![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/02/3.jpg\")
Laborers marching towards the ICE facility in Portland with their union display a banner reading “Labor says ICE out.”
\nOn January 31, demonstrators in Portland marched to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Field Office in Portland. In response, without provocation, ICE agents attacked them with a variety of dangerous weapons, blanketing the area in tear gas and injuring a number of small children. Rather than intimidating the people of Portland, this brazen assault has only galvanized them against ICE. In the following account, participants in the demonstration recount the events as they unfolded.
\n\n\n\n\n“I feel sure that the police are helping us more than I could do in ten years. They are making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in ten years. If they will only continue, I shall be very grateful; they will save me lots of work.”
\n\n \n
On January 31, a day after the National Shutdown in protest against the brutality that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is perpetrating around the country, a five-thousand-strong rally and march got underway in Elizabeth Caruthers Park in Portland, Oregon. The theme was “Labor says ICE out!”
\n\n Laborers marching towards the ICE facility in Portland with their union display a banner reading “Labor says ICE out.”
\nUnlike previous mass protests, which avoided direct contact with the Department of Homeland Security, the stated goal was to march on the infamous ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office. The Field Office has become a daily target of protests ranging from five to 200 people since the uptick in DHS aggression last summer.
\n\nMany local radicals saw more potential in this march than the usual demonstrations. It was planned well in advance, with an intentional focus on class, capitalism, and logistics, and organizers made an effort to reach out to various unions and other organizations. Consequently, an unspoken consensus emerged that, after the march and rally concluded, there would be an earnest attempt to shut down the ICE facility. This understanding was in part inspired by the shift in dynamics within the crowd that had gathered at the Field Office after the murder of Alex Pretti on January 24.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/02/2.jpg\")
An anti-ICE protester holds up a sign depicting a line of federal police, reading “Jackbooted thugs” and “Fascist ICE.”
\nHowever, the DHS forces at the Field Office did not wait to deploy their weaponry.
\n\nAs the march made its way to the ICE building on South Macadam Avenue, Federal Protective Services agents and Customs and Border Protection agents showed themselves. Some people in the march jeered at them. The mercenaries responded to their words and gestures by attacking the crowd with an array of “less-lethal” weapons, blanketing the area with tear gas and firing on the crowd at random with pepper-balls and flash-bang grenades.
\n\nThis march involved more children than the average demonstration in Portland, including some very small children. The federal agents did not spare the children, but attacked them with the same viciousness with which they attacked adults. Gruesome images circulated afterwards, showing children struggling with the effects of tear gas.
\n\nShortly after the march arrived, federal agents emerged without warning, immediately and indiscriminately attacking demonstrators with tear gas and other munitions.
\nIt’s important to point out that many of these kids are not simply passive victims. They, too, have been resisting the regime. Many of them had walked out of class on January 30 and participated in marches that were as radical as the labor march of January 31. For example, self-organized students at McDaniel High School walked out that day and marched down a major arterial road. The speeches at the closing of that march were at least as fiery as those at the labor march, according to young people who attended both rallies. At the closing rally of the McDaniel walk-out, an elder Portland Black Panther joined students who spoke out, as immigrants or the children of immigrants, on the gravity of our current situation and the need for action.
\n\nSome of those students attended the labor march, many of them prepared with personal protective equipment, knowing that officers could attack the march regardless of whether the participants were “peaceful.” The brutality of the federal agents comes as no great surprise to those who understand state violence as a means of imposing social control rather than responding to actual threats—but it is infuriating nonetheless.
\n\nForced away from the facility, the crowd began to make their way back to the park, shouting at the feds between gasps for air. There were so many people that it was difficult for many to escape the noxious clouds, which extended for over six blocks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/02/4.jpg\")
A cloud of teargas above the ICE facility in Portland, lit up with an orange hue by an exploding flash-bang grenade.
\nOnce most of the marchers were back in the park, the closing rally began. After a lot of eye flushes, a few speeches, and a rendition of Bella Ciao, the labor event was formally concluded. Someone announced that those who were willing and able should head back to the Field Office to show the feds how we felt about their actions. Considering how many people have witnessed footage of two public executions by ICE over the past month, the repressive violence that they perpetrated in Portland on January 31 should be less shocking now. Nonetheless, experiencing it firsthand made it concrete for many participants in the demonstration: federal agents are our enemies. As Greek anarchists said in 2008, sometimes tear gas helps you to see more clearly.
\n\nAs the sun set, hundreds of angry people gathered in front of the Field Office. Soon, the sound of rhythmic banging cut through the chants and shouts; the crowd turned to see masked individuals banging on a dumpster as they wheeled it towards the driveway of the facility. The driveway is the major bottleneck for getting vehicles—and thus officers and prisoners—in and out of the facility. Cheers erupted as demonstrators thrust the dumpster against the gate.
\n\nPeople stood fearlessly in thick clouds of tear gas after federal agents came out to deliver a second barrage of chemical warfare.
\nA line of agents opened the gate to secure the dumpster. While this was happening, some people began to dismantle the plywood protection on one side of the facility. After the feds regrouped, they sent out another team to tackle people in the crowd. Though a couple people met their charge with projectiles and others responded by pulling people free of the feds’ grasp, the mercenaries fired another round of tear gas, pepper-balls, and flash-bang grenades, clearing the crowd enough to make some arrests.
\n\nDespite their violence, people are not intimidated. The tone has started to change here in Portland. We’ve been seeing the return of tactics that were widespread in 2020. Some people show up wearing gloves, prepared to throw the tear-gas canisters back at the mercenaries who deploy them; others are coming in behind them with leaf blowers, trying to blow the smoke back at the feds, or using traffic cones to put the gas canisters out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/02/5.jpg\")
A Federal agent standing on the roof of an ICE facility in Portland aiming a pepper-ball gun down at protesters.
\nElsewhere that evening, a far-right streamer had a bad experience. This person and his henchmen have been harassing anti-ICE protesters for months, sometimes benefitting from protection offered by protest marshals. Instead of getting into pointless shouting matches with him, some anti-fascists apparently chose to confront him when he wasn’t expecting it. There are certainly cases in which far-right pundits have built careers out of claiming to have been victimized; but in this case, this action seems to have diminished the capacity of the far right to support the feds. The right-wing streamers sent out a call to attack an anti-ICE event on the following day, February 1—but despite all their bluster, they didn’t show up.
\n\nThat night, many of us learned that an Enterprise Rent-a-Car facility had been attacked a few days ago for collaborating with ICE. It has been well known in Portland since 2020 that Enterprise Rent-a-Car collaborates with ICE, but it was only confirmed on a national scale after Chicago officials mentioned it in the recent plate-switching scandals there. The news also circulated that one ICE agent, Rita Soraghan, had finally moved out of her home after two noise demonstrations had taken place there in recent months.
\n\nICE is abducting massive numbers of people, sending them to what are basically concentration camps to perform forced labor. Some of those they kidnap are sent to face considerable risk of death in their countries of origin, exiled to prisons in a country they have never visited, or outright disappeared. ICE agents are openly murdering people who oppose these vile deeds in the streets. The courts and politicians are powerless at best and complicit at worst. Whatever strong words we hear from the mayors of Minneapolis and Portland, they only wish to repair the façade of social peace so that the institutions of power can maintain control. It’s likely going to take a revolt on scale much greater than what happened in 2020 to change course.
\n\nAnarchists could not have manifested the 2020 uprising alone. But bravery is contagious and we helped to light the beacons that drew people out into open revolt. More recently, the Telsa Takedown protests proved that low-intensity direct action targeting logistics can bridge the gap between clandestine attacks and symbolic public protest activity. All of us, however we are situated, can do things to pave the way for the changes that we desperately need.
\n\nAs the violence of ICE and CBP and borders in general make their way further into the interior, the situation is only going to get worse until we take decisive mass action. But Portland and Minneapolis do not fight alone. Instead of retreating, people are coming together to protect and support each other. More and more are choosing to intervene whenever and wherever the feds appear.
\n\nFor better or worse, this is only the beginning.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/02/1.jpg\")
An anti-ICE protester holds up a sign reading “Somewhere in America, a little girl is hiding in an attic writing about ICE.”
\nAt the opening of Donald Trump’s second term, many people were paralyzed by the idea that resistance would only play into his hands. He and his supporters appeared to be an unstoppable force, something out of a nightmare. In that context, we published an article titled “It’s Safer in the Front,” arguing that avoiding confrontation is not the most effective strategy for surviving the rise of fascism.
\n\nA year later, the spell has been broken. The Trump administration has caused tremendous harm, but they have not succeeded in pacifying the population. If anything, people are losing their fear, becoming more capable of fighting back—and learning, in the process, that our passivity and isolation are essential to the administration’s control.
\n\nNo politician, party, or petition is going to protect us from the kidnappers and murderers who hold power today. Our only hope is our own collective courage. If we do not find it, the ones who control the institutions will have no reason to grant any of our demands; if we find it, we can defend each other, we can topple autocrats, we can change the world as we see fit.
\n\nIn the following account, a participant in a demonstration in Portland describes the experience of collectively crossing the line into revolt and discovering that, when everyone does this together, our oppressors’ power evaporates.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/29/2.jpg\")
“Fuck these fascists.”
\nOn Saturday, January 24, Border Patrol agents opened fire in Minneapolis, publicly executing Alex Pretti as he tried to defend a woman from federal agents who were shoving her to the ground and pepper-spraying her. They fired ten rounds at him, shooting him in the back.
\n\nThat same night, people rallied outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Oregon. As dusk fell, the crowd’s righteous anger was unmistakable. The energy felt different from previous nights.
\n\nLast summer, as protests unfolded at the facility, federal agents had painted a thin blue line across the driveway entrance, a clear warning that no one was allowed to cross. Since then, small groups and even lone protesters had stepped over that line, often resulting in officers carrying out targeted arrests or snatching people in the moment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/29/1.jpg\")
The thin blue line.
\nSaturday was different. There was no room left in the driveway. It filled completely, with people spilling out into the street. Within minutes, the crowd began making space for dumpsters and other objects that were rolled into place to barricade the main gate. Shortly after, another door that the feds sometimes use to exit the building was barricaded as well.
\n\nNotably, in sharp contrast to recent months, there was no peace policing, no hand-wringing over tactics. People cheered in response to the barricading. The crowd was unified and unafraid to show it.
\n\nAfter some time, federal agents, unable to exit through their usual gate to carry out their routine violence, began firing munitions through and over the barricade. Once they had forced a bit of distance between themselves and the crowd, they pushed out, dragged the barricades inside the driveway, and retreated behind the gate, which closed behind them.
\n\nPeople were gassed but not discouraged. The energy remained high.
\n\nIt’s common for agents to storm out and brutalize protesters to clear space for government vehicles entering or leaving. But that night, they were using a rear driveway for vehicles. When they exited the front of the building, their sole purpose was to hurt people.
\n\nThe officers came out for the sole purpose of hurting people…
\nThey came out again—and this time, the assault escalated. They assaulted people with flash-bang grenades and pepper balls, filling the area with more tear gas than before. After this barrage of munitions, they retreated again.
\n\nA lull followed. The crowd regrouped. Medics rinsed people’s eyes. Folks caught their breath, many still standing their ground directly in front of the building.
\n\nThen the feds came out a final time.
\n\nThey unleashed more tear gas and munitions than in the previous two pushes combined. It was relentless.
\n\n…and were forced to retreat again and again.
\nIn the middle of the chaos, someone yelled, “It’s safer in the front!” The crowd surged forward together, larger and more unified than at any previous point that night.
\n\nAs another wave of gas filled the air, including Hexachloroethane (HC) smoke canisters, everyone moved as a unit. Nearly every canister the agents fired into the crowd was thrown right back. Other demonstrators, armed with nothing but protest signs, ran through the smoke, fanning the gas away from those who were choking.
\n\nThe feds wanted fear. They wanted the crowd to disperse in disarray. They wanted people isolated, choking, scrambling for safety.
\n\nInstead, they got solidarity.
\n\nThey got a crowd that refused to retreat. They got strangers locking arms in clouds of gas. They got medics running toward the smoke instead of away from it. They got people with nothing but cardboard signs and soaked bandanas standing their ground against armored agents armed with weapons of war.
\n\nEvery time they fired, the crowd regrouped. Every time they pushed forward, people came back together. The message was unmistakable: repression would not restore their control, and violence would not make the community disappear.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/29/4.jpg\")
\nWhat happened that night was not disorder. It was collective refusal. It was people deciding, in real time, that they would not quietly accept state terror in their city. It was grief turning into action. It was rage turning into protection. It was the understanding that when the government murders someone for defending others, the only moral response is to stand up. Together.
\n\nAs a consequence of that kind of solidarity, not one single person was snatched by the feds for crossing their blue line.
\n\nThe barricades can be dragged away. The gas canisters can be fired. The gates can slam shut.
\n\nBut the line the feds drew in blue paint last summer is gone now. The fear it was meant to create didn’t hold. People crossed it. They erased it. And they’re not going back.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/29/3.jpg\")
\nAs Election Day approaches in a context of anxiety about the prospect of Donald Trump attempting to hold onto power by force or cunning, the revolutionary potential that was palpable in early June has receded almost beyond the horizon. Anarchism, abolitionism, and direct action tactics have gained traction throughout the Trump era; thanks to the fearmongering of the administration, anarchists have as much visibility as we have experienced in a century. Yet once again, we are watching the election crowd out any other subject or strategy. Many anarchists, despite decades of rejecting representative democracy, are focused on hoping for a Biden victory—or trying to figure out how to block a Trump coup, lest democracy give way to autocracy. Others are echoing the far right in anticipating a civil war.
\n\nThis is an old story, in which the twin threats of tyranny and civil war serve to discipline rebels back into supporting representative democracy, foreclosing the possibility of revolutionary change. But what if we want none of these—neither tyranny, nor civil war, nor to perpetually settle for being ruled by the lesser of two evils?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/3.jpg\")
Subtle signs of unrest.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/2.jpg\")
The best this system can offer us.
\nIt’s not surprising that anarchists are concerned about the outcome of the election. Which administration comes to power—whether by electoral victory or by other means—will determine what kind of challenges we confront as we continue fighting to abolish police, prisons, borders, and other forms of oppression.
\n\nHere is the strongest argument we can imagine for voting: if we understand ourselves as engaged in an outright conflict with an opposing army comprised of all the forces of the state, it might make sense to take advantage of a chance, however small, to influence who will lead that army against us. From this perspective, it could be worth taking a half hour to cast a ballot—assuming there really is no more effective way to employ that particular half hour—but it could never justify diverting our attention from our offensive efforts or letting our enemies know where we sleep at night.1 (To those who worry that voting legitimizes our rulers, we might counter that the chief way we legitimize their rule is by not overthrowing them.)
\n\nOf course, the vast majority of people do not understand voting this way. The liberal obsession with voting as the be-all-end-all of political participation is a symptom of—and an alibi for—a perverse refusal to take responsibility for all the more effective ways that one can go about making change. Likewise, leftists who grant that the state presents a structural obstacle to their aspirations nonetheless tend to get their hopes up that the periodic reign of the lesser of two evils represents a step towards a better world rather than a way to stabilize the existing order. Consequently, they are always taken by surprise by the ways that state actors coopt and undermine their efforts.
\n\nTake the Workers Party in Brazil, Syriza in Greece, and—not so long ago—Barack Obama in the United States. All of these used progressive rhetoric and minor social reforms as cover to continue implementing a neoliberal agenda and cracking down on movements for social change, stoking popular disillusionment and ultimately creating the conditions for the far right to come to power. Only by comparison with Bolsonaro, New Democracy, and Trump—the far-right successors whose victories they rendered inevitable—can these administrations seem desirable to anyone on the left.
\n\nThis time around, no one has any illusions that progress or reform are anywhere on the ballot. Cynicism abounds. If, in his first presidential campaign, Trump essentially promised that he would return the white working class to the 1950s, Joe Biden is proposing to take America back in time to 2016. Politically speaking, Biden is a nonentity representing voters’ fear of being ruled by Trump, their despair of ever seeing meaningful change through the political system, and their failure to imagine a more effective approach to self-determination.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/6.jpg\")
“Without revolution, there is no change. Vote PCPE!” This graffiti promoting the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain aptly illustrates the contradictions of the leftist relationship to state democracy. Since the mid-19th century, Marx and his successors have acknowledged that there are structural reasons that the state does not serve the working class—while nonetheless urging workers to form parties and run for office.
\nThe more we focus on the election, the more we tend to internalize the logic of electoral politics: representation, majority rule, sovereignty as a winner-take-all competition, deference to procedure. Liberal concerns about preserving the rule of law and reforming the Electoral College serve to instill these premises.
\n\nFor example—if the reason that it would be unconscionable to accept a second Trump term is that we believe that the majority of duly registered voters in this country oppose his candidacy, what if Trump surprises everyone again by winning the election with a solid majority of the electoral college, or even winning the popular vote? Will we then be duty-bound to accept his authority and obey the rulings of his Supreme Court?
\n\nFrom our standpoint, it is moral cowardice to frame the problem with Trump remaining in power as a concern that he might do so illegally. The people who are focusing on this are forgetting that the reason we’re in this mess in the first place is because Trump was already elected through the same democratic electoral system that they are urging us to defend at all costs. Focusing on the possibility that Trump might pull off an underhanded victory this time around is tantamount to priming everyone who opposes Trump to be prepared to give up fighting and accept another four years of his administration if he wins “fair and square.” Just as significantly, this serves to accustom the same people to complacency if Biden takes power but goes on enforcing at least some of the policies of the Trump era—as he undoubtedly will. Democracy itself is the problem, beguiling people to disregard their own consciences in favor of protocol, regardless of the cost in human suffering.
\n\nAs anarchists, we didn’t set out to interrupt Trump’s inauguration because he lost the popular vote in 2016—we did it because we opposed his entire agenda and the idea that anyone should be able to wield that much power in the first place. We didn’t shut down airports because we anticipated that a duly appointed judge would eventually rule Trump’s Muslim ban unconstitutional—we did it because we believe that all human beings deserve the right to travel freely, whatever any president, judge, or voting bloc decrees. Our ethical compass is not majoritarian or procedural. Even if Trump were reelected with 100% of registered voters casting their ballots in his favor,2 we would continue to stand up to his attacks on immigrants, his federal interventions against Black Lives Matter protests, his force-propped authority.
\n\nThere is nothing inherently just about the will of the majority, any more than there is anything inherently ethical or honorable about obeying the law. If you really want to do away with injustice, make it impossible for any group—be it a minority or a majority—to systematically dominate others. Until we build extensive horizontal networks of solidarity to accomplish this, tyrants like Trump will continue coming to power, and centrists like Joe Biden will continue trying to meet them halfway in a manner that ratchets our society ever closer to tyranny, and all the voting in the world won’t help.
\n\n\n\n\n“Everything that happened in Nazi Germany was legal. It happened in courtrooms, just like this. It was done by judges, judges who wore robes and judges who quoted the law and judges who said ‘This is the law, respect it.’”
\n\n-Jerry Rubin, February 15, 1970, facing sentencing for contempt of court.
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/4.jpg\")
\nThe threat presented by Trump’s candidacy and the violence of his supporters is convenient for centrists like Joe Biden and his supporters at the New York Times. They have already spent the summer using this excuse to urge protesters to exit the streets and give up their leverage on murderous police departments, baselessly suggesting that protests could drive voters into Trump’s arms.
\n\nIn fact, if we study the polls over the course of 2020, Biden consolidated his lead after the George Floyd Rebellion got underway at the end of May; Trump only began to regain ground when the protests died down. If Trump loses this election and fails to retain power by other means, much of the credit must go to the rebels for compelling a subset of the ruling class to shift their allegiances to Biden by showing that four more years of Trump could render the United States ungovernable.
\n\nCentrists have always benefitted from the threat posed by the far right. Thanks to Trump, if Biden wins the election and secures power, millions of people who have every reason to fight against his express agenda will breathe a sigh of relief all the same. Liberals who would have continued to protest against racist immigration policies and police violence under Trump will quietly accept them under Biden, leaving the radicals who continue to oppose them isolated and exposed.
\n\nWe’ve come a long way since June 2020—a long way the wrong way. In the immediate aftermath of the uprising, when people around the country had seen demonstrators in Minneapolis abolish a police precinct via direct action, it was finally possible to imagine doing away with the institution of policing itself. Reformists diluted this bold proposition, substituting their proposal to “defund” the police via lobbying. Unsurprisingly, moving the struggle back to the terrain of party politics and government procedure produced dismal results. Now that the contest between Biden and Trump occupies everyone’s attention, even defunding the police seems hopelessly idealistic.
\n\nSo the Biden campaign represents the counterrevolution, no less than Donald Trump does. Trump’s absurd efforts to portray Biden as a far-left radical mobilize right-wing voters, but they also serve to close the Overton window to the left, framing the Biden campaign as the most radical platform conceivable.
\n\nThis tendency to water down radical proposals and reduce the scope of the popular imagination is inherent in majoritarian democracy. The exigencies of competing to form the biggest voting bloc in order to capture power tend to reduce all political platforms to the lowest common denominator, suppressing difference. Minorities of all kinds are structurally compelled to become junior partners in coalitions that have little incentive to prioritize their needs. Centralization gives rise to homogenization, marginalizing those who will not or cannot pretend to be like everyone else, reinforcing the existing order as the only possible reality.
\n\nPressuring people to support the lesser of two evils rather than pursuing their own dreams, electoral politics puts those dreams further and further out of reach.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/7.jpg\")
Graffiti in Italy: “Death to democracy. Anarchy and freedom!”
\nSo what’s the alternative? If we don’t grant whichever politician wins the election the right to govern us, what does that mean for the future of the United States of America? If the consensus reality imposed by majoritarian democracy makes radical change impossible, how do we proceed?
\n\nThe far right has already advanced their answer to these questions: civil war. If they cannot retain control of the state—the machinery of centralized violence—by electoral means, they are threatening to take violence into their own hands.
\n\nSome anti-fascists have adopted this rhetoric as well—and indeed, for some, the war has already arrived. “I see a civil war right around the corner,” Michael Reinoehl said to a reporter immediately before police murdered him in cold blood.
\n\nMost of those who warn of impending civil war aren’t explicitly advocating for it—they are just arguing that we should be prepared. Yet, as Emma Goldman spelled out in her essay “Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter,” preparing for war can hasten its arrival. It can also make it difficult to recognize other possibilities.
\n\nThe reasons that the far right are clamoring for civil war are complex. At the grassroots level, rank-and-file racists sense that they are on the losing end of the culture war and demographic shifts. Some have apparently concluded that the longer they put off open hostilities, the worse their position becomes. As they radicalize, demagogues like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson must radicalize along with them in order to retain their loyalty.
\n\nMeanwhile, the extractive industries that supply much of the Republican Party’s funding are concerned about these demographic changes eroding their voter base, leading to increased taxation and environmental regulations. They likely see pandemic safety measures as a practice run for ecological measures that could cut into their profits permanently—COVID-19 denial and climate change denial arise from the same sectors. They intend to keep maximizing their profits at all costs, ecological catastrophe and civil strife notwithstanding. Just as the George Floyd rebellion exerted leverage on the institutions of our society, Republicans aim to use the threat of mass violence as leverage to preserve the status quo.
\n\nBut do we stand to gain anything from escalating towards civil war? If the far right are calling for it, we should be especially suspicious of this paradigm.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/11.jpg\")
September 5, 2020: Militia members in Louisville, Kentucky.
\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—i.e., to achieve a monopoly on violence, control, and perceived legitimacy. The exigencies of civil war, no less than the exigencies of electoral competition, reward those who can appeal to the wealthy and powerful for resources and those who can reduce their agenda to the lowest common denominator in order to build mass.3
\n\n\n\n\n“Guided by the experiences of those who participated in the original uprising in Syria, we can learn a lot about the hazards of militarism in revolutionary struggle. Once the conflict with Assad’s government shifted from strikes and subversion to militarized violence, those who were backed by state or institutional actors were able to centralize themselves as the protagonists; power collected in the hands of Islamists and other reactionaries. As Italian insurrectionist anarchists famously argued, ‘the force of insurrection is social, not military.’ The uprising didn’t spread far enough fast enough to become a revolution. Instead, it turned into a gruesome civil war, bringing the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ to a close and with it the worldwide wave of revolts.”
\n\n \n
If war is politics by other means, then politics as we know it—the state and its most resilient and stable form to date, representative democracy—may have emerged as war by other means. Militarized conflicts that compel everyone to take sides according to a binary framework tend to engender the same hierarchies, the same mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and the same centralization of coercive force that are fundamental to the state. The state emerges when one side wins a war and imposes its authority; civil war resumes when the incentives to compete for power via elections rather than brute force break down. But in the end, civil war per se is bound to end with the reemergence of the state; anything else would require a revolution that transforms the participants, not a binary conflict that ends with one party dominating the other. In this regard, if war is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote, we might say that goes for civil war as well.
\n\nA brief review of US history confirms that representative democracy has always existed on a spectrum with civil war. Bleeding Kansas is perhaps the best known example of this: for years, people fought and killed each other in a struggle to determine whether Kansas would vote to preserve the institution of slavery. The same rivals who would beat and shoot each other one week would cast ballots against each other the next, then go back to beating and shooting each other.
\n\nTrump and his supporters are part of a centuries-old tradition that understands democracy as a variant of civil war. Trump’s strategy of voter intimidation, for example, draws on a long heritage extending back to the Plug Uglies and other gangs that employed violence to systematically rig the outcome of elections.
\n\n\n\n\n“Stealing elections is how democracy works. It’s how it has always worked. If you legitimize a monopoly on coercive force and authority by claiming to represent the will of the people, then obviously subsequent power struggles will focus on defining which people constitute ‘the People.’”
\n\n-Peter Gelderloos, “Preparing for Electoral Unrest and a Right-Wing Power Grab”
\n
In this context, we can recognize Trump’s emphasis on Nuremberg-style mass rallies as a demagogic form of democracy originally descended from open clashes within the polity:
\n\n\n\n\n“Winning an election is one way to claim the legitimacy of having been chosen by the people; being acclaimed in the streets or instituted by popular violence are other ways. In ancient Sparta, leaders were elected to the council of elders by a shouting contest—the candidate who received the loudest applause won. The technical term for this is acclamation… This is the oldest form of democracy—Spartan rather than Athenian—in which the masses legitimize a movement or ruling party as representative by acclaiming it in person, rather than through elections.
\n\n \n
So civil war is not a solution to the problems with representative democracy. It simply continues the logic of the majoritarian contest for power on another terrain, the terrain of open violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/1.jpg\")
Both representative democracy and civil war are essentially spectator sports, subordinating the agency of ordinary people to politicians or militia members.
\nIf the risk of focusing on the election alongside liberals is that we will internalize the logic of electoral politics, then one risk of spending so much time fighting the far right is that we will internalize their premises, as well, coming to assume that the only alternative to electoral politics is militarized clashes. The proliferation of guns at demonstrations seems to reflect this—not so much the guns themselves as the way that they are coming to dominate our imaginations.
\n\nA few accelerationists have welcomed the escalation of hostilities, hailing a post-democratic era in which those who are mobilized by different ideologies, value systems, and notions of belonging will fight it out openly. This is redundant at best: we already live in an era of civil war that will almost certainly intensify. Ukraine—Charlottesville—one, two, many Syrias. The question is not how to foment social conflict, but how to maximize the likelihood that the outcome of these conflicts will be more freedom, more egalitarian relations, and hopefully, in the long run, more harmony.
\n\nOrdinarily, the anarchist position on elections is to reject the centrality of voting as the be-all-end-all of political participation. In 2020, it is just as important to reject civil war as the alternative. This is not an argument against partisanship per se—rather, it’s a question of what kind of partisanship we want to foster. Rather than joining one of the rival factions competing for control of the state, let’s look for ways to transform these struggles and the social bodies that are engaged in them, ways to broaden the horizons of possibility.
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\nIn place of civil war, which pits discrete factions against each other in a contest of arms, we aim to spread revolt on a horizontal and decentralized basis, destabilizing the institutions of power and the allegiances and conflicts that underpin them. The first step in this process is to dismiss the idea that any law, majority, or leadership has an inherent claim on our obedience. The second step is to throw out any lingering romanticism about what we can accomplish by force of arms alone—we seek to transform our relations with others, not to exterminate them. The third step is to refuse our roles in perpetuating the existing order, whether as active participants in it or passive accomplices who permit it to continue, setting contagious examples of rebellion that can spread throughout society at large.
\n\nThe ungovernable uprisings of May and June demonstrated how effective this can be. Civil war revolves around fighting an enemy; in revolt, we offer those who are not yet involved roles as protagonists in their own version of a shared narrative. The further rebellion and refusal spread from one sector of society to the next, the greater the potential for real social change. Altering the conditions in which people conceptualize the issues that affect them and decide how to align themselves, we can redraw the lines of conflict—for example, from “conservatives versus liberals” to “residents versus evictions.”
\n\nWe should also explore all the other ways we can relate to each other besides warfare, setting positive precedents for coexisting and cooperating across lines of difference. The mutual aid programs that have multiplied since March have the virtue of creating connections between people who might not otherwise identify with each other, diminishing the likelihood that conflicts will escalate to lethal force. In addition to interrupting the prevailing order, we also have to weave a new social fabric, making peace as an offensive measure against needless destructive conflicts.4
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Necessary but not sufficient.
\nThis November, if Trump attempts to hold on to power and legalistic solutions fail to resolve the crisis, some liberal centrists will press us to serve as the shock troops of democracy, taking risks that they would never take themselves in order to preserve the integrity of an electoral system that has always suppressed our voices and our autonomy. Far-right Republicans and outright fascists would love to see us locked in symmetrical warfare with better-armed militias who want nothing more than a fixed target and a legitimate excuse to employ their weapons. We should be careful not to end up playing either of these roles, but to chart our own path, evaluating the effectiveness of our actions according to the extent to which they achieve our goals.
