n\nMore resistance is expected in August when PL/490 faces the courts. These Indigenous efforts demonstrate that combative actions and solidarity among diverse peoples and movements are fundamental to the struggle against a genocidal state.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/felipedjeguaka/status/1408174920673251330\n\n\n
“Bahia terra de côco e azeite de dendê A água do côco é doce, eu também quero beber. Vamos cantar, dançar o catimbó, pra trazer o bolsonaro amarrado no cipó.” – “Let’s sing, dance the catimbó, to bring Bolsonaro bound in vines.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Midia1508/status/1409467019787964417\n\n\n
On the morning of Monday, June 28, Indigenous people blocked Avenida Presidente Castelo Branco to protest bill 490.
\n\nWhile the criminal justice system is oppressive under any government, repression targeting ideological opponents has intensified considerably under Bolsonaro. On March 18, in Brasília, Federal Police arrested the PT (Workers’ Party, Partido dos Trabalhadores) militant Rodrigo Pilha for carrying a banner reading “Bolsonaro Genocida” (“Bolsonaro is genocidal”). Pilha was held for more than 100 days until he began a hunger strike protesting isolation, torture, and his continued imprisonment even after being entitled to transfer to a semi-open facility. He and four other defendants are being prosecuted under the National Security Law, a legal remnant from the dictatorship era. Similarly, during protests on July 3 in São Paulo, Matheus Machado was arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned for ten days, accused of stealing a police helmet he found on the ground. Machado is free under severe legal conditions. Both were only released after intense public pressure.
\n\nThese legal devices for targeting protesters are not new tools. Dilma Roussef and the Workers’ Party administration used them in 2013. However, police persecution is advancing and harsher laws are on the way, such as a bill inspired by the Patriot Act written by Bolsonaro himself in 2016 when he was still a congressman.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/1.jpg\")
Blockade of a viaduct in Belo Horizonte, July 3, 2021.
\nAnother law in the works, PL272, would directly attack social movements by criminalizing strikes and protests and introducing vetoed passages from the Anti-Terrorism Law signed by Dilma Roussef and her Workers’ Party government just before her fall in 2016.
\n\nJust as Trump utilized executive privileges that were vastly expanded under Obama, a right-wing government is once again building on the legislative and administrative tools of repression passed by previous administrations further to the left. In this case, the president’s intention to carry out a coup is obvious and long predates his election. If he knows there will be no resistance, this is virtually an invitation for him to go ahead. As he himself claimed, it is the military that “decides whether the people will live in a democracy or a dictatorship.” While military leaders before the Dilma administration generally refrained from commenting on politics and claimed to be “totally committed to democracy,” today they routinely release statements that add to Bolsonaro’s threats. The head of the Air Force reacted to the CPI investigations into the corruption of military personnel by saying that “an armed man does not make threats”—itself a threat.
\n\nBolsonaro’s administration has a well-known penchant for positive references to the Nazis. On July 22, Bolsonaro proudly hosted Beatrix von Storch from the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). Storch, the granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister Lutz Graf von Krosigk, has already claimed to be in favor of “shooting refugees.” She represents an ultra-nationalist, neo-fascist, and partly neo-Nazi party. When necessary, Bolsonaro and his family draw closer to Israel and religious fundamentalism, but when it’s convenient, he dog-whistles anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi rhetoric.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/eixopolitico/status/1419624144950468613\n\n\n
Bolsonaro hosted Beatrix von Storch from the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) on July 22.
\n\nIn this context, pro-Bolsonaro populist organizing including rallies, motorcades, and motorcycle rides, alongside militarized police forces and military control of most of the executive branch, represent an authoritarian offensive stretching from the street to the top of the security apparatus and the government. The current rigging of the military police, which was previously controlled at the state level, and the precedent of a coup orchestrated by the police in Bolivia in 2019 make a new Brazilian coup a very real threat.
