![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/09/17/4.jpg\")
A glimpse of a more innocent time.
\nThirteen years ago, a thousand demonstrators descended on Wall Street, occupying Zuccotti Park and kicking off what came to be known as the Occupy movement. Revisiting that moment today, we can see how dramatically the terrain of social movements has changed as our society has polarized. The organizers of Occupy Wall Street proposed to create a movement that could bring all society together against the ruling order and the few who profit from it, mobilizing under the slogan “We are the 99%.” Today, the divisions that cut through our society have only deepened, rendering it more difficult to imagine social change. Yet this only renders the legacy of the Occupy movement more important.
\n\nAt the invitation of Marisa Holmes, one of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, we present here the conclusion to her book, Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice. Holmes sets the Occupy movement in the context of the movement against capitalist globalization that preceded it and the wave of similar movements from Egypt and Tunisia to Spain and Greece.
\n\nAt its peak—arguably, the general strike in Oakland on November 2—the movement that spread around the country from Zuccotti Park was, in the words of one participant, “a collective force with the ambition and capacity to transform the whole city.” In reinventing the general strike, the participants opened a new horizon for 21st-century movements that has yet to be properly explored.
\n\nAlthough anarchists like Marisa Holmes were central to the origins of the Occupy movement, there was considerable debate among anarchists regarding how best to engage within the context that it created. Participants in our collective were critical of what we regarded as a tendency to conceal real conflicts and differences within society as a whole. Reflecting on the Occupy movement from the vantage point of 2014, we argued that the Occupy movement was limited by structural factors:
\n\n\n\n\nWhat limits did the Occupy movement reach? Why did it subside without achieving its object of transforming society? First, it offered almost no analysis of racialized power, despite the central role of race in dividing labor struggles and poor people’s resistance in the US. Second, perhaps not coincidentally, its discourse was largely legalistic and reformist—it was premised on the assumption that the laws and institutions of the state are fundamentally beneficial, or at least legitimate. Finally, it began as a political rather than social movement—hence the decision to occupy Wall Street instead of acting on a terrain closer to most people’s everyday lives, as if capitalism were not a ubiquitous relation but something emanating from the stock market. As a result of these three factors, the majority of the participants in Occupy were activists, newly precarious exiles from the middle class, and members of the underclass, in roughly that order; the working poor were notably absent. The simplistic sloganeering of Occupy obscured the lines of conflict that run through our society from top to bottom: “police are part of the 99%” is technically true, economically speaking, but so are most rapists and white supremacists. All of this meant that when the police came to evict the encampments and kill the movement, Occupy had neither the numbers, nor the fierceness, nor the analysis it would have needed to defend itself.
\n
When a movement reaches its limits and subsides, it illustrates the obstacles future movements will have to surpass—and indeed, from the Ferguson uprising to the Standing Rock occupation to the George Floyd rebellion, the movements that followed Occupy all served to illuminate the fault lines within the social body to which the Occupy movement had addressed itself.
\n\nFrom the vantage point of 2024, however, the idea of a movement that aspired to encompass 99% of society seems not only naïvely utopian but arguably preferable to the intractable situation we face. Today, everyone in all walks of life is all too aware of the lines of conflict that run through our society, and various political factions from the center to the extreme right have positioned themselves to benefit from those conflicts, capturing energy from them as if from a dynamo. Now, the capitalist order is not stabilized by the illusion of general consent, but rather by the looming threat of violent conflict. If we could somehow initiate a movement that could draw people together from all walks of life to take on the ruling class and capitalism, that would enable us to transcend the deeply engrained antagonism that has trapped the social movements of the past decade at an impasse.
\n\nTo accomplish that, we will need to find ways to enable those who benefit from a modicum of privilege in this society to see what they stand to gain from acting in solidarity with those worse off than them. This is one of the most important challenges before us today.
\n\nAlthough most participants in the Occupy movement used the language of democracy to describe the aspiration to establish solidarity on the basis of participatory decision-making, real existing democracy has always been characterized by pitched conflicts between rival power blocs. As we suggested ahead of the 2020 election,
\n\n\n\n\nDemocracy is often framed as the alternative to civil war. The idea is that we have democratic institutions so everyone won’t just kill each other in direct pursuit of power. This is the social contract that liberals accuse Trump of violating.
\n\nBut if, as Carl von Clausewitz said, war is simply politics by other means, we should consider what representative democracy and civil war have in common. Both are essentially winner-takes-all struggles in which adversaries compete to control the state.
\n
The Occupy movement sought to challenge representative democracy via grassroots direct democracy, attempting to remove the state from the equation. We might argue that the best elements of the Occupy experiment were not the ways that it sought to move democratic decision-making processes from congresses and parliament buildings to parks and squares, but rather the ways that it decentralized agency, establishing new relations on a more or less horizontal and voluntary basis. Calling this “democratic” created an ambiguity that enabled politicians from Syriza to Bernie Sanders to draw participants in the movements of 2011 back into state politics. This is why we use the word “anarchist” to describe what we are trying to do—and why it matters that anarchists were some of the most influential participants in getting the Occupy movement off the ground in the first place.
\n\nThose who became politically conscious after the Occupy movement, who never experienced the moment of hope and possibility that it represented, stand to benefit from learning about it and drawing on its example in contemporary political experimentation. Without further ado, here are Marisa Holmes’s conclusions on the basis of her experience in and research into the movement.
\n\n A glimpse of a more innocent time.
\nAn excerpt of a book by Marisa Holmes.
\n\nThe square both physically embodies and symbolizes the society as a whole. Occupying the square calls into question how the existing society functions and opens the possibility for a new one to take its place. Whoever controls the square controls the future. The question is: What kind of society do we, the 99%, want to live in?
\n\nAt the moment, the status quo of neoliberalism is holding on by a very thin thread. It nearly escaped a fascist coup on January 6, 2021 in the US. Elsewhere, there are also increasingly violent counterrevolutionary and fascist movements. The radical left finds itself in a three-way fight with the state on one side and fascists on the other. The two often collaborate against us. As history has shown, reform will not get us out of this situation. We cannot continue as if these are normal times, with politics as usual. There must be a true revolutionary path forward against and beyond the state and capitalism, as well as all forms of domination. Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the 2011 movements can inform the direction of this path: as a common chant in OWS went, “This—is—just—practice.”
\n\nIn different contexts, the 2011 movements used the terms autonomous, horizontal, and democratic to describe both their practices and ultimate goals. The revolutionary youth of Egypt and Tunisia were independent, decentralized, and horizontal, and had the goal of creating regional democratic councils. Common chants across The Arab Spring were about bread, freedom, and, above all, dignity. In Spain, at Puerta del Sol, and in 15M after, they were against all forms of representation and practiced what they called “real democracy.” They engaged in an intentional constituent process against and beyond the state and made the strategic decision to go into the neighborhoods where they squatted new social centers and defended people from evictions. At Syntagma in Greece, they insisted on “direct democracy,” created mutual aid projects, and defended the semi-autonomous neighborhood of Exarchia.
\n\nThe New York City General Assembly (NYCGA), which organized OWS, defined itself as a “an open, participatory, and horizontally organized process.” During the occupation, The Declaration of the Occupation called for direct democracy, and the Statement of Autonomy asserted our autonomy from existing political structures. In one meeting of the 2011 movements in Tunis in 2013, we occupied the World Social Forum, and established an autonomous, horizontal, and democratic space. What were shared most across the new movements of 2011 were our practices of organization.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/09/17/3.jpg\")
\nOne important precursor to OWS and other 2011 movements was the Global Justice Movement (GJM), sometimes called the alter-globalization movement. There were many direct connections and intergenerational conversations between the two. Action frameworks, agreements, and tactical plans were informed directly from the GJM. Even the people’s mic was adapted from the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. A genealogy can be traced from the GJM to OWS.
\n\nThe Global Justice Movement was primarily organized around summits of major financial organizations like the WTO. There were many months in between summits, and time for trainings and organizational development. Then, those who could afford to go, or were in some way subsidized to go, would descend on the summits to engage in a variety of creative and direct-action antics. When a summit was over, the attendees would return home. The squares were convergences around physical spaces, in opposition to a shared corporate target, where alternatives were created. However, they were not counter summits. First, they were not intended to be temporary, but permanent. Even if they were all eventually cleared, there was an initial intention to stay and hold space indefinitely.
\n\nSecond, during the GJM summits, there would be convergence spaces for collectives and working groups to coordinate. Food, legal support, medical care, shelter, art making, and action-planning happened in these convergences. However, they were not very open. During OWS and other squares, those who participated generated organization in the course of the occupation. The practice of engaging in direct democracy was extended to the society as a whole. There was an invitation to participate on social media, and in person, in the co-creation of another world. This world was possible, because it was unfolding in real time before our eyes.
\n\nThird, in the GJM, there were more formal coalitions among institutional partners such as non-profits, community-based organizations, and unions. In contrast, the squares were organized largely around individual participation rather than group affiliation. Jeffery Juris calls this “a logic of aggregation” (2012). This allowed for people who were not already organized to plug in, as well as individuals to challenge the more hierarchical organizations they may have been part of. For example, there were rank-and-file workers, who were organized, but stifled by the bureaucracy and hypocrisy of their labor unions. There were organizers who had day jobs in non-profits, who held more radical politics. They could find an outlet for their real interests and talents at OWS. Organizing people as individuals into a collective created a dynamic space, where participation in our own structures grew, while the more institutional left was pressured to respond.
\n\nFourth, during the GJM, people used participatory and democratic structures with consensus decision-making processes. This primarily took the form of councils, working groups, and affinity groups. Consensus was built in smaller groups, and then confederated to accommodate for scale. During the squares, consensus was also used, but started in assemblies and then later moved into councils. Members often rotated between groups, and the boundaries were fluid. This allowed for more flexible organization and guarded against too much specialization or bureaucracy.
\n\nOverall, OWS and the squares could be read as a next step after the GJM. Much of what was developed in the GJM was adapted and expanded upon. The biggest shift was operating in the open, in public. This generated a movement that was not only internally participatory or democratic, but outward facing and inviting for anyone who wanted to join. The 2011 movements were what I call participatory movements.
\n\nWalking down Wall Street in the financial district, one will notice a series of wooden squares in the ground. They mark the original wall constructed by Dutch colonial settlers in the seventeenth century to keep out potential invaders whether pirates, natives, or the English. It was along this wall that slaves were bought and sold. It was here that women were subjugated and trafficked. Here, JP Morgan Chase privatized the New York water system, and built his first headquarters. Here the US customs house was established, and the Bill of Rights was signed into law.
\n\nDuring Occupy Wall Street, we practiced a coalitional politics that wove together individual identities into a collective one—the 99%. We, the 99%, were those who had lost homes to foreclosures, those who faced long-term unemployment, or were buried under student debt. We, the 99%, were day laborers, prison workers, domestic workers, and sex workers. We, the 99% were brutalized and killed by police and stopped at borders. We, the 99% were disciplined along gender binaries and roles. We, the 99% were denied healthcare. We, the 99% were all of those long oppressed and exploited, who had simply had enough. There was a common enemy, and it was right there in front of us—Wall Street. It was the solidarity between us that was powerful. It was multi-racial, multi-national, and multi-gender. It had a lot of potential, but it fell apart.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/09/17/1.jpg\")
\nThe GJM and OWS faced many of the same internal challenges around race and gender. Elizabeth Betita Martinez reflected on the racial composition of the convergence against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, 1999. In her widely cited article, “Where was the color in Seattle? Looking for reasons the Great Battle was so white” (2000) she argued there were multiple factors that led to a lack of people of color participating in the event. The solution Betita Martinez proposed for addressing the demographic problem of Seattle, and the GJM more broadly, was for POC to get more organized themselves. She wrote, “There must be effective follow-up and increased communication between people of color across the nation: grassroots organizers, activists, cultural workers, and educators. We need to build on the contacts made (or that need to be made) from Seattle.” Manissa McCleave Maharawal reached a similar conclusion.
\n\nAfter the GJM there was more of a commitment on the radical left to address oppression more seriously. Some of this work was specifically centered around accountability.
\n\nMuch of the work done in OWS around community accountability by the Safer Spaces Committee (SSC) was inspired by INCITE! (2006) and driven by members of Support New York (2016). The SSC consistently took a survivor-centered and intersectional approach that acknowledged the many ways power operates. It’s not as if this work wasn’t happening. It was. It just wasn’t priori- tized or valued by everyone in OWS. If more people had listened to the Safer Spaces Committee, and they had been more influential, then our spaces would have been better equipped to deal with harm and conflict.
\n\nDuring the park, the Safer Spaces Committee, the People of Color Caucus, Women Occupying Wall Street, the OWS Queer Caucus, and OWS Disability Caucus insisted on an intersectional framework for our work and pushed us all to do better. They called on OWS to be inclusive rather than open, and to engage more seriously with power. While we did not solve all problems, and were not perfect, there were lessons learned from the caucuses in real time, which shaped how OWS continued. During the May Day planning process, there was an intersectional analysis and a coalitional approach that were made explicit with the phrase, “All Our Grievances Are Connected.” The definition of work was broadened to include domestic work, reproductive work, sex work, prison labor, and unskilled labor—forms of labor generally excluded from the mainstream labor movement that have more oppressed people doing them. During the one-year anniversary, we used the phrase “All Roads Lead to Wall Street” and built an action framework to accommodate multiple areas of organizing and tactics. This was just not enough.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/09/17/2.jpg\")
\nOccupy Wall Street and the other 2011 movements were hit on all sides by those who wanted to tear us down. This cannot be overstated. Institutionalization, cooptation, repression, and counter-revolution were strong forces working to prevent a true social revolution from taking place. Part of the current struggle against these forces involves the writing of analytical work from within our movements. If this work is not done, then our enemies will drive the narratives that current and future generations take for granted.
\n\nIn OWS, there were attempts at particular forms of institutionalization. Some early examples were the Occupy Office and the Movement Resource Group. These projects consolidated access to physical and financial resources without any accountability, transparency, or oversight, and attempted to steer OWS and the broader movement toward more acceptable, “reasonable” forms of political engagement. Those involved utilized the language of affinity to justify themselves, distorting it beyond recognition.
\n\nThere were informal elites throughout OWS, but they became most prominent in the later stages of offshoots. Strike Debt faced multiple power plays by political blocs who, again used the language of horizontal, autonomous, or democratic politics, but prevented these ideas from being put into practice. Instead, they worked to create formalized hierarchies with themselves at the top. Those in Occupy Sandy talked about mutual aid, not charity, but coordinators were in fact doing charity. Hierarchies were again created around resources. Similar processes played out in other squares. Given the centrality of social media, there were brutal battles for control over accounts by informal elites.
\n\nIn parallel to institutionalization, there was a more overt process of cooption from political parties. The Working Families Party (WFP), a “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, infiltrated OWS, and sought to redirect some of its energy into an electoral process. Bill de Blasio, for instance, visited the park, as NYC Public Advocate, and later ran for office using the rhetoric of the 99% and the “tale of two cities.” The Bernie Sanders campaign was even more explicit about its strategy and made constant conflations of the movement and the campaign. This happened in parallel to SYRIZA and Podemos, which considered itself a “party-movement.”
\n\nThe repression was shaped by the context of the War [on] Terror. The Global Justice Movement (GJM) had reached its peak before 9/11, before the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The GJM, was, in part, disbanded, due to escalating repression and creation of counter- terrorism campaigns. OWS came along at a time when the War on Terror was much more entrenched with drone campaigns striking the very countries in North Africa and the Middle East that were rising up in 2011. The Department of Homeland Security had developed much more widespread and integrated methods of surveillance and data collection, alongside old-fashioned in-person infiltration. The GJM could not withstand the repression, and neither could OWS.
\n\nThe counterrevolution that took hold after OWS and Black Lives Matter was much more intense than anything experienced during the GJM. Actual white supremacists and neo-Nazis emerged, using many of the same digital and social media tools, to integrate and broaden their reach. They also sought to control in person public spaces. Charlottesville is one key example. Neo-fascism developed as an international movement in reaction to the potential for a real revolution to break out. It was already underway before Donald Trump ever considered running for office, although his campaign and victory definitely added fuel to the fascist fire.
\n\nHorizontal, autonomous, and directly democratic practices were shared across contexts; they made the 2011 movements happen. People had a voice, many for the first time in their lives. The energy and excitement of this was palpable and made new worlds possible. Unfortunately, the squares and OWS were met with many internal and external challenges and they could not address them all effectively. This brings us to a contemporary aim—building more intentional, intersectional, accountable, equitable, and resilient movements.
\n\nThere was not strong enough organization in OWS or the squares over the long run. Being in public and open to new people meant exposing ourselves to many different experiences and understandings of the world. At the beginning, this was essential and helped fuel our growth. However, not everyone who came through the squares or other organizing spaces understood why these practices were important. They were gaining some hands-on experiences and were becoming highly skilled, but lacked a sense of movement history or ideological cohesion. Without a consistent commitment to political education and collective defense of principles, it was much easier for other political tendencies, with hierarchical practices, to swoop in and take control. Future movements must be prepared to move from the initial moment of growth into a more sustained horizontal, autonomous, and democratic organization.
\n\nRace, gender, class, and ability were not central enough to our work. They should have been baked into the work from the very beginning. Learning from this, future movements must start with an intersectional analysis, and practice. This would include centering those who are oppressed in decision-making, action-planning, and more public-facing visible roles. It would mean listening to those who are oppressed and taking their concerns seriously. Most of all, this would mean acknowledging that while the new world is being built, we tend to replicate patterns of the old one. None of us are immune from doing things that are harmful. There is also no immediate answer or way to fix systems and structures that are so ingrained without struggle. Undoing racism, undoing sexism, undoing classism, and undoing ableism will be a constant process of abolishing what is and creating what we want.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/09/17/5.jpg\")
\nThere was not enough emphasis on harm reduction or addressing conflict. We all went in a bit blind to the many possible ways that people could get hurt. There was the naive belief that everyone who participated would be well-intentioned, and there for all the right reasons. Most people were, but it doesn’t take many—only a handful really—to totally derail the work of building relationships. Future movements must have processes of accountability for all instances of harm and conflict. There must be shared expectations of all those involved to be accountable to others, and share in the work of doing accountability. There must be consequences when people refuse to be accountable and perpetuate harmful behavior. Excluding some people so that other people can keep participating must be an option.
\n\nIt is essential to think carefully about who has access to resources, when, where, and why. Much like the current society, resources become sites of informal and formal concentrations of power-over others. These could include financial, cultural, social, or other resources. Given the reliance on social media in the squares and OWS, the accounts were resources. I hope that future movements take the use of social media very seriously, and how it can facilitate both horizontal and hierarchical structures. A movement is not a marketing campaign. It cannot be reduced to brands, memes, and hashtags. It is not about individual celebrities or fundraising. It is about our relationships.
\n\nGoing about making a social revolution inevitably put us at odds with the forces of institutions, political parties, the state, and counterrevolutionary movements. It is an essential step to come to terms with this fact. If there is no conflict with opposing political forces, then there is no struggle. The question really is when and where to draw a line between one’s friends and enemies. After establishing this, the follow-up question is how to be participatory and open enough to new people while protecting a project against attacks. There is no easy answer here that works in all cases. There may be different strategies and tactics given the context. Overall, though, the goal must be to minimize the influence of those seeking to institutionalize, co-opt, repress, or redirect for the counterrevolution. At the same time, there must be increasing influence of those seeking a horizontal, autonomous, and democratic revolution.
\n\nFacing our enemies was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting during the squares. To guard against this in the future there is a need for pacing and taking things slow when needed. There must be a conscious effort to build capacity with regular people who are sympathetic, but not professional organizers. There must be a holistic way of approaching the work and integrating healing practices. We must build a culture of care if we are to outlive fascism.
\n\nWherever there are people who insist on acting as if they’re already free, the spirit of OWS is present. OWS lives in occupations of public space and in squats. It lives in rank and file independent labor actions such as work stoppages, strikes, and sabotage. It lives in direct actions during pipeline campaigns to protect water. It lives in the refusal to pay all unjust debts, whether student, medical, housing, or personal credit debts. It lives in prisoners struggling inside, and supporters outside. It lives in immigrants and refugees breaking down borders. It lives in actions against police murders, abolition, and Black liberation. It lives in Indigenous struggles to defend and reclaim land. It lives in those reclaiming Pride from corporations and police. It lives in LGBTQI+ liberation. It lives in feminists challenging all concentrations of dominating power, like the Supreme Court of the United States. It lives in disabled people asserting autonomy and fighting for healthcare. It lives in neurodivergent folks fighting for mental health support. It lives, perhaps most of all, in the ever-expanding networks of mutual aid providing material assistance and care to one another. OWS lives on, if not always in name, in practice.
\n\nThe question now is how to weave together all these struggles. How can we emulate what was effective from OWS and the squares? How can we overcome all the challenges we faced? What began in 2011 at OWS is still possible, now, in the present. Let’s stop thinking of the world as it is and imagine what it could be. Then, we can really occupy everywhere.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/04/29/from-redwood-trees-to-olive-groves-the-commune-grows-a-statement-from-the-tree-occupation-at-cal-poly-humboldt", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/04/29/from-redwood-trees-to-olive-groves-the-commune-grows-a-statement-from-the-tree-occupation-at-cal-poly-humboldt", "title": "From Redwood Trees to Olive Groves, the Commune Grows : A Statement from the Tree Occupation at Cal Poly Humboldt", "summary": "A statement from Gaza solidarity demonstrators who have established a tree occupation to hold territory at Cal Poly Humboldt.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/header.jpg", "date_published": "2024-04-29T22:45:49Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:59Z", "tags": [ "gaza", "california", "cal poly humboldt", "building occupation", "Occupy", "student movement", "encampment", "palestine" ], "content_html": "Today—Monday, April 29, 2024—there are encampments and building occupations in solidarity with Gaza in place at dozens of universities around the United States, and they are beginning to appear elsewhere around the world. Police have already carried out a number of brutal raids targeting them, but in many cases, the protesters have come back, undeterred, or even faced down the police. One of the fiercest occupations has taken place at Cal Poly Humboldt, where students took over a building, survived a massive police assault, and then forced the police to retreat off campus.
\n\nAs of today, the occupation at Cal Poly Humboldt has held its ground for a week. The school has been shut down until graduation. Right now, local, state, and federal agencies are amassing forces to prepare to raid the encampment.
\n\nAt this critical moment, we received a statement from people who have established a tree occupation to hold territory at Cal Poly Humboldt. We present it along with pictures from the occupied university and a video of a participant in the Cal Poly occupation calling to address participants in an encampment at another university across the country.
\n\nYou can access a printable pdf of this text in zine form here.
\n\nA participant in the Cal Poly occupation calls to address participants in an encampment at another university. We have blurred the video for the security of the protesters—but please listen to the audio.
\nWe have heard the call to escalate in solidarity with Palestine, and we are answering: we have taken to the trees.
\n\nFrom where I sit, in the branches of a redwood tree, I have the ocean to my right and the forest to my left. Usually, it hurts to look at the cityscape, to see the colonial infrastructure remaking native lands according to its own ends. But today, I see these mission-style buildings covered in calls for a free Palestine and the return of Native homelands. I see a sprawling, ever-growing camp filled with people who are feeding and clothing each other, held by the protection of our barricades. I see medics keeping folks hydrated, kids playing, artists and musicians creating, gardens sprouting up, and everywhere the sense that a new world is being born. This vision is stoked by the militant flame of the brave occupiers, by the desire to defend it all—to push the cops out every time they attempt to harass us or pull down the barricades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/1.jpg\")
\nThe success of our occupation thus far has come about as a consequence of our ability to adapt while refusing to back down. We learn from nature that diversity makes an ecosystem more resilient and vibrant, and the same is true in our movements. There is no one perspective, tactic, or voice in our camp. No one speaks for everyone. What brought us together was a shared revulsion for this genocide. What keeps us together is our commitment to escalation towards liberation, to upholding each other’s autonomy, and to nurturing lifeways together amid this struggle.
\n\nWe recognize that a diversity of tactics is crucial for maintaining an offensive position. To expand our tactics, we have turned to our personal history of struggle against empire here in so-called Humboldt. Judi Bari, an environmental activist who was car-bombed and framed for her activity with EarthFirst!, spoke about the need to end the global capitalist machine in order to halt planetary destruction and oppression of all kinds. We concur. This tree sit is a love letter to these connections, to all those struggling to end this genocide, and to Palestinians worldwide. Among the great old trees, a tree sit is a sign of rebellious hope—hope as a way of choosing agency. It is an invitation to a new perspective on the world itself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/14.jpg\")
\nThis tree sit is also a love letter to Tortuguita. Tortuguita was 26 years old on January 18, 2023 when Georgia State Troopers murdered them in the Weelaunee Forest. At that time, they were defending the forest from the Cop City project. Funded by the likes of Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, Delta Airlines, UPS, Home Depot, Equifax, Georgia Pacific, so on and so forth, Cop City is a deforestation project designed to build a massive mock city in which US police will train in urban warfare; Israeli Occupying Forces will be contracted to train them in the art of imposing apartheid. This is just one of many proposed cop cities across the country. The fight to free Palestine and the fight to free ourselves are intimately intwined. The military and police see these connections—and so must we.
\n\nThis connection, in conjunction with a knowledge of history and with our own experiences over the last week, have shown us that any struggle to put an end to genocide necessarily includes a struggle against the police themselves, just as putting an end to genocide means stopping extractive colonial capitalism, halting the causes of climate chaos, and putting an end to the ongoing imperial nightmare we live in.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/16.jpg\")
\nPolice and the military are the ultimate threat wielded against anyone who fights effectively for a better world. We are inspired to see all the beautiful things that have flourished so spontaneously in just one week thanks to a few people being brave enough to create and defend a cop-free zone. We are not just working to destroy the nightmare of the world as it currently exists—we are also defending the seed of the world to come, defending a life worth living and sharing with others.