\n\nIf armed militias attempt to seize the capitol buildings to pressure the state to permit Trump to retain office, reprising the tactic they tested out during the “re-open” protests in April, we should not go to meet them there in open combat. Rather, we should identify all the pressure points throughout this society via which we can exert leverage asymmetrically, all the supply chains that deliver the resources that the militias, their backers, and the state itself depend on. Imagine a wave of blockades, strikes, self-organized assemblies, and cooperative actions targeting a variety of aspects of the state and the economy, arising from a multiplicity of overlapping forms of organization that cannot all be coopted by Democrats eager to dictate terms, setting precedents that will stand long after this particular political moment has passed. By seizing the opportunity to interpose our own narratives and our own agendas, speaking directly to the everyday needs of ordinary people, we could come out of the crisis stronger and better connected.
\n\nIf there has to be a crisis, let’s make the most of it.
\n\nIf there is any unambiguously good news this electoral season, it is that neither of the major candidates represent anything like a radical agenda. Had Bernie Sanders become the Democratic candidate and won the election, he would have faced the same internal sabotage from career politicians that prevented him from winning the nomination, not to mention the structural challenges that doomed the socialist aspirations of the Workers Party and Syriza. His efforts to temper cutthroat capitalism could only have failed, inducing some of his supporters to embrace centrist realpolitik while leaving others disillusioned and bitter. Better that the center is discredited under Biden.
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2016 was a lifetime ago.
\nFor years, we have argued that owing to the consequences of neoliberal globalization, the state can do little to mitigate the impact of capitalism on the general public. Under these conditions, no party can hold power long without losing legitimacy and catalyzing opposition. We saw this under the Workers Party in Brazil, under Syriza in Greece, under Obama in the US. Now we have seen it under Trump as well—the grassroots nationalists and white supremacists who suffered so many reverses under his administration would probably be in a stronger position today if they had been able to present themselves as the opposition to an unpopular Clinton administration. As we argued the day after Trump won the 2016 election:
\n\n\n\n\nLet us look for silver linings in this cloud of oncoming tear gas. Perhaps it is for the best that someone like Trump is coming to power now, rather than four years hence. Let the right wing demonstrate that their solutions are just as inadequate as those proposed from the Left. In a time of economic crises, ecological collapse, and spreading war, the state is a hot potato: no one will be able to hold it long.
\n
If it is true that state power has become a hot potato that burns whoever tries to hold it—a thesis that will be tested again this November—the last thing we need is for our revolutionary proposals to be conflated with the watered-down program of some political party. If we are to make deep and lasting change, our movements must continue growing from the grassroots, demonstrating the efficacy of direct action, fostering an appetite for fundamental change, never confused with a party program that could be implemented through the existing apparatus of state power.
\n\nIf Biden succeeds in securing the presidency, we must immediately pivot to confronting him, showing all the ways that his administration will continue carrying out Trump’s agenda. There must be no confusion about the distance between grassroots social movements and the political party in the White House.
\n\nUnder a Biden presidency, we will likely see increasing attacks from a frustrated far right. The millions of racists Trump has emboldened will not simply shift their allegiances to the likes of the Lincoln Project if he is defeated at the polls. We should be able to weather their attacks the same way we defeated the fighting formations of the far right during the Trump era, provided our comrades on the left and towards the center do not leave us to fight alone. Once more, this will be determined by whether we permit Biden and his cronies to create the impression that the crisis of the Trump years has been resolved.
\n\nIn any case, rather than facing a choice between democracy and civil war, we face a future that almost certainly holds both. It’s up to us to make sure that it holds something else as well—contagious momentum towards liberation.
\n\nAs we wrote four years ago, hours after Trump won the election,
\n\n\n\n\nCradle the seed, even in the volcano’s mouth.
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\nIn many states, registering to vote renders your home address a matter of public record. Those who wish to avoid this can register as homeless. ↩
\nIncidentally, no US presidential candidate has ever received the votes of even a quarter of the population. ↩
\nIn an interview earlier this month, a longtime anarchist fighter in Rojava described how this played out in the early years of the Syrian Civil War: “As the fights escalated and the war intensified, weaker factions were absorbed by stronger factions or just disbanded. When ISIS started to penetrate into Syria in 2013, the opposition factions had to chose sides—with Daesh or against them.” ↩
\nIn this regard, we are inspired by the recent anti-war statements from rebels on both sides of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. We can learn a lot from anarchists and other anti-militarists who lived through the civil wars in former Yugoslavia, Colombia, Peru, and Northern Ireland. ↩
\nIn the following analysis, Peter Gelderloos explores the motivations and capabilities of the various factions that are likely to participate in the forthcoming conflict over the outcome of the 2020 election, describes how this figures in right-wing efforts to establish a revamped white supremacy in the context of the existing democratic system, and reviews what we can hope to accomplish by resisting.
\n\nOf course, it’s far from certain what will happen starting in November, especially with Donald Trump now in the hospital. But we should never underestimate Trump’s ability to bounce back. Though he has failed to implement much of his agenda thus far, nothing has yet halted his efforts.
\n\nAs our colleagues have explored, Trump’s strategy of voter intimidation draws on a long heritage in the United States, extending back to the “plug uglies” and other gangs that employed violence to systematically rig the outcome of elections. But Trump’s plan extends far beyond the voting process, as explored in the Atlantic.
\n\nEvery possible outcome of the struggle over the 2020 election involves considerable risks. No matter how it occurs, a Trump victory would further polarize the country, radicalizing many liberals and leftists, but it would also likely lead to a tremendous amount of bloodshed and repression. If Biden wins the election in a landslide without significant resistance from Trump’s supporters, he will surely crack down on radicals and introduce policies that are oppressive to poor, Black, brown, indigenous, and undocumented people in order to placate the right-wing forces with whom he hopes to re-establish a truce. If Biden ends up in office thanks chiefly to the efforts of social movements in the street, it could discourage him from immediately cracking down on them, but this path involves passing through a very dangerous period of open conflict in which victory is by no means guaranteed.
\n\nAnd regardless of what happens between now and January, social polarization in the United States will continue to deepen. A large segment of the Republican Party is openly and perhaps irrevocably committed to a program of brute force, and they will still be pursuing this strategy regardless of who holds power in February.
\n\nAs usual, we will get out of the coming crisis what we are able to accomplish for ourselves on the basis of our own capabilities and efforts, nothing more. No one is coming to save us. The outcome of the Egyptian revolution shows us how badly things could go awry if we count on the military and Silicon Valley corporate executives to resolve a crisis, as many Democrats do. Rather than just scrambling to respond to the immediate threat of Trump seizing power, participants in social movements should strategize for a long-term struggle, evaluating the effectiveness of different approaches according to whether they deepen grassroots relationships and collective power. This will hardly be the last battle.
\n\nFinally, we urge those who are speaking in general terms about a general strike to study the example of the November 2 general strike at the high point of Occupy Oakland.1 In an era when so many of us are out of work or fill inessential roles in the service industry, it is not enough simply to walk out on the job; one must be proactive, interrupting business as usual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/5.jpg\")
\nPeter Gelderloos
\n\nIt is vital that anarchist strategy be situated: that we see strategy not as a chessboard from above, as in the authoritarian worldview, but as a perspective on the situation we inhabit, looking outward with our own eyes.
\n\nNonetheless, we should not make the mistake of assuming that everyone we see on the other side of the barricades, those we are fighting against, are on the same side or want the same thing. In the conflict that is building up pressure around the US elections, combative fascist organizations want a victory in the streets, whereas the Republican Party wants a victory in the courts. They each see the other as a naïve ally but also as a means to an end. They will each try to pull the conflict into their chosen terrain. Of course, the conflict will occur in both terrains simultaneously, but which one is dominant, the relative degree of their strength, will have a huge effect on events.
\n\nWhat follows is a brief approximation of the strength of the different sectors that will be on the other side of the barricades, and the direction they will try to pull in. I will try to use an evidence-based approach that assumes grand social machinations leave a footprint, in contrast to conspiracy theory thinking that assumes the motivations and conniving of important sectors of society can be entirely hidden from view.
\n\nThe military brass generally dislike Trump and they roundly oppose an interventionist domestic politics. Historically, military coups are rarely airtight secrets in their preparatory phase, and over the last four years the military has shown itself willing to leak information that is harmful to Trump. In this case, we can read the lack of evidence of coup preparations as evidence that no such preparations are taking place.
\n\nOn its face, this means that a coup is not in the cards, if we are going to use that word with any precision. Without the military, and with existing paramilitary organizations lacking anything near the level of strength and coordination they would need pull something like that off, we have to turn our attention to other kinds of power plays that can be equally dangerous but that function in completely different ways.
\n\nThe neutrality of the military, however, bears examining, as many in the center Left have already misinterpreted it. Many Democrats have predicted that the military will frog march Trump out of office if he tries to seize another term, but this is a grave misunderstanding, both of how the military view their neutrality and of exactly what kind of power grab Trump is planning. The brass have openly stated that they will make no interventions into the electoral process, and in this case I think we can believe them. And as we shall see shortly, it is actually the Democrats’ strategy, and not Trump’s, that relies more on a military intervention.
\n\nThe main terrain in which the military actually comes into play is in street conflicts. In a settler democracy, the only time the military is systematically used against the citizenry is to put down anti-racist, particularly Black and Indigenous, rebellions. However, throughout the George Floyd uprising, there has been significant resistance to the deployment of the military against the protests.
\n\nIn unrest around the elections, they will be similarly resistant to deployment against protests, while they will gladly accede to deployment against an uprising that appears to threaten democratic continuity. The threshold between protest and uprising is subjective and contextual. To us, the outpouring of anger and solidarity after George Floyd was murdered was an uprising, because it was aimed at the heart of power in Amerikkka. To progressives and centrists, it was a protest movement, because they were convinced they could discipline the movement to adhere to watered-down demands that could be integrated into the present system. For the military to accept that it was an uprising, and thus a valid target for their violence, they would have had to accept that all those millions of people had already cast off allegiance to the state. Obviously, they do not use a revolutionary criterion to determine whether something is an uprising. Rather, their criterion is: Can this rebellion be reincorporated into the dominant system? And do we want it to be reincorporated?
\n\nOther factors play a role in this determination: how multi-racial the movement is and how much social support it has, how lethal the street conflict is and the extent of material damage it causes. They will prefer to view any unrest arising in the sensitive period of an election as a civic demand for a properly functioning democracy that obeys its own rules. An uprising, in their eyes, will be when the crowds decide to kick out their current rulers by any means necessary.
\n\nBecause our institutions see white people as citizens and always doubt the civic status of Black people, the fascists and the militia movement enjoy a much higher threshold before the military is used against them. And their modus operandi is for lone wolves to carry out the most violent actions, meaning their movement can effectively escalate towards conditions of civil war without collectively reaping the repression or the full force of military pacification.
\n\nThe anti-racist movement, on the other hand, will be the target of military pacification if the level of conflict goes beyond the subjective line between violent protest and incipient civil war. And this is problematic, because the police, the fascists, and the Democratic Party will probably have a greater influence over the level of conflict than the anti-racist movement. It should also be pointed out that military pacification involves multiple thresholds, encompassing the mobilization of the National Guard for symbolic effect and logistical support, the use of the military for patrolling streets, and green-lighting the military to use lethal force in the epicenters of conflict.
\n\nIn the most violent scenario, the military take action in the streets to squelch an incipient civil war and restore the constitutional order, which in effect would mean defending the prerogative of the courts and legislatures to decide a contested election (a legal contest Trump has an advantage in). This action would set a dangerous precedent and most of the casualties would be radicals and people on the far left. However, it is unlikely that this would change the military and political culture enough for Trump to stay in power beyond the legally limited eight years. We might recall that the military has been used against the US population multiple times over the last half century without changing the constitutional order.
\n\nIt should be noted that the military today are at a twenty-year high in the amount of social legitimacy they enjoy, thanks primarily to the Democrats. After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the military’s involvement in atrocities was widely known. By favoring troop draw-downs and shifting lethal force to the more impersonal drone strikes, Obama facilitated a narrative in which military brutality was political in character, and thus a property of Bush administration excesses rather than the military itself. Under Trump, Democrats have gone even further, fawning over the military and holding them up as the gold standard of a democratic institution (which, historically, they are—though people who use “democracy” as a synonym for liberty fail to understand that). And because Trump has been a decidedly un-hawkish president, the movement has not had as many opportunities to spread critical awareness about what sorts of things the military trains people to do.
\n\nThe lack of effective organizing among veterans becomes apparent at times like these, when we have few or no channels of communication with soldiers. Revolutionary movements are usually only able to withstand military levels of repression by sparking mutinies. At least in the short-term, we are faced with a conflict with high risks and not a lot to gain. As such, we should probably focus on what negative outcomes we might be able to prevent, and what sorts of partial victories we might accomplish, given that the meaning of the movement at this point will be watered down to simple opposition to Trump. Creating revolutionary relationships and spreading non-reformist visions starting in 2021 might be the most we can win at this point.
\n\nThe police, in contrast to the military, are at an all-time low in terms of their social legitimacy, thanks to the George Floyd uprising as well as social movements before and since. However, policing is a constant activity, and the more criticism and contempt they receive, the more they double down.
\n\nOn election day, it is likely police will play a role in some of the disturbances. Long-simmering tensions will boil over in response to the voter suppression efforts that are already being planned in racialized neighborhoods. Cops will be called in to pacify subjects who are angry about their vote being denied because they don’t have the right ID or for some other excuse, or, most likely, in the case of people defending themselves from right-wing harassment. The cops will do as they do. People will film it, and something might even kick off on site, in front of all the frustrated people waiting to vote. With a riot on their hands, the police may close down the polling station. More gasoline for the fire.
\n\nAs we shall see, the most significant conflicts are likely to happen after Election Day. In these, we will witness an already familiar pattern. Police, often in concert with right-wingers, will attack anti-racist protestors who are in the streets to show their opposition to Trump, the racist suppression of votes, other acts of police brutality, and the system as a whole. Many city governments will attempt to stage-manage large peaceful protests in coordination with the Democratic Party, but in at least some cases, the police will sabotage these spectacles of peaceful citizenry, starting police riots. And in places where people decide to riot for their own good reasons, plenty of “citizen journalists” will spread the conspiracy theory that police provocateurs started it. Such conspiracy theorists delegitimize people fighting back, and they obscure the fact that true police riots are impossible to miss: the pigs bull rush the crowd, laying out left and right, with no provocation.
\n\nResults will vary from city to city. In some places, police brutality will pacify the movement, but elsewhere it will provoke more people to come out into the streets, or to move from protest to revolt. In general, police will help create an impasse that cannot be resolved by police action alone.
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\nCustoms and Border Protection (CBP) are Trump’s favored police force, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is probably the segment of the government bureaucracy that is most loyal to him, though a large portion of career bureaucrats in the middle levels of the Department—between the jackbooted cops on the bottom and the appointees at the very top—are still not in his camp.
\n\nAn honest evaluation shows that Trump does not have a high degree of control. The Atlantic accurately refers to him as a “weak authoritarian.” He clearly has authoritarian impulses and an authoritarian effect on any organization he manages to dominate (e.g., the Republican Party), but most of his attempts to translate his will into policy have actually failed. The CBP distinctly represents a force he can use to make strategic interventions.
\n\nIn post-electoral unrest, he is likely to send his federal police to epicenters of unrest and revolt to provide a level of force superior to the local police but short of the military. In July, CBP and other federal officers were not able to neutralize the revolt in Portland, and no matter what agency uses them, riot policing tactics will be unlikely to pacify the movement across the board. However, the CBP does possess the military force of a mid-sized army, though their experience and training for deployment in urban settings—not as cops but as a military—is an open question. If they were instructed to use a level of force consistent with a military intervention, it is very possible the movement would be unable to withstand them. Such an intervention would cause an immense amount of political blowback, but Trump has been able to weather most of the blowback he has provoked so far, having to walk himself back only a couple times in his whole presidency. His current view is certainly that he can get away with almost anything.
\n\nWhen Barr and Trump declared several cities “anarchist jurisdictions,” it was widely seen as an attempt to justify federal intervention, and at the time, the President and his AG were without a doubt already thinking about the elections. Those cities are probably the most likely sites for a brutal federal police intervention. However, none of them are in the key swing states. What would the relation be between a CBP assault in those cities and Trump’s shady electoral campaign?
\n\nFor starters, Trump obviously hates the anti-racist movement. When people protest against him, he wants his supporters to “rough them up.” The right tends to favor strategies of breaking the resistance rather than recuperating it. This never works in the long run, but it can definitely work in the short run.
\n\nGoing beyond his authoritarian personality to questions of strategy, Trump is most intelligent—and this is one of the few regards in which that word can be applied to him—at working the media spectacle. His recipe for victory has always relied on having an extremely motivated base, even though that base has always been a minority. Unleashing extreme police violence against the anti-racist movement is guaranteed crowd pleaser for his voters, especially the millions of cops who will see the repressive campaigns as an inspiring call of duty, a nod to the paramilitary mobilizations that resolve the crisis of whiteness, as I describe in Diagnostic of the Future.
\n\nOn another level, such a strategy would create spectacles of chaos and lawlessness in Democratic cities that could serve as a further rallying cry to frightened white voters and to the militia movement. This was Trump’s strategy throughout the George Floyd rebellion, and though the CBP intervention in Portland emboldened people in the street rather than pacifying them, the way the media portrayed the unrest decreased support for the Black Lives Matter movement among white people likely to vote Republican, the only demographic to considerably withdraw support from the movement after June.
\n\nUsed again after the elections, this strategy would have the added bonus of distracting media attention from the legal maneuvers in battleground states where Republican lawyers were trying to disqualify votes, creating a bloody spectacle in which the most militaristic scenes are associated with Democratic states.
\n\nIn view of this possibility, it’s noteworthy that the chief long-term impact of the September 26 Proud Boys rally in Portland—which many feared would involve considerable violence in revenge for the shooting death of a member of Patriot Prayer a month earlier—was that Portland police officers were designated as federal marshals for the remainder of 2020. It often turns out that the greatest threat fascists pose is in what they enable the state to do, rather than what they can do by themselves.
\n\nThe capitalists who support the right-wing populism that has taken hold in several of the world’s most powerful countries are a small minority. Most capitalists, especially those who are significantly higher up the ladder than mid-grade investors and real estate developers, are strongly opposed to a second Trump term.
\n\nHowever, they know they can profit under either president, and the global capitalist economy is currently in a situation that favors short-term strategies, due to the grave uncertainties around long-term growth. Far from being a president who has increased government interventionism, Trump has represented a politics of extreme deregulation that has provided a windfall to capitalists in extractive and financial industries. The fossil fuel sector makes for a great example. They are among the most conservative of capitalists, but nearly all of the ones who are higher up understand that fossil fuels have no future. Stalwarts like Exxon have been losing considerable ground to companies like BP that got on the energy transition bandwagon years ago. They all know that they need progressive policies, they need something like a Green New Deal to get government funding to pay for a transition to so-called green energy infrastructure. But because longer-term investments are so uncertain—in no small part because of a lack of political will to fund the energy transition—the nature of their trade compels them to stick their faces in the trough of short-term profit.
\n\nFrom the World Economic Forum to the Milken Conference, capitalism’s smartest planners, innovators, and technocrats are warning that the chief dangers to the future of their system are climate change, right-wing populism, and trade wars, with Christine Lagarde, one of the most important technocrats in the world, warning that capitalism might not exist anymore in just 20 years because of these dangers. All of these dangers are caused by or exacerbated by the right, whereas the left is the only sector currently offering proposals that might save capitalism.
\n\nSo yes, a majority of mid-level capitalists and the overwhelming majority of high-level capitalists prefer Biden. However, even greater is their preference for stability—for a relatively smooth election that most people will accept as valid. They do not want tanks in the street of the country that, for the most part, is still the center of global capitalism, and certainly not on an occasion as routine as an election.
\n\nYet they face an unprecedented problem. The development of technocratic governing structures has not kept pace with the rise in social conflict and the crisis of democracy, so at a moment of considerable instability, capitalists find themselves with less fine-tuned control over government.
\n\nIn a way, this indicates the demise of the political-economic system created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which has served as the basis for the so-called American Century. FDR’s rise to power was effectively a coup of Washington over Wall Street. Capitalists accepted this relative loss of power because they saw that an extremely powerful, interventionist government pursuing the best conditions for capital accumulation on a global scale would be better for them than a regime of less regulated markets, less interventionism, no central planning, and more competition. Subsequently, all major political parties were united in seeking the best conditions for capital accumulation. That situation has come to a crashing end, with isolationist Trump coming to power in the US and the pro-Brexit Tories in the UK. Neoliberal capitalists are still unsure how to respond. In the short-term, a number of billionaires are making sure Biden is the better funded candidate, and some are even financing voter registration in Florida, but we will probably see their more salient, forceful interventions after the election is resolved.
\n\nAnother question concerns the new technologies at the cutting edge of the capitalist economy, specifically social network technologies. It is well known that Facebook enabled Trump’s 2016 victory and that Facebook has specific algorithms that favor divisiveness—divisiveness is more attention grabbing, and attention is what represents value to advertisers. This provided the far right with a huge platform. It is equally well known that Silicon Valley as a whole, one of the most important sectors of global capitalism, tends to oppose the far right and the policies they espouse, and it is evident that the growth of the far right has created a social polarization that undermines social consensus and perhaps even the possibility of democracy itself.
\n\nCan all this instability be explained as the result of the myopic obsession of a Harvard man-child seeking to maintain his company’s dominant share of the advertising market in an environment of fierce competition, to hell with the consequences? Can any of it be chalked up to the concealed racism of the Silicon Valley elite, or the religious mystique that the advertising industry invests in their ability to make the masses believe anything they want? It wouldn’t be the first time the powerful undermined themselves through a narcissistic fascination with their own power. In this case, that means figuring out exactly which lies they can best sell to which people, based on purchasing history, and exploiting it to the maximum, as Cambridge Analytica did with Facebook data.
\n\nFacebook is relaxing fact-checking standards in an election year, and they already know such policies helped Trump win in 2016. Insider accounts reveal the highest levels of the company are sensitive to politicized right-wing accusations about liberal bias: Facebook has recognized that Trump’s base is a highly profitable, niche clientele for them. It is probably relevant that Facebook has been losing market share for years now, most dramatically in the US, but that this July its stocks shot up as it managed to beat a trend of slumping revenue growth.
\n\nHowever we interpret the current allegiances of Silicon Valley, the fact that capitalists are realizing their unrivaled wealth does not currently enable them to buy certainty in their efforts to exert control over the future will likely motivate them to support a rational reorganization of society and government once the dust settles. As soon as they close the next deal…
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/1.jpg\")
Stockbrokers have been enthusiastic about Trump’s efforts to deregulate the economy, but they are not enthusiastic about the United States descending into chaos.
\nThe far right is a hodgepodge that runs the gamut from Constitutionalist militias to neo-Nazi gangs, with plenty of crypto-fascist umbrella organizations and Western chauvinists in between. Two things have become clear over the last few years. First, they have the capacity and the willingness to murder significant numbers of people in oppressed communities and anti-racist protests. Second, they do not have the power to stand up to large social movements—and even against just the most radical sectors, primarily organized anarchists, they often cannot hold their own.
\n\nAnti-fascist strategies of the last few years have proven very effective at limiting the spread of fascist and racist discourses and preventing the growth of the far right movement itself. With no easy victories and more than a few resounding defeats, the far right has crumbled into frequent infighting, snitching, and equivocation. Most of its individual members and constituent groups are still out there, but they are much weaker than they would be if not for all the anti-fascist activity.
\n\nBecause of this disorganization and sense of frustration, one of the ways they will take action is through lone wolf attacks. Such attacks may be the main cause of deaths related to electoral unrest, but they will not be effective at stopping the anti-racist movement. In the month that remains, anarchists and other anti-fascists would do well to consider what the most likely targets for such attacks are and take measures to defend them, while also reaching out to spaces we might not have affinity with, such as churches and nightclubs, to make sure they are thinking about these possibilities.
\n\nLone wolf attacks from the far right sometimes include attacks against police. While such attacks may make it more difficult for the police to work together with the far right, that may be too charitable a view, as it assumes that police will act rationally to protect their own interests.
\n\nThe far right has signaled that they want a civil war, spreading the idea that they’re just waiting for the moment that the gloves come off. But Trump has not formally integrated the far right in any organizational way. There is no command structure like the one that was central to historical fascist movements or more recently to Golden Dawn in Greece.
\n\nThis does not make the far right any less dangerous, or any less capable of murdering our comrades and loved ones. It does mean that they will not be able to play the role of a paramilitary force backing a coup attempt, which I’ve argued the Republicans aren’t planning anyway. It also means that some of the things they do during electoral unrest may clash with Republican strategies—for example, killing cops, giving their power grab the appearance of a racist coup, or suppressing votes in a way that cannot be defended in court.
\n\nIn a settler state like the US, paramilitaries work in a diffuse, decentralized manner. Their job has been to attack social enemies on their own initiative. Historically, this has meant enslaved people and their descendants, indigenous people, and anti-capitalist movements. Their historical role has not included major maneuvers in the political sphere such as coups (understanding politics in the alienated sense as the poleis)—and it has been more than a century since the organized brawls that used to decide elections in the 19th century. Such maneuvers require operational coordination across the board.
\n\nThere have recently been key moments when far-right forces have developed a certain level of operational coordination with specific police forces—on the Mexican border and more recently in Portland and Kenosha, for example. They may try to achieve an even greater level of coordination around the elections, which could include protests and attacks on state houses in battleground states where the governors or legislatures are Democrat-controlled and are trying to appoint electors for Biden. But the majority of far-right forces around the country will be uncoordinated, attacking any institution or group Trump might name in his tweets, definitely attacking the anti-racist movement, and quite possibly also attacking judges, media organizations, Black churches, synagogues, and other spaces.
\n\nEven as they work together with the police, some of their actions will actually cause the protest movement to grow—and as we have seen throughout 2020, they will frequently not be able to win control of the streets.
\n\nIn any case, it will be a moment of truth for the far right, and we should be able to see how much of their rhetoric and self-image is bluster and how much they have actually prepared themselves, psychologically and physically, to attempt to eliminate anarchists and the left. The fallout from this conflict might well define the relationship between the far right and the Republican Party for years to come.
\n\nOne of the best ways to minimize the harm they will cause is for every community to think about what strategies local militias and street fascists will try to take, how to respond when they attack protests, and how to respond if they attempt more symbolic actions like taking over government buildings. Rather than putting themselves in needlessly dangerous situations, people should evaluate on a case-by-base basis what is to be gained from attempting to eject the far right from a specific place.
\n\nIn very general terms, I think the most important place to be is protecting the anti-racist movement, which is currently the most radical expression of struggle. Protecting polling places should probably be left to progressive de-escalation activists, both to give them the opportunity to see if they actually have the organizational capacity to make their own chosen strategies viable rather than just attacking real social movement participants for being “violent,” and because of the certainty that if anarchists are present at any polling place where there is unrest, the Democrats will try to pin the blame on us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/2.jpg\")
Coordination between the state and paramilitaries remains uneven, to say the least.
\nThe Republican Party is attempting to win the election through legal, semi-legal, and extralegal means. Donald Trump is not preparing a coup attempt in any traditional understanding of the term. This needs to be emphasized so we can prepare effective strategies for November and beyond. In the previous section, we have seen the fruits of an effectively deployed anti-fascist strategy. Every strategy has its advantages and disadvantages, and one of the risks of focusing chiefly on fighting fascism is that it can reinforce democracy—and with it, capitalism and the state.
\n\nStealing elections is how democracy works. It’s how it has always worked. If you legitimize a monopoly on coercive force and authority by claiming to represent the will of the people, then obviously subsequent power struggles will focus on defining which people constitute “the People,” giving a bullhorn to the ones in your camp and silencing the others. When we discuss the specific ways the Republicans are planning to steal this election, let’s not encourage the ahistorical naïveté that this is somehow shocking or unprecedented.
\n\nGranted, this year the theft will be a little more crass—though we only have to go back to the Civil Rights era to find even more extreme examples. Electoral manipulation is completely in line with Trump’s psychology, unlike a coup. Normally, the psychology of a candidate would not have a huge impact on the functioning of a large institution, but in the case of the Republican Party, Trump has effectively tamed it—only, of course, through his effective use of equally powerful institutions like Twitter, Facebook, and Fox News. Many Republicans dislike and disagree with Trump, but they recognize that he can cause them to lose re-election, so they focus on maintaining the strength of the Party and hoping they’ll be rid of him in another four years.
\n\nAs a real estate magnate, Trump prefers and understands the battlefield of lawsuits and legal loopholes. It is also abundantly clear that Trump is a cowardly person, and though flirting with a fascist fan base stokes his authoritarian ego, in questions of policy he avoids open conflict and militaristic disputes.
\n\nOver the last 20 to 40 years, strategies for stealing elections have differed markedly between the two parties. Nowadays, Republicans win elections through voter suppression. In elections with high turnout, they lose; in elections with low turnout, they win. They accomplish voter suppression by making it harder to register, by purging felons from voter rolls, by harassing people and making it harder to vote the day of the elections, and by installing vote-counting machines with lower accuracy rates in poor and racialized districts so that a higher percentage of ballots will be thrown out.
\n\nAll of the evidence suggests that Republican efforts to win this election focus on legal measures. Their front line soldiers are lawyers. Aside from the maneuver to gut the Post Office, they are trying to make it easier to challenge voters at the polls, to create long lines so that the polls close before everyone can vote, to throw out mail-in ballots, and to mount legal challenges the day of the election and immediately afterward to stop or delay vote counting.
\n\nTrump’s calls for supporters to show up at polling places and harass “suspicious” voters is not the main thrust of the Party’s strategy. In some cases, it may even create legal headaches for Republicans—though it could also provoke riots, which is as good an excuse as any for police to close down polling places.
