![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/5.jpg\")
The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”
\nFive years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.
\n\nThis is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.
\n\nOctober 2019 in Santiago, Chile. The president has called in the armed forces against the people for the first time since the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.
\n\n“Wait, I don’t get it. The advertisements are untouched. There’s not even graffiti. Not a single window is broken.”
\n\n“Yes. And?”
\n\n“I mean, the shelves are all empty. Did they just evacuate all the merchandise, or was it actually looted?”
\n\n“Haha what? Of course it was looted, the whole neighborhood looted it. Well, women and children first.”
\n\n“And no one destroyed anything?”
\n\n“Look, the idea isn’t to give them a bigger insurance check. Besides, if things keep going the way they are, that building may soon be ours.”
\n\n“That would be a serious step. I can’t imagine things ever reaching this point where I come from. Good luck with your struggle.”
\n\n“No! No, no, no, brother—our struggle. You’re here. You’re in this. Tell people.”
\n\n“I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone back home.”
\n\n“Explain it like this: neoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die.”
\n\n The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”
\nOn October 17, 2019, Chile’s student movement was on its heels, facing new legislation that put police in schools for the very first time. With the students’ normal organizing environment swept out of their control, the movement launched a campaign against a routine increase in public transit fare. With a right-wing billionaire in the presidency, the prospects for resistance looked dim.
\n\nEverything changed in a single day. On October 18, a small rush-hour protest at a metro transfer station triggered a stoppage of Santiago’s entire public transit system. As commuters were stuck in hot traffic, images of police beating students began to circulate on their phones.
\n\nSantiago exploded. In one weekend, over a hundred metro stations were attacked, with ten completely destroyed. A quarter of the Wal-Marts (the largest grocery chain) in Chile were looted or burned. The government declared martial law in response to civil disturbance for the first time since the 1973-1990 Pinochet military dictatorship—but the people would not back down.
\n\nChile graffiti reel, 2019-2020.
\nWe decided to take a break from our country after I finally beat criminal charges resulting from participating in combative political activity. We had just crossed the border out of Ecuador when we heard reports about an uprising there. Peasants were marching on the capitol, choking off the highways to force the president to reverse proposed austerity measures.
\n\nYou said, “We should go back.”
\n\nI said, “If it were Chile…”
\n\nJust two weeks later, it was.
\n\nI’m not from Chile, but I lived there for years.
\n\nWe arrived in Santiago a week before everything exploded, and almost immediately encountered an evasión [a collective fare-dodging action] that students were staging. It was your first time in Chile, and I was excited for you to get a small taste of student rebellion. And, hey, getting where we were going quicker without having to pay the second highest transit fare in Latin America?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/9.jpg\")
Evasion, 2019.
\nOK. But the best part was how fun it was. It was so fun that the following day, when we heard the shriek of students rushing down the escalators towards the turnstiles, that we ditched our free bus ride and rushed into the station. As if we had just scored the winning goal, the teenage rebels thrilled, chanting “If you don’t jump, you’re a cop!” as we hopped through the turnstiles they had liberated. We kept evading whenever we encountered fare-dodging actions that week, even if we didn’t really need a metro ride.
\n\nOn October 18, I was supposed to give a talk at some friends’ anarchist ateneo [social center]. You were out on the town while I was back at my old apartment preparing. You WhatsApp’d me some videos of kids wilding out in the metro station. Was it really Los Heroes [a metro station]?1 You were at the center of history? God damn. I just YeahYeahYeah’d you because I had seen Chilean riots before. “Oh I’m glad you got to see that. We have to get ready to leave though.”
\n\nYou—somehow—got back to my old apartment where we were staying. Knowing what I know now, I don’t even understand how you got there in time. But you were always good at finding me in the streets over the coming months, even when things got chaotic. What should have been a 45-minute commute to the ateneo took two and a half hours. Time can be elastic in Chile, sure, but it really shouldn’t take that long.
\n\nSomehow, we got there. No one else did, though. Over the months that followed, the coolest people I met flattered me with, “Oh, I was going to come to your talk that day! But then, well…”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/8.jpg\")
The CrimethInc. presentation in Villa Francia on October 18, 2019.
\nAs we waited for an audience, I saw two ten-year-olds walking down the middle of the street with a children’s couch the size of a playpen.
\n\n“There’s no way they’re gonna do what I think they’re gonna do to that couch, right?”
\n\nThey did. Right onto the fire at the end of the block. We started to piece it together: what you had seen, no one at the event, the heavy traffic, this flaming barricade. Santiago was going off.
\n\nWe crossed downtown to our friend’s apartment, closer to the action, but it turned out the action was everywhere. The husk of a bus. Smoldering buildings. At one point, our cab driver wasn’t sure what to do because the intersection had cops on one side and fighting encapuchados [masked heroes] on the other.
\n\nI was still YeahYeahYeah-ing your wide eyes when I left the following day, despite all my friends’ insistence that this was something special. When I got to the anarchist book fair in Buenos Aires—to give my talk again—the whole book fair was cancelled. They managed to get through a couple of the time slots, but everyone was talking about Chile. Looking at their phones. Cheering for our team whenever we struck a blow and expressing outrage every time there was news about repression. It didn’t take long for the organizers to pack it all in and just open up the social center so the whole book fair could simply watch the news from Chile.
\n\nMy friend, one of the organizers, walked over to me while I was wide-eyeing the events on the television. He whispered to me, “Dude, why the fuck did you leave?”
\n\nThe third time I tried to give my ill-fated talk, it was in the middle of the revolt, both temporally and territorially. Some anarchists had opened up a squat in one of the looted and abandoned businesses right by the main protest plaza. Enough people said they still wanted to see my talk—even though I didn’t understand why they would be interested in anything other than what was going on around us—that I decided to organize a presentation at the squat. Plus, I loved the space and wanted to keep it active. During talks there, one would regularly hear the uproar of revolt just outside the door, although we occasionally had to tuck our heads into our knees and wait out the wafting clouds of teargas.
\n\nNobody came. The host had been optimistic, but after waiting a couple of hours, he informed me that the legendary 1970s Basque punk band, La Polla Records, was playing in a stadium that day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/10.jpg\")
Fifty years of punk rock in the middle of an insurrection: “No rest, no peace!”
\n“I don’t really like punk rock, so I didn’t mind opening up the space for you. But I guess everyone’s there.”
\n\nBut I do like punk rock. So I grabbed my loosies and hopped on my bike.
\n\nAlmost ten years ago now, five punks died in Santiago when bouncers violently beat back a rush of poor punks who were trying to get into a show where the British crust band Doom was playing. Wanting to avoid a similar situation—or simply intimidated by the uncontrollable, pay for nothing, fight for everything spirit that was consuming Chile—the security at the stadium would simply allow you to walk in without a ticket. I even took my bicycle in.
\n\nInside the stadium, 15,000 punks were letting their hair down. Out in the plaza, every sector of the oppressed was present, and while we gave the cops our worst, we tried to be on our best behavior with each other because survival depended on our collective bonds. For example, a fragile truce existed during those months between the different soccer hooligan barras bravas so that they could fight the police together. On the rare occasions that fights did break out between demonstrators, everyone would chant “If you fight, you’re a cop! If you fight, you’re a cop!” Wild anarchist idealists went to the plaza with their most polished pitches to promote the values we believed would deepen the revolt.
\n\nInside that stadium, however, the pressure was off. The plaza always had an element of carnival, but the La Polla Records show felt much more like a celebration of how far the anarchy had gone. If you know, you know, and everyone there got it—all punks—and we could just be bad because being bad together was so good. We didn’t need justifications or explanations, we could just enjoy the environment of collective, chaotic rebellion. While we had to mind our interactions on the frontline (“If you recognize me behind my mask, no you didn’t”), lest buchón sapo [Argentine, then Chilean, for “snitch”] plainclothes track our social connections, here in the stadium, those of us who had maintained a professional candor with each other in the streets could embrace and see the whole of each other’s faces erupting in radiant laughter.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/7.jpg\")
Demonstrators snap a photo of the declaration of intra-hooligan, anti-police unity. It reads, “We lost too much time fighting among ourselves,” with each word atop the colors of a different team.
\nEveryone was sharing alcohol and weed and whatever else they had. A skinhead hooligan had hacked the stadium’s sprinkler system and was spraying mist over his section of the crowd under the hot summer sun. People climbed onto the sound tower and the roof of the stadium to hang banners in solidarity with the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche struggle or to dance silhouetted against the setting sun.
\n\nHere, the audience was in control—except the audience was totally out of control. Just a few songs into La Polla Records’ set, they had to stop in the middle of a song because too many enthusiastic hooligans had gotten on the stage and one had fallen into the drumset. They weren’t trying to stop the show, really. They were just excited.
\n\nA few more songs of the same, and one fateful fight between a bouncer who tried to suggest to a fan that he shouldn’t grab the singer’s neck in order to sing along, and the whole thing fell apart. Altogether, La Polla Records played something like five songs before abandoning the stage. As dusk came on, the atmosphere shifted from enthusiasm to anger.
\n\n15,000 punks rule! La Polla Records in Chile, February 2020.
\n15,000 grumbling punks and anarchists and hooligans and skinheads filed out of the stadium. Honestly, the amount of inward-facing frustration was so high that the most strategic choice the police could have made that evening would have been to allow the infighting to take its natural course. However, when there are thousands of punks occupying the road outside the stadium drinking and destroying traffic infrastructure, the pigs just can’t help themselves.
\n\nAnd neither could we. The most beautiful, glorious street battle of those six months unfolded before my eyes. We could see the police descending from up in the hills, so their arrival was anticipated. There was an air of “Here we go…”
\n\nBrightly colored mohawks bounced in and out of visibility amid clouds of tear gas. The most wildly dressed peacock punks engaged in feral smashing of beer bottles against police, while boom boxes provided a fast-paced tupa-tupa-tupa soundtrack to the riot. We didn’t see the best practices of gas masks, goggles, and gloves that the frontline used in the plaza. This was pure fuck you energy.
\n\nI had made a friend earlier that night while standing around selling cigarettes—but our befriending quickly accelerated when we realized we needed to rely on each other to get out of there safely. Even though they had, let’s say, much more reason to avoid capture by the police, on our first attempt to extract ourselves, they grabbed my arm and said, “Can we just watch it though?”
\n\nYeah… except no! They were shooting shit at us! Dozens of punks rushed past us and, behind them, mechanical faceless stormtroopers advanced out of the gas clouds, arms drawn. We turned and ran.
\n\nIn those six months, I mastered a whole audio taxonomy of booms—deep ones for the spent spray paint cans thrown into street fires, three different mid-level frequencies for different police projectiles, and the most piercing booms, fireworks. With the cops at our heels, we heard—BOOM—and instinctively I told my friend, “Jump!” No shit, a smoking canister hurtled under our feet. BOOM BOOM! Instinctively, again, “Duck!” This time, they went right over our heads.
\n\n“We absolutely have to get out of here.” We turned down a side street and wandered to the home of a friendly but ribbing communist who was excited to share his plan to subvert either the anarchist circle-A, or the constitutional process—I couldn’t tell which—by making a circle-A logo for the “Apruebo” (Approve) campaign for the constitution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/12.jpg\")
“Stop prohibiting so many things, I can’t keep up with disobeying them all.”
\nOver the last five years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing the material from this documentary in live presentations. In the days that this film depicts, every time I organized a talk, it was interrupted by the fiercest street confrontations in decades, or a people’s insurrection just across the border, or an uncontrollable wave of rioting punks. I wish that was still happening today. It’s better to do than to watch.
\n\nSince those days, I’ve presented the live version of Fell In Love With Fire within autonomous territory held in defiance of state power—in Weelaunee Forest, at a Los Panchos community in Mexico City, in People’s Park, where the audience sat on a trashed excavator left from the last riots to retake the park in 2022. It is my hope that this videozine, this documentalgo, can serve as tool to bring those kinds of spaces onto the map of other projects of rebellious self-determination across the globe and across time.
\n\nPlease, don’t limit your use of this video to isolated viewing, nor to sterile, polite, seated events to raise funds. Use it to raise hell.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/3.jpg\")
Their side.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/4.jpg\")
Our side.
\nYou can download the English .srt subtitles file here to translate the subtitles into another language for us.
\n\nLos Héroes is not far from La Moneda, the metro stetion where kids dropped a televisión onto the tracks—shutting down the metro and setting off the chain reaction of revolt. ↩
\nOn June 2023, in the city of Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, police brutally murdered a teenager named Nahel Merzouk, continuing a pattern of post-colonial violence directed at a sector of the French population that is treated as second-class citizens. In response, thousands of people in the outlying banlieues of Paris and other French cities engaged in several days of pitched revolt, attacking town halls and police stations, looting shops, and defending themselves against the police. In the following reflection, a participant in the movements of recent years looks back on the revolt of June 2023 and the movements that preceded it, exploring the limits they reached and considering what it would take for them to bring about revolutionary transformation.
\n\nFor further reflections on the same events, you could begin here.
\n\n\n\n\n“How much longer will all of this go on?
\n\n
\nIt’s already been years since everything should have blown up
\nToo bad unity wasn’t on our side
\nBut you know it’s all going to end badly
\nThe war of the worlds you wanted, here it is
\nBut what, what are we waiting for? What are we waiting for to start the fire?”-Qu’est ce qu’on attend pour foutre le feu (What are we waiting for to start the fire?), A song by NTM, 1996
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/5.jpg\")
A protester in Nanterre, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nDuring the last mobilization against the pension reform in France (February-May 2023), comrades from the Chilean platform Vitrina Distópica asked whether we were witnessing a revolt in France. At the time, it appeared that, excepting a few hot nights in March following the authoritarian introduction of the pension reform, there was little evidence of a real revolt.
\n\nWhat was occurring seemed to be a French-style social movement, strong but classic—not a revolt that could truly threaten those in power like the Yellow Vests uprising, or the revolts of recent years in Chile, Iran, Lebanon, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.
\n\nNonetheless, it was legitimate to ask whether this mobilization, however it played out, was a sign that we were living through a pre-revolutionary period in France, in view of the succession of several massive and offensive movements across a short period of time (2016-2023).
\n\nIf the events of this summer confirm the intensity of this period, the choice of the word revolt to describe them is significant. We can use this word not because it is more political than “riot” (which itself has a highly political content), but rather on account of the particular characteristics of this movement. It was dazzling, spontaneous, offensive, and entirely self-organized; the participants presented no limited demands, but articulated a clear desire to “take justice into their own hands” and, above all, to “hurt the state,” as some expressed in the suburbs of Paris.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/6.jpg\")
Cars burning in France, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nThe greater the humiliation and degradation of living conditions, the more violent revolt is likely to be. The use of violence by the oppressed against their oppressors is both a means of expression and a means of regaining their dignity. Revolutionary violence can be a way for dominated peoples to build a new dignity, as Elsa Dorlin, Frantz Fanon, and Miguel Enríquez have argued.
\n\nThe intensity of the revolt in France—but also in Chile in 2019 and in Iran in 2019 and 2022—gives us an idea of the degree of rage and humiliation accumulated at the margins1 of these nations.
\n\nThe role of revolutionaries is not to contain this rage, but to help identify a strategic horizon, articulate objectives, and resist the counterattack of the state and ruling order. To build a force capable of converting rage into power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/9.jpg\")
“Vengeance for Nahel.” Graffiti in France in June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nAs in the Yellow Vest movement, the violence that the insurgents exercised also shows the weakness of the “mediations” (i.e., intermediary bodies) between these populations and the regime. Here, we mean mediations in the negative sense of institutions that maintain the prevailing social order (the town hall, the police, and sometimes social workers2 and religious organizations) but also in the more positive sense of organized political spaces capable of sustaining righteous anger during the revolt and over time.3
\n\nWhere local associations or organizations4 do exist, they often struggle to mobilize a broad base, especially when it comes to young people, and they rarely have political objectives beyond their immediate territory.5 This applies in working-class neighborhoods, but it also characterizes the majority of local organizations throughout France. As in other parts of the world, this demonstrates the absence of radical, autonomous organizations originating from or rooted in these neighborhoods with the capacity to act on everyday life and to formulate long-term political objectives and strategies.
\n\nSuch organizations have existed in the past. Think of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Young Lords (an organization of Puerto Rican immigrants built on the BPP model), the Chilean MIR and its work in the poblaciónes (working-class neighborhoods in Chile), the PKK and its popular roots in Bakur (occupied Turkish Kurdistan). In France, the Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues (MIB) played a pioneering role in the 1990s, linking local struggles with nationwide efforts to combat police violence and to organize working-class neighborhoods on an autonomous basis.
\n\nHowever, since the 2005 revolt, it seems that, beyond some collectives supporting the Palestinian struggle at moments of aggression such as in 2014, the only political and social organizations that have managed to mobilize a popular base in the poor suburbs have been Islamist organizations in their various incarnations.6
\n\nIn 2015-2016, following the jihadist attacks of the 2010s, an ideological offensive and campaign of state repression targeted Muslims indiscriminately, making no distinction between Muslims, Islamists, and jihadists. Ironically, this considerably weakened spaces in the poor suburbs that also functioned to play a role of mediation and appeasement. At the same time, this indiscriminate repression also increased the anger of many Muslims living in working-class neighborhoods, contributing to the feeling that they were second-class citizens.
\n\nEvery movement in France in recent years has been suppressed, chiefly by outright repression. This puts the Macron administration in a situation of fear and dependence on the police.
\n\nThe unbridled neoliberalism that Macron’s administration seeks to implement in France depends on the imposition of police force. Consequently, today, the French state is one of the regimes that most fears its police. This likely explains why the administration did not react to the threats of sedition from the trade-unions Alliance and Unsa police.7 For their part, the police are well aware of Macron’s dependence, and are taking advantage of the opportunity to increase their power and independence.
\n\nThis situation—which is increasingly common, and inherent in the role that police play in society—suggests that, while it is not impossible that some adjustments to the police might take place at some point, we cannot expect any reforms that will really weaken the institution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/10.jpg\")
A protester in France takes on the police in June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nLaunched by Black people in working-class neighborhoods in the United States, the uprising in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd quickly drew the participation of a large section of society. The riots expanded into a broader multiracial revolt as anarchists, anti-racists, police abolitionists, and left-wing groups joined the movement en masse along with liberals and people who did not consider themselves “political.” Even the corporate media and various multinational corporations took a stand in response to the leverage that the movement exerted.
\n\nIn contrast to the events in the United States, but consistent with what occurred in France in 2005, no other segment of French society joined young people in the revolt that broke out in French working-class neighborhoods in 2023.
\n\nIronically, in France itself in June 2020, during the uprising in the United States, a powerful collective, the Truth Committee for Adama,8 organized an impressive and offensive march that brought together nearly 100,000 people in Paris in solidarity. By contrast, in 2023, in response to Nahel’s death, the marche blanche (“white march,” an expression of mourning) organized in his honor drew fewer than 20,000 people. A week after the uprising, excepting the riots, the demonstrations in the country’s major cities (including Paris, Lyon, and Marseille) never exceeded 2000 people.
\n\nOn account of the spontaneous participation of many social classes and the action of many organized groups, the response to the murder of George Floyd was accepted as eminently political and “legitimate” in the United States and, consequently, around the world. Nahel’s death did not inspire the same reaction.9 The rest of the population didn’t join in, and in France,10 no one was able to give it the political significance that had been ascribed to George Floyd’s assassination.
\n\nSocial divisions prevented the revolt from spreading in France, but the insurgents found support in the working-class districts of Switzerland and Belgium. Similar riots erupted in Lausanne and Brussels without the support of any organization. In people’s consciousness, the boundaries of class and race within French society itself were stronger than the official national frontiers. Living conditions exerted more influence than the mirage of nations.
\n\nThe success of the demonstration in Paris for George Floyd in 2020 and the riots that followed it, as well as the expressions of solidarity in Switzerland and Belgium for Nahel in 2023, demonstrate the existence of a transnational class consciousness among young people from working-class neighborhoods who are targeted by structural white supremacy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/8.jpg\")
A burning car in France, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nThe succession of high-intensity movements in France has showed that the conditions that could trigger a revolutionary movement are present. At the same time, it has also revealed the factors that are delaying the emergence of such a movement.
\n\nGenerally speaking, when violent repression extinguishes a revolt, the consequent trauma stifles the rebellious desires of that generation for quite some time. Renewed agitation is only possible when it is not exactly the same people in the street.
\n\nIn France, while repression has intensified in response to each movement—leaving people with mutilated hands, blinded, or even killed—it has not extinguished the social movements and riots that have followed one another since at least 2016.
\n\nThis situation is reminiscent of the succession of revolts in Iran: 2009, 2017, 2019 (when something like 1500 people were killed), and the feminist revolution of 2022. What is taking place in France is on a smaller scale, but comparably consistent.
\n\nIf in France as in Iran, these figures give an idea of the combativeness of the peoples in question (of their heroism, in the case of Iran), we can also explain this repetition by the fact that it was not the same parts of the population that were successively rising up.
\n\nIn Iran, for example, the movement of 2009 chiefly involved the middle classes in the big cities, whereas in 2017 and 2019, the protagonists were largely from the working classes, and in 2022, they were women and non-“Persian” minorities.11
\n\nIn France, the movement of 2016 against the loi travail (“labor law”) involved students and politicized workers (the “left wing”). The gilets jaunes (“yellow vest”) movement that began in 2018 was initiated by white working-class people from the margins of France (especially geographically speaking). The movement against the neoliberal pension reform that peaked in March 2023 involved a mixture of those demographics, whereas the revolt that began in June 2023 consisted mostly of young people from the periphery who are on the receiving end of white supremacist violence from the state.
\n\nWhile people from the peripheral neighborhoods received little support in the revolt of summer 2023, conversely, they took little part in the movement against the pension reform or in the Yellow Vests uprising.12
\n\nThe gulf between these movements does not mean that there is no relationship between them. The powerful social movement of spring 2006 came close on the heels of the suburban revolt of autumn 2005. Likewise, albeit in the opposite order, this summer’s revolt follows the mobilizations of spring 2023. In each case, less than three months passed between the two events. Nonetheless, the connections are not as strong as they could be.
\n\nThis creates a situation that is volatile, but in which the waves of revolt are dispersed across time and space, preventing the eruption of a tsunami powerful enough to topple the regime.
\n\nStill, this multiplication of movements shows that the conditions likely exist for a powerful revolutionary movement to emerge.
\n\n\n\n\n“Struggles find their strength in their ability to weave together different fragments of the proletariat. The uprising was successful only because, all over the country, people from all walks of life and communities found their own way to participate.”
\n\n-Paper Planes, discussing the movement in Sri Lanka in 2022
\n
In contrast to the situation in Iran or France, looking at uprisings in which one part of the social body takes the first step (be it Indian peasants, Indigenous people in Ecuador, high-school students in Chile, or Black people in the United States) and a large part of the population follows,13 we can see that these are more likely to achieve structural victories.
\n\nIn the conditions of late capitalism, in which no compromise seems to be possible even in the face of widespread resistance, these victories are often temporary: the promised reorganization of several local police forces in the United States, the fall of the regime in Sudan, the constituent process in Chile, the fall of governments in Sri Lanka and Lebanon. No revolt has yet succeeded in preventing the return to normality.
\n\nStill, the revolts that go further offer a hint of what it could take to make permanent changes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/7.jpg\")
Protesters in France demand justice in response to the murder of Nahel Merzouk, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nWith their call for unity, the gilets jaunes, like all the uprisings13 of our time, baffled political spaces accustomed to clear-cut divisions. During that movement, the omnipresence of French symbols was not a reason to stay away so much as a reminder that any popular insurrection today will be “impure” and confusing.
\n\nIn popular uprisings, insurgents make use of the symbols and spaces available to them. Here, those used by the movement were more reminiscent of the iconography of the French Revolution (1789-93) within popular culture than the signature of the extreme right.
\n\n\n\n\n“If we say that “the people” are in the street, it’s not a people that would have existed beforehand, it’s on the contrary the one that was missing beforehand. It’s not ‘the people’ who produce the uprising, it’s the uprising that produces its people, by arousing the common experience and intelligence, the human fabric and language of real life that had disappeared.”.
\n\n-To Our Friends, the Invisible Committee
\n
It’s only by accepting that the yellow vests themselves produced their own notion of “the people” that we can understand how, during the attack on the old Stock Exchange on December 1, 2018, we could witness a Le Pen-voting farmer alongside an autonomous activist from Morocco and, most importantly, a fifteen-year-old boy from the poor suburbs shouting: “We are the people… Wallah it’s us, the people!”14
\n\nStill, when we took part in the revolt at a roundabout in the Paris suburbs, our exchanges with residents of immigrant background (whether recent or longstanding) showed that many were attracted by the revolt but preferred to keep a certain distance from it. Some feared racist elements, while others explained that they couldn’t or didn’t know how to take part in a movement they defined as “for the French.”
\n\nBeyond the instrumentalization by the media and ruling class of the actual presence of racist groups and behaviors, the iconography and reference points of the movement remained almost exclusively Franco-French (flags, the guillotine, May ’68, the Paris Commune, the Council of the Resistance), however subversively people employed them. This was one of the limits that prevented the yellow vest movement from expanding. Calls for “everyone” to be yellow vests were rarely accompanied by the kind of actions that could enable the uprising to involve all the different communities that live on French territory.15
\n\nThe national character of the majority of revolts in our time only makes it more important to fight against the nationalist tendencies and fascist groups that attempt to profit from unrest. In France, the anti-fascist movement did so physically and successfully within the yellow vest demonstrations, while several yellow vest groups did so politically by articulating egalitarian principles and employing transnational symbols.16
\n\nThe revolt of June 2023, for its part, was short-lived and without means of addressing other sectors of society, and consequently not capable of experimenting with making new connections. In the end, neither of these movements was capable of building bridges that could close the gulf between the country’s rebels—not during the upheavals, and not afterwards, either.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/3.jpg\")
Tear down the barriers between us. Protesters in Nanterre, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nIn other eras, organizations have made it a central objective to establish connections across such gulfs. The Chicago Rainbow Coalition, launched by Fred Hampton in 1969, brought together Black Panthers, Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, poor white people recently arrived from Appalachia, and others.
\n\nThe Wobblies of the Industrial Workers of the World, also in the United States, having built themselves up against the racism of American trade unions, founded a transnational union at the beginning of the 20th century that was capable of uniting Asian, Black, white, and Latino/Latina workers in a network that extended across the world. For its part, the MIR (again) succeeded, quite exceptionally in Chilean history, in creating an alliance between Mapuche and Chilean campesino workers.
\n\nMore recently in France, spaces as varied as the Adama committee (which issued calls to join the gilets jaunes), Verdragon (a popular ecology space) in Bagnolet, and the Hangar (a squat fighting against gentrification) in Montreuil are trying to create connections between ecologists, working-class neighborhoods, and autonomous circles. The Cantine Syrienne and the internationalist network The Peoples Want, just like the Maison aux volets rouges and its festival, are trying to create common political spaces between exiled persons in France and local populations,17 attempting to extend the classic notion of “people” to all those who actually live in France.
\n\nAnother relevant example is the gilets noirs (black vests), led by migrants and their French supporters, who responded to the gilets jaunes movement by launching an effort to achieve administrative regularization for all migrants in France, along with decent housing and living conditions. They built connections with groups like the Adama Committee, and with the Popular Solidarity Brigade during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
\n\nIt’s only by promoting, amplifying, and sometimes uniting experiences of this kind that we could create “the people” in a new sense, overcoming—without denying—the disparities, histories, and differences to build a revolutionary people.
\n\n\n\n\n“It’s time for this to stop, make way for joy
\n\n
\nSo that our youth with a vengeful hand
\nBurn down the police state first and
\nSend the republic to burn at the same stake, yeah
\nNow it’s our turn to throw the dice.”NTM, Qu’est ce qu’on attend pour foutre le feu, 1996
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/2.jpg\")
Protesters in Nanterre, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nThanks to friends and comrades whose feedback and reflections fed this text.
\n\nGlory to the insurgents.
\n\n-Lucas Amilcar
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/08/09/1.jpg\")
Protesters in Nanterre, June 2023. Credit: @tulyppe
\nWe use the word “margin” here in the sense that bell hooks uses it (for example, in her book From Margin to Center)—to describe an oppressed population that holds a unique radical potential. ↩
\nThey themselves often refuse to take on this role: “And we’re between the young people and the police. We are the mediators of the false social peace that the government is trying to establish,” said one local educator. “What do we do?” asked another respected figure in a neighborhood. “Nothing at all. It’s over, we’re not firemen.” ↩
\nOn the causes and strategies used by the French state in poor suburbs, we recommend Julien Talpin’s book Bâillonner les quartiers (“Gagging the Neighborhoods”). ↩
\nLet’s not forget, however, that since 2005 some groups have succeeded in creating political spaces or important and sometimes subversive forms of political expression. For example, the Echo-banlieue and Bondy Blog media, the Hangar in Montreuil or Verdragon in Bagnolet, Diaty Diallo and her powerful book deux secondes d’air qui brûle, the Adama Committee and the justice and truth network. ↩
\nThere are exceptions, of course, such as the Réseau d’Entraide Vérité et Justice (Truth and Justice Mutual Aid Network), which brings together collectives against state violence throughout France. ↩
\nJust like the Marxists in the 1970s, Islamists are divided over trends, tactics, and various profound disagreements in France and elsewhere. For example, there are debates between non-violent public groups and jihadists practicing armed struggle, Salafists of various currents, Muslim Brotherhoods, and other groups. ↩
\nA threatening communiqué written at the start of the revolt to warn the government that the police were scrutinizing the state’s response and were ready to engage in unilateral “resistance” on their own. ↩
\nA collective created after the murder of Adama Traoré in 2016. ↩
\nContrary to the approach of the international media or the United Nations, for example, which questioned the role of the state and police and their structural racism. ↩
\nThis is not to say that it was non-existent. The Paris garbage collectors (most of whom live in the suburbs) spearheaded the pension movement. The gilets jaunes protests saw many residents of working-class neighborhoods and hundreds of young people take part in the insurrectionary nights of December 1 and 8, 2018. However, in both cases, there was little local, continuous presence, with the exception of Champigny, Montreuil, and Rungis in the case of the Paris suburbs. ↩
\nThink, for example, of the thawra in Lebanon, in which all denominations, usually opposed to each other, stood side by side; soccer fans from Istanbul (Besiktas, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray) and Santiago de Chile (Colo Colo and the UC) clashing with police during the Gezi uprising and the Revuelta Chilena; or the Aragalaya uprising in Sri Lanka in 2022, when Buddhist monks and queer rebels, Sinhaleses and Tamils, all rose up together. ↩ ↩2
\nThe Arabic word “Wallah,” common among young people from emigrant and working-class backgrounds, means “I swear on Allah-God.” The author personally experienced this scene. ↩
\nIn other revolts, we can think of the deliberate use of the term “azadi” (freedom) in the Syrian revolution as an appeal to Kurdish communities; in Iran, the use of the slogan “Kurdistan, the eyes and light of Iran” used by Turkmen communities; and the use of the Mapuche flag in Chile and the Kabyle flag in Algeria during the Hirak. ↩
\nWe’re thinking, for example, of the yellow vests in Montreuil, Toulouse, and Commercy who, rather than denouncing the Marseillaise or the tricolor [the French national flag], decided to diversify the references present in the movement by organizing discussions on the lessons of the Syrian revolution, the Algerian hirak, and the struggle in Kurdistan; multiplying the Palestinian, black, and rainbow flags at demonstrations; and making banners and tags in Arabic and Spanish (“Que se Vayan todos” or “الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام”). Unfortunately, these gestures remained isolated. ↩
\nMost of the French examples are drawn from the Paris suburbs, where the author has lived for 30 years. ↩
\nThe following text was sent to us by French comrades on the third day of unrest following the murder of the teenager Nahel Merzouk by French police in the city of Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. It provides an analysis of the situation and an overview of the fight against police brutality in France starting in the 1970s.
\n\nToday, this movement is facing intense repression in the streets, the media, and the courts. As of now, at least three people have been killed in addition to Nahel. Rather than focus on the deployment of specialized military police across the country, we prefer to begin with the efforts of the young people who are risking their lives to stand up for Nahel and for themselves.
\n\nIn the streets, many people say that the feelings of rage and the intensity of the fight is reminiscent of the riots of 2005. Just as those riots took place following the student movement of 2005, this veritable uprising has followed the powerful movement against the pension reform imposed by President Emmanuel Macron, which faced unprecedented repression in the spring. Despite tremendous allocations of resources and veritable legal impunity, police in France appear to be losing both their perceived legitimacy and their ability to intimidate large sectors of the public into passivity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/01/2.jpg\")
\nOn June 27, 2023, Nahel Merzouk, age 17, was driving a car in Nanterre when motorcycle police stopped him for a roadside check, then murdered him in cold blood. As one of the passengers later described, one officer threatened Nahel, “Don’t move or I’ll put a bullet in your head.” Then both officers struck him through the open window of the car. Stunned by the blows, Nahel accidentally released the brake and hit the accelerator, upon which one officer shot and killed him. We know all of this because almost the entire scene was filmed.
\n\nThe video of Nahel’s murder quickly went viral on social media outlets, which have played a key role in the ensuing unrest. People swiftly reacted in the streets.
\n\nStarting that first night, June 27, violent clashes broke out in predominantly immigrant neighborhoods in Nanterre and other suburbs of Paris (Mantes-la-Jolie, Boulogne-Billancourt, Clichy-sous-Bois, Colombes, Asnières, Montfermeil) and across France (Roubaix, Lille, Bordeaux…). On June 28, despite politicians acknowledging the heinous character of this murder and the government and the moderate fringes of the left making calls for peace, the revolt spread to other towns (Neuilly sur Marne, Clamart, Wattrelos, Bagnolet, Montreuil, Saint Denis, Dammarie les Lys, Toulouse, Marseille…).\n \nIn the meantime, Nahel’s family set up a “Truth and Justice committee” (“Comité Vérité et Justice”) with the assistance of Assa Traoré (whose brother was brutally killed by the police in 2016) and former militants of the “Mouvement de l’Immigration et des Banlieues” (MIB). Nahel’s mother, a model of dignity and courage, called for a great marche blanche (“white march”) in Nanterre, set for the afternoon of June 29.
\n\nOn the morning of June 29, the government declared that they were opening an investigation as to whether the police officer who murdered Nahel committed voluntary manslaughter. This apparently did not dissuade people from attending the march.
\n\nThis great march drew together an estimated 15,000 people. They retraced Nahel’s last drive, marching to the rhythm of slogans including “Everybody hates the police,” “Cop, rapist, murderer” and “Justice for Nahel.” One sign read, “How many other Nahels have not been filmed?”
\n\nFrom that moment, it was obvious that Nahel’s death had come as a huge shock, and that many of the protesters were marching in solidarity with the victim’s family. But the demands were also about something much broader: the role of the police in our society. As if they were aware of this, the pigs decided to gas this peaceful march as it arrived at the Préfecture (the regional branch of the central government) in Nanterre, setting off a new wave of clashes that spread as far as the chic business district of La Défense. “If they don’t let us do the march, we’ll fuck everything up” was the message heard among the young rioters.\n
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/01/7.jpg\")
After the marche blanche in Nanterre, June 29.
\nIt would be impossible to list every district and town that joined the movement on the evening of June 29, as there were so many. Undiminished by the announcement that the government would investigate the killing, this third night of unrest gave the movement an unprecedented scope. The jeunes de quartiers (as the media and politicians often refer to them—equivalent to ‘‘kids from the projects’’) have set fire to cars, motorcycles and scooters, and public buildings including local and national police stations, schools, municipal libraries, prefectures, and town halls. They have destroying street furniture, looted supermarkets, and set fire to building sites in addition to employing fireworks in clashes with the police. Over the past several years, these have become the preferred self-defense weapon among young people who are subjected to daily harassment and arbitrary police operations.
\n\nThis countrywide insurgency did not come out of nowhere. It is spontaneous, in the sense that it is largely horizontal, unpredictable, and constantly inventing new forms of resistance in line with the aspirations that drive it. But this revolt also emerges as a response to the way that the state has managed post-colonial immigration.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/01/1.jpg\")
\nSince the 1960s, the French state has taken advantage of a workforce “imported” from its former colonies in North and West Africa. The initial plan wasn’t for these workers to build a life and settle in France. They were contained in specific areas: first, in slums, and then in Projects—“cités”—at the periphery of major urban centers. These areas have come to be known as the “banlieues.”
\n\nIn the 1970s, when it became obvious that the Black and Arab workers were a permanent part of the population of France, they became a political problem. The political parties that succeeded each other in power adopted a policy of exception. The goal was to maintain racial boundaries and to control a category of people constantly scrutinized and described as a menace to the social order. Consequently, working-class immigrant neighborhoods have chiefly been managed through policing. The police (and the prefectures upon which the local police depend) are almost exclusively responsible for managing and controlling day-to-day activities in the “cités,” which have become sites of experimentation for France’s own brand of policing.
\n\nThe inhabitants of these neighborhoods experience humiliation, intimidation, and retaliation from police on a daily basis. In addition to being excluded from the political life of the country, youth from immigrant backgrounds are constantly controlled, insulted, and arrested. Likewise, all the activities and trades that the most precarious depend on to survive are heavily criminalized.
\n\nThe riots must also be understood in the context of the long history of racially-motivated police murders in France. In France, as in the United States, the gratuitous use of violence against individuals who are thus excluded from the dominant conception of humanity is one of the mechanisms that produce and maintain racial categories. The police have killed hundreds of Black and Arab young men since the 1970s. In part, this is the result of the intense and continued police presence in immigrant neighborhoods; more generally, it is a material consequence of the structural racism that defines the relationship between the French state and the young people whose families immigrated to France after the 1960s amid the gradual dismantlement of the French colonial empire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/01/3.jpg\")
\nFor decades, people in the quartiers (literally, “neighborhoods”1) have taken up explicit political positions against police violence. In 1983, people organized the “Marche pour l’Egalité” (March for Equality) in response to a series of police murders in the suburbs of Lyon and Marseille. Massive riots have occurred every ten years since 1979 in the city of Vaulx-en-Velin, a symbol of state-driven police violence against non-white youth. Created in 1995, the “Mouvement Immigration Banlieue” fought for “truth and justice” (vérité et justice) for the families of the victims of “police blunders” (the euphemism that apologists use to describe acts of extreme police brutality). It was a self-organized, autonomous organization that rejected the discourses of mainstream political parties. In the year 2000, it was evicted from its space in Paris.
\n\nIn 2005, an insurrection broke out after two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, died after being chased and harassed by the police in Clichy-sous-Bois, in the north of Paris. Among many others, we remember Lamine Dieng, who was murdered by police in 2005; Adama Traoré, murdered by police in 2016; Théo Luhaka, raped by police in 2017; Ibrahima Bah, killed by police in 2019.
\n\nIt’s the same scenario every time: police commit murder, then lie to protect themselves. Sometimes, a video or a protest challenges the police narrative, providing enough evidence to force the authorities to open a case against the murderer. But legal procedures against the cops almost never conclude with a conviction. In France, the law serves the interests of the state; in practice, the police are granted a free hand and legal immunity.
\n\nIn the past few days, we have seen, once again, that the state protects those who defend it. When the paramedic who treated Nahel after he was shot in the chest revealed the name of the officer who murdered him to the media, he was immediately sentenced to 18 months in prison.2
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/01/4.jpg\")
\nTo understand these riots, we must also see them in the context of contemporary class struggle in France. France has experienced a nationwide social movement or wave of unrest almost every year since 2016. Riots have become an integral part of the French political language, and what we are seeing in 2023 may be the most radical expression of that to date.
\n\nIn other words—in view of how unpopular the neoliberal policies forcefully implemented in France since 2016 have been, the governments of François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron were only able to stay in power thanks to the violence of the police. Because they understand the structuring relationships of power that connect the state, the government, the police, and the population, right-wing and fascist police unions have methodically organized to concentrate more and more social benefits in their hands, as well as the technological and legal means to inflict violence on everyone else.
\n\nFor example, in 2017, a law gave the police the right (and therefore the incentive) to use firearms when an individual refuses to cooperate with them. The direct consequence of this law was a dramatic increase in the annual number of police murders. Before 2017, the police (officially) killed 15 to 20 young Black and Arab men each year; that number rose to 51 in 2021 and has averaged 40 ever since.
\n\nMore generally, there have been more and more new officers hired every year, with more and more equipment at their disposal. Militarized police inflict systematic repression against social movements; the ever-accelerating militarization of the police is one of the factors that explains the feeling of powerlessness that characterizes some leftists in France. Concretely, this creates tense and precarious life circumstances for many, especially for women living in immigrant neighborhoods. Our mothers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/01/6.jpg\")
Consequences of the marche blanche in Nanterre, June 29.
\nRegarding the current wave of unrest, I can only speak from my position, describing what I have seen in the city where I live in the suburbs close to Paris.
\n\nThe movement has used three primary tactics, all very effectively: violent clashes with police, the destruction of “symbols” of the Republic, and looting.
\n\nThe clashes with police have mostly occurred inside the projects, the “quartiers.” “Light them up!” Everyone has seen these images: the cops are attacked with fireworks, Molotov cocktails, stones, and outdoor furniture by people in black bloc attire, often very young. Some of the offensive actions that have occurred at night may be less motivated by solidarity with Nahel in particular than by a more general desire to take revenge on those who control, humiliate, and beat people every day. It is as if the balance of power has temporarily changed sides.
\n\nIn the moment of confrontation, there are no slogans, no leftist messages, only the radical will to fight back. Most of the crews that are participating are comprised of young people, predominantly men, who have known each other for a long time. The people engaging in these tactics have no desire for mediation.
\n\nClashes at a city hall in a district near Paris.
\nThe young participants, many of whom are teenagers, are methodical. They have attacked county offices, city halls, and sites of executive power, all for obvious reasons. But they are also attacking the schools that segregate and exclude and force people into the capitalist system; the police stations in which the cops capture their friends and beat them; the surveillance cameras that monitor their movements; public transportation infrastructure, which is rare in the “quartiers” and often newly built to shuttle gentrifiers to their newly flipped suburban houses; and the construction sites building new and instantly obsolete infrastructure for the Olympic Games, which are playing a significant role in the gentrification of the suburbs.
\n\nFinally, the movement has shown its creative power in the field of looting, particularly in the role that cars and scooters have played. Cars are used to force doors and fences, while scooters allow for a quick exit afterwards. Scooters also play a crucial part in the clashes with police. Without going into too much detail, mobility is crucial to the battles that take place at night.
\n\nWhat is looted? Almost everything, but contrary to the corporate media narrative, most of the looting isn’t festive or fun: the huge majority of what is taken is simply basic commodities and medication. This implies that the movement sparked by Nahel’s death also expresses a fundamentally anti-capitalist rejection of precarity and the high cost of living.
\n\nOverheard at 4 am in the neighborhood supermarket: “I’m taking all this for my mom.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/01/8.jpg\")
Consequences of the marche blanche in Nanterre, June 29.
\nDespite the profoundly universal nature of the political feeling at the heart of the unrest, and the centrality of the fight against police brutality in social movements since (at least) 2016, the possibility of an alliance between the left and the young rioters remains tenuous. Leftist politicians are largely calling for peace and reconciliation, imagining projects to “reform a republican police” that would “reopen dialogue between the police and the people” (“refonder une police républicaine” and “rétablir le dialogue entre la police et sa population”).
\n\nThe revolutionary left (which is chiefly Trotskyst in France) supports the “Comité Vérité et Justice pour Nahel” formed by family members and close supporters, on the model of the “Comité Vérité et Justice pour Adama” and the Traoré family, but they haven’t taken any public position regarding the current uprising. As for anarchists and other autonomous groups, they are still finding their footing, mostly keeping to observation, legal, and logistical support roles—even if some of us participate actively participate in the riots.
\n\nIn the end, the movement goes on regardless, and the youth who are participating are not particularly concerned about groups that they don’t feel themselves to be a part of.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/01/5.jpg\")
\nA little more than a week after Nahel’s passing, following five nights of revolt, the French state is using the full weight of the judiciary system to crush the uprising. If anyone remained in doubt, it is now clear: there will be no justice and no peace.
\n\nMore than 300 people were sentenced to prison last night. Yesterday, at Créteil, in the southern part of the Paris region, almost all the youth who were being judged were sent to prison. It didn’t matter whether they had good lawyers, bad lawyers, whether there was evidence or no evidence, whether they had good personality references, whether they had snitched. At the end of the day, everyone went back to Fresnes with sentences ranging from 6 to 30 months.
\n\nPerhaps that one afternoon that we witnessed was particularly bad, but the news from other courthouses across the Paris region is just as bad. The judges are following a directive of June 30 from Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti (an avowed rapist and asshole), in which he calls for a “firm and fast response” with strict “safety measures”—in other words, imprisonment. The prosecutors and judges are eagerly complying.
\n\nAcross France, people as young as 12 years old are being systematically sentenced to months or more in prison. In the streets, the affect is more and more nihilistic: “they can’t catch us all.” Still, for the past few days, things have been calmer at night. It could be that the repression is working to intimidate people; or that mothers are keeping their kids at home; or that the looting has slowed down because the stores need to be filled up with goods again; or that people are waiting for the weekend of July 14, the French national holiday, to set things ablaze once more.
\n\nYou can read more about comparution immédiates (“immediate judgement”), which has been used in almost all the cases this week, here.
\n\nNanterre, cité Pablo Picasso.
\nHere, quartiers is the casual term by which people who live in immigrant neighborhoods in suburban cities refer to their communities. ↩
\nThis source suggests that the details of the situation are a bit more complicated; it confirms that a paramedic was given a suspended sentence in relation to Nahel’s murder, while another person who allegedly revealed information about the murderer was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, 12 of which were suspended. ↩
\nOn September 16, 2022, Guidance Patrol police in Tehran murdered a 22-year-old woman; allegedly, she was not wearing the hijab in accordance with Iranian state policy. In response, people across Iran have taken to the streets for almost two weeks, confronting police and opening up spaces of ungovernable freedom. For many in Iran, it appears that a revolutionary process is underway.
\n\nCollaborating with Collective 98, an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian group focused on struggles in Iran, we were able to interview Iranian and Kurdish feminists about the situation. Collective 98 derives its name from “Aban” 98, the uprising that spread across Iran in November 2019—year 1398 according to the Iranian calendar. In the following text, they explore the historical significance of this wave of revolt and the forces that set it in motion.
\n\nThe woman whose death sparked this movement is known most widely as Mahsa Amini, thanks to news reporting and social media hashtags. In fact, her Kurdish name is Jina; this is the name by which she is known to her family, friends, and the whole of Kurdistan in Iran. Kurdish people in Iran—being an ethnic minority—often choose a Persian “second name” to conceal their Kurdish identity. In Kurdish, Jina means life, a political concept that appears in the slogan that Kurdish women have popularized in Kurdish parts of Turkey and Rojava since 2013, and which has become the central refrain of this cycle of struggles: Jin, Jian, Azadî [“women, life, freedom”].
\n\nFrom the revolt in Iran to the anti-war protests in Russia, from the defense of Exarchia to the student walkouts protesting anti-trans policies in the United States, resisting patriarchy is fundamental to confronting capitalism and the state. A victory in Iran would galvanize a host of similar struggles elsewhere around the world.
\n\nTo keep up with developments in Iran, we recommend SarKhatism/ and Blackfishvoice on Telegram (both in Farsi) and the websites of the Slingers Collective and the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (both in English).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/28/4.jpg\")
Jina means life: Jina Mahsa Amini.
\n“The beginning of the end” is the expression used in a statement issued on September 25, 2022 by “The Teachers Who Seek Justice” on the current cycle of struggles in Iran, one week after the killing of Mahsa/Jina Amini. This phrase captures the stakes of this historic moment. It implies that the proletarians on the streets, especially women and ethnic minorities, see the end of the 44 years of Islamic dictatorship as very close. They have entered into an explicitly revolutionary phase in which there is no solution but revolution.
\n\nThe uprising of December 2017-January 2018 represented a watershed moment in the history of the Islamic Republic, when millions of proletarians across the country in more than 100 cities rebelled against the ruling oligarchy, saying “enough is enough” to a life governed by misery, precarity, dictatorship, Islamist autocracy, and authoritarian repression. It was the first time that society, especially the leftist students in Tehran, expressed the negation of the system as a whole: “Reformists, hardliners, the game is over!”
\n\nOver the past five years, the whole country has been on fire. You could say it is burning from both ends: between chronic nationwide riots and organized struggles involving teachers, students, nurses, pensioners, workers, and other sectors of society.1 Teachers, to give a single example, have mobilized six massive demonstrations and strikes over the past six months, each one taking place in more than 100 cities. The leaders and well-known activists of this movement have been arrested and are now in prison, but the teachers’ movement continues to mobilize.
\n\nThese two levels of struggle—the spontaneous mass uprising and the more organized forms of resistance—are interrelated. Each cycle of struggle is becoming more intense and “militant” than the previous one, and the temporal gaps between the cycles are becoming increasingly shorter.
\n\nNonetheless, Mahsa’s/Jina’s death has unleashed something qualitatively different, which must be considered a break with the historical period that started with the December 2017-January 2018 uprising.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/28/5.jpg\")
\nThe previous cycle of uprisings was provoked by explicitly economic intrigues (three-fold increase of fuel prices in November 2019, for example2) and directed against the widespread misery structurally engendered by authoritarian neoliberalism over the past 30 years. The economic crisis and extremely harsh class differentiation in Iran is not simply the result of the US sanctions—as the pseudo-anti-imperialist wants to make us believe—nor is it simply the result of the structural adjustments imposed by the International Monetary Fund after the Iran-Iraq war in the 1990s. While these are absolutely important factors, we see the social problems not simply in abstract and “external” terms but rather as the result of a deeper and more longstanding historical process in which the ruling oligarchy has dispossessed many populations, rendered labor precarious, commodified various domains of social reproduction, and brutally repressed syndicates, labor unions, and any other organized form of doing politics.3
\n\nWe should not underestimate the catastrophic and destructive effects of the US and EU sanctions on the daily lives of people in the current conjecture, nor do we want to downplay the relevance of the past histories of “semi-colonialism” in Iran up to the present. We cannot forget the participation of the Labour Party in the UK in the 1953 coup, engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency, to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who championed the nationalization of the oil industry in Iran. It was precisely imperialist interventions like this that provided the social conditions for the rise of Islamists like Khomeini who hijacked the progressive revolution of 1979 and established an autocratic dictatorship.4 Rather, our position is a political negation that operates with the logic of neither/nor, criticizing the Islamic Republic and the US and its allies at the same time. This double negation is fundamental to forming genuinely international solidarities and to the cause of internationalism itself.5
\n\nNow, despite all the cycles of struggles and forms of political organizing of the past five years, this time round is different, because the riots are ignited by the killing of Jina Amini, a woman of Kurdish ethnicity, due to compulsory Hijab—the structural pillar of patriarchal domination in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 Revolution. The ethnic and gender dimension of this state killing has changed the political dynamics in Iran, giving rise to unprecedented developments.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/28/3.jpg\")
\nFirst, the fact that protests began in Kurdistan—in Saghez, Jina’s home city, where she was born and buried—played a crucial role in what happened afterwards. Kurdistan has a peculiar position in the history of political movements and social struggles against the Islamic Republic. In the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, when the majority of Persians in Iran said “yes” to a referendum on creating an Islamic Republic, Kurdistan said a strong “no” (see this historic photo). Khomeini declared war—more precisely, “Jahad”—on Kurdistan. What followed was an armed struggle between the Kurdish people (and Kurdish left-leaning parties) and the Revolutionary Guard (i.e., Islamist forces who took power and hijacked the revolution). Many non-Kurdish leftists also joined with Kurdistan at the time, because they saw Kurdistan as the “last bastion” to defend—the social geography in which there remained a possibility of realizing the progressive and leftists’ ideals of the Revolution. Although Kurdistan was defeated after almost a decade of armed struggle and numerous other forms of political organization, nonetheless, Kurdistan never bent the knee to the Islamic Republic.
\n\nHence, one of the slogans that emerged after the murder of Jina was “Kurdistan, Kurdistan, the graveyard of fascists.” In the immediate aftermath of Jina’s murdering, it was Kurdish women who began chanting “Jin, Jian, Azadî” (Women, Life, Freedom), the famous slogan originally chanted by Kurdish women in Turkey and more recently in Rojava (the Northern and North-eastern parts of Syria). In Iran, this slogan has now spread beyond Kurdistan across the country to the point that the current movement, which is indeed a feminist revolution, is known by this name, “Jin, Jian, Azadî.”6
\n\nDemonstrators chanting “Kurdistan, Kurdistan, the graveyard of fascists.”
\nAmong the three terms of the slogan, the second one, Jian [Life], has some striking features. While Jin [women] refers to gender liberation and Azadî to autonomy and self-governance, Jian, is first and foremost reminiscent of the name of the symbolic martyr of the movement, Jina Amini (as in Kurdish, Jina also means life). On Jina’s grave, her family inscribed the following sentence: “Dear Jina, you are not dead, your name become the Code.” She became the universal symbol of all previous martyrs, signifying all the other Jinas whose lives are ruined by the Islamic Republic, both directly and indirectly, because of their gender, class, sexuality, or the destruction of their ecological environment.
\n\nThere is an existential component to this movement, which is also expressed on Twitter (with #Mahsa_Amini or #Jina_Amini) among the Iranian users who recount how their lives and the lives of their friends and families have been wasted over the past 44 years—tortured, imprisoned in both extra-juridical ways and show trials, their lives wasted outside of prison in everyday life without any chance to be fully actualized. Lives that did not live, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno put it [Das Leben lebt nicht]7. Yet this melancholic recalling of the past is oriented towards the future, with an aspiration to finally put an end to the zombie Islamic Republic that drains our vital energies and life processes. There is a future to be reclaimed, a future in which no one will be killed on account of her gender or her hair, in which no one will be tortured and no one will suffer from poverty—a classless society governed by a genuine and not just formal freedom (though not everyone shares that last goal).
\n\nFor what does class struggle mean, if not reclaiming life in its entirety by liberating it from the ways it has been colonized by capitalist accumulation and all the other forms of domination that sustain and secure that?
\n\nThe fear of standing up to a monstrous authoritarian regime that displays no principles whatsoever has turned into its opposite: rage, power, and solidarity. The oppressed classes have never been this united since the 1979 Revolution. The videos showing sisterhood among women, united against misogynist repressive forces, have given everyone goose bumps.8 The solidarities established between the so-called “center” and the “periphery” across the country as well as among traditionally opposed ethnic minorities (between the Kurds and the Turks in the province of Western Azarbaijan) are unprecedented. The courage and determination of the youth to build barricades and fight with their bare hands or cobblestones against the police are astonishing and admirable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/28/2.jpg\")
Satarkhan Street in western Tehran, around 12:15 am on the first of Mehr (one of the months in Iranian calendar), September 23, 2022.
\nAs the social class who are oppressed, dominated, and exploited above everyone else, women are at the forefront of transforming fear into rage, subordination into collective subjectivity, death into life. Women protestors courageously take off their scarves, wave them in the air, and burn them in the flaming barricades set up to hinder police violence.9 There is nothing more empowering than burning scarves in Iran: it is like burning a swastika under Hitler’s regime in the 1930s. Contrary to Western corporate media reports, the protests in Iran are not simply about the “morality police”—they represent a rejection of the structural social, political, and juridical relations that systematically reproduce capitalist patriarchy combined with Islamist codes.
\n\nAs a social relation, Hijab signifies a set of constitutive elements of the Islamic Republic. First, viewed symbolically, compulsory Hijab represents the regime of patriarchy as a whole. The compulsory practice of veiling the body reminds women on a daily basis that they have an inferior position within society, that they are the second sex, that their bodies are structurally owned by the family, their brothers, fathers, male partners, and of course by the bosses and the state. Second, Hijab also represents the religious, autocratic authority that is capable—or at least, was capable—of imposing Islamic dress codes on the bodies of the ruled classes, especially women. No to Hijab means radically challenging the authority and legitimacy of the Islamic Republic as a whole. Third, and from an international standpoint, Hijab as an “Islamic virtue” is also understood by the ruling classes as the most important representative of “anti-imperialism.” Just as Adolf Hitler systematically employed the swastika to ideologically express the “prosperity” and “well-being” of a society ruled by National Socialism, the Islamic Republic has imposed Hijab on women to convey the impression that Iranian society is constituted by the realization of Islamic virtues and ideals and therefore fundamentally opposed to the Western empire and its moral values and social norms. Hijab thus allegedly represents an ideological and practical alternative to the empire.
\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, on March 8, 1979, tens of thousands of women marched in the streets of Tehran against the imposition of compulsory Hijab, chanting “Either a headscarf or a head injury” and “We did not make a revolution to go back”—referring to the reactionary aspect of compulsory Hijab that aims to “turn back” the wheels of history. At the time, the Islamist media and Khomeini labeled the feminists and other women on the streets as supporters of imperialism who subscribed to “Western culture.” Tragically, no one heard the women’s voices or heeded their warnings, not even the leftists who—catastrophically—accorded an ontological priority to the struggle against imperialism, relativizing and downplaying all other forms of domination as “secondary.” Today, when women burn scarves on the streets and the whole society emphatically rejects compulsory Hijab, this shakes the entire patriarchal and autocratic authority to the core, along with the pseudo-anti-imperialist legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. These are the pillars of class rule in Iran and the whole population is rejecting them. The Islamic republic is already dead in the minds of its people; now the people must kill it in reality.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/28/1.jpg\")
\nLet’s be clear: burning scarfs is not a right-wing gesture oriented towards a fascist Islamophobia. No one is challenging anyone’s religion. Rather, it is a gesture proclaiming emancipation from compulsory Hijab, which controls women’s bodies. Hijab has nothing to do with “women’s culture” in the Middle East, as some postcolonial thinkers imply. In the context of the Islamic Republic, Hijab is a method of class domination, an integral part of capitalist patriarchy, and must be criticized without compromise.
\n\nAs a historically specific social relationship, capitalism has the capacity to employ “non-capitalist” social relations at the service of its own accumulation and reproduction. Religion, like patriarchy, is not a thing of the past; it is not an anachronistic residue that lies beneath the surface of modern society without social effectivity. In a capitalist society like Iran, class domination as a whole is mediated by and recoded via Islamic codes. Compulsory Hijab has been a crucial element in the Islamic Republic patriarchy that has marginalized women and systematically controlled their bodies. This has also led to a division within the working class in the broad sense of the term through gendered hierarchies and interpersonal domination.
\n\nThe pseudo-anti-imperialists who think that the people on the street are simply the puppets of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States not only deprive the people of their agency and subjectivity in a typically orientalist manner by presupposing an “abstract essence” for a society like Iran—they also reproduce the reactionary discourse and practice of the Islamic Republic itself. Understanding this is crucial for international solidarity with women in Iran and the oppressed classes more generally. Strikingly, even the religious Muslim women who wear Islamic dresses like the chador have emphatically rejected compulsory Hijab and supported this movement on the streets and social media.
\n\nWith women at the forefront of the struggles fighting courageously against the repressive apparatus of the state, the Islamic Republic has never appeared so weak. The question is not “what is to be done,” but how to finish it off?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/28/7.jpg\")
\nKurdistan initiated the protests and introduced feminist and anti-authoritarian slogans. This catalyzed the students—the social sector that is always at the forefront of political events—in universities, especially in Tehran, to organize protests and expand the uprising via their assemblies and sit-down strikes. Like COVID-19, in the timespan of the two days following Jina’s death, the uprising spread across the whole country; so far, the oppressed classes have fought with tooth and nail against the regime’s repressive forces in more than 80 cities across the country.
\n\nBecause we have entered an explicitly revolutionary stage, the street conflicts between the protestors on the one hand and the police and Basij (the militia organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) on the other have become less “one-sided” than before. People have realized that, with social cooperation, solidarity, and practice, they too can exhaust the repressive forces and finally shut them down. Young people especially are learning various methods of self-defense, such as making a “handmade nail screw” that punctures the tire of police motorcycles and prevents them from moving freely to carry out attacks. Independent doctors are announcing their mobile numbers on the internet to help those who are injured in the protests, as going to the hospital is often dangerous. There are also calls for “neighborhood organization,” a local structure to connect those who live in the same area.
\n\nGiven that the ideological apparatus of the government has become dysfunctional for most of the society, the chief medium through which the Islamic Republic continues to reproduce itself is the repressive apparatus that, during this uprising alone, has already killed 80 people and arrested thousands of protesters.10 Let us not forget that this occurred during an internet blackout, a brutal method that the Islamic Republic has repeatedly employed in the past, especially during the 2019 November uprising—Abaan-e-Khoonin [“Bloody November”]—when “the authorities completely shut down the internet for four successive days, transforming the country into a big black box, slaughtering the people with impunity.”11 Jina Amini also represents and calls to memory the hundreds of martyrs who were murdered at that time.12 Those who support the Islamic Republic on the grounds that it is an anti-imperialist force in global geopolitics conveniently ignore that it murders its own people on the streets, imprisons them illegally, and tortures them to extract false confessions.
\n\nNow, after ten days, the prospects of this cycle of spontaneous mass uprising depend on the more organized forms of resistance, especially the strike of workers, teachers, and students. In Iran, unlike the most advanced capitalist societies, unions and syndicates are not integrated into the capitalist system. Unions do not simply aim to realize their own particular demands, thus hindering the formation of a more radical movement. Rather, they seek fundamental transformations that the ruling classes see as an existential threat. This is the reason why hundreds of union members and syndicates (teachers, students, workers, pensioner activists) are currently in prison, some of them tortured.
\n\nOver the past four days, there have been many calls for a “general strike” from progressive students and teachers and also some anonymous militants who produced agitational videos using revolutionary songs produced in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution. Oil workers have also threatened to go on strike if the Islamic Republic continues to repress the protests on the streets.13 If this happens, then the whole dynamic will change.
\n\nWhat is certain is that the uprising needs new energy, an event that enables it to keep going, as it is very difficult to sustain such an uprising on a daily basis over a long period of time. More generally, beyond the immediate exigencies of the present, overthrowing the Islamic Republic hinges very much on crucial organizational questions that require not only a “collective intellect” but also time to put it into practice via trial and error. The missing link is an organic relationship between the spontaneous mass uprising and other organized forms of struggle. This implies that each side of this relation becomes more organized internally, through the formation of local-countrywide organizations and more coordinated actions among the unions and syndicates.
\n\nMost importantly—and this is crucial for international solidarity—the radical trends within the movement need to be promoted, while the reactionary elements should be criticized. The revolution that society seeks is not simply a political one in which the autocratic Islamic Republic is displaced by another—say, a more democratic-liberal—political form. It is also a social revolution in which not only the individual subjectivities of the people but also the most important social structures are transformed. Corporate media in the West (for example, the BBC Persian and Iran International) as well as celebrity activists like Masih Alinejad (who work with the most conservative forces in the United States, those in favor of prohibiting abortion and “regime change” via military intervention) are doing their best to promote the reactionary trends within the movement, reducing the whole problem to the question of “human rights.” They mispresent the social relations that emerge from the structures of capitalist societies as merely juridical ones. Their manipulative propaganda portrays a reactionary alternative, injecting doses of “loyalism” into the popular imagination: a politics that aims to revive the social-political order overthrown by the 1979 Revolution.
\n\nThe people on the streets are not stupid; they do not put much stock in this narrative. It is important for our internationalist comrades across the world to support the radical trends and slogans of the movement, opposing the loyalist diaspora who are spreading nationalism by bringing the flag of Persia before the revolution of 1979 to demonstrations.
\n\nThe problem is not just how to overthrow the Islamic Republic, but how to defend the revolution and its progressive forces after its toppling. The more support radical forces and progressive elements receive, the easier it will be to defend the revolution against reactionary forces. The Islamic Republic plays a crucial role in the global accumulation of capital (via the supply of raw materials such as oil and gas) and also in geopolitical power relations in the Middle East. Clearly, regional and global powers will do everything they can to shape the revolutionary process and its outcome to align with their own economic and geopolitical interests. Only with strong international solidarities supporting the most radical tendencies within the movement could the yet-to-be revolution maintain itself against the reactionary forces of loyalism, against geopolitical interventions, and against the violent integration into global circuits of accumulation.
\n\nThe future is marked by uncertainties. Yet, class struggle from below and against all forms of domination will remain an important material force in the course of capitalism’s history. Of that much, we are certain.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/28/6.jpg\")
\nA statement written and signed by leftist feminists from Kurdistan on the current feminist insurrection in Iran.
\n\nYou are hearing our voice from Kurdistan. This is a collective voice of leftists and marginalized feminists from a geography whose history is marked by discrimination, imprisonment, torture, execution, and exile. This has been the case since the early days of the 1979 Revolution. We are Kurdish women and queer people who inherited a history that is not only full of violence but also of struggle and resistance. We have always had to fight on multiple fronts: in one battleground, against the patriarchy of Kurdish and non-Kurdish men, and in the other one, against the regime’s Islamist fundamentalism and the imposition of its gendered hierarchy. Against the chauvinist feminists, we have been fighting very hard to articulate gender oppression in its intersectionality with various forms of domination imposed upon us as ethnic-national minority.
\n\nToday, we are all witnessing a feminist revolution in Iran in terms of form and content. The Kurdish slogan of “Jin—Jiyan—Azadî” (“Women—Life—Freedom”) has become the central refrain of this cycle of struggles, giving it a new and fresh life. We express our uncompromising support for the struggles of the people in Iran, especially for the women’s courageous and unstoppable fights on the streets. Since the current uprising is born out of Jina Amini’s killing by state femicide, we would like to name this uprising after Jina: “the movement of Jina” [“the movement for life”]. The name Jina in Kurdish means both life and life-giving, reminding us of Jiyan, the middle term of the slogan now chanted everywhere. For us, Jina is an appropriate name because we believe “Berxwedan jiyan e” [a reference to the Kurdish slogan, “life is resistance”].
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/28/8.jpg\")
\nThis uprising has not only elevated the question of gendered and sexual oppression to a public concern but also shown in practice how gendered, ethnic, and class forms of oppression can be articulated in a radical manner, namely as mutually interrelated. This political articulation has enabled the protestors to form a strong and united front against dictatorship, political Islam, chauvinism, patriarchy, and the domination of capital. Those women and queer people who have brought social struggles from the so-called “private” sphere to the “public” sphere, from the domestic domain to the streets, are genuinely inspiring to us, for they have shown that the liberation from patriarchy, the state, and capital are deeply intertwined.
\n\nLet us not forget that we are at a critical conjuncture, a crucial turning point in history. Jina has become our common code, uniting us in these multi-faceted and difficult circumstances. We see ourselves as part of the social movements that seek justice for the killing of all Jinas, especially the feminist and leftist movement that opposes femicide and queer killing, whilst also taking a stand against “exclusive nationalisms” (be it on the side of the left or the right).