\n\nThere will be no end to these wars of empire if the struggles in “first world countries” don’t develop teeth and begin to embody solidarity and “land back” as more than symbolic gestures. We will not go back to normal. Normal means ignoring the genocide of Palestinians every day, while living miserable lives on a hamster wheel of labor that never made us happy in the first place. Normal means earning a paycheck and turning our backs on the 14,000+ Palestinian children murdered just since October 7. This occupation has shown that when you stop everything and get off the hamster wheel, what is waiting for you is community and endless possibilities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/15.jpg\")
\nWe fight for the living, and we mourn the trail of dead that this empire of money and war has left in its path. We remember you, though there are too many to recount here, all of you who have died at the hands of this global empire—
\n\nHaya Sharif Bakr Al-Batniji. George Floyd. Ibrahim Amma Saad Al-Qara. Sandra Bland. Sham Abdul Karim Ibrahim Al-Hato. Treyvon Martin. Hosni Mohamed Hosni Muhareb. Toypurina. Musk Omar Kamel Abu Rahma. Tortuguita. Adam Youssef Muhammad Al-Hila. Josiah Lawson. Zeina Hossam Jamil Al-Zaanen. David Chain. Sondos Ziyad Mahmoud Al-Azaib. Rayshard Brooks. Malik Youssef Omar Sharaf. Avalon. Mansour Hamada Monsour Sobh. Berta Isabel Caceres Flores. Marie Ihab Darwish Gouda. Fred Hampton. Zakaria Imad Abd Muheisen. Nex Benedict. Khalaf Fawzi Muhamma Al-Sawarka. Rachel Corrie. Shireen Abu Akleh. Al-Jarrah mahmoud Misbah Al-Khor.
\n\nAnd so many more. We won’t let you down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/3.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/4.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/5.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/6.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/7.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/8.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/9.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/10.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/11.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/13.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/29/17.jpg\")
\nWhat 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. ↩
\nLignite mining, express highways, gravel mining, parking decks, lime pits, and candy factories all have something in common that might not be obvious at first glance. Capitalists need to cut down forests to make way for them. But all around Germany, people are mobilizing to stop them. Over the past decade, forest occupations and forest defense actions have proliferated to such a point that we can now reflect on the movement as a whole.
\n\nThe red text in this report is adapted from the book Klimakämpfe—Wir sind die fucking Zukunft.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/6.jpg\")
Together against the megamachine: in this photo from 2014, a year before the mass “Ende Gelände” actions began, we see a small group of people on their way to interrupt one of the massive diggers at a coal mine. Even facing seemingly impossible odds, small groups can experiment with tactics that later serve as the basis for mass actions and victories.
\nSince February 26, 2021, people have been occupying a forest near Ravensburg called Altdorfer Wald. A gravel pit is threatening the forest’s existence and some activists who had earlier built climate camps and tree houses in the inner city of Ravensburg decided to live in the forest to protect it. At the moment this occupation is not facing eviction.
\n\nOn the day of the occupation near Ravensburg, all the way at the other end of Germany, police began the eviction of an occupied inner-city forest. In Flensburg, in October 2020, people had begun building tree houses and platforms to save the trees, which were slated to be cut down to make way for a hotel and parking deck. A matter of days before the end of the legal cutting season, the investors sent cold-blooded mercenaries with chainsaws to attack the trees despite the risk to activists. The city politics rewarded the investors’ misdeeds by ordering more police to attack and evict the occupation at the very moment that Flensburg was one of the COVID-19 mutation hotspots in Germany.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RoedGroedBawa/status/1363878592086761476\n\n\n
Speaking of the pandemic, the Green Party in Hessen has lost support even among middle-class people, as they not only argued for the new express highway A-49 and as a result for large cuttings in Dannenröder Forest, Herrenwald, and Maulbacher Wald, but additionally initiated an eviction that lasted weeks in November 2020 even though the region was a COVID-19 hotspot, as well. The occupations in these forests had started in 2019; some protesters still remain nearby, as the highway is not yet constructed even though the trees on the future trail have been hacked down. On of the most spectacular actions involved a 300-meter-long traverse of rope connecting Danni and Herri.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/keinea49/status/1332587140333658113/photo/1\n\n\n
Likely to the surprise of many of those involved, another occupation has been successful: On February 21, near Halle (Westfalen), demonstrators occupied the Steinhausener Forest where the candy factory Storck intended to expand. Less than a week later, while the occupiers were awaiting eviction, the company decided to change plans. At least for the present, the forest is safe.
\n\nIn Wuppertal, at Osterholz, five hectares of forest are endangered because of a lime pit. The Kalkwerke Oetelshofen aims to store the earth that they excavate where there are trees. People have been occupying the area since August 2019. Just as occurs everywhere else, the capitalists who are profiting from destroyed forests seek to frame their propaganda as “objective discussion,” they complain about alleged “defamation” and emphasize that their business is of systemic importance. Indeed, any capitalist business is of systemic importance—but as the system itself is the root of the problem, this argument is not convincing for those who want to change the system. In any case, at the moment, they are not being permitted to cut down the forest.
\n\nIn Wilhelmsburg, in Hamburg, in a forest called WiWa (Wilder Wald, wild forest), people constructed tree houses because the city declared the area a potential development area. The activists in the forest developed platforms in the trees—but this is probably not the kind of development politicians appreciate.
\n\nFurthermore, people are maintaining forest occupations in two villages in Rhineland that are threatened by lignite mining. The occupation in Keyenberg dates to September 2020, while the one in Lützerath just began on January 16, 2021. The resistance there is closely connected to those people who are trying to save the villages by occupying houses that the coal company RWE wants to destroy or by squatting construction equipment.
\n\nFinally, the most famous forest defense occupation of all, in the Hambach Forest, is still occupied. First squatted in 2012, it has been evicted and reoccupied several times. In January 2020, politicians decided that Hambi should not be completely destroyed—after most of it already had been—but the occupation still remains. Recently, some people from Hambi published issue number 5 of the bilingual zine Shitbarricade.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/15.jpg\")
Hambach Forest.
\nAnd for those who like to travel internationally, there are occupations in Poland, Switzerland, and France as well as fights in Sweden and Belgium that are networked with the fights in Germany. But a closer look at these would exceed the scope of this article.
\n\nForest occupations seem to be spreading throughout Germany. At Hambach Forest, which is being destroyed to make way for corporate lignite mining, at the zenith of the occupations before the eviction in 2018, forest defenders constructed more than 70 tree houses. Families came to the forest to build barricades together. At Dannenröder Forest, where developers cut an aisle for a highway, protesters built more than 500 barricades, tree houses, and other constructions between 2019 and 2020. The eviction at Danni took more than two months with up to 2000 cops involved each day and more than 2000 charges pressed against activists.
\n\nWhat are the reasons for this? Fifteen years ago, very few people were climbing trees to save the forests, raise awareness about airport expansions or lignite mining, and oppose the destructiveness of capitalism. Today, hundreds of people are engaged in the fights at Hambach Forest, at Dannenröder Forest, and even in some tiny urban woods.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/7.jpg\")
Hambach Forest.
\nIn 2003, I got to know Lakoma, a small Sorbian village near Cottbus. The inhabitants had already been resettled in GDR times [German Democratic Republic, popularly known as East Germany], but the demolition of the houses was delayed by the reunification and artists had decided to revive the place. A cultural barn had been built and a “Wagenplatz” [an occupied trailer park]. Some of the houses were occupied. I spent the night in a wagon, participated in tree occupations, took walks through the remnants of the village. Passing wooden sculptures of resistance, demolished houses and half-demolished bathrooms, I began to realize that the ruthless displacement of minorities for resource extraction was not just happening far away, but right here.
\n\nYears later, I learn that in the GDR there was even a children’s song about coal, the oven-song (Ofenlied): “Good morning dear oven, we freeze so much. Therefore burn dear stove, so we don’t freeze anymore. I have no coal, I’m cold myself. Ask the digger for coal, in the valley behind the forest. Good morning, dear digger, in the valley behind the forest. Give us coal, for we are freezing and the stove is cold. I have no coal, my buckets are empty, ask the earth for coal in the shaft black and heavy. Good morning dear earth, in the shaft black and heavy. Give us coal, for we are freezing and the buckets are empty. Just grab it says the earth, bring the digger. Stoke the fire in the oven, then you won’t freeze anymore.”
\n\nBut coal was and is also deeply rooted culturally in West Germany. Borussia Dortmund fans in the stadium and boys’ choirs still sing the Steigerlied (coal miners’ song) today, and many families proudly tell of their relatives who labored or even perished in hard coal or lignite mining. Phasing out coal is not only a technical issue and a climate policy necessity; it also requires a cultural rethink.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/4.jpg\")
The “Herri” occupation against highway A49.
\nWhy there so many people getting involved in forest defense in Germany?
\n\nThe club of Rome published “Limits to Growth” in 1972. Since then, scientists have renewed urgent calls for change constantly.
\n\nSome of those who are engaged today report that they joined the struggles because of the failure of politics. Certainly, the fact that political efforts to achieve reform have failed is a good reason to search for more efficient and fulfilling strategies. But politicians have always failed to come through on their promises—this is not new. Is the failure of politics more obvious today than it was in the past?
\n\nRather, the discourse has changed, and this has made its failure clear.
\n\nWithout question, this change of discourse is a positive development—in contrast to many others, such as spreading right-wing beliefs and anti-Semitic tendencies. It is not only a matter of increasing awareness of climate or environmental issues, but also of the spread of emancipatory ideas, such as the idea that it is effective and legitimate to employ direct action to change society.
\n\nWho changed this discourse? Activists appearing on talk shows on TV? The arson attacks on cables leading to the coal mines? “Fridays for Future”? The mass protests of Ende Gelände in the coalmines? Sabotage on the railway tracks to the coal power stations? The NGOs? Local initiatives? The early activists who believed in direct action against seemingly insurmountable odds? All of these together?
\n\nLet’s have a closer look.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/3.jpg\")
A local initiative (BI Bahnhofsviertel) supporting the occupation in Flensburg.
\nLocal initiatives from those who are directly impacted by the things they are protesting are a crucial element in the success of large movements. Local expertise and continuous work over years and decades can neither be provided by activist groups nor by NGOs focused on nationwide work. BIs (“Bürgerinitiativen”—citizens’ initiatives) are indispensable for rooting resistance in regions. In phases of little interest, they are often the only ones working on issues for years. When questions arise, large NGOs often rely on their knowledge—often, unfortunately, without adequately valuing their work—and yet these initiatives are often forgotten, because during phases when a lot is happening, they are not necessarily in the spotlight.
\n\nFor example, the Buirers for Buir regularly organize “red line” actions in which they form symbolic red lines between the Hambach open-pit mine and the threatened forest with red banners, flags, and T-shirts. They show films and hold educational events, they participate in rallies and marches and in alliances against the demolition of more villages for coal. It may seem insignificant, but it is important—especially in these fast-moving times—that some people are continuously mobilizing around the issue.
\n\nIn December 2018, three and a half months after Greta Thunberg started striking in Stockholm, the first actions referring to her happened in Germany. Only two months later, regional groups in more than 150 cities all over Germany organized school strikes on Fridays. On March 15, 2019, some 300,000 people took part in actions in more than 200 cities nationwide; this number had grown even bigger by summer 2019, with actions in more than 500 cities.
\n\nIt is remarkable that so many students are organizing with such commitment and perseverance. It is to their great credit that they have put the debate about climate policy clearly on the social agenda. Angela Merkel has responded with a transparently mendacious strategy of pretending to embrace the protests. “A very good initiative,” she said, claiming that she “very much supports students taking to the streets and fighting for climate protection” and that the protests have “certainly driven the federal government to accelerate.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/14.jpg\")
Fridays for Future.
\nThe Fridays for Future protests are heterogeneous. While in some places, participants express solidarity with the Hambacher Forest occupation and critically position themselves against demand-based politics, in other places, they let mayors speak at their demonstrations or sit down with politicians at round tables.
\n\nJakob Blasel, one of the spokespersons of the German branch of Fridays for Future, describes how he went to the office of Peter Altmaier, the German minister of economy and energy. He knew that Altmeier had issued the invitation to the demonstrators to come to the ministry’s courtyard in order to exploit the whole thing as a PR event. So instead of giving Altmaier the opportunity to speak to the strikers, they announced that the students wanted to explain to Altmaier what they were fighting for. The Fridays for Future spokespeople had a conversation with Altmaier in his offices lasting about half an hour, whereupon the minister’s secretariat expressed the expectation that Altmaier would surely be allowed to address the demonstration. The strikers said no. Altmaier nevertheless appeared and was booed, drowned out, and sent away, told to go to the ministry and do his work there. And yet the photograph of the conversation in his office also ended up in many media reports. Although Blasel emphasizes that Altmaier obviously “didn’t get the message,” he nevertheless shows a certain pride in having talked to the minister.
\n\nJakob Blasel of Fridays for Future visiting Peter Altmaier, the German minister of economy and energy.
\nThe relationship between Fridays for Future and the political class is ambiguous. FFF has presented demands, justifying this with the claim that politics needs a clear line of action. Although participants often name politicians as part of the problem, many demands are directed specifically at them. Participants accuse the politicians of failure, but at the same time, they assume—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—that this failure is due to a lack of information. I consider the latter to be naïve wishful thinking. If destructive behavior were due simply to lack of information, we would find an unusual number of pitifully uninformed people in high political offices. In that case, education alone would be enough to remedy the problems.
\n\nBut the decision-makers are not uninformed. Rather—as inconceivable as this may be to some—they are consciously and knowingly opting for short-term profits, doing so in full knowledge of the consequences. They are doing this simply because it is beneficial to their careers—in short, out of pure egoism.
\n\nIn addition to the risk of appropriation by external actors, another great danger of the FFF is pacification from within. While at the beginning, there were more radical demands, in mid-2019 I read on fridaysforfuture.de that a German coal phase-out should be implemented by 2030. It is sad how quickly the demands softened due to the supposed necessities of realpolitik. Of course, this should not be surprising when one of the spokeswomen is also active in the Green Party. Fortunately, however, this is internally controversial, and she is accused of personality cult and career politics.
\n\nWhat started out as more of a unifying slogan and an alliance of different groups quickly became the brand name for an association of initiatives and individuals capable of putting on a very specific kind of mass action: Ende Gelände (“Here—and no further”). The image is undoubtedly impressive: thousands of people, dressed in dust masks and white painting suits, entering the huge open pit mines and blocking the diggers. Their presence paralyzes operations, making it impossible to continue excavating. At the same time, elsewhere, just as many people block the rails on which coal is transported from the mine to the power plant. Because the power plant does not have enough supplies, it has to reduce its output.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/13.jpg\")
Ende Gelände.
\nEnde Gelände has been organizing mass actions since 2015, mostly in the Rhenish lignite mining area. Already that first year, around a thousand activists were participating; in the summer of 2019, according to their own figures, as many as six thousand people took part in the blockades and blockade attempts.
\n\nEnde Gelände is a participatory action—explicitly intended to enable people with little or no experience of action to take part. Days in advance, people organize themselves into affinity groups so that they can look out for each other during the action. They simulate breaking through police lines and practice rinsing pepper spray from their eyes. They pack straw sacks as seating pads for hard rails. When they set out on the day of the action, the atmosphere is thick with expectations, with determination, with fear—or at least respect—and deafening chanting. Many people and groups from other countries attend. People exchange experiences; debates take place.
\n\nIn preparing the actions, Ende Gelände develops an “Aktionskonsens” (action consensus) describing the intended framework of the actions. This typically includes a commitment to openly announced mass actions and a description of the prescribed behavior.
\n\nIn 2019, this framework included the following:
\n\n“We will behave calmly and courteously, we will not endanger any people. We will block and occupy with our bodies. The goal is not to destroy or damage infrastructure. We will not be held back by structural obstacles. We will flow through or around police or plant security. Our action will convey a picture of diversity, creativity, and openness. Our action is not directed against RWE workers, companies commissioned by RWE, or the police. The safety of the participating activists, the workers, and all those involved is our top priority. We are preparing well for a safe journey to our places of action.”
\n\nEnde Gelände is gratifyingly clear in its criticism of the existing economic system, stating online, “Without a turn away from fossil capitalism, neither a serious fight against the climate crisis nor global social justice is possible. A profound, socio-ecological transformation is needed to achieve a good life for all.”
\n\nEnde Gelände works on shifting the discourse of society as a whole, that is, what is sayable and thinkable. This is precisely where the great merit lies.
\n\nAnd yet, after the action weekends, I am not only overwhelmed by the many people who are willing to take personal risks, but I ask myself questions. I ask myself whether the assembly line-style action format leads to the fact that people simply blindly consume this model without understanding themselves as a formative part of the action. I wonder to what extent people understand the action framework as a negotiated consensus of the participants, or if many only perceive it as something immutable, external to themselves.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/12.jpg\")
Ende Gelände.
\nIn my opinion, a movement is not particularly powerful when it does the same thing over and over again in an almost traditional way. It is better to be unpredictable, incalculable, uncontrollable. This is what is missing from Ende Gelände. Although it is important to offer a certain security to new activists, ritualized and predictable events will eventually become politically dead, both internally and externally, and therefore meaningless.
\n\nIn an evaluation paper, the Hamburg anti-nuclear office writes about Ende Gelände:
\n\n\n\n\n“It is necessary for the survival of a movement to take itself and its own goals seriously. The goal of addressing the operation of coal-fired power plants through direct intervention is not limited to conveying images of this project in the media, but must also include the practical attempt to implement it.
\n\n“We are serious about shutting down coal power stations; this became very concrete in the moments when it was not simply “Here and no further” (“Ende Gelände”) at a predetermined location, but when people in the action took it into their own hands, broke away from the structures of the campaign, and went ‘off the rails’ on their own. At this point, the power of the movement becomes directly visible. By taking themselves seriously in their goal to shut down the power plant, people were able to go exactly where it really hurt the operators and for which there could be no plans from the campaign. The howls of rage from police, operators, and politicians triggered by this determination clearly show that after two days of embracing [i.e., of surrounding the plant without actually impacting its functioning], we had finally found the pressure point where it hurt our political counterparts.
\n\n“The blessing and curse of movement campaigns is to be able to grow, but also to have to. Each campaign event has to surpass the previous one in order to continue to convey the hope of being the most important intervention point of the movement at the moment. This is very unfortunate, but apparently cannot be changed ad hoc. In the long run, the only thing that helps is to continuously build social sites of resistance, and to deny oneself [sic] campaign hopping. Only in this way can it be possible to reorganize resistance after a movement cycle has been broken off and have a lasting effect, as was achieved in the Wendland.”1
\n
“What if a significant portion of the population still finds the storming of a lignite-fired power plant more scandalous than its sheer existence?” Arranca magazine asks in Issue #53. They summarize that the Ende-Gelände actions are “for some, an expression of mass militancy, and for others, a peaceful disobedient mass action. The form of action fits diverse subjective states of consciousness—and expands them without making the question of militancy the central question.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/10.jpg\")
A photo from an action that shut down autobahnen all over Germany.
\nMilitant activists often communicate their analysis and techniques through letters claiming responsibility. Since they try to remain anonymous due to the high risk of repression, they seek to express themselves in the media via the actions themselves and the written statements. The numerous very emotional debates that follow militant attacks show that the actions, in addition to the undeniable intervention in the normal operation of opencast coal mines, can do at least one more thing: incite controversy.
\n\nOn April 13, 2016, the Aachener Zeitung reported on an act of sabotage on a power pole that carries lines that supply power to the Inden open pit mine. An angle grinder had been used to saw into the pole directly above the foundation.
\n\nA statement claiming responsibility appeared on linksunten.indymedia, reading, in part:
\n\n\n\n\n“Tonight, from 11.04.16 to 12.04.16, I tried to turn off the lights of the Inden open pit mine. To express my anger about the ongoing lignite mining and the repression against the people who oppose it, I started to fell a power pole between Fronhoven and the power plant Weisweiler. This mast carries the lines that supply the open pit mine with electricity and thus render work possible. Even though the mast is still standing at the moment, it is damaged to such an extent that RWE will probably have to relocate it itself. I was aware of the risks for me, but I think it is necessary to take drastic measures in the fight for a better world…
\n\n“To achieve this, we should stop thinking in categories of good and bad resistance and be in solidarity with each other. The castor resistance could only be so successful because militant and peaceful actions complemented each other. Change the electricity provider! Occupy houses, offices, and excavators! Block access roads and work processes! Cut down power poles instead of trees! What I dared to try, you’ve been able to do for a long time!”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/5.jpg\")
A vehicle belonging to RWE, burned in Rhineland.
\nJust a few days later, on April 25, 2016, another act of sabotage hit the Hambach open pit mine. The Aachener Zeitung wrote on that day that it was an unprecedented act of sabotage. A fire under a cable bridge led to a short circuit and thus temporarily paralyzed the entire open pit mine, including the main coal excavator. Once again, there was a statement claiming responsibility:
\n\n\n\n\n“We are speaking out as those who brought about the failure of the Hambach lignite mine last Sunday morning, April 24, 2016. As the target of our attack, we chose the exposed underground cables between the coal bunker and the conveyor collection point. All excavators, spreaders, and conveyors are connected to these cables. The cables run from the substation at the western edge of the mine near Oberzier, where the transformation from 280kV to 30kV takes place, to the belt collection point via steel scaffolds at a height of about 20 – 200 cm. Including the insulation, they were about 10 cm thick. To be sure of achieving an effect on as many cables as possible, we placed an enormous amount of gasoline under the cables and ignited it. There were no buildings or equipment near the fire site that the fire could have spread to. No people were staying there either. The various blackouts were accompanied by bright flashes that were visible throughout the pit. These were caused by discharges from the power cables as soon as their insulation had melted through. Our action is not only directed against RWE, but also against the prevailing conditions. Radical resistance is necessary in a world in which capital interests are in the foreground and the power apparatus ruthlessly enforces its shortsighted interests against all reason as well as against man and nature. We want to oppose this system with a clear ‘NO,’ as a first step towards overturning these power relations at some point.(…)
\n\n“The attempt to mediate between RWE and the lignite resistance exposes the power relations at play. Mediation means to ask the resistance to be less radical, less ‘mean’ to RWE, or in other words: ‘the resistance must not disrupt which accepts the existence of RWE and its work of destruction as a given. That is, the authoritarian violence legitimized by domination, which lies in the mining and conversion of coal to electricity, is accepted; the rebellious violence that resists it appears illegitimate. The result can only be a guarantee of continued existence for RWE, however it may be, which now also has the blessing of a part of the resistance. The part that allowed itself to be included in the arbitration process. The resistance is split into the eliminated and involved part and the remaining and isolated illegitimate part. When people claim that such an action would harm the resistance, it speaks of consideration for the power of the rulers to divide the resistance into good and evil. Evil is that which hurts, really disrupts, and is effective.
\n\n“The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger writes: ‘Arson, violence against people, occupations of excavators and senseless destruction of technical facilities with the aim of paralyzing open-cast mines and power plants—the ferocity of criminal acts is increasing.’ At the same time, occupations, arsons and blockades are not senseless, but stop the destructive frenzy of RWE very precisely. What harms the resistance is the obedience to the ruling power and its media, which seek to tell us what is good and evil. We should listen to our consciences and our reason, not to the media. With our action, we have delivered the proof that clever and careful militancy, with moderate and justifiable danger to oneself, can put an end to RWE’s normal operations. Our action could have been done by any small group. No special skills, knowledge, or access were needed. All the necessary information is publicly available.
\n\n“For a radical, decisive, and direct resistance! For a world that is not destroyed for capital interests!”
\n
The latter act found imitation a year later, according to indymedia reports:
\n\n\n\n\n“On 24.12.2017, we set fire to the cables that supply the Hambach open pit mine with electricity. So at least part of the huge machines there were shut down. In this case, the cables were located at the vantage point on the open pit (the one after Terra Nova).
\n\n“Stop Coal now! To RWE: Merry Crisis and a happy new fear!”
\n
Debate broke out on the Hambach forestry occupation’s homepage:
\n\n\n\n\n“Legitimate? I believe that the means should be chosen as appropriately as possible. Why hit someone in a conflict when a conversation would have done? Why kill an aggressor when he/she could be put out of action with one blow? I cannot determine in advance what effect the acts of sabotage will have on the resistance. The saboteurs certainly couldn’t either. But they had the courage to try it, and for that I am grateful. Because in order to stop the opencast mines, talks were tried a long time ago. Without success. Legal action was taken. Without success. Education, demonstrations, chains of lights, human chains. Without being able to stop the destruction by themselves. Civil disobedience, occupations, blockades. Maybe a little bit is moving. But climate change and its devastating consequences continue. There is not even a decrease in emissions.
\n\n“Moreover, the price for people who engage in civil disobedience is being driven up. Civil suits and damage claims are designed to make activists keep quiet by threatening financial ruin or imprisonment. Those who evade this by remaining anonymous, refusing to give their personal details and fingerprints to the police, are mistreated at the police station, or arbitrarily picked up near the occupations and imprisoned for hours. The logical consequence is actions that disrupt or paralyze operations and where the actors do not fall into the hands of the police and the securities.”
\n
Militant actions were also discussed at Climate Camp 2016, with a climate camp newspaper posted in the restrooms stating:
\n\n\n\n\n“Actions that dispensed with a militancy aesthetic of fire and destroyed police cars could be ‘just as effective in their blocking effect,’ according to the Action Consensus. In this formulation, it seems as if ‘effectiveness’ per se is the most meaningful criterion for judging actions. We do not see it that way, but would argue for weighing (risk, effectiveness, communicability, connectivity, etc.). However, if effectiveness is already used, we consider the above claim to be simply wrong in view of the operational failures and damage caused in recent months, for example, by arson attacks (including an at least partial shutdown of an opencast mine for several days). Of course, it does not follow that open blockades are not highly useful. However, measured by their blocking efficiency alone, they are less effective, but much stronger on other levels such as connectivity, public sympathy, etc.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/9.jpg\")
“Against Volk and Wagen.” A Block Volkswagen protest.
