![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/01/1.jpg\")
\nIn the following analysis, participants in the resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in the Twin Cities reflect on the lessons of the strikes of January 23 and January 30, looking for ways to expand and strengthen the movement.
\n\nOn January 23, 2026, a general strike against the ICE occupation paralyzed the Twin Cities. Seven days later, a second strike took place, on January 30. The first of these mass strikes drew significantly more participants than the second.
\n\nA poll conducted by participating labor and faith organizations reports that 23% of registered voters participated in the first strike in some way—a figure that does not even include vast sectors of the working class, such as undocumented workers, young people, and tens of thousands who are understandably disillusioned with the political system. Extrapolating from those polls, which indicated that 38% of those who participated in the strike in some way actively refused to work that day, we can conclude that over 300,000 people withdrew from the economy on January 23 in the Twin Cities alone.
\n\nA major Somali shopping center called Karmel Mall closed for the day. Daycare centers were forced to close when their staff demanded the day off. Workers forced a major AT&T call center to close. The biggest nursing home in the Twin Cities metro area held mandatory all-staff meetings to threaten to fire employees who participated, but those scare tactics failed and they faced mass absenteeism. The combined population of Minneapolis and Saint Paul is less than 750,000; that Friday, we saw an estimated 100,000 people take the streets in sub-zero temperatures. It is safe to conclude that at least one out of every eight Twin Cities residents took part in the general strike.
\n\nMost of what we have done here since the federal attack on the Twin Cities began has been reactive. We have organized rapid response networks to document ICE and confront their operations; we have driven them out of areas after they shoot or murder people; we have attempted to blockade their headquarters. The really exciting thing about the general strike was that it was proactive: by withdrawing our participation from the economy, we were exerting pressure not only on the Trump regime, but on the capitalist class that backs it and the Democratic politicians who have largely stayed out of its way or actively assisted as its bounty hunters have kidnapped our neighbors and terrorized us.
\n\nIf we are to reach a future in which we are not at the mercy of a totalitarian police state, we will have to develop our ability to engage in collective actions like the general strike of January 23. We have to become capable of proactively exerting leverage upon our adversaries, fracturing their coalitions and ultimately breaking their grip on power. What could hinder us from doing this?
\n\n\nThe second general strike was also massive, though significantly smaller than the first. Estimates of the crowd sizes downtown range from 20,000-30,000 people, depending on the source. A number of factors account for this discrepancy in size.
\n\nFirst, the general strike of January 23 had been called at least ten days in advance, whereas the call for the January 30 strike went out only five days ahead of time. But this alone cannot explain the difference. In times of extreme urgency and anger, actions that are called immediately sometimes turn out better than actions that are called too far in advance. The general strike of January 23 occurred at a high point of organically building momentum, when people were desperately looking for a way to take action; the strike of January 30 occurred when politicians had managed to undercut this momentum.
\n\nMovements often contract after they appear to have won concessions—in this case, the demotion of Border Patrol “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino and hollow promises from Democrat politicians to negotiate for some “guard rails” around ICE activity. Any apparent victory, however symbolic, functions as a pressure valve to diminish the urgency that people feel.
\n\nAlthough the people of the Twin Cities have experienced horrific violence at the hands of ICE for months now, the replacement of Bovino with border czar Tom Homan has given local politicians an opportunity to assert a new narrative, with governor Tim Walz calling for “a return to normalcy.” At best, this will mean a kinder, gentler Gestapo.
\n\nBoth Donald Trump and the Minnesota Democrats have a stake in “turning down the temperature,” even if that means that ICE abductions continuing by the thousand. One local Twin Cities group speculates that Walz and Trump are already working together to keep the ICE operation going in a slightly less controversial manner:
\n\n\n\n\nWe can infer the nature of the deal Walz made with Trump from the things we have seen over the last six days. Border Patrol have abandoned their previous function as crowd control at ICE’s local headquarters, the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building. Now they have ceded that role to Hennepin County Sheriffs. In the past, we’ve seen these sheriffs wearing standard blue police uniforms. This morning, when they beat and arrested at least five protesters outside Whipple, they were dressed up in tactical gear, green uniforms, and masks. They looked almost indistinguishable from the BorTac officers they are replacing. It seems clear that Walz offered up his own stormtroopers to replace Trump’s, so that Operation Metro Surge can continue unabated, and he can save face by pretending that the worst of the federal invaders have gone home.
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Even if the Democrats get ICE to behave more politely, that should appease no one. If all that the Trump administration has to do to normalize putting thousands of ICE agents in the streets is to start by doing so with unhinged violence and then retreat to a slightly less provocative approach, they will repeat that tactic all around the country. There is no “appropriate” role for ICE; Donald Trump has channeled so many billions of dollars to ICE for the purpose of building a private army with which to mete out repression targeting scapegoats and political enemies alike. The road to fascism is paved with reforms that pacify people just long enough to tighten the vice.
\n\nRather than trying to reform institutions that exist for the sole purpose of abducting, oppressing, and murdering, we have to abolish them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/01/3.jpg\")
There can be no compromise with institutions that exist for the sole purpose of oppression.
\nThe other reason that the second strike was smaller was that the constellation of labor unions, immigrants’ rights organizations, and religious institutions that bolstered the numbers for January 23 neither promoted nor mobilized their members for January 30. Instead, the call for the January 30 strike seemed to originate from a coalition of student organizations at the University of Minnesota, including the Somali, Ethiopian, and Eritrean student associations, the Black Student Union, and a graduate student organization.
\n\nTo understand the political dynamics behind these two very different strikes and the decline in participation on January 30, we have to address an albatross that has weighed down revolutionary movements for centuries: vanguardism.
\n\nVanguardism is defined as
\n\n\n\n\n“The strategy whereby an organization attempts to place itself at the center of a revolutionary movement and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology.”
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The idea of a revolutionary vanguard party underpins practically every authoritarian socialist project since the 19th century. In November 1917, Vladimir Lenin made a speech in which he set the blueprint for every state socialist party, asserting that
\n\n\n\n\n“A party is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the masses.”
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Organizations that model themselves in this image see themselves as the brain of the movement, and the rank-and-file participants as the body. They believe that their role is to guide an ignorant populace in a more “advanced” direction.
\n\nThe anarchist Alfredo Bonanno summarized his critique of this approach succinctly enough:
\n\n\n\n\n“This organization tends to cut itself off from and impose itself upon the revolutionary movement that produced it.”
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But don’t take Bonanno’s word for it. For us, this is not an ideological issue—a question of political branding—but a strategic issue.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/01/2.jpg\")
\nThe problem with vanguardism is that even when it works, it doesn’t work. Even when vanguardism consolidates control of a movement in the hands of the leadership of a single organization, it doesn’t make the movement more vibrant and effective. Whether the organization in question uses its authority to impose a direction on the rest of the movement or to hold the movement back from action altogether, it can only inhibit the growth of a movement with a widely distributed sense of agency and initiative. What’s more, organizations that understand themselves as the vanguard of the movement tend to compete with each other for control in ways that undermine the prospects of the movement as a whole. The general strike of January 30 is instructive because it offers examples of all three of these outcomes.
\n\nBy 2 pm on January 30, it became clear to anyone who was paying attention that the student groups were not themselves in the driver’s seat of the strike. A certain authoritarian socialist party was running the show. Their professionally-printed picket signs displayed their phone number. Their yellow-vested marshals policed the crowd and directed people along a predetermined route. Their chant leaders stood with a PA system on the back of a 26-foot flatbed truck that led the march. We marched in a big circle, starting and ending at the same location, Government Plaza, giving participants no opportunity to engage state forces or gum up ICE infrastructure. Like practically every event that this group has ever called, the march was as much an advertisement for the party as a tactic intended to exert pressure on the ruling class and empower the oppressed.
\n\nPresumably, this particular party, fairly large by the standards of Marxist-Leninist sects in the United States but without much of a foothold in the Twin Cities, had funneled its plans through student groups at the university. It used them as proxies to call for a strike at a moment when the iron was hot and the people of Minnesota were clamoring to fight ICE. As vanguard parties frequently do, it led from the rear.
\n\nBut all was not well in the wider ecosystem of left organizations. Another Marxist party, with a smaller footprint on the national stage but a much more established presence in Minneapolis, refused to participate in the January 30 strike. Through one of its most active front organizations, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, this competing party conspicuously declined to endorse the general strike, explaining this decision thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“This is not a MIRAC action. We support the workers’ struggle and follow the lead of unions for strikes and strike related activities. We have not seen the vast majority of unions sign onto this. MIRAC will always put our logo on our events. We do not endorse actions with no organizational logos because we can’t ensure it’s safe [sic] for participants.”
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Because this proposal for a mass strike came from outside their turf, they could only view it with territorialism and suspicion. While their competitors led from the rear, this organization sought to stand aside completely, as if they could be neutral on a moving train.
\n\nThese organizing failures are not merely incidental. They are familiar patterns that have been associated with the vanguardist approach to movement building for generations. The zero-sum approach to politics, the jealous factionalism, the turf war attitude, the reliance on front groups, the deprioritizing of tactics that actually confront the authorities, and the opportunistic drive to seize a leadership role over and above any other strategic consideration are all recognizable signs of vanguardism.
\n\nThe resistance to ICE in the Twin Cities became powerful because, rather than starting from top-down leadership models, it began at the grassroots with models that anyone could employ, models that maximized the agency and autonomy of everyone who wanted to participate. The rapid response networks proliferated because they were empowering, because they made everyone a protagonist, not because they were controlled by infallible leadership. If anything, the Twin Cities rapid response model removed bottlenecks and centralization from the model developed just a couple months earlier in Chicago, which had already been horizontal and participatory.
\n\nBecause the movement in the Twin Cities grew up in a process of organic experimentation, offering space for everyone’s ingenuity and initiative and recognizing strength in diversity rather than in the control of a preexisting leadership, it has been able to grow bigger, stronger, and smarter than any single party ever could. People try out tactics and strategies and stick with the ones that work, not the ones that benefit a leadership cadre. We should not conflate building the membership of top-down organizations with building the power of a movement. For example, many unions officially refused to participate in both the January 23 and January 30 strikes, but rank-and-file membership participated in both nonetheless. Rank-and-file readiness to strike is almost always ahead of the leadership, in unions and parties alike.
\n\nAs long as our movements depend upon vanguardist organizations and their petty power struggles, we will remain at their mercy and consequently at the mercy of the ruling class. We need a movement that cannot be held back or hijacked by any leadership, a movement that compels every aspiring vanguard to hurry after it, setting aside their squabbles and petty ambitions. That was what made the general strike of January 23 so powerful.
\n\nSo the problem with the January 30 strike was not that it brought out fewer people than the January 23 strike, per se. Many of the experiments that participants in the movement in the Twin Cities have undertaken have brought out far fewer people while pointing to an open horizon and demonstrating possibilities that others could take up and improve upon. But simply attempting to repeat the movement’s previous victories for the sake of recruitment, without opening space for innovation and confrontation, can only run it into the ground.
\n\nThe important question is whether an organizational model is reproducible, serving to empower whoever makes use of it to resist oppression, or extractive, serving to concentrate power in the hands of leaders.
\n\nThe leaderless character of the resistance to ICE in Minnesota is precisely what has made it effective. The decentralized nature of the rapid response groups has made them durable and agile. The initiative of autonomous fighters in the neighborhoods has enabled people to rise in revolt every time they have shot or murdered our neighbors. The horizontality of our mutual aid networks makes them opaque to the feds while enabling them to feed, clothe, and care for vulnerable families. No official organization would ever dare to call for the countless acts of bravery by which individuals have collectively propelled this movement forward. The everyday anarchism of the Minneapolis revolution is its greatest strength.
\n\nTo the extent that we allow top-down forces to take control of the movement, we will compromise its structural integrity and set ourselves up to lose. With so much on the line, we can’t afford to let that happen.
\n\nWe don’t need everyone who participates in the movement to agree. Some will buy into the false promises of Democratic politicians, at least until the next betrayal. Some will prefer to look to the leadership of authoritarian cadre organizations. But if a critical mass of people understand that no one is coming to save us—that it really is up to us to win this fight—and take it upon ourselves to stand up to ICE, doing whatever it takes regardless of what any politician or party prescribes, our movement will remain dynamic enough to go on growing.
\n\nAnd in the end, we will win.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/01/4.jpg\")
\nIn France, a powerful movement has erupted in response to an attempt to raise the retirement age. While millions have gone on strike and poured into the streets, President Emmanuel Macron and his henchmen have attempted to crush this movement by escalating police violence to lethal extremes. In the following report, we offer a chronology of the events of the past week, including a translation of an account by one participant in the movement and a statement from the parents of another who remains in a coma. You can read an overview the first phase of the movement and an analysis of the issues at stake here.
\n\nWhen French president Emmanuel Macron ran for office last year, part of his platform was an unpopular pension reform that would force workers to work several years more before retirement. Forced to choose between outright fascists and neoliberals, French voters grudgingly elected Macron, but a showdown has been brewing ever since.
\n\nThe movement against the pension reform got underway with a strike on January 16, 2023. Polite protests gave way to generalized unrest on March 16 when prime minister Élisabeth Borne used article 49.3 of the Constitution to bypass a vote in the National Assembly, implementing the new law by force. As the revolt gathered steam, it expanded beyond opposing the pension reform to rejecting neoliberalism as a whole. The protests, strikes, and blockades became gestures of resistance against the arbitrary power of the executive office as well as against Macron and his cronies (“Macron et son monde”), reminiscent of the Yellow Vests movement in 2018.
\n\nToday, the movement has reached another stage. In response to the intensification of the struggle and the diversification of tactics and battlefronts, police have dramatically escalated the violence with which they are targeting demonstrators. Even corporate business media like the The Financial Times are criticizing Macron’s repressive and authoritarian handling of the movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/29/4.jpg\")
Protests in Lorient on Tuesday, March 28.
\nOn March 22, the day before a general strike called by the unions, Macron stoked the fires of resentment. He showed up to address corporate media wearing a watch worth 80,000 euros, which he attempted to subtly remove during the interview. In that media appearance, Macron presented an authoritarian and disdainful figure, lying about the movement and the repression that the police had meted out. Effectively, he told the unions and the people that he cared neither about what they had to say nor about their lives in general.
\n\nOn Thursday, March 23, about 3.5 million people took the streets, including more than 800,000 in Paris alone. The blockades and strikes were successful all over the country, impacting high schools, universities, city transit, garbage collection garages, refineries, harbors, airports, trains, highways, and other institutions. The day ended with numerous “manifs sauvages” (wildcat marches) in the streets of Paris and fires all around the country—some at symbols of the executive and the government, including county offices, town halls, and police stations.
\n\nWhile it felt like a victory and a sort of coming together, Thursday also revealed that Macron and his police aimed to crush the budding uprising at any cost. Police targeted everyone without exception—for example, they usually abstain from hitting the security line that protects the unions, but in this case, they did not hesitate to. Images circulated widely showing police charging protestors indiscriminately, shooting military-grade GM2L grenades upwards and into the crowd, knocking people unconscious. While French police have never shied from using military weapons to subdue rebellious crowds—for example, during the Yellow Vest movement and the eviction of the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes in 2018—it is unusual for them to target elected officials, unions, students, and children as well as the black bloc. In many cases, the entire crowd responded with collective anger, which is also unusual.
\n\nCompared to the tremendous number of people in the streets, there were very few arrests. This was for two reasons. First, people were well organized, outnumbered the cops, and protected each other as much as they could. Second, the cops were not trying to grab people, but to inflict physical and emotional damage, in hopes of dissuading the many people who were taking to the streets for the first time from returning. Whether they succeeded or not remains to be seen.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/29/2.jpg\")
Anger directed at Élisabeth Borne, prime minister of France.
\nFriday, March 24 opened with a strong presence on the picket lines, in particular at the refinery Total Normandy (close to Le Havre). People came from Paris and neighboring regions to support the blockade throughout the night and early in the morning. Comrades who appreciate French pop culture will be happy to know that rapper Medine and actress Adèle Haenel were on the picket line.
\n\nA part of supporting the strike is resisting “réquisitions.” Despite the right to strike being written into the French Constitution, there is a legal provision that allows the local government (la Préfecture) to force strikers back to work if the strike puts the economy at risk. In Le Havre, the blockade remained strong, but the state has been carrying out réquisitions across the country, especially in the field of energy. This confirms that the strike is working, as there is usually a delay between refineries shutting down and fuel shortages beginning, but it also indicates that the government is prepared to send the cops to people’s houses in order to force them back to work.
\n\nProtests in Lorient on Tuesday, March 28.
\nOn Saturday March 25, 30,000 people assembled in Sainte-Soline, a small town near Poitiers, to protest the privatization of water and the excavation of the biggest of the industrial “mega-basins” in France. Announced by the Confédération Paysanne (the largest and most historic union of farmworkers in France), the collective Bassines Non Merci! (BNM), Les Soulèvements de la Terre (literally, “Earth Uprisings”), and more than a hundred other associations and unions, the demonstration had the same objective as the previous protest at that same location: to set foot in the empty crater where the basin is supposed to be built.
\n\nThe previous mobilization in Sainte-Soline had been a success. On Saturday, October 30, 2022, some 7000 people marched on the basin and managed to breach the massive police lines (1700 police backed by helicopters). Three groups walked in teams, with separate trajectories and strategies, targeting three different access points with scaled levels of risk tolerance; it was all framed as a big game in the style of capture-the-flag. Police did their best to retaliate, but they were overwhelmed.
\n\nOn March 25, at first, the atmosphere was merry and determined, continuing the tone of October. Many signs were encouraging. The number of participants had more than tripled since the previous demonstration, likely benefitting from the fact that a powerful movement was in full swing throughout the country. Farmers from the Confédération Paysanne driving tractors had evaded police lines to reach the camp, which was established quite close to the site of the intended mega-basin.
\n\nHowever, things got nasty very fast. The police, determined to get revenge for the setbacks they had experienced in the streets elsewhere in France, set out to make an example of the protesters in this big open area that afforded very little shelter or protection.
\n\n\n\n\n“The objective of the protesters at Sainte-Soline was to skirt the police and reach the crater, and to plant their flags as a way of thumbing their nose at power and at these absurd reservoirs. The goal of the police was to deploy the full range of their force and brutality against unprotected (or poorly protected) protesters in order to traumatize, maim, and demoralize them.”
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Once again, three groups formed, but when they reached the edges of the basin, police quickly forced them to converge into one procession, mixing them all together. The police attacked first with tear gas and shrapnel grenades, to which the front line replied with fireworks and stones. Under police fire, with over 5000 grenades falling from the sky—some of them tear gas grenades, some of them the extremely dangerous GM2L grenades—any distinction between the black bloc, the union leaders, politicians, and the rest of the people in the march evaporated. More than two hundred people were injured, many of them severely.
\n\nThe police intentionally fired at the part of the field where the wounded were being treated. They blocked the ambulances and did their best to make it impossible to take the injured to the hospital in time to treat their injuries. As a consequence of this intentionally murderous strategy, as of now, two people remain in critical condition, in grave danger of death. Many more have been permanently mutilated, some losing eyes.
\n\nDespite spectacular images of a huge protest bloc walking in the field among deer and tear gas and of police wagons burning, despite the brief incursion into the perimeter of the basin, it’s impossible to consider the day a success. Now is the time to heal and take stock of the situation. It is clearer than ever that the state is ready to kill to maintain control and protect the interests of the capitalists who rule the agro-industry at the expense of a sustainable future. Likewise, the authorities used the protest in Sainte-Soline as an opportunity to do as much harm as possible to many of those who had been outmaneuvering them in the streets.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/cardojo2/status/1640004370874941446\n\n\n
This is a translation of an anonymous report-back describing the protest that took place in Sainte-Soline against the construction of the mega-basins and the privatization of water on March 25.
\n\nShit, what the hell are we doing here? Yes, yes, we fight for water, we fight against the privatization of life, we fight against the state that protects the interests of the few instead of defending the lives of the many.
\n\nMedic, medic! Here, here! And while we yell and point to the wounded, we need to keep an eye on what’s falling from the sky. Other hands point to a projectile right above our heads. What is it? Tear gas, sting-ball grenade? Identify it, evaluate the trajectory, the risk, run a little, feel our eardrums burst from the nearby explosion. Ears ringing for a couple of minutes.
\n\nShit, what the hell are we doing here again? Yes, yes, crossing the blue barrier to get to the basin. Ha, no, not a blue barrier but two, it’s not only blue but khaki green, and it has wire fencing, and barbed wire, and there’s the embankment to climb. What’s hidden behind all of this? A lake, water that belongs to everyone pumped and stored for the few. Medic, medic! Fuck, where are the medics, things are pretty urgent right now. Shit is falling left, right, in front of us, behind us. Hey, comrade, need some saline? Hey, did you notice, your head is bleeding? Careful, grenade!! Fall back, a little, keep calm, forward again.
\n\nShit, what the hell are we doing here again? Yes, yes, we have numbers, we’re the mass. it’s all we have against the military-grade weapons that are raining down on us, that cut our legs off, that tear our limbs apart.