\n\nIt would be a terrible mistake not to take the streets the way people have done from north to south, hoping instead to defeat Bolsonaro and his supporters in the 2022 elections or with a conviction through the CPI. Remember, Trump never faced consequences for his crimes from within the institutions, and he only lost the election in a context of widespread revolt. We can’t rely on the parliament that approves the Bolsonaro administration’s projects or the same political and economic elites that opened the doors for Bolsonaro’s militarism. Even if we managed to restore liberal democratic politics that way, that would not eliminate fascism—it would only return with it to the barracks from which it will be recruited again the next time it is useful to the powerful.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/6.jpg\")
“Bolsonaro Out!” Indigenous people form the front line of a demonstration in Brasília on June 19.
\nFrom May 29 through June and July 2021, social movements and unions called for demonstrations around the country protesting Jair Bolsonaro’s government. These protests brought tens of thousands of people into the streets in major capitals. Many people attended carrying the names and photos of loved ones lost to the pandemic. In many cities, autonomous blocs involving anarchists, Indigenous people, football fans, and anti-fascists took the lead. Some of the protests were combative, involving barricades, blockades, graffiti, and attacks on the property of the wealthy.
\n\nAt the same time, center-left parties continue to spread the dangerous idea that the 2022 elections offer the only way to get rid of Bolsonaro and his government. Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil) became eligible to run after charges against him were dropped due to lack of evidence; he is a favorite in the polls.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/2.jpg\")
An autonomous bloc in São Paulo, July 3.
\nAfter police brutally attacked a peaceful demonstration on May 29 in Recife with tear gas and rubber bullets, and clashes in São Paulo marked the protests of June 19, these organizations called for a new action for July 24—more than one month later. However, corruption scandals involving top members of the government buying overpriced vaccines imparted a sense of urgency, and the demonstrations were moved to the beginning of July. Capitalizing on renewed hopes that the institutions would come through to handle the crises Bolsonaro has created, the trade union federations, parties, and movements organized by the center-left tried to monopolize control over decisions about when and how the demonstrations would take place.
\n\nMany people criticized the attempt to postpone the demonstrations in order to temper the momentum of the participants for fear that it could compromise their electoral agenda. When trade union central committees and political parties decide that everyone must wait more than a month for the next demonstration to protest hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, then opportunistically change their decision when a corruption scandal emerges, they reveal a commitment to the same legalism that enabled the far-right to take power in the first place. Mass murder is part of our daily lives, they are saying—but corruption, now that is unacceptable!
\n\nIf we want to defend ourselves against such rulers, we have to do it ourselves. Even if we only achieve half victories, like an impeachment or the electoral defeat of Bolsonaro, those will hardly happen without the streets on fire. We must confront the legalistic and centralizing tendencies within our own movements and abandon any desire to govern the revolt. When someone tries to centralize influence over the movement, dividing those who take action in the streets into legitimate and illegitimate actors, the next step is always police repression.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RedeInfoA/status/1411434924645752837\n\n\n
Many social movements in Brazil claim to be inspired by the recent struggles in Colombia, the United States and Chile, even if they only extract specific aspects out of context—such as the new Chilean constitution or the struggle of the Colombian people to stop Ivan Duque’s tax reform. But the social strength we have seen in those struggles is only possible because a critical mass of the participants respect a diversity of actions on the streets and within each kind of organization.
\n\nJust like Workers’ Party militants in their delusions about the 2013 uprising in Brazil, or Democrats in the United States in 2020, the reformist left in Brazil is spreading paranoia that the recent social unrest is the work of “infiltrators.” The outside agitator is the perennial mythical character invoked by those who have never visited a street protest, who fear revolt more than they fear the police. In addition to rejecting the narrative that blames those who rebel for repression, we must also challenge the notion that if we wish to be safe from the pandemic, then rather than protesting, we must stay home—after crowding together at work and on public transport, under the reign of a government that seeks to kill us off!
\n\nOn June 19, in São Paulo, we saw what happens when we do not confront tendencies towards centralization in social movements that promote electoralism, when members of the MTST (Homeless Workers Movement) physically attacked an autonomous bloc including Indigenous people, unions, individuals, and anarchist collectives. The members of the MTST were trying to break up barricades on the avenue and to report people to the police, repeating the errors of 2014 when they violently unmasked participants in a black bloc and handed them over to police.