\nThe occupiers gained nationwide notoriety in summer and fall 2018, but occupations in this forest have already existed since April 2012. At that time, activists were able to tramp there and away very easily because the occupation was in direct proximity to the highway exit. Today, the highway from Cologne to Aachen runs further south; it was relocated over a distance of several kilometers because of the open pit mining.
\n\nIn November 2012, police carried out the first major eviction operation in the occupied forest. It took four days to get one of the squatters out of an underground tunnel. With gratifying naturalness, the call for reoccupation followed shortly thereafter, and new huts, barricades, and tree houses began to appear in September 2013. Over the following years, these became several villages in the forest. Signposts stand at some intersections along the trails through the remaining portions of the forest. I am pointed to ‘Oaktown’ or ‘Beechtown,’ the direction to ‘Lorien’ is indicated, or the way back to the meadow. ‘Mordor’ is written on the arrow pointing into the lunar landscape of the open pit and the mine.
\n\nAsking in the Hambach Forest about Ende Gelände, we might get the answer that Ende Gelände only shows up once a year bringing massive media attention to the topic of lignite mining while leaving the activists alone on the trees in winter. We might also hear that people who take part in actions of Ende Gelände do not learn how to do actions in small groups because they just experience following a few leaders to block the infrastructure.
\n\nThis definitely is one side of the coin. But still, some of the participants in the mass protests do not feel comfortable simply consuming plans a few functionaries made up behind locked doors. Thanks to groups like “Zucker im Tank” (“sugar in the tank”) that have offered skillshares at Ende Gelände camps, ties have developed between Ende Gelände and self-organized affinity groups. The “Anti-Kohle-Kids” (anti-coal-kids)—who use the slogan “Let’s establish a positive connotation for AKK” (referring to the former head of the German conservative party CDU, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, often just called AKK)—are establishing ties between Fridays for Future and Ende Gelände. And last but not least, the guided tours through the Hambi by forest guide Michael Zobel introduced thousands of visitors to forest occupations, explaining the uniqueness of the forest in one sentence and the function of the tree houses in the next.
\n\nBut of course, in all these groups, we can find people who believe in state solutions as well. Some of the spokespersons of Fridays for Future Germany are involved in the youth wing of the Green Party; a former spokesperson of Ende Gelände is now running for Bundestag [the lower house of the German parliament]. Some of these people might be seeking to advance their personal careers for egoistic reasons; others are probably naïve.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/2.jpg\")
Inside a treehouse in Flensburg named Rødgrød.
\nBut the forest occupation movement is about more than trying to influence the decisions that politicians make in the halls of power. Experiencing the need to optimize every facet of ourselves within capitalist reality increases the attractiveness of spaces where we can try a totally different way of being, places where it does not matter whether we have an academic degree nor where we were born. Places where we can develop new ways of making decisions. Places where we share rather than ceaselessly competing. Where we dare to live as kinky queers, where we try out being straight edge, where we meet beautiful people and participate in challenging debates. Places where we can at least start to dream about a better future. Places where people can stand an inconvenient and honest answer to the question “How are you?”
\n\nAnd even though the experiences of participating in the occupation movement are mostly associated with experiences of intense police brutality, it is impossible to erase the memories of the beautiful moments. These memories are seeds that spread. Some might never germinate, but others will soon bear fruit, and still others will eventually grow as well.
\n\nIn 1980, when anti-nuclear activists established an occupation called “the free republic of Wendland,” they hung up a banner proclaiming “Turm und Dorf könnt ihr zerstören, aber nicht die Kraft, die es schuf”—“You can destroy our tower and our village, but not the strength that created it.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/11.jpg\")
Ende Gelände.
\nLet’s conclude by identifying some of the strategic decisions that have strengthened the movement.
\n\nForcing the police to evict: If there are very few of you in the occupation and you can’t keep the occupation going for much longer, you might consider provoking an eviction, because leaving might feel like a bigger defeat than being evicted. In the past, expanding from tree occupations to occupy the construction site itself has served this purpose effectively enough.
\n\nRefusing to identify as nonviolent: While concentrating on offering low-threshold blockades of coal infrastructure, Ende Gelände consciously never used the term “nonviolence.” Instead, they described their plans as an invitation to those who might feel comfortable with a certain approach. This compromise between the different groups involved in the network enabled very different players to cooperate.
\n\nRefusing to be reduced to a few demands: On the webpage of the Hambi occupation, most articles are explicitly marked as the opinion of some participants; sometimes discussions take place between different writers online. Additionally, many of the barrios (the different neighborhoods within the occupation) and sometimes even individual treehouses maintained their own social media accounts. There is no such thing as a headquarters in the movement.
\n\nRefusing to give your ID to the cops and the court: First used at the Ende Gelände protests and around Hambi to protect international people joining the struggle, this is a double-edged strategy, as those who refuse to give their IDs risk being held in pretrial detention and face a higher likelihood of having their fingerprints taken. All the same, this strategy has successfully discouraged the state from pressing charges against many activists. As always, it is always possible that the police won’t imprison hundreds of activists for longer, but many people wouldn’t have joined the mass protests without this option, and were willing to take this risk.
\n\nAfter some years of participants experimenting with refusing to give their IDs, some of the long-term effects have become more obvious. Those people who are recognized by the police are sometimes isolated in court, because the other members of their former affinity groups fear to have their IDs checked and to be persecuted as well. People live in fear of being recognized by chance somewhere else. Communication between activists and groups gets more complicated, as people change their names often, making it more difficult to build long-lasting relationships and cooperation.
\n\nFrom the forests to the factories: In 2018 and 2019, the topic of traffic was discussed within the movement; some people focused on car exhibitions as potential targets for actions, while others described a need to hit where it hurts most: at the production sites. One of the results of these debates was a big blockade of VW in Wolfsburg 2019.
\n\nSometimes leaving an occupation is an important step for thinking strategically about a struggle. If you are involved in the daily life of an occupation—constantly working out where to get food and drinking water and building material and how to handle the authorities—it can be difficult to take a step back and think about the big questions. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for the movement is to take a few days or weeks off, to avoid the tendency to miss the forest for the trees (a saying that is used in German as well). Keep in mind: the number of structures and barricades will not necessarily correlate with the media attention (if that is your goal) or the “quality” of a struggle. The eviction at Hambi in 2018 raised more media attention than the eviction at Danni in 2020. Sometimes building more tree houses is just a form of self-deception: what seems to make the occupation bigger could end up becoming an ineffectual ritual if we don’t manage to push things further.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/1.jpg\")
The occupation in Flensburg.
\nAnnouncing the reoccupation in advance: Before the occupation at the Hambach Forest was evicted in autumn 2014, activists had already announced that they would reoccupy the forest; one month after the eviction, the forest was squatted again. Even if you personally aren’t sure you will be able to engage in a re-squatting on account of being exhausted, announcing a reoccupation as the only possible answer to an eviction makes a very strong statement. It invites people who have not been involved yet to participate, giving the movement an opportunity to renew itself.
\n\nInternet access: During the pandemic, when people can’t go to school or university or their job is changed to an online “home office,” this home could be a tree house. At Dannenröder forest, many students were thankful for reliable high-speed internet connections near the occupation or even in the tree houses.
\n\nSkillshare: At Hambi, yearly events for sharing skills take place to circulate knowledge between those who already have experience and the future inhabitants defenders of the forests. Sharing knowledge while the movement is still small makes it possible to handle the challenges that ensue when a movement grows rapidly and everyone is busy dealing with other problems.
\n\nCommon reference points: Having been to the same squatted forest is a reference that connects people. Even if the first occupation at Hambi in 2012 doesn’t have a lot in common with the occupations there in 2014, 2018, or today, we immediately feel connected to people when we share our experiences of being in Hambi. It is similar to people going to the ZAD or to Christiania in Copenhagen; Hambi, too, has become a sort of legend. This was only possible because the forest used to be so big that as soon as the occupied parts were evicted, people could occupy other parts of the same forest.
\n\nInfrastructure: Maintaining open (and generally “legal”) “project houses” near the occupations offer participants the option of sleeping in a warm, dry room when they need to, along with an address at which to receive letters and a place to fill up drinking water and take a shower. These spaces can serve as an office with an internet connection and perhaps a printer or copier. Self-organized open projects can offer space to paint banners, build lockboxes, or just relax without the fear of being beaten up or evicted—without being dependent on the solidarity of more bourgeois supporters who might not like to support all the different types of actions that might require indoor preparation. Activists bought a house close to Hambi at the same time that the first occupations at Hambi started. They opened up WAA (the Workshop for Actions and Alternatives) explicitly to support the fight against lignite mining.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/8.jpg\")
A barricade at Hambi.
\nOne simple reason to occupy trees rather than joining political parties or old-fashioned NGOs is the possibility of victory. Success is always relative; we might save one tree while hundreds of trees are cut down. But still—in this day and age, saving a tree is something to be proud of. It is the right thing to do in a society as destructive as ours. It’s a small demonstration of respect for nature—and therefore, of respect for ourselves.
\n\nA region in Germany famous for decades of resistance against the nuclear industry. One of the best known Hüttendörfer (“hut villages,” i.e., protest camps) was constructed—and then evicted—there in 1980, known as the “Free Republic of Wendland.“ Between 1995 and 2011, high-level nuclear waste transports to Gorleben (Wendland) marked the crest of the anti-nuclear movement in Germany of that time, bringing together everyone from local farmers to militant activists and middle-class people. One of the main objectives (to prevent the salt mine in Gorleben to be used as final storage for the waste) was finally achieved in September 2020. ↩
\nSince Minneapolis police brutally murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, demonstrations have exploded across the US and the world. Millions of people have taken to the streets to demand justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and an end to police violence and terror, underscoring the need to eradicate systemic racism by radically transforming our society. Within 24 hours of the explosion of protest, the President of the United States claimed that anarchists and anti-fascists were responsible for the unrest that has occurred in cities across the country.
\n\nThis move to blame anarchists and “antifa” is intended to discredit these popular uprisings while demonizing and isolating the participants. Yet the ways that the prevailing order has failed almost all of us are clearer than ever. Outrage and protest have spread far beyond any particular ideology or group. As tens of thousands fill the streets of scores of cities, it is obvious that anarchists are not responsible for organizing these demonstrations. The demonstrations and the unrest accompanying them represent an organic response to a widely felt need.
\n\nAt the same time, this organic groundswell of momentum, based in reproducible tactics that anyone can employ, embodies anarchist models for social change. Many of the practices and principles that have been fundamental to this movement have long been mainstays of anarchist organizing.
\n\nHere, we explore the anarchist roots of eight principles that have been essential to the success of the Black Lives Matter and Justice for George Floyd demonstrations, seeking to center Black initiatives that reflect anti-authoritarian values. For background on Black anarchism specifically, we recommend Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s Anarchism and the Black Revolution or the more recent Anarkata Statement.
\n\nThis text is co-authored and co-published with Agency.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/5.jpg\")
Throughout this article, we have only used photographs that are already widely available online, in order to avoid inadvertently providing sensitive information to the police.
\nOne of the many things that politicians aim to obscure by insisting that “outside agitators” are responsible for the uprising that began in Minneapolis is that oppressed communities in the United States are already occupied and exploited by outsiders. This began with the colonization of North America by European settlers, the original “outside agitators,” and continues today with the ownership of most of the real estate and businesses in Black, indigenous, and immigrant neighborhoods by non-residents with few ties to those communities—not to mention the policing of these neighborhoods by officers like Derek Chauvin who commute to the districts they terrorize.
\n\nIn opposition to these ongoing occupations, anarchists call for self-determination, arguing that individuals and communities should control their own bodies and living conditions and determine their own destinies rather than live under the imposition of state power, which is designed to serve the urges of a privileged few rather than the needs of the many. As the horrific murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor show, reclaiming control over public space from the police forces that hold Black communities hostage is an essential step towards self-determination.
\n\nLikewise, anarchists believe that those who are directly affected by a situation should be the ones to decide how to respond to it. In taking the initiative to respond to the murder of George Floyd themselves on their own terms rather than deferring to “community leaders” or petitioning the government for redress, the people of Minneapolis made their demand for autonomy crystal clear.
\n\nOn the streets of their neighborhoods, in their schools and workplaces, ordinary people in revolt are finding support from anarchists in their efforts to attain genuine self-determination for their communities.
\n\n\n\n\n“We need to use the greatest power that we have, which is control over our bodies, control of our labor, to make the situation ungovernable and untenable in the United States, and to do it in an organized systemic fashion.”
\n
-Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/6.jpg\")
\nContrary to the propaganda of right-wing conspiracy theorists, there has been no single force, organization, or ideology guiding these protests. Demonstrations for justice and against police violence have taken place in all 50 states and nearly 50 other countries over the past week without any central coordination whatsoever.
\n\nIn contrast to top-down, centralized efforts, this flourishing of grassroots initiatives characterizes the anarchist approach to social change. Like the Occupy Movement, which anarchist activists and tactics helped to launch, local manifestations can take different forms according to context while amplifying the overall message. Horizontal links between participants allow for flexibility, keeping it easy for new people to get involved as they see fit. This model has won historic victories—for example, the mobilization against the summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, during which anarchists and others outwitted police through a networked structure of autonomous affinity groups that worked together to shut down the city.
\n\nToday, Black Lives Matter activists are also employing a decentralized approach, permitting the movement to spread organically and ensuring that it cannot be contained or coopted.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/4.jpg\")
An assembly during the Occupy Wall Street protests, September 26, 2011.
\nAs proponents of equality, anarchists oppose white supremacy and fascism. Those on the receiving end of colonial violence have always defended themselves against racist violence; anarchists believe in taking action in solidarity even when they themselves are not the targets. In one of the earliest expressions of anarchism in the United States, the prominent American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison linked his rejection of the institutions of government and property to his opposition to the institution of slavery. In the 1980s and 1990s, anarchists across North America formed Anti-Racist Action chapters to fight against neo-Nazi organizing. Today’s so-called “antifa” groups are part of this longstanding tradition of defending communities against racist and fascist violence. Historically, anarchist organizing spearheaded by Black people and other people of color has played a critical role in pushing broader social movements to challenge systemic racism. From Ferguson to Charlottesville and in Minneapolis today, anarchists of all ethnicities have been on the front lines of efforts to prevent neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and other white supremacists from harming people.
\n\nThe efforts of President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and the right-wing media to declare “antifa” a terrorist organization are a transparent ploy to undermine this popular uprising and distract its supporters. The Ku Klux Klan, the deadliest terrorist organization in US history, receives no such condemnation—nor do the groups that radicalized the racist who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, nor the white supremacist gang whose symbol a NYPD officer flashed last week at a Black Lives Matter protest. Trump’s government brands those who oppose white supremacy and fascism “terrorists,” despite the fact that—unlike the bigots they oppose—they have yet to be responsible for a single person’s death.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/3.jpg\")
Anarchists at the front of clashes with white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
\nMutual aid is a practice of reciprocal care through which participants in a network make sure that everyone’s needs are met. It is neither a tit-for-tat exchange nor the sort of one-way assistance that a charity organization offers, but a free interchange of assistance and resources. Anarchists believe that communities can meet their needs through mutual aid rather than cutthroat competition for profit.
\n\nAs the COVID-19 crisis unfolded, communities across the US recognized the need to organize to meet urgent needs collectively. Because anarchists took the initiative in these efforts from the beginning, they came to be known under the banner of mutual aid. Subsequently, even progressive politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on Americans to form mutual aid initiatives.
\n\nThe term was originally popularized by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and spread through international anarchist networks. Kropotkin, a naturalist and biologist, argued in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) that it is reciprocity and cooperation, not bloodthirsty competition, that enables species from the smallest microorganisms to human societies to survive and thrive. This challenged the Social Darwinist dogma of “survival of the fittest” that business elites used to justify the exploitation and inequality that accompanied the expansion of global capitalism in the nineteenth century. Kropotkin made a scientific and philosophical case for reorganizing society according to the principles of mutual aid, which he described as “the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all” and “the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.” Since Kropotkin’s day, anarchists have consistently put this principle into practice via efforts like Food Not Bombs, Really Really Free Markets, community bail and bond funds, the Common Ground Collective’s work after Hurricane Katrina, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, and other projects.
\n\nToday, COVID-19 relief volunteers and supporters of the Justice for George Floyd protests collaborate to offer free medical care, water, food, and supplies on the streets of Minneapolis, Washington, DC, and around the United States. These efforts draw on the anarchist principle to each according to need, from each according to ability.
\n\nIt’s no surprise that COVID-19 relief and protest support efforts are intersecting. Due to the racialized disparities in wealth, health care access, and workplace vulnerability, people of color and Black people in particular have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic. Fighting for the principle that Black lives matter means confronting not only police violence but also all the other systems of oppression that have kept so many Black communities impoverished. These community initiatives reflect the anarchist idea that everyone’s health and freedom are interlinked and can best be preserved through solidarity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/1.jpg\")
Malik Rahim, one of the founders of Common Ground, a collective that coordinated mutual aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
\nAs hundreds of thousands of people have poured into the streets, defying police orders and curfews, over 10,000 protestors have been arrested and many injured by police or right-wing vigilantes. Despite this, the movement has continued to grow, thanks in part to emerging social movement infrastructure including collectives providing health and medical support, pro-bono legal assistance, bail funds, and other forms of solidarity. Anarchists have participated on the front lines of these efforts, leveraging longstanding infrastructure and drawing on decades of experience.
\n\nParticipating in the worldwide protest network journalists dubbed the “anti-globalization” movement in the 1990s, anarchists took an active role in organizing collective infrastructure for medical, legal, and logistical support at large protests. Bail funds, activist lawyers, street medics, and communication teams played a critical role in mobilizations like the one against the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Since then, anarchists have honed their skills in mass mobilizations against government and corporate gatherings from the Republican and Democratic National Conventions from 2000 onwards to the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh in 2009 and Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Organizing horizontally in volunteer networks, building relationships between local and national organizers, and drawing on solidarity and mutual aid to provide resources to participants, they have repeatedly empowered ordinary people to exert an outsize influence on historic events.
\n\nWe see the legacy of these successes in the emerging legal and medical infrastructures supporting the Justice for George Floyd protests. For example, the Northstar Health Collective in Minneapolis, which provided critical support for the protests, was founded by anarchists during the mobilization against the 2008 Republican National Convention.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/9.jpg\")
A street medic treating a demonstrator calling for justice for George Floyd.
\nIn a decentralized movement, how can various groups employing different strategies coordinate to minimize the likelihood of conflict? How can they ensure that their efforts are not vulnerable to the divide-and-conquer strategies of the state and conservative media interests? For decades, anarchists have experimented with answers to these questions.
\n\nWhen the Republican National Convention took place in Minnesota in 2008, a coalition of protest groups involving many anarchists agreed upon the “St. Paul Principles,” inspired by similar points of unity used in mass organizing efforts anchored by anarchists in major cities in Canada and the US over the preceding years. Models like this assist people of diverse ideologies and priorities in supporting rather than hindering each other’s efforts.
\n\nThe Justice for George Floyd protests are so diverse and incorporate so many different approaches that by no means all participants adhere to this framework. But many of the most prominent voices are insisting on a similar approach to prevent the movement from being divided. This embrace of a diversity of tactics reflects the core anarchist value of autonomy.
\n\nAnarchists reject focusing on petitioning for top-down reforms in favor of seeking solutions that attack social problems at their roots. Reforms can be a step towards fundamental change, but anarchists argue that we should begin from an analysis of the root causes of social ills and a holistic understanding of the systems that both ensure disparities and benefit from them.
\n\nSo far, none of the reforms that politicians propose, such as civilian review boards or body cameras, have served to diminish police violence on a nationwide level. Neither have legal responses, such as bringing lawsuits or charges against officers, nor electoral solutions like lobbying or voting in new politicians. Despite reform efforts following the rebellion in Ferguson in 2014, the number of police killings annually in the US actually increased between 2015 and 2019.
\n\nToday, for the first time, mainstream discourse is acknowledging the possibility of defunding police departments or abolishing them altogether. Anarchists join Black feminists and prison abolitionists in insisting that cosmetic reforms will not solve the underlying issues of power, racism, and exploitation that drive state violence. Anarchists have been targets of police and state violence for over a century, from the Haymarket martyrs to the Anarchist Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids, and the J20 case. These experiences inform the anarchist vision of a world entirely free of police and the exploitation they perpetuate.
\n\n\n\n\n“The unjust institutions which work so much misery and suffering to the masses have their root in governments, and owe their whole existence to the power derived from government, we cannot help but believe that were every law, every title deed, every court, and every police officer or soldier abolished tomorrow with one sweep, we would be better off than now.”
\n
-Lucy Parsons, The Principles of Anarchism
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/2.jpg\")
Lucy Parsons
\nThe slogan “Black Lives Matter” has radical implications. To assert that human life is more important than preserving state control or protecting corporate property poses a profound challenge to today’s political and economic order. This implies a fundamentally different ethics than the logic of the state.
\n\nAs the COVID-19 crisis has shown, business as usual can be deadly. Alongside environmental destruction, workplace accidents, massive consumer debt, and the waste of human potential that characterizes the capitalist economy, the pandemic is adding another layer of tragedy to the costs of valuing profit over people. Many workers, forced to return to their jobs by politically motivated reopening efforts, are being punished by their employers for attempting to protect their health. All of this, on top of the pervasive police violence that sparked the Floyd protests, suggests how little the powerful value the lives of everyday people.
\n\nAnarchists join the Black Lives Matter movement in promoting a different conception of value. Insisting on the value of Black lives means challenging the institutions that prioritize profit and control over them—the police as well as the politicians protecting them, exploitative employers, polluters, profiteers, and many others. This means taking a stand against capitalism as well as police. From the Industrial Workers of the World, a union that challenges the wage system itself, to the mutual aid networks that put gift economies into practice, anarchists consistently strive to foster a world of cooperation beyond the market. The Movement for Black Lives, too, outlines that they are explictly anti-capitalist in their organizing principles. Valuing Black lives requires profoundly transforming the economic system.
\n\nMany voices both inside and out of the protests are joining the chorus demanding that human life must take precedence over property. Even business owners who have experienced looting or fires in the course of the protests have spoken up to insist that the focus should remain on the core issues of anti-Black violence, policing, and social justice. This points the way toward an ethics of solidarity that characterizes anarchist approaches to social transformation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/7.jpg\")
\nPresident Trump is wrong. It’s not “anarchists” who are responsible for the courageous militant actions we’ve seen in the streets—though anarchists of many ethnicities have participated. Above all, it has been Black and brown youth and other marginalized people whose bravery and determination have compelled the entire world to take notice. As we’ve seen, there are significant overlaps between the values and strategies of anarchist movements and of Black Lives Matter and other anti-police and liberation struggles. While anarchists should not displace other participants’ ways of describing their activities to claim these as examples of anarchist ideology, these resonances are the basis for mutual exchange and solidarity in the process of building multi-racial movements for liberation.
\n\nAnarchists believe that it is worth fighting to create a society based on mutual aid, autonomy, equality, freedom, and solidarity. For any movement to be effective, the participants must identify what it will take to change things. The courageous response to the murder of George Floyd showed the effectiveness of uncompromising direct action—not only to raise the social costs of injustice, but also to make it possible to imagine another world. After the burning of the third precinct in Minneapolis demonstrated that ordinary people can defeat the police in open conflict, defunding and abolishing the police became thinkable on the scale of nationwide public discourse.
\n\nIn Minneapolis and then in Louisville, Los Angeles, New York City, and around the world, Black, brown, and other marginalized people have converged to shut down business as usual. Anarchists have participated, contributing experience with resistance tactics, infrastructures that offer support to all in need, and visions of a world in which the institutions that killed George Floyd and so many others would not exist. Ideas and approaches that resonate with anarchist values can be seen in action throughout these protests, regardless of whether those who employ them give them political labels.
\n\nThese values and practices, which transcend any single ideology or tradition, can be the basis for people to come together across lines of difference as they confront state power in the streets. The indigenous anarchist collective Indigenous Action and others have argued that modern movements need “accomplices not allies”—people dedicated to sharing risks and taking direct action together, motivated by a vision of collective liberation rather than guilt, duty, or prestige. The Justice for George Floyd protests have demonstrated the effectiveness of multiracial, decentralized, grassroots efforts. Informed by a horizontal, participatory ethos that rejects police violence as well as every other form of state coercion, anarchists insist that everyone has a role to play in the process of getting free.
\n\nOne of the most central messages from anarchist organizing over the past decades—including struggles for refugee and migrant solidarity, queer liberation, prison abolition and beyond—is that each of us can only be free when all of us are free. Ashanti Alston, an anarchist activist, speaker, and writer, has articulated this beautifully. As a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army and a former political prisoner, Alston has had plenty of experience confronting state violence. Informed by the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, his vision of collective liberation reflects an anarchist ethos shared across many movements and communities, echoing forward to inspire our efforts today:
\n\n\n\n\n“We have to figure out how to create a world where it’s possible for all different people to be who they are, to have a world where everyone fits.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/9.jpg\")
Ashanti Alston, photographed at a meeting of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, February 2003 in New York City.
\nAugust is shaping up to be a busy month in the United States, with a convergence of struggles against fascist organizing, the prison-industrial complex, and the violence of the border as exemplified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With our comrades at Submedia and It’s Going Down, we’ve prepared a short video addressing the situation, followed by a brief analysis.
\n\nAll out this August!
\nWe’re seeing a new wave of activity from the fascist movement that was so soundly beaten in the streets a year ago. Early on the morning of July 28, the Nazis of Patriot Front attacked the camp set up by Occupy ICE in San Antonio. This August, the same fascist groups that terrorized and murdered people last year are preparing to rally around the US again—everywhere from Providence and Washington, DC to Portland and Berkeley.
\n\nFascists are the street wing of the Trump agenda. We have to shut them down wherever they organize. But above all, we can’t let them stop us from standing up to the state, the chief source of authoritarian violence.
\n\n\n\n\n“These goons are of great use to the authorities. They can carry out attacks that the state is not yet able to, intimidating those who might otherwise rebel. They distract from the institutionalized violence of the state, which is still the cause of most of the oppression that takes place in our society. Above all, they enable the authorities to portray themselves as neutral keepers of the peace.”