\n\nMedic, medic! How long have we been here for? Twenty minutes, perhaps. A group of medics hovers around a body. One of them is already short on supplies. The others don’t have much left, either. What are they going to do? What’s going to happen to me if I fall?
\n\nCareful there! Watch out for the grenade a couple of meters away, can’t remember to move, explosion, head banging. Fuck, I’m beat, I forgot to run out of the way. I’m fine, need to keep moving forward. Grab your partner, a quick check to see if they’re fine, too. All good. Let’s go.
\n\nThere’s fire in front of us, black smoke coming from the flaming vehicles, white smoke from the tear gas, the flash of a flame, the spark of a grenade dying down, we can’t see shit.
\n\nHow long were we there for? Two, three hours? Less than an hour, in fact. An eternity, or maybe it wasn’t long enough?
\n\nWhy did we fall back all of a sudden? A guy on the brink of death up front, a line of four-wheelers that tried to surround us, the realization that we didn’t stand a chance, fatigue on the frontline?
\n\nShit, what the hell we were doing there? It’s over.
\n\nEvacuating the wounded, reuniting with the crew. Perceiving the shock by the look in the others’ eyes, assessing injuries, attempting a few words. A comrade breaks down in tears, we huddle close. Absurd, uneven, dangerous.
\n\nWhat happens after something like that? Someone must know.
\n\nWe go home, an endless procession black with anger and rancor, an unwilling army, exhausted. We’re alive, we’re lucky.
\n\nA clip from a livestream of the events in Sainte-Soline on March 25, 2023.
\nThis is a translation of a statement from the parents of an activist who remains in a coma five days after the police violence at Sainte-Soline.
\n\nFollowing the injury caused by a GM2L grenade, during the demonstration of March 25, 2023 organized in Sainte-Soline against the irrigation basin projects, our son Serge is currently in a hospital fighting for his life.
\n\nWe filed a complaint for attempted murder and voluntary obstruction of the arrival of the emergency services; and for violation of professional secrecy within the framework of a police investigation, and misappropriation of information contained in a file for that purpose.
\n\nFollowing the various articles published in the press, many of which are inaccurate or misleading, we would like to make it known that:
\n\nWe believe that these are not criminal acts that would sully our son, but on the contrary that these acts are to his credit.
\n\nSerge’s parents
\nMarch 29, 2023
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/29/3.jpg\")
Graffiti reading “Vengeance for S. [Serge]—49.3° of rage!” “Beneath the BRAV-M, the beach” [a reference to the famous graffiti from May 1968, “Beneath the concrete, the beach”] and “Bring us the head of the henchmen.”
\nBack in the city, many people attended a nationwide mobilization against the “Loi Asile et Immigration” (also called the Loi Darmanin, after the Minister of the Interior—the head cop of France, if you will). This law, the next one on Macron’s oppressive agenda, will severely reduce the rights of migrants, facilitating the imprisonment and deportation of exiled and undocumented people on French land. While the number of people who attended that protest was nothing close to the number of people who are protesting against the pension reform, we are slowly building ties connecting anti-racist resistance and solidarity with wider resistance against the government.
\n\nFrom Saturday on, police violence became the chief topic of conversation and media coverage. Gérald Darmanin and Laurent Nuñez (the head cops of France and of Paris, respectively) did their best to spread lies about the events in Sainte-Soline and to try to legitimize the police retaliation in Paris. In the city, the BRAV-M police units—the “mobile” units that chase people around on motorcycles—took center stage in this discussion. There is already a remarkable number of videos of the BRAV-M assaulting isolated individuals, running over people, and verbally and sexually abusing people; this should not be surprising, as their ancestors, the “voltigeurs,” were famous for similar behavior, including the murder of Malek Oussekine in 1986, which inspired the movie La Haine.
\n\nSome unions—including the CGT and Solidaires—also spoke out against police brutality, expressing solidarity with those who suffered in Sainte-Soline. The slogan “Ni oubli, ni pardon” (“don’t forget, don’t forgive”) is slowly proliferating among striking workers. Even international media covering the movement and condemning Macron’s autocratic and repressive strategy has begun focusing on police violence rather than the pension reform.
\n\nAt several work sites, as a consequence of requisitions and fatigue, workers had taken a break from the strike over the weekend. Many resumed striking again on Monday and Tuesday, but there is undoubtedly a certain weariness amongst strikers and supporters doubled with sadness and fear in the face of large-scale military repression. Darmanin and Macron are hoping to sway public opinion by brandishing the specter of violence in front of people’s eyes in the same way that the government did to suppress the Gilets Jaunes movement in December 2018. Whether this strategy will be successful remains to be seen. It will depend, in part, on how successful we are at presenting other narratives.
\n\nThe general strike of Tuesday, March 28 was relatively successful, depending on who you ask. The number of people in the streets is diminishing, but it was still among the highest recorded over the past two months—about two million. Cities in the west of France (“le Grand-Ouest”), famous for their insurrectionary tendencies, coordinated successful road blockades. A significant number of refineries, fuel storage units, and other logistical centers were blocked or on strike; more than 400 gas stations in France were out of fuel on Wednesday, March 29. Schools and universities remained on strike as well—as did the Eiffel Tower, among other well-known French institutions.
\n\nAs for the demonstrations themselves, the results were mixed. Fierce gatherings took place in Rennes and Nantes, where the black bloc is always offensive, and in cities like Lyon, St-Etienne, and Toulouse. In Paris, the atmosphere was tense. While some confrontations with police broke out late in the day, they felt more symbolic than strategic. Significantly, the spontaneous night marches have died down. If spontaneous marches and other forms direct action return to the streets despite the government’s show of force over the weekend, that could give the movement a second wind; if they do not, that could determine its fate.
\n\nProtests in Lorient on Tuesday, March 28.
\nWhile the government’s perverse rhetoric should not shape our actions, it is important to puncture the narratives that they are trying to propagate. Essentially, Macron is using the same strategy he used to suppress the Yellow Vests. He is blaming the protesters for the injuries that police inflict on them, in order to infantilize and discredit those who defend themselves against the police and to justify the escalation of police repression.
\n\nThis circular rhetoric is already at play in Darmanin’s lies about the events in Sainte-Soline, as explored in the analysis “The Trap of Sainte-Soline.” Darmanin has initiated a legal process targeting the collective “Les Soulèvements de la Terre” for “dissolution,” equating ecological sabotage with terrorism by claiming that many of the protesters at Sainte-Soline are long-time “A-listed dangerous individuals” (“fichés S” in the French counter-information databases).
\n\nThe state is attempting to turn the popular outcry about police violence on its head. The goal is not so much to legitimize the use of military force on unarmed protesters—Macron won’t admit to that—but to present it as the unavoidable side-effect of his righteous efforts to protect the French Republic from dangerous and irresponsible individuals who must be stopped for their own sake.
\n\nBut there is another way to read this whole situation.
\n\nIf Macron is determined to force his agenda through without a vote regardless of how unpopular it is, and to suppress all protest by means of militarized police violence, then the only way to prevent the arrival of outright autocracy is to establish a rapport de force with the police. In that case, those who take the initiative to experiment with ways to defend themselves from police are neither infantile nor irresponsible. On the contrary, they are the only thing standing between us and tyranny.
\n\nPolice footage from of the events in Sainte-Soline on March 25, 2023, showing people defending themselves against the police assault.
\nIn this spirit, many people have called for gatherings across France on Thursday, March 30 to oppose police brutality and stand up for the people who have been wounded, some of whom are still fighting for their lives in the hospital.
\n\nFacing down the police is not a matter of bringing symmetrical force to bear against them, but of outflanking them. It requires outsmarting them as they attempt to isolate and corner us, whether physically or discursively. It means escalating all together, uncontrollably, as a network too extensive to surround—moving, merging, branching off, changing course, and innovating more rapidly than they can keep up with, and doing so on every kind of terrain, from the streets themselves to the narrative about what is taking place in them.
\n\nFor now, the issue of police brutality threatens to supplant all other subjects of public discussion, including the pension reform, work itself, and the power of the state. This may also conceal a trap for the movement. Focusing on the police alone will not necessarily produce a strategy that enables us to overcome them.
\n\nThe intersyndicale (the coordination of the eight biggest national unions in France) has called for the next nationwide strike to occur on Thursday, April 6. In many people’s eyes, that is too late, as the events that will determine whether the movement lives or dies will have occurred by then. This long gap will give unions time to negotiate with the state: already, some union leaders have been speaking with the government. While a few hardliners inside the CGT and other unions are resisting their leaders’ pressure to concede, the history of union politics is a veritable litany of cautionary tales.
\n\nOf course, when the unions announced the general strike for March 23 after the spontaneous protests of Thursday, March 16, many people also believed that the movement would die over the following week. As always, what takes place in the streets will determine everything. Despite fatigue, pain, and grief, French people have yet to give up the fight. Long live the revolution!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/29/1.jpg\")
The police in Sainte-Soline on March 25, 2023.
\nTestimony of Layla Staats, a member of the Mohawk nation who participated in the action in Sainte-Soline.
\nWe present a second statement written by Serge’s comrades and close-ones, released on Wednesday, March 29.
\n\nWhile our comrade Serge continues fighting for the life that the state has attempted to take away from him, we are witnessing a new outpouring of violence against him. The media are attempting to depict him as a man who ought to be shot. Today, he is still in a coma, in critical condition. We send our solidarity to Mickaël and to all who felt the brute force of police violence brought down on them.
\n\nThe bourgeois media continue endlessly parroting words carefully chosen by the state in order to construct, out of thin air, the enemy that it wants to fight. Their false front will crumble in the face of the many narratives that have corrected and and rewritten the course of events. The police used grenades with the specific purpose of inflicting physical and mental harm upon the protesters; they are responsible for preventing emergency responders from evacuating the injured, even if that meant leaving our comrades to die.
\n\nIntelligence services have been liberally handing out the information they had collected on Serge to newsrooms across the country. Their objective is to force us to define ourselves in the words used by the police. Here, we will not engage with the deliberately abridged versions of Serge’s identity that the police has been circulating. We don’t believe that any truth about him can be found within the arcana of state and media propaganda. As a revolutionary, Serge has been participating with all his might and for many years in many class struggles against our exploitation, always with a view to the broadening and strengthening of life and victory for the proletariat.
\n\nAnd indeed, we cannot let ourselves be crushed.
\n\nWe call on all those who know him to tell others around them who he is. Remember: Serge, in struggle, refuses the state’s strategy to separate good and bad protesters. With him and for him, we uphold this line.
\n\nOn Tuesday, March 28, people everywhere took it upon themselves to show their solidarity with the movement against the pension reform in France. We have also received many messages from international comrades. We warmly thank them, and encourage them to continue and support the movement. More actions are already planned, and we encourage people to join and multiply them without restraint, in France and in the rest of the world.
\n\nWe want this communiqué to be shared as widely as possible.
\n\nPS: There are many rumors about Serge’s medical condition. Don’t share them. We will keep you updated.
\n\nTo contact us: s.informations@proton.me
\n\nComrades of S.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2023/03/22/france-the-movement-against-the-pension-reform-on-the-threshold-of-an-uprising", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2023/03/22/france-the-movement-against-the-pension-reform-on-the-threshold-of-an-uprising", "title": "France: The Movement against the Pension Reform : On the Threshold of an Uprising?", "summary": "In France, a new surge of protest activity has erupted against the government of Emmanuel Macron in response to an unpopular pension reform. ", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/22/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/22/header.jpg", "date_published": "2023-03-22T20:30:02Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:56Z", "tags": [ "neoliberalism", "Paris", "labor", "Strike", "general strike", "blockage", "France", "anti-work", "macron", "centrism" ], "content_html": "In France, a new surge of protest activity has erupted against the government of Emmanuel Macron in response to an unpopular pension reform. This promises to be the most powerful unrest in France since the Yellow Vest movement. In the following introduction and translation, we explore the roots, forms, and prospects of this movement.
\n\n\n\n\nThe bastards know it well: what they feared in the quasi-insurrection of 2018 is not so much a social subject—whatever the worst leftist sociology says—nor even a set of practices. It was an ungovernability, determined and diffuse. A wave of hatred of the neoliberal universe.
\n\n \n
After two months of traditional protests and occasional strikes stage-managed by the intersyndicale (the coordination of the eight biggest national unions in France), the movement against Macron’s government pension reform came to a head when Elizabeth Borne (Macron’s prime minister and the head of the government) announced that she was going to use article 49.3 of the Constitution to implement the pension reform without a vote in the National Assembly.
\n\nDuring those first two months, large numbers of people took to the streets, but despite public support, the protests and strikes were not combative. However, the deputies in the National Assembly were divided; it was possible that a majority would oppose the pension reform, so Borne sidestepped them. The law still has to be approved by the Senate, but for now, that is beside the point. French deputies opposed to Macron and Borne filed for a vote of confidence, which would have pushed Borne’s government out of office.
\n\nOn the night of Thursday, March 16, people spontaneously assembled in symbolic locations in Paris and other cities to protest the use of article 49.3. As the night wore on, they refused to leave, despite police becoming more and more violent. In the end, police arrested a large number of people across France—almost 300 in Paris alone—almost all of whom were released without charges the next day.
\n\nOver the weekend, spontaneous street protests (les “manifs sauvages”) broke out, taking advantage of a garbage collection strike to fill the streets of Paris with flaming garbage bins. As police violence intensifies, the “spontaneous” aspect of these protests plays an important technical role. Most mass protests in France, such as the ones that took place before Thursday, are “déclarées”—groups register them with the police beforehand. Spontaneous protests are legal, but the framework for repression is less clear than it is for the authorized demonstrations. This is a big issue: courts still have to rule on whether you can be arrested simply for being in the vicinity of a spontaneous protest, what the consequences should be for leading a spontaneous protest, whether the French constitutional right to demonstrate includes spontaneous protests, and what the police can legally do to target people at these protests.
\n\nMoreover, all the authorized protests have a set location or route, whereas the current spontaneous protests are unpredictable. They do not converge on a strategic location, nor do they have a particular goal aside from harassing the cops. Groups ranging from 100 to 1000 move in different directions all around a given area, barricading the streets, painting, and setting things on fire. Just as occurred during the 2020 George Floyd uprising in the United States, the police can’t contain and control several groups at once.
\n\n\n\n\n“We can handle one 10,000-person protest, but ten 1000-person protests throughout the city will overwhelm us.”
\n\n-Los Angeles police officer, summer 2020
\n
The more fatigued they get, the more violent the cops become. People are being very brave, but they are also sustaining serious injuries and trauma.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jdicajdisrien/status/1637190033361739778\n\n\n
These spontaneous street protests are occurring at night, while early in the morning and during the day, the strike has been intensifying, with people organizing more and more blockades. The strike began before the application of article 49.3 last Thursday; the chief sectors that are participating include garbage processing (collection and incineration), fuel distribution (refineries and transportation), and public transportation (city transit, trains, and airports).
\n\nThe unions have called for a nationwide strike this Thursday, March 23. When the leadership announced this last week, it came across as an effort at pacification, to get people out of the streets; but because people did not cease to take to the streets, instead, it now represents an opportunity to escalate. We expect the country to be blocked, and for the unions to be outflanked by spontaneous direct actions all over the country, involving both autonomous groups and local union branches. This has already begun to occur—in Fos-sur-Mer or in Rennes, for example.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ColeStangler/status/1638130426366533632\n\n\n
In Paris, the people leading the strike are the garbage collectors, working from three different locations. They have been on strike since March 7, and have maintained picket lines since then. Only one picket line has been breached by police, and it has reformed since then. They need money to keep the strike going. They have become the stars of the movement, in some way, because the garbage accumulating in the streets of Paris has provided the ideal material for the nighttime crowds to set on fire—an endlessly replenishing resource for as long as the garbage trucks remain inoperable.
\n\nGenerally speaking, the people on the picket lines are workers and leftists of various stripes, while those running the streets at night are younger and rowdier. These groups are not antagonistic to one another, which has not always been the case in the French political landscape. People seem to enjoy meeting each other when and where they can; there are no general assemblies bringing all the generations together, but neither the unions nor the older leftists are condemning the nighttime riots.
\n\nOver the preceding months, a conversation had developed about how COVID-19 caused a break in the transmission of techniques, stories, and cultures of struggle in French activist circles, and how that led to the propagation of centralized (and frankly, boring) politics in many universities. In this movement, we are seeing new political formations emerge along with decentralized and autonomous experiments in direct action and resistance, revealing the limitations of the traditional means of control and repression. The events of the past week show that we can put to rest any fears about the passivity of the younger generation.
\n\nLast Monday, the National Assembly voted not reject the government, further outraging people. The fact that the government of Macron and Borne remains in power will keep the precarious balance between nationalist and leftist agendas stable, for now. But for how long?
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Lebienpublic/status/1636414213244567563\n\n\n
As in the Yellow Vest movement of 2018, nationalism is a driving force in these protests. No one has really pulled out the French flags yet, but they could make their appearance soon. For good or for ill, since the Yellow Vests, the mainstream French political imagination has been almost entirely focused on the French Revolution. People are calling for Macron to be beheaded, to protect the sacred honor of French democracy, and so on. All this comes with a broad and—thus far—diffuse nationalism. Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party is waiting in the wings to capitalize on the situation.
\n\nTo continue growing, the movement will have to surpass its current limits. So far, the riots and the blockades have been majority white; most working-class people of color won’t benefit from the current pension system anyway. Unless it becomes clear what they might have to gain from this movement, they probably will not take to the streets, and that will limit the possibility of an insurrection. Likewise, while dramatic images have indeed circulated from Paris and other cities, unlike the Yellow Vests, this movement started in the big cities, and it remains unclear how far it will spread to the more rural areas of the country.
\n\nLikewise, it remains to be seen how a new round of unrest in France would influence movements elsewhere around the world. The rhythm of unrest in France is generally out of sync with political events elsewhere. The Occupy movement and its equivalents took place in Spain, Greece, the United States, and even Germany in 2011, but the French equivalent, Nuit Debout, occurred a full five years later; the Yellow Vest movement began a year ahead of most of the global revolts of 2019. But with movements picking up steam again in Greece and elsewhere, events in France could contribute to shaping the popular imagination around the world. None of the tensions that catalyzed the global revolts of 2019 and the George Floyd uprising of 2020 have been resolved. From the United States and France to Russia and Iran, governments have simply attempted to suppress dissent with brute force, as people slowly, steadily become more desperate and angry.
\n\nIn the short term, comrades in France are hoping to build power to resist the upcoming repressive laws targeting migrants, undocumented people, houseless people, and squatters that are in the works from the government of Macron and Borne. In Paris and the neighboring areas specifically, the struggle against the city’s preparation for the Olympic Games in summer 2024 is also on many people’s minds. Reclaiming the streets is urgent when evictions, destruction of parks and public spaces, and the construction of massive and unnecessary infrastructure in the northern suburbs of Paris is being weaponized as a means to control and cleanse traditionally working-class neighborhoods.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/22/2.jpg\")
The Nuit Debout movement of 2016, a part of the resistance to the labor law that was introduced that year using article 49.3, is one of the precedents for the movement emerging today.
\nThis is a translation of “La macronie, bientôt finie?”
\n\nThe announcement on Thursday, March 16 that the government would use article 49.3 of the Constitution to impose its pension reform without a National Assembly vote propelled the protest movement into a new dimension. Despite fierce repression, a strange mixture of anger and joy is spreading throughout the country: spontaneous demonstrations, surprise blockades of main roads, invasions of shopping centers or railway tracks, dumping garbage in the offices of deputies, nighttime garbage fires, targeted power outages, and more. The situation has become uncontrollable and the president has no plan other than to promise that he will hold out at all costs and sink into a headlong rush of violence. The days to come will therefore be decisive: either the movement will wear out its energy—though everything indicates the opposite—or Macron’s rule will collapse. In this text, we’ll try to present a progress report, analyzing the forces involved as well as their strategies and objectives in the short and medium terms.
\n\nIf we consider the two forces officially present, the situation is unique in that neither can permit themselves to lose. On the one hand, we have the “social movement,” which we often think has disappeared but which always returns for lack of anything better. The most optimistic see in this the necessary prelude to building a rapport de force that could pave the way for an uprising or even revolution. The most pessimistic believe that, on the contrary, it is compromised from the outset—that the channeling and ritualization of popular discontent contributes to the good management of the prevailing order and therefore to maintaining and reinforcing it.
\n\nBe that as it may—on paper, this “social movement” has everything to win: the unions are united, the demonstrations are numerous, public opinion is largely favorable to it, and although the government was elected democratically, it is very much in the minority. The stars are therefore aligned, all the lights are green; in such objectively favorable conditions, if the “social movement” loses, that means that it will never again be able to imagine or claim to win anything.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/22/1.jpg\")
Strikes and blockades have broken out across France.