\n\nHowever, it’s possible that this friction between Trump’s populism and the bureaucratic efficiency of the Republican Party machine represents a sort of growing pain. Trump is probably too much of an amoral opportunist to be understood as an ideologue, but he is undoubtedly an enthusiastic white supremacist—and as such, he has been instrumental to an ideological shift in the Republican Party from genteel good ol’ boys to avowed white nationalists like Stephen Miller. These are both modes of reactionary white supremacists (as opposed to the progressive white supremacists of the Democratic Party), but Trump’s violating of taboos has enabled white nationalists to gain ground and move in the open.
\n\nOne of the ways they are doing this is to encourage white militias and spread the conspiracy theory that the left wants to start a civil war, so that when the right carries out paramilitary actions, they can pretend to be victims acting in self-defense. It also seems clear that these white nationalists, still a minority even in Trump’s camp, have not thought out the consequences of their own strategy; they are acting in response to the crisis of whiteness, promoting white mobilization as a good thing, without fully understanding how to integrate it in the existing system. However, there are plenty of precedents for them to choose from.
\n\nAn article in the Intercept argues that Trump is enacting a fascistic pattern, starting out by calling attention to an external danger—immigrants—and then turning on an internal enemy, antifascists and anarchists. While this is certainly true, what his team is aiming for is a common occurrence in US history, contrary to the progressives who see Trump as an aberration. We can call it patrician democracy: the longstanding, classical idea that only the “right sort” of people ought to vote, including their loyal dependents if necessary. Through much of the 20th century, KKK terrorism was designed to limit the political participation of the racialized lower classes, as well as to attack the Jewish communist bogeyman who supposedly came to stir them up.
\n\nIt is fully compatible with the Republican imaginary to project a democracy ruled by upstanding middle- and upper-class citizens, protected from any threats by mobilized white patriots. Most of US history has looked something like this. Whether they can actually reinstitute that state of affairs now is doubtful, and many veteran Republican pollsters have been sounding the alarm that catering to reactionary whites is a losing strategy in the mid-term, centering as it does on a demographic that is steady shrinking. But the fact that they are trying is itself a real enough danger.
\n\nRepublicans had faced an uphill battle for winning this election, but Democrats have handed them an opportunity to stay in the game. By unilaterally encouraging mail-in voting instead of favoring bipartisan proposals to encourage hygienic protections for the elections, Democrats have created an unprecedented situation in which a solid majority of mail-in votes will be Democrat. This is a golden opportunity for voter suppression. In the primaries, 2% of mail-in votes were thrown out, and the number appears to be even higher for BIPOC voters. Excuses for throwing out a vote can include a change in address or a change in signature—and how fluid someone’s signature looks is definitely related to class. By contrast, standard voting machines throw out between 1% and a fraction of a percent of the votes. Now Republican lawyers in battleground states are working on legal changes to make it even easier to throw out mail-in ballots—and they will also rely on their specially trained “poll watchers,” the “Trump army,” to make in-person voting more difficult for certain people. The Democrats have voluntarily created a situation in which they have to win battleground states by margins of 2-5%.
\n\nThe Democrats have given up the defensive advantage they held, wrapped it up in a bow, and gifted it to the Republicans. Previously, Republicans would have had to find a way to make a significant number of votes disappear while exit polls were announcing a crushing Biden win. But because mail-in votes take longer to count, Trump will probably be ahead in the polls on election night, which is when the public and a frenetic news cycle expect to be able to announce the winner. Trump will declare victory, claim that Democrats are trying to steal the vote, and Republican lawyers will step in to stop the counting of votes wherever they can, with multiple cases likely to end up before the Supreme Court.
\n\nAn explanation of how contested election results must be resolved can be found here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/3.jpg\")
The new face of the Republican Party is just the old face, once again.
\nDemocratic strategies for electoral manipulation center on suppressing and delegitimizing third parties while convincing demographics who Democratic politicians spend the rest of the year betraying that the Democratic Party is still their best bet. Though it has been clear since at least the 1990s that Republicans are only able to win many elections via voter suppression, Democrats have not undertaken a concerted push to prohibit these tactics, to make voting rights universal and automatic, or to abolish the electoral college. There was a consent decree in place to prevent voter intimidation, which federal judges recently allowed to expire, but that decree did not prevent more typical kinds of voter suppression, like the unequal distribution of polling machines that won Florida for Bush in 2000, or the standard practice of poll watchers demanding more rigorous proofs of identification in poor and racialized neighborhoods, and other methods for creating long lines so not everyone gets a chance to vote. The consent decree didn’t even prevent Trump from calling for supporters to go to polling places as vigilantes in the 2016 election, and of course it did not change the electoral college system that allows someone who loses the popular vote to win the election.
\n\nDemocrats had a chance to make all these changes, not just as a court order with an expiration date but as established law or even a Constitutional reform, when they held the majority during Obama’s first term. Why didn’t they?
\n\nFor once, it’s not because they’re stupid—it’s because they hate and fear racialized people and poor people, and they recognize that universal voting would give control of the Party to its progressive wing. History has already showed us that the political center prefers the far right to the far left. Recently, the Labor Party in the UK intentionally sabotaged their own election campaign in order to force out Jeremy Corbyn, the progressive party leader. Likewise, in 2016, the Democrats rigged internal party votes to block Bernie Sanders, even at a time when polling showed that Sanders had a better chance of winning than Hillary Clinton. Earlier, during Obama’s first term, Democrats were careful to lavish their attention on the investor class rather than promoting policies tailored to the needs of most Black people. Making sure that everyone was automatically registered to vote and could get their votes counted would have seemed downright radical —likewise, introducing punishments for voter suppression.
\n\nSo though Democrats are indeed stupid, not everything they do is an effect of their stupidity. If we take a calm view of the situation, they actually constitute one of the most dangerous sectors in the upcoming electoral unrest, and they are probably the group that most anti-fascists have thought about least. This is another chief disadvantage of prioritizing the framework of anti-fascism: it often means privileging the left and obscuring its true historical role.
\n\nActively or reluctantly, Democrats will encourage a peaceful, symbolic protest movement in response to Republican machinations to steal the election. Such a movement will represent an explicit break with the tactical intelligence and collective self-defense that has repeatedly overcome the police and the far right over the past few months. That experience of revolt—that know-how, determination, and solidarity—is one of the only things that can keep people safe through the coming turmoil. It’s also one of the only things that can change the outcome of the crisis. In specific cities, people can kick out the far right—and just as the George Floyd rebellion forced the state to begin dismissing and even arresting police officers, similar actions might stop courts and legislatures from throwing out uncounted votes. Generalized unrest might compel large segments of the government to conclude that Trump and his Party are just not worth so much destabilization.
\n\nTo be clear, I am not advocating riots in order to make sure votes are counted. In the coming situation, riots are likely regardless of how anarchists feel about the election. People who are fed up with being delegitimized and stolen from constantly in everyday life may very well pick this highly symbolic opportunity to pour out all their anger. This is one of the implicit dangers of the situation: a social conflict that revolves around a contested election.
\n\nIncidentally, I am referring to the movement that might contest far right power grabs as “anti-racist” rather than as “left.” There is no emancipatory horizon that focuses on electoral results. The historic role of the left is to institutionalize and thus strangle emancipatory movements. This only works because so many people in the rank and file of the left are sincere in their desire for change—but all the same, they are roped into a chain of co-optation that stretches from the center to the margins. The movement will be strongest if it understands itself as a continuation of the Black-led, anti-police rebellion that broke out once more after the murder of George Floyd. Even though elections will not free anyone, voter suppression is part of the arsenal of white supremacy, and far-right power grabs pose a threat to all of us. Centering anti-racism allows us to aim at the foundation of the United States. It also gives us more possibilities of linking up with an international movement.
\n\nDemocrats will do everything they can to foreclose all these possible connections. By calling for a peaceful protest movement, they will attempt to leave people exposed to far-right attacks and police violence, and they will blame anarchists for the disturbances, leaving us exposed to repression and vigilante attacks. If things go poorly for them, they may try to blame anarchists for giving Trump another four years, and they will spend those years trying to discipline social movements and impose authoritarian control over the ideas and practices of anti-racism, climate activism, housing struggle, and other points of mobilization.
\n\nMy experience over the last five years, both in the United States and adjacent to the Catalan independence movement, leads me to believe that anarchists fatally underestimate the force that center-left parties can have in the streets. This is because we have experienced amazing, communal moments when we win in the streets and state forces flee, and because there aren’t many Democratic Party canvassers and similar types in the important protests. The Party machine, however, possesses immense resources that give it levers of influence that pass through the mainstream media, labor unions, NGOs, churches, academics, alternative media, and far-left groups, allowing it important opportunities to enforce nonviolence or to render a movement isolated and vulnerable.
\n\nThe significant growth of authoritarian left groups under the umbrella of anti-fascism only facilitates this trend, as authoritarian leftists, in such moments, tend to attack anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left, lining up in a facile popular front with the forces of moderation.
\n\nRemember, it was not the far right that finally tamped down the George Floyd rebellion or the Ferguson uprising in 2014. It was the left, working in an unbroken chain from the center to the activist margin.
\n\nTo pull a victory out of this election, the Democrats probably have to win back the Senate—which will give them a decisive advantage in the final stage for resolving electoral disputes—but this only matters so much. They have already made abundantly clear their support for the police and antagonism to social movements. Whatever happens, democracy will not resolve its crisis of legitimacy. Society will remain polarized.
\n\nAnything other than a Democratic victory and a relatively smooth transition of power will only accelerate the erosion of the status of the United States as global leader. Absent a powerful, international, revolutionary movement, all that means is that there will be more systemic chaos as other equally unsavory governments try to fill the void.
\n\nA Trump victory with a high incidence of voter suppression will encourage autocratic tendencies and a tolerance for dictatorship in other countries around the world. It will also spark a renewed reform movement, another reiteration of the snake oil of “real democracy.” How capitalists respond to these movements and where they find the best investment opportunities will probably play a major role in deciding which tendency is dominant. At the moment, progressive capitalists have all the best long-term plans, but they suffer a major disconnect when it comes to translating those plans into government action.
\n\nAs detailed in the aforementioned article in the Atlantic, there are several dates spread throughout November, December, and January that mark the official choosing of the President. Each of these dates offers an opportunity for Republican and Democratic lawyers to battle it out while contesting the vote—and as voter suppression maneuvers become public, there will also be protests to try to sway the outcome. The Democrats will try to keep these protests peaceful, and the streets will be the site of a polygonal battle between cops, fascists, leftist organizers, and uncontrollable elements. These will be dangerous moments, and the combined force of the police and the fascists will not be enough to get people off the streets, whereas Democratic pacification will be effective in many places.
\n\nThe Democrats might win the legal maneuvers, given that they will almost certainly win the popular vote and should be able to carry enough critical states. The current Supreme Court remains untested on the question of whether all votes must be counted. They are likely to respect states’ rights to determine their own criteria for counting or disqualifying votes, but they will also favor the processing of all votes rather than closing the tally after election day. If there is severe rioting and instability sparked by flagrant attempts to suppress voting, they might be moved to favor the popular vote in order to preserve an appearance of democratic legitimacy.
\n\nIf anti-racist uprisings are complemented by labor strikes and interruptions in the flow of commodities, that could significantly change the equation. Such a multifaceted movement would be harder for police, fascists, and even the military to suppress, and it could make it harder for Democrats to co-opt the movement via a watered down anti-racism, insofar as economic disruption could introduce a more explicitly anti-capitalist agenda. Unrest that triggers a wildcat workers’ movement in the US will certainly make courts and legislatures afraid and more likely to favor an outcome that promises to restore stability—i.e., a Democratic victory. However, if the movement were strong enough, centrist Democrats would remove all support and might come to favor a Trump victory if that could mean an end to the instability.
\n\nThe specific outcome, and which institution plays the decisive role in determining it, will influence what kind of reformist discourses flourish in January. A Democratic victory will be followed by concessions to the center right and possibly some tepid reforms for ethical government and voting rights, as well as some extremely inadequate legislation related to police training, healthcare, and the environment. A divided government with Trump still in office will mean four more years of political spectacle and destabilized governance, as well as a reconfiguration of the relationship between the far right and the Republican Party. This could mean the Party taking more distance from the far right or creating a closer, more coordinated relationship with it, depending on the role it plays in the election unrest and the effectiveness of public backlash.
\n\nIn either case, we can expect a new wave of repression against anarchists—and a continued need for anarchist and other radical initiatives for mutual aid, healthcare, housing defense, and land defense. Countless people have done an amazing job so far of dealing with extremely difficult circumstances including the rise of the far right, a series of rebellions, police repression, a pandemic, a major recession and staggering unemployment, out-of-control climate change including hurricanes and wildfires, and the loss of comrades and loved ones. This is a global movement; many more amazing moments of struggle and community lie before us. At this juncture, two opposed strategies for the continuation of capitalism are battling for the right to determine our future. The whole world is watching. When the time comes, we will all be in the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/04/6.jpg\")
\nAlready in 1907, Errico Malatesta emphasized that simply ceasing to work cannot itself exert much leverage on the authorities, nor bring about transformative social change, unless it is coupled with other measures. ↩
\nOn September 9, the news came out that a whistleblower within the Department of Homeland Security had filed a complaint about the department’s Trump-appointed leadership instructing him to downplay the threat represented by white supremacists and play up the dangers posed by anarchists and anti-fascists. Yet it has largely escaped notice how Joe Biden and other Democrats have embraced Donald Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists. It is convenient for centrist Democrats that they can pose as Trump’s moderate critics while appropriating his talking points about protesters, letting him do the dirty work of establishing the narratives that justify state repression.
\n\nIn remarks on July 28, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden grouped “anarchists” with “arsonists,” asserting that “arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted,” endorsing Trump’s repeated allegation that adherence to anarchist ideas is itself some kind of crime on a par with arson. On September 7, when Barbara Barr asked Biden “Do you condemn antifa?” he answered, “Yes, I do,” associating “antifa” with “violence, no matter who it is.” This endorses a narrative Trump has been avidly promoting for years, especially since his May 31 tweet that “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”
\n\nTrump and others on the far right have long sought to establish opposition to fascism as sufficient cause to justify state surveillance and intervention. This is one of the steps on the road to totalitarianism. The US two-party system functions like a ratchet, with the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back. As the Democrats follow the Republicans in steadily countenancing more and more authoritarianism, the work that Trump is doing to frame anarchists, anti-fascists, and other protesters as legitimate targets will also be useful to Biden’s party. We need to understand how this works now, lest the continuation of current state repression after a potential Biden victory catch us flat-footed.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/carterforva/status/1288221642968236032\n\n\n
According to a complaint filed by whistleblower Brian Murphy, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security” Ken Cuccinelli instructed officials at the DHS to alter intelligence reports to reflect Trump’s fear-mongering talking points about anarchist and anti-fascist violence while downplaying the threat that far-right and white nationalists pose to the general population. From the text of the complaint:
\n\n\n\n\nDuring multiple meetings between the end of May 2020 and July 31, 2020, Mr. Murphy made protected disclosures to Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding abuse of authority and\nimproper administration of an intelligence program with respect to intelligence information on ANTIFA [sic] and “anarchist” [sic] groups operating throughout the United States. On each occasion, Mr. Murphy was instructed by Mr. Wolf and/or Mr. Cuccinelli to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups.
\n
In addition, Cuccinelli instructed Murphy to modify reports about white supremacist organizing in order to make “the threat appear less severe,” and to add “information on the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups.”
\n\nOne DHS report was edited so that references to white supremacists “presenting the most lethal threat” were replaced with the words “Domestic Violent Extremists,” a catchall term used to create a false equivalence between those who promote and carry out racist attacks and those who organize to defend their communities against them.
\n\nAfter these revelations, when Democrats like Biden and corporations like Facebook continue to frame anarchists and anti-fascists as a threat to the general public, it must be clear to everyone that they are willfully advancing a false narrative Donald Trump concocted to target his enemies.
\n\nIf they continue to promote this narrative, it will be because, like Trump, they wish to preserve the tremendous disparities of capitalism and white supremacy, which anarchists and anti-fascists seek to undo. They too want tyranny—a kinder, gentler, more sustainable tyranny. They just don’t want to be the ones held responsible for escalating it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/10/1.jpg\")
Protesters outside Chad Wolf’s home in Alexandria, Virginia.
\nSince its establishment, the Department of Homeland Security has always targeted protest movements—but much more so, it has played a fundamental role in intensifying Islamophobia and other forms of systemic oppression. From the perspective of those who desire to live in a free and egalitarian society, there is no right way for DHS representatives to assess the terror threats facing the United States. The department itself exists for the sole purpose of carrying out surveillance and directing lethal force against anyone who might threaten the ruling order. The considerable attention Murphy’s complaint has received from self-professed leftists indicates the degree to which many leftists are willing to join centrists in legitimizing representatives of the institutions that the left otherwise ostensibly opposes, so long as those representatives are taking a stand against Trump specifically.
\n\nThis shows us how much ground radicals stand to lose by focusing on Trump alone—one of the insidious tendencies of the aforementioned ratchet effect. Liberal centrists already experienced the disastrous consequences of this approach in the disappointments that awaited the millenarian cult around former FBI director Robert Mueller. Biden is just the latest beneficiary of this tendency to seek a “legitimate” representative of entrenched power to counter Trump’s ascendancy in the name of the law. The problem is that the law is not something above the US government, that Mueller or Biden can use to bring Trump to order; the law only has force by virtue of the same government that Trump already dominates.
\n\nIt’s foolish to argue that in targeting protesters rather than fascists, the DHS is focusing on the wrong threat. The important thing to understand here is that there is a shakeup taking place inside the state institutions of repression—a shakeup aimed at expanding the targets of “anti-terror” operations to include an ever-increasing number of anarchists, anti-fascists, leftists, and other dissidents, especially those from demographics that are already targeted on account of ethnicity, class, and religion. At the same time, the space that is allocated for extra-legal action to defend white supremacy is continuing to expand—witness Trump’s praise of Kyle Rittenhouse. Rather than offering the DHS an opportunity to re-legitimize itself by promising to protect us from white supremacists—which would simply provide another rationale for politicians to allocate resources to the DHS that will inevitably be directed against targeted communities and protest movements—we have to point to the systemic factors that ensure that as long as it exists, DHS will always serve to oppress people and crush movements for freedom and equality.
\n\nDHS has been expanding the scope of its targets while giving white supremacists a free pass since its inception, well before Trump came to power. At the opening of the Obama years, another DHS employee, Daryle Johnson was pushed out of the department for sounding the alarm about far-right activity ahead of a wave of killings. More recently, fusion centers have served to transmit far-right conspiracy theories to local police departments, ensuring that local police prioritize targeting anti-fascists while often working hand in glove with Trump supporters, militias, and other far-right groups. The recent wave of Blue Leaks has only confirmed the degree to which federal officers are embracing far-right priorities in focusing on repressing anarchists and anti-fascists.
\n\nOnce the latest shakeup in the DHS is complete, there will be no more revelations of the sort we see in Murphy’s complaint. Both parties will accept that the department exists to attack anarchists, protesters, and others who oppose fascism and police violence. White supremacists will have acquired even more leeway to organize and carry out attacks without facing pushback from the state.
\n\nAnd this process can take place under Biden as well as under Trump.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/KELLYWEILL/status/1303793442972196868\n\n\n
Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli are both serving unlawfully as a result of Donald Trump’s machinations to avoid the mandated appointment process. Wolf especially is already infamous for drafting a policy to snatch children from their parents at the US border and for sending federal officers from a variety of DHS departments to Portland in an attempt to suppress protests. Many analysts interpret the deployment of federal officers to Portland and elsewhere as a test run to prepare to use federal forces countrywide to impose Trump’s authority should he win, suspend, or steal the 2020 election.
\n\nWolf has staked his career on supporting Trump’s efforts to consolidate power, emphasizing that the wishes of local authorities are utterly beside the point. “President Trump has made it abundantly clear that there will come a point when state and local officials fail to protect its citizens from violence, the federal government will have no choice but to protect our American citizens,” Wolf wrote in a letter to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler on August 31. Wolf emphasized this point again on September 9, asserting that DHS has a “moral and legal duty” to “protect” cities from “rioters.”
\n\nDemocrats and leftists have responded to this escalating situation the same way they have responded to four years of the Trump program: by spreading information, “speaking truth to power,” and the like. None of this has done anything to compel Wolf or Cuccinelli to step down from their posts or to change the trajectory of the DHS or the white supremacists who support Trump. Chiefly, it just gives Democrats an alibi to tell voters that they are not to blame for the authoritarian turn of the state. If Democrats really believed in the rules that forbid Wolf and Cuccinelli to govern DHS, they would do something about it, not register complaints.
\n\nArguably, the only reason left-leaning Democrats have any leverage on the ruling class whatsoever is that the poor, desperate, and politicized are prepared to go to great lengths to interrupt business as usual and make great swaths of the United States ungovernable. Like all reformists, the Democrats derive their leverage on other elements of the ruling class from the unrest that they promise to quell—but in order to maintain that leverage, they have to show that they can quell the unrest without making too many concessions. The ratchet, once again.
\n\nSo perhaps it is naïve to attribute the weakness of the Democrats to naïveté. While Trump encourages his supporters to prepare to help him secure power in a contested election, while the police who support him go on carrying out extrajudicial murders of people of color and the occasional white anti-fascist as well, Democrats are intentionally not seeking to mobilize the kind of force that could prevent Trump from seizing and maintaining power.
\n\nIf Trump does try to hold on to power in defiance of electoral protocol, Democrats are counting on protesters to risk their lives to make this untenable. Anarchists, anti-fascists, and participants in the fiercest aspects of the anti-police uprisings and the Black Lives Matter movement are the only social force that could accomplish this. But the Democrats offer no allegiance to the people they expect to risk death on their behalf. Indeed, they are already selling them out ahead of the election.
\n\nIn the long term, centrists like Biden likely aim to establish a new social peace by rallying a critical mass of voters—and capitalists—behind them, then sacrificing Black demonstrators, anarchists, and anti-fascists on the altar of “homeland security” as a concession to placate the far right. Trump’s laughable talking point that Biden represents the “rioters” who compelled our society to grapple with the senseless murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many more Black people barely conceals the fact that the opposite is true: Biden represents another strategy for maintaining the same state of affairs that Trump intends to, the same status quo that resulted in all those murders. This explains Biden’s embrace of Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists and “violence” itself, which is a code word for anything that interrupts the unceasing violence that is necessary to maintain the grievous disparities in privilege, property, and power that characterize our current social order.
\n\nShould Biden win the election, we will have to be prepared to fight just as hard against repression from the Department of Homeland Security and other state agencies as we will have to fight if Trump wins. The only distinction is that under Trump, the repression will be brutal but widely unpopular, whereas under Biden, it will be more discreet but broadly accepted as legitimate.
\n\nThis is why we must not grant a millimeter to Biden’s rhetoric about “violent” anarchists, nor trust that Biden will do anything to rein in DHS. Don’t grease the ratchet. Break it.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/elivalley/status/1311095095215689728\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/03/tools-and-tactics-in-the-portland-protests-from-leaf-blowers-and-umbrellas-to-lasers-bubbles-and-balloons", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/03/tools-and-tactics-in-the-portland-protests-from-leaf-blowers-and-umbrellas-to-lasers-bubbles-and-balloons", "title": "Tools and Tactics in the Portland Protests : From Leaf Blowers and Umbrellas to Lasers, Balloons, and Power Tools", "summary": "How to employ leaf blowers, umbrellas, shields, lasers, power tools, lacrosse sticks, kitchen mitts, paint bombs, bubbles, balloons, and more.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-08-03T21:32:06Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:45Z", "tags": [ "Portland", "fascism", "police", "riots", "Uprising", "Minneapolis", "Trump", "tactics" ], "content_html": "
Across over two months of protests, demonstrators in Portland have experimented with a variety of tactics and strategies. The clashes in Portland drew international attention starting in mid-June, when footage spread of federal agents in unmarked cars snatching demonstrators off the sidewalks and Donald Trump announced that federal agents would be using this model to intervene in other cities around the United States. After Trump’s announcement, the demonstrations in Portland grew exponentially, drawing thousands each night, until the governor of Oregon declared that federal agents would be withdrawn from the streets. In the following overview, participants in the Portland demonstrations describe some of the tools and tactics they have seen employed there.
\n\nMany of these tools work best in combination with each other. As usual, diversity of tactics is key—not just tolerance for different approaches, but thinking about how to combine all of them into a symbiotic whole. Soon, we aim to follow up this cursory review with a more thorough accounting of the full range of street tactics and equipment relevant to today’s demonstrators.
\n\nThe Portland protests have also produced some new terminology, such as the expression “swoop,” which describes what happens when a reformist with a megaphone makes a power play to hijack a gathering organized by people who want to see the police abolished. As demonstrators expand their notions of what tactics are appropriate in this swiftly polarizing society, we hope they will also expand their visions of what is worth fighting for, adopting horizontal models of organization and learning how to identify and resist power plays.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/5.jpg\")
Ready or not—the war is on.
\nDigital Security
\nMasking and Proper Attire
\nRiot Ribs, Food Carts, Infrastructure
\nLeaf Blowers
\nUmbrellas
\nShields
\nSports Equipment
\nBalloons and Bubbles
\nLasers
\nGraffiti
\nPaint Bombs
\nFireworks
\nFire
\nFence Toppling
\nDe-Arresting
\nCrowd Movement
\nDisabling Cameras, Breaking Windows
\nLegal Support, Jail Support
\nhttps://twitter.com/dougbrown8/status/1288732683917332480\n\n\n
This thread spells out how to protect your privacy via proper phone safety at demonstrations—before, during, and after the protest. You can find a lot of important information about general security in protest situations here.
\n\nWearing a mask is responsible from a medical perspective—in the era of the pandemic—but also for security reasons, to protect your privacy. Nowadays you don’t just have to worry about the police filming and arresting you, but also about far-right internet trolls trying to identify you from video footage.
\n\nIf demonstrators are dressed appropriately in black bloc fashion, it should be difficult to make out identifying particulars.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/arunindy/status/1288717970416398336\n\n\n
Pay attention to detail. Cover your tattoos and other unique traits. Cover your whole face, not just your mouth. There should be no visible logos on your clothes, shoes, or backpack. Read this for more details.
\n\nIt is really good for morale to have a group of people providing food and other needed resources. Portland protesters have been deeply thankful that Riot Ribs have come out to feed everyone free food. This enables people to stay longer and helps them to feel that it is worth the effort and risk to support the movement that nourishes them.
\n\nYou can read about Riot Ribs here.
\n\nFeds and cops know how important these mutual aid efforts are and intentionally target them in hopes of breaking the will of the demonstrators:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/griffinmalone6/status/1288757440729628673\n\n\n
Here you can “before” and “after” shots of the infrastructure one night that federal mercenaries attacked it:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/bitchwitch20/status/1287826105496346624\n\n\n
Unfortunately, uniformed officers are not the only danger threatening community infrastructure. In late July, Riot Ribs experienced a coup involving physical violence and intimidation. Wherever money is involved in activism, there is great risk of infighting unless the goals, structures, and expectations have been set very precisely in advance. The original Riot Ribs folks have left town, apparently taking the concept of Riot Ribs on the road to other cities as Revolution Ribs. Someone should write in detail about the rise, fall, and rebirth of Riot Ribs.
\n\nLeaf blowers can dispel tear gas or smoke.
\n\nTear “gas” is actually a fine particulate matter—imagine a bag of flour exploding, but much finer and lighter. When this particulate lands on you, it stays there and can be re-activated later, especially by water or sweat. For this reason, demonstrators have used leaf blowers to blow tear gas off of people after exposure—it is the same concept as taking a shower at the beach to get the last of the sand off your body.
\n\nBe careful not to blow tear gas in a direction where it could affect other people.
\n\nA single leaf blower can serve to blow gas from a single canister away from people until others can extinguish it, as demonstrated in this classic video from Hong Kong:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/demosisto/status/1188518932031762432\n\n\n
But for best results, use several leaf blowers together:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1288715582112591872\n\n\n
When you’re choosing a leaf blower, make sure it has a good fan and a wireless power source.
\n\nLeaf blowers work well in combination with umbrellas and shields. While the shields protect demonstrators against impact munitions, the leaf blowers keep the gas moving away from protesters until someone can run up and extinguish the canister or throw it back at the assaulters who shot it. Teamwork!
\n\nYou can see an example of this approach at the beginning of this video:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1289649707048869891\n\n\n
This article traces the origins of the leaf blower as a tool of struggle, from Hong Kong to the debut of the “dad bloc” in Portland.
\n\nIn some cases during the clashes in Portland, demonstrators with leaf blowers and other tools were able to keep the tear gas that federal mercenaries deployed entirely within the fence surrounding the so-called Justice Center:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/griffinmalone6/status/1287301017558687746\n\n\n
A few people in Portland have employed other less effective tools—such as box fans—for the same purpose:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1287315866963460096\n\n\n
Not wishing to be outdone, federal mercenaries in Portland used a fogger to spray demonstrators with poison:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/dougbrown8/status/1288767229476012032\n\n\n
Umbrellas can serve several functions at once. An umbrella can block a stream of pepper spray. A full line of umbrellas at the front of a demonstration can block the view of unwanted cameras and police spotters stationed on rooftops—for example, concealing efforts to attack the joints of the fence, or making it safer to change clothes or employ other tactics. While not a reliable substitute for a shield, an umbrella can also aid in deflecting police bullets, green and blue powder marker rounds, and the laser spotters used by police to identify troublemakers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/6.jpg\")
Umbrellas in action together.
\nOn January 20, 2017, during the fierce resistance to the inauguration of Donald Trump, a single umbrella played a crucial role in enabling a large number of demonstrators in the black bloc to break out of a police kettle and escape arrest. Previously seen in demonstrations in Hong Kong, the umbrella has become an anti-fascist symbol of sorts.
\n\nIn Portland, people with umbrellas have worked shoulder to shoulder with those carrying shields, creating a phalanx that can hold a line in a street, offering cover and protection to those behind them. In at least one case, demonstrators have forced federal mercenaries to retreat back into their courthouse by slowly advancing in a line like this.