\n\n \n
All out for Portland!
\nFor years, people concerned about the violence of immigration enforcement sought a point of intervention to take action against it. At the beginning of the Trump era, we proposed that people build on the example of the airport blockades by shutting down ICE offices. This summer, the Occupy ICE model finally took off, with occupations all around the United States.
\n\nThe movement has managed to accomplish a lot with a relatively small amount of people. Unlike astroturf movements like the March for Our Lives that rapidly became a series of promotional events for the Democratic Party, Occupy ICE has offered agency to the exploited and excluded and achieved a direct impact. This has included direct aid and solidarity for the struggles of immigrants, halting specific deportations, and delaying deportations on a larger scale. Occupy ICE has blocked the Trump administration’s policy of breaking up families and forced Trump to try to distance himself from his own policy.
\n\nIn short, direct action gets the goods: we don’t need political parties to make change, we can take action ourselves to force the state to stop what it is doing.
\n\nUnlike the top-down decision involving the FBI and DHS to clear the Occupy encampments in coordinated attacks, the Trump administration has thus far permitted cities to handle the encampments on their own, presumably for fear that centralized repression would backfire. In response, fascists and others on the far right have taken on the task of attacking the encampments themselves, following in the footsteps of DHS agents. The fascists aspire to act as an auxiliary force of repression to do what the forces of the state cannot currently do.
\n\nHowever, this strategy can backfire on those who hold state power. The failure of the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville a year ago cost the Trump regime dearly. Likewise, the decision to rely on evidence provided by far-right surveillance vigilantes Project Veritas cost prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff the entire J20 case. When fascists and other grassroots reactionaries overextend themselves, their failures can undermine the legitimacy of the reigning party they hope to support. We have to see fascist attacks as an opportunity to seize the initiative in our struggle against the state.
\n\nAbove all, fascists would like us to narrow the scope of our efforts to countering their organizing; they aim to trap us in a private grudge match while the state continues to mass-incarcerate and deport people. We beat them by organizing movements that can take on the chief source of oppression, the state itself.
\n\nThe organizers of a looming nationwide prison strike have expressed solidarity with Occupy ICE, linking the fight against prison slavery to the call to abolish ICE. This has come in the form of statements from prison strike leaders in support of Occupy ICE and also recent hunger strikes in solidarity with hunger-striking migrant detainees. When prisoners unite across racial lines against prison slavery, it’s up to us to do the same on the outside.
\n\nSo in solidarity with #AllOutAugust, we encourage people to continue to organize blockades against ICE facilities; to continue to defend Occupy ICE camps and reenergize them with events, music, films, and discussions; and to mobilize solidarity around the prison strike, as well. It is easy to draw links between resistance to prison slavery and the fight to abolish ICE and the borders it violently enforces. Continuing to support the Occupy ICE camps and anti-ICE blockades is one of many ways to act in solidarity with the prison strike.
\n\nEntering into open conflict with fascists is often terrifying. Yet we hope that the movement for a world without oppression can come out of the trying events of August stronger—and that as the summer comes to a close, the struggles against borders, fascists, and police will converge in new ways and gain new momentum.
\n\nGood luck out there, dear comrades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/31/1.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/31/3.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/31/2.jpg\")
\nOn January 17, 2018, the French government announced on television, via the voice of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, that it had given up on pursuing the highly controversial project of building a new airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes (NDDL). This decision capped five decades of political, economic, legal, environmental, and personal struggle. The airport was to be located approximately 30 kilometers north of the city of Nantes in western France; instead, the site became la ZAD—the Zone à Défendre (Zone To Defend). What began as a small protest camp grew into a world-famous space of autonomous experimentation that lasted almost nine years.
\n\nAt the very moment we are publishing this article, a massive police operation has invaded the ZAD to evict it. The French government was prepared to lose the fight to build an airport, but no state willingly cedes autonomy to anyone within its territory. The ZAD’s moment of triumph as a single-issue struggle may have spelled its doom as a space of contagious freedom.
\n\nYet the state alone could never destroy such a vibrant project. As we will explore in detail below, dynamics that emerged from within the occupation enabled the police to resume the offensive. In some regards, this pattern is built into the life cycle of movements based around concrete objectives; but in other regards, what took place at the ZAD is avoidable, and we should make a point of learning from it if we hope to create permanent autonomous zones.
\n\nThe similarities to the story of Standing Rock are obvious. In the US, starting in April 2016, thousands of people mobilized to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through North Dakota. Following months of clashes with the police, President Barack Obama announced that the Army Corps of Engineers would deny the permit for the last leg of the pipeline; protesters declared victory and many left the camp. Within a couple months, Donald Trump’s administration reversed the decision, the police evicted the last stragglers in the camp in a brutal raid, and the pipeline proceeded after all. The ZAD and Standing Rock offer cautionary tales about the perils of victory.
\n\nAs one zadist wrote presciently to the occupiers of Standing Rock at the peak of the latter movement,
\n\n\n\n\n“All the things you dream of: do them now, while your enemies are reeling, trying to figure out their next angle of attack. There won’t ever be less repression, less police and private security, less drones and dogs. I personally regret not pushing harder before our possibilities shifted, not taking things to the fullest expression they could have reached. I hope you won’t have these same regrets.”
\n
In the following text, we trace the history of 50 years of resistance to the airport at NDDL and analyze the internal dynamics that set the stage for today’s police raid.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/44.jpg\")
Clashes with the police in the ZAD.
\nThe idea of building a new airport in the Nantes area dates back to the 1960s. At that time, the Paris region (Ile-de-France) was constantly consolidating more and more capital. To reverse this tendency, the French government decided to embark on a new project of decentralization by creating new areas that would be attractive for investors.
\n\nIn the Grand Ouest, the geographical area including the cities of Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, local authorities were concerned that the infrastructure of the region was lacking. For example, the dilapidated airport at Nantes fell short of their desire for a hub that could receive millions of passengers, provide trans-Atlantic flights, and offer a runway for the Concorde, at the time the new national aeronautic jewel. In 1965, the Loire-Atlantique prefecture agreed to start looking for an additional aeronautic site for the region.
\n\nIn 1968, Notre-Dame-Des-Landes was selected as the best place to build a new airport on account of its location between Rennes and Nantes. Local farmers opposed the project; they formed the first organization to defend against it in 1972. In 1974, a zone d’aménagement différé (deferred development zone) was created at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. This official decree allowed the government to progressively purchase land in the area. However, the oil crisis of the 1970s and the opening of the new high-speed railway line (TGV) at Nantes in 1989 delayed the project for several decades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/42.jpg\")
No airport!
\nIn 2000, the project was revived under the government of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. This delighted Jean-Marc Ayrault, then Mayor of Nantes (and later Prime Minister under François Hollande’s presidency), who had personal plans for restructuring his city. The plan from 1970 was already obsolete. After creating a special committee to study the issue, the local authorities received an official report validating that the project promoted “public utility and interest.” Despite the newly adopted Grenelle de l’Environnement1 stating that no new airport should be build in France, on February 9, 2008, the French state signed a decree valid for 10 years stating the “public utility and interest” of building the new airport.
\n\nAt this point, various groups began to object that environmental issues had been set aside in order to speed up the validation process. Opponents of the airport organized awareness campaigns on a local and national scale.
\n\nIn 2009, their determination paid off. That summer, local activists and residents organized a “climate action camp” on the designated site of the future airport. Hundreds of activists discussed the issues at stake in the decision to build an international airport on top of these fields and historic farmers’ houses. The first major occupation took place during this camp. Understanding that the French government was determined to pursue the project, activists decided to occupy the site of the future airport by squatting the buildings and farms that were left empty by the authorities and building their own shacks and houses. On the incandescent ashes of the “climate action camp,” the ZAD was born.2 When the occupation began, several organizations decided to follow the legal protocol by presenting the Conseil d’Etat3 with several objections to the airport project, focusing on its environmental impact. The Conseil d’Etat rejected their demands.
\n\nAmong the numerous objections raised to the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the major ones include:
\n\nIn addition to the obvious fact that airplanes are accelerating global climate change, the new airport would destroy approximately 2000 hectares of well-preserved forests and wetlands. The project would have a massive impact on the biodiversity of the region, including on hundreds of animal species and natural water sources within and around the ZAD that are officially “protected.”
\nThe airport would also affect human beings, destroying farming lands and eliminating the chief income of local farmers and their families. The contract for the construction of the airport included measures to expel the inhabitants of the construction zone. Living near an airport would also raise health and quality of life issues for residents.
\nThere were also economic problems relating to the airport. Why put money into creating a new airport rather than renovating the existing one? What would happen to the older airport once the new one was operational? A new airport in the region would impact the locals in other ways, as taxes would increase.
\nFinally, the lack of transparency. At first, authorities promoted the new airport by explaining that it would be bigger than the existing one. However, opponents revealed that the plans for the future airport indicated that the additional space would not be used to increase the “comfort” of passengers in the terminals, but rather to create a bigger shopping area. This increased popular opposition.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/7.jpg\")
The classic slogan of the ZAD: “Against the airport and its world.”
\n</figcaption>\n </figure>
\n\nIn December 2010, a subsidiary company of VINCI, the internationally well-known French Concession and Construction Company, was selected as the state’s new partner for the airport project. According to the contract, VINCI would receive funds from the state to design, build, and operate the future airport for 55 years, in addition to the existing airport between Nantes and Saint-Nazaire. The opening of the new airport at NDDL was set for 2017.
\n\nAfter the official announcement, the French multinational was targeted in solidarity actions across France and elsewhere around the world. The decision did not discourage the opponents. On the contrary, more and more people showed up to occupy the land. Many activists were eager to experiment in alternative forms of autonomous living based in mutual aid and self-sufficiency. Parcels of land were transformed into collectively cultivated gardens; collective spaces were created as well as several forges, bakeries, and mills. Here is a rough translation of a text published in December 2011 summarizing the general idea behind the creation of the ZAD at NDDL:
\n\n\n\n\nNôtre Dame des Landes
\n\nThe struggle against the NDDL airport is an attempt to create a breach in the capitalist ramparts. Because for many of us, to attack capitalism, we had to start somewhere!
\n\nThis is 2000 hectares that will be razed to the ground and covered with concrete, with the delusional goal of creating a HQE (High Environmental Quality) international airport. We could laugh about it if the local population in favor of this project were not imagining making a profit from it. But the rich will become richer and the poor, poorer. The realization of this project led by VINCI, a multi-national company present on all the continents (also in Khimki, near Moscow, where VINCI wants cut down the last local forests, and where the weak resistance on the ground confronts ultra-violent far-right wing militias, in a context in which political assassination is common place), was therefore chosen, in defiance of the local population, who made a call to occupy the land in 2009 to resist this decision.
\n\nThe occupation has been going on for two years now, during which a handful of anti-capitalist resistance fighters have developed food, cultural, and political autonomy. The squatting of this zone to defend (ZAD) slows down the construction of the airport, leading to the charging of activists, repression against them, and starting not long ago, eviction procedures, but we will resist whatever the cost!
\n\nThis is why, today, we are calling for the re-occupation of the site and for international rebellion!
\n\nIt goes without saying that when they evict us, we will resist! (And international solidarity is necessary if we want to put capitalism to an end!)
\n\nAgainst rampant capitalism and the sacred power of money, there is only one solution: insurrection!
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/31.jpg\")
“This is a summons to resist.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/18.jpg\")
A map of the ZAD.
\nThe ZAD progressively became a sort of autonomous community, drawing a wide range of individuals from longtime farmers living on the ZAD to anarchists, anti-globalization activists, liberals, and leftists. The zadists themselves emphasize this diversity. Years later, in 2017, “Camille” (a standard nom de guerre among activists), a zadist at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, explained:
\n\n\n\n\n“The movement itself is large and has great solidarity, but there’s a great diversity of people and opinions (…) From those who’ve got degrees to people from the streets or those who just want to get away from their families (…) some are already politically engaged, some just broken by conventional life.”
\n
The growth of the ZAD led to an intensification of legal battles to block the airport project. The opponents filed many appeals and legal proceedings followed one another for several years. In 2012, two local farmers went on hunger strike in front of the Nantes prefecture to protest the project. The newly elected Socialist President François Hollande promised that the government would not physically enter the zone until every other means available had been exhausted.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/8.jpg\")
“Welcome to our vision of the future.”
\nNevertheless, early in the morning of October 16, 2012, the government of Jean-Marc Ayrault—now Prime Minister—launched Opération César, the official name given to the eviction of the ZAD.4 More than one thousand police forces, two helicopters, and several armed vehicles were deployed in this operation.
\n\nOn the first day of Operation Caesar, police forces slowly progressed through the occupied zone, destroying everything in their path. However, the authorities had underestimated their opponents: unanticipated resistance from zadists stymied the operation. Over the following days, activists gathered to reoccupy and defend the ZAD. Demonstrations delayed police operations while activists erected barricades and pelted the police with stones. The wide array of actions, the unfailing solidarity among zadists, and their knowledge of the terrain were major assets. The NDDL movement gained more and more support and visibility while Operation Caesar bogged down.
\n\nAfter days of perpetual harassment on one side and tenacious resistance on the other, the government suspended the operation. This decision was not taken lightly. On the first day of the eviction, the Prefect of Loire-Atlantique, Christian de Lavernée, had declared, “If the state can’t take back the zone, then we should be worried for the state.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/10.jpg\")
“If the state can’t take back the zone, we should be worried for the state.”
\nThe French government had admitted defeat. This was a major turning point in the psychological war between the authorities and the zadists. The following month, on November 17, 2012, several thousand people showed up to reclaim and reoccupy their land and to clean and rebuild the ZAD. You can read a report from the reoccupation demo here. To read a longer personal account of Operation Caesar, we recommend “Rural Rebels and Useless Airports,” published in two parts here and here.
\n\nA week after the successful reoccupation, the government changed its strategy, seeking to restore its public image by announcing the establishment of three different commissions—one gathering experts, another focusing on establishing dialogue between the different parties, and the a third composed of scientists—in order to find a solution to the conflict.
\n\nIn 2013, the movement around the occupation of the ZAD continued growing; numerous agricultural and living projects appeared. In the meantime, direct action and sabotage became more frequent, as chronicled in a zine entitled Défendre la zad, Paroles publiques depuis le mouvement d’occupation de la zad de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, 2013-2015.
\n\nFor example, in March 2013, a group went to a construction site outside of Nantes. This construction site was slated to start building a major highway connecting Saint-Nazaire, Nantes, and Rennes in order to facilitate the transport and delivery of equipment to build the airport at NDDL and to connect it to those three cities. The group destroyed ducts, cables, surveyors’ equipment, and six electric poles. They justified this attack with the following arguments:
\n\nDefending the zone and fighting against the airport and its world doesn’t just mean occupying the ZAD or living there while awaiting eviction. It also means building a real offensive against the project by developing practices of active resistance.
\nThe movement must not fall into the traps of the government and be neutralized. That includes the commission aimed at establishing dialogue, with all its negotiations, agreements, compromises, potential moratoriums, and other frauds.
\nDirect action will increase the pressure on the decision-makers.
\nIndeed, on April 2013, the dialogue commission presented its conclusions. Once again, the airport project was announced to be of “public utility,” but this time the commission asked for a few improvements regarding environmental compensations. For example, in view of the hundreds of protected species living on the ZAD and its surroundings, the commission determined that financial compensation should be granted in return for… four of them. This underscores the cynicism of the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/32.jpg\")
Building new realities.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/33.jpg\")
A habitation in the ZAD.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/43.jpg\")
An occupied site in the ZAD, 2013.
\nOn Saturday, February 22, 2014, the resistance movement flexed its muscles with a massive demonstration in Nantes. As one of the participants wrote, this day represented “one of these magic moments where life resurfaces with a roar.” This day of actions remains one the high points in the struggle against the airport, not only because of the intensity of the fighting in the streets of Nantes, but also because it showed that the participants were capable of breaking out of the narratives that are usually imposed on activists by the state.
\n\nThe battle of Nantes, February 22, 2014.
\nOn that day, they proved they were not only defending a specific territory, but were capable of going on the offensive. Projecting themselves into the heart of a major metropolis and attacking it from the inside, the zadists used tactics that had been developed inside the ZAD including barricading, ambushing, building huts, and hosting collective discussions and meals. Early in the morning, over 500 tractors converged on Nantes, causing traffic jams on all the major routes around the metropolis. Some of them established a picket in front of the Nantes Atlantique airport. Then tractors entered the city and blocked the tramway lines.
\n\nMeanwhile, a colorful and heterogeneous crowd took over the streets. According to the previously mentioned account, the general atmosphere was carnivalesque, distinct from the usual monochrome, mournful, and powerless demonstrations organized by political parties and trade unions. That day, it seemed that everything was possible:
\n\nA group built a tree house in front of the prefecture building;
\nothers attacked economic and political infrastructure and smashed store fronts;
\nriot cops were spray-painted with a fire extinguisher;
\na police station and an administrative court were attacked;
\na drilling machine and an excavator were set on fire at a construction site;
\nthe VINCI real-estate headquarters was looted and destroyed; and
\na train line was sabotaged in solidarity with the No TAV struggle in the Susa Valley.
\nThe author of the abovementioned account emphasizes that despite the confrontations between activists and police, demonstrators never disassociated themselves from each other or scattered: “there was room for all the practices that constitute the movement.” From the beginning of the ZAD, a diverse range of people had occupied a large open space and created multiple contrasting atmospheres and spaces within it; this experience spilled over into the demonstrations.
\n\nFor all these reasons, the demonstration on February 22, 2014, caught the authorities off guard, sending a clear message to the government again and opening new breaches for future struggles. The total cost of damage from the demonstration exceeded a million euros.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/45.jpg\")
Photographs from the streets of Nantes on February 22, 2014 illustrate the intensity of the confrontations.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/20.jpg\")
Graffiti in Nantes on February 22, 2014: “ZAD everywhere.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/22.jpg\")
Nantes on February 22, 2014.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/23.jpg\")
Cops outside a police station that came under attack in Nantes on February 22, 2014.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/29.jpg\")
The VINCI real estate building in Nantes on February 22, 2014.
\nOn July 17, 2015, the Administrative Court of Nantes once again rejected all the appeals that had been presented against the airport. The construction of the airport was to move forward. The authorities were gambling that they could outlast the opposition, or at least outgun them.
\n\nOn October 30, a month before the COP 21 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference), the government, via the voice of its Prime Minister Manuel Valls, announced that the construction of the new airport at Notre-Dame-Des-Landes would resume in 2016. Due to the Court’s decision, the authorities and VINCI wanted to accelerate the process and start the construction as soon as possible.
\n\nThe COP 21 opened in Paris on November 30, 2015. Despite the newly established State of Emergency that followed the ISIS attacks, earlier that month, people gathered at Place de la République to oppose the international political spectacle. The forbidden demonstration ended with long confrontations with police forces on the famous Parisian square and mass arrests. Repression did not succeed in intimidating environmental activists, however; actions continued on a daily basis until the Climate Change Conference ended on December 12, when 195 countries signed a supposedly historic agreement to save the planet by limiting global warming. On the one side, a permanent state of emergency; on the other, the proponents of the airport, greenwashing an imposed consensus reality.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/19.jpg\")
Graffiti in Nantes on February 22, 2014: “Neither airport nor metropolis.”
\nZadists and other activists organized several days of action at the ZAD and in other major cities nationwide for the beginning of 2016. On January 9, 2016, over 20,000 people demonstrated near Nantes by blocking roads and freeways to show their opposition to the reopening of the airport project. You can find photos of the demonstration here and an English transcription of the speeches here.
\n\nOn January 13, the trial opened for the families who lived on the site slated for the airport. More than 1000 supporters gathered in front of the Court in Nantes. Another national day of mobilization against the airport took place on January 16. In Paris, people gathered at a large banquet to denounce the State of Emergency, then took the streets with banners showing their support for the ZAD.
\n\nBad news arrived on January 25, 2016. The High Court of Nantes called for the evictions of the remaining inhabitants of the ZAD. Eleven families had until the end of March to leave their houses. Among these families, four local farmers faced additional peril as their cattle, buildings, machines, and fields—their entire livelihoods—could be destroyed or seized at any moment by the authorities. This decision did not weaken the resistance against the airport project, as a direct action report from February 1 illustrates. Some zadists responded by building new houses and infrastructures within the ZAD. In addition, there was a national call to demonstrate against the airport on February 27.
\n\nMeanwhile, the government announced a local referendum on the airport issue. This strategic decision can be analyzed at different levels:
\n\nThe proposition can be seen as a way to muzzle and weaken the movement, imposing a question from above in place of the narratives arising from below;
\nthe vote would be used to divide people into those in favor and those against the project;
\nthe vote could offer a new way for the government to legitimize and impose the project by justifying it through participatory direct democracy.
\nOn February 27, between 30,000 and 50,000 people responded to the national call to action, gathering on the main national roads next to the ZAD. Over 60 busses carrying demonstrators from all over France joined pedestrians, motorists, over 800 cyclists, and about 50 tractors in what is considered to have been the highest turnout at a demonstration that Notre-Dame-Des-Landes had seen since the beginning of the struggle.
\n\nIn the meantime, another major succession of events diverted the government’s attention from the ZAD, as confrontations erupted in every major city of France in opposition to the newly presented Loi Travail. Consequently, no evictions took place in the ZAD that March, as had previously been planned.
\n\nOn June 26, 2016, while the struggles against the Loi Travail were slowly losing their intensity, the results of the local referendum on the airport were released, showing 55% of the voters in favor of the project. Opponents of the airport criticized the wording of the question, the geographical area of the vote, and other aspects of the referendum. Nevertheless, it was certain that this result gave more perceived legitimacy to the French government in pushing through the project once and for all. Fortunately, however, the French political agenda ended up playing to our advantage. As presidential elections were set in April-May 2017, politicians were focusing more on their campaigns and careers and therefore decided to not to get their hands dirty in the controversial project until after the voting.
\n\nIn May 2017, newly elected President Emmanuel Macron decided to continue misleading everyone with his campaign promise of doing politics differently. He named a mainstream environmental figure, Nicolas Hulot, to be Minister of the Ecological and Solidarity Transition. Before making a final decision, the new government officially announced a new mediation plan to lower the pressure from protesters and study all the aspects of the highly controversial airport project one last time.
\n\nSix months later, in December 2017, three mediators handed their study to Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, explaining that between the options of building a new airport and expanding the existing airport in Nantes, both options were “reasonably conceivable.” As the possibility increased that the project would be abandoned, a new media campaign to delegitimize zadists emerged. An article posted on the official ZAD website explains that this “last hope” attempt to discredit the ZAD and its resistance originated from the Gendarmerie (the national police force in France, which has military status), who sent photographs and false information to several major media channels.
\n\nJournalists, thrilled to have a major headline and opening subject, published and commented on the information and pictures without verifying their accuracy or questioning their origin. This smear campaign described zadists as “terrorists” ready to “fight and kill” if necessary, using projectiles full of acid and pétanque balls (heavy metal balls used for the eponymous traditional game) spiked with razor blades or nails. Suddenly, the ZAD turned into a battlefield where activists dug tunnels and entrenchments, built weapons caches for firearms and incendiary devices, and hid traps in the forest.
\n\nThe question of whether some activists had weapons in the ZAD is a distraction. Could such weapons have posed a lethal threat to heavily armed police forces? No, the threat of violence at NDDL always came from the state; it was always the police who determined its intensity. The police are the ones who have repeatedly murdered activists who posed them no threat, and not the other way around. The important thing is to understand what objective drove the authorities to spread such allegations. One doesn’t have to be an expert to see that the primary objective was to weaken the struggle against the airport by creating divisions within the ZAD and its supporters. By portraying zadists as “terrorists” and the ZAD as a major national threat, the authorities sought to spread anxiety among the public so that when the eventual eviction took place, fewer people would identify with its inhabitants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/13.jpg\")
Police units progressing through the woods of the ZAD.
\nAs the official decision regarding the future of the airport project at Notre-Dame-des-Landes approached, police forces were deployed in the ZAD to reaffirm the government’s legitimacy and control over this “too long abandoned and uncontrolled” piece of land. Fearing what could be the fiercest demonstrations since Operation Caesar in 2012, the authorities allocated considerable resources for the anticipated eviction. Between 400 and 500 riot policemen (CRS) were sent to Nantes and Rennes to put down demonstrations. In addition, around 500 military officers (gendarmes) were deployed near the ZAD. The gendarmerie helicopter was back in the sky of NDDL, keeping every person in the ZAD under surveillance and studying every single house, farm, hut, and other form of shelter constructed thought the years of occupation. Large armored vehicles usually used for clearing roads of obstacles and barricades were sent near the eviction site. On the eve of the Prime Minister’ declaration concerning the future of NDDL, the massive law enforcement presence clearly gave an impression of siege, as the 300 people living inside the ZAD were under constant surveillance and pressure. Police units surrounding the ZAD sought to ensure that no vehicles or resources could enter the zone. The idea was to isolate the inhabitants from outside supporters in order to speed the eviction process. In the meantime, we learned via mainstream media that even more police squadrons were on their way to the ZAD.
\n\nOn January 17, 2018, a little after mid-day, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced on live television the long-awaited government decision. After a long and solemn introduction to his discourse, he finally said: “Today, I note that Notre-Dame-des-Landes is the airport of division. Since the election of the President of the Republic, we are mobilized together to strengthen the country’s security, and to transform it. The seriousness of the economic stakes that the country is going through, the seriousness of the security challenges it faces, demand that we stay together focused on our priorities. The project of Notre-Dame-des-Landes will therefore be abandoned. This decision is logical in view of the stalemate in which this project is located. Fifty years of hesitation have never made a forgone conclusion. This decision is without any ambiguity. The lands will return to their agricultural vocation. Contrary to what the report proposes, they will not be retained to carry out the project later.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/1.jpg\")
Celebrating the victory against the airport at the ZAD on January 17, 2018.