\n\n“Jin—Jiyan—Azadî” originally appeared in the struggles of Kurdish women in Turkey and recently became one of the main slogans in Rojava; in Iran, it spread in the blink of an eye to every corner of the whole country. What is inspiring about the slogan is that it can overcome the borders historically established by colonial and imperialist forces in the Middle East—just as the Kurdish, a nation without the state, have done in the region, especially Kurdish women. We take this transnational and transborder unity as indicative of the strength of the Kurdish women’s movement, indeed as a bright omen. Just as we see ourselves as an integral part of the women’s protests and queer communities in Iran, so too, we utilize the buildup of women’s and queer people’s historical experiences in other parts of Kurdistan in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. “Jin—Jiyan—Azadî,” traditionally used in the funeral of Kurdish martyrs, is now chanted in the funeral of our martyr, Jina Amini. This enables us to speak of women’s power, subjectivity, and courage in their fight against the patriarchal forces driven by death and enslavement.
\n\nSparked by the state femicide of Jina, the current uprising quickly turned into a movement against mandatory Hijab in particular and in favor of overthrowing of the regime more generally. The movement has been able to challenge, indeed to deconstruct, the prevailing narratives and images depicting Kurdish women as well as the women of other ethnicities in Iran, in two specific respects. First, the nationalist’s racist misrepresentation of ethnic minority women as simply puppets in the hands of political parties with no agency of their own. Second, the Western orientalist view of Middle East women.
\n\nThe regime’s repressions and atrocities are not news to anyone. Since its violent establishment in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic republic’s response to all social conflicts has always been repression—namely, the imprisonment and the killing of protesters. Like many other people in Iran, hundreds of women and feminist activists have been arrested during the past two weeks and are in prison now. Women and queer people, however, have shown that fear can no longer prevent them from participating in the various movements growing in society. They can and already have become the pioneers of overthrowing masculine dictators and oligarchs in the region as a whole.
\n\nWhat is happening now in Iran promises the beginning of a new historical era of fighting against violence, fundamentalism, and deprivation of the right to life. We consider ourselves part of this movement, inviting the leftist and feminist/queer groups throughout the region and the Global South to join us in this war. We are calling for Kurdish, Turkish, Arab, and Baloch feminists to join us in order to redefine the intersectionality of the various forms of domination imposed upon all of us in a progressive manner, namely: beyond the patriarchal formulations of ethnic oppression. We also call for the anti-capitalist and anti-racist feminists in the “West” and other part of the world to support our cause and stand beside us. The ideals of freedom and emancipation cannot be realized without reclaiming the right to our lives; this is what precisely echoes in Jin—Jiyan—Azadî. Our feminist revolution is following this slogan very carefully, thereby demanding a genuinely global solidarity for its realization in practice.
\n\n\nFor background on the 2019 November uprising, see the Collective 98 statement in Roar Magazine, signed by more than 100 hundred militants, activists, and academics. For an analysis of neoliberalism in Iran, read this. ↩
\nFor more information on the 2019 November uprising, see the text Collective 98 wrote on its first anniversary. ↩
\nFor more on the question of pseudo-anti-imperialism, read this. ↩
\nJohn Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (London: Bookmarks Publication, 2006), ‘Iranian Oil’, pp. 174-77. Asef Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of Arab Spring (Standford, California: Stanford University Press, 2017), pp. 2-7. ↩
\nSee the open letter from Collective 98 to ACTA, one of the most important leftist platforms in France, which published a catastrophically ideological piece from the standpoint of pseudo-anti-imeprialism on the praise of Ghassem Suleimani, the military general of the Revolutionary Guard—who not only repressed dissidents in Iran but also destabilized Iraq, Syria, and indeed the whole region. ↩
\nFor more perspective on this slogan, consult the interview RadioZamaneh conducted with the leftist activists inside Iran who called for a general strike. ↩
\nTheodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life ↩
\nSee the famous photo taken in Tehran, a few minutes after midnight, in which three women, joining hands, wave their scarfs in the air behind burning barricades. ↩
\nSee, for example, this viral video in which women burn their scarves and dance around a fire. For some Iranian feminists, this was reminiscent of the witches before the rise of capitalism. ↩
\nFor statistics detailing the killings and arrests in Kurdistan, consult this report. ↩
\nAs discussed in the statement that appeared via ROAR Magazine. ↩
\n304 to 1500 The real number of victims is not clear. Amnesty International confirms that at least 304 people were killed, while Reuters reports 1500 people. ↩
\nFor an analysis of the recent strike by oil workers, see Iman Ganji and Jose Rosales, “The Bitter Experience of Workers in Iran—A Letter from Comrades.” ↩
\nIn October 2019, an uprising exploded throughout Chile. For a while, the police and armed forces lost control. Seeking to placate the rebels, the government announced a plebiscite about whether to replace the constitution, a relic of the far-right dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A majority of the parties in congress drew up a roadmap for this process, calling it the “Agreement for Social Peace.” In May 2021, elections to determine who would participate in the constitutional process were hailed as a victory for “independent” politics—though we expressed concern that this process would chiefly serve to pacify social movements, pointing out that today, it is much easier to rally opposition to a government than it is to make change via state institutions. As it turned out, in the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, a majority of Chileans voted to reject the proposed constitution—shocking many Chilean leftists, who had not expected such a resounding defeat.
\n\nHoping to gain insight into these events, we sent a series of questions to several thoughtful participants in autonomous social movements. Some of them suspended their rejection of state politics to participate in the constitutional process, while others remained outside the process, taking note of the ways that it shaped the possibilities in Chilean society at large.
\n\nLooking on from a distance, the events in Chile strike us as part of a familiar pattern. The institutions of capitalism and the state impoverish and oppress people, precipitating revolt; the defenders of those institutions scramble to channel anger and desire for change back into reforming the prevailing institutions; as they shift their attention to reform and electoral politics, the rebels lose leverage on those who hold power, and the cycle repeats itself.
\n\nIn fact, electoral politics has served to subdue revolutionary movements since the emergence of modern democracy. In France, immediately after the revolutions of 1848 and 1870, elections served to return reactionaries to power; at the apex of the May 1968 uprising, president Charles de Gaulle regained control by calling a new election for June 23. Transformative social change takes place at a different pace than the establishment of majorities. Seeking to legitimize proposals by majority vote—rather than opening up space for experimentation by decentralizing the processes that distribute agency and legitimacy—will always reduce political possibility to the lowest common denominator.
\n\nThe same repressive process can play out even via direct democracy, especially when it becomes separated from the force of revolt that offered it leverage in the first place. Movements that wait to reach consensus before taking action tie their hands from the start, as we can see by comparing different encampments during the Occupy movement. In Bosnia in 2014, an uprising that began with the burning of government buildings ended with a whimper when the plenums that had crafted a proposal for social change discovered that the reconstituted government no longer had any need for reform once the threat from the streets had abated. It seems to us that the transformative process of revolt itself is the important thing to self-organize, not formal processes to achieve social change through the institutions of the state. Anything that distracts us from this priority can only weaken our movements.
\n\nWe still remember how, at the high point of the 2019 revolt, for about a month, Santiago and many other parts of Chile were self-organized via a decentralized network of neighborhood assemblies employing a wide array of decision-making structures. Each one was shaped by the participants, focusing on the matters that concerned them and discussing what could be done immediately with the resources at their disposal. This remains the high-water mark of popular power in Chile.
\n\nAfter the constitution was approved, the cabildos (town hall meetings) began in many of the same spaces. They appeared to mimic the neighborhood assembly format, but focused on discussing the constitutional process. The immediate power that people had experienced in their neighborhood assemblies gave way to a sense that power came from the state—or at least through the state—and that their desires would eventually be fulfilled at the end of a long, orderly, democratic process. (“And you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”)
\n\nComparing the events in Chile with the grim end results of other left electoral victories in Brazil, Greece, and Spain—which admittedly did not go so far as to propose to establish a new constitutional basis for government—it seems to us that anything that draws us back into trying to reform the institutions of power can only sidetrack us and obscure our real proposals by associating them with the inevitable failures of the state. From our perspective, the failure of the constitutional process in Chile is a cautionary tale. At the same time, if we want to foster movements that can reject such compromises and continue building strength through changing circumstances, we will have to innovate ways to make them sustainable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/10.jpg\")
Today, the reigning government in Chile is headed by Gabriel Boric of the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio (“broad front”). Boric originally made his name participating in the same same student movements that he now directs riot police to suppress by force. In this photograph, anarchists confront riot police in Santiago, Chile on September 11, 2022, the anniversary of the day that the dictator Augusto Pinochet came to power.
\nWe’ve edited the responses for brevity and clarity. The original answers will appear in the Spanish version of this article. The photographs appear courtesy of Frente Fotográfico, who write, “The fantasy that the nostalgic Chilean oligarchy of the dictatorship is going to give up its privileges through democratic means has once again led us to defeat.”
\n\nHow would you like us to describe you?
\n\nI am a queer Mapuche anarchist nihilist involved in the rebuilding of an active anarchist library, support for anarchist political prisoners, and neighborhood organizing, focused more on creating encounters and sharpening thought among anarchists specifically, with little faith in “the people.”
\n\nDid you have any hope for what might come out of the constituent process? What was the best possible case?
\n\nThe revolt of October 18, 2019 awakened a great hope for political change in Chile. There were clear demands to change the country’s policies on a structural level.
\n\nSocial unrest was widespread, advancing demands about health, education, the Private Pension System (AFP), basic human rights—which today are inoperative in any modern democracy—gender perspectives, women’s rights, the LGBTQIA+ community, animal rights, ecological rights, and Indigenous rights. The fundamental issue was the need to put an end to the constitution that was created during the dictatorship, which organizes the country as a big company, tying the hands of ordinary people so they cannot do anything to put a stop to resource extraction, corruption, and exploitation.
\n\nThe entire political class failed to appease the demonstrators for several weeks—despite many deaths, hundreds of people mutilated by gunshots, hundreds of people imprisoned. In the face of this, President Sebastián Piñera summoned the political parties of all stripes to create an “Agreement for Peace.” Behind closed doors, they organized to stop the social crisis that was happening.
\n\nThe ruling class and the political class were desperate. The most conservative parties and the left parties agreed that the situation could not go on; they announced that they had decided to call for a plebiscite to decide whether people wanted a new constitution and how it should be shaped.
\n\nThe “Agreement for Peace” rejected any attempt to restrict resource extraction, including water use, mining, forestry, agriculture, and livestock. Of course, these are the main causes of inequality and impoverishment.
\n\nThe cabildos, or popular assemblies, arose in all the territories. They were convened around questions, so that the participants in the constitutional process would know the thinking and wishes of the people. The cabildos were organized by territory or by community. So, for example, there were feminist, ecological, and LGBTQIA+ cabildos, in which any person who felt called could participate.
\n\nThe trap of these spaces was that the political parties structured them and imparted a bias to them. So the questions varied depending on the social classes or territories involved, creating different points of view.
\n\nStill, throughout that stage of the process, there was an atmosphere of citizen cooperation—people began to understand better how everything is organized, how everything is connected between the different institutions, and how this economically affects all aspects of life in a neoliberal system.
\n\nThere was no way to avoid taking a position on the issues that arose with the revolt. The social movements that existed before the revolt strengthened their struggles and many more people became politically involved in confronting various forms of social precarity. In this sense, the fear generated by the dictatorship vanished, opening doors to debate and criticism of the system.
\n\nThe desire to overturn the old rules that govern this country after so many years of political blindness and social apathy—the fact that everyone is talking about the issues that affect us as a society—this is undoubtedly a great achievement, generated by all of the people who took to the streets to fight for a more just society for all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/2.jpg\")
According to Frente Fotográfico, “Since the defeat of the plebiscite, tensions within the center left have been rising, even more so since the Boric government turned dangerously to the right. Likewise, the most radicalized groups have tried to assume more prominence after the defeat of the democratic left.”
\nDo you feel that the popular social movements that participated in the constituent convention compromised their principles?
\n\nThe issue of whether to participate in the constituent process did not generate much conflict. It was clear that this process, which has always been comprised of a select few from the aristocratic and business elite, should include Indigenous peoples, who have always been outside of any state organization and decision-making throughout the history of this and other territories.
\n\nGender parity has always been relegated to the sidelines. We know that there are often women on the right and women on the left. Women on the right are strongly opposed to feminism, but it was also necessary for feminist women to be involved in shaping the laws that will condition the lives of millions of them.
\n\nPeople from the underclass or middle-class sectors, who raised important issues during the revolt, involving the whole population in the future organization of this country—they deserve to be involved in the process, too. I will never believe that legal means are the way to bring about real social change, but I believe that at a symbolic and representational level, this is very important.
\n\nThe participants in the constitutional convention were elected from all the regions of the country, from all the Indigenous ethnic groups, including openly Indigenous ethnicities, as well as people openly opposed to the new constitution. All the social sectors were represented in one way or another. It is important to emphasize that participating in a constitutional convention does not prevent one from participating in other forms of organization.
\n\nOne event that seemed to me to be symbolic occurred on the first day that the convention met at the palace of the former congress. At the opening ceremony, while some were trying to sing the national anthem, other convention members were shouting to demand freedom to the political prisoners of the revolt.
\n\nBecause of the differences between the 155 people who made up the constitutional convention, many of the debates and agreements were public, especially on issues of national interest. There was also a cable TV channel where you could watch the day-to-day process and listen to the declarations and the positions of each participant.
\n\nThis new formula of citizen participation made it clear that the democratic spectacle is useful to subdue social movements, that real change is created in the streets, in the towns, in the workplaces, and in every place where repression takes place, not from the actions of politicians.
\n\nStudents and other demonstrators clash with riot police in Santiago on September 9, 2022, after the plebiscite of September 4.
\nAs the date of the vote approached, what characterized the sides that coalesced around accepting or rejecting the constitution?
\n\nAfter the election of the convention participants, they began to prepare the political advertisements that were broadcast on television and on all the national channels. In these ads, they sought to debunk the fake news that was bombarding social media networks and radio and television channels, urging people to reject the new draft constitution.
\n\nThis campaign showed that the new constitution included housing rights, more resources for health, education, and the elderly, infrastructure for those with disabilities, environmental protections, animal rights, recognizing the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, harsher punishments for corruption, and other issues that the old constitution did not address.
\n\nThe right wing responded the way they always have, with information campaigns based on fear and lies, provoking confusion and delegitimizing the members of the constitutional convention. They spent hundreds of millions spreading propaganda to make people believe that approving the constitution would make things worse.
\n\nThose who lacked a clear political position before the revolt began to doubt the campaign as it progressed—both the proposals and the process. This showed that the dictatorship and the capitalist system have succeeded in creating resistance to change, spreading fear of social policies that would benefit the poorest. Many people believe that the state addressing social problems is “communism” and therefore reject a more equitable constitution, preferring the old one—even though the old one was made with bloody hands and favors private companies.
\n\nThe right wing has always been aggressive in protecting its interests, directly attacking policies that could generate economic support for the lower social classes, justifying the discourse of meritocracy according to which the poor are poor because they want to be poor. They take advantage of the Mapuche conflict to pressure the current government and the constitutional process, claiming that it is not possible to negotiate with the Mapuche people who maintain their stance of confrontation. The polls and the media took the rejection of the constitution for granted from the beginning.
\n\nBased on the results, we can ask ourselves more questions and offer criticisms regarding everything that has happened. Even after a generalized social revolt, the result of the plebescite threw this whole process in the garbage, leaving us in the same situation as we were before.
\n\nIt is really quite shameful as an inhabitant of this country. But at the same time, many of us have never believed in the state. We know that real change emerges in struggle on the front line. We do not participate in their media circus, even less so now that it has been shown how the mass media play their role.
\n\nThousands of people say that their votes were determined by the information they received from the television about the new draft constitution, that they did not agree with some of the points, that they did not want to lose their houses, that they would lose their pensions, that their healthcare would get worse, that they would not be able to access anything private because the state was going to prohibit it… so many opinions totally misrepresenting the actual proposals, demonstrating that the hundreds of millions of pesos spent in this campaign, that the decades of a neoliberal system and more than 500 years of colonization have served to create an ignorant people. In spite of the real data, what really determines what they vote for are symbols, the fear that Chile will become like Venezuela, that the Indigenous peoples will have more value and privilege than the Chilean people. Effectively, people said “we don’t want everything for free, because we are we are the proud offspring of the exploited.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/8.jpg\")
According to Frente Fotográfico, on September 11, 2022, the anniversary of the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power at a cost of countless lives, “Thousands of people marched towards the general cemetery in a demonstration that was marked by clashes between the militarized police and protesters from the black bloc who tried to reach La Moneda [the government headquarters]. From that moment on, the police charged the demonstrators throughout the pilgrimage, until they reached the cemetery, where the cops quickly swept through, even running over the families who were peacefully paying homage to their disappeared.”
\nHave there been examples of projects that continued building their own social power autonomously from the constituent process, or has it been difficult to prevent that process from impacting all projects for liberation?
\n\nIn this territory, there is a strong tradition of popular struggles, including radical left political groups and various strands of anarchism. There are many examples of autonomous projects that have not changed or stopped. The majority of them have only become more determined not to delegate the task of organizing our lives to political parties.
\n\nThe democratic game is only one option. There are many other ways of relating. The defense of our territories, of our loved ones, of our communities, of animals, of our own bodies—this is a daily resistance.
\n\nCurrently, the most important issue impacting the security of the state is the Mapuche conflict, which runs parallel to the social revolt. The Mapuche struggle has its own axis, phases, and demands. The conflict is getting worse every day, the militarization of the Walmapu (Mapuche territory) has proceeded since the first days of the government of current president Gabriel Boric. This shows that all the political campaigns, all the appeals to the government for change, were a farce.
\n\nSince Boric assumed office, right-wing policies have only gained ground in regards to resource extraction treaties such as the TPP-11 (the Trans-Pacific Partnership), forestry, the student movement, and the criminalization of protest via more severe laws.
\n\nLife in this territory will continue to be in conflict. The defenders of life will never cease to confront domination, we will never stop creating networks and spaces where they can never reach, where their where their laws will not guide us and where their beliefs will never have any value. Ancestral energies remain alive in spite of hundreds of years of trying to subjugate us. Weichafes [a Mapuche name for Warriors], anarchists will not rest in building a future based on respect, love, and solidarity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/7.jpg\")
Graffiti in the cemetery in Santiago in which police attacked mourners on September 11, 2022, the anniversary of the coup. It reads “Neither god nor king.”
\nAfter the vote in May 2021, we wrote:
\n\n\n\n\n“Some anarchists have suggested that, the 21st century, state power is a hot potato—arguing that because neoliberal globalization has made it difficult for state structures to mitigate the impact of capitalism, no party will be able to hold state power for long without losing credibility.”
\n
Undoubtedly, today’s states no longer fulfill the determinant role they played at their inception. Today, multinational corporations and moguls use the structures of the states for their own benefit. Chile is a social laboratory: in the last ten years, several leftist and right-wing political parties have emerged representing new social sectors. Those of us who participate in these are part of the cycle that perpetuates this system.
\n\nIn this sense, the capitalist system has the advantage of continuously reinventing itself. For example, previously, to be vegan was to be anti-system, anti-capitalist; today, we already know that veganism is one more branch of capitalist development. By the same token, I believe that as some parties become obsolete, new parties will emerge. But the central conflict, the struggle with the state and capital, continues.
\n\nI would like to thank the CrimethInc. team for the opportunity to provide a critical view of the latest processes that affect the territory dominated by the state of Chile and Walmapu, which is Mapuche territory. Thank you for listening to a Mapuche-queer-anarchist-nihilist comrade who believes that life in this society and in the cities, with all its attendant problems, is absurd and meaningless—who invites others to connect with the earth, to create ties and networks of connection, to realize our desire for the world, here and now.
\n\nAn embrace to all those who carry a new world in their hearts.
\n\nStudents drive back an armored police vehicle in September 2022.
\nThe following responses come from an anonymous contributor who was involved in the constitutional convention but has otherwise chosen to remain outside of institutional processes.
\n\nWhat did you hope might come out of the constitutional process? What was the best case scenario?
\n\nWe hoped for something more than what is usually possible in an institutional framework: the possibility of rebuilding the relationships between people and nature. We hoped to de-privatize water, to move towards a more just society. In that sense, despite not achieving those goals today, hope remains. As long as land, water, and nature are privatized, there will continue to be social ecological conflicts [e.g., the struggles against exploitation and dispossession that are exacerbated by extractive industries and mega-corporations consuming resources and destroying ecosystems].
\n\nWe in the social movements remain firm in our programs. From the beginning, we proposed a feminist, ecological constitution and a rule of law designed to protect freedom and well-being.
\n\nThere is a fierce conflict between nationalism and plurinationality. [The concept of “plurinationality” is familiar from Bolivia, where a 2009 referendum ratified a constitution introducing a “plurinational” state, recognizing Indigenous rights and autonomy.] I think that this is where the rejection of the constitution won the most ground: in glorifying a hegemonic nationalist culture, denying the existence of other peoples and identities and shutting down the possibility of spaces where they could exercise their rights of autonomy. There, we lost outright.
\n\nYes, I believe that it will be difficult for this defeat not to have an impact on projects of feminist emancipation, Indigenous liberation, gender dissidence, and the struggle against neoliberalism in general. Still, perhaps it will open the doors to new processes, new forms of collective construction, outside the institutional framework. We will continue to build from the territories [i.e., from the ground up in local communities], through practices of autonomy and self-management, according to a non-institutional logic.
\n\nIn May 2021, we wrote:
\n\n\n\n\n“In the 21st century, state power is a hot potato: because neoliberal globalization has made it difficult for state structures to mitigate the impact of capitalism, no party will be able to hold state power for long without losing credibility.”
\n
Were you anticipating the outcome of the vote on September 4, 2022? Why do you think that so many people rejected the proposed constitution?
\n\nI agree about the difficulty of mitigating the impacts of neoliberalism, but also from Modatima1 [the Movement for the Defense of Access to Water, Land, and Environmental Protection—a non-governmental organization including paid organizers], we have made the decision to compete for local and regional government positions and intervene from there.
\n\nSince May 2021, we have seen an onslaught of fascism and the extreme right. In addition to gaining a powerful representation in parliament, they have been able to popularize racist ideas and pressure the government to implement repressive measures, including against Indigenous peoples.
\n\nI always thought there was a chance that the “No” vote would succeed, but never by such a margin. As we have already pointed out, we were not able to confront the lies of the right and reach out to the common people.
\n\nFrom our perspective, the proposal to draft a new constitution for Chile was a concession achieved by the uprising of 2019. Could that uprising have aimed for another goal, with different results? If you could go back to May 2021—or even to October 2019—what would you do differently?
\n\nIn fact, we have many criticisms regarding how the negotiations between the parties were carried out, excluding the protagonists of the uprising. This agreement ended up capturing the forms of political participation within the institutional framework. Today, we have to evaluate whether participants in the social and popular movements made any gains by participating in the constitutional process.
\n\nIf we could go back to the revolt and do things differently, we would be less innocent regarding the communication strategies of the right. We would engage in more popular education about the constitutional process and move towards more participatory and less elitist deliberation.
\n\nI never thought that the constitutional process was a process of liberation. I believe that real transformation takes place elsewhere. Those are slower paths, of popular organization and shifting consciousness. Perhaps the uprising made us believe that we had advanced much further there, and in that, we were wrong.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/6.jpg\")
September 11, 2022: a banner reading “With our memory intact—revenge for the murdered comrades of yesterday and today,” with a list of names including Claudia López, an anarchist murdered on September 11, 1998, under the democratic regime that succeed the dictatorship.
\nHow should we describe you?
\n\nWe are a couple of Popular Educators (Compas Educadorxs Populares) who have been involved for a long time in self-managed education projects, in both free schools and formal schools. Starting years before the uprising, we have been part of the solidarity network supporting Mapuche political prisoners and prisoners from anarchist, autonomous and anti-authoritarian spaces; since the popular revolt, we have been active organizing activities, resources, and support for political prisoners from the revolt.
\n\nDid you have any hope regarding what could come out of the constitutional process—either from the process itself or from parallel effects? What was the best possible case?
\n\nRegarding the first question—before speaking about the constituent process itself and as a preamble to all the questions—let us say that we still retain hope in the popular movement that broke out in October 2019, understanding this so-called estallido (“outbreak”) or revolt as an expression of popular discontent rejecting a model of life that is against life itself. Although the political awareness necessary to analyze this malaise and propose self-organized alternatives is emerging—to the same extent that political organization is appearing among the common people—this revolt takes several forms:
\n\nFirst, an awareness, termed despertar [“awakening”] in the discourse of the protest movement that broke out in October 2019. We feel that discontent appeared more as a reaction to the accumulation of violence and abuse on the part of those in power than as a force unfolding with clarity about how to build a society that would be more just, less oppressive, and more egalitarian in our differences. In that sense, everything was on the table to be debated and reinvented.
\nSecond, an accomplishment of the struggles of various social movements (students, NO+AFP2, movements for decent housing, Mapuche movements, feminist movements, environmental movements) in the sense that they instilled in the collective consciousness—or at least raised the possibility—that we live under a social order that benefits a few at the expense of the majority and that, in its most concrete expression, reduces us to struggling to survive in the rat race, without time to enjoy ourselves, with strenuous work days and transportation to and from work, with debt, without enough space and time to socialize and build community.
\nThird, the possibility that the open space in the streets, in protests, in consciousness, in speeches, and in political practices (local assemblies, councils, and the like) could function as a catalyst to speed up historical time and harvest the underground work carried out by the popular movement and the extra-institutional left over the last 30 years. This could occur in two different spheres—never completely separate, but necessary to distinguish—organization and political-economic.
\nAs far as organization is concerned, the possibility opened up of resuming the thread of history from before the transition to so-called democracy (1990-2019, the transition that was never completed): popular, grassroots organization that walked alongside the revolutionary left and, going further back, to return to the time that preceded the dictatorship, of a union of workers and the construction of popular power that preceded (and perhaps partly explains) the military coup.
\n\nThe councils (cabildos), or assemblies, supported and sustained in the space of street fighting and direct confrontation with the forces of repression, offered another space for building organization and symbolically undermining the foundations of the reigning social order.
\n\nIn the political-economic sphere, the harvest of the revolt consists in giving cohesion to the isolated critiques of the system (of patriarchy, the pension system, inequality in health and education, hydroelectric plants, the dispossession of the Mapuche people, and so on) in order to build an analysis from below revealing the common and transversal elements connecting all of these issues. In other words, a critique of the neoliberal capitalist system as the root cause of all of these issues, and of the fundamental problem—the loss of meaning that we are experiencing as a people, which became so clear to us all on October 18, 2019.
\n\nThe widespread use of the Mapuche flag in the protests, the growing appreciation (prior to October 18, 2019) of the Mapuche culture and other cultures originating from these lands as seen in murals, the widespread use of certain words, costumes, and practices—we believe and perceive on a more subtle level that this corresponds with the profound desire to return to the earth, the breathe in peace, to live in harmony with those around us through mutual support and conversation. This also implies that, although we speak of threads that are taken up again, there are also new understandings based on the historical experience of this territory and at a global level, which imply questioning and recreating more horizontal forms of organization, calling into question capitalism and its patriarchal and colonial roots, in order to place ourselves in reciprocity with the land and all living beings—to refuse to participate in the race to increase production/exploitation of life on earth without a thought for the life and culture that this machine demolishes. Perhaps this also means revisiting an older narrative, one which has always been in the stories and culture of the first peoples of this land.
\n\nOf course, this last point could be interpreted as an idealization of the movement of October 2019. It is important to emphasize that we are talking about a force that is beginning to emerge and spread into the collective consciousness, but it is still only tiny seedlings that peek into the sunlight, not the ancient forest of the earth’s wisdom reborn, not yet.
\n\nAfter this great preamble, the answer itself: the constitutional process was an agreement carried out by the Chilean political caste.3 This agreement that was formulated on November 15, 2019. We consider it primarily a concession that the constituted powers considered necessary to preserve their position. Of course, their positions and motivations were diverse and, to be sure, those in the most reformist sectors (somewhat on the left) within institutional political spaces did not see this as a concession but as an achievement. Nevertheless, in a more general sense, this was something completely undesirable for the traditional right and the “second” right (the former Concertación, the compromise the emerged from the end of the dictatorship) and desirable for the pseudo-left of institutionalized politics (some of the people from the ex-compromise/New Majority and part of the Frente Amplio, “Broad Front”). A separate case is the Communist Party, which was excluded from the negotiations but actively participated in the process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/5.jpg\")
September 11, 2022, Santiago, Chile.
\nExplain the problems with the agreement of November 15.
\n\nFirst, it saved President Piñera and his government, who were hanging by a thread in those days, having already sacrificed the minister of the interior, his cousin, Andres Chadwick.
\n\nSecond, the agreement ignored, and in the short term deactivated, the emerging organization in the territories. Instead of fostering popular organization and taking advantage of the momentum to transform political practice into one that genuinely seeks to foster and represent a solid social base upon which a project of profound socio-economic change could be based, the political caste designed a process that once again moved the problem to the electoral level, sustaining a political-advertising logic.
\n\nThird, the two sectors of the right wing skillfully (and the pseudo-left clumsily) designed a constitutional process that met the conditions so that, in the end, the transformation would be minimal and favorable for the economic right (possibly what we are experiencing now). This served to reverse the transformative forces and return everything to the reactionary status quo.
\n\nFrom this point of view, although there was hope that this process of constitutional change—regulated by the same elite that has propagated the model of profit with minimal social rights—as one more possible path to follow and not to dismiss a priori, we are certain that the paths to real transformations do not abide by the timelines of the institutions or their mechanisms and representative procedures, which serve to depoliticize rather than to foster participative political culture.
\n\nLet’s see… now we will review all of its specific limitations:
\n\nWhat does this imply? It takes a long time to design a process within a time constraint; there is time pressure from the very beginning, which increases bickering and errors, and offers valuable content for the media (which are dominated by the economic right in collusion with the Concertación that put an end to left-wing media in the 1990s) and social media with which to plant the idea that those in the convention do not work, that they are lazy, that it is a circus in there, and so on. This generalizes individual actions and ignores the arduous daily work carried out by many participants, who were defenders of territorial and social organizations facing serious environmental and exclusion problems.
\n\nIn addition, the need to reach such broad agreements led to “Frankenstein” solutions in order to keep different sectors happy, so that that many of the sections of the newly proposed constitution do not appear to have a clear and coherent vision and seem to be simply a collection of unrelated parts with the intention of pleasing everyone. The endless negotiations imposed by the two thirds quorum on top of the short timeframe impaired the quality of the new constitutional project; the Rejection campaign used this to conceal its class interests so they could disguise their critiques as merely technical (as we often see technocratic neoliberals claim to be non-ideological and objective).
\n\nOur vision, from the beginning, which was refined in our own reflections and nurtured by the reflections of other organizations, was that the convention was a space ceded by the existing power, which effectively opened up space for certain political positions that have been excluded from the hegemonic political conversation for the last thirty years. Instead, we saw a space that was deliberately and cunningly designed to demobilize the movement (with the exception of the political caste, which took this time to reorganize), to dilute and draw out the discussion, severing any connection with the period of the uprising (thanks in large part to the pandemic and the isolation that came with it), leaving exposed weak points in the constitution by design that would delegitimize it, water it down, and finally lead to it being rejected (which was accomplished in the end).
\n\nFor us, the constitutional process at least had the potential to offer (within the terms which were allowed by the institution) greater levels of protection for nature, which had been devastated in our country (as in all countries condemned to the category of “Third World” that survive on the exportation of raw materials to the global economy) and an improvement in social rights, which can have a real impact on people’s quality of life and undermine at least one aspect of the economic system (even though it did not take down the model of accumulation at its core), as state subsidies tend to give priority to the public state sector when it comes to social rights, opening the doors to end ISAPRES (the system for provisions in private health) and AFP (private pension funds insurance). And of course, it is necessary to mention reproductive and abortion rights as well as animal rights and environmental protection.
\n\nAll of this was implemented by a right-leaning parliament with a pseudo-leftist group who came to an agreement before they won regarding how to move the constitution to the center in order for it to gain approval, with transitional regulations that would impede the effective implementation of some of the most important aspects of the new constitution. Despite being better than what currently exists, in political terms, it skirted the argument, beginning from a lowest common denominator in social, political, and economic aspects. Perhaps the greatest change this new constitutional project would have introduced would have been establishing a right-wing social state without changing the system of accumulation; this might have deepened awareness of the necessity of making changes to the economic system, since guaranteed rights are useless without the economic backing which would enable the state to put them into effect.
\n\nWith respect to the groups that participated in the constitutional convention: I think that it is important to be self-critical as a popular social movement. Although much can be said about certain groups individually to evaluate their actions, there was an inability to work in unison, not only within the convention, but also in critically analyzing the process and taking actions and making denunciations accordingly. This involved both individual and collective egos, the splintering within the most radical left, the prioritizing of individual projects over more structural societal issues that impact a range of demographics, and a lack of understanding that many of the ideas that were put forward in the proposed constitution not only didn’t represent much of the population, but also weren’t understood by them, as they were topics foreign to the conversations and daily experiences of the majority of people immersed in a neoliberal society. In conclusion, more than giving up on their principles (which in some cases was already in motion and had been imposed, whereas in other cases, we saw that people didn’t actually adhere to the principles that they claimed to espouse) it seems to us that cohesion was rendered impossible by the vulnerability of the left and some of the popular social movement to infiltration and destruction from within (as was the case with the “Lista del Pueblo,” the coalition of independent candidates that participated in the 2021 elections to the constitutional convention), the difficulty of building a popular organization due to the onslaught of neoliberalism from the 1980s until present, and a certain dogmatism, puritanism, and messianism from some of the groups, which all claim to possess an uncompromising truth, as if pigheadedness were the greatest revolutionary virtue.
\n\nPerhaps this discourse seems bitter, but we feel it is necessary, as the enemy will always look to weaken and destroy us. We aim to find, within our own actions, the origin of our failures, even if they are institutional and don’t respond to the logic of the political practices that mobilize us, since we are situated in the social landscape and the understanding of the people, of which we are a part. This is what guides us on our collective path and makes it possible for us to take action to transform certain conditions of our oppression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/1.jpg\")
Carrying a Molotov cocktail, a demonstrator approaches Chilean riot police in September 2022.
\nAs the date of the vote was nearing, what positions emerged around “no” (reject) and “yes” (approve)? And on the other side, were there examples of grassroots social movements that managed to continue building autonomously outside of the constitutional process, or was it difficult to avoid the impact of this process even in autonomous projects?
\n\nThe multiplicity of the aspects contained in the constitution, paradoxically, led to the multiplicity of critics. Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelicals came together in rejecting the new constitution, since it established the right to abortion.
\n\nThe proposal for plurinationality faced a formidable smear campaign from the right as well as a failure to establish what this would mean in the popular understanding, which led to a revival of nationalist and racist sentiment. One example of how the contradictory versions of this conversation took shape in the minds of the public was the speaker who, clearly partial to the rejection of the new constitution, told a story about her son not getting accepted into a public kindergarten in order to give the spot to a Mapuche child. Across the institutional political spectrum, the media reproduced the idea that Indigenous peoples would become a privileged group and characterized political violence against capitalist forestry extraction in Wallmapu as terrorism.
\n\nThese same tropes were applied to the migrant population, which media narratives associated with the increase in crime. We experienced another example of these false narratives when an adult female student in one of our education spaces, asked about the consequences of the 2019 social uprising, referred to migration and people from Venezuela being given priority in access to jobs.
\n\nOn the other hand, after the approval, the majority of those who had historically supported the Concertación (those of the “30 años,” the thirty years since the fall of the dictatorship) lined up. At least in the eyes of the people, an important part of the social movement unrelated to institutional politics and often critical of the Concertación and even more to the left than Frente Amplio also joined. But in practice, this appeared to represent a historical continuity of the Concertación and the eternal lure of the “lesser of two evils” (as we saw with politicians who were in favor of approval saying that they did not believe in the new constitution, but it was either this or Pinochet’s constitution).
\n\nThe right was camouflaged like never before. They cherry-picked people from the supposed center-left (Christian Democracy and others from the ex-Concertación), and some pathetic remains of the world of junk culture and intellectualism in order to carry out their chameleon-like exercise of concealment, which is where a group who called themselves Amarillos por Chile (“yellows for Chile”) comes in. Even former President Piñera and candidate J. A. Kast were hidden during the campaign in favor of “common people” “without a party” (or from the “Center Left”) who “only want the best for Chile,” stating that the constitution that was to be drafted should be a “house for everyone” and not this new “partisan” constitution (in the words of former President Lagos, a fervent supporter of Chile signing the TPP, who received a standing ovation from the entire business community at the end of his term).
\n\nAs always, the right puts on a piteous face and warns that any new path would mean a direct descent into the abyss. The new element this time around was that the argument did not focus solely on anti-communism or on supposed ideological differences in which every social right would be characterized as “extremist,” or that it sought to create the greatest possible transformation (when in reality, they would be minimal concessions in a subsidiary state). However, the right also pointed more to a technical question, claiming neutrality and apparent temperance in its opinion, supporting this narrative with the faces of the center-left, right, and apolitical, affirming and installing in the collective imagination the belief that a new constitutional process would be able to draft a better constitution. Finally, they started spreading catchy slogans without any argumentation or explanation, like “This thing sucks” or “Not like this.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/4.jpg\")
September 11, 2022, Santiago, Chile.
\nFollowing the vote in May 2021, we wrote:
\n\n\n\n\n“Some anarchists have suggested that, in the 21st century, state power is a hot potato, arguing that due to neoliberal modernization it has become difficult for structures of the state to mitigate the impact of capitalism and that no political party will be capable of maintaining state power for long without loosing credibility.”
\n
Personally and collectively, we have built a path which has more to do with autonomy than it does with taking state power. That said, this doesn’t imply indifference or neutrality regarding the positions of political movements at an institutional level or a lack of acknowledgment of the impact that they have on the positive or negative sentiments with respect to the strengthening of the popular movement.
\n\nThe question of taking the power of the state in the 21st century in particular (but also in the 20th century) depends largely on the levels of consciousness within society, among the people, and—absolutely tied to consciousness—the degree and quality of political organization. Any political project that aims to seize power from the state must confront the means of reproduction of capital and, in order to achieve deeper changes, should be prepared to resist the offensive of national and international capitalism and its pressure mechanisms. This offensive can have effects on the economy and thus on the lives of the people, as we see in Bolivia.
\n\nThis requires a political organization that has an impact on the process, that is well informed about what is being done and why, that feels supported, protected and genuinely listened to through real participation mechanisms and that, in turn, is sheltered in the community-organization space and sustained by ethics and motivations beyond immediate benefit to themselves or their families. All of these have been undermined by the neoliberal model, which has been in a crisis in Chile for the last ten years but has not been replaced by another practice and political discourse: there is a consensus of discontent, but how to interpret this discontent is a fertile ground for conflict and outright manipulation.
\n\nHave you seen evidence of a political change in Chile since the elections in May of 2021?
\n\nThere hasn’t been profound political change, because the convictions and interpretations aren’t profound (even if discontent is). We see an effective manipulation, which was planted on November 15, 2019. Conversely, we have seen the establishment of the “reject” vote as the dominant opinion, chiefly in the popular sectors, due to a disinformation campaign based on defamation and lies with a very high budget—carried out by traditional media and social networks adopting big data analysis strategies and fake news.
\n\nThe arrival in the government of Gabriel Boric and the identification of his government as supporters of the “Approval” vote was not very helpful. The automatic transmission of the popular opposition to whoever holds the position of president (regarding the thesis you raised, with which we agree, we remember how, in 2021, Piñera’s support plunged as low as 6%), on top of unpopular measures adopted by the government and a climate of fear and insecurity (crime, deliberate increases in inflation from the Central Bank, and the pandemic) both real and fueled by the mass media and digital networks—these created the perfect ecosystem for the “reject” campaign to triumph, since it has been gaining strength by leaps and bounds as individualism and social fragmentation reestablished themselves in the wake of the 2019 uprising.
\n\nFaced with a choice between the certainty of at least continuing as we were or the uncertainty of change, in the absence of a sustained collective program, people’s strength and decisiveness were compromised. In this sense, there appears the idea that the huge degree of uncertainty over the past few years partially caused the subsiding of the confidence that had been garnered from the uprising and the impulses towards transformative social change.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/3.jpg\")
September 11, 2022, Santiago, Chile.
\nDid you anticipate the results of the September 4, 2022 vote? Why do you think so many people rejected the proposed constitution?
\n\nBetween the two of us who are writing these reflections, one expected that the constitution would be approved by a narrow margin and the other anticipated from June onwards that the “reject” vote would win. The huge demonstrations for the “approve” vote and a study conducted by Big Data a few days before the plebescite predicted a win for “approve,” which made us unsure who would win the days leading up to the vote… but one of us definitely thought that “reject” would win.
\n\nI think that the “reject” campaign won because they had a strategy. They planned their victory (or failing that, a weak win for “approval,” undermining its mandate) starting on November 15, 2020. The pandemic weakened the revolutionary will that predominated until February 2020; the fear, uncertainty, and isolation wore down the spirit of the people.
\n\nIn May 2021, [in the elections to the constitutional convention], the “approve” vote won the majority, although it did not yet have any content and it was also partially supported by the traditional right, who started changing their discourse when they realized their disadvantage, like Trojan Horses (another highlight of the strategy of the right) cynically supporting “approval,” knowing beforehand that they were merely there to make the case for the “reject” campaign, this technique we already mentioned of feigning impartiality and apoliticism in order to change sides.
\n\nOn the other hand, we also think that a certain naïveté on the left and within the popular social movement also played a role in the loss, as well as the social disconnection of the more passive part of the population that does not usually vote. When the vote became obligatory, it incorporated a social group with whom there were no common political, social, or organizational ties. There was also a lack of experience in the institutional field, which stems from the fact that it does not make sense to pour out one’s own forces in an electoral process, and a general misreading of the situation. On November 15, the movement had the strength it would have needed not to reject compromises with the political caste, but it seems that thirty years of experience were not enough. Repression was also strong—young people were losing their eyes systematically, hundreds were killed and tortured in police stations and there were rumors circulating about a potential coup de etat.
\n\nIn other words, the movement was pushed into a constitutional process without the political and social organization it needed, without prior discussions to coordinate criteria and formulate analyses and strategies with which to approach the process in such a way that the result was an expression of the popular struggles to achieve legitimacy and validity—for example, by means of an intermediary plebescite that would accept or reject particular proposals or ways of participating in the process of drafting a new constitution.
\n\nSome within the left attribute the victory of the “reject” campaign to some of the politics assumed by the government of Boric. We agree with some of these arguments (such as not allowing the withdrawal of funds from the AFP), but unfortunately, we believe that the detention of Hector Llaitul, leader of the CAM [Coordinadora Arauco Malleco, a militant Indigenous organization seeking Mapuche autonomy] and the repression of students were not relevant factors in determining the results. After a brief faltering of the continuity of the hegemonic narrative, the press regained their power and influence over the population in the final months of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 (until COVID consumed the entire news cycle) and reestablished the well-known discourse of “reject” by a large portion of the population (including the “progressives”) who were against all manifestations of political violence, both from students and from autonomous Mapuche groups, labelling anyone who employed political violence as criminals and delinquents (and sometimes terrorists). In this way, they managed to demobilize and undermine the strategies of the groups most interested in transforming the economic model. Thus, Boric’s government took on the character of containing these transformative social forces, just as we anticipated.
\n\nFrom our perspective, the proposal to draft a new Chilean constitution was a concession won by the October 18, 2019 uprising. Is it possible that this uprising could have pursed other goals?
\n\nI want to stress that the uprising was not a cohesive movement of a previously defined political force, but rather a heterogenous social force, without representatives, programs, or the leadership of political parties. It is necessary to keep this in mind in order to comprehend that what the movement wanted is something that can be traced back and deduced through discourse, emerging political practices, and symbolic elements, but there is no program that can be tracked and read that necessarily represents the movement. (Even fascist-nationalist groups claimed and welcomed the October rebellion, for example.)
\n\nIn our view, there was a process of strengthening organization and communication, a reworking and proliferation of ideas at a grassroots level, and critical lessons developed by sectors of the social and popular political movement during the last decades. In this sense, the goals of the people (which may or may not have included a new constitution) should arise from the popular movement itself, which means expanding, strengthening, and developing cultural and relational work within and between social and political organizations. This was all centered on the possibility of a sustainable transformative project with a real social base, with its feet well planted in the soil of the territories in order to resist the attacks of capital, and nourished from the roots of a people that builds and liberates itself. Symbolically, burying the Pinochet constitution provided the possibility of making a clear break with the neoliberal policies it enshrined and integrating the various struggles into a common goal. Now the question of how to generate these transformations has become a difficult step in approaching social maturity, which requires revisiting the same questions of personal and individual accommodation as they apply to the large sector of people who are less convinced.
\n\nIf you could go back to May 2021—or even October 2019—what would you do differently?
\n\nMaybe we would go back to November 2019 and try to get everyone not to accept the agreement, instead looking for paths forward that could strengthen the organizations, popular power, and autonomous direct actions without the pressure of institutional power. Now, if the movement had accepted the agreement anyway, we could have tried to strengthen the conversation from there, as well as the discussions prior to the constitutional convention, in order to advance a clearer and more unified proposal for the new constitution: both involving the key aspects that it should include as well as the sort of procedures necessary to ensure that more people would participate in and identify with the project. And from there, we could generate spaces for information, communication, and group learning that would have made it possible to understand the complex legislative language that lends itself to numerous interpretations and thus gave space for confused and erroneous ideas.
\n\nHave the results of the plebecite changed your analysis regarding which strategies will be most effective for liberation and social change?
\n\nIn broad terms, it has not significantly changed our analysis, when it comes to our own political practice, but we do feel a greater urgency to continue to invigorate the spaces we described above; we consider this to be equally necessary after the results of the plebiscite. Without a doubt, the electoral processes that have taken place since the popular revolt of 2019 have served to discipline genuinely subversive political currents, channeling political expression into a representative framework of agreements in which questions are defined by power groups and limited to consultation via vote, and all of this takes place by the least direct route, which has the effect of demobilizing the population. Even as we are still evaluating the recent results, we ask and challenge ourselves: “How do we sustain a radical social dialogue which, on one side, enables us to participate in political processes, debate, and discussion about the basic rights of the people, while on the other, enables us to reveal the limitations and superficiality of ‘representative democracy’ as a giant machine intent on dampening social revolutionary processes in order to maintain the status quo?”
\n\nStarting from the political structure of the “state,” and even more so in the global capitalist neoliberal context, makes it incredibly difficult to achieve transformation and the liberation of the people. The story that repeats itself is one of assimilation, co-optation, and increasing domination; progressive movements often allow and encourage this (sometimes even more than the right itself). We acknowledge the reality of the state and we do not mean to devalue authentically leftist groups that fight for social change from within the institutional sphere of political power, but our vision is to strengthen territorial autonomy in terms of thought, culture, resources, and health, undermining the very foundations of power, demonstrating its artificiality and its way of creating needs and addictions. We recognize that institutional changes impact social and cultural processes, which is why we are neither indifferent nor neutral, but this is not how we approach work or transformation. The institutional struggle has demonstrated its limitations, at least in this phase of the development of consciousness.
\n\nPerhaps there are other strategic issues that we will see more clearly once this stage of the process is over, such as the necessity to confront the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism, the possibility of creating a counterculture that it has a greater scope. We also foresee the necessity of establishing genuine dialogue between those who identify as part of the revolutionary left, especially those who do not engage with the institutions. The usual propaganda and criticism, mutual defamation, and invalidation of differences renders dialogue more difficult.
\n\nIn order to form a sense of collectivity, we should value humility, wisdom, freedom of expression, being a good guest and a good host, caring for and developing the sort of expression that builds bridges and validates our differences, compassion and the ability to see the virtues within every person and their individual, genealogical, and ancestral sufferings, which run through us all and cloud our judgment. That is to say—we should listen to, care for, and accompany each other more, practices that enable us to build a collective sense. We consider all of these things important for getting together (without creating a hegemony) towards a common horizon. The construction and practice of a culture and ethics which comes forth from the earth and is nourished by the sky.
\n\nDemonstrations in Chile on September 11, 2022 rejecting the legacy of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and remembering Claudia López, among others.
\nThe following reflection from the streets of Chile appeared on our podcast in November 2019, only a few weeks into the uprising, in response to the original proposal for a plebiscite introducing a constitutional process. It still strikes us as a wise response.
\n\nOn November 15, a majority of the parties in congress approved a more specific deal for how the plebiscite will be run, calling the deal “The Agreement for Social Peace.”
\n\nThere was some anxiety in the movement that this concession would finally placate a critical mass of people in the streets. Some of the popular assemblies and cabildos, or, colonial style councils, started to orient their discussions around a new constitution. Even some politicians were encouraging cabildos. I was nervous that what Piñera couldn’t achieve with the iron fist of the military, he was achieving with the velvet glove of democratic potential. I was wrong though. The most important slogan of the movement arose to the surface again, just like it had with previous concessions like Piñera’s tablescrap social reforms, the cancelling of the metro fare hike, and when he fired his cabinet: “Aún No Ganamos Nada” or, “We Have Won Nothing Yet,” basically a call to keep filling the streets, to not settle for scraps, to keep fighting for dignity.
\n\nThere’s a spectrum of opinions within the movement about the demand for a Consitutional Assembly. Most anarchists, for example, see it as a distraction and a way for the state to recuperate the legitimacy that it has lost. On the other hand, I think Piñera’s announcement did actually surprise people and give them a sense of their power—a plebiscite to decide whether people wanted a new constitution is totally historic. That wasn’t even on the table during the 1988 plebiscite that ended the dictatorship. However, I think most of the popular assemblies and people in the streets, including some anarchists, see the process Piñera proposed as illegitimate because they don’t see it as leading to a “true” constitutional assembly, and a “true” constitutional assembly means all kinds of different things to different people.
\n\nJust to give you a taste of what this sounds like, here’s the communiqué about rejecting the “Agreement for Social Peace” from the neighborhood assembly in Plaza Bogotá:
\n\n\n\n\n“We wholly reject this agreement. The content and proposal of this illegitimate ‘agreement’ do not seem motivated towards generating a consititutional process that is representative and participatory for the people, rather, it simply reproduces the old form of making deals that benefit the elite. We do not accept any constitutional process that doesn’t work towards truth and justice—we say NO to impunity. We demand that President Piñera step down immediately, having been the chief politician responsible for multiple violations of human rights. Our assembly considers any agreement without a solution for the current needs of justice and dignity to be an illegitimate agreement.
\n\n“We will self-organize a people’s plebiscite in coordination with other regions and neighborhoods. We will work to build horizontal links of organization and coordination with other self-organized popular assemblies toward the goal of holding a people’s plebiscite that can be carried out in different areas and, through this, we can freely and sovereignly self-determine what it is the people actually want in a new constitution.
\n\n“We will not give up the streets. We will keep protesting actively in our territory since we believe that the struggle must go on in order to demonstrate our rejection to the imposition of the state and its institutions onto the current process of social constitution in the streets.
\n\n“We call on the people to reject this agreement, in which we weren’t invited to participate or form, which is presented to us today as an exit from conflict. Furthermore we call on people to join this call for an autonomous plebiscite throughout the territories as an exercise of our own independent power. Until diginity becomes the custom.”
\n
As an anarchist, there are some things I agree with in the communiqué, and some things I don’t, and surely there were even other anarchists who helped shape the communiqué. Overall, though, I wish more of the assemblies were oriented towards things we can do rather than what we think about ongoing issues…because when it comes to ideology, we’ll never all agree. The assembly in my neighborhood involves Trotskyists, anarchists, liberals, and those identities aren’t changing any time soon, and whenever we talk about what needs to happen with the constitutional assembly it’s just a broken record of grand schemes for social change. Instead, I wish we were discussing things like, if martial law is declared again, what will we do? What is our neighborhood’s policy on looting—like, maybe immigrants and mothers get first pick? How do we stop our neighbors from getting evicted? When something big goes down, where will we gather? Orienting the discussions around breaking the law, together, rather than shaping the law. The communiqué about the plebiscite does call for the most important thing, however, which is not giving up the streets in light of the Agreement for Social Peace.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/9.jpg\")
Graffiti reading “September is black—nothing to celebrate”; “vengeance”; and “freedom to prisoners.”
\nModatima and other organizations are part of the broader social movement “No más zonas de sacrificio” (no more sacrifice zones) against industrial pollution in Chile. They approach environmental justice with a class analysis, recognizing that national economic development relies on extractive industries, foreign investment, and international corporate profits. For example, the plantation lumber industry has done considerable harm to water in many Mapuche communities; some of the most insurgent Mapuche communities happen to be the ones that do not have enough water to meet basic human rights standards. ↩
\nThe NO+AFP (“no more AFP”) movement organizes protests against the Pension Fund Administrators (Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, or AFP). ↩
\nInterviewee’s note: We refer to the political caste because it is comprised of groups, the majority of which have developed in the political institutions without considering the real popular base or the world of the workers. Even though new groups have emerged within the political institutions following the initial student movement (such as Frente Amplio, the principle collective coalition of the government), they have adopted the same political marketing strategy: rather than building from and with social bases, offering a publicity product. ↩
\nIn the following text, a Sri Lankan anarchist who participated in the protest movement that toppled president Gotabaya Rajapaksa reflects on Gota Go Gama (“Gota Go Home”), the occupation at the heart of the movement. Gama is Sinhala for “village”; the Tamil equivalent is Gramam. Starting on April 9, protesters established a permanent occupation at Galle Face, the half-kilometer-long oceanside park in downtown Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. On July 9, a combative crowd stormed the Presidential Palace, the Presidential Secretariat, and the residence of the Prime Minister, forcing Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country.
\n\nYou can read interviews with participants in this movement here and a reflection on its relation to other uprisings of our time here. The author of the following text signed it “the Gadfly”—you can reach them here. Photographs courtesy of Riyal Riffai.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/16.jpg\")
A demonstrator in a car parade on April 4, 2022.
\n\n\n\n“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. Gota Go Gama was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…
\n\nThere was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
\n\nAnd that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
\n\nSo now you can go up on that steep hill in Galle Face and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”
\n\n-Gatherer S. Thompson
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/7.jpg\")
April 9 was the first day of the protests at Galle Face, which led to the establishment of the occupation.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/17.jpg\")
Demonstrators on April 9, at the opening of the occupation movement.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/8.jpg\")
Protesters on April 10, 2022.
\nIt was Sri Lanka’s Woodstock, Kronstadt, and Occupy Wall Street all rolled into one. For most of us, it started in April. With the near constant rain and mud caking our feet we all chanted, thousand strong, “Gota Go Home!”
\n\nWe grew up hearing about the glory days of the 1953 Hartal [general strike]. That’s when Sri Lanka came to a standstill and everyone basically up and went on strike. “The people came out of their homes and cooked rice on the railway tracks,” the baby boomers used to say. “The country was a ghost town.”
\n\nThen we have the sour memories of the bloody late eighties. While America was grooving to “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and watching “Say Anything,” Sri Lanka was serenaded by screams coming out of torture chambers and sight of the latest charred, broken bodies smoldering on tire pyres.
\n\nBut thirty years later, something very different happened and it was a refreshing change from the political tripe we have been fed since the 1990s.
\n\nGota [former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa] came promising the people a wonderland, but all they got was a purgatory of blackouts and inflation. The free markets couldn’t fix the mess; the man was robbing us blind and queues for essentials stretched for miles and miles. Shit really hit the fan when even the middle class (i.e., the don’t-give-a-shit class) came out to the streets to protest. Everything erupted when the protestors went to Mirihana [the suburb where Gotabaya Rajapaksa lived] to catcall the old goat in his decadent lair. The rest of the country watched, glued to their TVs; slow grins spread on their faces as they saw police barricades toppled with triumphant vigor.
\n\nThat was the moment when sheep became lions. In the days that followed, the rabble marched to the patch of grass called Galle Face and swore with fists in the air that they would not move until Gota went home.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/9.jpg\")
Protesters on April 14, 2022.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/10.jpg\")
Protesters on April 14, 2022.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/11.jpg\")
People reading in the library at the occupation on April 16, 2022.
\nGGG was Sri Lanka’s first truly leaderless movement.
\n\n“Well, no one is in charge here, brother. In fact, it is all of us who are in charge. You, me, and that guy over there,” someone said at Galle Face.
\n\nAnarchos: Greek for “Without rulers or leaders.”
\n\nBut that didn’t stop the cops from arresting people they believed to be leaders.
\n\nIn a way, the Galle Face movement being leaderless offered the advantage of frustrating the authorities, who kept looking for a brooding charismatic figure somewhere in the one of the tents planning a revolution.
\n\nOn the first few days of GGG, we remember undercover cops and political spies asking us who the leader was. The Government frantically searched to cut the head off the serpent.
\n\nBut like Ravanan [the mythical ten-headed demon king of Lanka] the Aragalaya [Sinhala for “struggle”], too, was many-headed.
\n\nA few of us knew that a fire had been lit…
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/12.jpg\")
A demonstration on April 17, 2022.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/13.jpg\")
A demonstration on April 17, 2022.
\nMutual aid defines human society. We wouldn’t have come this far if our ancestors had not banded together in tribes for survival.
\n\nBut that sense of community, even in Asia (or should we say, especially in Asia), had been lost to time with every iteration of the state.
\n\nGGG re-affirmed the importance of community by building one that took care of a revolution happening in the heart of Colombo.
\n\nThere was a kitchen, a hospital, a guerrilla garden, distribution points, a library, a cinema, and a school, while two trucks with solar panels served as power plants! \nThose who could contributed with food, clothing, tents and books. Those who couldn’t lent their hands to build and run the Gama.
\n\nThe protest site was called an Adarasha Gammanaya, or “model village.”
\n\nThe Sri Lankan government had tried to create such Adarasha Gammanayas before, like the Kibbutz-inspired gammudawa project [Gam Udawa, “rising villages”]. But it was our little Gama that got the world talking!
\n\nBuilding autonomy and self-reliance had been tried before in Sri Lanka, but that was to hold up the image of the ruling regimes; rarely were they for the benefit of the common people.
\n\nBut GGG came together and functioned in a non-exploitive way. Nobody got special privileges and everybody got their fair share. “To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/1.jpg\")
On May 9, prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa—incidentally, the older brother of president Gotabaya Rajapaksa—resigned. His supporters attacked the occupation that day, injuring a large number of people. Protesters retaliated, burning down the homes of a number of politicians.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/2.jpg\")
The aftermath of the May 9 raid on the camp.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/3.jpg\")
May 9: Police are the same all the world over.
\nSri Lanka had been plagued with sectarian violence for a long time. The roots of the bigotry and racism extend back to before independence; politicians have used ethnic differences and strife to divide people efficiently. There are libraries worth of books written about Sri Lanka’s conflict-ridden history; it would take more than just a zine to cover it all.
\n\nGiven the country’s many divisions, the state and its friends waited gleefully for GGG to fall apart in a week. But they were so wrong.
\n\nInstead, they saw our LGBTQ comrades serving Iftar dinners [the meal eaten after sunset during Ramadan] to Muslims,
\nPriests, monks, nuns, and Imams forming human barriers to protect student protestors from police batons,
\nThe Sinhalese memorializing the Tamil lives lost in the race riots of ‘83 and the last phase of the war [the Sri Lankan civil war],
\nA mingling of the classes,
\nAnd a gathering of all people, together for one purpose.
\nThose nights under stars and with the breeze of the Indian Ocean, reminded us what makes us truly human.
\nWe held each other despite our differences:
\nWe understood that it takes all five fingers clenched and raised to strike against the ones who oppress us.
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/15.jpg\")
Demonstrators on the night of May 9, 2022, following the first attack on the occupation.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/14.jpg\")
Demonstrators on the night of May 9, 2022, following the first attack on the occupation. In Sri Lanka, black flags do not necessarily connote anarchism; they are used more widely as a symbol of protest.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/19.jpg\")
A bloc of buddhist monks carrying black flags in protest.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/4.jpg\")
May 16: a sign reading “no justice, no peace.”
\nWe were the Gauls of Galle Face; a barbarian horde throwing ourselves against the Roman shields of the riot police.
\n\nQuite a lot of us got our first dose of CS gas. Spent canisters became a collector’s item. Radical students who had practically been raised on the stuff initiated newbies in the art of street fighting.
\n\nIf eyes are the windows of the soul, then tear-gassed eyes are the floodgates of the dispossessed.
\n\nThe pillars of solidarity and mutual aid supported the Gama’s direct action; especially the 24-hour protest chanting at “Gate Zero,” the main barricade in front of the Presidential Secretariat.
\n\nAccordingly, the walls of the Port City were summarily covered in graffiti and black banners were hung from the lamp posts. Lots of hawkers and small businesses opened up shop just for the crowds of protesters who came pouring in every day.
\n\nThe support network helped GGG open branches in many parts of the island to help educate the people.
\n\nAnd when the state attacked the occupiers on May 9, the people didn’t just stand by; they dispatched the hooligans with haste into the algae-infested waters of Biera Lake.
\n\nIn a country scarred by inter-ethnic riots and massacres, the narrative was flipped on night of May 9 when the people burned down the homes of MPs and other government politicians.
\n\nThe biggest direct action ever in Sri Lanka’s history is without a doubt the storming of the Presidential Palace, the Presidential Secretariat, and the Temple Trees [the official residence of the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka] on July 9. Protesters took to the swimming pools of these decadent houses and thousands flocked to Colombo to romp about in the luxuries that were well out of plebeian reach.
\n\nThe movement, for a time, seem to re-attach the spine that was long removed from a long-suffering people. These were days of triumph for a people subjugated by warlords, despots, imperialists and capitalists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/5.jpg\")
June 5: one of the tents in the occupation.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/6.jpg\")
June 2022: the Pride parade in the capital of Sri Lanka at the height of the occupation movement.
\nThe occupation of the three state buildings didn’t last long and the government’s lapdog media and propagandists were hard at work scaring the public with rumors about minorities secretly funding the protesters, among other things.
\n\nParliament quickly elected Ranil Wickremesinghe to take up Gota’s vacant seat in a desperate bid to save the establishment. Ranil is the Frank Underwood [the chief antagonist in the political thriller House of Cards] of Sri Lankan politics and had been a right-hand man to the Pinochet-style party governments of the late 1980s. His notoriety grew from a rumored torture camp called Batalanda.
\n\nRanil is best known as a cunning deal maker. Strangely, this did not strike the occupiers when they decided to hand over the buildings on July 22. GGG’s juggernaut was lulled into a complacency that all revolutions face when victories are won. We did not see the hand of the deep state at work, slowly chipping away at the ground we stood on.
\n\nIt’s pretty easy for moderates and liberals in any popular movement to take the path of compromise. The pseudo-radical masks some wear slowly melt away when the powers that be toss down a few peanuts—or just the promise of peanuts. The worst offenders are the charismatic mini-politicians that invade radical spaces. They have the charm to divert any and all political discussions to their advantage. They spout the latest ideologies and blend in quite easily, yet have no clue about theory and praxis.
\n\nThe political class are well aware of these types and bait them with privileges in the coming regime, grooming them to become the new statists. Such people have derailed so many of the movements that have come and gone.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/20.jpg\")
July 19: the occupied secretariat.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/21.jpg\")
A CrimethInc. poster hanging in one of the tents in the Gota Go Gama.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/22.jpg\")
Another poster hanging in a tent in the Gota Go Gama on July 16, 2022. The design is by @lightandcrispy_.
\nMeanwhile, the IMF [International Monetary Fund] team had come and gone, promising a bailout that will undoubtedly slam the motherload of austerity measures on the people.
\n\nFuel queues are still a common sight. A loaf of bread rose to 350 rupees, unaffordable to most of the working poor.
\n\nWith the gauntlet thrown down by the state, the forces are hounding the protesters with extreme prejudice. People are being arrested for swiping beer mugs, flags, and other mundane things from the state buildings. Hell, even the guy who hugged the pillar of the Presidential Palace was arrested!
\n\nGGG was cleared a week after a brutal crackdown on July 22. Many protestors were mercilessly beaten with iron rods and electric cables; tents and installations were torn apart. Fears grew when bodies started washing up on the beach next to the occupation site. The headlines were full of drive-by shootings, which the police called “gang violence.”
\n\nTo add insult to injury, the government declared that protestors will be charged 5 million rupees (around $13,800 American dollars) for the damage allegedly done to Galle Face Green.
\n\nGotabhaya, who was hopping around Southeast Asia trying to claim asylum in a third country, flew back to Sri Lanka on the night of September 2 and was quickly taken to the Rajapaksa family home in the South by a group of political sycophants in a jeep convoy. Rumor has it that he might try to creep in the back door of the Parliament and go for the Prime Minister’s seat.
\n\nThe Aragalaya is reeling, but we won’t go quietly into the night. We’ve learned our lessons and are biding our time for the opportune moment to make history again.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/05/18.jpg\")
Aragalaya. Design: AGNI.
\nIn October 2019, an Indigenous and popular uprising broke out in Ecuador in response to a package of neoliberal measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund. After twelve days and eleven deaths, they succeeded in forcing the government to cancel the measures and to grant a subsidy to offset the price of fuel. Now, at the end of June 2022, a new general strike is entering its third week in Ecuador, accompanied by new occupations, demonstrations, and clashes. Once again, the strike is led by the Indigenous movement, facing off once more against the policies of the IMF and increasing fuel prices. During the 2019 revolt, we interviewed a comrade in the Primera Linea [the front lines] in Quito to learn about the dynamics of the revolt in the Ecuadorian capital and the self-management and popular power practices of the “Quito Commune.” Two and a half years later, we reached out to him again.
\n\nWhat does it mean that people in Ecuador have to fight this whole battle all over again so soon after a historic victory? Will the momentum spread throughout Latin America again? Read on.
\n\nFor perspective on what a modern-day general strike might look like in the United States, start here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/2.jpg\")
\nWhat has happened over the last two and a half years in Ecuador so that, after a pandemic and both parliamentary and presidential elections, everything has returned to this point again?
\n\nAfter the popular insurrection of 2019, [then-president] Lenin Moreno began to raise the price of fuel again gradually—in short, the partial victory of 2019 was annulled and we returned to the starting point. Then the current president, Guillermo Lasso, intensified this, sending fuel prices sky high, which has caused a spike in the prices of basic necessities.
\n\nMoreno managed to complete his term, along with his ministers. Along with the high command of the police and the army, they have gone unpunished for the crimes they committed during the October days.
\n\nThe elections took place in 2021. The candidate of the Indigenous movement was Yaku Pérez, who managed to capitalize on the discontent of October—but that was not enough to make it to the general election and challenge Andres Arauz, the Correist candidate. [Brought to power by the “pink tide” that established left governments throughout Latin America, Rafael Correa served as president of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017; today, accused of corruption, he lives in Belgium.] Guillermo Lasso, a banker, responsible for the bank holiday of 1999, reached the second round and won the elections. [In March 1999, fearing hyperinflation, the Ecuadorian government declared a national bank holiday, which ended up lasting a full week; at the time, Guillermo Lasso was CEO of Banco Guayaquil.]