\n\nBlack, Indigenous, and anarchist movements condemned this episode. The MTST is one of the largest movements in the country and it is not fair to judge all the participants, many of whom are also Indigenous and Black. The problem here is structural. Similar incidents recurred in the July 13 protests in Rio de Janeiro, when members of a Stalinist party tried to commandeer the front of the march by expelling the autonomous bloc involving Indigenous people and anarchists, and again on July 24, when members of PCB (the Brazilian Communist Party) made a human chain to expel and assault a group of transgender and homeless people from the squat Casa Nem.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/cmi_saopaulo/status/1411441806298996740/photo/2\n\n\n
We must never accept those who criminalize protesters or seek to dispute their legitimacy by citing laws and parroting the talking points of the police. It is even worse to actively collaborate with the police, as occurred in São Paulo days before the July 24 demonstration, when representatives of the PCB, the National Union of Students (UNE), the Workers’ Cause Party (PCO), and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) sat down at the table with police to agree on what would happen at the protest, when and where, who would be a legitimate part of the demonstration and who the police should target.
\n\nThe records of that meeting were published online, exposing the process of criminalizing anarchists and autonomous movements. The movements and parties agreed on using fines to punish demonstrators with opposing ideologies occupying the same area or organizing simultaneous actions. Of course, this would restrict anti-fascists from organizing counter demonstrations against fascists, giving the far right a free pass to attack oppressed people. In signing this agreement, the PCB, PCO, and PSDB became ideologically equivalent in repudiating direct action and the “violent” acts they attribute to infiltrators. They also became complicit in any subsequent police repression.
\n\nThese attempts to stifle autonomous, Indigenous, and anarchist organizations in the streets show the dangers of hierarchical practices and methods. If people acting autonomously to express their rage over the loss of the dead and the misery of the living are disturbing not only to the police, but also to those marching alongside us, then the movements will likely stifle any rebellion long before the police themselves do. The choice to attack fellow protesters, as well as total silence on the part of the leadership of the groups that perpetrated the attacks, exposes the authoritarianism of the segments of the left that only accept revolt when they can control it. Taking the streets to exert real pressure is not a priority when they seek only to create an image of revolt directed toward the only form of social transformation they see as legitimate: the ballot box.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/rede_genocidio/status/1406732177191079938\n\n\n
Note of repudiation by the Rede de Proteção e Resistência ao Genocídio (Network for Protection and Resistance to Genocide) on the action of the MTST.
\n\nHistorically, far-right movements like Integralism (an old fascist Brazilian movement) were not stopped by voting or petitioning, but by direct action. We can see this in the episode in 1934 that became known as the “Battle of Praça da Sé,” when anarchists, socialists, and communists broke up an Integralist gathering in downtown São Paulo, stole a police machine gun, and violently dispersed the fascists, burying their movement for decades to come.
\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
Belo Horizonte: a blockade on July 24.
\nIn 2020, demonstrators in Brazil realized that direct action was necessary and anti-fascist soccer fans published calls to block right-wing motorcades and rallies, later denouncing racism and police violence. The movement gained momentum and inspiration from the George Floyd protests in the US. Many organizations and public figures said that they would not join the demonstrations and recommended that people stay home, claiming that the demonstrations would “offer the Bolsonaro government the pretext for even greater repression” or even “a coup” (or a “self-coup”). As we saw during the uprisings in the US, this narrative is reactionary, willfully imposing weakness on social movements, as it places the responsibility for repression on the oppressed.
\n\nIt is foolish to imagine that passivity will mollify authoritarians rather than embolden them. Submission is not an effective strategy against despots like Bolsonaro or Trump.
\n\nMovements in the US, Colombia, and Chile have illuminated how we can move forward by breaking the façade of social tranquility, generalizing rebellion and organization across a range of social sectors, and avoiding management and confinement by hierarchical left groups. Of course, we should not settle for concessions. A new constitution in Chile or a police reform in the US might only make it more difficult to pursue meaningful social change in the long run. Still, it is obvious that we will not achieve even a partial victory, such as the immediate fall of Bolsonaro, if the forces that seek to pacify and criminalize the revolt gain ground within our movements.