\n\nUmbrellas, shields, and leaf blowers together, at the toppled fence:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/1287303576214106114\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/1287304370913124352\n\n\n
For their part, police haven’t hesitated to randomly steal demonstrators’ umbrellas.
\n\nSo far, in Portland, shields have mostly been used in defense against attacks from a distance—such as impact munitions, tear gas grenades, and the like—rather than against batons or police charges.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/3.jpg\")
\nDifferent shield designs are better for different situations. Like umbrellas and leaf blowers, shields can do things in large numbers that they cannot do alone. If you want to form a shield wall, ideally your shield should be big enough to cover your body. But the bigger your shield is, the heavier, bulkier, and more difficult to transport it will be. Smaller shields can be lighter and easier to sneak into a protest area. Many people have been carrying smaller shields with them while playing other roles besides maintaining the shield wall. Having even just a little bit of protection has saved people from serious injury and provided the confidence to hold territory they might not otherwise have been able to.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/4.jpg\")
If you don’t have anything else on hand, a skateboard can serve as a small, mobile shield.
\nA common Portland shield design involves cutting a plastic barrel vertically into three or four curved rectangles, leaving the circles from the top and bottom of the barrel for making smaller shields.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ghostmobpdx/status/1289684460485500929\n\n\n
On the other hand, to form a shield wall, it is best to be able to line up shields so that they overlap slightly, as even slight breaks in the wall can present a vulnerability. Consequently, plywood may be preferable to barrels for that particular application.
\n\nSome in Portland have experimented with using lubricant on the edges of shields to make it more difficult for police to grab them during charges.
\n\nMake sure you’re using an effective technique when taking blows. If you are using a tall shield, hold it very tightly against your body where the center of your chest is; that makes you harder to move, preventing your adversary from pushing you around by your shield and ensuring that even if your shield moves, it still covers your body.
\n\nA shield wall in Oakland in solidarity with demonstrators in Portland:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/sarahbellelin/status/1287226244833202177\n\n\n
You can use sporting equipment to catch tear gas and throw it back. Just as you would when using a leaf blower, make sure you’re communicating well with other demonstrators and have a well-thought-out plan regarding what you are going to do with the canisters.
\n\nSome of the most effective tools for this purpose include lacrosse sticks, wiffle ball scoopers, and kitchen mitts—anything that enables you to engage with the canisters without touching them directly.
\n\nDemonstrators have used hockey sticks to hit the canisters back, too. Some people have been upgrading their umbrellas—for example, duct-taping an umbrella upside down on a lacrosse stick or hockey stick handle. The user can flip the tool around and use the side that makes the most sense in a given situation:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pdxcarmedic/status/1288643538347933696\n\n\n
Although there are many videos on the internet of people attempting to cover tear gas canisters with traffic cones and the like, it is a much better idea to extinguish them in containers of water. This twitter thread shows how to extinguish tear gas canisters:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1265808184519864320\n\n\n
Demonstrators have used balloons to show which way the wind is blowing—in order to know which way tear gas will blow—and identify a rallying point on the ground.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/proudbulba/status/1287291571646259200\n\n\n
They have also employed bubbles to mock the force of the police:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrolmos/status/1287306738106949633\n\n\n
In Portland, demonstrators have used lasers to disorient police and federal agents; they can also disable security cameras. It’s worth noting that pointing a laser at someone’s face is expressly illegal in Oregon and can draw a more aggressive response from police than defensive tools such as gas masks, shields, and leaf blowers. Those who have employed lasers by themselves have been targeted for arrest or shot with pepper balls and rubber bullets, as it is easy to trace the source of the laser unless the person directing it moves around rapidly between applications.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/7.jpg\")
Someone directing a laser at a mercenary who is discharging a chemical weapon at demonstrators.
\nAlmost all the lasers seen in Portland during the last weekend in July were the cheaper green ones, the 303’s (~50 mW), which can be deployed en masse to provide cover and irritate police. But the more powerful blue ones (~1w to 4w) are more effective against police, helicopters, and drones. They cost roughly $45 to $100.
\n\nPortlanders have also combined laser usage with high-powered flashlights on strobe function, in an effort to prevent the police from getting a good visual read on the crowd. Using bright lights to backlight a crowd might make it difficult for officers to pick out individuals at the front.
\n\nPolice also use lasers to identify demonstrators for targeting.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/2.jpg\")
Police employing lasers to target protesters.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrolmos/status/1288016965148110849\n\n\n
This is so obvious that it almost doesn’t bear mentioning, but demonstrators have painted inspiring messages all over the area in which these clashes have taken place, underscoring the determination of the participants. Federal agents have intentionally refrained from cleaning graffiti off the courthouse in order to pose as helpless victims, when in fact their violent provocations have been the chief cause of the entire sequence of conflict. Nonetheless, although images of graffiti on federal property may serve to outrage far-right voters who already supported Trump and his goons, these images also convey the courageous defiance of those who are standing up to the authorities.
\n\nDemonstrators have used paint to reduce the vision of officers wearing visors or utilizing transparent shields. Officers need clear vision to be able to go on attacking people.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mathieulrolland/status/1287511718499766272\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/_whatriot/status/1288741205379956738\n\n\n
One of the classic models for making a paint bomb is to inflate a small balloon and dip it into wax over and over until the wax can hold shape by itself, then pop the balloon and fill the vessel with paint. Other containers, such as hollow Christmas tree ornaments, can serve the same function. You can find more information here.
\n\nThe use of fireworks as projectiles to disorient or discourage police and federal agents has made for fantastic visual displays, both in the moment and in the footage that circulates afterwards. Ordinarily, it is irresponsible to aim fireworks at human beings, but the state mercenaries here are equipped with so much taxpayer-funded protective gear that this arguably does more to prevent them from harming others than it does to put them at risk.
\n\nOn the other hand, many demonstrators are reporting that the booms of fireworks trigger their PTSD as a consequence of the ongoing trauma created by the booms of flash-bang grenades deployed by police. There are tradeoffs to everything.
\n\nProtesters in Portland have used fire to distract officers or to create an ambience of celebration. It’s important to be very conscious about safety issues when people are doing this; in some instances, trees or human beings have been exposed to flame. Some protesters have used mortar fireworks to set fires from a distance.
\n\nThe question of whether fire is appropriate at these protests has been hotly contested between demonstrators who are oriented towards symbolic displays and those who are focused on direct confrontation. Self-appointed protest police have been quick to put out fires, talk people out of setting them, and hassle people who have started them.
\n\nAll of the fires in question have been purely symbolic—in contrast to the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, nothing significant has been burned. Fire has been employed to burn flags, trash, the elk statue and its location after it was removed, and on one occasion a tiny pile of pamphlets or something like that in the police union (PPA) building. So all the debate is about symbolic fires.
\n\nProtestors scrambling to put out a small symbolic fire:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/human42lm/status/1289855658565632001\n\n\n
Symbolic fires:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/econbrkfst/status/1277384499953688576\n\n\n
Since the end of May, the police have installed several fences in Portland in attempts to control demonstrations, and demonstrators have repeatedly attempted to topple or relocate them. The earlier fences were mostly of the ordinary chainlink variety; protesters dubbed a series of such fences “The Sacred Fence.”
\n\nA word of caution about those previous fence relocations. Sometimes the fences that were torn down were left discarded in street intersections, creating a hazard of tripping or injury, especially when officers subsequently attacked with tear gas, forcing blinded demonstrators to retreat hastily. Be mindful about where you put a fence after you dismantle it.
\n\nIn late July, the authorities built an industrial barrier around the federal courthouse with a sturdier frame, fencing, and smaller holes, anchoring it with concrete blocks at the back. On subsequent nights, the blocks were moved the front side; protesters and reporters frequently stood on these blocks, but federal mercenaries would target those who did so with considerable fire from impact munition weapons.
\n\nOn July 25, some demonstrators equipped with power tools including a portable angle grinder managed to topple a section of the fence. The angle grinder was used effectively on the corner of the fence, but ran out of batteries before the job was finished. Lesson: charge up first and bring spare batteries.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/alexmilantracy/status/1287283495266525184\n\n\n
The use of power tools was new. Umbrellas and shields were critical in protecting the operator from press cameras and impact munitions, while leaf blowers kept the smoke away.
\n\n“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” as Archimedes said. Ultimately, the section of fence was pulled down toward the protestors side by a wide line of people, after earlier attempts to pull it apart at the place where the angle grinder had been employed, using a line of people pulling on ropes.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/oregonian/status/1288502532705259521\n\n\n
Possible improvements could include finishing the cuts into the hinges or using a sledgehammer to bang through an unfinished cut. It could make sense to arrange to have two sets of ropes pulling on both the left and right sides of a seam where the cut was made: two deep lines instead of one wide line. As people have discovered in the process of toppling statues, it is important to use a strap or chain that has no elasticity, rather than a rope that has too much give.
\n\nProtesters have used sections of the chainlink fence as “shields,” but these do not block gas or impact munitions. They have also used them, at least symbolically, to “barricade” the courthouse doors closed from the outside. This never actually stopped federal agents, as no one ever attempted to block the doors at the back of the courthouse.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/1.jpg\")
Symbolically blockading the front of the courthouse.
\nAt one point, demonstrators filled parts of the fence with expanding foam to prevent federal agents from shooting through it:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1287276794710618113\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1287280037863895043\n\n\n
Whether it was acceptable to shake or topple the fence became a point of contention between the protest police and front liners:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pdocumentarians/status/1289469522756345857\n\n\n
After the fence came down:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/clypian/status/1287315331594117120\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/7im/status/1288534589011406848\n\n\n
During the clashes in Portland, demonstrators have repeatedly freed people from police and federal mercenaries who were attempting to kidnap them. Successful de-arrests are usually only possible when demonstrators massively outnumber those attempting to kidnap them. To succeed, the action has to happen so fast that there isn’t time for police or federal reinforcements to respond.
\n\nDe-arrests are risky and can result in much higher charges than the original arrest. It is not a tactic to employ lightly. However, if the balance of numbers and power are in the demonstrators’ favor, successful de-arrests can show state or federal mercenaries that it is not worth grappling with a group of protesters, convincing them to shift to dispersal tactics.
\n\nGenerally speaking, as long as the police are not prepared to kettle and mass-arrest everyone, the surest way for individuals to avoid arrest when police are pressing into a crowd to split it up is to follow the largest part of the crowd. This is because—all other things being equal—the biggest crowd is usually the hardest for them to deal with. This insight scales up, since the best approach for crowds is to stay as large as they can.
\n\nWe have seen this with the crowds in Portland, where people have learned to stick together in large groups when the police attack, moving slowly and calmly rather than running and not retreating more than necessary—one block is typically the most that the police in Portland will advance at a time. There are chants about this: “Stay together, stay tight; we do this every night,” reminding everyone that there is no reason to take exceptional risks to one’s personal safety if one can return the next night to accomplish the same action more safely with more friends.
\n\nThere are other factors to bear in mind, of course. It’s better to be with a group that is aware of its surroundings, quick on its feet, and capable of defending itself than to be with a group that is sluggish, confused, and easily intimidated.
\n\nIn Portland, we have repeatedly seen police employ a “bull rush” in which they charge at full clip while using some combination of tear gas, pepper spray, impact munitions, and batons on everyone in their path. If you are not part of a crowd big enough and equipped enough to prevent the police from injuring or picking off individuals, it’s important to be ready to run. Cops can’t sprint very far.
\n\nA bull rush on June 12:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrolmos/status/1271715330188967938\n\n\n
A bull rush on June 27:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/johnnthelefty/status/1276854263747014659\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1277159562563317760\n\n\n
A bull rush on June 28:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/rosecityantifa/status/1289956848158642177\n\n\n
A bull rush on July 18:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1284731897143160832\n\n\n
A bull rush on July 25:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/donovanfarley/status/1287309238134423552\n\n\n
A bull rush on August 1:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pdocumentarians/status/1289792025580023808\n\n\n
People have used paint and other tactics to prevent surveillance cameras from filming demonstrators. Some demonstrators have also broken windows—a tactic that can serve to draw the attention of the police away from what they were trying to do before. If you are engaged in any sort of activity like this, it is especially important to dress properly (see above). It can be worthwhile to dispose of all the clothes you were wearing after an incident. What’s more expensive—another run to the thrift store, or bail money, court fees, and a lawyer?
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1286585525365768193\n\n\n
It has been very important to organize proper legal support in Portland with federal mercenaries arresting people every night. Even if you can’t go to the actions, you can help bail people out of jail or raise money to contribute to bail funds.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrolmos/status/1286941911631056898\n\n\n
A movement that combines a wide range of the tactics described here—the way demonstrators have done in Portland—can hold space in the face of considerable state violence. Unfortunately, this may soon be necessary all around the United States.
\n\nBe like water—keep your mask tight—and destroy what destroys you.
\n\nFor extra credit: cartwheels!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/22/from-portland-to-the-world-a-call-for-solidarity-with-the-struggle-against-the-federal-occupation", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/22/from-portland-to-the-world-a-call-for-solidarity-with-the-struggle-against-the-federal-occupation", "title": "From Portland to the World : A Call for Solidarity with the Struggle against the Federal Occupation", "summary": "Portland organizations entreat everyone who is inspired by their struggle against federal occupation to spread it countrywide.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/22/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/22/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-07-22T11:02:58Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:45Z", "tags": [ "Portland", "fascism", "police", "riots", "Uprising", "Minneapolis", "Trump" ], "content_html": "Since the end of May, demonstrators opposing police violence and white supremacy have thronged the streets of Portland, Oregon, clashing with law enforcement officers. Last week, aspiring autocrat Donald Trump escalated the situation by announcing that he would be sending federal agents around the country to assert his authority through acts of violence against protesters. The past few days have seen thousands sweep into the streets of Portland to defend those who were already protesting and demand the departure of Trump’s federal agents from their city.
\n\nNow participants in the movement in Portland are calling for solidarity actions starting this Saturday, on July 25. The following statement from several Portland organizations—including (Pop)ular (Mob)ilization, Portland Rising Tide, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Group, Colectivo X, and Symbiosis PDX—entreats everyone who has been inspired by the determination and endurance of demonstrators in that city to spread the struggle countrywide, just as Donald Trump hopes to deploy federal forces everywhere.
\n\nPlease circulate this video and statement—and think about how you can prepare to fight against the escalation of state tyranny wherever you are.
\n\nHere is a list of solidarity events around the country.
\n\nWe love that people are thinking about the ways they can support the people in this city, especially those who have been pressing hard in the streets for the past seven weeks in support of the struggle for Black lives and for freedom for all—and despite the brutally repressive tactics of police and federal forces. We want to accept your support—and we say the best way to support us is to take inspiration from Portland and bring this fight to where you are in any way you can.
\n\nGo as hard as you want, use every tool in the toolbox, and employ every tactic you can. Our fight is your fight and we want to share it with you. Our common struggle against fascism and against the police and federal officials defending white supremacy are intertwined. The movement is moving: solidarity is spreading and the bigger we get the faster we win.
\n\nWe will stay in the streets until every institution in our society reflects the acknowledgement that BLACK LIVES MATTER—and we hope you will too.
\n\nEndorsed by:
\n\n(Pop)ular (Mob)ilization
\nPortland Rising Tide
\nThe Revolutionary Abolitionist Group
\nColectivo X
\nSymbiosis PDX
\nhttps://twitter.com/PNWYLF/status/1285806490180128770\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/17/solidarity-with-the-people-in-the-streets-of-portland-against-the-federal-occupation-and-the-police", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/17/solidarity-with-the-people-in-the-streets-of-portland-against-the-federal-occupation-and-the-police", "title": "Solidarity with the People in the Streets of Portland : Against the Federal Occupation and the Police", "summary": "Having failed to mobilize the military, Trump aims to deploy DHS agents around the US. Looking at Portland, we can see what this will mean.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-07-17T11:22:01Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:45Z", "tags": [ "Portland", "police", "riots", "Uprising", "Minneapolis", "Trump" ], "content_html": "
On Thursday, both Donald Trump and his white nationalist and nativist advisor Stephen Miller announced that they will begin deploying armed officers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the streets of cities that have seen large-scale protests—specifically, cities governed by Democrats. According to The Daily Mail, Trump stated he would “be looking at Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago.” To understand what the stakes are, we focus on Portland, where DHS agents have already been brutalizing demonstrators for weeks.
\n\nAt the beginning of June, when Trump tried to mobilize the military against protesters, he discovered that they were not willing to use up their credibility propping up his administration. Trump’s order to attack DC protesters so he could stage a photo op and his push to invoke the Insurrection Act only further diminished his polling numbers, illuminating some of the fault lines within the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/4.jpg\")
Trump trying to look tough at his presidency’s weakest point thus far.
\nIn the month since, Trump has worked out which of the armed elements of the federal government are loyal enough to him to go to war against US citizens on his behalf. As demonstrators pulled down statues outside the White House and his faithful Fox News spin doctors labored overtime to come up with new narratives justifying violence against civilians, Trump called for Department of Homeland Security agents to deploy to places where statues were under attack. Now he is expanding their mission, challenging local and state authorities’ control. It is a classic Trump move to sidestep the bad press resulting from his ruinous response to the COVID-19 crisis and his efforts to cover up the mounting death toll by redirecting the news cycle to his grudge match with the Democrats, “antifa,” Black Lives Matter, and other such bugaboos. But deploying DHS forces is also an opportunity for him to test out a new strategy, attempting to set a new precedent for militarizing and politicizing the suppression of protest.
\n\nIf this succeeds, Trump will continue to push the envelope. Today, it is beside the point to compare developments in the United States to the situation in Germany in the early 1930s; we are already seeing the outlines of 21st-century fascism, or else of civil war. If they remain spectators, those who anticipate the presidential election as a referendum on Trump’s brand of government may discover in November that the future has already been decided. And if there are not serious consequences for this decision, then regardless of whether Trump wins the election, we will see DHS forces regularly deployed in this manner more and more, intensifying the police state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/1.jpg\")
The foot soldiers of autocracy.
\nStarting in late May, Portland police mobilized riot troops daily to push protesters off the street, targeting and brutalizing journalists and turning the downtown into a shooting gallery with tear gas and “less lethal munitions.” DHS agents first joined them in brutalizing protesters weeks ago. According to the Williamette Weekly,
\n\n\n\n\nFor the past two weeks, federal officers have patrolled the blocks surrounding the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse. That’s thanks mostly to President Donald Trump, who deployed the Department of Homeland Security to at least three U.S. cities that had seen significant street protests—Portland, Seattle, and Washington, DC.
\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/itsmaregine/status/1283862881633632257\n\n\n
In a DHS memo explaining the deployment to Portland, described by the Portland Mercury as “an inflammatory statement riddled with inaccuracies and spelling errors” and in some cases lacking even the most basic punctuation, acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf repeats the phrase “violent anarchists” 72 times, using this phrase to designate a total of several thousand people. In many cases, he brands a group of hundreds “violent anarchists” on account of the alleged actions of just a couple individuals. Of course, secretary Wolf and his cronies have no way of knowing the politics of every person involved in the protests. Rather, their goal is to carry out classic totalitarian propaganda: in repeating this phrase endlessly, they seek to invent an enemy to justify a militarized takeover.
\n\nAs the Portland Mercury pointed out,
\n\n\n\n\nWolf did not mention that the majority of violence Portlanders have witnessed over the past 47 days has come from the hands of the police.
\n
While DHS officials publish fear-mongering announcements about “violent anarchists” painting messages on the plywood covering the windows of the Hatfield courthouse in Portland, federal agents have been set loose on demonstrators throughout the city. On July 11, federal agents in Portland shot 26-year-old Donavan LaBella in the head with an impact munition, fracturing his skull. LaBella required facial reconstruction surgery and was still in serious condition at the hospital days later.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1283869468658147336\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1284021166277947394\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/TheRealCoryElia/status/1282555597322194944\n\n\n
According to a report on Oregon Public Broadcasting,
\n\n\n\n\nFederal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.
\n
We should take care not to treat the intervention of federal agents as exceptional; it is just the latest chapter in a story involving state repression at every level. As the Portland Mercury reports, Portland police have been inflicting plenty of violence themselves:
\n\n\n\n\nOn Tuesday, a PPB officer was caught on film removing a protester’s protective face mask to pepper spray a protester in the eyes. This morning, the public witnessed a gaggle of PPB officers chase and tackle a person who was biking down SW 4th in downtown Portland—despite that street being open to public use.
\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/matcha_chai/status/1283328232033411072\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/DanMcKATU/status/1283748895600721920\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/kboo/status/1282954116424073217\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/pdxrosieriddle/status/1284020202145902593\n\n\n
For years, the Portland Police and the Department of Homeland Security have worked with fascist and far-right organizers to coordinate their demonstrations and facilitate their violence against anti-racist and anti-fascist counter-protesters as well as the general public. In June 2018, DHS worked directly with far-right leader Joey Gibson to plan a rally in downtown Portland during which fascists were permitted to attack counter-demonstrators with impunity. In early 2019, texts between Gibson and members of the Portland Police Bureau came to light, revealing that the police were feeding Gibson information, letting him know when his colleagues that were on probation needed to lay low, and informed him in advance about anti-fascist events and activities. Police faced no consequences for this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/05/1.jpg\")
Already in 2017, when fascist Jeremy Christian murdered two people after attending a far-right rally in Portland, we were compelled to publish this poster explaining how fascists and Portland police work together.
\nFor now, Trump and his supporters are making great efforts to justify the intervention of federal officers in Portland, to such an extent that the governor of Oregon has accused him of simply attempting to pull “an election stunt.” But if this becomes normalized, one day, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies will intervene all around the country on a regular basis, without need of justification—attacking and permanently injuring protesters, kidnapping activists in unmarked cars, and suppressing protest by lethal force if necessary. Trump is not just a rogue demagogue; he is testing the balance of power on behalf of the entire ruling class, trying to figure out just how much they can get away with.
\n\nThe brutality of the DHS and the Portland police illustrates why people rebelled in response to the murder of the George Floyd in the first place. There is no question of the government or the police being accountable to us. The only way we can gain leverage on them is by becoming ungovernable, making it impossible for them to keep their economy running at our expense. The answer is not to petition the authorities for more stringent rules governing state and federal intervention—a doomed venture—but to delegitimize all the forces of oppression, from the federal to the local level, and organize together to make it impossible for them to rule us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/3.jpg\")
A demonstrator in Portland on the night of July 16.
\nWhile it currently seems unlikely that Trump can craft a consensus among the ruling class to hold on to power—democratically or not—for four more years, it is certain that the marauders who make up his administration are in no hurry to lose their grip on the reins of the state. As the rifts within the ruling class widen alongside the gulfs in our entire society, some of them may be legitimately concerned that they could share the fate of those of Trump’s closest associates who have already been found guilty of crimes. If deploying DHS against “violent anarchists” goes well for Trump, he will move on to his next adversaries, and the balance of power may begin to shift in his favor.
\n\nRather than imagining that elections and “the rule of law” will protect us from tyranny, we must understand how representation and law are themselves bound up in the perpetuation of the institutions via which tyrants like Trump rule. The only reason we have elections or rights in the first place is that our predecessors fought a revolution and then a bloody civil war. The work of liberation that they began still waits for us to finish it today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/2.jpg\")
For a world without police.
\nThe cop-free zone is not the particular block or traffic circle or park. It is the shared commitment to defending a space and eliminating the dynamics of policing and white supremacy. In the following collection, we explore some people’s experiences attempting to create police-free autonomous zones in different parts of the United States.
\n\nYesterday, Seattle police evicted the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), also known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), ending an experiment in autonomy that had extended over three weeks of inspiring creativity and heartbreaking tragedies. Yet the legend of this space has spread around the world, inspiring solidarity actions as far away as Tokyo and attempts to emulate it from Portland to New York City and Washington, DC. For an overview of the story of the occupation in Seattle, you could start here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/19.jpg\")
The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone/Organized Protest at its peak.
\nTo establish a cop-free zone is a show of strength, whether it lasts for a single evening or a period of years. It can dramatically expand the popular imagination: just as police abolition was unthinkable until the uprising in Minneapolis demonstrated that rioters could defeat police in open confrontation, even the most temporary autonomous zone can enable people to rethink their assumptions about policing.
\n\nAbove all, a liberated zone provides a space in which to remember and mourn. Just as Occupy Oakland renamed the plaza they occupied in honor of Oscar Grant in 2011, contemporary cop-free zones have served as memorials to those whose lives have been taken by police violence, hosting breathtaking participatory art installations. The most important artistic endeavors and community gatherings in the US right now are taking place in these spaces.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/9.jpg\")
A memorial in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in the first days of its existence.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/6.jpg\")
In Richmond, in the autonomous zone rechristened Marcus-David Peters Circle, demonstrators transformed a Confederate monument into a moving community memorial using the palette of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/20.jpg\")
One of the memorials at the foot of the reimagined monument at Marcus-David Peters Circle, Richmond.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/5.jpg\")
A memorial at a cop-free zone in Atlanta.
\nAt the same time, when the police are still so powerful and the ruling class that they serve is scrambling to legitimize them in the public eye, establishing a cop-free zone involves challenges and risks. In response to the sudden popularity of police abolition, the state urgently needs to create spectacles that create the impression that the abolition of policing is even more gruesome than the ongoing violence of police.
\n\nTrying to control fixed territory puts us on the defensive, making us a stationary target for white supremacists and others to attack us. These attacks can range from actual shootings, such as the one DeJuan Young described experiencing in Seattle, to the blatantly dishonest smear campaign that Fox News perpetrated against the occupation there. At the same time, police and other state actors seek to drive violence and anti-social activity into areas they don’t control in order to discredit those who inhabit them. In Greece, police have long used this tactic against ungovernable neighborhoods like Exarchia as well as autonomous zones in Greek universities.
\n\nControlling a particular space doesn’t necessarily equip us to interrupt the processes that cause the anti-social violence that the authorities use to justify policing. The proposal to abolish the police is not a proposal to defund a particular institution, but to overhaul our entire society, abolishing the disparities that make police necessary to maintain the prevailing order. Inside an autonomous zone, we can demonstrate gift economics and other models of mutual aid, but that won’t suffice to protect the participants from the pressures of capitalism and white supremacy, which are bound to continue destabilizing our relationships until we can bring about wider social change.
\n\nThis doesn’t mean we should abandon the language of “autonomy” in favor of “occupation” or “organization,” as some have argued. Rather, we need to popularize a different understanding of what autonomy is. As we understand the concept, to be autonomous is not to administer an independent juridical zone the way the state does; rather, autonomy is a question of how much leverage all the participants in an environment have over what they are able to do and experience in it. In this sense, autonomy is not a property of a defined physical space, but rather a quality of a network of relations.
\n\n\n\n\n“Autonomy… needn’t mean meeting all your needs independently; it could also mean the kind of interdependence that gives you leverage on the people you depend on. No single institution should be able to monopolize access to resources or social relations. A society that promotes autonomy requires what an engineer would call redundancy: a wide range of options and possibilities in every aspect of life.”
\n\n \n
Concentrating power over an autonomous zone in a single leadership or decision-making structure is a liability, not an advantage. Monopolies on power usually benefit the comparatively privileged, who are best equipped to employ frameworks of legitimacy to position themselves favorably, whereas those who are on the receiving end of racial and class disparities are often excluded even when these frameworks are supposed to empower them. If our goal is to abolish white supremacy, our top priority should be to support the voices and actions of the most disenfranchised Black, brown, and queer people, not to follow the leadership of those who already benefit from status of some kind. Likewise, too much emphasis on unity tends to restrict both tactics and long-term goals to a lowest common denominator, undercutting the diversity and unpredictability that enable movements to establish autonomous zones in the first place.
\n\nAll these considerations suggest that, even if our goal is simply to hold a particular physical space, we have to prioritize carrying out offensive activities throughout society at large that can keep our adversaries on the defensive, while investing energy in the activities that nourish movements and spaces rather than focusing on defending particular boundaries. We should understand occupied spaces as an effect of our efforts, rather than as the central cause we rally around.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/11.jpg\")
\nOther movements have already grappled with these questions in the past. We can learn a lot from the squatting movement in Europe, the Movimento sem Terra (MST) in Brazil, the Occupy movement in the US, and other examples worldwide. In the worst case, misunderstanding autonomous space as a physical territory rather than as the relationships and courage that maintain it can lead to some participants making disastrous compromises with the authorities in hopes of being permitted to retain that territory.
\n\nFinally, establishing and defending police-free zones compels us to develop a robust analysis of what policing is in order to make sure that we don’t replicate it. The extent to which we can resolve conflict ourselves in these spaces will be one of the most important factors in determining whether we can hold on to them and demonstrate a model of autonomy that deserves to become contagious. We should not confuse our ability to defend cop-free zones with being able to employ lethal force the same way that the police do. If we make this mistake, we risk reproducing the dynamics of existing systems of policing, and the ones who suffer the worst consequences will likely be young Black men.
\n\n\n\n\n“We must find mutually satisfying resolutions or else suffer the consequences of ongoing strife. This is an incentive to take all parties’ needs and perceptions seriously, to develop skills with which to defuse tensions and reconcile rivals. It isn’t necessary to get everyone to agree, but we have to find ways to differ that do not produce hierarchies, oppression, or pointless antagonism.
\n\n \n
In this regard, the first line of defense of the cop-free zone is not the violent force with which it is defended, but the ways that the participants turn care into a transformative force.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/15.jpg\")
The alley behind the Third Precinct in Minneapolis through which police withdrew before protesters burned it down in response to the murder of George Floyd.
\nIn the following accounts from New York City, Portland, and elsewhere around the United States, participants in autonomous zones reflect on their experiences.
\n\nI headed to the occupation at City Hall on Monday evening [June 29], expecting an eviction. I planned to stay the night. I knew that might mean not sleeping.
\n\nSeveral marches were converging on the plaza at once. The section of park that was surrounded by police barricades and filled with protesters was much bigger than Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street. Still, the quickly growing crowd could not fit in that space. We had to expand.