\nThe decision was clear. The government acknowledged its inability to pursue the construction of the future airport; finally, they were dropping the controversial project. However, shortly after uttering these words, Edouard Philippe revealed the government’s true intentions. To assuage the loss of the new airport at NDDL, the French government would commit to guarantee that the cities of Brest, Nantes, and Rennes would have easy connections with other European metropolises. To do so, the government wanted to not only reorganize and extend the existing airports of Nantes and Rennes, but also to intensify the connection between air and rail in the west of France by improving rail infrastructures and assuring more train connections between the western metropolises, Paris, and its international airports.
\n\nFinally, regarding the situation in the ZAD, the Prime Minister pretended to open a dialogue with its inhabitants, a dialogue that looked more like an ultimatum or warning: “[t]he three roads that cross the site of Notre-Dame-Des-Landes must now be returned to free circulation for all. Squats overflowing on the road will be evacuated, obstacles removed, traffic restored. Otherwise, the police will carry out the necessary operations.” Later, he added: “In accordance with the law, expropriated farmers will be able to return to their lands if they wish to do so. The illegal occupants of these lands will have to leave by spring or will be evicted. (…) From now on, law enforcement are mobilized to ensure that this process is conducted in compliance with the law and that squatters gradually release lands that do not belong to them.” The French government was hoping that people would conclude that the ZAD no longer had any reason to exist as the project had been dropped. Zadists would have until the end of winter break—the end of March—to leave the ZAD and their houses. Otherwise, the authorities would carry out a complete eviction and “cleaning” of the zone.
\n\nThis decision is not surprising. Any government fears losing control over its territory, its subjects (citizens or not), and their personal initiatives. Everything that does not originate from the government’s decision or the law it enacts must either be wiped out or integrated into the legal framework. The latter approach is the easiest way for the authorities to participate in the trend of “alternative projects” while imposing control over such initiatives. One of the many examples illustrating this trend within French cities is the multiplication of legalized “artistic” squats—opened with the approval of local authorities and under their supervision—which accelerate the constant process of gentrification.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/2.jpg\")
Celebrating the victory against the airport at the ZAD on January 17, 2018.
\nNumerous journalists were present at the ZAD at the time of the Prime Minister’s announcement to cover the reactions of its inhabitants. Some local collectives and organizations planned a press conference to comment on the government’s decision. The abandonment of the airport project was received as a great victory from some of the zadists. However, others were wary regarding the future of the ZAD and the real objectives of the government. Here is the common press release made by the anti-airport movement on January 17, 2018, originally posted on the official ZAD website:
\n\n\n\n\nCommon press release from the anti-airport movement following the government’s announcement.
\n\nAt lunchtime today, the government finally announced that the airport project located in Notre-Dame-des-Landes has been abandoned.
\n\nWe do note that the “DUP” (ed. Declaration of Public Utility) will not be extended. The project will definitely be null and void by February the 8th.
\n\nThis is an historic victory against a destructive project. This was made possible thanks to a long mobilization that has been both diverse and determined.
\n\nFirst of all, we’d like to sincerely thank everyone that mobilized against this airport project over the past 50 years.
\n\nRegarding the future of the ZAD, the whole movement would like to confirm the following points:
\n\n\n
\n\n- \n
\nThe need for the farmers and people that were expropriated to recover their rights as soon as possible.
\n- \n
\nThe refusal of any eviction of those who came here over the last few years to live and defend the place, and who wish to continue living here and look after the area.
\n- \n
\nThe will to let the various actors of the struggle (farmers, naturalists, locals, groups, people who have lived here for a long time or have just joined us) handle the land of the ZAD in the long term.
\nTo implement these measures, we need to put a hold on the institutional redistribution of the land. In the future, this place must remain a place of social, environmental and agricultural experimentations.
\n\nRegarding the question of the reopening of the road D281, a road closed by the state in 2013, the movement will take the matter in its own hands. A police presence or intervention could only create tensions.
\n\nOn this memorable day, we would like to address a strong message of solidarity towards all the struggles set against other destructive projects that threaten territories.
\n\nWe are calling on everyone to join us on the 10th of February to celebrate the abandoning of the airport project and to keep on building the future of the ZAD.
\n\nAcipa, Coordination des opposants, COPAIn 44, Naturalistes en lutte, les habitant-e-s de la zad.
\n
The official press release raises a lot of legitimate questions and concerns:
\n\nFirst, while signed by only five collectives and organizations involved in the struggle against the airport, the official statement claims to be the voice of the entire “anti-airport movement.” This is already concerning, as it excludes the voices and opinions of other individuals involved in the struggle and life within the ZAD.
\nSecondly, in presenting an official press release in front of the national mainstream media, this part of the zadists fell into the trap set up by the government, accepting dialogue, negotiation, and ultimately legal conditions concerning the future of the ZAD.
\nFinally, by tacitly agreeing to reopen the D281 road and even to assist the authorities by removing every obstacle and barricade on it themselves, the signatories of this press release accepted the terms of the government in a way that could facilitate the eviction of the ZAD.
\nIn other words, the press release signed by only a part of the protagonists involved in the life of the ZAD endangered not only everyone who might be opposed to dialogue, but also the future of the ZAD itself. As we will explore below, this press release reintroduced the tensions between the different components of the ZAD. Worse, it revealed that the same authoritarian specter that haunted past struggles is still undermining our struggles today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/12.jpg\")
Police forces preserving the habitat of Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
\nFor footage of some of these events, consult this collection of video coverage from Operation Caesar to the end of February 2016. You can also view two independent documentaries on the ZAD, one in French and one with English subtitles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/35.jpg\")
The occupied road D281, also known as La route des chicanes.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/38.jpg\")
La route des chicanes.
\nThroughout the years of struggle against the airport project, the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes acquired a reputation—not only among anarchist circles worldwide but also among liberals and mainstream environmental activists. However, it is almost inevitable that when a struggle receives a lot of attention, its image tends to be idealized and consequently falsified.
\n\nUnfortunately, the ZAD is no exception to this rule. After years of effort and collective work to build a new kind of reality outside of the destructive, exploitative, and authoritarian world we all know, the government’s decision and the official victory celebration from part of the zadists revealed the long-suppressed conflicts between the different political tendencies of the participants.
\n\nWhether in a small countryside community like the ZAD or in our oversized cities, living with others involves quarrels, agreements, conflicts, friendships, fights, love, and all the other complexities of human relations. Refusing to acknowledge this reality in order to maintain the pure and virtuous image of a united political struggle is dangerous, as it divorces people from their own individuality, differences, and autonomy. Moreover, making the conflicts within a struggle invisible does not help us to learn from them in order to be better prepared for future struggles. With the survival and the legacy of the ZAD at stake, we consider it important to share some articles written by dissident voices on the situation within the occupied zone following the government’s official announcement and the “historical victory of the movement.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/24.jpg\")
Fires in Nantes on February 22, 2014.
\nOn January 19, 2018, two days after the government’s decision to drop the airport project, an article entitled “NDDL: La lute continue! Une réalité cachée” was published on Indymedia Nantes. The article explains that contrary to the image depicted by some zadists in the national media, the actual situation within the ZAD in the aftermath of the so-called “victory” was catastrophic. According to the author, some “dream-seller productionist capitalists” had also settled in the ZAD and were working on evicting the “less desirable” activists from it. After the official announcement of the “victory” against the airport, some zadists close to political organizations (Front de Gauche, NPA, Europe Ecologie Les Verts), collectives, committees, and associations (ACIPA, COPAIN44, ADECA, ACEDPA) were attempting to transform the Zone To Defend into a legalized alternative occupied zone.
\n\nAccording to the author, in order to do this, they agreed to collaborate with the authorities to find a common agreement on the future of the ZAD. In the process of seeking to legalize the occupied zone, they dissociated themselves from more radical or autonomous individuals, denying their longtime involvement in the struggle against the airport and their contributions to life at the ZAD. Finally, the author adds, even if the ZAD is an important case within the recent history of international autonomous struggles, it is important to acknowledge that the collective life within the ZAD was complex, difficult, and not without issues—including violence, drug and alcohol use, and even informal militias. Moreover, regarding the myth of unity at the ZAD, the author asserts that there had never been solidarity “between the white sheep and black sheep” on the ZAD, except when police forces entered the occupied zone in 2012.
\n\nThis personal account raises an important question: if the ZAD has been victorious, what sort of victory are we talking about? In the article entitled Mouvement, où est ta victoire? (available in English here), the authors explore the real nature of the “victory” that was announced by self-designated leaders.
\n\nThe authors do not deny that the government has abandoned the airport project, which obviously represents a victory for the struggle. But if we consider the impact of the ZAD at a larger scale, can we still call it a victory? Have we won enough to be talking about making peace with our adversaries already? The ZAD did not succeed in defeating VINCI or the State, or even transforming people’s relations or power dynamics. Indeed, according to the article, even if the project has been abandoned, VINCI, the chief beneficiary of the airport project, would still receive financial compensation from the state and would continue to reap profits by upgrading the Nantes airport and increasing its role in airport management on a national scale. Moreover, now that the future of the ZAD was threatened anew, conflicts regarding private property and land exploitation were breaking out to such an extent that, as the authors put it, “the ZAD will be an agricultural battlefield.” The article also mentions power struggles, imbalances within decision-making structures, and class inequalities among the inhabitants of the ZAD.
\n\nFinally, considering the question “Is this struggle victorious against capitalism, sexism, speciesism, classism, and authoritarian practices?” the authors caution that “after the abandonment of the project emerges the risk of forfeiting the political struggle by setting aside its radical dimension.” Unfortunately, through the ploy of opening negotiations, the French government succeeded in creating potential representatives and mediators within the ZAD in order to pacify those who might resist. Once more, this article reveals the contrasting interpretations, objectives, and aspirations of the various individuals involved in the struggle against the airport. As soon as some semblance of victory was reached, liberals, political opportunists, and others called it quits.
\n\nIn short, without the single issue of the airport to rally around, fractures appeared along all the fault lines within the social body that had maintained the occupation. This put the zadists who prized the ZAD not only as a protest camp but also as a break with the existing order in an awkward position. With some locals and farmers also desiring to “return to normal,” should they break with their fellow occupiers and prepare to take on the state alone, or attempt to hammer out some sort of compromise with them even if this meant answering to the pressure of the state? We can appreciate the difficulty of this question.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/25.jpg\")
Our dreams, their nightmares: Nantes on February 22, 2014.
\nThe danger that the struggle will be pacified is exemplified by one extremely controversial decision: the agreement to clear and reopen the road D281, as the government requested in its official announcement. As the authors of the text Mouvement, où est ta victoire? explain,
\n\n\n\n\n“What was missing for these dominant factions of the movement to gain legitimacy from the government is obviously the demonstration that they were able to bring order to the zone, the order of the movement approaching that of the state. This is how one can understand the cleaning of the notorious road D281, a veritable showdown within the movement.”
\n
This decision increased the tensions among the different participants in the ZAD. In a letter addressed to “all who recognized themselves in the movement against the airport and its world,”5 the authors explain:
\n\n\n\n\n“We attach a strictly political importance to the future of this space and what is played out here: the questioning of the speed, of the place that the automobile takes in our lives and the terrain we occupy, and finally of a certain vision about the functionality of the space where the usage is decided from above rather than locally on the ground. These questions will always be relevant after the hypothetical end of a police threat. For many of us, this road is also a part, small but vital, of this struggle for space to imagine. That is why if this road becomes once again a normalized road, to the detriment of all the praxis that have been created there over the past five years, a part of the movement would experience it as if it were the beginning of the normalization of the occupied zone.”
\n
Unfortunately, these concerns and warnings did not change the decision some people made to clear the road in compliance with the wishes of the state. On January 22, 2018, less than a week after the official “victory” against the airport, they participated in demolishing the famous “route des chicanes.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/4.jpg\")
Anti-riot fences deployed to protect the “cleaning” of road D281.
\nThis hasty action left more than one activist stunned and furious. Watching other activists destroying the living spaces you spent hours building—just because it has been decided by some sort of unofficial authority—is a form of violence. In reaction, numerous articles appeared expressing personal stupefaction and disapproval, or simply to publicly denounce the authoritarian tendencies that had finally erupted into plain sight.
\n\nIn one article, an activist living in Mexico shared his opinion on the movement’s decision to help the government clean D281. The author raises numerous legitimate questions: Why were they so quick to act? Why didn’t they wait for the government’s ultimatum before clearing the road? Who negotiated with whom? Who promised to do what? Who is going to lose this game in the end? For the author, these negotiations with the government looked like under-the-table agreements. He wonders why the principle of majority rule was suddenly implemented in making the decision to clean the road, rather than the practice—longstanding at the ZAD—of taking all the time necessary to discuss a matter until everyone arrived at a unanimous decision.6
\n\nIn response to this attempt to reintroduce the old model of democracy, participants in the ZAD made it clear that they had refused to be part of the old world from the beginning, and openly rejected the concept of democracy itself. Decision-making processes aside, regardless of what the arguments were for cleaning the road, doing so was like setting down one’s weapons before signing a peace treaty. It was a fatal tactical error.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/3.jpg\")
Cleaning road D281: “Smile! You are on camera!”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/5.jpg\")
Police forces ensuring the cleaning of road D281.
\nBy removing obstacles from D281, it seemed, the movement sought to erase any vestiges of the old, “improper” ZAD that could impact its new image as a victorious democratic movement in dialogue with the democratically elected authorities. The author of the aforementioned text also criticized a statement of Julien Durand, spokesperson of the ACIPA, during a radio interview:
\n\n\n\n\n“Since the project of Notre-Dame-des-Landes is abandoned, there is no longer a threat, therefore we are no longer in a phase of resistance. From now on, we must think differently, that is to say, thinking about the future of the zone so that there is good understanding, serenity, and dialogue within it to achieve a normal daily life.”
\n
This quote speaks for itself. This self-proclaimed leader of the ZAD decided to turn the page on the struggle, falling for the illusory promise of a pacified future for the occupied zone—a vision in which the ultimate goal was to return to normal daily life.
\n\nWhat does Julien Durand mean when he refers to “normal daily life?” Does his model of “normal daily life” line up with the one imposed by society at large? His statement could be interpreted to mean “We won! Now let’s go back to normal!” Moreover, as the abovementioned author highlights, this statement denies “any political dimension and the eminently fruitful nature of conflicts inherent to this heterogeneous community experience.” According to the author, it is concerning that such participants in the ZAD would seek to exclude the supposed “margins” from its official history. The author asserts that the “victorious” movement seemed to be (re)constructing a narrative that would muzzle dissident voices, omitting many important aspects of the collective of the ZAD. “Leaders” and states both seek to rewrite history for their own purposes.
\n\nFinally, the author explains that one of the essential dimensions of the ZAD was that it gave a lot of individuals the possibility to escape from the deadly cycle of this society by putting their desires and hopes immediately into action. These were the rebels who made the airport impossible. He concludes with a warning:
\n\n\n\n\n“If it is they who today must, on the seemingly consensual motive of ‘disengagement from the route des chicanes,’ be sacrificed on the altar of ‘normalization’ or ‘pacification,’ then the exceptional adventure of NDDL will fall miserably, for our greatest shame, into the sad and dismal dustbin of history.”
\n
The author of the previous article was dead on the money. A couple of weeks after the clearing of D281, on February 5, 2018, police entered the ZAD to escort official cleaning vehicles on the “route des chicanes.” Several dozen gendarmerie trucks, anti-riot fences, and a helicopter were deployed on the ZAD for this official “cleaning operation.” If you give the authorities an inch, they will take a mile.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/6.jpg\")
Road D281: the trucks of the gendarmerie return to the heart of the ZAD.
\nIn a desperate ploy to reinforce their legitimacy in the public eye after the decision to cancel the airport, authorities invited several media outlets to show that they were regaining control of the zone. For the first time in months, police units and trucks were able to reenter the heart of the ZAD and to clear the once-occupied D281. Due to the presence of law enforcement during the cleaning operation, some zadists made the following call:
\n\n\n\n\n“Today, contrary to what has been asked for in exchange for the lifting of the works’ blockade, a dozen heavy police trucks entered the ZAD to ‘protect the works’ (the official cleaning operation) that were not blocked, searching a living place on their way, which we experienced as a provocation.
\n\nWe are calling all the sympathizers of the movement against the airport and for the future of the ZAD to come tomorrow (February 6, 2018) for peaceful rallies to ensure that the (cleaning) workers pass without the cops and to protect all the living spaces in order to prevent any eviction attempt.
\n\n-Some occupants of the ZAD”
\n
It is hard not to see this call as naïve, especially in relation to the authorities. It appears that the authors realized, to their surprise, that the intruders had not abided by the agreements that zadists had made with the government. What a shock!
\n\nIn our opinion, it was a mistake to join a discussion with the authorities in the first place. It always end the same way: the leading figures of a movement enter negotiations, and in doing so they show that they are prepared to give up some of their autonomy. The authorities take advantage of this to offer a few meaningless concessions; in the end, they regain control of the situation, after which they no longer have any reason to continue making concessions or abiding by agreements.
\n\nAny form of leadership is an Achilles’ heel for the struggle: so long as there is a leader, they can be deputized, replaced, or taken hostage. It would be much more difficult for the authorities to pacify movements if every participant had a sense of their own agency and was determined not to let anyone else make decisions for them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/9.jpg\")
The police destroy habitations on the ZAD.
\nOnce law enforcement entered the occupied zone without encountering fierce resistance, an eviction became inevitable. On February 23, 2018, several activists informed us that the situation within the ZAD had worsened. Starting with the official cleaning operation of D281, the police presence and occupation increased. On a daily basis, between 20 and 50 police trucks occupied D281. Officially, they were there to oversee the cleaning process; unofficially, they were there to increase surveillance and repression. Helicopters and drones flew over the ZAD, recording living places, fields, and farms for topographical purposes. Video cameras, antennas, and listening stations were deployed in the ZAD. The police began to raid living spaces. These strategies of intimidation are nothing new; they served to prepare the ground for the eviction planned for the end of March. You can view video footage of the cleaning operation carried out by authorities on Sunday February 11, 2018 in two parts, here and here.
\n\nSince the “victory” of the ZAD, several dissident autonomous and anarchist voices have denounced what they perceived to be authoritarian tendencies within the struggle. These criticisms were nothing new, but after the cleaning of D281, they became more audible. The chief groups described as displaying authoritarian tendencies in general assemblies and other decision-making processes include the more institutional elements of the struggle such as ACIPA, COPAIN, and Naturalistes en lutte, but also some of the “fringe” occupiers of the ZAD, including some involved with the Comité pour le Maintien des Occupations (“Committee for Maintaining the Occupations,” or CMDO).
\n\nThis is not the first time such concerns have surfaced. Regarding the case of D281, an article posted on Indymedia Nantes asserts that people affiliated with the Maison de la Grève took part in destroying the living spaces established on the occupied road alongside members of the previously mentioned organizations. The article also refers to the tensions that occurred during the dismantlement between the inhabitants of the road and the “agents of the imaginary order party.” The author concludes by saying:
\n\n\n\n\n“We could talk about a world turned upside down were it not that, after having stood alongside them in this struggle and elsewhere, this is not a surprise for anyone anymore. But still, crawling in front of the prefecture and being to that extent its armed wing, it seems that with the victory the masks come off. Count on us not to let this pass in silence. It has to be known.”
\n
The least we can say is that the events described in this account are extremely concerning. As the author says, for years, “appélistes”7 and their sympathizers have stood alongside anarchists and other autonomous individuals throughout all the major struggles that have taken place in France. On numerous occasions, we have fought on the same side, taking part in the same actions, confronting the same police, facing the same state violence and repression, assisting each other in the same difficulties, and meeting in the same general assemblies—even if difficult power dynamics emerged repeatedly.
\n\nOne can read another perspective on these events from the CMDO in a text entitled The ZAD Will Survive, distributed in newspaper form on February 10. This is their account of the controversial decision to clear the road:
\n\n\n\n\n“In the days following the announcement of the abandonment, the clearing of the D281 would become the focal point around which one of two possibilities was going to play out: either the final breakup of the movement, or the possibility of seeing it grow and continue beyond the 17th of January. Should one risk losing everything–the experiment of the ZAD, being united in defense of our squatted land, a common future with the other components of the movement—for the sake of a symbol? It was decided in an assembly that, no, we could not, yet without really reaching consensus. Some people took the decision really badly, and it involved long discussions, often turning to outright shouting matches, to finally dismantle the two cabins that stood in the roadway.”
\n
In reaction to the dismantlement of D281 and the seizure of power by some groups and individuals at the ZAD, a call was made to discuss these issues on February 10, 2018 at a distance from the national convergence and demonstration in the occupied zone. About 200 people answered the call and gathered to discuss the logic of political composition (political alliances due to common interests, affinity groups, etc.) and the concentration of power within the struggle. This personal account sums up the general situation within the ZAD, from the unexpected political alliances that decided the future of the zone to the explicit censorship and exclusion of anarchists and other radical elements in order to facilitate the pacification of the struggle.
\n\nOne of the conclusions of this unofficial discussion was that the most institutional tendencies of the ZAD had attained hegemony. Usually, leaders would meet off the record to reach agreements, then use the assemblies to impose their decisions. Due to these tendencies, but also to the way that less experienced individuals often found themselves on the receiving end of mockery or exclusive behavior, some of the occupants had deserted their spaces. The most radical individuals found themselves a minority within the assemblies, their voices nearly inaudible. In such a situation, assemblies show their limits as a horizontal model for decision-making.
\n\nAlongside this stratification of decision-making within the movement, participants in the discussion identified an increase in control and censorship in the communication venues and media of the ZAD, such as the local committee mailing list and the official website, zad.nadir.org.
\n\nThis is how, as the author explains, anarchists, anti-speciesists, and other autonomous elements found themselves isolated as they faced the state, hierarchical political organizations, and trade unions. An Italian activist who participated in the discussion reported that the situation reminded him of what happened at the Val Susa (Italy) during the No TAV struggle.
\n\nThe logic represented by the “liberation” of D281 is obvious in retrospect. The official position of the movement was to continue the occupation while collaborating with the state. With control of the land at stake, the critique of property was suddenly inconvenient. In any case, as today’s eviction demonstrates, in the absence of a unified, illegal, and uncompromising occupation of the ZAD, there was no question of the government permitting the occupiers to remain. In the end, it was not the intransigent anarchists who were being unrealistic.
\n\nThe author of the abovementioned account notes that what was taking place within the ZAD was also occurring at the same time in many other spaces. Before 2012, the flags of political organizations, liberal political banners, and journalists were not welcome at the ZAD. But following 2012, the atmosphere changed completely. Yet the limits of political compositions are now exploding in broad daylight. “There is no unity within struggles. There are always internal conflicts that we should accept rather than conceal”—as had been done at the ZAD for several years.
\n\nThis article is valuable because it seeks to present the situation at the ZAD as it really is, with all its ambiguities and complexity, instead of idealizing it. Moreover, as the author explains, doing this is not only a way to support the experiments in progress and the individuals who don’t want to give up the fight, but also to support and spread anti-authoritarian and disruptive positions in general.
\n\nFor more information about the situation at the ZAD after the cancellation of the airport, read this personal account about the power dynamics and political alliances, and this compilation of articles written by dissident voices in the aftermath of the “victory.”
\n\nAt the same moment that we published this article, another entitled ZAD: Second Round appeared in France, offering another perspective on the conflicts about whether and how to negotiate with the state, exploring the challenges of maintaining collectivity across different perspectives, and critiquing the tendency of some groups to isolate themselves with a narrative of radical puritanism. Suffice it to say—these are complicated subjects and there are many different sides to the story.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/26.jpg\")
Breaking up the paving stones to use as projectiles in Nantes on February 22, 2014.
\nOn January 9, 2018, shortly before the government announced that they were giving up on building the airport, the public prosecutor’s department of Toulouse dismissed charges against the gendarme who had used a grenade to murder the young pacifist Rémi Fraisse in 2014 during a night of confrontations at Sivens, where another ZAD was fighting against the creation of a dam.
\n\nThis ruling was not a surprise. Since the beginning of the investigation, the French government had sought to conceal its responsibility in this case—although during such confrontations, law enforcement units directly execute orders from higher ranks within the state apparatus. A few weeks after dropping the airport project, the French government launched an eviction operation at the ZAD of Bois Lejuc, near Bure—a foretaste of what was to happen in NDDL. Starting in summer 2016, activists had been occupying nearby woods and villages to prevent the construction of an industrial center of geological storage (Gigéo) for the most dangerous radioactive waste. On February 22, 2018, about 500 gendarmes entered the occupied woods, raiding living spaces including the maison de la résistance and arresting several activists. Nevertheless, despite the violence of the eviction and a strong law enforcement presence at the site, the struggle at Bure is not over, as evidenced by the gathering of committees to discuss the future of struggle that took place on March 3-4.
\n\nAs we prepare to publish this article, the eviction of Notre-Dame-des-Landes is underway. Yet even if the eviction is successful, the ZAD at NDDL has renewed environmental struggles in France and around the world by spreading notions like direct action, sabotage, mutual aid, self-determination, autonomy, and opposition to capitalism and the state. The ZAD has been a space of experimentation, strategizing, brainstorming, debate, conflict, victories and defeats, and dreams. It will continue to nourish our imaginations as long as we tell its story.
\n\nWhen we do, it is vital that we discuss what happened during the last months of the ZAD’s existence and after its victory. Power imbalances, “leadership,” and authoritarianism represent terrible menaces to our aspirations, as the pacification of the ZAD demonstrates. Reflecting on the ZAD, we have to reconsider how we approach struggles; we have to become more skilled at identifying and breaking up concentrations of power, so we can prevent them from jeopardizing our capacity to open new horizons.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/27.jpg\")
Nantes on February 22, 2014.