\n\nThere were also elections in the CONAIE [the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador]. The winner was Leónidas Iza, leader of the MIC (Indigenous Movement of Cotopaxi) and one of the leaders of the October revolt.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/1.jpg\")
“Lasso out”: protesters defending themselves from police around the House of Culture in Quito.
\nIn 2019, the uprising in Ecuador helped trigger subsequent uprisings in Chile and elsewhere. Have the movements in Colombia, Chile, and elsewhere in Latin America influenced the movements in Ecuador since then?
\n\nFrom October 2019 on, the populations of several Latin American countries rose up against their governments. However, even though the current events in the country reflect a general, continent-wide crisis and have been decisive in shaping in the collective imaginary, they have clear implications that are tied to the Ecuadorian context. It’s as if something had been left unfinished from the uprising three years ago.
\n\nHow do you see the first year of Lasso’s government? How was it possible for a neoliberal banker to become president after an uprising as strong and successful as the one in 2019? Why has he lost that support so rapidly, so that only one year into power, he faces another popular uprising?
\n\nAppalling. Lasso won thanks to the anti-Correista vote. The scenario would have been different if Yaku Pérez had made it to the second round. Many people voted for Lasso to reject the possible return of the former Citizen Revolution Movement [a party formed by supporters of Rafael Correa]. The divisions within the Indigenous movement contributed to Lasso’s rise to power.
\n\nAs soon as Lasso began his government, he lost his main ally, the Social Christian Party [PSC]. There was immediately conflict with the Constitutional Court. Considering that he is only supported by a minority in the Assembly, this has forced the banker to struggle to figure out how to govern.
\n\nAt first, his main strategy was to arrange the extensive vaccination of the general public, which equipped him with excellent political capital for the first few months. After the pandemic and the vaccination period, the reality of the situation in the country was clear for all to see.
\n\nThe Indigenous movement and several sectors of society sat down to talk with the government twice last year, and the government didn’t listen. What we’re living through now is the result of a lack of response to the demands of Ecuadorian society, which has experienced the raw consequences of poverty, unemployment, destruction of territory, and increased violence in the streets and in jails due to wars between criminal groups. There were four massacres in Ecuadorian prisons (in the last two years, 360 prisoners have been murdered) and contract killings have become an everyday occurrence in the main cities of the country.
\n\nBanks have not canceled the debts of campesinos or workers, despite the pandemic. There can be no economic revival for the poorest because the bankers are suffocating them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/3.jpg\")
The graffiti in the background reads “The dead.”
\nThe current National Strike, seen from the outside, seems very similar to the strike of October 2019. What are the similarities and differences?
\n\nThe 2019 uprising was the uprising of the sons and daughters of the first Indigenous uprising of the 1990s. It is a new generation full of rage and thirsty for justice.
\n\nUnlike the previous strike, it was CONAIE, together with other peasant organizations, that declared a national strike beginning on Monday, June 13. Three years ago, it was students and transport workers—bus drivers, taxi drivers, and truckers—who lit the match.
\n\nThis time, the Indigenous communities resisted in their territories for a week before arriving in Quito. The inhabitants of the capital, especially the students and the inhabitants of the poor neighborhoods, had to sustain the strike in the city alone during the first week. The inhabitants of the suburbs of Quito, especially in the south of the city, have fought in their neighborhoods from day one. This didn’t happen three years ago, or at least not as intensely as it is happening now.
\n\nThe repression has been strong, but apart from the events of Friday, June 24, the police and the military have been more strategic in the ways that they have employed force. This is why there was not an explosion in Quito during the first week. There were marches and clashes with the police, but the situation did not get out of control until the arrival of CONAIE.
\n\nDue to political differences with the leaders of CONAIE, the Frente Unitario de Trabajadores (FUT), the main workers’ union, remained out of the demonstrations this year.
\n\nNot even the truck drivers joined.
\n\nHowever, the solidarity of the people has not changed—indeed, it has grown stronger since the last revolt. The comrades are now better organized despite the difficulties caused by the government.
\n\nOn Sunday, June 19, at the end of the first week of the strike, in response to the announcement of the arrival of communities from all over the country in Quito, the military and the National Police ordered the requisition of the Ecuadorian House of Culture (CCE), so that this site could not serve as a meeting point for the demonstrators, unlike in 2019. Consequently, the Central University became the site of the assemblies and the logistical center of the uprising. This has led to clashes not only in the area of the Arbolito [a historic park in the center of Quito], the Parliament, and the historic city center, but also in the area around the Central University.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/PoliciaEcuador/status/1539516832348090369\n\n\n
June 22: Ecuador police complaining that one police unit “has been destroyed and burned in its entirety, as have the patrol cars and motorcycles that were assigned to the service of citizens,” along with a plea for “no more violence.” Pretty rich, coming from those whose profession is to wield violence against the public.
\n\nCan you give a brief description of the events that have occurred in the course of the strike? What are the chief demands—and have they shifted in the course of the mobilization? What strategies and tactics have demonstrators employed?
\n\nThe national strike began on Monday, June 13. On that day, Indigenous and campesino organizations began blocking roads in their territories. In Quito, students organized a march from the Central University to the city center. The blockades were not particularly strong and the mobilization in the city center was repressed.
\n\nThe outlook suggested that the strike would not be as strong as the one that took place in 2019.
\n\nBut in the early hours of Tuesday, June 14, the government made the mistake of illegally arresting CONAIE leader Leónidas Iza, provoking an immediate reaction across the country. This was what lit the fuse, causing the strike to gain momentum. The police held Leónidas Iza hostage for 24 hours and the protest escalated. In Quito, people attacked the Flagrancia Unit [the police unit focusing on “flagrant crimes”—ironically, “flagrant” originally means “on fire”] and set a police vehicle on fire. In Latacunga, the Indigenous movement occupied the headquarters of the Prosecutor’s Office. The next day, Iza was released, but he had to show up every day to sign paperwork in the city of Latacunga.
\n\nStarting on the second day, the neighborhoods of Quito became active, especially in the south of the city and in the northern suburbs. They were repressed for several days, but continued to resist. Quito’s students and social movements marched for five days in support of the national strike. Thursday, June 16, was the day when the largest number of people took to the streets—approximately 10,000 people. The demonstration took the same approach as the previous ones: a march towards the city center, which was violently repressed by the police.
\n\nThe city of Cuenca also took action, and the police attacked the university where the demonstrators had taken refuge. Academic authorities denounced the incident and called for a much bigger march for the next day.
\n\nIn the capital, where dozens of police infiltrators had been following people after the end of the marches and arresting them, people began to organize groups to identify and remove them from the marches. This put a strain on the repressive apparatus of the police. The demonstrators were wary of the police and photos of these infiltrators circulated on social networks. Likewise, before expelling infiltrators, people took photographs of their faces.
\n\nIt is important to understand what the demands of this national strike are. People are presenting ten demands to the government.
\n\nThese include lower fuel prices; a banking moratorium so that people can reactivate the economy without the pressure of the bank vultures; a halt to exploiting and destroying the territories where there are water sources and where communities live; mechanisms such as prior consultation in the territories where mining or oil extraction is planned.
\n\nAnother demand is to declare a state of emergency in public health and education. Both sectors have been attacked by the government’s neoliberal policies and have seen their budgets shrink.
\n\nFair prices for agricultural products so that farmers can receive what their work is worth. A stricter control by the government on basic necessities, in view of rampant speculation.
\n\nA halt to the privatization of strategic sectors including social security, the Banco del Pacífico, the CNT (National Telecommunications Corporation), and highways. Respect for the 21 collective rights of Indigenous organizations and bilingual education.
\n\nThe last demand is to guarantee the safety of citizens, given the wave of violence in the streets and in the country’s prisons.
\n\nAll these demands are shared by the people who are supporting the national strike.
\n\nAfter five days, faced with the indifference of the government, the Indigenous and campesino movement decided to go to Quito. On Friday, June 17, the government declared a state of emergency in the provinces that were seeing the most unrest and enacted a curfew in Quito from 10 pm to 5 am. On Sunday, June 19, they ordered the requisition of the House of Culture and violently occupied it to prevent people from organizing. Blockading and clashes between residents of Quito’s southern districts and the police continued throughout the weekend.
\n\nOn Monday, June 20, the first caravans of the Indigenous movement began to arrive in the north and south of the capital and were violently repressed. Meanwhile, the students of the Central University and the social movements of Quito occupied the university so that those who were arriving would have a safe place to sleep and organize. In the evening, trucks full of demonstrators began to arrive one by one, but police harassed them from all sides in hopes of preventing them from reaching the city.
\n\nOnly two universities have opened their doors to the Indigenous movement.
\n\nSince the House of Culture was in the hands of the police, the operational center of the national strike shifted to the Central University for the first time. Here, people began to organize the first solidarity kitchens, childcare centers, medical brigades, and storage centers, and the front lines of resistance.
\n\nFrom the morning of Tuesday, June 21, clashes with the police began throughout the northern part of central Quito. The death toll was already rising, eventually reaching five victims. Police threw one demonstrator into a ravine; another, in the province of Puyo, was killed by a tear gas canister that lodged in his skull; others in Quito were killed by buckshot.
\n\nOn Thursday, June 23, a gigantic march took back the House of Culture and the El Arbolito park, and the main assemblies returned to the historic site of the Ecuadorian left. The conflict immediately shifted to the area around the park and the entrances to the National Assembly. Having much more experience this time than during the previous strike, the front lines have been better organized and protected.
\n\nIn the district of San Antonio, in the north of Quito, residents attacked the army when it tried to enter the area to crack down on the demonstrators. One comrade was killed by a shot from the military.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/4.jpg\")
“Lasso, you fucked with my people—you messed up.”
\nOn Friday, June 24, Guillermo Lasso made a broadcast on national television authorizing the police to increase their repressive force. An hour later, the police and the army indiscriminately attacked the House of Culture and the Arbolito, causing a mass escape from the area. Many children and elderly people suffocated as a result of police violence.
\n\nWe were all chased all over the place until we left the area. Dozens of people were arrested and injured. However, the police withdrew from the area in the evening.
\n\nThis weekend, many comrades have returned to their communities, while others are arriving. Collective cleaning tasks have been organized and priority has been given to assemblies to organize the third week of the national strike. On Saturday, June 25, there was a massive march of women and dissidents.
\n\nToday, Sunday, June 26, there are concerts and sports activities at the Central University. An artistic and cultural festival will be held in the House of Culture.
\n\nHowever, the minimum condition for dialogue is an immediate reduction in fuel prices.
\n\nWhich social sectors have mobilized in Ecuador? What social and political alliances have they created?
\n\nThe Indigenous and peasant movements have mobilized, along with the students and the neighborhoods of Quito. The Indigenous and peasant movements are historically the most organized; the students and neighborhoods have become active again in this situation. The neighborhoods of Quito are the surprise of this strike; they have shown a high level of organization and control of the territory.
\n\nMany comrades throughout the country are supporting the national strike, and it is in this context that the main alliances have been woven. Many of them were not organizing together before due to ideological differences, but those have been set aside in view of the importance of the moment. Although not strong enough yet, the social movement has matured enormously, especially in Quito.
\n\nHow do you evaluate the role of CONAIE in this national strike? Has it managed to assert itself as the main protagonist of social opposition to the neoliberal order? Has it succeeded in establishing social alliances beyond the indigenous world?
\n\nCONAIE continues to be the country’s chief political entity and one of the most important in Latin America. Their organizational capacity and collective strength continue to amaze. However, the internal fractures have taken a toll: the force that they have managed to field this time is less than that of 2019. Still, the comrades continue to put their bodies on the line for everyone.
\n\nIt is not easy to come to sleep on cardboard on the floor in coliseums for days. Their determination is amazing.
\n\nBeyond the alliances they may or may not have generated, they are recognized by all as the foremost defenders of the collective rights of Ecuadorian society. What is missing is for the urban social movements to coordinate more with the Indigenous movement and for the latter to learn from the urban movements as well. There is still no assembly in which social collectives can make decisions about what is happening. They are involved in day-to-day organization, they participate in small assemblies, but it has not been possible, for example, to create an assembly that brings together all the social movements of Quito and the front lines that are supporting this national strike.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/5.jpg\")
\nHow do you see the role of CONAIE leader Leonidas Iza, who emerged in October 2019 as a prominent figure from the left of the Indigenous organization and ultimately became its president? How do you understand Iza’s arrest on the second day of the strike? Is he playing more of an agitator or moderator role in the context of social protest? Does he have goals in electoral politics?
\n\nLeónidas Iza is the absolute leader of the national strike. CONAIE now has a leader with clear political ideas and excellent preparation. His ideas are more radical than those of his predecessors. This caused him problems within the movement, but at the same time aroused a lot of sympathy.
\n\nAs I mentioned at the beginning, Iza’s arrest was the trigger that gave force to the national strike.
\n\nThe problem is that Iza’s leadership, intentionally or not, is overshadowing other social and Indigenous leaders. The media also helped centralize all attention on him. He has both moderated and also agitated this movement, depending on the moment.
\n\nThe Indigenous movement wants to have the first Indigenous president in the history of the country, so one way or another, at some point everything that is happening will be capitalized on in electoral politics. I don’t know if Iza or someone else will do it, but this is undeniable.
\n\nWhat role is Correism playing in this national strike?
\n\nJust like three years ago, they participate, but they do not have the slightest control over what is happening. They support the national strike and want to topple Lasso, which is why they were the ones who called the plenary session of the Assembly to discuss the possibility of impeachment on account of nationwide chaos.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/6.jpg\")
\nIt seems that a request for impeachment (muerte cruzada) is being processed in the National Assembly. How likely is this to happen? Is it realistic to anticipate the fall of Lasso, either through parliament or social protest? What can we expect next, a new government elected by Parliament or new elections? Is this something that the movements seek, or do they fear that the political order will reestablish itself in a new form? What prospects are opening up and what opportunities are closing?
\n\nFourteen days have passed and the government still manages to keep itself on its feet with various tricks. The repression that occurred on Friday was a hard blow for everyone.
\n\nThe Indigenous movement has asked its political arm, Pachakutic, to vote in favor of impeachment as an alternative and a way out of the current crisis, if the government fails to respond to the ten demands. They cannot return home with empty pockets; five comrades have already lost their lives.
\n\nUnseating Lasso would not change things, because his vice president would take power and continue the same political project. But it would still set an important new precedent regarding the ability of social movements to obtain results, even if they are only partial.
\n\nThere is not enough force yet to bend Guillermo Lasso, so impeachment has been considered as an option.
\n\nHowever, as I write this, there are still not enough votes to topple the president via impeachment. Yesterday, Lasso strategically withdrew the State of Emergency so as not to justify a national crisis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/29/7.jpg\")
\nWe rose up again. This time, we have more experience, but not enough strength to achieve our objectives. We are resisting and defending ourselves from police and state violence, one day at a time.
\n\nTomorrow, Monday, June 27, a new week of unemployment begins, which will be decisive. We will see if additional subjects and social forces will join in, if the strength in the neighborhoods will increase, if new collective strategies of struggle will emerge, if it will be possible to put the government in difficulty again. Everything is still unknown; what is certain is that resistance continues and we will not give up.
\n\nWe are also aware that this uprising is not going to change the country’s problems at the root, but we know that the next revolt will be better because we are already building that possibility here. The organizational processes that have emerged and that sustain the strike (popular kitchens, medical brigades, front lines, daycare centers for children) are being organized and that fabric is what will remain after all this is over.
\n\nThe rage is great—and so is the desire to win. We continue in the fight, we do not give up.
\n\nWe continue the fight, we do not falter.
\n\nTo learn more about the struggle in Ecuador, we recommend the news sources Wambra radio, Indymedia Ecuador, Conaie comunicación, Acapana, and revista crisis.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/CONAIE_Ecuador/status/1541849225641738240\n\n\n
“The government breaks off dialogue, confirming its authoritarianism, lack of will, and incapacity. Lasso Guillermo is responsible for the consequences of his belligerent policy. We demand respect for our maximum leader. Lasso doesn’t break up with Leonidas, he breaks up with the people.”
\n\nThe Uprising in Ecuador: Inside the Quito Commune—An Interview from on the Front Lines
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/submedia/status/1541850003504775168\n \n
Early on May 28, 2013, a bulldozer arrived in Gezi Park, at the center of Istanbul, and began uprooting trees. Thousands flocked to the park in response, clashing with the police and catalyzing a movement that spread around the country in defiance of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Today, as Erdoğan takes advantage of Turkey’s current leverage within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to plan another invasion of Syria, it is important to remember that he had to suppress powerful social movements in Turkey in order to cement control. Such social movements still represent our best hope for peace and social change—in Turkey, Syria, and all around the world.
\n\nThe following text originally appeared in Rolling Thunder in early 2014. The author has added an introduction penned this week. For more on Turkey, you could start by reading about the background of Kurdish resistance or the roots of Turkish fascism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/26.jpg\")
The Gezi Park uprising, June 2013.
\nThe memory of Gezi is vivid and fresh. It’s as if the barricades went up just last month, not nine years ago. I suppose that’s how you can distinguish a truly historical moment from ordinary run-of-the-mill moments.
\n\nWhat started as a last-ditch effort to protect a public park in the heart of Istanbul accelerated rapidly into an uprising that spread throughout the country, becoming the most widespread and largest movement Turkey had ever seen. From its practices within the occupied park to the humor scribbled on every building, Gezi was unique, a dream realized for any anarchist or leftist radical.
\n\nAlthough the memory is fresh, it is punishingly bittersweet. Looking back on the joy and hope we felt in the streets that June, I wonder—was it naiveté or optimism of the will that led millions to chant “This is only the beginning”?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/11.jpg\")
\nIn hindsight, it was indeed a beginning. But it was not the beginning of the liberation we tried to bring about. Instead, it was followed by a series of counter-revolutionary measures against everything that Gezi stood for.
\n\nHow much counter-revolution can you fit into a decade? Let’s look at the five fronts on which the reaction has advanced in Turkey since 2013:
\n\nGezi was one of many factors that precipitated a falling-out between the two factions within the Turkish brand of islamic neoliberalism, identified with the figureheads Tayyip Erdoğan and Fethullah Gülen. After the rift between them widened, the Gülenist cadres within the armed forces launched an unsuccessful coup attempt against Erdoğan on July 15, 2016. The fallout from this rift between those in power has reverberated throughout Turkey. Erdoğan’s counter-attack was comprehensive; he took advantage of the coup attempt to arrest and imprison all of his opponents, including many of the actors within Gezi. Those who have avoided imprisonment have been blacklisted, lost their employment, and became public targets via the throughly AKP-controlled media channels.
\n\nThe Gezi uprising was a rare moment—perhaps the only one in living memory—when you could see a Turkish nationalist and a PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] supporter fighting on the same side of the barricades against a common enemy. The AKP regime rightly identified this as a threat to its existence; arguably, it could threaten the existence of the Turkish state-building project as a whole. The AKP has attacked this solidarity with extreme violence and repression while intensifying the war against the Kurdish movement in Turkey and Syria and also, recently, in Iraq. For now, the prospect of solidarity between the Turkish left and the Kurdish liberation movement appears distant. Peace caravans and demonstrations organized in solidarity with Rojava were bombed by Islamist mercenaries under the observation of Turkish intelligence services. The leaders of the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), a project explicitly aimed at establishing bonds between the the Kurdish liberation movement and the Turkish left, have been thrown in jail along with thousands of their members. The complete suppression of the HDP is almost a foregone conclusion at this point, the date of it to be determined by Erdoğan’s political calculations.
\n\nGezi’s implicit demands were the removal of Erdoğan and his AKP regime—but at the onset, the politics that drove the defense of the park were shaped by a demand for “the right to the city.” According to some figures, the privatization overseen during the AKP regime amounts to 62 billion dollars and the public land that was sold comprises 75,000 acres. The plunder of public space and resources has accelerated over the past decade as privatization and land development continue to run rampant. Over the past five years, the Turkish lira has lost 75% of its value against the dollar, with the pace accelerating to a loss of 44% last year. Estimates of inflation range between 25% and 70% depending on who is crunching the numbers. Any way you look at it, the currency is at the edge of collapse at the expense of working people. One strategy of survival is to maintain loyalty to the AKP to secure gainful employment and skim off as much as possible. At the top, the AKP cadre and large holding firms close to them have been adding to their fortunes by transferring any remaining wealth to their pockets.
\n\nAlongside the post-coup purges, Erdoğan has been restructuring state institutions including the universities, the governance of charitable organizations, and—most crucially—the judicial system in order to ensure that they all do his bidding. The latest fruits of this restructuring are the convictions of the alleged organizers of the Gezi after a lengthy show trial. Eight people have been handed sentences ranging from 18 years to life for supposedly organizing the Gezi uprising. For those of us who lived through the spontaneous movement that erupted in Gezi, this is a laughable claim: it was a festival of resistance, a carnival of liberation exceeding anything anyone could have organized. Today, it is nearly impossible to even have a peaceful march in Turkey without the police immediately surrounding, beating, and arresting you. The only radical constituent of the Gezi movement that is still able to wield power in the streets is the women’s movement, with their annual March 8 marches and efforts to organize against patriarchal violence.
\n\nThe AKP’s involvement in Syria has enabled it to form tight links with a variety of jihadist organizations. They have been training and arming groups like al-Nusra, hybridizing them with their homegrown equivalents and opening up Turkey as a safe haven for Islamists. Of course, these favors will be called in when the time comes. The aforementioned suicide bombings and the various paramilitary formations operating in Kurdistan offer an indication of what that might look like. The existence of these armed groups melding Turkish nationalism with Islamism and overlapping with the military and police represents a real threat to all stripes of the Turkish opposition, from revolutionaries to liberal democrats. Even rumors that the paramilitaries might take action have a chilling effect on those attempting to organize against the AKP and Erdoğan.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/17.jpg\")
Gezi Park, seen from above.
\nToday, we are waiting on the next presidential election—an election that many of us are counting on as what might be the last chance to get rid of Erdoğan, an election in which the HDP and its sympathizers will once again act as the decisive bloc. It feels momentous, and Erdoğan is indeed losing strength as some members of his cadre jump ship one after another. Yet despite the importance of this upcoming vote—the actual date of which remains to be determined—this is all strangely familiar.
\n\nIn fact, we’ve been here before. For the past ten years, there has always been an election on the horizon that people hope will deal a death blow to Erdoğan. Since Gezi, there have been no less than six of these elections, ranging from a referendum to presidential, parliamentary, and mayoral elections. Some of them were repeated until the “correct” result was delivered. Perhaps this is the counter-revolutionary maneuver that is the most painful. The spirit of direct action and prefigurative politics has been crushed through Erdoğan’s shrewd consolidation of power and brutal repression—leaving us to put all our hope into electoral politics. Once we were fighting for the beginning of a revolution; now we are fighting for the end of our despair.
\n\nOf course, no-one saw the Gezi uprising coming. In retrospect, it shared common threads with the momentum and tactics that produced the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the plaza occupations in Spain and Greece, and the Occupy movement in the United States—but at the time, from where we were standing, it took us by surprise. Similarly, many of the ominous developments we see in Turkey are variations on themes that we also see playing out in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere around the world. As internationalists, we must continue to learn from each other’s struggles and tactics and remember that solidarity is our most powerful weapon against the disease of nationalism.
\n\nAlmost a decade on, as another wave of unrest slowly sweeps back and forth from one side of the planet to the other, the Gezi uprising can serve as a reference point for the high-water mark of the previous wave of rebellion. It might also inform us as to what it will take to surpass it.
\n\nOne lesson: you might unexpectedly find yourself at the beginning of something momentous. The more prepared you are for that moment, the more likely it will be that you will be able to help shape what that something will become.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/12.jpg\")
June 11, 2013, Taksim Square. “In Seattle, we wrote the legal number on our arms in marker to call a lawyer if we were arrested. In Istanbul, people wrote their blood types on their arms. I hear in Egypt, they just write their names.”
\nThe remainder of this text was completed at the beginning of 2014. For a day-by-day account of the uprising, start here.
\n\nMay 27 – Bulldozers arrive at Gezi Park to remove a few trees as part of the government’s development of Taksim Square. A few dozen friends respond immediately and stop the trees from being removed, starting an encampment that grows tenfold in each day that follows.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/21.jpg\")
The pepper spraying of the woman in the red dress on May 28 produced an iconic image of the resistance, which spread through social media.
\nMay 31 – Having been brutally evicted from the park by riot police, a few hundred people attempt to hold a press conference at Taksim Square but are attacked with water cannons. Social media is buzzing with news of the attack. The neighborhoods around the square explode in spontaneous revolt; street fighting continues until early morning.
\n\nJune 1 – The Gezi Resistance recaptures the square and the park from the police and starts to set up an occupation; thousands arrive with tents in tow. The clashes spread around Istanbul and Turkey as people march in solidarity with those defending Gezi Park.
\n\nJune 8-9 – The neighborhoods around the square have been totally transformed by graffiti and barricades, while an autonomous commune takes shape within the park. On June 8, fans from the three major soccer clubs of Istanbul converge on the square for a dramatic show of force. They have put aside previous hostilities towards each other, becoming the principal fighting force against the police, especially the fan club of Besiktas, Carşı. On June 9, there is a much larger demonstration of hundreds of thousands, this time more leftist in character. People claim this is the largest crowd the square has ever seen.
\n\nJune 11 – The police launch an operation at 7 am to take back the square. Fierce clashes continue into the night, but ultimately the police hold the square.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/14.jpg\")
The evening of the police operation to clear the square, June 11. A call was put out to converge on the square. While the numbers were at their highest, the police launched a barrage of tear gas. It was a miracle that another fatal stampede didn’t occur, reprising the tragedy of 1977.
\nJune 15-16 – Having occupied the square for the past four days, the police use it to stage the eviction of Gezi park at 7 pm. The park is quickly cleared, but Istanbul explodes as the city tries to make its way to Taksim. Demonstrators cross the Bosporus bridge for the second time in two weeks. The fighting goes on well into the next day.
\n\nJune 16 – Prime Minister Erdoğan makes his appearance at a massive rally in Istanbul in the style of a conqueror while clashes still continue across the city. He continues to defame, insult, and belittle those in the street.
\n\nJune 18 – Through the initiative of Carşı, forums begin to take place in dozens of parks in different neighborhoods around the city. They are local in flavor, emphasizing various issues that impact the neighborhoods.
\n\nJune 30 – The Gay Pride march is larger than it has ever been, with 50,000 attending. It is as much a march for the Gezi Resistance as for the LGBT community in Istanbul, pointing to the convergence of many struggles through Gezi.
\n\nJuly 8 – The beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims. The Anti-Capitalist Muslims mark the month by organizing people’s iftars, the breaking of the fast at sunset, in public places on newspapers spread on the ground.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/20.jpg\")
\nCarşı is the main fan club of the football team Beşiktaş, with a 30-year legacy behind them. Despite having the Circle A in their logo (previous versions also carried a hammer and sickle), they do not identify as anarchists; the circle A simply represents their “rebel spirit.” Carşı defines itself as apolitical in the sense that it does not support any political party or ideology, yet they have a history of participating in May Day and anti-war demonstrations and opening political banners in their stadium. One of their main slogans is “CARŞI: Against everything, including itself!” Carşı gained a lot of respect during the resistance both for their bravery in street fighting and by providing a space for the soccer fans of all three major Istanbul clubs to unite against the police, putting aside their previous mutual hostility.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/19.jpg\")
On June 8, fans from the three main clubs in Istanbul converged on Taksim Square for a celebratory show of force.
\nAnarchists were integral to the Gezi Resistance, providing the forms of prefigurative politics that shaped the commune in the park and participating at the forefront in fighting the police. Beyond the smaller crews, the most organized anarchist group was DAF—Revolutionary Anarchist Action1—although the sudden emergence of the movement shocked them as much as everyone else. They set up their space right at the entrance with the Anti-Capitalist Muslims on one side and the Kurdish BDP and PKK on the other. Running three social spaces in Istanbul, they were able to provide logistical support in self-organization and also organized workshops and events on the anarchist struggle worldwide.
\n\nThe LGBT community outdid itself at every step as one of the shining constituents of the Gezi Resistance. They held down a section of the occupation at the park and fought on the barricades during some of the most crucial battles, blowing minds in a traditionally macho and homophobic society where queer people are regarded as passive and cowardly despite every example to the contrary. The annual Pride week occurred right after the eviction of the park and served an important role in keeping people in the streets. The Pride March drew more people than ever before: the first example of how movements in Turkey can count on much larger numbers and energy thanks to Gezi.
\n\nWith their slogan “Allah, Bread, Justice,” the Anti-Capitalist Muslims challenged both the Islamist neoliberalism of the AKP and the conservative secularism of some within the Gezi Resistance. They emerged during the May Day celebrations of 2012, drawing on a current of thought leading back to the Iranian Islamic Scholar Ali Şeriati. They organized Friday prayers and other Islamic celebrations at the park in an effort to combat the “pious vs. sinful” polarization pushed by Erdoğan. One of their most successful initiatives occurred at the onset of Ramadan, the month of fasting, which began a few weeks after the eviction of Gezi. As a response to the government-sponsored lavish feasts to break the fast at sundown, they organized “earth tables.” Throughout the month of Ramadan thousands of people around the country broke their fast together upon newspapers on the ground, sometimes directly in front of water cannons.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/13.jpg\")
Anti-Capitalist Muslims holding Friday prayers at Gezi Park.
\nDISK and KESK are the two trade union confederations on the left that emerged from the struggles of the 1970s and ’80s. DISK was the main organizer behind the 1977 May Day demonstration in Taksim Square that became the site of a paramilitary massacre. Both confederations supported the Gezi Resistance, attempting to supplement it with calls for strikes. Although two such strikes did happen during the uprising, they were completely ineffective in sabotaging the national economy; once again showing the powerlessness of traditional-form trade unions in the modern class-composition landscape.
\n\nAn umbrella group representing various city-based struggles in Istanbul. Many of their members belong to a budding anti-authoritarian Left scene involved in immigrant rights defense, ecological struggles, and fighting the enclosure of the city. They were involved in defending Gezi Park from development long before the struggle blew up, and were the most organized logistical group within the park due to their already extensive network among those interested in right-to-the-city activism. They attempted to push the movement further by reclaiming a derelict parcel of land within the barricaded zone. Like many other groups, they emerged from June 2013 much stronger, with new projects including a weekly news bulletin and a pirate radio station, Gezi Radio (www.geziradyo.org).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/2.jpg\")
A map of the occupation of Gezi Park.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/16.jpg\")
A map of central Istanbul, with the Bosphorus to the east.
\nI look around and can’t fathom what has become of this place, of the streets where I grew up. Where I went on my first date and went to my first protest, where I had my first drink sitting on the curb, where my friends and I periodically got into trouble. It was all on these streets of Beyoğlu. Now, we are thousands and thousands taunting the police in unison, chanting for them to gas us so we can get going.
\n\nAnd finally it arrives: the canisters are flying in one after another. We are so used to it by now that it is almost a relief to smell the gas; our first reaction is to cheer the arrival of the burning sensation. There’s no panic and no one is running. We make a slow retreat of a few dozen meters before the materials to construct the first barricade of the evening are brought to the forefront. This is the beginning of a two-day battle to take back the square. We’ve all lost count, but probably the fifth or sixth such battle since the end of May.
\n\nThe AKP government, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at its helm, took power in Turkey ten years ago and embarked upon itslong-term project of transforming the country into an exemplary Islamic neoliberal stronghold. The latest stage of Sultan Erdoğan’s vision has been a concerted attack on Istanbul through a number of urban transformation projects that would enclose the remaining public spaces in the city. One of these was to destroy Gezi Park to make way for a commercial shopping complex in the heart of the city, Taksim Square, effectively erasing the long history and culture associated with that space.
\n\nTwo months prior, in April, there were only about 300 of us at Gezi as part of a day-long festival to fight the development of the park. At that time, my comrades and I acknowledged that we were in yet another losing fight, after having been through so many. There was some energy at the festival, but we were mostly just the usual suspects. It was hard not to be cynical. At least we made a stand, we told ourselves; hopefully history will remember that some were opposed to what Istanbul was slated to become. It was just as depressing as every previous moment of the five years of AKP rule. It felt like there was no space to move, even to breathe, as Erdoğan consolidated his grip on our lives.
\n\nAlthough at home it felt more and more claustrophobic, the pundits of politics and economy observing from afar kept glorifying the successes of the Turkish miracle. “More than 10% annual growth rate!” “Look at Greece and Spain, Turkey is doing amazing!” Yes, Turkey has been spared the austerity measures that have been implemented in countries such as Portugal, Spain, and Greece, but this has been the result of another crisis-fighting strategy: extreme urban development through the enclosure of the city. Although initially hit by the financial crisis in 2008, the AKP government was able to keep full fiscal blowout at bay by attracting foreign liquid capital in a scheme intrinsically tied to urban development projects such as the destruction of Gezi Park.
\n\nAs I observed the hundreds of thousands around me in Taksim Square, I couldn’t help imagining that this might be the crucial turn from the austerity riots of the past years. Gezi was—at least in part—an uprising against the enclosure of the city in a time of an economic boom; it was not a protest demanding a return to the Keynesian dream. That said, the clock is ticking on the Turkish economy; the foreign debt holders will come knocking on the door soon. One can only hope that a population having struggled during boom-time development won’t settle for a return to liquidity once a financial crisis brings about austerity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/3.jpg\")
Burnt media vans form a makeshift barricade in front of the Ataturk Cultural Center, draped in the banners of leftist organizations and other groups.
\nTaksim Square is a heavy place for my parents’ generation. My uncles and aunts have told me the story of the Taksim Square massacre on May Day 1977, when snipers on rooftops and the ensuing panic killed 34 people. Since then, Taksim Square has been the hotly contested zone of May Day celebrations; many of the demonstrations of the past five years have become street battles to take the square. Despite the ritualistic nature of these protests, they were instrumental in injecting life into a Left that had found itself in a rut, powerless.
\n\nAt first, my relatives hadn’t wanted to talk about the old militant student movement, though they had been integral to it. They claimed to have moved on from that period of their lives. But it was clear to me that rather than having moved on or even sold out, they had been crushed by the successive military coups of 1971 and 1980. Thousands of leftist students were rounded up, imprisoned, and tortured by the military regimes. In addition to dozens of extrajudicial paramilitary killings, military tribunals hanged more than 50 people. The trauma of the iron fist still hangs over the society in Turkey and has been blamed for the “apolitical” culture of my generation, those born in the 1980s and ’90s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/27.jpg\")
Taksim Square on May Day 1977, the day of the massacre of 34 people.
\nCursed by what preceded it, this apolitical generation created as if out of thin air the most defiant, diffuse, and long-lasting popular uprising in the history of the country. Older leftists are still trying to wrap their heads around this. The joyful rebellion did not fit into their stale frameworks; it did not compute with their Trotskys and Lenins.
\n\nThis was the beauty of the Gezi resistance. That nobody saw it coming. Not one person or group in Turkey can claim with a straight face that they predicted what transpired at the end of May and into June. The euphoria that dominated the streets of Istanbul had a lot to dowith the unexpectedness of the revolt. Millions of people had their wildest wishes fulfilled overnight as if by a magical insurrectionary genie. Isolation and depression evaporated as people found each other in the tear gas.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/4.jpg\")
Barricade number 4 on Inonu Caddesi, with the Bosporus Strait dividing Europe from Asia in the background. This barricade was named for Abdullah Cömert, killed on June 3 by a tear gas canister shot at his head in the southeastern city of Hatay.
\nGezi Park was a beautiful commune for almost two weeks. Spontaneity and autonomy were the rules of the game; after the park was retaken, the first tents went up with the initiative of small groups of friends. The whole park rapidly filled with tents to sleep in and dozens of larger structures hosting almost every single leftist or activist group. Mutual aid was the order of this utopia. Starry-eyed old-timers and fresh militants were living a dream come true. Leaving their normal existence behind for the time being, people who had never imagined a world without police were impressed to discover a more harmonious society in the absence of the state.
\n\nGerman pianist David Martello brought his piano to the barricades on June 12, 2013, providing inspiration and encouragement to all who were tensely awaiting the next police attack.
\nThe encampment at Gezi Park bore some similarities to the experience of Occupy in the US. It was an experiment in self-organization: free stores (called Revolutionary Markets), libraries, a permaculture space, workshops, multiple kitchens, a medic tent, media production zones, and cultural events were part and parcel of the space. Yet in other respects, it was totally different from Occupy.
\n\nFor example, there were no general assemblies or decision-making processes apart from those organized by the constituents of the camp in their smaller affinity or organizational groups. The central podium was an ongoing open-mic where people were free to speak as they pleased and some larger concerts and film screenings took place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/18.jpg\")
A library in Gezi Park during the occupation.
\nDespite the absence of a centralized decision-making body, the camp was home to many different organizations in addition to the individuals and groups of friends who were also there. The occupation resembled an open-air fair of Left, revolutionary, and identity-based groups. Each group eventually carved out a little space where members would camp and congregate.
\n\nThis was especially the case while the square itself was occupied. Almost every far-left group opened up a tent with their flags flying on top. At one end of the square looms the Atatürk Cultural Center, which was adorned with dozens of banners representing many of the same groups camped out in the square and the park. What a slap in the face this must have been for Erdoğan, who had unleashed police violence for years every May Day to prevent rallies of a few hours. This surreal landscape was refreshing in that it showed a rare moment of unity among groups that evolved through sectarian split after split, stretching back to Turkey’s militant-leftist 1970s. However,\nit was dismaying that the pissing contest between organizations promoting their names and logos continued even in these circumstances.
\n\nThe Gezi occupation also differed from Occupy in class composition. While in the US, many of the occupations became de facto homeless encampments, this was not the case in Istanbul. Perhaps because the occupation broke out at the end of the school year, during the day the occupiers were mainly people in their 20s—a budding white-collar workforce slated for the malls and business plazas of AKP’s future. This changed at the end of each workday when thousands of older people passed through until the late hours of the evening.
\n\nCritiques have been leveled at the Gezi Resistance for being too nationalistic in tone. While this was partly true at the onset of the uprising, it was quickly transformed by the participation of Kurdish groups. The Peace andDemocracy Party (BDP), the political party of the Kurdish struggle, claimed the space to the left of the entrance. Kurdish youth raised the flag of the PKK and portraits of their leader Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned in a Turkish island prison since 1999. For those who remembered the bloody 1990s, when the majority of the 35,000 deaths from the civil war occurred, it was surreal to see the face of public enemy number one flying on flags over Taksim square. Up until recently, politicians would not even dare speak Öcalan’s name in public, instead referring to him as the “head of the terrorists.”
\n\nEvery night, the commune transformed into a massive party and celebration. Huge circular halay dances with hundreds of Kurds singing their songs of liberation occurred at the entrance; deeper inside the park, participants consumed copious amounts of alcohol. This public drunkenness expressed defiance of the AKP and its policies of piety, but it also generated controversy, as some from the encampment wanted a more serious and less intoxicated resistance and others thought it inappropriate to be partying while comrades were still fighting the police in Ankara and elsewhere in Turkey—even in other Istanbul neighborhoods such as Gazi.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/22.jpg\")
“Freedom for the headscarf and for alcohol!”
\nDuring the taking of the square and the weeks that followed, the air was thick with the excitement of a city in resistance. Indeed, “resistance” became the assumed name for what was going on; those on the streets saw themselves as part of a resistance movement against the AKP, its vision for Turkey, and its police state. This resistance was expressed in the creative energy, wit, and humor unleashed upon the walls of Istanbul. The liberated zone was visually transformed, thanks in part to street vendors who seamlessly switched from selling their usual fare of sunglasses, clothes, and tourist schwag to spray paint, helmets, and gas masks.
\n\nWall space ran out; you had to wander around searching for a place to throw up your most recent witty slogan.Istanbul jam-packed the streets with obscure references to popular culture, internet memes, and nose-thumbing at the government. Word plays celebrated the ubiquitous tear gas:“ Does it come in strawberry?” Erdoğan’s statements were flung back at him, such as when he said each woman should bear three children: “I’m gonna make three kids and have them jump you.” Another hilarious quip waited around every corner: “Tayyip Winter is Coming,”2 “We’re gonna destroy the government and build a mall in its place,” “Incredible Halk,”3 “You weren’t gonna ban that last beer,”4 “Everyday I’m Chapuling,”5 and on and on for kilometers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/23.jpg\")
“Until you run out of gray paint!”
\nThe takeover was so complete that even some of the non-sympathetic business establishments had to comply or suffer mob justice. One of the owners of a döner kebab stand at the entrance of Istiklal Avenue off of Taksim Square made the mistake of posting on Facebook about the “dogs” who had taken over and his desire to live in a Muslim country. His restaurant was reduced to rubble moments after and the board of his company had to fire him. Other businesses that did not demonstrate solidarity with the resistance were repeatedly pressured and taunted. Even Starbucks Turkey, having received some heat for not assisting protestors, had to issue a press statement expressing that it was with the resistance and would always provide support.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/15.jpg\")
One of the owners of a döner kebab stand at the entrance of Istiklal Avenue off of Taksim Square made the mistake of posting on Facebook about the “dogs” who had taken over and his desire to live in a Muslim country. His restaurant was reduced to rubble moments after and the board of his company had to fire him.
\nThe fact that many from the bourgeoisie supported the uprising underscores the central contradiction of the movement. Members of the old-guard secular and liberal bourgeoisie appeared to embrace the Gezi Movement—most notably the Koç Group, one of the few family brand-name dynasties in Turkey. They went as far as providing infrastructural support by opening up their franchise of the Hyatt alongside the park to serve as a makeshift hospital. Mobile telephone providers brought cell phone transmission vans behind the barricades in orderto facilitate the ever-increasing traffic of text messages and tweets. Ironically, they had to hang banners reading “This vehicle is here so that you have reception” as insurance against arson.
\n\nHow could the interests of a faction of the bourgeoisie converge with those wanting to stop development in Istanbul? This was a product of an intra-ruling-class conflict that had been brewing for years between green (Islamic) capital, under Erdoğan’s favoritism and facilitation, and the old-guard secular capitalist class that had been sidelined and saw the Gezi uprising as an opportunity. It also reflected the desire to be part of a movement to preserve the individual freedoms and rights of modernity, recently under attack by the Islam-tinted neoliberalism of the AKP. The fact that a part of the ruling class of Turkey supported the Gezi movement points to its success at becoming all-encompassing and also its failure to become an anti-capitalist force, despite the massive number of anti-capitalists involved.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/24.jpg\")
“Tayyip [Erdoğan] blocked us on Facebook!”
\nAll of this transpired behind dozens of barricades set up around the liberated zone of Taksim and the park. On one of the main avenues leading into the square, Inönü Avenue, there were 15 separate barricades constructed from bricks, construction debris, busses, cars, rebar cemented down to point outwards, trash containers, and everything else. Constructed from materials passed hand-to-hand by human chains of fifty or more people, these barricades stood many meters high.
\n\nAs in other cities where barricades have stood consistently, such as Oaxaca where in 2006, they were maintained for months, the barricades developed their own rebel culture. Crews of mostly younger kids or leftist militant youth claimed barricades for their own with a sense of pride and conviction. Little tents and squatted spaces storing rocks and bottles near certain barricades also provided shelter for their guardians to rest. These were the outliers, the barricades at the edge of the commune. The more central ones had been claimed with banners and flags in the leftist pissing contest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/5.jpg\")
\nI am woken up by a comrade who tells me that the police are in the square. I rush to get there. I run across the barricade of the Socialist Democratic Party (SDP) at the edge of the square, a few hundred meters from their offices. It’s a massive metal structure made of scaffoldings, concrete barriers, and other material scavenged from construction sites. Molotov cocktails are being tossed by a handful of people in front of the barricade, behind a shield that reads “SDP Public Order Enforcement.” From the higher vantage point of the park, hundreds of people are watching this unfold as if at a soccer match, cheering when a Molotov explodes on the advancing water cannon and booing when the cannon attempts to ram through the barricade. A few hours later, the media posts pictures of those tossing the firebombs and the twitter feeds light up with conspiracy theories about how they are actually police provocateurs. The evidence? A bulge beneath one of their belts—supposedly a radio or firearm.
\n\nThis assumption takes hold like wildfire; in no time, even the international media is circulating it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/10.jpg\")
Leftist militant or police infiltrator? Many pacifists were quick to label those fighting back during the eviction of the square on June 11 as paid police provocateurs. None of these allegations proved true.
\nThose at the barricade eventually have to retreat into the SDP office, and 70 people are arrested in a raid. Among them is Ulaş Bayraktaroğlu, identified in pictures clearly as one of the main people throwing the Molotovs: he’s a former political prisoner from the state-invented Revolutionary Headquarters case, and a member of the central committee of the SDP. The police also show a handgun they say was found among other weapons in the offices. The conspiracy theorists update their stories. Despite their determination to remain in denial, the pacifists involved in the Gezi Resistance are confronted with the fact that this movement also includes bona fide leftist militants, some of whom are involved in armed factions. So much for the spin doctors and liberal intellectuals who want to frame Gezi as Turkey’s version of Occupy, who hurry to label those who fight back as provocateurs.
\n\nAll day and into the night, there is intense street fighting in and around the square, while inside Gezi Park a strange tranquility reigns. The calm is occasionally interrupted by medics rushing the injured from the streets into the medical area. From time to time, the police launch a barrage of tear gas into the park; some put on their gas masks so they can continue their conversations, while others rush to extinguish the canisters. In the end, the square is left to the police. All in all, it feels like another normal day at Gezi.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/6.jpg\")
\nOne evening, I go to the neighborhood of Gazi, a stronghold of DHKP-C (The Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party—Front) and other leftist urban guerillas. The DHKP-C has come to resemble a death cult of martyrdom in their use of suicide bombers. Despite their undeniable ability to assassinate police, in their communiqué of support for the Gezi Resistance they said that they would not launch any attacks until absolutely necessary, as they want to see the street-fighting movement mature without such interventions. Hats off to them.
\n\nThe fighting never stopped in the neighborhood of Gazi even when the reclaimed Gezi Park resembled a massive party behind barricades. Although only 19 kilometers away, Gazi is much further in class terms from the more white-collar resistance in Gezi, and has its own history and culture of resistance. A slum dating to the ’60s, it was the destination of many refugees from the Kurdish civil war, and it has always been a strong enclave of the leftist Alevi population of Istanbul.
\n\nIn 1995, a paramilitary drive-by attack on two cafés and a bakery left an elderly man dead before the attackers fled to the local police station. It was\na provocation in the true sense, not the kind alleged by pacifists at Gezi. After the vehicle rushed to the police station, neighbors immediately gathered in front of it, only to be fired upon with high-caliber machine guns. Another person died on the spot and many others were wounded.
\n\nGazi exploded. For four days, it was in open revolt, with battles against the police and the army. In the end, seventeen people were killed and the rebellion was brutally crushed, but it left a deep mark.
\n\nSome Greek comrades who go to Gazi looking for that Aegean solidarity in the flame of a bottle say that they have never seen such large Molotovs. Indeed, every evening a march starts up on the main street and becomes an urban war with fireworks, stones, slingshots, and Molotovs directed against the police and their armored vehicles, met by tear gas and a plethora of explosives and projectiles. People from the neighborhood tell me that at times both sides have also fired upon each other, but no one has caught a bullet yet.
\n\nAt Gezi Park, the Gazi neighborhood has become a mythical land where superhero leftists wage war on the pigs. It’s distant enough to be an Other inspiring admiration. This reminds me of how US liberals love it when the Third World riots against corrupt governments, yet line up to protect the police from angry youth in their own cities. The sentiment in Turkey is not as bad as in the US though—how could it be? When the police attack Gezi, people fantasize about Gazi coming to the rescue. As usual, Twitter is the venue for rumors: “Gazi neighborhood is on the highway marching to Taksim!” “The police are totally fucked now that Gazi is coming,” but the superheroes never arrive en masse.
\n\nThat is, not until the last attack on the park on Saturday June 15. That day, thousands of residents from Gazi walked on the highway at night and fought their way to Taksim, finally reaching the city center by morning. They joined in with those attempting to take back the square; but even with their help, in the end, we could not recapture the square for a second time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/7.jpg\")
\nTension reigned after the police took Taksim square on June 11. Everybody was waiting for the inevitable final battle. It was clear that the police had taken the square in order to prepare a staging ground from which to take back Gezi Park. Walking around the encampment, you could feel the urgency. Some were collecting the most valuable things to be rescued in case of a raid; others were preparing, filling balloons with a panoply of fire accelerants. The counter-insurgency strategy of the state was in full force: Erdoğan and his cronies kept emphasizing that naïve young environmentalists were becoming pawns in the hands of leftist terrorists, and that those who were behind all this unrest were actually the “interest lobby”6 or “foreign agents.”
\n\nThe government used outright lies to rile up its base against the Gezi Resistance. The day after the park was reclaimed for the commune, on June 1, the heaviest fighting occurred in Beşiktaş, as the soccer fan club Carşı tried to make its way up the hill to reach Taksim. They fought for hours in their own neighborhood, in one instance hijacking a massive bulldozer to charge the police lines. When it seemed like the police were on the verge of committing a massacre, hundreds of people fled into a nearby mosque seeking shelter. The muezzin, who sings the call for prayer, let people into the mosque and facilitated the formation of a makeshift clinic. Blood was oozing from multiple head injuries and many were vomiting from the tear gas.
\n\nThis episode was brought up over and over again by the AKP and Erdoğan himself to illustrate the sinful nature of the resistance. They had entered a mosque with their shoes! They were drinking beer and having orgies! People running for their lives had entered the mosque with their shoes on, but all that transpired inside was a frantic effort to stanch bleeding wounds. Such lies were refuted even by the officials of the mosque itself and served only to infuriate those who were involved in the protests.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/1.jpg\")
The mosque of Valide Sultan is turned into a makeshift medical center treating people injured on the street.
\nErdoğan’s strategy was to polarize the country by defaming the Gezi Resistance. He was counting on his 50% electoral victory, emphasizing his democratic ascension to power. Erdoğan became such a defender of democracy that when he was at his mildest, he would encourage the resistance movement to meet him at the polls in the upcoming elections. The possibility that those reclaiming Gezi and Taksim Square could be done with both the military—the brutal guardians of secular democracy—and with democracy itself, which brought autocratic neo-Islamism to power, was beyond the comprehension of those in power in Turkey. Where the experiment in autonomous self-organization will lead the rebels of Turkey is still uncertain, but the circumstances in which the struggle emerged point to a critique of democracy itself.
\n\nMeanwhile, the government was reading from the counter-insurgency playbook page by page. The AKP met with self-appointed representatives of the movement to seek concessions and prepare a pretext of failed negotiations. The commune rejected such representation outright, holding autonomous forums at seven different areas of the park to discuss how to move forward. The park was cleared while these discussions were still in their initial stages.
\n\nAlthough there were no “naïve environmentalists” at Gezi, there was a degree of naïve trust that the negotiations with the government could at least delay the impending attack. Consequently, the final attack came when people least expected it. The police attacked on June 15, when the park was filled with its usual evening crowd of children and the elderly. They entered Gezi Park, destroying everything and brutally beating everyone in their way. The city exploded once again, as neighborhoods started to make their way towards Taksim to participate in a battle that would last for more than a day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/8.jpg\")
\nThere was something odd about the water cannon that evening, during the eviction of Gezi Park. Instead of spraying at the fiercest members of the resistance at the front, the nozzle was directed to spray over everyone. There was no tear gas launched at that moment, yet the air was acidic, burning in our lungs. Were they using transparent tear gas? Was it some new crowd control weapon?
\n\nIt became clear what was happening when we saw people running into sympathetic bars, furiously stripping off their clothes soaked by the water cannon to reveal that their whole bodies were bright red. Some were convulsing, trying desperately to rub anti-acid solutions all over their skin. The next morning, the newspapers published photos of the pigs loading jugs of pepper-spray into the water cannons. The initial pepper spraying of the woman in the red dress had produced an iconic image of the resistance, which spread through social media. With no sense of irony, the police were now dousing the entire population in pepper spray from the nozzle of the water cannon.
\n\nThe barricade wars went on until the first hours of the morning. After a few hours of sleep, we were back facing the tear gas and ripping up cobblestones on Sıraselviler, one of the streets that lead to Taksim. It was the usual back and forth as we advanced toward the water cannons, only to be sprayed back to our original position behind the barricades. It was Father’s day; some people had hung a banner for our patriarch sultan, reading “Happy Father’s Day, Dear Tayyip.”
\n\nFinally, the police overcame our barricades and there was panic as they charged down the street arresting people. I had the keys to a nearby apartment, so I gathered a group of fugitives who seemed helpless and lost and herded them into it. Eleven people around their mid-20s flooded into the apartment with relief. Peeking out the window, we saw a manhunt on the streets—plainclothes police were sweeping up everyone they found. The fugitives hadn’t forgotten their manners; they clumsily took off their shoes at the door even though I insisted that it didn’t matter under the circumstances. I was reminded of Erdoğan railing against the infidels who didn’t take off their shoes when they went to have their orgy at the mosque.
\n\nIt was a bit awkward, as none of us really knew each other; there seemed to be three or four different groups in the tiny apartment. Everyone was riled up and speaking frantically about the events of the day and the weeks past. Suddenly, I realized that some of them were nationalists; others were upset about people throwing rocks at the police. This was the spirit of the Gezi Resistance: finding yourself in the same space with people you never thought you had anything in common with. I was tempted to argue with them, but after all the tear gas I didn’t have it in me. Later I lamented that missed opportunity.
\n\nAfter the police left, we went back out into the street. It was 9 pm; as on every other night over the past three weeks, people were leaning out of their windows banging on pots and pans. Cars were honking; some residents started chants from their windows as the pot banging subsided: “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism!” “No liberation alone, either all together or none of us!”
\n\nNight had fallen. We began converging on Istiklal Avenue. Once we were a few thousand, we started marching toward the square with the conviction that it belonged to us. The police attacked with tear gas and water cannons. How many times can you experience the same sequence of events and still find joy in the face of it? A group of young and fearless street fighters headed to the front with one of those boxes of fireworks intended to be placed on the ground and watched from a safe distance. They lit it up and held it aimed at the closest water cannon, advancing slowly as bright colors exploded on the line of cops. The crowd behind them applauded wildly as we advanced to reinforce the growing barricade before setting it on fire.
\n\nThe battle continued into the early morning hours until there were not enough of us left in the street. We returned home wondering what would happen the next day, and what would happen to Turkey in the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/25.jpg\")
\nOnce the police cleared the park, they continued by raiding the homes and offices of the best-known participants. The first raids were predictable: the state went to the addresses of leftist militants and groups, as it had for decades. Dozens of operations took place and many of their cadres were arrested. In addition, there were raids targeting the leaders of Carşı, the soccer fan club of Beşiktaş, as well as those who tweeted under their legal names about what was happening in the streets.
\n\nThe euphoria of the Gezi resistance hasn’t evaporated yet. The stories are on everyone’s lips; it’s all people talk about in the cafés and bars of Istiklal. During Pride Week, I attended some of the events; the theme this year was resistance. Both the trans march and the main Pride march were bigger than they had ever been: 50,000 people adorned in rainbows in the face of a traditionally homophobic Turkish society. Friends commented that this was probably the second time that there were more straight than gay people in the Gay Pride march—the first being thirteen years ago, when there were only a few dozen people, most of them allies marching in solidarity.
\n\nAt the onset of the rebellion, there had been instances when anti-women, anti-sex worker, and homophobic chants could be heard in the streets. Queers and feminists intervened in various ways when this took place; they succeeded in countering this manifestation of patriarchy in a transformative way.
\n\nThe story goes that during the first days of the uprising, after the police were kicked out of Taksim and the square was reclaimed for the people and barricaded, there was a moment of calm. A delegation of Carşı members took advantage of this to pay a visit to the offices of one of the main LGBT organizations in Turkey. Like other rebel identities and leftist groups, this organization also had an office in the liberated zone of Beyoğlu from which it was providing crucial infrastructural support to the uprising. Carşı entered to offer an apology for their homophobic and sexist chants. They explained that this was what they had been taught by society, but now they understood their mistake. As a token to show the sincerity of their apology, they had brought a shield that had previously belonged to the riot police.
\n\nAfter the dust settled, I met up with a friend I’d made during the heady days of the commune, a student from Kurdistan attending Istanbul Technical University for an engineering degree. We talked about the peace process the AKP had been crafting with the PKK since the winter. He was extremely cynical about the politicking, seeing the Gezi Resistance as the true path to peace for the Kurdish struggle. We exchanged stories we’d heard about personal transformation during the uprising. He told me about the tensions between their BDP tent, with the flags of Öcalan, and some of the Turkish nationalist elements in the Gezi occupation. That argument had become a dialogue that continued, interspersed with battles with the police, throughout the events. Suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end of state violence and a media blackout, many Turks had to come to grips with the fact that their perceptions of the war in Kurdistan had been mediated by the same corporations that were silencing them now.
\n\nSharing this space of resistance against a common enemy inspired a revolutionary reconciliation. Yet with summer lethargy taking over, the first manifestation of the Gezi Spirit came to an end. June had left five dead and hundreds with serious injuries, some in critical condition. Physical and figurative wounds needed healing. Although from afar, it might seem that things have died down since June, on the ground there is a tense anticipation of what is to come. One challenge for the resistance will be the upcoming election cycles: municipal elections in spring 2014, and general elections a year later. All shapes and sizes of political leeches are looking to co-opt the movement.
\n\nIt is incredible how the sense of nausea, helplessness, and depression that had overtaken many in the face of the steamroller of the AKP has evaporated after Gezi. It is still an open question how the Gezi Resistance will develop in the future and whether or not it will be able to further the practices first developed behind the barricades. Although one cannot predict the course of the coming years, it is unquestionable that a genie has come out of the bottle and millions have found each other. This spirit is haunting Turkey and the worst nightmares of those in power; everyone knows that Gezi will have a lasting impact on social and political life in Turkey. The Gezi Resistance is prepared for the long haul. As we reminded each other in one of the most popular chants:
\n\nThis is only the beginning. Continue the struggle!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/20/9.jpg\")
People working together to build barricades.
\nRecently, DAF collapsed when it emerged that a couple at the center of the organization had been employing physical and emotional abuse towards members. ↩
\nA reference to the TV series Game of Thrones. ↩
\nThe Incredible Hulk is detourned by replacing Hulk with Halk, the Turkish word for “the people.” ↩
\nThe AKP has attacked the bustling street life in Beyoğlu by passing laws against alcohol consumption. ↩
\nOne of Erdoğan’s initial remarks on the uprising was to call its participants çapulcu, looters or marauders. Participants assumed this name for themselves, proudly proclaiming that they were all çapulcus. ↩
\nWe assume that Erdoğan meant to implicate the old-guard bourgeoisie with this epithet, but also to cultivate support among those who see interest as a sin in Islam. ↩
\nDespite brutal state repression, Colombia’s general strike has continued strong now for 23 days. The revolt has largely been leaderless and solidarity has expanded to include an impressively wide array of Colombian society: Indigenous and Afro-Colombian movements, queer and trans people, workers, students, people whose precarious employment has been lost to the pandemic. As in many other recent uprisings around the world, this one has been driven first and foremost by youth who know that their only hope to have any future at all is to fight for it. Millions are united in their rejection of unlivable conditions and horrific police violence.
\n\nThis is a 21st-century strike. In a country where the majority worked precarious jobs in an informal economy, now devastated by the pandemic and government restrictions, this strike is less about not going to work than about actively shutting everything down. Blockades have managed to halt commerce in many cities, but they serve a double role: these points are also where people gather and experiment with new ways of living together and caring for one another, outside of dictates of capitalism and the state.
\n\nMurals, dances, barricades, nurses, steaming pots of food, shields, and conversation between neighbors are all equally important to this uprising. Knowledge and skills have been shared between movements with decades of experience and young rebels on the front line. People combine courageous expressions of joy and care with an iron determination to fight.
\n\nThere are tactical echoes from other revolts of the past few years—Hong Kong, Chile, the US—but the horizontal organizing of the strike is significant: this represents a major break from Colombia’s past of centralized armed struggle and labor union movements. Popular assemblies have sprung up to handle decision-making; leaders are distrusted and ignored; people have little faith in the state.
\n\n“From Cali to Jacarézinho: Against State Violence!” A short film by Antimídia.
\nThis makes sense in a country where the state has ruled through fear and death alone for decades—but as the numbers of those murdered, wounded, and disappeared during the protests continue to mount, the bravery of those out in the streets is inspiring. You can donate to medical supplies for the protests in Cali here, or even better, organize a solidarity demonstration. Much of Colombia’s arms budget comes from the US. International solidarity is even more critical since May 17, when Colombian President Iván Duque deployed the police and military in full force to clear all the blockades.
\n\nWe’ve translated a report from Medios Libres Cali, originally published in Spanish on May 11, and conducted two interviews with participants in the movement from Cali, on May 12, and Bogotá, on May 17. Together, these document a historic movement in Colombia, which sets crucial precedents for forthcoming movements around the world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/1.jpg\")
Protesters stream down Paso del Comercio in Cali.
\nAn article by Medios Libres Cali.
\n\n“We strike because we cannot take it anymore.” Working class communities have described this strike best by comparing the situation in Colombia to a pressure cooker: the strike is the manifestation of a critical mass of grievances coming to a boil. Among these is the package of four disastrous reforms that attack the poorest communities and benefit privileged sectors: the tax reform that would levy a 19% VAT on staple foods; the health reform that privatizes healthcare and eliminates access to it; the pension reform transferring money to private funds; and the labor reform that could enable exceptions to the minimum wage.
\n\nBut the reform package is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is a society battered by poverty and inequality; a country embroiled in war for decades and governed by a narco-state that shows its true colors more each day. Day by day, the cloak of democracy is shed to reveal the face of dictatorship. That’s why communities refused to accept these reforms, because they truly could not take any more. Already in 2019, the so-called “Duque package” triggered a massive mobilization paralyzing the country for almost two months, known as 21N (November 21, 2019, the date on which that strike began). Late at night, behind closed doors, the government—supported by the Uribista1 far right—signed a decree creating Grupo Bicentenario, a state financial holding company, despite the fact that the protests had called for the project’s withdrawal as one of the strike’s ten non-negotiable points. Grupo Bicentenario is made up of 19 financial companies including Banco Agrario, Findeter, Finagro, Icetex, and the National Savings Fund.
\n\nIt seems that all the previous atrocities weren’t enough. More than 30,000 people have been disappeared since 1985, according to the Truth Commission, as part of an ongoing attack on social movements, systematically targeting indigenous communities in particular. This is a country nourished by violence, in which there were 6402 extrajudicial executions confirmed between 2002 and 2008. More than 900 influential participants in social movements have been murdered since 2016, according to Indepaz—101 in 2020 alone, according to a report by the Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP). The displacement of rural communities is ongoing, with 28,509 people violently displaced and confined in 2020, according to the Colombian Ombudsman’s Office. At the same time, it is a country that lives with hunger—by mid-2020, the National Institute of Health had documented at least 9151 cases of children under 5 with acute malnutrition—in which the economy has been devastated by the pandemic.
\n\nTogether, all the different resulting forms of discontent have made many people feel like the strike is theirs. That’s why so many came out in solidarity and returned to the streets with rage—and, more importantly, without fear. Thousands of people with nothing to lose chose to participate in a strike that has now lasted 14 days. The strike belongs to the people, the neighborhood, neighbors, mothers, employees, students, the social movement, football hooligans, workers, Black and Indigenous communities, truckers, taxi drivers, farmers, women, and all of the LGBTQI+ crews. More than anything, this strike belongs to the country’s working-class youth.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/2.jpg\")
“Faggot and Front Liner.”
\nThe Colombian people are tired of not being heard, tired of futile marches that arrive at the great centers of power and end up in the manipulative hands of power-brokers who negotiate the non-negotiable. This strike began its ferment deep in the heart of the lower-class neighborhoods, on the lips of grandmothers and neighbors, of mothers and teachers who care about the youth. It was no coincidence then that the strike has gathered and concentrated people at the cities’ entrances rather than the plazas, at crucial intersections rather than the municipal buildings, in working-class neighborhoods rather than tourist areas: places that truly represent something to the people.
\n\nNeither the resignation of Carrasquilla (the Minister of Finance) nor the withdrawal of the tax reform has managed to stop this wave of protest. The strike shares the color and face of our people, the feeling in the neighborhoods. Within the strike points,2 those who had long been invisible in society began to emerge as protagonists, those without a voice who want a future. Heroes emerge who defend the area as the Front Line, youth organized against the state apparatus headed by the ESMAD (the Colombian riot police) and its death squad. Improvised medical campaigns, nurses, and paramedics emerge in this urban war that leaves so much death: people who care for the people, the people healing themselves. Mothers arrive with their love and their seasonings to prepare community meals in the streets. They light the cooking fire, stoke it, and they’ve got food for thousands, because this is how people persist and maintain a strike. The human rights defenders shine with their own light: in the midst of the gunfire, they shield people, ensure that we get home amid the darkness of an insidious dictatorship, and search until they find those who have been disappeared by the cowards of the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/3.jpg\")
Two frontliners on the barricade use road signs as shields.
\nThe Colombian government calls itself a social state governed by the rule of law, but in Colombia, no one knows what the laws are, and the state is only recognizable by the force it uses against people and by its systematic neglect.
\n\nThe numbers of dead and disappeared in this country are terrifying. We have seen grim statistics pile up for decades, villages bathed in blood, waves of violence that comprise the history of our soil. But what has occurred over the past 14 days of general strike and widespread protest has etched itself into collective memory as the unmasking of a dictatorial state. We have lived through the militarization of cities, the excesses of police violence, state violence, the deaths of innocents at the hands of the police, forced disappearances, and the alliance of paramilitary and state security forces. This is the brutal honesty of Uribe’s legacy and its structures of para-state warfare.
\n\nTemblores and Indepaz, two human rights organizations, released a scathing report on May 9, full of chilling figures: a total of 47 people murdered, 39 confirmed killed by police. Of those cases, 36 were in the department (Colombia’s equivalent of states) of Valle del Cauca (35 in Cali and one in Yumbo). On top of this, there were at least 1876 cases of police violence nationally, including the following:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/4.jpg\")
Demonstrators holding the names of those killed during the strike.
\nThis sort of state violence is unprecedented in Colombian cities. The state is treating social protest as an undeclared war; outrageous numbers of police and outrageous use of force (especially firearms, in coordination with snipers and helicopters that shoot at a defenseless populace) are now part of the landscape in the country’s most oppressed cities. Streets and neighborhoods have turned into battlefields. The mountains and jungles, rural paths and townships have been already been living through this for decades.
\n\nThe strategy of fear is macabre. People from high offices like ex-President, ex-Senator, and Centro Democrático party leader Álvaro Uribe Vélez, FFAA (Colombian Armed Forces) Director General Eduardo Zapateiro, Minister of Defense Diego Molano, the Attorney General’s office, and other far-right and Uribista politicians have made horrific statements, openly declaring war against demonstrators. It’s worth taking note of the discourse used by the Uribista machine to incite white elitist groups in Cali in their armed response to the protests, using terms like “terrorists” to refer to protesters and alleging links between the Indigenous minga3 and guerrilla groups or arms being smuggled into the blockade points.