\nOn the other side, there is Emmanuel Macron, his government, and some fanatics who believe in him. They know they are in the minority, but that is where they draw their strength from. Macron is not a president who was elected to be liked or even appreciated. He embodies the terminus of politics: his pure and perfect adherence to the economy, to efficiency, to performance. He does not see the people, life, human beings, only atoms from which to extract value. Macron is a kind of evil droid who wants the best for those he governs against their will. His idea of politics is an Excel spreadsheet: as long as the calculations are correct and the numbers come out right, he will continue to move forward at a steady pace. On the other hand, he knows that if he hesitates, trembles, or gives up, he will not be able to claim to govern anything or anyone.
\n\nA face-off is not a symmetry, however. What threatens the “social movement” is fatigue and resignation. The only thing that could make the president give up is the concrete risk of an uprising. Since the use of article 49.3 on Thursday, March 16, we see that the situation is changing. Now that negotiation with the authorities has become obsolete, the “social movement” is boiling over and surpassing itself. Its contours are becoming pre-insurrectional.
\n\nThere remains a third, unofficial force, inertia: those who, for the moment, refuse to join the battle out of laziness, happenstance, or fear. At present, they are effectively playing for the government, but the more unstable the situation, the more they will have to take sides, whether for the movement or for the government. The great achievement of the Yellow Vests was to bring frustration and dissatisfaction out from behind the screens, getting people offline and into the streets.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/TaoualitAmar/status/1633161674696847366\n\n\n
But what is really behind this confrontation and its staging? What is it that grips the heart, inspiring courage or rage? What is at stake is the rejection of work.
\n\nObviously, no one dares to formulate the issue this way, because as soon as we talk about work, an old trap closes on us. Its mechanism is, however, rudimentary and well known: behind the very concept of work, one has voluntarily confused two quite distinct realities. On the one hand, work as singular participation in collective life, in its richness and creativity. On the other hand, work as a particular form of individual labor in the capitalist organization of life—that is, work as pain and exploitation. If one ventures to criticize work, or even to wish for its abolition, that will usually be understood as a petit-bourgeois whim or gutter punk nihilism. If we want to eat bread, we need bakers; if we want bakers, we need bakeries; if we want bakeries, we need masons; and for the dough we put in the oven, we need farmers who sow, harvest, and so on. No one, of course, is in a position to dispute such evidence.
\n\nThe problem, our problem, is that if we reject work to such an extent, if we are millions in the streets pounding the pavement to avoid being subjected to two more years of work, it is not because we are lazy or dream of joining a bridge club, but because the form that the common and collective effort has taken in this society is unbearable, humiliating, often meaningless and mutilating. If you think about it, we have never fought for retirement—always against work.
\n\nFor people to recognize collectively on a grand scale that for the great majority of us, work is pain: the authorities cannot permit that idea to take hold, for it would imply the destruction of the whole social edifice, without which they would be nothing. If our common condition is that we have no power over our lives and know it, then paradoxically, everything becomes possible again. Let us note that revolutions do not necessarily need great theories and complex analyses; it is sometimes enough simply to make a tiny demand that one holds onto until the end. It would be enough, for example, to refuse to be humiliated: by a schedule, by a salary, by a manager or a task. It would be enough to have a collective movement that suspends the anguish of the calendar, the to-do-list, the agenda. It would suffice to claim the most minimal dignity for oneself, one’s family and others, and the whole system would collapse. Capitalism has never been anything other than the objective and economic organization of humiliation and pain.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/CerveauxNon/status/1637045941986263042\n\n\n
Having said that, we must recognize that in the immediate future, the social organization that we are contesting is not only held together by the blackmail for survival that it imposes on everyone. It is also held together by the violence of the police. We won’t get into the social role of the police and the reasons they behave so detestably; those have already been synthesized well enough in the text “Why All Cops Are Bastards.” What seems urgent to us is to think strategically about their violence, what it represses and stifles via terror and intimidation.
\n\nIn the last few days, researchers and commentators have denounced the lack of professionalism of the police—their excesses, their arbitrariness, sometimes even their violence. Even on BFMTV [the most-watched conservative news channel in France], they were surprised that out of the 292 people arrested on Thursday, March 16 at Place de la Concorde, 283 were released from police custody without prosecution and the remaining 9 were given a simple reprimand. The problem with this kind of indignation is that, in focusing on a perceived dysfunction of the system, they prevent themselves from seeing what can only be an intentional strategy. If hundreds of BRAV-M [the Brigades de répression des actions violentes motorisées, police motorcycle units established during the Yellow Vest protests] are roaming the streets of Paris to chase down and beat up protesters, if on Friday a prefectural decree forbade any gathering anywhere in an area comprising about a quarter of the entire capital, that is because [Emmanuel] Macron, [Minister of the Interior Gérald] Darmanin, and [Paris Police Prefect Laurent] Nuñez have agreed on the method: empty the streets, shock the bodies, terrify the hearts… while waiting for it to pass.
\n\nLet’s repeat, one never wins “militarily” against the police. Police represent an obstacle that must be kept in check, dodged, exhausted, disorganized, or demoralized. To do away with the police is not to naïvely hope that one day they will lay down their arms and join the movement, but on the contrary, to make sure that each of their attempts to reimpose order through violence produces more disorder. Let’s remember that on the first Saturday of the Yellow Vests movement, on the Champs Elysees [a famous avenue in Paris], the crowd that felt particularly legitimate chanted “the police with us.” A few police charges and tear gas later, the most beautiful avenue in the world was transformed into a battlefield.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BFMTV/status/1066352998396436480\n\n\n
That said, our strategic decision-making capacities for the street are very limited. We have no general staff, only our common sense, our numbers, and a certain inclination towards improvising. In the current configuration, we can nevertheless draw some lessons from these last weeks:
\n\nThe policing of demonstrations, which is to say, the task of keeping them within the bounds of harmlessness, is a task shared between the union leaders and the police force. A demonstration that goes as planned is a victory for the government. A demonstration that overflows the bounds prepared for it spreads anxiety to the top of the government, demoralizes the police, and brings us closer to the abolition of work. A crowd that no longer accepts the police-led route, that damages the symbols of the economy and expresses its anger joyously, is a disruption and therefore a threat.
\nUntil now, with the exception of March 7, all mass demonstrations have been contained by the police. The trade union processions have remained perfectly orderly and the most determined demonstrators were systematically isolated and brutally repressed. In some circumstances, a little audacity releases the energy necessary to escape from the frame; in others, it can enable the police to violently close down any possibility. It happens that when you want to break a window, you first break your nose on the edge of the frame.
\nBecause of their speed of movement and their extreme brutality, the BRAV-M cops are the most formidable obstacle. The confidence that they have built up over the past few years and especially in recent weeks must be undermined. If we cannot rule out the possibility that small groups will occasionally outwit them and reduce their audacity, the most effective option would be for the peaceful crowd of union members and demonstrators to no longer tolerate their presence, to stand with their hands up whenever these cops attempt to break through the demonstration, to shout at them and push them away. If their appearance in the demonstrations starts causing disorder instead of restoring order, Mr. Nunez will be forced to exile them to the Ile de la Cité [the island in the center of Paris], to cloister them in their garage on rue Chanoinesse.
\nOn Thursday, March 16, following the announcement of the use of article 49.3, a union demonstration announced ahead of time and more scattered calls converged on the other side of the Concorde bridge in front of the National Assembly. The primary objective of the police being to protect the representatives of the nation, theys pushed the crowd back to the south. Thanks to this maneuver, the demonstrators found themselves propelled into and dispersed throughout the tourist streets of the city center. The piles of garbage left by the garbage collectors’ strike spontaneously became bonfires, slowing down and preventing police responses. Spontaneously, in many cities around the country, burning garbage cans became the signature of the movement.
\nOn Friday March 17, a new call to go to the Place de la Concorde was contained. Though the demonstrators were courageous and determined, they found themselves caught in a trap, a vice, unable to regain their mobility. The prefecture did not make the same mistake as the day before. On Saturday, a third call to gather in the same square convinced the authorities to ban all gatherings in an area stretching from the Champs Élysées to the Louvre, from the Grands Boulevards to the rue de Sèvres—in other words, across about a quarter of Paris around the Presidential Palace of the Elysée and the National Assembly. Thousands of police officers stationed in the area were able to prevent the beginning of any gathering by harassing passersby. On the other side of the city, a gathering at Place d’Italie took the police deployment in stride and started a spontaneous demonstration in the opposite direction. Mobile groups were able to block the streets for several hours, setting fire to garbage cans and temporarily escaping the BRAV-M.
\nThe ABCs of strategy are that tactics should not clash, but should compose. The Paris prefecture has already presented its battle narrative: responsible but harmless mass demonstrations on one side, nightly riots led by radical and illegitimate fringes on the other. Anyone who has been in the streets this past week knows how much this caricature is a lie and how important it is to keep it that way. For this is their ultimate weapon: to divide the revolt into good and bad, responsible and uncontrollable. Solidarity is their worst nightmare. If the movement gains intensity, the trade union processions will end up being attacked and, consequently, defending themselves. The surprise blockades of the beltways by CGT groups [Confédération Générale du Travail, a national trade union] indicate that a part of the base is already determined to go beyond the rituals. When the police intervened in Fos-sur-Mer on Monday to enforce the prefect’s orders, the unionized workers escalated to confrontation. The more that the actions multiply, the more that the grip of the police will loosen. Gérald Darmanin mentioned that there have been more than 1200 spontaneous demonstrations over the past few days.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/illwilleditions/status/1638342765669937153\n \n
Beyond its own violence, the effectiveness of the police also lies in its power of diversion. By determining the place, the form, and the time of confrontation, it saps the energy of the movement. If we bet on disorder and the threat it poses to the government to compel Macron to give up on extending working hours, the blockade is crucial. Indeed, no one will wait indefinitely for the general strike of a working class and a labor movement eroded by 30 years of neoliberalism; the most obvious, spontaneous, and effective political gesture is now the blocking of economic flows, the interruption of the normal flow of goods and humans.
\n\nWhat has been organized in Rennes for two weeks can serve as an example. Rather than confronting the police as their primary objective, the people of Rennes have set up semi-public assemblies in which blocking actions are conceived. This Monday at dawn, a call for “dead cities” saw hundreds of people spread over several points of the city come to block the main roads and the Rennes ring road. Two weeks earlier, 300 people set fire to garbage cans in the middle of the night, blocking the street of Lorient until the early morning. The challenge is never to confront the police but to take them by surprise, to become stealthy. Even from the point of view of those who only swear by numbers and are still waiting for the general strike, this multiplication of blocking points and disorder is obvious. If, after the explosion in response to use of article 49.3 last Thursday, there had only been the call [from official union leadership] to demonstrate the following Thursday, everyone would have resigned themselves to a last stand and defeat. The blockades and the diffuse disorder have inspired the courage, confidence, and impetus the movement needed to project itself beyond the deadlines determined behind the doors of the union leaders.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AnonymeCitoyen/status/1638439834694873089\n\n\n
The collapse of classical politics along with its parties and its disillusionment has opened the way to innovative autonomous experiments. The movement against the labor law, Nuit Debout [a movement in 2016], the Yellow Vests, les Soulèvements de la Terre [the uprisings of the earth, a recent series of environmental mobilizations using mass direct action], and many others have confirmed in recent years that not only was there nothing left to expect from representation, but that nobody wanted it anymore.
\n\nEach of these sequences would deserve a thorough analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, but we will stick to one basic fact: undoing power implies inventing new forms, and for that, in the atomization of the metropolis, we need places to meet, think, and act from. For decades, the occupation of buildings, university campuses, or other places has been part of the obvious practices of any movement. A university president who accepted the intervention of the police on his campus was immediately condemned, as it was taken for granted that the collective and participatory reappropriation of space was the minimum response to the privatization of all spaces and the policing of public space.
\n\nIt is clear that today, no occupation is tolerated. If, as people have done in Rennes, one takes over an abandoned cinema to transform it into a Maison du Peuple [“house of the people”] where trade unionists, activists, and locals meet, the socialist mayor of the city evicts it within 48 hours, sending hundreds of police officers. As for the universities, their authorities shamelessly invoke the risks of disorder and the possibility of distance learning to close them administratively or send the police against their own students. On the other hand, all this underscores how important it is to have places where we can meet and organize ourselves, how much they can increase what we are capable of. In Paris, an occupation of the Bourse du Travail [labor union hall] was attempted after a boisterous assembly and a spontaneous banquet beneath the glass roof of the workers’ movement. However, it withered away in the night, due to the indecision or incomprehension of the unions and autonomous rebels. We need places to build connection and solidarity and we need connection and solidarity to hold places. The story of the chicken and the egg.
\n\nIn Rennes, the movement temporarily overcame the problem: once evacuated, the participants in the Maison du Peuple met in broad daylight and continued to organize blockades as well as meetings—presumably while waiting to be sufficiently united and strong to take back a place with roof, running water, and heating. In Paris, the limits that the Nuit Debout experiment reached seem to have foreclosed the possibility of meeting outdoors. The caricature that lingers would have it that open-air discussions only produce monologues without beginning or end. However, we remember the aperitif at Valls’2 and the possibility, even from our self-centered metropolitan solitude, to make the decision at the drop of a hat to rush to the Prime Minister’s house with several thousand people. The fact that the government is so intent on leaving us without meeting points shows how urgent it is to establish them.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/JulesRavel1/status/1638320128914776067\n\n\n
As we have said, the contours of the movement are becoming pre-insurrectional. Every day, the blockades multiply, the actions intensify. Thursday will therefore be decisive. From the point of view of the reform, if the demonstrations on Thursday get out of control, Macron will be cornered. Either he will take the risk of a black Saturday3 everywhere in the country—that is to say, the Yellow-Vestification that he fears above all—or he will back down on Friday, invoking the risk of significant uncontrollable outbursts.
\n\nEverything is at stake now, and more. The left is waiting in ambush, ready to sell an electoral loophole, the illusion of a referendum, or even the construction of the 4th International—whatever it takes to call for patience and a return to normal. For the movement to endure and avoid cooptation as well as repression, it will have to confront as soon as possible the question that is central to any uprising: how to organize itself. And undoubtedly, some people are already thinking and talking about how to live communism and spread anarchy.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/illwilleditions/status/1638276868192325652\n\n\n
We present here a hasty translation of a statement from comrades in France whose friend was severely injured by police in Sainte-Soline.
\n\nOn Saturday, March 25, in Sainte-Soline, our comrade S. was hit in the head by an explosive grenade during the demonstration against the basins [a project of large water reservoirs for industrial farm irrigation]. In spite of his critical condition, the prefecture first intentionally prevented emergency services from intervening, then prevented them from transporting him to an appropriate care unit a second time. He is currently in neurosurgical intensive care. At this time, his life hangs by a thread.
\n\nThe outburst of violence that the demonstrators suffered inflicted hundreds of injuries, including several serious physical injuries, as announced in the various reports available. The 30,000 demonstrators had come with the objective of blocking the construction of the mega-basins of Sainte-Soline, a project of water monopolization carried out by a small number of people for the benefit of a capitalist model that has nothing left to defend but death. The violence of the armed arm of the democratic state is the most striking expression of this.
\n\nIn response to the window of possibility that the movement against the pension reform has opened, the police are mutilating people and even trying to assassinate people in order to prevent an uprising, to defend the bourgeoisie and its world. Nothing will weaken our determination to put an end to their reign. On Tuesday, March 28 and the following days, let’s strengthen the strikes and blockades, let’s take the streets, for S. and all those from our movements who have been wounded and locked up.
\n\nLong live the revolution.
\n\nComrades of S.
\n\nPS: If you have any information about the circumstances of the injuries inflicted on S., please contact us at:
\n\n\n\nWe want this communiqué to be spread as widely as possible.
\n\nA reference to “the best form of defense is attack,” the original text puns on the similarity between the French words for “retreat” and “retirement.” ↩
\nOn April 9, 2016, during a general assembly, participants in the Nuit Debout movement decided to invite themselves to the home of Prime Minister Manuel Valls for an aperitif. A month later, on May 10, 2016, facing an unruly social movement, Valls announced that he had decided to invoke article 49:3 of the Constitution in order to implement the unpopular Loi Travail [labor law] without a vote in the National Assembly—a precedent for the current crisis. ↩
\nStarting on December 1, 2018, the Yellow Vest movement repeatedly mobilized on Saturdays, disrupting urban areas. ↩
\nIn October 2019, an Indigenous and popular uprising broke out in Ecuador in response to a package of neoliberal measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund. After twelve days and eleven deaths, they succeeded in forcing the government to cancel the measures and to grant a subsidy to offset the price of fuel. Now, at the end of June 2022, a new general strike is entering its third week in Ecuador, accompanied by new occupations, demonstrations, and clashes. Once again, the strike is led by the Indigenous movement, facing off once more against the policies of the IMF and increasing fuel prices. During the 2019 revolt, we interviewed a comrade in the Primera Linea [the front lines] in Quito to learn about the dynamics of the revolt in the Ecuadorian capital and the self-management and popular power practices of the “Quito Commune.” Two and a half years later, we reached out to him again.
\n\nWhat does it mean that people in Ecuador have to fight this whole battle all over again so soon after a historic victory? Will the momentum spread throughout Latin America again? Read on.
\n\nFor perspective on what a modern-day general strike might look like in the United States, start here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/2.jpg\")
\nWhat has happened over the last two and a half years in Ecuador so that, after a pandemic and both parliamentary and presidential elections, everything has returned to this point again?
\n\nAfter the popular insurrection of 2019, [then-president] Lenin Moreno began to raise the price of fuel again gradually—in short, the partial victory of 2019 was annulled and we returned to the starting point. Then the current president, Guillermo Lasso, intensified this, sending fuel prices sky high, which has caused a spike in the prices of basic necessities.
\n\nMoreno managed to complete his term, along with his ministers. Along with the high command of the police and the army, they have gone unpunished for the crimes they committed during the October days.
\n\nThe elections took place in 2021. The candidate of the Indigenous movement was Yaku Pérez, who managed to capitalize on the discontent of October—but that was not enough to make it to the general election and challenge Andres Arauz, the Correist candidate. [Brought to power by the “pink tide” that established left governments throughout Latin America, Rafael Correa served as president of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017; today, accused of corruption, he lives in Belgium.] Guillermo Lasso, a banker, responsible for the bank holiday of 1999, reached the second round and won the elections. [In March 1999, fearing hyperinflation, the Ecuadorian government declared a national bank holiday, which ended up lasting a full week; at the time, Guillermo Lasso was CEO of Banco Guayaquil.]
\n\nThere were also elections in the CONAIE [the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador]. The winner was Leónidas Iza, leader of the MIC (Indigenous Movement of Cotopaxi) and one of the leaders of the October revolt.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/1.jpg\")
“Lasso out”: protesters defending themselves from police around the House of Culture in Quito.
\nIn 2019, the uprising in Ecuador helped trigger subsequent uprisings in Chile and elsewhere. Have the movements in Colombia, Chile, and elsewhere in Latin America influenced the movements in Ecuador since then?
\n\nFrom October 2019 on, the populations of several Latin American countries rose up against their governments. However, even though the current events in the country reflect a general, continent-wide crisis and have been decisive in shaping in the collective imaginary, they have clear implications that are tied to the Ecuadorian context. It’s as if something had been left unfinished from the uprising three years ago.
\n\nHow do you see the first year of Lasso’s government? How was it possible for a neoliberal banker to become president after an uprising as strong and successful as the one in 2019? Why has he lost that support so rapidly, so that only one year into power, he faces another popular uprising?
\n\nAppalling. Lasso won thanks to the anti-Correista vote. The scenario would have been different if Yaku Pérez had made it to the second round. Many people voted for Lasso to reject the possible return of the former Citizen Revolution Movement [a party formed by supporters of Rafael Correa]. The divisions within the Indigenous movement contributed to Lasso’s rise to power.
\n\nAs soon as Lasso began his government, he lost his main ally, the Social Christian Party [PSC]. There was immediately conflict with the Constitutional Court. Considering that he is only supported by a minority in the Assembly, this has forced the banker to struggle to figure out how to govern.
\n\nAt first, his main strategy was to arrange the extensive vaccination of the general public, which equipped him with excellent political capital for the first few months. After the pandemic and the vaccination period, the reality of the situation in the country was clear for all to see.
\n\nThe Indigenous movement and several sectors of society sat down to talk with the government twice last year, and the government didn’t listen. What we’re living through now is the result of a lack of response to the demands of Ecuadorian society, which has experienced the raw consequences of poverty, unemployment, destruction of territory, and increased violence in the streets and in jails due to wars between criminal groups. There were four massacres in Ecuadorian prisons (in the last two years, 360 prisoners have been murdered) and contract killings have become an everyday occurrence in the main cities of the country.
\n\nBanks have not canceled the debts of campesinos or workers, despite the pandemic. There can be no economic revival for the poorest because the bankers are suffocating them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/3.jpg\")
The graffiti in the background reads “The dead.”
\nThe current National Strike, seen from the outside, seems very similar to the strike of October 2019. What are the similarities and differences?
\n\nThe 2019 uprising was the uprising of the sons and daughters of the first Indigenous uprising of the 1990s. It is a new generation full of rage and thirsty for justice.