\nIn opposition to the old leftist myth of a future revolution that will liberate us all one day, like a miracle or prophecy, we believe that the present is the greatest imaginable gift and the best time to engage in struggle. As some friends once wrote, “There is no secret for revolution, no grand dialectic, no master theory. Revolution is simple. Go out and meet folks who are just as passionate as you are— and if they don’t realize it, help them along the way. Combine forces, scheme, and make plans. Then, do it.” Acting enables us to embrace self-determination and discover that we have the power to open breaches within an overdetermined world. These breaches offer opportunities to experiment and experience new forms of relations, living arrangements, and aspirations.
\n\nAs our future darkens from one day to the next because of industrially produced climate change, capitalist immiseration, and intensifying authoritarianism, this sort of secession becomes ever more vital. This world will never change if we hesitate to cut ties with it, for it is our participation that reproduces it. This is why we have to secede right here, in the heart of the empire: not to present demands to the rulers, but to seize back the resources they have taken from us, creating spaces beyond their control in which power flows according to a different logic. This is not a passive conception of what it means to secede. It means creating and multiplying self-sufficient spaces in which we can take on the authorities and win. To borrow one of the most famous slogans of the ZAD, “Secession everywhere!”
\n\nWe have nothing to gain from clinging to the prevailing order. As other comrades have written, every unique, self-determined action is a spark that shoots beyond the confines of both the status quo and abstract critiques thereof, threatening both, not to mention those who uphold them. All the necessary ingredients to bring about the end of their world are at hand. The question is: Are we willing to use them?
\n\nThe end of the world won’t wait! Fight now! Fight everywhere!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/15.jpg\")
Tear gas in the bocage.
\nThis is a translation of a zine written in French by some occupiers of the ZAD, July-August 2015.
\n\nThe ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes has been a hotbed of struggle for several years. Thereafter, other ZADs have begun to appear everywhere. But what is a ZAD? A lot of people who got involved in its creation behave as if the answer was obvious, but this is a question that is almost never raised. So, this is the question we want to pose to those who use this word, and, to start with, to ourselves.
\n\nThe authors of this text are a group of individuals who have been living and fighting on the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes for several years and who decided to spend some time thinking about the question of what a ZAD is for us. What we are going to tell you here is our response to our question. It is a subjective response that we don’t consider the only possible answer. We would like you to take it as an invitation to ask yourself the same question with those with whom you share some parts of life and struggle. We hope to see your answers, as many definitions of the ZAD could lay the foundation for a movement that is still waiting for us to give it some consistency.
\n\nAs the starting point of our reflections, we took the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the one that we know the best, but also the first one created.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/34.jpg\")
A collective kitchen in the ZAD.
\nFor us, one of the facts that distinguishes the ZAD from other places is that it originated from direct action. The latter is not necessarily a hidden or risky action. Living in the ZAD is in itself a direct action: it means squatting in a place in the countryside where there is a large infrastructure project. At the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the ratio of power is such that occupying lands became something “normal,” trivial, which can happen without any complications whatsoever.
\n\nDirect action means taking action, often as a group, to fight directly against a situation that affects our lives or the lives of others—without asking any intermediary (such as trade unions, political parties, governments, or other “competent” authorities) to intervene. For example, holding a demonstration against VINCI (the concessionaire of the airport project) would be a symbolic action, but going to their actual buildings, blocking the doorways, and making sure that no one can actually work would make it into a direct action. Direct action could also include preventing bulldozers from moving forward during an eviction or construction project, occupying and cultivating a piece of land, burning down a prefecture building, barricading a road, or collectively planting an orchard on a field slated to be covered with concrete. In a world that makes us feel powerless, it is a way to regain control of our lives.
\n\nAs our desires are in conflict with the interests of the state, illegality is a reality here and often our tactics are also illegal, as the ZAD would have never existed legally. We do not recognize the state’s legitimacy to decide for us what should be permitted. What the state wants is to control us and assure the enforcement of the law, hence the advantage of forbidding everything that is outside of its control. However, rejecting the state’s legitimacy is not an end in itself. In this struggle, there is a diversity of tactics: legal actions, excavators’ sabotages, acts of resistance by the inhabitants of the ZAD to the state’s expropriations of houses and farms, expropriations of supermarkets, large demonstrations, ambushes against the police… This diversity constitutes the strength of this struggle, and the fact that an action is forbidden does not make it less legitimate.
\n\nThe media often discuss non-violence and violence by assigning them moral values: it is implied that “violence” is bad, when the “violence” they are talking about consists in resisting and defending ourselves against the police or inflicting material damages. For us, violence is on the side of the state and its decision makers—for example, through territorial planning and development. Moreover, labeling individuals who resist as violent takes part in a maneuver to discredit them and the ZAD. Be aware that an individual can both be cultivating the land and fighting with the police.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/40.jpg\")
Another way of living.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/14.jpg\")
Resisting eviction.
\nAn important aspect of the ZAD is the idea of building another reality in which we are less dependent on the state and capitalism. Living here means learning to handle things with what we have, or finding what we need without having to rely on professionals or experts. We do not call an electrician to fix a problem because if we have electricity, it is not through a legal way: either we are producing it ourselves, or we connected ourselves to the electricity network illegally. For some of us, it is politically important to know that we can build our houses with what we found in the dump, that we can fix everything with the blue farmer string. For others, it means taking the time and giving themselves the means to cut wood and create beams for present or future constructions. In any case, learning to be more autonomous for practical things is a way of defending ourselves against a system aimed at making us dependent. It is not a question of each individual learning how to do everything, but rather of helping each other and sharing our knowledge and resources so we can take care of things all together.
\n\nWe live on the zone on a daily basis, therefore we try to create the level of comfort that we need to feel good. This is also linked to the desire of projecting ourselves in the long-term, to live permanently here. For many people, the ZAD is not only a direct action or a way to show their ideals—it is also their life, and their home. We know that our houses and vegetable gardens could be destroyed at any moment, and that we might be forced to leave, but we live and organize as if we could stay here for the rest of our lives: we can’t just stop doing things just because they could evict us at some point.
\n\nWe are not simply against the government; we also want to create something that is more suitable to us. The ZAD is a place that is managed by its inhabitants, who decide what happens within it: the state doesn’t have any say about it anymore. In the same way that we don’t want to follow the official regulations to build our houses, we want to decide everything, and figure out our way of getting organized.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/17.jpg\")
Zadists defending their living spaces.
\nThose who live and fight on the ZAD share numerous common backgrounds and experiences: living within the same space; being confronted with clashes when cops or fascists show up; living with each other on a daily basis. There is also solidarity and mutual aid on a daily basis: giving somebody a hand, lending what the neighbor doesn’t have, sharing what we cultivate or collect. Of course, all this doesn’t take place without a hitch, but despite everything, it binds all the inhabitants of the ZAD together. In this way, the ZAD is, less by choice than by fact, a form of community.
\n\nBut the ZAD remains open. Everyone can, if they wish, come live in the ZAD for several days or weeks. Not every community or collective will necessarily welcome you with wide-open doors, but overall, the ZAD is accessible to anyone, even if the individual doesn’t know anyone or comes from a completely different culture. Often, squats or groups of individuals involved in direct action are not easy to approach or access (for reasons related to friendship, affinity, or safety, for example). One of the strengths of the ZAD is that it offers an open door to possibilities of living and struggling that are different from the models imposed by the dominant socio-economic order. Such possibilities play the role of key moments and meeting places that social movements often provide too.
\n\nThe ZAD brings together a variety of individuals who come from really different worlds and backgrounds: from the activist’s milieu—local or not, familiar with street tactics or squats; from the farmer’s milieu—where some of them left their jobs; or from a completely different background, or from all of them at once. All these people sharing the same space, living and fighting together, creates a big mess, but also, and mostly, a great wealth. While everyone tends to isolate us, sharing a space and working with all kinds of individuals is already a victory that inspires us.
\n\nThis openness and diversity make the ZAD a meeting place, a crossroads of struggles: some nomads who build bridges between a lot of different places live alongside established individuals who carry long term projects; some people find within it a stable basis from which they can take risks elsewhere; already constituted groups arrange to meet here; strangers forge new complicities.
\n\nBut the ZAD is also deeply rooted in its territory: the link with “historical” inhabitants, those who were already present before the project and who were often the first opposed to it, represents one of the major strengths of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. It was a group of defiant inhabitants who made a call to occupy the land, a call answered by people who were living further away. These links and connections, the mutual aid or rants and quarrels that are shared on the ZAD also involve the “historical” inhabitants of the ZAD themselves or their nearby neighbors. The occupiers came progressively to reinforce the local struggle that had already existed for years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/39.jpg\")
Welcome to the ZAD.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/28.jpg\")
A barricade in Nantes on February 22, 2014.
\nBehind our ways of living, fighting, or building relationships, there are some ideas that, in our opinion, are largely shared. Even if we never reach a collective agreement about them, they are part of the ideals we aspire to.
\n\nBy opposing an airport project, we fight in reality against territorial planning and development, in which people’s lives are decided beforehand by engineers and architects who impose the locations of stores, housing, airports, and more. They want spaces in which everything is controlled, surveyed, and planned. From its birth, the occupation movement fought not only against the airport project, but also against the managerial logic of those in power.
\n\nIn the world of the developers, most exchanges are made via money. The current system enables some privileged individuals to enrich themselves by impoverishing others. We want at the same time to make this system collapse and to create relations that are not based in money.
\n\nMore generally, we aspire to step aside from the logic of domination, which gives more value and power to some individuals over others: those with IDs over those without, men over women or others, white people over those who are not, heterosexuals over homosexuals and others, “French” people over foreigners. These inequalities also exist within the ZAD, but there are attempts to make this space hospitable for everyone.
\n\nFinally, we don’t grant the state or anyone else the authority to decide how we have to live and what we have to experience. We try to organize the life and struggle at the ZAD without hierarchies, by giving the same power to everyone. This is not something that runs smoothly, but rather something based on constant debates and permanent experimentation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/11.jpg\")
Unafraid.
\nAfter Operation Caesar, numerous energies converged towards the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. A lot of us wanted this energy not to simply stay focused on Notre-Dame-des-Landes. This reminds us of the image of a rhizome where this energy would be concentrated, crossbred, growing here and then radiating out to feed the struggle everywhere else. The idea would be for the individuals who are fighting locally against infrastructure, metropolis, or territorial development projects to use the ZAD as an example: like an idea, an image, that could help them to skip a step, that could enable them to benefit from its media coverage, that could give them a concrete reference point to direct people to so they wouldn’t have to explain a lot of abstract concepts. That “the ZAD” belongs to a largely shared imaginary helps people to act locally in their own ways, against the same forces. Through this process, we hope to break the image of a so-called democratic society, and to become more numerous in fighting, everywhere.
\n\nHere, some rare and uncommon conditions are combined, such as little intervention from the police and state, some cultivable fields, and a desire to live without hierarchies. The life that is created from the intersection of these conditions provides one idea of a possible future among thousands of others possibilities. This is not an alternative showcase—because we do not create the ZAD to prove anything—but a concrete experience to organize our own lives for ourselves.
\n\nThe idea of a ZAD seems to have the strength to gather and federate groups and individuals within the dynamics of struggle. A ZAD movement seems to appear everywhere—Roybon, Testet, Agen, Echillais, Oléron, and more… Let’s think about the traps and obstacles that we frequently face: from the action of political parties that manoeuver among these opposition movements for political ends, to the idealization of a “zadist’s way of life” without any political convictions, without forgetting the criminalization of such movements that is intended to empty actions of their meanings, or even the demand formulated to opponents to offer the proof of a viable alternative. All this prevents a global questioning and reduces each problem to technical or legal issues… To avoid depoliticization or being taken over by the state and its henchmen, it is time to think collectively about what we are carrying in order to create a revolutionary struggle.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/08/37.jpg\")
The bocage of Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
\nThe Grenelle de l’Environnement is an official political report adopted in 2007, dedicated to “protecting the environment.” Like so many other official political meetings and documents dealing with ecological issues, greenwashing is one of the chief objectives. ↩
\nAlthough the climate action camp marks the creation of the ZAD, the first occupation on site actually took place in 2007 at the Rosier (“rose bush”) squat, an old house located within the ZAD’s perimeter. ↩
\nAn official institution in charge of advising the government in preparing laws and decrees, having the status of being the supreme administrative judge. ↩
\nThis recalls Julius Caesar’s invasion of France, which set the stage for him to abolish democracy in the Roman Republic. It’s not surprising that the French security forces chose such an authoritarian title for their attack, but it is striking that they framed themselves as an external force invading France. ↩
\nThis is not to say that consensus process is always ideal, either. For further analysis of democratic decision-making, we highly recommend the book From Democracy to Freedom. ↩
\n“Appélistes” are a sort of neo-Blanquist network inspired by a text entitled Call and the works of Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee. Although their effort to reconstruct a non-Marxist communism is noteworthy, some of them have made a point of not calling themselves anarchists—and we should probably take them at their word. ↩
\nThis is the second part in our “After the Crest” series, studying what we can learn from the waning phase of social movements. In this installment, participants in Occupy Oakland trace its trajectory from origins to conclusion, exploring why it reached certain limits and what it will take for future movements to surpass them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-1b.jpg\")
After the Crest, part II: The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune
\nIn setting ourselves the sobering task of narrating the decline of Occupy Oakland, we are at least spared any argument about when the high point took place. There might be disagreement about whether the “general strike” of November 2, 2011 deserved that title, but no one would dispute that it was the high-water mark of the local movement and a turning point in the Occupy sequence unfolding across the country.
\n\nAt that moment, describing Occupy Oakland as the Oakland Commune was not just an exaggeration. For a short time, we really were a collective force with the ambition and capacity to transform the whole city and radicalize the national movement. The experience of that day has stayed with many of us, a brief and chaotic glimpse of insurrectionary horizons that closed as quickly as they opened. Remembering this as we go about our daily lives under capitalism has been enormously painful; for many of us in the Bay Area, the last year and a half has been a process of grieving the loss of that moment. This grief was present in all the successive stages of that political sequence. Although the movement continued for months, bringing out thousands of people for explosive days of action, none of the later moments—December 12, January 28, or May 1—even remotely compare to November 2.
\n\nBefore we can analyze the Oakland Commune’s decline, we have to understand its rise and the various projects in the Bay that helped to foster it. The following narrative is not meant as a total account of all of the elements that combined to form the Oakland Commune, but rather the ones we experienced firsthand.
\n\nDuring the spring of 2011, with a backdrop including the Arab Spring, the European “movement of the squares,” and its faint echo in the Wisconsin capitol occupation, comrades in the Bay Area began a slow process of reconstituting themselves as a force in the streets. This followed an extended period of decomposition and aimlessness. Many of us expected that the wave of unrest sweeping the globe would reach the US eventually, and we wanted to be prepared. That summer, the Bay Area witnessed a series of small but fierce and creative demonstrations. From the native encampment protecting Glen Cove against suburban development in Vallejo to the riotous protests in San Francisco after police gunned down Kenneth Harding when he avoided a transit fare check, the summer provided several opportunities for radicals from a range of communities to work together.
\n\nDuring June and July, a mix of anti-state communists and insurrectionary anarchists organized a series of anti-austerity actions dubbed Anticuts that got people into the streets to experiment with new tactics and forms of social intervention. These were intended to map out the local terrain of struggle and the various antagonistic social constellations that might participate in future rebellions. Through these small and sometimes frustrating excursions, new march routes and ways to understand the geography of downtown Oakland emerged. For instance, the third and final Anticut action—organized in solidarity with a hunger strike in California prisons—marched from the future home of Occupy Oakland in Frank Ogawa Plaza down Broadway past the police headquarters, courthouse, and jail, holding a noise demo there before circling back towards the plaza to disperse. This small demonstration marked the first time this loop was tried. Months later, during the high-tension moments of Occupy Oakland, that march route became intimately familiar to thousands of people, sometimes repeated multiple times per day.
\n\nThe rhythm of small and medium-sized demonstrations such as the Anonymous actions against BART police and the one-day occupation of UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall continued throughout the summer and early fall. But it wasn’t until momentum began to build nationally after the establishment of the Zucotti Park camp on Wall Street—September 17, 2011—that the full potential of the relationships built over the summer could blossom. Oakland joined the national movement late, on October 10, immediately establishing a sprawling camp in the plaza in front of City Hall—renamed Oscar Grant Plaza, after the young Black man murdered by BART police in 2009. This became a liberated zone, off-limits to police and politicians and organized according to principles of self-organization, free access to food and supplies, open participation in all aspects of camp life, and autonomous action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-3b.jpg\")
The kitchen during the first week of Occupy Oakland
\nIn hindsight, it is striking how quickly Occupy Oakland emerged, matured, and reached its peak. Only two weeks separate the beginning of the camp from the first police raid in the early hours of October 25. After the Commune repeatedly resisted attempts by the city administration to assert control over the camp—staging public burnings of warning letters during general assemblies in the amphitheater on the steps of city hall—Mayor Jean Quan authorized the militarized police operation that left the camp in ruins and over 100 in jail.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-4b.jpg\")
The camp in ruins after the October 25 early morning police raid
\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. During the Oakland Commune’s incredibly rapid yet brief ascent, there seemed to be no limit on what could happen in a week, a day, an hour.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-5b.jpg\")
Teargas fills downtown streets during clashes in the evening of October 25 as thousands try to take back the plaza
\nIt all came to a head on November 2. Looking back, the scope of that day remains impressive. In less than 24 hours, the strike unleashed all the tactics explored during the entire Occupy Oakland sequence. Flying pickets, work actions, marches, blockades, occupations, and moments of riotous destruction brought as many as 50,000 people to downtown Oakland, many of whom were participating in disruptive acts for what must have been the first time.
\n\n Oscar Grant Plaza is transformed into an anti-captialist festival during the November 2 strike
\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. By early afternoon, as tens of thousands filled the streets, an anti-capitalist march led by a large black bloc smashed its way through downtown, leaving broken windows and graffiti on banks and corporations in its wake. Within a few hours, tens of thousands of people marched on the port of Oakland, shutting down all operations at its various terminals. Finally, as night fell, hundreds of people joyfully occupied the aptly-named Traveler’s Aid building a few blocks from the plaza; long empty, it had formerly housed a nonprofit serving the homeless. Within an hour, however, riot police attacked and evicted the new occupation, provoking a night of rioting during which people wrecked most of the businesses and city offices around the plaza, including a police substation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-7b.jpg\")
A banner is strung across 14th and Broadway, the central intersection of downtown Oakland at the corner of the plaza, during the November 2 strike
\nWe were in the middle of something without recent precedent in the US. And yet the day was just a day. There was no continuation, no sense of what might come next. The following morning, after three weeks of great weather, the first rains of the season fell and the camp lay quiet, foreshadowing the dispirited mood of the months to come. The backlash from the previous day’s anti-capitalist march and the more indiscriminate rioting later in the night was intense, as various liberal elements took the opportunity to demonize anarchists and the black bloc, calling for vigilante patrols by pacifists and initiating a reactionary backlash that caused many anarchists and radicals to steer clear of the camp for a few days. The mood shifted from elation to demoralization very quickly, especially given the failure of the occupation of the Traveler’s Aid building, which might have opened up new horizons for the Oakland Commune. It was difficult to recognize this at the time, but we had already encountered the fundamental limits of this sequence of struggle. The slow decline had begun.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-8b.jpg\")
Tens of thousands march towards the port of Oakland during the November 2 strike
\nArguably, the decline had been set in motion in the days immediately before the strike. Up until the raid on October 25, the power of the Oakland Commune lay in the camp itself: in collective activities that linked each day in the liberated plaza with the next, building momentum through consistent interaction around questions of survival rather than activism. When over 600 riot police fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades as they broke through the barricades protecting Oscar Grant Plaza in the dark morning hours of October 25, they were not only attempting to evict the camp, but to break apart the continuity of the tenuous community that we had formed.
\n\nThis first eviction backfired on them spectacularly. The crowds came back even bigger and called for the November 2 strike—a timely and effective decision. But it also marked the first moment when the energy of the Commune shifted from the daily process of holding liberated space to a strategy built around discrete “days of action.” The day in question was only one week away, and the buildup to it ran parallel with the reconstitution of the camp. But with the historic decision to strike, there was a shift away from the reproduction and expansion of the original oppositional zone. Something was lost in this transition.
\n\nThe consistent process of eating, sleeping, and organizing with many others in a liberated zone at the heart of a struggling North American city had proved to be a challenge for which few were prepared. At times, the Commune was a veritable inferno—a place of fistfights, constant emergencies, injury, illness, miscommunication, and stress. At other moments, it offered a kind of freedom and beauty unlike anything else. There were times when each person seemed full of limitless creativity, compassion, and dedication, matched by hatred of capitalism and the state. We could see the experience changing people day by day, hour by hour, and we could feel it changing us. The camp was a place of joy, laughter, and care, almost psychedelic in the confusion it provided to the senses. But mostly, it was a place that teetered on the edge of breakdown, a place in which none of the usual buffers and mediations that mask the daily violence of contemporary America were present. All the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and other poisonous dynamics that form the foundations of capitalist society rose to the surface in this liberated zone, challenging the Commune’s ability to sustain itself. We were ill-prepared for the problems the camp raised, though people made heroic attempts to respond to each new emergency.
\n\nFor this reason, many comrades welcomed the first police raid in hopes that direct conflict with the state would breathe new life into a struggle slowly dying of internal causes. After the raid, people could focus their attention outward in offensive actions like the general strike, away from the overwhelming difficulties of the camp.
\n\nThe decision to strike was not a mistake. On the contrary, it was one of the better decisions collectively made during the entire sequence. But it inaugurated a half-year period defined increasingly by days of action called for by the general assembly rather than the rhythms of shared experience. This process accelerated after the second eviction of the camp on November 14 and reached its terminal point with the late January call for another general strike on May 1—a strike that never materialized. May Day 2012 ended up being an exciting day of action, but it paled in comparison to the November 2 strike, which had been organized in only a week. The more that the Oakland Commune lost its footing, momentum, and sense of direction, the more it relied on arbitrarily chosen days of action that were increasingly few and far between.
\n\nIn the shift away from the camp towards spectacular offensives, the actions of November 2 opened up three horizons of struggle, each of which hit a wall over the following months. In many regards, the limits of these approaches were already apparent during the strike.
\n\nFirst, there were the tens of thousands who laid siege to the port. Most would agree that the high point of the day—the action that had the most impact on capitalism and the local power structure—was this blockade of the port of Oakland. However, the success of that action empowered one tendency within the movement to push the struggle away from reclaiming space and disrupting the flows of capital toward a kind of trade union superactivism that later proved to be a dead end.
\n\nSecondly, there was the attempt, later in the evening, to occupy the Traveler’s Aid building. But when riot police besieged the building, the participants failed to put up any meaningful defense. It was one thing to occupy public parks and plazas—but another thing to breach the sacred barriers of private property. Comrades had been discussing that trajectory from the beginning, but the failure of the Traveler’s Aid attempt indicated that it might remain an unsurpassable horizon.
\n\nFinally, there was street fighting and the black bloc. This represented the dream of continuous escalation, in which a proactive offensive of black-clad rioters would usher in a new phase of increasingly widespread militant rebellion, culminating in a full-on uprising. Certainly, November 2 saw some of the most intense street conflicts up to that point, epitomized by the appearance of a large black bloc during the afternoon anti-capitalist march. Yet that night, when riot police were finally ordered to reassert control of downtown Oakland and evict the newly occupied building, this increased street militancy meant little. Police scattered the participants like a bowling ball plowing into a wedge of pins.
\n\nFew people were organized into affinity groups capable of acting intelligently and decisively in the face of the highly trained and physically intimidating Oakland police. Inexperienced rioters had the tendency to attack weakly and prematurely, then scatter when the police counter-attacked. In addition, the presence of vigilante pacifist members of Occupy—whose violent assertion of nonviolence underscored the paradox of their position—and amateur journalists too busy photographing the riot to help their ostensible comrades both produced confusion and dissension. As is often the case in the US, comrades were able to carry out attacks on property with relative ease, adopting an effective hit-and-run strategy. But when it came to standing ground or mounting an offensive against the police, the street fighters were rarely effective.
\n\nAfter the camp was cleared during the second police raid of the plaza on November 14, many comrades continued along each of these three trajectories, moving ever farther from the camp that had brought them together in the first place.
\n\nThe labor solidarity wing of the movement, born during the November 2 port blockade, increasingly viewed Occupy as a vehicle for supporting unions and intervening in existing workers’ disputes. On December 12, this faction led a day of action to shut down ports across the West Coast (as well as in other scattered locations such as a Walmart distribution center in Colorado). This had been called for in response to the wave of repression and camp evictions across the country in late November and early December, as well as in solidarity with the struggle of longshoremen in Longview, WA against the efforts of the multinational corporation EGT to break their union, the ILWU. While not entirely successful, the day was still impressive, demonstrating the continuing power of Occupy. As 2012 began, this labor solidarity wing of the movement was busy spearheading a regional mobilization to disrupt the first scab ship scheduled to dock at the EGT facilities in Longview. Many comrades from the Bay planned to converge on Longview in what looked to be an important showdown.
\n\nElsewhere, an alliance of insurrectionaries and comrades from a wide range of working groups that had sustained the camp were organizing another offensive. Regrouping from the failure of the Traveler’s Aid occupation, they had called for a massive day of action on January 28, 2012 to occupy a large undisclosed building. This was to become a new hub for the Oakland Commune.
\n\nFinally, there was the assortment of radicals and rebels who continuously struggled to hold down Oscar Grant Plaza itself. Some of them had slept on benches in the plaza long before Occupy; some were young locals politicized over the previous months; others hailed from a range of eccentric Bay Area groupings including a contingent of juggalos. The plaza was still contested turf with regular general assemblies, events, and a 24-hour “vigil” that held space, served food, and provided a social venue. The park and empty lot a few blocks away in the gentrifying Uptown district at 19th and Telegraph had also become a second front, following a brief occupation there on November 19 that ripped down the surrounding fences and established a camp before being quickly evicted.