\n\nThere are hundreds of videos of members of the armed forces, the ESMAD, the police, intelligence operatives, and organized armed citizens attacking rallies and peaceful assemblies, aiming their firearms at the crowd, sowing terror among the protesters and shooting, wounding, and killing people in the streets. Despite this, national media have not only shamefully concealed the reality of the situation but have also misrepresented acts of protest according to the state narrative. The fact that more than 500 people have disappeared after being detained during the demonstrations indicates the seriousness of the human rights violations. Two of those disappeared were found dead on May 7, 2021, according to Temblores.
\n\nPolice have fired directly on demonstrators who were exercising their right to protest by closing roads with community kitchens and improvised barricades. But the most dangerous attacks have been those organized jointly between state security forces and the armed civilian population: a rich, racist, classist, Uribista mob that carries out organized attacks against demonstrators in a manner similar to white supremacists, supported and protected by the police. Is this a dictatorship? A para-state?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/5.jpg\")
A tense standoff between protesters and soldiers at a barricade.
\nCali is the capital of the Southwest. It connects southern regions such as Cauca and Nariño, fertile lands of Indigenous and ancestral memory, with the Pacific Ocean and Buenaventura, the largest commercial maritime port in the country. This is a strategic corridor of the Colombian economy and a region battered by poverty, an epicenter of war with a history built over many years of people rising up in resistance. On April 28, as the strike got underway, the Misak people gave the city a dawn surprise, toppling the statue of settler and slave owner Sebastián de Belalcázar.
\n\nCali has been used as a military laboratory in recent years for control of social movements. Social organizations have noticed that organized repressive practices that are used in Cali are later replicated elsewhere in Colombia. During this year’s national strike, some practices have been alarmingly systematic, such as power outages at gathering points coinciding with police attacks. The manipulation and censorship of Internet access and social media content are already familiar practices. We also see the media pitting different neighborhoods against each other to create a false narrative, fueling hatred between classes in order to spur an armed response on both sides. The state tests many strategies of war and confusion in the city of Cali in order to then apply proven forms of repression around the rest of the country.
\n\nIn the face of the military experimentation that protesting Caleñas experience, the city has armed itself with courage. It has denounced the war waged against it and seen that joy, dignity, and anger prevail. The faces of the dead are already painted on the walls, a reminder that we bled for this strike. There are more than 35 young people who gave their lives to the struggle; for them and the 120 people disappeared in this city, the strike carries on.
\n\n“Stay strong, rebel Cali—the whole world cries out your name.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/6.jpg\")
Indigenous people stream in bearing the flag of the CRIC.
\nIn the midst of systematic warfare in the city of Cali, with more than 18 points blockaded in resistance, there was joy that gave color to the fight that had seemed lost after 35 deaths. More than 8000 Indigenous people arrived from the mountains and valleys of Cauca to bring food, support, medicine, wisdom, and defense to the struggle brewing in Cali.
\n\nCeremonial staffs in hand and bearing the red and green flags of the CRIC (Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca), the Indigenous minga arrived via chivas (traditional transportation similar to a bus) packed with people and food. The voices of traditional territorial authorities greeted the communities in revolt and offered their strength to continue the 2021 general strike in the face of state repression. People received the Indigenous Guard with respect and affection; with their arrival, hope returned to the streets of Cali. “Adelante compañeros dispuestos a resistir, defender nuestro derecho así nos toque morir, Guardia Guardia, Fuerza Fuerza, por mi raza por mi tierra” rang the anthem of the Guard: “Onward, comrades ready to resist, to defend our rights even to the death, Guard! Guard! Strength! Strength! For my people, for my land.”
\n\nThe Guard come from the ten Indigenous peoples of the Cauca. “We come to strike because the government has not responded to our demands,” said a Nasa elder who is in charge of one of the kitchens. “We will stay until the government agrees not to implement any tax reform and to withdraw the health, labor, and pension initiatives,” said a community member elsewhere who wore the red and green scarf of the CRIC. “We come to defend the city that the state has abandoned, because the people in Cali are being killed and what they need now is support in their struggle, which belongs to everyone,” said a coordinator of the humanitarian commissions that the minga provides to the strike.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/7.jpg\")
A frontliner and a member of the Indigenous Guard, hand in hand fighting the same fight.
\nBut a segment of Uribista Cali—racist, paramilitary Cali—had planned a grim second act: a right-wing mob armed with guns attacked the Indigenous community members on their way to the popular assembly at Universidad del Valle (University of the Valley). Nine comrades were wounded; they are fighting for their lives in medical centers around the city. The fact that our people could come together to determine our future truly scares them. Now, 12,000 more indigenous people are coming. “Let’s see if they can kill us all,” says a Guard, full of indignation. “They believed that by killing one they would subdue us and instead we became millions.” That is the power of the struggle and the example of these age-old warriors, because we are all minga.
\n\nThe path of the struggle has been complex due to government attempts to suppress the strike, but we fight on. People at the strike points self-organize in popular assemblies, different cities coordinate their mobilizations, and the strike does not stop.
\n\nIn many of the popular assemblies at strike points, which function as direct decision-making bodies for different areas, there have been proposals that no strike or blockade should be lifted until some basic demands are met, including:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/8.jpg\")
“I march because I’m alive and I don’t known until when. Rapist ESMAD.”
\nWe interviewed an independent media activist in Cali on May 11, who preferred to remain anonymous, and the Interdisciplinary Group for Anarchist Studies and Tendencies (GRIETA) from Bogotá on May 17. Parentheses () are retained from the original Spanish answers; brackets [] were added by the translators.
\n\nThank you for agreeing to this interview. How would you like to identify yourselves?
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: We are the Interdisciplinary Group for Anarchist Studies and Tendencies (GRIETA, Grupo Interdisciplinario de Estudios y Tendencias Anarkistas), founded in 2013. Our goal is to spread an anarchist ethic to contribute to social and ecological transformation. We collectively study anarchisms, their effects, and the possibility of making theoretical contributions that serve to build an anarchism of the South.
\n\nWhile this was being written, several police officers in the city of Popayán sexually abused Allison Salazar Miranda, who could not bear the situation and chose to take her own life. We dedicate this interview to her and to the 50 other people who have been murdered, as well as other victims of state violence during the strike.
\n\nDescribe how people are organizing themselves. Are there leaders? Are people acting autonomously?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: This is one of the chief aspects that differentiates the strike from other protests or strikes that have taken place in this country. This time, separate from the traditional organizations, political movements, opposition parties, and labor unions that normally come out to demonstrations, the movement is a popular civic strike. The blockade points in this city and in many other cities across the province and the country have been established by people from the neighborhood, from the community. Out of popular discontent and the desire for change, they took to the streets in search of opportunities. That’s why there are no leaders or centralized organization; each area has been growing stronger according to its own rhythm and capacities. New blockade points have also been set up, emerging several days after the first ones.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: The revolt in Colombia has taken shape in a way that is distant from the traditional leftist forms of doing politics, especially those that involve vertical structures and come from the Communist Party. Even though the initial call for the April 28 strike, like the 2019 strike, came from the so-called National Strike Committee (composed of labor, populist, and environmentalist organizations), the popular movement really organized itself to keep promoting ongoing mobilizations and days of resistance. This was not in vain, as today marks 20 days of continuous protest and revolt. This movement has mainly taken the form of organized spontaneity (an oxymoron), since there is no vanguard or steering group directing the steps to follow. It’s the populace itself, through popular assemblies and direct actions in the streets, deciding to hold strong in their dissent day after day. This dynamic has led to leaders being overshadowed by the actions of the movements, which prioritize collective decision-making regarding how to continue popular resistance. This doesn’t excuse the fact that there’s more than one personality from the traditional leftist movements who would like to take advantage of the circumstances to gain political capital from this struggle, but people point these figures out as the opportunists they are.
\n\nIn terms of groups acting autonomously, in Colombia, the Nasa Indigenous communities are a reference point. They self-organize in different groups like the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca (CRIC), “The Liberation of Mother Earth Process,” and, since 2005, “The Social and Community Minga.” As a people, they know what it means to fight for autonomy—they have been doing so since the arrival of European colonizers and they continue to against the modern Colombian state. We think that the Nasa, the Afro-Colombian population—which also self-organizes in different groups such as the Black Communities Process (PCN) and the Community Councils—and the legacy of the Palenque4 liberation movement in the Colombian Caribbean are examples of the historic struggle for peoples’ self-liberation. They have injected forms of autonomous and communal organization into urban areas, which are being expressed in what’s going on today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/9.jpg\")
Afro-Colombian women sing at a blockade point.
\nWho are the participants in the revolt? Workers, students, Indigenous peoples, political tendencies? What do the social and political dynamics within the uprising look like?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: The participants are primarily young people from working class neighborhoods; they’re the ones who are in front and organizing the concentration points. In the neighborhoods, they’re accompanied by people of all different ages from the community. But the civic movement that has come together in the strike is incredibly varied and comes from many sectors of the population that have shown their support—the student movement, feminist movements, environmentalist movements, some opposition parties, artists, all these have been supporting the strike and the movement. Social movements and the Indigenous movement have joined the protests. The Indigenous movement specifically has come in with major contributions in terms of logistics and coordination as well as support from the Indigenous Guard, which is an organized group responsible for order within Indigenous communities—they’re the authority that must be respected. It’s very important to clarify that they are unarmed.
\n\nThere are so many different types of trades, social sectors, and people participating that it’s complicated to group it all into one movement. The truckers joined a few days in (in Colombia, there are no railroads, so all domestic transport utilizes cargo trucks), the taxi union participated for a couple days, even a group from the INPEC union (the police agency in charge of managing the prisons) took part in a few of the marches. All share a dissatisfaction with the government and its politics of death.
\n\nSince it hasn’t been a planned or structured movement, the internal dynamics have mutated according to the moment. The first day was supposed to be a one-day march that ended up continuing organically, so that first day or first two days there were demonstrations, then popular assemblies were set up at each mobilization and blockade point. There’s also been talk of larger assemblies that could bring in voices from different areas. This is supported by the CRIC [Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca, or Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca], an Indigenous movement from the neighboring department.
\n\nIt’s also important to mention that this movement has been taking place all over the country. Cali has been the center of the strike because of the number of blockades and the number of days it has been continuously maintained, but this is no reason to ignore the hundreds of demonstrations throughout the country. According to multiple analysts, there are demonstrations in more than 600 municipalities—in more than half of the small cities in the country, and all of the capital cities. There is popular discontent all over the country, and the strike looks like a possibility for change.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: The social and political dynamics of this strike are historic. It’s been decades since so many sectors have organized together; usually, the main protesters are higher education students, workers’ unions, transport workers, youth, Indigenous people, and peasants, but this time there are a lot of high school students, people from the bulk of the population that hasn’t had access to education, and full-time workers whose work has become precarious due to government restrictions. It’s worth highlighting that all of these people have mobilized and worked together to fill the streets as has never been done before, at least not since the 1977 strike.
\n\nPolitical tendencies have been trying to recruit people, since the 2022 election is on the horizon. The presidency is up for grabs, and this could mean a total defeat of Uribismo (Uribismo denotes a doctrine5 with ex-president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez as its top figure), getting rid of [President Ivan] Duque, who has an incredibly high disapproval rating, and weakening the Democratic Center party, which is synonymous with land grabs, forced displacement, massacres, and alliances with drug traffickers and paramilitaries. For the majority of centrist and center-left groups, this is an opportunity to elect a government that could stray a little from the ultra-conservative far right that has always controlled the territory called Colombia, and to begin a process of industrialization and agricultural mechanization. Connections are already being made towards this end, without any kind of definitive picture yet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/10.jpg\")
“Uribe—Paramilitary son of a bitch.”
\nTwenty days into the General Strike, there is a Strike Committee negotiating with the government; however, there’s discontent in the streets, because this committee doesn’t represent the great diversity of sentiments among those who have maintained the blockades and the humanitarian corridors. Additionally, these union leadership figures are the ones who have negotiated under the table and sold out strikes during past national mobilizations. They hold onto oligarchical viewpoints, there are only two women, and seven of the others have clear ties to Fajardismo6 and the Green Party, Uribismo’s Trojan horse.
\n\nCould you describe a typical day at one of the concentration points? Who’s there and what are they doing?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: Colombia—especially Cali—is a place with a well-nourished multiculturalism that creates many different dynamics depending on the area and the people who live there. Things have also changed as time has passed; learning and organization grow with each passing day. The blockades are primarily held by the Front Line. The community and the mothers are there around the community kitchen. There are also medic teams made up of students and people from the community with those skills. Cultural activities have shined at all of the points: concerts, murals, screen-printing, performances, and other forms of art have popped up spontaneously all around the city. Games and sports are a part of daily life. Popular assemblies emerge for making decisions. These are a few first experiences, but they have allowed for a lot of organization and helped counteract the stigmatizing narrative that the dominant media have sown.
\n\nIn another sense, apart from all these activities, the mobilization points are spaces for the community to come together. There are countless experiences of community support that would be interesting to highlight. For example, at one of the mobilization points, a neighbor who works in construction, who knows how to weld and has the tools for it, helped participants in the Front Line to make shields for protection. Several local police stations (CAIs) have also been converted into libraries and cultural spaces for the community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/11.jpg\")
A police substation has been converted into a community library named after Nicolás Guerrero, who was killed by police during the strike.
\nGRIETA, Bogotá: The days in the humanitarian corridors are the most hopeful part of the general strike. People begin arriving early in the morning and come together in artistic and educational activities. Huge murals have been painted in every neighborhood rejecting police violence, embracing community organization, and celebrating the resistance of the young people on the front line—people who, with no opportunities in such an unequal country, put their bodies on the defensive line each day.
\n\nFood has also played a central role. The community kitchens have been offering meals daily to people with empty stomachs and no resources. Autonomy has been developed in the occupation of public space, ordinary people from grandparents to children are attending popular assemblies, lists of demands are emerging from popular referendums and sentiments rather than bureaucracy.
\n\nIn this community construction process, most of the injuries and arrests happen at night. Neighbors have chosen to open their houses, handing out food, first aid supplies, water with baking soda, and other resources to help resist the tear gas. These actions have led the ESMAD [riot police] agents to attack neighbors, firing directly at their houses. This unscrupulous violence that’s now entering city neighborhoods is the same that has always existed in the countryside, and perhaps this awakening has strengthened cries for police reform and the dismantling of the ESMAD.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/12.jpg\")
Community kitchens like this one have sustained the strike at every blockade point.
\nThe police have unleashed terrible violence, especially at night. What’s the dynamic like at night? What groups remain in the streets? What are confrontations with the police like?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: The activities that were taking place at night have slowed down or stopped because in the first few days of the strike, it was during these moments that the police and armed forces carried out their worst attacks, using firearms and very aggressive strategies. In the Siloé neighborhood, internet access was interrupted on the night of May 3 while a special police group (GOES—Grupo de operaciones especiales, or Special Operations Group) arrived with long guns to repress the blockade. Several people were killed in the neighborhood on that censored night, including a minor.
\n\nBecause of this situation, activities are limited at night or carried out with lots of caution, since, as several human rights organizations have confirmed, there are no guarantees for the respect of life at night (attacks and abuses occur during the day as well, but to a much lesser degree). Some resistance points manage to stick it out by protecting themselves well and hiding in the vicinity, while others with less organization or fewer experienced people withdraw at nightfall and take their spaces back during the day. This was one of the most painful lessons during the first few days of the strike, since many people were murdered on those nights. (The official statistics barely report any information and the NGOs haven’t been able to put out a specific figure because of the number of cases, but a sensationalist local newspaper mentioned 22 deaths by May 2, plus the ones that have occurred since).
\n\nThe police violence has been very intense, above all from the ESMAD (Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron), a police unit created more than 20 years ago to repress social protest. Several of the weapons they employ are used in violation of the established protocols for minimizing harm. That’s why more than 20 people have already lost eyes from being shot by the ESMAD. They use 12-gauge shotguns loaded with beanbag munitions, the same thing that Dilan Cruz was murdered with in Bogotá in November 2019.
\n\nThese are just the lawful strategies that are still endorsed even when used incorrectly; however, the police also use firearms against the community. The ESMAD and the regular police often use unregistered guns so they won’t leave evidence. It’s also common practice to hide identification numbers and police frequently dress as civilians or infiltrate marches.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: We have been astonished by the state violence since the first day of the general strike. We knew that they had made a huge investment in weaponry and resources for repression, but seeing it in action was horrific. In the first few nights, police violence took the form of human rights violations such as beatings, arbitrary arrests, and illegal raids. The ESMAD deployed a new weapon called Venom in their armored vehicles for the first time. It costs 400 million Colombian pesos [about $110,000 USD] and has three compartments that each fire 10 projectiles at a 45-degree angle, carrying tear gas and flash-bang grenades. This weapon had never been used in Latin America before, not even in the most intense periods of the dictatorships.
\n\nAt night, people go out to block and hold the main streets, they set up barricades and fires, and it’s just a matter of waiting until the ESMAD decides to attack with the forces and tanks it has available. Things have escalated as the days have gone on, especially in Cali. Attacks by state forces continue as before, but human rights campaigns have also begun to report cases of sexual violence, murders have been confirmed, and there are alarming numbers of missing persons who have later turned up dead in rivers and rural areas.
\n\nOne of the most serious developments, though, is the militarization and para-militarization of the cities. A massacre took place, backed by the armed forces of Colombia. During the day, repression was carried out with legal “non-lethal” weapons, but at night the state cut electricity to the neighborhoods where people were gathered, hunted people down, blocked the internet and cell signals, and censored Facebook and Instagram Live while armed civilians attacked youth in resistance, the Indigenous minga, and anyone deemed to think or act differently. This is a clear expression of the paramilitarism that has haunted this region and doesn’t intend to give up its power easily.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/13.jpg\")
Tear gas has been used heavily against protesters since the strike’s beginning.
\nIn any uprising like this, there is always a lot of organization that doesn’t necessarily take place in the streets and might be hard to see from the outside. Could you describe some of these efforts that nourish and strengthen the revolt?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: In addition to the young people putting their bodies on the line, going face-to-face with the repression, and keeping the blockade points standing, there is strong participation from the whole family. The mothers especially are participating from the community kitchens, feeding everyone who’s taking part. The medic teams, which have set up operations at neighborhood basketball courts, meeting halls, and neighbors’ houses, have also played a crucial role during the establishment of the concentration points. In many neighborhoods and at many points, the community has participated by donating food and medicine. People don’t have much, but the little that’s there is always enough to share.
\n\nAdditionally, longstanding organizations and movements are participating primarily by providing forms of logistical assistance. Human rights observation and alternative media coverage has been indispensable; however, due to the number of mobilization points, neither task has been accomplished to the extent it needs to.
\n\nAfter arriving in Cali, the Indigenous movement from the Cauca (the province south of Valle del Cauca, where Cali is located) sought out dialogue with the people blockadingto work together and offfer help, drawing on decades of experience with organization and social mobilization.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/14.jpg\")
With such extreme police violence, medic teams are a crucial part of strike support.
\nGRIETA, Bogotá: We think the reproduction of daily life and labors of care are fundamental. They are what enables the revolt to develop each day. These labors take the forms of neighborhood community kitchens and networks of affection that are growing stronger due to the murders, torture, disappearances, sexual abuses, and the escalation of systematic violence deployed by the Colombian state headed by Ivan Duque’s Uribista administration.
\n\nWhat tactics and strategies are demonstrators using? Have any new ones emerged?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: There are blockades at the entrances to the cities, effectively halting production and consumption, and other blockades in working class neighborhoods. Organization is based on knowledge of the terrain and support from neighbors. Improvised barricades are built in a wide perimeter in order to hold several streets at once and keep the police out. The “front line” is for clashes and defense and then there are second and third lines with assorted other tasks. There are safe houses in case of an attack as well as food stockpiles and a treatment area that’s well-equipped for first aid and stabilizing the wounded.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: In the demonstrations of these last few weeks, we’ve seen a variety of tactics and strategies. In terms of tactics, we could mention the constant mobilizations and marches that have happened not only in the big cities but also the medium-sized cities and municipalities where there had never been revolts or demonstrations before. Occupations, pot-and-pan demos, and cultural actions (performances, transgressive dances) have had an important place within the demonstrations because they have created learning spaces where the motivations behind the march can be explained to people who might have felt apathetic about the protests. Graffiti and murals have also been used tactically to denounce the tax reform (“the primary motive of the mobilization”) and the state repression that demonstrators have suffered at the hands of the police.
\n\nMutual aid and solidarity between different social sectors and classes have also allowed the mobilization to survive through several weeks in the streets and constant, disproportionate repression from the state and paramilitaries who have free reign to kill in the cities. This has been seen in Cali, Pereira, and other cities, where armed civilians in the company of police fire on demonstrators or on the Indigenous Guard. It makes it clear that the narco-paramilitary state currently uses tactics which for years were only seen in rural areas to dispossess Indigenous people and peasants of their lands.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1391599373306449920\n\n\n
This repression has led to consistent solidarity and economic, moral, and symbolic support between different parts of the struggle. The mobilization has fed on the rage bred by state neglect and extreme repression. One stand-out case is what happened in Cali, where the Indigenous Guard left their territory to accompany, defend, and fight together with the people who had mobilized in the city. This gesture along with many others has shown that struggle in the streets unites and revives the revolutionary spirit that they have tried always tried to beat out of us, the lower classes of this country and the world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/15.jpg\")
Youth have driven this uprising, putting their bodies on the line to struggle for a world they can live in.
\nDescribe the paramilitary situation. What have paramilitaries done, how do they coordinate with the state, and how have demonstrators responded?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: In Colombia, paramilitarism is a force that conducts covert military actions and pushes a fascist narrative in defense of private property and the re-establishment of order. The modus operandi has been to break the security perimeter of the blockade points and enter in vehicles, firing from long range. This has two objectives: to kill people and to sow terror. The blockade points have held strong because when something like this happens, reinforcements arrive from other points, carry out the wounded, and manage to keep morale and motivation high.
\n\nThe paramilitary phenomenon is very complex and with the actions of the last few days, we’ve seen tactics that had never been used before. It’s important to clarify that the term “paramilitary” includes a number of different actors, the common denominator being action that is coordinated with or permitted by the armed forces. There are at least four main actors:
\n\n•\tArmed forces dressed in civilian clothes shooting at protesters. The protesters, with the help of the Indigenous Guard, have documented at least two cases of this. The lack of identification enables them to act illegally.\n•\tGroups of hitmen hired by powerful people to carry out specific attacks or assassinations.\n•\tFar-right extremists (many of them linked to drug trafficking) who call themselves “good citizens” and true patriots out of a sense of superiority. With institutional support, they take “justice” into their own hands and attack protesters, who the mass media have depicted as criminals. This is what happened in Ciudad Jardín and on the road to Jamundí [two upscale suburbs of Cali] on May 9, 2021.\n•\tParamilitary armies that never demobilized and exercise control over certain territories of Colombia.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: Paramilitarism in Colombia took the form of “para-state” organizations—parallel to the state—that emerged at the end of the 1980s to combat the guerrillas, in collusion with the Colombian military. The 2005 peace negotiation between the state and the paramilitaries didn’t completely eliminate these organizations; their shadow has always been present in Colombia, especially in the figure of the “Águilas Negras” [Black Eagles].
\n\nOver the past few years, the Águilas Negras haven’t seemed to have a clear organizational structure like the paramilitaries of old; they are more a type of name that the Colombian state, drug traffickers, the mining companies present in Colombian territory, illegal mining interests, and others resort to in order to threaten and kill movement leaders who obstruct capitalist accumulation by dispossession—which is to say, accumulation coming from rural areas. Because of this, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and environmentalist fighters in key territories are the most affected.
\n\nHowever, during the current strike, we have seen something a bit different: it’s not the state or another actor hiding behind the “Águilas Negras” name who has repressed the protests; it is openly the state, unmasked. In fact, Álvaro Uribe openly invited the military and police to fire on protesters, whom he called “vandalistic terrorists.” We have also seen another phenomenon: armed civilians firing at people marching. But these civilians are either out-of-uniform police or appear to be citizens with clearly neo-fascist characteristics. The latter might be similar to white supremacists in the US. Of course, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the Águilas Negras could appear, perhaps linked to the Colombian armed forces and police and probably in the form of threats to the most visible leaders of the strike.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/16.jpg\")
A banner displays several notorious figures of the Colombian para-state.
\nWhat does this revolt need to persist and spread?
\n\nMedia activist, Cali: Time is the popular strike’s worst enemy. As supply shortages begin, the community could turn against the blockade points. But the poverty and state neglect are so extreme in these resisting sectors that the youth have nothing to lose and much to gain. Rather than negotiating or attempting to reach an agreement, the state has responded to the strike by militarizing the cities to ensure public order. This has outraged more middle-class people who have finally joined in to support the strike based on the possibilities and knowledge available to them.
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: For the last ten years or so, Colombia has experienced increasing social mobilization. Among the stronger expressions of this were the 2011 and 2018 student strikes, the 2013 peasant strike, and the Indigenous minga. In 2019, after the 2016 peace accords with the FARC, there was a general strike that, unlike former strikes, didn’t appear to focus on any one particular sector, whether students, peasants, or Indigenous peoples. It extended to the whole population. We’re seeing this tendency gain momentum in the current strike: although the Indigenous minga and the student movement have actively participated, this seems to be rooted in a generalized, collective unrest opposing the increasing precarity of life and the contemporary neo-fascism embodied by Uribismo. The intensification of protest has been a slow process that also depends on the conditions of the moment. I think this leaves us with a lesson: we must respect the rhythms of the popular movement, with its ups and downs, and not pressure the movement towards efficiency, which belongs to capital. It’s a slow process.
\n\nThat said, I think we have to care for the movement, supporting it from multiple angles—in the community kitchens, the popular assemblies, going to marches, reflecting, supporting the front line, and so on—always trying to extend it, but without overexerting ourselves to try to see immediate results. We think there is a key element in this: not to let a movement, which from its beginning is heterogeneous and decentralized, be captured by a party or presidential aspiration. To care for it, it must continue to have strong popular support and above all, this support must continue to grow; if not, it’ll lose vitality.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/17.jpg\")
Dance performances, traditional and novel, have been part or the the rich cultural expression taking place in Colombian streets during the strike.
\nWhat roles have anarchists played in the revolt?
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: Anarchists’ main role has been participating in the actions of the popular movement, spreading ideas, sharing our political ethic, and learning from other novel actions such as the Vogueart performance in which three transwomen danced in front of the police and symbols of the patriarchy. Our role has also been to promote the strike’s visibility on virtual platforms, which serve as a loudspeaker to the world. We think that generating international conversations to analyze what is happening from anarchist and libertarian viewpoints has also been important anarchic activity.
\n\nAnything else you would like to add?
\n\nGRIETA, Bogotá: In our understanding, one interesting characteristic underlying these days of protest and revolt has been the iconoclastic nature of the movement. This seems to be a trait of anarchisms of the south, and it has shown up in anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-extraction, and anti-patriarchal actions. Since the Indigenous Misak people toppled a monument to Sebastián de Belalcázar in Cali and another to Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in Bogotá,7 other groups have tried to knock down monuments in the middle of violent confrontations in multiple cities. They have also attacked icons of capitalism such as banks and public and private institutions that serve the economic elite.
\n\nAnother action that we think is worth highlighting took place on Twitter, where Colombian K-pop fans managed to block Uribista and anti-strike hashtags through collective actions. This contribution seems important on a digital level, because far-right narratives are also created on the internet, and they turn many people against the mobilizations.
\n\nFinally, all the systematic state violence has led to the creation of a front line of mothers, among them the mother of one of the many youths murdered during this strike. This demonstrates the social and political gravity of what is happening in Colombia, at the same time as it shows the dignified uprising of a people. For a group of mothers to decide to organize themselves to defend the movement proves that rage and discontent have generalized at a dizzying rate. Clearly, we celebrate these actions.
\n\nUp with the autonomous popular struggle, down with the repressive yoke of the state and its governments!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/21/18.jpg\")
“We are the Mothers of the Brave.”
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1392314824743391232\n\n\n
Álvaro Uribe Vélez, right-wing president of Colombia from 2002-2010, is notorious for his corruption and ties to paramilitary and drug-trafficking activity. He is so emblematic of the confluence of narco-paramilitary-economic-state power in Colombia that his name is synonymous with this tendency. Hence, “Uribista” is used to describe a certain right-wing politics associated with paramilitarism in Colombia. Our interview with GRIETA, published below, gives more context. ↩
\nDescriptions of the events in Colombia frequently mention “puntos de concentración,” “puntos de resistencia,” or “puntos de paro”: literally, “concentration points,” “resistance points,” and “strike points.” We have retained the language of “point” because it is so widespread and because it is worth drawing attention to this specific strategy. These points combine the functions of blocking commerce, providing for the free distribution of food and other necessities, and serving as spaces for free expression—spaces of encounter and social life beyond the bounds of state and capital. ↩
\nThe word “minga” is used among several Indigenous cultures in the Andean region. It has no English translation. It can refer to forms of voluntary, joyful collective labor for the good of the community; it also carries a sense of the collective identity of the people involved in these activities. The minga is not limited to those of an Indigenous identity; as evidenced here, it invites others from different backgrounds to join into being and participating in minga. ↩
\nPalenque de San Basilio is a village on the Caribbean coast just outside of Cartagena; it was founded by Africans who escaped slavery in the 1600s. For some time after its founding, the residents attempted to free all the other enslaved Africans arriving in Cartagena, a major slave port. ↩
\nThe core idea of this doctrine is “democratic security,” i.e., the elimination of “terrorism” at any cost. ↩
\nA current of electoral politics that takes its name from Sergio Fajardo, a potential presidential candidate in the 2022 elections. Fajardo has been the subject of multiple political and corruption scandals. ↩
\nSebastián de Belalcázar and Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, the founders of Cali and Bogotá respectively, are figures that symbolize the colonial yoke. They founded these cities at the cost of the genocide of Indigenous peoples. ↩
\nAfter decades of armed conflict and paramilitary violence, Colombia has seen protest movements return in strength over the past year and a half. The forceful demonstrations of the past week exceed even the high points of the nationwide uprising of November and December 2019. In response, the most heavily armed government in Latin America has carried out a brutal crackdown.
\n\nThe COVID-19 pandemic and its social and economic consequences have hit Colombia hard. The country is reaching a breaking point as the ruling class attempts to squeeze the last drops of profit out of an already suffering populace kept in line via intense police violence. Although these conditions are especially extreme, they are not unique to Colombia—they resemble similar situations in Greece, Brazil, and elsewhere around the world. These are not coincidences, but parallel manifestations of global phenomena. Everywhere, the pandemic has intensified disparities in wealth, power, and access to the means of survival, while serving as an excuse for increasing state repression. In learning from and extending solidarity to those who face state and paramilitary violence in Latin America—much of which is supported and directed by the United States and other governments and capitalist institutions—we are confronting the same global forces that threaten our own freedom and well-being.
\n\nSince the following text was written, President Ivan Duque of Colombia made a statement on Sunday, May 2 asking Colombia’s congress to withdraw the tax reform bill that had sparked protests across the country. This is reminiscent of the victory that a similar social movement achieved in Ecuador in October 2019, inspiring uprisings in Chile and elsewhere. However, as of today, the protests in Colombia continue—especially in the city of Cali, arguably the epicenter of the demonstrations—because that failed law is only the most visible measure in a package of reforms that also includes healthcare privatization.
\n\nHere, we present a translation of a report by Medios Libres Cali, an independent media organization in Cali. An adapted version of the original text was published in three parts by Avispa Midia. For more on the situation in Colombia, we recommend our report on the context of the mass uprising against police violence that took place last September.
\n\nAll photos save the first one by Medios Libres Cali.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/1.jpg\")
“The narco-state is killing us.”
\nDespite the peace accords signed by the government and the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Popular Army) in 2016, which were supposed to bring an end to the armed conflict in Colombia, paramilitarism and narco-trafficking continue to fuel the war. El Centro Democrático (the party of ex-president Álvaro Uribe and current president Iván Duque) is responsible for continuing the war; it is focusing its power on asserting political and financial control of the country.
\n\nAs of February 2021, 252 former FARC guerillas who demobilized to sign a peace accord have been assassinated. Today, four years after signing that peace accord, the government has implemented less than 75% of the agreement, and has taken no action on substantial components of it that were supposed to address the structural causes of the conflict, such as access to, redistribution, and possession of land—which has historically been one of the causes of the deep inequality within the country.
\n\nThis inequality intensified with the arrival of the pandemic, clearly showing the state’s ineffectiveness, incapacity, and disinterest in the well-being of its people. The delayed decision to close airports greatly accelerated the early spread of the virus. Now, while Colombia is experiencing its third COVID peak, the nation is facing an even worse wave of violence, poverty, and corruption, in which hunger is one of the worst problems. The war is bathing our territory in blood. In the first months of 2021, at least 57 influential participants in social movements have been murdered, 20 of them Indigenous people, most of whom were from the province of Cauca. In addition, there were 158 femicides in the first three months of the year and several other massacres.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/3.jpg\")
A young combatant squares off behind a shield.
\nColombia is the country of extrajudicial executions. A report by the Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP) documented 6402 illegal murders of civilians between 2002 and 2008, all of whom the army and police dishonestly misrepresented as “killed in combat.” These killings peaked in 2007 and 2008 during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe Véles. The figure comes close to the total number of casualties of Jorge Rafael Videla’s military dictatorship in Argentina; it is more than double the official number of victims executed or disappeared by Augusto Pinochet in Chile. In Colombia, people no longer wonder who gave the orders for these killings. They know the orders came from Uribe, and they no longer fear saying it aloud. Colombia has lost its fear.
\n\nEver since the peace agreement, the government of Iván Duque (a protégé of Uribe) has sought to undermine the peace by all possible means, and they are succeeding. According to INDEPAZ (Institute for Studies in Development and Peace Networks), 124 massacres have taken place in 2020 and 2021, involving over 300 victims altogether. More than 1,000 activists have been murdered in Colombia since the accord was signed. Living in this country is a constant struggle against the austerity policies of a government whose only response to people’s needs is a boot to the face. Alongside economic programs that foster misery and inequality, genocidal political programs aim to exterminate any collective identity outside of or opposed to the reigning order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/15.jpg\")
A half-eaten loaf and an improvised weapon show the stark conditions in Colombia—and the only path out.
\nAmid a third peak of COVID-19 infections, thousands took the streets to participate in the general strike of April 28. What could make people overcome their fear of the virus and occupy the streets in the face of the bloodiest government in Latin America?
\n\nThe Duque administration’s corrupt and negligent management of the crisis generated by COVID-19 has thrown the country into a tailspin of exponentially increasing impoverishment. According to government figures, in 2020, the equivalent of $11.5 million USD was invested in hospital infrastructure and humanitarian aid in the form of economic transfers; yet there have been thousands of allegations of corruption regarding the management of these policies. Meanwhile, Duque’s government has failed to implement a basic income proposal signed by 4000 people, including at least 50 members of parliament, as a means to sustain the households with the greatest need. Day in and day out, these people have to go out into the streets and risk exposure to the virus just to survive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/16.jpg\")
“If COVID doesn’t kill us, this perverse government will.”
\nOn the contrary, the government has focused on providing support to the banks, securing their financial liquidity through funds transferred directly from the Emergency Mitigation Fund (FOME) created in the wake of the pandemic. Experts have stated that, solely through transfers known as “Solidarity Income,” the banks would pocket at least $6.3 million USD taken directly from the public treasury. This “Solidarity Income” never reached the people who really need it. Even during the pandemic, in Colombia we continue to see the vast majority of people get poorer while the rich get richer.
\n\nNone of this is new. For decades, the political class of conservatives and right-wingers have presented themselves as the intermediaries between the country and the hegemonic global economy. They systematically maintain this position by exterminating peoples, stealing land, and dominating the working majority. This is a dictatorship in disguise, with enough weapons and resources to keep the country chained down for many more decades.
\n\nThe grassroots uprising that is taking place today is not spontaneous. Rather, it is a reaction to years upon years of domination and injustice. The final straw that set off the protests we saw this April was the proposal of the so-called “Solidarity Financing Law,” a tax reform that will impoverish the majority of the population.
\n\nUnder the pretext of reducing the deficit that it had created with the last reform, Duque’s administration came up with the terrible idea of increasing the cost of living in one of the most unequal countries in the world. It’s shocking that in the midst of a crisis, the Colombian government would decide to raise food taxes for the lower and middle classes. It makes no sense to raise the price of food when the population is going hungry. It is even more outrageous that the proposed reforms will not only harm everyday people but further enrich the country’s wealthiest monopolies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/6.jpg\")
Shield tactics have been crucial to defending against police attacks since the 2019 general strike.
\nThe decisions that determine the direction of the country and the future of millions are made solely by political, military, and economic elites. They pass laws in favor of banking and ranching empires, laws in favor of North American, Asian, and European financial interests, laws to grant themselves immunity after they steal everyone else’s resources, laws to keep them in power both locally and nationally. These laws are approved behind closed doors, without public debate. One of the most obvious examples of this is the legal reform that will make changes to the Colombian healthcare system. Introduced on March 16th, 2021, it has still not been passed by Congress, but its supporters in the legislature pulled secretive moves the night of April 26 to try to push it through while attention was fixed on the tax reform.
\n\nThis health reform could be worse than COVID-19 itself. Essentially, it is intended to implement the full privatization of the Colombian healthcare system. We will have to pay coverage fees for pathology, or the EPS (Colombia’s public health insurance) will deny us medical attention. People who require medical attention through the EPS will have to demonstrate that they are taking good care of themselves and did nothing to cause their illness or injury; if their insurance provider can prove otherwise, it will be able to deny them coverage, forcing them to pay out of pocket. This program is also intended to end public municipal vaccination programs—at the peak of the pandemic!—and to give insurance providers authority to decide how to offer these services and to whom.
\n\nThis reform would allow multinationals and transnational pharmaceutical companies to impose prices and market rules for healthcare in Colombia. It would end health insurance discounts for those in professions including education, manufacturing, and the armed forces. Hospitals will have to demonstrate results in a proposal gruesomely similar to the “results” that the Uribe government demanded of soldiers, which resulted in over 10,000 “false positives”—the practice of extrajudicial execution in which the government and military kidnapped and murdered young people, then falsely reported them as FARC-EP combatants in order to fill quotas.
\n\nSimilarly, it’s estimated that the current health law that privatized the health system in 1993 has led to one million deaths through lack of medical attention or negligence, inflicting even more casualties than the armed conflict.
\n\nFrom the beginning of the pandemic, the poorest have faced the cruel choice between staying home to avoid the virus and working to survive. A few weeks into the pandemic, red handkerchiefs began to appear in the windows of houses in marginalized neighborhoods, signifying that the household was going hungry. Soon, they could be seen by the thousands.
\n\nThis is why, one year after the beginning of the quarantine, when the government proposed a tax reform that would hit the lower and middle classes the hardest, people did not hesitate to take to the streets. In that moment of crisis, there was no longer any choice—only rage and frustration. It was time to bring Colombia to a halt in defense of human dignity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/2.jpg\")
“Corruption and oppression are destroyed by rebellion.”
\nThere were no leaders, only a date proposed by the labor unions—April 28—and that was enough for families, friends, neighbors, and neighborhoods to self-organize through social networks. The people flowed together into a great river of communities marching toward the major gathering points and entrances to the city. This was an efficient way to make the strike real, ensuring that no one could enter or leave.
\n\nThe first day was filled with shouting, speeches, and singing and dancing in the street. This is the way we are in Cali: happy and brave, dignified and festive, dancers and warriors. People walked back to their houses that night, tired but with the knowing smiles of those who have accomplished something. In the following days, the blockades multiplied and the number of participants swelled, inspired by examples of resistance to overcome the fear of repression.
\n\nBut the government has experience as well, particularly violent and paramilitary experience. It began detaining, killing, disappearing, and raping young people. This only increased the intensity of the resistance in the streets.
\n\nWhile restrictive measures were still in place in some Colombian cities, the government declared a curfew beginning at 8 pm on April 28 in an attempt to break the continuity of the mobilization. By 10 am the next morning, they had already modified the measure in response to the discontent in the streets, using the pretext of seeking to prevent crowded situations to pressure people via the curfew.
\n\nOn April 30, the third day of the strike, the authorities shifted to a strategy of state terror—the same terror they have used on other occasions to paralyze communities. The restrictive measures supposedly necessitated by the pandemic provided an excuse for police agencies to carry out illegal mass arrests under the cover of municipal orders, as well as grave abuses of authority including murder, excessive force, threats, irregular arrests, destruction of protesters’ possessions, and sexual abuse.
\n\nNonetheless, on May 1, attendance in the protests exceeded all expectations and many other cities joined in. By this point, demonstrations were taking place in more than 500 cities across the country. Our memory from other difficult struggles, passed down to us from other times by our parents and grandparents, reminds us that when the people unite, there is no power more transformative.
\n\nThrough their police abuse complaint platform “GRITA,” by 11 pm on May 1, the human rights organization Temblores had received reports of 940 complaints of police violence, 92 victims of physical police violence, 21 people murdered by the police, four victims of sexual abuse at the hands of police officers, and 12 people shot in the eye by police.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/13.jpg\")
Massive numbers took to the streets all over Colombia.
\nThe city of Cali has poured out in protest, organizing in spontaneous ways that allow people to meet. People have poured into the major gathering places with beautiful creativity. Food is always at the center of these places—diverse and delicious meals distributed from the communal pots. The front line is there, and other lines of care and defense on the part of youth in resistance. Many areas of the city have been renamed: La Loma de la Cruz, “Hill of the Cross,” is now called La Loma de la Dignidad, “Hill of Dignity”; El Paso del Comercio, “Commerce Pass,” is now called el Paso del Aguante, “Endurance Pass.” The Bridge of a Thousand Days is now the Bridge of a Thousand Struggles and the Gate to the Sea is now the Gate to Freedom.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/10.jpg\")
Barricades were set up and defended all over Cali.
\nHowever, repression has continued on a daily basis. Echoing the phrase “I will always remember when I threw a stone in anger and the repressive government responded with shrapnel,” people have lived through intense days of resistance defending at least seven permanent blockades throughout the city. The people of Cali protested in huge numbers and with determination from the first day of the mobilizations. At most gathering places, people were provoked by police forces, leading to clashes between the protesters and the riot police (ESMAD). Mayor Jorge Iván Ospina’s city government has assigned the task of policing the demonstrations to the Special Operations Group (GOES) of the National Police.
\n\nHere, we present an overview of police atrocities in Cali each day during the strike, compiled by a number of human rights organizations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/12.jpg\")
“Murderers, Rapists. #ESMAD #policias”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/4.jpg\")
“Resistance Port: Against the Reform.”
\nAs of this writing, there is no human rights report yet from May 1, despite large numbers of protesters who covered a great part of the meeting points in the city center. Indiscriminate attacks were reported in the Paso del Aguante, Calipso and Puerto Resistencia protest sites. The police took advantage of the night to attack the most vulnerable points of the May 1 demonstrations. There have been reports from throughout the city of armed civilians shooting into the neighborhoods next to these areas. That night, a state of “Military Assistance” was declared to legalize the militarization of cities where mobilization and civil resistance against the tax reform continued.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/11.jpg\")
A young family on the barricades.
\nIt has been difficult to find information about military expenses from official sources. It seems that they intend to hide the truth about government spending on war materials. Colombia currently spends around 40 trillion Colombian pesos ($10.5 billion USD) on the defense ministry every year. The military budget has historically been high, as internal conflict has continued and escalated for several decades now. Despite efforts to establish peace talks, today the conflict has diversified and intensified in many parts of the country, and defense expenses now make up around 11% of Colombia’s government spending—a high percentage for a country with a weakened economy. This puts Colombia in 25th place in the world ranking for public defense expenses, far above countries like France (with 3.3%), Spain (2.9%), or even Brazil (3.86%).
\n\nThe ESMAD (Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios, the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad), a division of the national police apparatus, was created in 1999 to suppress mobilizations in the country. It was supposed to be a temporary special force, but it has now existed for more than 20 years and grown stronger through successive governments. Today, it consists of 3876 officers with a budget of 490 billion pesos ($131 million USD). In the course of its tenure, the squadron has murdered at least 20 civilians via what they call “excessive force.”
\n\nToday, the Duque-Uribe government, estranged from the people and anticipating strong popular discontent stemming from the aforementioned measures, has allocated millions to strengthen its security forces. The government has been preparing for some time now to use repression to deal with unrest. In March 2020, at the onset of the social and economic crisis caused by COVID-19, it purchased five armored vehicles for 8 billion pesos ($2.1 million USD) along with 9.515 billion pesos ($2.5 million USD) worth of ammunition and weaponry for the ESMAD. The 2021 budget has been increased by almost one billion pesos. In short, this government responds to social protest as if it is at war.
\n\nYet neither the ESMAD nor the police have succeeded in containing the general strike. This is why President Duque declared the installation of “Military Assistance” in any cities that needed it—a measure that allows the use of military forces to respond to public disorder and disasters. The presence of these forces on the streets curtails rights as in a state of siege. Military presence in the streets increases the possibility of acts of war during demonstrations, because the state approaches the situation from a military perspective.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/5.jpg\")
A crowd confronts the heavily armored ESMAD (Colombian riot police).
\nThe Colombian people gathered on every corner, shutting down every city. The neighborhoods took to the streets to reject the tax reform under the slogan “If we don’t unite, we will sink.” Colombia became a river of people. A great fire of unity has spread in honor of those who have given their lives. Their loss hurts us deeply, but their deaths must not be in vain. The voices of the entire country make themselves heard and a multitude of marches have spread the voice of resistance.
\n\nColombia has shaken off its fear. We have nothing left to lose.
\n\n¡A PARAR PARA AVANZAR! WE STRIKE TO MOVE FORWARD!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/9.jpg\")
“For our dead: a minute of silence and a life of combat.”
\nThe Uprising in Colombia: “An Example of What Is to Come”
\n\nPublisher’s note: This is not to suggest that there is any proper way for police to utilize “less-lethal” weapons. ↩
\nThe streets of several Colombian cities have erupted into conflict in the last two days in response to the brutal police murder of 43-year-old Javier Ordóñez, a lawyer and father of two in Bogotá, the nation’s capital. Ordóñez was peaceably drinking in the street in front of his friends’ apartment when police arrived and, without provocation, beat him and tased him 11 times. By the time he arrived at the hospital, after a further beating at the police station, he was already dead.
\n\nVideo captured by Ordóñez’s friends and shared widely on social media sparked widespread protests in Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, Bucaramanga, Popayán, Ibagué, Barranquilla, Neiva, Tunja, and Duitama. In Bogotá alone, 56 police substations, called CAIs (Comandos de Atención Inmediata) were damaged, most of them burned. Although mainstream news is reporting eight people killed by police or paramilitaries on the first night, images circulating in Colombia on Thursday claimed 10, all but one of whom have been identified. The numbers of wounded vary by source. The New York Times claimed that a further 66 had suffered bullet wounds the night of September 9, with over 400 wounded in total.
\n\nColombia has an intense history of violent state and paramilitary repression, which has only intensified during the pandemic. Under current president Ivan Duque, widely seen as a continuation of former president Álvaro Uribe’s corrupt narco-administration, the Colombian government has failed to uphold its side of the peace accords with demobilized guerrilla forces, and murders and disappearances of activists, dissidents, and revolutionaries have increased significantly.
\n\nIn the following report and interview, we explore the background and implications of the latest chapter in a global wave of revolts against police and state repression. For more information on social struggles in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, consult Avispa Midia and PASC, the Colombia Solidarity Accompaniment Project, both of which contributed to this article.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/10.jpg\")
September 10, 2020: 10 people murdered, Bogotá, Colombia. Justice and stop the genocide.
\nOn November 21, 2019, taking inspiration from the Chilean revolt and uprisings across South America, broad swaths of Colombian society took to the streets. The protests, which often took a militant tone and lasted roughly a month, were not over any one specific grievance but in response to multiple factors that had made life in this war-torn country unbearable. Duque’s government was trying to push through an unpopular packet of austerity measures, students were demanding better funding for education, and murders of activists, Indigenous people, and ex-guerrillas by the state or paramilitaries had increased.
\n\nThe month-long mobilization came to be called the paro nacional or national strike. More than the duration, its significance lay in the fact that it was the first time in decades that anyone had seen such an autonomous mass mobilization. For years, militant resistance had been monopolized by specialized, armed guerrilla groups such as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army, the ) and the ELN (National Liberation Army). The strike represented the return of more generalized street confrontation that lent itself to much broader participation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/2.jpg\")
“The police protect us? NO, the cops repress, mutilate, rape, and kill.”
\nColombia’s paro nacional should be seen in the context of the movements shaking other South American countries at the time. While the Chilean insurrection lasted longer and reached further in terms of self-organization and militancy, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay all saw widespread protests in 2019. In Bolivia, a complex and highly charged conflict led to a bloody coup by right-wing Christians.
\n\nAs in Colombia, there were several longstanding causes behind the mobilizations. Latin America has suffered astronomical rates of violence and inequality for decades—really, for centuries. Thanks to austerity policies, the brunt of recent economic stagnation has been intentionally forced on the most marginalized.
\n\nThe examples of revolt in other South American countries, as well as from Hong Kong and beyond, helped spark the month of protest in Colombia late last year. The new tactics popularized in Hong Kong and Chile were reflected in Colombian rebels’ effective use of the primera linea shield bloc tactic.
\n\nChile’s months of unrest, which were only halted by the pandemic, provided an inspiring horizon for those in South America and around the globe. On the other end of the scale, the nightmare that Bolivia has lived over the past year is a sobering reminder that political coups and openly racist regimes pose as much of a threat as ever. The stakes are high, as Colombians know all too well from years of state and paramilitary violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/8.jpg\")
A demonstrator in Bogotá uses a spray can to fan the flames of a burning police station on September 10. Photo by Nadège Mazars.
\nColombia was hit hard by the pandemic—and also by intense, militarized quarantines that most people were forced to violate out of economically induced desperation. In a country in which most people make their living in the informal economy, people were even further criminalized for doing what they needed to do to survive daily.
\n\nAlready turbulent, daily life got markedly worse. Atrocities passed almost completely ignored. In one case, the state massacred 23 prisoners in La Modelo prison for protesting against squalid conditions and lack of pandemic precautions.
\n\nThe state and other armed groups have been using the pandemic as cover to increase repression against organizers and resistance movements. When asked about the current revolt, an anarchist in the city of Cali said, “This had been coming for a while. Massacres were happening almost daily. We’re not putting up with it anymore and we’re out in the streets giving it our all.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/3.jpg\")
The crowd faces off with an ESMAD armored vehicle in Bogotá on September 9.
\nWhile international solidarity with the US uprising against the police was swift and reached many parts of the globe, in many ways this revolt marks the first real occurrence of the same model in another country. The scale and speed of the response in Bogotá to Ordóñez’s murder has already eclipsed what happened in Minneapolis or Kenosha. This is not entirely surprising in a country roughly the size and population of California that has seen 971 activists, human rights defenders, and ex-guerrillas murdered since the 2016 peace accords.
\n\nBy all accounts, the protests were chiefly led by young people—of the nine confirmed deaths from the night of September 9, eight of the deceased were between the ages of 17 and 27. Street combatants largely targeted police, police stations, and banks, but destruction was fairly widespread.
\n\nIt remains to be seen how some of the spontaneous elements of the last two days’ protests will combine with the organized militancy that developed last November and December. In the US, we saw aspects of both the initial wave of rioting in Minneapolis and the “front-line” forms of organization that developed in Portland show up in the same spaces in Kenosha in late August.
\n\nSome of the language seen in the streets of Colombia is also similar to the language of the revolt that began with the murder of George Floyd. Beyond the now ubiquitous ACAB, which is tagged everywhere, protesters carried signs declaring “the police don’t protect us.” A smashed-up street billboard was redecorated to read “Nothing is worth more than life.”
\n\nUnfortunately, the mainstream Colombian media are already deploying their own version of the dishonest “outside agitator” narrative used to such destructive effect in the US in May and June. A report from RCN Noticias, a Colombian TV news network, stokes fear about highly organized street groups under the direction of guerrilla forces:
\n\n\n\n\n“The destruction of 56 CAIs was not a case of isolated incidents but an articulated strategy that was prepared ahead of time, waiting for a trigger. We have details of armed collectives, their preparation to attack, and their recruitment of young people in high schools and universities. This report… reveals a series of cells or neighborhood groups behind the violent protests, dedicated to creating chaos, who take direction from the ELN and from FARC splinter groups.”
\n
After a laughably paranoid explanation of the meaning of “ACAB,” they cut to Colombian Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo: “This has an international origin. It has an international origin and it is directed against the police of countries all over the world.”
\n\nJust like its US counterpart, this false narrative serves to delegitimize protest in the eyes of the populace. In the US, it set the stage for at least part of the population to accept an even more brutal phase of police repression. More Colombian youth will be killed because of the irresponsible and unfounded allegations from these “journalists.”
\n\nRCN’s principal shareholder is Colombian billionaire Carlos Ardila Lülle, particularly loathed for his stake in the sugar industry in the state of Cauca, where many Indigenous Nasa people have been murdered for their resistance to monocrop sugarcane agriculture invading their lands. Lülle’s reach extends beyond media and industry to political and narco-paramilitary influence.
\n\nThere is no coordinated international plot “against the police of countries all over the world.” Who could organize such a thing? Only the extremely wealthy have the resources to pay people to revolt who otherwise would not—and they seek to suppress movements for change, not to catalyze them. The opposite is true: the politicians and police of all the world’s governments coordinate to violently impose the capitalist world order on all of us. There is no secret cabal organizing resistance conspiratorially—the situation has become so dire that revolts are breaking out as a response to the conditions that are imposed on people. If there are parallels between the revolts in different parts of the world, it is simply because the means of repression are so universal, owing to the homogeneity of the global ruling class and the strategies employed by those who comprise it. Police, everywhere, are the front line of this repression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/6.jpg\")
A burnt out and vandalized police station in Bogotá, destroyed the night of September 9.
\nDemonstrations continued in Bogotá, Cali, and other cities the night of September 10. According to an independent media activist on the ground in Cali, the ESMAD (Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron), carabineros, mounted police, and military police mobilized heavily—an atypical show of force, especially the use of the military police. Rumors of the additional use of live ammunition against protesters have not been confirmed yet, but there are photos of police pointing pistols at people. Hours after the protest in Cali convened on September 10, a group of protesters was forced to take refuge in the university hospital, where they were surrounded by police for hours, fighting back bravely. By 9 pm, at least 32 people had been arrested, although only seven were identified, according to Medios Libres Cali.
\n\nIn Bogotá, by 10:30 pm on September 10, human rights organizations had reported 138 confirmed arrests. The number grew throughout the night. Although additional police murders have not been reported, sources documenting the events on twitter described continued beatings, disappearings, and torture of demonstrators.
\n\nIt seems unlikely that the unrest will die down any time soon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/1.jpg\")
\nA longtime resident of Bogotá and member of PASC, the Colombia Solidarity Accompaniment Project, provides more context in the following in-depth interview.
\n\n—What led up to this?
\n\nSo the background we’ve seen leading up to the situation in the streets of Bogotá on September 9 and now today, September 10, has to do with longstanding social conflict. The pandemic made more obvious the situation that was already ongoing in terms of poverty, exclusions, huge suburbs full of displaced people… the armed conflict that is still going on, the war against the poor. The war against campesinos by paramilitaries in the countryside is still going on, so there are still waves of displacement of poor people who are stuck in the suburbs. Usually people survive from informal economy… they’ve just spent six months being criminalized just for going out of their houses to buy food. So people are literally dying from hunger; people have been in an unbearable situation for the past months. And the ongoing police brutality, like many other places in the world, is something that upset people, especially the poor people who are always experiencing repression—the jails are full of poor people.
\n\nSo this definitely has something to do with what happened. On September 9, in the morning, at 4 am, a guy is having a beer with some friends in the street, which is illegal… then the police appear and, according to his friends, the guy says “OK, well, give me a ticket, that’s fine, I’m having a beer on the street, you want to give me a ticket, give me a ticket,” and the police answered “No, there’s no ticket today,” and they started to beat him up and to tase him. They tased him at least 11 times according to the autopsy. Eventually, they took him to the police station, where he was beaten up again, then finally sent to the hospital. When he reached the hospital, he was dead.
\n\nAnd then, even worse than all that, when the family was at their home, with the body, putting out candles and performing their ceremonies, the police officers went around with their tasers in their hands, proud. So that attitude of the police was the spark—people feel oppressed, they feel that their lives are worth nothing, and this is why people went to the street yesterday night.
\n\nThere was a first call at 5 pm. Many people gathered around the police station. The attitude of the police was really repressive towards the people. That’s how the situation developed into riots. Something like 50 police stations have been burned down. The police used that excuse to open fire against the mass of people—so now we have confirmation of seven deaths and 45 wounded, at least 20 of them by bullets. They literally were given the order to shoot people in the streets, to shoot to kill. So the images we can see in the social networks are really disturbing: police officers, some of them not wearing their police uniforms, and other civilians that, you don’t know if they’re police officers, families of police officers, paramilitaries, or whatever, going after people in the streets in order to shoot them.
\n\nThis is what happened yesterday night, until late. Right now, it’s September 10; there are more demonstrations in front of the police station, and some people have already been arrested today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/4.jpg\")
\n—How would you describe the relationship between this and last year’s *paro nacional?*
\n\nSo we have to understand that in Colombia for seven years, for ten years, there has been an ongoing mobilization process… the last huge episode was a general strike in November 2019. Because of the end of the year, it stopped, but it was supposed to resume in March 20201—but instead, like people everywhere else on earth, we were stuck at home for six months, because of the pandemic. So there’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of rage that comes from the frustration of the feeling that people had a few months ago. And also, these ongoing mobilizations of campesinos in the cities have been building a certain type of social fabric—so neighbors know each other because they were going to bang pots together every night throughout the whole month of November and part of December. That social fabric was the foundation for the ongoing mobilization, including what is happening today, too. So we can definitely see a link and a buildup from those situations.
\n\n—What has been the role of anti-authoritarians in the uprising?
\n\nIt’s been really interesting with several of the mobilizations over the past years and especially the last one, the strike—it’s not just what we call here the “organized” folks that go to the streets. “Organized” meaning being in an anarchist federation, being in a union, being in a campesino organization, being in one of the big social movements that are active in Colombia. It exceeds those categories. So you see your neighbor that never organized anything, who is just randomly against injustice, joining the protests that used to be made up only of activists. It’s been interesting to see that change, regarding the kind of people who go to the street—and different people working together, too, anti-authoritarians and people from social movements, Indigenous movements, and to see that bound up all together. In the past month, despite the pandemic, Indigenous movements, campesino movements, and student movements have joined together in something called the March for Dignity—50 to 100 people have been walking from different regions towards Bogotá for two weeks. That drew a lot of support from many people. It has been another element of the background.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/5.jpg\")
A crowd on September 9.
\n—Do you see connections between this and the anti-police revolt in the US that began in May?
\n\nWe can definitely see a link between the revolt here and the revolt we’ve seen in the United States. Obviously, there is an issue around systemic racism in the United States and what it means for Black people; Black Lives Matter and the whole sense of that struggle in the United States is not exactly the same here, even if we can see that those who are the most affected by the killing of social leaders, by the wave of massacres that we’ve been seeing in the countryside in Colombia, are Indigenous folks, are Black communities that are organized, that have another way of seeing life, that have community bonds and have another project in life, which is not capitalism. So there are links and there are differences.
\n\nBut I think the main issue is that the pandemic is just one more example confirming why people cannot stand that system anymore, and people are genuinely revolting against that oppression. This is the main connection, this is what can be learned, this is where we can build bridges in terms of questions like, which world are we dreaming of? Can we dream, can we build a world in which we don’t need jails? Can we build a world in which we don’t need the state? These are the kind of questions—and this is the basis from which we can build those bridges between struggles in the United States and the rest of the Americas, together with Indigenous and Black community struggles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/7.jpg\")
\n—What role have paramilitary groups played in the repression?
\n\nThe Colombian armed conflict is still going on. Basically, the main war against the people didn’t have so much to do with the guerrillas of the FARC—the war is actually a war of the state against its own people, against its own territory, because many communities have another way of life. They don’t want to be dependent on the state, they want to have territorial autonomy, they want to have their own economy, which is not a capitalist economy. So there’s an ongoing war against those concrete existing projects.
\n\nAnd this war plays out through legal measures—there is a legal framing—people are being detained and arrested, there are political prisoners, people are repressed by the police. But paramilitarism is a strategy that the state has always been using as a way to spread terror in the countryside and carry out genocide against ethnic people and also against their projects, against that social fabric. The social fabric itself is the military target of the paramilitary strategy. This is something that has been so deeply woven into Colombian society for so many years that we were not even surprised to see civilians, yesterday night, openly joining the police with guns and helping them out. Because paramilitary activity is so embedded in the practice of the military and the police forces of Colombia for so long that the two are fundamentally linked.
\n\n—What does this uprising mean in the larger context of social movements in Colombia and South America?
\n\nSeveral big organizations have been planning how to arrange the return of the general strike. Actually, for September 21. So these riots, this uprising—it’s interesting that it arrives at the moment at which everyone we’ve been seeing being calm through the pandemic, even when the situation was clearly unbearable, was anticipating something. For people who became homeless over the past weeks, the misery to which a huge part of society is condemned is totally unbearable. So everybody has been waiting, awaiting a big uprising. It’s an example of what’s to come.
\n\nIt’s an example of what’s to come in Colombia, but it’s also an example of what’s to come in the rest of South America. Brazil is in a terrible situation. We’ve seen what’s been happening in Argentina with the police trying to make a sort of coup on September 9, yesterday. So you can see there is a kind of social conflictivity that is growing, and it has to do with the fact that this economic system cannot give us what we need. Now, that doesn’t mean that the results of uprising and struggle will be peace and anarchy… unfortunately, it might also be fascism. But it’s a struggle that has to take place, it’s a struggle that cannot take place only through an uprising, it also has to take place by the development of the social fabric, through the establishment of links, of building different kinds of projects, different alternatives, many of which we already have, while others have yet to be created.
\n\nJust to name a few examples of inspiring things that have been happening—during the pandemic, campesino organizations that have autonomous trajectories have been sending tons of food to poor neighborhoods in Bogotá and other cities. We’ve seen similar examples in other parts of South America. And for example, in some of those regions, they have their own security systems—so they have their own guards, but they are unarmed guards. This has been a proposal from the communities for a long time in order to replace the police, to say, you know, we don’t need the police coming from the state—we have our own community structure to ensure safety. The whole idea of the guards that comes from an Indigenous perspective is totally different. They have a stick, but that stick is never used to beat up anyone; it’s a stick that represents collective authority, it is given to someone and can be taken from that person. It is an authority that you give someone to be a guard, temporarily, but that can be taken away from them at any moment, and this is a collective responsibility, to make the community guards work. So we have Indigenous guards, we have guardia cimarrona, the Black community guards, and actually, what’s been called the primera linea, the front line, young folks that have been forming lines of protection in the student demonstrations and the strike, have been in an exchange over the last month with the guards from the rural areas, to get everyone to understand that perspective, to apply it in the cities.
\n\nSo people are not just participating in an uprising, people are not just fighting against the system—they are also imagining and they are creating new ways and new perspectives for another kind of society. Despite the rage that I can feel right now about all the terrible things we’ve been seeing over the past hours but also the past weeks—I lost count, but over the past month and a half, we’re at something like 15 massacres, 60 people were slaughtered by soldiers or paramilitaries in rural areas—the wave of violence can bring you to total desperation, but we do see that there are inspiring examples for anarchists and anti-authoritarians, or whoever wants to see a world without oppression and without a state, there are things that are filling us with hope.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/11/9.jpg\")
\nIntroduction to Anarchism and Resistance in Bogotá—A summary of the context of social struggles in Bogotá a decade and a half ago, written by visitors from the United States.
\n\nOriginally published on September 10, 2020; translated from the Spanish by Duncan Riley.
\n\nOn the afternoon of Wednesday, September 9, 2020, multiple protests against police brutality occurred in cities including Bogotá, Medellín, Cali,2 Barranquilla, Ibagué, and Tunja. With its axis in the capitol, the activity began with a demonstration of hundreds of people in front of the Comando de Acción Inmediata (Immediate Action Command) in the Villa Luz neighborhood, in the locality of Engativá, where there was a serious clash with security forces. From there, scenes of protest and clashes, with thousands of participants, extended to other areas of the city, principally to the popular neighborhoods, in places like Suba and Kennedy, and to a lesser extent, Bosa, Usme, Teusaquillo, Antonio Nariño, Usaquén, and Ciudad Bolívar, and to areas on the outskirts of Bogotá, like Soacha and Madrid.
\n\nCalled spontaneously through social networks after the cruel murder of Javier Ordoñez by agents of the police in the early morning of that same Wednesday, the protest against the repressive action was surprising in its magnitude and rapidity. The action was catalyzed by the spreading of a video that shows the cruel treatment of Javier Ordoñez by multiple police officers after he was already overpowered and on the ground. The response of the population seems to be influenced by the mobilization of the Black population in the United States against racist police after the murder of George Floyd, and the anti-repression experience of the days of mobilizations in November and December 2019 in this country, driven themselves by the murder of the young man Dilan Cruz.
\n\nThe day of protest against police brutality on September 9 draws on elements of local revolt and is led by working-class youth, often the targets of police brutality themselves and the principal victims of unemployment, precarious work, and urban violence. It resumes, though still without clear political continuity, the protests of the women’s movement against the sexual violence committed by Security Forces in June of this year, the anti-hunger mobilizations of unemployed women workers and the residents of popular neighborhoods during the first months of quarantine, and the less successful mobilization on August 21st to protest recent massacres and the increasing violence in the country.3
\n\nIn the midst of a context marked by social exhaustion and the economic crisis generated by the measures of mandatory isolation and the social-sanitary crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, these protests are weaved into a new wave of outrage from victims, human rights organizations, and the media against multiple incidents of police brutality committed by security forces before and during the quarantine. Their explosive nature demonstrates the existence of a significant uneasiness among multiple social sectors and the development of a certain common identity among the participants, although disorganized and fragmented.
\n\nThe struggle against police brutality—demanding justice for Javier Ordoñez, Anderson Arboleda, Dilan Cruz, and all victims of governmental repression—is vital today. It is a struggle that should depart from the recognition of the centrality and sensitivity of the victims and their families, and should begin analyzing the special emphasis that institutional repression places on working-class youths, the Black population, and sexual dissidents. The example of Nicolás Neira, a teenager murdered 15 years ago by the Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (Mobile Antiriot Squad), should bring us to question the character of the Security Forces in the framework of a repressive state and an unjust, violent, and unequal capitalist society, sketching possible alternatives of self-organization and self-care, looking towards socialism and freedom.