\n\nUnlike the previous strike, it was CONAIE, together with other peasant organizations, that declared a national strike beginning on Monday, June 13. Three years ago, it was students and transport workers—bus drivers, taxi drivers, and truckers—who lit the match.
\n\nThis time, the Indigenous communities resisted in their territories for a week before arriving in Quito. The inhabitants of the capital, especially the students and the inhabitants of the poor neighborhoods, had to sustain the strike in the city alone during the first week. The inhabitants of the suburbs of Quito, especially in the south of the city, have fought in their neighborhoods from day one. This didn’t happen three years ago, or at least not as intensely as it is happening now.
\n\nThe repression has been strong, but apart from the events of Friday, June 24, the police and the military have been more strategic in the ways that they have employed force. This is why there was not an explosion in Quito during the first week. There were marches and clashes with the police, but the situation did not get out of control until the arrival of CONAIE.
\n\nDue to political differences with the leaders of CONAIE, the Frente Unitario de Trabajadores (FUT), the main workers’ union, remained out of the demonstrations this year.
\n\nNot even the truck drivers joined.
\n\nHowever, the solidarity of the people has not changed—indeed, it has grown stronger since the last revolt. The comrades are now better organized despite the difficulties caused by the government.
\n\nOn Sunday, June 19, at the end of the first week of the strike, in response to the announcement of the arrival of communities from all over the country in Quito, the military and the National Police ordered the requisition of the Ecuadorian House of Culture (CCE), so that this site could not serve as a meeting point for the demonstrators, unlike in 2019. Consequently, the Central University became the site of the assemblies and the logistical center of the uprising. This has led to clashes not only in the area of the Arbolito [a historic park in the center of Quito], the Parliament, and the historic city center, but also in the area around the Central University.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/PoliciaEcuador/status/1539516832348090369\n\n\n
June 22: Ecuador police complaining that one police unit “has been destroyed and burned in its entirety, as have the patrol cars and motorcycles that were assigned to the service of citizens,” along with a plea for “no more violence.” Pretty rich, coming from those whose profession is to wield violence against the public.
\n\nCan you give a brief description of the events that have occurred in the course of the strike? What are the chief demands—and have they shifted in the course of the mobilization? What strategies and tactics have demonstrators employed?
\n\nThe national strike began on Monday, June 13. On that day, Indigenous and campesino organizations began blocking roads in their territories. In Quito, students organized a march from the Central University to the city center. The blockades were not particularly strong and the mobilization in the city center was repressed.
\n\nThe outlook suggested that the strike would not be as strong as the one that took place in 2019.
\n\nBut in the early hours of Tuesday, June 14, the government made the mistake of illegally arresting CONAIE leader Leónidas Iza, provoking an immediate reaction across the country. This was what lit the fuse, causing the strike to gain momentum. The police held Leónidas Iza hostage for 24 hours and the protest escalated. In Quito, people attacked the Flagrancia Unit [the police unit focusing on “flagrant crimes”—ironically, “flagrant” originally means “on fire”] and set a police vehicle on fire. In Latacunga, the Indigenous movement occupied the headquarters of the Prosecutor’s Office. The next day, Iza was released, but he had to show up every day to sign paperwork in the city of Latacunga.
\n\nStarting on the second day, the neighborhoods of Quito became active, especially in the south of the city and in the northern suburbs. They were repressed for several days, but continued to resist. Quito’s students and social movements marched for five days in support of the national strike. Thursday, June 16, was the day when the largest number of people took to the streets—approximately 10,000 people. The demonstration took the same approach as the previous ones: a march towards the city center, which was violently repressed by the police.
\n\nThe city of Cuenca also took action, and the police attacked the university where the demonstrators had taken refuge. Academic authorities denounced the incident and called for a much bigger march for the next day.
\n\nIn the capital, where dozens of police infiltrators had been following people after the end of the marches and arresting them, people began to organize groups to identify and remove them from the marches. This put a strain on the repressive apparatus of the police. The demonstrators were wary of the police and photos of these infiltrators circulated on social networks. Likewise, before expelling infiltrators, people took photographs of their faces.
\n\nIt is important to understand what the demands of this national strike are. People are presenting ten demands to the government.
\n\nThese include lower fuel prices; a banking moratorium so that people can reactivate the economy without the pressure of the bank vultures; a halt to exploiting and destroying the territories where there are water sources and where communities live; mechanisms such as prior consultation in the territories where mining or oil extraction is planned.
\n\nAnother demand is to declare a state of emergency in public health and education. Both sectors have been attacked by the government’s neoliberal policies and have seen their budgets shrink.
\n\nFair prices for agricultural products so that farmers can receive what their work is worth. A stricter control by the government on basic necessities, in view of rampant speculation.
\n\nA halt to the privatization of strategic sectors including social security, the Banco del Pacífico, the CNT (National Telecommunications Corporation), and highways. Respect for the 21 collective rights of Indigenous organizations and bilingual education.
\n\nThe last demand is to guarantee the safety of citizens, given the wave of violence in the streets and in the country’s prisons.
\n\nAll these demands are shared by the people who are supporting the national strike.
\n\nAfter five days, faced with the indifference of the government, the Indigenous and campesino movement decided to go to Quito. On Friday, June 17, the government declared a state of emergency in the provinces that were seeing the most unrest and enacted a curfew in Quito from 10 pm to 5 am. On Sunday, June 19, they ordered the requisition of the House of Culture and violently occupied it to prevent people from organizing. Blockading and clashes between residents of Quito’s southern districts and the police continued throughout the weekend.
\n\nOn Monday, June 20, the first caravans of the Indigenous movement began to arrive in the north and south of the capital and were violently repressed. Meanwhile, the students of the Central University and the social movements of Quito occupied the university so that those who were arriving would have a safe place to sleep and organize. In the evening, trucks full of demonstrators began to arrive one by one, but police harassed them from all sides in hopes of preventing them from reaching the city.
\n\nOnly two universities have opened their doors to the Indigenous movement.
\n\nSince the House of Culture was in the hands of the police, the operational center of the national strike shifted to the Central University for the first time. Here, people began to organize the first solidarity kitchens, childcare centers, medical brigades, and storage centers, and the front lines of resistance.
\n\nFrom the morning of Tuesday, June 21, clashes with the police began throughout the northern part of central Quito. The death toll was already rising, eventually reaching five victims. Police threw one demonstrator into a ravine; another, in the province of Puyo, was killed by a tear gas canister that lodged in his skull; others in Quito were killed by buckshot.
\n\nOn Thursday, June 23, a gigantic march took back the House of Culture and the El Arbolito park, and the main assemblies returned to the historic site of the Ecuadorian left. The conflict immediately shifted to the area around the park and the entrances to the National Assembly. Having much more experience this time than during the previous strike, the front lines have been better organized and protected.
\n\nIn the district of San Antonio, in the north of Quito, residents attacked the army when it tried to enter the area to crack down on the demonstrators. One comrade was killed by a shot from the military.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/4.jpg\")
“Lasso, you fucked with my people—you messed up.”
\nOn Friday, June 24, Guillermo Lasso made a broadcast on national television authorizing the police to increase their repressive force. An hour later, the police and the army indiscriminately attacked the House of Culture and the Arbolito, causing a mass escape from the area. Many children and elderly people suffocated as a result of police violence.
\n\nWe were all chased all over the place until we left the area. Dozens of people were arrested and injured. However, the police withdrew from the area in the evening.
\n\nThis weekend, many comrades have returned to their communities, while others are arriving. Collective cleaning tasks have been organized and priority has been given to assemblies to organize the third week of the national strike. On Saturday, June 25, there was a massive march of women and dissidents.
\n\nToday, Sunday, June 26, there are concerts and sports activities at the Central University. An artistic and cultural festival will be held in the House of Culture.
\n\nHowever, the minimum condition for dialogue is an immediate reduction in fuel prices.
\n\nWhich social sectors have mobilized in Ecuador? What social and political alliances have they created?
\n\nThe Indigenous and peasant movements have mobilized, along with the students and the neighborhoods of Quito. The Indigenous and peasant movements are historically the most organized; the students and neighborhoods have become active again in this situation. The neighborhoods of Quito are the surprise of this strike; they have shown a high level of organization and control of the territory.
\n\nMany comrades throughout the country are supporting the national strike, and it is in this context that the main alliances have been woven. Many of them were not organizing together before due to ideological differences, but those have been set aside in view of the importance of the moment. Although not strong enough yet, the social movement has matured enormously, especially in Quito.
\n\nHow do you evaluate the role of CONAIE in this national strike? Has it managed to assert itself as the main protagonist of social opposition to the neoliberal order? Has it succeeded in establishing social alliances beyond the indigenous world?
\n\nCONAIE continues to be the country’s chief political entity and one of the most important in Latin America. Their organizational capacity and collective strength continue to amaze. However, the internal fractures have taken a toll: the force that they have managed to field this time is less than that of 2019. Still, the comrades continue to put their bodies on the line for everyone.
\n\nIt is not easy to come to sleep on cardboard on the floor in coliseums for days. Their determination is amazing.
\n\nBeyond the alliances they may or may not have generated, they are recognized by all as the foremost defenders of the collective rights of Ecuadorian society. What is missing is for the urban social movements to coordinate more with the Indigenous movement and for the latter to learn from the urban movements as well. There is still no assembly in which social collectives can make decisions about what is happening. They are involved in day-to-day organization, they participate in small assemblies, but it has not been possible, for example, to create an assembly that brings together all the social movements of Quito and the front lines that are supporting this national strike.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/5.jpg\")
\nHow do you see the role of CONAIE leader Leonidas Iza, who emerged in October 2019 as a prominent figure from the left of the Indigenous organization and ultimately became its president? How do you understand Iza’s arrest on the second day of the strike? Is he playing more of an agitator or moderator role in the context of social protest? Does he have goals in electoral politics?
\n\nLeónidas Iza is the absolute leader of the national strike. CONAIE now has a leader with clear political ideas and excellent preparation. His ideas are more radical than those of his predecessors. This caused him problems within the movement, but at the same time aroused a lot of sympathy.
\n\nAs I mentioned at the beginning, Iza’s arrest was the trigger that gave force to the national strike.
\n\nThe problem is that Iza’s leadership, intentionally or not, is overshadowing other social and Indigenous leaders. The media also helped centralize all attention on him. He has both moderated and also agitated this movement, depending on the moment.
\n\nThe Indigenous movement wants to have the first Indigenous president in the history of the country, so one way or another, at some point everything that is happening will be capitalized on in electoral politics. I don’t know if Iza or someone else will do it, but this is undeniable.
\n\nWhat role is Correism playing in this national strike?
\n\nJust like three years ago, they participate, but they do not have the slightest control over what is happening. They support the national strike and want to topple Lasso, which is why they were the ones who called the plenary session of the Assembly to discuss the possibility of impeachment on account of nationwide chaos.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/6.jpg\")
\nIt seems that a request for impeachment (muerte cruzada) is being processed in the National Assembly. How likely is this to happen? Is it realistic to anticipate the fall of Lasso, either through parliament or social protest? What can we expect next, a new government elected by Parliament or new elections? Is this something that the movements seek, or do they fear that the political order will reestablish itself in a new form? What prospects are opening up and what opportunities are closing?
\n\nFourteen days have passed and the government still manages to keep itself on its feet with various tricks. The repression that occurred on Friday was a hard blow for everyone.
\n\nThe Indigenous movement has asked its political arm, Pachakutic, to vote in favor of impeachment as an alternative and a way out of the current crisis, if the government fails to respond to the ten demands. They cannot return home with empty pockets; five comrades have already lost their lives.
\n\nUnseating Lasso would not change things, because his vice president would take power and continue the same political project. But it would still set an important new precedent regarding the ability of social movements to obtain results, even if they are only partial.
\n\nThere is not enough force yet to bend Guillermo Lasso, so impeachment has been considered as an option.
\n\nHowever, as I write this, there are still not enough votes to topple the president via impeachment. Yesterday, Lasso strategically withdrew the State of Emergency so as not to justify a national crisis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/7.jpg\")
\nWe rose up again. This time, we have more experience, but not enough strength to achieve our objectives. We are resisting and defending ourselves from police and state violence, one day at a time.
\n\nTomorrow, Monday, June 27, a new week of unemployment begins, which will be decisive. We will see if additional subjects and social forces will join in, if the strength in the neighborhoods will increase, if new collective strategies of struggle will emerge, if it will be possible to put the government in difficulty again. Everything is still unknown; what is certain is that resistance continues and we will not give up.
\n\nWe are also aware that this uprising is not going to change the country’s problems at the root, but we know that the next revolt will be better because we are already building that possibility here. The organizational processes that have emerged and that sustain the strike (popular kitchens, medical brigades, front lines, daycare centers for children) are being organized and that fabric is what will remain after all this is over.
\n\nThe rage is great—and so is the desire to win. We continue in the fight, we do not give up.
\n\nWe continue the fight, we do not falter.
\n\nTo learn more about the struggle in Ecuador, we recommend the news sources Wambra radio, Indymedia Ecuador, Conaie comunicación, Acapana, and revista crisis.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/CONAIE_Ecuador/status/1541849225641738240\n\n\n
“The government breaks off dialogue, confirming its authoritarianism, lack of will, and incapacity. Lasso Guillermo is responsible for the consequences of his belligerent policy. We demand respect for our maximum leader. Lasso doesn’t break up with Leonidas, he breaks up with the people.”
\n\nThe Uprising in Ecuador: Inside the Quito Commune—An Interview from on the Front Lines
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/submedia/status/1541850003504775168\n \n
What would a general strike look like today? The last two localized general strikes in the United States occurred in the same city—Oakland, California—in 1946 and 2011.1 This makes it easy to compare them in order to see what we can learn from the ways that labor struggles have changed over the past century.
\n\nLooking at the strikes of the 1940s, we can see that any combative labor resistance that breaks out today will likely emerge in defiance of union leadership rather than because of it. Looking at the general strike of 2011, we can see that to succeed, combative organizing must begin outside the workplace as well as within it, connecting the struggles of the unemployed and precarious with those of the employed. Exploring how the strategies that people experimented with in 2011 have fared in the decade since, we can draw up new proposals about what to bring to tomorrow’s uprisings.
\n\nAs it has become increasingly difficult for workers to exert leverage on employers on a workplace-by-workplace basis, the general strike might represent a more ambitious way to wield power against the capitalist class as a whole.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/8.jpg\")
“General strike—occupy everything—death to capitalism.” A banner in downtown Oakland on the night of November 2, 2011.
\nThe general strike of December 1946 in Oakland was arguably the last general strike of the 20th century in the United States. As Jeremy Brecher details in Strike!, it occurred on the heels of the Second World War, during which the union bureaucracy renounced strikes.
\n\n\n\n\nWhen the United States entered the war, the leaders of both the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations pledged that there should be no strikes or walkouts for the duration of the war. Thus, at a time when profits were “high by any standard” and a great demand for labor meant “higher wages could be secured… and a short stoppage could secure immediate results,” the unions renounced the principal method by which workers could have gained from the situation.
\n\nInterestingly, the unions with Communist leadership carried this policy furthest.
\n
Defying the united front of government and labor bureaucrats, rank-and-file workers shifted to wildcat strikes as a way to exert leverage. As Brecher recounts:
\n\n\n\n\nAt first, the power of the government and the unions, combined with general support for the war, virtually put an end to strikes. The chairman of the War Labor Board called labor’s no-strike policy an “outstanding success.” Five months after Pearl Harbor was bombed, he reported that there had not been a single authorized strike and that every time a wildcat walkout had occurred, union officials had done all they could to end it.
\n\nFaced with this united front of government, employers, and their own unions, workers developed the technique of quick, unofficial strikes independent of and even against the union structure on a far larger scale than ever before. The number of such strikes began to rise in the summer of 1942, and by 1944, the last full year of the war, more strikes took place than in any previous year in American history.
\n
When the war ended, capitalists were determined to regain control of the production process by suppressing wildcat strikes, while workers hoped to win wage increases to offset inflation. As a result, a new wave of wildcat strikes broke out.
\n\nMany of these wildcat strikes ultimately forced the union bureaucracy to declare official strikes. For example, immediately after the conclusion of the war, United Auto Workers requested a 30% wage increase from General Motors—but the union president declared that he hoped to reach an agreement with the management without any work stoppages. It was only after the workers at 90 plants in the Detroit area went on strike that the union ordered a strike vote, which eventually resulted in 225,000 workers walking out.
\n\nThe United States Bureau of Labor Statistics called the first half of 1946 “the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history.” Stan Weir described it as “the largest strike wave that ever occurred in the United States.”
\n\nAccording to Brecher,
\n\n\n\n\nTrade unions played an essential role in forestalling what might otherwise have been a general confrontation between the workers of a great many industries and the government, supporting the employers. The unions were unable to prevent the post-war strike wave, but by leading it they managed to keep it under control.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/23.jpg\")
A scene from the Russian film Forgotten Melody for a Flute.
\nAltogether, 1946 saw general strikes in six cities: Rochester, Houston, Hartford, Lancaster, Camden, and—last of all—in Oakland, California.
\n\nBrecher notes that by 1946, 69 percent of production workers in manufacturing were covered by collective bargaining agreements. But unionizing efforts in the service industry had not been as successful—and after the war ended, women who had been employed in well-paid unionized production jobs were forced back into precarious service industry employment.
\n\nIn the Bay Area, storeowners had their own Retail Merchants’ Association, which fought viciously to prevent the Oakland Retail Clerks’ union from organizing department store workers. Nonetheless, the momentum of the strike wave bolstered the union drive at Kahn’s Department Store, the largest store in Oakland—located downtown at the intersection of Broadway and 16th—and Hastings, the men’s store beside Kahn’s. At the same time, a nationwide maritime strike dragged on into late November in the Bay Area, creating an atmosphere of tension.
\n\nWorkers at Hastings went on strike on October 21, and workers at Kahn’s joined them on October 31. In “The Oakland General Strike,” Richard Boyden describes how these strikes became a flashpoint for labor unrest:
\n\n\n\n\nThere was strong sympathy for the strikers, most of whom were women. Not only did they receive crucial support from the Teamsters who honored the picket lines, but from the other unions, many of whose members volunteered their free time to join the strikers at the store entrances. Even before the general strike, therefore, activists—both rank-and-filers and officials—of a broad cross section of the labor movement were meeting each other on the strike scene. This contributed to a growing sense of common purpose and struggle and sentiment, as the strike dragged on, for a general strike.
\n
According to census records, Oakland was predominantly white in 1946. It was also plagued by racial tension: the Zoot Suit Riots that had broken out in Los Angeles in 1943 had spread to Oakland as well. Nonetheless, photographs from November 1946 show an array of workers picketing in front of Kahn’s, including both Black and white workers of various genders.
\n\nAccording to Boyden, the local leadership of the Teamsters union “covertly opposed the Kahn’s-Hastings strike, but was prevented from acting on this opposition by its own membership.” As Boyden puts it,
\n\n\n\n\nThe Retail Clerks’ union had always relied on Teamster support in strikes because retail workers are relatively unskilled and easily replaced. The stopping of deliveries, therefore, often is the key to success.
\n
Blocking deliveries remains a crucial element of today’s strikes.
\n\nOn Sunday, December 1, starting before dawn, 400 Oakland police officers shut down the pickets around Kahn’s and Hastings, attacking the picketers with billy clubs and cordoning off the area. As thousands watched, the police accompanied a professional strike-breaking team from Los Angeles in delivering merchandise to the two department stores. The cops towed away the cars belonging to picketers and set up machine guns in the middle of the square facing Kahn’s.
\n\nIn response, streetcar operators and bus drivers abandoned their vehicles downtown, removing the steering mechanisms, effectively blockading traffic. Union organizers gathered at the Labor Temple to discuss the situation. The president of the Teamsters’ local demanded that the assembly announce a general strike immediately, declaring that his union would strike the next day regardless. A larger meeting was planned for Monday.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/24.jpg\")
Oakland police stand guard as strikebreakers’ trucks deliver goods to Kahn’s department store on December 1, 1946; a line of Key System streetcars abandoned on Telegraph Avenue by their operators.
\nThe next day, thousands of people gathered to reinforce the pickets around the stores. Union officials gathered at 10 am for what must have been a contentious meeting, judging by the fact that the call for a strike did not come out until 10 pm that night. According to Boyden, union leaders were propelled forward against their will by popular outrage: “They were frightened—first by the specter of anarchy, which seemed to grow every minute, and by the possibility of repression and reprisals.”
\n\nOn Tuesday morning, Boyden writes,
\n\n\n\n\nThe industrial and residential districts of Oakland, Alameda, San Leandro, and Hayward were silent, the streets empty… Twenty-thousand people came downtown to join the pickets. Some workers joined the strike in organized contingents, marching from their union halls.
\n
Police attempted to establish a line in front of Hastings again, but Teamsters ran them off. Picketers also intervened when reporters attempted to take photographs in the streets (an important precedent to recall today in the age of livestreaming).