\n\nWe are certain that not all the people who participate in a mass popular uprising will be part of a formal organization, nor should they be. Not every form of action is foreseen and planned by social movements. Instead of questioning the “organization” or the “legitimacy” of those who take action, we should ask ourselves how to support them, how to offer tools so that the revolt can become more dangerous, how we can help to build lasting alternatives.
\n\nAs for the dangers of combative actions in the streets, we recall that on May 29, the Recife police needed no pretext whatsoever to attack a peaceful protest and blind two people who were not even participating. If an organized bloc had been present to protect protesters with shields, keeping the riot police at a distance by combative means as the front lines in Chile and Hong Kong have done, the presence of elderly people, families, and people with reduced mobility would not have served as a pretext to promote pacifism and get beaten by police. According to the “revolutionary clock” of those who seek centralization, control, and pacification, it is never the right time to build barricades and fight back. But when fascism is flourishing, taking over both the streets and the institutions, this is a sign that our clock is running late and fiercer forms of action are long overdue.
\n\nDismantling fascism involves disrupting its grassroots organization, blocking its marches and rallies so that they can’t occupy the streets to recruit more members, and neutralizing its strategies for spreading its ideology. The actions of June and July show that thousands of people are willing to take the streets and impose consequences on the rich and powerful. Indigenous peoples have been organizing against the most destructive government they have faced in decades; they show a willingness to build popular and radical alliances.
\n\nAs a result of the dialogue between social struggles in the city, countryside, and Indigenous lands, on July 24, the day of the last great national protest against Bolsonaro that month, people set fire to a statue of the pioneer Borba Gato, a symbol of wealth built on Indigenous extermination and black slavery. In an action signed by the Revolução Periférica collective, people surrounded the 42-foot statue with burning tires. Some activists accused of participating in the group were arrested a few days later, including Paulo Galo, a member of the Entregadores Antifascistas (an antifascist delivery workers’ informal organization) and his wife Géssica Barbosa. Barbosa was released on July 30, but Galo remains illegally imprisoned.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1419138055877931011\n\n\n
When we occupy the streets en masse, learning from our mistakes and successes, sharing tools for resistance and self-defense, we advance further towards our revolutionary goals than when we count on leaders and bureaucrats to do the work for us. Now, in the face of crises that are continuing to worsen, some on the left would back down and give in to the delusion that this murderous government can correct itself via its own institutional mechnisms. The opposite is true. We must fight even harder, more intelligently, and more creatively for the new world we carry in our hearts.
\n\nLet us be the ones who build the barricades in the streets to confront fascism, not the pacifying hands that tear them down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/4.jpg\")
“Robbed us and killed us—impeachment is too little!” It takes fire in the streets to achieve even partial victories.
\nThe first criminal conviction of an officer from the dictatorship occurred in 2021, 36 years after the regime’s end, when one Civil Police chief was sentenced to two years in a “semi-open” facility (essentially a halfway house without fences or guards) for kidnapping and imprisonment. ↩
\nThis has been a rough year for everyone, including us. At the nadir, Donald Trump was tweeting that anarchists were responsible for all the rioting around the country, the New York Times was alleging that the violence was our fault personally, and social media corporations were cutting our lines of communication with the public. In the old days, if all those things happened to you in a row, the next thing to expect would be a police raid. This year, though, all that is just par for the course—most people have had an even rougher time, with tens of thousands of political arrests and hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths in the United States alone. Despite all these challenges, in many ways, we had one of our most productive years. In the following report, we review the events of 2020 and the highlights of our publishing efforts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/05/1.jpg\")
This poster that we published before the pandemic reached the United States captures the spirit of 2020, from COVID-19 and forest fires to the George Floyd Uprising.
\nOne of our achievements in 2020 was expanding our website to be fully multi-lingual: we got the infrastructure of the site functioning in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and we added new material in a grand total of 28 different languages. While the COVID-19 pandemic gave governments an excuse to clamp down national borders and foment new gulfs between populations, we’ve made another important step towards cultivating international connections and consciousness in the anarchist movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/13/header.jpg\")
\nThe pandemic created a captive audience of several billion people, all depending on the internet for information; we saw massive spike in traffic to our website. On the other hand, busy responding to constant emergencies, we didn’t complete any new print projects in English besides an array of new zines. Our German-speaking comrades upstaged us, producing a new book collecting German versions of CrimethInc. texts from the past eight years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/03/7.jpg\")
A new collection of our work in German.