\n\nJustice for the victims of police brutality!
\n\nGrupo Libertario Vía Libre
\n\nMarch 2020 was also anticipated to see the opening of a new phase of revolt in Chile. ↩
\nThe city of Cali and surrounding areas were the site of a large revolt led by enslaved and formerly enslaved Afro-Colombians known as the Zurriago in 1850 and 1851. The revolt included the public whipping of slave owners and the destruction of fences that had been erected on common lands by property owners, and it played an important role in sparking the Civil War of 1851, which culminated in the abolition of slavery in Colombia (then known as New Granada). ↩
\nThe August 21 action was a march protesting the recent massacres targeting youths across the country during the month of August. An analysis of this action published on Vía Libre’s website on August 28 argued that it was necessary to build stronger links between different social struggles, such as those of students, peasants, and workers, in order to strengthen the resistance to state violence. ↩
\nOn August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager—just one of hundreds of instances every year in which a white police officer kills a young Black man in the United States. This time, though the cup overflowed—and for a week and a half, an ungovernable revolt raged in on the streets of Ferguson as angry residents and their supporters used a variety of tactics including arson, property destruction, looting, and gunfire to keep police at a distance and impose consequences for the murder. This set a precedent for subsequent rebellions around the country from Berkeley to Baltimore—culminating, after a pause during the first years of the Trump era, with the countrywide upheaval in response to the murder of George Floyd. To understand the events of the past two and a half months better, we can revisit the uprising in Ferguson and the practices and discourses that emerged in those days.
\n\nThe following overview sets out the context leading up to the revolt and recounts the events in a timeline including narratives from the participants. For another account of the uprising, read Looting Back; to learn about the perspectives of anarchists who were involved, read Reflections on the Ferguson Uprising, a group discussion recorded in February 2015.
\n\nAn earlier version of this text appeared in 2015 in issue #12 of Rolling Thunder, our anarchist journal of dangerous living. It is also available as a zine you can print out and distribute in your community. As we revisit the uprising that spread from Ferguson in 2014, our thoughts remain focused on those who have not yet been killed by police—from whose number another life is subtracted every day. Honor the dead and fight like hell for the living.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/5.jpg\")
A protester sprays lighter fluid on a police car as others smash its windows near the Ferguson Police Department after the November 24 grand jury decision not to prosecute Darren Wilson for murdering Micheal Brown.
\nTo understand what happened in Ferguson in 2014, we have to start a little earlier.
\n\nOur story begins in the 1850s, when Missouri was a battleground between proponents and critics of slavery. Abolitionists and other well-meaning individuals repeatedly attempted to use the courts to secure freedom and rights for Black people. This was as naïve and ineffectual then1 as counting on the courts to convict police is today.
\n\nIn the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, concluding a court case initiated in Missouri, the US Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent—enslaved or free—could not be accorded the rights of citizens. It also overturned the “Missouri Compromise” of 1820, intended to maintain a balance between states that practiced slavery and states that prohibited it. The Supreme Court held that the Fifth Amendment barred any law that would deprive a slaveholder of his property, such as his slaves. Furthermore, if Black people were
\n\n\n\n\nentitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race the right to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation… it would give them full liberty of speech in public and in private, to hold public meetings upon public affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.
\n
This is a concise history lesson on the institutions of US democracy. Property, the sanctity of which is asserted today by those who wring their hands about the looting in Ferguson, is revealed as a justification for robbing an entire people of their lives. Citizenship, which has divided democracy into included and excluded since ancient Athens, shows its true colors: rather than a means of transcending racism, citizenship served to introduce racial disparities, as it serves to perpetuate them today. The court system put the stamp of legitimacy on all this, validating racial divisions so poor white people would have an interest in siding with the wealthy against poor people of color. Nothing was more terrifying to the honorable and learned men of the Supreme Court than the possibility that Black people might speak, travel, and bear arms freely, mingling with the rest of society. The Dred Scott decision should make an anarchist out of any person of good conscience: for either one is bound to abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court, the highest law in the land, or one is bound to abide by one’s own conscience regardless of what any court rules.
\n\nCountless Black and indigenous rebels came to the second conclusion, along with at least a few white people. One of these was John Brown, who led a raid into Missouri at the end of 1858 to liberate a handful of slaves, killing one slaveholder and seizing the belongings of another. Thus began the countdown to his raid on Harper’s Ferry, which triggered the Civil War. It was illegal direct action in support of Black resistance that forced the issue of slavery, not legal recourse or peaceful protest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/14.jpg\")
Graffiti on the gas pump at the burnt QT in Ferguson, celebrating eight decades of uprisings.
\nFast forward through the reorganization of capitalism from plantation slavery to industrial wage labor: capitalists have to pay for the upkeep of slaves through thick and thin, while workers can be hired and fired as needed. Fast forward through the restabilization of white supremacy by the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups that were autonomous of the state and yet complementary to it (just like the pioneers who formed the vanguard of colonization, whose frontier spirit is remembered so fondly by “libertarian” capitalists today). Fast forward through the civil rights movement, much of which was channeled into institutional struggles for inclusion that ultimately stabilized white supremacy once more—offering a pressure valve for an upwardly mobile minority while the majority of Black people languish in poverty and, increasingly, in prison.
\n\nAt the turn of the 20th century, St. Louis, Missouri was a thriving industrial center, drawing massive numbers of Black workers. When globalization drew factory production out of North America, reducing cities like Detroit and St. Louis to Rust Belt ghost towns, Black workers were the first to suffer, left to starve in decaying urban cores.
\n\nDespite formal desegregation, explicitly racialized power remained as economically spacialized power. Around the country, urban blight and aggressive development slowly broke up longstanding poor and Black communities, dispersing people to new suburban ghettos. Ferguson is a satellite town just outside St. Louis; between 1990 and 2010, its Black population more than doubled, while more than half of the white population fled to other suburbs.
\n\nIn 2008, the economic crisis hit, once again impacting Black people first and worst. Ferguson was in the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis in Missouri; for years, banks had preyed on families, extending them sub-prime mortgages. Consequently, as unemployment spiked, many were left impoverished and homeless, or crowded into housing complexes.
\n\nAll this gives the lie to rhetoric about people “destroying their own neighborhoods.” Many in Ferguson own nothing at all; they have only recently been forced to move there, driven by market forces that would soon drive them on again. Pundits bewailed the economic setbacks that the rioting might inflict on an already suffering town, but this confuses the profits of developers with the needs of actual residents. If Ferguson is developed and experiences an economic upswing, its poorest residents will not benefit from this—they’ll be forced out by rising costs.
\n\nIn fact, for the poor and unemployed, rioting might be the only hope of improving their prospects: in March 2015, the QuikTrip Corporation announced that it would donate the property of the QT that was burned in August 2014 to host a job training center, to be funded by $1.2 million in donations from St. Louis businesses. It took weeks of rioting and arson to secure this single concession from the profiting class.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/10.jpg\")
Graffiti in Ferguson during the uprising supporting Kevin Johnson, on death row since 2007 for the killing of a police officer involved in the death of Kevin’s 12-year-old brother, Joseph “Bam Bam” Long. Kevin is from Meacham Park, a small working-middle class Black neighborhood in affluent, white, suburban Kirkwood. Meacham Park was also home of cop killer Charles Lee “Cookie” Thorton, and in 2004 the scene of youth chasing police from the neighborhood with rocks and bottles.
\nDespite widespread hope that Obama’s election heralded the coming of a post-racial America, racial disparities only worsened while he was in office. In retrospect, this expectation sounds so naïve that few will even admit to it—but how else can we explain the euphoria that greeted his victory in 2008, prompting even anarchists to suspend their usual counter-inaugural protests?
\n\nDuring democratic presidencies in the US, there seems to be a period after the mid-term elections that is prone to social upheaval. The Seattle WTO demonstrations of 1999 occurred in the third year of Bill Clinton’s second term, interrupting the neoliberal triumphalism that characterized the 1990s. The Occupy movement of 2011 occurred during the third year of Obama’s first term, bringing anti-capitalism into mainstream discourse for the first time in generations. It is not surprising, then, that the second wave of rebellion under America’s first Black president, occurring at the analogous point in his second term, focused on race. At this point in the electoral cycle, no one had any illusions that electoral politics could address racial inequalities, and there was no more incentive for even Obama’s staunchest supporters to keep quiet.
\n\nToday, in 2020, it seems clear that the general public is becoming progressively disillusioned—with neoliberalism, with capitalism, with liberal notions of racial equality and “progress.” But just as Obama’s initial campaign re-mystified the disenchanted millions, we will likely see future political parties accomplish the same thing, as Syriza temporarily did in Greece in 2014 (with disastrous results). There’s a sucker born every minute, ready to fall for age-old tricks. As long as representational politics commands the hopes and imaginations of so many US citizens, electoral rhythms will modulate the pace of social movements—triggering them every so often, but suppressing them the rest of the time. We should be ready to seize the opportunities that arise when politicians fail to deliver on their promises, but in the long run we have to transform that disillusionment into a feeling of possibility outside the electoral system.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/6.jpg\")
The events in Ferguson stripped the veneer of legitimacy from the forms of structural white supremacy imposed by police violence.
\nIn early 2011, in response to austerity measures, protesters occupied the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a localized struggle, but it gained traction on the popular imagination out of all proportion to its size. This clearly indicated that something big was coming, and some anarchists even brainstormed about how to prepare for it—but all the same, the nationwide wave of Occupy a few months later caught everyone flat-footed.
\n\nIn August 2014, after white police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a week and a half of pitched protests shook the town. Once again, these were localized, but they loomed big in the popular imagination. Police kill people every day in the US, but until that August it hadn’t gained traction on the public consciousness. What was new about the Ferguson protests was not just that people refused to cede the streets to the police for days on end,2 nor that they openly defied the “community leadership” that usually pacifies such revolts. It was also that all around the country, people were finally paying attention and expressing approval. Like the occupation of the capitol building in Madison, this portended things to come. Ferguson is a microcosm of the US; what happened there could happen anywhere.
\n\nThe Occupy movement subsided without achieving its object of transforming society. We can identify three built-in limits that contributed to this. First, it offered almost no analysis of racialized power, despite the central role of race in dividing labor struggles and poor people’s resistance in the US. Second, perhaps not coincidentally, its discourse was largely legalistic and reformist—it was premised on the assumption that the laws and institutions of the state are fundamentally beneficial, or at least legitimate. Finally, it began as a political rather than social movement—hence the initial decision to occupy Wall Street instead of acting on a terrain closer to most people’s everyday lives, as if capitalism were not a ubiquitous relation but something emanating from the stock market.
\n\nAs a result of these three factors, the majority of the participants in Occupy were activists, newly precarious exiles from the middle class, and members of the underclass, in roughly that order; the working poor were notably absent. The simplistic sloganeering of Occupy obscured the lines of conflict that run through our society from top to bottom: “police are part of the 99%” is technically true, economically speaking, but so are most rapists and white supremacists. All of this meant that when the police came to evict the encampments and kill the movement, Occupy had neither the numbers, nor the fierceness, nor the analysis it needed to defend itself.
\n\nWhen a movement reaches its limits and subsides, it illustrates the obstacles future movements will have to surpass. Accordingly, the model of struggle originating in Ferguson transcended the failures of Occupy. Where Occupy whitewashed the issue of race, the Ferguson protests placed it front and center. Where Occupy confined itself to the unfavorable terrain of “political” physical sites and reformist demands, the people who rose up in Ferguson were fighting on their own streets for their own very lives. Whereas, with the temporary exception of Occupy Oakland, Occupy lacked the will to stand down the police, people in Ferguson braved tear gas and bullets to do just that. Where Occupy sought to conceal all the different forms of hierarchy and strife that cut through this society beneath the unifying banner of “the 99%,” the conflicts in Ferguson pushed them to the fore.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/21.jpg\")
The army of the rich…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/22.jpg\")
…the vanguard of white supremacy.
\nIn today’s hyperlinked world, revolt can proceed from the bottom to the top and from the periphery to the center, as Bakunin once prescribed. How many people had previously heard of Ferguson or of Sidi Bouzid, the town in Tunisia where Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire and sparked the uprisings of the Arab Spring?
\n\nThis poses further questions about the relationship between the hotspots and the hinterlands. Should aspiring insurgents focus on intensifying high-profile struggles in radical meccas like the San Francisco Bay Area, in hopes that they will catalyze revolt elsewhere? Or should we regard those as the effects, rather than the causes, of ruptures in little-known towns that are not already quarantined as radical enclaves? Although both Occupy and the wave of revolt emanating from Ferguson arguably reached their peaks in the Bay Area, neither began there, and many of the participants had moved there from elsewhere. Even if we measure the progress and intensity of revolt by what happens in the hotspots, it may be that to push things further, we have to focus on the hinterlands.
\n\nWhat convergence and concentration were to the anti-globalization movement at the turn of the century, simultaneity and diffusion are today. Just as capitalism and white supremacy are everywhere, any expression of resistance can instantly replicate and spread.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/15.jpg\")
Thousands of police and National Guardsmen failing to preserve order, November 24.
\nIn preparing this timeline, we drew from the zine No We Won’t Go Home, the Missouri Prison Newsletter, the Antistate STL website, and many other sources.
\n\nAUGUST 9 (SATURDAY) - Michael Brown is shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri by police officer Darren Wilson. Brown was walking home from a convenience store to his grandmother’s house when Wilson stopped him for jaywalking and a scuffle ensued. Witnesses report that the officer shot Brown as he fled with his hands up in surrender. A crowd quickly grows; shots are fired into the air and a dumpster is set on fire. Police respond with an armored riot vehicle, a helicopter, dogs, and assault rifles. As anger grows, the police are forced to withdraw.
\n\n\n\n\nAs the night drags on, the politicians arrive. OBS, NOI, NBPP, UAPO,3 alphabet soup. They’re trying, with little success, to grab the attention of a relatively small crowd. Instead of joining us as we face the police station, they face us, trying to tell everyone how we need to act, what needs to happen next, who will be involved in a futile and meaningless negotiation, as if those of us on either side of the line that is being drawn have anything to say to those on the other.
\n
AUGUST 10 (SUNDAY) - In the evening, crowds gather for a prayer vigil at the site of the shooting, in the Canfield apartments. The crowd marches to W. Florissant where police have massed. The protesters confront the police line, yelling insults and throwing things. Three or four police cruisers attempt to drive through the crowd. People surround them and smash out their windows.
\n\nAfter police exit the scene, people begin to celebrate. Some march down to the Quick Trip; others attempt to march to the police station, but meet a wall of police. Protesters smash the windows of the QuikTrip and others flood in to loot the store. People openly drive cars onto W. Florissant and fill them with looted goods. Police respond with tear gas, but mostly remain clear of the crowd. Later, someone reportedly shoots at the police helicopter circling above.
\n\nThe crowd remains in the street late into the night. By the time things die down, the looting has spread to twelve businesses, with multiple dumpsters on fire. A fire completely engulfs the QT and reduces it to rubble. Two officers have been injured by rocks and bottles.
\n\n\n\n\nIt’s about 8:10 when I show up. Exiting the highway, I see six cop cars parked at the gas station. Across the street, there are more than 10 police SUVs parked in the cemetery. We comment on how they’re just being prepared for what might happen, yet nothing could prepare us for the amount of police ahead. We drive another mile down Lucas and Hunt, and as we head north, traffic gets incredibly thick. Then the police cars start speeding past us. It’s impossible for them to get through, so they speed dangerously past on the opposite side of the street. We can’t make it to the apartment complex by car because there are so many people, police, police cars, dogs, kids.
\n\nWe park and make the hike in—past over a hundred cop cars.
\n
\n\n\nThe police on the southern end of the street, where the rowdier crowd is, call for more backup from the police blocking off the north side. Instead of navigating the side streets, the scared and hasty cops drive their cars through a mob of hundreds or more people who are growing bolder all the time. The first two or three cars slowly make their way through the crowd, but by the fourth people are physically stopping the cars, beating on them and eventually all you can hear is one loud thud after another as people stomp the police cars. The door of one cop car is pulled open, but the car speeds off before the cops inside are extracted. The police are just running a gauntlet of angry people. Lots of cheering. Almost everyone has stopped being afraid.
\n\nYou might expect the crowd of attackers to be young men in their early 20s or teens, but all genders and all ages are getting their kicks in. I see people as young as 10 or 12 years old attacking the cars and people in their 50s too.
\n\nOnce the police have made it to the south side, it seems clear that the block is ours. The police are maintaining lines at Ferguson Avenue (to the south) and just north of the bridge for the 270 interchange (to the north). The mile or so between is totally unpoliced and filled with thousands of people.
\n\nThis commercial stretch, full of parasitical businesses, has numerous small roads leading east into the densely populated neighborhoods just a block away. The police, too afraid and outnumbered to enter a residential area seething with outrage, are unable to block those streets. As they hear about what is going on, people are pouring into the commercial district on foot, in cars, on motorcycles. For once, the geography of this suburb is on our side.
\n
\n\n\nIn the QT, it looks like people three or four deep just lining the windows. The gas prices are ripped down off the big sign out front and “SNITCHES” is painted on it. “RIP MIKE MIKE,” “187 County Police,” and other messages adorn the brick of the QT. Elsewhere along the street: “AVENGE MIKE MIKE” “FUCK DA POLICE,” “KILL COPS,” “THE ONLY GOOD COP IS A DEAD COP,” “SNITCHES GET STITCHES,” “AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES OUR MASTERS BLIND,” and “MIKE BROWN, THIS FOR YOU.”
\n
\n\n\nA pallet of water bottles. I grab a case and hand them out; it’s August after all. “There’s more where that came from.” Everyone is eager for a first drink of looted beer and packs of smokes are passed around. Might as well, even though it tastes like shit. Come to think of it, I don’t actually want any of this crap. But that’s not really the point, is it?
\n\nSome have started to work on the cash register as lottery tickets rain down from the sky and celebratory shots are fired into the air. Are they taking aim at God or just sending a warning to the cops?
\n\nEither way, it’s a little too close for comfort. Fear is still with me, but it’s not controlling me.
\n\nNext, it’s Sam’s Meat Market, the beauty shops, Red’s BBQ. Someone has a go at the Liberty tax prep office while others are trying to get into the storage units across the street. Dumpsters are being set on fire as cars speed wildly up and down the strip. Young people with masked faces leaning out the windows showing off their looted bottles, flipping off the police helicopter.
\n\nA ten-year-old girl carrying a large sack full of food says, “We’re gonna eat good at school tomorrow.”
\n
\n\n\n“Hey, can you get me some ‘rillos?” A group of young women peer around the corner at the gas station being emptied of its contents.
\n\n“Nah, but you can, they’re free tonight.”
\n\n“We don’t got a mask though. You got another one?”
\n\n“Here, it’s easy, just take the t-shirt and put your head through the neck hole like you’re gonna put it on. Then turn it into a hood and tie the sleeves behind your head.”
\n\nAfter two and a half hours, the looting has spread within fifty yards of the southern police line and backup has arrived in sufficient quantities to begin clearing the strip. The stationary phalanx has started to move and everyone is running back into the neighborhood. We hear a rumor that the Foot Locker on the other side of the cops is being looted, but then we see it: plumes of black smoke and an orange glow on the horizon.
\n\nLike moths we are drawn towards the flames. “The smoke so thick down there you can’t even breathe.” Armored personnel carriers block access to the fire, shining powerfully bright lights in our direction. Back the other way. Maybe we can still get some shoes to replace the ones falling apart on our feet.
\n\nA man runs out of the woods, coming from where we’re headed. “It’s over, Foot Locker’s done. The cops showed up. They lockin’ people up.” He warns a few more behind us and then, loaded down with shoeboxes, dips into his house.
\n\nA young kid on a bike rolls up as we walk back to the car.
\n\n“Hey, y’all black bloc?”
\n\n“Uh… Yeah, sort of.”
\n\n“Me too, I’m one of those anar…”
\n\n“Anarchists?”
\n\n“Yeah, that’s me.”
\n\n“Black bloc’s not a group you belong to, it’s just a way to stay safe in the streets. When everybody wears the same color and covers their face it makes it harder for the cops to arrest you.”
\n\n“Cool. Why y’all out here?”
\n\n“Cause we’re pissed about what happened. Isn’t that why everyone’s here?”
\n\n“Yeah… but I heard I could get some free shit too.”
\n\nAs we head back home, cop cars are still racing in from distant jurisdictions. I roll the window down and let the night air blow through my hair knowing that this moment will never be erased.
\n
AUGUST 11 (MONDAY) - Crowds attempt to gather at the burned QuikTrip. As soon as people begin to block the street, they are attacked by riot police with armored personnel carriers, tear gas, and rubber bullets. The cops set up static lines on either end of W. Florissant while neighborhood residents and others yell and throw stones. Neighborhood residents come to the aid of those from outside the area, giving them directions and leading them through the surrounding neighborhoods. Mild street fighting continues late into the night as protestors discuss the need for continued determination, more supplies, and new tactics such as strikes and walkouts.
\n\nLooting threatens to spread as smash and grabs occur in south St. Louis and the Galleria Mall in West County. Police deploy preemptively in dense commercial districts downtown and in University City.
\n\nAUGUST 12 (TUESDAY) - Again, people attempt to stage a protest at the QT and are attacked by militarized riot police. Some of the crowd marches to a rally at a local church where Al Sharpton is speaking. Outside, the mood is tense. Hundreds of people are milling around the yard of the church, the sidewalk, and the street, holding signs, yelling, and talking, while motorists drive up and down the street honking their horns in support. Racial conflicts surface within the crowd. Late that night, five people are shot, one by police.
\n\n\n\n\nThe police have started to blame organized white anarchists for instigating the mayhem on Sunday night. Others on Twitter and Facebook are following their lead, unwittingly playing into the new police disinformation strategy of our era: the anarchist as outside agitator.
\n\nAs we drive in, a large crowd is headed away from ground zero, the burned out gas station newly named “Mike Brown Plaza.” We park and decide to go where the crowd is—a rally at a local Black church. Al Sharpton presiding, Nation of Islam running security. The mood is tense given the previous nights of rioting, police attacks, and arrests, but hundreds of people are here, lining the sidewalks and the median. The street is full of cars. The incessant honking is overwhelming.
\n\nI’m facing the street, trying to work up the courage to strike up a conversation. Then from behind, a commotion. I see my friend being chased away by a stream of people. I try to intercede. “What’s going on? What are you doing?” Immediately I’m surrounded. Large men are standing close all around me.
\n\n“Get out of here. This is a Black space.”
\n\n“If you an anarchist, you need to leave.”
\n\n“We don’t want that anarchist shit here.”
\n\nThis is the most important moment of my entire life. They’re gonna have to kill me to keep me away.
\n\n“No. I’m staying.”
\n\nA slender black arm reaches across my chest and pulls me out of the crowd. “No, we want him here,” she yells. “Him being here proves this ain’t about black versus white.”
\n\nAnother man approaches, wants to get his picture taken with me. “Come here, get in the picture,” he yells to his friend. We hold hands like in a poster for racial unity. Another arm around my back.
\n\n“What was that about?” No one seems to have the answer.
\n\nI’m shaken. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay with these people who just rescued me, who value my presence, who in this moment I feel closer to than my own brother. But I can’t help feeling like an outsider, like I no longer belong. I feel small.
\n
AUGUST 13 (WEDNESDAY) - A familiar scene plays out on West Florissant. Crowds gather and are attacked by police. This time some protestors come prepared. A small number of Molotov cocktails are thrown at the police lines along with rocks and returned tear gas canisters. Things are escalating.
\n\nAUGUST 14 (THURSDAY) - As President Obama speaks on the events in Ferguson, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon puts the State Highway Patrol in charge of the protests, under the leadership of Ron Johnson, a Black officer. Johnson promises to be less heavy-handed than the County Police. Protesters fill West Florissant early in the day with cars and barbecues.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/2.jpg\")
Where brute force fails, try cooptation: Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson attempts to ingratiate himself to protesters in Ferguson—as white police officers look on.
\n\n\n\nThe QT has been a gathering point since it was burned, but today is the first day it feels like the epicenter of a movement. It has transformed from a gas station to a burned building to a thriving park where people exchange ideas, make friends, and prepare for the coming fight once the sun goes down. The mood is festive; cars blast music, some loaded with people shouting out of the windows or riding on the hoods.
\n\nThree separate times, the police attempt to enter the crowd and are chased out. Even the commanding officers are surrounded, shouted down, and chased to their cars and out of the demonstration. One can smell the fear from the officers and see the sweat on their foreheads. Despite the efforts of wannabe politicians, the presence on the streets lasts long into the night as we all celebrate winning the streets from the police.
\n
\n\n\nThe police have pulled back. They’re still there just around the corner, hiding behind the thin veneer of social peace, ready to jump into action at a moment’s notice, but they’re not attacking us tonight. They’ve retreated, strategically, but it was the fierceness of our fight and the threat of more to come that made them pull out. I’ve outrun and evaded the police before, but I’ve never seen them fall back, I’ve never been part of something powerful enough to bind their hands. Not until now.
\n\nIt feels like everyone else is experiencing this small victory with me for the first time as well. The half-mile strip of W. Florissant is a victory parade ground. All that’s missing are the streamers and confetti. There are a thousand people on the street tonight and a thousand more passing through in their cars.
\n\nEveryone must be feeling good. I’m back at the church and a large Black man in fatigues motions for me to come talk to him.
\n\n“I saw you here the other night and I meant to pull you aside.”
\n\n“Yeah, that was crazy. What was that all about? If there’s a problem I hope we can talk it out.”
\n\n“I don’t even know. That’s not what I’m about. I’m on some anti-government shit. I was one of them chasin’ your friend away. I didn’t want to see no disrespect for the Brown family. But I guess I just got caught up in it.”
\n\n“Yeah me too.”
\n\n“I seen you out here and I just want to let you know where I’m at. I got gas masks in my car. I’m ready for whatever. I been in touch with my militia brothers. They say they can have boots on the ground tomorrow.”
\n\n“Damn, alright.” Holy fuck, this shit is way over my head. Is this a trap? Is this guy for real?
\n\n“Be safe out here.”
\n\n“You too. I’ll see you around.”
\n\nLater that night we see the guy who led the charge against my friend.
\n\n“That wasn’t the time or the place to say something. When I realized who y’all were, I thought about it and I realized we’re pretty much on the same page. Whatever differences we have, I’m sure we can work it out. Everything was just really tense the other night… I’ve been dreaming about this my whole life and I want it to last forever. But we gotta be organized and y’all are organized. Y’all are more ready than anybody.”
\n\nIn some ways we are more ready for this than most people: riot police, chemical weapons, days and nights of marching, becoming anonymous when we need to, fundraising, jail support, coming prepared. In other ways, we’re in the rear watching as people of all ages and genders run ahead of us. The collective strategy people have enacted directly on the streets is more intelligent and brave than anything we could come up with in one of our circular, painful meetings.
\n
AUGUST 15 (FRIDAY) - The Ferguson Police Department releases surveillance footage of the “robbery” Mike Brown allegedly participated in at Ferguson Market. During the day, the scene on the street is festive. By evening, the mood has shifted as a confrontation unfolds between protesters and police guarding the store. The police use tear gas and flash-bang grenades in an effort to disperse the crowd. Instead of running away, protestors fight back; some shoot into the air. A group of about 100 confronts police lines, throwing bottles and rocks and holding ground against overwhelming numbers of police. Ferguson Market is the epicenter of renewed looting.
\n\nAUGUST 16 (SATURDAY) - In response to the previous night’s looting, Governor Jay Nixon declares a curfew from the hours of midnight to five in the morning. Almost immediately, there is a public call by activists to resist the curfew. The QT quickly fills up with people, eating, giving out water, and talking about what to do next. Although the crowd largely seems intent on resisting the curfew, a few “leaders” from the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam successfully scare most people out of staying in the streets past midnight. As the clock hits midnight, the NOI, NBPP and even the activists that put out the call to resist the curfew are nowhere in sight. The only people left, while relatively small in number, are determined and defiant.
\n\nArmed with pistols and Molotov cocktails, some of the crowd has assembled under the awning of a boarded up barbecue restaurant and are preparing to attack the police when they advance. Around 45 minutes after midnight, the police begin to slowly clear the streets. When protesters refuse to disperse, the cops fire tear gas and smoke grenades into the crowd. People pick up the gas canisters and throw them back at the advancing police line. Multiple protesters collapse in the street and are carried to relative safety by others. Some people rip up chunks of asphalt from potholes while others grab rocks from storefront landscaping, but they are no match for the heavily armored police vehicles. The crowd is pushed back.
\n\nOut of nowhere, a lone police car with its sirens on screams down W. Florissant from the opposite direction of the advancing line of riot cops. In the ensuing panic, protestors run down side streets as gunfire rings out from people posted up underneath the awning. Chaos ensues as the police car loops back and more protesters flee, running straight into the crossfire of the people under the awning and the advancing police line. One protester is hit twice by gunfire, either from police or by friendly fire. He is loaded into a car and rushed to the hospital.
\n\n\n\n\nThe governor has declared a curfew. No one will be allowed on the streets of Ferguson after midnight.
\n\nOf course we’re going. “Fuck their curfew.”
\n\nA local activist group has called for a march to defy the curfew. The rumor is that they want to march out of the boundary and then back in all together in a big crowd. Safety in numbers. Or maybe a trick to lead us all away from the coming conflict. Leaders betray.
\n\nIt’s been drizzling for hours. If anyone had any doubts, this confirms it: God is a counter-revolutionary.
\n\nBlack army boots and a suit with silver starred epaulets. The national chairman of the New Black Panther Party is going around the crowd trying to convince everyone to go home. “I will not lead my people into a meat grinder. The art of war tells us that we should choose the time and place we fight, not our enemy. Brothers, we don’t have enough guns out here today to defeat the enemy. We don’t have enough gas masks or medical supplies. There are women and children here!”
\n\nPaternalistic, patriarchal, militaristic… completely out of touch with the mood on the street. And yet some people are buying the fear-monger’s wares. Slowly, because of the rain or an exaggerated threat, the crowd thins. The clock strikes twelve. “Hands up, don’t shoot!” “We still here. What you gonna do? Nothin’!” Somehow there are still two hundred of us left in the street. The crowd seems small, too small, compared to the hundreds here just hours before. The cops are keeping their distance, so what do we do? Close the gap.
\n\nWe march towards the police line. Defiance that just won’t quit. Scuffles. Rocks and bottles thrown and then comes the tear gas. Round after round filling the street, choking the air. I run after a spinning canister trying to catch it so I can throw it back. Someone else gets there first.
\n\n“Ow, that shit burns!”
\n\n“You gotta get some gloves.”
\n\nI show him my leather work gloves.
\n\n“Two dollars from Home Depot.”
\n\nHe nods his head in agreement, appreciation.
\n\nI see my friend trying to help up a stranger who has fallen. My respirator in place I run through the clouds of gas to help him.
\n\n“Can you stand up? Can you walk? Here, lean on me.” I put his arm around my shoulder and carry his weight.
\n\n“Watch my back!” I scream to a nearby stranger as we slowly walk away from the approaching police line.
\n\n“I got you, keep going.”
\n\nWe’re breaking up chunks of asphalt and throwing them at tanks. Others are watching us, getting the idea, joining in. Then for no apparent reason a lone police cruiser, sirens blazing, comes screaming in from behind. Panic everywhere, people running, loud bangs, smoke and tears filling my eyes. Where are my friends? What’s happening?
\n\nStill frame: a body lying on the ground.
\n\nIf I was in a movie right now, everything would go quiet for a second or two, the frames clicking by one at a time blurry and out of focus, and then it would all speed up again, the camera framing a shot of my closest friend, fallen, hurt, but unable to tell me what’s wrong, what happened. The only sound he can muster: a haunting groan. A crowd forming around us, me yelling for everyone to get back, to give us space, my voice cracking with emotion. A short stocky man with a high-pitched voice, his whole body shaking, gyrating, almost as if he were dancing, is screaming, “He’s been shot! He’s been shot!” over and over. And then seemingly out of nowhere a car pulls up, my friend is carried in and he’s rushed to the hospital, guided there by riot angels I’ll never know.
\n\nI stare at the spot where he had just been. Rain mingles with small puddles of blood in the dimpled surface of the sidewalk. A police tank stops at the intersection. “Fuck you, motherfuckers!” as I throw the stone I’ve been holding. I want to hurt them, to draw the blood that was drawn from my friend. If I can’t do that, I’ll have to settle for letting their hell fall down on my body. It’s nothing I haven’t felt before: the sting of rubber bullets ripping into my skin, metal cuffs cutting off the blood flowing to my hands, the relentless fire of pepper spray burning my face, the choking cloud of tear gas condensing in my eyes, the dull thud of a four foot wooden pole on my head.
\n\nGive it your best shot. I can take it.
\n\nI even kind of like it.
\n\nPerhaps this is the moment in which I lose my fear.
\n
\n\n\nThey won’t let us all into the hospital. Gun violence, protocol, protective custody. A friend is lying on the sidewalk, unable to go further. Others are walking around aimlessly, in a daze. I’m talking on a cell phone to a drunken friend, trying to explain what’s happened.
\n\nI see him walk up. A suit and a tie, a badge on his hip.
\n\n“So were any of you there? Did you see what happened?”
\n\nWithout thinking, just wanting him to leave, “Nobody’s going to talk to you, just go away.”
\n\n“Ok, well, I hope your buddy dies up there.”
\n\nShock. Did he really just say that?
\n\n“Get the fuck out of here! Go shoot yourself in the fucking head!”
\n
AUGUST 17 (SUNDAY) - Violence breaks out hours before the curfew, in what the media call the worst night of rioting. The past few days have only increased the audacity of the crowds. This time, protestors attempt to march on the police command center located in a nearby strip mall. Some throw Molotov cocktails at the police; gunshots are reported. The police respond with a rain of tear gas and rubber bullets, eventually pushing the crowds back down the street. The looting becomes more dispersed and widespread, with incidents reported in multiple locations miles away from the QT.
\n\n\n\n\nAfter a few hours, it becomes obvious. We have to go back out there. Can’t just sit around the house all day rotting inside, letting our sadness turn into paralyzing fear. A friend brings some candles and flowers from our garden. We head for the spot where he was shot. There’s still some police tape tied to the fence. We rip it off and I push it into the mud with my shoe. We light the candles and scatter the flowers. I sit down wondering if anyone walking by will know what happened here, in this exact place, not even twenty-four hours ago.
\n\nI want to write something. A paint marker and some toilet paper. “The only way to heal this pain is to change the world.”
\n\nI need to walk around, to feel the crowd surround me, to be covered once again in the warm blanket of an anger that refuses to die.
\n\nI see the top cops walking around, so sure of their safety, pressing the flesh. What do they think they’re doing? “Hey, I just wanted you to know that not everyone here likes you. You know, in case you forgot.” I follow them around for a while, looking right at the center of their eyes. And then I’m screaming.
\n\n“Hey Johnson, let me get your kidney. I want your kidney.”
\n\n“Calm down son.”
\n\n“Don’t tell me to calm down. My buddy’s in the hospital right now with all kinds of tubes and shit comin’ out of his face. He lost his kidney and his spleen. There’s a bullet right up in his heart. And that’s on you motherfucker. Fuck your curfew. If you hadn’t come down here with your tanks and tear gas none of that shit would’ve happened. I want your fuckin’ kidney! If he dies, you’re gonna pay.”
\n\n“Listen, I’m here to protect your right to protest peacefully.”
\n\n“What do you think I’m doin? Just because I’m getting loud? What’re you gonna do? You gonna beat me up? You gonna shoot me? Go ahead. Get the fuck outta here. Are you gonna wait till somebody else gets shot, till somebody else dies before you wake the fuck up.”
\n\nHe’s trying to ignore me, talking to the media, trying to appear calm and reasonable in contrast to my out-of-control raw anger.
\n\n“I’m gonna get that kidney one way or another.”
\n\nThey don’t even touch me. They just walk away and get in their cars, sweating, stinking of fear.
\n
AUGUST 18 (MONDAY) - Governor Nixon declares a State of Emergency and calls in the National Guard to protect the police command center. The police announce that they will not allow crowds to assemble and that all protesters will be forced to continue moving along the street or be arrested. The curfew, however, is lifted from the city of Ferguson. Police block off W. Florissant to cars and set up checkpoints at both ends of the strip. Many of the side roads through the neighborhoods that lead down to the strip are blocked as well. This new police tactic is a blow to protesters who had previously used the side roads to flood onto W. Florissant and escape when things got too hot.
\n\nIn the afternoon, pop star Nelly arrives on the scene, telling people they have options. Someone in the crowd shouts back “You have options, you’re rich!”
\n\nAs darkness approaches, the crowd swells and people begin to defiantly march in the streets. As a standoff with the police line develops, rocks and bottles fly through the air. Peace marshals link arms in response, forming a line between the march and the police and attempting to push people back off the streets. Despite the efforts of the “peace police,” some continue to confront the police throughout the night.
\n\n\n\n\nWhat does that even mean? State of Emergency. National Guard. Will the army be the new police? Will they have live rounds? What are the rules of engagement for this new situation?
\n\nWe’re marching again. Up and down the strip, cops blocking off either end. “Stay on the sidewalk.” We’re in the street. “Stay in the right hand lane.” We’ve taken up both. “Move back towards the sidewalk.” We take over the whole street. Every passing car is simply a part of the demo. “If you scared go to church.” “No justice, No sleep!” There’s a thin police line ahead but we go right through it and they don’t lift a finger. That’s how afraid they are of another confrontation, another spark. It’s clear they’ve been ordered to stand down.
\n\nWe’re back at the other end. This time they’ve made a line we won’t be marching through. They don’t want a replay of the night before. But wait, they’ve brought help. Fifty preachers and liberal do-gooders, the “peace keepers” link arms and walk toward us with their backs to the police. Non-violent resistance now means doing the job of the police for them, weaponlessly.
\n
\n\n\nBack at Canfield, there’s a crowd around two or three police tanks. The cops are all wearing fatigues, helmets and body armor. They’ve got pepper ball guns, beanbag and wooden dowel shotguns, AR 15’s, tear gas launchers, sniper rifles, tazers.
\n\nA woman has ripped up a “Do Not Enter” sign and is holding it up in the middle of the street. She’s all alone. Every once in a while, she drops the sign and goes back into the crowd to check on her baby.
\n\nThe police, through their loudspeaker, are telling us not to do everything we’re doing. Even when we comply, they threaten us.
\n\n“If you are ripping out a street sign you may be subject to arrest or other measures.
\n\n“If you are standing in the QuikTrip lot you may be subject to arrest or other measures.
\n\n“If you are carrying a street sign that you have illegally removed you may be subject to arrest or other measures.
\n\n“If you are standing still you may be subject to arrest or other measures…”
\n\nThe lone woman comes back into the street with her large metal sign. One by one people drag out traffic cones to symbolically block the way. A few dumpster lids are propped up between them, creating a flimsy defense against rubber bullets. The street slowly fills with people.
\n\nTen, fifteen, twenty tear gas canisters fly through the sky. They’ve also brought flash-bang grenades and smoke bombs. This time, everyone is throwing them back. Rocks are flying through the air. It’s still not enough, but at least people are learning to work together, to throw in waves.
\n\nAn armored car approaches and we run down Canfield back to the safety of a neighborhood the police have yet to invade. Shots ring out. “If you gonna shoot, shoot straight!” The tear gas is thick tonight and we take a minute to wash our faces in the spigot of a house just down the block.
\n\nSome kids next to us light a Molotov and either out of excitement or nerves drop it in the middle of the street. “You’ve got to run up before you throw that.” Everyone is laughing, teasing the youth for his lack of experience in something we’re all still novices at.
\n\n“Make this one count!” Someone runs up to the window of a nearby building, breaks the glass and tosses in a Molotov. The small crowd cheers to the sight of reflected flames. Someone else runs up with a bottle of gas and dumps more fuel on the fire.
\n\nSome trash is added to the small fire burning in the street in hopes that it will disperse the low-hanging clouds of gas.
\n\nAnother armored car speeds in and we run away. At least for tonight, we’ve had enough. Back home, we’re giddy with the knowledge that this rebellion has been going strong for ten days and nights. Despite the overwhelming show of military force, despite the recuperators and their longer leashes, despite the good cops and their bigger cages, the rebels on the streets refuse to back down.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/3.jpg\")
Demonstrators blockading the streets of Ferguson on August 18.
\nAUGUST 19 (TUESDAY) - Shortly after noon, police kill Kajieme Powell a couple miles away from Ferguson in North St. Louis. An angry crowd gathers.
\n\nMeanwhile, for the first time in over a week, police and their political counterparts succeed in imposing order on W. Florissant. Despite an intimidating police presence, people continue to march up and down the street. Members of the Nation of Islam, church leaders, and liberal activists urge, shout, and push people onto the sidewalks and away from police lines. Some small conflicts erupt, but nothing gets out of control.
\n\nSEPTEMBER 10 - Organizers call for a shut down of I-70 in solidarity with Michael Brown and to put pressure on the prosecutor to indict Darren Wilson. Police respond with an overwhelming show of force, deploying roughly 300 officers. Protesters gather in the street and boldly march towards the police line. The police succeed in stopping protesters from reaching the highway, but are unable to calm the crowd, some of whom throw bricks and bottles at them. Police make a few arrests but fail to catch some of the culprits, who escape into the surrounding neighborhood.
\n\nSEPTEMBER 23 - Mike Brown’s memorial is burned in the early morning. Residents blame police or white supremacists. Throughout the day, supporters rebuild the memorial, while tension builds as word spreads. When night falls, the streets fill once again, this time without the presence of “peacekeepers.” Police are met with bottles and rocks as they push people off the streets and into the neighborhood. After a brief standoff on Canfield Drive, which the police are still too scared to enter during protests, shots ring out. The next morning, two high-ranking officers complain of having to dive behind cruisers to avoid being hit.
\n\nSEPTEMBER 28 - A large crowd of protesters throws bottles and rocks at officers outside of the Ferguson Police Department.
\n\nOCTOBER 2 - Police evict a protest encampment that had been occupying an empty lot in protest of Mike Brown’s killing.
\n\nOCTOBER 4 - Protesters briefly disrupt the St. Louis symphony, singing “Which side are you on?”
\n\nOCTOBER 8 - Just before dusk, a white off-duty police officer moonlighting as a security guard in a wealthy St. Louis neighborhood shoots and kills 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers. Within a few hours, hundreds have gathered at the intersection. Police spout off the usual story that the kid had a gun and shot first. But many witnesses and friends claim the “gun” was actually a sandwich Vonderrit had just purchased. The crowd’s anger grows and people begin to surround the nervous police officers, shouting at them. The police, realizing they are outnumbered and that the situation is beginning to be unsafe, try to leave in their cruisers. People surround the cars, smash- ing out taillights and the window of a detective’s car as he drives off.
\n\nAfter the police withdraw, protesters take the street and block traffic on the major boulevard, Grand. A few more minor scuffles occur. Police are attacked whenever they approach the march; instead of calling in backup, they withdraw. The city is clearly afraid of having a “Ferguson” on their hands.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/8.jpg\")
Demonstrators burn American flags after a vigil remembering Vonderrit Myers, murdered by police.
\nOCTOBER 9 - Once again, a large crowd gathers at the intersection where Vonderrit Myers was killed. The crowd marches down to South Grand and proceeds to shut down the on-ramp and exits for highway I-44 for close to an hour. The police keep a safe distance, hoping to deescalate the situation. Eventually, the crowd starts to march down Flora Place, after one woman points out that it is the wealthy residents of that street that pay for the private security who killed Myers.
\n\nAs the crowd approaches Flora Place, people bang on cars, scream at the residents, and blare air horns. Protesters steal American flags off of front porches and a few houses have bricks thrown through their windows. The crowd gathers in an intersection and burns the collected flags, then marches back to the main street. When protesters reach the main intersection, three cops boldly run into the crowd. The officers are immediately surrounded and shoved out. Within minutes, roughly 100 officers flood the area to rescue the three, spraying the crowd with mace. Brief scuffles follow, but the crowd is mostly dispersed.
\n\n\n\n\nSomeone pushes her head in the window of a cop car. “See this face?” she screams at the driver. “Every time you put your fucking finger on that trigger know this face is gonna be there. Every god damn time, this is what we’re gonna do.”
\n\nAfterwards, the media repeats the usual line of “a peaceful protest turned violent.” But from the moment the group left the vigil, it was rowdy and militant. There was no “turning” at any point for this group, nor a small group whose actions stood out from the broader group.
\n
OCTOBER 12-14 - Activists called for this to be a weekend of disruption in solidarity with Mike Brown and to push for an indictment against Darren Wilson. During the day, protesters disrupt various sites and events, including political campaign rallies, the Rams game, and Wal-Marts. At night, people gather outside the Ferguson Police Department. The weekend, while “peaceful,” achieves its goal of interrupting the normal flow of life in St. Louis and returning nationwide media attention to the case. Over the following month, suspense builds as a Grand Jury prepares to announce whether to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/1.jpg\")
Protest in St. Louis, October 12.
\nNOVEMBER 17 - As the Grand Jury continues to deliberate, Governor Jay Nixon declares a State of Emergency. National Guard troops move in to guard 43 locations around Ferguson including electrical substations, police stations, shopping malls, and government facilities. An eerie tension descends on the city as residents await the verdict and National Guardsmen roam the streets in armored cars.
\n\nAll around the country, the authorities have been scrambling to prepare for the impending storm. Some are trying to make agreements with protest leaders, in hopes of isolating troublemakers. Others emphasize that the protests will be dramatic and disruptive, no longer trying to preserve the illusion of social peace. Corporate media widely reports an announcement from the FBI that “extremists” will likely attack police officers and other targets.
\n\nNOVEMBER 20 - 28-year-old Akai Gurley is “accidentally” shot and killed by the police in Brooklyn in the stairwell of the apartment where he lived.
\n\nNOVEMBER 22 - Police murder Tamir Rice, a 12-year- old boy, in Cleveland, OH, firing the fatal shots within two seconds of arriving on the scene and refusing to provide first aid to the child. This makes national news—not because it is more egregious than other police murders, but because of the attention already focused on the issue.
\n\nNOVEMBER 23 - Protesters gather where Vonderrit Myers was killed and march through south St. Louis, disrupting traffic throughout the city. A website lists scores of gathering points around the US for protests responding to the forthcoming Grand Jury announcement.
\n\nNOVEMBER 24 - Hundreds gather outside the Ferguson Police Station, awaiting the announcement. People huddle around cars and stereos listening to live news broadcasts. When it is announced that Darren Wilson will not be indicted, the crowd rushes the police station, shoving down the crash barriers surrounding it. Mike Brown’s stepfather is recorded screaming, “Burn this bitch down!” Later, the police threaten to charge him with “Inciting a Riot” if he doesn’t apologize for this. Within the hour, the crowd has started to attack police and break the windows of buildings surrounding the police station. Protesters surround the riot cops and armored trucks, throwing rocks and bottles at them as they hide behind their shields. A crowd rushes an abandoned police cruiser, damaging it and attempting to flip it over. Police fire tear gas, then fall back as gunshots are fired from the crowd. With the police retreating, the crowd starts to loot and set fires. Two police cruisers are completely burned.
\n\nOn West Florissant, hundreds of people take over the street. People are openly looting as police watch helplessly from a few hundred yards away. By the end of the night, two dozen structural fires have been set and many cars at a dealership have been completely torched. Gunshots ring out all night through the smoke and flames. Interstate 44 is shut down by hundreds of protesters.
\n\nOn South Grand, people riot through the bar district, smashing out windows and looting various stores. A few protesters try to stop the crowds from looting businesses, mostly without success. Eventually, police overpower the crowd with armored trucks and tear gas and disperse protesters into the surrounding neighborhood.
\n\nElsewhere in Ferguson, there are apparent reprisals, as the church Michael Brown’s father attends is burned and the body of another young Black man, 20-year-old DeAndre Joshua, is found near the location of Michael Brown’s death. He has been shot in the head and then burned.
\n\nMeanwhile, solidarity actions explode around the country. Tens of thousands of protesters converge in New York, shutting down all three bridges into Manhattan; the Police Commissioner is splattered with fake blood at a demonstration in Times Square. Protesters shut down highways 10 and 110 in Los Angeles and Interstate 5 in Seattle. In Oakland, over 2500 meet downtown and block highway 580 for hours. Then the crowd marches back downtown to the police station, where clashes erupt on Broadway. Participants erect burning barricades and loot several corporate stores, including a Starbucks and Smart & Final grocery store. Dozens are arrested.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/9.jpg\")
The New York City Police Commissioner, spattered with fake blood in Times Square by a protester on November 24.
\n\n\n\nWe are gathered in downtown Ferguson. The moment comes for the prosecutor to read the verdict. Someone has rigged up a PA system to broadcast the speech. He’s cutting in and out. I can barely hear it.
\n\nI see people shaking their heads. The verdict is clear: no indictment. Word is spreading through the crowd and folks start to yell at the police line guarding the station. Some throw things at them. I hear later that the first thing thrown was a bullhorn, which has all sorts of meaning if you think about it. We yelled at you for too long, this thing has proved useless! The time for talk is over! At this point, there are only ten or so riot police around. Some of them start to back away frantically, almost tripping over each other.
\n\nA woman comes through the crowd sobbing. I try to comfort her and she tells me, “We’re so far from ever getting any justice! Why?” We hug and another woman comes up to hold her. I let go just as CNN comes over to record this moment. I get in front of the camera and yell at them for being vultures, for not letting this woman have this moment alone. They eventually leave. Antagonism towards the media is pretty strong. Earlier in the night some media were robbed and others threatened with violence.
\n\nSuddenly, gunshots ring out and people surge in that direction. Windows start breaking all around. Some peace police are trying really hard to guard the businesses, but failing.
\n\nMeanwhile, a large part of the crowd is marching to a formation of riot police down the street to confront them. People start to bust up blocks of paving stones, concrete, and anything they can find to throw. The sound of rocks hitting riot shields is ubiquitous.
\n\nA cop car is parked about fifteen feet in front of the line of cops, where most of the crowd is. Folks start to trash it. Windows are smashed and anything loose in the car is grabbed. I heard later that someone popped the trunk and got an AR-15 out of it. No one is stopping anyone. Two young Black girls are yelling expletives at the police. One of them, embarrassed, says, “Oh, I’m sorry! I don’t usually cuss. I go to church every Sunday!” They laugh, pick up rocks, and throw them at the cop car. There are numerous cameras around and they aren’t wearing masks. I try to warn them, but they just shrug.
\n\nThe police yell over the intercom, “PLEASE STOP THROWING ROCKS! YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO ARREST OR OTHER MEASURES! STOP IT NOW!” People start to rock the car to try to flip it. “PLEASE STOP TRYING TO FLIP THE POLICE CAR, OR YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO ARREST! STOP NOW!”
\n\nThen they fire tear gas and beanbag rounds. As we run from the gas, I see an older Black man asking younger kids if they’re leaving.
\n\n“You all leaving already? Or are you just taking a break and gonna go back for more? Yeah, take a break, but don’t leave! Keep your strength. Go back for more.” Sage advice.
\n\nPeople wait until the tear gas dissipates and come back to throw more rocks at the line. The cop car is totaled. There’s nothing left to do except to try and flip the motherfucker again. In response, the police shoot more tear gas, this time a whole lot.
\n\nThe crowd is dissipating into the neighborhood side streets and the police are advancing towards the police station and firing gas into the side streets. Some folks are looting a BoostMobile store and a few other shops.
\n\nMy group decides to circle back to the police line where our cars are. We walk through the neighbor- hood, and someone near us pops off a few shots in the direction of the police, pretty nonchalant. The police fire more gas. We loop back to S. Florissant, where the cop car is now on fire.
\n\nIt’s beautiful. A rare sight. Later, I hear that another cop car behind it got set on fire too.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/11.jpg\")
Demonstrators attempting to flip a police car in Ferguson on the night of the grand jury announcement, November 24.
\nNOVEMBER 25 - Governor Nixon has deployed over 2000 National Guardsmen in Missouri. Protesters rally again outside the Ferguson Police Department. The crowd has dwindled significantly since the previous night, but people are still angry and confrontational. The police and National Guard have increased their presence in front of the police department and are largely able to maintain control, rushing into the crowd and attacking people every time a bottle or rock is thrown.
\n\nAfter a few hours of standing off with the police, the crowd begins to march quickly down the street, leaving the police behind. A few blocks later, protesters round a corner and approach the Ferguson City Hall, which is unguarded with a single empty cop car parked in front. People break the cruiser’s windows, attempting to flip it over and set it on fire while others break the windows of City Hall. By the time the police arrive with their armored vehicles and cars, the crowd has moved back towards the main street. A few cruisers have their windows smashed out as the armored vehicles shoot tear gas into the air.
\n\nSolidarity actions continue nationwide, in what will add up to more than 170 cities. Thousands march again through Manhattan—taking over Times Square and Wall Street, shutting down an entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel and both sides of the FDR and West Side Highways, and blocking traffic for hours. Protesters block highways and clash with police in Atlanta, Durham, Portland, and many other cities. In Oakland, a small crowd takes over highway 880, then a larger crowd blocks highway 580, ending in nearly 100 arrests. The remaining crowd creates massive burning barricades across Telegraph Avenue to hold back police, looting a series of corporate stores in North Oakland and smashing gentrifying businesses. Another mass arrest occurs near Emeryville at the end of the night.
\n\n\n\n\nWe’re leaving downtown Durham, North Carolina, and I’m looking with caution into the darkness of smaller neighborhoods as our police tail increases. But upon seeing the signs of the Durham Freeway, NC-147, the crowd starts shouting, “1-4-7” over and over. We steer effortlessly onto the on-ramp, no police in front of us. A large piece of construction fencing appears magically to our right, and I help several other masked folks pick it up in stride as we march down the hill. The fencing is too small for a barricade, but maybe it will help to slow traffic so no one gets hit by an aggressive driver.
\n\nThe fencing gets suddenly heavier; a middle-aged white woman has grabbed onto it, yelling that we need to “be peaceful.” I want to tell her that the fence is going to help keep people safer, but instead I just ignore her and keep walking toward the highway. We can argue later—this moment feels crucial and she is a distraction. Unfortunately, the woman refuses to let go and is futilely trying to win a tug-of-war over this little bit of fence. She’s pulled along, until another person pulls her hands off the fence. They both trip and fall. Others help her up and make sure she’s not hurt, but she’s already screaming about being knocked down. I think of all those nonviolence advocates that have been tugged along as they pull backwards, finally to be abandoned to the side of the highway as a struggle explodes beyond their comfort level. Right now, I think that all of us, even those who have dreamt of our cities on fire for years, have been totally surpassed by what we’ve seen and heard from Ferguson. Honestly, I’m just trying to catch up.
\n
\n\n\nFrom the sidewalk of a park a block away, I watch three thousand people fill the plaza above Underground Atlanta. Left-wing organizers are leading emotional chants from a small stage. Speakers blasting Public Enemy, a few musical acts, and a series of vehement speeches lend a communitarian, cultural mask to the result of the previous day’s private meeting between organizers and law enforcement: a four-hour rally with no plans to march.
\n\nTwo hours later, I’m departing from the park with sixty others, tinny music playing on a sound cart. I’m shouting through a t-shirt tied around my face. Nearly half of the crowd joins as we march past, splitting the static rally in two. Tensions are emerging that will intensify as the night goes on. On one side, lit road flares, knocked over trashcans, and homemade masks; on the other, cleanup crews and indignation.
\n\nThe cover of last week’s independent weekly showed people blocking the highway near here; we head for it again. The red light of road flares reflects off the concrete walls, matching the tail- lights of oncoming traffic on the Interstate 75/85 connector. Within moments, six lanes of traffic are at a complete halt in front of nearly 250 of us. I hear shouts from the other side of the interstate. Glancing back, I realize that half the crowd has stopped in the on-ramp: a protester is face down, one shoe off, a cop’s knee in his back. Rocks start to fly, but we’re disorganized and it takes too long to make our way to the nearest off-ramp. As we crest the hill, I see a cruiser drive away with an arrestee behind a smashed windshield.
\n\nThere are about 80 of us still going. We dip right, my shoulder a little too close to one of the many motorcycle cops at the bottom of the hill. Nearly all of us flood the CSX train yard, filling jackets and packs with stones. A block later, young people are shouting the names of their sets and cliques as we chuck rocks at police officers, cruisers, storefronts, and parked cars. I see one cop fall to the ground, hit in the face by a flying stone, taking a second officer with him.
\n\nA bridge ahead: at once the gateway back to downtown and the easiest place to get kettled. We’re in before the realization hits the whole crowd—a line of riot police in front of us, a line of cruisers at the back. I’m certain we’re getting arrested as the banner holders at the front press forward. Yet, at what must be a command from some higher authority, the riot police scramble to part before us.
\n\nTwo hours after the march began, we pass the plaza where we started. There are still nearly 300 people at the rally; this time, all of them join the march. As the composition of the crowd changes, the shape of the march shifts: the new participants drag behind, creating a physical gulf between the front and the back. In the front, my mask enables me to blend with a mix protestors, young college students, gang members, graffiti writers, parents, white east side hipsters, Black and brown streetwear partiers, middle-aged radicals, and other angry people. The back seems to be more reactionary: upwardly mobile students, private school alumni, left-wing activists. A masked demonstrator leaps atop a parked taxicab, smashing in its front and back windshields: cheers from the front, boos from the back.
\n\nYoung people are rushing into stores ahead, screaming that if they don’t close for the night, they’ll be attacked and looted. Several oblige as construction equipment, trashcans, newspaper boxes, and a decorative display of Christmas trees are overturned and dragged into Peachtree Street. I’m keeping count in case the news crews don’t: a window each out of Meehan’s Irish Pub, Wells Fargo, and a vacant storefront.
\n\nClad in a Morehouse jacket—an all-Black private school on the city’s west side—a protestor rushes from the back of the crowd to start swinging on a vandal. His blows are interrupted by another Black man, screaming “If you fuck with my bloods, you’re gonna get killed.” I’m shocked, but not as much as he is; fifteen people surround him and another demonstrator knocks him out flat.
\n\nTwo blocks up, a hundred riot police block the road. We’re being pushed to the sidewalk as more than twenty demonstrators are snatched at random. As we’re forced to retreat south down Peachtree, I see the remains of the banner from the front of the march, now burning.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/24.jpg\")
Police in Atlanta on November 25…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/25.jpg\")
…and the protesters opposing them.
\n\n\n\nOakland, California. I was grabbing a quick dinner when I started getting texts that the 880 highway had been blocked. After the insanity of the previous evening’s demonstrations, I was reluctant to get back out on the streets. But the frantic texts started multiplying. I met up with some friends and we drove around the edges of downtown, trying to find the march by following the spotlights of the police helicopters.
\n\nThe crowd is roughly 1000 people. After successfully blocking the 880, they’re facing off with a line of California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers who are preventing them from taking another onramp. A moment of confusion; people are yelling out suggestions for what to do next. Someone tries to do a mic check, hearkening back to Occupy. They’re completely ignored.
\n\nThe crowd pushes ahead into uptown and onto Telegraph Avenue, leaving the onramp behind. A group of young people—mostly Black and brown, mostly hooded and masked—has taken the initiative, and the crowd is following. Cars honk in support; spectators cheer from the sidewalks. A dumpster is pushed into Telegraph and set alight, a preview of things to come.
\n\nSuddenly, I understand where we’re headed. Up ahead, past 34th, the 580 overpass crosses Telegraph. There’s no onramp here, just a chain- link fence—and beyond it, a vine-covered hillside ascending to the highway. People knock down the fence and hundreds rush up the embankment in the surreal glare of the police helicopter spotlight.
\n\nAt the same time, a burning dumpster appears behind the march, and another on a side street. Riot police have been gathering farther back in both those directions, but they’re hesitant to advance on the furious and ecstatic crowd. Masked kids are smashing the windows of the Walgreens at the base of the embankment.
\n\nThe police continue to hold back, so we follow the hundreds that have climbed up onto 580. Multiple highways converge in Oakland near this point, creating a tangle of overpasses and elevated connectors. The section of highway we stand on is completely blocked by the crowd. About thirty feet ahead of us, across a chasm, lies another parallel elevated highway, swarming with riot police and police cars.
\n\nAn unmasked woman in a button-down shirt is screaming at the police: “How does it feel to know that everyone hates you?” The blue and red lights of the police sirens illuminate her enraged expression. “This time it’s not about the economy, it’s not about the war, it’s about YOU!” A young guy adds, “How does it feel to be losing, you motherfuckers?” We can see the bulky silhouettes of the riot police puffing out their chests and pointing at us, but all they can do is shine their flashlights across the dark chasm in our direction.
\n\nMuch of the crowd on the highway begins march- ing east, so we scramble back down the embankment to Telegraph, where around 500 people are still holding the intersection to prevent the growing lines of riot police from cutting off those up on the 580. An old-school Bay Area anarchist approaches me with concern. “Keep an eye on that truck,” she says, pointing to a big expensive-looking pickup speeding off into the darkness down a side street. “They just tried to run down those kids building barricades.”
\n\nThe march has now split. Roughly half the crowd is continuing east on the elevated highway. Within the hour, many of them will be mass-arrested. Our half of the crowd starts to push north up Telegraph as the riot police slowly advance behind us. As we march under the overpass, a thunderous boom echoes through the crowd, followed by a moment of frightened silence and then cheering. Someone in the crowd has come prepared with some intense firecrackers.
\n\nThe California Highway Patrol is out in full force, with officers decked head to toe in tactical gear guarding their outpost just beyond the overpass. A tense silence falls on the marching crowd for the duration of the block. When the last of us arrive at the next major intersection at MacArthur, the riot police begin to move in behind us. A startling explosion punctuates the night and cheers rise from the crowd. From the top of the small mound at the corner of the intersection, I see a puff of smoke rise from the police lines and the CHP officers in that section of their line stumbling backwards. Another explosion next to advancing CHP cruisers on MacArthur inspires more cheering and chanting.
\n\nA squad car in the intersection that has been partly surrounded by the crowd begins accelerating in an attempt to escape. Someone completely masked up runs over and starts taking out its windows with a hammer. Police surge into the crowd and fistfights erupt. The masked person is tackled; batons swing to keep the crowd back. Dozens of riot police charge up Telegraph towards us as we once again continue north.
\n\nI’ve seen many demonstrations and riots in this city over the years. But I’ve never seen something like this traverse multiple neighborhoods in one evening, employing so many different tactics and forms in quick succession. It’s as if we’ve crossed some kind of line. We’re back again, finally, in that magical and euphoric uncertainty where everything suddenly seems possible.
\n\nA massive wall of fire rises across Telegraph at the back of the march. A strange mix of neighbors and participants hold their phones up to snap photos of the eight-foot-tall flames stretching across the wide street, while others put the final touches on the burning barricade: a last dumpster here, another recycling bin there. Some people are star- ing into the flames; I hear others saying prayers. A second massive burning barricade is already shining half a block ahead. This one has been artfully constructed out of materials from the nearby MacArthur BART transit village development. We hurry to join back up with the main section of the crowd.
\n\nStanding in the intersection of Telegraph and 40th, the gateway to the increasingly posh and gentrified Temescal district, I no longer see the lines of riot police behind us. Only fire.
\n\nThe crews that came for looting see their opening. Sounds of shattering glass and cheers draw my attention first to the Subway up on the left, then to the BMW and Audi dealership across the street on the right. In both cases, lockboxes and cash registers are carried off into the night. I look through the broken glass into the car dealership. Young people are jumping on all the cars on the showroom floor to the sound of the high-pitched burglar alarm. The crowd is still hundreds deep. Next to go is the corporate paint store. Expropriated full cans of paint fly through the windows of a pretentious new coffee shop, exploding white paint inside.
\n\nSuddenly that pickup truck is on us, revving its engine as it tears through the crowd, barely missing several people. It flips a U-turn down the street and accelerates towards us for a second pass. People around me are screaming as we scramble to get out of its path. Someone with great aim smashes out one of the truck’s windows with a rock as it passes. It screeches to a halt, the doors fly open, and two big men jump out, pointing in the direction of the rock thrower. Another woman sitting in the back seat does not get out. An argument breaks out between the men and the closest protesters. As an angry woman turns to walk away from the men, one of them punches her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground. The crowd instantly swarms the two men. They lie unconscious beside their truck as we continue north.
\n\nA T-Mobile store is thoroughly gutted; the looting continues to escalate. Things are starting to blur together; it becomes difficult to count the number of stores looted, highways blocked, and confrontations with police and vigilantes. Scenes like these continue in the Bay Area on a near-nightly basis for the next two weeks. Later, as we walk back on side streets towards downtown, where we left the car hours earlier, I see the helicopters circling far off to the west. For us, the night is over; we’ll be back tomorrow. For others, the night is just getting started.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/13.jpg\")
Missouri National Guardsmen patrol the ruins of Ferguson on November 26, 2014.
\nAs momentum plateaued in Ferguson and other parts of the country, it picked up in the Bay Area. Oakland, which hosted the high point of the Occupy Movement in 2011, became the epicenter of two weeks of nightly clashes.
\n\nNOVEMBER 26 - A destructive march plays cat and mouse with Oakland police in downtown and West Oakland for hours before being dispersed by police. Multiple downtown businesses are damaged.
\n\nNOVEMBER 28 - Black Friday protests interrupt shopping all around the country. In Missouri, crowds of protesters march through the St. Louis, West County, and Frontenac shopping malls, shutting down all three.
\n\nIn West Oakland, coordinated civil disobedience at the Bay Area Rapid Transit station shuts down all service in and out of San Francisco for over two hours. In San Francisco, nearly 1000 protesters besiege the shopping district of Union Square, clash- ing with police and damaging fancy stores. They march into the Mission district, looting stores and smashing banks. The night ends in a mass arrest of the dwindling crowd.
\n\nDECEMBER 3 - A New York grand jury refuses to indict the police officers who choked Eric Garner to death in July. Solidarity demonstrations adopt his last words, “I can’t breathe.” Crowds block Market Street in San Francisco. In Oakland, a march weaves through downtown; riot police prevent it from reaching OPD headquarters. Instead, participants march through the wealthy Piedmont neighborhood.
\n\nDECEMBER 4 - Another march weaves through Downtown Oakland, eventually heading east to- wards the Fruitvale district, where there is a showdown with Oakland police and a mass arrest. In San Francisco, a die-in blocks Market Street for a second night. In Minneapolis, demonstrators march three miles on Interstate 35W.
\n\nDECEMBER 5 - Hundreds march through downtown Oakland, holding a noise demonstration in from of the jail to support arrestees. The crowd moves on to take over the 880 freeway before being pushed off by police. Next, the march surrounds the West Oakland BART station and destroys the gates protecting the riot police inside. The station is shut down for an hour before the march moves back downtown for more property destruction, clashes with police, and arrests. In Durham, another march hundreds strong blocks the highway and clashes with police.