\n\nAt first, it seemed like a better plan to expand deeper into the park. The south end of the park was only guarded by a few cops milling about on the outskirts. Expanding in that direction would involve a small confrontation, but one we could definitely win. However, the people holding the barricades to the south were hesitant to move the line. Rather than arguing, the crowd took the path of least resistance and poured into the streets at the northeast corner. Taking Centre Street meant blocking car access to the Brooklyn Bridge. Holding Chambers Street gave protesters the opportunity to adorn the courthouse with graffiti. Expanding outward into the streets ensured a conflict, for better or worse. With our numbers we could easily hold the space—at least until early morning. By then, most people would be gone and the police could confidently storm in. This outcome was painfully obvious.
\n\nStill, it was happening regardless. I quickly set to work trying to help the expansion of the occupation succeed however I could.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/24.jpg\")
Occupied zone in front of City Hall in New York City, July 1.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/29.jpg\")
Occupied zone in front of City Hall in New York City, July 2.
\nOccupiers congregated on Chambers for an impromptu teach-in in the street. At any given moment, there were several collective discussions, presentations, and assemblies happening at once. People brought tables into the intersection and loaded them down with free pizza. After months of unrest, most of lower Manhattan was full of crowd control barricades. These were quickly repurposed along with nearby construction materials to reinforce our presence in the area.
\n\nThroughout the park, people were sharing food, clothes, personal protective gear, bedding, and other essentials. There were drink coolers sorted and labeled: Water, Sparkling water, Juice, Gatorade. A generator-powered phone-charging station enabled people to stay longer while staying in communication with the outside world. A free library—with no late fees!—was established early on and stocked with the words of Black revolutionaries and poets. By July 1, the occupation was offering free COVID-19 testing, too. I was taken aback by how swiftly and proficiently people came together to build meaningful infrastructure. At one point, I overheard someone asking how they could help with food distribution. A volunteer answered that they could come behind the table to help pass out pizza, and they did.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/27.jpg\")
An assembly in the occupied zone in front of City Hall in New York City, July 1.
\nWhen tensions with police escalated around 2:30 am, I asked people at the supply table for every umbrella they had. I intended to distribute them along the front lines to defend against pepper spray. The people distributing supplies were so calm and collected. I remember wishing we had their levelheadedness on the barricades.
\n\nAs the night drew on, the crowd began to turn in on itself. Despite barriers having surrounded the encampment for days and nights, a couple people suddenly decided that rather than deterring police from charging, the barricades were trapping us in. They would say things like “We need to make an escape route,” or “The barricades give the police an excuse to raid the park.” In reality, the police had every excuse they needed to evict the park, barricades or not, and NYPD has never waited for excuses to attack us. Barricades keep the police from rushing in to make random arrests. Barricades do not feel pain when they are hit with batons. Barricades do not need to be bailed out of jail.
\n\nRegarding the question of escape routes, remember, every exit is also an entrance. Because the intended goal of the occupation is to hold space rather than to be mobile, it makes sense to have a strong perimeter on all sides. Yes, perimeters will be the points of conflict. That will always be the case, no matter how big or small the space. Geometry shows us that the larger the area occupied, the more police it will take to surround it. The sheer size of the City Hall Autonomous Zone is what enables a small group of people to defend overnight. It took police two hours to dismantle the unguarded barricades early Wednesday morning. Had the crowd chosen to leave the park while police were attacking, this would have been plenty of time to get everyone out through the other end.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/25.jpg\")
Graffiti adorning City Hall in New York City, July 2.
\nWe saw this play out on Monday night (Tuesday morning). As some people were dismantling the barricades on the Northeast side of the park, protesters reinforced the ones in the Northwest side. Lines of barriers were strewn throughout the street and connected one to the next in a tight blockade. Despite numerous attempts, police were unable to get through the Northwest side as long as protesters were guarding it. Yet while people were painting the now iconic face of the surrogate courthouse, police entered through the gap in the northeast and were able to make arrests. Fortunately, they were quickly pushed back to the outskirts, where they waited until early morning for our numbers to dwindle. In the early morning, they flooded in through the Northeast and pushed everyone back into the park. This shows how important the barricades are to holding the space and keeping us safe.
\n\nTo be clear: the City Hall Autonomous Zone is nothing if not messy. Since day one there have been heated megaphone arguments between organizers, not to mention the arguments everyone else is engaging in. This is to be expected with such a wildly diverse set of goals and ideologies. Some anarchists dismiss the occupation as a product of the nonprofit-industrial complex. It has even been said that some of the original organizers established a verbal agreement with police that they could stay until July 1 if they remained orderly and left afterwords. Needless to say, we are past that point.
\n\nThe truth is that the New York City Hall Autonomous Zone—NYCHAZ—is by far the most conflictual thing taking place in New York right now. If it were solely an encampment of fringe radicals with years of experience and impeccable politics, it would be much smaller and far less interesting. The beauty is the process, not the occupation. Though the police have successfully cleared the streets of barricades after multiple nights of confrontation, they cannot clear them from memory of everyone who has participated. What’s taking place now will produce a new generation of radicals, just as Occupy did a decade ago. Entire crowds of people can learn so much in only a few nights. Some of it can be communicated online; most of it, you’ve just got to be there.
\n\nWhile I strongly disagreed with proposal to clear the barricades, I felt it best not to fight over the matter. It’s both a blessing and a curse that no one contingent reigns over the occupation. The atmosphere at the NYCHAZ is such that some protesters can sit around a zoom channel, cheering politicians, while others paint ACAB on the downtown courthouses and pile construction materials in the streets. Everything has its time and place. If some tactics or ideas don’t catch on at one end of the park, there’s a good chance they will still work at the other end. The crowd dynamics are always changing. If you try something and it doesn’t get the reaction you were hoping, try something else—or just wait a bit and try it again. Monday night, people were bickering about barricades. By Tuesday, people were reinforcing them with 20 foot pieces of rebar and building shields in the park.
\n\nWednesday morning. My second consecutive night of barricading and forgoing sleep. I’m standing with friends and strangers holding each other as we push against police shields. It’s the second night in a row that I’m nearly certain we’re all going to be arrested. Just the same, there’s really no other option but to stand our ground and endure. After hours of confrontation, pepper spray, and beatings, the police finally get the order to retreat. I’m overcome with relief and adoration for everyone who chose to stick out the night.
\n\nWe take a moment to embrace in celebration, a moment to drink water. It’s around 9 am. I change and leave the park with a couple friends, hoping to get a little sleep before returning.
\n\nOne of them texts me a few hours later: “It feels good to be alive.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/21.jpg\")
Welcome to beautiful Marcus-David Peters Circle in Richmond, liberated by the people in the year 2020.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/7.jpg\")
Marcus-David Peters Circle, where the rising tide of revolt will soon sweep away the Confederate statue.
\nThe following is a first-person account of what we’ll call Area X. Area X is a made-up name for a real place that has no name; to respect the opacity of this space, key details will be blurred. Area X is a police-free zone somewhere in the USA. The zone is located at a site where a building burned down after a Black man was murdered. Area X serves as both a memorial to the fallen and a gathering place—a stretch of the city in which the police cannot enforce law and order and with which they cannot negotiate.
\n\nFor me, it started like this. We arrived at the site less than an hour after the murder. Our comrade had witnessed the whole thing and made us aware of exactly what had happened. Luckily, our comrade had gotten out of the situation safely.
\n\nWhen we arrived, we found a small but angry crowd facing off with a police line. The crowd was mostly Black, reflecting the neighborhood where the killing took place. People screamed at the cops and the District Attorney who came out to calm people down, talked among themselves about what had happened, and held the streets until late. The next day, the site was packed with people for most of the day; by sundown, the cops had been forced out of the area by people throwing bottles and attacking their cars. The cops shot tear gas and flash grenades and then withdrew behind a cloud of smoke. Though they left the scene, police remained posted along a nearby highway with bearcats, swat vehicles, you name it.
\n\nShortly after police fled the scene, a march formed that took the highway and blocked traffic. In hindsight, this was a decisive moment. People shut down the freeway and blocked traffic—and then sure enough, 30 minutes later, activists were on their bullhorns telling people to “link arms,” “prepare to be arrested,” everything I know means “this is not where it’s at.” My crew exited the freeway. The flow of traffic was stopped for a moment as people on the highway paid their respects—but staying too long on the highway is just being traffic, and we have to be water. As we exited the freeway, we passed more pacifiers with bullhorns, leaving them to stick to their corner on another highway on-ramp.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/12.jpg\")
The vicinity of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis after protesters burned it down in response to the murder of George Floyd.
\nWe walked down to where the shooting had taken place the night before. That was where the fight was at. There was nobody there trying to pacify or neutralize, only a mixed crowd that all wanted one thing: to burn that building to the ground. It’s interesting to note that the only reason the crowd was able to attack the building in peace is because all the activists and NGO people were focused on the freeway, at a distance from what was to become Area X.
\n\nThe first step in the creation of Area X was the destruction of the building. Media teams were forced to withdraw from the area as the building caught fire. The crowd stopped an outsider medic who tried to put out the fire. As the building went up, a cop tried to clear the streets in front of Area X by driving erratically through the street where dozens of people had been gathered. His objective was to open a route for fire trucks, but this failed as the police vehicle was repeatedly attacked with bricks. After a few laps in the street, he was forced to retreat. As he left the scene, the fire trucks appeared; they, too, were blocked by a small force of people linking arms and refusing to move. The drivers were forced to turn their trucks around.
\n\nAt this point, a large rowdy crowd split off to join a militant Black-led march headed to a nearby police precinct. The police had been tied up on the highway and elsewhere in the city that day, and now a new formation was headed to a nearby neighborhood, further dividing their attention. By this time, it was well after dark, but that didn’t stop some folks from marching with their children all the way up at the front. The march was guarded by barricaders and rock slingers who attacked police when they tried to drive by the crowd. As the crowd arrived at the police precinct, divisions emerged regarding whether to “file a collective police report” or to “fuck this shit up” as megaphone holders peace-policed the crowd about “agitators.” This didn’t work, either, since police began firing tear gas and flash-bang grenades at the crowd and people responded with bottles, rocks, fireworks, and lasers.
\n\nThis march from Area X to the precinct set the geographic coordinates of the revolt over the next two days, with a series of marches going to different locations in the area.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/17.jpg\")
The Target in Minneapolis that was looted in protest against the murder of George Floyd.
\nArea X is an armed demonstration held down almost entirely by Black people. Because it is armed, liberals and NGOs, formal BLM organizers, politicians, campaigners, and other activists largely avoid the space. News agencies have been almost unanimously barred from entering Area X. This is not to say that there’s no order or organization to the way the space is maintained. It is thoroughly intergenerational—elders are out there as well as children, teenagers, and young adults. Many people in Area X have a very clear vision and they share that vision with those who ask. One of the first things we had to figure out as organized comrades was how to fight alongside the force that already exists here.
\n\nWe’ve come down to Area X every day since the shooting, meeting people, talking, blocking the streets with cars, watching sideshows, and so on. At one point, for good reason, Area X did not allow any white people to enter the space. As a group of comrades that is not white only but does include several white people, this presented a hurdle for us. It points to a common problem concerning the limits of ally politics.
\n\nWe organized to offer material support of various kinds: plates of food, expropriated construction barricades to help secure the space, benches, tons of supplies. One of the challenges in organizing with others there was that as anarchists, we are organized “informally,” which is to say, in a way that is chaotic and intentionally opaque. This can make formal communication between groups complicated. Of course, we built affinity on a personal level with some people, but with others, the process has been challenging.
\n\nAs one comrade put it, the dilemma is less a matter of friction between formal and informal organizing and more about the difference between memetic and synthetic modes of organizing. In the memetic framework, the question is how a rebellion can reproduce groups and networks based in affinity so they divide and multiply, enabling the antagonism to spread across social and political divides. In the synthetic framework, the question is how these efforts can be brought into harmony and potentially made more coherent.
\n\nIn our experience, the memetic form of organizing reached its limits when it failed to sustain momentum alongside the occupation at Area X. While rowdy marches of young front-liners and people from Area X battled with police at the nearby precinct on the first several nights, these eventually fizzled out. Could we create something more synthetic that goes beyond the stale models of formal organization we’re already familiar with? We have been moving in synthetic direction by adopting the custom of always bringing supplies or material support. We want people to know that we’re powerful, that we’re capable of fighting, but we don’t do that only through conflict and militancy. A large part of utilizing our power is demonstrating our power to give, to share, to care. Anarchists facing the limits of ally politics might consider specializing in these areas. In many ways, many of us already do.
\n\nWe expanded our personal affinities with several individuals from Area X when we invited them to participate in a squatted rave just around the corner from the occupation. This change of setting, expanding the uncontrollable areas near Area X, also added a new dimension to our friendships.
\n\nIt’s still too early to say what’s happening here in Area X, but it’s something powerful, something nobody could have imagined two months ago. We still have so many questions. How can we build something like the Red Warrior camp? How can we open up new fronts in order to prevent the police from restoring the old status quo? How do we negotiate political and strategic disagreements with other participants?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/18.jpg\")
The Target in Minneapolis.
\nThree accounts from different participants in three attempts to create autonomous zones in Portland.
\n\nPeople had been gathering at the Justice Center for several days when word spread to “Bring overnight gear” that night. It was only word of mouth and Signal groups at first. Then, as it got later in the evening, it appeared on social media and spread. A makeshift barricade went up, but the crowd was almost immediately dispersed via gas and munitions from police. Word then spread to “call it off” via word of mouth and text messages. No further attempt was made that night to create an autonomous zone.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/1.jpg\")
Conflict outside the Justice Center in Portland.
\nThere were numerous rumors about attempts to create autonomous zones in Portland that didn’t come to fruition before the actual attempts I participated in.
\n\nThe first took place outside Mayor Ted Wheeler’s fancy apartment in one of the most upscale parts of our city. Earlier in the day, a local abolitionist chapter of Care Not Cops, a subset of Critical Resistance, had organized a protest in the same location to put pressure on the mayor and city council to vote against the proposed budget cut for the Portland Police Bureau, arguing it was not enough of a reduction—it was only a 3% reduction in what was actually an increase in their budget. That evening’s attempted occupation was intended to keep the pressure on elected officials.
\n\nUpon arriving, I joined a group of a few hundred folks chanting and banging on light poles. We had about a half block to ourselves, with people building elaborate blockades all night. The vibe was joyous, decentralized, at times chaotic. We called this the Patrick Kimmons Autonomous Zone (PKAZ) to honor a Black man killed by police in 2018. The name was spontaneously chosen after a vigil for him was set up. For most of the night, there were a few tents but not enough to provide a feeling of security to those of us in them.
\n\nWe wondered when the cops would show up. There were a few false alarms. The crowd thinned out around 2 am, making us vulnerable to attack. The police waited until 5:30 am, when we heard our comrades shouting and, over the loud speakers, “This is the Portland Police Bureau.”
\n\nI believe they allowed us to stay overnight because we had large numbers at the beginning, when liberals joined from other marches. This initial group was high energy and defiant, reinforcing our position with barricades. The police waited to attack until our numbers dwindled to under 100.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/2.jpg\")
Portland.
\nThe second attempt occurred a week later, although it may not initially have been intended to create an autonomous zone. A march ended at the north police precinct, located in one of our historically Black but now heavily gentrified neighborhoods. I joined after people had taken over a full block; the police had retreated from defending the front of the precinct to take up position at the back and on the roof. This time, there seemed to be more organized affinity groups, including many medics, teams building barricades, and people pointing lasers at the cops on the roof to hinder their efforts to film us. At one point, a car that got through our barricade drove at the crowd, hitting no one but ramming several other cars.
\n\nAs the night wore on, some Black organizers advised us to take shifts so we could hold the position overnight. Yet no tents were erected. My own companions were debating: on one side, we were being called to stay there beside the Black organizers and community members; on the other, we were being asked to leave by Black comrades watching from home expressing concern that the occupation would provoke more police violence in this historically Black neighborhood.
\n\nA few hours later, police charged the crowd using impact munitions. I left at that point, but others continued to resist, using barricades as they retreated and holding the line for many hours into the night.
\n\nAgain, the police were able to thwart this attempt as a consequence of low numbers and division. They aim to strike us when we are at our weakest before we can establish a real foothold. For new people joining the movement, it can be hard to decide where to go or who to follow. Both of these occupations were organized in solidarity with the George Floyd uprising and anti-police protests. If you don’t have a nuanced analysis about how to resist the state, it’s easy to fall in lockstep behind liberal protest police who respond to direct confrontation with police with reactionary denunciations. Without community relationships and trust, it can be hard to know how best to show solidarity with those harmed during these actions. Still, the true cause of harm is the police, who terrorize people every night of the year, not just when there are occupations.
\n\nAs Portlanders come out night after night, some of us are learning to trust each other. We are learning how to de-arrest people when the police attempt to snatch them, how to endure their attacks and chemical weapons. This is where the autonomous zone is being built—every night we are out here learning how to be together and trust each and hold each other accountable as we build a world without police.
\n\nSome police attacks on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Portland, June 20-28.
\nIt began with a march. I knew we were heading to the precinct and that there was a tentative goal to “occupy the space until it was shut down,” but that this was only going to take place if we had the numbers to do so. Our numbers were too low for that. At some point, the word spread amongst the crowd that we would only go there, occupy the space and “make our voices heard,” then leave.
\n\nOn arriving, we gathered in front of the precinct and listened to speakers in the back of a truck. It quickly became confusing. All of the speakers seemed to be giving conflicting messages; we saw them arguing among themselves off to one side. The police had come out and lined up near us by this point.
\n\nOne speaker would say we needed to make the police understand Black stories, while scolding us for trolling the police because it unnecessarily put us all in danger. Another speaker would get up and say we were “taking back what’s ours” and that we were staying there for the night and not to destroy any building in the area besides the precinct—a message that could easily be misheard or misunderstood as it traveled through the crowd. One speaker would say “there are no bad protesters!” and affirm diversity of tactics while the next one would scream that “unless a Black person is doing it next to you, you are doing it wrong” and that “ACAB is not the priority, BLM is”—also a confusing message that could easily be misinterpreted under the circumstances.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/3.jpg\")
Portland.
\nWhile this was happening, people were carrying in palettes and makeshift barricade supplies, taking them over to the side facing the precinct. A small campfire was made in the lot beside the precinct—this is a federally recognized form of Native protest/gathering, as a sign displayed by the fire explained. People were also tagging the precinct building. Some speakers were yelling at the taggers to stop while others encouraged them.
\n\nAfter a tense and confusing hour, a speaker announced that those speakers were leaving and that anyone who would like to leave peacefully could follow them, while anyone who wanted to “stay of their own accord” could do so. Some speakers left while some remained.
\n\nMy group decided to head home because the messages and direction were mixed and the group did not feel confident as a whole, and the numbers were way too low to make it safe for us to stay—there were maybe 50 people there.
\n\nA general problem with all three of the attempts to create autonomous zones in Portland was that they were not announced until the day before at the earliest, and then the plans were spread far and wide on social media, ruining both the element of surprise and the advantage of drawing large numbers. To succeed, an autonomous zone has to emerge in an opportune time and place. That moment has not yet occurred in Portland and we cannot create it by force.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/4.jpg\")
Portland.
\n\n\n\nATTORNEY WEINGLASS: Where do you reside?
\n\nABBIE HOFFMAN: I live in Woodstock Nation.
\n\nATTORNEY WEINGLASS: Will you tell the Court and jury where it is?
\n\nABBIE HOFFMAN: Yes. It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind in the same way as the Sioux Indians carried [sic] the Sioux nation around with them. It is a nation dedicated to cooperation versus competition, to the idea that people should have better means of exchange than property or money, that there should be some other basis for human interaction. It is a nation dedicated to—
\n\nTHE COURT: Just where it is, that is all.
\n\nTHE WITNESS: It is in my mind and in the minds of my brothers and sisters. It does not consist of property or material but, rather, of ideas and certain values. We believe in a society—
\n\nTHE COURT: No, we want the place of residence, if he has one, place of doing business, if you have a business. Nothing about philosophy or India, sir. Just where you live, if you have a place to live. Now you said Woodstock. In what state is Woodstock?
\n\nTHE WITNESS: It is in the state of mind, in the mind of myself and my brothers and sisters. It is a conspiracy. Presently, the nation is held captive, in the penitentiaries of the institutions of a decaying system.
\n
Our state capitol isn’t known for its activist scene. Traditionally, the nearby college town and its smaller sister city are where people move to get politically active, or even to experience the occasional small riot. Whenever we need to mobilize at the capitol—say, if white nationalists are coming to town—the classic groan on our area’s Signal loop is, “So, is there anyone there who can bottomline?” Usually, it remains a question without an answer, but four nights after the murder of George Floyd I realized we had been asking the wrong question all along.
\n\nWithout much of an activist or protest tradition there, the crowd that night didn’t have a rubric to follow. Anything was possible, and it was messy as hell. You could tell people were there with all kinds of conflicting expectations about what would go down. There were people who thought that the apex of meaningful protest was to find the police line and just sit in front of it. There were peace police who shut down anyone who so much as flew a paper airplane toward the cops—that actually happened. But there was also a crew of kids that showed up with baseball bats in hand. About half of the crowd was Black, and it was overwhelmingly young. Two white patriot types walked around freely, scoping people out; curiously, they were met with less suspicion than white protesters in black bloc gear. Just the day before, conspiracy theories had started circulating on social media about white anarchist “outside agitators” hijacking the demonstrations.
\n\nMy buddy and I definitely fit the profile. Even before the “outside agitator” scapegoating in the media, we had decided to play a defense-oriented support role rather than anything antagonistic—or, better put, protagonistic. I came prepared to try out a method for extinguishing tear gas that I had only seen in videos of foreign uprisings. When I arrived, though, it seemed unlikely that I would get the chance to put my tools to the test. Sure, there were the kids with bats, but the crowd itself wasn’t doing much, just endlessly chanting on the capitol grounds. I didn’t think anything would happen. As it turned out, the outside agitator narrative had even gotten to me—I’d made the mistake of thinking that the police needed an excuse to come at us. On the contrary, without any provocation, the canisters started to rain from the sky.
\n\nI rushed over to pick up a smoking round with my leather glove and dunked it in my bucket of water and baking soda. Eyes up. Scanning again.
\n\n“Are they moving forward?”
\n\n“There’s another one!” My buddy shouted.
\n\nI was there in the teary blink of an eye to dunk another in. That felt good! It was like being a left fielder again. As I knelt over my bucket, shaking it and holding the top on gently so just a little smoke could exit the edge of the lid, a group of young Black women started yelling at me, “What is that? Hey! Who is he? What are you doing?!” I don’t know for a fact that the outside agitator narrative had reached them, but I don’t know what else would explain scrutinizing the behavior of a single person in the streets while an army of police were advancing and shooting projectiles.
\n\nI turned, hand still on my bucket, to explain that I was putting out tear gas, but behind my COVID mask, my voice didn’t go very far. I pulled off the mask and they came closer. Their demeanor changed when I finally succeeded at explaining what I was doing. They got right in my face: “Hell yeah! That’s what’s up.” So much for social distancing! At least I had contributed to a little more mutual trust in the crowd, I hoped.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/13.jpg\")
Minneapolis.
\nThe initial tear gas burst happened while the sun was still high, and the scene basically remained the same for hours. All we were doing was chanting and standing around. Finally, the sun began to set. We had made it to the golden hour before night. In my experience, this is when the magic happens. No matter what happens during the day, if you can maintain the people and the energy until sunset, something good can happen.
\n\nAs darkness fell, my buddy turned on the portable boom box we’d brought and started blasting some Boosie. The tenor of the demonstration hadn’t felt right for it before, and we hadn’t wanted to set the tone for everyone else, but after hours of chanting, the crowd was quieting down and something was needed to keep the energy up. People loved it. Signs were bouncing and everyone started getting down in the street. The cops retreated and that got everyone even more hyped. People started making requests, mostly for NWA’s “Fuck The Police.” I was surprised. Like, wasn’t that song a hit when their parents were kids? But then again, what has changed about cops over the last 30 years?
\n\nEventually, the police reappeared with reinforcements. Time to deploy our third defensive tool of the night, the laser. My buddy shined it at the cops; as he scanned them with it, I remembering seeing one officer grab a second cop with a big firearm and point directly down the laser’s line at us. Oh shit.1 This time, the tear gas didn’t rain from the sky—it came right at us. Wear goggles and helmets y’all. The crowd ran. People were scared. We all ran to an intersection on the other corner of the capitol grounds, a few blocks from the advancing police line.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/14.jpg\")
Minneapolis.
\nThe mood changed again. We turned off the boom box; it felt glib to have music on while people were trying to get their bearings. The police took the grounds around the capitol building and let us have the streets about 100 yards from them. The scattered crowd started to gather again, their fear giving way to anger, and someone made another request for NWA. Hell yeah. We blasted it, singing along with everyone else: “Fuck the police! Fuck the police!” We were solid now. It was apparent that the cops were going to stick to the capitol and the other government buildings first and foremost, leaving the intersection to us. A good beat can go a long way to give a crowd a sense of ownership over a space. We kept the tunes rolling.
\n\nI was searching my iPod for songs when this white, DSA-looking, university-type activist came up to my buddy and said, “Hey, can we talk?”
\n\n“Yeah man, sure.”
\n\n“People were saying that your laser is why the cops fired teargas on us and dispersed everybody.”
\n\nMy buddy and I exchanged an “Is this person fucking serious?” look.
\n\n“No, I know. We can’t control them, but people are feeling pretty uncomfortable with the laser.” He then pointed to the boom box, “This is great though! I just wanted to pass that along because I don’t know if anyone would have come up to y’all all dressed in black—which is also cool with me. I get it!” It was hard not to find the kid charming. He was trying his best to reconcile good ally politics with an apparent belief in going beyond peaceful protest, but, like, strategically. My buddy said he’d chill with the laser and I told the kid I appreciated him coming up and talking to us and not getting aggro.
\n\nMore tear gas. More scattering—but this time, it didn’t take long for people to come back together. At the intersection by the capitol, we had still stayed in eyesight of the cops, a holdover from that day’s earlier strategy of just going wherever the cops were and demonstrating at them. This time, though, we had regrouped in the downtown shopping area and the cops were nowhere to be seen.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/10.jpg\")
Richmond.
\nWe were free. Not capital F free, but it was a kind of freedom nonetheless. For as brief a time and as limited of an area as it was, we were free from police. Everyone could sense they weren’t coming for us at that moment. And all the anger, the frustrated emotions held back when the police were pushing us around earlier that day, earlier in our lives—for the last few centuries, really—all of that exploded… and with it the windows of every nearby business.
\n\nAt first, there were a few cries of, “Look at these white motherfuckers out here breaking shit!” But it only took a quick scan of the area to see that it was hardly just white people inciting and participating in the destruction. In that space, the currency of society was turned upside down—it didn’t matter if a store was a corporate chain like Target or Subway,2 if it had shiny plate glass windows, fancy decor, intricate and interesting signage—it was going to get it. On the other hand, anywhere that looked kind of run down, or had a tired, Black security guard working detail, got a pass. “The man’s just working,” folks shouted as the security guard smiled at the mob and waved back in appreciation.
\n\nThe cops still weren’t coming. My buddy and I hung back as the destructive march passed the courthouse up ahead. National Guard and police surrounded the courthouse, but like video game villains whose programming only allows them to move a certain distance from a given point, the police were not budging from their posts. As we took a break, we watched a second wave of looters pass through. We saw a family step inside one restaurant and come out with a scale. “Oh shit,” my friend said, “that’s capital!” I saw two houseless guys nonchalantly enter another restaurant whose windows had been smashed. I remembered them from earlier because as we were being dispersed, they were on the sidewalk, taking in the show, commenting to each other about how the police had the whole situation on lockdown and that you can’t mess with the cops. The dogmatic Marxist part of my brain chastised them for valorizing the police: “Don’t you know that’s against your material interests?” But now, they were carefully stepping back out of the restaurant’s broken windows with a big TV that required both of them to carry it. Godspeed. “The last will be first, and the first will be last.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/16.jpg\")
Minneapolis.
\nWe wandered around, admiring the graffiti and destruction that decorated our city. “Our city!” It had never really felt like that before. At one point, we wandered into a parking lot where a loud, laser-ridden rave was thumping. Fuck! If only we hadn’t ditched our laser! After months of quarantine, vibing in rhythm alongside hundreds of other people felt like medicine for my mind and heart. For a few minutes, I simply closed my eyes and lost myself in the music. Was this real? How long ago had it been that the police were dispersing us with poison and pain? Hours, right? Ages. Was this freedom? I had known the word, but few times had I felt the feeling. What is freedom anyway? Is my freedom different than what everyone else here thinks of as freedom? My mind raced and wondered and wandered as the beat drove my feet one after another. I had been getting worn out before, but now I couldn’t miss a beat. “Dude, I am HIGH,” I exclaimed to my friend, but I hadn’t hit any pipe or popped any pill. The music came to a halt as a young Black woman climbed on the subwoofer and shouted, “This isn’t what you’re here for! It’s time to do what you came here to do!”
\n\nShe was right, and the crowd filtered back out towards the capitol to confront the police. Honestly, looking back, if the evening had ended in simply partying the night away in a parking garage, I don’t know if it would have felt as free. One of the few ways we can know freedom, a vulgar freedom you might call it, is when the authorities want to stop you but can’t. If we had just gone on dancing, and they let us have it as a way to stop the destruction, it wouldn’t have felt as good. But as an intermission in the middle of a full night of rioting against the police, against the whole world, it was exactly what I needed, and it transformed the vibe for the rest of the night. We weren’t just against the police, we were there together.
\n\nAt the capitol, the cops dispersed us again. More tear gas—and they kept their posts as we scattered. My friend and I found yet another crowd of about 50 people, a different group than the crowd we had been with at the rave earlier. “How many groups like this are there downtown?”