\n\nThis was the political climate in Oakland on New Year’s Eve, as a spirited march left from the plaza for a noise demo. The crowd followed the now familiar loop from the plaza to the police headquarters, courthouse, and jail, where people unleashed a torrent of fireworks before returning to the plaza for a raucous dance party. With hundreds attending, it was powerful demonstration that even without the camp the Commune could still call the plaza home. It was also a celebration of the struggles to come and the next major wave of the Occupy movement, which many believed to be just around the corner. In those early celebratory hours of 2012, it was nearly impossible to grasp how quickly all of these possible trajectories would hit walls. But in January, the limits that first became apparent on November 2 became debilitating, ushering in the terminal phase of the movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-9b.jpg\")
The final night of the vigil at the plaza, hours before the police raid of January 4
\nOscar Grant Plaza was first to go. Running scuffles between the ragtag rebels of the plaza and platoons of cops looking to scare them off had increased throughout December, becoming a daily occurrence by the final week of the year. Dozens were arrested. In contrast to previous mass arrest situations, the cops and DA were clearly looking to make examples of the arrestees, who were slapped with large bails, felony charges, and a new favorite tactic of repression: stay-away orders that threatened people with additional jail time if they returned to downtown Oakland. While not as spectacular as police indiscriminately tear-gassing and spraying crowds with projectiles, the most brutal and effective repression of the whole Occupy Oakland sequence arguably occurred during the turf war over the plaza at the turn of the year. Because so many comrades were focused on organizing for the upcoming days of action, those facing the cops and courts in the plaza were isolated, without the support they needed.
\n\nInspired by the success of the New Year’s Eve noise demo and hoping to respond to the escalating repression, the Tactical Action Committee—a militant group composed primarily of young Black men from Oakland who had been busy defending the plaza and organizing other actions—called for the first FTP (Fuck the Police) march one week later, on January 7. On January 4, after a general assembly in the plaza ended and the majority of people went home, a militarized raid involving dozens of riot police successfully evicted the vigil. This was the third and final raid of Oscar Grant Plaza. A member of TAC was among those arrested in the operation. The rebel presence in the plaza had been successfully removed, and the upcoming FTP march took on increasing significance.
\n\nNearly three hundred gathered at the corner of the Plaza at 14th and Broadway on the evening of January 7. Many were masked up and ready for a fight, feeling that this was the moment to present a coordinated militant response to the successive evictions of the Commune. Led by a massive “Fuck the Police” banner, the march took off once again down Broadway on the loop past police headquarters and the jail. Clashes erupted near the headquarters as a police cruiser was attacked, bottles were thrown, a small fire was lit in the street, and lines of riot police repeatedly charged the crowd. Yet once again, the displays of militancy were just that, displays—ineffective when it came to defending comrades. Fighters were able to get in a few hits on police, but quickly retreated and fled out of downtown in the face of the OPD offensive. Arguing erupted among comrades, as it became clear that the eagerness with which many went on the attack was not matched by any kind of organized defense or coordinated crowd movement. As comrades scattered, leaving the plaza abandoned once again, another wave of arrests ensued with police units picking off isolated street fighters who had been identified by undercovers in the crowd. As with the wave of arrests around the plaza over the previous weeks, the people arrested at this first FTP march bore some of the heaviest penalties of the whole sequence, with some comrades eventually doing significant jail time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-10b.jpg\")
Comrades flee from charging lines of riot police during the first FTP march, January 7
\nThe first FTP march failed to reverse the rapid decline of the Commune or reassert the movement’s presence downtown. On the contrary, it accelerated this decline, signaling to the state that it was now clearly gaining the advantage. This was not the fault of TAC, who continued to hold weekly FTP marches over the following months that were usually less confrontational. Rather, it showed the limits of the uncoordinated and tactically ineffective displays of street militancy mustered by the black blocs of that period. At the time, this series of painful defeats failed to register to many comrades as a serious blow to the movement, even though the authorities had successfully swept the plaza clean and neutralized the attempt to mount a response. Many people were distracted, with their sights set on the upcoming days of action. In retrospect, the new year was clearly off to a bad start.
\n\nPlanning continued for the convergence in Longview and the January 28 day of action. General assemblies decreased in size and regularity but continued to meet, increasingly retreating to the park at 19th and Telegraph since an increasing number of comrades were prohibited from the Plaza by stay-away orders. The source of the Commune’s power, the defiant public occupation of space, was quickly drying up, though the upcoming offensives gave many comrades the sense that another wave of momentum was imminent.
\n\nThis delusion was shaken when the bureaucrats at the top of the ILWU outmaneuvered the planned blockade of the scab ship in Longview, and all plans for the convergence imploded. Occupy caravans had been organized from Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere, while the federal government announced it would defend the scab ship with a Coast Guard cutter. Comrades from across the West Coast were just waiting for word from those working directly with the Longview Longshoremen to initiate a confrontational showdown. But in their determination to reorient Occupy towards labor activism, the tendency that had coalesced during the November 2 port blockade constructed a framework that was completely disconnected from the streets and plazas from which they had emerged. With every step from the November 2 strike through the December West Coast port blockade and towards Longview, these actions ceased to be participatory disruptions in the international flows of capital as a projection of the occupation’s power beyond the plaza. Instead, they became solidarity actions, organized only with supporting the union in mind. There was naïve talk about the actions sparking a wildcat strike in the ports, or prying the union away from the bureaucrats who were eager to diffuse the conflict and cooperate with EGT. But none of this came close to materializing.
\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. This was enough to ease the tension and avert the showdown. On January 27, as the last-minute plans for the following day’s attempt to occupy a building were finalized, a confusing statement emerged from the caravan organizers, announcing that the Longview workers had accepted a contract and that this was—in some unspecified way—a victory. This was how the port campaign ended: not with a bang, but a whimper.
\n\nThe next morning, the final offensive of January kicked into action. Though in many regards it was the most significant day since the general strike, the planned January 28 (J28) building occupation was fundamentally an arbitrarily chosen day of action with all the limits thereof. However, unlike the port actions, this was a massive attempt to return to what had made the Oakland Commune so powerful in the first place: liberating space from capital and the state, transforming it into a collective occupation where people could take care of each other and organize further actions. Even though many remember that spectacular day as one of the most important in their experience as part of the Oakland Commune, in relation to its stated goal, it was a disaster.
\n\nIn response to criticism of the clandestinely organized occupation of the Traveler’s Aid building on November 2, J28 was organized in a radically open structure. Regular “Move-In Assemblies” of over 100 met publicly in the plaza to plan the occupation, while giving a smaller closed group the mandate to pick a building in relative secrecy. This assembly spent countless days organizing infrastructure for the new occupation, setting up guidelines for accountability within the space and planning a multi-day festival of music, speakers, and films. As the day of action unfolded, this ambitious plan was blasted apart in the first spectacular clashes outside the target building—the massive Kaiser Center Auditorium—in what became known as The Battle of Oak Street. It was probably because people believed so strongly in the dream that a new liberated space could emerge from the Kaiser Center and resuscitate the Commune that they fought so hard and with such a collective spirit that day. But OPD had no qualms about transforming downtown into a warzone to insure that private property remained off-limits.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-11b.jpg\")
Police open fire on the crowd during the battle of Oak Street, January 28
\nA backup plan later in the day also failed to seize a building. As night fell, OPD called in additional police forces from across the Bay Area. After their first attempt to kettle a march of nearly a thousand people at 19th and Telegraph was outmaneuvered—the crowd dramatically escaped by tearing down the fences the city had recently rebuilt—the police finally succeeded in surrounding over 400 comrades outside the downtown YMCA. The arrestees spent the following days in filthy overcrowded cells at Santa Rita Jail.
\n\nAmazingly, those who remained on the streets remained undaunted. They broke into City Hall, burning the American flag and vandalizing the inside of the building in revenge for the police repression. Even after riot police with shotguns chased them off, the night was still not over. An FTP march was quickly organized. In keeping with tradition, participants took the familiar loop through downtown and unleashed rocks, bottles, and other objects at the police station and jail as they passed. The Commune was not going down without a fight.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-12b.jpg\")
Comrades respond to the police attack by throwing chairs and other objects at police lines during The Battle of Oak Street, January 28
\nYet that was the end. The limits had emerged one by one over the course of January, and there was no new occupation or wave of mobilizations on the way. On January 29, as comrades scrambled to support the hundreds in jail while thousands across the country organized solidarity demonstrations with Oakland, over 300 gathered at the plaza in what turned out to be the last large general assembly. They voted enthusiastically to endorse calls emerging from New York and elsewhere for a May 1 global general strike—a strike that never materialized. Many still hoped that Occupy would reemerge with a spring offensive. But given the bitter defeat in the turf war over the plaza, the implosion of the port blockade campaign, and the failure to secure a new home for the Commune, this seemed unlikely. January was the end. Occupy’s window of radical possibilities would soon be closed in Oakland and everywhere else.
\n\nOver the following months, people carried out many amazing and inspiring radical projects. Occupy Oakland organized a series of large neighborhood BBQs across the city. The anti-repression committee set an impressive standard for how to take care of arrestees and imprisoned comrades. The SF Commune temporarily held a building at 888 Turk. Insurgent feminist and queer comrades who had come together over the previous months continued a campaign of actions and interventions while writing and distributing propaganda and texts. Clashes and attacks temporarily erupted across the Bay around May Day, while a struggle over an occupied farm emerged in neighboring Albany. Foreclosure defense campaigns successfully held off a series of evictions. For a week, people occupied an Oakland public school that was being closed down.
\n\nYet the chance to regain momentum had passed in January. All of these efforts were still riding on evaporating momentum from the previous fall. In their increasing detachment from each other, they represented the long process of dispersal and decomposition that began with the strike on November 2.
\n\nAt its core, Occupy was about occupying. In Oakland and elsewhere, it was about producing a form of life defined by mutual aid, self-organization, and autonomous action. It was about defending spaces free from police, politicians, and bosses, and the necessarily violent conflict between those zones and the surrounding capitalist world on which the camps nonetheless depended. Oakland took this about as far as it could go within the framework of Occupy, establishing a zone that fed and sheltered hundreds of people each day—sometimes thousands—in brazen defiance of the city officials fifty yards away in City Hall and the cops leering from the periphery. For all the hype about social media, livestreaming, and other information technologies enabling this new wave of revolt, the grounding of the struggle in the face-to-face relationships that combined to form the occupation is clearly what gave Occupy its unique potential and created the material foundation for all the political possibilities of the movement. The authorities understood this. That’s why they cleared the camps in Oakland and everywhere else, using as much force as necessary to prevent reoccupation.
\n\nOnce the camp was cleared, the Oakland Commune became a husk deprived of its central tactic and, arguably, its reason for being. This was the reason why the vigil clung mournfully to the plaza despite repeated battering by OPD. It was the reason why the decision was made to claim a building for the movement on January 28. It was why the planning for an autonomous occupation provided the initial impetus for the convergence of feminist and queer comrades in what would later become Occupy Patriarchy. Without something to take the place of what had been lost with the camp, there was little chance that we would regain the expansive prospects of the fall.
\n\nThe strength of “the camp form” was its ability to carve out material zones of political antagonism that were not organized around petitioning the authorities for concessions through symbolic demonstration but directly providing for our daily needs through the repurposing and reclamation of urban space. This was one of the most appealing aspects of the camp: it offered the opportunity to explore ways of relating and surviving together that did not rely on the usual mechanisms—money, the state, police, predefined social hierarchies and categories—though the banishment of those things was always partial and provisional at best. This enabled the participants to bypass some of the more tedious ways in which activists develop political projects, equipping people to organize around their own survival, in their own cities, on the basis of their personal experience of oppression and need, rather than according to essentially moral objections to this or that injustice. In the context of this contagious form of revolt spreading through the communal liberation of space, the movement’s rejection of the need to issue any specific demands to authorities made perfect sense. Occupy’s power came from the proliferation and reproduction of these oppositional zones, not from its political sway.
\n\nBut if the camp was the source of our strength, it was also the source of the limits we reached, and not only because without it there was no real future for Occupy. At root, the camp was inadequate to the project of finding ways to live together beyond the specious forms of community that capitalism provides. In fact, the Oakland camp was already in a state of degeneration by the time it was cleared, and probably would have broken down on its own eventually.
\n\nThe camp was no more violent or miserable then the city of Oakland is on any given day. Yet the level of everyday misery, alienation, and abuse that makes up the mundane reality of capitalist society is truly staggering, especially when concentrated in a plot of grass in the middle of an impoverished city. When we liberate urban space in 21st century America, we have no choice but to confront the devastation produced by centuries of capitalism, conquest, and domination.
\n\nInside the reclaimed space opened up by the Commune, rampant interpersonal conflicts and forms of structural violence could not be contained or managed in the ways that capitalism normally does, through the violence of the police, the institutions of the state, or the ready-to-hand hierarchies provided by money and commodities. We had to confront these problems collectively and directly. But to do so adequately would have required the expropriation of resources and space far beyond what was within the grasp of the nascent movement. It also would have required the audacious dedication of participants to transcend their atomized lives and constructed identities under capitalism, going past the point of no return. The failure to overcome these fundamental obstacles enabled power relationships built on patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity to reassert their dominance within the movement while undermining and repressing the vital new relationships that had emerged through the process of struggle. These were the underlying limits that led the Commune away from the reclamation of space that had provided the basis for its initial rapid ascent, and ushered in its six month decline, passing the point of no return as the horizons of struggle that led away from the camp hit dead ends in January 2012.
\n\nThis is the double bind we found ourselves in: the camp was both inadequate and essential. A potential solution to this bind is contained in the concept of the Commune, by which we mean the projected translation of the principles of the camp onto a new, more expansive footing. Occupy Oakland became the Oakland Commune once it took the camp as the model for a project (barely realized) of reclamation, autonomy, and the disruption of capital on a much wider basis: neighborhood assemblies reclaiming abandoned buildings for their needs; social centers that could serve as hubs for organizing offensives and sustain all kinds of self-organization and care; occupations of schools and workplaces. These were the horizons that the Oakland Commune illuminated, in the positive sense, despite its limits. We believe it is likely that future struggles in the US will follow this trajectory in some way, using Occupy’s attempted offensives and space reclamations as the foundation upon which something much larger, more beautiful and more ferocious can begin to take shape.
\n\nBut the questions still remain: what would it mean to actually take care of each other and to collectively sustain and nurture an unstoppable insurrectionary struggle? How can we dismantle and negate the oppressive power relationships and toxic interpersonal dynamics we carry with us into liberated spaces? How can we make room for the myriad of revolts within the revolt that are necessary to upend all forms of domination? The effectiveness of any future antagonistic projects in the U.S. will be determined by our ability to answer these questions and thus transcend the limits that were so debilitating within Oscar Grant Plaza, forcing the Commune away from the very source of its power.
\n\nAnother wave of struggle and unrest will undoubtedly explode in our streets and plazas sooner or later. Our task in the meantime is to cultivate fierce and creative forms of cooperating, caring for each other, and fighting together that can help us smash through the fundamental limits of contemporary revolt when the time is right. If we can make substantial strides beyond these obstacles, police attacks and jail sentences will be no match for the uncontrollable momentum of our collective force.
\n\nSome Oakland Antagonists, August 2013
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-13b.jpg\")
Banner during the November 2 Strike
\nWhat is violence? Who gets to define it? Does it have a place in the pursuit of liberation? These age-old questions have returned to the fore during the Occupy movement. But this discussion never takes place on a level playing field; while some delegitimize violence, the language of legitimacy itself paves the way for the authorities to employ it. [You can listen to an audio version of this text here.]
\n\n\n\n\n“Though lines of police on horses, and with dogs, charged the main street outside the police station to push rioters back, there were significant pockets of violence which they could not reach.”
\n\n– The New York Times, on the UK riots of August 2011
\n
During the 2001 FTAA summit in Quebec City, one newspaper famously reported that violence erupted when protesters began throwing tear gas canisters back at the lines of riot police. When the authorities are perceived to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, “violence” is often used to denote illegitimate use of force—anything that interrupts or escapes their control. This makes the term something of a floating signifier, since it is also understood to mean “harm or threat that violates consent.”
\n\nThis is further complicated by the ways our society is based on and permeated by harm or threat that violates consent. In this sense, isn’t it violent to live on colonized territory, destroying ecosystems through our daily consumption and benefitting from economic relations that are forced on others at gunpoint? Isn’t it violent for armed guards to keep food and land, once a commons shared by all, from those who need them? Is it more violent to resist the police who evict people from their homes, or to stand aside while people are made homeless? Is it more violent to throw tear gas canisters back at police, or to denounce those who throw them back as “violent,” giving police a free hand to do worse?
\n\nIn this state of affairs, there is no such thing as nonviolence—the closest we can hope to come is to negate the harm or threat posed by the proponents of top-down violence. And when so many people are invested in the privileges this violence affords them, it’s naïve to think that we could defend ourselves and others among the dispossessed without violating the wishes of at least a few bankers and landlords. So instead of asking whether an action is violent, we might do better to ask simply: does it counteract power disparities, or reinforce them?
\n\nThis is the fundamental anarchist question. We can ask it in every situation; every further question about values, tactics, and strategy proceeds from it. When the question can be framed thus, why would anyone want to drag the debate back to the dichotomy of violence and nonviolence?
\n\nThe discourse of violence and nonviolence is attractive above all because it offers an easy way to claim the higher moral ground. This makes it seductive both for criticizing the state and for competing against other activists for influence. But in a hierarchical society, gaining the higher ground often reinforces hierarchy itself.
\n\nLegitimacy is one of the currencies that are unequally distributed in our society, through which its disparities are maintained. Defining people or actions as violent is a way of excluding them from legitimate discourse, of silencing and shutting out. This parallels and reinforces other forms of marginalization: a wealthy white person can act “nonviolently” in ways that would be seen as violent were a poor person of color to do the same thing. In an unequal society, the defining of “violence” is no more neutral than any other tool.
\n\nDefining people or actions as violent also has immediate consequences: it justifies the use of force against them. This has been an essential step in practically every campaign targeting communities of color, protest movements, and others on the wrong side of capitalism. If you’ve attended enough mobilizations, you know that it’s often possible to anticipate exactly how much violence the police will use against a demonstration by the way the story is presented on the news the night before. In this regard, pundits and even rival organizers can participate in policing alongside the police, determining who is a legitimate target by the way they frame the narrative.
\n\nOn the one-year anniversary of the Egyptian uprising, the military lifted the Emergency Laws—“except in thug-related cases.” The popular upheaval of 2011 had forced the authorities to legitimize previously unacceptable forms of resistance, with Obama characterizing as “nonviolent” an uprising in which thousands had fought police and burned down police stations. In order to re-legitimize the legal apparatus of the dictatorship, it was necessary to create a new distinction between violent “thugs” and the rest of the population. Yet the substance of this distinction was never spelled out; in practice, “thug” is simply the word for a person targeted by the Emergency Laws. From the perspective of the authorities, ideally the infliction of violence itself would suffice to brand its victims as violent—i.e., as legitimate targets.1
\n\nSo when a broad enough part of the population engages in resistance, the authorities have to redefine it as nonviolent, even if it would previously have been considered violent. Otherwise, the dichotomy between violence and legitimacy might erode—and without that dichotomy, it would be much harder to justify the use of force against those who threaten the status quo. By the same token, the more ground we cede in what we permit the authorities to define as violent, the more they will sweep into that category, and the greater risk all of us will face. One consequence of the past several decades of self-described nonviolent civil disobedience is that some people regard merely raising one’s voice as violent; this makes it possible to portray those who take even the most tentative steps to protect themselves against police violence as violent thugs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/violence/2b.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence… linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”
\n
\n\n\n— UC police captain Margo Bennett, quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle, justifying the use of force against students at the University of California at Berkeley
\n
Violent repression is only one side of the two-pronged strategy by which social movements are suppressed. For this repression to succeed, movements must be divided into legitimate and illegitimate, and the former convinced to disown the latter—usually in return for privileges or concessions. We can see this process up close in the efforts of professional journalists like Chris Hedges and Rebecca Solnit to demonize rivals in the Occupy movement.
\n\nIn last year’s Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House: Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution,” Rebecca Solnit mixed together moral and strategic arguments against “violence,” hedging her bets with a sort of US exceptionalism: Zapatistas can carry guns and Egyptian rebels set buildings on fire, but let no one so much as burn a trash can in the US. At base, her argument was that only “people power” can achieve revolutionary social change—and that “people power” is necessarily nonviolent.
\n\nSolnit should know that the defining of violence isn’t neutral: in her article “The Myth of Seattle Violence,” she recounted her unsuccessful struggle to get the New York Times to stop representing the demonstrations against the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle as “violent.” In consistently emphasizing violence as her central category, Solnit is reinforcing the effectiveness of one of the tools that will inevitably be used against protesters—including her—whenever it serves the interests of the powerful.
\n\nSolnit reserves particular ire for those who endorse diversity of tactics as a way to preclude the aforementioned dividing of movements. Several paragraphs of “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools” were devoted to denouncing the CrimethInc. “Dear Occupiers” pamphlet: Solnit proclaimed it “a screed in justification of violence,” “empty machismo peppered with insults,” and stooped to ad hominem attacks on authors about whom she admittedly knew nothing.2
\n\nAs anyone can readily ascertain, the majority of “Dear Occupiers” simply reviews the systemic problems with capitalism; the advocacy of diversity of tactics is limited to a couple subdued paragraphs. Why would an award-winning author misrepresent this as a pro-violence screed?
\n\nPerhaps for the same reason that she joins the authorities in delegitimizing violence even when this equips them to delegitimize her own efforts: Solnit’s leverage in social movements and her privileges in capitalist society are both staked on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate. If social movements ever cease to be managed from the top down—if they stop policing themselves—the Hedges and Solnits of the world will be out of a job literally as well as figuratively. That would explain why they perceive their worst enemies to be those who soberly advise against dividing movements into legitimate and illegitimate factions.
\n\nIt’s hard to imagine Solnit would have represented “Dear Occupiers” the way she did if she expected her audience to read it. Given her readership, this is a fairly safe bet—Solnit is often published in the corporate media, while CrimethInc. literature is distributed only through grass-roots networks; in any case, she didn’t include a link. Chris Hedges took similar liberties in his notorious “The Cancer in Occupy,” a litany of outrageous generalizations about “black bloc anarchists.” It seems that both authors’ ultimate goal is silencing: Why would you want to hear what those people have to say? They’re violent thugs.
\n\nThe title of Solnit’s article is a reference to Audre Lorde’s influential text, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Lorde’s text was not an endorsement of nonviolence; even Derrick Jensen, whom Hedges quotes approvingly, has debunked such misuse of this quotation. Here, let it suffice to repeat that the most powerful of the master’s tools is not violence, but delegitimization and division—as Lorde emphasized in her text. To defend our movements against these, Lorde exhorted us:
\n\n\n\n\n“Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark… Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”
\n
If we are to survive, that means:
\n\n\n\n\n“…learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish… learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
\n
It is particularly shameless that Solnit would quote Lorde’s argument against silencing out of context in order to delegitimize and divide. But perhaps we should not be surprised when successful professionals sell out anonymous poor people: they have to defend their class interests, or else risk joining us. For the mechanisms that raise people to positions of influence within activist hierarchies and liberal media are not neutral, either; they reward docility, often coded as “nonviolence,” rendering invisible those whose efforts actually threaten capitalism and hierarchy.
\n\nWhen we want to be taken seriously, it’s tempting to claim legitimacy any way we can. But if we don’t want to reinforce the hierarchies of our society, we should be careful not to validate forms of legitimacy that perpetuate them.
\n\nIt is easy to recognize how this works in some situations: when we evaluate people on the basis of their academic credentials, for example, this prioritizes abstract knowledge over lived experience, centralizing those who can get a fair shot in academia and marginalizing everyone else. In other cases, this occurs more subtly. We emphasize our status as community organizers, implying that those who lack the time or resources for such pursuits are less entitled to speak. We claim credibility as longtime locals, implicitly delegitimizing all who are not—including immigrants who have been forced to move to our neighborhoods because their communities have been wrecked by processes originating in ours. We justify our struggles on the basis of our roles within capitalist society—as students, workers, taxpayers, citizens—not realizing how much harder this can make it for the unemployed, homeless, and excluded to justify theirs.
\n\nWe’re often surprised by the resulting blowback. Politicians discredit our comrades with the very vocabulary we popularized: “Those aren’t activists, they’re homeless people pretending to be activists.” “We’re not targeting communities of color, we’re protecting them from criminal activity.” Yet we prepared the way for this ourselves by affirming language that makes legitimacy conditional.
\n\nWhen we emphasize that our movements are and must be nonviolent, we’re doing the same thing. This creates an Other that is outside the protection of whatever legitimacy we win for ourselves—that is, in short, a legitimate target for violence. Anyone who pulls their comrades free from the police rather than waiting passively to be arrested—anyone who makes shields to protect themselves from rubber bullets rather than abandoning the streets to the police—anyone who is charged with assault on an officer for being assaulted by one: all these unfortunates are thrown to the wolves as the violent ones, the bad apples. Those who must wear masks even in legal actions because of their precarious employment or immigration status are denounced as cancer, betrayed in return for a few crumbs of legitimacy from the powers that be. We Good Citizens can afford to be perfectly transparent; we would never commit a crime or harbor a potential criminal in our midst.
\n\nAnd the Othering of violence smooths the way for the violence of Othering. The ones who bear the worst consequences of this are not the middle class brats pilloried in internet flame wars, but the same people on the wrong side of every other dividing line in capitalism: the poor, the marginalized, those who have no credentials, no institutions to stand up for them, no incentive to play the political games that are slanted in favor of the authorities and perhaps also a few jet-setting activists.
\n\nSimply delegitimizing violence can’t put an end to it. The disparities of this society couldn’t be maintained without it, and the desperate will always respond by acting out, especially when they sense that they’ve been abandoned to their fate. But this kind of delegitimization can create a gulf between the angry and the morally upright, the “irrational” and the rational, the violent and the social. We saw the consequences of this in the UK riots of August 2011, when many of the disenfranchised, despairing of bettering themselves through any legitimate means, hazarded a private war against property, the police, and the rest of society. Some of them had attempted to participate in previous popular movements, only to be stigmatized as hooligans; not surprisingly, their rebellion took an antisocial turn, resulting in five deaths and further alienating them from other sectors of the population.