\n\nAccording to participant Stan Weir,
\n\n\n\n\nA mass of couples danced in the streets. The participants were making history, knew it, and were having fun. By Tuesday morning, they had cordoned off the central city and were directing traffic. Anyone could leave, but only those with passports (union cards) could get in. The comment made by a prominent national network newscaster, that “Oakland is a ghost town tonight,” was a contribution to ignorance. Never before or since had Oakland been so alive and happy for the majority of the population…
\n\nIn all general strikes the participants are very soon forced by the very nature of events to themselves run the society they have just stopped. The process in the Oakland experiment was beginning to deepen. There was as yet little evidence of official union leadership in the streets.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/21.jpg\")
Massive crowds gather in front of Kahn’s department store on December 3, 1946.
\nRestaurants opened as usual that morning, but the Teamsters shut down all of the unionized ones by 8 am. Some people set up a soup kitchen downtown, but it was not able to feed the tremendous number of people who had gathered. In 1946 as today, sufficient infrastructure is fundamental to any mass mobilization.
\n\nWell over 10,000 people convened at the Oakland Auditorium that night for a meeting; an overflow crowd of thousands stood outside in the rain, listening to the proceedings over loudspeakers. The prize for rhetoric goes to Norwegian-born American Federation of Labor organizer Harry Lundeberg:
\n\n\n\n\n“This,” said Lundeberg of the police action, “is fascism in America.” The Los Angeles strike breakers were “…just the average finks,” he shouted: “…the super finks are the city administration… These finky gazoonies who call themselves city fathers have been taking lessons from Hitler and Stalin.”
\n
Lundeberg had spent the earlier part of 1946 engaging in red-baiting attacks on the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations during the maritime strike, but in the heat of the moment, all was forgotten. The next day, there were 35,000 people downtown for the pickets.
\n\nIn response to the strike, the head of the Retail Merchants’ Association reached out to the leadership of the Teamsters. The upper echelons of the union leadership, it turned out, were more sympathetic to the employers than they were to rank-and-file workers. Dan Tobin, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, announced that “The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is bitterly opposed to any general strike for any cause. I am therefore ordering you and all those associated with you who are members of our International Union to return to work as soon as possible.”
\n\nWest Coast Teamster boss Dave Beck complained that “This damn general strike is nothing but a revolution. It isn’t labor tactics. It’s revolutionary tactics.”
\n\nStan Weir attributes the failure of the strike to spread beyond predominantly white demographics to the fact that the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the only organized labor contingent in the Bay Area headed by leaders sympathetic to the Communist Party, effectively stood aside throughout the events. (This didn’t prevent reactionaries from attempting to associate the general strike with the Communist Party afterwards.) If we accept Weir’s account, racial divisions played a role in limiting how far the strike could spread, but chiefly as a consequence of the concentration of power in the hands of leaders who had different goals from the ordinary workers under them.
\n\nOn the evening of Wednesday, December 4, the American Federation of Labor committee met with the department store owners until 4 am. At 10:30 am the next morning, the AFL representatives voted to end the strike.
\n\nRank-and-file workers were outraged. Some continued picketing and convened local union meetings to try to keep the strike going. According to Stan Weir,
\n\n\n\n\nThe people on the street learned of the decision from a sound truck put on the street by the AFL Central Labor Council. It was the officials’ first really decisive act of leadership. They had consulted among themselves and decided to end the strike on the basis of the Oakland City Manager’s promise that police would not again be used to bring in scabs. No concessions were gained for the women retail clerks at Kahn’s and Hastings Department Stores whose strikes had triggered the General Strike; they were left free to negotiate any settlement they could get on their own. Those women and many other strikers heard the sound truck’s message with the form of anger that was close to heartbreak. Numbers of truckers and other workers continued to picket with the women, yelling protests at the truck and appealing to all who could hear that they should stay out. But all strikers other than the clerks had been ordered back to work and no longer had any protection against the disciplinary actions that might be brought against them for strike-caused absences.
\n
By Friday, the general strike was over, sabotaged from above. At noon that day, 25 strike-breakers were brought into Kahn’s. Picketers responded angrily, but the union leadership once again deescalated the situation by calling for a mass meeting at the Labor Temple, enabling the strike-breakers to get into the department store without a confrontation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/25.jpg\")
The Oakland Tribune announces the end of the strike on Thursday, December 5; the Oakland Auditorium on the afternoon of Friday, December 6, 1946, as 1200 employers met to discuss the strike.
\nSix months later, the workers at Kahn’s and Hastings were still out on strike.
\n\nAccording to Boyden, Teamster bosses like Dave Beck exemplified the sort of profiteers who professionalized the union bureaucracy, transforming it into a junior partner of the capitalist class:
\n\n\n\n\n[Beck] rightly viewed the general strike as a revolutionary tactic, and opposed its use no matter what the situation. He was a business unionist par excellence and a professional anti-communist. He sought to build and consolidate his organization by “selling” the conservative Teamsters union to the employers as a “responsible” alternative to militant and/or radical unions…
\n\nBeck viewed the union as a business, not a cause. He wanted to “Taylorize” the labor movement, apply to it the business methods developed by the corporations and create in the person of the union official a new professional, whose position and power rested in expertise and efficiency, not on the democratic participation of the union members. And Beck treated his union like his own company. He used his profits from the Teamsters to become a millionaire, investing extensively in Seattle real estate and other business ventures. There was no place in this scheme for militant trade unionism.
\n
The tensions that lingered in Oakland after the general strike were channeled into electoral politics. The rival American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations united to form a Political Action Committee to run candidates for the Oakland City Council. The strikes at Kahn’s and Hastings ended with a compromise the day before the elections. Four of the labor candidates were elected, though they were always outvoted by the other five City Council members. In any case, according to Stan Weir, “The four winners were by no means outspoken champions of labor. They did not utilize their offices as a tribune for a progressive labor-civic program.” Looking back, Weir realized that Harry Lundeberg, in his “finky gazoonies” speech, had begun to shift workers’ attention away from a direct struggle against employers to a focus on City Council.
\n\nAfter the general strike in Oakland, it was all downhill for labor struggles in the United States. Workers never again regained the leverage they had wielded during the general strikes of 1946.
\n\nPresident Harry Truman’s Executive Order of March 21, 1947 required that all federal civil-service employees be screened for “loyalty.” That June, Congress introduced the Taft–Hartley Act, prohibiting wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, and closed shops. Union leaders were required to file with the United States Department of Labor declaring that they did not support the Communist Party and had no relationship with any organization seeking the “overthrow of the United States government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means.” The years that followed saw the second Red Scare, including the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover and the imprisonment, firing, blacklisting, interrogation, and persecution of countless thousands of workers and organizers. All of these served to hamstring the labor movement while contributing to the ascendancy of its most reactionary elements. This occurred long before globalization enabled capitalists to sidestep unionized labor forces entirely, though the taming of the labor movement helped to pave the way for that. By the end of the twentieth century, subsequent waves of white flight, deindustrialization, gentrification, and the shift of the majority of wage earners into non-unionized service industry jobs had utterly transformed Oakland and other cities like it.
\n\nTo those who have participated in the social upheavals of the early twenty-first century, many aspects of the story of the general strike of 1946 will be familiar: police brutality as the spark that catalyzes a contagious uprising, the ingenuity and initiative of the participants (Stan Weir described striking workers as “people who have been released from the necessity to hide their feelings”), the challenges of coordinating to meet the needs of a revolt that interrupts capitalist logistics without replacing them, the retreat into electoral politics during the waning phase.
\n\nThe part that may be surprising for those who grew up after the heyday of the old labor movement is the extent to which the union leadership worked directly with the capitalist class to suppress the strike. The decades of labor organizing that had created these unions built the shared consciousness and commitments that made the strike possible, but the union hierarchies were among the chief threats to the movement itself. Today, as a new generation seeks tools with which to stand up to the capitalist class, we should not forget the lessons of 1946. Formal unions do not suffice to enable workers to stand up for themselves. The important things are organizing, solidarity, and audacity, outside of the workplace as well as inside it. The official recognition of a union—however hard won—will not automatically deliver those things, and is no substitute for them.
\n\nIn 1946—as today—the power of a strike did not derive simply from the fact that workers stopped working in a given workplace. The power of the strike derived from their determination to shut down that workplace, to defend themselves against strike-breakers and police, and to interrupt business as usual on all fronts—and from the fact that when they did these things successfully, it was contagious, drawing in the participation of many people who did not share their workplace or their immediate concerns.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/26.jpg\")
Strikers gather in front of Hastings department store on December 3, 1946; graffiti on the smashed window of a Bank of America on November 2, 2011.
\nAfter 1946, decades passed before anything like a general strike took place again in the United States. Besides the “Day without an Immigrant” protests of May 1, 2006—a subject for another study—the closest thing to a successful general strike in the United States thus far in the 21st century arguably took place in Oakland on November 2, 2011, at the high point of the Occupy movement.
\n\nThe strike of November 2, 2011 differed from the general strike of 1946 in several instructive ways. Rather than mobilizing card-carrying union members to shut down their own workplaces, a motley assemblage of students, precarious workers, unemployed people, radicals, and other rebels set out to shut down the city from outside the economy proper.
\n\nThree years into the recession, the year 2011 opened with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, followed by the plaza occupation movements in Spain and Greece—setting the stage for sluggish social movements in the United States to finally kick into gear.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/3.jpg\")
The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt inspired people around the world in 2011. In this photograph, demonstrators wave an Egyptian flag during the port blockade in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nThough rapidly gentrifying, Oakland had not entirely lost its character as a longtime hotbed of radical activity. If few recalled the strikes of 1946, the legacy of the Black Panther Party and other radical groups from the 1960s and ’70s lingered in the popular imagination. At the same time, the local government was comprised in part of alumni of the previous generation of activists, who were experts at co-opting and pacifying social movements.
\n\nRiots had broken out in Oakland at the beginning of 2009 in response to the murder of Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit police. Afterwards, a combative student movement took off in the Bay Area with a series of building occupations; it peaked on March 4, 2010 in a mass march from Berkeley to Oakland that ended with a breakaway march blocking the freeway. Anarchists carried a reinforced banner in that march reading “Occupy Everything”—an image from the future. In the buildup to March 4, some people had talked about calling for a general strike, but no one had a clear idea of what that could look like.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/7.jpg\")
Anarchists participating in the March from the University of California at Berkeley to downtown Oakland on March 4, 2010.
\nIn February 2011, in response to a bill stripping public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, demonstrators in Madison occupied the capitol. Again, there was some talk about calling for a general strike. On April 4, longshore workers from Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down the ports of San Francisco and Oakland in solidarity with workers in Wisconsin.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/5.jpg\")
A poster promoting the idea of a general strike during the protests in Madison, Wisconsin in early 2011: “General strike means nobody and nothing works.”
\nIn summer 2011, seeking to revitalize local networks and experiment with new tactics, a small number of anarchists and anti-state communists organized a series of anti-austerity demonstrations dubbed Anticuts. As participants later recounted,
\n\n\n\n\nThe 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.
\n
In following this march route, the Anticuts demonstrators started by City Hall—from which the police had attacked the pickets on the morning of December 1, 1946—then passed by the site where Kahn’s department store had been, and then, a block later, crossed the intersection where the first streetcar driver had abandoned his vehicle in protest that morning sixty-four and a half years earlier.
\n\nWhile the strikers of 1946 focused on asserting their interests in their workplaces, the Anticuts demonstrators focused on the control of public space, the defunding of libraries and other public resources, and the prison-industrial complex. Work itself had become more precarious and diffuse in the intervening decades to such an extent that it had become easier to take on other aspects of capitalism. The demonstrators confronted the conditions of their survival rather than seeking to negotiate better rewards for participating in production.
\n\nOn September 17, a thousand people responded to a call to occupy Zuccotti Park in New York City. The original proposal was to gather in imitation of the Tahrir Square demonstrators in Cairo and agree on a single demand to present to the government; the editor of Adbusters, the magazine that first published the call, said “We’re hoping it’s something specific and doable, like asking Obama to set up a committee to look into the fall of US banking.” Occupy Wall Street began as form without content, a calculated attempt to create a memetic imitation of overseas movements. Owing to the involvement of anarchists like David Graeber, however, the movement adopted a horizontal, participatory structure that enabled it to surpass the vision of those who had founded it.
\n\nAcross the United States, activists with a wide range of agendas and ideologies established copycat occupations. One of the first of these appeared in San Francisco. Occupy Oakland began weeks later; this gave the participants time to discuss the character of the other occupations around the country and identify what they wanted to do differently. “If this movement is to bring any fundamental change in the quality of our lives,” argued one participant ahead of the first gathering, “it must be drastically different than any of the other Occupations [sic] around the country.”
\n\nDespite rain, a thousand people gathered on October 10 in front of Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza, rechristened Oscar Grant Plaza—one block from the site of Kahn’s Department Store. The camp drew together participants in many earlier struggles in the Bay Area, augmenting their commitments and experience by connecting them with a broader social body.
\n\n“From the start, Occupy Oakland immediately rejected cooperation with city government officials,” the authors of “Who Is Oakland?” noted. In contrast to Occupy groups elsewhere around the United States, Occupy Oakland involved large numbers of people who were uncompromisingly opposed to the police and to reformist strategies; many participants defended the legitimacy of autonomous action, rejecting the idea that the assemblies should exert centralized control over the movement through formal consensus process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/2.jpg\")
“Worker solidarity: no compromise with bosses or politicians.” Banners at Oscar Grant Plaza during Occupy Oakland.
\nAccording to an early report from participants,
\n\n\n\n\nOn the very first day, the camp had a fully functional kitchen, an info-tent, and a supply tent. By the end of this week there was a medic tent, art supply tent, an insurrectionary library, a free store, the Raheim Brown Free School, a media tent, a POC tent, a Sukkah, a DJ booth, and not to mention hundreds of sleeping-space tents. In addition, the rotating kitchen crew has been feeding everyone consistently from 8 am until midnight and throwing spontaneous BBQs.
\n
The two dozen tents that had appeared the first night increased to one hundred and fifty tents by the end of the first week. Participants described the occupation as a liberated zone, while rival elements of the power structure sought to co-opt or suppress it. According to the authors of “Who Is Oakland?”,
\n\n\n\n\nThe press releases of the city government, Oakland Police Department, and business associations like the Oakland Chamber of Commerce continually repeat[ed] that the Occupy Oakland encampment, feeding nearly a thousand mostly desperately poor people a day, was composed primarily of non-Oakland resident “white outsiders” intent on destroying the city. For anyone who spent any length of time at the encampment, Occupy Oakland was clearly one of the most racially and ethnically diverse Occupy encampments in the country—composed of people of color from all walks of life, from local business owners to fired Oakland school teachers, from college students to the homeless and seriously mentally ill. Unfortunately, social justice activists, clergy, and community groups mimicked the city’s erasure of people of color in their analysis of Occupy, when they were not negotiating with the mayor’s office behind closed doors to dismantle the encampment “peacefully.”
\n\nFrom the beginning, the Occupy Oakland encampment existed in a tightening vise between two faces of the state: nonprofits and the police. An array of community organizations immediately began negotiating with city bureaucracies and pushing for the encampment to adopt nonviolence pledges and move to Snow Park (itself later cleared by OPD despite total compliance of individuals who settled there). At the same time, police departments across the Bay Area [were] readying one of the largest and most expensive paramilitary operations in recent history.
\n
In the early hours of October 25, Occupy Oakland became the first Occupy encampment in the United States to be raided in a full-scale police operation. According to the authors of “The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune,”
\n\n\n\n\nAfter 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.
\n\nLater 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.
\n
According to “Insurrection, Oakland Style: A History”:
\n\n\n\n\nA general assembly was called for 6 pm on October 26. The police were nowhere in sight, but some reported that they were massing at a nearby parking garage. They were never to mobilize in any show of force. Bike patrols were passing back information, and a general feeling of safety permeated the camp. The metal fence that had been set up by the city was taken down, and once again the plaza was in the hands of #OccupyOakland. A proposal was submitted for a general strike in Oakland on November 2. The proposal passed by 96.9%; 1484 votes for to 77 against, with 47 abstentions, more than enough in Oakland’s modified consensus of 90% for the proposal to pass.
\n
96.9% was a considerable majority out of one of the largest assemblies to take place. But the population of Oakland totaled almost 400,000, and the participants in Occupy were arguably among the less steadily employed residents of Oakland: many of them were unemployed, while others were employed in the gig economy or other precarious labor. The general strike of 1946 had involved more than 100,000 workers. How could a couple thousand people pull off the same thing?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/14.jpg\")
A pumpkin at Oscar Grant Plaza announcing the forthcoming general strike.
\nIn 1946, a significant part of the population of Oakland had been unionized; in 2011, something like 89% of workers had no unions, and most of the unions that remained had been thoroughly integrated into the smooth functioning of the economy. The general strike of 1946 drew its force from the fact that, without workers, the Oakland economy ground to a halt; in 2011, in the midst of a continuing recession, most workers were employed in sectors of the economy that were hardly essential to its functioning. How do baristas, dishwashers, dog-walkers, sex workers, medical study lab rats, self-employed graphic designers, grad students, and those who seek employment on Craiglist make an impact by not working for a day?
\n\nBy shutting down the economy from outside.
\n\nBut how?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/22.jpg\")
The announcement of the November 2 general strike.
\nOf course, not everyone involved in Occupy Oakland was a precarious worker. Some were connected to the same ILWU local that had shut down the ports on April 4. Elements in the nurses’ and teachers’ unions were also sympathetic to the movement. Negotiations ensued with and within Bay Area unions ahead of November 2.
\n\nBy Friday, October 28, fault lines were emerging. Representatives of the ILWU and other unions announced that they would not call on their members to strike. “However energetic we are about the cause, we also are law-abiding organizations that are very cautious,” Matthew Goldstein, president of the union representing faculty at four East Bay schools in the Peralta Community College District, told reporters. “A general strike on the order of the 1946 general strike in Oakland is an ambitious goal, especially in just a few days.” (As we have seen, the 1946 general strike broke out in two days, whereas Occupy Oakland had given themselves a week to organize.)
\n\n“Only a few unions, such as the SEIU (public sector) gave an official call-out for their members to take a day off in order to participate,” the Rust Bunny collective recounted afterwards, noting that the Service Employees International Union struck a tacit agreement with City Hall to that purpose. Many unions informally encouraged their members to participate in the day of action without calling for a strike, neither wishing to risk losing credibility nor to face the legal consequences of an illegal strike.
\n\n“It’s virtually impossible for any union to endorse a work-stoppage because all contracts have no-strike clauses, which unions are bound to honor,” ILWU communications director Craig Merrilees told reporters.
\n\nThat same day, Jack Heyman, a retired Oakland longshoreman and chairman of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, speaking at Zuccotti Park to Occupy Wall Street, declared, “Longshore workers are attempting to shut down the ports in the Bay Area. We will be calling on other workers in other ports to join us.”
\n\nAt Occupy Wall Street on Friday, October 28, 2011, Jack Heyman announces the solidarity of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union with the Occupy Oakland’s call for a General Strike on November 2 in response to police violence against protesters in Oakland.
\nThe ILWU had a longstanding clause in their contract permitting them to refuse to cross a picket line and cancel a shift if the situation was deemed unsafe. Radicals within the ILWU encouraged participants in Occupy Oakland to set up picket lines at the Port of Oakland in order to enable them to activate that clause. This approach relied upon the precarious and unemployed to enable unionized workers to walk off the job without suffering the consequences of breaching their contracts. It represented an ambitious effort to integrate the unionized working class and the precarious underclass into a single unified strategy. As we shall see, this strategy had drawbacks of its own.
\n\nYears earlier, in Washington, DC, anarchists mobilizing against the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had called for a “People’s Strike” on September 27, 2002 to shut down the nation’s capital. Though only a few thousand protesters turned out for the day’s action, their militant messaging achieved the goal in advance: the government advised people not to ride the metro or come downtown to work, and the police themselves surrounded and effectively shut down many of the targets in their efforts to secure them. In Oakland in 2011, the call for a general strike had similar effects. A spokesman for the University of California Office of the President in downtown Oakland announced the office would be closed on November 2 and that the 1300 employees who worked in the building would work from home, for fear that the Bay Area Rapid Transit system might be impacted. The mayor gave city employees permission to take November 2 off—with the exception of police.
\n\nOn November 1, the Oakland Police Officer’s Association took the unusual step of publishing an open letter criticizing the mayor and hinting at a strike of their own:
\n\n\n\n\nWe represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police…
\n\nOn Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence, and destruction of property.
\n\nThen, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in—to camp out at the very place they were evacuated [sic] from the day before.
\n\nTo add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.
\n\nMeanwhile, a message has been sent to all police officers: Everyone, including those who have the day off, must show up for work on Wednesday.
\n
Conflicts within the halls of power are often a crucial element in successful revolutionary mobilizations. The police carried out a sort of strike of their own on November 2, almost completely withdrawing until midnight.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/17.jpg\")
Oakland police prepared by boarding up their windows—from the inside.