\n\nThis group was the least legibly “political” I had seen all night. Like, people weren’t carrying many signs, for example. It was the first time that night that my friend and I were the only white people there. The vibe was lit. People were joking around while throwing trashcans into the street, setting them on fire, then lighting their cigarettes on the barricades. Without the police to impose their control over our small zone, a new kind of order emerged. Private cars were off limits, no matter how valuable they looked—everyone knew the value of a ride, and plenty of nice looking cars rolled through blasting tunes and throwing up signs in solidarity. When someone wanted to break a window, their friends took the time to clear the area so that no one would get hurt by shattering glass or a ricocheting stone. If someone came up with an argument about why that business shouldn’t get it—it was Black-owned, or supported the movement, or whatever—it got a pass. In the looting I saw, no one quarreled over any of the goods, and I saw plenty of hand-offs as well. Traffic was mostly blocked, but protesters guided through the cars with children.
\n\nThe territory we controlled wasn’t fixed. It expanded and contracted as the night went on. It didn’t have anything that Fox News could describe as a “border,” the way they did when they maligned the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. But that was fine with me. The responsibilities of maintaining fixed territory, especially in the face of constant threat from the authorities, can become a burden that shuts down opportunities to experiment rather than opening them up. As an anarchist, I don’t seek to control territory. I seek to liberate it.
\n\nNot that anyone there needed my help! Everyone was just casually tagging, burning trash, another speaker mage showed up and finally it was his turn to play NWA and Lil Boosie for the fiftieth time that night. Someone realized that the lampposts had American flags on them and, without any debate or discussion, everyone worked together to bring one down and burn it. “We are not a part of this so-called nation.” At that moment, Law, as we knew it, wasn’t present. The only people making decisions about how and who got what was ourselves. Still, to my discredit, I was a little nervous when the tough-looking guy with the speaker walked up to my buddy, lowered the volume, drawing all eyes towards us, and said, “Yo, you’re the guy who had that laser, right?”
\n\nOh shit, is this one of the people who had serious disagreements with the laser earlier, feeling that he can express them now that we’re away from the police? Whatever the consequences, I wasn’t going to lie. That space was freedom, and while it’s hard to define freedom, the closest definition that has guided my struggle towards it—through different political labels like socialist or anarchist—is the ability to live your life honestly: not to have to lie. “Yeah, that was us,” I responded.
\n\nIf he already mistrusted us because of what the media was saying about white anarchists or because my friend had been sorely mistaken to think a laser was an innocent tool in this context, I wasn’t going to give him any more reason to mistrust us by lying about it. Whatever came next—and it might be an altercation—would at least take place in freedom. Freedom isn’t always pretty, but it’s dignified. However this guy felt about the laser, we were going to work it out without the fucking pigs.
\n\n“Bro, you’re the whole reason they shot tear gas at us.”
\n\n“I know, someone else told me people felt that way. Listen, I’m sorry, I didn’t know they would—“
\n\n“What? The fuck you sorry for? This shit is FUN. Thank you, man.”
\n\n“Uh, you’re welcome…” But we were the ones who were thankful and welcome.
\n\nThat was the freest I’ve ever felt in “America.” But the state cannot allow examples of what it is like to live under a different kind of order to flourish. Out of nowhere, a bearcat full of storm troopers peeled around the corner. Waco. The harmonious fire we had kindled together burst into escaping comets down every alley and side street. MOVE!
\n\nBut I couldn’t move. I knew it was a mistake to conflate the relationships in that space with the space itself, but the ground we were on had become sacred to me. The Free State of Jones.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/22.jpg\")
\nOnce they had me in cuffs, the police stopped shouting orders and started asking questions. Discussion can only take place on their terms. Why was I such a pussy? Why did I come to a city I wasn’t from to protest? Did I ever think about what would happen? But I had enough questions of my own running in my head. What would the charges be? Was I about to lose my job? I need that fucking job. Was I going to get doxxed? My family said they supported the movement, but what would happen if they started getting death threats because of insane conspiracy theories about my arrest? Would my arrest be used as further “evidence” of white anarchist outside agitators, despite the fact I had been literally just standing there? The Future.
\n\nIt wasn’t my first arrest. I’ve spent years of my life on probation or facing felony charges. The Past. In my experience, the first night dealing with jail and booking is the worst part of a criminal case. That’s the sprint. The endless, oft-continued court appearances and twists and turns in the litigation are the marathon. If you can make it through the sprint, you’ll have time to find your stride later on.
\n\nBack in The Now, I took a deep, deep breath, and as I exhaled, I vowed to myself that regardless of their threats, no matter how things turned out, I wasn’t going to make things harder on myself by worrying about what would come. I knew who I was and I knew that there was no way that I would ever miss the chance to be at ground zero in a rebellion like this. And I was happy with that part of me.
\n\nRecognition isn’t worth much on it’s own, but even at that moment I recognized the degree of privilege that enabled me to go full zen—I’ve thankfully never done prison time, for example. Still, more than one of the prisoners I’ve corresponded with have emphasized a refrain that really hit home for me that night: you may not always be able to defend your body, but you must always defend your mind.
\n\nNow grounded in my Self, I looked outward at the police who held me. Their faces were long and tired. I had to be there that day because of who I was; they had to be there because of their boss. I almost felt sorry for them. Almost. They weren’t upset exactly. I recognized the same biological adrenaline rush in them that I had been running off of all night long, but it came from a different place. I enjoyed finding ways to come together with everyone else there, I enjoyed taking risks, even if it meant the occasional difficult conversation. The joy the police experienced came from belittling me or belittling others in front of me. They drew no joy from the risks they chose to take. Whereas I had been interrogating my motives, my emotions, and my Self all night long, they let their Selves be determined by petty backslapping over who could best intimidate others.
\n\nFor the police, freedom means impunity, freedom from having to deal with the consequences of the ways they treat others—precisely the opposite of the accountability that we aspire to. I thought about the dark places that must lead them to in their personal lives, and I was suddenly overcome with sorrow for all of their victims, whether on the job or in their personal lives. No, I couldn’t feel sorry for them. They’ll deserve everything they get when the chickens finally come home to roost. But I knew that if they could experience what I felt that night, they would never again be able to trade their dignity for a gun and a paycheck.
\n\nYour heart can be a police-free zone. Defend it.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/PDXzane/status/1269844361912569862\n\n\n
At the close of the first chapter of this cycle, we remember the victories that gave rise to the cop-free zone in Seattle.
\n\nLast night on Capitol Hill in Seattle was a wonderful demonstration of diversity of tactics. There was a candlelight vigil to honor those killed by police and vigilantes since this uprising started. So many flowers and heartbreaking, heartwarming art. The vigil took place in two different places, one on the street and one on a sidewalk. A live band was playing on a nearby street and people were dancing. Others were giving out tons of free food—a hot meal as well as snacks, water, juice, and medical supplies. There was an entire medic station in the outdoor patio of a restaurant. Art and murals covered everything, people freely spray painting out in the open on the street and walls. Thousands of people out, lots of folks just hanging out at Cal Anderson park right next to everything. Signs saying “Emotional Support—> this way.”
\n\nOn another block, cops and National Guard were blocked in on all four sides near the precinct. They were kettled, basically. Over the course of a few hours, the barricade they put up was slowly pushed almost a full block, nearly all the way to the precinct. The cops ended up tear gassing those folks and shooting loads of pepper balls and flash-bang grenades into the crowd later in the night. People kept regrouping and coming back with their umbrellas and dumpsters and plastic crates and whatever else they could find to protect themselves, throwing things back at the cops each time they attacked. Meanwhile, a dumpster fire of epic proportions was happening at another intersection, with Black people around it telling everyone to enjoy themselves and not to put the fire out—to go somewhere else if it wasn’t their thing, reminding people that Minneapolis has just decided to defund their police force after many fires and refusing to protest the “right, legal way.” I ended up staying until 2 am. It was so hard to want to leave! So inspiring and energizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/02/8.jpg\")
Graffiti in a squatted center in small-town Kavala, Greece, photographed in 2016.
\nIn retrospect, the laser and the loud music basically painted an audio-visual target for the police. Like most crowd tactics to resist police, lasers can provide increased safety if many people are using them, but if it’s only a few, they can increase the risk, especially to those employing them. ↩
\nAuthor’s note: Days after this, I was back at the state capitol on the first night of protests without riots. A middle-class, white couple in their thirties was handing out a flyer that said, “Fuck Trump! From Emmit (sic) Till to George Floyd, STOP THE DESTRUCTION. If you see someone breaking windows or looting local businesses STOP THEM. STAY peaceful, STAY vigilant. It’s time for history to stop repeating itself. Your kids and your grandkids don’t have to be out here in the future.” Normally, I would just grab the stack of flyers and tell the couple to fuck off with their condescending, paternalistic bullshit, but there was such an emphasis on remaining peaceful in the crowd that I feared I would get jumped if I started something. So I explained, patiently and painstakingly, that no one would even know George Floyd’s name if it weren’t for the looting and burning in Minneapolis. I was surprised at the response I got: “Well, yeah, but that was a Target, I’m just saying people shouldn’t loot local businesses. Like the pawn shop that got hit last night, that’s owned by two Muslim guys and I used to live in this neighborhood, I know those guys.” Obviously, I wasn’t speaking with someone who had ever had to pawn anything for survival. One of the shifts I’ve noticed in the politics of this revolt is that it is almost popular consensus now that we don’t need to cry over the looting of corporate chain stores. There are disagreements over whether looting itself is strategic, but almost everyone accepts the argument that no tears need be shed for corporate box stores because their insurance will cover them. Really, this is a counterrevolutionary argument, almost a perverse remix of corporate philanthropy. If our response to riots is a militaristic assessment of “targets,” we miss the fundamental relationship between wealth and power that is at the root of oppression in our society. As exemplified by the white, do-gooder couple that described the luxury downtown apartment complexes as their “community,” even the most well-meaning of white people will fall back on some form of anti-Blackness, racism, white supremacy—whatever you want to call it—if their priority is social peace and preserving the legitimacy of private property. ↩
\nIn December, CrimethInc. agents will traverse the West Coast of the US, distributing anarchist literature at three book fairs and offering three different presentations in at least ten different cities. This is a crucial moment, with clashes intensifying in various parts of the world; it’s a good time to strengthen our connections, sharpen our analyses, and strategize together for the next round. We’ll be revisiting our book about the last cycle of struggles, From Democracy to Freedom, as it relates to the questions confronting social movements today, and drawing on dialogue with participants in the movements unfolding right now. Come join us!
\n\nThe descriptions of the talks follow the schedule, below.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/19/fdtf-tour-williams-2019.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/19/fdtf-tour-oakland-2019.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/78813085_543300552883494_3671648914353684480_o.jpg?_nc_cat=104&_nc_ohc=_fhs9HZ4SrMAQkR-EhFb8T_mbeixqqUY4eLDH0w1lBm0KIaQOmmuW6xqQ&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.xx&oh=e1ae5b84712c09cb88838aa9b0234d11&oe=5E451607\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/19/fdtf-tour-tijuana-2019.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\nAll the events except the three specified below.
\n\nDemocracy is the most universal political ideal of our time. From the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to Occupy Wall Street and the autonomous region of Rojava, practically every government and popular movement calls itself democratic. Today, the far right has also appropriated the rhetoric of direct democracy, as a wave of populism has swept demagogues like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro into power.
\n\nWhat is democracy, precisely? How does the rhetoric of democracy serve various agendas? Is there a difference between democracy and self-determination? Are there other ways to describe what we are doing together when we make decisions? And how can this inform our participation in struggles against capitalism and state oppression?
\n\nDrawing on From Democracy to Freedom, the latest book from the CrimethInc. collective, we will explore these questions and more. Join us for a lively discussion!
\n\nPortland, Oregon on December 4; Humboldt Anarchist Book Fair, California on December 14
\n\nOnce upon a time, anarchists saw ourselves as engaged in a two-sided struggle between the common people and the institutions of power. Today, as the future of neoliberalism becomes uncertain and uprisings break out from France to Hong Kong, we are increasingly finding ourselves in three-way fights that pit us against both the reigning authorities and far-right nationalists driven by their own vision of civil war.
\n\nHow do we strategize for conflicts that involve three or more sides, so that one adversary does not benefit from our victories against another side? This has been a problem for anarchists at least since the Russian Revolution.
\n\nIn this presentation, we will introduce the concept of non-binary conflict, consider case studies of contemporary three-sided conflicts around the world, and discuss how this can inform our struggles against fascists, the Trump administration, and the centrists of the Democratic Party.
\n\nTamarack, Oakland, December 7
\n\nThroughout its first three-quarters, 2019 has been a moment of gathering momentum for emancipatory movements around the world, even as populist, nativist, revanchist, and fascist projects likewise swell around the world. Following on the heights of the gilets jaunes experiment last fall and winter, populations in revolt topped leaders in Sudan and Puerto Rico. Haiti teetered on civil war. Hong Kong began its descent into open insurrection, and now, in a feedback loop, popular revolt spills across Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia, across Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, while Hong Kong continues to burn and conflicts in the multi-power war zones of Palestine and Syria intensify.
\n\nWhat are the possibilities for this wave to strengthen and amplify or, alternately, to be annulled by an entirely different dynamic, inimical to emancipation? Can we identify a consistency to or internal character of these revolts, distinct from those of the last global wave circa 2011? How do we understand the anti-political character of these revolts, their refusal of the typical insignia of left and right—and what dangers and potentials does this raise? What role might a global recession, long overdue, play in the unfolding of these events? What local variants might eventually emerge in the US—and how should we be preparing?
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/08/06/who-needs-fascists-when-there-are-police-reflections-on-the-anti-fascist-mobilization-in-portland-of-august-4", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/08/06/who-needs-fascists-when-there-are-police-reflections-on-the-anti-fascist-mobilization-in-portland-of-august-4", "title": "Who Needs Fascists When We Have Police? : Reflections on the Anti-Fascist Mobilization in Portland of August 4", "summary": "Conventional wisdom has it that the role of fascists is to do the dirty work of the state. Yet on August 4 in Portland, it was the police who did the fascists' dirty work. A full report & analysis.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/06/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/06/header.jpg", "date_published": "2018-08-06T14:04:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:37Z", "tags": [ "police", "fascism", "Portland" ], "content_html": "On August 4, thousands of people came together in Portland, Oregon to protest a rally organized by the fascist groups “Patriot Prayer” and the “Proud Boys.” At a similar march in Portland on June 30, police opened their ranks in order to allow fascists to attack protesters, then protected the assailants and attacked the same protesters that the fascists had just attacked. August 4 followed a similar script. Once again, police worked closely with the fascists, but this time the police were the ones who escalated the conflict, deploying near lethal force against those who had come to demonstrate against fascism. Examining the events of August 4, we can see that the fascists themselves are not the greatest threat we face. Police are already acting as the stormtroopers of fascism in the United States.
\n\nBelow is our analysis of the events of August 4, followed by an eyewitness account. Please donate to the bail fund to support those arrested on August 4.
\n\nThroughout 2017 as anarchists and other opponents of fascism scrambled to respond to a newly ascendant fascist movement, police, too, were refining their strategies. In Charlottesville when fascists attacked outnumbered counter-demonstrators, the police stood back and let the clashes take place, only interceding afterwards. However, the violence that resulted from this strategy catalyzed a nationwide backlash. Two weeks later, when Joey Gibson and his “Patriot Prayer” group attempted to hold rallies in San Francisco and Berkeley, 10,000 anti-fascists chased out the police and their fascist friends.
\n\nThe forces of order set out to craft a new approach. In April 2018, participants in a small anti-fascist rally in Newnan, Georgia reported that the police had changed strategies, indiscriminately targeting them with overwhelming force and lethal weaponry from the very beginning of the demonstration. “The next round will not pit us against rag-tag Nazis, but against the full force of the state itself,” they warned others around the country. “Street-level fascists are dangerous, but the escalation of state control and police violence fulfills their program on a much larger scale.”
\n\nIt has since come to light that several of the participants in the police mobilization in Newnan are themselves open adherents of fascism.
\n\nCollusion between police and fascists is nothing new. The Ku Klux Klan openly coordinated with police in many parts of the United States throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, when the relationship between police and openly fascist groups is not recognized, this enables the authorities to present themselves as a supposedly neutral solution to the problem of “extremism,” justifying an intensification of surveillance and control that are then used to implement increasingly totalitarian measures.
\n\nConventional wisdom has it that the role of fascists is to do the dirty work of the state, carrying out attacks that the police cannot, like last month’s Nazi assault on the Occupy ICE encampment in San Antonio. Yet on August 4 in Portland, it was the police who did the dirty work for the fascists. They were the ones who perpetrated the violence that the fascists had been promising to enact. They allowed participants in the fascist rally to gather outside the area for which they had obtained a permit, rather than within it, so as to avoid being searched. They allowed the fascists to retain the majority of their weapons, then accompanied them around downtown like a bodyguard, facing outward away from the fascists to protect them from the entire city of Portland. Finally, the police attacked the crowd, initiating hostilities by shooting concussion grenades at people’s heads.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/06/2.jpg\")
A police officer fired this concussion grenade at an anti-fascist demonstrator’s head, inflicting a grievous head wound. If the demonstrator had not been wearing a helmet, the impact would likely have been fatal.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/06/4.jpg\")
Police officers grinning as they employ potentially lethal force against those in the path of the fascist march.
\nThe following day, a similar scenario played out in Berkeley at another demonstration called by the same network of fascists. Few fascists showed up, yet intense conflicts unfolded between anti-fascists and police.
\n\nHow do we respond to escalating totalitarianism when every attempt to stand up to those recruiting for racist murders brings us immediately into conflict with the full force of the police state?
\n\nFirst, we have to connect the struggle against fascism with the struggles against police that have taken place over the past several years. We have to join forces with everyone on the receiving end of police violence—communities of color, poor people, undocumented people, and everyone else who already recognizes the struggle against police violence as a matter of life and death.
\n\nSecond, we have to use the increasingly overt collaboration between fascists and police to delegitimize the police in the eyes of those who still regard them as the preservers of safety and justice. As we have explored elsewhere, fascist overreach can cause more people to recognize the oppressive function of the “enforcers of order.”
\n\nFinally, we have to be clear about the connections between grassroots fascists and the systematic violence of the state. If the fascist agenda comes to fruition, it will be carried out through the institutions of the state. Those who wish to oppose slavery and genocide should make sure that the state has neither the legitimacy to get away with them nor the resources to carry them out. This is one of the many ways in which an anarchist opposition to state power itself is essential to the struggle against fascism. We need to help other people make these connections, and quick.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/dougbrown8/status/1025870333671223296\n\n\n
Note: Throughout this text, we refer to “Patriot Prayer” and the “Proud Boys” as fascists on account of their numerous well-documented affiliations with explicitly fascist groups and their explicit advocacy of patriarchal authoritarianism and bigotry. Some of them disingenuously seek to cloud the issue, but it is enough for us that they advocate for the mass murders Pinochet carried out and regularly give Nazi salutes at these demonstrations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/06/3.jpg\")
“Proud Boys” and “Patriot Prayer” members explicitly endorse mass killings of those who disagree with them. In Chile, those killings were not carried out by grassroots fascists but by the police and military—just as they will be in the US unless we mobilize on a massive scale.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/06/1.jpg\")
Anti-fascist demonstrators in Portland: a proportionate response.
\nPeople trickled into Chapman square. The Pop Mob demonstration packed the sidewalk and the courthouse steps, joined by the more liberal contingent of counterprotestors. People carried signs, speakers with bullhorns addressed the crowd, and clowns danced on an adjacent sidewalk while people in black bloc milled about. After some scouting, the best route down to the waterfront was determined and the bloc crowded in behind a banner reading “GTFÖ ya Jabrönis” to lead the march. Pop Mob fell in behind us. We arrived at the intersection of Salmon and Naito Parkway just after 11:30.
\n\nAfter about an hour of standing in direct sunlight, packed in behind the banner, dripping sweat and occasionally forming a tight circle so someone could change or pee, we got word that Joey Gibson and his goons were marching north on the waterfront. The police had been threatening us since we got there, telling us to get out of the street or we would be subject to arrest and less-lethal impact weapons.
\n\nWe turned north and began marching up the opposite sidewalk across the street from the fascists. Armored vehicles with pigs in full riot gear drove up and down Naito Parkway between the two groups. Pigs on foot were also forced to walk up and down the street in the hot sun in full riot gear; their visible discomfort made the heat that we were suffering more bearable. At some point, my smaller affinity group got separated from the rest of our bloc. We stayed moving with the larger group, approximately one third of which was also clad in some kind of bloc gear, as it moved up and down the sidewalk, still unable to enter the street. Bystanders handed us cold water bottles and Food Not Bombs gave out falafel wraps. A vast and diverse group of people had turned out.
\n\nIn addition to the bloc, labor was there in force along with the Democratic Socialists of America and the various other groups that composed Pop Mob, including some folks dressed up as giant sunflowers. At one point, someone rolled up a shopping cart with a guillotine in it, to the tune of The Coup’s “The Guillotine.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/06/5.jpg\")
Last summer, anarchists in Portland deployed giant spiders; this year, Demand Utopia turned out dressed as sunflowers.
\nThe march slowed to a stop. Our crew was reveling in having found some shade to stop and drink water in; we were dancing to the music playing from a source none of us could see. The reprieve was brief. Suddenly to the south there was a flurry of movement and a call for assistance. We moved in and saw that Joey Gibson and two members of his goon squad had been allowed to cross the street into the counterprotest. We locked arms and everyone present, bloc and not, formed a tight circle around them and pushed them back into the street. I didn’t see what transpired before that moment but as they\ncrossed back over to their side, they exchanged high fives. Just then, I heard someone yell, “I got Joey’s hat! Anyone wanna take a selfie in it?”
\n\nThere was another brief scuffle with a guy trying to take pictures in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then the tension seemed to dissipate a bit. After what felt like ages but probably wasn’t more than 20 minutes, the fascists started walking south again from Salmon Street. The counterprotest followed from across the street, then turned right down Main Street and descended deeper into southwest. There was a scattering then a regrouping of people as folks scrambled to reassemble behind banners—I think this was at Columbia and Naito Parkway. Riot cops now faced off with the counterprotestors, with the fascists cowering across the street behind them, cheering on the taxpayer-funded stormtroopers. A U-Haul truck was driving around full of counterprotesters with a PA system in the back and a banner reading “racists can’t dance,” playing music for people to dance to.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/1025859285727813632\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/RPeavyhouse/status/1025948839759339520\n\n\n
We were far enough back that we didn’t have our eyes on the pigs when they opened fire so the first few concussive rounds were a terrifying, confusing surprise. Everyone was suddenly moving backwards. I tried to keep my eyes or hands on my friends and walk slowly backwards, as did most of the people around me, in spite of the number of people who, understandably, turned and ran. The pigs continued to fire concussive rounds, pepper balls, marker rounds, and possibly rubber bullets. I also saw several people covered in mace getting their eyes flushed by medics or other comrades. I saw a few people bleeding from what I assumed were rubber bullet wounds or from gravel sprayed by concussive rounds hitting the asphalt and exploding.
\n\nThe pigs continued deploying less-lethal rounds, pushing the counterprotest first west, then north. After a long game of cat and mouse, the counterprotest was so scattered that our crew decided it was time to go. Our numbers were diminishing, we were vulnerable to being kettled, and I was nervous that we would get trapped between fascists and pigs if we continued going in the direction that the police were trying to force us.
\n\nLater, I learned that there were still fascists hanging around at the waterfront despite their shuttles having left. From accounts I heard, there were about 30 people on either side of Naito Parkway, riot cops between them, yelling at each other for an hour or so before getting bored and leaving.
\n\nThe next day, I’m not the only one demoralized. A few fascists jumped the barricades and left bloody, but in the end the pigs protected them and did so effectively. We never had an opportunity to get close to them; they had their march.
\n\nOn the other hand, the turnout was tremendous. The amalgam of different groups and individual actors created a mass of people that outnumbered the fascists at least 3 to 1. I have no doubt that Saturday’s events will inform tactical decisions in the future. As we collectively gain experience fighting fascism in our contemporary context, we will continue to adjust accordingly. Also, the disproportionate police response infuriated a lot of people.
\n\nFinally, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about riot cops’ use of concussive rounds. Afterwards, there were several accounts of police aiming at people’s heads with flash-bang grenades. One individual was struck in the back of the head at close range. The round penetrated their helmet and inflicted a gaping head wound. If they had not been wearing a helmet, the attack would have been fatal.
\n\nThe implications of this are serious. We know cops are violent, murderous thugs, and the environment of a demonstration gives them an excuse to indulge in hurting people under the pretense of “crowd control” with even less accountability than normal. Perhaps motorcycle helmets should be considered essential from now on.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/PNWAWC/status/1025918684219559937\n\n\n
Live Updates from the Demonstration of August 4
\n\nFootage beginning shortly after police initiated hostilities.
\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\")
\nWe are publishing one more analysis from participants in the blockade of the Portland facilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After our previous reports, “The ICE Age Is Over: Reflections from the ICE Blockades” and “Occupy ICE Portland: Policing Revolution?” we reached out to other participants for an additional perspective on the situation. As we emphasized before, our collective has no official position on issues internal to the occupation; we are simply passing on the reports of anarchists who are involved. We urge you to support those arrested in the ICE blockades and participate in the struggle for a world without borders or white supremacy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/11/5.jpg\")
\nA nebulous line exists between reality and dreams. This line, like any other border, is itself unreal. We know that our dreams can and do become reality. Thoughts become deeds. Lies, told often enough, are considered true. Those in power absorb radical messages (even #AbolishICE) and twist them into new horrors. How do we intervene when our words and actions will be used against us?
\n\nWith this analysis, we hope to add to conversations that are occurring all around the world. We encourage strategic thinking and storytelling, mourning, celebration, hostility, and rest. We will explore three key issues within the Portland occupation and other Occupy movements. We hope that you can find ways these relate to your local movement or occupation and perhaps to other situations moving forward.
\n\nAnarchism is an ideology of both subtle distinctions and hard lines. Sometimes, an uncompromising action can shift the Overton Window in dramatic and inspiring ways. Introducing anarchistic ideals into popular discussion is a way to move toward freedom and liberation and away from repression and authoritarianism. Already, thanks to the daily efforts of various affinity organizations around the US, we see the discourse on immigration reform shifting to include conversations about abolition: abolishing the agencies that are the militarized arms of enforcement, abolishing the criminalization of migration, abolishing national borders altogether. Many of these conversations were previously unthinkable within the prevailing narrative.
\n\nWe hope to address the conflict between working within or replicating the structures and methods of the state, on the one hand, and creating a space for autonomous organizing that can maintain integrity while accomplishing a set goal, on the other. We argue that the analysis that gives rise to reformist tendencies is incomplete, which makes it dangerous—especially when it comes to planning direct action campaigns with participants who are targeted by state violence.
\n\nWe also intend to address the emergence of individualistic dynamics within ostensibly collective projects, the ways that hierarchies can emerge within horizontal groups, and the complicity of the government of Portland with federal actors. We continue to examine and learn from our mistakes and successes, and hope others can learn from them, too.
\n\nOne of the lessons that our time at the camp drove home is that reform will never accomplish our goals. The state is a machine that aims to destroy us. Even if, in times of emergency, we may have to work with representatives of the state to ensure the safety of our neighbors, we must always be aware of the state’s motives—which revolve around profit and control, never around liberation.
\n\nWe saw this play out on many levels. A few days after the establishment of the camp, the first round of reformists arrived. These were local groups and individuals, self-appointed or charismatic leaders, who saw an opportunity, smelled notoriety. They brought local influence, connections to sympathetic politicians, and a kind of celebrity that brought in numbers and offered a degree of legitimacy with business owners and middle-class society. These low-level influencers began the process of softening the militancy that had originally established the camp. There were discussions about the barriers that should be put in place for the community. General Assemblies were made less general, with more qualifications imposed on who was a part of the “community,” depending on amount of time spent in camp and personal preferences. Discourse began to form about “good” and “bad” protestors. Decisions were made unilaterally. A group was told to leave the camp for graffiti and others for personal misunderstandings. As liberalism crept in, respect for autonomy evaporated. The original discussions about self-determination were discarded in favor of “security teams” with arbitrary training standards that were imposed upon the camp rather than agreed on by participants. Another danger of reformist thinking is the constant replication of statist structures and a seeming inability to see beyond those false parameters.
\n\nThe stage was set for activists who aim to get elected. Liberals hold that the abuses of ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be resolved by bureaucratic restructuring and that it is possible to negotiate with the heavily armored Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). The most explicit example of this was when activists assisted federal police in dismantling the camp’s defensive barricades, but there are many other examples.
\n\nMost perniciously, self-appointed “leaders” approached DHS and brokered a deal. Within 48 hours, Homeland Security and ICE had moved back into the building. These “leaders” negotiated this agreement on behalf of the commune without disclosure or consent. They did so without proper legal representation or good information about the relevant laws. This secret decision, made perhaps out of fear, brought fear to the entire camp. Always remember: the state does not have to tell you the truth. The purposes of law enforcement are well served when you are scared and unsure, cut off from your comrades and the real support that is provided by community, not government.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/11/8.jpg\")
\nThis prepared the ground for the next level NGO-type “mass mobilization” groups who wanted to use the fame of the camp to promote their own organizations’ specific policy goals. Other groups distanced themselves from the action to preserve their connections with governmental and private financing.
\n\nAt this point, the desire of reformists to move the battle into some sort of policy framework came out into the open. Abolitionists confined themselves to demanding that the requested reforms be material rather than merely symbolic: not just catchphrase policies, but those that would support the long-term demands and goals of affected communities.
\n\nThe purpose of anarchism is not to establish an anarchist state. It is to disrupt and delegitimize all the functions of the state itself and to agitate continually for increased autonomy. Liberalism and reform politics aim for compromise in a way that necessarily undermines true revolutionary work.