\n\nThe responsibility for this tragedy rests not only on the rebels themselves, nor on those who imposed the injustices from which they suffered, but also upon the activists who stigmatized them rather than joining in creating a movement that could channel their anger. If there is no connection between those who intend to transform society and those who suffer most within it, no common cause between the hopeful and the enraged, then when the latter rebel, the former will disown them, and the latter will be crushed along with all hope of real change. No effort to do away with hierarchy can succeed while excluding the disenfranchised, the Others.
\n\nWhat should be our basis for legitimacy, then, if not our commitment to legality, nonviolence, or any other standard that hangs our potential comrades out to dry? How do we explain what we’re doing and why we’re entitled to do it? We have to mint and circulate a currency of legitimacy that is not controlled by our rulers, that doesn’t create Others.
\n\nAs anarchists, we hold that our desires and well-being and those of our fellow creatures are the only meaningful basis for action. Rather than classifying actions as violent or nonviolent, we focus on whether they extend or curtail freedom. Rather than insisting that we are nonviolent, we emphasize the necessity of interrupting the violence inherent in top-down rule. This might be inconvenient for those accustomed to seeking dialogue with the powerful, but it is unavoidable for everyone who truly wishes to abolish their power.
\n\nBut how do we interrupt the violence of top-down rule? The partisans of nonviolence frame their argument in strategic as well as moral terms: violence alienates the masses, preventing us from building the “people power” we need to triumph.
\n\nThere is a kernel of truth at the heart of this. If violence is understood as illegitimate use of force, their argument can be summarized as a tautology: delegitimized action is unpopular.
\n\nIndeed, those who take the legitimacy of capitalist society for granted are liable to see anyone who takes material steps to counteract its disparities as violent. The challenge facing us, then, is to legitimize concrete forms of resistance: not on the grounds that they are nonviolent, but on the grounds that they are liberating, that they fulfill real needs and desires.
\n\nThis is not an easy matter. Even when we passionately believe in what we are doing, if it is not widely recognized as legitimate we tend to sputter when asked to explain ourselves. If only we could stay within the bounds prescribed for us within this system while we go about overthrowing it! The Occupy movement was characterized by attempts to do just that—citizens insisting on their right to occupy public parks on the basis of obscure legal loopholes, making tortuous justifications no more convincing to onlookers than to the authorities. People want to redress the injustices around them, but in a highly regulated and controlled society, there’s so little they feel entitled to do.
\n\nSolnit may be right that the emphasis on nonviolence was essential to the initial success of Occupy Wall Street: people want some assurance that they’re not going to have to leave their comfort zones, and that what they’re doing will make sense to everyone else. But it often happens that the preconditions for a movement become limitations that it must transcend: Occupy Oakland remained vibrant after other occupations died down because it embraced a diversity of tactics, not despite this. Likewise, if we really want to transform our society, we can’t remain forever within the narrow boundaries of what the authorities deem legitimate: we have to extend the range of what people feel entitled to do.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/violence/3b.jpg\")
\nAll the media coverage in the world won’t help us if we fail to create a situation in which people feel entitled to defend themselves and each other.
\n\nLegitimizing resistance, expanding what is acceptable, is not going to be popular at first—it never is, precisely because of the tautology set forth above. It takes consistent effort to shift the discourse: calmly facing outrage and recriminations, humbly emphasizing our own criteria for what is legitimate.
\n\nWhether we think this challenge is worthwhile depends on our long-term goals. As David Graeber has pointed out, conflicts over goals often masquerade as moral and strategic differences. Making nonviolence the central tenet of our movement makes good sense if our long-term goal is not to challenge the fundamental structure of our society, but to build a mass movement that can wield legitimacy as defined by the powerful—and that is prepared to police itself accordingly. But if we really want to transform our society, we have to transform the discourse of legitimacy, not just position ourselves well within it as it currently exists. If we focus only on the latter, we will find that terrain slipping constantly from beneath our feet, and that many of those with whom we need to find common cause can never share it with us.
\n\nIt’s important to have strategic debates: shifting away from the discourse of nonviolence doesn’t mean we have to endorse every single broken window as a good idea.. But it only obstructs these debates when dogmatists insist that all who do not share their goals and assumptions—not to say their class interests!—have no strategic sense. It’s also not strategic to focus on delegitimizing each other’s efforts rather than coordinating to act together where we overlap. That’s the point of affirming a diversity of tactics: to build a movement that has space for all of us, yet leaves no space for domination and silencing—a “people power” that can both expand and intensify.
\n\n\n\n\n“Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission, 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us … if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back.”
\n
– Solidarity statement from Cairo to Occupy Wall Street, October 24, 2011
\n\nWitness how police officers routinely charge arrestees with whatever violence they have inflicted upon them. ↩
\nFor what it’s worth, though Solnit alleges that we “don’t seem prepared to act,” the authors of “Dear Occupiers” and this text are all lifelong participants in social movements, most of whom live well below the poverty line far from liberal Meccas like her San Francisco. This subject strikes very close to home for us: several of us have faced trumped up rioting charges and many of us have dear friends in prison. We choose to write anonymously in part because, not being professional journalists, we can’t count on employers not to discriminate against us for our political beliefs, and also because these beliefs attract more hostile attention from the authorities than those of Solnit or Hedges, but above all because we don’t seek to found careers or personal fame on our efforts to change the world. ↩
\nThis is the story of the occupation of a derelict building in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on November 12-13, 2011, told in the voices of a wide range of participants. While anarchists and corporate media have circulated news of this action far and wide, the experiences shared inside the building have remained a sort of black box. This report opens up that box, just as the occupiers opened up the building, to reveal a world of possibility.
\n\nSome of the narratives below are excerpted from longer accounts, which can be read in their entirety here.
\n\nSlideshow courtesy of Underground Reverie
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/1b.jpg\")
\nIn contrast to the occupation movement in some parts of the US, anarchists were involved in Occupy Chapel Hill from the very beginning, sending out the initial call and facilitating the first meetings. The points of unity consensed upon at the first gathering were based on the Pittsburgh Principles, and the group never adopted a nonviolence agreement.
\n\n\n\n\nAt the second assembly, we debated whether to set up an encampment. Some argued against it, claiming that the police would evict us and insisting we should apply for a permit first. In nearby Raleigh, occupiers had applied for a permit but were only granted one lasting a few hours; everyone who remained after it expired was arrested. A few of us thought it better to go forward without permission than to embolden the authorities to believe we would comply with whatever was convenient for them.
\n\nA different facilitator would have let the debate remain abstract indefinitely, effectively quashing the possibility of an occupation, but ours cut right to the chase: “Raise your hand if you want to camp out here tonight.” A few hands went hesitantly up. “Looks like five… six, seven… OK, let’s split into two groups: those who want to occupy, and everyone else. We’ll reconvene in ten minutes.”
\n\nAt first there were only a half dozen of us, but once we took that first step, others started drifting over. Ten minutes later there were twenty-four occupiers—more than we believed the local police were prepared to arrest—and that night fully three dozen people camped out in Peace and Justice Plaza. I stayed awake all night waiting for a raid, but it never came. We’d won the first round, expanding the zone of the possible.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/2b.jpg\")
\nOn November 2, participants in the general strike in Oakland attempted to occupy an empty building that had previously provided services to the homeless. This controversial action ended in dramatic confrontations with riot police, but opened up a new horizon as winter crept up on the occupation movement.
\n\nSaturday, November 12, following the second annual Carrboro anarchist book fair, upwards of fifty people gathered for a march in solidarity with the occupation movement.
\n\n\n\n\nWe couldn’t tell if we were parading yet. The crowd had begun to move, but it was still finding its rhythm and cohesion. But we two found our cue: there was a little boy, maybe five years old, carrying a black flag on the end of a six-foot bamboo pole. It tottered, sometimes bumping other paraders, as he struggled proudly and joyously to keep it aloft. We were with him.
\n
Undercover officers were already following participants, peppering them with inappropriate questions.
\n\n\n\n\nThis middle-aged white guy in a puffy red winter vest shuffled to catch up with us. Curious and clueless, he was in from “out of town,” he knew nothing about Anarchy or Occupy, and he was hoping we would explain things to him. Did we want to “smash capitalism?” Did we know what the plan was for tonight? Sometimes we couldn’t resist saying hilarious nonsense to him, but mostly we told him about how much we loved detective movies.
\n
The march proceeded to the 10,000-square-foot commercial building at 419 West Franklin Street, a former Chrysler-Plymouth dealership empty since 2003. The absentee owner, Joe Riddle, was among the town’s most widely loathed property holders. He had no plans for the building; as it was sitting on property valued at close to a million dollars, only a powerful corporation could possibly purchase it.
\n\n\n\n\nWhen we left the book fair, I had no idea what to expect, other than that we would be heading towards the plaza occupation. I was caught off guard by the large number of people and full of excitement as we made our way through a parking lot to the street. When we arrived, I was surprised to see the group move in the opposite direction. By the time we’d crossed the street to the building, I was so caught up in chanting and looking around at the crowd that I hadn’t taken stock of where I was. At this point, I looked toward the front of the march and saw that the windows of a building had been decorated with two large banners.
\n\nThe march veered up the driveway in front of the building. As the crowd approached the vertical-sliding door, it glided up and two or three pairs of eyes stared out from under hats and over bandannas. As we streamed in, I saw people conversing and looking around the huge main room, silhouetted by the electric lights that had been rigged up and placed in the center. Someone handed me a folded sheet of paper that presented one of the most truly exciting ideas I had ever seen: the proposal that, amidst this global economic and political collapse, a community could form around this long-abandoned and maliciously wasted property and make something of benefit to the town at large. As I walked around the premises, I couldn’t believe that this was happening before my eyes. While I was caught entirely off-guard, I was eager to see where it would go.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/3b.jpg\")
\nParticipants distributed leaflets proposing that the space could be turned into a social center serving the community, including a meticulously designed blueprint showing some of “the countless uses such a building could be put to once freed from the stranglehold of rent.” Over the course of the evening, these handouts were warmly received by hundreds of passersby.
\n\n\n\n\nI stepped out to get some air. A couple approached me: “What’s going on here?”
\n\nI handed them the pamphlet and explained, “We’re turning this building into a community center.”
\n\nThe man’s face lit up. “That’s great! I worked as a chef next door for years and this place just rots here!”
\n\nI nodded and added matter-of-factly, “It’s an illegal occupation.”
\n\n“Even better!” he said enthusiastically.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/4b.jpg\")
\nThe leaflet spelled out an anticapitalist rationale for occupying the building, framing it in reference to the local context:
\n\n\n\n\nAcross the US, tens of thousands of commercial and residential buildings sit empty while people sleep in the streets or descend into poverty paying ever-rising rent. Chapel Hill is no different. This building has been empty for a full decade, gathering dust and equity for a faraway landlord while rent skyrockets beyond our ability to pay. A brand new “green” development remains empty right up the street, gentrifying the neighborhood so longtime locals have to move to Durham. This is what happens when our town is shaped by profit rather than human need.
\n
A handful of police officers positioned themselves across the street, a threatening but hesitant presence.
\n\n\n\n\nWe had a police liaison ready and waiting, but they never initiated contact with us. When the police crossed the street towards the building, about fifty of us gathered in front of it, chanting “A—Anti—Anticapitalista!” The officers hesitated—what was this strange incantation?—and withdrew. That chant cast an enchantment, magically protecting the occupation.
\n
Two people from the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership also arrived; after the building had remained untouched for so many years, they had coincidentally just arranged for an artist to make a display in the front window. Occupiers engaged personably with them, exchanging contact information to open negotiations about the space. Later this was intentionally omitted from the authorities’ account of events, so as not to disrupt their narrative about dangerous and unapproachable anarchists.
\n\nMeanwhile, more and more people were arriving, passing through the open garage door to explore the building.
\n\n\n\n\nVastness. Pure vastness. How can a building be so enormous? A single orange extension cord snaked across the vast concrete floor to a jury-rigged contraption of silver flood lamps. The warm grey yellow light flooded up and outwards to a massive ceiling of latticed wooden beams, casting crisscrossed shadows to the eaves of the roof beyond. The cinderblock walls seemed to extend out endlessly, an impossible distance, to a back door that had to be a football field away.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/5b.jpg\")
\nSome people began cleaning the interior; others set up a kitchen, a reading library, and sleeping areas. Trucks and cars were pulling up in the driveway one after another to unload supplies. A show originally scheduled in a local basement as an after-party for the book fair was moved to the occupation.
\n\n\n\n\nS— performed her set a cappella, kneeling on a blanket in that immense darkness with all of us pressed around her, a spark sailing up into the night. She’s always an amazing singer, but this was something else. When she opened her mouth, the whole world poured out: childbirth and tear gas, clear streams and mountaintop removal, rage and exaltation and tragedy.
\n\nOccupying a building means investing yourself in a space that may be taken from you any minute, in a time you know is short; it forces you to be present in a way we rarely are, to confront your own mortality. Death accompanies us at every step, devouring us instant after instant, but we only awaken to this when we stumble into unrepeatable moments. Without that awareness to give it urgency, music is only music; that night, it was existence itself, running through our fingers like sand.
\n\nR— joined her with his berimbau for the last song. When he hit the first note and paused, it echoed through the building and throughout our lives. Death and the police—the great erasers—were close at our heels, but for that moment we were immortal together, viscerally alive.
\n
A joyous dance party ensued in the front room, as several dozen people cavorted with increasing abandon to live DJs while looped footage from the Oakland general strike was projected larger than life across the wall behind them. Over one hundred people from many different walks of life passed through the building in the course of the evening; locals who had only seen each other around town introduced themselves and conferred giddily. Many of these were younger anarchists, students, and hipsters employed in the service industry, but others were long-established residents old enough to recount stories from the days before the automobile dealership closed. There were even a few attendees who possessed positions of influence at the university or in local politics; later, of course, it never came up that they had participated exuberantly in an illegal occupation.
\n\n\n\n\nThe most exciting thing for me about occupying this building was the looks on my friends’ faces. Surprise. Accomplishment. Possibility. Unbridled joy.
\n\nNone of us thought we could hold this building, but several hours in we were still dancing, still chatting with passersby, still dreaming about what would come next. What if this building could actually be ours? What if we could be powerful enough together to build the beautiful things we deserve? I had so many conversations with strangers about what we can make and be for each other outside the constraints of capitalism, so many daydreams about living in a world where everyone has enough—and on each of these new friends’ faces, I found the resolve to make something worth taking risks for.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/6b.jpg\")
\nAs the festivities finally died down, about two dozen people settled in to sleep in the building overnight, securing the doors and unrolling sleeping bags on cardboard and wooden pallets. Others stood watch—some inside, some outside—waiting to sound the alarm in case of a police raid.
\n\n\n\n\nOccupy Chapel Hill had encamped in the only public space in Chapel Hill, a concrete plaza outside the building that serves as post office and courthouse, located at the edge of a long stretch of bars. At 2 a.m. every night, patrons stumble from the bars, tearing down signs, kicking tents, and shouting obscenities at occupiers. No wonder so many occupiers fled to Occupy Chrysler for the cavernous safety of the abandoned car dealership at the other end of the street. While four or five members of OCH waged the stressful nightly battle to deescalate intoxicant-fueled anger at the plaza, I settled with one companion on the stoop in front of the Chrysler building to stay awake and watch while weary occupiers got some well-deserved rest.
\n\nTraffic dwindled, leaving only a cold quiet street of brick buildings and gold-leafed trees, a few stars, and the just-waning moon. In those quiet hours before dawn, anything seemed possible in the town where we both had lived most of our lives. If the landlord antagonistic to the town let us stay, if the town antagonistic to the landlord let us stay, if a nonprofit arts organization with tentative access to the building partnered with us, if any of those things happened we had the skills among us to winter off the grid easily. At three times the size of the public plaza, the hulking building behind us not only offered room for Occupy’s general assemblies, teach-ins, and sleeping, but ample space to become whatever a community envisioned: a kitchen, a clinic, a classroom, a library, a movement and arts space. It seemed all we had to do was wait for morning and begin.
\n
Police officers dropped by in the morning, unsuccessfully seeking to gather intelligence from those on watch duty. This visit was also omitted from their later narrative of events. The artist who had been invited by the Downtown Partnership to decorate the storefront showed up shortly thereafter; a friend of participants in Occupy Chapel Hill, she expressed support for the occupiers. This didn’t prevent enemies of the occupation from later using her as an excuse to justify the raid.
\n\nAn assembly discussing anarchist strategies against the prison-industrial complex had been planned for the book fair venue at noon. It was moved to the front room of the occupation; dozens of people participated, sticking around afterwards for lunch catered by a supportive local restaurant. Others, several of whom were carpenters or construction workers by trade, were busy fixing up the building: sweeping the floors, unboarding the windows, and building structures to supplement the furniture dropped off by enthusiastic locals.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/7b.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nAfter lunch, a rumor circulated that the police were preparing to raid the space. A few dozen of us gathered for an impromptu meeting. It struck me how different this was from the general assemblies of Occupy Chapel Hill. Those were often bureaucratic nightmares, breeding boredom and aggravation as people deadlocked over minutia and droned on just to hear themselves speak.
\n\nHere, there was nothing abstract about the issues at hand, nothing that promoted pointless arguing or ego trips. We were putting our bodies on the line just by being present; these were real choices that would have immediate consequences for all of us. For once, we didn’t need a facilitator to listen to each other or stay on topic. With our freedom at stake, we had every reason to work well together. Maybe the problem at the plaza had been that we weren’t risking enough.
\n\nWe decided that if the police came and it was clear we couldn’t keep the building, we would all leave in a group, taking our belongings with us and being sure not to leave anyone in their hands. They must have had that meeting infiltrated or else they wouldn’t have known to swoop in right after it; later, they claimed they were afraid we were dangerous, but their real fear must have been that we would bring the occupation to a close on our own terms, without any losses.
\n
Many people hurried home from this meeting to get more supplies and return to the building prepared to hold it for the long haul. The police took this opportunity to carry out a fully militarized raid.
\n\n\n\n\nI was sitting on the brick edge of the flowerbed, drinking coffee and sharing a chocolate bar with friends, alternately watching Franklin Street’s pedestrians and glancing at the yoga class beginning inside our building. The conversation was lighthearted; we were all dizzy with the excitement of taking a stand against the wastefulness of the property owner. We feared our joy might be short-lived—we anticipated being quickly evicted, and had committed to a plan to leave peacefully when the police arrived—but nevertheless, we were reveling in our future plans for the community center we hoped to establish.
\n\nI was suddenly distracted by the headlights of a white SUV, growing larger and larger in the back door of the building. I heard someone inside yell “POLICE!” I pictured a few officers arriving to tell those inside the building that it was private property, that they had to vacate or be arrested. I sighed and began to collect my belongings.
\n\nBut as I rounded the corner of the building, I was met by a group of police officers and Special Emergency Response Team members—my brain automatically labeled them “soldiers.” Some were wearing familiar black Chapel Hill Police Department uniforms; others green fatigues and tactical vests. All were carrying loaded weapons—automatic rifles and handguns. Many had belts loaded with extra cartridges, ammunition, and plastic zip-tie handcuffs. They were running towards me, pointing their guns and screaming “ON THE GROUND! EVERYBODY ON THE GROUND! FACES ON THE PAVEMENT!”
\n\nI paused. Surely they don’t mean me, I thought. Surely they aren’t carrying those guns because they’re scared of me. Knowing that I was outside, and that my bag only contained notebooks, pamphlets, and a coffee thermos, it seemed impossible that these police officers were really running towards, really screaming at, really aiming their weapons at me. I took a moment to set my half-empty cup of coffee on the edge of the flowerbed. But as the barrels of their rifles drew closer, I realized yes, they are running at me. I threw myself to the concrete, face down.
\n\nI listened to my own ragged, heavy breathing and the sounds of boots. I was torn between the visceral need to see the friends I had been sitting with and a fear that made me squeeze my eyes tightly shut. I focused on my breathing—in, out, in, out. What would have happened if I’d hesitated any longer before falling to the pavement? Would they have fired? If I’d reached into my pocket to protect my phone, would they have killed me?
\n\nI heard a man’s gruff voice above me: “Please place your hands at the small of your back.” A second passed before I realized he was addressing me. I took my hands from beneath my face and placed them behind me. I felt him take my hands and pull one through each loop of the plastic handcuffs. I heard the tk-tk-tk-tk ratcheting of the cuffs being tightened. I remained face down on the sidewalk. I counted seventy-two of my own deep breaths.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/8b.jpg\")
\nAn operation coordinated between multiple police departments shut down several blocks of Franklin Street, Chapel Hill’s primary artery, for over an hour while officers waving assault rifles stormed the building. They arrested eight people and detained many more, including journalists and legal observers. Ironically, the city bus requisitioned by police to hold arrestees bore an advertisement for Wells Fargo on the side. A large crowd immediately gathered across the street chanting “Shame!” and “Police, Police, the Army of the Rich!” and explaining the circumstances of the raid to curious passersby.
\n\nThat evening, less than six hours later, a spirited solidarity march of nearly a hundred people took the streets of downtown Chapel Hill, marching around the main thoroughfares chanting “Occupy Everything” and “We’ll Be Back.” Some carried black flags; others bore banners reading “Under Capitalism We’re All Under Gunpoint” and “Fight Back.” The majority of the participants marched as a black bloc, sending a clear message that they were not intimidated; many supporters and curious passers-by followed behind.
\n\n\n\n\nI’m not the kind of person who gets up in front of people to tell them what I think—I’m usually too nervous to address even a small crowd. But that night I felt like my voice was the voice of all the women in the march; my voice was as strong as one hundred people’s voices, screaming, “Cops, Pigs, Murderers!” at the top of my lungs. Afterwards, I told my friend that I felt like I needed to yell for all the ladies, because I wanted to be sure everyone would hear us, too. I yelled as loudly as I could. It was hard to imagine a reason to be anywhere but there, surrounded by the most awesome human beings I know, in that beautiful moment.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/9b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/10b.jpg\")
\nThe march was followed by a benefit show packed with well over a hundred people. Locals and visitors from around the state expressed solidarity with the arrestees, the building occupation, and the anticapitalist movement. The owners of the venue had openly approved of the black bloc assembling there and returning after the march; this marked a watershed gain in public support for anarchists in Chapel Hill.
\n\n\n\n\nEveryone was there, even the Women’s Studies professor I’d dated—my housemate loaned her his scarf for the black bloc. Our band somehow ended up playing, too, even though we weren’t on the bill and hadn’t practiced in half a year; people were waving black flags in the air as they danced. The whole weekend was like an anarchist cartoon, with all the clichés crowded in back to back: the book fair, the workshop, the squat, the assembly, the raid, the march, the show. I hadn’t slept in something like 72 hours; things were starting to feel surreal. Had those blonde students with black sweatshirts over their UNC gear been real? Were they really shouting “Fuck the Police!” with us?
\n
Monday afternoon, dozens of protesters disrupted the press conference at which the mayor and police chief attempted justify the raid. This swift response prevented the authorities from spinning a narrative of public support and likely contributed to later public willingness to express disapproval. Media attention continued to focus on outrage against the police rather than the violation of property rights.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/11b.jpg\")
\nThat evening, Occupy Chapel Hill gathered for a contentious general assembly at the original encampment. There were more people in attendance, and more energy, than there had been at any general assembly since its inception; whether or not one approved of the building occupation, it had undeniably breathed life into the local movement as well as garnering it national attention. The discussion revealed that the differences within Occupy Chapel Hill were hardly fatal. In subsequent general assemblies it became clear that the building occupation had radicalized many if not most participants, further expanding their notion of the possible.
\n\nOver the following week, people inspired by the efforts in Oakland and Chapel Hill occupied buildings in Saint Louis, Washington, DC, and Seattle. This new wave of actions pushed the Occupy movement from symbolic protests towards directly challenging the sanctity of property.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/12b.jpg\")
\nphoto by Nancy Munoz
\n\nOn Thursday, over one hundred people marched up Franklin Street expressing solidarity with occupiers worldwide and reaffirming their opposition to the raid; many of them were taking the street for the first time. The following Monday, two hundred people from a wide range of demographics assembled at the police station, marched without a permit down a major boulevard to the town hall, and continued to block traffic and raise a ruckus for hours while some of them entered the city council meeting to speak out or disrupt it. Local government was in disarray, the police were powerless to do anything with public disapproval at an all-time high, and a diverse social movement was coming together around anarchist-initiated efforts. A solidarity march the same night in Atlanta underscored how widely the ripples from the building occupation had spread.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/13b.jpg\")
\nThis story demonstrates how swiftly a social movement can take off when a few individuals seize the right opportunity to push the envelope. By creating an open, irresistible space that transformed all who passed through it, the occupiers shifted the political landscape in a single night. The authorities were confronted with a no-win situation: they had to choose between ceding territory and discrediting themselves in the public eye. Swift follow-up enabled anarchists to turn subsequent attempts at repression into additional opportunities to forge connections and spread the virus of resistance.
\n\nAs the economy worsens and social conflict intensifies, the conditions will be increasingly ripe for contesting the physical territory of capitalism. But this can only succeed and spread when it is viewed above all as a way to fight for social territory. The relationships we build in the process of fighting are the territory we win, even more than the plazas and buildings we seize.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/15b.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nI do not feel that we lost, even when I walk down Franklin Street and read the “condemned” sign now posted out front. The sense of possibility remains; there is a new intensity when we mask up for a black bloc downtown, an aliveness that pulls on those around us. My only regret is that we never got to name our space. Its memory persists, but incommunicable, faceless. If I fight now, it is not only to honor that memory, but also to give it form for all those who can only imagine it in the abstract. We will be back. Next time we’ll be ready.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/occupych/16b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2011/11/27/occupy-everything-flyer.jpg\")
\n