\nIt has been a difficult time for creative experimentation, with unceasing crises making it difficult to do anything other than continuously react. Nonetheless, we managed to publish a few artistic projects—notably a multi-continental art project celebrating the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth and our exploration of Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, originally solicited for the second issue of Antipolitika, the premier Balkan anarchist journal, in a theme issue engaging with the legacy of Yugoslavia.
\n\nFor the same reason, it has been a bad year for reflective theoretical projects, though we did publish “What Would an Anarchist Program Look Like?”, an exercise intended to provoke people into formulating their own proposals for what anarchist revolution will involve.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/22/7.jpg\")
A scene from our art project celebrating the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth.
\nThe aforementioned spike in web traffic enabled us to reach more people, as the tactics and analyses we have been developing for a quarter of a century suddenly became relevant to countless thousands who found themselves caught between an uprising and a police state. But not being able to travel, speak publicly, or sell books through book stores also made us more dependent on corporate channels to communicate. Midway through 2020, the empire struck back, with Facebook banning us from their platform along with dozens of other anarchist writers and news sites on the pretext that they were banning pages that “support violence.” Though they spun this as a measure to crack down on militia organizing, in fact, militias were permitted to continue organizing on Facebook: the militia mobilization in which Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two people and shot a third was organized via Facebook shortly after the ban went into effect. Far from cracking down on violence, in banning us and an array of other anarchist journalists, Facebook was simply bowing to right-wing pressure to suppress the voices of those who were documenting the rise of fascist violence.
\n\nIn response, thousands of public figures including David Graeber, Noam Chomsky, Cory Doctorow, and Chelsea Manning published an open letter protesting the banning of anarchist journalists from Facebook and rejecting the company’s false equivalence between right-wing groups that organize violent attacks and anti-fascist groups that report on them.
\n\nNext, the New York Times platformed a far-right conspiracy hack with no prior journalistic experience to allege that CrimethInc. was somehow responsible for orchestrating all the unrest around the country. It seems almost incomprehensible that reputable journalists would sully their credibility simply in order to bolster the narrative spread by their avowed adversary, Donald Trump. The only way we can understand this is by framing it in the context of ongoing centrist attempts to undermine the momentum of the George Floyd uprising by alleging it would return Trump to office and employing divisive narratives about outside agitators.
\n\nIt took until mid-December for Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to follow Facebook’s example, closing our account without explanation or justification. Presumably, both platforms will slowly, steadily suppress anarchists and other principled voices from here forward. This makes it especially pressing to establish other means of communicating. To that end, we’ve established a Telegram channel, a Mastodon account, and notifications via Signalboost.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/19/banned-on-facebook.jpg\")
\nEverything we contributed in 2020—from composing eyewitness reports and analysis to programming this site and mailing out books—we accomplished by means of 100% volunteer labor, working collectively and anonymously the way we have since the mid-1990s. We seek neither financial gain nor fame nor personal credit for what we do. We are driven solely by our desire for collective liberation and the joy we take in collaborating on creative projects together.
\n\nAs always—if you like what we do, the best thing you can do is do it yourself. Take action in your own community, develop and refine your own analyses and strategies, reach out to others and fight for social change. You can also contribute to our efforts in a variety of ways, or, failing that, donate to us to help us print new outreach materials. Please contact us if you can help in some other way!
\n\nWe lost a lot of talented and hardworking comrades this year. It will be challenging to fill their shoes.
\n\nIn February, anarchist author, publisher, and gadfly Aragorn! passed away. We published a transcription of an interview conducted in summer 2018 in which Aragorn! describes the development of counterculture and anarchism across four decades—from his youth in the hardcore scene during the Reagan years to gang conflicts with Nazi skinheads, the first Gulf War, the emergence of the Internet, and all the different publishing and infrastructure projects he participated in.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/19/10.jpg\")
Aragorn!
\nIn September, our friend David Graeber also passed away. David was a tireless and wide-ranging anarchist thinker. Like Aragorn!, we all assumed he still had decades of important work ahead of him when he was suddenly taken from us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/03/5.jpg\")
David Graeber.