\n\nIt is important to keep messaging clear from the start. We must establish up front that we do not want to replace ICE with an updated version of Immigration and Naturalization Services, which would still imprison people for traveling. We want to abolish ICE and everything it does completely. We do not want to secure the border. We do not want immigration reform, but to stop all deportations immediately, abolish immigration imprisonment, abolish borders in so-called North America, decriminalize movement, and undermine the logic of “citizen versus migrant.” This is not about simply the abolition of ICE, but the decolonization of North America. The toughest opposition to this messaging will always be the liberals and the people concerned about “optics” above all.
\n\nIf you have the energy for it, you can talk with these people about how borders, imprisonment, and police perpetuate centuries of violence including slavery, the colonization of North America, and Western imperialism. If not, you could ask them to read this.
\n\nThe intersections between “No Border” work and prison abolition have never been more salient. These are rich traditions that offer us long histories to build on. The fight against borders is not our struggle alone. We will not be the primary authors of this resistance. Just as new relationships have been forged in the uprisings against police brutality, the time is ripe for us to build new connections in the fight against the internalization of the border. This will require more nuances and a contemplative approach. It is time to resist specific strategies of enforcement and establish alliances based on shared goals—not necessarily on shared ideology.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/11/6.jpg\")
\nLeadership and influence are not bad things in and of themselves. Hierarchy is not defined by the presence of influential leaders alone. It is a form of manipulative leadership that makes secret decisions and frames dissent as unacceptable, often employing fear or guilt as tools to compel compliance (for example, “If you make the action too radical, you are responsible for what the police do to vulnerable communities”). It involves hoarding power and information—and hoarding information during confrontations with the state is very dangerous. People may do so out of a desire to feel important, rather than because they actually wish to collaborate with police, but regardless, it renders the larger group more vulnerable to the state.
\n\nFor example, a local paper published an article mentioning that a
\n\n\n\n\n“document obtained by WW… suggests occupiers may be risking far more serious charges… Oregon’s chief deputy federal defender, Steve Sady… handed out copies of the document at a meeting with a small group of key protest organizers Saturday.”
\n
This is a perfect example of how the state co-opts existing dynamics and plays on personal fear. This was collaboration with the state, plain and simple, without the knowledge or consent of anyone outside this “key” group. They made a secret deal with the state, placing the value of their own judgment above the judgment of the entirety of the rest of the camp.
\n\nLack of information makes it impossible to make transparent, consensus-based decisions. It makes it harder to build a strong, cohesive movement, and spreads feelings of distrust and fear. People make poor decisions when they act out of fear. The state is counting on us being afraid so they can squash our movements before we even get started. This evolved into a tangible fear throughout the camp by the first weekend.
\n\nTo reiterate, hierarchy is not merely the presence of power; power moves dynamically at all times, in all interactions. Hierarchy is the abuse of power and an attitude of egotistical entitlement to leadership, and often involves leaders whose leadership role the group has not consented to. This is how situations played out at camp, time and time again. There were no roundtable discussions, group consensus, or even transparency of information or intentions. Individuals appointed themselves “leaders” and the camp followed their instructions, allowing these “leaders” to take away their autonomy. This is how these “leaders” turned into “key protest organizers” and effectively sold the camp out to federal agents within the first five days of the occupation. Hierarchy and patriarchy work well together, and this empowered the “leaders” to do the state’s job for them.
\n\nTo be clear, these hierarchical dynamics can occur within our own anarchist affinity groups. We need to remember how much work there is to be done. It is foolish to decide independently that your group of five will be the only people on site who are empowered to do security, or that only one single person should work on media messaging. We certainly don’t all share the same skills—and we don’t need to. Liberation movements need to empower everyone to contribute the skills they have, or else hierarchies will emerge and weaken the movement, stopping some people from contributing or developing their own strengths and stopping others from even being curious about what strengths other people might have.
\n\nHierarchy is power calcified into tropes. In our society, the common tropes of power are white-skinned, bullying, and misogynist. We have to be careful not to fall into those tropes ourselves, no matter how radical our ideologies are. White supremacy and misogyny are so widespread that they offer opportunities for the state to undermine and disrupt radical movements. Even if the destructive dynamics are not coming from state infiltrators, the disruption and damage to the movement is the same.
\n\nTo illustrate the toxic intersection between patriarchy and state violence, we can recall Brandon Darby, an FBI informant who infiltrated the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans, which formed to take direct action in response to Hurricane Katrina, and then an activist community planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Participants had described Brandon’s behavior as patriarchal and predatory long before it turned out that he was working with federal agents to entrap unwary young activists.
\n\nIn Portland, some of the leaders were not white nor male, but their actions perpetuated recurring issues of hierarchy, patriarchy, and capitulation to the state. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if it’s a cop, an informant, a troll, or simply a liberal being a liberal. Pay attention to how people’s behavior impacts your collective ability to achieve your goals.
\n\nOur goal is not to spread paranoia or gossip among radicals regarding who might be a snitch, but to provide information on what has hurt us in the past and how to avoid replicating these dynamics in the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/11/7.jpg\")
\nCity and state actors have collaborated with federal institutions like Homeland Security and ICE. This advances the aims of authoritarianism. We need to develop a widespread hostility to policing efforts, both those of state agents and the moral, political, and tactical policing of individuals who think they know how to govern the struggle.
\n\nPortland is a “sanctuary city.” A sanctuary city (or county, or state) is a governmental entity that limits its cooperation with ICE agents in order to protect low-priority immigrants from deportation—while still turning over those immigrants who have committed additional crimes.
\n\nIn February 2017, Portland City Council voted to fund immigration assistance for migrants, and shortly after, voted to declare Portland a “sanctuary city,” expressing their disinclination to assist ICE in finding and deporting undocumented immigrants. Many people in Portland who believe in the workings of city government thought that this meant that the city council and the mayor would actively protect at least low-priority immigrants from deportation. “The City of Portland will remain a welcoming, safe place for all people,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a statement. \nHowever, a local newspaper published an article debunking this:
\n\n\n\n\n“…review of more than 1000 internal communications between federal immigration and Oregon law enforcement agencies shows many local officials are already testing the limits of so-called sanctuary laws. At least 11 agencies—including the Oregon State Police, the Portland Police Bureau and the Oregon Department of Corrections—may have shared more information than was required in 2017.”
\n
Regarding the mayor’s promise that Portland police “will not work with ICE to enforce federal immigration law,” the same article states that
\n\n\n\n\n“Portland police shared several unredacted police reports with the federal agency in 2017. But that was before a policy change on February 1. Unlike the DA’s office, Portland police decided that providing public records is barred by the state’s sanctuary law, a spokesman says. The bureau now charges federal immigration officials for the reports and redaction.”
\n
So, the only thing that changed is that the Portland Police Bureau now makes money from the requests for information it still fulfills. This doesn’t protect people. It just makes money for the police.
\n\nPortland police are at OccupyICEPDX, even though the mayor stated definitively they would not be used to enforce federal law. Portland police have been onsite at Occupy since the second day, establishing their presence on the perimeters of the camp, directing traffic off the main road, and surveilling those staying at and supporting the emerging Temporary Autonomous Zone. Blogger and occupier Andrew Sorg had a strange interaction with a masked DHS officer, in which Sorg asked if he was a Portland police officer. The officer refused to answer and excused himself from the line shortly thereafter.
\n\nPortland’s complicity with the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) significantly affects the landscape of political action in Portland. Treating protest as a threat to national security means that all protestors are considered potential terrorists who can therefore be handled at the federal level. An attorney for the ACLU of Oregon, one of the groups active against the JTTF, states that “lack of transparency also makes it very difficult to know how and when rights violations involve Portland police officers who are deputized as JTTF officers and who operate under the authority of the FBI.”
\n\nOn a state level, Oregon has had a sanctuary state law since 1987, a law that was prompted by the landmark civil rights case Trevino v. Dahlin. Oregon’s sanctuary law states:
\n\n\n\n\n“No law enforcement agency of the State of Oregon or of any political subdivision of the state shall use agency moneys, equipment or personnel for the purpose of detecting or apprehending persons whose only violation of law is that they are persons of foreign citizenship present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws.”
\n
This law was supported by conservative lawmakers, law enforcement and civil rights organizations alike—by conservatives and law enforcement for keeping state funds from enforcing federal law, and by civil rights organizations for preserving civil liberties. Current efforts like Initiative Petition 22, proposed by the anti-immigrant hate group, Oregonians for Immigration Reform, seek to repeal these protections and encourage the use of state funds to pay for federal investigations and enforcement, at the same time that California and Texas are trying to pass state sanctuary laws that mimic the 1987 Oregon legislation.
\n\nDHS has jurisdiction on federal property, like the Portland federal courthouse and the plaza across the street, where fascist groups like Patriot Prayer and associated groups (including Traditionalist Worker’s Party, Identity Europa, Hellshaking Street Preachers, American Freedom Keepers, and the Oath Keepers) have organized eight different rallies in the last year in Portland alone. Time and again, DHS and the Portland police collaborate to referee rallies, protests, and counter-protests. They have collected information on protesters and bystanders alike during past actions.
\n\nThe information that Portland police collect is now available either for free or at a small price to the FBI. This includes the personal information of those kettled in crowd control activity, which the police promised they would delete and did not. Increasing collusion between the federal and local government means more surveillance, tighter information networks, and increasingly punitive actions against protesters.
\n\nFinally, we have to address how white supremacy in left-leaning and radical circles impacted the camp and the blockade.
\n\nTo be clear, white people should never speak on behalf of affected communities. We should prevent white people from centering themselves in this struggle financially, physically, and politically. It makes sense to exclude white people from certain spaces. All incoming support should be directed to people and organizations that have been fighting against US ethnic cleansing. White people should be humble about their place in the fight.
\n\nWith all that said, white people must not uncritically follow the leadership of people of color regardless of the political content of that leadership. Hostile forces have used this tendency as a tool to undermine the movement. We have seen the supposed differences between white and non-white activists manipulated and exacerbated. People’s motivations for using this rhetoric may have been narcissism, a desire to hold power, or a belief that they were carrying out orders. Ultimately, it does not matter. At the end of the day, these dynamics left the camp fraught with power struggles and vulnerable to manipulation. Between these problems and “leaders” negotiating behind closed doors, the camp’s on-the-ground effectiveness was reduced to nothing before the first week was over.
\n\nPeople of color are not a monolith. One person of color should not be given the authority to speak for all people of color or to frame any particular tactic or strategy as “what all people of color want.” Important decisions that affect the group as a whole must be made by group consensus, not by self-appointed leaders or figureheads. This goes double for decisions that specifically impact those who are most targeted by ICE and police forces.
\n\nWe hope that you are able to apply these observations fruitfully in your own context, whatever that might be. Here are some proposals we consider useful:
\n\nWe’ve received the following report from participants in the occupation around the Portland facilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While our collective has no official position on issues internal to the occupation, we consider it important to promote constructive conversations about power dynamics within our movements and the ways that they can impose limits on what we can accomplish together. For more material on this subject, consult our earlier report, “The ICE Age Is Over: Reflections from the ICE Blockades.” Shortly, for the sake of amplifying multiple perspectives, we will add one more text from Portland.
\n\n\n\n\n“Criticize the comrade, take a criticism from the comrade.” -Bambu
\n
“We do NOT touch the police tape. We do NOT block the street,” a “leader” of the Portland occupation screamed through a megaphone at a crowd of newly arrived demonstrators near the reopened ICE facility. Organic anger from a group of mostly liberals led to a brief confrontation with Federal Protective Services (FPS/DHS), which was quickly quashed by an internal security team. People were ushered onto the sidewalk and scolded for not following supposedly “collective” agreements. The building remained untouched as protesters who were eager to agitate were made to feel guilty and illegitimate.
\n\nIn the last three weeks of Portland’s occupation at the ICE building, we’ve found ourselves caught between a desire to build with folks and a need to critique the ways that violence is sustained by our work. We’ve failed to address interpersonal violence and have left people isolated from the movement. We’ve prioritized the security of our “leaders” because of their contributions and their assumed necessity to our commune rather than making space for conversation about sexual violence and the strategies we must implement to make sure folks are held accountable rather than simply “vouched for.” And we’ve lost sight of the initial goal of abolishing ICE.
\n\nOur occupation is said to be leading the movement against deportations across the country. We’re currently cohabitating with the ICE facility; as their work continues, we continue to sit back with our La Croix in hand and practice “self-care.” In many ways, this commune has been helpless since its inception, demonstrating the need to build conversation and criticism into our work.
\n\nWhen it comes down to it, the vast majority of us here have no idea how to coexist in a commune; we are improvising. We offer up this criticism knowing that it’s much easier to critique than to build. We write this in hopes of making space for continual analysis, collective reflection, and commitment to future organizing.
\n\nMore than anything, we must practice humility and be conscious of our role in this organizing work. Shutting down an ICE building for over two weeks is a huge feat, and we do not want to diminish this accomplishment. But we cannot forget the people who our commune is said to be built on behalf of: undocumented folks, and specifically undocumented children, who are suffering in detention centers around the country. We remind ourselves first and foremost that these people do not need our saving. Amazing organizing efforts have been led by undocumented folks in and out of detention centers, often largely by undocumented women. They’ll be doing that whether or not we sleep out here tonight. Still, solidarity efforts are crucial to dismantling these walls and to abolishing ICE.
\n\nThe commune is exciting because it’s an opportunity to experiment with different organizing strategies and visions for another world. We have an amazing kitchen staff, an incredible kids area, and overall an impressive space. But we also have a pseudo-policing unit, extremely flawed approaches to navigating accusations of sexual violence, and potential security threats. At this point, preserving the commune has become a more central project than actually disrupting ICE. We’ve failed to build a space to assess and change our strategies as they inevitably fail or are co-opted. Consequently, our commune has done little to interrogate the ways it reproduces and legitimizes policing, surveillance, and heteropatriarchal violence.
\n\nUltimately, much of our work has been whitewashed, neutralized, and made non-threatening to the state—that’s how we’ve been able to be legitimized as an action that will not be touched by the Portland Police Bureau (PPB). We supposedly decided that the commune will now only engage in “passive resistance,” a concept as oxymoronic as “good policing” or “public property.” The commune’s internal police force, known as the “Care Team,” has worked to ensure that protesters “keep in line.” Our commitment to the commune’s continued existence has become a commitment to establishing a framework in which insurgent and revolutionary politics become unimaginable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/09/3.jpg\")
\nSeizing the lack of structure as an opportunity for a power grab, a group of people created a self-appointed security team within the first few days. Sporting pink bandannas as an emblem of this new committee, the group established a visible manifestation of their higher status.
\n\nFrom the beginning, the team consisted primarily of individuals with a pattern of taking control and policing others at past demonstrations. Masquerading as anarchists and radicals, these people implement authoritarian practices and recreate the state structures we have set out to abolish. The ideology of many of those on the security team is indecipherable; sometimes it appears that their primary motive is power.
\n\nThe security phenomenon is a recurring issue in Portland. At almost every rally or march, one finds the same dozen people role-playing as cops, following around “suspicious” people. They hold themselves above the participants, who they are there to “protect.” The people who assume this role never appear on the front lines fighting riot police; they can’t be found when there is a real security threat. They pounce on the lone agitator, getting enough action to bolster their ego\nand flex their power. The anarchist symbols covering the camp are purely aesthetic, since we\ncontinue to let security govern us.
\n\nThe security team created a monopoly on information, keeping important reports about threats to themselves. Using this lack of transparency to their advantage, security members were able to justify their existence through distorted threats and the instilling of fear—a tactic habitually used by the state. Calling a “code red” one night, security commanded people to retreat into tents while refusing to offer information as to what the situation was. Terrified newcomers and children scrambled back with no grasp on how severe the threat actually was.
\n\nTheir authority allows them to determine the political legitimacy of people’s thoughts and actions, as well as deciding which actions are “too risky” for the commune to engage in. We’ve seen women enter the space with questions about the work, only to be told, “Do you really want to know or are you just being facetious?” We’ve seen folks heckling Homeland Security Officers told that they’re “kids” and therefore should get back in line and listen to the commune authority. We’ve seen comrades lambasted and told to leave for attempting civil disobedience.
\n\nAll of this is done under the guise of “protecting” people of color and trans folks. We are open to discussing tactics, but we will not stand for a security team that grounds its work in the patriarchal protection of black, brown, and trans people and that insists on policing all forms of political action, analysis, and engagement.
\n\nThe members of the security team are able to absolve themselves of responsibility for their policing efforts by leaning on “consensus-based decisions.” In confronting someone who is “out of line,” they argue that they’re simply carrying out orders. Whose orders these are is entirely unclear. Consensus by itself can be employed as a tactic for repressing autonomous action. But the commune takes it one step further by neglecting to actually engage in true consensus decision-making. The general assemblies here occur sporadically and happen at inaccessible times. The result is that an invisible, unknown, exclusive committee of people reach a decision which is then stamped as group consensus and forced on everyone else. There is a hidden rigid hierarchy disguised in careful leftist language to isolate critics. Blatantly false statements are thrown around, such as “EVERYONE living at camp agrees that…” or “the overwhelming CONSENSUS is…” This destroys any space for critique and gives those new to the camp the impression that everyone is in unanimous agreement.
\n\nWe understand the need to disrupt the “ally industrial complex” in which white people, those new to the movement, and other “privileged” folks sit on the side and cheer on our POC comrades. At this point, more and more people want to get involved, and that’s crucial. People who show up must be understood as potential comrades and legitimate political actors. The liberal who decides to scream at the cops is engaging in an activity that might further radicalize them—and yet we choose to police that work, tell them it’s out of line, and demand that the ways we disrupt ICE be narrow and pre-approved. How do we expect to expand this movement if we teach our potential comrades that their political analysis is irrelevant? Why should they return to this work if they are told that their ideas, opinions, and forms of action are incorrect? If our goal is to build a new world, we have to start by not replicating the old. Ultimately, we’re isolating potential comrades and disciplining our collective political imagination.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/09/4.jpg\")
\nAfter initial criticism of the internal police force, the security team rebranded themselves as “the Care Team.” This attempt to rebrand leans on understandings of the importance of care—the feminized labor that sustains the social and emotional well-being of the commune. When we think of care, we think of our kitchen staff, the folks who hold down the childcare tent, and those partaking in other forms of feminized work. Excluding those folks from “the” Care Team is not only a tactic the internal police uses to to avoid accountability, but is also a disrespectful manipulation of feminist understandings of care.
\n\nWe hear more and more in leftist circles about the need to build a new world based on a politics of care. We understand care as feminized work of listening, working to understand people’s emotional needs, and validating and supporting all who enter our spaces. It’s a call to collectivize our traumas and strategies for healing, which should not be conflated with neoliberal notions of “self-care.” We see much of the work of care tied to Black Feminist analysis, the work of the Movement for Black Lives, and in prison abolitionist circles. We want to expand that work in order to build a movement for each other.
\n\nContrary to many beliefs, “care” is not about a practice of patriarchal protection, nor a politics based on policing potential threats. The current campaign of Critical Resistance, “Care Not Cops,” does the necessary work of disrupting notions of “good policing,” making it clear that policing and care are incompatible. Care is an acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others and a recognition of the need to collaborate for our collective survival.
\n\nWithin minutes of entering the commune we learn that one of the core organizers is a person with serious accusations against them. Of course, it’s not our job to snoop around and try to determine whether or not this specific person is “guilty,” nor necessarily to call for their immediate removal. But we do want to know whether there is a process by which accusations are heard, people’s experiences are validated, and action is taken to hold people accountable and to ensure that those making these accusations feel welcomed in. We want to see a commitment to addressing and disrupting gendered violence and other forms of harm. And we want to know that these conversations are at the forefront of the community we seek to build.
\n\nWhen men are in charge, apparently, this becomes too much to ask for. When we ask why someone is still on the core “Care Team,” we are told that despite accusations, this person has been “vouched for.” His leadership position and the amount he’s contributed become grounds for delegitimizing and failing to address accusations. We hear excuses about organizational capacity used to put accusations of sexual violence on the back burner until we can give them the attention they need.
\n\nOur shared critiques of criminal justice procedures and commitments to abolishing the prison industrial complex are being used to justify not addressing the sexual violence accusations against people. The counterargument that people of color are more likely to face incarceration is not wrong; however, to use this as a justification not to hold people accountable is disappointing. To manipulate these realities in order to avoid even having conversations about feminist praxis only further embeds our work in the same patriarchal structures that we claim to oppose.
\n\nThe work of transformative justice is tricky and we’ve seen few attempts at it done well. But that should not cause us to conclude it is not necessary in our work. If we learned anything from zines like Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, essays like Betrayal: A Critical Analysis of Rape Culture in Anarchist Subcultures, and the book The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, it is that this sort of misogyny in our circles is nothing new. We know that these forms of violence and harm take place within our communities. We build with our shared commitment to holding ourselves and each other accountable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/09/2.jpg\")
\nIf you’ve spent any time at the camp, you are probably familiar with the obsession with “passive resistance.” It’s hard to miss. The phrase is posted on the entrance to the camp, mindlessly thrown around by “leaders,” and praised by the liberals who come and go. As much as it is used, nobody seems to know what it means or how we came to embrace it. This section will not be focused on the failures of nonviolence. That story has been written countless times and we’ve all sat through arguments over it. Instead, we focus on how self-appointed leaders twist the idea to shut down virtually any resistance to ICE.
\n\nPassive resistance is not about passivity, it is about resistance. It is peaceful, but it is not compliance. At the camp, the term is being pulled further and further from its definition. When a few daring comrades tried to lock arms on the side entrance, blocking in the federal agents, they were attacked for not practicing proper resistance. Other people tried linking themselves together in the driveway, but were criticized by leaders for poking the bear. Even yelling at police is a bit too provocative. Passive resistance has lost its meaning and value, and it seems that the leaders don’t care about resisting, just about passivity.
\n\nThe assumption at the camp seems to be that by engaging in their version of passive resistance, we will swing the media coverage and stall a police attack. It sounds great in theory, but it appears to ignore history altogether. Those who embrace this framework are operating under the illusion that if we are peaceful and compliant with police orders, we can exist in harmony with the state. This ignores every peaceful protest that has been ambushed by riot police, every “passive” mobilization that has been squashed by the state, every instance of police brutality. It buys into the notion that our behavior dictates how the police will treat us, the same idea recited by Fox News pundits after police murders. In reality, the state cares little about how we behave. The authorities make their own excuses with the assistance of the media and attack on their own initiative. The goal of abolishing ICE and the practice of physically shutting it down puts us in conflict with the state. Since the camp is diametrically opposed to the state and its wishes, a police attack is inevitable. Peacefulness and compliance will not seduce the state into inaction, it will just take away our power. In conceding our power, we let our safety lie in the hands of the police.
\n\nOn June 28, while most of the camp slept, federal police cleared the entrances and arrested multiple people. Our barricades were ripped down, and the veteran camp in the driveway was torn to pieces—despite their peacefulness. The police proved that they didn’t need an excuse to move on the camp. Yet leaders are still calling for “passive resistance” and employing vulnerability politics to suppress militancy.
\n\nThe Care Team frequently falls back on the claim that any escalation would “put __ group at risk,” using the most convenient marginalized identity at hand to make this argument. The “risk” that they claim to be defending people from is the potential for arrests or police brutality directed towards people of color and trans people. This analysis is not incorrect; less privileged people will be further targeted by police, face harsher sentences, and gain less sympathy from white civil society. However, the weaponizing of identity in order to police certain actions not only means speaking on behalf of a population “in need of protection,” it also attempts to make any discussion about risk, tactics, and actions impossible and to shut down political conversation.
\n\nIf we believe that we can remove risk and danger from this work, then we ultimately must commit to reproducing the existing social order. There will be risk in disrupting ICE and danger in threatening white civil society. People should analyze the risks, the dangers they face personally, and determine whether or not they want to take an action or be in a specific space. We need to build in support so we do not reserve specific actions for more privileged people—but winning with “passive resistance” is a fantasy.
\n\nTo assume that we must resist passively in order to accommodate more vulnerable commune members falsely ties militance to whiteness. We think of Jackie Wang’s essay, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety,” in which she takes on this question of risk. Wang writes,
\n\n\n\n\n“When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army.”
\n
We think about people who have been resisting in deportation centers since before ICE’s inception,about militant direct action taken by undocumented students across the country and the need for further militancy to dismantle patriarchy, white supremacy, and the settler-colonial state.
\n\nA feeling of complacency has spread throughout the camp as it has transitioned from a militant attempt to shut down ICE operations to a sort of Burning Man commune peacefully coexisting with DHS. With an assortment of sparkling water, open yoga sessions, and nightly concerts contrasted by armored snipers on the roof and makeshift barricades covered in circle-As, the camp has the look of a leftist music festival—Anarchoachella, if you will. Camaraderie is important and nothing is inherently wrong with creating a comfortable space. But our focus has been abandoned and our inclination towards action has dissipated.
\n\nWhen attempting to initiate an urgently-needed discussion on possible actions the night before ICE resumed work in the building, organizers were met with hostility for interrupting a music show and berated by a crowd of mostly newcomers about the necessity of “self-care” and “taking a break.” After a night of dancing and consuming kale salads, they put up no resistance as ICE agents poured into the building the next morning. While this is unintentional, we are capitalizing on the suffering of children and wasting resources to live out our collective ideological fantasies. If holding space is prioritized over disrupting deportations and separations, the commune is nothing more than a bourgeois liberal playground.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/09/1.jpg\")
\nIn our struggle to smash the borders and end the deadly policing of them, we have replicated the same institutions we oppose. Our camp is encircled in barriers separating ourselves from the capitalist hellworld and the flow of people is strictly controlled. Our own security cameras monitor the movements of occupiers and the entrances and exits are restricted to a few gates. We have created categories of those who belong and those who don’t. A list has been compiled of commune exiles that includes critics, utopians, and anti-authoritarians. ACAB adorns the wall but the “Care Team” is a border patrol of its own. Rampant anti-houseless rhetoric prompts exclusion of those perceived as houseless while simultaneously labeling ourselves a tent city. If nothing changes, our commune will collapse before the police even attempt to raid it.
\n\nThe occupation has been remarkable in garnering support and sparking grand aspirations. The amount of effort and organization put into sustaining the commune is commendable. But right now, we are doing nothing to hinder deportations or support detainee organizing. Occupiers are living comfortably while ICE continues its reign of terror next door. With all its flaws, the commune has taught us and transformed us. Still, it’s time to abandon our notions of space and romanticized community and consider what it would mean to build a movement based on unconditional hospitality, real care, and actual militancy.
\n\nIf it stays as it is, the commune will continue to drain resources and police insurrectionary potential while amounting to nothing more than a mild inconvenience to ICE employees. With the widespread popularity of increasingly radical abolitionist politics, we have the opportunity to bring people into our analysis and agitate against state control and hierarchy in general. We must back up our utopian visions by showing the revolutionary possibility of a world free of borders and authority. This is not a call to abandon the occupation altogether or to allow ICE to resume as normal. This is a reminder of the need for constant critique and a space to have these conversations. We ask our comrades to consider our goals and examine our tactics. Opportunities for meaningful action exist within the commune but only if we overhaul our current commitment to passivity and let go of our desire to be palatable to the state.
\n\nFurthermore, we call for a decentralized approach. ICE isn’t just a building, so don’t let your actions be limited to it. Seek out all of the appendages that keep the machine running and strike while we have the power. The information is out there. Find your comrades, form an affinity group, and get to work. Redecorate your local GEO Group building, throw a block party in front of an ICE agent’s house, and always hold yourself and your comrades accountable. ICE is starting to melt, but we’re just warming up.
\n\nwith love,
\n\nYour local mindless anarchists hell-bent on nothing but destruction
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/07/01/portland-holds-it-down-against-fascists-and-police-the-clashes-of-june-30-2018", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/07/01/portland-holds-it-down-against-fascists-and-police-the-clashes-of-june-30-2018", "title": "Portland Holds It Down against Fascists and Police : The Clashes of June 30, 2018", "summary": "On June 30, on a day of nationwide demonstrations against ICE, fascists and police mobilized together in Portland. Courageous anti-fascists responded. Here is the blow-by-blow reportback.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/01/header1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/01/header1.jpg", "date_published": "2018-07-01T16:16:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:37Z", "tags": [ "Portland", "antifascism", "fascism" ], "content_html": "On June 30, on a day of nationwide demonstrations against the brutality of ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and borders in general, fascists mobilized around the United States to march through downtown Portland protected by a massive phalanx of riot police. The ensuing clashes were reminiscent of the fascist mobilizations of 2017—especially April 15 in Berkeley and June 4 in Portland—but even more egregiously violent. Portland police already wrote the playbook on coordinating with fascists, but this time they opened their lines to let the fascists charge demonstrators, then attacked those the fascists had just attacked. From now on, every movement that attempts to come to grips with the violence of the state—such as the recent wave of protests against ICE—will likely have to deal with the violence of grassroots fascists protected by police as well. Let’s organize to make sure we’re prepared for the trouble ahead.
\n\nHere follows a full account from our comrades in Portland. To support anti-fascists arrested in Portland, contribute to this fundraiser.
\n\nIn Portland, OR, on June 30, Joey Gibson, Patriot Prayer, Proud Boys, Nazis, and the usual assortment of alt-right nationalists showed up to hold a “Freedom & Courage Rally” at Terry Schrunk Plaza at 4 pm. The event description was bizarre. It was almost Pentecostal in tone, speaking of “cleansing the streets of Portland” and finishing with a declaration: “WE WILL MARCH NO EXCEPTIONS.” They advertised that they’d confirmed participants from Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, and Florida, all the while pleading with the Portland Police Bureau for “fairness.” They had been run out of town earlier in June, apparently denied the police protection from anti-fascist demonstrators to which they’d grown accustomed. The irony of an overwhelmingly white ultra-nationalist group whining about “unfair” treatment from the police is hilarious, especially since the Portland Police riot line always faces the anti-fascists and police always attack and arrest anti-fascists—they never attack or arrest the fash. Cops and Klan go hand in hand, indeed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/01/11.jpg\")
\nThe demonstration started off as usual. In Portland, the fascists rally on federal property (for their own protection, obviously) in the middle of downtown: Terry Schrunk Plaza. Anti-fascists assemble in the park adjacent to Terry Schrunk—it’s called Chapman Square. Since the police were quite aware of the dynamics between the demonstrators, they lined Madison Street, facing the anti-fascists in Chapman Square. As Portland has been on high alert because of the #OccupyICE protests for the past three weeks (and Terry Schrunk is federal), DHS (Department of Homeland Security) officers made an appearance. They arrived wearing the federal government’s finest repression gear—caged helmets, masked faces, three-foot batons, pepper ball guns, and so on. A notable difference between this and past demos was that this time, the DHS police were organized into different teams, indicated by a stripe on the back of their helmets. The fascists also had their Halloween costumes on, ranging from a full-blown Pepe/Kek worshiper who looked like a wrestler to 3%ers (remember them helping police with arrests last summer?) wearing what looked like real combat gear. And they call anti-fascists LARPers?! Even Based Spartan made a re-emergence.