\nMeanwhile, energized by the proposed general strike, countless new participants were flowing into Occupy Oakland. Many of them had not previously been exposed to the radical politics of those who had been involved in it since the beginning. Nonetheless, according to one member of the Industrial Workers of the World,
\n\n\n\n\nThe General Assembly passed several key motions leading up to the General Strike—a motion supporting autonomous actions that occupied buildings for the purpose of expropriating them, a motion that reprisal pickets would be sent out where requested against schools and businesses that disciplined their students or workers for participating in the general strike, and that health and safety pickets would be sent out early where requested, so that workers would have a picket line to refuse to cross…
\n\nBy Tuesday, the community colleges had large, public walkouts planned, most instructors had cancelled classes, and it all just seemed to arise out of the air.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-6b.jpg\")
Oscar Grant plaza on November 2, 2011.
\nOn November 2, many longshore workers called out of work in the morning, leaving the port running at a diminished capacity. Students and teachers from Berkeley and Laney College marched downtown to join the strike after serving a symbolic eviction notice at Oakland Unified School District headquarters. The Men’s Wearhouse beside the plaza displayed a sign in its window saying “We stand with the 99%. Closed Wednesday, Nov. 2.” The marquee of the Grand Lake Theater read “We proudly support the Occupy Wall Street movement—closed Wednesday in support of the strike.”
\n\nMassive numbers of people gathered at Oscar Grant Plaza. According to the authors of “The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune,”
\n\n\n\n\nPeople 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.
\n
A participant in one of the flying pickets described their experience shutting down a café that had refused to close:
\n\n\n\n\nWe began loudly shouting slogans like “Shut it down!” “General Strike!” and “Let them strike, it’s their right!” After we noisily created havoc and prevented the café from operating, someone negotiated with the boss and he agreed to close, let the workers leave, and pay them for a full day’s wages—even though they had not even been there half a shift. There were about 15 people working there, with about five Latino guys baking and cooking in the visible kitchen and the rest were young Black and white women and men working the counter and serving food.
\n\nMost of the workers were excited at our action, especially the ones who knew some of the Wobblies, but they had to be discrete in front of management. There was some confusion, at least until management disappeared from the windows, but once that happened the workers were all smiles and talked to us through the glass doors. We asked if we should stay or leave, and the enthusiastic response was “Stay!” …The same worker who told us to stay later said through the glass “You did it! You shut it down!” and gave one of the Wobblies a fist bump through the glass door. We stayed until all the workers had left the café, hoping that some of them would make it to the area around Oscar Grant Plaza to join the strike.
\n\nWhile we were waiting for the workers to leave, a couple of potential customers complained that we were “attacking a small local business.”
\n
This narrative, like the events at the port, illustrates the extent to which this kind of “strike from outside the workplace” could be misunderstood or misrepresented as anti-worker. In fact, in 1946, it had been the Teamsters who had shut down restaurants in downtown Oakland, also acting from outside the workplace.
\n\nAt 2 pm, at the intersection of Broadway and Telegraph beside the former site of Kahn’s, an anti-capitalist march that had been announced autonomously outside the consensus process of the Occupy assemblies gathered behind banners proclaiming “If we cannot live, we will not work—general strike!” and “This is class war.” Many participants sported black flags, motorcycle helmets, masks, matching black clothing, and shields painted to resemble the covers of books. These shields had first appeared during the Anticuts marches of the preceding summer, inspired by similar shields in Italy.
\n\nLed by a black bloc of hundreds, the march visited Chase Bank, the Bank of America at the Kaiser Center, the Wells Fargo at 12th and Broadway, Whole Foods—the management of which had refused to give workers the day off—and the University of California Office of the President, leaving a trail of graffiti and broken windows in its wake. One participant spray-painted “1946” across a cracked Bank of America window. This was a return to the tactics that anarchists and others had employed in the riots responding to the murder of Oscar Grant—and before that, most famously, during the mobilization against the summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. In addition to forcibly shutting down the targets, these tactics expressed uncompromising opposition to capitalism itself—establishing a confrontational pole in the distinctly heterogeneous Occupy movement. In effect, the participants were counterposing a rival memetic gesture to the assembly and occupation that had characterized Occupy up to that point.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/20.jpg\")
“A large canister of paint was used to write the word “STRIKE” across the front windows. As the painters ran back toward the crowd some of those in the crowd decided these people needed to be tackled and knocked to the ground. Eventually, the scuffle grew to include the painters, the tacklers and the people who broke the painters free and allowed them to run into the crowd for safety.” –Bruce Valde in the December 2011 issue of the Industrial Worker.
\nSome witnesses disapproved; others charged that vandalism would discredit the movement. Debates about “violence” were rampant in the United States at that time, including in the Bay Area, peaking with Chris Hedges’ notorious text “The Cancer in Occupy.” It was only later, between the rebellion in Ferguson in 2014 and the first year of Trump’s presidency, that large numbers of people began to accept the need—at least in certain circumstances—for tactics that many had previously delegitimized as “violent.”
\n\nAt 4 pm, thousands began to gather at 14th and Broadway to march to the Port of Oakland. According to one eyewitness,
\n\n\n\n\nTwo marches would leave for the port, at 4 and 5 pm, the first, from reliable estimates, consisting of at least 10,000 people, the second consisting of 15,000-20,000 people. Plus many more people went to the port from elsewhere. The best estimates I have seen for the numbers at the port were 35,000-50,000, which I can easily believe.
\n
According to another eyewitness,
\n\n\n\n\nAs we got to the intersection at the Port where there is a traffic signal at the entrance to the APL terminal, I marveled at the trucks idled six abreast in the midst of the human swarm. I wondered what the troqueros thought about the shutdown, so I asked the first two I saw standing next to their trucks. I began by apologizing for preventing them from working. They immediately responded by rejecting my apology, saying “We’re part of this and we’re happy it’s happening.” Their only disappointment was that they thought the strike would happen in the morning.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/19.jpg\")
According to Stephen Coles, “After 8 pm, there was some confusion among our crowd picketing the APL Gate about whether we had successfully blocked the full shift. Amid the arguing, this man stepped forward and said he was with the Longshore Union. He confirmed that the strike was successful and workers were not able to cross the lines. Some in the skeptical crowd demanded his ID as we were getting mixed messages from Twitter and other sources. He supplied it: Craig Merrilees, Communications Director for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. He went on to say the workers were grateful to Occupy marchers for facilitating the picket line and then answered questions about arbitration from folks in the crowd around him.” This testimony is interesting because the following month, Craig Merrilees took an outspoken role in denouncing Occupy in the corporate media.
\nFinally, after night fell, hundreds of people occupied the Traveler’s Aid building a few blocks from Oscar Grant Plaza. Long empty, it had previously housed a nonprofit serving the homeless. In anticipation of a police raid, defenders built a barricade at 16th and Broadway to defend the area—though when they lit it ablaze, conflicts about “violence” broke out with renewed vigor. Finally, at midnight, the police, who had been absent all day, appeared in considerable force and attacked, recapturing the Traveler’s Aid building and provoking a night of rioting during which many of the businesses and city offices around the plaza were damaged, including a police substation.
\n\nScenes from Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nAnd then it was over. Having called for a big day of action, the movement went into a refractory period. It took some participants months to realize that November 2 had been the high point of Occupy.
\n\nDebates followed about the legitimacy of some of the tactics that anarchists had employed. Although the general assembly had passed a motion supporting autonomous building occupations, some still objected to the occupation of the Traveler’s Aid building; others were angry about the anti-capitalist march that had visited Whole Foods. As one participant observed, however, “Far more people participated in the Oakland General Strike than have ever attended a General Assembly.” Discussions about direct democracy, consensus process, and self-determination continued for years after Occupy.
\n\nOn November 10, a man was fatally shot beside the encampment in Oscar Grant Plaza, underscoring the severity of the challenges that Occupy Oakland had taken on in attempting to create a commons in the midst of poverty and desperation. Early on November 14, the police evicted the camp again, this time permanently.
\n\nNonetheless, some elements of Occupy Oakland were determined to continue developing a model for a 21st-century strike. In “Blockading the Port Is Only the First of Many Last Resorts,” published on December 7, some participants argued that it was essential to understand how the economy had changed since 1946:
\n\n\n\n\nThis is why the general strike on November 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces—the ports, for instance—did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat. In such a situation, the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple… mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration, and sale of goods produced elsewhere.
\n
As participants in Occupy Oakland began to organize towards another port shutdown, scheduled for December 12 and intended to encompass the entire West Coast, union bureaucrats and capitalist media outlets took advantage of the vulnerabilities of the model of strike as “intervention by an extrinsic proletariat” to sow dissension. The fact that ILWU members had to claim to be endangered in order to stop work—and had to claim to oppose the strike in order to avoid legal consequences—offered a convenient wedge.
\n\n“Occupy Oakland plans West Coast port shutdown, but port workers don’t support it,” proclaimed the Washington Post on December 5.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/13.jpg\")
One’s perspective on the general strike of 2011 depended considerably on whether one was positioned within it…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/9.jpg\")
…or outside of it.
\n“The ILWU International officers in San Francisco are claiming to have nothing to do with the December 12 action and even oppose it,” wrote the former Communications Director of the ILWU on December 8. “Officially, they must distance themselves from the action call to protect themselves from being sued by the PMA [Pacific Maritime Association] for the damages of the action. But they are going beyond the legally required disclaimers.”
\n\nAfter the blockades of December 12, which were more or less successful in the Bay but drew considerably fewer participants than the November 2 general strike, the New York Times accused Occupy Oakland of “co-opting the unions’ cause instead of working with them.” ILWU communications director Craig Merrilees denied that the ILWU tacitly approved of the strike, charging that Occupy organizers had been “very disrespectful of the democratic decision-making process in the union and deliberately went around that process to call their own action without consulting workers.”
\n\n“Their actions further alienate the movement from average American workers,” Forbes crowed.
\n\nHostile press like this was inevitable. Even if the entire conflict had played out within the ILWU without any “outside agitators” to blame, corporate media would have published negative coverage of any faction promoting tactics that could exert significant leverage on employers. But bad press was not the chief obstacle facing those who sought to continue developing this model for a 21st-century strike.
\n\nThe real problem was that a strategy based on precarious activists shutting down unionized workplaces from outside failed to bridge the gap between the divergent needs of the unionized employees and the precarious blockaders. If the goal was to shut down the economy as a generalized pressure tactic on behalf of the unemployed and precarious, it was not clear what the union members might stand to gain from this; many ILWU members earned comfortable salaries and had job security that was not worth risking for the sake of what some considered utopian or nihilistic adventurism. (“We have jobs and families,” said a random truck driver the Associated Press found to condemn the Occupy protesters; “Most of them don’t.”) If the goal was only to defend the bargaining rights of the ILWU, it was not clear what the precarious blockaders might stand to gain from taking considerable risks to preserve the security of workers who occupied a stabler position in the economy.
\n\nThe ILWU leadership had no intention of being associated with blockades that could result in fines and other penalties, and they were determined not to cede control of the ports to a grassroots movement. In this context, even when rank-and-file union organizers attempted to organize a work stoppage—the chief form of leverage a union can exert—they had to do so from outside the workplace, defying the representatives of the union, as if they were themselves nihilistic adventurists. Calls from all sides to center the unions in actions at the ports only intensified this paradox.
\n\nEven in the best case, centering the unions—whether that was understood as the official leadership or as radical currents within the rank and file—meant deferring to people who were not necessarily invested in the fortunes of the Occupy movement or attuned to the strategic needs of the blockaders. It bogged down the organizing in internal debates within the group that had the most to lose from escalation, and shifted the objectives towards defending the jurisdiction of the official union structures rather than building new fighting formations to defend everyone impacted by capitalism. This produced diminishing returns as the movement itself melted away from one mobilization to the next.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/12.jpg\")
A repurposed street sign in Oakland on the evening of November 2, 2011: “No work ahead.”
\nJack Heyman and others did their best to legitimize the port blockades. Longtime radical labor organizers grappled with the questions that had come up in the blockades. And there was an opportunity to try again: some Occupy organizers were coordinating with an ILWU local in Longview, Washington, where the multinational corporation EGT was maneuvering to break the union. Hoping to show that Occupy could be real allies to unionized workers, they called for a regional convergence to block a ship that was scheduled to dock at the EGT facilities in that port.
\n\nOccupy Portland and Occupy Seattle organized planning meetings on January 5 and 6. At the first one, in Portland, the ILWU leadership made it clear that they would do everything in their power to hamstring the mobilization. According to a subsequent account, the president of one ILWU local seized the platform to read a letter from the president of the ILWU “calling on ILWU members who might participate in the convergence to be sure to keep their actions within the confines set by Taft-Hartley and to avoid working with Occupy.”
\n\nOn January 6, 2012, over 200 people gathered at a labor solidarity forum called by Occupy Seattle to support Longview ILWU Local 21 in its battle against EGT. Supporters of the ILWU leadership from the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland ILWU locals disrupted the meeting—first verbally, then physically.
\n\nJanuary 6: a meeting called for by Occupy Seattle to support ILWU strikers descends into chaos. Fighting unions means fighting within the unions. It always has.
\nIn the end, according to one account,
\n\n\n\n\nThe 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 defuse the conflict and cooperate with EGT. But none of this came close to materializing.
\n\nIn 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.
\n
Radical elements of the ILWU described these events differently in a press release crediting the Occupy movement as a crucial element in the settlement with EGT. “It wasn’t until rank and file and Occupy planned a mass convergence to blockade the ship that EGT suddenly had the impetus to negotiate,” stated a sympathetic officer of ILWU local in the Bay Area. “Labor can no longer win victories against the employers without the community. It must include a broad-based movement. The strategy and tactics employed by the Occupy movement in conjunction with rank-and-file ILWU members confirm that the past militant traditions of the ILWU are still effective against the employers today.”
\n\nEven if this was a victory for the ILWU—which others denied—it did not help the Occupy movement to maintain momentum. They never repeated the port blockades of November and December. Efforts to coordinate with workers to blockade the Golden Gate Bridge for May Day 2012 fell through when, once again, the unions called off the action at the last minute. Though the blockaders’ risk tolerance may have given organized labor a small advantage at the negotiating table, putting union leadership in the driver’s seat of the entire movement drove it into the ground. In the end, the most vibrant events of May Day 2012 in the Bay as well as Los Angeles and Seattle drew more from the anti-capitalist march of November 2 than they did from the blockading of the port. Interrupting the economy from outside—without coordinating with union representatives or making demands—had proved more viable.
\n\nLooking back a year later, participants in the blockades argued that Occupy protesters should have shut down the ports themselves through direct action rather than focusing on loopholes in the ILWU contract. One organizer suggested that participants in Occupy were only able to offer meaningful solidarity to rank-and-file workers because they defied the union leadership and organized autonomously from it. Even Jacobin magazine, the executive director of which had willfully sought to discredit participants in Occupy who were skeptical of unions (disingenuously alleging that they believed that “‘building “communes,’ rather than confronting capital, should be the movement’s main mission”), detailed how the ILWU leadership had played a fundamentally reactionary role throughout the events.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/16.jpg\")
Diversity of tactics? A demonstrator meditates while others set up burning barricades in the background: downtown Oakland on the evening of November 2, 2011.
\nBack in December 2011, the authors of “Blockading the Port Is Only the First of Many Last Resorts” had already concluded that it was blockaders and rioters, not unions, who represented the future of labor resistance:
\n\n\n\n\nIn the present instance, the initiative is coming from outside the port and from outside the workers’ movement as such, even though it involves workers and unions. For the most part, the initiative here has come from a motley band of people who work in non-unionized workplaces, or (for good reason) hate their unions, or work part-time or have no jobs at all…
\n\nThe coming intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will find no success in attempting to revitalize the moribund unions. Workers will need to participate in the same kinds of direct actions—occupations, blockades, sabotage—that have proven the highlights of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area. When tens of thousands of people marched to the port of Oakland on November 2nd in order to shut it down, by and large they did not do it to defend the jurisdiction of the ILWU, or to take a stand against union-busting (most people were, it appears, ignorant of these contexts). They did it because they hate the present-day economy, because they hate capitalism, and because the ports are one of the most obvious linkages in the web of misery in which we are all caught.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/1.jpg\")
The port blockade in Oakland: sunset on November 2, 2011.
\nTo repeat the words of the ILWU officer: “Labor can no longer win victories against the employers without the community. It must include a broad-based movement.” Even if you wish to focus on labor organizing alone, the only way to give it teeth is to organize with people outside of specific workplaces, without relying on union bureaucracy. Those who attempt to reenact a sanitized version of the strikes of 1946 without understanding what made the general strike of 2011 effective will not get far.
\n\nWhat would a modern-day general strike look like? It would involve a broad range of precarious workers, unemployed people, and other rebels taking disruptive action to shut down the economy from outside. However the strike might begin, it would have to proliferate horizontally, spreading beyond any single demographic as a contagious rebellion exceeding the control of any organization. It would entail targeting the choke points of the economy—physical locations like ports, highways, and distribution centers as well as online venues and other forms of infrastructure, not to mention the workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and prisons in which most of us spend most of our lives. It would necessitate defying politicians, union representatives, community leaders, and everyone who defends their legitimacy. It would be controversial. To persist, it would require seizing and redistributing resources. Many of these actions would take place within workplaces, but to center the agency of official unions or other organizations that have legal standing under capitalism would be to ensure defeat in advance.
\n\n\n\n\nAs 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.
\n\n-Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy: The World Struggles to Wake, 2010-2011
\n
\n\n\nWho is more entitled to occupy a school than those who can’t afford to attend it? Who is more entitled to sabotage the economy than those for whom there are no jobs?
\n\n \n
But the general strike of 2011 also hit a wall. There hasn’t been another since. How could we get past that impasse? To answer that question, we have to look at what happened after the general strike of 2011.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/4.jpg\")
A demonstrator paints “Strike” on the façade of the Whole Foods in downtown Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nThe assembly; the occupation; the blockade; the riot. Confronting the declining leverage of unions and labor organizing in a changing economy, Occupy Oakland experimented with all four of these, in turn.
\n\nIn 2012, at the conclusion of the Occupy movement, if you had chosen participants at random and asked them which of those four models would be most widely adopted a decade later, they probably would have guessed that assemblies would become the most widespread, whereas rioting would remain the most marginal and extreme.
\n\nWhat actually happened is surprising.
\n\nOverseas, in Spain, where the immediate predecessor of the Occupy movement had appeared in the plazas of Madrid and Barcelona, people confronted the same questions in 2012 and arrived at some of the same answers. In Barcelona, during the nationwide general strike of March 29, 2012, many of the participants set out to shut down the economy from outside, using an array of tactics including roving pickets, blockading, and rioting fiercer than anything seen in the Bay Area in 2011. Striking students in Québec arrived at more or less the same strategy that same spring—crucially, with the assistance of non-student supporters. We can trace the circulation of these tactics around the world over the following years—from Turkey to Brazil, from France to Hong Kong, from Ecuador to Chile and Colombia. All of these upheavals offer useful reference points about how to disrupt the economy from outside the workplace.
\n\nIn the United States, the breakaway march in Oakland on March 4, 2010 and the port blockades during the general strike of 2011 foreshadowed the highway blockades that spread around the country in 2014, inspired by the revolt in Ferguson. This movement improved on Occupy in many ways, centering the agency of those most impacted by white supremacy and police violence. Later, at the opening of the Trump era, thousands of people blockaded airports, fulfilling a proposal that had seemed outlandish in 2012.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/15.jpg\")
“It’s a man’s world: let’s fuck it up.” A banner at the blockade of the port in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nAs the intensity of these confrontations picked up, however, horizontal, open assemblies largely fell by the wayside. People overcorrected for the most maddening aspects of the Occupy assemblies (the centrality of white and male voices, the tendency for proposals to bog down in consensus process, the lack of meaningful affinity) by shifting to entirely decentralized and informal frameworks or else by adopting a cadre organizing model tying legitimacy to identity. Anarchists withdrew to affinity groups and collectives, other activists to organizations and parties. The social body that had gathered at the occupations fractured into invite-only Signal threads, socialist groupuscules, and the Bernie Sanders campaign.
\n\nAfterwards, while social movements picked up steam around the world, efforts to connect workplace organizing with confrontational street activity did not gain much momentum.2 The tactics that some activists in Oakland had experimented with in order to update the labor movement for the 21st century became associated almost exclusively with efforts to grapple with the capitalist landscape outside the workplace: fighting fascists, opposing deportations, imposing consequences for police murders.
\n\nThis culminated in the generalized uprising that broke out in May 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd, facilitated by the fact that the first wave of COVID-19 had already imposed an almost total work stoppage on society. (Talk about a general strike introduced from outside the workplace!) The confrontational tactics that were essential to catalyzing this uprising were precisely the same tactics that had been most controversial during Occupy.
\n\nIn the wake of a high point of activity like the George Floyd uprising, activists often become disoriented and dispirited. Because the bar for what counts as a victory has been raised so high, projects or goals that felt worthwhile before the uprising can seem meaningless. Looking for a new way forward, some people who participated in defeating police departments and shutting down cities in 2020 have turned their attention to labor organizing without thinking about how the experiences of summer 2020 might inform it—and without any inkling that the tactics they employed that summer were descended, in part, from an effort to reimagine labor resistance for the 21st century.