\nLongtime anarchist Stuart Christie, the Anarchist Black Cross organizer who carried the torch of anarchism through the bleak mid-20th century until its resurgence in the 1980s. We recommend his writing as well as the anarchist film archive he curated.
\n\nWe also lost Diane di Prima, one of the most important beat poets and an anarchist proponent of revolution across two centuries, and Lucio Urtubia Jiménez, the anarchist illegalist whose inspiring political counterfeiting efforts are chronicled in the documentary Lucio.
\n\nWe mourn the death of Michael Forest Reinoehl, the anti-fascist who was extrajudicially murdered by police and US marshals at the urging of Donald Trump for the crime of defending himself from a fascist attack.
\n\nBrian McCarville, an anarchist imprisoned in Oregon, passed away on his 68th birthday, September 27. He had participated in struggles against the prison system since the turn of the century. Fierce anti-prison organizers Karen Smith and Rebecca L. Hensley passed away in December, followed by Lois Martin, an octogenarian volunteer with No More Deaths and a veteran of six decades of activism.
\n\nWhile we were completing this text, we learned of the passing of anarchist historian Alexandre Skirda. He was known best for his biography of Nestor Makhno, Anarchy’s Cossack, which remains the definitive work on the life of the Ukrainian revolutionary.
\n\nFinally, we grieve the passing of all those who have been killed by police, imprisonment, and COVID-19—all the squandered potential of our age.
\n\nIt’s easy to forget that 2020 began the same way it is ending, with saber-rattling from Trump threatening a war with Iran. In Chile and Lebanon, the uprisings that had exploded in late 2019 were still simmering. In the United States, things seemed relatively quiet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/30/against-all-wars-farsi_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Working with comrades around the world, we made versions of this poster reading “Against all wars—against all governments—against all oppression” in Farsi, Arabic, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
\nThe COVID-19 pandemic is the first of a series of biological and ecological crises that late capitalism will face. We foreshadowed how a health system based around control would fail to protect people in “The Operation Succeeded, but the Patient Died,” our analysis of how what Michel Foucault called “biopower” functions in both hospitals and prisons.
\n\nIn our introduction to “Against the Coronavirus and the Opportunism of the State,” a report from Italy when COVID-19 was spiking there ahead of the outbreak in the United States, we laid out the basic problem that the virus forced our society to confront:
\n\n\n\n\nFundamentally, the problem is that we lack a discourse about health that is not premised on centralized control. Across the political spectrum, every metaphor we have for safety and health is predicated on the exclusion of difference (for example, borders, segregation, isolation, protection) rather than the aim of developing a positive relationship with difference (for example, extending health-care resources to all, including those outside the borders of the US).
\n\nWe need a way of conceiving of well-being that understands bodily health, social ties, human dignity, and freedom as all being interconnected. We need a way of responding to crisis based in mutual aid—that doesn’t grant even more power and legitimacy to tyrants.
\n
Indeed, state strategies based in borders and segregation failed to keep the virus out of Europe and the United States. The chief forces that limited the impact of the pandemic and the ensuing economic turmoil here were mutual aid projects and voluntary decentralized measures such as wearing a mask and engaging in social distancing. Had access to proper medical care and enough resources to be able to take a year off from work been more evenly distributed, that would surely have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
\n\nThe economic imperatives that supposedly foster “productivity” have only been a threat to the general population and an obstacle to rational solutions. If most people were free to apply themselves to the tasks that they consider most meaningful rather than being forced to do whatever turns a profit for capitalists in order to avoid getting evicted from their homes, that would surely have resulted in more of the resources of our society being put towards solutions like finding and distributing a safe and effective vaccine, not fewer.