\n\nDECEMBER 6 - A march originating near the University of California at Berkeley campus clashes with Berkeley police near their headquarters and loots multiple stores, including a Trader Joe’s and Radio Shack. The crowds grow as students join in. In response, police departments from across the region pour into central Berkeley, firing dozens of rounds of tear gas and physically attacking demonstrators and bystanders, inflicting serious injuries.
\n\nDECEMBER 7 - On Sunday night, another march starts in Berkeley and moves into North Oakland to clash with police, destroy multiple California Highway Patrol (CHP) cruisers, and take over Highway 24. CHP officers use tear gas and rubber bullets to push back the crowd. People respond with rocks and fireworks, then march back into downtown Berkeley, destroying bank façades and ATMs. They attack cell phone and electronics stores, culminating with the looting of Whole Foods. The night ends with hundreds of people gathering around bonfires in the middle of Telegraph, popping bottles of expropriated Prosecco. Police are afraid to engage the crowd, but some participants are snatched in targeted arrests.
\n\nDECEMBER 8 - The third march from Berkeley is by far the largest. Over 2000 people take over Interstate 80, stopping all traffic for two hours, while another segment of the demonstration blocks the train tracks parallel to the freeway. The crowd attempts to march on the Bay Bridge but is pushed back into Emeryville, where over 250 people are arrested.
\n\nDECEMBER 9 - The fourth march from Berkeley sets out once again down Telegraph Avenue into Oakland and shuts down another section of Highway 24 and the MacArthur BART station. Increasingly violent clashes ensue with CHP officers in full riot gear, who fire rubber bullets and beanbag rounds, causing numerous injuries and ultimately pushing the crowd off the freeway. The march then loops through downtown Oakland and makes its way into Emeryville, where a Pak-N-Save grocery store is looted along with a CVS pharmacy and 7-Eleven.
\n\nDECEMBER 10 - Hundreds of Berkeley High School students stage a walkout and rally at city hall. A smaller fifth march from Berkeley makes its way into Oakland, where a T-Mobile store is looted and other corporate stores are attacked. People point out and attack undercover CHP officers, who pull guns on the crowd as they make an arrest.
\n\nDECEMBER 13 - Rallies called by civil rights organizations in New York, Boston, Oakland, Washington, DC, and elsewhere around the country draw tens of thousands—but they also signify the end of the unruly phase of the movement as the old guard of Black leaders regain control. Like the People’s Climate March in New York two and a half months prior, most of the demonstrations are scripted affairs in which the police need not make arrests, although hundreds manage to take the Brooklyn Bridge after the official protest ends. In Washington, DC, a group of young activists from Ferguson and St. Louis interrupts the scheduled programming to declare that the movement has been hijacked from its confrontational grassroots origins.
\n\nDECEMBER 20 - A gunman shoots and kills two NYPD cops in their patrol car in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. Media and city officials blame the Black Lives Matter protests; NYC Mayor de Blasio calls for a moratorium on demonstrations. NYPD officers respond with a sort of strike in which they only make “necessary” arrests, and publicly catcall the mayor for not being supportive enough. This slowdown dramatizes how most arrests are needless, intended only to accrue profits for the government, but it is also a sign that the police are beginning to conceive of their interests as distinct from the power structure they ostensibly serve—a development that sent police into the arms of the fascist Golden Dawn party in Greece. A flood of racist invective on the internet also hints at a possible resurgence of extra-governmental white supremacist activity.
\n\nDECEMBER 23 - Police in Berkeley, Missouri shoot and kill 18-year-old Antonio Martin outside of a Mobil gas station. Police claim the teen pointed a gun at an officer but many witnesses claim otherwise. Within the hour, a crowd of roughly 200 people has gathered around the Mobil, which by now is completely full of police, medical examiners, and forensic teams. After a few hours of being yelled at, the police attempt to snatch a man from the crowd. People instantly rush the officers and a scuffle ensues. Eventually, the police throw flash-bang grenades to clear the area. People respond by throwing bottles and fireworks, then run into the street and attack police cruisers. Some rush across the street and begin to loot the adjacent QuikTrip.
\n\nPeople calmly loot the QT for roughly an hour before a fire is set inside it, causing the police to rush in with assault rifles and extinguish the fire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/18.jpg\")
The site in Berkeley, Missouri where Antonio Martin was murdered by a police officer.
\nDECEMBER 24 - Protesters in Berkeley, Missouri gather again outside the Mobil gas station to protest the killing of Antonio Martin. This time people march towards the highway and block I-70 for roughly 45 minutes. The crowd retreats to the Mobil after police push people off the highway. People smash out a beauty supply store and begin to loot. Tonight the police are far more prepared and are able to arrest many of the alleged looters.
\n\nThe next evening, a few dozen protesters in Oakland vandalize businesses and the city’s main Christmas tree; but as in Greece in December 2008, the onset of the Christmas holidays marks the end of the trajectory. Over the following month, St. Louis police murder two more young men of color—23-year-old LeDarius Williams, who had already been shot once by police as a teenager, and 19-year-old Isaac Holmes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/19.jpg\")
In the eyes of police, those who oppose their right to murder with impunity are simply targets.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/20.jpg\")
As police increasingly rely on militarized violence to control the population, the tactics that demonstrators refined in Ferguson have become essential to protesters around the country.
\n\n\n\nDespite everything that has happened, to this day, the police in the St. Louis area have stuck to their pattern of killing a person every month. If we want a world without police murders, we need a world without police. The struggle continues.
\n
The following reflections were composed in early 2015.
\n\nA compelling narrative with a protagonist that everyone can relate to is supposed to be the centerpiece of quality fiction writing, not to mention successful journalism. Yet no two people tell a story the same way. How does a story change depending on who tells it? What are its unseen roots?
\n\nIt’s revealing how different people chart the lineage of the surge of anti-police activity in 2014. Some look back to the acquittal of the man who murdered Trayvon Martin, some to the murder of Oscar Grant, some to the Rodney King riots. Whose names do we remember? In Ferguson, graffiti at the QT proclaimed “LA ’92/Watts ‘65/Spain ‘36.” Which lineage is that?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/17.jpg\")
Demonstrators riding through Ferguson after the grand jury announcement, November 24.
\nLet’s go back to the beginning/the middle/a long time back/a little ways back. In the US, for decades now, we’ve been experiencing the effects of the redirecting portion of a cycle of recuperation. Many of the people who fought in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s have been thoroughly incorporated into the system, so that they can be used to legitimize the state,4 while most of the people who refused to compromise have been incarcerated or killed. Diversity trainings for every police department, as well as Black prison wardens and presidents, have become a palliative program for maintaining social inequities. As part of this process, the non-profit complex has been solidifying its role as the gentle hand of the state, taking up the language of combative cultures past and reworking it into the rhetoric of social justice activism—once called civil rights activism—so that it can interface more legibly with power.5
\n\nAn important piece of the non-profit puzzle has been the institutionalization and specialization of anti-oppression politics, creating a new discourse useful for those interested in a specific kind of control: reform.6 The rhetoric of identity politics and allyship flattens a complicated terrain of overlapping and oppositional experiences. It centralizes personal experience in a way that fosters both an overinflated sense of self-importance and an obsessive self-criticism that can be paralyzing.7 Also, by framing the project of taking leadership from those who are most affected as an objective moral duty, it obscures the essential question of how people choose who to ally with. We all exist in a multiplicity of realities that are in constant flux,8 but the language of identity politics forces a static identification, falsely unifying people in categories according to a few characteristics, despite all other difference.
\n\nIn response, some comrades theorized a few years ago that the refusal of fixed identity would be central to the coming insurrections—that rejecting our individual subjectivities was essential to rewriting our culturally held mythologies of power. As a reaction against managerial and pacifying identity politics, this made sense—but in practice, the abolition of identity was never more than a gross oversimplification.9 A peculiar self-centering becomes implicit in this apparent self-abolition. When we remove all language about our experiences of difference, pretending that all we have to do to negate our socialization is to proclaim it so, which unspoken, singular narrative easily replaces all the others? This rhetoric also implied that in moments of open conflict, it would be easy to find each other across our socially imposed roles through a shared combative culture—because when we’re rioting, we’re all one. In a strange parallel with the identity politics it rejected, this rhetoric centered individualized personal experience once more, disregarding the challenges to achieving more than a fleeting connection across socially imposed gulfs.
\n\nFor too long, anarchists have been left in a void between the rejection of identity politics and the rejection of identity, grasping for an approach to understanding narrative and experience while resisting the totalizing force of definition. Meanwhile, most of the major political struggles of the last several years have centralized questions about racialized power, specifically anti-Black (and sometimes anti-brown) violence—foregrounding (in)visibility and (a socially imposed) lack of subjectivity10 from a very different angle. Protest cultures that remain stuck in controlled or single-issue approaches have become obsolete11; today’s struggles force multiple axes of power to the surface. We need new ways of understanding and engaging with them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/16.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Ferguson destroyed the material infrastructure via which police impose the violence of white supremacy.
\nWhen deep-rooted social conflicts are pushed to the surface, people rush to conceal them again. Hide away the problems. Keep trouble from spreading. Sew the ruptures in the social fabric back together. Whatever their motivations, proponents of social peace use both physical and rhetorical means to achieve this; sometimes, they’re more dangerous than the cops.
\n\nLiberal leaders and authoritarian groups from far and wide fought hard for control of the narrative in Ferguson. The recuperative power of the Black left was in full effect, expressed via an array of tactics to discredit everyone who could not be reconciled with the state. From organizing separate daytime protests that were coordinated with city officials to using the legacies of dead militants to justify demands for nonviolence and launching public smear campaigns, leftists vied to undermine the possibility of self-organization. Even corporate media picked up on the divergence of agendas between (more targeted) Black youth and the people of color who hoped to “lead” them, practically all of whom were more integrated into the power structure and had more reason to remain compliant. Despite the forces arrayed against them, many of the people in Ferguson were determined to gain control of the streets, and pushed the would-be managers aside. What would it take for this rejection of the political left to outlast the days of open conflict?
\n\nIn a parallel containment practice, media, politicians, and revolutionary leaders alike decried “white anarchists” as outside agitators.12 This approach to pacification, aimed at fracturing any possible cohesion those fighting state power might find through conflict, typically separates out good protestors from bad ones and draws lines along race and ethnicity.13 In Ferguson, the Black managerial class tried to use this to link whiteness—in this rare case, an undesirable identifier—with property destruction, looting, and other undesirable actions. This was a divisive tactic to prey on people’s fears, spread mistrust, and discourage others from showing up. How can revolutionaries and other activists parrot the media and police rhetoric that obviously serves to reinforce, rather than collapse, the power of the state?
\n\nThe phrase “white anarchists” is ripe with problems and questions. It invisiblizes anarchist people of color—perhaps in order to separate anarchism out as a professional or political class, something that is not for poor people, and definitely not for poor people of color. Anarchism is not a white radical phenomenon—but let’s be real, much of anarchist culture is intensely racialized. Anarchist cultures carry within them many of the problems we inherit from white supremacist culture; most of them remain disproportionately rooted in European history, and many suffer side effects from the exploitation and tokenization of people of color that is popular among the authoritarian left.
\n\nIn the midst of post-Ferguson conversations about how whiteness and anti-Blackness are normalized and maintained in this culture, we have to ask how we reproduce white supremacist culture in anarchist cultures. How do we fetishize and tokenize people we want to be in struggle with, or combative cultural norms that we idealize, in a way that keeps them outside? For instance, let’s not use the growing popularity of Afro-pessimist critiques to make our anarchist projects seem more relevant without re-evaluating the foundations of our theory and practice in light of them. When it comes to future anti-police struggles, anarchists—as a body that is certainly not singular—will likely be both inside of and outside of the social dynamics and demographics of those struggles, and we will continue to have to reconcile the limitations and opportunities that situation creates.
\n\nThe lifelong projects of destroying whiteness and class society necessitate attacking the structures that reinforce them. This is not just a question of our personal conduct, relationships, or social norms.14 It may be that when we’re rioting, we’re not magically all the same, but we can fight together in a way that acts against our socially imposed positions in this world. We can choose to act against the parts of our own identities that otherwise cause us to wield power over others and/or to play the victim.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/4.jpg\")
Anarchists tend to fight from the outside. Whether or not we gather in self-identified radical circles of friends, anarchists intentionally position ourselves outside and against almost everything else. Perhaps this is because we are theoretically opposed to being involved in broad coalitions in order to steer them in a certain direction. Perhaps it is because we don’t believe in politicking and don’t want to legitimize it. Whatever the reason, this outsider status often positions us well in the beginning, when social ruptures crack open the center to render everything outside; but it often leaves us struggling to catch up as new insides begin forming. We reject this re-forming process, calling it recuperation, but we usually lack a meaningful way to engage with what comes next. How can we—not just anarchists, but rebels of all kinds—make something that transcends our social circles and immediate projects?
\n\nReflecting on the most recent wave of anti-police activity, many anarchists are talking regretfully about not coming out of the days in the streets together with more new relationships that could become long-standing. Anarchists who were in Ferguson say they aren’t surprised that some folks they met there got involved in leftist groups in the following months, partly because there weren’t visible anarchist spaces or projects.15 During intense periods of social unrest, anarchists sometimes pose a dichotomy between fighting in the streets and “outreach,” as if those are the only options, as if they must be in opposition to each other. Certainly, there are physical limits to what any group of people can do, but there must be ways to connect with folks that increase our capacity for fighting together. Could we engage differently with people during those moments of conflict, in ways that could change what happens afterwards?
\n\nWith so many obstacles in place to prevent us from finding common cause—from the far-reaching physical and emotional effects of police violence and state repression to the attitudes and actions of aspiring managerial activists—how do we find each other in those moments of instability? How do we engage with people without defining ourselves in a way that excludes us from everything, while still recognizing the ways we are different? How do we side with militants within embattled communities that we are not a part of, without further contributing to divisions within them that may endanger those potential friends and our relationships with them? And how do we search out new directions without obsessing uselessly over questions of relevance?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/12.jpg\")
Ferguson, August 2014. Old anarchist hyperbole coming true.
\nThe conflicts that spread from Ferguson were not initiated by anarchists, but drew great interest and participation from anarchists across the country. In this kind of situation, we have to show up prepared to contribute and with a perceptible humility. No one wants to start from someone else’s pre-formed political agenda; we all have to figure out what we have to learn from each other. Often, anarchists describe our role in social upheavals as pushing struggle further, but sometimes we are only playing at a criminality that others are much deeper in. In struggles where many of the people involved are responding to the reality of constant low-intensity warfare with the police, we have to be honest with ourselves about what strengths we have to bring and what overtures we are prepared to make good on.
\n\nNone of the conflicts that came to a head in Ferguson have been resolved, nor do the authorities or their colleagues have any idea how to resolve them. Whether we bring the courage to act, an eye to security and collective safety, specific tactical know-how, or ideas that challenge embedded norms, let’s be prepared to engage whenever the next eruptions occur.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/7.jpg\")
A legacy of defiance.
\nA selection of some of our previous publishing on the revolt in Ferguson:
\n\nThis episode of our podcast offers an overview of the development of white supremacy in the US from colonization to the Ferguson uprising.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/23.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“When they are asked to participate, they don’t answer. They do not wish to be spoken\nto. Without looking round they keep walking. They appear to live in another universe. They’re occupied with all kinds of things, but their purpose remains invisible through the media lens. They seem never to know what they want. But this dismissive attitude is not\nmerely indifference. They are intently concentrating on the right thing; their silence stems from this. They only answer unasked questions. Their attention is focused on the approach of an event. And when the time comes, they are the ones who move into action without hesitation.”
\n\n–ADILKNO, Cracking the Movement
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/09/26.jpg\")
\nIn St. Louis, racial codes prohibited a variety of relations between legally designated racial groups since the late 1600s. So-called miscegenation was prohibited well into the mid-20th century, and neighborhood ordinances effectively prevented Black people from owning houses in Ferguson through the 1960s. These laws were essential in creating the racial tensions that persist up to the present day. ↩
\nOccupy Wall Street was awkward to say the least for the first week of its existence; it only entered history because it went on long enough for more people to trickle in. The revolt in Ferguson was only one of many such outbursts in a series stretching at least back to the 2009 Oscar Grant riots in Oakland. The difference was that it persisted long enough to spread. If a revolt can extend in time, it will extend in space. ↩
\nThe Organization for Black Struggle (OBS) and Universal African Peoples Organization (UAPO) are decades-old Black-led organizations based in St. Louis. The Nation of Islam (NOI) and the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) are national organizations with a roughly separatist agenda. (“There is no new Black Panther Party” -members of the original Black Panther Party). ↩
\nYou can read about Mayor Jean Quan and other activists-turned-politicians in the excellent ’zine Who is Oakland? ↩
\nAbout ten years ago, for instance, a former Black Panther noted that after he came out of prison, he was expected to give up all the information to the state that he had been careful to protect as a Panther—under the guise of grant writing. For more about non-profits, read The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. ↩
\nReform isn’t neutral; it moves us backwards. After social conflict comes to the surface, giving movement to bound things, reform serves to put us all back where we started, immobilized again. ↩
\nThink about how “the personal is political” devolved into the lipstick feminism of the white, middle-class third wave. ↩
\nThe middle class American/colonizer project is one of imposing stability on a system that will never stabilize. This gives some insight into how definition itself is violence. ↩
\nSee En Vogue’s song, Free Your Mind. “Colorblind, don’t be so shallow” is still the proper response. ↩
\nCheck out Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, and Calvin Warren to read more on Afro-Pessimism and anti-Blackness. ↩
\nFighting racialized power is increasingly central to the vital conflicts that are erupting today, in the same way that repressive inclusion is increasingly central to the shutting down of revolutionary possibility. The People’s Climate March of September 2014 was a classic example of the latter: it boasted the diversity language central to the nonprofit organizing model and insisted that it “made history,” and yet it took up none of the questions, tactics, or strategies that Ferguson had pushed to the fore. Rather, the form of organization conspired to suppress them, using the language of diversity against diversity itself. ↩
\nThe operation of creating outside agitators is a microcosm of the process of re-inclusion/re-exclusion that stabilizes capitalism and white supremacy. This tactic has been used repeatedly, especially against populations of people who have been forced to relocate through immigration or exile. In the 1960s, for instance, it was frequently a defensive maneuver white Southerners used, labeling as “outside agitators” the Black youth whose families had moved north during the diaspora after emancipation. ↩
\nHow was this different in Ferguson, where the Black youth who are typically drawn as criminal outsiders were already painted as some of the protagonists of this story? ↩
\nFor those who are not on the receiving end of the legacy of colonization and slavery, these projects do mean being ready to take flack for looking like a dumb white person (or whatever the equivalent is in your case). However hard this may be, it can’t be as hard as being on that receiving end. ↩
\nMidwestern stereotypes aside, there has been an earnestness in many of the accounts from Ferguson that is sometimes lacking from anarchist discourse. A kind of bravado can fill anarchist texts as we front an offensive position when we are actually acting defensively, all while trying to figure out how to sound like we’re being “real.” Often that realness that anarchists search for is as simple as being in touch with your own personal capacity, and understanding how you allow yourself to be pushed beyond it when there is an outside need. ↩
\nAcross 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.
\nJuly 4 saw fiercely ungovernable demonstrations from Olympia to Atlanta. The following report from south Minneapolis describes a march that took place that evening, exploring the logic of autonomous organizing and concluding with a gallery chronicling the graffiti that the march left in its wake.
\n\n\n\n\nA.C.A.B.
\n\n \n
\nSay it with me baby
\nFuck the pigs
\nLike it’s Minnehaha and Lake Street
On the night of July 4, a small but rowdy crowd took to the streets of south Minneapolis to celebrate the the recent uprising and express support for those still facing charges from it. About forty people retraced a now-familiar route from George Floyd Square along Lake Street to the burned-out carcass of the Third Precinct, shooting off fireworks, burning American flags, and covering the area in fresh graffiti. Above all, the night affirmed the joy of the revolt—a joy born of thousands finding their power in acting collectively.
\n\nThis celebration was organized autonomously. Autonomous organizing can be confusing for those more familiar with traditional protests choreographed by activists and “community organizers.” Instead of building a coalition of organizations to coordinate the event, networks of friends self-organized to set the stage for an open-ended evening. Rather than concentrating agency in a formally designated leadership, this approach invites all the participants to understand themselves as active contributors. In this case, several different people arrived with fireworks to set off; some handed fireworks out to others who wanted to join in on the fun. A few people got to light fireworks for the very first time!
\n\nEven without established leadership, there can still be planning. In contrast to a protest organized according to top-down logic, however, the plan can be loose enough to allow for spontaneity; in some cases, plans may not be openly communicated until the moment of opportunity, in order to prevent police intervention and retain the element of surprise. When the plan is shared with those assembled, it can be modified based on others’ input. For example, the route from Chicago Avenue to Lake Street has been traversed a number of times since the beginning of the uprising, but the participants could have chosen an alternate route if the police had decided to respond. The Hong Kong-inspired slogan “be water”—which was spray-painted on the walls of Minneapolis during the uprising and again on Saturday—emphasizes the value of being mobile and flexible in order to be able to change routes and destinations as needed.
\n\nOn Saturday, the police never showed up, likely due to the opaque organizing and shifting department priorities following the rebellion—not to mention it being a busy holiday weekend.
\n\nStanding together in front of the empty shell of the Third Precinct with fireworks booming overhead as people spray-painted every available surface, we felt just the smallest reverberation of the uprising we experienced just weeks before. Unlike protests, which employ a means (e.g., a march or a blockade) to reach an end (e.g., sending a message or making demands), the events of the uprising and this past Saturday night blur this distinction. They create a kind of means-as-end, or means-without-end, in which the purpose is inextricable from the lived experience of the event itself. To fuse means and ends in this way, we have to move beyond the predetermined choreography of protest to a more transformative paradigm of action. “I’ll never forget that night” reads the latest graffiti written on the barricades surrounding the precinct, referring to the night of May 28 on which unrelenting crowds forced police to retreat from their station and established a brief yet real police-free zone—abolition in real time.
\n\nIf the crowd intended to send a distinct message on July 4, it is that those who are currently facing the harshest repression from the uprising will not have to endure it alone. Hundreds are facing charges, including several people who are charged with arson by federal authorities. They will need our utmost support as they begin what will be a long and grueling process through the legal system.
\n\nWhile the revolt has subsided and momentum shifts gears, that does not mean that peace has returned to Minneapolis. In the words of Minneapolis-born rapper Reeves Junya, which are now inscribed on the walls of Lake Street,
\n\n\n\n\n“We don’t know peace, only gun smoke.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/47.jpg\")
\nMeeting up at George Floyd Square seemed like fairly common sense, but it caused a mild local controversy. Some critics suggested that the square is a memorial, a somber place of Black mourning, and therefore the crowd’s celebratory vibe would be unwelcome and disruptive.
\n\nWhile the space is anchored by the large memorial to George Floyd, it is also large and heterogenous. There are barricades on each street for at least one block extending in every direction from 38th and Chicago. The square has also expanded to include an adjacent park. Within this area, in addition to the memorial, DJs play music, people cook and share food, preachers lead prayers, merchants sell T-shirts, supplies are distributed freely, gardeners tend a garden erected in the street, and lots of people hang out. Multiple demonstrations gathered at this square and departed from it on July 4.
\n\nThis projection of the site as a space for mourning is not incorrect, but it fails to capture the full breadth of what is going on in the square or the emotional complexity of the environment. The uprising itself was driven by a powerful surge of joy emerging from the collective expression of rage and grief. As the sun set this past Saturday night, several fireworks exploded directly above the memorial itself, showing that the atmosphere of the space cannot be neatly summarized. It is a mistake to impose a false dichotomy between supposed (white) agitators who want to celebrate and (Black) mourners who want peace and quiet. Meeting at George Floyd Square could have created opportunities for people to make more connections outside already-existing social circles by inviting people who had not heard about what was going on.
\n\nInstead, confusion about autonomous and leaderless organizing methods sparked warnings that circulated around the square to discourage people from joining. As a result, the only participants were the ones who traveled to George Floyd Square with the intention of joining; even some of those who had showed up intending to participate but lacked personal relationships with other participants apparently chose not to join the march in the end. Those who were concerned about representing and managing groups of people ensured that those who marched to the precinct were separated from everyone else at the square, illustrating how such forms of political analysis can give rise to self-fulfilling prophecies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/1.jpg\")
Behind the Third Precinct: Chinga la migra; Fuck 12; From the bottom of my heart… RIP to George Floyd and all victims of slave catcher violence.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/2.jpg\")
Fuck MPD-Mpls; Revolution forever; Quit your job; Say her name Sandra Bland; Fuck 12; Literally ACAB; 1312.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/3.jpg\")
Next door to the Third Precinct: Free ‘em all; Kill cops; Let me breathe; BLM; Fuck MPD.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/4.jpg\")
In front of the Third Precinct: Fuck you; Fuck cops/1033, Fuck COVID/5G, Fuck Soros; Black trans lives matter; Autozone the pigs.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/5.jpg\")
Free them all; ACAB - every last one; Fuck 12; No retina scanners; Kill the pig in ur head; You lose pigs.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/6.jpg\")
No peace; <3 HK [Hong Kong]; MPD [crossed out].
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/7.jpg\")
Burn em all; Smells like bacon; Free the prisoners.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/8.jpg\")
Burn ‘em all; Torch em; Fuck 12; Kill killer cops.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/9.jpg\")
Street barricades untouched from the night before: Burn more of these [arrow pointing to precinct].
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/10.jpg\")
I’ll never forget that night; Be H2O.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/11.jpg\")
<3 HK; Fuck MPD; Burn 5 more.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/12.jpg\")
Lets burn another; Lets kill cops.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/13.jpg\")
We don’t know peace; 612 ain’t nothin to fuck with.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/14.jpg\")
Fuck the pigs like its Minnehaha and Lake street [lyrics to Finna’s “Say”].
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/16.jpg\")
Burn the plantation; Kill pigs on sight.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/17.jpg\")
Free all prisoners.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/18.jpg\")
Free the prisoners; Kill cops; Remember May 28.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/19.jpg\")
Burn them all; Layleen Polanco [transwoman of color killed in prison in New York]; George Floyd; Fuck 12.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/20.jpg\")
Another can burn; Fuck 12.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/21.jpg\")
Kill cops; Kill all cops.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/22.jpg\")
Outside the former Autozone: I had a dream I got everything I wanted.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/23.jpg\")
Outside the former Arby’s: No cops yes now [lyrics to Four Fists’s “Nobody’s Biz”].
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/24.jpg\")
On Lake Street: Abolir la policia.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/25.jpg\")
ACAB; Free all arsonists; Kill all cops; George Floyd; Fuck USA; ACAB.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/26.jpg\")
Free em all; Fuck 12; America is canceled.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/27.jpg\")
Be water; Kill the cop in ur head; (And the other ones); BOES [moniker].
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/28.jpg\")
Fuck 12; Kill every cop.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/29.jpg\")
Fuck 12; ACAB; RIP Layleen Polanco Xtravaganza; Round 2 when?
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/30.jpg\")
ACAB; Defend looters; Fuck USA.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/31.jpg\")
Fire to the prisons; We don’t know peace only gun smoke [lyrics to Reeves Junya’s “City on Fire”].
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/33.jpg\")
Free all rioters.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/34.jpg\")
America is canceled.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/35.jpg\")
Fuck 12; Autozone the MPD.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/36.jpg\")
Stand with HK.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/37.jpg\")
Burn another precinct; Layleen Polanco; Free ‘em all.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/38.jpg\")
Two countries one virus, be water <3 HK; Layleen Polanco.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/39.jpg\")
The owner of Cadillac Pawn shot and killed Calvin Horton, a Black man alleged to have been looting the store, during the uprising. The store’s facade is regularly defaced: Fuck you!!; Fuck this store; RIP Calvin; Fuck 12; Fuck this.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/40.jpg\")
Amnesty for all rioters.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/41.jpg\")
Free the rioters; and all prisoners.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/42.jpg\")
We dream of a better world for everybody; Fuck 12; Everybody hates the pigs; No justice no peace; abolish the cops.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/43.jpg\")
Free the rioters; Free all rioters.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/44.jpg\")
Another untouched street barricade: ACAB.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/45.jpg\")
Fuck cops; George Floyd; F12.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/06/46.jpg\")
ACAB; Fuck 12; Fuck 12; ACAB; ACAB.
\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. ↩
\n“Stonewall was a riot.” In the 51 years since the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City catapulted the movement for LGBTQ+ liberation into public consciousness, this phrase has become a cliché. Yes, it was a riot—but what kind of riot was it? On the anniversary of the iconic queer rebellion, many of us are reflecting on how today’s struggles against police and white supremacy connect to past uprisings. Let’s look at the resonances between Stonewall and the Justice for George Floyd rebellions and what these show us about how to catalyze resistance to oppression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/3.jpg\")
This image brought to you by Gilead Pharmaceuticals, Hilton Hotels, and Bacardi Rum (no, really—see for yourself).
\nSo what kind of riot was Stonewall?
\n\nStonewall was a violent anti-police riot. It was a riot in which furious queers attempted to injure police officers and set them on fire in the course of fighting to hold territory in the street. It was not a dignified, militant, organized expression of the “language of the unheard.” It was a violent, chaotic blast of rage against the institution responsible for inflicting so much cruelty and misery upon queer people in the city.
\n\nOn the first night of the riots, at least four NYPD cops were injured, according to their own records. Protesters lit fires in trash cans, painted graffiti, hurled bricks and bottles at police, threw garbage in the streets, and destroyed a parking meter. To every “peaceful protester” today: if you insist that violent protest is always counter-productive, queer history is not on your side.
\n\nIt was a leaderless, multiracial riot. There were no “demands.” The events weren’t sponsored by any organization. Contemporary claims that Stonewall was “led” by Black trans women or other identity-specific categories, while admirable in their efforts to redress exclusions from history, fail to capture the fluid, leaderless quality of the riots. While endless controversies swirl over who threw the first brick or the precise demographics of the crowds, the evidence we have from photos and contemporary accounts makes one thing clear: it was a fierce attack against the police carried out by a multiracial group of young queers, mostly male-assigned but of varied gender presentations, without the sanction or direction of any group. Political radicals participated, but the majority of people in the streets were angry queers without any particular allegiance to any organization or ideology, fed up with the oppression they faced every day.
\n\nSelf-appointed “community leaders” from the New York Mattachine Society criticized the riots. They installed a sign on the smashed up Stonewall Inn attempting to get the rebels to behave:
\n\n\n\n\n“We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/4.jpg\")
Note the early use of identity-based counterinsurgency tactics. “Our” people?
\nWhy did the Mattachine—the most active gay rights group in the city at the time—want to prevent conflict with the police? In part, they wanted to because they had been engaged in negotiations with the NYPD for years, hoping to curb vice squad officers’ efforts to entrap men seeking sex with other men. To their credit, their efforts had helped to substantially reduce certain forms of anti-queer police harassment. At the same time, they had established themselves as the mediators and representatives of the gay community vis-à-vis the police—and now the power they had built was threatened by ungovernable, outraged queers who refused to negotiate.
\n\nStonewall was a youth riot. The young people who congregated in and around the bar—many of them hustlers or sex workers, many of them homeless or precariously housed—were some of the queers most aggressively targeted by the police and most severely exploited by the Mafia-driven bar industry and older, wealthier queers. The New York Times reported on the second night of rioting with the headline, “Police Again Rout ‘Village’ Youths,” and most observers commented on how young most of the combatants were. As in the uprisings unfolding today, young people who had nothing to lose, who weren’t held back by the hesitation or baggage of their elders, were the ones who pushed the struggle forward.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/6.jpg\")
The kids are alright.
\nStonewall was fun. Queens danced a can-can line in front of the police in silly drag. Protesters ran around, flirted, camped, taunted cops, sang, and generally reveled in the exhilarating ambience of shared resistance. The culture of playful defiance that young street queers had developed over many years was an integral element of the riots, enabling them to overcome fear and violence and to give expression to their rage.
\n\nSo there are important resonances between today’s rebellions and the catalytic power of the Stonewall riots half a century ago. Both the gay liberation movement from 1969 on and the Black Lives Matter movements of recent years exploded into public consciousness in the aftermath of riots against police—not peaceful protests, not organization-building, not “winning hearts and minds,” not mobilizing “allies.” The characteristics shared by these two uprisings and the circumstances that provoked them offer useful insights for social rebels today.
\n\nThe striking thing about both the raid on the Stonewall Inn and the killing of George Floyd is that both events were completely normal. Raids, harassment, violence, and mass arrests of queer people were commonplace in the US in 1969; anti-Black violence and police murders are tragically ordinary occurrences in the US today. These explosions did not take place because the injustices that prompted them were exceptional. Neither straight society in 1969 nor white society in 2020 suddenly took note of homophobic and racist police violence because something had changed about the violence itself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/1.jpg\")
Police beating young gays was common. What was new was fighting back.
\nAnd neither of these uprisings were the first time that activists had protested the injustice in question. In New York City, activists had been working to curb police harassment for years by 1969; small protests had begun to take place in other cities over anti-gay police harassment. Likewise, protests against racist police violence have broken out consistently across the US for many years.
\n\nWhat changed? In both the Stonewall riots and the Justice for George Floyd demonstrations, the difference was that protesters began using tactics that interrupted law and order, respectability, non-violence, and permission from authorities. In so doing, they were violating the norms set by both society at large and their own movements. Only by physically fighting back against the police in New York and in Minneapolis did rioters manage to force those who hold power to prioritize addressing their grievances. Only by successfully confronting the police with force did they inspire the defiant resistance that spread like wildfire across the country, permanently changing the context in which Americans understood gay and Black life.
\n\nWithin a week of the murder of George Floyd, solidarity protests had taken place in all 50 of the United States—and soon after, in over 50 countries worldwide. This occurred thanks to the autonomous initiative of countless ordinary people, many of whom were not connected to formal organizations and activist networks, who wanted to show support for the rebels in Minneapolis and to contest racism and police power locally. In many places, multiple demonstrations took place on the same day, allowing people to participate whenever and wherever they were able to and to choose their preferred tactics, degree of risk, and political framing. This decentralization and absence of formal leadership has maximized participation and minimized the risk of coordinated repression as countless forms of resistance have emerged from the many-headed hydra of the movement.
\n\nThis echoes the proliferation of Gay Liberation Front chapters that exploded across the US in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots. Literally hundreds of groups sprang up in 1969 and 1970, many in places where no gay organization had ever existed; while many were short-lived, they helped to radicalize an entire generation of young gay and lesbian people, exponentially expanding the visibility of the community and the forms of activism that were emerging from it. While national organizations gradually emerged later in the 1970s and 1980s, redirecting grassroots energy towards lobbying and centralized political campaigns, the LGBTQ+ movement has remained stubbornly decentralized with a great deal of local variation and avenues for grassroots participation everywhere.
\n\nWithin a year of the Stonewall riots, many participants in the Gay Liberation Front who were frustrated by the entrenched sexist, anti-trans*, and racist attitudes they encountered in the new groups split off to form lesbian feminist, trans*, and/or Third World/people of color-specific queer organizations. In today’s age of intersectional politics, more people acknowledge and prioritize these problems; LGBTQ+ organizations in particular are highlighting and centering Black struggles and the struggles of other people of color. The Black Lives Matter movement has learned from critiques of previous Black liberation struggles, integrating a focus on gender and sexuality and intra-community differences into their organizing, which has incalculably strengthened the demonstrations.
\n\nWhile many observers have remarked on the multiracial character of the demonstrations across the US since Floyd’s murder, significant disagreements persist over how to understand the dynamics between participants positioned differently in relation to white supremacy and anti-Black violence. Whether as “allies” or accomplices, as followers of Black leadership or autonomous rebels seeking their own liberation, white and other non-Black protesters should seek to build ongoing relationships of trust with Black rebels as we develop new models for struggle.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/8.jpg\")
\nThe Stonewall and Justice for George Floyd riots were catalyzed by the widespread participation of radical youth, largely acting outside the channels preferred by older activists and power brokers. Today, too, we should center the activity of rebellious young people—seeking to support their initiatives rather than attempting to direct or control them. Older generations with more protest experience can offer valuable skills and resources from street tactics and security measures to connections for bail money. But the responses we have seen from “movement elders” to both uprisings show that many of them will try to slow the movement down and redirect it towards conventional politics that recentralize their leadership—if we let them.
\n\nThe Floyd protests have varied widely in their character and tone, but as many accounts indicate, there is a widespread atmosphere of playful, passionate defiance alongside the mourning and rage. Music and dance have played a critical role in building the courage and energy of crowds, while the sharp-edged humor of meme culture has inspired creative signs and helped to spread the messages of the movement. Drawing on the critical role of music and culture throughout centuries of Black freedom struggles and picking up on the innovative blending of art and cutting-edge queer aesthetics by ACT-UP and other more recent movements, these demonstrations draw on a long tradition of joyful resistance to power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/9.jpg\")
Then and now.
\nToday marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first marches commemorating the resistance of queer rioters at Stonewall. New York’s “Christopher Street Liberation Day March”—the more depoliticized term “Pride” only caught on years afterwards—and its counterparts in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco marked the emergence of a trend that now spans the globe. The commercialization of corporate Pride™ festivals has been thoroughly critiqued by radical queers every step of the way. But while anti-capitalist sentiments, though widespread, were not foundational to the framing of Liberation Day or Pride marches in many places, resisting the police has always been an essential aspect of this history. While anti-capitalist challenges to corporate Pride continue, the struggle against police is intertwined with the very roots of our collective history, underscoring the contradictions of securitized, cop-inclusive Prides.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/7.jpg\")
Not just proud, but defiant.
\nSince the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, conflicts erupted over the presence of police at Pride festivals in Toronto, Columbus, and several other cities. Last year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, demonstrators in San Francisco shut down the parade in protest against the inclusion of police, while in New York, a large unpermitted “Reclaim Pride” queer liberation march offered a radical alternative to the NYPD-saturated mainstream parade.
\n\nThis year in San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, New York, and many other cities, LGBTQ+ organizers are protesting, not partying, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. These events highlight the anti-police history of the event, explicitly rejecting police permits and any other form of collaboration with law enforcement. When a white organizer with Christopher Street West applied for a police permit for a “solidarity” march with Black Lives Matter in the course of planning Los Angeles Pride, a massive outcry forced the organization to cancel the application and withdraw from the organizing entirely.
\n\nWhile Stonewall gets the most press owing to the Pride tradition it helped to launch, other gay riots such as the ones at Cooper’s Donuts in Los Angeles and Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco also offer important lessons for today’s struggles. The most significant riot in the history of the US gay liberation movement since Stonewall took place on May 21, 1979, when ex-cop and politician Dan White was convicted only of manslaughter for murdering gay activist and politician Harvey Milk along with San Francisco mayor George Moscone. Thousands of gay rioters fought police, torched squad cars, and attacked San Francisco’s City Hall. After the “White Night Riots,” as they came to be known, a gay anarchist commentator evaluated the path forward in stark terms:
\n\n\n\n\nWhether or not a newly reforged Stonewall Nation will rise out of the ashes of burning police cars depends on gay people, not their self-proclaimed “leaders.” “White Monday” crystallized the situations: the line of demarcation has been drawn. One can side with the so-called “rioters” or one can side with the police—but there is no middle ground. A battle is raging all over this country, and it has been raging for years: a grim, silent battle largely unacknowledged except by its victims, given no publicity except when it erupts into the open as it did May 21st. On one side, there is the State—and on the other side there is the gay community.
\n\nChoose sides.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/5.jpg\")
Yaaaas, queen!
\nUntil recently, it appeared that much of the LGBTQ+ community had chosen the path of assimilation, collaborating with the state at the expense of its vulnerable members and everyone on the receiving end of racialized oppression. But the conflicts over policing and Pride in recent years, coming to a head this weekend in the context of COVID-19 and the Floyd protests, indicate a deep and growing rift—and the possibility of radical transformation. Perhaps queer people today, inspired by the courage of Black Lives Matter and recalling our own riotous history, are ready to revisit that choice.
\n\nThis time, let’s choose the right side.
\n\nFrom Stonewall to the Minneapolis Third Precinct: fuck the police forever.
\n\n-some queer anarchists
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/28/2.jpg\")
\nIn the following analysis, we review the series of movements that led to the uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd, explore the factors that made the uprising so powerful, discuss the threats facing it, and conclude with a series of accounts from participants in Minneapolis, New York City, Richmond, Grand Rapids, Austin, Seattle, and elsewhere around the country.
\n\nThroughout this article, we have only used photographs that are already widely available online, in order to avoid inadvertently providing sensitive information to the police.
\n\n\n\n\nLet us not resent those who get out of hand for reminding us of the conflicts that remain unresolved in our society. On the contrary, we should be grateful. They are not disturbing the peace; they are simply bringing to light that there never was any peace, there never was any justice in the first place. At tremendous risk to themselves, they are giving us a gift: a chance to recognize the suffering around us and to rediscover our capacity to identify and sympathize with those who experience it.
\n\nFor we can only experience tragedies such as the death of Michael Brown for what they are when we see other people responding to them as tragedies. Otherwise, unless the events touch us directly, we remain numb. If you want people to register an injustice, you have to react to it immediately, the way people did in Ferguson. You must not wait for some better moment, not plead with the authorities, not formulate a sound bite for some imagined audience representing public opinion. You must immediately proceed to action, showing that the situation is serious enough to warrant it.
\n\n-“What They Mean When They Say Peace,” published during the uprising in Ferguson, a precursor of the movement that has unfolded countrywide since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
\n
We must begin with a moment of silence—for no revolt, no matter how powerful, not even if it could burn down every police precinct and open up every prison, could ever give life back to Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, David McAtee, Rayshard Brooks, or any of the countless other Black people who have been murdered by police since the founding of the United States of America. Uprisings like the one that began in Minneapolis are a way of attempting to discourage the police from committing future murders, but they are also expressions of grief for the irreparable losses that have already taken place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/7.jpg\")
Seattle, Washington.
\nIn seeking historical reference points to understand this uprising, most people begin with the riots of the 1960s—though as longtime news anchor Dan Rather put it,
\n\n\n\n\n“In 1968 there was a sense, proven by subsequent elections, that those taking to the streets in pain and protest were a minority of the country and the levers of power in business, government, and culture were arrayed against them. I do not get that sense in 2020.”
\n
Tracing the lineage of this revolt, we would start more recently, passing over the rebellions in Los Angeles in 1992 and Cincinnati in 2001 to begin with the riots in Oakland in 2009 in response to the murder of Oscar Grant. The unrest in Oakland was small in comparison to what has happened since, but it brought together the same combination of demographics that has been involved in subsequent uprisings—angry Black youth who knew they could be next, protesters fed up with fruitless reform campaigns, anarchists opposed to state violence on principle, and other rebels of a variety of ethnic backgrounds—setting a precedent that was echoed over the next five years in Seattle, Atlanta, Anaheim, Brooklyn, Durham, and elsewhere.
\n\nEach of these revolts lasted a couple days at most, a gesture rejecting the order imposed by police violence without being able to counterpose a sustainable alternative. This changed with the revolt in Ferguson in August 2014, which extended over a full week and a half, then recurred in November, spreading across the entire United States for a period of weeks. After the uprising in Ferguson, it was possible for those on the receiving end of police violence to imagine becoming ungovernable on a massive scale.
\n\nFurther uprisings followed around the US, arguably peaking in Baltimore at the end of April 2015 in response to the murder of Freddie Gray. By the time revolt broke out in Minneapolis in response to the murder of Jamar Clark in November 2015, this model seemed to be reaching its limits—limits imposed by the increasing consolidation of power in the hands of institutional organizers as well as by the force of police repression. As we noted in 2015,
\n\n\n\n\nIt’s not clear how much further the state can go to maintain the current order by means of pure force. If uprisings occurred in multiple cities in the same region at the same time, or if a much broader range of people got involved, all bets would be off.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/9.jpg\")
St. Louis, Missouri, 2020.
\nWhen Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, these revolts suddenly ceased. We identified this at the opening of 2018; it is a historical enigma yet to be properly accounted for. Certainly police did not cease murdering or oppressing Black and brown people. Perhaps all that changed was that anarchists and other activists were so busy reacting to fascist violence that they failed to provide the necessary solidarity to the communities most targeted by police violence.
\n\nThe onset of the Trump era provoked a wave of participatory direct action involving tens of thousands of people—from the successful efforts to disrupt Trump’s inauguration and blockade airports to the ICE occupations of 2018. By mid-2018, however, anarchists and targeted communities were increasingly on their own in these struggles, as other protesters returned to seeking state solutions.
\n\nCentrists hoping to repeat the downfall of Nixon pursued a doomed strategy of seeking to impeach Trump and remove him from office, demonstrating a fundamental naïveté about how power works. Leftists reprised their campaign to elect Bernie Sanders president, likely absorbing some disappointed centrists but ultimately discovering that their ambition to fix America from the top down was equally naïve. Centrist fossil Joe Biden rode Black votes to victory in the Democratic primaries, temporarily creating the mistaken impression among some pundits that the majority of Black people in the US were more interested in a second-rate rerun of the Obama years than in radical change. In retrospect, it’s clear that the real issue was that no meaningful forms of change were on the table.
\n\nBy the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in full force, all the statist means of seeking social change had been exhausted. Trump exacerbated the situation, seizing the opportunity to arrange a massive wealth transfer of billions of dollars to the richest stratum of society in the midst of the worst economic recession in living memory. In this context, millions of people in the US, alongside billions around the world, spent mid-March to late May in isolation, contemplating their own mortality. It had never been clearer that the institutions of power are fundamentally hostile and destructive to the lives of ordinary people.
\n\nThis is why, when the news of Black rebels’ response to George Floyd’s murder spread, even white middle-class liberals felt the tragedy viscerally. The pandemic suspended some of the mechanisms that ordinarily insulate the privileged from identifying with the most marginalized.
\n\nThose who are always targeted by police, who suffer most from racism and poverty, recognized that it was now or never. Heroically, all around the US, they staked their lives in an all-out attack on their oppressors—and millions of stir-crazy people of all classes and backgrounds joined them in the streets.
\n\nTrump and other politicians have expressed shock at the riots that followed George Floyd’s murder, alleging that anarchists must have coordinated them; in fact, they did more to provoke the riots than anarchists ever could. It was the policies of the state itself that spread the collective intelligence that guided the revolt—marking police, banks, and corporations as legitimate targets and making it easy for just about anyone to understand why people would attack them. Trump’s explicit support for white supremacists, his xenophobic border policies, his efforts to abolish healthcare access, his contribution to accelerating global warming, and his refusal to provide any sort of support for those threatened by unemployment or COVID-19 showed everyone that we are all facing a life-or-death struggle, not just those who are regularly murdered by police.
\n\nPerhaps the darkest hour does herald the dawn, after all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/2.jpg\")
Together, we are unstoppable: Minneapolis, Minnesota.
\nWhere one reformist campaign after another has failed, the courage of those who burned down the Third Precinct in Minneapolis has catalyzed an unprecedented movement for social change. The victories of the first week of the movement alone surpass what other approaches had accomplished in years. We should not underestimate the contributions of abolitionists who have labored for decades to make it possible for people to imagine doing without police and prisons, but many of those who set this movement in motion do not think of themselves as activists at all.
\n\nThe past three weeks have offered the most persuasive demonstration of the effectiveness of direct action in decades. Liberals will try to represent the strength of the movement as a mere question of numbers, but these numbers only came together because daring rebels showed that they could defeat the Minneapolis police in open combat. The idea of abolishing the police was deemed inadmissible until it became conceivable that rioters could overthrow the police by main force. Then, and only then, police abolition became a widespread discussion item.
\n\nSo direct action gets the goods—and everyone knows it now. It will be very difficult to put this genie back in the bottle. From the centrists who are suddenly struggling to reduce police abolition to a matter of “defunding” to Donald Trump himself, who was forced to make a show of calling for police reforms yesterday, there is no denying that the riots have changed everyone’s priorities. Rather than alienating people, as critics always alleged it would, confrontational direct action has won millions over to ideas and values they might never have considered otherwise.
\n\nThis will have long-term effects on a global scale as movements all around the world internalize these lessons. International solidarity actions have already taken place in over 50 other countries, some of them including massive riots.
\n\nAs we wrote in 2014, one of the most important things about a movement like this is that it finally enables us to grieve together and to grasp what is being taken from us—not just in the daily murders of Black, brown, and poor people, not just in the incarceration and deportation of millions, but also in the ways that the order that the police enforce forecloses everyone’s potential. For some of us, this order prevents us from accessing the resources and education we need to make the most of ourselves on our own terms; for others, it prevents us from being able to access the compassion buried deep in our hearts for those who are more targeted than we are; for still others, it threatens to end our lives wholesale. In interrupting this order, we rediscover what it could mean to live fully, in meaningful and expansive community, enabling ourselves to feel deeply and to act according to our consciences.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/1.jpg\")
Washington, DC, May 30.
\nNone of this is to say that things will be easy from here forward. Let’s review some of the risks we face.
\n\nUntil now, Trump has sought to benefit from social polarization. During the first week of the uprising, it seemed possible that Trump could take advantage of the revolt as a sort of Reichstag fire to seize still more power, perhaps establishing martial law. There is evidence that his supporters openly pursued this strategy. On May 29, an Air Force sergeant and another participant in the white supremacist “Boogaloo” movement killed a federal security officer in Oakland, apparently as a false flag operation intended to accelerate the arrival of civil war.
\n\nTrump’s grip on power was strong enough to survive the impeachment, but it was not strong enough for him to mobilize the military against the general population. The appearance of the National Guard on the streets of many cities set a limit to how far the revolt could go in those locations, but the demonstrations only spread to other towns, drawing more and more participants and support and expanding to include new tactics including statue toppling and occupations. Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to turn the army against the protesters, but other members of the government balked. On June 11, the highest-ranking military figure in the US apologized for appearing alongside Trump in a media stunt outside the White House on June 1. As the political climate becomes more and more volatile, the heads of the military doubtless understand that they need to preserve their veneer of legitimacy lest the entire house of cards collapse.
\n\nWhen it proves impossible to isolate and destroy our movements, the next danger is that they will be gentrified and coopted. Police repression has proved useless; the police are caught in a cycle in which all of their tools for controlling disorder only spread it wider. The influx of aspiring politicians, managers, and other would-be leaders into the streets has done more to dampen the revolt than any amount of state violence. This would still pose little threat to the movement’s momentum if all the participants had internalized the importance of horizontality and autonomy, as demonstrated by the victory in Minneapolis; but those lessons will take some time to learn, and there are many powerful institutional actors who have every reason to interfere. As we continue to discuss how to root out elements of structural white supremacy within our movements, we will also need to relentlessly challenge the legitimacy of those who aspire to concentrate power, to represent others, or to determine for others what strategies and tactics are appropriate.
\n\nCentrists are spreading the most superficial version of our arguments, talking about defunding the police without addressing any of the deep disparities in wealth and power that the police exist to maintain. We will have to continue spelling out why we oppose policing itself alongside other aspects of capitalism and the state—and this may become more difficult, rather than less, as liberals appropriate our talking points and rhetoric.
\n\nIn the future, while we will likely see some changes to police protocols or even to the institution of policing itself, the authorities will aim to carry this out at the expense of our communities, seeking to drive anti-social activity into the spaces that they abandon. Police elsewhere have already utilized this strategy to punish unruly neighborhoods such as Exarchia in Athens, Greece. This makes it especially pressing to apply ourselves to the positive aspects of police abolition, addressing the root causes of destructive and anti-social behavior. As most of our communities possess limited access to resources, this will not be easy—but it will be necessary regardless, as the state is not coming to save us.
\n\nLaw enforcement agencies, especially on the federal level, will continue trying to weaponize every toxic element that they can find in our movements, from oppressive dynamics around race and gender to egotism and social conflict. Formal solidarity agreements are an important step towards shoring up our collective weaknesses, but interpersonal dynamics represent another front on which we have to step up our efforts to handle conflict constructively.
\n\nAlready, we are seeing house raids and FBI visits around the country. While local courts remain overwhelmed by the cases that have backed up during the pandemic and some prosecutors are refusing to press low-level charges against demonstrators, federal investigators are seeking to inflict the worst possible consequences on those they blame for the revolt. This twitter thread illustrates some of the strategies federal agents employ to identify protesters. How much support these defendants receive will determine how much further federal prosecutors go in targeting those who participated in the movement—and how much momentum remains for the future.
\n\nFinally, there is the looming threat of intensifying fascist activity, which would take attention off the white supremacist violence of the state and put activists and targeted communities on the defensive. In 2017, anarchists and anti-fascists defeated a growing fascist movement—staving off a menace that could have made the victories of the past three years impossible. It remains to be seen whether the continuing polarization of our society will give rise to a new mass wave of fascist organizing, but militias have mobilized in many towns and fascists and other far-right individuals, emboldened by Trump’s calls to treat anti-fascists as terrorists, have already shot demonstrators in Seattle and Albuquerque.
\n\nWhatever happens next, we should remember for the rest of our lives how bleak things looked just one month ago and how rapidly the situation changed. Although revolts across the world in 2019 hinted at the possibility that the United States, too, would erupt, few anticipated it after the outbreak of COVID-19 and the malaise that followed. Even when we cannot see them, there are always opportunities to resist the ruling order and find common cause with others. May this experience sustain us through the difficult years ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/12.jpg\")
A solidarity poster distributed in Seattle calling for the dismissal of charges against all the participants in the revolt.
\nIn the following anonymously submitted narratives, anarchists across the country recount their experiences during the first week of the uprising. For other accounts of the uprising in Minneapolis, consult It’s Going Down, our own report entitled “The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis,” and “An Obituary for Identity Politics.”
\n\nMinneapolis
\nRichmond
\nNew York City
\nGrand Rapids
\nCleveland
\nPhiladelphia
\nAustin
\nFort Lauderdale
\nAtlanta
\nSeattle
\nCoda: Minneapolis, again
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/6.jpg\")
\nWe marched down Lake Street, dragging barricades into the road and painting “Fuck 12” with teenagers. Some kid who joined off the street yelled excitedly that we were like Martin Luther King, Jr. and another kid responded “No, bro, we’re Malcolm X!” Our tumbleweed of an offshoot march felt angry and joyous and like an escalation… and then we got to the Third Precinct. As we walked up, Black youth were smashing a cop car, ripping out gear and stacks of blank tickets until everyone stormed the gate to the precinct parking lot. A kid smashed each squad car with a skateboard until an elder yelled “WAIT STOP!!!” I thought the anticipated peace policing had finally arrived—until she concluded, “Get their personal vehicles too!”
\n\nSomething thick was in the air the next few nights. We saw people watching each other’s backs, sharing food and looted beer with strangers, having dance parties, passing out spray-paint and hand sanitizer, hugging even though they shouldn’t. Someone grabbed a set of golf clubs from a pawnshop and gave them out in front of the US Bank. It was like it was a team sport and those windows were the opponents and we were all on the same team. Rebels took turns beating an ATM with a sledgehammer and driving cars into it while the crowd cheered. The sky was so heavy with smoke it looked like dark clouds. And then the police station was on fire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/3.jpg\")
Minneapolis, May 2020.
\nSurrounded by ashen rubble and streets flooding with water, the scene outside the Third Precinct that night can hardly be described. It was as if we had all been transported to the distant future, after the apocalypse. Picture it with me.
\n\nAcross the street is the precinct. People are using the boards ripped off of adjacent businesses to build barricades to shield themselves from the tear gas canisters. The people around me are being hit with rubber bullets. The confidence of the crowd ebbs and flows as the sun begins to set. The final goal here is obvious, but victory is hardly guaranteed.
\n\nPeople are collecting stones from rubble piles and breaking them into smaller chunks. They’ve requisitioned a trash can from the Target and are filling it up and dumping piles by the front lines. In this scenario, it’s hard for anyone to think for more than five or ten seconds before acting, including the police. That gives anyone capable of planning even a few minutes into the future an advantage.
\n\nIt’s not long before someone runs up urgently with a familiar look of absolute seriousness in his eyes. He has some friends with shields on the side of the building and they need help. In a few minutes, we are facing a constant barrage of concussion grenades and rubber bullets. The shields repel most of them. People all around us are using the stones to overwhelm the dozen or so cops on our side of the building, focusing on one weak point of their fortification rather than attacking all of them at once.
\n\nWhen the police began to pull back, the cheers were deafening. It hurt my ears to hear the thousands of people around me screaming, “Burn it down!” as everyone climbed over the fences together. It was as if we were the first people to land on the moon. Determined clusters of people fortified the area with barricades; others simply stood and laughed, taking it all in.
\n\nBy the end of the night, teenagers encircled the flaming building, skating, holding hands, sitting in the street with bottles of champagne. Older folks passed through with surgical masks on, waving to the kids. They can never take this away from us.
\n\nMinneapolis, night of May 28.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1266213711167045632\n\n\n
On the night of May 30, I joined hundreds at the intersection of West Broad Street and North Belvidere Street, where a bus had been incinerated by our crowd the night before. Neither our rage nor our sense of our own power had diminished at all. We were eager to take the city by storm again. As the crowd mobilized, warming up with a march through the nearby university campus, we returned to the Broad & Belvidere intersection to find multiple stopped police cruisers with their officers standing outside them. Unhesitatingly, the front of the crowd rushed the police, running them out almost instantly, and the tone for the second night was set: cops out!
\n\nWe raged through the city, eager to outdo ourselves, leaving in our path desecrated monuments, a torched Confederate museum, smashed banks, and looted chain stores including the freshly-built Whole Foods. For hours, we played cat and mouse with the police, overwhelming their attempts to direct us and moving more quickly than they could in their efforts to shut us down. Again, we returned to Broad and Belvidere, meeting lines of riot cops and armored vehicles in front of us. They attempted to gain ground, spreading from their besieged headquarters blocks away, only to be confronted with a crowd unintimidated by force. Tear gas grenades, rubber bullets, and marker rounds were countered by rocks, bricks, blinding lasers, blazing barricades, and whatever we could hurl toward the enemy to keep them at bay. A long caravan of cars blocked a lane of traffic parallel to the battle, honking in support of us and cheering, while the intersection behind us became a sideshow of cars and motorcycles doing donuts, stereos incessantly blasting Boosie’s “Fuck the Police” and Crime Mob’s “Knuck if You Buck.”
\n\n\n\n\nCities, fuck ‘em!
\n
\nNarcotics, fuck ‘em!
\nFeds, fuck ‘em!
\nDAs, fuck ‘em!
\nWe don’t need you bitches on our streets, say with me,
\nFuck the police!
Doing a full 360° rotation, I could hardly take in everything I was experiencing. It was a whirlwind of tear gas, car exhaust, weed smoke, and the fumes of burned material filling the air as militants clashed and friends embraced and danced carelessly. What had begun in rage and mourning had become a lesson in our own power; even as a fierce battle wore on, I found myself smiling. In the spaces we had opened up, there were opportunities for joy to explode into the world, joy unhindered by fear. The police stood there silently in their burdensome gear in the heat for hours. One wonders whether they envied us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/14.jpg\")
A police car burning in front of the police station in Richmond, Virginia on the evening of May 29.
\nUnion Square. Police in riot gear line 14th street, preventing the march from moving further north. The climate is both joyous and tense; music lingers in the air. In New York, it is commonplace to see a speaker on wheels—on the tail end of a bike or shoved inside a granny cart. Tonight, at the center of 14th and Broadway, we’re blessed by at least one serenading. Rather than continue marching, the crowd spreads out across several blocks. No one is certain as to how to move forward. We pace, anxiously anticipating a move from the police. Suddenly, as if to break the stalemate, someone swings a hammer through the plate glass window of Chase Bank. Then, all at once, the entire area from 14th and University to 12th and 4th comes alive with clamor.
\n\nThere was once a garbage can on every corner of this street. Now there are four in the road catching fire. A single police car squeals into the intersection. The crowd scatters. I lose my friends in the commotion.
\n\nIn retrospect, I had come with too many people. Our group was put together hastily. Our risk factors and ways of interacting with a riot varied widely. Though we were scarcely more than a handful, our numbers made it impossible to keep track of everyone simultaneously. On later nights, I went only with one or two dedicated friends, committed to sticking together.
\n\nI turned the corner to the next block. A small line of protestors was dutifully hammering at a couple abandoned police vans. A few people were guarding the corner store—not so much to quell the anger of the crowd as to direct its focus. Nobody was protecting the banks. One trashed police van was on fire. I later learned that another was burned to the ground only a couple blocks over. Tension was mounting. Cops started careening in from a side street. Most people fled. Being on my own, I decided to run as well.
\n\nI put some distance between my body and the chaos on 14th Street. I stripped off my sweater, happy to be free of its excessive warmth. I tossed my bag under a parked car where it was less likely to be picked up and walked through Washington Square. It was populated mostly by families, musicians, people gleaning the last cool nights of late spring, seemingly unfazed by the demolition of the neighboring streets. It was going to be a long walk home.
\n\nApproaching Broadway-Lafayette, I noticed a series of clothes hangers strewn across the sidewalk. A march of about a hundred young people was roving around Soho. As it turned out, their actions set the stage for the next few nights.
\n\nTo some, it might be surprising to hear that the most dramatic situations still had an air of serenity. It was no coincidence that much of the looting took place where there was little police presence. The brazenness and unpredictability of the riotous crowds complicated the police response. Occasionally officers would rush a crowd to make one or two arrests. It was a scare tactic. They would rush so we would run; we would run so they wouldn’t be obliged to arrest us. Pure theater.
\n\nSometimes people stood their ground. Sometimes the cops were the ones to retreat.
\n\nIn New York, especially, the racist implications of the good protester/bad protester narrative are starkly apparent. The first couple nights, I saw very few instances of what has been called riot shaming—the policing of young Black and brown people in the aftermath of police murder. If anything, the disputes were about targets, not tactics. As more white people joined the movement from one night to the next, I watched this narrative shift in real time from “not here” to “don’t.” I began to see white people physically confronting Black protesters on the premise that what they were doing was bad for the movement. Normally, I try to avoid totalizing statements. However, in view of the implications of this dynamic, I will say this: It is not white people’s place to weigh in on what is an appropriate response to the constant murder of Black people by police.
\n\nAway from the streets, politicians left and right began speaking out against protesters. Racially charged epithets appeared in the newspapers: “These were not protesters, they were thugs, criminals.” Both Trump and De Blasio clung desperately to the lie that outside agitators were responsible for the uprising. They hid behind the racial ambiguity of this claim in order to violently repress Black resistance. In actuality, Black people were at the forefront of everything from peaceful demonstrations to arsons. In New York, the political distinction between looters and protesters was a conscious effort to condemn a part of the movement that was not only Black-led, but had disproportionately more Black participants. On several occasions, Trump himself has echoed the myth that violent protests overshadow peaceful protests. If this doesn’t confirm whose agenda this narrative serves, I don’t know what could. There is no other way to say this: To condemn looting and praise the peaceful marches is to demonize Black self-determination and favor majority white crowds.
\n\nStill, some people allege that looters are just criminal opportunists—that they are not actually there to protest. For me, protesting is not an act unto itself. It is the reason for action. One can march in protest, one can resign from office in protest, one can hunger strike in protest, and yes, one can loot in protest. There is no denying that the looting that took place was in direct response to the murder of George Floyd. Sunday night, I watched so-called “criminal thugs” storm Lululemon for yoga mats and leggings. I passed a teashop where I had previously purchased Christmas gifts for my mother. The looting was not a way to capitalize on a movement. It was a shattering of status symbols that are predicated on racial exclusion. Sure, some of it will be resold, but at a fraction of the price the stores were charging. The press says organized crime; the looters say DIY Reparations.
\n\nSeveral nights, one could hear over the scanner that officers were not to pursue looters at all, presumably for risk of injury. Instead, when police wanted to assert their force over the protests, they did so by rounding up and beating peaceful protesters. Some wish to blame this brutality on the looters. That is not my intention. I believe there is a mutual benefit to having protesters who practice nonviolence alongside those who do not. Every march that involves destruction of property contains within it a kernel of nonviolent protesters. What’s more, clear division between orderly and rowdy marches mark the former as easy targets for police violence. I’ve attended a myriad of marches in the past couple weeks. By far my most terrifying experiences were spent kneeling.
\n\nI’ve never seen such a massive and widespread upheaval before. It was common to leave one protest only to wind up unexpectedly in the midst of another. Some people claim that the lawlessness was a coordinated effort by anarchists. As an anarchist, it was nearly impossible even to coordinate with my immediate friends as to where we were going to meet. We participated in the demonstrations, but the scale of what was happening was so beyond me. I will never forget the army of skateboarders I saw chanting “Apple Store! Apple store” as they stole their way through SoHo. I watched some guy conduct a riot of one on a deserted side street—flipping barricades and smashing up cop cars with an oversized rock. So many police vehicles were rendered inoperable those first nights, the ones that were still capable of driving went around with PIG and FTP painted on the side.
\n\nPotlatch: a crowd joyously looting an Apple Store in SoHo the night following May 31.
\nIt was truly a humbling experience. At a certain point I had to re-evaluate what kind of impact I was making and how I could be most helpful. I’ve had over a decade of relevant experience, but I’ve never seen anything on this scale. To put this in perspective: until now, the most confrontational tactic anarchists have employed has involved showing up with a hammer and breaking windows. By the second night in New York, countless people who couldn’t be bothered about Bakunin were looting with shovels. It was everywhere. Never in my life have I thought that anarchists should be the vanguard of revolution, but now much of what I had to offer was just a drop of rain in a tempest.
\n\nI started showing up with extra gloves and jackets. Militancy can occur spontaneously, I reasoned, but safety precautions less so. Given the climate of conspiracy theories about bricks and accusations about outside agitators, I was a little nervous to offer supplies. Thankfully, they were well received.
\n\nThere’s a lot that people with experience in the street can teach first-timers. If someone is attracting a lot of attention from police or cameras, cover for them. Make sure they get rid of identifying markers and get away safely. At the same time, we should learn from the newcomers who are pushing things forward. One can develop a comfortable reserve after years of conflict. It’s good to challenge that. There are kids going from zero to sixty in a single night. Don’t let yourself be stuck at forty.
\n\nThe long game of upheaval involves knowing when to push and when to minimize risks. Supporting arrestees is invaluable in times like these. Those who donate time, supplies, and money—who wait outside the jail with food and phone chargers—make waves of resistance possible. I imagine we will continue to see an array of charges pressed across the country. Our ability to support defendants will dramatically shape the future of revolt to come.
\n\nBy the middle of the following week, police repression was taking its toll. Reports were circulating about mass arrests, beatings, interrogations, the suspension of habeas corpus. The boot was dropping. People had won the streets by sheer numbers. The curfew declared Monday night stunted the number of people in the streets. By 8 pm, the main bridges connecting New York were heavily guarded by police. Comrades would open their homes to protesters who were trapped in other boroughs. Being out past 8 generally entailed a long odyssey home.