\n\nAnti-fascists taunted fascists with megaphones and chants, and the Unpresidented Brass Band provided a situationally-appropriate soundtrack, complete with “sad trombone” effects and a sousaphone every time one of the braver fash decided to “come talk” to the anti-fascists. Signs and banners were everywhere, and the bloc was a sprawling front line of roving fighters. The air was electric and numbers were clearly on our side, which always leads to one thing—state repression. One small group of anti-fascists were attacked by the fash, so the police responded by emptying what appeared to be pepper ball guns at the anti-fascists. This set the tone for the subsequent actions of the police.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/itsmikebivins/status/1013230015171817472\n\n\n
Twenty minutes later, police announced an official state action and the code under which it fell, and described the potential consequences if anyone chose to violate them. Essentially, they were warning anti-fascist demonstrators what to expect. This is certainly uncommon. It must have taken place because of the presence of major news outlets, and perhaps because the local police were working so openly with DHS. This action they announced was that they were going to set up a police line and clear the street adjacent to the fascist demonstrators.
\n\nThe fascists formed a self-described phalanx, which took about twenty minutes to assemble, and then immediately began marching towards Chapman Square at full speed. The initial clashes were mitigated by police presence and the speed of the marchers, but there were visible amounts of trash and sticks flying through the air. The fascists turned towards the river, then turned back towards their original direction. It initially looked like they were establishing a serpentine reach, but instead they stopped after several blocks. Anti-fascist demonstrators kept up with them the entire time, but kept a city block between both parallel marches. Anti-fascists grabbed street signs, barricades, construction barriers, and large sheets of wood to create barricades every time the fash attempted a charge. Then, as the fascists stopped and turned several blocks later, both groups began marching towards each other. A small group of anti-fascists broke off and there was a scuffle, followed by the anti-fascist charge.
\n\nIt’s important to note that the fascists charged through police lines with the express intention of attacking anti-fascist demonstrators. And the police allowed them to. Remember all that equipment? Nothing was deployed against the attackers.
\n\nToday was not a typical day in Portland. It was a good indicator of what anti-fascists are up against. The level of physical and psychological intimidation from groups of goons who train together was overwhelming. This phenomenon should be familiar to us from history. During the previous rise of fascism, state power was transferred to what were essentially street gangs (think of the SS). June 30 was an example of that phenomenon recurring—perhaps the most visible I have personally seen in Portland. The scene was reminiscent of the fascist demonstrations in Berkeley in 2017; but with no police or physical objects to stop the rivers of demonstrators, the initial clash was brutal.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/itsmikebivins/status/1013225997762641920\n\n\n
Fireworks and mortars, bear mace, bludgeons, and weighted gloves were among the most visible weapons. The “Berkeley Charge” was repelled by the sheer number of anti-fascist demonstrators and their advantageous positioning but it was clear that the fascists were there to attack them at all costs. The amount of blood spilled by both sides was unsurprising due to the fascists’ consistent state-backed escalation of violence. There were multiple beatdowns from both sides during this initial charge, and both sides peeled back momentarily. The fash let their front line venture too far into the anti-fascist line, and they realized it and turned back. The police immediately used flash-bang grenades. Five minutes later, the clash was a declared a riot.
\n\nBoth groups continued on the same trajectory as before and met up again several blocks later. The skirmishes continued for the next hour throughout downtown. Finally, when the crowds arrived back at the original location (Terry Schrunk and Chapman Square), the state was able to repress most of the anti-fascist defense, while allowing the fascists to continue attacking intermittently. Since the demonstration had been declared a riot, state forces effectively cancelled the Patriot Prayer event by forcing both groups to march on the sidewalks. In the final scene, the remaining anti-fascists chanted “BYE BYE NAZIS” as the fascists mounted the singular vehicle they’d arrived in.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/itsmikebivins/status/1013242125176066048\n\n\n
Yes, that’s right—the fash brought a big yellow school bus. What version of reality are we in right now? The situation is bizarre, comrades. This is fascism.
\n\nIt is worth noting the degree of collaboration between the fascists, the police, and the state. All three groups were visibly interfacing, coordinating, and collaborating. The transfer of power and state enforcement has already begun. Everyone should remember that Joey Gibson is a real estate agent and wannabe politician, and assuredly there were other politicians and would-be politicians fighting alongside him today.
\n\nStill, today in Portland anti-fascists had the numbers and the spirit on our side. Anti-fascists gave no platform and no space, and even the state couldn’t protect the fash—although they tried as hard as they could to do so.
\n\nThe police tried to repress anti-fascists from the start. They attacked, they threatened arrest and violence, they allowed the fascists to stream through their lines to attack us. There was no holding back from either side today. And Portland held it down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/01/6.jpg\")
Before.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/01/7.jpg\")
After.
\nWe include this additional perspective from the streets of Portland for the sake of historical completeness.
\n\nI showed up to Terry Schrunk Plaza with friends. We were late to the party. Concealing as much of our individual identities as possible had taken time, but for me one of the reasons that I didn’t show up promptly at the beginning of the rally was simply that I didn’t want to be there. I NEVER want to be there. My eyebrows pitch and the blood rises in my face when liberal media casts leftists who come out in opposition to fascists as eager participants in a slugfest, there to earn our edgy anarchist badges. Nothing could be further from the truth for me. If I could never again be in the vicinity of a large mass of entitled, violent, spoiled babies just waiting to hurt people, I would be thrilled. But I imagine that for most of the people that showed up, like me, staying home as fascism spreads wasn’t an option.
\n\nOver the course of the next hour and a half, more people continued to pour into the counter-protestor side of the park, Chapman Square. Across the street, behind DHS agents armed to the gills and metal fence barricades, Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys were pumping each other up, giving speeches, and occasionally hurling insults across the street via megaphone. Counter-protesters outnumbered the fascists at least 2-1 by my estimate, with at least half of those in attendance bloc’ed up. There was a strong union presence and several members of the National Lawyers Guild had showed up as well. I paced back and forth, sat, stood, sat again. The bathroom in the park was closed and I had to pee. I was sweating profusely underneath what little protection I had available, but I couldn’t drink any more water. At one point, someone got pushed out of the park for a previous sexual assault.
\n\nThis went on for what seemed like an interminable length of time. Counter-protestors heckled the fascist rally with multiple megaphones, chanting things like, “We remember Charlottsville, you got Heather Heyer killed!” Someone with a megaphone started chanting “Proud Boys drink piss!” and I had to suppress laughter as I heard someone mumble something about kink-shaming. Proud Boy Tiny was handcuffed along with one other person, which lead to much cheering from the counter-protest. I suspect these arrests further infuriated the fash.
\n\nFinally, a big yellow school bus rolled up and unloaded about 50 Proud Boys. Shortly after that, I heard someone yell, “They’re moving!” Equipped with body armor, helmets, and flag poles, the fash poured out of Terry Schrunk Plaza and into the street. Counter-protestors moved adjacent to them, blocking off 3rd avenue. I don’t know who threw the first projectile, but that is unimportant. Suddenly, gravel, half-full bottles of water, firecrackers, and other objects were being lobbed back and forth. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, police had opened fire, attacking the counter-protesters with rubber bullets. I heard cries go up from multiple directions calling for a medic. Someone was rushed past me with an escort on either side, bleeding profusely from the head. It was a war zone. Finally, I became aware that the police were firing on us as I caught a lung full of pepper spray from the pepper balls they were launching into the crowd.
\n\nThe PP/PB rally moved down Madison Street, then turned north onto 2nd. The counter-protest kept moving north on 3rd. When both groups got to Main Street, they turned to face each other. I heard someone from the fash side yell, “Let’s get em!” and all hell broke loose. There were clashes all around me. As if to illustrate their cowardice, the fascists went after lone counter-protestors out in the front, with as many as seven people on one. I turned around to search the crowd for my friends and almost ran straight into a bearded man with a face full of blood; the image of his breath making bubbles as blood filled his nostrils is still with me. The fascists were literally gang beating people and the police were letting them.
\n\nIn front of me at roughly 45 degree angles in both directions, lone people were being attacked by groups of three and four Proud Boys. I decided at random and began running toward my left when there was a loud bang between myself and the group I was running toward. Though I knew it was probably a firework, I retreated a few steps before continuing in that direction. The person I was running toward was up and struggling loose from the scum by the time I got there. Amid cries to pull back, explosions from fireworks, and distorted megaphone noise from the police, we retreated back to 3rd.
\n\nAt Salmon Street, people started taking advantage of the construction barricades that were there to block the road off. People were grabbing trash can lids to use as shields and searching for anything not tied down to defend themselves with. This scene repeated itself at the next intersection. The Portland police were declaring the scene a riot. As the fascists made their way back to the park where they started, I looked around to realize that we had gotten split up into at least two smaller groups. The counter-protest followed them back to Terry Schrunk Plaza. Once it appeared that they were just waiting around for their busses to come pick them up, I decided it was time to leave. Trying to depart with the knowledge that anyone driving past us could have been coming from that rally was one of the most unnerving parts of the whole experience.
\n\nThis was easily the most violent clash I have ever witnessed. Reflecting on that experience, I have many questions. They got their permit revoked, but ultimately it was the city that shut them down. Of course, the cops defended the white nationalists and other assorted fash, despite their crying to the contrary, but strategically, how could we have prevented the early police assault on the counter-demonstration? How did the group get split up—and how could we have prevented that? How could we have kept each other safer, preventing fascists from singling people out and beating them? Ultimately, my biggest question is how to draw more people out. We had hundreds, but if we had been thousands, as we should have, they might have never even left the park.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/06/06/confronting-the-nationalists-and-their-police-a-full-report-from-portland-on-june-4", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/06/06/confronting-the-nationalists-and-their-police-a-full-report-from-portland-on-june-4", "title": "Confronting the Nationalists and Their Police : A Full Report from Portland on June 4", "summary": "In response to a rally called to promote violent nationalism in the wake of two racist murders, antifascists converged in Portland despite a massive police operation. A full on-the-ground report.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/header.jpg", "date_published": "2017-06-06T08:41:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:34Z", "tags": [ "Portland", "fascism", "antifascism", "antifa" ], "content_html": "On June 4, shortly after Jeremy Christian murdered two people who intervened when he was harassing two teenage women of color on a Portland commuter train, nationalists organized a rally in downtown Portland, inviting “patriots” such as Kyle Chapman to come speak in favor of carrying out violent attacks on anti-fascists and others. In response, anarchists and other opponents of fascism converged in downtown Portland, despite a massive police operation to reserve the space for nationalists. In this account, one participant offers a full report on the day’s events.
\n\nMy crew and I were nervous going into the protest against the nationalist “Patriot Prayer” rally in Portland on June 4. We had talked in advance about what could happen; the conversation was a little bleaker than our usual planning discussions. The mainstream media has been reporting nonstop on the killing of two people and slashing of a third who stood up to defend two young women of color from white supremacist Jeremy Christian’s hostility on the commuter train a week ago, and we were all feeling the tension. “Something sketchy is going to happen” was more or less what we concluded. At the minimum, we were expecting a Berkeley-style street brawl between antifascists and alt-right LARPing patriots in gladiator costumes; at the worst, we figured some delusional, Kyle-Chapman-loving, “antifa are the real fascists” white nationalist would throw a grenade and we would lose some comrades. In the end, we decided that any risk we envisioned was outweighed by our desire not to let the nationalists organize openly, as that would embolden more racists to go out and harass, attack, and murder people of color. We prepared for the worst.
\n\nWhen we arrived on the scene, we saw that others had come prepared as well. The black bloc was prepared. The police were prepared. The nationalists were prepared. We passed the smaller labor rally and the timid “no masks allowed” liberal rally on the blocks surrounding the fascists; then we made our war around the lines and lines of police protecting the patriots. We felt a bit safer when we saw that the largest of the four concurrent demonstrations was the one comprised of militant antifascists. It’s hard to gauge the exact number because the participants were spread out around a park the size of a city block, but I think it is safe to say the total was around 1000.
\n\nAt protests in the northwest over the past few months, police have sought to confiscate anything that could be interpreted as a weapon, essentially disarming protesters early on before anybody gets a chance to make use of them. In Seattle on January 20, the day an antifascist was shot, the Seattle PD kettled the anarchist march after only a block of marching, took all the flags, shields, and sticks, and let everyone go. In Portland, the police were taking people’s flags, flagpoles, baseball bats, shields, and anything else they could identify from the edge of the park as protesters entered. A number of people managed to slip through with shields. Plenty of people in the black bloc, and four out of the five people I came with, were wearing helmets and other protective gear. A few friends were wearing Kevlar vests under their hoodies in order not to be the next antifascist shot by a trigger-happy patriot. Based on pictures the police released later, people also managed to carry in a small arsenal of knives, brass knuckles, pepper spray, chains, flares, telescopic batons, smoke bombs, fireworks, slingshots, crowbars, and, of course, cases of Pepsi.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/7.jpg\")
“Their identification with those in power is always a kind of cosplay: they can only be a pathetic imitation of the tyrants they look up to. They ape the Spartans, the Romans, the Nazis, who themselves were pathetic imitations of an idealized image of manhood, mere cogs in a military machine.”
\nAbout 50 well-armed cops acted as a buffer between the antifascists and the fascists, with a few more scattered around the edges of the park and a few hundred more at the ready. Behind them, Three Percenters and stick-waving, armor-wearing gladiators formed another line, and behind them, flag-waving, Trump-loving white people who just wanted to listen to alt-right B-list celebrities like Kyle Chapman proclaim things like “Open season on antifa. Smash on sight!” There were a few hundred nationalists. I’d be shocked if anyone put the number higher than 300.
\n\nI imagine the police were under a lot of pressure to prevent brawls between MAGA goons and antifascists, and they were mostly successful. With all the media hype, the mayor calling for the federal government to cancel the permits and then rescinding his request, and the wave of escalating antigovernment protests in Portland, their main strategy was to keep all the demonstrations separate. There was certainly no safe way to cross the street as a group or to engage meaningfully with the nationalists. The few alt-right provocateurs who made it into the park with the antifascists were quickly chased out. The sketchy photographers who were walking around trying to get close-ups of people’s faces were run off as well.
\n\nDemonstrators gently expel a “proud boy” nationalist from the antifascist area.
\nA lifted pickup driving by got stuck in traffic. Some mischievous individuals confiscated its American flag and “blue lives matter” flags; it was pelted with water bottles and sticks. People brought the “blue lives matter” flag to the front and burned it a few feet from the line of riot cops. One confused Proud Boy in his early 20s was discovered wandering around the park, identifiable by a shirt reading “Proud Boy.” I’m not sure if he was trying to be brave or if he was just lost, but he was surrounded by about 40 black-clad antifascists. This kid could easily have been seriously injured, and several comrades were on the verge of letting him have it. As he was contemplating his final moments, trying not to release the contents of his bladder and surely regretting his poor sense of direction, he was told, “You ought to leave.” And he did. Quickly.
\n\nFor three and a half hours, pretty much nothing happened. Every once in a while, someone would get chased off and people would rush over to see what was going on. A few times, some eager young’un with a bullhorn tried to rally people to mass up in one corner of the park in order to somehow march through the line of riot cops and disrupt the fascists. While I appreciate this kind of optimism, the probability of success seemed considerably smaller than the probability of getting beat up by a hundred well-prepared cops. There was some stagnation. And the tension was still there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/5.jpg\")
Police preserving a space for advocates of nationalist violence to recruit.
\nThen, seemingly out of nowhere, the cops attacked the antifascist rally—without any kind of direct provocation.
\n\nNow, I’m not much of a fan of the “we were attacked by the cops for no reason, I swear!” line. I don’t really think it serves us as anarchists to appeal to the moral outrage of liberals who already hate us. It doesn’t make us feel better about getting attacked—and it certainly doesn’t make it enticing to anyone to join a group that is constantly getting attacked by cops “for no reason.”
\n\nThey didn’t attack us for no reason, though. They have a hundred good reasons to attack us. As anarchists who are fighting against the rise of fascism, who are on the news for disrupting white nationalist events all around the country, who burn limousines and punch Nazis during important transitions of government power, who fight cops and break windows and march without permits, who advocate the dismantling of government and police and prisons, who have no respect for authority, who want to abolish hierarchy, whose ideas and tactics are gaining traction among a growing population of people who are feeling angry and need an outlet to vent their dissatisfaction and disillusionment… there are plenty of reasons police would choose to attack us.
\n\nTheir official line was that unidentified people in black were collecting bricks from the top of a park bathroom, so they moved in to prevent the throwing of bricks. Conveniently, they timed their attack on the antifascist rally to take place half an hour before the nationalist rally was set to end. The park in which the nationalists were gathering was surrounded on all sides by counterdemonstrators. Presumably the police concluded that the only way to prevent roving street brawls was to push back the most militant opposition, opening space for the patriots to disperse safely.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/4.jpg\")
Police firing “less lethal” munitions at demonstrators.
\nThe police came in firing pepper balls, rubber bullets, tear gas, concussion bombs, pepper spray, and something they referred to as “aerial distraction devices,” all to the delight of the equally surprised fascists they were protecting. Demonstrators responded with rocks, sticks, water bottles, bricks, full Pepsi cans, and anything else that could be thrown. As people pelted the cops in riot gear making their way into the park, unarmored bike cops stood in the street to the side of the mêlée. It can be difficult to make split-second decisions in such circumstances, but on reflection, the bike cops were probably more vulnerable than the cops clad head to toe in expensive body armor.
\n\nA crew of well-prepared folks in black bloc were able to hold out a little longer, but most people were almost immediately pushed back by the gas, and medics were on the scene immediately treating people with eye flushes and treating various injuries. One medic I talked to treated someone who caught a brick to the cheek, presumably from friendly fire (aim better next time, comrades!). After a few rounds of less-lethal weaponry and police charges, the park was cleared and the bloc started reforming about a hundred yards back, across the street in the next section of the same park. Chants of “Walk! Don’t run!” kept the atmosphere oddly calm and dissuaded a lot of people from panicking. By this point, about half of the participants had dispersed.
\n\nThe nationalist rally was now a full block away with a ton of aggressive cops blocking access to it. A barricade of construction signs and newspaper boxes appeared in the street to prevent any further police advance. As people mingled, a few in black started calling for people to regroup in bloc and march. About a hundred or so people took off chanting down the street, while the rest stayed in the park or at the barricade. The march made it about two blocks, but was outmaneuvered and turned back by riot cops who were riding around holding on to the exterior of customized personnel-carrying SUVs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/9.jpg\")
Antifascists marching through Portland on June 4.
\nThe march swung back by the park and almost everybody else joined in, swelling the numbers to somewhere between 300 and 500. It seemed like something might have been possible, but I could sense the hesitation of the group I was rolling with. The march made it another block, then was again outflanked by the police on the SUVs and we had to make another turn. After another block, we were turned away yet again by a different group of cops. I could see more cop SUVs loaded down with riot cops zooming ahead from the side streets.
\n\nThe city isn’t made of cobblestones, there weren’t any nearby construction sites, just about everything was bolted down, and almost all the flags and many of the shields had been confiscated a few hours earlier. It felt like we were being corralled. With limited means to engage, my buddy and I decided to disengage, so we made our way up a side street to de-bloc. At the time, we had mixed feelings about leaving; the size and anger of the crowd suggested that it might have some potential. Unfortunately, it turned out that our instincts were right. The march only progressed a couple more blocks before being kettled, trapping about 200 people on a city block without escape routes.
\n\nWhen people realized they were trapped, a giant pile of black clothing, helmets, knives, rocks, and other weapons materialized and a group of sweaty, plaid wearing Portlanders meandered about, waiting to find out what would happen. A few people managed to ascend a high wall to escape into a parking garage before the police caught on and started blasting them with pepper balls, shooting over the heads of a few disapproving bystanders. The cops began slowly processing people, letting them go after photographing their IDs. As this was taking place, the nationalist demonstration was ending and the participants were dispersing right in front of the family-friendly liberal rally.
\n\nAltogether, there were 14 arrests, and around 200 people were IDed from the antifascist march. The day didn’t feel like a defeat, but it didn’t feel like a success either. A lot of people came together to fight back against the police, but with limited resources and effectiveness. The alt-right rally was completely surrounded by people who opposed them, but it was largely unaffected by the counterdemonstrations. The police were most effective when they were acting as a buffer between the demonstrations and when they were corralling the marches. On at least two occasions, Three Percenters actively aided the police in arresting antifascists. The antifascist contingent was most effective and felt the most inspiring when we were able to maintain a space free of police, however briefly.
\n\nAt the end of any major confrontation, my comrades and I ask ourselves questions and discuss what could have gone better. Could we have held space longer even under assault from heavily-armed police? Were there other ways to disrupt the nationalist rally? How can we fight in a sterilized and controlled cityscape? What would have helped us prevent the kettle? Could we have been more prepared? Helmets felt essential, and sturdy flagpoles would have been nice—but what could have transformed the fight to something that felt winnable? More shields to protect against police projectiles? Hammers to break up material? Smoke bombs? What lessons can we draw as we move forward? I hope to hear conversations like these happening as people strategize about what we can do, individually and collectively, to be smarter, fiercer, and more effective the next time we engage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/2.jpg\")
A smashed police vehicle in Portland on May Day, 2017. The events of June 4 put such actions in context.
\nIn May, Jeremy Christian, an alt-right proponent of so-called “free speech,” murdered two people on a commuter train in Portland who were responding to his attacks on two teenage women of color. In response, far-right organizers promoted a rally in favor of “free speech” to take place in downtown Portland on June 4. Portland Police, Oregon State Police, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and a host of other state forces mobilized to protect these “patriots” from the consequences of promoting hatred and violence. In response, we have prepared a poster articulating how police and fascists work together to hasten the rise of totalitarianism. Please print these out and deploy them everywhere.
\n\nPoster: “The Two Faces of Fascism” color pdf
\n\nPoster: “The Two Faces of Fascism” black-and-white pdf
\n\n\nThe events in Portland reflect a classic model we have already seen police and fascists employ in Berkeley. Police disarm and disempower demonstrators so fascists can attack them with impunity. In the aftermath of the clashes that took place in Berkeley on April 15, police carried out a series of raids in the Bay Area utilizing intelligence that had been provided to them by far-right internet trolls. This two-pronged assault enables reactionaries embedded in the state to disavow the elements of their agenda that are perceived as too extreme, while utilizing a variety of tactics to crush attempts at self-determination and self-defense.
\n\nIn creating a space for nationalists to promote violence and seizing weapons from those who need to be able to defend themselves from attacks like the one carried out by Jeremy Christian, Portland police are complicit in the rise of fascism. On June 4, police attacked demonstrators bearing banners reading MOURN THE DEAD and FIGHT LIKE HELL FOR THE LIVING. They utilized a variety of less-lethal weaponry to break up demonstrations against the far-right organizers, in order to preserve a space for the far right to continue recruiting.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/10.jpg\")
\nFascists and other nationalists support the police, in turn, by spreading narratives justifying their violence against those opposing the rise of fascism. Anyone who has experience in demonstrations knows that police manufacture their own propaganda to justify whatever they do. Yet reactionaries who consider CNN and the New York Times “fake news” are willing to believe anything they read on a police twitter account. This is the mindset that supports fascism: independent reporting and critical inquiry are derided, while the narratives spread by the authorities are swallowed whole.
\n\nAll this is part of a broader pattern in which police and fascists reinforce each other’s activities. Here’s how it works, in a nutshell. Fascist groups promote racist, sexist, and nationalist violence. Individual bigots carry it out—attacking people in the streets, shooting people in churches, stabbing people on trains. The authorities use these attacks as an excuse to increase control, promising to protect a fearful population. But the greatest threat is not individual fascists: it is the state itself. It is the state that deports and imprisons millions, that suppresses dissent, that imposes the tremendous imbalances of power that characterize this society.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/8.jpg\")
The state stands on a foundation of violence; fascism is never far away.
\nIf we count on the authorities to control fascist activity, granting them resources and legitimacy in hopes that they will protect us, it is only a matter of time until a more reactionary government takes power and uses those resources and legitimacy to carry out even more violence.
\n\nThis is why only grassroots resistance can stop the rise of fascism. We salute the courage of those who took the streets in Portland to oppose racist violence and the rise of fascism. In the end, if we want to put an end to all racist violence, we will have to come to grips with the state itself. We have to become capable of defending our demonstrations and communities from police as well as fascists.
\n\nDemonstrators chant “all cops are bastards” in Portland on June 4 after police attack them.
\nOn May Day 2017, anarchists participated in lively demonstrations all around the United States, from the heartland to the coasts. In the Northwest, Seattle witnessed a successful block party at the site of a juvenile corrections center, while in Olympia anarchists barricaded train tracks to oppose fracking and clashed with police. Support arrestees here. Yet Portland, Oregon may take the cake for the most creative and combative May Day. Demonstrators not only defended themselves from unprovoked attacks from police who declared the march a riot—they also introduced exciting new innovations into the aesthetic of the black bloc street presence. Here, comrades from Portland explain their goals with the giant spiders they created for May Day, and offer a helpful guide for those who wish to make spiders of their own.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/5.jpg\")
Circling the A in arachnid!
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/7.jpg\")
Eight-legged anarchy!
\nIn an effort to bridge the gap between art and activism, giant spiders were assembled off-site and pushed up the street to the demonstration, stocked with water bottles, snacks, earplugs, and other party favors. The idea was to narrow the divide between “us” and “them” that often exists at demonstrations, and it was a complete success. We performed community outreach, engaged in cultural development, boosted morale, provided crucial supplies, and created an amazing photo opportunity in the process.
\n\nThe concept is multi-dimensional: it works on many different levels. The idea began from frustrations around attendance at local demonstrations. In Portland, where the majority of citizens seem to be white, middle-class, and apolitical on account of these privileges, they don’t show up unless a demonstration concerns their interests specifically. However, Portlanders are fascinated by their own love of art and “wacky” stuff as well as the commodification of protest as “funtertainment.” We decided to embrace this love of the “weird” to test whether a hyper-localized approach to engaging people could succeed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/10.jpg\")
How to make spiders of your own!
\nOur tactical art enabled us to fill a supporting role for other participants in the march, helping challenge narratives that the black bloc is an “othered” or “othering” tactic. Whether this separation is intentional or not, the fact remains that the general public is often hesitant to engage with us. Bearing that in mind—as well the tendency of the Portland Police Department to brutally shut down demonstrations—we stocked our Spiders with fliers, water, LAW (liquid, antacid, water, the eyewash with which street medics treat pepper spray), ear plugs, and snacks. We also included a few other party favors, because anarchy needs revelry!
\n\nWe intentionally engaged with the folks around us. A lot of people walked up to ask what the spiders meant! It was inspiring to see so much dialogue between folks in everyday garb and folks in black bloc. We explained the ideas behind our actions as anarchists and the creations themselves: the three spiders representing Mutual Aid, Solidarity, and Direct Action.
\n\nA word about symbolism. The idea of using the spider as an icon of resistance is that spiders are always there watching, waiting, and keeping the environment free of pesky insects and other parasites that consume resources without supporting their fellow beings. While we may look scary, we’re here with you and for you. We are the spiders, and the insects are the societal ills that we fight against.
\n\nThe symbolism of the black widow spider is rich with history that guides our work. We want to contribute to that rich history, adding our own interpretations. Mutual Aid, Solidarity, Direct Action are our black widow’s cruses. (Crux? Curse? Cures?)
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/3.jpg\")
Building webs of mutual aid and solidarity!
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/4.jpg\")
The anarcho-arachnids in action.
\nIn regards to developing our own culture, there are many barriers we face in this process. State repression is the biggest threat, of course. The specter of state repression can complicate organizing, planning, and building trust in our communities. Portland has a history of repression and slander, ruining the lives of activists and anarchists; these horror stories reverberate throughout the underground. We can’t allow ourselves to be publicly disparaged and forced into hiding by our adversaries and their culture war, so we create as a political act. Creating is intuitively human: we plan, we build, we think, we conspire, we imagine. It is also an activity in which everyone can engage to some degree while building new skills. It enables us to get to know each other, build trust, and share time and company.
\n\nMore globally, seizing the Spectacle is a step towards our goals, because it allows us to dictate our own narratives. With the development of Public Relations and Social Engineering, the visage of capitalism has come to define its delusional reality. To paraphrase Guy Debord, lived experiences are now taken in as a collection of representational images. We can tell our own stories and show the general public what these three principles mean in action. We can create our own mythos, speaking out on our own terms, in our own language, with our own symbols. The state and media dictate too much of what we’re allowed to say and how it’s spun—it’s time to spin our own webs to connect and fortify our relationships.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/8.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/9.jpg\")
What has eight legs, no gods, and no masters?
\nWe are building the bridges we need to move forward. The existing connections between art, activism, and anarchism are fiery and well-storied. The new wave of repression under Trump’s regime is still building steam, but it is already proving dangerous. We need to be more careful than ever. Art allows us to demonstrate and show our fangs, and we can use art to empower those around us.
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![Protesters](\"https://media.washtimes.com/media/image/2020/07/20/APTOPIX_Racial_Injustice_Portland_32735.jpg-fc00b.jpg\"){kind=link}
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