\n\n\n\n\nRather than placing blind faith in the state, we must focus on what we can do with our own agency, looking back to previous precedents for guidance. Let no one charge that anarchistic organizing is not “disciplined” or “coordinated” enough to address an issue like this. We have seen over and over that capitalist and state structures are at their most “disciplined” and “coordinated” precisely in the ways that they impose unnecessary crises on us—poverty, climate change, the prison-industrial complex. Anarchism, as we see it, is not a hypothetical blueprint for an alternate world, but the immediate necessity of acting outside and against the dictates of profit and authority in order to counteract their consequences. While the current models of “addressing the pandemic” that states are carrying out are based on top-down control that nevertheless fail to protect the most vulnerable, an anarchist approach would focus chiefly on shifting resources such as medical care toward all who require them, while empowering individuals and communities to be able to limit the amount of risk they choose to expose themselves to without tremendous negative consequences.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/5.jpg\")
\nOur follow-up text, “Surviving the Virus: An Anarchist Guide,” was likely our most widely-read article of 2020, reaching hundreds of thousands of people in sixteen different languages. Expanding on it, we offered an analysis of the perils of expanding state power in the COVID-19 era, sketching out three contending programs in the face of the crisis: the adherents of untrammeled capitalism (representing death), the proponents of technocracy (representing survival), and the partisans of freedom (that is, of life itself).
\n\nWe returned to some of these themes in “What’s Worth Dying for?”, exploring why so many people in the United States—including poor people—are in favor of sacrificing human beings on the altar of the economy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/capitalism-is-a-death-cult/capitalism-is-a-death-cult_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nAs people grasped for points of intervention to respond to the emerging crises, we focused on housing resistance, publishing an interview with Station 40 in San Francisco, the housing collective that was one of the first groups to publicly declare a rent strike, followed by outreach material and a history of rent strikes worldwide. We also published a narrative from a delivery driver in Manhattan describing the ways that risk is distributed according to class. Finally, we collected an array of stickers and graffiti capturing anarchists’ initial reactions to the pandemic all around the world.
\n\nIn our most ambitious historical effort of the year, “The Anarchists versus the Plague,” we chronicled the efforts of Malatesta and his comrades to respond to the cholera epidemic of 1884, translating a wealth of previously unavailable texts from French and Italian to distill lessons for twenty-first-century anarchists facing today’s pandemic.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/16.jpg\")
“A court for king cholera.” In 1884 as today, poverty and oppression were the chief comorbidities afflicting the population alongside the plague.
\nAt the beginning of the uprising in Minneapolis, we recognized how powerful and far-reaching the ensuing movement would become. We chronicled scenes from the first three weeks in our “Snapshots from the Uprising.” Our report from the uprising itself, “The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis,” became our second most widely-read article of the year, thanks in part to Fox News and the like.
\n\nAs a general principle, we try to avoid counterproductive exposure—it’s better for our publishing to reach people who will use it to do good work in the world, and otherwise to remain unheralded. But sometimes it becomes impossible to avoid publicity.
\n\n The uprising that began in Minneapolis extended the model offered by the 2014 uprising in Ferguson to the entire United States.
\nAs the movement expanded and explored new tactics, we published accounts from autonomous zones around the country and other experiments, notably an ambitious attempt to topple a statue of Christopher Columbus in Chicago.
\n\nWe also supported the movement with analytical texts, such as “What Will It Take to Stop the Police from Killing.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/4.jpg\")
Far from enabling Trump to win reelection, the uprising showed that Trump had not succeeded in securing control of the United States, discouraging his supporters among the capitalist class from throwing their weight behind his effort to seize power regardless of the outcome of the election.
\nWe covered solidarity actions in 54 countries supporting the uprising in the United States. We also published reports from homegrown uprisings in Serbia, Belarus, Colombia, Iran, and elsewhere around the world.
\n\nOn the one-year anniversary of the Turkish invasion of Rojava, we published an extensive interview with anarchists in northeast Syria, comparing their experiences fighting the Islamic State and Turkey, exploring what has occurred in Syria since the invasion, and evaluating the effectiveness of anarchist interventions in Rojava.
\n\nWe’ve also been publishing a monthly news update from Greece, to support the anarchist movement there as it contends with successive waves of repression under the aptly-named “New Democracy” government.