\n\nIf blockading, rioting, black bloc tactics, the establishment of “cop-free zones,” and other tactics from 2011 have spread far and wide while labor organizing models have remained at an impasse, this should inform our strategizing. Of course, just because a particular tactic thrives in our current context does not mean that it will suffice to solve the problems we face. After the 2020 revolt, it’s a good idea to seek an even broader basis for collective struggle—and in theory, labor organizing could offer this.
\n\nSo what is missing from the toolset that reaches us, indirectly and incompletely, from the experiments of Occupy Oakland?
\n\nA decade ago, many anarchists considered it their top priority to escalate social conflict. In retrospect, those who fantasized about “social rupture” in 2009 were like the Futurists of 1909 who published a manifesto demanding more aggression, speed, and war immediately before the outbreak of World War I. Today, we have conflicts and ruptures aplenty; increasing atomization and polarization are the only things we can count on. What is not guaranteed is that we will be able to build long-term connections on a large enough scale to collectively produce a shared vision of how to improve our lives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/18.jpg\")
Demonstrators at the port blockade in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nDespite the role that their leadership played in suppressing the general strike, the unions of the 1940s also offered an indispensable venue for rank-and-file workers to connect with each other in order to build a culture of solidarity. Without those unions, the general strike of 1946 would never have occurred in the first place. Likewise, in place of the unions of the 1940s, Occupy Oakland had the encampment and the assembly: these served as spaces of encounter, enabling a broad range of people from many different walks of life to rapidly build new social ties and shared visions. The “Oakland Commune” emerged in this space, a semi-mythological collectivity representing the dream of sharing and fighting together. In reality, the Occupy Oakland encampment was often a very challenging environment, to say the least; afterwards, some participants suggested that, like the unions of 1946, it was both essential to the movement and ultimately implicated in its demise. But this is an argument to improve on the model it offered, rather than trying to do without a space of broad connection.
\n\nAs our relations become ever more atomized, disposable, volatile, and fraught, mirroring the society we live in and the economy that drives it, the absence of spaces for meaningful ongoing connection is one of the greatest challenges facing us. If we are to apply the lessons of 2011 to today’s labor struggles—bringing together the employed, the precariously employed, and the unemployed in a common struggle that challenges capitalism as a whole, rather than seeking to defend the status of small segments of the working class—we will need new spaces of encounter in which to build collectivity.
\n\nWhat model could connect us today the way that the unions connected people in 1946 and the Occupy assemblies connected people in 2011?
\n\nFriends, we leave you with this question.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/11.jpg\")
“Revolt—for a life worth living.” A banner in downtown Oakland on the night of November 2, 2011.
\n\n\n\nForget about going back to the old days—there can be no more peace treaties between classes when even governments are scrambling to keep up with the accelerating effects of capitalism. Forget about fighting to preserve your economic role and privileges—the only hope is to legitimize common resistance from outside them, against them. Forget about strategies based on incremental victories, radicalizing our demands as people build up a taste for winning—today it’s easier to topple governments than to reform them. We have to popularize new ways of fighting that create social bodies outside all capitalist roles, that can one day put an end to capitalism itself.
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/10.jpg\")
\nA few points of departure to learn more about the two general strikes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/6.jpg\")
\nFor the sake of brevity, in this analysis, we pass over over the nationwide “Day without an Immigrant” strike of May 1, 2006, one of few other contenders in the category of 21st-century general strike. It’s worth noting that the “Day without an Immigrant” strike was initiated by one of the most precarious demographics in the United States—and that the chief objective was not to negotiate their salaries or workplace conditions, but to press the government not to render them even more precarious. ↩
\nThe popularity of “anti-work” politics today is the logical consequence of seventy-five years of reversals in the labor movement. It represents a sober (if chiefly instinctive) assessment of the prospects for old-fashioned labor organizing. ↩
\nDespite brutal state repression, Colombia’s general strike has continued strong now for 23 days. The revolt has largely been leaderless and solidarity has expanded to include an impressively wide array of Colombian society: Indigenous and Afro-Colombian movements, queer and trans people, workers, students, people whose precarious employment has been lost to the pandemic. As in many other recent uprisings around the world, this one has been driven first and foremost by youth who know that their only hope to have any future at all is to fight for it. Millions are united in their rejection of unlivable conditions and horrific police violence.
\n\nThis is a 21st-century strike. In a country where the majority worked precarious jobs in an informal economy, now devastated by the pandemic and government restrictions, this strike is less about not going to work than about actively shutting everything down. Blockades have managed to halt commerce in many cities, but they serve a double role: these points are also where people gather and experiment with new ways of living together and caring for one another, outside of dictates of capitalism and the state.
\n\nMurals, dances, barricades, nurses, steaming pots of food, shields, and conversation between neighbors are all equally important to this uprising. Knowledge and skills have been shared between movements with decades of experience and young rebels on the front line. People combine courageous expressions of joy and care with an iron determination to fight.
\n\nThere are tactical echoes from other revolts of the past few years—Hong Kong, Chile, the US—but the horizontal organizing of the strike is significant: this represents a major break from Colombia’s past of centralized armed struggle and labor union movements. Popular assemblies have sprung up to handle decision-making; leaders are distrusted and ignored; people have little faith in the state.
\n\n“From Cali to Jacarézinho: Against State Violence!” A short film by Antimídia.
\nThis makes sense in a country where the state has ruled through fear and death alone for decades—but as the numbers of those murdered, wounded, and disappeared during the protests continue to mount, the bravery of those out in the streets is inspiring. You can donate to medical supplies for the protests in Cali here, or even better, organize a solidarity demonstration. Much of Colombia’s arms budget comes from the US. International solidarity is even more critical since May 17, when Colombian President Iván Duque deployed the police and military in full force to clear all the blockades.
\n\nWe’ve translated a report from Medios Libres Cali, originally published in Spanish on May 11, and conducted two interviews with participants in the movement from Cali, on May 12, and Bogotá, on May 17. Together, these document a historic movement in Colombia, which sets crucial precedents for forthcoming movements around the world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/1.jpg\")
Protesters stream down Paso del Comercio in Cali.
\nAn article by Medios Libres Cali.
\n\n“We strike because we cannot take it anymore.” Working class communities have described this strike best by comparing the situation in Colombia to a pressure cooker: the strike is the manifestation of a critical mass of grievances coming to a boil. Among these is the package of four disastrous reforms that attack the poorest communities and benefit privileged sectors: the tax reform that would levy a 19% VAT on staple foods; the health reform that privatizes healthcare and eliminates access to it; the pension reform transferring money to private funds; and the labor reform that could enable exceptions to the minimum wage.
\n\nBut the reform package is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is a society battered by poverty and inequality; a country embroiled in war for decades and governed by a narco-state that shows its true colors more each day. Day by day, the cloak of democracy is shed to reveal the face of dictatorship. That’s why communities refused to accept these reforms, because they truly could not take any more. Already in 2019, the so-called “Duque package” triggered a massive mobilization paralyzing the country for almost two months, known as 21N (November 21, 2019, the date on which that strike began). Late at night, behind closed doors, the government—supported by the Uribista1 far right—signed a decree creating Grupo Bicentenario, a state financial holding company, despite the fact that the protests had called for the project’s withdrawal as one of the strike’s ten non-negotiable points. Grupo Bicentenario is made up of 19 financial companies including Banco Agrario, Findeter, Finagro, Icetex, and the National Savings Fund.
\n\nIt seems that all the previous atrocities weren’t enough. More than 30,000 people have been disappeared since 1985, according to the Truth Commission, as part of an ongoing attack on social movements, systematically targeting indigenous communities in particular. This is a country nourished by violence, in which there were 6402 extrajudicial executions confirmed between 2002 and 2008. More than 900 influential participants in social movements have been murdered since 2016, according to Indepaz—101 in 2020 alone, according to a report by the Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP). The displacement of rural communities is ongoing, with 28,509 people violently displaced and confined in 2020, according to the Colombian Ombudsman’s Office. At the same time, it is a country that lives with hunger—by mid-2020, the National Institute of Health had documented at least 9151 cases of children under 5 with acute malnutrition—in which the economy has been devastated by the pandemic.
\n\nTogether, all the different resulting forms of discontent have made many people feel like the strike is theirs. That’s why so many came out in solidarity and returned to the streets with rage—and, more importantly, without fear. Thousands of people with nothing to lose chose to participate in a strike that has now lasted 14 days. The strike belongs to the people, the neighborhood, neighbors, mothers, employees, students, the social movement, football hooligans, workers, Black and Indigenous communities, truckers, taxi drivers, farmers, women, and all of the LGBTQI+ crews. More than anything, this strike belongs to the country’s working-class youth.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/2.jpg\")
“Faggot and Front Liner.”
\nThe Colombian people are tired of not being heard, tired of futile marches that arrive at the great centers of power and end up in the manipulative hands of power-brokers who negotiate the non-negotiable. This strike began its ferment deep in the heart of the lower-class neighborhoods, on the lips of grandmothers and neighbors, of mothers and teachers who care about the youth. It was no coincidence then that the strike has gathered and concentrated people at the cities’ entrances rather than the plazas, at crucial intersections rather than the municipal buildings, in working-class neighborhoods rather than tourist areas: places that truly represent something to the people.
\n\nNeither the resignation of Carrasquilla (the Minister of Finance) nor the withdrawal of the tax reform has managed to stop this wave of protest. The strike shares the color and face of our people, the feeling in the neighborhoods. Within the strike points,2 those who had long been invisible in society began to emerge as protagonists, those without a voice who want a future. Heroes emerge who defend the area as the Front Line, youth organized against the state apparatus headed by the ESMAD (the Colombian riot police) and its death squad. Improvised medical campaigns, nurses, and paramedics emerge in this urban war that leaves so much death: people who care for the people, the people healing themselves. Mothers arrive with their love and their seasonings to prepare community meals in the streets. They light the cooking fire, stoke it, and they’ve got food for thousands, because this is how people persist and maintain a strike. The human rights defenders shine with their own light: in the midst of the gunfire, they shield people, ensure that we get home amid the darkness of an insidious dictatorship, and search until they find those who have been disappeared by the cowards of the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/3.jpg\")
Two frontliners on the barricade use road signs as shields.
\nThe Colombian government calls itself a social state governed by the rule of law, but in Colombia, no one knows what the laws are, and the state is only recognizable by the force it uses against people and by its systematic neglect.
\n\nThe numbers of dead and disappeared in this country are terrifying. We have seen grim statistics pile up for decades, villages bathed in blood, waves of violence that comprise the history of our soil. But what has occurred over the past 14 days of general strike and widespread protest has etched itself into collective memory as the unmasking of a dictatorial state. We have lived through the militarization of cities, the excesses of police violence, state violence, the deaths of innocents at the hands of the police, forced disappearances, and the alliance of paramilitary and state security forces. This is the brutal honesty of Uribe’s legacy and its structures of para-state warfare.
\n\nTemblores and Indepaz, two human rights organizations, released a scathing report on May 9, full of chilling figures: a total of 47 people murdered, 39 confirmed killed by police. Of those cases, 36 were in the department (Colombia’s equivalent of states) of Valle del Cauca (35 in Cali and one in Yumbo). On top of this, there were at least 1876 cases of police violence nationally, including the following:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/4.jpg\")
Demonstrators holding the names of those killed during the strike.
\nThis sort of state violence is unprecedented in Colombian cities. The state is treating social protest as an undeclared war; outrageous numbers of police and outrageous use of force (especially firearms, in coordination with snipers and helicopters that shoot at a defenseless populace) are now part of the landscape in the country’s most oppressed cities. Streets and neighborhoods have turned into battlefields. The mountains and jungles, rural paths and townships have been already been living through this for decades.
\n\nThe strategy of fear is macabre. People from high offices like ex-President, ex-Senator, and Centro Democrático party leader Álvaro Uribe Vélez, FFAA (Colombian Armed Forces) Director General Eduardo Zapateiro, Minister of Defense Diego Molano, the Attorney General’s office, and other far-right and Uribista politicians have made horrific statements, openly declaring war against demonstrators. It’s worth taking note of the discourse used by the Uribista machine to incite white elitist groups in Cali in their armed response to the protests, using terms like “terrorists” to refer to protesters and alleging links between the Indigenous minga3 and guerrilla groups or arms being smuggled into the blockade points.
\n\nThere are hundreds of videos of members of the armed forces, the ESMAD, the police, intelligence operatives, and organized armed citizens attacking rallies and peaceful assemblies, aiming their firearms at the crowd, sowing terror among the protesters and shooting, wounding, and killing people in the streets. Despite this, national media have not only shamefully concealed the reality of the situation but have also misrepresented acts of protest according to the state narrative. The fact that more than 500 people have disappeared after being detained during the demonstrations indicates the seriousness of the human rights violations. Two of those disappeared were found dead on May 7, 2021, according to Temblores.
\n\nPolice have fired directly on demonstrators who were exercising their right to protest by closing roads with community kitchens and improvised barricades. But the most dangerous attacks have been those organized jointly between state security forces and the armed civilian population: a rich, racist, classist, Uribista mob that carries out organized attacks against demonstrators in a manner similar to white supremacists, supported and protected by the police. Is this a dictatorship? A para-state?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/5.jpg\")
A tense standoff between protesters and soldiers at a barricade.
\nCali is the capital of the Southwest. It connects southern regions such as Cauca and Nariño, fertile lands of Indigenous and ancestral memory, with the Pacific Ocean and Buenaventura, the largest commercial maritime port in the country. This is a strategic corridor of the Colombian economy and a region battered by poverty, an epicenter of war with a history built over many years of people rising up in resistance. On April 28, as the strike got underway, the Misak people gave the city a dawn surprise, toppling the statue of settler and slave owner Sebastián de Belalcázar.
\n\nCali has been used as a military laboratory in recent years for control of social movements. Social organizations have noticed that organized repressive practices that are used in Cali are later replicated elsewhere in Colombia. During this year’s national strike, some practices have been alarmingly systematic, such as power outages at gathering points coinciding with police attacks. The manipulation and censorship of Internet access and social media content are already familiar practices. We also see the media pitting different neighborhoods against each other to create a false narrative, fueling hatred between classes in order to spur an armed response on both sides. The state tests many strategies of war and confusion in the city of Cali in order to then apply proven forms of repression around the rest of the country.
\n\nIn the face of the military experimentation that protesting Caleñas experience, the city has armed itself with courage. It has denounced the war waged against it and seen that joy, dignity, and anger prevail. The faces of the dead are already painted on the walls, a reminder that we bled for this strike. There are more than 35 young people who gave their lives to the struggle; for them and the 120 people disappeared in this city, the strike carries on.
\n\n“Stay strong, rebel Cali—the whole world cries out your name.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/6.jpg\")
Indigenous people stream in bearing the flag of the CRIC.
\nIn the midst of systematic warfare in the city of Cali, with more than 18 points blockaded in resistance, there was joy that gave color to the fight that had seemed lost after 35 deaths. More than 8000 Indigenous people arrived from the mountains and valleys of Cauca to bring food, support, medicine, wisdom, and defense to the struggle brewing in Cali.
\n\nCeremonial staffs in hand and bearing the red and green flags of the CRIC (Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca), the Indigenous minga arrived via chivas (traditional transportation similar to a bus) packed with people and food. The voices of traditional territorial authorities greeted the communities in revolt and offered their strength to continue the 2021 general strike in the face of state repression. People received the Indigenous Guard with respect and affection; with their arrival, hope returned to the streets of Cali. “Adelante compañeros dispuestos a resistir, defender nuestro derecho así nos toque morir, Guardia Guardia, Fuerza Fuerza, por mi raza por mi tierra” rang the anthem of the Guard: “Onward, comrades ready to resist, to defend our rights even to the death, Guard! Guard! Strength! Strength! For my people, for my land.”
\n\nThe Guard come from the ten Indigenous peoples of the Cauca. “We come to strike because the government has not responded to our demands,” said a Nasa elder who is in charge of one of the kitchens. “We will stay until the government agrees not to implement any tax reform and to withdraw the health, labor, and pension initiatives,” said a community member elsewhere who wore the red and green scarf of the CRIC. “We come to defend the city that the state has abandoned, because the people in Cali are being killed and what they need now is support in their struggle, which belongs to everyone,” said a coordinator of the humanitarian commissions that the minga provides to the strike.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/7.jpg\")
A frontliner and a member of the Indigenous Guard, hand in hand fighting the same fight.
\nBut a segment of Uribista Cali—racist, paramilitary Cali—had planned a grim second act: a right-wing mob armed with guns attacked the Indigenous community members on their way to the popular assembly at Universidad del Valle (University of the Valley). Nine comrades were wounded; they are fighting for their lives in medical centers around the city. The fact that our people could come together to determine our future truly scares them. Now, 12,000 more indigenous people are coming. “Let’s see if they can kill us all,” says a Guard, full of indignation. “They believed that by killing one they would subdue us and instead we became millions.” That is the power of the struggle and the example of these age-old warriors, because we are all minga.
\n\nThe path of the struggle has been complex due to government attempts to suppress the strike, but we fight on. People at the strike points self-organize in popular assemblies, different cities coordinate their mobilizations, and the strike does not stop.
\n\nIn many of the popular assemblies at strike points, which function as direct decision-making bodies for different areas, there have been proposals that no strike or blockade should be lifted until some basic demands are met, including:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/8.jpg\")
“I march because I’m alive and I don’t known until when. Rapist ESMAD.”
\nWe interviewed an independent media activist in Cali on May 11, who preferred to remain anonymous, and the Interdisciplinary Group for Anarchist Studies and Tendencies (GRIETA) from Bogotá on May 17. Parentheses () are retained from the original Spanish answers; brackets [] were added by the translators.
\n\nThank you for agreeing to this interview. How would you like to identify yourselves?
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: We are the Interdisciplinary Group for Anarchist Studies and Tendencies (GRIETA, Grupo Interdisciplinario de Estudios y Tendencias Anarkistas), founded in 2013. Our goal is to spread an anarchist ethic to contribute to social and ecological transformation. We collectively study anarchisms, their effects, and the possibility of making theoretical contributions that serve to build an anarchism of the South.
\n\nWhile this was being written, several police officers in the city of Popayán sexually abused Allison Salazar Miranda, who could not bear the situation and chose to take her own life. We dedicate this interview to her and to the 50 other people who have been murdered, as well as other victims of state violence during the strike.
\n\nDescribe how people are organizing themselves. Are there leaders? Are people acting autonomously?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: This is one of the chief aspects that differentiates the strike from other protests or strikes that have taken place in this country. This time, separate from the traditional organizations, political movements, opposition parties, and labor unions that normally come out to demonstrations, the movement is a popular civic strike. The blockade points in this city and in many other cities across the province and the country have been established by people from the neighborhood, from the community. Out of popular discontent and the desire for change, they took to the streets in search of opportunities. That’s why there are no leaders or centralized organization; each area has been growing stronger according to its own rhythm and capacities. New blockade points have also been set up, emerging several days after the first ones.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: The revolt in Colombia has taken shape in a way that is distant from the traditional leftist forms of doing politics, especially those that involve vertical structures and come from the Communist Party. Even though the initial call for the April 28 strike, like the 2019 strike, came from the so-called National Strike Committee (composed of labor, populist, and environmentalist organizations), the popular movement really organized itself to keep promoting ongoing mobilizations and days of resistance. This was not in vain, as today marks 20 days of continuous protest and revolt. This movement has mainly taken the form of organized spontaneity (an oxymoron), since there is no vanguard or steering group directing the steps to follow. It’s the populace itself, through popular assemblies and direct actions in the streets, deciding to hold strong in their dissent day after day. This dynamic has led to leaders being overshadowed by the actions of the movements, which prioritize collective decision-making regarding how to continue popular resistance. This doesn’t excuse the fact that there’s more than one personality from the traditional leftist movements who would like to take advantage of the circumstances to gain political capital from this struggle, but people point these figures out as the opportunists they are.
\n\nIn terms of groups acting autonomously, in Colombia, the Nasa Indigenous communities are a reference point. They self-organize in different groups like the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca (CRIC), “The Liberation of Mother Earth Process,” and, since 2005, “The Social and Community Minga.” As a people, they know what it means to fight for autonomy—they have been doing so since the arrival of European colonizers and they continue to against the modern Colombian state. We think that the Nasa, the Afro-Colombian population—which also self-organizes in different groups such as the Black Communities Process (PCN) and the Community Councils—and the legacy of the Palenque4 liberation movement in the Colombian Caribbean are examples of the historic struggle for peoples’ self-liberation. They have injected forms of autonomous and communal organization into urban areas, which are being expressed in what’s going on today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/9.jpg\")
Afro-Colombian women sing at a blockade point.