\n\nBut let’s get one thing clear. By no means was the power and beauty of the first few nights suppressed by the police. Neither was it co-opted by self-appointed, beret-clad leaders. The truth is that no one had ever imagined that revolt could be possible on such a massive scale in modern-day New York. Each night exceeded the last. Friday night, multiple precincts in Brooklyn were ransacked and a police van was set aflame. Saturday, Union Square was wrecked and looting began. Sunday, Soho was completely gutted. Monday, the looting moved uptown. Decentralized looting continued for several nights, despite curfew. By midweek, nearly all Manhattan was boarded up. Businesses were empty. Certainly no police cars were left unattended.
\n\nThe exponential growth and strength of the protests took the authorities by surprise. As I said, De Blasio, Cuomo, and Trump all alleged that the uprising was a coordinated effort by outside agitators. In reality, the riots involved a very wide range of participants. The targets were luxury stores and police—this was so obvious there was no need for prior planning. It was just a matter of being at the right place at the right time. Luckily, it was happening all the time, everywhere. The unrest persisted until all the obvious targets had been exhausted. Left without a clear next step, the rioting stalled.
\n\nBut the wave of resistance that took place the first few nights is only a small part of a much longer history of abolitionist and Black power movements. It represents a high water mark that is sure to be surpassed by yet another wave. As I write, New York is still experiencing massive daily protests. The energy continues to this day, astonishing and inspiring.
\n\nOne of the most surreal aspects of this whole ordeal is trying to adjust back to \n“normal life” again. For me, this means trying to reset my sleep schedule and clean my room as I get acclimated to the boarded up, war-torn streets of Manhattan. I ride my bike around and take pictures of the leftover graffiti on the shuttered buildings. I know that at some point in the future, these images will be so prevalent that they will no longer be spectacular. The thing that really sticks with you after the looting stops is not the random clothes that you don’t even want, nor an accurate account of which windows shattered when—it is the lived experience that life could be different. It’s a collective knowledge and we’re still learning.
\n\nAs far as I can tell, the general consensus among anarchists in the US is that “No one thought this would happen here.” In fact, no one ever knows if anything is going to happen anywhere. All you can do is come prepared, dream big, and hope for the best. History is determined by those who decide to act. When the window of opportunity comes crashing open, you can have anything you want, but you gotta act fast. It’s remarkable how easy it is to step across the threshold.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/5.jpg\")
New York City.
\nWe live in a midsized Midwestern city: Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s named for the river that runs through the center, although the river has long since been tamed by colonialism. White settlers used the river as a highway, mass-cutting timber and floating logs down it. These logs fueled the furniture industry and its exploitation sparked the furniture riots of 1911. In 1967, poverty, poor housing, and redlining driven by racism sparked riots that erupted in the shadow of Detroit’s better known rage. That year, 33 fires were set on the southeast side in predominately Black neighborhoods. This is char from decades ago and its echoes are still felt today.
\n\nOn Saturday, May 30, 2020, we summoned ghosts. As with so many towns across this stolen land, our city took to the streets in calmness and attention toward formal leadership seeking to tell us what to do and how we ought to behave and channel our rage. We milled about for hours in the sweltering heat, trying to locate and identify our friends in the sea of masked faces. We found them holding a banner with eager strangers that read “Attack White Supremacy,” we found them wearing helmets, wielding shields, and passing spray paint from hand to nervous hand.
\n\nAfter hours passed, you could feel the crowd growing antsy; our packed bodies were pushed in a direction by who knows what, circling the police station. Something happened. Bodies pushed, fists pumped, shouts cried out in an incoherent choir of rage. It just took one arm to lift a can of spray paint to change things. “Fuck 12” emblazoned on the side of the historic police station. To the point. The crowd cheered louder.
\n\nA couple of dumb white people tried to use their bikes to protect the building out of fear that we would only get injured. I get into a screaming match with one of the young men. The crush of bodies instilled fear and seriousness. Then more arms reached up, brandishing spray paint. “Burn The Plantation” and “Shoot Back!” These arms were diverse. No one particular race. All kinds of folks of various identities. This was one of the more diverse events to ever happen in downtown. We were there not just out of the goodness of hearts, but because we are fucking families and best friends and partners and of course we’ll fight shoulder to shoulder for and with our loved ones. In the past, one could be certain that peace police or cop apologists would make some kind of physical intervention, but that Saturday was different. The page had been turned and we were in a different time, seeing a new tradition born.
\n\nCheers greeted each sloppily painted statement on that building that houses the Grand Rapids Police Department, Secretary of State, and parole court, which takes up a whole block of downtown. At the same time, people were building barricades in the city’s cardinal intersection. Ornamental pots overflowing with flowers, garbage cans set ablaze, street signs, dumpsters, garbage, you name it… all of those were dragged in for reinforcement. The parts of the road that we couldn’t close off were blocked by sympathetic motorists blasting music from their vehicles. A dance party broke out. People were jumping up and down. The “Attack White Supremacy” banner was moved and hung on the barricade.
\n\nWe held this space until nightfall. Until the first crash of glass was heard and cheers rang out. Yeah, we could have held that intersection and danced all night, but the people’s energy demanded something more. Why not take things further?
\n\nEvery window of the police station, gone. When all of the windows were broken on the first floor, people went after the second floor. A banner was taken down and set on fire; people carefully walked it into the Secretary of State office and set it on a desk. Someone wielding a stop sign chopped at he security camera on the outside of the building, hacking at it until it fell. After every brave moment, a roar of cheering echoed through the corridor of buildings. Finding my friends and crying, not because of the clichéd poetry of tear gas, but from tears of joy, laughing so hard. Our town? Seriously? Yes. The crowd snaked around through every downtown business and establishment, smashing. Over a hundred storefronts, they say. Fires lit, business looted. The fancy men’s clothing store. “Anyone need a belt?” asked someone carrying a rack of them. Magic cards from the comic book shop were shared, sushi from the fancy sushi place distributed, the jewelry store completely busted, the bridal shop, the art museum, the news station… everything under the moon that night, destroyed.
\n\nI guess 2020 will be added to our small list of uprisings. I’m still taking it in. Now downtown is a sea of blonde particleboard patching up and reinforcing the windows. Bandages trying to heal the contusions. What a joke. That’s not how it works. Now we will haunt the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/8.jpg\")
Minneapolis.
\nIt finally happened.
\n\nIt finally happened. After years of liberal recuperation, after years of the siren song of reformism, after years of community “self-control” as a result of fear of police rage and retaliation, it finally happened… and of course I was not there to see the uprising blossom in all its glory. Instead of being in the streets, inhaling tear gas and dealing with the rubber bullets, I was sequestered in a secure location, helping to run the backend logistics for medics and other support people, watching all of this play out on livestreams and police scanners… in a moment, though, our support crew became blind and deaf as the livestreamers were pushed out of a downtown transformed into a warzone and the police scanners went dead.
\n\nAs day turned into night and the action moved outside of the downtown area, the city became wholly unrecognizable, illegible, not just to the police, but to the support people and participants as well. The lines of activism, the lines of identified spaces of discursive action, collapsed in direct confrontation between the community and the people who were there to occupy our communities with military force. Finally, people had abandoned the political “leadership” of established activist groups and entered into the realm of direct action, direct intervention in their own lives.
\n\nI left the safety of that secure location to meet up with the rest of my family unit, which was safe across town. The roads were deserted. Columns of cops blocking bridges and exit ramps dotted the landscape. In the distance, the smoke of burning cop cars was still visible on the horizon.
\n\nAt nightfall, scouts started to hit the streets, seeking confrontations, looking for spaces in which support and intervention were possible. That night, I helped get the kids to sleep, said my goodbyes, and steeled myself to enter the unknown. Those were some of the hardest goodbyes I have ever uttered, telling the young ones that everything was going to be fine, that that was what a fight for liberation looks like, that I would be safe—while not necessarily being totally confident of that safety.
\n\nThe National Guard was on the way, the city was officially on lockdown, the curfew was in place, and off we went, into the abyss, with only the speed of our vehicle as our only protection.
\n\nDarkness. Street lights out. Around the corner, you could see trash in the streets from overturned trash cans. The police scanners were back up, broadcasting calls about looting. Caravans of cars with red, black, and green flags flying could be seen in the distance. Every turn, every side street, every commercial district held the possibility of occupation or liberation—and at the same time, everything seemed empty, tense, full of possibility and hazard.
\n\nThat night, it became clear that, at least for a while, the rules of engagement had fundamentally changed. Power dynamics were realigned. The nice smooth world of liberal reformism and naïveté collapsed under the weight of the rage of the people. Nothing has been the same since. Everything occurs in fragments now—everything is momentary, material, grounded in the dynamics of conflict, constant, exhausting, energizing, and dangerous at the same time. The drudgery of life in the city evaporated. The very streets of the city seem to be standing up, fighting back in the face of the police—flipping the middle finger at police choppers, spraying “Fuck 12” across a police station. Standing tall with all of the dangerous possibilities that this moment contains.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/18.jpg\")
Cleveland, Ohio.
\nOn Saturday, a march that started at the Philadelphia Museum of Art found itself blocked by police at the entrance to the highway. Kids started jumping on the cop cars, dancing on them and kicking the windshields. I couldn’t see what was happening through the crowd, but when a of cloud milky gas shot up at the front, people backed up quickly, fearing tear gas. In fact, some kids had taken the fire extinguishers from the cop cars and turned them on the police to block their pepper spray. Maybe fifteen minutes later, from a block away, we could see smoke billowing up from the cop car that had served as a dancing platform.
\n\nThe march moved on. Several bank windows were smashed. The Starbucks next to City Hall caught fire along with unmarked police vehicles. A statue of one of Philadelphia’s most racist mayors, Frank Rizzo, was vandalized in front of City Hall; it has since been removed. After a few tense moments with the police around City Hall, a large section of the march instead headed to the main downtown shopping strip. Dozens of shops were looted, their goods distributed to anyone who might make use of them.
\n\nOn Sunday morning, I went out for a walk with my partner. Approaching Spruce, we heard helicopters nearby and checked social media. There were reports of riots near 52nd and Market, so we walked that direction. As we got closer, several residents on their porches greeted us, some telling us to “be careful” heading that way.
\n\nAt Chestnut and 52nd, the first thing I saw was an armored police vehicle blaring at the crowd of mostly young men in the streets. The men keep walking toward the police, yelling and occasionally throwing water bottles at what was essentially a tank. Off to one side, two guys were hammering at some concrete to make more effective projectiles. The cops headed north to cheers—there was smoke up there. Maybe a cop car was on fire? But rather than disperse or head toward the heat, more people gathered while clusters of folks went door to door tearing open the metal gates guarding each business. A young Black woman could be overheard shouting, “That’s a Black-owned business!”
\n\nA group of five middle-aged Black women chastised her: “Man, we been giving them everything for years, where that got us, fuck that shit.”
\n\nFirst, a dollar store was wrenched open. All of the women, young and old, walked over and then ran out carrying pillows, bedding, shirts, and various cosmetics and household items. Another group of kids started knocking over the street stalls filled with water, candy, and fragrance bottles. Next they hit the pharmacy. Candy was distributed freely to anyone passing by. At some point, a police helicopter started flying low above us, blaring its sirens. Traffic was trying to make it way through the intersection. I realized that some of the drivers were locals who had gotten their cars and were coming through to fill up on goods. Soon a dumpster was in the street, further disrupting traffic.
\n\nAs we walked home, we were half a block behind a guy carrying a huge trash bag full of looted goods. Three blocks away from the action, he turned off the sidewalk and let himself into his house. “Outside agitators,” I thought.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/16.jpg\")
Cleveland, Ohio.
\nAfter finally prying the boards off of the Shell station across the highway from the local police headquarters, kids were running in and coming back out carrying the most ordinary things like trophies. One teenager brought his girlfriend a giant bag of Takis. She had such big heart eyes and said “Baby! You brought me Takis!” as if it were the greatest gift she had ever received.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/13.jpg\")
Cleveland, Ohio.
\nFort Lauderdale, Florida: probably not high on your list of riot capitals. But beyond its reputation as a glitzy beach tourist destination, there’s a notably brutal police and sheriff’s force and a substantial population of poor and angry people. We’re here to show solidarity and we aim to be prepared for whatever may come. Phones left at home or in the car, one fully charged burner phone in case of emergency. Plenty of water, sunscreen; bandannas with apple cider vinegar; spare masks; hand sanitizer; a change of clothes. Legal numbers written on skin, meetup place and time arranged in case we get separated. We’re ready to roll.
\n\nAs we round the corner of the parking garage, two cops are loading a stack of bricks into a police pickup truck, apparently connected to an incomplete repair job on the brick sidewalk. Later, the media picks up the notion that somehow all over the country, anarchists have been driving around leaving piles of bricks everywhere for convenient use while rioting. Even if we had, that would be an awkward place to leave them; there’s nothing here worth throwing a brick at. Ironically, though, it turns out that this is exactly the spot where the police will start the riot a few hours later.
\n\nAs we arrive at the departure point, the march is already swelling out of the park and into the street. We’re taken aback at the size of the crowd—it’s massive! At first glance, it appears to be well in excess of the one thousand participants that the organizers optimistically predicted. The street is too small for us. We’re swarming all four lanes in both directions, both sidewalks, and spilling into parks and side streets in a mass several blocks long. What a dream, seeing nearly everyone in a march masked up! The energy is high: chants, raised fists, laughter and chatting among the demonstrators, near-constant honks and yells of support from passersby.
\n\nThe crowd is extremely diverse, though solidly majority Black; there are people of all ages, but an especially strong showing from young folks, including high-school and even middle-school-aged people with hand-drawn signs. Some of them try to start chants of “Fuck 12!” though some of the adults are less comfortable with this; “No Justice, No Peace” and “Say his name—George Floyd!” elicit the loudest responses. A snazzily-dressed young man on a shiny red scooter weaves in and out of the crowd honking, pumping people up, and yelling, “C’mon, y’all! FUCK the POLICE!” Hawk-eyed volunteers in neon vests roam the outskirts. As we pass businesses along the main artery, there are lines of protestors standing with raised fists facing the crowd: supportive bystanders taking a break in the shade, or peace police to make sure we don’t get out of hand?
\n\nAfter many long blocks marching under the hot sun, finally we arrive: the police headquarters. Someone is standing on the sign at the entrance to the parking lot, waving a large black and red flag. Another person leans against the building’s wall and fires up a blunt in the shade. There are over a thousand of us; the parking lot (strategically emptied of cars by the forward-thinking police) is full and surging with people. Apart from two pigs with binoculars on the rooftop, there are no police in sight—none. We press up to the front wall. Someone is yelling on a bullhorn, but I can’t make it out. Someone lowers the American flag from the pole by the front door of the station, to cheers. A minute or two later it’s raised again, spray-painted with “FREEDOM FOR SOME,” to a few weak cheers; is that the best we could think of? Most of us are just milling around. What are we going to do?
\n\nNothing, apparently. Before we know it, a cluster of people from the front are streaming back to the street. We only just got here! Most people stay put, clearly wanting more of a confrontation, a stronger statement, something. Earnest marshals wander through the discontented crowd, urging them back to the road to return downtown. “Marched all the way down here, for all of seven minutes,” complains one woman. “We ain’t even been here long enough.” The crowd is annoyed and disappointed, but not rebellious. Our little cluster stays put and tries to chat with others around us, but before long it’s clear that whatever possibilities might have been presented by the large numbers are slipping through our fingers. We picked up the vibe ahead of time from the organizers that this will be a heavily self-policed situation, despite the “woke-washing” rhetoric of not riot-shaming people… at least people who riot elsewhere, that is.
\n\nAfter deliberation, we head back into the street, but try to hold it by the station as the march stretches out. The highway lies just a couple of blocks in the opposite direction, and there are a couple hundred people still milling about, hungry for something else. But informal proposals to head to the highway don’t gain traction, and with the bulk of the march now blocks ahead and police behind us forming a line of cruisers and motorcycles, there doesn’t seem to be much we can do. Sighing with frustration, we amble our way back towards the rest of the march.
\n\nThere are knots of people clustering around conflicts as protestors scream at one another. A middle-aged man with what seems to be heat stroke chats with a couple of paramedics seated on the sidewalk. Police are still carefully keeping their distance. We’re only blocking one direction, and cars going the other way nearly all honk in support. But our energy is low. More conflicts between protestors heat up, then dissipate. Up ahead, we see a small crowd clustering around the entrance to a CVS. By the time we get there, it’s clear that a debate has broken out between people who want what’s inside without paying for it and others who want to stop them from getting it. The peace police carry the day. Two middle-aged women are yelling at each other, debating whether someone’s grandmother gets her prescriptions filled there. Across the street, a small knot of locals, unmasked and unconcerned, speculate on targets. “Hold on, yo, there’s a fucking BANK,” says one, swaggering over to a building. WHOOMP, goes a window. The handful of stragglers stroll back to the street and continue on their way.
\n\nWhere are we going? Hopefully to the courthouse, the town hall, the jail, or somewhere where people can at least vent some more rage. But no, the final destination is just the same pleasant grassy park we started from. By the time we arrive, the original march has circled the block across and back over a bridge, and is spilling into the park. We sit in the grass, out of earshot of the self-congratulatory speeches of the organizers. A lone man climbs to the top of the bandshell, prompting cheers, and leads chants of “Black Lives Matter!” and, briefly, “Fuck 12!” though the latter proves less popular. People roam around chatting, flirting, filming videos and snapping pictures. I see a drone hovering over the crowd and try to think over how to disrupt it—then realize, as it lands, that it was brought by one of the protestors, a nerdy looking man sitting on the lawn. There are well over a thousand people still around in the pleasant late afternoon sun and hardly any police in sight, though we know they can’t be far. The appointed dispersal time passes, the organizers conclude their speeches, and crowds begin filing back to their cars. Most people aren’t in a hurry to leave; many are likely enjoying their first mass public outing since COVID hit. A guy is walking through the crowd pulling a red wagon full of ice and plastic bottles: “Margaritas, rum punch, edibles! Cash, Venmo, Paypal!” We rest and snack, and consider how much longer we should stick around.
\n\nThen—something shifts. I feel it before I see it: a new energy, a tension, then murmuring rippling through the seated crowds. A few people, then more, start walking towards an intersection and down a street towards the parking garage out of sight. Then suddenly dozens and then hundreds are walking, jogging, sprinting that way. We decide to join them and see what’s going on. And then—BOOM. A flash-bang grenade echoes in the distance. BOOM, BOOM. Screams and yells. We walk faster.
\n\nRounding the corner into the street, we see a tense crowd surrounding two police vehicles. In the distance there are flashing lights, yells, commotion. Around us, many curious onlookers are hovering, some moving towards the conflict, others jogging away from it. Everyone looks pissed. People are yelling at the vehicle containing two cops trying to turn out of a parking lot into the street. CRASH—someone busts out the window of the police SUV and tinted glass sprinkles the ground. The busted vehicle zips down to the parking garage and retreats into its depths, where angry shouts and more flash-bang explosions are echoing.
\n\nWe duck into a corner and change our outfits. Back on the street, people are milling about, fuming and cursing the cops. What happened? We hear rumors, but the crowd seems clear on one thing: the cops started it. “Why’d they even come out here all dressed like they ready for war, when we ain’t even do nothing? Okay, then! Y’all want a war, you got it!”
\n\nWe will find out later that the “riot” began when an aggro white dude with a badge shoved a young Black woman who was kneeling on the ground with her hands in the air, prompting screams of outrage and a flurry of thrown bottles. A video that made it to CNN noted a Black female cop as she followed her white colleague back into the police line, screaming at him in fury for his senseless escalation. The white officer, Stephen Pohorence, would be “relieved from duty” (i.e., paid the same salary to sit at an air-conditioned desk until the affair blows over) for his action, prompting the head of the police union to lash out. Pohorence, not surprisingly, has a history of violent arrests, drawing his gun on people, and accusations of racial profiling—which no one other than his targets seemed to notice until now.
\n\nIn the distance, there appears to be a white woman in yoga pants sitting in lotus position in the middle of an intersection in front of a line of riot police. Sure, why not—diversity of tactics, right? In the street we’re holding, there are cars trying to escape from the area but held up by the throng; on one of them, a woman in fashionable sunglasses is sitting in an open window holding a Black Lives Matter sign. The guy on the red scooter is zipping through the crowd, urging people to take a stand and yelling, “FUCK THE POLIIIIIICE!!!” A few people are chucking rocks or water bottles at the police line, but most are waiting to see what happens.
\n\nMore explosions. People are screaming, sprinting past me from the police line. My blood is boiling. “Fuck you!” people are bellowing at the police from all sides. BOOM, and again, BOOM go the flash-bangs. A hiss, a swirl of colored smoke, and the acrid whiff intensifies—OK, that’s tear gas. A young woman runs by sobbing. I am too angry to think. The canister is right there on the ground. I run up to it, lean down—some remote part of my brain knows this is not a good idea, but it’s right there and it needs to GO!—and then my hand is grasping the canister, gripping as loosely as I can while still lifting it aloft, arm rears back, and it’s flying through the air. I feel nothing but exhilaration! Fuck you, pigs! Take that! I’m on fire!
\n\nOh, wait—my hand is definitely on fire. I look at my thin glove, which still looks intact, but the burning sensation has arrived and is throbbing harder every instant. That was stupid, stupid. Still, that canister had to go. Wait, the burning is in my eyes, too. Another cloud is wafting towards me. Police aren’t charging, though, so I’m walking calmly back towards the intersection where an anxious crowd is milling. The same guy with his red wagon selling margaritas is still walking through the crowd, tears streaming down his face. All around me, people are pouring liquids into the eyes of others, coughing, sputtering. Plenty of graffiti going up all over the wall of—whatever this building is. I can’t even tell. I can’t see.
\n\nBlinking, tears streaming, burning. OK, this is unpleasant, but I can handle it. Is my hand OK? I’m not sure. Are my people OK? People are rushing up to me, beckoning me to bend, look up, open my eyes. No, I’m fine, I shake my head to say. Wait, no I’m not. OK, yes, please, I nod. Someone holds a bottle of milk aloft; I try to keep my eyes open. Wait, milk? Isn’t it supposed to be Maalox or something? Whatever, I’m in the moment.
\n\nI blink furiously. Anxious faces look at me expectantly. “Guess I’m not vegan anymore,” I gurgle in a raspy voice to the medic and observers. They politely chuckle, mostly glad that I’m speaking and smiling. I ask the medic if they have anything for burns; they don’t, but picking up what I’m putting down, they pull out a heavy heat-proof glove and offer it to me. We share a meaningful look.
\n\nMy eyes are still burning. I stumble a few steps further and another medic rinses my eyes. The burning has diminished, but now my T-shirt mask is sopping with milk and water, and as I try to keep the mask concealing my face I feel like I’m being waterboarded.1 This isn’t going to work. Fortunately, an affinity group member is holding out a clean N95 mask—good planning. I keep the wet t-shirt on to cover my head and neck, but slide it down from my nose and mouth and strap on the mask. I can breathe again. Still burning a bit, and my hand is killing me, but I’m back in the game.
\n\nOK. Where are we? Where are they? We retreat briefly to a side street and assess the situation. Another rush of people—“They’re coming, y’all, watch the fuck out,” someone yells while jogging by. Yes, there is a line of riot cops advancing down the other street. But they’re single file, not in formation, and only a couple dozen deep. Why are people panicking? We’re still a few hundred strong, but spread out. I have to keep remembering that most of the people here, even if they have plenty of experience with individual police, have mostly never been in a group conflict situation like this.
\n\nAs they assemble a line on a nearby patch of grass, an angry man bellows at them, “Y’all faggots! Y’all are a bunch of cocksucker motherfuckers!” He’s clearly on our side and feels the rage that we feel, but this is a bit… off message. A friend walks towards him and pipes up in a friendly voice, “Hey, I hate the cops too, but I like sucking cock!” He’s not sure what to say. We keep moving.
\n\nNo one is sure what to do. The cops are just standing there, on a downward slope on a patch of grass off the intersection—a comically bad position from a tactical point of view. If we wanted to, we could easily chase them off. But every time someone chucks a bottle at them, a dozen protestors angrily yell at them to stop. Instead, a cycle begins; the protestors form a line in a semi-circle facing the police line, but don’t get close enough to confront them. People take a knee, or start a chant, or yell things; photographers click away; people indignantly tell others what to do and not do.
\n\nOne young woman, a White Ally extraordinaire, strides back and forth yelling at everyone the usual platitudes about not putting people of color in danger, etc. She doesn’t seem to realize that well over 80% of the people here appear to be Black, not to mention that nobody appointed her savior of the masses and peace police head deputy. Beware of Woke Karen: throw a bottle and she’ll ask to see your manager.
\n\nAnother cycle of kneeling, yelling, chanting, waiting. “We are not afraid of you!” I yell at the police line. It doesn’t catch on. I don’t know how to try to convey the sense that we are actually more powerful than them in this moment. The fear on our side is palpable. Yet it also swells and recedes; in brief moments, the scales tip towards collective bravery.
\n\nLater, I learn that shortly before this, a riot cop shot a Black woman in the head with a rubber bullet, fracturing her skull.
\n\nI feel something swelling behind me, and turn to look with a flash of alarm. But what greets my eyes immediately flips me to excitement. The white sedan that has been lurking amidst the protestors is blasting a popular hip-hop track on the stereo and the crowd has ignited with delight. Suddenly dozens, now well over a hundred people clustered around the car in the intersection are chanting along and moving in unison with huge grins on their faces. This is my favorite moment in the demo—a brief flicker of genuine revelry, of absolute joy at sharing collective exhilaration together in the street despite the violence, against the fear. When “Whose streets? OUR streets!” feels like more than just a slogan, but a bodily reality. It’s probably only ninety seconds before the song changes or people get distracted by something else. But I will remember it for a long time.
\n\nThe crowd is slowly thinning. A person in neon tights on one of those annoying Segways is slowly zigzagging through the crowd, telling everyone that the police will be charging in ten minutes. She’s not a cop; what is she basing that on? C’mon, rumor control! A Black woman in her 20s with amazing nails screams, “Who the fuck side you on, anyway? Someone needs to knock that bitch right off her damn scooter.” We all cackle. A beefy white guy, who mentions that he was recently released from the local jail, laments, “What we need is some meth up in this, so people can really get rolling!” I knew we’d forgotten something.
\n\nFirecrackers snap; a firework zips toward the police line. Anguished shouts from the protestors. Then—WHOOSH—more tear gas. I’m ready this time. I’ve been waiting for this. I rush for the first can. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve—” Another guy has beaten me to it; gym shorts and a tank top, no mask—I don’t think he even has gloves! But he’s leaning, grabbing, throwing. “OK, you’ve got it!” A second one skids across the ground to my right, and the remaining demonstrators scurry away. I rush over, lean down, grasp it with my heavy-duty mitt, and chuck it back towards the police line. I hear rubber bullets whizzing, though it’s hard to see and the gas is starting to burn again. I turn and sprint diagonally backwards towards the park, out of range. There’s no crowd cover and I stand way out. But they’re not charging; the riot cops haven’t taken advantage of the ground they’ve cleared, only advancing a few yards out of the grassy slope they were on and still on the far side of the intersection.
\n\nOh shit, where is my affinity group? I got so zeroed in on getting those canisters back where they belong, I lost track. Strafing laterally to stay out of police view I scan the trickle of demonstrators on the sidewalk by the museum. Oh great, I see one of us. Skirting the edges of the park, I jog across the street and intercept them. Here we are. There’s one of us still missing—scanning, scanning—there they are, hustling this way. We’re reunited.
\n\n“You OK?” “Yes, you?” “Aargh, I took a fucking tear gas canister to the face!” Oh shit.
\n\nWe round the corner away from the police line and crouch against a wall. They lift up their mask; there’s a lot of blood. “How does it look?” “Uh, kinda bad.” Is there a medic around? Medic? No medic. Someone’s got more bottles of milk, but nothing past that. We find a clean bandanna and rinse the wound with water. It looks gnarly, but isn’t actually bleeding that heavily, and the pain is manageable. Whew. Mask back on. What’s next?
\n\nMore police vehicles are pouring in. No charge yet, but they’re swelling their forces, while our crowd is trickling away. The street and intersection are still clogged but some cars are getting through, and there appear to be more police in the street than us, with remaining demonstrators lurking on the sidewalks taunting the cops or waiting on the edges to see what happens next. As we lean against a wall, the protestor who was calling the cops “faggots” earlier asks my cocksucking friend to borrow a lighter, and they share a smoke and a friendly moment. A small victory.
\n\nWe heard rumors of people massing by the courthouse and decide to check it out, as things seem to be wrapping up here. It’s fake news, though, and now we’re isolated from any crowd. I think we’re done here. Pop into an alleyway for a fashion moment. With our outerwear changed, we’re back in civilian drag and walking back to the parking garage where the conflict kicked off, where our car is hopefully still waiting. We climb a stairwell to the second floor, then pause to look out over the street. The angle offers a perfect view of a low wall spanning the sidewalk across the street, along which a massive message in gold spray paint reads:
\n\nTHE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN <3
\n\nIf so, it certainly has a long way to go. But it’s a start.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Dakarai_Turner/status/1266549838788902914\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1267641851215036416\n\n\n
These two tweets give a sense of the kind of footage that conservative television stations were compelled to broadcast during the uprising—and, incidentally, of the uselessness of police.
\n\nAfter the clashes on Friday [May 29], the crowd continued to gather at Centennial Olympic Park for a few days, even though many of the adjacent stores and bars had already been smashed and looted. At first, it seemed stupid to keep going there, but there was also a special charm. When the city government declared the curfew, they established a guaranteed moment of conflict; many people would arrive in the hour ahead of curfew, just in time to clash with the police.
\n\nThe first volley of tear gas had been enough to disperse the crowd the previous night, but on this evening, many people had arrived prepared to respond. Within a few minutes, hundreds of people were dragging construction equipment into Centennial Olympic Park Drive, constructing a tremendous barricade against the National Guard and police. All around, people were throwing rocks and bricks into the road for others to use, while some pummeled the National Guard with them. Some people I took to be college students were telling people to stop throwing things; meanwhile, the front lines were building a second layer of barricades many feet high. I heard someone tell the white college students to break bricks if they wanted to help—simply being there wasn’t enough.
\n\nMedics were treating people for tear gas exposure, but many people were quickly throwing every canister back. I saw a fairly large group of Black people approach a smaller group of non-Black people at the front barricade. “We want to go loot some stores up on Peachtree Street, but we need the cops to stay down here. Can you guys hold this up?”
\n\n“Yeah, 20 minutes at least.”
\n\nAnti-oppression activists went on yelling that white people were endangering Black people. The police were pinned at the site of conflict for 40 minutes before they could disperse the crowd. No one was arrested that night on Peachtree Street.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/4.jpg\")
Minneapolis, May 30.
\nFrom the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Occupied Coast Salish territory.
\n\nThe most joyous occasion I experienced took place in the hours following the shooting at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). Everybody’s response was a perfect illustration of the fact that we don’t need police to protect us. One of the front-line demonstrators who have been at the demonstrations every day helped to stop the attacker from driving his car into us. The driver shot him, and the street medics began applying a tourniquet before the assailant had even gotten out of the car.
\n\nWithin hours, every street that led to the demonstration outside the precinct was blocked by repurposed police barricades, boulders, people’s cars, and lines of people standing with their bikes. The numbers of the demonstration swelled to even greater attendance. In the face of increasingly violent police repression, as well as reactionary attacks from behind, those of us in the streets showed our dedication to each other to prove that a world without police isn’t just a political statement, it’s a possible solution to the violence of our lives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/17.jpg\")
Seattle, Washington.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/15.jpg\")
Seattle, Washington, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
\nSome years ago, the police tried to ruin my life. They led me to a room in their police precinct, angry and joyous about catching me, smiling with their gaping teeth. They locked my feet to the floor and then they beat me. The experience of being at the violent whim of something or someone so powerful is something I will always struggle with. At any random moment, I can still feel like I am covered in blood. Alone. Crying.
\n\nI will never forgive the police. I’m not one to make bravado-filled proclamations about violence against cops. I would prefer they simply leave their posts. But if I saw one of the cops who beat me on the ground begging for his life while having a stress-induced heart attack, I’d step over him without hesitation.
\n\nFor hours, outside the room, the police concocted a story to use to charge me with a crime. They came in from time to time, screaming and threatening to beat me again. Breathing in and out, I sat there telling myself that I had to prepare for it. Imagining the punches, preemptively tensing my whole body in anticipation. Fortunately, more beating never came. But the criminal indictment from a grand jury came just a day later.
\n\nTwo years later, after dozens of court appearances, I was acquitted. I was lucky. I didn’t end up dead or locked up.
\n\nI know that as an anarchist, this is just the way it goes. We fight political, social, and economic authority in all the forms they assume. We come up against the forces of domination and we shouldn’t be surprised when they respond with brute force. Still, it stings. And even though my mind and body can often be in this state of war, it is ultimately something I want to be released from.
\n\nIn a lot of ways, the repression we experience can only be healed through the process of revolt. Mass refusal is the complicated release of our repressed longings—influenced by the various personal and systematic traumas we experience. These longings cannot be placated or understood by political campaigns or reform. Sadly, mass refusal often only occurs after a resonating event that is extremely painful and traumatic—a police murder, in this case. It can be an opportunity for the release of a freedom that is always struggling to break through the seemingly hopeless daily façade we call “normal”—liberation from racialization, patriarchy, capital, politics, school, or religion. The police are usually the ones who repress our efforts to shake free of all of these. But when things pass beyond their control, the release of energy feels infinite.
\n\nThe uprising in Minneapolis after the murder of the George Floyd was such a release. An exit from this reality, from the hopelessness that history imposes on us. It represents the possible return of the repressed as actors against the various levels of invisibility that are imposed upon us. Against the reality that can push you down for being poor and black and then kill you for trying to pass a bad dollar bill as real. The same one that can also kill you without using the police—be it through the virus or the stress of private property, race, class, or social stigma.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/11.jpg\")
Minneapolis.
\nOn May 28, a window opened. It was like a jubilee. A great leveling. Many stores in Minneapolis became free—especially around the Third Precinct. The free movement of formerly locked up goods at Target and Cub Foods—what is called “looting”—was a sight to behold. I think of the times I’ve nervously shoplifted and I think of all the times I and others like me have been caught by security. I also think of all those who have been murdered over the theft or perceived theft of commodities.
\n\nWalking around the diverse crowd, there was poetry everywhere—both on the brick and mortar and in the actions of everyone present. I wanted to see it all. A car was on fire and people were going to the Target to grab what little was left of flammable materials to add to the fire—mannequins, display tables, and the like. Some churchy couple was playing guitar, singing Leonard Cohen songs, and people were singing along. A medic tent, presumably full of supplies looted from Target and Cub, was handing out water and providing first aid. Cars were streaming into the parking lot, so much so that there was a constant traffic jam. Thousands of people were going in and out of Target and Cub Food and filling up their cars with liberated goods, many of them with shopping lists. They were smiling.
\n\nI heard one man in the store asking a friend on the phone where exactly the kitty litter was. At some point, someone tried to drive a car into Cub food, but failed. A liquor store was also being looted nearby and folks were sharing the spoils. The floors of these former stores were flooded with water and soggy paper from the sprinkler systems—but that did not stop some of them from eventually catching fire. A nearby bank drive-through ATM was meticulously broken into by a large group of people cheering each other on. It was all very cordial, no conflict in sight—besides with the police.
\n\nI had numerous conversations with people. I can’t count the number of times random people would walk by me and we would catch each other’s glance and both say something like “IS THIS REAL? ARE WE DREAMING RIGHT NOW? WHAT IS THIS?” One mom and her young son came down from a suburb to just see it. She was a sociologist and we started discussing the reasons for it all. Her son wandered off into the Target and she rushed off to find him. Another guy was talking about how what was happening was straight up anarchy. The range of people was extremely diverse—yet I saw none of the conflict around race that I’m used to seeing in similar situations.
\n\nLater on, as the sun went down, there was another attack on the already smashed up Third Precinct. From the roof, the cops responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, but then they stopped and abandoned the roof. In the adjacent parking lot, they were firing gas and rubber bullets as the rest of the cops that could fit into cars were getting in them. The others who couldn’t fit crowded together into a riot line, periodically shooting at onlookers in order to protect the ones getting into the cars. Eventually, all the cops made their way to the gate of the parking lot. The cops on foot struggled to open the gate by hand, then eventually gave up. One officer used a car to ram the gate, bursting it open. A line of cops and cars spilled out, from cruisers to bearcats—all abandoning the precinct. It was incredible. Rocks were being thrown at them, laser pointers shined at them. Just like that, they were gone.
\n\nThe crowd went wild. It’s the happiest you could be, running the police out. A fire appeared in the lobby of the precinct. There was no effort to stop it and no need to stop it.
\n\nSeeing a police precinct burn is a much-needed release for all those who have been forced inside one, for everyone who has been beaten inside it, for everyone who loves someone who has been murdered by the police. Seeing cops run scared from a righteous crowd is a release. It’s healing.
\n\nAt some point, a USPS van showed up, all of its windows busted out, covered in graffiti. The driver was doing burnouts and donuts. People flipped it and set it on fire. Another banged up van peeled around the corner five minutes later and the driver nearly hit a few people doing donuts again. People eventually convinced the driver to chill and to reverse it into the burning police station; but in the confusion, people kept getting in the way, so the driver rammed it into the other burning USPS van and it, too, went up. Another one showed up five minutes later, too, set on fire down the street.
\n\nWhen we are given free rein, what comes out is beautiful—creative and destructive. When we destroy the halls of power, where we are so often forced to speak in tongues or body rhythms that aren’t for us (law, social justice, reform), other paths of experimentation open up before us. Ways of living that already existed in the shadows of capital and authority can bloom freely and new ones that have yet to be created can emerge.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/10.jpg\")
\nEditor’s note: Along with many experienced street medics and animal liberation advocates, we strongly recommend using water rather than milk to treat exposure to tear gas. ↩
\nIn this anonymous submission, participants in the uprising in Minneapolis in response to the murder of George Floyd explore how a combination of different tactics compelled the police to abandon the Third Precinct.
\n\nThe following analysis is motivated by a discussion that took place in front of the Third Precinct as fires billowed from its windows on Day Three of the George Floyd Rebellion in Minneapolis. We joined a group of people whose fire-lit faces beamed in with joy and awe from across the street. People of various ethnicities sat side by side talking about the tactical value of lasers, the “share everything” ethos, interracial unity in fighting the police, and the trap of “innocence.” There were no disagreements; we all saw the same things that helped us win. Thousands of people shared the experience of these battles. We hope that they will carry the memory of how to fight. But the time of combat and the celebration of victory is incommensurable with the habits, spaces, and attachments of everyday life and its reproduction. It is frightening how distant the event already feels from us. Our purpose here is to preserve the strategy that proved victorious against the Minneapolis Third Precinct.
\n\nOur analysis focuses on the tactics and composition of the crowd that besieged the Third Precinct on Day Two of the uprising. The siege lasted roughly from 4 pm well into the early hours of the morning of May 28. We believe that the tactical retreat of the police from the Third Precinct on Day Three was won by the siege of Day Two, which exhausted the Precinct’s personnel and supplies. We were not present for the fighting that preceded the retreat on Day Three, as we showed up just as the police were leaving. We were across the city in an area where youth were fighting the cops in tit-for-tat battles while trying to loot a strip mall—hence our focus on Day Two here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-3.jpg\")
May 28: The Third Precinct during the day. It was set alight that night.
\nThe last popular revolt against the Minneapolis Police Department took place in response to the police murder of Jamar Clark on November 15, 2015. It spurred two weeks of unrest that lasted until December 2. Crowds repeatedly engaged the police in ballistic confrontations; however, the response to the shooting coalesced around an occupation of the nearby Fourth Precinct. Organizations like the NAACP and the newly formed Black Lives Matter asserted their control over the crowds that gathered; they were often at odds with young unaffiliated rebels who preferred to fight the police directly. Much of our analysis below focuses on how young Black and Brown rebels from poor and working-class neighborhoods seized the opportunity to reverse this relationship. We argue that this was a necessary condition for the uprising.
\n\nGeorge Floyd was murdered by the police at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue between 8:20 and 8:32 pm on Monday, May 25. Demonstrations against the killing began the next day at the site of his murder, where a vigil took place. Some attendees began a march to the Third Precinct at Lake Street and 26th, where rebels attacked police vehicles in the parking lot.
\n\nThese two locations became consistent gathering points. Many community groups, organizations, liberals, progressives, and leftists assembled at the vigil site, while those who wanted to fight generally gathered near the Precinct. This put over two miles between two very different crowds, a spatial division that was reflected in other areas of the city as well. Looters clashed with police in scattered commercial zones outside of the sphere of influence of the organizations while many of the leftist marches excluded fighting elements with the familiar tactic of peace policing in the name of identity-based risk aversion.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-1.jpg\")
May 28: Inside the liberated and gutted Target across Lake Street from the Third Precinct.
\nThe subject of our analysis is not a race, a class, an organization, or even a movement, but a crowd. We focus on a crowd for three reasons. First, with the exception of the street medics, the power and success of those who fought the Third Precinct did not depend on their experience in “organizing” or in organizations. Rather, it resulted from unaffiliated individuals and groups courageously stepping into roles that complemented each other and seizing opportunities as they arose.
\n\nWhile the initial gathering was occasioned by a rally hosted by a Black-led organization, all of the actions that materially defeated the Third Precinct were undertaken after the rally had ended, carried out by people who were not affiliated with it. There was practically no one there from the usual gamut of self-appointed community and religious leaders, which meant that the crowd was able to transform the situation freely. Organizations rely on stability and predictability to execute strategies that require great quantities of time to formulate. Consequently, organization leaders can be threatened by sudden changes in the social conditions, which can make their organizations irrelevant. Organizations—even self-proclaimed “revolutionary” organizations—have an interest in suppressing spontaneous revolt in order to recruit from those who are discontent and enraged. Whether it is an elected official, a religious leader, a “community organizer,” or a leftist representative, their message to unruly crowds is always the same: wait.
\n\nThe agency that took down the Third Precinct was a crowd and not an organization because its goals, means, and internal makeup were not regulated by centralized authority. This proved beneficial, as the crowd consequently had recourse to more practical options and was freer to create unforeseen internal relationships in order to adapt to the conflict at hand. We expand on this below in the section titled “The Pattern of Battle and ‘Composition.’”
\n\nThe agency in the streets on May 27 was located in a crowd because its constituents had few stakes in the existing order that is managed by the police. Crucially, a gang truce had been called after the first day of unrest, neutralizing territorial barriers to participation. The crowd mostly originated from working-class and poor Black and Brown neighborhoods. This was especially true of those who threw things at the police and vandalized and looted stores. Those who do not identify as “owners” of the world that oppresses them are more likely to fight and steal from it when the opportunity arises. The crowd had no interest in justifying itself to onlookers and it was scarcely interested in “signifying” anything to anyone outside of itself. There were no signs or speeches, only chants that served the tactical purposes of “hyping up” (“Fuck 12!”) and interrupting police violence with strategically deployed “innocence” (“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-2.jpg\")
May 28: A looted pawn shop east of the Third Precinct on Lake Street about to catch fire. The story spread that the previous night, the owner had shot and killed someone.
\nWe saw people playing the following roles:
\n\nThis included street medics and medics performing triage and urgent care at a converted community center two blocks away from the precinct. Under different circumstances, this could be performed at any nearby sympathetic commercial, religious, or not-for profit establishment. Alternatively, a crowd or a medic group could occupy such a space for the duration of a protest. Those who were organized as street medics did not interfere with the tactical choices of the crowd. Instead, they consistently treated anyone who needed their help.
\n\nThis is common practice in many US cities by now, but police scanner monitors with an ear for strategically important information played a critical role in setting up information flows from the police to the crowd. It is almost certain that on the whole, much of the crowd was not practicing the greatest security to access the Telegram channel. We advise rebels to set up the Telegram app on burner phones in order to stay informed while preventing police stingrays (false cell phone towers) from gleaning their personal information.
\n\nThe non-violent tactics of peaceful protesters served two familiar aims and one unusual one:
\n\nThey created a spectacle of legitimacy, which was intensified as police violence escalated.
\nThey created a front line that blocked police attempts to advance when they deployed outside of the Precinct.
\nIn addition, in an unexpected turn of affairs, the peaceful protestors shielded those who employed projectiles.
\nWhenever the police threatened tear gas or rubber bullets, non-violent protesters lined up at the front with their hands up in the air, chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Sometimes they kneeled, but typically only during relative lulls in the action. When the cops deployed outside the Precincts, their police lines frequently found themselves facing a line of “non-violent” protestors. This had the effect of temporarily stabilizing the space of conflict and gave other crowd members a stationary target. While some peaceful protestors angrily commanded people to stop throwing things, they were few and grew quiet as the day wore on. This was most likely because the police were targeting people who threw things with rubber bullets early on in the conflict, which enraged the crowd. It’s worth noting that the reverse has often been the case—we are used to seeing more confrontational tactics used to shield those practicing non-violence (e.g., at Standing Rock and Charlottesville). The reversal of this relationship in Minneapolis afforded greater autonomy to those employing confrontational tactics.
\n\nBallistics squads threw water bottles, rocks, and a few Molotov cocktails at police, and shot fireworks. Those using ballistics didn’t always work in groups, but doing so protected them from being targeted by non-violent protestors who wanted to dictate the tactics of the crowd. The ballistics squads served three aims:
\n\nThey drew police violence away from the peaceful elements of the crowd during moments of escalation.
\nThey patiently depleted the police crowd control munitions.
\nThey threatened the physical safety of the police, making it more costly for them to advance.
\nThe first day of the uprising, there were attacks on multiple parked police SUVs at the Third Precinct. This sensibility resumed quickly on Day Two, beginning with the throwing of water bottles at police officers positioned on the roof of the Third Precinct and alongside the building. After the police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, the ballistics squads also began to employ rocks. Elements within the crowd dismantled bus bench embankments made of stone and smashed them up to supply additional projectiles. Nightfall saw the use of fireworks by a few people, which quickly generalized in Days Three and Four. “Boogaloos” (Second Amendment accelerationists) had already briefly employed fireworks on Day One, but from what we saw they mostly sat it out on the sidelines thereafter. Finally, it is worth noting that the Minneapolis police used “green tips,” rubber bullets with exploding green ink tips to mark lawbreakers for later arrest. Once it became clear that the police department had limited capacity to make good on its threat and, moreover, that the crowd could win, those who had been marked had every incentive to fight like hell to defy the police.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-4.jpg\")
May 28: The back of the same pawn shop on fire.
\nIn the grammar of the Hong Kong movement, those who operate laser pointers are referred to as “light mages.” As was the case in Hong Kong, Chile, and elsewhere in 2019, some people came prepared with laser pointers to attack the optical capacity of the police. Laser pointers involve a special risk/reward ratio, as it is very easy to track people using laser pointers, even when they are operating within a dense and active crowd at night. Laser pointer users are particularly vulnerable if they attempt to target individual police officers or (especially) police helicopters while operating in small crowds; this is still the case even if the entire neighborhood is undergoing mass looting (the daytime use of high-powered lasers with scopes remains untested, to our knowledge). The upside of laser pointers is immense: they momentarily compromise the eyesight of the police on the ground and they can disable police surveillance drones by interfering with their infrared sensors and obstacle-detection cameras. In the latter case, a persistently lasered drone may descend to the earth where the crowd can destroy it. This occurred repeatedly on Days Two and Three. If a crowd is particularly dense and visually difficult to discern, lasers can be used to chase away police helicopters. This was successfully demonstrated on Day Three following the retreat of the police from the Third Precinct, as well as on Day Four in the vicinity of the Fifth Precinct battle.
\n\nBarricaders built barricades out of nearby materials, including an impressive barricade that blocked the police on 26th Avenue just north of Lake Street. In the latter case, the barricade was assembled out of a train of shopping carts and a cart-return station pulled from a nearby parking lot, dumpsters, police barricades, and plywood and fencing materials from a condominium construction site. At the Third Precinct, the barricade provided useful cover for laser pointer attacks and rock-throwers, while also serving as a natural gathering point for the crowd to regroup. At the Fifth Precinct, when the police pressed on foot toward the crowd, dozens of individuals filled the street with a multi-rowed barricade. On the one hand, this had the advantage of preventing the police from advancing further and making arrests, while allowing the crowd to regroup out of reach of the rubber bullets. However, it quickly became clear that the barricades were discouraging the crowd from retaking the street, and it had to be partially dismantled in order to facilitate a second press toward the police lines. It can be difficult to coordinate defense and attack within a single gesture.
\n\nCar sound systems and engines provided a sonic environment that enlivened the crowd. The anthem of Days Two and Three was Lil’ Boosie’s “Fuck The Police.” Yet one innovation we had never seen before was the use of car engines to add to the soundscape and “rev up” the crowd. This began with a pick-up truck with a modified exhaust system, which was parked behind the crowd facing away from it. When tensions ran high with the police and it appeared that the conflict would resume, the driver would red line his engine and make it roar thunderously over the crowd. Other similarly modified cars joined in, as well as a few motorcyclists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-5.jpg\")
May 28: The interior of Cub Foods, next to the Target that was looted. A large quantity of melted ice cream.
\nLooting served three critical aims.
\n\nFirst, it liberated supplies to heal and nourish the crowd. On the first day, rebels attempted to seize the liquor store directly across from the Third Precinct. Their success was brief, as the cops managed to re-secure it. Early in the standoff on Day Two, a handful of people signaled their determination by climbing on top of the store to mock the police from the roof. The crowd cheered at this humiliation, which implicitly set the objective for the rest of the day: to demonstrate the powerlessness of the police, demoralize them, and exhaust their capacities.
\n\nAn hour or so later, looting began at the liquor store and at an Aldi a block away. While a majority of those present participated in the looting, it was clear that some took it upon themselves to be strategic about it. Looters at the Aldi liberated immense quantities of bottled water, sports drinks, milk, protein bars, and other snacks and assembled huge quantities of these items on street corners throughout the vicinity. In addition to the liquor store and the Aldi, the Third Precinct was conveniently situated adjacent to a Target, a Cub Foods, a shoe store, a dollar store, an Autozone, a Wendy’s, and various other businesses. Once the looting began, it immediately became a part of the logistics of the crowd’s siege on the Precinct.
\n\nSecond, looting boosted the crowd’s morale by creating solidarity and joy through a shared act of collective transgression. The act of gift giving and the spirit of generosity was made accessible to all, providing a positive counterpoint to the head-to-head conflicts with the police.
\n\nThird, and most importantly, looting contributed to keeping the situation ungovernable. As looting spread throughout the city, police forces everywhere were spread thin. Their attempts to secure key targets only gave looters free rein over other areas in the city. Like a fist squeezing water, the police found themselves frustrated by an opponent that expanded exponentially.
\n\nThe decision to burn looted businesses can be seen as tactically intelligent. It contributed to depleting police resources, since the firefighters forced to continually extinguish structure fires all over town required heavy police escorts. This severely impacted their ability to intervene in situations of ongoing looting, the vast majority of which they never responded to (the malls and the Super Target store on University Ave being exceptions). This has played out differently in other cities, where police opted not to escort firefighters. Perhaps this explains why demonstrators fired in the air around firefighting vehicles during the Watts rebellion.
\n\nIn the case of the Third Precinct, the burning of the Autozone had two immediate consequences: first, it forced the police to move out into the street and establish a perimeter around the building for firefighters. While this diminished the clash at the site of the precinct, it also pushed the crowd down Lake Street, which subsequently induced widespread looting and contributed to the diffusion of the riot across the whole neighborhood. By interrupting the magnetic force of the Precinct, the police response to the fire indirectly contributed to expanding the riot across the city.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-6.jpg\")
May 29: Police forming a perimeter around the Third Precinct a few hours before curfew.
\nWe call the battles of the second and third days at the Precinct a siege because the police were defeated by attrition. The pattern of the battle was characterized by steady intensification punctuated by qualitative leaps due to the violence of the police and the spread of the conflict into looting and attacks on corporate-owned buildings. The combination of the roles listed above helped to create a situation that was unpoliceable, yet which the police were stubbornly determined to contain. The repression required for every containment effort intensified the revolt and pushed it further out into the surrounding area. By Day Three, all of the corporate infrastructure surrounding the Third Precinct had been destroyed and the police had nothing but a “kingdom of ashes” to show for their efforts. Only their Precinct remained, a lonely target with depleted supplies. The rebels who showed up on Day Three found an enemy teetering on the brink. All it needed was a final push.
\n\nDay Two of the uprising began with a rally: attendees were on the streets, while the police were stationed on top of their building with an arsenal of crowd control weaponry. The pattern of struggle began during the rally, when the crowd tried to climb over the fences that protected the Precinct in order to vandalize it. The police fired rubber bullets in response as rally speakers called for calm. After some time passed and more speeches were made, people tried again. When the volley of rubber bullets came, the crowd responded with rocks and water bottles. This set off a dynamic of escalation that accelerated quickly once the rally ended. Some called for non-violence and sought to interfere with those who were throwing things, but most people didn’t bother arguing with them. They were largely ignored or else the reply was always the same: “That non-violence shit don’t work!” In fact, neither side of this argument was exactly correct: as the course of the battle was to demonstrate, both sides needed each other to accomplish the historic feat of reducing the Third Precinct to ashes.
\n\nIt’s important to note that the dynamic we saw on Day Two did not involve using non-violence and waiting for repression to escalate the situation. Instead, a number of individuals stuck their necks out very far to invite police violence and escalation. Once the crowd and the police were locked into an escalating pattern of conflict, the objective of the police was to expand their territorial control radiating outward from the Precinct. When the police decided to advance, they began by throwing concussion grenades at the crowd as a whole and firing rubber bullets at those throwing projectiles, setting up barricades, and firing tear gas.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-7.jpg\")
May 29: The beauty supply section of a looted Walgreens on Lake Street, just east of the Third Precinct.
\nThe intelligence of the crowd proved itself as participants quickly learned five lessons in the course of this struggle.
\n\nFirst, it is important to remain calm in the face of concussion grenades, as they are not physically harmful if you are more than five feet away from them. This lesson extends to a more general insight about crisis governance: don’t panic, as the police will always use panic against us. One must react quickly while staying as calm as possible.
\n\nSecond, the practice of flushing tear-gassed eyes spread rapidly from street medics throughout the rest of the crowd. Employing stores of looted bottled water, many people in the crowd were able to learn and quickly execute eye-flushing. People throwing rocks one minute could be seen treating the eyes of others in the next. This basic medic knowledge helped to build the crowd’s confidence, allowing them to resist the temptation to panic and stampede, so that they could return to the space of engagement.
\n\nThird, perhaps the crowd’s most important tactical discovery was that when one is forced to retreat from tear gas, one must refill the space one has abandoned as quickly as possible. Each time the crowd at the Third Precinct returned, it came back angrier and more determined either to stop the police advance or to make them pay as dearly as possible for every step they took.
\n\nFourth, borrowing from the language of Hong Kong, we saw the crowd practice the maxim “Be water.” Not only did the crowd quickly flow back into spaces from which they had to retreat, but when forced outward, the crowd didn’t behave the way that the cops did by fixating on territorial control. When they could, the crowd flowed back into the spaces from which they had been forced to retreat due to tear gas. But when necessary, the crowd flowed away from police advances like a torrential destructive force. Each police advance resulted in more businesses being smashed, looted, and burned. This meant that the police were losers regardless of whether they chose to remain besieged or push back the crowd.
\n\nFinally, the fall of the Third Precinct demonstrates the power of ungovernability as a strategic aim and means of crowd activity. The more that a crowd can do, the harder it will be to police. Crowds can maximize their agency by increasing the number of roles that people can play and by maximizing the complementary relationships between them.
\n\nNon-violence practitioners can use their legitimacy to temporarily conceal or shield ballistics squads. Ballistics squads can draw police fire away from those practicing non-violence. Looters can help feed and heal the crowd while simultaneously disorienting the police. In turn, those going head to head with the police can generate opportunities for looting. Light mages can provide ballistics crews with temporary opacity by blinding the police and disabling surveillance drones and cameras. Non-violence practitioners can buy time for barricaders, whose works can later alleviate the need for non-violence to secure the front line.
\n\nHere we see that an internally diverse and complex crowd is more powerful than a crowd that is homogenous. We use the term composition to name this phenomenon of maximizing complementary practical diversity. It is distinct from organization because the roles are elective, individuals can shift between them as needed or desired, and there are no leaders to assign or coordinate them. Crowds that form and fight through composition are more effective against the police not only because they tend to be more difficult to control, but also because the intelligence that animates them responds to and evolves alongside the really existing situation on the ground, rather than according to preexisting conceptions of what a battle “ought” to look like. Not only are “compositional” crowds more likely to engage the police in battles of attrition, but they are more likely to have the fluidity that is necessary to win.
\n\nAs a final remark on this, we may contrast composition with the idea of “diversity of tactics” used by the alter-globalization movement. “Diversity of tactics” was the idea that different groups at an action should use different tactical means in different times or spaces in order to work toward a shared goal. In other words, “You do you and I’ll do me,” but without any regard for how what I’m doing complements what you’re doing and vice-versa. Diversity of tactics is activist code for “tolerance.” The crowd that formed on May 27 against the Third Precinct did not “practice the diversity of tactics,” but came together by connecting different tactics and roles to each other in a shared space-time that enabled participants to deploy each tactic as the situation required.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-8.jpg\")
May 29: Graffiti from the previous night adorns businesses.
\nWe are used to seeing more confrontational tactics used to shield those practicing non-violence, as in Standing Rock and Charlottesville or in the figure of the “front-liner” in Hong Kong. However, the reversal of this relationship divided the functions of the “militant front-liner” (à la Hong Kong) across two separate roles: shielding the crowd and counter-offense. This never rose to the level of an explicit strategy in the streets; there were no calls to “shield the throwers.” In the US context, where non-violence and its attendant innocence narratives are deeply entrenched in struggles against state racism, it is unclear if this strategy could function explicitly without ballistics crews first taking risks to invite bloodshed upon themselves. In other words, it appears likely that the joining of ballistics tactics and non-violence in Minneapolis was made possible by a tacitly shared perception of the importance of self-sacrifice in confronting the state that forced all sides to push through their fear.
\n\nYet this shared perception of risk only goes so far. While peaceful protesters probably viewed each other’s gestures as moral symbols against police violence, ballistics squads undoubtedly viewed those gestures differently, namely, as shields, or as materially strategic opportunities. Here again, we may highlight the power of the way that composition plays out in real situations, by pointing out how it allows the possibility that totally different understandings of the same tactic can coexist side by side. We combine without becoming the same, we move together without understanding one another, and yet it works.
\n\nThere are potential limits to dividing front-liner functions across these roles. First, it doesn’t challenge the valorization of suffering in the politics of non-violence. Second, it leaves the value of ballistic confrontation ambiguous by preventing it from coalescing in a stable role at the front of the crowd. It is undeniable that the Third Precinct would not have been taken without ballistic tactics. However, because the front line was identified with non-violence, the spatial and symbolic importance of ballistics was implicitly secondary. This leaves us to wonder whether this has made it easier for counter-insurgency to take root in the movement through “community policing” and its corollary, the self-policing of demonstrations and movements within the bounds of non-violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/09/siege-9.jpg\")
May 29: Graffiti on a K-mart.
\nWe believe that the biggest danger facing the current movement was already present at the Battle of the Third Precinct—namely, the danger of rumors and paranoia. We maintain that the practice of “fact checking” is crucial for the current movement to minimize confusion about the terrain and internal distrust about its own composition.
\n\nWe heard a litany of rumors throughout Day Two. We were told repeatedly that riot police reinforcements were on their way to kettle us. We were warned by fleeing crowd members that the National Guard was “twenty minutes away.” A white lady pulled up alongside us in her van and screamed “THE GAS LINES IN THE BURNING AUTOZONE ARE GONNA BLOWWW!!!” All of these rumors proved to be false. As expressions of panicked anxiety, they always produced the same effect: to make the crowd second-guess their power. It was almost as if certain members of the crowd experienced a form of vertigo in the face of the power that they nonetheless helped to forge.
\n\nIt is necessary to interrupt the rumors by asking questions of those repeating them. There are simple questions that we can ask to halt the spread of fear and rumors that have the effect of weakening the crowd. “How do you know this?” “Who told you this?” “What is the source of your information?” “Is this a confirmed fact?” “The evidence seems inconclusive; what assumptions are you using to make a judgment?”
\n\nAlong with rumors, there is also the problem of attributing disproportionate importance to certain features of the conflict. Going into Day Two, one of the dominant storylines was the threat of “Boogaloo boys,” who had showed up the previous day. This surprised us because we didn’t encounter them on Day One. We saw half a dozen of them on Day Two, but they had relegated themselves to the sidelines of an event that outstripped them. Despite their proclaimed sympathy with George Floyd, a couple of them later stood guard in front of a business to defend it from looters. This demonstrated not only the limit of their claimed solidarity, but also of their strategic sensibility.
\n\nFinally, we awoke on Day Three to so-called reports that either police provocateurs or outside agitators were responsible for the previous day’s destruction. Target, Cub Foods, Autozone, Wendy’s, and a half-constructed condominium high rise1 had all gone up in flames by the end of the night. We cannot discount the possibility that any number of hostile forces sought to smear the crowd by escalating the destruction of property. If that is true, however, it cannot be denied that their plan backfired spectacularly.
\n\nIn general, the crowd looked upon these sublime fires with awe and approval. Even on the second night, when the condominium development became fully engulfed, the crowd sat across from it on 26th Avenue and rested as if gathered around a bonfire. Each structure fire contributed to the material abolition of the existing state of things and the reduction to ash became the crowd’s seal of victory. Instead of believing the rumors about provocateurs or agitators, we find it more plausible that people who have been oppressed for centuries, who are poor, and who are staring down the barrel of a Second Great Depression would rather set the world on fire than suffer the sight of its order. We interpret the structure fires as signifying that the crowd knew that the structures of the police, white supremacy, and class are based in material forces and buildings.
\n\nFor this reason, we maintain that we should assess the threat posed by possible provocateurs, infiltrators, and agitators on the basis of whether their actions directly enhance or diminish the power of the crowd. We have learned that dozens of structure fires are not enough to diminish “public support” for the movement—though no one could have imagined this beforehand. However, those who filmed crowd members destroying property or breaking the law—regardless of whether they intended to inform law enforcement agencies—posed a material threat to the crowd, because in addition to bolstering confusion and fear, they empowered the state with access to information.
\n\nEver since Guy Debord’s 1965 text “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” there has been a rich tradition of memorializing the emergence of communal social life in riots. Riots abolish capitalist social relations, which allows for new relations between people and the things that make up their world. Here is our evidence.
\n\nWhen the liquor store was opened, dozens came out with cases of beer, which were set on the ground with swagger for everyone to share. The crowd’s beer of choice was Corona.
\n\nWe saw a man walk calmly out of the store with both arms full of whiskey. He gave one to each person he passed as he walked off to rejoin the fight. Some of the emptied liquor bottles on the street were later thrown at the police.
\n\nWith buildings aflame all around us, a man walked by and said to no one in particular, “That tobacco shop used to have a great deal on loosies… oh well. Fuck ‘em.”
\n\nWe saw a woman walking a grocery cart full of Pampers and steaks back to her house. A group that was taking a snack and water break on the corner clapped in applause as she rolled by.
\n\nAfter a group opened the Autozone, people sat inside smoking cigarettes as they watched the battle between cops and rebels from behind the front window. One could see them pointing back and forth between the police and elements in the crowd as they spoke and nodding in response to each other. Were they seeing the same things we were seeing?
\n\nWe shopped for shoes in the ransacked storeroom of a looted Foot Locker. The floor was covered wall to wall with half-destroyed shoeboxes, tissue paper, and shoes. People called out for sizes and types as they rummaged. We spent fifteen minutes just to find a matching pair until we heard the din of battle and dipped.
\n\nOn Day Three, the floors of the grocery stores that had been partially burned out were covered in inches of sprinkler water and a foul mix of food that had been thrown from the shelves. Still, people in rain boots could be found inside combing over the remaining goods like they were shopping for deals. Gleaners helped each other step over dangerous objects and, again, shared their loot outside.
\n\nAs the police made their retreat, a young Somali woman dressed in traditional garb celebrated by digging up a landscaping brick and unceremoniously heaving it through a bus stop shelter window. Her friends—also traditionally dressed—raised their fists and danced.
\n\nA masked shirtless man skipped past the burning Precinct and pumped his fists, shouting, “COVID IS OVER!” while twenty feet away, some teenage girls took a group selfie. Instead of saying “Cheese!” they said “Death to the pigs!” Lasers flashed across the smoke-filled sky at a police helicopter overhead.
\n\nWe passed a liquor store that was being looted as we walked away from the best party on Earth. A mother and her two young teenagers rolled up in their car and asked if there was any good booze left. “Hell yea! Get some!” The daughter grinned and said, “Come on! I’ll help you Mommy!” They donned their COVID masks and marched off.
\n\nA day later, before the assault on the Fifth Precinct, there was mass looting in the Midtown neighborhood. A young kid who couldn’t be more than seven or eight years old walked up to us with a whiskey bottle sporting a rag coming out the top. “Y’all got a light?” We laughed and asked, “What do you wanna hit?” He pointed to a friendly grocery store and we asked if he could find “an enemy target.” He immediately turned to the US Bank across the street.
\n\n“This is anarchy.”
\nEditor’s note: The partially constructed 189-unit housing complex referenced here (“Midtown Corner”) was not, in fact, condominiums. Midtown Corner was a mixed-used development, with retail space on the first floor and a full 189 units of affordable rental housing comprising the upper five floors. Some public confusion may have arisen due to the fact that only 38 of the 189 units were designated “deeply affordable,” meaning the rent would be pegged to 60% or less of Area Median Income. However, the remaining approximately 150 units were not priced at luxury or market rate; they were designated “affordable,” with rent pegged to 80% or less of AMI. The development did not contain a single residential unit not slated for affordable rent pricing. ↩
\nTo emphasize the artistic aspects of the uprising against police and white supremacy that has spread around the country from Minneapolis, we present a mural recording some of the names of the dead, which appeared immediately after the murder of George Floyd. Painted on the side of a derelict house in a St. Louis neighborhood devastated by imposed scarcity, it memorializes twenty-one people whose lives have been taken by police or vigilantes. Below, we explore the context of the mural and offer some background on those whose names are recorded on it. Remembering means fighting.
\n\n\n\n\n“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
\n\n-Zora Neale Hurston
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/1.jpg\")
\nIt is significant that this mural appears in south St. Louis, only a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the historic uprising of 2014. In many ways, the uprising in Minneapolis and the worldwide wave of revolt that it catalyzed are simply a continuation of a much longer struggle that re-entered the public consciousness with the rebellion in Ferguson in response to the murder of Michael Brown. We can trace a thread from the riots in Oakland in January 2009 in response to the police murder of Oscar Grant1 through a series of similar revolts around the US culminating in the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore in 2014 and 2015.
\n\nIf we follow the roots of these upheavals, we can go back further still—to the riots of the 1960s and all the way to the struggle against chattel slavery in the 1800s. As long as racialized disparities in power have been imposed from above, people have struggled against them from below.