\n\nAfter US military officials refused to deploy the armed forces inside the United States to suppress protests against police and white supremacy, Trump set out to identify which of the armed elements of the federal government were loyal enough to him to go to war against US citizens on his behalf. He sent federal troops from the Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Oregon in a test run to see if they would be able to control the population if he attempted to seize power after the election. Thousands responded, turning the city into a warzone for weeks. We published a call for solidarity with those on the streets of Portland that contributed to another wave of resistance around the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/3.jpg\")
Cognitive dissonance: in Portland, even those who still believe in electoral politics found themselves at the forefront of clashes with the police.
\nOver the following months, Joe Biden embraced Donald Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists, agreeing that “arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted.” We responded with “The Insidious Workings of The Political Ratchet”:
\n\n\n\n\nThe US two-party system functions like a ratchet, with the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back. As the Democrats follow the Republicans in steadily countenancing more and more authoritarianism, the work that Trump is doing to frame anarchists, anti-fascists, and other protesters as legitimate targets will also be useful to Biden’s party.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/4.jpg\")
\nAs the election approached, we spelled out the dangers and the stakes in our articles “Preparing for Electoral Unrest and a Right-Wing Power Grab” and “Between Electoral Politics and Civil War.”
\n\nIn Chile, where the powerful street movements of 2019 had been suppressed by the pandemic and then channeled towards reformism, our correspondents reported on the role of electoral politics in containing and coopting struggles following the referendum in which voters demanded the replacement of the constitution left from the dictatorship era. In both countries, the elections functioned to reduce the horizon of imaginable social change. By October 2020, it was difficult to remember that over the summer, a Newsweek poll had found that fully 54% of those questioned believed the burning of the Minneapolis Police Precinct was justified after George Floyd’s killing at a time when Biden was polling around 46% and Trump at 38%. It takes a steady stream of centrist and far-right propaganda to maintain the impression that “ordinary people” want to keep things the way they are.
\n\nImmediately ahead of the US election, we organized “Everybody Out,” an awareness campaign rejecting both political parties and spreading access to the tactics demonstrators had developed during the clashes in Portland and elsewhere over the summer, in case they became necessary in the event of Trump attempting to seize power or Biden attempting to preserve Trump’s policies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/27/3.jpg\")
\nIn the end, Biden won the election. But Trump has made it very clear that if he could have seized power by brute force, he would have done so—and the rebels who made parts of many cities around the country ungovernable in May and June were among the chief factors discouraging a massive part of the capitalist class from supporting him in this endeavor. Without our grassroots resistance, his scheme could have succeeded.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1325120376867872768\n\n\n
Elections may shift who holds power within the state, but they don’t bring about immediate changes on the level of society. Aided and abetted by prosecutors and police, fascists continue to mobilize, and the dismay Trump’s loss has spread among his supporters will likely facilitate their recruiting efforts. From Washington, DC to the Pacific Northwest,
\n\n\n\n\nBiden’s electoral victory has done nothing to curtail the escalating violence of the far right. It has only emboldened them, while at the same time giving liberals an excuse to leave the most vulnerable sectors of the population to face their violence alone.
\n
Back in power, neoliberal democrats are approaching 2021 will the intention of preserving business as usual at all costs. The coming year will see the trials and tribulations of 2020 continue on a terrain that has only changed superficially: the same cutthroat capitalism, the same pandemic, the same racist police, the same authoritarian measures to exert control—and hopefully, the same courageous rebellion and resistance.
\n\nWe can conclude 2020 proud of our accomplishments, cherishing the starkly beautiful moments when people defied a world of dangers to offer a glimpse of all our lives could be.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/NYCAntifa/status/1266214274722082818\n\n\n
One of our other projects this past year was to release a series of do-it-yourself guides to protest skills and equipment. These include protecting yourself from doxxing and police batons, and everything you need to know to pick out the best helmets, body armor, and goggles and gas masks for your needs.
\n\nWe published two guides chiefly for street medics, about how to treat common injuries from police weapons and gunshot wounds.
\n\nFinally, we collected an array of tactics employed during the struggle against police and federal troops in Portland, including such innovations as employing leaf blowers to repel tear gas.
\n\nIn 2021, we’ll follow up with more guides. For good or for ill, none of the struggles we participated in this past year are concluded.
\n\nIf you also survived 2020, congratulations, and we’ll see you in the streets. Thank you for doing whatever you had to do to make it here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/10.png\")
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