\nWho are the participants in the revolt? Workers, students, Indigenous peoples, political tendencies? What do the social and political dynamics within the uprising look like?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: The participants are primarily young people from working class neighborhoods; they’re the ones who are in front and organizing the concentration points. In the neighborhoods, they’re accompanied by people of all different ages from the community. But the civic movement that has come together in the strike is incredibly varied and comes from many sectors of the population that have shown their support—the student movement, feminist movements, environmentalist movements, some opposition parties, artists, all these have been supporting the strike and the movement. Social movements and the Indigenous movement have joined the protests. The Indigenous movement specifically has come in with major contributions in terms of logistics and coordination as well as support from the Indigenous Guard, which is an organized group responsible for order within Indigenous communities—they’re the authority that must be respected. It’s very important to clarify that they are unarmed.
\n\nThere are so many different types of trades, social sectors, and people participating that it’s complicated to group it all into one movement. The truckers joined a few days in (in Colombia, there are no railroads, so all domestic transport utilizes cargo trucks), the taxi union participated for a couple days, even a group from the INPEC union (the police agency in charge of managing the prisons) took part in a few of the marches. All share a dissatisfaction with the government and its politics of death.
\n\nSince it hasn’t been a planned or structured movement, the internal dynamics have mutated according to the moment. The first day was supposed to be a one-day march that ended up continuing organically, so that first day or first two days there were demonstrations, then popular assemblies were set up at each mobilization and blockade point. There’s also been talk of larger assemblies that could bring in voices from different areas. This is supported by the CRIC [Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca, or Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca], an Indigenous movement from the neighboring department.
\n\nIt’s also important to mention that this movement has been taking place all over the country. Cali has been the center of the strike because of the number of blockades and the number of days it has been continuously maintained, but this is no reason to ignore the hundreds of demonstrations throughout the country. According to multiple analysts, there are demonstrations in more than 600 municipalities—in more than half of the small cities in the country, and all of the capital cities. There is popular discontent all over the country, and the strike looks like a possibility for change.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: The social and political dynamics of this strike are historic. It’s been decades since so many sectors have organized together; usually, the main protesters are higher education students, workers’ unions, transport workers, youth, Indigenous people, and peasants, but this time there are a lot of high school students, people from the bulk of the population that hasn’t had access to education, and full-time workers whose work has become precarious due to government restrictions. It’s worth highlighting that all of these people have mobilized and worked together to fill the streets as has never been done before, at least not since the 1977 strike.
\n\nPolitical tendencies have been trying to recruit people, since the 2022 election is on the horizon. The presidency is up for grabs, and this could mean a total defeat of Uribismo (Uribismo denotes a doctrine5 with ex-president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez as its top figure), getting rid of [President Ivan] Duque, who has an incredibly high disapproval rating, and weakening the Democratic Center party, which is synonymous with land grabs, forced displacement, massacres, and alliances with drug traffickers and paramilitaries. For the majority of centrist and center-left groups, this is an opportunity to elect a government that could stray a little from the ultra-conservative far right that has always controlled the territory called Colombia, and to begin a process of industrialization and agricultural mechanization. Connections are already being made towards this end, without any kind of definitive picture yet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/10.jpg\")
“Uribe—Paramilitary son of a bitch.”
\nTwenty days into the General Strike, there is a Strike Committee negotiating with the government; however, there’s discontent in the streets, because this committee doesn’t represent the great diversity of sentiments among those who have maintained the blockades and the humanitarian corridors. Additionally, these union leadership figures are the ones who have negotiated under the table and sold out strikes during past national mobilizations. They hold onto oligarchical viewpoints, there are only two women, and seven of the others have clear ties to Fajardismo6 and the Green Party, Uribismo’s Trojan horse.
\n\nCould you describe a typical day at one of the concentration points? Who’s there and what are they doing?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: Colombia—especially Cali—is a place with a well-nourished multiculturalism that creates many different dynamics depending on the area and the people who live there. Things have also changed as time has passed; learning and organization grow with each passing day. The blockades are primarily held by the Front Line. The community and the mothers are there around the community kitchen. There are also medic teams made up of students and people from the community with those skills. Cultural activities have shined at all of the points: concerts, murals, screen-printing, performances, and other forms of art have popped up spontaneously all around the city. Games and sports are a part of daily life. Popular assemblies emerge for making decisions. These are a few first experiences, but they have allowed for a lot of organization and helped counteract the stigmatizing narrative that the dominant media have sown.
\n\nIn another sense, apart from all these activities, the mobilization points are spaces for the community to come together. There are countless experiences of community support that would be interesting to highlight. For example, at one of the mobilization points, a neighbor who works in construction, who knows how to weld and has the tools for it, helped participants in the Front Line to make shields for protection. Several local police stations (CAIs) have also been converted into libraries and cultural spaces for the community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/11.jpg\")
A police substation has been converted into a community library named after Nicolás Guerrero, who was killed by police during the strike.
\nGRIETA, Bogotá: The days in the humanitarian corridors are the most hopeful part of the general strike. People begin arriving early in the morning and come together in artistic and educational activities. Huge murals have been painted in every neighborhood rejecting police violence, embracing community organization, and celebrating the resistance of the young people on the front line—people who, with no opportunities in such an unequal country, put their bodies on the defensive line each day.
\n\nFood has also played a central role. The community kitchens have been offering meals daily to people with empty stomachs and no resources. Autonomy has been developed in the occupation of public space, ordinary people from grandparents to children are attending popular assemblies, lists of demands are emerging from popular referendums and sentiments rather than bureaucracy.
\n\nIn this community construction process, most of the injuries and arrests happen at night. Neighbors have chosen to open their houses, handing out food, first aid supplies, water with baking soda, and other resources to help resist the tear gas. These actions have led the ESMAD [riot police] agents to attack neighbors, firing directly at their houses. This unscrupulous violence that’s now entering city neighborhoods is the same that has always existed in the countryside, and perhaps this awakening has strengthened cries for police reform and the dismantling of the ESMAD.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/12.jpg\")
Community kitchens like this one have sustained the strike at every blockade point.
\nThe police have unleashed terrible violence, especially at night. What’s the dynamic like at night? What groups remain in the streets? What are confrontations with the police like?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: The activities that were taking place at night have slowed down or stopped because in the first few days of the strike, it was during these moments that the police and armed forces carried out their worst attacks, using firearms and very aggressive strategies. In the Siloé neighborhood, internet access was interrupted on the night of May 3 while a special police group (GOES—Grupo de operaciones especiales, or Special Operations Group) arrived with long guns to repress the blockade. Several people were killed in the neighborhood on that censored night, including a minor.
\n\nBecause of this situation, activities are limited at night or carried out with lots of caution, since, as several human rights organizations have confirmed, there are no guarantees for the respect of life at night (attacks and abuses occur during the day as well, but to a much lesser degree). Some resistance points manage to stick it out by protecting themselves well and hiding in the vicinity, while others with less organization or fewer experienced people withdraw at nightfall and take their spaces back during the day. This was one of the most painful lessons during the first few days of the strike, since many people were murdered on those nights. (The official statistics barely report any information and the NGOs haven’t been able to put out a specific figure because of the number of cases, but a sensationalist local newspaper mentioned 22 deaths by May 2, plus the ones that have occurred since).
\n\nThe police violence has been very intense, above all from the ESMAD (Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron), a police unit created more than 20 years ago to repress social protest. Several of the weapons they employ are used in violation of the established protocols for minimizing harm. That’s why more than 20 people have already lost eyes from being shot by the ESMAD. They use 12-gauge shotguns loaded with beanbag munitions, the same thing that Dilan Cruz was murdered with in Bogotá in November 2019.
\n\nThese are just the lawful strategies that are still endorsed even when used incorrectly; however, the police also use firearms against the community. The ESMAD and the regular police often use unregistered guns so they won’t leave evidence. It’s also common practice to hide identification numbers and police frequently dress as civilians or infiltrate marches.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: We have been astonished by the state violence since the first day of the general strike. We knew that they had made a huge investment in weaponry and resources for repression, but seeing it in action was horrific. In the first few nights, police violence took the form of human rights violations such as beatings, arbitrary arrests, and illegal raids. The ESMAD deployed a new weapon called Venom in their armored vehicles for the first time. It costs 400 million Colombian pesos [about $110,000 USD] and has three compartments that each fire 10 projectiles at a 45-degree angle, carrying tear gas and flash-bang grenades. This weapon had never been used in Latin America before, not even in the most intense periods of the dictatorships.
\n\nAt night, people go out to block and hold the main streets, they set up barricades and fires, and it’s just a matter of waiting until the ESMAD decides to attack with the forces and tanks it has available. Things have escalated as the days have gone on, especially in Cali. Attacks by state forces continue as before, but human rights campaigns have also begun to report cases of sexual violence, murders have been confirmed, and there are alarming numbers of missing persons who have later turned up dead in rivers and rural areas.
\n\nOne of the most serious developments, though, is the militarization and para-militarization of the cities. A massacre took place, backed by the armed forces of Colombia. During the day, repression was carried out with legal “non-lethal” weapons, but at night the state cut electricity to the neighborhoods where people were gathered, hunted people down, blocked the internet and cell signals, and censored Facebook and Instagram Live while armed civilians attacked youth in resistance, the Indigenous minga, and anyone deemed to think or act differently. This is a clear expression of the paramilitarism that has haunted this region and doesn’t intend to give up its power easily.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/13.jpg\")
Tear gas has been used heavily against protesters since the strike’s beginning.
\nIn any uprising like this, there is always a lot of organization that doesn’t necessarily take place in the streets and might be hard to see from the outside. Could you describe some of these efforts that nourish and strengthen the revolt?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: In addition to the young people putting their bodies on the line, going face-to-face with the repression, and keeping the blockade points standing, there is strong participation from the whole family. The mothers especially are participating from the community kitchens, feeding everyone who’s taking part. The medic teams, which have set up operations at neighborhood basketball courts, meeting halls, and neighbors’ houses, have also played a crucial role during the establishment of the concentration points. In many neighborhoods and at many points, the community has participated by donating food and medicine. People don’t have much, but the little that’s there is always enough to share.
\n\nAdditionally, longstanding organizations and movements are participating primarily by providing forms of logistical assistance. Human rights observation and alternative media coverage has been indispensable; however, due to the number of mobilization points, neither task has been accomplished to the extent it needs to.
\n\nAfter arriving in Cali, the Indigenous movement from the Cauca (the province south of Valle del Cauca, where Cali is located) sought out dialogue with the people blockadingto work together and offfer help, drawing on decades of experience with organization and social mobilization.
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With such extreme police violence, medic teams are a crucial part of strike support.
\nGRIETA, Bogotá: We think the reproduction of daily life and labors of care are fundamental. They are what enables the revolt to develop each day. These labors take the forms of neighborhood community kitchens and networks of affection that are growing stronger due to the murders, torture, disappearances, sexual abuses, and the escalation of systematic violence deployed by the Colombian state headed by Ivan Duque’s Uribista administration.
\n\nWhat tactics and strategies are demonstrators using? Have any new ones emerged?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: There are blockades at the entrances to the cities, effectively halting production and consumption, and other blockades in working class neighborhoods. Organization is based on knowledge of the terrain and support from neighbors. Improvised barricades are built in a wide perimeter in order to hold several streets at once and keep the police out. The “front line” is for clashes and defense and then there are second and third lines with assorted other tasks. There are safe houses in case of an attack as well as food stockpiles and a treatment area that’s well-equipped for first aid and stabilizing the wounded.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: In the demonstrations of these last few weeks, we’ve seen a variety of tactics and strategies. In terms of tactics, we could mention the constant mobilizations and marches that have happened not only in the big cities but also the medium-sized cities and municipalities where there had never been revolts or demonstrations before. Occupations, pot-and-pan demos, and cultural actions (performances, transgressive dances) have had an important place within the demonstrations because they have created learning spaces where the motivations behind the march can be explained to people who might have felt apathetic about the protests. Graffiti and murals have also been used tactically to denounce the tax reform (“the primary motive of the mobilization”) and the state repression that demonstrators have suffered at the hands of the police.
\n\nMutual aid and solidarity between different social sectors and classes have also allowed the mobilization to survive through several weeks in the streets and constant, disproportionate repression from the state and paramilitaries who have free reign to kill in the cities. This has been seen in Cali, Pereira, and other cities, where armed civilians in the company of police fire on demonstrators or on the Indigenous Guard. It makes it clear that the narco-paramilitary state currently uses tactics which for years were only seen in rural areas to dispossess Indigenous people and peasants of their lands.
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This repression has led to consistent solidarity and economic, moral, and symbolic support between different parts of the struggle. The mobilization has fed on the rage bred by state neglect and extreme repression. One stand-out case is what happened in Cali, where the Indigenous Guard left their territory to accompany, defend, and fight together with the people who had mobilized in the city. This gesture along with many others has shown that struggle in the streets unites and revives the revolutionary spirit that they have tried always tried to beat out of us, the lower classes of this country and the world.
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Youth have driven this uprising, putting their bodies on the line to struggle for a world they can live in.
\nDescribe the paramilitary situation. What have paramilitaries done, how do they coordinate with the state, and how have demonstrators responded?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: In Colombia, paramilitarism is a force that conducts covert military actions and pushes a fascist narrative in defense of private property and the re-establishment of order. The modus operandi has been to break the security perimeter of the blockade points and enter in vehicles, firing from long range. This has two objectives: to kill people and to sow terror. The blockade points have held strong because when something like this happens, reinforcements arrive from other points, carry out the wounded, and manage to keep morale and motivation high.
\n\nThe paramilitary phenomenon is very complex and with the actions of the last few days, we’ve seen tactics that had never been used before. It’s important to clarify that the term “paramilitary” includes a number of different actors, the common denominator being action that is coordinated with or permitted by the armed forces. There are at least four main actors:
\n\n•\tArmed forces dressed in civilian clothes shooting at protesters. The protesters, with the help of the Indigenous Guard, have documented at least two cases of this. The lack of identification enables them to act illegally.\n•\tGroups of hitmen hired by powerful people to carry out specific attacks or assassinations.\n•\tFar-right extremists (many of them linked to drug trafficking) who call themselves “good citizens” and true patriots out of a sense of superiority. With institutional support, they take “justice” into their own hands and attack protesters, who the mass media have depicted as criminals. This is what happened in Ciudad Jardín and on the road to Jamundí [two upscale suburbs of Cali] on May 9, 2021.\n•\tParamilitary armies that never demobilized and exercise control over certain territories of Colombia.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: Paramilitarism in Colombia took the form of “para-state” organizations—parallel to the state—that emerged at the end of the 1980s to combat the guerrillas, in collusion with the Colombian military. The 2005 peace negotiation between the state and the paramilitaries didn’t completely eliminate these organizations; their shadow has always been present in Colombia, especially in the figure of the “Águilas Negras” [Black Eagles].
\n\nOver the past few years, the Águilas Negras haven’t seemed to have a clear organizational structure like the paramilitaries of old; they are more a type of name that the Colombian state, drug traffickers, the mining companies present in Colombian territory, illegal mining interests, and others resort to in order to threaten and kill movement leaders who obstruct capitalist accumulation by dispossession—which is to say, accumulation coming from rural areas. Because of this, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and environmentalist fighters in key territories are the most affected.
\n\nHowever, during the current strike, we have seen something a bit different: it’s not the state or another actor hiding behind the “Águilas Negras” name who has repressed the protests; it is openly the state, unmasked. In fact, Álvaro Uribe openly invited the military and police to fire on protesters, whom he called “vandalistic terrorists.” We have also seen another phenomenon: armed civilians firing at people marching. But these civilians are either out-of-uniform police or appear to be citizens with clearly neo-fascist characteristics. The latter might be similar to white supremacists in the US. Of course, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the Águilas Negras could appear, perhaps linked to the Colombian armed forces and police and probably in the form of threats to the most visible leaders of the strike.
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A banner displays several notorious figures of the Colombian para-state.
\nWhat does this revolt need to persist and spread?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: Time is the popular strike’s worst enemy. As supply shortages begin, the community could turn against the blockade points. But the poverty and state neglect are so extreme in these resisting sectors that the youth have nothing to lose and much to gain. Rather than negotiating or attempting to reach an agreement, the state has responded to the strike by militarizing the cities to ensure public order. This has outraged more middle-class people who have finally joined in to support the strike based on the possibilities and knowledge available to them.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: For the last ten years or so, Colombia has experienced increasing social mobilization. Among the stronger expressions of this were the 2011 and 2018 student strikes, the 2013 peasant strike, and the Indigenous minga. In 2019, after the 2016 peace accords with the FARC, there was a general strike that, unlike former strikes, didn’t appear to focus on any one particular sector, whether students, peasants, or Indigenous peoples. It extended to the whole population. We’re seeing this tendency gain momentum in the current strike: although the Indigenous minga and the student movement have actively participated, this seems to be rooted in a generalized, collective unrest opposing the increasing precarity of life and the contemporary neo-fascism embodied by Uribismo. The intensification of protest has been a slow process that also depends on the conditions of the moment. I think this leaves us with a lesson: we must respect the rhythms of the popular movement, with its ups and downs, and not pressure the movement towards efficiency, which belongs to capital. It’s a slow process.
\n\nThat said, I think we have to care for the movement, supporting it from multiple angles—in the community kitchens, the popular assemblies, going to marches, reflecting, supporting the front line, and so on—always trying to extend it, but without overexerting ourselves to try to see immediate results. We think there is a key element in this: not to let a movement, which from its beginning is heterogeneous and decentralized, be captured by a party or presidential aspiration. To care for it, it must continue to have strong popular support and above all, this support must continue to grow; if not, it’ll lose vitality.
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Dance performances, traditional and novel, have been part or the the rich cultural expression taking place in Colombian streets during the strike.
\nWhat roles have anarchists played in the revolt?
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: Anarchists’ main role has been participating in the actions of the popular movement, spreading ideas, sharing our political ethic, and learning from other novel actions such as the Vogueart performance in which three transwomen danced in front of the police and symbols of the patriarchy. Our role has also been to promote the strike’s visibility on virtual platforms, which serve as a loudspeaker to the world. We think that generating international conversations to analyze what is happening from anarchist and libertarian viewpoints has also been important anarchic activity.
\n\nAnything else you would like to add?
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: In our understanding, one interesting characteristic underlying these days of protest and revolt has been the iconoclastic nature of the movement. This seems to be a trait of anarchisms of the south, and it has shown up in anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-extraction, and anti-patriarchal actions. Since the Indigenous Misak people toppled a monument to Sebastián de Belalcázar in Cali and another to Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in Bogotá,7 other groups have tried to knock down monuments in the middle of violent confrontations in multiple cities. They have also attacked icons of capitalism such as banks and public and private institutions that serve the economic elite.
\n\nAnother action that we think is worth highlighting took place on Twitter, where Colombian K-pop fans managed to block Uribista and anti-strike hashtags through collective actions. This contribution seems important on a digital level, because far-right narratives are also created on the internet, and they turn many people against the mobilizations.
\n\nFinally, all the systematic state violence has led to the creation of a front line of mothers, among them the mother of one of the many youths murdered during this strike. This demonstrates the social and political gravity of what is happening in Colombia, at the same time as it shows the dignified uprising of a people. For a group of mothers to decide to organize themselves to defend the movement proves that rage and discontent have generalized at a dizzying rate. Clearly, we celebrate these actions.
\n\nUp with the autonomous popular struggle, down with the repressive yoke of the state and its governments!
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“We are the Mothers of the Brave.”
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Álvaro Uribe Vélez, right-wing president of Colombia from 2002-2010, is notorious for his corruption and ties to paramilitary and drug-trafficking activity. He is so emblematic of the confluence of narco-paramilitary-economic-state power in Colombia that his name is synonymous with this tendency. Hence, “Uribista” is used to describe a certain right-wing politics associated with paramilitarism in Colombia. Our interview with GRIETA, published below, gives more context. ↩
\nDescriptions of the events in Colombia frequently mention “puntos de concentración,” “puntos de resistencia,” or “puntos de paro”: literally, “concentration points,” “resistance points,” and “strike points.” We have retained the language of “point” because it is so widespread and because it is worth drawing attention to this specific strategy. These points combine the functions of blocking commerce, providing for the free distribution of food and other necessities, and serving as spaces for free expression—spaces of encounter and social life beyond the bounds of state and capital. ↩
\nThe word “minga” is used among several Indigenous cultures in the Andean region. It has no English translation. It can refer to forms of voluntary, joyful collective labor for the good of the community; it also carries a sense of the collective identity of the people involved in these activities. The minga is not limited to those of an Indigenous identity; as evidenced here, it invites others from different backgrounds to join into being and participating in minga. ↩
\nPalenque de San Basilio is a village on the Caribbean coast just outside of Cartagena; it was founded by Africans who escaped slavery in the 1600s. For some time after its founding, the residents attempted to free all the other enslaved Africans arriving in Cartagena, a major slave port. ↩
\nThe core idea of this doctrine is “democratic security,” i.e., the elimination of “terrorism” at any cost. ↩
\nA current of electoral politics that takes its name from Sergio Fajardo, a potential presidential candidate in the 2022 elections. Fajardo has been the subject of multiple political and corruption scandals. ↩
\nSebastián de Belalcázar and Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, the founders of Cali and Bogotá respectively, are figures that symbolize the colonial yoke. They founded these cities at the cost of the genocide of Indigenous peoples. ↩
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