\n\nIn the current cycle of struggle, we are seeing many familiar dynamics play out once more. The movement in Minneapolis took off as a consequence of the courageous, confrontational action of outraged ordinary people who for the most part did not think of themselves as activists. Once it became clear that brute force would not suffice to put down the ungovernable rebellion, the authorities mobilized the National Guard, while liberal “community leaders” and police departments shifted tactics, attempting to present themselves as friends of the movement on the condition that the participants abandon the unruly strategies that had given them power in the first place.
\n\nNow self-described organizers are seeking to regain control of the streets, encouraging people to wait for a “justice” system that offers no guarantees. But as Alton, Illinois native Miles Davis admonished us decades ago, “When you’re creating your own shit, man [sic], even the sky ain’t the limit.”
\n\nIn fact, all of these things that are happening now happened before in the Ferguson uprising. To be oriented in the present, it can help to go back and learn about the past.
\n\nWhile the 2014 uprising crested without breaching the fortifications of the police department, the movement of the past two weeks has attacked and shut down police stations from Minneapolis to Ferguson. In the words of Guy Debord, this kind of poetry “brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/stlcountypd/status/1266947767630548993\n\n\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/2.jpg\")
The Ferguson police station on May 31, 2020.
\n\n\n\n“Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.”
\n\n-Maya Angelou, one-time resident of St. Louis
\n
As Milan Kundera put it, “The struggle of man [sic] against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In remembering the dead and the resistance that they inspired, we preserve a space for defiant grieving and a vision of a world without hierarchy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/3.jpg\")
\nContent warning: some of the following heartbreaking stories include graphic detail.
\n\nGeorge Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Officers pinned him to ground and crushed the life out of him, despite pleas from both Floyd and bystanders that they were killing him. Protests in response to his death have catalyzed rioting, looting, and fires on a scale not seen in decades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/4.jpg\")
A mural memorializing George Floyd in Minneapolis.
\nKiwi Herring, a Black transgender woman, was shot to death by St. Louis police on August 23, 2017. Before police arrived, Herring had been using a knife to defend herself against a transphobic neighbor. Police used Herring’s knife as justification for killing her, then pressed trumped up charges against Herring’s partner, Kris Thompson, in order to keep Thompson from testifying against them. The charges are still pending. Herring’s death sparked local protests.
\n\nMike Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Brown’s death ignited weeks of protests, riots, and looting, precipitating anti-police struggles throughout America.
\n\nIsaiah Hammett, a white 21-year-old, was killed by a St. Louis SWAT team during a no-knock raid on June 7, 2017. After he secured the safety of his disabled grandfather, Hammett was shot to death by police, who fired over 100 rounds at him. In response to his death, Hammett’s friends and family led rowdy protests for days throughout south St. Louis, using their home as a base.
\n\nAiyana Stanley-Jones, an 8-year-old African-American girl, was killed by a Detroit SWAT team when they raided the wrong address on May 16, 2010. According to her grandmother, a flash grenade set Aiyana on fire before police shot her to death.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/7.jpg\")
A mural memorializing Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Malice Green, a Black man who was murdered by white police officers in Detroit.
\nVonDerrit Myers, Jr. was killed by Officer Jason Flanery while Flanery was moonlighting as private security in south St. Louis’s Shaw neighborhood on October 8, 2014. Within hours of the shooting, a riotous crowd drove police from the scene of the Black teenager’s death. Occurring between the Ferguson uprising in August and the announcement in November that Michael Brown’s murderer would not be indicted, the killing sparked two nights of protests during which demonstrators attacked police, burned flags, and marched down the wealthy block that had hired Officer Flanery as security. Though the SLMPD had no qualms employing Flanery after he killed VonDerrit Myers, Flanery was fired in 2016 after he crashed his squad car in a wealthy neighborhood while drunk and high on cocaine.
\n\nKajieme Powell was killed by St. Louis police officers Thomas Shelton and Ellis Brown August 19, 2014, ten days after the killing of Mike Brown. Powell, a 25-year-old Black man, had been pacing around holding a knife during a mental health episode. Instead of assessing the situation or helping Powell, police killed him within moments of arriving on the scene.
\n\nSandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman, died under suspicious circumstances in a Weller County, Texas jail on July 13, 2015. Police claim she hanged herself; others doubt this narrative. Whether police killed Bland outright or simply held her against her will, causing severe distress, they are responsible for her death. Police are a danger to anyone they come in contact with, especially people of color, poor people, and those suffering mental health problems. Bland’s death catalyzed protests across America.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/6.jpg\")
\nVanessa Evans, a 37-year-old Black woman, died in police custody on November 5, 2010. Guards and medical staff in St. Louis’s downtown jail ignored repeated pleas from Evans that she was having an asthma attack and could not breathe. The jail is notorious for killing people by preventing them from accessing medical attention.
\n\nJesus “Chuy” Huerta died in police custody in Durham, North Carolina on November 19, 2013. Police claimed that the 17-year-old Huerta shot himself while handcuffed in the back of a police car. Huerta’s death drove protesters to march to the Durham police station and smash out its windows, precipitating weeks of conflict.
\n\nMansur Ball-Bey, a Moorish teenager, was killed by St. Louis police on August 19, 2015. Ball-Bey was killed while fleeing a raid of his home. Rowdy protests ensued. Ball-Bey’s death occurred on the one-year anniversary of police killing Kajieme Powell. To make matters worse, the killer of VonDerrit Myers, Jr., Officer Jason Flanery, was spotted with a tactical unit sent to quell protesters.
\n\nBreonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was killed by Louisville police during a no-knock raid on March 13, 2020. Many people have invoked Breonna Taylor’s memory during recent anti-police demonstrations. Inspired by the Minneapolis revolt, on the night of May 28, protesters in Louisville trashed buildings, set fires, and looted for eight hours as a way of honoring Taylor and others the police have killed or harmed.
\n\nCarlo Giuliani was shot and killed by an Italian police officer on July 20, 2001. As a participant in the anti-globalization movement, the 23-year-old Giuliani had been engaging in combative protest against the G8 summit in Genoa.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/8.jpg\")
Graffiti remembering Carlo Giuliani in Piazza Vetra, Milan, Italy.
\nFrancis McIntosh was burned to death by a lynch mob on April 28, 1836 in modern-day Kierner Plaza, St. Louis. Police had arrested McIntosh, a Black steamboat worker, earlier in the day, after he refused to help them apprehend a shipmate of his. Officers William Mull and George Hammand told McIntosh he was going to be lynched. Fearing for his life, McIntosh stabbed them to death and fled, but was quickly captured.
\n\nIf in the 1830s, white racist St. Louis had a stereotype of the “dangerous Black man,” it was the river worker. Enslaved or free, river workers were strong and independent. They traveled the waterways of the Midwest socializing, plotting, expropriating, and getting a sense of the world both North and South.
\n\nAfter the thousands-strong mob took McIntosh from the jail, they chained him to a locust tree, piled wood to his knees, and burned him to death. Although McIntosh pleaded with the mob to put him out of his misery during the half hour it took the flames to kill him, an unnamed alderman stood guard with a pistol to make sure that no one did.
\n\nTrayvon Martin was shot to death by George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012. Though Martin was simply walking home, Zimmerman, a member of the community watch, assumed that the teenager was up to no good. Zimmerman stopped Martin and killed him. Martin’s death enraged people across America, ushering in a new era of protests against police and vigilantes.
\n\nDonnel Dortch, a Black teenager, was killed by a Kinloch police officer in September 1962. Dortch’s death sparked days of protests, riots, and fires throughout north St. Louis County. The suburban municipality of Kinloch borders Ferguson; these riots were a precursor to the 2014 uprising.
\n\nJoseph “Bam Bam” Long died in Meacham Park on July 5, 2005. Meacham Park, a Black working-class neighborhood in the suburbs of St. Louis, is surrounded by the affluent and white municipality of Kirkwood, which has a long history of exploiting Meacham Park while cutting off resources to it. At the age of 12, Joseph “Bam Bam” Long collapsed from a preexisting heart condition. When police arrived on the scene, they took advantage of the situation to search the house for Long’s older brother, Kevin Johnson, rather than administering aid to Long. Later in the day, after Long had died, Kevin Johnson killed one of the officers who had let his brother die. Johnson is currently on death row in Missouri.
\n\nAlexis Grigoropoulos was killed by Greek police on December 6, 2008. The 15-year-old was out with friends celebrating his feast day in the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens when police shot him to death. The killing of Grigoropoulos provoked weeks of riots, looting, strikes, occupations, and fires throughout Athens and beyond.
\n\nJohn was killed by vigilante slave owners in Lewis County, Missouri on November 2, 1849. The elderly John had helped plan and execute the mass escape of between 30 and 40 people in northeastern Missouri. The runaways were friends and family of John’s who were enslaved to five local households. Though they managed to collect provisions and a number of their masters’ wagons and carts, the group stalled fifteen miles short of the Mississippi River, which marked the divide between “free” Illinois and enslaved Missouri. John was shot to death while attempting to negotiate, after which the runaways surrendered. Their masters re-enslaved the runaways and sold at least one conspirator, the medicine woman Lin, down river.
\n\nAmadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant, was shot to death by four New York City police officers on February 4, 1999. Diallo was returning from a late dinner; when the police stopped him, he reached inside his coat to remove his ID. The four officers responded by shooting 41 times in the span of just a few seconds, hitting Diallo 19 times. The killing sparked protests in NYC. Diallo’s name has come to evoke the vicious and cruel racism of the police.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/08/5.jpg\")
A mural in memory of Amadou Diallo.
\nCary Ball, Jr., a 25-year-old Black man, was killed by St. Louis police officers Jason Chambers and Timothy Boyce. After a brief chase through downtown, Ball crashed his car. The police then shot him 25 times.
\n\nCountless others. We could fill whole city blocks with the names of those killed by police, vigilantes, and other perpetrators of systemic violence. In America alone, the police have ended the lives of about a thousand people per year for several years running now. While this mural emphasizes Black people killed locally and recently, it also includes a range of other people of various genders, races, spaces, and times, a mix of high-profile and relatively unknown cases.
\n\nAny such mural will always be incomplete. Even the scorched walls of all the worlds police stations and government buildings could never suffice to fit the names of all the people murdered by those institutions.
\n\nPart of the anarchist presence in the first Oscar Grant riots was organized by the group UA in the Bay, a holdover from the countrywide Unconventional Action network that had helped organize the anarchist mobilization against the Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities in summer 2008. Everything comes full circle. ↩
\nAs we explored in a previous analysis, the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly interrupted social and political unrest worldwide, from Chile to Hong Kong. The situation took a grim turn as governments worldwide seized the opportunity to experiment with new authoritarian strategies of control. France hurried into this alongside Greece and Italy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/1.jpg\")
Inspired by the uprising in Minneapolis, more than 20,000 people answered a call to demonstrate against police murders on June 2, opening a new chapter of the pandemic era in France.
\nBefore the virus, France was experiencing a new wave of social movements against the government’s decision to change the retirement plan system. Throughout years of almost uninterrupted political disruption—from the 2016 Loi Travail protests to the Yellow Vests—the new emerging movement repeatedly attempted to reinvent itself in order to escape from the limitations of reformist rituals. Unfortunately, COVID-19 hastened the death of this movement.
\n\nOne of the chief difficulties we have all faced is to be able to imagine beyond this Orwellian nightmare—or should we say this new reality? The global “sanitary” lockdown has forced us to rethink our strategies in order to continue fighting for a freer world. The May Day events offered an opportunity to evaluate our capacity to do so in order to break free from this new framework that the authorities have imposed on us in the name of “safety.”
\n\nIn France, May Day was hardly an unqualified success. Although groups of people succeeded demonstrating throughout the country, the traditional vibrancy and offensive momentum that we usually experience was largely suppressed by strict restrictions on freedom of movement and by continuous harassment stemming from a massive police presence in the streets. For a lot of us in France, May Day 2020 left a bitter taste in our mouths.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/2.jpg\")
June 2 in Paris: after weeks of confinement, we were anxious to get our hands dirty again.
\nBut anarchists, political activists, and social movements per se were not the only targets of the French government. Indeed, despite the “sanitary” state of emergency, police officers remained one the only groups of people allowed to be in the streets. In allowing this, the French government gave a free pass to law enforcement to continue to do what they do best—to terrorize and brutalize specific communities and individuals. During the past two months of full confinement, at least nine people have been killed by the police, and many more injured. As a result, several days of sporadic riots against the police took place in various suburbs—known in France as les banlieues—of several cities.
\n\nTragically, such a situation is common in France. Massive riots in the suburbs took place in 2005 following the deaths of two young teenagers as a consequence of pursuit by police forces. As in the US, our government and police forces have their own specific history of oppression and racism against communities of color. Here are a few examples to illustrate the structural racism inherent in the French institution of police:
\n\nThis article from 2015 shows that, in the Paris area at least, a significant majority of law enforcement officers voted for the Rassemblement National—formerly Front National, an openly far-right xenophobic and populist political party created by ex-SS and other collaborationists under Nazis Germany. It goes without saying that due to the increasing polarization of our society—in France and worldwide—this political inclination among law enforcement has only increased since then.
\nLast April, a person of color trying to escape from the police was chased into the Seine River. After they caught him, the cops used racist slurs and started making jokes about the swimming skills of the person arrested. One police officer even said to his colleague: “[He]’s sinking, you should have put a ball and chain on his foot…”—making a clear reference to the tragic events of October 17, 1961 during which the French police threw Algerian demonstrators off a Parisian bridge, drowning them. The only reason we know about this event is because video of the arrest went viral online.
\nFinally, the current French law enforcement doctrine used in the suburbs and against these communities directly originates in the doctrine that France was using in Algeria and Indochina during its decolonization wars. We see here that after terrorizing populations overseas, the French government continues to terrorize and brutalize the same categories of people within its own territory. On this topic, we highly recommend the following documentary made by Désarmons-les ! and available with English subtitles.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/5.jpg\")
June 2 saw a massive convergence in the streets to denounce police violence and structural racism.
\nStarting on May 11, France began to lift its lockdown. However, the authorities extended the sanitary state of emergency until the end of July, using this excuse to forbid any form of gathering in the streets. As of now, while shopping malls have reopened, it is technically forbidden to hang out in groups of more than ten. Let’s not be fooled—this has nothing to do with protecting our health. It is purely and simply a way to suppress any potential social unrest, as the authorities know that people are even angrier than they were before the pandemic and that they are only waiting for an opportunity to recapture the streets to express their rage. But for three weeks, that opportunity never came.
\n\nThen, a week ago, the riots in Minneapolis erupted following the police execution of George Floyd. And, exactly as the virus had in March, these riots completely reshuffled the cards worldwide—they were the spark that a lot of us had been waiting for in order to break free from the global fear and lethargy created by COVID-19. As flames engulfed the Minneapolis Police Department precinct, revolt spread around the world. On the same night that George Floyd was murdered, another case of police violence took place in Bondy, France. Police officers brutally beat a 14-year-old boy while arresting him. He his currently awaiting eye surgery.
\n\nOn Saturday, May 30, a demonstration in solidarity with undocumented people was planned in Paris. The local authorities prohibited it and sent a large number of cops to prevent any form of gathering. The fact that the demonstration was not permitted didn’t discourage the participants. The police started by arresting about 50 people, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the situation and had no choice but to permit the wave of people to proceed through the streets. The fact that the police could no longer hold their positions was mostly a consequence of the fierce determination that undocumented people showed while leading the procession. Thousands of people walked through the streets until they reached Place de la République. Frustrated for not being able to keep the streets clear of protestors, the police started attacking the crowd.
\n\nNevertheless, this demonstration was a victory in that thousands of people walked in the streets of Paris for the first time in the post-COVID-19 era—and above all because it was led by undocumented people. The same people who are “invisible” in the eyes of the government, the same people who during the pandemic were on the frontlines of the sanitary crisis, whether because they had to keep working in precarious jobs—like so many other people who were forced to work due to the fact that their jobs were considered as “necessary” by authorities, regardless of their vulnerability—or because they don’t have any income and are living in precarious conditions. The fact that they are the ones who succeeded defying the authorities that despise them and deny them any form of dignity and humanity is extremely empowering and symbolically powerful.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/4.jpg\")
June 2: feeding the fire of international revolt.
\nOn that same day, a similar action took place in Marseille, where several hundreds of people demonstrated for their rights as undocumented people. During that demonstration, some people carried signs decrying police violence and expressing solidarity with George Floyd.
\n\nMoreover, last week, while the insurrectionary wave was spreading among the US— foregrounding not only the role that police play in our society, but also the urgent necessity to disarm and abolish this institution via a revolutionary process—a new medical report was released regarding the death of a young Black man named Adama Traoré in a French police station on July 19, 2016.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/7.jpg\")
People before the High Court of Paris demanding justice and the truth about the death of Adama Traoré in July 2016.
\nThis official document is openly racialized—speaking about Adama Traoré as being “a subject of black race”—and worse, it exempts the police officers who arrested Adama from any responsibility in his death. Yet surprisingly, the report acknowledges that Adama Traoré died due to asphyxia. There’s no need to go any further than this: this makes it obvious that the official medical report is covering up the responsibility that these police officers have in killing him. We know that the preferred strategy of immobilization used by the thugs wearing badges is the so-called “ventral debicutus” (face down) technique, and we know that it often results in the death of the person arrested. This is exactly the same technique that Derek Chauvin used to murder George Floyd in the US and that French cops used while arresting Lamine Dieng in 2007 in Paris before letting him die in the back of their truck.
\n\nUnderstanding that, after nearly four years of judicial battles, the authorities are once again refusing to be accountable for their own actions and that they continue to blame Adama for his own death, fabricating health issues and conditions to explain his asphyxia, Adama’s sister Assa Traoré made a call on social media to gather on Tuesday, June 2 in front of the High Court of Paris to denounce the hypocrisy of the authorities in the case of her brother’s death, as well as police brutality and structural racism in general. In solidarity with those mourning George Floyd in Minneapolis, and as an echo of his tragic death, the call spread under the slogan “I can’t breathe!”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/3.jpg\")
Assa Traoré, sister of Adama Traoré.
\nIn response, the authorities used official media to denounce the “irresponsibility” of making such a call in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, seeking to spread fear among potential demonstrators in order to discourage people from taking necessary actions against a system that treats so many of us as expendable. Several hours before the gathering was scheduled to begin, police officers verbally threatened Assa Traoré, once again demonstrating the sort of “mobster” practices law enforcement employ on a daily basis.
\n\nThat night, despite a significant amount of police forces deployed in the area, thousands and thousands of people answered the call and converged in front of the Court. The mobilization was massive—more than 20,000 people took the streets. The images speak for themselves. In our opinion, it is important to mention that compared to traditional demonstrations, this event succeeded in bringing together people from many different backgrounds, life experiences, and geographical areas. As we saw, this diversity was an explosive cocktail. Therefore, in the unrest to come, we should continue to do everything we can to be more inclusive. We should also ask ourselves why some of the participants in this gathering are disconnected from some of our other fights—could it be because we have failed to address their needs and realities?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/8.jpg\")
People gathering in front of the High Court of Paris on June 2.
\nAfter several speeches and chants—including the now internationally known “Tout le monde déteste la police” (“Everyone hates the police”)—things escalated. Police forces threw the first tear gas canisters; protestors responded with diverse projectiles and by lighting the first fires. The crowd scattered and riots broke out in several different areas. Protestors built barricades out of electric scooters and set them on fire; others smashed windows. Some stores might have been looted, but let’s be honest here—who cares, the institution of property itself is the problem here. Some rioters joyfully attacked a police station, while others were confronted police forces. Riots and wildcat demonstrations continued until late at night. For a lot more of pictures and step by step reports of the events that took place that night, we recommend this article and this one.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/9.jpg\")
Solidarity graffiti.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/10.jpg\")
Solidarity graffiti.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/11.jpg\")
Solidarity graffiti.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/12.jpg\")
Solidarity graffiti.
\nDemonstrations also took place in the streets of Lyon, Marseille, Lille, and Nantes. As we write, other gatherings are taking place in Toulouse and Montpellier.
\n\nUnsurprisingly, as soon as the first clashes broke out in Paris between demonstrators and police, politicians seized the occasion to denounce the entire gathering. The Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, said on social media that “Violence has no place in democracy. There is no justification for the outbursts that took place in Paris tonight, especially when public gatherings are banned to protect everyone’s health. I want to congratulate the security and rescue forces for their restraint and composure.” This is classic political rhetoric, in which the Minister explains that the only legitimate violence that exists is that carried out by the state—and therefore by the police. This sounds to us like a blatant justification of police violence and murder.
\n\nThe day after the gathering, on June 3, asked about racism within the French police, Castaner promised that “every mistake, every excess, every word including racists slurs will result in an investigation, a decision, and a sanction.” We will repeat it once more—we don’t want more “responsible” or “better” police, we want no police at all!
\n\nThe fire that the Minneapolis riots have started is spreading—and at a fast pace. The courage and determination that so many people in the US have showed is contagious and inspiring. We hope that the events of the past few days in France herald a rebirth of social unrest. It is now our responsibility to continue pushing forward. More than ever, it is clear that this whole system doesn’t work, that it will only continue to reinforce the disparities that exist on so many different levels. We must put an end to it by any means necessary. From Minneapolis to Paris, from Brazil to Greece, all together, let’s build a new world on the ashes of the old one. Until then—and more than ever—smash capitalism, smash all states, and fuck the police!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/6.jpg\")
One day, the tables will turn.
\nHere are some more calls to demonstrate in the upcoming days and weeks in France:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/04/13.jpg\")
You won’t be able to tame this spreading rage.
\nOutraged by the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, tens of thousands of people around the world have taken to the streets over the past few days to express solidarity with the subsequent uprisings in Minneapolis and elsewhere around the United States. The majority of these demonstrations have been organized by grassroots groups with anti-authoritarian politics in keeping with the ungovernable spirit of the revolt itself. From Liberia and Syria to Japan and Brazil, these efforts show that those who want to abolish the police and root out white supremacy are not alone—we are part of a worldwide movement that is gaining momentum even as the institutions of the state become more violent and oppressive.
\n\nOur comrades in Germany, Black Mosquito, have published a print version of our solidarity poster and stickers, which they are selling to raise funds for arrestees in the United States. We encourage readers to donate to the various legal support funds serving demonstrators in different parts of the country and to take an interest in the struggles against police that are taking place in different parts of the world. Here follows the closest thing there is to a comprehensive list of global solidarity actions thus far.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/15.jpg\")
\nThis list will be updated irregularly. So far, it includes solidarity efforts in:
\n\nOn the afternoon of June 1, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in solidarity with George Floyd in Auckland and demonstrated in at least three other cities.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Samrdyson/status/1267311486193397762?s=19\n\n\n
During a solidarity rally in Buenos Aires, a crowd gathered in the center of the city and marched to the US Chamber of Commerce, carrying signs reading “ Justice for George Floyd “ and shouting slogans against Donald Trump.
\n\nA small group of demonstrators protested in front of the United States Embassy in Armenia on June 4 under the banner “Armenians for Black Lives.”
\n\nPrisoners in revolt showing solidarity
\n\n![](\"https://anarchistsworldwide.noblogs.org/files/2020/06/1-1.jpg\")
\nA solidarity photo with graffiti:
\n\n![](\"https://anarchistsworldwide.noblogs.org/files/2020/05/narrm1-1536x1172.jpg\")
\nA solidarity photo with a banner drop:
\n\n![](\"https://anarchistsworldwide.noblogs.org/files/2020/05/warang.jpg\")
\nThere is a #BlackLivesMatter in Vienna solidarity demonstration announced for June 4:
\n\n\n \n\n \n
\n\n\n“Racism and police violence towards People Of Color, especially Black People Of Color, are not isolated cases; we are confronted with them every day. The murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery have brought to our attention again in recent days how racist and inhumane the police are. Not only in the USA, but also in Austria and other European countries. We cannot leave these murders uncommented. In Austria, we think of the violence against Marcus Omofuma, who was killed by Austrian police officers who sealed his mouth and nose on a flight from Vienna to Sofia, thereby suffocating him…”
\n
About 50.000 took part in this demo:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/antifa_w/status/1268635450320830473\n\n\n
The following day, on June 6, there where again thousands on the streets:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/antifa_w/status/1268943468459630593\n\n\n
In Belgium, the Berlin graffiti crew 1UP painted an entire train car with a mural reading “Please, I can’t breathe” in protest against the murder of George Floyd. A petition to the train company not to erase the mural drew thousands of signatures.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/8.jpg\")
\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
\nhttps://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1266477666020048897\n\n\n
Creativ protest against the colonial history of Belgium in solidarity with the movement in the US:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Emily_Lykos/status/1268600257786654725\n\n\n
Clashes erupt after a demonstration on June 7:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/enough14D/status/1269690260604301313\n\n\n
On May 31, in São Paulo and many other cities, participants in anti-fascist football clubs joined others in massive demonstrations against Brazil’s openly fascist president, Jair Bolsonaro. Many framed the mobilization in anti-racist terms. The Black Lives Matter movement has been an important reference point in Brazil, where as many as 49,000 Black people are murdered every year; police in Rio de Janeiro alone killed over 1800 people in 2019, the majority of them young Black men.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Antimdia1/status/1267870123039305731\n\n\n
Meanwhile, artwork circulates memorializing George Floyd alongside João Pedro, a Black Brazilian teenager murdered by the police:
\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/3.jpg\")
“Fire to the racists.” Brazilian artwork referencing the fires set in Minneapolis.
\nA demonstration in Rio de Janeiro:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/9.jpg\")
\nA demonstration in Curitiba on June 1st marching against fascism, police violence and solidarity with Black Lives Matter movement:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RedeInfoA/status/1267651971403714560\n\n\n
Clashes and riots after another racist murder by the cops in São Paulo – protests use the hashtag #JusticaPorGuilherme:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/owarleyalves/status/1272906019996303361\n\n\n
Anti-racist rally in Sofia on June 6:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/20.jpg\")
\nOn June 1, a massive unpermitted block party entitled “No Justice No Peace—Abolish Police” took place:
\n\n\n\n\n“Thousands of people took to the streets of Halifax Canada for the second time in three days last night as we shut down one of the busiest intersections in the city for hours with a Reclaim-the-Streets-style blocko. The DJ had the dance floor jumping, the chanting and messaging was directed towards abolishing the police, and fireworks were set off throughout the night. No arrests—and we left on our own terms after several hours of defiant celebration of the anti-police rebellions sweeping the US.
\n\n“A chant to share: ‘ACAB—let’s keep fighting ’til we’re free.’”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/1.jpg\")
Halifax.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/2.jpg\")
Halifax.
\nMore than 20,000 people gathered in Montréal on May 31 as part of the Justice for George Floyd demonstration organized by several anti-racist collectives including Justice for Victims of Police Killings, Hoodstock, and Tout le hood en parle. The demonstration was called to denounce the murder of George Floyd, but also the police murders that have taken place in Montréal, including the killings of Anthony Griffin, Bony Jean-Pierre, Pierre Coriolan, and Nicholas Gibbs.
\n\nAfter several hours walking through the city, the Montreal police service (SPVM) blocked the crowd at the corners of Saint-Urbain and Montigny streets, preventing it from heading to the police headquarters. At this point, the SPVM tear-gassed the demonstration and charged, triggering widespread chaos. Burning barricades appeared simultaneously on multiple streets as the demonstration split up into several groups ranging from a few dozen to several hundred people, completely paralyzing the city center. Demonstrators responded to the flash-bang grenades with projectiles. Some looting took place, as well.
\n\n\n\n\n“From the moment when the racist police of the SVPM divided us by throwing tear gas, we departed in many different directions. It was really a bad move on their part. About 20 minutes later I found myself with around sixty people. That was nice to see. It is rare in demonstrations in Montréal that whites are in the minority. And with the violence of the police things escalated quickly. People threw rocks and smashed the windows of banks and luxury stores with iron bars found in a building site. I think the message was very clear: as soon as the police kill someone, anywhere in North America, it will blow up everywhere.”
\n
\n\n\n“…We also didn’t see them running for their lives frightened by the cops. People walked into the store, walked out with lots of stuff, and wandered the quiet streets. It was a little state of emergency in which it had become commonplace to do that. What is interesting is to see that looting is not just a direct way to redistribute wealth, it is also a time when we cancel the value of the goods. It opens up a fundamental debate on private property. We do not come to break or steal what does not belong to us—on the contrary, we paradoxically show that it is ours, and that we are going to do with it what we want. We were robbed of this world by force, and it is by force that we will take it back.”
\n
Full report here. A follow-up demonstration is planned for Sunday, June 7.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/6.jpg\")
Montréal.
\n\n\n\n“On May 30, a few days after Regis Korchinski-Paquet was killed by Toronto police, a demo brought thousands of people together in Christie Pitts to challenge police violence and anti-black racism. Over the same period in the US, combative demos occurred every night in many cities in response to a police killing in Minneapolis, pushing back the police and burning their stuff, as well as attacking businesses, part of the capitalist system that has brutalized and exploited black people since its beginnings…”
\n
“Justice for Regis: Some Critical Reflections on the May 30 Demo”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/12.jpg\")
\n Elsewhere in Canada, solidarity demonstrations took place in Toronto and Vancouver.
\n\nWe have published a solidarity statement from anarchist participants of the “first line” of the protests in Chile expressing support for the uprising that started in Minneapolis.
\n\nA rally in front of the US embassy in Bogota took place on June 3 – a foto report
\n\nA solidarity punk song:
\n\nBanner drop:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/19.jpg\")
\nProtest in Zagreb in June:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/23.jpg\")
\nA demonstration on June 6 in Prague – a foto report:
\n\n![](\"https://a2larm.cz/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020_06_06_black_lives_matters_zewlakk-0030.jpg\")
\nOn May 31, 2000 people gathered at the US Embassy, then took the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/10.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/14.jpg\")
\nBlack Lives Matter protestors in Bristol pulled down a statue of slaver Edward Colston, dragged it through the streets, and threw it into the sea
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/nadinebh_/status/1269645995320672256\n\n\n
Several thousand marched in solidarity.
\n\nOn June 3, Downing Street was attacked after another solidarity march.
\n\nSolidarity demonstration with 3000 participants on June 3
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/VarisVerkosto/status/1268184007348543488\n\n\n
You can read an updated report on the new outbreak of anti-police demonstrations in France here.
\n\nOn June 1, there was a small demonstration scheduled in front of the US embassy in Paris, but police prevented it from happening—demonstrations remain forbidden in France for the next several months. Another demonstration was scheduled for June 2 at 7 pm to remember a Black man who was killed four years ago in front of the Paris court of justice. His sister’s call for the demonstration was viewed over one million times on Instagram and a large number of people are marching together as we publish this. Other events were planned that day in Marseille, Nantes, Lille and Lyon.
\n\nProtests in France are using the #JusticePourAdama Hashtag.
\n\nTear gas is used against the demonstration on June 2.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Bismuthback/status/1267874857745813506\n\n\n
Confounding expectations, thousands of people gathered and participated in an unauthorized demonstration on June 2.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ATEEZ_WY/status/1267881633664950284\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/givemeabrekk/status/1267873178380128262\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/JeromeRoos/status/1267909349453807616\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/youlakee/status/1267920916509609985?s=19\n\n\n
Tensions after a demo on June 5:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/fbleuhnormandie/status/1268956216107175936\n\n\n
A demonstration is scheduled for June 3:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/comitevj31/status/1267506089047797760\n\n\n
Our full analysis of the situation in France can be found here
\n\nA rally was announced for June 8, but it’s postponed due to the lock-down because of COVID–19.
\n\nDutzende demonstrieren am 1. Juni
\n\nSeveral dozen protestors gathered in front of Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Metro Station on 4 June to express solidarity with the demonstrations in the US against white supremacy and police.
\n\nA German anonymous hacking collective attacked the homepage of the Minneapolis Police Department on May 31, temporarily taking it offline.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AnonKollektiv/status/1267212050780114951\n\n\n
Four professional football players from well-known German teams expressed solidarity and now face internal repression from the football league. Some clubs also displayed anti-racist messages quoting Angela Davis.
\n\nCountrywide protests were scheduled for June 6. Over 200.000 people participated – in Hamburg and Berlin cops attacked the demonstrations and focused mainly on PoC.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Ende__Gelaende/status/1269366947889774597\n\n\n
Here is a review of all the local solidarity actions that have taken place already:
\n\nA solidarity demonstration on May 30 drew nearly 3000 people:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ISDBund/status/1267095388714123275\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/glr_berlin/status/1266752626919645184\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/flotopress/status/1267020654450262017\n\n\n
Another solidarity demonstration on May 31 drew similar numbers:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BEMigrantifa/status/1267052686173765639\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/BEMigrantifa/status/1267073504081514496\n\n\n
A spontaneous demo in solidarity with George Floyd and the revolt marched through the Neukölln district in Berlin on June 6. Several banks and shops were attacked during the demo. A short report.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Antikalypse/status/1269027303037829124\n\n\n
Graffiti mural:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pm_cheung/status/1266718626884788225\n\n\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/5.jpg\")
A banner in Berlin.
\nA rally on May 28:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BremenNika/status/1265876266479161349\n\n\n
Solidarity graffiti:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BurnGarbage/status/1266828011699089412\n\n\n
The political police opened an investigation into this graffiti, as they feel “threatened” by it.
\n\nA demonstration took place on June 2 with 2500 participants.
\n\nSeveral hundred on a demo on June 4:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/alibi602/status/1268639162124718080\n\n\n
An expression of solidarity from a freshly squatted field blockaded against natural gas extraction:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ErdgasN/status/1267495367735721990\n\n\n
A solidarity demonstration on May 30:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/LoveGuerillos/status/1267484527410233345\n\n\n
Solidarity graffiti:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/13.jpg\")
\nSolidarity demo for George Floyd and in remembrance of Oury Jalloh who have been burnt by police in Dessau 2005.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Dessau_Nazifrei/status/1268440182979727366\n\n\n
Solidarity posters:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/UnterdruckDo/status/1267255669826170889\n\n\n
Posters:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/dresden_a/status/1266785205366525952\n\n\n
Graffiti:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/addnme/status/1268827992895246342\n\n\n
Graffiti:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/antifa_dresden/status/1269355418322718721?s=19\n\n\n
Graffiti mural:
\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
A Black Lives Matter demonstration is scheduled for June 6:
\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
Almost 2000 people followed that call:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/17.jpg\")
\nOn June 3 the local police station was attacked with color:
\n\n\n\n\n»Cops kill - Abolish Police\nIn the night from Wednesday to Thursday we covered the police station in Flensburg with paint.\nWe did this out of anger about (racist) cop violence and institutional racism in the US and everywhere else. As a sign of solidarity with the insurgents in the US. In memory of George Floyd and all other people who were victims of racist cop violence.\nRacism kills. Everywhere.«\n– found at Indymedia
\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/fein_frisch/status/1268549289346772992\n\n\n
Spontaneous solidarity demo with several hundred participants:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/beobachterffm/status/1268240840259964928\n\n\n
A demonstration is scheduled for June 5:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/generalstreik20/status/1266269556609179649\n\n\n
Several thousand people participated:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Antifa309/status/1268921331543879681\n\n\n
Legendary anti-fascist soccer club St. Pauli with a strong video message of solidarity:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/fcstpauli/status/1268216246765527043\n\n\n
A banner at the squat Rote Flora:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/GROWHamburg/status/1272171715884433408\n\n\n
Train graffiti:
\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
A demonstration drew 400 participants:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/JgR_LE/status/1267116636722597890\n\n\n
There was also a demonstration in Connewitz on June 1, during which some bottles were thrown. It was a regular anti-cop demo, but the participants made references to the uprising in the US:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/DorflerRuben/status/1267501371051442182\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/simon_brgr/status/1267627119762452486\n\n\n
Graffiti mural:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/derrechterand/status/1267031247764819968/photo/3\n\n\n
A demonstration drew 400 participants:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/No_Pasaran_Muc/status/1266785765238996992\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/afa_nt/status/1267064697842544643\n\n\n
A solidarity photo from May 30:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/eklat_ms/status/1266665760706957312\n\n\n
A banner drop from May 31:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/eklat_ms/status/1267070602915074048\n\n\n
A demonstration on May 28:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AntifaNMS/status/1266089832729772039\n\n\n
And on June 5:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AntifaNMS/status/1268962769367379968\n\n\n
Graffiti:
\n\n\n \n\n \n
There was a solidarity demonstration on May 29.
\n\nAntifa Würzburg is calling for a demo on June 5:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/antifa_wue/status/1268170861758070784?s=19\n\n\n
Solidarity graffiti:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/exiledarizona/status/1266709658879877120\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/chris_avramidis/status/1267462968150765568\n\n\n
A solidarity demonstration on May 29:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/_A_Star_/status/1266466583494512642\n\n\n
Greek police have emulated the tactic by which George Floyd was killed, placing their knees on detainees in Athens. Another demonstration has been called for June 3 and thousands followed the call:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/th1an1/status/1268233786078224385?s=19\n\n\n
After the demonstration cops were attacked with molotovs in front of the US embassy:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/meydangazetesi/status/1268261111008309251?s=19\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/exiledarizona/status/1268242970433720322?s=19\n\n\n
Another demo on June 5 ended in fights with the police.
\n\n![](\"https://www.ekathimerini.com/resources/2020-06/gre22758314-thumb-large1-thumb-large.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/4.jpg\")
“From Omonoia to Moria and Evros, I can’t breathe.” Ομόνοια is a square in the center of Athens where many migrants stay, which has the worst police station in Athens; Moria (μουριά) is on the island that has the worst detainment camp for refugees and migrants.
\nSeveral hundred on solidarity demo on June 5:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/th1an1/status/1269020621805101059\n\n\n
A video in solidarity with the protests and against the police:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AcrossMediums/status/1270226280227549185\n\n\n
Activists collected their experience from the last couple of months fighting with the police and shared it as a sign of solidarity.
\n\nSolidarity graffiti:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ultras_antifaa/status/1268468907574255616?s=19\n\n\n
Anonymous calling for world revolution:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/1267009531919265795\n\n\n
5000 demonstrators took the streets:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/WSMIreland/status/1267463343570370566\n\n\n
On June 2, 300 people gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy’s Tel Aviv branch to protest the murder of George Floyd.
\n\nAnother demo on June 2 in Jerusalem:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/16.jpg\")
\nA solidarity demo is scheduled for June 7.
\n\nA solidarity demonstration in Vicenza leaving some graffiti on an US military base:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BocciodromoVi/status/1267788760655310852\n\n\n
May 30 demonstration against police violence:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Gregor_Wakounig/status/1266678103339720705\n\n\n
A thread about the following protests since May 30 in Japan:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/naminanamix/status/1269191622819844096\n\n\n
A solidarity action in Tokyo supporting the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1278040554572599301\n\n\n
Dozens of people gathered outside the US embassy in Nairobi on June 2 to protest over the death of George Floyd.
\n\nThe Kurdish Women’s Movement has released a statement condemning the murder of George Floyd, drawing a parallel with the suffering of the Kurds.
\n\nA solidarity picture and statment from Tekoşîna Anarşîst:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/TA_Anarsist/status/1268638234340450305\n\n\n
Liberians protested at the US Embassy near Monrovia in solidarity on May 28.
\n\nSeveral hundreds took the street in Vilnius on June 5.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/18.jpg\")
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/scdunja/status/1274330415759855621\n\n\n
Riots broke out after another police murder. Police everywhere, Justice nowhere.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/TerTerEtLiberte/status/1268501501405736961\n\n\n
Riots broke out after another police murder.. Police everywhere, Justice nowhere.\nProtests using the hashtag #JusticiaparaGiovanni
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/th1an1/status/1268866632916578310\n\n\n
An overview about the riots and protests:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1269048858304303104\n\n\n
Clashes outside the US embassy:
\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
Anti-racism protest in Podgorica:
\n\n![](\"https://balkaninsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Protest-Podgorica-001.jpg\")
\nSeveral hundred took the street on May 31 in a solidarity demonstration, and more returned the next day:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/elyasi601/status/1267758333655687170\n\n\n
There was a demonstration on June 2.
\n\nThousands took the streets on June 3:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/JeromeRoos/status/1268219527810121729?s=19\n\n\n
A solidarity demo in Lagos on June 3
\n\n![](\"https://alexis.lindaikejisblog.com/photos/shares/5ed552fe63342.jpg\")
\nThere was a massive demonstration in Oslo on June 5:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/DOBRIKSCAMERA/status/1268929695376183296\n\n\n
An artwork in solidarity from Bandilang Itim
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BandilangItimPH/status/1267774911084294146?s=19\n\n\n
Rally on May 29:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AnarchistsWW/status/1266699664343986177\n\n\n
Demo in June:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/21.jpg\")
\nA demonstration on June 7:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/1312md161/status/1269412075887091712\n\n\n
A solidarity banner-drop in Belgrad:
\n\n![](\"https://antipolitika.noblogs.org/files/2020/06/bgd-mineapolis.jpg\")
\nProtests took place in Edinburgh and Glasgow
\n\nOn May 29, during a weekly anarchist-organized bicycle demonstration in a series that has drawn thousands of participants since late April, the Anti-Capitalist Bloc visited the US embassy during the weekly massive anti-government protests to express rage against the violence of police. Chants included “No justice, no peace! Fuck the police!” Elsewhere in the course of the demonstration, participants dropped a massive banner reading “Capitalism kills—let’s spread the virus of revolt.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1266465254072029185\n\n\n
Solidarity graffiti:
\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
3000 took the streets on June 4:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/b9AcE/status/1268629942960603137\n\n\n
Thousands attending a solidarity demo in Stockholm. Police were attacking participants later that night:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/b9AcE/status/1268252871482642434\n\n\n
Over 2000 people took the streets in solidarity with George Floyd.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AntifaZH161/status/1267439647224971264\n\n\n
An anonymous love letter from Zürich:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n»In solidarity with the people’s uprising in the US, tonight we set on fire some containers adjacent to the local US consulate. May the flames of classwar further spread across the world!
\n\nUnited against cops, racism and capitalism!\nLong live the struggle for people’s liberation!\nLong live international solidarity!«
\n
A rally on June 6:
\n\nProtests on June 1 in Barcelona and Madrid and upcoming protests on June 7.
\n\nSyrian artists Aziz Asmar and Anis Hamdoun painted a mural honoring George Floyd on the side of a building destroyed in the course of the Syrian civil war.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/02/11.jpg\")
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/omar_hajkadour/status/1267467711413719040\n\n\n
Rally on June 6 in Tunis in solidarity with the protests in the US and against police violence in Tunisia.
\n\nOn June 2, there was a solidarity demonstration that clashed with the police. Several people where arrested. This is significant, because Turkey has effectively been a totalitarian police state for years now.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/meydangazetesi/status/1267837159136006148\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/meydangazetesi/status/1267841439339294723/photo/1\n\n\n
We’ve reached a breaking point. The murders of George Floyd—and Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and the other Black people whose lives were ended by police just this month—are only the latest in a centuries-long string of tragedies. But in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the state is openly treating Black communities as a surplus population to be culled by the virus, the arrogance and senselessness of the murder carried out by Officer Derek Chauvin crossed a line. Supported by hundreds of thousands across the US and beyond, the people of Minneapolis have made it clear that this intolerable situation must end, no matter what it takes.
\n\nSince the Ferguson uprising of 2014, considerable attention has focused on racist police killings in the United States. Reformers of many stripes have introduced new policies in hopes of reining in the violence. Yet according to the Police Shootings Database, the police killed more people in the US last year than in 2015. If police killings are continuing or even increasing despite widespread public attention and reform efforts, we need to revisit our strategy.
\n\nHow can we bring an end to racist police murders once and for all?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/31/1.jpg\")
The weaker their order is, the more powerful they try to appear.
\nIt’s widely known that the chances of individual officers or departments suffering real consequences for killing people, especially Black people, are next to nothing. It makes sense that protestors and grieving families often demand criminal charges against murderous cops—the US criminal legal system offers no other model for “justice,” and by refusing to press charges, the authorities show how little they value Black lives. But locking ordinary people in cages doesn’t prevent anti-social activity—and considering that police violence is legitimized by exceptional laws and powerful institutions, this deterrent seems to be even less effective for police. Johannes Mehserle, the officer who murdered Oscar Grant in Oakland in 2009, was one of very few police to serve prison time; yet the 2018 killing of Joshua Pawlik and many other police murders in the region suggest that this precedent has not deterred Bay Area police from fatally shooting people.
\n\nNor do lawsuits seem to make a difference. The family of Justine Damond received a $20 million settlement after her murder by Minneapolis police—an extremely rare occurrence, likely related to the unusual circumstance of a Black male officer killing a white woman. But forcing the city’s taxpayers—some of whom suffer police violence daily—to shell out millions to pay for their murderous activity doesn’t work to stop police killings.
\n\nIf it did, George Floyd would still be alive.
\n\nMinneapolis already has a civilian review board, but this didn’t prevent Chauvin from killing George Floyd. In fact, the review board had failed to impose consequences for any of the eighteen previous complaints made against Chauvin. It also didn’t prevent the murders of Justine Damond, Jamar Clark, or any of the other people killed by the city’s police.
\n\nPolice commissioners themselves are now calling for oversight and accountability, likely in hopes of preventing further rioting. This shows how little threat such measures pose to their power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/31/2.jpg\")
St. Louis police conduct a constructive discussion about civilian review boards at a 2015 Board of Alderman meeting after the Ferguson uprising.
\nMost of the police killings that have taken place over the past few years have been carried out by officers wearing body cameras. This hasn’t stopped them from killing—and it has almost never resulted in criminal convictions. An independent 2016 Temple University study concluded that on the contrary, the use of wearable body cameras correlated with an increase in fatal shootings by police, disproportionately threatening males, young people, and people of color. Other research efforts that have touted the technology’s benefits, such as the 2017 University of Nevada Las Vegas study, were conducted in part by police departments looking to save money on complaints.
\n\nAlthough it doesn’t seem to reduce killings, body camera footage does put the rest of us in danger, as it provides evidence that prosecutors sympathetic to police can cherry-pick to find ways to blame us when officers attack us.
\n\n\n\n\nWe don’t need more thorough information about what the police are doing. We need to stop them from doing what they do. We’re not looking for transparency or accountability. We’re looking for a world without police.
\n\n-“Cameras Everywhere, Safety Nowhere; Why Police Body Cameras Won’t Make Us Safer”
\n
Civilian filming also isn’t enough. Derek Chauvin knew he was being filmed, yet he still murdered George Floyd without hesitation. The officers who murdered Philando Castile, Eric Garner, and countless other people weren’t stopped by the cameras trained on them. Even if “the whole world is watching,” more surveillance won’t make us any safer as long as killer cops can act with impunity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/31/3.jpg\")
Body cameras only enrich surveillance companies and provide prosecutors with more material to use against us.
\nPerhaps we should direct our rage at politicians rather than police, as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio suggests?
\n\nOf course politicians are complicit for their cowardly support for the police. But they’re not the ones who harass and bully us every day, who invade our privacy and spy on us, who physically stand between us and the resources we need, who beat and shoot and kill us. In fact, unlike the police with their guns, tear gas, and tanks, the power of politicians is an illusion; it only exists because of the ways we cede our power to make decisions to them. If not for the police protecting their privileges and enforcing their orders, politicians wouldn’t matter at all. Without the military, Homeland Security, Secret Service, and armed vigilantes to ensure that we do his bidding, Trump would be nothing more than an especially obnoxious bully. As long as the police regulate everything we can do, directing our anger against politicians will make little impact.
\n\nIn a time of increasing social tension and volatility, when power structures increasingly rely on brute force rather than the consent of the general population, politicians of all stripes are especially fearful about losing the loyalty of the armed wing of the state. If they don’t guarantee police officers impunity, they risk undermining their own power; in an extreme case, they might even be deposed, as we have seen in coups from Chile to Egypt. Why did a Black president with “social justice” credentials stand by and watch as the killers of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, and so many others got away with murder? Perhaps because it was more important to Barack Obama to protect the stability of his regime than to pursue justice for racist killings. This makes it even more unlikely that appeals to politicians will make a difference.
\n\nShould we be registering to vote and making our voices heard in the ballot box, as Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms insists?
\n\nAgain, what happened in Minneapolis implies that this doesn’t work. If a city with a progressive mayor and a city council composed entirely of Democrats and Green Party members still can’t prevent out-of-control racist cops from killing people again and again and again, there’s no reason to believe that voting differently in those elections would have made any difference. Racist police violence is only on the national agenda because the courageous, defiant resistance of people in the streets has put it there. Police murder has never been on the ballot as an item to vote for or against. Their violence is the glue holding together a system we never chose. It won’t be votes that abolish it, either. It’ll be by action.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Kaimandante/status/1266432197541736448\n\n\n
Well then, if direct action is the only way to address police murders, then certainly the most effective way to make change is through strict non-violence, as Martin Luther King Jr.’s granddaughter tells us.
\n\nUnfortunately, that’s rhetoric, not history. In fact, the civil rights movement drew its successes from a combination of militant direct action, armed self-defense, rioting, and non-violent civil disobedience. King’s appeal as a civil rights leader—and the interest politicians today have in promoting his legacy to the exclusion of all others—arose in no small part because he offered an alternative to the threat of ungovernable urban riots and Black Power militancy. Condemning all action that falls outside the paradigm of nonviolence divides movements, protecting the reigning order and concealing the history of how change really happens.
\n\nIf not strictly nonviolent protests, can riots ensure that police stop killing and are held accountable?
\n\nRiots can accomplish many things that peaceful protesting rarely does. They raise the economic and political costs of police violence for the regimes that perpetrate it. They can enable marginalized people to meet their needs directly via empowering group action—their needs for collective grieving, for vengeance, even for material goods. They dispel the myth that the police are invulnerable and rupture the illusion of political consensus. They expand the horizons of our collective imagination about what we can do together and how the world could be different.
\n\nBut riots alone may not suffice. While mass unrest has forced reluctant authorities to press charges against killer cops—in Oakland, in Ferguson, in Baltimore, and now in Minneapolis—they often don’t secure convictions, as the court cases in Ferguson and Baltimore make clear. And even if they could discourage further killings by some specific police forces, the consistent rate of police murders over the past five years shows that they have yet to make a dent in the overall problem. The flames of Ferguson were just dying down when St. Louis police fatally shot Isaac Holmes, despite the threat of further unrest.
\n\nIf we have to burn down whole neighborhoods just to get a single officer indicted, that’s not a viable program to make the US justice industry accountable. The courage and determination of the rebels in Minneapolis and around the country represents an inspiring step forward. But we should not understand them as a means of reform—we should approach them as a step towards revolution.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ArteYAnarquia/status/1267017564066111488\n\n\n
A good start.
\n\nIf none of the “solutions” that governments, police departments, and some community activists have proposed will suffice, what could put a stop to racist police murders once and for all? It is not easy to answer this question, but we have to ask it in earnest.
\n\nThe assumption that Black and Brown lives are expendable is fundamental to all of the institutionalized power structures of our time. We will answer the question of what will work to abolish police murders in practice, through a lifelong process of experimentation—but it is clear that it will require us to abolish or utterly transform all of these structures. Starting from the model of collective defiance we have seen over the past week, we have to extrapolate what long-term change can look like. Here are some long-term objectives—some stars to navigate by.
\n\nAs long as police have weapons and impunity, they will go on killing us. All of our efforts have only made a dent in their impunity; it’s time to go all the way. Only when the highway patrol cannot end our lives during a routine traffic stop will the terror that so many of us feel every time we see blue lights flashing begin to ease. Only when no group of uniformed thugs feels entitled to pin anyone to the ground and ignore his pleas will all of us be free from the threat of becoming the next George Floyd.
\n\nOnce police are disarmed, it will become clear to everyone how useless they are at the things we think we need them for. When mentally ill people act in ways that seem erratic to others, we need counselors and advocates, not armed gunmen. When romantic partners and neighbors have conflicts, we need people with conflict resolution and de-escalation skills, not violent escalators enforcing a patriarchal agenda. When kids need traffic directed so they can cross the street, we need friendly elders and neighbors who know them, not people toting lethal weapons who have little experience working with children. When we lose things or find things, we need a community center to exchange them, not a precinct. When our cars break down by the side of the road, we need a community of Good Samaritans, not a mercenary looking to write us a ticket. The majority of what the police do is harmful and should be immediately eliminated to make us all safer; much of the rest could be done much better by skilled, unarmed volunteers of good will.
\n\nAs an institution, policing itself is violent and oppressive to the core. The thousands of murders individual officers perpetrate are just the tip of the iceberg. How can we measure the daily anxiety, the acute terror, the petty humiliations, the impact of family members being kidnapped and shaken down that so many people experience every time they must engage with infuriating arrogance grinning from behind a badge? From their origin in slave patrols to today’s high-tech spy drones and predictive policing algorithms, police have never existed to protect us.
\n\nIt’s not a question of bad apples. The entire barrel is rotten.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/31/4.jpg\")
Nothing about the institution of policing can be salvaged.
\nThe chant “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!” is more than a slogan—it’s a necessity. There is no safety we can count on that is not built on our trust and relationships with each other. To be certain of our safety, we must be able to define for ourselves what risks we face and how to address them together.
\n\nCritics argue that it’s naïve to talk about disarming and abolishing the police, citing the aggression and chaos we will supposedly unleash on each other without the violence of the thin blue line to keep us in check. But what’s truly naïve is to continue believing that an institution responsible for killing a thousand people every year is somehow keeping us safe.
\n\nCollective self-defense will not be easy, but it’s our only hope. It will mean organizing to prevent the violence of the far right—of those encouraged by Trump to shoot looters and by state governments to run over protestors. It will mean taking responsibility for developing new skills in conflict resolution and new structures for rapid response in times of crisis. The indications that Minneapolis gangs are organizing a truce to collaborate on protecting protestors from far-right violence are encouraging. We will need all of our courage and creativity to develop new approaches that value and protect all of us, rather than sacrificing millions of us to be caged or killed in order to secure the safety and property of some.
\n\nWant to prevent looting? Ensure that everyone has housing, enough to eat, and enough resources to live a dignified life. When they don’t, who can blame them for taking out their rage against those who stand between them and the resources they need?
\n\nIn Minneapolis, local communities are establishing supply depots where resources redistributed during the riots can be freely shared, both to support the protests and to enable neighbors to live. The COVID-19 crisis has popularized mutual aid networks; the riots are taking them to the next level. The police exist to ensure that resources are distributed not according to need, but according to an archaic system of property rights that benefits those who hoard them for themselves rather than sharing them. The protestors have turned this upside down. Contrary to critics who see looters of a Target as “destroying their own community,” it’s more accurate to say that they have transformed an institution that existed to siphon profits out of their neighborhood to outside investors into a project that actually serves their immediate material needs. Destroying the barriers that separate our communities from the resources we need is one of the most crucial things we can do to transform our society. Abolishing the police is a step towards accomplishing this, while ending the killings they perpetrate.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1266867333437546497\n\n\n
One of the reasons why cops get away with murder so often is that the Supreme Court has interpreted laws to grant police “qualified immunity” for killing people—which has happened in over half of the cases that reached appellate courts in the past five years. Why should an unrepentant rapist and his cronies be in the position to authorize cops to kill us whenever they see fit? For that matter, why should they be able to determine whether we can have abortions, or how we can organize unions, or the limits of indigenous sovereignty, or anything else?
\n\nThe persistence of police murder is just one of the risks we engender by relinquishing our power to nine black-robed figures. To ensure our freedom, we must take back our self-determination from the clutches of the courts.
\n\n\n\n\n“The more we can delegitimize the authority of Supreme Courts to shape our lives, and the more powerful and creative we can make our alternatives, the less we will have to fear from the Trumps and Kavanaughs of the world. Let’s build a society that enables everyone to engage in genuine self-determination—in which no man can decide what all of us may do with our bodies—in which no state can take away our power to shape our future.”
\n\n-“Kavanaugh Shouldn’t Be on the Supreme Court. Neither Should Anyone Else.”
\n
While we’re at it, what about those politicians? If electing new officials can’t stop the police from killing us, what good are they? If we really want to secure our future against the arbitrary power of the authorities, we can’t go half way. As we organize in our neighborhoods to share and distribute resources, let’s lay the groundwork for a new grassroots form of political organization that can exercise power directly without need for representatives. Inspired by the council system in the Kurdish territories of Rojava, the assemblies of the Greek anarchist movement, the student strikes in Montréal, and many other examples, we can build a new world from the bottom up, without politicians at the top to boss us around.
\n\nSo what will it take for us to end police murders once and for all? Nothing short of revolution.
\n\nBut that revolution isn’t a distant utopia, or a single spasm in which we storm the Winter Palace. It’s an ongoing process of building relationships, sharing resources, defending ourselves, undoing the interlocking structures of white supremacy, and organizing to meet our needs together without police or politicians—and it’s already happening. It’s time for each and every one of us to choose a side and take a stand. The stakes are high—the life you save might be your own. But as the courageous protestors in Minneapolis and beyond have shown us, not even the power of the police is absolute. Together, we can overcome their violence and build a new world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/31/5.jpg\")
\nThe demonstrations this week in Minneapolis mark a historic watershed in the COVID-19 era. As we argued in March, there are some things that are worth risking death for. Perpetuating capitalism is not one of them. But some of us face threats even more deadly than COVID-19. It is worth risking our lives to fight for a world in which no one will be murdered the way that George Floyd was—and what is happening in Minneapolis shows that people are ready to.
\n\nEven before the pandemic hit, the United States was a powder keg, with rapidly escalating inequalities polarizing the population. Since March, we have experienced historically unprecedented unemployment alongside lethal risks that have been distributed throughout the population along the same lines of race and class as the preexisting disparities. The government has invented billions of dollars to pour into the pockets of executives, while leaving ordinary people high and dry; corporations are forcing those who still have jobs to risk their lives daily, while introducing new surveillance technologies and seeking to hasten the pace of automation. In short, we are being treated as a surplus population to be controlled by state violence and culled by the virus.
\n\nPoliticians across the political spectrum are complicit in this. Some are relying more on brute force to stabilize the situation, others more on more rational management, but no one holding power has a real plan for how to address the systemic factors that got us here in the first place. At best, they borrow rhetoric and talking points from campaigns that we start, showing—just as the firing of the police in Minneapolis did—that the only way we will see social change is if we take grassroots action to bring it about by force.
\n\nYet until May 26, the chief fault line in the United States appeared to be between Trump supporters who want to pretend that there is no pandemic taking place and Democrats who want to be seen as the cautious, responsible ones without addressing the factors that force us to put ourselves at risk. The spectacle of clashes between an astroturf far-right movement demanding to “re-open” the economy and unusually restrained police officers defending state shutdown measures served to limit political discourse to a fool’s choice between the kind of “freedom” championed by capitalists and white supremacists on one side and the kind of “safety” that totalitarian states always promise to provide on the other.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1262440032239005699\n\n\n
The courageous resistance to police control in Minneapolis on May 26 and 27 in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd shows that a large number of people are ready to oppose the government and the police even at great risk to themselves. We are hearing the voices of a part of the population that was silent these past two months—those who are neither wealthy liberals nor bootlicking conservatives—and it turns out that together, we are powerful enough to interrupt the status quo.
\n\nThe events in Minneapolis will expand the collective imagination of what is possible, which had contracted painfully over the past several years. They will change the discourse about how social change happens. It has become clear that entreating those who hold power through electoral means is a dead end. Attempting to make change by main force is a gamble, but it is the only realistic option left.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/28/1.jpg\")
\nIt is significant that the mobilization that took us across this threshold was a response to anti-black police violence, initiated by those on the receiving end of white supremacy and all the other vectors of oppression. As we noted at the end of 2017, the uprisings against police violence that took place around the country from Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond virtually ceased after the election of Donald Trump. The reason why this happened is unclear, but they certainly did not cease because police violence diminished in any way. The uprising in Minneapolis brings all the unsettled debts of that era back into play, but in a totally different context, in which a lot more people have been radicalized, society is much more polarized, and it is increasingly clear to everyone that—whether from the bullets of the police, COVID-19, or global climate change—our lives are at stake.
\n\nThe clashes in Minneapolis dominate the news from Greece to Chile. For good or for ill, the United States occupies a central place in the global attention economy—and thanks to the pandemic, everyone around the world is experiencing similar pressures. Especially in the global South—Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa—where large numbers of people experience the same brutality that is meted out to people like George Floyd, the rebellion in Minneapolis will offer an example others will emulate over the coming months.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/28/2.jpg\")
Solidarity graffiti in Athens, Greece.
\nHow will the ruling class respond? In the United States, Trump and his supporters will charge that Democrats can’t control the states they govern, using this to stoke racist fear among the beneficiaries of white privilege. Centrist Democrats will claim that this sort of unrest is what happens when rule of law is not respected in the White House, hoping to regain power nationally—even though Minnesota is under Democratic governance right now, and the law has always been an instrument of white supremacy. The institutional Left will present themselves as intermediaries, offering to get us out of the street and under control in return for a few concessions.
\n\nHopefully, in a time when the state itself is fracturing into rival factions, none of these groups have the political capital they need to carry out a massive state clampdown without running the risk of being abandoned by the others. It appears that each faction would like the others to be the ones held responsible for escalating the situation. In any case, Trump is no longer the only one dominating the news cycle. Now this war has two sides.
\n\nOnly a week ago, some elements on the far-right were trying to frame themselves as anti-police because of the “re-open” protests. In Minneapolis last night, gun-toting militia members expressed the awkward position that they supported the protests but opposed the looting—a contradiction that becomes flagrantly obvious as soon as you notice which direction they are pointing their guns. The apparent murder of a demonstrator in Minneapolis last night by a vigilante defending a store should make it clear enough that vigilantes and cops are the same thing—murderers—whether in or out of uniform.
\n\nAnd what should we do? We should talk clearly to everyone who will listen about why people are standing up for themselves. We should share skills about how to keep each other safe in the street. We should strengthen our networks and prepare to participate in similar events all around the world. We should resist every effort to divide those acting together in solidarity against police violence, especially conspiracy theories about outside agitators. We should explain yet again why vandalism and looting are effective and legitimate protest tactics. Every time people stand up for themselves against the police state, we should show up in solidarity, prepared to run the same risks that those we support face every day. Above all, we should share visions of a world without oppression, without hierarchy, without police or prisons or surveillance, and demonstrate strategies via which to create it.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1265808184519864320\n\n\n
We owe nothing to the police who have taken advantage of the pandemic to murder black people even more flagrantly than before. They were never meant to keep us safe. We owe nothing to the billionaires who have taken advantage of the pandemic to pocket even more money from the state and corner the market with their monopolies. Life for their economy means death for us. We owe nothing to the politicians who have scarcely lifted a finger to protect our health or housing. They have had their chance. We need to change everything ourselves.
\n\nThe ruling order is doomed. It will collapse sooner or later. Concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands is not sustainable. The only question is whether we will abolish it before it kills all of us and decimates the planet. Time is short. The lives we thought were ahead of us have already been snatched from us. It’s up to us to create another future.
\n\nThank you to everyone in Minneapolis and Los Angeles who risked their freedom—and perhaps their lives—last night to show that the murder of George Floyd is unacceptable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/a-new-world/a-new-world_front_color.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nWe will keep this updated as they are announced.
\n\nMay 29, 6 pm, Armory Park—”Wear a mask!”
\n\nFriday, May 29, 8 pm
\nFuck the Police: Vengeance for George Floyd/ Minneapolis Solidarity Demo, Oakland Oscar Grant Plaza, 14th and Broadway—”Be Safe, Wear a Mask”
May 28, 29, and 30, every day at noon at the Denver Capitol Building: Justice for George Floyd
\n\nFriday, May 29, 4 pm
\nCNN Center 1: Stop Killing Us!
Sunday, June 7, 8 pm
\nCorner of Satellite Blvd and Pleasant Hill Rd
Saturday, May 30, 10 am \nStand Up and Say Their Name\nHosted by ONE–Dubois County, at Dubois County Courthouse
\n\nSaturday, May 30, 1 pm\nWe Still Can’t Breathe
\n\nMay 29, 8:30 pm
\nMarch of Freedom: Meet outside Muhammad Ali Center; wear a black mask
Friday, May 29, 5 pm—Peters Park, 1277 Washington Street—”Stop the pandemic of police brutality”
\n\nFriday, May 29, 1:30 pm
\nWestern Mass Stand-Out Protest: Stop Killing Black People
Saturday, May 30, 6 pm
\nEnd the Killing Now
Saturday, May 30, 10 am
\nBlack Lives Matter March on Elm
Saturday, May 30, 1 pm
\nAlbany Run/Walk/Rally For Black Lives
Thursday, May 28, 6 pm
\nNew York Solidarity with Minneapolis, Union Square
Friday, May 29, 6 pm
\nBarclay’s Center, Brooklyn; “Wear PPE, prepare to escalate, prepare to march”
Friday, May 29, 6:30 pm
\nJustice for George Floyd
Sunday, May 31, 3:30 pm
\nMemorial for George Floyd
Saturday, May 30, 2 pm, at the Free Stamp—SURJ NEO (Showing Up for Racial Justice - Northeast Ohio)
\n\nThere is currently an occupation of the downtown justice center at 1120 SW 3rd Avenue in solidarity with George Floyd, announced by the PNW Youth Liberation Front.
\n\nFriday, May 29, 6 pm
\nGather at Knoxville Police Department: “Participants asked to mask and social distance or take part in drive by protest if they aren’t comfortable/safe in large groups.”
Saturday, May 30, 12 pm
\n“From Austin to Minneapolis:Justice for George Floyd and Mike Ramos”
Friday, May 29, 2 pm
\nhosted by Black Lives Matter Houston—Discovery Green, meet at 1500 McKinney Street and march to City Hall
Saturday, May 30, 5 pm, 301 E Travis St.—hosted by Autonomous Brown Berets
\n\nFriday, May 29, 2 pm\nGeorge Floyd Solidarity Action
\n\nSaturday, May 30, 6 pm
\nProtest for George Floyd
Friday, May 29, 8:30 pm
\nNO JUSTICE NO PEACE FUCK THE POLICE\nMeet at Monroe Park (wear a mask and gloves)
Friday, May 29, 7 pm
\nInternational District, Chinatown, Hing Hay Park
Saturday, May 30, 12 pm (noon)
\n610 5th Ave. South—”March for Justice #GeorgeFloyd”
Saturday, June 6, 2-5 pm
\n#SeattleJusticeforGeorgeFloyd—”We will meet under the Space Needle and begin marching towards Pike Place at 2 pm; please no violence or looting” [sic]
Spontaneous demonstrations already took place in Neumunster and Bremen.
\n\nFriday, May 29, 6 pm
\nUhr vor dem City Arkaden (Alte Freiheit)
Friday, May 29, 8 pm—Plateia Exarcheia—”Against the state’s terror everywhere.”
\n\nA Twitter thread archiving the police scanner in Minneapolis on the evening of May 27.
\n\nAn archived livestream documenting several hours of protest activity on the evening of May 27.
\n\nAnd After the Virus? The Perils Ahead
\n\nNext Time It Explodes: Revolt, Repression, and Backlash since the Ferguson Uprising
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